A little over a year ago I published the results of a study that examined which metrics were most consistent on a year-to-year basis for starting pitchers. My colleague, Matt Klaassen, followed up and expanded on that study recently here at FanGraphs. Matt’s study also focused on starting pitchers–those with a minimum of 140 innings pitched in consecutive years.

Recently I was asked the following on Twitter:

@billpetti have you ever done research on reliever year-to-year performance variability? I’d like to see the common wisdom tested

— Justin Overfelt (@j_felt08) May 21, 2013

I can’t speak specifically to what the common wisdom is Justin is referring to, but I can certainly run the correlations for relief pitchers and compare them to what I found for starters.

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“I’m probably leading the league in bad contact, too.” — Marco Scutaro

We talked for a few minutes, Marco Scutaro and I, about hitting and contact before a game a few weeks back. When I told him he’s leading the league in contact rate since 2010, he offered the response above with a slight frown and a flick of the bat. He swung a bat the whole time we talked, even. But his voice never really wavered — it never betrayed either the physical effort he was putting into choosing his bat for the day or the matter-of-fact humor that accompanied his answers.

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Even when I’m not trying to pay attention to Bryce Harper, he finds a way to capture my focus. Last night, I was seeing off a friend on the east side of Portland, and if I’d been thinking about any sport, it was hockey, since these are the days of the NHL playoffs. A TV was being projected onto one of the walls of the bar, and at first it was showing a minor-league hockey game. Eventually it switched to baseball highlights, which eventually turned to a game between the Nationals and the Giants. The Nationals won 2-1 in ten innings, but what stuck with me wasn’t the result, but rather a Bryce Harper double.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harper rip a Jeremy Affeldt delivery into right field. The ball skidded all the way to the fence, where it was recovered by Hunter Pence, but Harper pulled up at second with ease. He’d score minutes later. I’ve seen Bryce Harper double before, but this one was different. This one was an in-between grounder/line drive, and it was hit between the first and second basemen, and it made it all the way to the wall. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw something like that.

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It’s not right to say Fernando Rodney is back to being his old self, because right now he’s sitting on a career-high strikeout rate. But he is back to being unreliable, or at least, he has been unreliable, to this point in the 2013 season. Wednesday, in Toronto, he blew a save against the Blue Jays. He was removed after facing just three batters. The save was blown on Rodney’s sixth pitch, when Jose Bautista took him deep on an inside fastball at 98 miles per hour.

Rodney retired Edwin Encarnacion, then he walked Adam Lind. Lind didn’t score, so that walk didn’t really hurt. Lind walked on five pitches, and not on one. Certainly not on the first pitch that he saw. But I want to talk a little bit about that pitch anyway, just because. I want to talk about ball one from Fernando Rodney to Adam Lind, a 97 mile-per-hour fastball that just missed away. I know this sure seems insignificant, but baseball is insignificant, and you and I are insignificant, so let’s come together in our collective insignificance and celebrate all that ultimately doesn’t matter. Celebrate or don’t celebrate; eventually you will be dead.

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The Mariners stuck with it for 735 innings. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in baseball agreed that Jesus Montero could not catch at an acceptable level in the Major Leagues, the Mariners let him try for the equivalent of a half season spread out over eight painful months. Now, it seems like the organization is accepting the reality that Jesus Montero is not, and will never be, a Major League catcher. As of today, he isn’t even a Major League player.

The Mariners are swapping out Jesuses in their backup catcher role — Montero had already lost the starting gig to vaunted superstar Kelly Shoppach — by replacing Montero with Jesus Sucre, the polar opposite of Montero as a player. Sucre is a no-bat defensive specialist, but given Montero’s struggles on both sides of the plate, a non-prospect catch-and-throw backup is probably an upgrade at this point.

So, with Montero back in Triple-A for the foreseeable future, I figured it would be a good time to re-do an exercise we did with Montero 17 months ago, when he was first traded from New York to Seattle. At that point, we walked through a list of comparable bat-first prospects who reached the Majors at an early age, noting that players of this type have turned into superstars, but that the median forecast based on similar prospects called for Montero to turn into a good hitter, not a great one. I ended that piece with the following paragraphs:

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This morning, the following tweet from Gordon Wittenmeyer showed up in my timeline.

