According to David Lennon at Newsday, it looks like changes are coming to the posting system that allows Japanese clubs to, in effect, sell their players to American teams. Though this knowledge comes from anonymous sources, the alterations seem to fit an important facet of successful negotiations: there’s something in them for every party at the table.
The Rangers are sliding again. Perhaps you’ve noticed. The last time they won was September 8, and even that was just their second win in seven games. Since then they have zero wins in seven games, losing on Monday to the Rays, who are direct wild-card competition. To make matters worse, the Rangers haven’t even had a single lead in this seven-game cold streak. Or maybe that doesn’t make matters worse. Maybe it’d be worse to have blown leads. Maybe the sequences don’t matter, provided the end result is still a loss. Who cares how you get there? Losing is losing, and mid-September is the wrong time to be losing.
Used to be, the Rangers felt like postseason shoo-ins. Now they’re clinging to a half-game lead for a wild-card slot, their division hopes entirely dashed. There are four teams on the Rangers’ heels, the Indians tied in the win column. Our playoff odds report puts the Rangers’ chances of getting beyond the regular season at 47%. It is now, basically, a coin flip, where it used to be a flip of a very biased coin. Though hope is far from lost, the Rangers need to get to work, because now they can’t back into the playoffs — they’ve already done the backing up. The Rangers need to score and not let the other guys score.
And so it’s come to this. On September 2, Barry Zito allowed four runs in a four-inning start. Shortly thereafter, he was sent back to the bullpen. He hasn’t pitched since. Really, there’s no reason for him to pitch from this point forward, but he might still get one last turn, maybe to rest some arms, maybe additionally in a show of respect to a veteran who was at least always a good sport. This is how the Zito contract ends. Or, probably ends — MLB.com refuses to just outright state the obvious.
Zito’s days as a Giant are likely coming to an end. His seven-year, $126 million contract ends with this season. The Giants almost surely will decline to pay him an $18 million option. Zito then would get a $7 million buyout. The left-hander is 4-11 with a 5.91 ERA and has twice been removed from the rotation.
Zito’s club option is almost as comical as the old Vernon Wells opt-out clause. It’s an enduring reminder that someone once thought Zito could be highly effective through 2013. Zito wasn’t even all that good when he finished up in Oakland, and he never had much of a margin of error. Since then, he’s only declined further, and now one wonders what he’ll be doing half a year from now. But decline aside, I thought it’d be fun to review Zito’s fastest pitches from the 2013 season. Zito has famously long been something of a junk-baller, but he never did away with his heater completely. One always needs at least the threat of a fastball, and you establish a threat by throwing it. So, below, I’ve prepared a list, showing Zito’s top ten pitches from 2013 that registered at least 86 miles per hour.
Though it’s not yet set in stone, Clayton Kershaw is probably going to win the ERA title, and he’s probably going to win the National League Cy Young Award, because Cy Young Awards frequently go to the guys with the ERA titles. Yet Kershaw isn’t the only starter with an ERA under 2, after you lower the minimums a little bit. There are actually three of them, one of whom is Kershaw, who is demonstrably and understandably amazing. One of them is Jarred Cosart, whose ERA is a hell of a lot more promising than the rest of his numbers. And the third is Clay Buchholz. Kershaw stands out because his adjusted ERA is nearly half the league average. Buchholz stands out because his adjusted ERA is two-thirds Kershaw’s. And Buchholz, now, is back from injury.
Any ERA that low, for a starter, is unsustainable, especially for a starter in the American League and Fenway Park, but Buchholz’s xFIP- is way improved. His FIP- is way improved. Something that’s helped him prevent runs is that he hasn’t surrendered many dingers, as dingers count for runs automatically. But more interesting than that is Buchholz’s strikeout increase. Used to be that Buchholz’s strikeout rates didn’t quite match the quality of his stuff, or at least that was the perception. This year he’s taken a leap forward, striking out a quarter of the batters he’s faced. Changes in strikeout rate capture an analyst’s attention, and in Buchholz’s case, there’s something in particular that’s been driving this.
Why do some teams hit multi-run homers while other teams struggle? The relationship is not as simple as: better OBP, better rate of multi-run homers. I recently dug through sevens season of WPA logs and determined the baseball gods are not totally logical.
Observing the variation is one thing, but to ascribe it all to purely noise is another. Teams can control their runs per home run rate through constructing rosters and lineups predisposed towards greater home run efficiency. So we can’t consign variations to the random luck spittoon until we’ve more specifically assessed what’s happening in the lineup.
In the previous article, I briefly outlined what I called the Giancarlo Problem — where a team’s best OBP and best HR-rate are located within the same player. The Giancarlo Problem can result in deceiving team-wide statistics. So in this second venture, we are going to examine three dimensions instead of two: 1) OBP, excluding home runs, 2) home run rates, and 3) lineup positions.
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Platoon splits are real, and they matter. The trouble comes in when people put too much emphasis on individual platoon performance over a short period of time. It is understandable, of course, and as fans, we have a right to overreact to things. But when it comes to getting to the truth of things, it gets a bit more complicated. One can read about the general principles of thinking about observed platoon performance versus true talent elsewhere. What can be instructive is looking at some concrete cases of unusual or standout performances of certain players. For today, let’s take a look at the platoon histories of a couple of left-handed hitters: Alex Gordon and Robinson Cano.
On Friday, when I was writing about Carl Yastrzemski, I thought about Willie Mays. Anecdotally, when we think of the worst-ever final season by a great player, we think of Mays wasting away on the Mets. But is that really the example we should think of, or is it simply the most well-known? With both Vladimir Guerrero and Todd Helton announcing their retirement over the weekend further adding fuel to the fire, I figured I’d dig in and see if we could look at this a little more objectively. I’ll be splitting this into four posts — two for hitters, and two for pitchers.
The home team has consistently, on a year-to-year basis, won 54% of its games. Several reasons have been explored for the disparity, such as familiarity to the home field and the umpire’s biased strike zone. Another aspect that comes into play is a first-inning discrepancy in favor of the home teams’ pitchers. They have an abnormally large advantage in strikeout and walk rates, partially because of a higher fastball velocity.
Note: For consistency throughout the article, when I refer to K/BB, it will be in reference to pitchers.
With better use of bullpens and more patient hitters, strikeout and walk rates have climbed in recent years. Since 1950 (the extent of Retrosheet’s data set), the home team has always maintained a higher K/BB ratio than the away team.
Last week, we spent some time talking about players that may or may not receive a qualifying offer when they hit free agency this winter. The qualifying offer is an important decision, because it grants the original organization a compensation pick at the end of the first round if that player changes teams through free agency. However, it requires teams to be willing to make an offer of at least $14 million in salary for 2014, so it can’t just be handed out to every free agent in hopes of stocking up on draft picks.
There are at least three remarkable things about Carl Yastrzemski’s playing career. The first is that he played forever. Second, he hit for the American League triple crown in 1967. But third, and most importantly, nobody played the Green Monster like Yaz. I asked my father about it, as he became eligible to vote during Yaz’s rookie season, and he put it simply: “He had it all mapped out.” With the Red Sox belatedly deciding that it’s time to erect a statue in honor of Yaz (I mean, come on, Frank Thomas already has his statue at US Cellular Field) I thought we could take a look back at Yaz’s career.
