Milwaukee’s system has a few intriguing names but lacks both impact talent and depth. The organization has had a lot of bad luck with high draft picks in recent years but found value in later rounds. Read the rest of this entry »
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about athletes in other sports who might hypothetically be able to make a decent transition into baseball. It’s something I think everyone’s thought of at least a few times before, and the first thing that came to my mind was that hockey goalies could and would make for good backstops, since they’re highly skilled at keeping things moving quickly from getting right past them. I know, for example, Dan Wilson used to be a goalie, so it’s not a surprise he was also a good defensive catcher when it came to blocking low pitches. It requires pretty obviously the same kind of skill.
Yet, while it’s clearly important for a catcher in the majors to be able to block challenging pitches, it’s also true that, in the majors, there isn’t a lot of spread in skill. Which means there isn’t a lot to be gained by being particularly excellent at preventing pitches from flying by. Last year, by our measures, the A’s were baseball’s worst pitch-blocking team, and it cost them 5.5 runs. The Cardinals were baseball’s best pitch-blocking team, and it gained them 6.4 runs. From worst to best, it’s a spread of about a win, which makes it maybe an unjustifiable thing to be concerned about one way or another.
In a sense, the pitching market is still at a standstill. Masahiro Tanaka has little reason to sign before his deadline, and other pitchers have little reason to sign before Tanaka does, so for about another week and a half, we could be dealing with a whole lot of nothing. And it’s not just free-agent pitchers. There could be renewed runs at David Price and Jeff Samardzija, but only after Tanaka goes. And free-agent position players might wait for financial clarity as well. The short-term result of all this is that we’re not seeing changes in the 2014 projected standings, because teams aren’t making moves. But something did happen to shake things up right before the weekend.
That something is that Derek Holland hurt himself on his own staircase. It sounds too absurd to take real seriously, but the fact of the matter is that Holland needed knee surgery and he’s projected to be out until midseason. To hear Holland talk, he’s determined to beat those projections back to the field, but medical timetables aren’t made up out of thin air. Holland is going to be out for a significant amount of time. Holland is good, and his replacement will be worse. The Rangers are in a fragile position, and this is a bigger deal than it might seem like.
Alex Rodriguez has been suspended for the entirety of the 2014 season. You already know this, and if you haven’t yet, go read Wendy Thurm’s breakdown of the arbiter’s ruling for more information on the judgment itself. I’m not all that interested in talking about Rodriguez that much more, personally, as this is a story that has been so thoroughly covered that there just isn’t that much more to say.
However, I think that the precedent of the season long suspension, and the near unanimous agreement that we’re going to see significantly increased suspension lengths for failed PED tests in the next CBA, creates an issue that Major League Baseball is going to have to contend with eventually. As we’ve seen in the A-Rod case, the relationship between the team and the player has essentially disintegrated, as the interests of the Yankees were clearly aligned with the interests of Major League Baseball; both wanted Rodriguez suspended for as long as possible.
By virtue of the suspension, the Yankees have just received a $25 million rebate, which could allow them to get under the $189 million luxury tax threshold and lead to significant long term savings from the resetting of the tax brackets. After years of benefiting from Rodriguez’s on-field performance while he was presumably using PEDs, the Yankees are now benefiting from the fact that Rodriguez is being punished for using PEDs. And that is essentially the definition of a moral hazard.
As we sit here in mid-January, there seems to be no more obvious free agent fit than the idea that Stephen Drew should sign with the Mets. It’s such an obvious pairing that the internet has been talking about it with such regularity that it almost seems like he already was a Met, and is now looking for his next new home.
It’s obvious because the Mets made some moves to improve this winter, importing Bartolo Colon, Curtis Granderson, and Chris Young, and still have a hole at shortstop. It’s obvious because their first-round pick is protected and they already gave up their second to add Granderson, so giving up a third-rounder seems to be a minor annoyance. It’s obvious because these are the guys who have started at least one game at short since Jose Reyes left following 2011 — Justin Turner, Omar Quintanilla, Ruben Tejada, Jordany Valdespin, Wilfredo Tovar, and Ronny Cedeno — and because that group has combined to contribute all of 2.8 WAR over two seasons. It’s obvious because a below-market return to Boston seems to be Drew’s only viable alternative at this point, his free agency waylaid by the qualifying offer.
Drew’s not a great player, but he is a good one, and almost certainly better than what the team currently has. So obvious! And yet just last week, GM Sandy Alderson reiterated his feeling that the team isn’t likely to sign Drew, instead intending to go into the season with Tejada and the .236 wOBA he put up last season. Merely media posturing, hoping to drag things out and get Scott Boras to lower his demands? Sure, possibly. Maybe even probably. Yet there’s also the not-small possibility that Alderson is just a bit smarter than the rest of us, and he really doesn’t have any intention of adding Drew. Read the rest of this entry »
Baseball arbitrator Frederic Horowitz reduced Alex Rodriguez’s suspension from 211 to 162 games in an opinion released to the parties today. Now that the arbitrator has ruled, Rodriguez’s suspension takes effect immediately.
The meaning of “immediately” is unclear, though, because we are in the midst of the offseason. Rodriguez’s attorneys told reporters that the third baseman plans to show up for spring training with the Yankees, even if he is barred from playing any regular-season games this year. The Yankees are likely to do what they can to stop that from happening.
At this point, we don’t know why the arbitrator reduced Rodriguez’s suspension to 162 games. His written opinion has not been made public. Rodriguez’s attorneys announced that they plan to ask a federal court on Monday to overturn the decision, despite the long odds (more on that below). If that happens, the opinion is likely to become public as an exhibit to Rodriguez’s complaint.
