Archive for Daily Graphings

Here on FanGraphs, a lot of the data we present is built around future projections. We host both pre-season and in-season forecasts from multiple systems, and these forecasts form the basis for many of our tools, including our Playoff Odds model. It’s safe to say that we like forecasts.

But I know not everyone reading this post trusts the projection systems, especially when they are forecasting things that we don’t want to be true. It’s natural to want to discard prior information when it doesn’t align with what we want to believe, and often, the forecasts serve as a wet blanket alternative to enthusiasm and excitement. What’s to like about a system that takes the fun out of breakout performances, or tells us that we need to be more patient with the guy who just looks terrible every time we watch him?

And it’s not like projection systems are infallible. Those forecasts never saw Cliff Lee coming, and they certainly didn’t anticipate Jose Bautista was going to go from career scrub to superstar at the age of 29. There are plenty of examples where players made dramatic, unexpected turns in their career arc, and using their track record to project their future would have been wrong. The fact that there are players who have radically changed their performance base allows us to extrapolate that possibility to every player who is performing in a way inconsistent with their projection.

But we just shouldn’t do it. Projections might be fun-sucking, soulless algorithms that are incapable of picking up on adjustments that players can and do make, but the reality is that these forecasts do a pretty good job of predicting the future, even for players whose current performances and projections don’t line up at all.

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Left field at AT&T Park in San Francisco is spacious — but compared to center field and right field, it’s not terribly complicated. No unusually high brick walls; no tricky angles. After Barry Bonds left the team, the Giants rotated some pretty mediocre defenders through left (and towards the end, Bonds was pretty mediocre himself). If the left fielder could hit, he’d probably be an overall plus, despite subpar range or weak arm. Think Pat Burrell in 2010.

The Washington Nationals’ four-game series in San Francisco this week, then, couldn’t have worked out better for new left fielder Ryan Zimmerman. The former Gold Glove third baseman made his first start in left on June 3 after returning from a 51-day stint on the disabled list for a broken right thumb. Zimmerman’s in left because Bryce Harper went down with his own thumb injury that is expected to keep him off the field until July. The Nationals moved Anthony Rendon to third — his natural position — and Danny Espinosa came off the bench to retake his old job at second. Before Zimmerman, Tyler Moore and Nate McLouth rotated in left and posted an 88 wRC+ and 58 wRC+, respectively.

But there’s much more to it. Zimmerman has been battling an arthritic condition in his right shoulder since 2012 and the injury has significantly affected his throwing motion. From 2007 through the 2011 season, Zimmerman had two of the top 10 defensive seasons for third baseman in the league, as measured by Defensive Runs Saved. Cumulatively, the only third baseman better than Zimmerman in those five seasons were Evan Longoria, Adrian Beltre and Scott Rolen, again using DRS.

That all changed with the shoulder injury in 2012. A cortisone shot allowed him to play through pain — and he delivered at the plate to the tune of a .352 wOBA and 121 wRC+ — but his defense suffered. He and the Nationals hoped off-season surgery would alleviate the pain and the effects of the injury on his throwing motion, but 2013 wasn’t much better from the hot corner. Zimmerman’s cumulative DRS from 2007 through 2011 was +55; in 2012 and 2013, it dropped to -2.

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Yoenis Cespedes‘ defense currently ranks third in the MLB, according to UZR/150. Here’s how the third-most valuable fielder in baseball sometimes likes to play routine outfield grounders:

How in the world is this guy third-best defensively in anything? Because this is how he makes up for those gaffes:
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Take a look at this. That’s a breakdown of projected WAR, by position, for every team in baseball between now and the end of the year. Click some of the column headers to learn things that you didn’t need to learn. The Angels project to be best in center field! The Rockies project to be best at shortstop! The Mets project to be a bad team! It’s a neat page, and it’s a page that is constantly updating, based on a variety of inputs.

