Archive for Daily Graphings

A little earlier, I played around with some strike-zone data. There’s a theory out there that umpires are more willing to give veteran pitchers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to called strikes. I wanted to investigate that, and sure enough, I was able to turn up a modest effect related to age and experience. However, my suspicion is that this has less to do with doubt benefits, and more to do with pitcher command. It makes sense that more experienced pitchers would be better command pitchers, and it makes sense that better command pitchers would end up with a little called-strike benefit given what we understand about good and bad pitch-framing, and so on. It’s something that could be investigated further, and I’ll think of what I did as a simple starting point.

Now, if we’re going to look at pitchers, we should also look at hitters. Just as there’s a theory that veteran pitchers get the benefit of the doubt, there’s also a theory that veteran hitters get the benefit of the doubt, in the opposite direction. In short, a lot of people believe that umpires are biased in favor of age and experience. I don’t know where this comes from, but enough people have repeated it that it’s worth a quick look with the numbers we have available. Once again, what follows isn’t exhaustive, but once again, it should get us started. If there’s any kind of major effect, this study should be able to find it.

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When evaluating a hitter or pitcher’s statistical performance, the vast majority of what you need to know comes from the following rate data – strikeouts, walks, popups, line drives, hard and weak flyballs, and hard and weak groundballs. Put some of those on the good side of the ledger, the rest on the bad, and pretty quickly one has a feel for the present ability, and along with scouting data, the future projection of the player. Today, let’s focus on strikeouts and walks, and on quantifying their overall impact on hitters’ offensive production. How much must a hitter do to compensate for poor K and BB rates, and much additional margin for error is provided by strong K and BB rates. Read the rest of this entry »

The marriage of scouting and statistics is well past the honeymoon stage in most front offices, but there are times when it’s easier than others. A college player out of a big program in an established baseball conference? Talk to the nerds, get a stat translation, get a projection, pair it with the qualitative analysis from the scouts. Boom. Date night.

Not to push this analogy too far, but working with Cuban players is more like a seven-year itch in the pairing: Neither side is completely happy with what they’ve got. In the case of Jose Abreu in particular, the scouts have a few competitions, a handful of games against Liechtenstein perhaps, spread out over many years. They can do their best with video.

The quants? They’re in even more trouble when it comes to Cuba.

Doesn’t mean they can’t do their best. Now that we’ve got a few projections in hand for the new White Sox first baseman, let’s take a look. We know the stakes are high — Abreu is no Rey Ordonez, he’s got no glove value to fall back on and the requirements to be a major league first baseman are stiff.

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On some level, people have understood pitch-framing for a long time. Catchers have long been taught to try to reduce their movement with the pitch on the way, and there were good framers before there was good framing analysis. But before people started really talking about the various good and bad framers, there were some other popular theories regarding the variations in called strike zones. Among them was that home-plate umpires would be tough on rookie pitchers, while to veterans they’d extend the benefit of the doubt. For so long, this was just kind of accepted, even among players, and it’s not like there’s ever been an abundance of data to analyze. That is, until PITCHf/x, which continues to revolutionize things years and years after its launch. We’re all revolutionaries!

Because you can probably see where I’m going, I’ll spare you more needless introduction. In short, I wanted to go in search of the veteran benefit of the doubt, now that we have a full six years of pretty reliable PITCHf/x data. Really, I wanted to go in search of age bias, and I figure if such a bias exists, it shouldn’t be too hard to turn it up. All the information I needed, I got right here on our own leaderboards. And it turns out there’s definitely been something interesting going on. It’s been subtle, but overall it’s been present.

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As we’ve talked about a whole bunch of times, the pitching market is at a standstill right now, as teams await a Masahiro Tanaka resolution. Free agents are waiting to maximize the size of their markets, and teams are waiting because they’d prefer not to be reduced to chasing one of the free agents instead of Tanaka. Tanaka, baseball has decided, is much better. Additionally, the trade market is quiet, especially the one for David Price, because while teams do of course see Price as an ace, getting him would require giving up players, and teams are more comfortable just giving up money. So Tanaka is the primary focus.

It stands to reason there could be one more run at Price after Tanaka makes a decision. Every team but one will be left without a new Tanaka on it, and there just aren’t many starters like that available. But where once a Price trade seemed like a foregone conclusion, here’s Buster Olney on Tuesday:

Increasingly, rival executives are convinced that David Price will remain with the Rays for the 2014 season. “Ninety percent chance he stays,” said one rival official. “The [trade] market hasn’t materialized.”

