Archive for Daily Graphings

We’re coming up on Memorial Day, and Mike Moustakas is hitting .152/.223/.320. That’s going to be his line for a while, because the Royals just optioned him out to Triple-A, and are going to hope he remembers how to hit against minor league pitching.

On the one hand, a case could be made that Moustakas’ performance was unsustainable, and a little positive regression would get him back to prior levels. After all, his walk and strikeout rates are right in line with career norms, and his .168 ISO is actually close to a career high. His overall line has been sabotaged by a .155 BABIP, the lowest in baseball for any player with 130 or more plate appearances. While BABIP for hitters has a wider range of true talent levels than BABIP for pitchers, no Major League player is going to run a sub-.200 BABIP for any real length of time. Given a longer leash, Moustakas’ numbers would have improved.

But let’s not kid ourselves; this isn’t just a small-sample BABIP problem. Over the last calendar year, Moustakas has hit just .227/.279/.368, putting up a 75 wRC+ that is only acceptable for an Andrelton Simmons-level defender. For his career, spanning over 1,600 plate appearances, Moustakas has an 80 wRC+. Even regressing Moustakas back to his career norms doesn’t make him good, and it’s not like Moustakas holds no responsibility for that .155 BABIP to begin with. In fact, his career is basically a case study in how to run a really low BABIP.

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Roughly a quarter of the 2014 season is in the books, and the sample sizes are creeping toward a representative level. Over the next couple of weeks, let’s take a somewhat deeper look at some of this season’s more noteworthy players and performances to date. “Noteworthy” doesn’t always mean “best”, though it does in most cases. Today, we’ll take a look at the first quarter performance of Yasiel Puig, who has done his best to blot out any notion that last season’s breakout was a fluke. His 2014 numbers are even better than last year’s, which were believed by many to have overly fueled by BABIP. What makes Puig tick, and how good could he eventually get?

In the aftermath of the A’s successful signing of Yoenis Cespedes, the Dodgers ventured into the Cuban professional ranks and signed Puig to a seven-year, $42M major league contract in 2012. Like Cespedes before him and Jose Abreu afterward, Puig had great success in Serie Nacional, the top rung of the Cuban professional ranks. Unlike them, however, he had not sustained this success – a loud .330-.431-.581 line in 2010-11 – over a material period of time. In addition, Serie Nacional stats are notoriously spotty. Critically, however, the guy the Dodgers signed was only 21 years old at the time. If this seven-year gamble panned out, they would be locking up Puig through age 27, while the A’s and White Sox would be buying themselves some decline phase along with some of Cespedes’ and Abreu’s prime years. Was Puig good enough to warrant such an investment?

It didn’t take long for that question to be answered definitely. Puig knifed through the Dodgers’ system, batting .328-.405-.611 over 229 minor league at-bats, and then exploded onto the scene at Dodger Stadium last summer. While his style has often overshadowed it, the substance has been there from Day One. While his plus-plus arm strength, his rawness in certain aspects of the game, and his immaturity in general often garnered the headlines, Puig has been one of the game’s top offensive producers since the day he showed up. How historic is the opening to act to his career? Consider this.

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After writing some good posts for the Community Blog, August Fagerstrom got our attention, and is now joining the staff of FanGraphs. He will be contributing regularly here. If you want to follow in his footsteps, the Community Blog is a great place to get noticed.

Late Tuesday evening, Kurt Suzuki hit an inside-the-park home run off San Diego Padres reliever Nick Vincent. As you likely know: Kurt Suzuki is a catcher. Another thing you likely know: catchers, generally speaking, are not fast baseball players. Kurt Suzuki is no exception to that rule. A third thing you likely know: inside-the-park home runs are generally reserved for fast baseball players. Kurt Suzuki is an exception to that rule. Here’s how it happened:

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Twitter user and probably good person Cory Little brought something to my attention the other day. The San Francisco Giants were playing a game in Colorado, and, following a somewhat ordinary looking sequence of events, from the top of the fifth inning:

• Brandon Hicks flies out
• Brandon Crawford singles
• Tyler Colvin doubles
• Madison Bumgarner strikes out
• Gregor Blanco triples
• Hunter Pence singles
• Pablo Sandoval strikes out

Three-run inning for San Francisco. Three two-out runs. The Giants took the lead, though they’d ultimately lose on a walk-off. What’s interesting isn’t the sequence, as it’s presented. What’s interesting is the sub-sequence. Let’s zoom in on the Bumgarner strikeout. The six pitches:

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Justin Verlander has a 3.55 ERA. Seems a little strange to be worried about a pitcher with a 3.55 ERA. But, a few things, about that ERA:

1. it is worse than some of his old ERAs
2. a league-average ERA is lower than it used to be
3. ERA, really?

There’s concern, and the concern is legitimate. Okay, so you go a step beyond ERA. You look at FIP. Verlander’s FIP is even lower than his ERA! ERA takes a long time to stabilize, but FIP can take a while, too, on account of how much it depends on dingers. Verlander, so far, hasn’t given up too many dingers, but let’s use a stat we just introduced on Tuesday to show why Verlander is at the root of much angst.

