Archive for Daily Graphings

With all due respect to Geovany Soto and Brayan Pena, I think it’s fair to say that we now have our first notable free agent signing of the off-season, as the Phillies have reportedly agreed to a two year contract with outfielder Marlon Byrd. The Phillies were known to be looking for a right-handed hitting outfielder, and Byrd provided a lower cost alternative to the likes of Nelson Cruz. Signing Byrd is a win in that it is not signing Cruz, who I labeled as the #1 “land mine” of this free agent class, so at the very least, Phillies fans should be excited that Byrd will keep them from punting a draft pick for the right to overpay for Cruz’s decline.

But, apart from not-Cruz, what do we expect from Marlon Byrd in the future, and is a two year deal for a guy with his inconsistent history a risk worth taking?

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A pretty common question we see in FanGraphs chats is what one statistic we’d use to evaluate pitchers, if we could use only one. The truthful answer is always a non-answer: You shouldn’t ever use just one statistic. It’s an unrealistic hypothetical, and good evaluation is done with a blend of different data. But I will say that I tend to look at xFIP early on, just to get a sense of what I’m dealing with. It’s a number that can scrape out a whole bunch of noise. Something I noticed is that, this season, Max Scherzer posted a 3.16 xFIP. Rick Porcello posted a 3.19 xFIP. Both were full-time starters for the same team, and one of them, presumably, is about to win the American League Cy Young Award.

It’s a comparison that’s interesting enough on its own, but adding more significance to the comparison is talk that the Tigers will explore trading one of these two pitchers in the weeks and months ahead. There’s skepticism everywhere that a team like the Tigers would actually think deeply about moving Scherzer, considering everything, but the ace is one year from free agency and he’s represented by Scott Boras. Porcello is two years from free agency, and the Tigers have Drew Smyly just about ready to resume starting. Really, the Tigers aren’t limited to picking one between Scherzer and Porcello, but things could well work out that way. And in talking about this, xFIP is only the start.

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One of the most remarkable things about the Internet is the speed with which news finds its way to updated Wikipedia pages. Even during the MLB playoffs, you can usually find notes about player achievements or umpire errors within a matter of minutes. MLB.com does not operate like Wikipedia, in that not just anyone can go in and change things around. But there is one similarity, in that here’s a screenshot of part of the Twins’ official roster from earlier Monday:

Somebody’s conspicuously absent. Let’s scroll down just a bit:

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The St. Louis Cardinals need a shortstop and have a surplus of talent with no obvious places to fit onto their roster. The Colorado Rockies have a superstar shortstop but need more good players than they currently have. These facts have people — including noted scribe Ken Rosenthal — speculating about what a Tulowitzki-to-STL deal might look like. In fact, it is probably now the most interesting trade rumor of the off-season.

For their part, the Rockies say that they aren’t interested in trading Tulowitzki. When you have one of the best players in the game signed to one of the most team-friendly contracts in the game, there shouldn’t be a huge sense of urgency to unload said player and contract. Over the summer, I rated Tulowitzki as the 13th most valuable trade chip in baseball, sliding in between Miguel Cabrera and Stephen Strasburg. For the Rockies to move Tulowitzki, the offer would have to be substantial.

The Cardinals have substantial talent though. Matt Adams looks like a nice player, but he’s blocked by Allen Craig at first base. Trevor Rosenthal wants to start, but there isn’t an obvious spot for him in the rotation at the moment. If Jaime Garcia is healthy by next spring, the Cardinals won’t even have room for all the starters they already have, not even counting the potential for Rosenthal or Carlos Martinez to transition back out of the bullpen. The team also has Kolten Wong now blocked by Matt Carpenter at second base, and if they end up re-signing Carlos Beltran, they’ll probably have to trade Jon Jay whenever Oscar Taveras proves ready for the big leagues.

So, yeah, the Cardinals have expendable talent that is basically the envy of every team in the sport. They have enough depth that they can probably target any player they want and make a serious offer that at least forces the other club to listen. The real question, though, is should they?

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Well, this is a bit of a surprise. This morning, the Braves have announced that they’re going to move to a new ballpark in 2017 following the expiration of their lease with Turner Field. Citing traffic problems and the fact that Turner Field would require “about $150 million in infrastructure work, including replacement of seats, upgrading lighting and plumbing, etc., to remain viable”, the Braves are instead just going to relocate out of a 20 year old stadium in search of something shinier and newer.