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Over the last few years, a common thought experiment among nerdy baseball fans has been to imagine what Mike Trout would sign for if he was a free agent. He was the best player in baseball before he could legally drink, and if the market had to price a player of his ability and youth, $400 million wouldn’t be out of the question. You could even make a case for $500 million if the contract was long enough. But it was all just fun mental gymnastics, a hypothetical that didn’t exist in reality.

However, Mike Trout isn’t the only historically special player currently dominating the big leagues. Clayton Kershaw has also put up numbers that few his age have ever matched, and since he’s only a year from reaching free agent status, we’re about to find out just what the market will pay for a young superstar on a Hall of Fame track.

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A few weeks ago I noticed hitters no longer improved, but instead their production only declined as they aged. Additionally, I answered at few questions on the first article in a second article. Today, I am going to look at the individual hitter traits to see which ones may be leading to the early decline.

First off, I will start off with some disclaimers.

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People don’t really argue about Tom Glavine anymore. It’s been some years since he pitched, and we have younger, Troutier, Cabreraier things to argue about. But when people did argue about Tom Glavine — and they used to do it a lot — his critics routinely pointed to the same thing. And when Glavine was voted into the Hall of Fame just the other day on the first ballot, the old familiar argument popped up again in certain places. Glavine, many people believe, was a product of a strike zone that extended several inches off the outside of the plate.

An alleged strike zone, it should be said, that Glavine kind of allegedly earned. The theory is that Glavine established that area and was given the benefit of the doubt by the umpires because he could so consistently put the ball there. So, with his command, Glavine was said to get strikes on balls. That would be a credit to his ability, but that also puts hitters at a disadvantage, and a lot of people want to know how Glavine would’ve held up under a more uniform zone. There’s a belief that, had Glavine been more squeezed, he would’ve been punished more often. The only problem is that Glavine doesn’t seem to have been a product of his strike zone at all.

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We officially learned yesterday that John Axford had a tipping problem. Specifically, the Cardinals scouting staff noticed he had been tipping his pitches nearly the entire time they had scouted him. This is actually something that Axford himself hinted at during an interview in early September, as he explained to FoxSports Ohio.

Axford, who had lost his job as the Brewers’ closer early in the season, found another reason to be glad to land with the Cardinals in his first meeting with his new coaching staff. The Cardinals gave him some pitching advice — the specifics of which he declined to discuss — that he says immediately helped his performance. “When a team has been looking at you for five years, trying to kill you every single time you’re out there on the mound, they pick up on every little detail they can — what you may be showing, or tipping, or what you’re doing different,”

Maybe this quasi-intervention was what Axford needed to get the message, because this was not the first time this issue has come up in his career.

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For the second year, our friends at SABR are going to be giving away three Research Awards at their annual Analytics Conference in March, intended to honor the best baseball writing from the previous year. However, there is so much good baseball writing happening in all corners of the world now that it is impossible for anyone to read all of it. So, to make sure the nomination process is as thorough as possible, we would like to ask you for your help in rewarding those who published something particularly notable about the sport last year.

From SABR’s own website, here are the guidelines for nominations:

What are the best baseball analytics articles you’ve read in 2013?

We’re seeking nominations for the 2014 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards, which recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year in the following categories:

Contemporary Baseball Analysis: Honoring the best analysis focusing on a subject related to the modern game(s), team(s) or player(s).
Contemporary Baseball Commentary: Honoring the best commentary focusing on a subject related to the modern game(s), team(s) or player(s).
Historical Baseball Analysis/Commentary: Honoring the best original analysis or commentary focusing on a subject related to a game(s), team(s) or player(s) throughout baseball history.

Works of “Analysis” will be judged on the following criteria: thorough examination of the subject matter; originality of research; factual accuracy; significance in advancing our understanding of baseball.

Works of “Commentary” will be judged on the following criteria: distinguished writing; profound insight; factual accuracy; significance in advancing our understanding of baseball.

A work can be in any format except books, including but not limited to articles, columns, blog posts, television, film, websites, spreadsheets or databases, but it must have been first published in the preceding calendar year. No unpublished work will be considered. No work published, in part or in whole, prior to the preceding calendar year will be considered.

No work will be considered in more than one category. Multiple nominations can be submitted, but only one work per author will be considered as a finalist.

I’ve got a few pieces in mind that stand out to me, but we’d love to hear your suggestions as well. If you’d like to submit a piece to be considered for nomination, please include the category you believe the piece fits into, the author, the title of the article, the date it was published, and a link to the article. If it is not online, please provide a brief summary of the work and the best way to get access to the work.

Suggestions from any publication are welcome. We’re happy if you really liked something we published (and our own Bill Petti and Jeff Zimmerman won the Contemporary Analysis award last year), but if you think the best thing you read last year was published elsewhere, that’s totally okay too. The nomination deadline is tomorrow, so make sure you get your suggestions in today.