Archive for Daily Graphings

Billy Heywood never actually managed the Minnesota Twins. Billy Heywood was a movie character, the titular character from the movie Little Big League. When you think about it, he was technically more of a manager than any of us will be, in that he got to wear a uniform and sit in actual major-league dugouts. The idea behind Little Big League is that Heywood is bequeathed the Minnesota Twins from his grandfather. The Twins stink and Heywood decides to fire the manager and instill himself into the position. The Twins start winning and all the players and Heywood himself find out a lot about themselves in the process. It’s a fairly dumb movie.

We are still quite a ways away from quantifying just to what extent a manager can affect a team, and perhaps further away from quantifying to what extent a manager who is a child can affect a team. There are so many variables, so many anecdotes from players about how managers can influence a winning attitude, that we really can’t put a number on most things. Some we can, like bunting, since a manager is largely responsible for calling those plays. He’s also responsible for initiating intentional walks.

Intentional walks are perhaps less of a lightning rod in our community than something like sacrifice bunts, but there is still a general idea that intentional walks are largely unnecessary, and can even be counterproductive at times, since they are allowing one of the things teams do not want — opponents on base. But as it happens, managers — or perhaps others in front offices that influence managers — appear to be getting smarter about intentional walks.

Foremost, a note on the research. I looked at play-by-play data from 1974 forward, the period in which we have the most accurate data of that kind. Obviously, this only entails an official four-finger, standing catcher type of intentional walks. There are certainly times when pitchers intentionally pitch around a player, but that isn’t really something we can look up definitively.

The first chart shows simply intentional walks per plate appearance. There was a sharp drop in the 90s, followed by a large spike in the early 2000s. The easy answer for that spike is that it was a reaction to the power surge showing among hitters that began in the late 90s — managers simply thought it to be more beneficial to put the big sluggers on base rather than have them hit. This, of course, culminated in 2004 when Barry Bonds was intentionally walked 120 times, accounting for almost 9% of the total intentional walks that year. We don’t know if that’s the reason for sure, but it seems like a fairly good bet. Nevertheless, that craziness has subsided, and we now see that IBB levels have leveled off back to the levels seen in the late 90s.

But something else has also happened, as the dirty cheaters who clicked on the other tabs have already figured out. Intentional walks are being used in more high-leverage situations than ever before. They now occur with more outs, tighter scores, and in later innings.

Without breaking down each base/out scenario, we can make a broad statement that intentional walks, if they make sense at all, usually make more sense in the later innings. Walking guys in the fifth or sixth is fairly poor strategy, in fact. Right now, we see that the average IBB happens in the 7th inning, and that is probably skewed a little low thanks the the NL’s always-make-the-pitcher-hit strategy.

More outs when putting a guy on is also a good thing — two outs being ideal, of course — since giving a free pass with fewer outs can lead to more runs for the batting team. In 2013, major league teams were averaging 1.5 outs when issuing a free pass. This ostensibly means that just as many teams issued a free pass with one out as they did with two. And while it’s historically high, that number hasn’t fluctuated all that much since 1974. Teams still need to work on this a bit, it seems.

The average score difference — about 1.38 runs in 2013 — is also trending downward, meaning the managers are using intentional walks when the games are closer. This also points to high-leverage usage. Teams are looking to keep the game close, or maintain their slim leads by bypassing the other team’s biggest threats. On the whole, if you’re going to just walk a guy, that’s probably the best time.

Without getting incredibly granular, it’s hard to make a mountaintop-worthy announcement that teams are figuring out how to use the intentional walk properly. There’s more research to be done here.We do know that the overall frequency of the IBB is down, which is good. We also know that when they do happen, they are happening in higher-leverage situations than five, ten, or 15 years ago. This is almost certainly good. I don’t remember if Billy Heywood every issued an intentional walk, but the fact that he was supposed to exist in a world just like ours save for the fact that a kid ran a baseball team, it seems safe to say he probably did. He may have done it in the fifth inning of a game his team was winning with one out and a man on. If so, that would have been a poor move. He may get a pass because he was 12 years old. Perhaps a petition campaign to teach run expectancies in elementary school is in order.

