This morning, Jon Heyman noted an odd thing on Twitter:

i am not a hater of WAR stat, but if someone can explain to me how starling marte & bryce harper are both 1.7, please do

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) April 29, 2013

He was quoting Baseball-Reference’s WAR calculation, and the two are indeed tied at +1.7 WAR on B-R. Here, we have Bryce Harper (+1.5 WAR) ahead of Starling Marte (+1.2 WAR), but the point still basically stands; WAR thinks Harper (1.200 OPS) and Marte (.835 OPS) have both been pretty great this year, with just a small (or no) difference between them. What Harper has done with the bat, WAR believes that Marte has mostly made up with his legs in baserunning (+3 run advantage) and defense (+3 run advantage), as well a slight bump from getting 12 extra plate appearances.

There’s no question that Harper has been a better offensive player, but there are questions about the defensive valuations, because defensive metrics aren’t as refined at this point as offensive metrics are. It is much easier to prove that Harper has been +10 runs better with the bat this year than it is to prove that Marte has been +3 runs better defensively by UZR, or +7 runs better defensively by DRS. There are more sources for error in the defensive metrics, and Heyman’s tweet led to a discussion on Twitter about the usefulness of including small sample defensive metrics in WAR.

I’ve written before about the strong correlation between team WAR and team winning percentage, and others have followed up with similar analysis more recently. However, all those articles have focused on full season or multi-season data samples, and since the question was raised and I hadn’t yet seen it answered, I became curious about whether WAR would actually correlate better at this point in the year if we just assumed every player in baseball was an average defender.

Essentially, if we just removed defensive metrics from the equation, and evaluated teams solely on their hitting and pitching, how would our WAR calculation compare to team winning percentage? And how does WAR correlate to team winning percentage based on just April 2013 data, when we’re dealing with much smaller sample sizes?

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The Astros are not a good baseball team. But, as Tyler Kepner detailed in the New York Times this weekend, they are a baseball team with a plan. Whether or not that will lead to wins this season is another matter, but the fact that they have a plan is shining through, even amidst the deluge of runs allowed. Read the rest of this entry »

As you read this, the Boston Red Sox have the best record in all of major-league baseball, unless you’re reading this at least a few days after it was published. The Red Sox’s success is less of a surprise than the Blue Jays’ lack of success, but nobody expected Boston to start this well, and the organization is well on its way toward restoring the city’s confidence in the team. The Red Sox have gotten to this point by getting valuable contributions from their position players and from their pitchers. That will not be the only obvious sentence in this post.

We should pause to acknowledge what the Boston pitching staff has done to date. If the season were to end today, we’d all be left wondering, “wait, what?” But eventually we’d get over it and look at the statistics, and the statistics would show that the Red Sox have the highest team pitching strikeout rate in baseball history. As a team, the Sox have struck out 26.7% of opposing batters, and second place would be the…2013 Tigers, at 25.8%. Third place would be the…2013 Reds, at 23.3%. Fourth place would be the…2013 Royals, at 23.2%. So times have changed and strikeouts are up, but for the sake of perspective, the Red Sox as a team have a higher strikeout rate than both Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax. This is, of course, a team effort, but the greatest individual contribution so far has been made by Ryan Dempster.

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Before the season season started, members of our staff took a shot at prognosticating the season, despite the fact that we all know You Can’t Predict Baseball. Of the 31 authors who participated, 15 of them — myself included — selected the Blue Jays as the favorites to win the AL East, and nine of the 16 who didn’t pick Toronto to win their division had them as a wild card club. The Blue Jays off-season makeover convinced most of us that they were a good team with a good shot at playing in October.

It might only be April 29th, but there’s a pretty good chance that 24 of us are going to end up being wrong, because while we’re still in the first month of the season, the Blue Jays season is in jeopardy.

