Baseball, without question, is going to be a worse game without Mariano Rivera. It wasn’t just that Rivera was consistently excellent. It’s that he was also unwaveringly humble and gracious, being the rare sort of Yankee you could like even if you rooted for a team of non-Yankees. But Rivera’s retirement does, at least, open up some questions that previously wouldn’t have been up for debate. When it comes to picking the best at something, Rivera’s absence gives a chance to somebody else.

I was asked in my Tuesday chat to identify the new most dominant pitch in baseball. Before, the answer was automatic: Mariano Rivera’s cutter. It was that way for nearly two decades, as Rivera rode one masterful pitch to glory and a certain place in the Hall of Fame. Rivera never really declined, and his cutter topped the list because of his command, his results and his longevity. But now we’re able to entertain the idea of other pitchers and other pitches. With Rivera out of the picture, choosing another pitch isn’t blasphemous. The way I see it, there are two contenders.

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Over the last two weeks, Kansas City Royals management has stirred the pot a little bit by saying that they might not carry a backup middle infielder. Then they said the new plan would be to have Danny Valencia play a little second base. This of course does nothing to solve the problem of giving them a backup shortstop. Also, since Valencia has never played second base and is entering his age-29 season. But if the Royals are going to carry 12 pitchers, their options are limited. They could roll with just four outfielders, or they could just hope that Alcides Escobar and Omar Infante are healthy all year, or they could just try the Valencia hail mary plan. Or they could just carry 11 pitchers.

Using fewer relief pitchers is not a new sabermetric idea, of course. But if there is one team that could pull it off, it’s the Royals. Looking at relief pitcher appearances from April-August, we can see that the Royals were at the bottom of the spectrum.
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This morning, I presented some data on the off-season price of a projected win in free agency, noting that one could come to a reasonable conclusion ranging between $5 and $7 million per win, depending on preference for average versus median or how significantly to discount future spending. That was mostly just an explanation of the assumptions and a data dump, but there’s plenty more to say about the market price of a win, so let’s dig into the data a bit more.

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A couple weeks back we took a look at the batted-ball profiles for Andrew Cashner and Jeff Samardzija, two hard throwers potentially poised to make a Max Scherzer-esque breakthrough in 2014. Today, let’s do the same for a totally different type of pitcher – the type that relies much less on missed bats, instead almost totally relying on inducement of weak contact. As we shall see, there is more than one way to “dominate”. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring is a time for big talk, for positive talk. Spring is when everyone’s sure they’re going to get better. And maybe everyone really does get better all the time. It’s just that some people get less better than others. Mike Matheny is in charge of a really good baseball team that almost won the World Series last fall. But Matheny, like most baseball people, wasn’t completely satisfied. In 2014, he wants his team to be better. And specifically, he’s also looking for his pitchers to be better… at hitting. And he thinks it’s going to happen.

“We’re going to be a better hitting group of pitchers this year,” Matheny said. “They do so much talking about how athletic they are but they were not content with what they were able to do on the offensive side last year.”

Continued:

“There were a lot of swings and misses,” Matheny said. “We were one of the worst teams in baseball with strikeouts from the pitcher’s position. That just shouldn’t be so.”

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While there are still a few lingering holdouts — or, perhaps more simply, a few players who still aren’t yet convinced that they’re not worth what they’re asking for — the off-season is pretty much over at this point. In fact, we’re only a couple of weeks away from a pair of actual baseball games that count in the standings. The 2014 season is almost here, so we can begin to make some declarations about what we can learn from the recently completed off-season. And one of the things I like learning the most about is the economics of baseball’s closest proximation to a free market.

For every team, their off-season goal can essentially be drilled down to the attempt to purchase future wins. Whether they’re signing a free agent, making a trade, claiming a player on waivers, or even building academies in foreign countries, most decisions made by a baseball operations staff are in the pursuit of buying wins for their team on the field. They aren’t always wins that manifest in the short term, and the exchange of dollars for wins is not always so straight forward, but this is the transaction that front offices are hired to make. Buy wins, as many as you can afford.

The most obvious market for this exchange is free agency; players market themselves and the wins they can bring to an organization, and the team that bids the most usually lands the player. While players come in all shapes and sizes, they are all essentially selling the same product, just in different types of packaging. If a team finds one player’s asking price too high, they’ll simply buy their wins in a different form. Free agency is the great equalizer, allowing players of all varieties to sell themselves next to players who they are rarely compared against, and for the observing public to find out exactly what teams think different packages are worth.

The resulting bids can essentially be translated into dollars per wins, or $/WAR, as we often refer to it around here. And now that we’ve got most of the free agents signed, let’s look at what wins were going for over the winter.

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Something that makes total sense is that catchers need to know their pitchers. Catchers, after all, are the guys calling all of the pitches, and catching many of the pitches, and you often hear about guys who either are or are not on the same page. It makes sense how familiarity could have an effect on pitch-calling. It also makes sense how familiarity could have an effect on pitch-receiving, as greater familiarity will yield a greater understanding of how pitches move and where they’re likely to go.

Earlier this very Monday, Eno posted an article titled “Familiarity Breeds Better Framing“. Eno was passing along material he got in speaking with Oakland catcher Stephen Vogt, and Vogt used Luke Gregerson as an example of a guy he doesn’t know well enough yet. Vogt needs to learn Gregerson’s tendencies and movement in order to maximize his own ability to catch him. This all got me wondering: can we see anything in the PITCHf/x data? What do the framing numbers look like for pitchers who’ve changed teams?

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As popular American explorer Jeff Sullivan noted at approximately this same time last year, there are a number of reasons why the numbers produced by players during spring training are unlikely to provide many clues as to the numbers those same players might produce during the regular season. Because of the limited sample sizes provided by spring play, is one reason. And because of the wide-ranging level of competition, is a second one. And because of how certain players use spring merely to work on this or that skill, is a third (if not even final) one.

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Spring training is a time of becoming reacquainted with baseball. The pace, the play, the pitches, the plate, even the equipment — there’s a daily language that comes easier with practice. Catchers are no different, though perhaps there’s a multiplier. You have to get used to your own game, and you have to get to know your pitchers again. And one of the newest ways to measure catcher defense — framing — may have a lot to do with this familiarity.

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On Sunday afternoon in Arizona against the Dodgers, San Diego center fielder Cameron Maybin made a nice diving catch to rob Juan Uribe of an extra-base hit:

Wonderful! That’s a fantastic play, even if one perhaps that might have been made much easier by the right fielder, Rymer Liriano, although you understand if a young player with just 53 professional games above Single-A may have hesitated to call off a major league center fielder. Still, Maybin made the play, and he looked good doing it. Great play, beautiful day, all is good in the world.

Except, after spending most of the next inning looking like this…  Read the rest of this entry »