As perhaps indicated by the piece I published here in the fall concerning the relationship between scouting grades and wins, one of my particular interests — and, I would argue, one of the more compelling frontiers of baseball research currently — is the examination of how a prospect’s scouting profile relates, in a concrete and objective way, to the production that might be expected of him at the major-league level. My assumption is that many, if not all, professional organizations have a means by which to assess such a thing — perhaps some in a less, others in a more, formal way. The bonuses they extend to amateur players indicate that some manner of valuation exists. For the public, however, the process by which such valuations are established is rather opaque.

The intention of this post is to add very, very slightly to the extant body of research on this topic. It (i.e. this post) has its genesis in a pastime that probably won’t be unfamiliar to the reader — namely, flipping through the pages of a Baseball America Prospect Handbook (a text with regard to which I’ve documented my emotional emotions elsewhere). As the reader will probably know, for each organization, the editors of Baseball America identify which prospects within that organization feature the best of this or that tool: Best Hitter for Average, Best Power Hitter, Best Strike-Zone Discipline, etc.

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Around the start of the offseason, there was talk that Nelson Cruz was after a $75-million contract. He eventually settled for $8 million. At the same time, there was talk that Ervin Santana was after a $100-million contract. He’s now settled for $14.1 million. Put those numbers together and you have $175 million requested and $22.1 million received. That difference of $153 million is the amount for which the Yankees signed Jacoby Ellsbury. So, that’s some perspective.

Santana reached a one-year agreement with the Braves Tuesday, and it became official early Wednesday. Over the weekend, all the talk was about how Santana would be choosing between the Orioles and the Blue Jays, but then the Braves developed a desperate need, with Kris Medlen preparing for probable Tommy John surgery. In need of a starting pitcher, the Braves signed pretty much the only available free-agent starting pitcher, and so Santana will pitch in the National League for the first time in his career. Probably, that’s a big reason why he made the decision he did.

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Watching the Braves rotation grab appendages has been tough this spring. Kris Medlen has ligament damage in his elbow, Brandon Beachy has biceps soreness, and Mike Minor survived a scarred urethra only to encounter shoulder soreness. None of the three is a lock to make the opening day rotation. And this is a team that brought two veteran free agents in for depth and had extra youth at the back end of their rotation. They might be fine without Ervin Santana, but yet that team does inspire a question. How many major-league ready starting pitchers should a competitive team field in a given year?

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One of the annual rites of baseball’s offseason is the publication of top prospect lists, organizational rankings, etc.. Over the next few days, my own personal rankings of each team’s minor league systems will appear here on FanGraphs. First, though, I’m going to give you a feel for the methodology – and some of the philosophy – behind them.

Baseball talent evaluation is unique in many respects when compared to the other major sports. An amateur scout can be looking at players ranging anywhere from 16 to 23 years old, and has to somehow put those players into a singular context to justify an organization’s investment in them. With virtually no exception, no amateur player can compete at the major league level without navigating at least part of a minor league system consisting of six or seven levels, excluding the Latin American rookie leagues. Football or basketball draftees, even if they are leaving college early, must compete for NFL or NBA spots immediately – if they can’t, they stay in school, or don’t get drafted. In baseball, there is projection to take into account, or lack thereof. A scout is given a radar gun and a stopwatch to capture the measurables, but it’s his mind, his entrepreneurial spirit and his gut that sells him on the players he recommends, signs, and – hopefully – watches progress toward the major leagues.

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There’s a pretty strong and obvious relationship between speed and baserunning. Speed is best demonstrated when running, and “baserunning” has “running” right in the word. There usually isn’t very much interesting to say about a fast guy who runs the bases well. Likewise, there usually isn’t very much interesting to say about a slow guy who runs the bases poorly. It’s more uncommon to hear about a fast guy with baserunning limitations, but we can make sense of that — baserunning skill isn’t 100% footspeed. Speed’s just a component, along with instincts and awareness and reaction time.

But it’s a major component. Not all good runners will be good baserunners, but it feels like all good baserunners should be good runners. Check out the top of last year’s baserunning value leaderboard. Jacoby Ellsbury is a good runner. Rajai Davis is a good runner. Eric Young, Elvis Andrus, Mike Trout, Alcides Escobar — all these guys, good runners. An almost infallible rule is, you need to be able to run pretty well to be able to run the bases pretty well. But note that I had to throw an “almost” in there. And I had to throw an “almost” in there on account of Daniel Murphy, baseball’s premier player with speed without speed.

