Archive for Daily Graphings

Looking back on it, I think I took LeBron James for granted during his time in Cleveland.

When a player reaches a certain level of greatness, this can be a natural human response. You can only hear or read about one excelling at such a high level for so long before it starts to seem like old news. I wish I had gone to more Cavaliers games before James did a thing on TV that made me stop acknowledging his existence in the NBA, or really the existence of the NBA in general. He is, obviously, an incredibly special athlete who played right in my backyard, and I took him for granted.

You might be tired of hearing or reading about Mike Trout, but you really shouldn’t be. Don’t take this one for granted. Mike Trout is, obviously, an incredibly special athlete and, really, enough can’t be said about him.

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You think about a playoff-contending team that really needs help at shortstop, and your mind immediately goes to the Detroit Tigers. Jose Iglesias‘ shin injury took him out of the mix before the season even started, and since Detroit never did go and get Stephen Drew before he returned to Boston, they’ve attempted to get by with a collection of odds and ends. They tried the ancient Alex Gonzalez, who quickly proved he was past his sell-by date. He gave way to Andrew Romine, acquired from the Angels during camp, with a touch of Danny Worth now and then. Romine’s wRC+ of 49 is the highest of that trio, so earlier this month they DFA‘d Worth and went with Eugenio Suarez, who has impressed in limited time and should hopefully prevent them from any further thoughts of asking first base coach Omar Vizquel to come out of retirement.

Maybe Suarez works out. Maybe he doesn’t, and the Tigers end up going out and getting Jimmy Rollins or Everth Cabrera or Ben Zobrist or Didi Gregorius or whatever shortstops become available. Either way, when the trade deadline gets a little closer and you start thinking about team needs, you’re likely going to think about the Tigers and their shortstops.

What you’re probably not going to think about are the Milwaukee Brewers, because they have a 24-year-old shortstop who made the All-Star team last year. They have playoff hopes, and they have Jean Segura. What they also have is a considerable issue.

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To whatever extent that Max Scherzer cares about these things, the good news is that Tigers fans are already preoccupied with worry over Justin Verlander, who was dismantled again on Monday. So Scherzer’s struggles can stay a little more hidden. But the bad news is that, with the Tigers stuck in such a slump, people will be inclined to worry more in general, and so there’s anxiety beyond just Verlander anxiety. There’s anxiety wherever anxiety’s possible, because the Tigers keep losing and the Royals keep winning. The Royals, right now — right now — right now — actually own sole possession of first place in the AL Central. The math keeps saying it won’t keep up, but math has never tucked someone in and read a nice bedtime story. Math doesn’t go to the store to get medicine and a Gatorade when you’re sick.

Tuesday night, the Royals were playing for first place, and they’d have to go through either Scherzer or the Tigers bullpen. They opted for the hard way and made it look like the easy way, sticking Scherzer with a full ten runs. When the second inning began, the teams were deadlocked at zero. About 30 minutes and 30 seconds later, Scherzer looked to the skies and left the mound, with the Royals suddenly up by a touchdown. Though the Tigers immediately countered with a safety, the margin would never get closer than that. A possible pitchers’ duel turned into a one-sided ambush, and in the process, the Royals forced Scherzer to set some new marks.

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There are a couple of ways to go about doing research, and one of them is preferred over the other. In the preferred course, you identify something of interest, and then you go into the numbers. The other way is the other way, where you go into the numbers and hunt around for something of interest. The former is a lot more targeted, but one could say the latter is a lot more open-minded. For this post, I started with the numbers and went from there.

I recently wrote about trusting catchers with runners on third base. In the course of doing that research, I noticed Jaime Garcia had a much higher rate of low off-speed pitches with a runner 90 feet away, as compared to with the bases empty. I didn’t really go any further in that piece, but I was interested in a follow-up that was built around guys who pitch differently by situation. It stands to reason every pitcher is different and every catcher is different, so not every battery will take the same approaches. This is a starting point: This is a post about fastball rates, and runners being on base or the bases being empty.

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Occasionally, writers or commentators who are not fans of WAR will talk about how the concept of a replacement level player is a fabrication, a subjective threshold determined in some arbitrary reality. It’s not a real baseline, they argue, and thus corrupts the entire model.

Well, helpfully, the A’s and Brewers have just completed a transaction that defines replacement level spectacularly well.

#Athletics acquired Mills from #Brewers for $1. Expected to move into rotation shortly.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 17, 2014

A dollar. The A’s cost to acquire Mills from the Brewers was the same as a gas station cup of coffee. While Mills wasn’t in their organization, he still served as a source of organizational depth because there was basically no frictional costs in obtaining his rights. This is the thing about replacement level players; they are so plentiful that you don’t even have to have one in order to have access to its utility. When you need one, you can go get them, and for little or no cost.

By the way, in his Major League career, Brad Mills has thrown 53 innings. His career WAR? 0.0. I guess the definition of replacement level isn’t so theoretical after all.