Until then, we are left to wonder what evidence Horowitz found credible or which provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Joint Drug Policy he relied on in reducing the suspension from 211 games to 162.
On those points, let’s take a step back and remind ourselves how we got here.
Thursday afternoon, I took a quick glance at 2014 team-by-team pitch-framing projections. This afternoon, I’m taking a quick glance at something else within the pitch-framing field. Longer glances are, of course, superior to quicker glances, but I take quick glances for three primary reasons. One, I don’t have the time, really, to dedicate to longer, research-paper-level glances. Two, I don’t have the mathematical chops to really get into stuff in depth. And three, quick glances make for good starting points, and they usually end up being fairly accurate. If you can get to X in an hour, and if you can only get to 1.1X in ten hours, how valuable are the extra nine hours? Extremely valuable, in science. Less valuable, in casual baseball analysis.
For some years, we’ve had pitch-framing information, for catchers. We’ve been able to tell how many strikes they gain or cost, and we’ve been able to assign run values. A major complication, however, lies in trying to separate catchers from pitchers. It’s the pitchers, after all, who’re throwing the pitches getting caught, and it stands to reason different pitchers might be differently challenging to receive. This is far from a new idea, but it’s an idea worthy of further exploration.
The votes are in, and Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas are in. Craig Biggio is out, barely. Jack Morris‘ 15 years of ballot eligibility are up, and his candidacy will be turned over to the Veterans’ Committee. Rafael Palmeiro didn’t receive the minimum 5% of the vote necessary to remain on the ballot. These results were certainly not the worst-case scenario, but they were far from the best. Let’s touch on a few of the points raised in my pre-results article from last week, and take a look at what the future might hold. Read the rest of this entry »
You. You, specifically. The person reading FanGraphs right now on your machine. Haven’t you ever thought about yourself as a player? You shouldn’t, you’d be terrible. You definitely wouldn’t want to even try to swing the bat. But, what if you were a batter, yet you never swung the bat? What might your numbers eventually look like against big-league competition?
It’s fun to think about the worst player possible, who would show up as essentially having the WAR of the complete absence of a player. The WAR of a vacuum, as it were, provided it weren’t such a strong vacuum that it attracted all batted balls in the field. A related thought project is putting yourself in the major leagues, and often, when people do this, they just comfortably assume a .000 wOBA. I mean, you’d never get on against a qualified big-league pitcher, right? That’s very kind of you to assume, but it’s also untrue. You could get on base sometimes. You’d just have to not swing the bat. How often could you reach if you followed that simple, single instruction?
When you are the 726th player drafted in a draft, your odds of making it to the major leagues are incredibly slim. Only two players drafted in that spot (and signed) in the history of the draft have donned a major league uniform: Milt Hill and Dane De La Rosa. It took De La Rosa five seasons of pitching, in any league, to throw his first pitch above A-ball. That time frame included stints in places such as Yuma, Helena, Long Beach, and Victoria with stops in between. It also included a stop in the real estate market in 2006 trying to close deals on houses.
The Rays gave him another chance in 2010, and he finally reached the major leagues on July 20th, 2011. He went on to pitch 11 more games in Tampa Bay before being traded to the Angels late in the 2013 Spring Training season. De La Rosa went to the Angels as a pitcher that struggled to command his fastball. Yet another new location for De La Rosa, but with it came a new approach to his craft.
In looking at video of De La Rosa from the past two seasons, he has made some minor tweaks to his delivery. The first changes come in his setup for his delivery (click all images to enlarge).
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The first image is from 8/27/12 when De La Rosa mopped up a 13-3 blowout against Boston while the second one came in his second save of his career against his former team. The 2013 image shows that De La Rosa has changed where he starts on the rubber while also starting his hands a bit higher, and closing off his front side more than he did in 2012.
At the max lift portion of his delivery, he now resembles the man he was called up to replace on the roster in 2013, Jered Weaver.
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De La Rosa has more bend in his back leg, has brought his hands closer to his body, and has more twist in his upper body as he shows his back to the opposing hitter. These adjustments allowed him to stay closed easier in order for him to open his hips up to come to the plate in rhythm with his delivery.
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One of the thing that stands out in reviewing De La Rosa from 2013 is his increased velocity.
The data from BrooksBaseball shows that shows that the average velocity on De La Rosa’s four-seam fastball rose nearly each month of the season in 2013, continuing the trend that started in 2012.
| Month | Avg Velo |
|---|---|
| April 2012 | 92.2 mph |
| Sept 2012 | 93.2 mph |
| April 2013 | 93.7 mph |
| May 2013 | 94.8 mph |
| June 2013 | 95.7 mph |
| July 2013 | 95.6 mph |
| Aug 2013 | 95.6 mph |
| Sept 2013 | 96.4 mph |
The data also shows that De La Rosa was throwing from a bit of a higher release point, which pitchers can use to add velocity while sacrificing horizontal movement. The increased velocity led to increased results. Opponents slugged just .277 against him last season, which was in the top tenth percentile of all relief pitchers that faced at least 200 batters in 2013. His Contact% as well as his opponents wOBA were both in the top-third of the same sample size. The improvements led to more success against right-handed batters as his swing and miss rate against those batters (35.5%) was higher than the likes of Koji Uehara (35.1%) and Craig Kimbrel (34.0%).
The Angels have had their issues in recent years harvesting pitching talent from their farm system, but they appear to have done quite well thus far here. They’ve turned an undrafted organizational middle reliever into an opportunity for a home town kid to go good. So far, so good.
