Archive for Daily Graphings

With all the Division Series now over, it now time to give a quick look at the League Championship Series umpires. I will look at the NLCS umpires today and the ALCS umpires tomorrow.

For each umpire, I have include their 3-year average K%, BB% and Zone% for both left-handed and right-handed hitters. I have created a 100 scale which shows how much more or less an umpire is than the league average. A value over 100 is always pitcher friendly (a lower BB% means a higher 100 value).

Additionally, I have included a heat map of the umpire’s called strike zone compared to the league average zone. It subtracts the percentage of called strikes divided by the total of the called balls and strikes of the umpire from the league average. For example, if the umpire called a pitch in the zone a strike 40% of the time and if the league average is 50%, the output would be -10% (40%-50%) or 0.10.

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Tigers fell behind the A’s two games to one in the series, they knew they’d need either Max Scherzer or Justin Verlander to pitch well if they were to advance. As it turned out, they needed them both — Scherzer recorded some critical outs in Game 4, and then Verlander recorded a lot more of them in Game 5, starting in what would’ve been Scherzer’s place. For eight innings on Thursday, Verlander was virtually unhittable, removing any would-be suspense from a potentially suspenseful game. At times on Tuesday, the A’s would’ve figured this would be Scherzer’s start, if necessary. At times on Tuesday, the A’s would’ve figured they’d have Thursday off. It was in Game 4 that the A’s were in position to lock this series up. In Game 5, they never really stood a chance.

The question coming in was whether the Tigers or A’s would emerge from this triumphant. The question in the middle innings became whether the A’s would so much as get a runner on base. Nobody reached until Josh Reddick’s walk in the bottom of the sixth. Nobody got a hit until Yoenis Cespedes‘ single in the bottom of the seventh. There wasn’t suspense until the game’s final batter, and by then Verlander had been removed. On October 6, 2012, Coco Crisp led off Game 1 of the ALDS with a home run against Verlander. He hasn’t given up another postseason run to the A’s in four starts, whiffing 43. It’s an all-time record, and it’s active, pending the future.

For eight innings, Verlander mowed the A’s down. With one swing of the bat, he was given all the run support he’d need. After Verlander was gone, the A’s couldn’t seize their one final chance. This was a Game 5 decided by three separate fastballs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Verlander didn’t have a Justin Verlander year, you may have noticed. Sure, he had 200 strikeouts and a decent ERA, but he wasn’t the guy that won all of the hardware in 2011 and could’ve won more in 2012. But that was because he had to work something out mechanically.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are currently four managerial openings in Major League Baseball. The Cubs, Reds, Nationals and Mariners are all in need of a new skipper. Torey Lovullo is likely to receive serious consideration from one or more of those teams.

Currently John Farrell’s bench coach in Boston, the 48-year-old Lovullo has managed in the minor leagues with the Indians and Red Sox. He interviewed for the Dodgers job in 2006, only to see it go to Grady Little. Boston interviewed him prior to the 2012 season, but hired Bobby Valentine. He was Toronto’s first base coach in 2011 and 2012.

In the second of a series of interviews with up-and-coming managerial candidates, Lovullo discussed the approach and philosophies he would bring to the job. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the weird things you just get used to when you’re a hockey fan is the vague, non-informative reportage of injuries, especially around playoff time. If a guy has a broken foot, it’s a lower-body injury. If a guy sustained a concussion, it’s an upper-body injury. No one ever goes into specifics until a playoff run is over, nominally so as not to give the other team some kind of advantage. If a guy’s playing through pain, you don’t want the other team targeting his sore spots, after all. Once a team is eliminated, or wins the Stanley Cup, everything comes out, and everyone admits what they’ve been dealing with. By the end, nobody’s healthy.

Tony Paul’s suspicion is that, whenever the Tigers are done playing baseball, everyone will come clean about what’s going on with Miguel Cabrera. It’s no secret that Cabrera’s playing hurt, and we’ve all heard about his litany of aches and pains, but we might not have a true understanding of how bad things have gotten. I don’t know, that’s speculation, but Cabrera most certainly doesn’t look like himself. He most certainly didn’t look like himself — or perform like himself — in September, as nagging pains mounted. The Tigers, like everyone, are more than just one player, and they’ve still got a shot at a title, but they’d have a better shot with a healthy Cabrera, a Cabrera who doesn’t presently exist.

