Archive for Daily Graphings

The Rangers, already the most injury plagued team in baseball, got a double dose of bad news on Wednesday.

Matt Harrison’s lingering back problems have simply not abated, and now he’s looking at either trying to pitch through serious pain or face a spinal fusion surgery which could potentially threaten his Major League career. Meanwhile, Martin Perez — who lasted just 3 2/3 innings on Saturday — was diagnosed with a tear in his UCL, and is probably going to join the Tommy John parade. The Rangers were already trying to get by without Derek Holland, Jurickson Profar, and Geovany Soto, as well as a host of role players who had been pushed into larger roles due to the team’s injury epidemic.

With both Perez and Harrison potentially out for the season, the Rangers rotation is in shambles, and some national pundits are already writing the team’s obituary. And certainly, losing 40% of your rotation on one day is not going to improve your team’s chances of making the playoffs. The Rangers are worse today than they were yesterday. But let’s keep some perspective; few players are so good that their loss would dramatically the needle for a team’s playoff odds, and the Rangers replacement for Martin Perez might actually be just as good.

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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. Let’s kick it off today with a look at Masahiro Tanaka’s first seven starts as a Yankee. (This article was written prior to his eighth start, on Wednesday night.) His 58/7 K/BB ratio obviously speaks volumes about his ability. Is his future success based almost exclusively on this solid foundation, or is there even more to him? Read the rest of this entry »

Dave observed the other day on Twitter that, over the past calendar year, Mark Buehrle has been one of the better and more valuable starting pitchers in baseball. A lot of that has had to do with home-run suppression, and if you read FanGraphs often, you know how we generally feel about home-run suppression, but the larger point is that, after getting off to a rough start in Toronto, Buehrle turned things around and continues to get batters out to this day. His strikeouts right now are basically the same as ever, and every game batters against Buehrle return to their dugouts shaking their heads. He is what he has been, allowing him to feel ageless.

Consider everything about Buehrle and you might assume that he’s pitching like he always has. Why mess with what’s been working? Buehrle’s always been a little bit deceptive and a little bit finesse, and it’s not like you very often see a pitcher in his mid-30s make an approach adjustment. But if you dig beneath the 2014 Mark Buehrle surface, you notice something you can’t un-notice. Of his 31 strikeouts, 20 have been called. This is unusual, and this has an explanation.

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One of the most confounding things in baseball is an obviously talented starting pitcher who doesn’t generate many strikeouts. Generally speaking, we expect to see strikeouts match the stuff, and while sometimes we just confuse a good fastball for a good repertoire, there are guys who just pitch below their ceilings. Garrett Richards, in the past, was such a guy. It wasn’t just that he possessed one of the fastest fastballs in the majors — he’s also thrown a sharp slider, yet through his first three years he posted the same strikeout rate as Jeff Karstens and Kevin Millwood. Because of the incongruity, Richards has been considered a sleeper, but sometimes all a sleeper is is an early-stage disappointment.

Right now it doesn’t look like Richards is going to be a disappointment. It looks like Richards is going to fulfill that sleeper potential people have long figured he had. Wednesday, Richards was dominant against the Phillies, whiffing eight over seven shutout innings. Now, through a quarter of the year, Richards has struck out one of every four batters he’s faced. One out of four is bigger than one out of six.

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David Price had one of the best starts of his career on Tuesday. With any start, you always have to consider the opponent, since it’s the opponent who’s responsible for doing anything with the pitches that get thrown, but at least by the numbers, Price was absolutely outstanding in Seattle, turning in a walk-free complete game with a dozen strikeouts. He was sufficiently dominant that he was allowed to handle the ninth inning of a one-run game, and he closed the deal with a 96 mile-per-hour swinging strikeout. Not that it was the swinging strikeouts for which people will remember the effort.

Closing the bottom of the first, Price froze Corey Hart with an inside running fastball. That was the first of eight called strikeouts Price would record, giving him twice as many called strikeouts as whiffs. It was tied for the highest called-strikeout start of the 2014 season, and while most called third strikes are the result of a hitter being caught off guard, in the end Price’s called strikeouts were pretty similar.