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If it seems like we’ve written about the Dodgers second base competition a lot this offseason, it’s because we have. Two months ago, I looked into the questionable depth the team had at the position; a few weeks ago, Eno Sarris revisited the situation to see whether it would present a problem. Now, barely more than a week before the team kicks off the season in Australia, there appears to be a winner, at least if you believe this beat writer or that one or that one, and it’s not $28 million Cuban import Alexander Guerrero: it’s former shortstop Dee Gordon, who has 3.2 career innings at the position.

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A variety of indicators tell us that Spring Training is here. The “Best Shape of My Life” stories, the ” _____ has reported to camp” tweets, and pitchers coming to camp talking about new pitches.

When not staring out the window waiting for spring to arrive, pitchers have a lot of time to review the previous season. As Albert Einstein famously said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That quote fits pitchers extremely well. Sometimes, they themselves realize their process is not working and want to add a new pitch. Survivor bias can set in for pitchers as they see new blood coming to camp and want to stand out from the crowd in camp. Other times, the team will have seen something and want to correct it.

Recently retired pitcher Jensen Lewis believes other factors are in play as well. “Adding pitches in camp rarely happens for an established pitcher unless the following happens,” Lewis said.

• Performance of the pitcher suffers so much that the front office or coaching staff decides it is necessary to add a pitch to survive at the major league level
• A veteran pitcher adds something to compensate for a loss of stuff/velocity
• You add a pitch by mistake just by playing catch or trying something different in a side session

“Most of the time, we pitchers will mess around playing catch and during side sessions with grips and anything we glean from fellow teammates or opposing pitchers, ” he said. “The art and craft of pitching is ever-evolving and thus breeds multiple avenues to get hitters out. Remember, deception is the common theme every pitcher is trying to accentuate,” Lewis said. “Only a few dozen guys have the overpowering stuff that you simply have no chance to hit. The rest of us go about each year tweaking our arsenals to further that deception. It boils down to one simple creed: hitters get themselves out; pitchers merely develop and hone ways to miss the sweet spot of the barrel on a consistent basis.”

Lewis went on to say that, “It’s your career, so any inch of ground you can gain by adding to your pre-existing repertoire or augmenting that arsenal through an additional pitch is completely individual. Pitchers can get really mental and think they need a new pitch when they merely need only to refine what they throw and have confidence in what they throw.”

Josh Zeid from the Houston Astros shared similar thoughts. “In this game, everyone is evolving. The hitters are getting better, and the other pitchers are getting better, ” he said, “so if I can add a pitch or fine tune a pitch so much that it gives me another weapon, I have to give myself that chance.” Zeid has been working more on his splitter in camp and says, “It’s a pitch that I have used sparingly to lefties and it’s given me a leg up when I’ve used it.” He is gaining confidence in his ability to throw it to both sides of the plate, and would like to use it against righties, “to stop them from sitting away as it brings a pitch back into them.”

Adding the pitch was more of a self evaluation for Zeid over the winter and he says the coaches have been receptive and supportive of the idea. He noticed right-handed batters had more success against him than left-handed batters (.305 batting average vs .178 batting average) last season, so he feels that, “without trying to change a whole lot, I can adapt and mold what I already have to give myself a better chance against all hitters.” He plans to continue working on the pitch in camp and once camps breaks and recognizes that if it is going to be a successful pitch for him in the long run, he has to use it in games. “If I’m confident in it AND having success with it, then I can’t wait to use it a lot more,” Zeid said.

This spring, over 25 pitchers are working on new pitches in camp. The reports have come from stories, both in print and on radio, and sometimes as in the case of Brian Wilson, the pitcher just surprises us by whipping out the pitch unannounced on the mound.