Cubs: 36 more H, 30 more 2B, 6 more HR and slug% 39 points higher than opponents. And 3.65 ERA. But 5 fewer runs, 9 games under .500. …

— Gordon Wittenmyer (@GDubCub) May 23, 2013

I hadn’t noticed this specifically, but once he said it, I did start to wonder about the Cubs record. After all, they’re getting quality offensive production from the likes of David DeJesus, Anthony Rizzo, Nate Schierholtz, and Luis Valbuena. Jeff Samardzija continues to look like an ace. Scott Feldman is living up his billing as the bargain free agent starter of the winter. Travis Wood is having a lot of success, even if it’s not all sustainable. Even after their early bullpen problems, Kevin Gregg has revitalized his career and has yet to give up a run in 11 innings of work.

With so many things going right, how are the Cubs 18-27? And, as Wittenmeyer’s tweet notes, are they actually playing better than their record suggests?

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Yankees Global Enterprises, the parent company of the New York Yankees, has teamed with the Manchester City Football Club of the English Premier League to bring a new Major League Soccer team to New York. The team will be known as the New York Football Club and will begin action in 2015 MLS season. The New York Times reported that the Yankees have invested as much as $25 million toward the $100 million purchase price.

Manchester City is owned by an investment group led by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi. That group has been working with MLS for several years to launch a new New York franchise. The New York Red Bulls play in Harrison, New Jersey.

The Yankees’ involvement in the Manchester City bid came together quickly in the past several weeks. The two sides know each other well as the Yankees’ Legends Hospitality provides services at Manchester City’s home stadium. As Howard Megdal reported for Sports On Earth, the New York Mets were once considered by MLS as the group that would team with a partner for a new New York pro soccer team. The Mets’ financial difficulties made that impossible, which opened the door for the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »

Used to be the hipster thing was to talk about pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving, and how it’s more important than it’s been given credit for. That was all well and fun, but people have a pretty good idea now, as the concept has gone borderline mainstream. And it turns out we don’t actually know that much about the effects, since it’s not as simple as calculating the difference between a ball and a strike. Of course, all else being equal, a good receiver is more valuable than a bad one, but we don’t know how much more valuable. The new hipster thing is to talk about receiving realistically. To distrust the idea of a guy being worth something like 50 runs above average. I live in Portland so you can trust me on my evaluation of hipster things.

Over the rest of this post, not everything is figured out. You could argue that very little is figured out, and so much more research could be done. Research by people with more time and way better technical skills. But I’ve decided to mess around with some numbers, and I’ll try to make this as reader-friendly as possible. I’m not going to lay out for you the true effects of good or bad pitch-receiving. Hopefully this’ll just make you think a little, before you think about something else.

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Vance Worley just got clobbered again, this time by the Braves. There’s no set and certain point at which a start turns into an official clobbering, but looking through Worley’s 2013 game log, I’d say this was the fifth or sixth time he’s been clobbered, in ten games. That’s an ugly ratio, and to make matters worse, recall that Worley was Minnesota’s opening-day starter. The Twins’ de facto ace owns an ERA over 7, with 82 hits allowed in just under 49 innings. His strikeouts are way down and on Wednesday he was chased by a double that followed an Evan Gattis grand slam. Two seasons ago, Worley finished third in the voting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

On May 17, Worley allowed one run in a start against the Red Sox, and he credited his improvement to mechanical tweaks he’d made in recent side sessions. He finished that start with three walks and a strikeout. At the end of April, following a rough appearance, Worley said he was throwing the way he wanted to be throwing. His pitches were fine, and his movement was normal. The results just weren’t present, for him. They still aren’t, and the only consolation for Minnesota is that Ben Revere has been bad, too.

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Is there an ideal ground ball rate for hitters? Should they be thinking about how many grounders they hit? Armed with some spreadsheets and a couple conversations with some Royals’ hitters, let’s see what we can discover.

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