You know about pitch-framing, and you’ve seen a lot of the numbers. Wow! Take a minute to step back and realize how incredible that is. A few years ago, we wouldn’t have thought this possible. A few years ago, people leaned mostly on catcher reputations. Then there was PITCHf/x and research and genius, and now we have an idea which catchers get the most and least favorable called strike zones. You’re tired of hearing about Jose Molina being great, and you’re tired of hearing about Ryan Doumit being terrible. In a short amount of time, framing details went from unknown to common knowledge. That’s wacky!

A lot of the time these days, when people talk about pitch-framing — or pitch-receiving, to be used interchangeably — they’re looking at specific examples. They’re looking at specific balls or specific strikes, and examining how that particular pitch was caught. Relatively little time is spent talking about changes in framing, on a player or team level. But that can be of interest, just like with any other stat, so I thought I’d take a stab right here. Let’s take a look at some 2012 and 2013 pitch-framing comparisons.

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Bruce Chen isn’t getting younger. The journeyman left-hander — currently with the Kansas City Royals — celebrated his 36th birthday yesterday. Since signing out of Panama, in 1993, he has made 365 big-league appearances. He has played for 10 teams.

Chen has gotten smarter as he’s gotten older. He has long survived on guile, and in recent years, he’s developed an appreciation for advanced stats. Not surprisingly, it came via a former teammate known for his analytic ways.

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Last night in Anaheim, Josh Hamilton had a really bad game. In five trips to the plate, he hit into three double plays, and in the two at-bats where he didn’t make two outs, he struck out, including a ninth inning whiff with the winning run in scoring position. For the day, he finished with a -.48 WPA, so while he didn’t single handedly cost them the game, he was the primary reason the Angels ended up dropping a 3-2 contest to the Mariners.

But I’m not here to lament Josh Hamilton again. His terrible performance is noteworthy, but I think it’s also worth acknowledging that Hamilton was fighting an uphill battle last night, because as a left-handed hitter in a game with John Hirschbeck behind the plate, he was screwed before he ever stepped up to the plate.

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The Royals allowed four runs Tuesday night. Fairly ordinary total, four runs. Not too few to score; not too many to allow. There were 16 games on Tuesday. In 13 of them, at least one team scored at least four runs. In two of them, both teams scored at least four runs. Four might be the least remarkable run total. But then, there’s a thing about these Royals. That was only the second time all month the Royals allowed more than three runs in a game. The other time, they allowed five. It’s been a good month for the Royals’ pitching staff, and so it’s been a good month for the Royals.

It was an impressive streak they put together. Between June 1 and June 14, the Royals played 13 games, never allowing four or more runs. In 2010, the Giants had such a streak of 18 games, but previous to that, you have to go back to the 2002 Diamondbacks to find a streak of at least equal length. Then you have to go back to the 1993 Braves. A few weeks ago, people wondered whether Ned Yost was on the hot seat. Now the Royals have pulled themselves back into the race, and they own the American League’s fourth-best run differential. Thanks in large part to their run prevention, the Royals presently have the look of a contender.

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Matt Harvey didn’t throw a no-hitter against the Braves on Tuesday, but he did almost do that, not allowing a hit until the bottom of the seventh. It’s not that Harvey relied entirely on the strikeout — of the batters he faced, 13 didn’t whiff. But then, of the batters he faced, 13 did whiff, and Harvey’s season rate is verging on 30%. Matt Harvey was already good a year ago. Since then he’s only induced more grounders and cut his walk rate in half. Harvey, at this point, is in the argument for being the most valuable young pitcher in all of baseball.

Against the Braves, Harvey registered 15 swinging strikes on secondary stuff, which is outstanding. Yet he also picked up eight whiffs on his heater, which is kind of par for the Harvey course. No other starter’s fastball has led to so many swinging strikes, as Harvey can just be completely overwhelming. Instead of just using his fastball as a foundation, Harvey uses it also as a weapon, which is a rare gift. To have a swing-and-miss fastball is to have one hell of an advantage, and though fastballs tend to get slower over time, for now, at least, Harvey’s elite.

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Kyle Kendrick isn’t all that remarkable. The Philadelphia Phillies right-hander has a standard pitcher’s frame and fairly average stuff. Neither his velocity nor his repertoire particularly stands out. His numbers — in 178 career appearances; 137 of them starts — don‘t jump out at you.