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Triple-A is weird. It’s the second-most-skilled level in American professional baseball, but it doesn’t have a lot of “prospects.” Many of these players have played or will play in the majors, but they aren’t considered as exciting because there’s a much clearer image of what kind of players they are. Lower-level players have more projection and potential, which makes them more interesting, but they aren’t as skilled as those in Triple-A. In fact, Triple-A players are largely what they are with little projection left — and most of them are role players.

But Sean Gilmartin is not supposed to be a role player. The Braves took Gilmartin with the 28^th overall pick in 2011 out of Florida State University, and he was frequently ranked in the top five in most Braves prospects lists from this past off-season. When the Gwinnett Braves headed into Louisville this past week, I went to take a look.

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A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:

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I still don’t really know what I’m supposed to do in these introductions, and I suspect it would be unprofessional to use this section to throw out links like this. I guess for the time being I might as well just repeat myself, since I’m at a loss and nobody reads these for the introductions anyway. Hey you guys! This is the second part of the fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best, and here’s last Friday’s wild-swings article. You’re going to see the five swings from the past week at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, as determined by PITCHf/x and me. Only included are full swings — not checked swings — and I’m also going to make a point of excluding swings on hit-and-runs, since those aren’t really up to the hitter. Maybe they’ll earn honorable mentions. I haven’t actually encountered one of those yet.

For the purpose of this series, I don’t care about funny-looking swings where the hitter loses his balance and falls down. So don’t look for those in the body, although you’re free to post them in the comments because they’re still hilarious and embarrassing. And as I noted earlier, don’t expect to see these posts next Friday, since I’ll be out of town and, more importantly, not at a computer. I’m going to go ahead and guess I couldn’t compose a post like this from a smartphone. That sounds like the terms of a prison sentence. The Friday after, we’ll be back in business, and now on this particular Friday, we’ll proceed with the list, in the usual descending order. I think this has been enough words.

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Entering the spring, Gerardo Parra was once again a man without a home. After a starting a career-high 124 times in 2011, and doing so handily, Parra shifted back into part-time status in 2012. But with Adam Eaton and Cody Ross both suffering injuries before the season began, and Jason Kubel landing on the disabled list with a strained left quad two weeks into it, Parra has once again been seeing regular action. In the process, he has not only acquitted himself well, but also helped hold down the Dbacks offense in the early going.

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Let us begin with a few notes! First, hello, welcome to the first part of the fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best. Thank you for reading because without you I would be literally penniless unemployed. Second, this post has a lot of .gifs in it. All of the posts in this series have a lot of .gifs in them, and you have no right to complain about browser locking, because you should know what to expect by now. If your machine can’t handle .gifs, it’s not going to handle these posts, and you don’t complain about the river when you can’t float across in a measuring cup. Third, per usual, this is all PITCHf/x-derived, and we’re just examining the five pitches the furthest from the center of the strike zone. Here’s last week’s edition. Sometimes people like to ask why so-and-so’s pitch didn’t make the list. It’s because the pitch wasn’t bad enough. But to sate your curiosity, guys who just missed the top five include James McDonald, Cliff Lee, and Jaime Garcia. Over the course of a week, Cliff Lee threw baseball’s seventh-wildest pitch. All right.

And a final note: don’t look for these posts next Friday, because I’ll be away, attending none of your business. I figured it was probably for the best to give you guys a warning, and I haven’t yet decided if the Friday after that will review the previous week or the previous two weeks. I probably won’t make that decision until the morning of that Friday, because I don’t deal with things ahead of time. Now we should be all good to go, so let’s watch some really wild pitches, together. You can pretend we’re family.

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Sliders have platoon splits. The traditional slider does, at least. So opposite-handed hitters are always a struggle for the fastball/slider reliever.

That’s not really the case for Luke Gregerson. Though the throws his slider more often, percentage-wise, than anybody in baseball not named Sergio Romo, Gregerson has avoided platoon splits over his career for the most part. The right-hander has struck out 24.6% of lefties, and 25.2% of righties. He walks a few more lefties (9.6% vs 6.3%), but that’s not the profile of a guy who can only get righties out. How does he do it?

Luke Gregerson has three sliders.

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