Archive for Daily Graphings

As the 2014 season approaches, the Cincinnati Reds are left with the unenviable task of figuring out exactly what to do with Billy Hamilton. After his September call-up, Hamilton electrified fans. In 13 games, he went 13 of 14 in stolen base attempts and scored 9 runs. He also managed to hit .368 in that span with a .105 ISO. If scouting reports and minor-league track records are to be believed, only two of those three stats should be taken to heart when projecting his future value. In 2013, in AAA, Hamilton had a .308 OBP and .657 OPS. He swiped 75 bags during that time, but the word is out on him — at this point, he just doesn’t have great hitting skills.

Hamilton will almost certainly be a part of the 2014 Reds roster, it’s the capacity at which he’ll be used that is up in the air. His speed (and its impact on his defense) is his asset, and putting him at the top of the lineup will give him the most chances to use that asset. This will also exploit his biggest weakness. Hiding his weakness by putting him at the bottom of the order will lose him a lot of opportunities to use his legs. I’m sure the Reds will wait to see how he fairs in Spring Training before making any decisions, but Hamilton’s status is currently in limbo.

“No one’s ever given me the time to show what I can do,” he says, a lean, tightly-muscled sprinter’s body slipping into uniform. “What people don’t understand is that it’s never a lack of opportunity, just time. I could hit .260 if I played every day up here. Maybe .270, .280 with a good hitting instructor. But a lot of the time, when a player’s called up, it’s those first few weeks that count. If you don’t get in the lineup, you become an extra man the rest of your career.”

It’s easy to imagine Hamilton saying such things toward the end of this April, but that quote is actually from 1979 and belongs to Matt Alexander, the most proficient pinch-runner in baseball history. He holds the records among pinch runners in appearances (271), steals (91), and runs scored (89). He appeared in 374 games, but logged a mere 195 plate appearances.  He only amassed 4.3 BsR in nine seasons, and stole bases at a 60% career rate. Yet the A’s and Pirates used him almost exclusively for pinch running. Alexander ended his career worth -.5 wins above replacement. His skills on the base paths just weren’t good enough to really make him an effective player in such a small role. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of things happen when you’re guaranteed a hundred thirty-five million dollars. That’s a guess on my part, since I’ve never been in that particular situation, and I can’t speak to what many of those things might be. I presume an overwhelming number of old acquaintances try to re-establish contact. One thing I know for sure is that people talk about you a lot. Lots of people out there talking about Freddie Freeman at the moment, on the heels of his contract extension and also on the heels of literally nothing else happening. Freeman’s eight years are the subject of much dialogue.

Some of the talk is new, and some of the talk is old. There’s just a whole lot of talk, in sum, because even with baseball’s rampant inflation, people are still getting used to the idea of nine-figure contracts and especially nine-figure contracts to non-superstars. People want to know how good Freeman actually is. People want to know how good Freeman will become. And, relatedly, people want to talk about Freeman’s power upside, since he’s a first baseman and first basemen are supposed to hit for more power than Freeman has to date.

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The Super Bowl is over, spring training is nearly upon us, and a whole bunch of potentially valuable free agents remain unsigned. Previously in this space, we already took a look at Ubaldo Jimenez and Ervin Santana from a batted-ball profile perspective; today and tomorrow, we’ll examine five others – starting pitchers Bronson Arroyo and A.J. Burnett, and position players Stephen Drew, Kendrys Morales and Nelson Cruz. Today, we’ll look at the hitters – tomorrow, the pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Much of my offseason writing on this site focused on the legal proceedings involving Major League Baseball, partly because MLB is embroiled in quite a few lawsuits, and partly because I try to stick to the advice: “Write what you know.” But as spring training kicks in to gear next week, and then the season in late March, I hope (I really, really hope) to spend more time on interesting baseball stories and less time on the intricacies of the Joint Drug Agreement and federal antitrust law.

Call me a dreamer.

In any event, there have been a few recent developments in MLB-related legal matters; perhaps not significant enough to warrant their own post, but important enough to mention as part of this legal roundup. When readers ask me on Twitter, “Hey, what’s happening with such-and-such lawsuit,” I’ll be able to send them a link to this article. At least for a while.