Read the rest of this entry »

Midnight struck for baseball’s Cinderella last night, as Adam Wainwright’s curveball played the part of the wicked stepmother. Actually, I don’t know the Cinderella story well enough to know if that sentence makes sense, so let’s move on from this tortured analogy after just one sentence. The Pirates lost last night, and the season that put the city back on the map as a baseball town is now over. So now, there’s one question hanging over the franchise: was this was a one year aberration or was this was the emergence a new force to be reckoned with in the NL Central?

From one perspective, it’s impossible to answer this question right now. We have no idea what the 2014 Pirates will actually look like after an off-season of roster shuffling. They could pony up their entire farm system to land both David Price and Giancarlo Stanton, and then, yeah, they’re obviously a contender next year. Or they might decide to play it safe, wait for the next wave of prospects to hit Pittsburgh, and take a step backwards in a consolidation year. There’s no way to know what the 2014 Pirates are going to do without knowing who is going to be playing for them.

But, we know some of the players that are almost certainly going to be on the team, and we know some things about how the 2013 Pirates won 94 games, so we can look at how much of what they did this year could reasonably be expected to carry over to 2014. So let’s do that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ahead of game five, Oakland manager Bob Melvin had a tough choice to make. Both Bartolo Colon and Sonny Gray were available on full rest. And though he has indicated that Sonny Gray is his starter, what this post presupposes is: what if he hadn’t told us who was starting. Who would we choose to be his starter?

Read the rest of this entry »

Cliff Lee pitched for the Phillies in the World Series in 2009, and though Lee and the Phillies didn’t win, the ace impressed armchair psychiatrists and industry officials alike with his apparent countenance and composure under stress. One of my favorite baseball anecdotes is that, the next spring, in a team meeting, a coach pointed to Lee and held him up as an example of how to stay balanced and perform when the pressure’s really on. It was then that Lee spoke up and said, paraphrased, “actually I damn near s*** my pants.”

In a postgame interview Wednesday night, Adam Wainwright admitted to having been nervous, given that he was tasked to start a do-or-die Division Series Game 5. Wainwright’s pitched in a World Series before, and he already had 14 games of playoff experience, but you could hardly blame him for being human. Experience doesn’t make you immune to feelings. It maybe gives you a better idea of how to handle them. Wainwright was chosen for the postgame interview because he threw a complete game to allow the Cardinals to advance to the NLCS. For the second time in two starts, Wainwright was dominant, and though there’s no such thing as an unwinnable game, Wainwright is the reason why you talk about avoiding aces in October. The Pirates technically had two chances to win this series, but this is why it felt like they only had one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Something I like to look at after every season is a chart of the locations of all the season’s intentional balls. Intentional balls, of course, are supposed to be super far away from the strike zone, but out of any such group there has to be a pitch that’s closest to being a strike, and for some reason those pitches fascinate me. This project would by no means be timely right now, in the middle of the playoffs, but something that is timely is something very similar. Along a similar vein to intentional balls, we have hit-by-pitches.

Hit-by-pitches just about have to be pitches out of the zone, in order to hit a batter, since batters stand some distance away from the plate. These pitches aren’t thrown wildly intentionally, but the locations are generally way off regardless, because pitchers aren’t perfect. But out of the pool of all hit-by-pitches, there has to be a pitch closest to having been in the zone. What follows is inspired by Shane Victorino.

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, in one of my chats, someone asked if I could design a dream starting pitcher, throwing any four pitches of my choosing. Of the pitches, I wanted a curveball, and of all the curveballs, I settled on Adam Wainwright‘s. There are a host of excellent curveballs out there — Clayton Kershaw‘s is famous, and Jose Fernandez’s will be — but Wainwright’s is spectacular, and I was also dealing with recency bias after Wainwright’s start against the Pirates in which his curve flat-out dominated. That curve was fresh in my mind, and the worst thing about Wainwright’s game ending was that I wouldn’t be able to watch that curveball anymore.

A funny thing happened on an earlier tour through the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards. I was looking at 2013 starting pitchers, and I was looking at curveballs, and almost by accident, I noticed that Wainwright’s curve generated a good whiff rate, but Gerrit Cole’s generated an excellent whiff rate. Cole — Wainwright’s opponent in just a couple hours in Game 5 of that series. This was originally slated to be a matchup between two great curves. Now it looks like a matchup between one of those great curves, and another, also great curve. There are a few things we can take away from this.

Read the rest of this entry »