These are the things pitchers are reportedly working on this spring:

• Heath Bell – adding a splitter
• Dellin Betances – adding a slurve
• Tony Cingrani – adding a slider
• Jorge De Leon – adding a splitter
• Ross Detwiler – adding a cutter
• Sean Doolittle – adding a slider and a changeup
• Danny Farquhar – a two-seam fastball
• Brandon Gomes – adding a cutter
• A.J. Griffin – dropping cutter; using more changeups
• Jim Henderson – adding a changeup
• Phil Hughes – scrapping his slider, going with a cutter and curveball instead
• Kevin Jepsen – adding a changeup
• Brad Lincoln – adding a split-changeup
• Mark Lowe – adding a cutter
• Zach McAllister – adding a slider
• Jake McGee – adding a curveball
• Darren O’Day – adding a changeup
• Jake Odorizzi – adding a splitter
• Martin Perez – adding a cutter
• Kevin Quackenbush – adding a splitter
• CC Sabathia – adding a cutter
• Tyler Skaggs: Angels undoing what Diamondbacks did to his mechanics
• Stephen Strasburg – adding a slider
• Marcus Stroman – adding a split-changeup
• Koji Uehara – adding a cutter
• Tom Wilhelmsen – adding a cutter
• Randy Wolf – adding a splitter

Some of the pitchers, in explaining their new pitches to the media this spring, echoing the insights from Lewis and Zeid. Sabathia is incorporating a true cut fastball this season, under the encouragement of Andy Pettitte, to help with his decreasing velocity. O’Day is adding a changeup to help make him more effective against left-handed batters. Cincinnati brought the slider to Cingrani. McGee, coming off a season in which he allowed the fifth-fewest balls in play for all relievers, bringing his curveball out of the mothballs. He told Neil Solondz of the Rays Radio broadcast team that he feels the larger speed differential will make his fastball even more effective.

Martin Perez tells Richard Durrett he is adding the cutter this season because he wanted a power pitch in his arsenal:

“Everybody knows I have a good changeup, but I wanted something with speed,” Perez said. “This year, my curve is better and I wanted to try the cutter. In the past, I tried it and if it wasn’t good, I’d throw it out. But now I’ve got more confidence. I can throw it and I feel great.”

Doolittle tells Susan Slusser he is refining what he throws as well as his confidence in this new pitches.

“Just because I have a new toy, I can’t change the way I pitch too much,” he said. “But I had a lot of innings last year where I had a lot of long battles with hitters fouling balls off. If I can get a guy on three pitches instead of having those kinds of battles, that will be a lot better than those 20-pitch innings.”

Odorizzi tells Roger Mooney he is evolving his changeup into a splitter to mimic the one his teammate, Alex Cobb, throws.

“I had an all right change-up. It wasn’t anything special, wasn’t anything terrible. It was just average,” Odorizzi said. “I wanted something I could throw more consistent and have more movement as opposed to speed-wise. I don’t know how they are speed-wise compared to each other, but the movement alone on the new pitch makes a world of difference, honestly. Even if it’s bad, it’s got movement.”

Adding a pitch to one’s repertoire is no magic elixir to cure a pitcher’s ills on the mound. It did help Wade Davis when he moved from the Tampa Bay rotation to the bullpen in 2012 as the addition of a cutter plus the increased velocity he utilized as a reliever allowed him to dominate in high leverage situations that season. Detwiler added a slider in 2012 and saw his overall SwStr% improve 18% from the previous season. Buchholz added a splitter after the 2011 season and his SwStr% declined from the previous season as did his K%. Kevin Correia added a cutter in 2010 and saw his K% improve five full percentage points, only to plummet six percentage points the next year. Sometimes, adding a new pitch is not enough and is only a temporary band aid to the problem and a pitcher decides to blow it up and start from scratch

Danny Farquhar serves as a most recent example of how rebuilding from square one can change a pitcher’s fortune. In a two-month span during the 2012 season, Farquhar was involved in the following roster moves:

DFA’d by Toronto
Claimed by Oakland
DFA’d by Oakland
Claimed by New York
DFA’d by New York
Outrighted to Double-A
Assigned to Triple-A
Traded to Seattle for Ichiro Suzuki

During all of those moves, Farquhar went through multiple reviews and arm angles before finally settling on his current one with the Mariners. Once he nailed down an arm angle, he added a curveball to his repertoire. A strong start to the Triple-A season with the new approach vaulted him to the Seattle bullpen for good in mid-May. As he explained to Ryan Divish:

“It’s a big off-speed pitch that I need to continue to throw for strikes; continue to mix in there because I have the fastball and cutter, which are two hard pitches…..even if it’s just showing it to hitters, it’s changing the speed, changing the plane and the eye level. The curveball is a big difference maker.”