Also, importantly, the location for the new stadium is in Cobb County, which is adjacent to Fulton County, where Turner Field is located. Without the threat of potentially losing the revenues that come from having the Braves stay where they are, Fulton County is very unlikely to kick in public money to make the kinds of upgrades the Braves would like to see. Cobb County is almost certainly going to pay a significant chunk of the cost of this proposed new stadium, so now the Braves have some real leverage to get more public funding, either from Cobb County or Fulton County.

The terms of the project and who pays for what haven’t yet been released — though the Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that the stadium includes $450 million in public financing, nearly 2/3 of the cost of the project — so it’s impossible to make specific statements about this particular deal, but in general, publicly funded stadiums are a terrible deal for the taxpayers, and the people of Cobb County and Fulton County are likely to be the real losers of today’s announcement. For some more in depth reading on why these deals are so bad for the public, here’s one of the many papers that have been written and tackle the topic.

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When I looked at this toward the end of August, a lot of baseball had happened. Enough baseball that I felt it worthwhile to take a look at this. Since that point, the rest of baseball happened, so now that we have season closure, it seems like it’s time for a second and final update. We can now officially answer the question: which individual pitch was the most unhittable during the 2013 regular season? Beyond that, which were the most unhittable pitches from relievers, and which were the most unhittable pitches from starters?

Of course, in updating the first post, I have to issue all the same caveats as in the first post. So in a sense I’m just writing the same thing again, with some different numbers and pictures. What this really is is a post containing contact-rate leaderboards. The pitches you’re going to see are the pitches that yielded the lowest rates of contact, getting therefore the highest rates of whiffs. That seems like a good way to explore unhittability, but as you understand, pitching is complex, and every pitch depends in some way on every other pitch.

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Lately, there have been persistent rumors that Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) are considering a major change to the posting system – perhaps in time to affect Masahiro Tanaka. One of the most commonly rumored proposals is a system that would allow three teams to “win” the post. In New York beat writer Joel Sherman’s words:

There had been speculation the system would undergo radical changes, with perhaps even the teams with the three highest posting bids all gaining the rights to negotiate with the players.

He goes on to note that the posted player may get the opportunity to pick one of three top bidders. For the sake of simplicity, let’s leave that wrinkle aside for now.

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We can wax poetic about baseball fairly easily — some have pretty much made a career out of it. The greenness of the park, the sheer number of games, and its tight ties to history are all bullet points in the “why baseball is the best sport” argument. There’s also the pace of the game. Baseball doesn’t have a clock! It can go on forever! While this can get overplayed at some times, it certainly is a draw. We perhaps aren’t interested in watching six-hour games every day, but the inherent pace of the sport brings with it another facet — drama.

Every sport has dramatic moments. There are always points in a game where one’s palms can get sweaty and knees bounce in anticipation. College basketball — specifically the NCAA tournament — may hold a monopoly on this, at least as far as intensity goes. But baseball has the most high-drama moments, simply due to the fact that there are so many games. But that’s the exact reason we don’t think of baseball — at least regular season baseball — as high-drama. There are so many games. No matter what happens, there is a game tomorrow. The effect of one at-bat on an entire team’s season is far less than the effect of one play on a football team’s season. That’s just the numbers. But baseball has the most, certainly. And the king of dramatic situation — the great bringer of the bouncing knee — is the full count. Read the rest of this entry »

As much as we’ve all grown accustomed to citing FIP, and trusting FIP, the theory is always kind of staggering at first, no matter who you are or what your background. The principle is that pitchers have little control over the results of their balls in play allowed. The evidence is convincing and exhausting. And it’s so challenging to come to terms with, because it flies in the face of what people are taught playing baseball growing up, and because different pitchers have different abilities to put the pitches where they want. How could location possibly be that unimportant, at least in that one particular regard? Don’t some spots lead to worse contact than others? Can’t some guys throw more pitches to those very spots?

Some people are still working on the investigation, and of course we know that BABIP isn’t completely random. For example, there’s the meaningful difference between groundball pitchers and fly-ball pitchers. But the general conclusion’s still valid. It never stops being a little weird when you stop and think about it, and what’s presented below contributes to the weirdness.

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Today, the Cincinnati Reds have agreed to sign Brayan Pena to a two year contract. Brayan Pena is a generic replacement level catcher, so you probably don’t care too much about him. You might care about Ryan Hanigan, however, since you’re reading FanGraphs. Because Hanigan is something of a sabermetric darling, and now he’s being cast aside in favor of a player who seems demonstrably worse.

For the Reds, this probably has less to do with Hanigan and more to do with Devin Mesoraco, who looks to be the team’s regular starting catcher in 2014 after today’s news. Pena fits the prototypical backup role, and now the team can attempt to use Hanigan as trade bait. And, given his skills and the amount of teams looking for a catcher this winter, they should have no shortage of suitors.

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