Considering current events, let’s acknowledge something up front: I am not composing this with my full, undivided attention, and you probably are not reading this with your full, undivided attention. That’s just fine, and maybe because of the latter, you won’t be aware of the former. But I wanted to open with an excuse, and it’s weird enough to be thinking and writing about baseball right now, or even this week. Some of you certainly won’t be in the mood to read about sports, although I suppose those who don’t care wouldn’t be looking at FanGraphs right now in the first place. Here is baseball content on a Friday. Read it or do not, and I’m okay with your decision.

If you’re still here, and if you’re still interested, this is the first part of the third edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here’s a link to last week’s version of this, in order to bring you up to speed. Top five wildest pitches, relative to the center of the zone, derived via PITCHf/x. It’s not relative to intended location because we have no way of reliably measuring that. Yes, that would be better, in theory. No, that is not doable, in reality. Please do not complain about these .gifs locking up your browsers because you should understand by now that these posts have .gifs in them. All of the posts in this series will have at least five .gifs in them. You should know whether or not your browser sucks at .gifs. You do not get my sympathy. To be honest nobody ever gets my sympathy just because they have a frozen Internet window. This seems like enough of an introduction, so let’s advance to the more meaty bits.

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Sometimes players are described as “bad-ball hitters.” Or, sometimes players will be described as having strike zones that range from the head to their heels. Vladimir Guerrero used to own these tags, and once upon a time, so did Nomar Garciaparra. It is possible to succeed while swinging at everything, and nobody personifies that today better than do Robinson Cano and Pablo Sandoval.

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Since Clubhouse Confidential is an off-season only show, the MLB Network has created a new show called MLB Now, where Brian Kenny and Harold Reynolds frequently disagree on differing topics. On yesterday’s show, the two briefly discussed the value of pitcher wins, as you can see in this clip below.

In that segment, Harold Reynolds cites CC Sabathia as an example of a pitcher who pitches to the score, noting that he performs differently when the game is on the line than when he’s just trying to get outs and has some runs to give up. While one will never be able to definitively prove or disprove the intent of a pitcher, given that we are left to only measure what they do rather than what they are thinking, Reynolds’ claim is testable. If Sabathia pitched dramatically better in close games than with a big lead, it would show up in the data.

It does not. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackie Bradley Jr.’s fantastic spring did not turn into April results. The highly regarded Red Sox prospect was sent down to Triple-A Pawtucket following Thursday’s game after he managed just three hits and six walks in 38 plate appearances. It’s clear what Bradley needs to work on with his everyday at-bats at Pawtucket: hitting advanced changeups and curveballs.

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In a deal announced on Tuesday, the Seattle Mariners will become the majority stakeholder in ROOT Sports Northwest, the regional sports network (RSN) owned by DirecTV. ROOT Sports NW currently broadcasts Mariners games under a 1o-year rights fee contract that pays the Mariners $45 million per year. That agreement gave the Mariners an opt-out clause after the 2015 season, which led many to speculate that the team would look to match the mega deals recently struck by their American League West rivals.

In 2011, the Angels inked a new local TV deal with regional sports network Fox Sports West, valued at $2.5 billion over 17 years, plus a 25% equity stake in the RSN. The Texas Rangers kicked off this new frenzy in late 2010 with its 20-year/$1.7 billion deal with Fox Sports Southwest. After the Angels’ new deal, the Houston Astros cashed in, joining with the Houston Rockets to create a new RSN with Comcast, called Comcast SportsNet Houston. The Astros will receive $80 million a year for the next 20 years, plus income generated from its 45% equity stake.

Instead, the Mariners are headed in a different and somewhat surprising direction. The new deal — estimated by Forbes at $2 billion over 17 years — will give the Mariners broader control over the RSN’s programming. But that control may come with some financial uncertainty.

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A while back, Jeff Zimmerman and I introduced the concept of Edge% — a metric that attempted to quantify the extent to which a pitcher worked the edges of the strike zone. Jeff initially looked at how this applied to Tim Lincecum and how his performance depended to some extent on his ability to pitch to the edges of the plate. I followed up with a high-level piece that compared the performance of pitchers at an aggregate level depending on how extreme their Edge% was in a given season.

While the findings were interesting, they were also a little inconsistent. That’s because Jeff and I independently created two distinct metrics. We decided to combine our efforts (as we have been known to do) and settle on a single, consistent formula.

And that’s the focus of this article.

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Let’s go ahead and get one thing clear up front: nobody thinks about pitcher pace, firstly. Firstly, one always thinks about pitcher performance, and then after that come the various watchability factors. What matters most is that a pitcher is good, and when a pitcher is consistently effective, nobody really cares how he gets it done, so long as he does. But pitcher pace lurks in the background, and when a guy isn’t effective, a slow tempo won’t score him any points. One tolerates a slow pitcher when the slow pitcher helps. One quickly runs out of patience when a slow pitcher hurts.

Slow and bad — it’s the worst of the four boxes to occupy. Of course, there’s some relationship, as pitchers tend to work slower with runners on base, and bad pitchers have more runners on base. There’s more to think about, more people to pay attention to, more importance behind every delivery. But when Mark Buehrle sucks, he still sucks quickly. Not everyone is Mark Buehrle, and this is how we get to talking about Mike Pelfrey.

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About two weeks ago, I got an email from a public relations representative asking me to write about a new fantasy baseball app called scoutPRO. I had never heard of it. But it seemed interesting: the company already had a fantasy football app, and so it was trying to move from football into baseball analytics. And its founder sounded interesting, too: a 50-year old UGA grad and serial entrepreneur named Diane Bloodworth who had made her prior career in information technology and consulting for the federal government.

So I spoke with her about moving between sports as a businessperson, and moving between worlds as a woman in the male-dominated industry of fantasy sports.
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Last night, the Tigers and Mariners squared off in a mid-week contest in front of 14,981 fans in Seattle, in a game that didn’t begin until 10:00 pm on the east coast. The Tigers are a good baseball team, and are expected to win the AL Central by a significant margin. The Mariners are a less good baseball team, and aren’t expected to be in the playoff race when the year ends. At the end of the year, there’s a pretty good chance that the outcome of this game isn’t going to have determined anything. It will get lost in the shuffle of history as just another regular season game. But, oh man, this game was not just another game. This game was amazing. Let us count the ways.

(Be warned, for there are some GIFs after the jump).

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