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“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.” — Crash Davis, in 1988’s classic baseball flick “Bull Durham”

This piece of advice from Kevin Costner’s character has been translated into nearly every ballpark in America, as fans and commentators alike lament a struggling pitcher’s inability to just throw the ball over the plate. Even if they hit the ball, it’s not another boring walk, and besides, you have seven guys standing behind you who are covering most of the field; as long you keep the ball in the ballpark, odds are that the hitter is going to make an out. Trust your defense, pitch to contact and, most importantly, work deep in the game.

But is putting trust into your defense actually a good strategy? After all, while most balls in play become outs, almost every strikeout becomes an out — there are rare times when a batter does reach on a strikeout due to a wild pitch or passed ball — and a pitcher’s job is to rack up as many outs as he can, while allowing as few runs as he can in the process. Are strikeouts an inefficient way of collecting outs, and would a pitcher be better off trading them in for those democratic ground balls if he wants to get as many outs as possible while staying within his pitch count? Let’s dive into the numbers.

Overall, there are 105 starting pitchers who have thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title. The average pitcher in this group has thrown 3.8 pitches for every batter faced, so given today’s rough guideline of 100 pitches per game for a starter, a pitcher can be expected to face about 26 batters per game, or get through the entire batting order nearly three times. However, because some batters reach base, the average qualified starter has required 5.3 pitches for each out he has recorded, meaning that he records about 19 outs per start, or 6 1/3 innings pitched.

Do groundball pitchers get more bang for their buck, as is often suggested? Let’s take a look at those 105 starters broken into quartiles based on ground ball percentage this year.

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Just over a month ago, Dave Cameron made an astute observation: Kenley Jansen was suddenly throwing harder in the earliest part of the season. Or as he put it, “PITCHF/x has already classified more 97+ mph pitches from Kenley Jansen this year than it did all of last year.” And since Jansen was already a hard-throwing and dominant closer with an unhittable pitch even before the velocity jump, it made for an interesting proposition. Namely, what would hitters do against a Jansen who was actually throwing harder? What happens if you take someone who is one of the three or four best in the world at what he does, and then give him something more to work with? What then?

Six weeks into the season, Jansen now has one more 97-plus mph pitch (21) logged than in his entire career through 2013. He’s also already allowed more than half as many earned runs as he allowed in any of the last three years, and he has four meltdowns as compared to eight in all of 2013. Hitters have a .276/.349/.408 line against in 2014, as opposed to .158/.245/.249 previously. He’s throwing harder, finding less success despite it, and, well, baseball is just the worst sometimes. (This may be residual Jose Fernandez anger.)

This has led to a pretty predictable narrative: Jansen is throwing harder…

…and it’s because of that that he’s had problems. Causation! It implies correlation, except when it doesn’t.

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Let’s talk about something Yasiel Puig did on Monday. In the fourth inning, off Tom Koehler, he hit a home run. He does that. In the fifth inning, off Henry Rodriguez, he walked on four pitches. The same guy had just previously walked Dee Gordon and Dan Haren. In the third inning, Puig flied out. In the seventh inning, Puig grounded out. For good measure, Puig also got caught stealing. But let’s hone in on the bottom of the first. Gordon led off with a groundout, and then it was Puig vs. Koehler with nobody on.

First pitch, fastball, in the zone, foul. Second pitch, fastball, in the zone, foul. That quickly, Koehler was ahead of Puig 0-and-2, and there is no more advantageous count for a pitcher, aside from 0-and-3. Koehler could choose from anything to try to put Puig away, and Puig was put on the total defensive. At that point, he probably wished he would’ve put one of the fouls in play.

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Jose Fernandez is broken. After allowing him to throw ridiculous pitches that opposing hitters simply couldn’t touch, his elbow threw in the towel in the fifth inning of his start on Friday night. You can basically see the injury occur in his in-game velocity chart.

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Normally, when a championship season begins, there already is a pretty clear stratification of teams within a league. In the current 15-team league era, leagues often divide fairly neatly into thirds: five pretty clear contenders, five pretty clear laggards or rebuilders and five “meh” clubs in the middle. As the season begins to unfold, a game of musical chairs begins, with a contender or two often falling short and a club or two from the “meh” and rebuilder categories making a surprise run.

The 2014 American League breaks this mold. almost a full quarter into the season, there are two clear contending clubs — the Detroit Tigers and Oakland A’s — and only the Houston Astros are an obvious laggard. The “meh” pile is 12 deep. Let’s look at this group a little closer for clues as to who might emerge as the other three AL playoff teams. Read the rest of this entry »