Archive for Daily Graphings

Young, first-year managers are a growing trend in Major League Baseball. That’s good news for David Wallace. The 34-year-old wasn’t a candidate for any of this off-season’s openings, but he almost certainly will be in future years.

A catcher in the Cleveland system for six seasons, Wallace moved from the playing field to the coaching ranks in 2009. An assistant on the Indians’ big-league coaching staff in 2009 and in 2010, he has spent the past three seasons as a minor-league manager. This past summer he skippered Cleveland’s high-A affiliate, the Carolina Mudcats.

Wallace — a product of Vanderbilt University — recently discussed the approach he’d bring to a big-league managerial position. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I wrote a piece for ESPN Insider and FanGraphs+ based around the question of how players like Jacoby Ellsbury have aged previously. There’s a belief among some that speed-and-defense players like Ellsbury are bad bets after they turn 30, since a large chunk of their value is tied to what they can do with their legs, and speed peaks earlier than other skills. However, there’s also data that shows that faster players actually age better than most other player types. Instead of just trying to show you what the aging curves say, though, I figured showing how similar players to Ellsbury actually did might be more appealing.

So, here’s the basic gist of how I went about finding Ellsbury-like players, though I’ll note that the process here is slightly different from the table I used in the ESPN piece, since I have a little more room to explain my thought process and findings here. I went to the leaderboards and set the date range to cover the last 30 years. I set the age filter to cover ages 27 to 29, the same ages as the last three seasons of Ellsbury’s career. To narrow it down to Ellsbury-type players, I used the positional tabs to select only outfielders, and then put a filter in place to cap Isolated Slugging at .180, which gets rid of the power hitters who are not really anything like Ellsbury to begin with. I also put in a minimum of 1,500 plate appearances, so that we only got players who were roughly full time players over those three seasons.

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It’s too bad it won’t be Roy Steele’s voice ringing this post’s title from on high — wherever the Athletics are playing — but the declaration itself does seem like more of a lock to happen eventually. Nineteen-year-old Addison Russell has had some doubters in the past. After playing his way to an all-star berth in the Arizona Fall League, the bat has successfully made fans at every stop.

The most interesting aspect of his play might be on the other side of the ball, though, where some feel his body type may move him off the position. After talking to the young man about his craft, though, and assessing his skillset and the values of his major league team, it seemed obvious to me that he’ll be a shortstop when he’s announced into the lineup for the first time in the big leagues.

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As first reported by the Bay Area Sports Guy, the Giants are going to sign former Braves hurler Tim Hudson to a two year, $23 million contract. This is slightly higher than the FanGraphs Crowd’s expected price of $17 million over two years, but still in the same ballpark, essentially. And there are plenty of reasons to like this deal for the Giants.

Yes, Tim Hudson is heading into his age-38 season, and missed almost the entire second half of the season due to a broken ankle. And yes, the 108 ERA- he posted last year was the highest of his career. There are going to be assumptions that these factors suggest that Hudson is headed for serious decline. Don’t believe it.

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The Phillies just gave Carlos Ruiz a guaranteed three year contract that covers his age-35 to age-37 seasons. In both my defense of the deal here and on Twitter, I have invoked Russell Martin’s name as a comparison, but noting that Martin was a huge bargain last winter has met with some resistance because Martin is significantly younger than Ruiz. His two year deal with the Pirates covered his age-30/31 seasons, so Pittsburgh wasn’t committing guaranteed money deep into his mid-30s, as the Phillies are doing with Ruiz.

There simply aren’t that many examples of highly productive 35 year old catchers, as most catchers are on their last legs at this point in their career, and that has helped fuel the belief that catchers age very poorly. The belief that catchers age in dog years is a prevalent one, and is one of the main reasons that the Ruiz deal has been poorly received. However, I think the evidence mostly points to this idea being incorrect.

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If you are familiar with my previous studies on the battery, I have often struggled with preconceived notions regarding the relationship between the pitcher, the catcher and the running game. I have previously concluded that it is the pitcher who has more influence on the caught stealing percentage of the battery than the catcher. In addition, I’ve concluded that it is the pitcher who has more of an impact on the passed ball. Meanwhile, in box scores and in broadcast booths all around the country we continue to reward caught stealing and responsibility for the passed ball to the catcher. Fact is, there are many variables at play and as a result, there is a battery effect that must be considered.

In my continuing study on the relationship between the pitcher and the catcher, this article addresses one specific area of the battery effect and will question the conventional wisdom that the catcher’s arm is the determining factor in the outcome of a would be base stealer.

