Archive for Daily Graphings

Last year, the Toronto Blue Jays were supposed to be contenders.

They were crowned the winners of the off-season after acquiring Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, R.A. Dickey, and Melky Cabrera in the same winter, giving their roster a big boost on paper. On the field, though, it didn’t work.

Johnson was lousy and injured, while Buehrle and Dickey failed to improve the rotation much even though they avoided the DL. Reyes and Cabrera both struggled with injury issues of their own, with Cabrera performing as one of the worst players in baseball when he did play. Instead of joining the A’s, Indians and Pirates in the Postseason of the Upstarts, the 2013 Blue Jays instead became another reminder of the perils of trying to build a team around splashy, big-name acquisitions.

Coming off a miserable season, the Blue Jays backed off from aggressive off-season upgrades. They signed one free agent to a Major League contract: Dioner Navarro, a part-time catcher signed for part-time money. Despite being linked to big names like Jeff Samardzija, the team’s most notable trade involved reliever Brad Lincoln going to Philadelphia for backup catcher Erik Kratz. Basically, the Blue Jays stood pat, despite what looked to be glaring holes in the rotation and at second base, not to mention all the questions about the big-names who disappointed so dramatically a year ago.

So, put it all together, and you have a last-place team that made no substantial upgrades over the winter, built around a core group of players that are almost universally on the wrong side of 30. That’s not a classic recipe for success, but as we head towards June, the Blue Jays are alone atop the American League East, and they now look like the prohibitive favorites to win the division.

How did the Blue Jays fix themselves by doing nothing? There are two primary, obvious differences between this year’s model and last year’s version.

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Victor Martinez is in his age-35 season. He spent nearly a decade in the majors playing catcher, the most physically demanding position for a hitter to play. He missed the entire 2012 season after tearing his ACL. Things like these are not exactly a recipe for success with regards to potential comeback scenarios for your typical hitter. Victor Martinez is not your a typical hitter.

In terms of just hitting, Martinez has been the best player in the American League this season. His .417 wOBA and 166 wRC+ are seventh-best in the entire MLB. Both his Steamer and ZiPS updated full-season projections have him finishing with the highest wRC+ of his career. This is pretty interesting, given the circumstances laid out above.

What’s even more interesting is how he’s doing it.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. This particular Prospect Watch feature will focus on prospect notes from around the minors — focusing on both top prospects and sleepers.

Chicago Cubs

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The world hasn’t ended, or at least not the part I’ve been in. And while the world is indeed ending, technically, it isn’t ending any faster than it was a day ago or a week ago. Ben Revere hit a home run and it seems there haven’t been any greater, big-picture consequences. You ordinarily don’t expect there to be, but as far as Revere was concerned, we couldn’t be absolutely sure until now. Ben Revere homered and things kept on keeping on. It’s how it was with Joey Gathright. It’s how it was with Jason Tyner. It’s how it was with Tony Campana, if you choose to count his inside-the-parker. It looks just the same in the box score.

Revere’s homer wasn’t witnessed by that many. Paid attendance was barely 23,000, and the game had an extended rain delay. It made little significant difference, turning a 4-1 deficit into a 4-2 deficit on the way to a 6-2 loss. And Revere, otherwise, had an ordinary game. His first time up, he made an out to third. His second time up, he made an out to first. His third time up, he made an out to third. His fifth time up, he made an out to second. It was a regular Phillies game with Ben Revere in it, save for his fourth plate appearance. But that fourth plate appearance is something we’ve been waiting for for years, so we can’t just let this go by. We have to seize this occasion to dwell, and so, let’s go over some pertinent facts.

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All throughout the winter — and for the last few winters, really — the Philadelphia Phillies have been the go-to for easy jokes to make about seemingly terribly-run baseball teams. We’ve wrung years of hilarity out of the Ryan Howard extension, dating to basically the exact moment it was signed. We cringed at the riches awarded to the declining Jonathan Papelbon in an era where teams are getting smarter about the values of closers. We watched GM Ruben Amaro, Jr. squeeze a few more good years after Pat Gillick’s 2008 World Series champs once he was promoted in Nov. 2008, then ride the team downward from 102 wins in 2011 to 82 in 2012 to 73 in 2013, all while refusing to trade any of the team’s clearly aging core. Just days ago, the Sporting News ranked all 30 GMs. Amaro came in last, and while none of those rankings have a lot of science to them, it’s hardly the first time.

And really, it was a different kind of bad for the Phillies. The Astros are worse on the field, and so are the Cubs. But those teams, and others like them, seemed to have a plan. They were willing to suffer the pain of 100-loss seasons in order to rebuild barren farm systems. They’re not there yet, but they’re both going in the right direction. The Phillies, meanwhile, refused to trade Cliff Lee or Cole Hamels or Chase Utley or Jimmy Rollins for talent that could have been on track to form the core of the next good Phillies team with J.P. Crawford and Jesse Biddle. Amaro, likely with his own employment status in mind, chose to retain or re-sign all while reloading with the likes of Michael Young and Delmon Young in 2013, then to get even older with his main moves for 2014: Read the rest of this entry »

Several weeks ago, there was some concern over Edwin Encarnacion. He was having a somewhat strikeout-prone April, and he was having an under-powered April, and Jays fans weren’t sure what to make of the guy going forward. He’s since hit 13 home runs in May, all in a span of 20 games, and now he basically seems like himself, and on a hot streak to boot. All concern has been erased.

