Archive for Daily Graphings

St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Carlos Beltran!

I would say congratulations, but this probably isn’t the kind of award you want to win. So, let’s just skip the festivities and skip right to the recap, shall we?

In last night’s game between the Dodgers and Cardinals, Los Angeles held a 3-1 lead heading into the bottom of the 7th inning. Zack Greinke was pitching well, but he’d thrown 93 pitches and after facing a pinch-hitter for Adam Wainwright, was going to have to roll through the top of the batting order for the fourth time. This is danger territory, the type of spot where rallies are frequent and leads are often blown. Pitchers are less effective as they get deeper into the game and hitters perform better against a pitcher they’ve faced multiple times that day. The recipe for a comeback was in place.

And Greinke really hurt himself by walking the light-hitting Adron Chambers, who had pinch-hit for Wainwright leading off the inning. That walk took six pitches, and ended with Greinke throwing three straight out of the zone to put Chambers on first base. This brought up Matt Carpenter, the Cardinals All-Star second baseman, and the beginning of the best part of St. Louis’ offensive attack.

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Monday night in Washington, the Braves beat Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals by a 3-2 score. The beginning of the Nationals’ MLB.com game recap reads so casually you almost skip right over the astonishing part and miss the absurdity. Quote:

WASHINGTON — The Nationals entered Monday night with nine chances remaining to cut directly into the Braves’ 12 1/2-game lead in the National League East. They wasted the first of those chances in the opener of a three-game series, as Justin Upton’s go-ahead solo home run in the eighth inning lifted Atlanta to a 3-2 victory.

Braves in first, check. Nationals with chances left, check. Nationals with a blown chance, check. Twelve and a half games. Wait. Now thirteen and a half games. Because the Braves won. The number is inserted as if the gap isn’t completely ridiculous. The number is inserted as if Nationals fans ought to be holding out hope.

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Trying to point out where the steroid era begins and ends, using data, is not as easy as you might think. While there are substances you can take to increase muscle mass, and that has direct consequences on athleticism, there just isn’t a clear moment where one the numbers pinpoint the beginnings of steroid usage in Major League Baseball. That might be because the pitchers were on them too, or that the steroid era reaches further back than we suppose, or continues more into today’s game than we prefer to think.

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As good as Jose Fernandez is, there still exists a critical angle. Fernandez, of course, pitches for the Marlins, and the Marlins get a lot of things wrong. The Internet usually doesn’t let those things go by unacknowledged, and the Marlins, this year, placed Fernandez on their opening-day roster. Fernandez was coming straight from Single-A, and had the Marlins waited even just a couple weeks, they could’ve preserved an extra year of team control. Instead, Fernandez is due to become a free agent in five years, instead of six. Viewed objectively, viewed just on paper, that decision is needlessly wasteful. The Marlins had no plans to contend. Fernandez didn’t need to be up that quick.

But there’s no sense in letting that dominate the conversation, because let’s revisit the beginning of that paragraph: “As good as Jose Fernandez is.” Fernandez just, and I mean just turned 21, and he’s outstanding. It’s fine to talk about contracts and service time, and those details are important, but that’s not nearly as interesting as on-field performance. Though Matt Harvey’s drawn more of the headlines, Fernandez has more quietly exceeded most reasonable expectations, and in the interest of better appreciating what he’s done, I thought we could take a few minutes to dig in. Let’s go beyond “Jose Fernandez is great.” What are some of his defining characteristics?

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For a while, Biogenesis didn’t exist. Then for a while, Biogenesis did exist, but we didn’t know anything about it. Then we started to know a lot about it, and in particular a lot about its distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, but it didn’t seem like baseball would be able to hand out much in the way of discipline. Then it seemed like baseball would be able to deliver suspensions, but not until 2014, after appeals were dealt with. Now baseball has handed out suspensions and all but one will go un-fought. This Monday is the big day: on this Monday, players tied to Biogenesis have been given official discipline.

Naturally, people are going to have questions. What does a 50-game suspension mean? What are the rest of the consequences out of all this? It’s too soon to really have an FAQ, because this early no Qs have been FA’d, so consider this FAQ more anticipatory. Let’s focus on the suspended Nelson Cruz, and the suspended Jhonny Peralta.

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Major League Baseball suspended 13 players today for violations of the Joint Drug Agreement based on evidence collected in its investigation of Biogenesis, the now-shuttered “anti-aging” clinic run by Anthony Bosch.