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For years, there’s been a pretty easy answer to the common question of “Who is the most underrated player in baseball?” It’s Ben Zobrist. It was Ben Zobrist last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. It’s probably been Zobrist since his breakout year in 2008. If you want to win a bar bet — and you happen to be at a bar where the patrons know what Wins Above Replacement is — the “Ben Zobrist has a higher WAR than Robinson Cano over the last six years” factoid is a pretty good place to start.

But Ben Zobrist is still human, and humans don’t age particularly well when it comes to athletic competitions. Next week, Zobrist will celebrate his 33rd birthday. His power is already starting to wane, as just 10 of his 40 hits this season have gone for extra bases, continuing a trend towards weaker contact that began last year. He’s also slowing down and is not the dynamic baserunner he was a few years back. While he remains an excellent defender and a player who can still control the strike zone, he’s becoming more of a good player than a great one. After years of being underrated, Zobrist is finally regressing into the player that people have thought he was.

And so now, it is probably time for him to pass the torch, and to anoint a new Most Underrated Player in Major League Baseball. Interestingly, the prime candidate looks an awful lot like the incumbent.

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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.

Joey Gallo, 3B, Texas Rangers (Profile)
Level: High-A   Age: 20   Top-15: 6th   Top-100: N/A
Line: 185 PA, .342/.459/.795, .452 ISO, 17.8% BB, 23.8% K

Summary
Joey Gallo used to throw pitches. Now he just abuses them.

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Hey, everybody, I’m the guy here who talks about pitch-framing, and I’m here to talk about pitch-framing — sort of. You might think there’s too much written about pitch-framing, but it’s a real thing that we can measure, so that’s kind of like saying you think there’s too much written about on-base percentage. Baseball stats are baseball stats, and that’s what we talk about here. But I’ll say this much: Usually, when people talk about framing, they’re talking about the catchers who do it. But I want to focus on the pitchers.

That is, the pitchers who benefit, and the pitchers who do the opposite of benefit. It’s important to remember good and bad framers don’t simply do what they do in isolation. That performance has an effect on pitcher statistics — statistics we’ve long thought to be fielding-independent. It’s an aspect not often discussed, in part because it gets incredibly complicated, but I figured I’d take this chance to provide a 2014 season update on pitchers and their zones. I’ve written these posts before, but not yet this season.

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Last off-season, the Red Sox made Stephen Drew a qualifying offer, giving him a chance to return for 2014 with a $14.1 million salary. He turned it down, and sought a multi-year offer in free agency instead. No offers came, and the Red Sox moved on. They brought Xander Bogaerts to camp as their regular shortstop, and gave Will Middlebrooks a chance to reclaim the starting third base job. While Boras made noise about the problems with the qualifying offer system, he continued to suggest that Drew’s market would emerge once the draft occurred and the attached compensation pick went away. The draft will be held in two weeks, and so Drew could have signed with any club as a “true free agent” 16 days from now.

Instead, today, he essentially accepted the qualifying offer from the Red Sox, taking a pro-rated version of the $14 million salary he turned down seven months ago. Once he’s ready to resume facing live pitching, Drew will presumably once again take over as the Red Sox shortstop, with Bogaerts shifting back to third base, and Middlebrooks serving as depth or a trade chip once he returns from the DL.

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What follows represents an attempt by the author to utilize the projections available at the site to identify the five starting pitchers whose per-inning WAR projections have most improved since the beginning of the season.

For every pitcher, what I’ve done is first to calculate his preseason (PRE) WAR projection prorated to 150 innings, averaging together Steamer and ZiPS forecasts where both are available. What I’ve done next is to calculate the prorated WAR for every pitcher’s rest-of-season (ROS) WAR projection (again, using both Steamer and ZiPS when available). I’ve then found the difference in prorated WAR between the preseason and rest-of-season projection.

When I attempted a similar exercise last month, I used updated end-of-season projections instead of prorated 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 pitchers have been considered who (a) are currently on a major-league roster and (b) have recorded at least 20 innings at the major-league level and (c) are expected to work predominantly as a starter for the duration of the season. Note that Projection denotes a composite Steamer and ZiPS projection. PRE denotes the player’s preseason projection; ROS, the rest-of-season projection. Inning estimates for both PRE and ROS projections are taken from relevant pitcher’s depth-chart innings projection. Data is current as of some time in the middle of the night between Monday and Tuesday.

5. Drew Hutchison, RHP, Toronto (Profile)
Projection (PRE): 115 IP, 7.5 K/9, 3.4 BB/9, 1.2 HR/9, 4.38 FIP, 1.1 WAR
Projection (ROS): 132 IP, 8.3 K/9, 3.2 BB/9, 1.1 HR/9, 3.93 FIP, 1.7 WAR

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