The new arm angle and new approach helped Farquhar post one of the 50 best K% for a reliever with at least 50 innings of work in a season in the past 15 seasons. Rather than rest on his laurels, he is continuing to evolve as a pitcher in 2014 joining the cool kids by adding a new pitch – a two-seam fastball – as well as utilizing his changeup more frequently. Normally, the addition of those two pitches would be suggested for a reliever that has issues against opposite-handed batters, but that is not the case for Farquhar as left-handed batters hit 84 points worse and struck out 17% more frequently against him than right-handed batters.

Farquhar’s proactive approach to his craft is something he explained to Jason Churchill back in January:

“My big work-in-progress is a two-seam fastball, like a good, consistent two-seam fastball, and I want to start it on the left-hander’s hip and let it run back over the plate.” As Farquhar went on to say, he uses his cutter in on the hands of lefties and a biting two-seamer is the perfect counter for that, since it’s movement is the exact opposite, despite the pitch looking nearly identical to the hitter.”

The new pitch will give left-handed batters more to think about when he comes inside on them. Instead of just being able to guess cutter, they’ll now have even less time to read cutter or two-seam fastball and may allow Farquhar to collect a few more strikeouts looking as well as some poorly-struck baseballs as he sets up new closer Fernando Rodney.

Farquhar and the other 25 pitchers on the list are simply heeding the advice of Tupac Shakur who once said, “I want to grow. I want to be better…We’re made to grow. You either evolve or disappear.” That applies to one’s hip-hop career as much as it does one’s baseball career as starting pitchers attempt to remain in rotations and relievers avoid becoming the next fungible commodity.

I remember a Sunday several years ago, when I was in college, when I got myself all interested in pitcher release points. I wasn’t interested in anything, specifically — I just wanted to come up with some kind of measurement, because I hadn’t seen data like that before. So I spent many, many hours capturing screenshots from MLB.tv and marking pixel coordinates on a spreadsheet. In that way, I worked hard to estimate a handful of release points from one pitcher, and I was satisfied, at least with the concept. I felt like the labor was worthwhile. These days you can get release-point information instantly, and it’s better and a hell of a lot more thorough.

The advantage of having all this information is that we get to have all this information. If there’s a disadvantage, it’s that it used to be fun to try to figure things out by hand. Analysis used to take longer, and be longer. It was a journey, for everyone involved. Now almost everything’s quantified. The ESPN Home Run Tracker can spit out tons of details about every single home run hit during the season. It’s insane, how far we’ve come. Oh, but, the ESPN Home Run Tracker isn’t active during spring training. And Giancarlo Stanton plays in spring training.

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Yesterday, I created a model of agent pricing using projected 2014 WAR as the only variable. As I noted in the post, I would classify this model as more of a toy than a rigorous attempt at analyzing the market, as we know there are plenty of factors beyond next season’s performance that influence the size of a free agent contract. Ignoring age and health are obvious flaws, as both are significant factors in contract size, especially when forecasting how many years a player might sign for. And we know that the market pays a different price for offense than it does for defense, reflecting some of the uncertainty that the defensive evaluations have relative to our ability to measure offensive production.

So, before I say any more about this model, let’s remember that this was essentially designed as something like the Marcel projections for salaries. Tom Tango built the Marcel projections as something of a baseline forecast, using very simplistic adjustments and ignoring things like park factors in order to show the bare minimum that a projection system should be able to accomplish. Likewise, I’d say that any serious attempt at evaluating the free agent market should be able to do better than what this basic model can do. This system is as simple as it gets — without being completely wrong, anyway — and we can almost certainly do better, but doing better comes with added complexity, and it’s still nice to have a simple, easily explained baseline to measure other forecasts against.

That said, let’s see what this basic pricing model — naming suggestions welcome, by the way — spits out for a dozen of the more notable 2015 free agents. For now, let’s ignore the future and pretend that these 12 players were free agents this past off-season, and see what the model would have forecast for them as 2014 free agents. As a reminder, we’re using a hybrid ZIPS/Steamer WAR forecasts, and the model multiplies projected WAR by five to estimate annual average value and projected WAR by 2.0 (for 3+ WAR players), 1.5 (for +2.0 to +2.9 WAR players), or 1.1 (for 1.0-1.9 WAR players) to estimate the number of years a player will sign for.

Because I selected 12 of the more notable pending free agents, we’re only looking at players with either a 2.0 or 1.5 multiple, as they’re all projected as above average performers for 2014. On to the forecasts:

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