It’s also a page that existed before the season, the data being the same data that showed up in our 2014 Positional Power Rankings. At one point, we had projected full-season WAR by position for everybody, based on the projections and the depth charts. Now that it’s the middle of June those preseason projections mean only so much, but I thought it could be informative to compare actual positional WAR to projected positional WAR, over the fraction of the season that’s in the books. At 18 different positions, we can already observe teams who are off from their preseason projection by at least two wins. At two positions, there’s a difference of at least three wins. Let’s take a quick look at all of these over- and underachievers.

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In the research for the piece I just posted on Johnny Cueto, I ended up with a treasure trove of data on pitch type outcomes during the PITCHF/x era. It is really fun information, and so I figured I’d share a few tidbits here that don’t necessarily lend themselves to an entire post. This post is basically just a list of interesting numbers without any commentary. Enjoy!

First, here are the 10 lowest wOBAs allowed for all pitch types for starting pitchers in 2014, setting a minimum of 100 pitches thrown for each pitch type.

Keep in mind that there’s a huge selection bias here, in that breaking balls and off-speed pitches get thrown primarily in pitcher’s counts, when the expected wOBA is much lower. So, you don’t want to say that Colin McHugh’s curveball is the second best pitch in baseball. It’s not. But it’s been a pretty fantastic out-pitch so far this year.

And now, the laggards, though we’ll only do bottom five in order to limit our the amount of public shaming.

Maybe time to mix it up or just try something else entirely, boys.

Last night, Johnny Cueto dominated the Dodgers, punching out 12 batters in just six shutout innings. This wasn’t anything new, though; Cueto has been destroying opposing hitters all season long. Hitters are batting just .158/.218/.261 against him this year, good for a pitiful .217 wOBA, and he’s the easy early frontrunner for the NL Cy Young Award.

Cueto has been very good before, but this year, he’s taking things to another level. His 28% strikeout rate is nine percentage points higher than his career average, and seven percentage points better than his career-best, posted last year. Last night was his fourth start of the season in which he punched out 10 or more batters; he’d only done that three times in his entire career prior to 2014. Cueto has always been a strike-thrower with a roughly average strikeout rate who succeeded by limiting hits on balls in play, never walking anyone, and completely shutting down the running game with the game’s best pickoff move.

Cueto is still doing all those things, only now, he’s also posting the fourth highest K% of any starting pitcher in baseball; the only guys ahead of him are Strasburg, Darvish, and Tanaka. Combine an elite strikeout rate with everything else Cueto does well, and you have something close to perfection.

But this isn’t the amazing part. The amazing part is how he’s doing it.

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Two decades ago, Tim Hudson was finishing up his first season at Chattahoochee Valley Community College. He was a short righty with a sinker, a slurve and small hands. More than 3,000 innings later, that sinker’s still going — but the rest of Hudson’s arsenal’s evolved. And maybe the story of that change can tell us a little bit about sinkerballers, in general.

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Earlier this week, we took a look at the thought process of a club that opened the season with thoughts of contention might go through when deciding whether to shift gears and sell off assets. Today, let’s take a look some of the organizational processes that lead up to the final product – a significant deal that helps set such a club up for the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Mike Trout has been baseball’s best and most dominant player since 2012, so a little earlier this year, when he encountered something of a slump, it was a newsworthy event. Trout seemed almost perfect in all things, so it raised more than a few eyebrows when he started striking out fairly often. Before Trout, there was no Trout, but between 2009 – 2011, no one accumulated more WAR than Evan Longoria. He was perhaps baseball’s best young player, and it’s not like he fell off a cliff after that; Trout was just better. But Longoria was an awesome young superstar, and he, too, seemed impervious to trouble. It would’ve been hard to imagine Longoria going through hard times.

Yet here we are now, and Longoria’s hit some hard times. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, it’s been partially masked by the whole Rays team dropping out of the race, and it’s not like Longoria’s been bad, but something’s been missing, something of great importance. He’s still just 28, so it’s probably too soon to talk about a decline, but to this point Longoria’s been without his greatest strength. And it’s a mystery as to why that is.

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