While there are many variables in play, for today we will solely look at timing of the battery and the past success of the battery, the pitcher, and the catcher in controlling the running game.
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Heading into the winter, it wasn’t entirely clear what the market for Carlos Ruiz was going to look like. He’s headed into his age-35 season, coming off his worst offensive year since 2008, and served a 25 game suspension for failing a drug test (for using amphetamines, specifically Adderall) last year. However, Ruiz proved to be a popular early market target for many teams, and after a week or two of a mini-bidding war, the Phillies have re-signed Ruiz to a three year, $26 million contract, a bit more than the FanGraphs Crowd’s 2/$17M forecast.

Because the Phillies have a long history of overpaying for aging players, the easy narrative is that Ruben Amaro strikes again. He just guaranteed Ruiz $8.5 million for his age-37 season, and the list of catchers who have been productive at that point in their careers is very small indeed. This deal, like almost every other contract signed by the Phillies in recent years, is unlikely to end well.

However, I will continue to point out that we should not evaluate a free agent contract by how it looks in the last year of the contract. Free agents on multi-year deals often take less money in AAV than they are worth for the beginning of the contract in exchange for being overpaid at the back end. This is entirely normal, and nearly every free agent contract is going to work the same way: value up front, albatross at the end. We cannot simply state that the Ruiz signing is a poor one for the Phillies because Ruiz will be overpaid at the end of the deal.

And while Ruiz is an aging catcher coming off a poor season, I think it would be useful to keep the lessons of Russell Martin in mind when talking about this deal for Ruiz, and perhaps hold off on the easy shots at Amaro for re-signing yet another old guy, since this old guy might still be a good player.

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“Replay is coming! Replay is coming!” You can almost hear Ben Revere running through the streets of Philadelphia sounding the call, if I remember my American history correctly. I imagine that 98% of FanGraphs readers read the news last week and reacted with only glee, because decades after some of their major sports competitors started using instant replay, MLB is finally getting with the times. Anything that can stop preventable mistakes from happening is a good thing, as I think you’d agree.

I probably don’t need to regale you with dozens of examples of terribly blown calls, from Phil Cuzzi blowing up the 2009 ALCS to Jim Joyce ruining Armando Galarraga’s perfect game to Don Denkinger’s infamous error in the 1985 World Series, so I won’t. You know the game needs replay, and so do I. Still, for the one straggler among you who might just be on the fence about it, I absolutely can’t pass up the opportunity to reuse this still of arguably the worst call in the history of sports, Tim Welke calling Jerry Hairston out on this play in Colorado in 2012:

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Earlier this year, Jack Moore reviewed Josh Johnson’s inability to get hitters out while pitching from the stretch. Johnson and the Jays were very much aware of the situation, but even still, it did not improve as the season went on. In the end, Johnson limited batters to a .315 wOBA and a .307 BABIP when he worked out of a full wind-up, while opposing batters had a .440 wOBA and a .450 BABIP when Johnson worked out of the stretch. His BABIP while pitching from the stretch was 73 points higher than any other pitcher that made at least 15 starts in 2013.

The simple answer this dramatic split would be to simply point at Johnson’s BABIP and say he was unlucky. If one were to review the video from the first inning of his July 27th start against Houston, one could certainly believe that:
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My cousin Cindy has a batting cage on her property. If you knew Cindy, this would absolutely not surprise you. She had been a farmer her whole life, and as she gets older and does less farming, she needs things to fill those now-free 18 hours or so. She needs things that involve activity as well, as she still has a lot of energy to burn. So when she had a family reunion of sorts last summer, there came a time when everybody had to take a turn in the batting cages. There were no helmets worn — these were strong Wisconsin folk, mind you — as the pitch speed was usually turned to the lowest setting. These were changeups, ostensibly. And when it was my turn to take some hacks, they still looked fast. I fouled a few off to begin, then was able to make some contact (note: making contact means weak grounders when it comes to my hitting.) Toward the end, the oddest thing happened. I started swinging early. I started getting comfortable enough that I started being proactive instead of reactive. In hitting terms, I adjusted.

Hitters in the middle of a cold streak use platitudes about their timing being off all the time. When a hitter is coming back from a prolonged injury, they often do rehab in the minors to get “their timing down.” Leg kicks can be added or removed from swings in order to assist with timing. It’s an integral part of hitting, is the point I’m making, and the point you already knew. It’s why so-called soft-tossing pitchers can still get away with cashing a check from a major league team. Their fastball might be weak, but they can counter that by taking enough from the off-speed stuff, that a hitter’s timing can still be thrown off significantly.

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