Jhonny Peralta (Tigers), Nelson Cruz (Rangers), Everth Cabrera (Padres), Francisco Cervilli (Yankees), Jesus Montero (Mariners), Antonio Bastardo (Phillies), Jordany Valdespin (Mets) and Sergio Escalona (Astros) were suspended for 50 games and agreed to forgo the appeal process, and will begin serving their suspensions immediately. Minor-league players Fernando Martinez (Astros), Jordan Norberto (free agent, formerly with the A’s), Fautino de los Santos (Padres) and Cesar Puello (Mets) also agreed to 50 game suspensions. All but Norberto will begin their suspensions immediately. Norberto’s suspension will become effective when and if he signs a contract with another team. This is a first JDA violation for each of these players.

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The FanGraphs staff made its obligatory preseason picks before the season (naturally), and I think it’s safe to say that none of us have psychic powers. My picks of the Angels and Blue Jays to win their divisions — they’re not looking so hot right now. In my defense, I was just blindly going along with what our preseason WAR estimates told me. OK, not the greatest defense, but I figured Steamer + ZiPS + FG-created depth charts could produce better guesses than I could on my own. Especially with the roster changes that have happened lately, I thought it would be a good time to revisit our projections. The Angels came up the series victors against the Blue Jays in their recent four-game Battle of the Disappointments, but both teams are still far below the expectations put on them.  However, let’s examine: could they actually be good teams who have just been unlucky?

Most teams have played somewhere around 110 games this season. That leaves plenty of room for unpredictability. If you flipped a coin 110 times, you’d expect to get about 55 heads, right? Well, the binomial distribution says there’s only about a 49.5% chance of the heads total being within even three of that (somewhere between 52 and 58 times). MLB teams are pretty different from coins — they’re a lot more expensive — but I think you can apply the same principle to them. The above calculation for the coin assumes the “true” rate of heads is 50%. What would we see if we were to presume our projections’ estimated preseason win totals are actually representative of the “true” win rates for each team? The following table will show you: Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the AL MVP debate turned into something resembling a culture war, with Miguel Cabrera representing the traditional methods of player evaluation while Mike Trout was the darling of the sabermetric community. In the final tally, Cabrera won in a landslide, receiving 22 of the 28 first place votes, but Trout and Cabrera were #1 and #2 on 27 of the 28 ballots submitted, with Trout sliding to third on just one ballot. While there was disagreement over which of the two was more valuable, there was broad consensus that they represented a tier unto themselves, with everyone else looking up to their excellence.

Well, it’s happening again. If you pull up the leaderboard for American League hitters, there’s Mike Trout at #1 (+6.9 WAR), followed more closely than last year by Miguel Cabrera at #2 (+6.4 WAR). While Trout blew away the field by WAR last year, Cabrera’s having an even better season in 2013 than he did a year ago, while Trout is just a little shy of last year’s remarkable pace. This year, instead of the big gap in WAR being between Trout and Cabrera, the gap is between Trout/Cabrera and everyone else; Chris Davis, at +5.1 WAR, is a distant third.

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I recently posed a question to 12 players. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Given the subjectivity involved, it doesn’t even have a right answer.

Is pitching more of an art or more of a science?

The question was phrased exactly that way. It was up to the people responding to interpret the meaning of “art or science” and to elaborate accordingly. Their responses are listed below in alphabetical order. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi again, you same people that I greeted earlier, and welcome to the second part of this edition of The Worst Of The Best. Right here you can check out a whole section archive, featuring posts in this series all the way back to the first one, if you like these posts and don’t really care about the timeliness. You’ll notice that this post is going up pretty late in the day, especially for a Friday. Optimally, it would go up much much earlier. But the delay isn’t my fault — it’s actually, honestly, the fault of two old people from San Diego I’d never met before. And one other old person from San Diego I have. You don’t need to know the story, because it’s perilously uninteresting, and hardly FanGraphs-appropriate. Just take my word for it that this post is late because of the California elderly. Take my word for it and forgive me.

Before, we looked at the five wildest pitches since the All-Star break, covering two weeks. Now we’re going to look at the five wildest swings, as has always followed. Next time we’ll get back to doing these on a weekly basis but for now just accept that I had to spend last Friday thinking instead about an incredibly boring trade deadline. The wildest swings are those swings at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, and for this post I excluded a check-swing strike by Yan Gomes, and another by Brett Pill. What’s left are five full swings, each of them humiliating. Are you ready to see them? You’re ready to see them. This requires like literally zero preparation on your part. In that regard, aren’t you lucky.

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