But that doesn’t mean the 28-year-old isn’t an effective pitcher. Relying primarily on sinkers, changeups and control, Kendrick does what a back-of-the-rotation starter is expected to do: He keeps his team in games as often as not. Overshadowed in a rotation that features Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels — and, in recent years, Roy Halladay — he simply goes out and does his job.

Kendrick, who is 6-4, with a 3.76 ERA this year, takes the mound tonight against the Washington Nationals. He talked about the evolution of his repertoire when the Phillies visited Fenway Park in May. Read the rest of this entry »

After months of threats and saber-rattling, the City of San Jose sued Major League Baseball and its 30 constituent teams on Tuesday over MLB’s refusal to allow the Oakland A’s to move to San Jose.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in San Jose, is a direct challenge to MLB’s federal antitrust exemption. San Jose claims that MLB places unreasonable restrictions on competition by giving each team its own exclusive territory (or in the case of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, shared territory) and veto power to prevent any other team from moving into that territory. As I explained in this FanGraphs post last September, under MLB rules, a team can move into the territory of another team only when the following conditions are met: a vote of three-fourths of the owners approving the move; the two ballparks are located at least five miles apart; the move results in no more than two teams in a single territory; and the team moving compensates the team already in the territory.

In addition to the federal antitrust claims, San Jose also charged MLB with violations of California antitrust law and with state law claims for interference with prospective economic advantage based on San Jose’s agreement to allow the A’s to buy certain parcels of city land, if the A’s plan to move is approved by the league.

You can read the lawsuit in its entirety here.

San Jose is represented by Joe Cotchett and his law firm, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. Cotchett is a nationally well-known and well-regarded attorney with experience in antitrust cases. In fact, Cotchett represented the National Football League and the (former) Los Angeles Rams when the Oakland Raiders sued the league for antitrust violations in 1982 when the league voted against allowing the Raiders to move to Los Angeles. The Raiders won that lawsuit, and paved the way for other professional sports franchises to move from city to city more easily.

Except, that is, in baseball.

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Ah, another fortnight has passed. How did you spend them? Perhaps you were deeply immersed in the Teapot Dome scandal? Perhaps you were eagerly awaiting the release of “Yeezus?” Perhaps you were simply watching the paint dry in anticipation of the next iteration of this series? I know I was doing at least one of these things.

As always, you can peep the explanation of our depth charts and standings pages — which fuel The Fortnight like so much lemon lime Gatorade — here. This week, we’ll be looking at the fortnight’s biggest losers.

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Jeff Sullivan’s recent enjoyable trot through San Diego Padres statistics and history led to a number of commentors thinking about San Diego’s park factors. The Padres changed the outfield dimensions of Petco Park in the off-season, and since park factors are backwards looking and rely on multiple years of data, changing dimensions can throw a bit of a monkey wrench into the calculations. So, it’s possible that our park factors are now somewhat behind the times, and we need to keep this in mind when looking at the park adjusted numbers (such as wRC+, ERA-/FIP-/xFIP-, WAR, etc…) for San Diego players, both hitters and pitchers.

It’s not quite so simple as noting that the changing dimensions have made the old park factors useless, however. Moving in the fences helps home runs, yes. This is undeniable. But it also can decrease triples and doubles, as well as effect the more odd elements of park factors, such as walk-rates, strikeout rates and pop-up rates.

It’s too early in the season to construct terribly useful park factors for the new dimensions, but we can do some harmless back-of-the-napkin mathematics to at least determine if the recent numbers suggest at least the early signs of serious run environment changes.
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You all know the R.A. Dickey story by now. Journeyman major leaguer reinvents himself as a knuckleball thrower in his 30s, then refines the pitch to become one of the better starting pitchers in baseball, culminating with his selection as the National League Cy Young Award winner last year. The knuckleball is always a fascinating pitch, and Dickey is a fascinating guy, so there has been no shortage of media attention focused his direction.

While I was not working here at FanGraphs last year, I could not resist taking a belated look at some of Dickey’s dominating knuckleballs from that 2012 season. I’ve selected three particularly impressive pitches from that campaign and used an effect known as StroMotion to help track their movement.

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