Similarly, people were very worried about George Springer after an underwhelming first couple weeks. Of course, Springer didn’t have Encarnacion’s track record, and of course, Springer was a rookie getting exposed to the majors for the first time, but I’d field questions in my chats about whether or not Springer might get demoted since his power was totally absent. In April, Springer batted .182 without a single dinger. In May, he’s batted .325 with eight dingers, and he’s homered in four games in a row. Springer has been one of the best hitters in baseball lately, and the initial overreaction now seems silly and absurd. Give rookies time. Especially the really good ones.

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Fun fact: over the last 365 days, the best hitter in baseball has been neither Miguel Cabrera nor Mike Trout. Instead, Yasiel Puig has ascended to the top of the charts, posting a 172 wRC+ that just edges past both superstars. Also fun fact: that 172 wRC+ is Puig’s career mark, because his entire Major League experience has been contained within the last calendar year. He’s a dozen games shy of one full Major league season, and he has a 172 wRC+.

Let’s try and put that start in some historical perspective. Tony already noted how good Puig’s rookie season was, relative to other 22-year-olds, but let’s see if we can go a little further, and isolate the best debut years in baseball history. This is actually a little difficult, because querying gamelog totals is not particularly easy, but we can hack together a list of comparisons using Baseball-Reference’s Play Index and our summable game logs here on FanGraphs.

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What follows represents an attempt by the author to utilize the projections available at the site to identify the five major-league hitters whose wOBA projections have most improved since the beginning of the season.

For every batter, what I’ve done is first to calculate his preseason (PRE) wOBA projection, averaging together Steamer and ZiPS forecasts where both are available. What I’ve done next is to calculate every hitter’s rest-of-season (ROS) wOBA projection (again, using both Steamer and ZiPS when available). I’ve then found the difference in wOBA between the preseason and rest-of-season projection.

When I attempted a similar exercise last month (with WAR, in that case), I used updated end-of-season projections instead of rest-of-season ones. The advantage of the latter (and why I’m using it here) is that it provides the closest available thing to an estimate of any given player’s current true-talent level — which, reason dictates, is what one requires to best identify those players who have most improved.

Only those hitters have been considered who both (a) are currently on a major-league roster and (b) weren’t accidentally omitted by the author, who is a moron. Note that Projection denotes a composite Steamer and ZiPS projection. PRE denotes the player’s preseason projection; ROS, the rest-of-season projection. Plate-appearances estimates for both PRE and ROS projections are taken from relevant batter’s depth-chart projection. Data is current as of Monday.

5. Devin Mesoraco, C, Cincinnati (Profile)
Projection (PRE): 413 PA, .247/.308/.413 (.274 BABIP), .313 wOBA, 96 wRC+
Projection (ROS): 240 PA, .260/.320/.438 (.288 BABIP), .330 wOBA, 107 wRC+

Notes
In 160-plus career starts for the club, Mesoraco has served as Cincinnati’s cleanup hitter just three times. In five starts since last Monday, Mesoraco has also served as Cincinnati’s cleanup hitter three times. In part, the loss of Jay Bruce and then (upon Bruce’s return) Joey Votto has facilitated the move. In part, it’s Mesoraco’s own production which has suggested to manager Bryan Price that his catcher ought to occupy one of the most important spots (both symbolically and actually) in the Reds lineup. Notably, Mesoraco’s plate-discipline projections haven’t improved at all. Rather, it’s his early BABIP and power-on-contact figures which have led to his more encouraging forecasts.

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This post is a bit of an experiment. During the day, while working on various writing topics and filtering through different ideas, I’ll often come up with something that isn’t quite worthy of a full 1,000 word post, but is interesting enough to share on its own. A lot of times, these things just end up on Twitter, but sometimes, they just don’t go anywhere.

Instead of just leaving these in the back room, I’m going to start putting them up just as stand-alone, low-commentary posts and see if there’s enough interest in the data points as conversation generators to continue posting them. If it turns out that you guys don’t like them, I won’t keep doing them, so critical feedback is certainly welcome, but perhaps there’s room on FanGraphs for posts that aren’t quite fully fleshed ideas, but instead just interesting statistical nuggets. We’ll see, I guess.

If you go to the site’s Playoff Odds page, you’ll see some pretty staggering numbers for the teams at the top. Our model currently forecasts the Tigers to have a 94% chance of reaching the postseason, for instance, both Bay Area teams are strong favorites to reach at least the Wild Card game as well. These numbers are surprisingly high given that we’re still in May, and there’s fourth months of baseball left to play. A lot can happen in four months.

But to illustrate why those numbers are so high, it helps to take a look at the projected final records in graph form, because there are some huge gaps between the teams at the top and the teams in the middle or bottom.

Here’s the American League first.

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Something wacky happened in Tampa Bay on Wednesday night. When something wacky happens in baseball, @cantpredictball is usually on the case. I’ll let them (him? her?) begin the storytelling:

The A’s had one hit tonight. They won 3-2.

— YCPB (@cantpredictball) May 22, 2014

You don’t need me, or cantpredictball, to tell you that’s rare. According to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, teams that get one-hit have won just 62 baseball games in 100 years. That’s just the ninth time it’s happened in the last decade. Oakland had never done it in its 45-year tenure as a franchise.

What’s funny about the game, besides the Athletics being victorious with one hit, is that if you look at the win expectancy chart, you really can’t even tell when that hit came. Go ahead, see if you can tell:
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