The All-Star Game isn’t for another 28 days, but with the voting in full swing and enough of the season under our belts, I figure it’s time to weigh in on how I’d fill out the roster if I were Grand Poobah and had the final say on all 34 players. I will note up front that I believe the All-Star Game is an annual affair, and we shouldn’t simply have the same collection of players every year just because those are the “true stars”.

The All-Star Game is best when it serves as both a platform for the game’s greatest players and recognition for those who have earned their way in. I will not be putting players on the roster who have not performed well in 2014, even if they are bonafide stars, with just one exception: people want the chance to honor Derek Jeter on a national stage, and an exhibition game is as good a place to do that as any.

We’ll start with the American League, with the NL to follow tomorrow. As a reminder, the rosters now comprise 34 players, which I’ll be splitting as 21 position players and 13 pitchers, as that has been the final tally for the game most of the last few years. And, yes, we’re honoring the rule requiring every team to be represented. I’ll list each player by the tier of how they got selected, then put the final roster down below. On to the picks.

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For all of the natural ebbs and flows of individual player performance from year to year, the game’s ruling class – the elite among the elite, the upper crust – is a fairly closed society that remains fairly static from year to year. Any given year might have its Yasiel Puig joining that group, or its Albert Pujols conceding his seat, but the core membership is fairly predictable. What might happen in any given season, however, is one of these elite players taking a temporary step up in class, reaching an even more rarified air than ever before. This week, let’s take a deeper look at the 2014 performance of some of the game’s elite, and determine whether they in fact have taken things to the next level. Today, Felix Hernandez. Read the rest of this entry »

Player projections, because of what they are, are always going to be pretty accurate at the group level, or else they’d be really lousy player projections in dire need of improvement. So when thinking about the future, a projection should always be the starting point. One truth is that there will be few exceptions to the rule that players follow their projections. Another truth is that there will always be exceptions. A third truth is that baseball fans will over-identify presumed exceptions, because we’re not very good at weighing recent events. As such, if this counts as a debate, it’s going to be a long-running, unwinnable debate, with new possible exceptions submitted every year. There’s always going to be some reason to believe in a given player who hasn’t performed like his projection over a couple weeks or months.

Dave wrote about some pretty important research last Friday, finding that in-season projections work well and there’s not much sense in isolating season-to-date statistics. Monday I put up ten polls and then another ten polls, focusing on position players and pitchers who haven’t met their projections so far. On each player, I wanted to gauge audience opinion, to see who people think might be exceptions, and who people think are just players on a streak or a slump. There’s not a ton we’ll be able to do with the results, when it comes to furthering our understanding of the game, but I thought it could be fun to quickly review some stuff we can already see. While more voting has taken place since the writing of this post, the numbers shouldn’t have changed very much.

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Yasiel Puig, it should go without saying, is one of the most fascinating players in baseball. He was incredible in his debut last year, and somehow has been better this year, to a near-historic extent, as he’s notably improved his plate discipline and become one of the best overall hitters in the game. He’s almost certainly going to start in the All-Star Game, and, along with Andrew McCutchen, Troy Tulowitzki, Carlos Gomez and Giancarlo Stanton, he’s going to get some National League MVP consideration.

Really, it’s not hard to see why. If you think about a “five-tool player,” Puig seems to fit that description pretty well. Does he have the hit tool? Of course. Power? Obviously. Throwing arm? Even more obviously. Defense? Well, the defensive metrics don’t love him, but he can do this, which also took a fair amount of the fifth tool, speed. There’s seemingly nothing Puig can’t do on a baseball field; there’s seemingly several things he can do that no one else can.

Except… there’s one thing that Puig is still really, really bad at: For all his speed, he absolutely cannot steal bases, to the point that he really should give up trying to completely. For now, at least. Read the rest of this entry »

After a slow start to the season, the Nationals are finally playing like one of the best teams in baseball. While Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper generate most of the headlines, however, it’s their low-profile first baseman who is one of the driving forces behind their surge. And when you begin to talk to Adam LaRoche, he helps you understand that hitting is as complicated as it is simple.

Part of LaRoche’s comeback is as basic as a change in medication. Last year, the slugger tried an extended release medication for his ADHD, and the results were nothing short of disastrous. “All of them are really appetite suppressers, and so I got to the point where I had no appetite,” LaRoche said before a game with the Giants this June. “Heat and humidity played a role — sweating every day, losing a bunch of weight — and I got down to college weight.” LaRoche just wasn’t healthy.

That can help explain the return in his power stroke, perhaps. But despite great results, he’s not really hitting the ball much further — his batted ball distance on homers and flies is actually down three feet from last year. It’s still top 100 in the league, but he hasn’t added punch on those balls.

Part of what LaRoche is doing that is so great is that he’s making contact like he never has before. He’s posting a career-best strikeout rate (17.1%, career 22%), and it’s backed by the best swinging-strike rate of his career (6.9%, compared to his career mark of 9.7%). That one stumped the hitter — “That… is really unexplainable,” he said as he tugged at his beard.

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