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As the calendar has flipped to February, we are officially transitioning out of free agent season — though a few stragglers remain — and moving into extension season. With arbitration providing the nudge for teams and players to run valuations and negotiate over their differences, it’s only natural that these discussions often turn into conversations about long term deals that avoid the process entirely, and the spring training months provide the best opportunity for a team and a player to come to a mutual agreement on a mutli-year extension. While Clayton Kershaw kicked off the extension season a few weeks ago, Freddie Freeman’s new deal with the Braves is a reminder that extension season isn’t limited to just big market teams with overflowing revenues, and also a reminder of just how important a player’s age has become in long term valuations.

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If you’ve been following this series from the start, then this post doesn’t need any introduction. If you haven’t, you’re probably not starting now, so this post doesn’t need any introduction. If this counts as an introduction, then, I’m certain that it’s entirely unnecessary. If this doesn’t count as an introduction, then, what does it count as? “A waste of my time,” is probably a popular suggestion.

Here are the first three installments, from earlier in the week:

• The 2013 Season In Inside Home Runs
• The 2013 Season In Outside Home Runs
• The 2013 Season In Low Home Runs

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On Saturday, Buster Olney mused on who would hit leadoff for the Red Sox this season. And it’s an interesting question, since the Red Sox had grown accustomed to Jacoby Ellsbury at the top of the batting order. As we’ve discussed a couple of other times this offseason, it’s one of those good problems — Boston has a plethora of talented hitters, so it isn’t like they have to shoehorn a bad hitter into the top spot. But a decision still has to be made, so let’s take a look.
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On yesterday’s podcast, Carson and I had a brief conversation about how different history can look with the benefit of hindsight. Or, maybe more accurately, how different baseball history can occasionally look if you apply our current tools and analysis to players and transactions from before the statistical revolution really became popular. That isn’t to say our current tools are perfect — I’m sure in 15 to 20 years, we’ll look back at our current analysis and see a bunch of problems — but I think it’s pretty clear that both the people running baseball teams and watching baseball games understand the relative value of different players better now than they used to. And there’s perhaps no single transaction that better illustrates the stark changes in player valuation we’ve seen over the last 15 years than the trade that sent Ken Griffey Jr to the Reds after the 1999 season.

Griffey was, at that point, one of the game’s true elite. He’d racked up +20 WAR from ages 27 to 29, and that’s with defensive metrics that thought his defense was just average in center field, a sentiment which opposing managers didn’t agree, given that he won a gold glove in each of those three seasons. If he wasn’t the best player in the game, he wasn’t far off from that mark, and because he decided he didn’t want to play in Seattle anymore, the Mariners had to put him on the trade block.

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Jason Heyward was supposed to be going to court in a few weeks. His agents had filed a salary number for arbitration, and his team was a file-to-trial team — once a player has filed an arbitration number with a file-to-trial team, it’s supposed to mean that they are headed to court to debate their respective cases in front of an arbitrator. We thought about this situation when they filed, and it seemed that were reasons on both sides for the public fight over $300 thousand — the team wanted to discuss more reasonable numbers quicker and needed the threat of trial, while the agents in this case were aggressive and didn’t mind the consequences, apparently.

But today, look in the news, and there’s an announcement — the Braves and Heyward have agreed to a two-year $13.3 million deal. This seems to go against the file-to-trial policy, at first. Until you look around the game and realize that two other file-to-trial teams, the Rays and the Blue Jays, have also made deals like this after filing numbers. Now it looks like there was one last benefit to the file-to-trial policy that we didn’t get to: leverage in negotiations for a multi-year deal.

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The ESPN Home Run Tracker is a wonderful resource, and I feel like I don’t even need to point that out, because by now you’re all already well aware. One of the bits of information it calculates for every dinger is the apex. This is the highest point above the field reached by the batted ball, in feet. The average home run maxes out right around 85-90 feet above the field of play before beginning its descent, and last year’s standard deviation around that, for example, was 20 feet. On the site, you can sort by apex, allowing you to see the season’s highest-hit home runs, and the season’s lowest-hit home runs.

This has nothing to do with that, despite the misleading post headline. Monday, I looked at the 2013 season’s most inside pitches hit for home runs. Later, I looked at the season’s most outside pitches hit for home runs. Now this is about the season’s lowest pitches hit for home runs, because I’m continuing a series just like I did a year ago. I suppose I could’ve spread these out a little more, but I don’t know what that would accomplish. Might as well get them all done quickly and then get back to regular business. There is not an overwhelming demand to read these posts.

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