Archive for Daily Graphings

Jimmy Rollins has been one of the best defensive shortstops in the game. Currently in his 14th season with the Philadelphia Phillies, the charismatic 34-year-old has won four Gold Gloves. Among shortstops who have played at least 10 seasons, he is second all-time in fielding percentage, behind only Omar Vizquel. Advanced metrics also show him in a favorable light.

Rollins has put up some pretty good offensive numbers, too. He has more than 2,000 hits, nearly 200 home runs and more than 400 stolen bases. But when all is said and done, he will be remembered most for his glove.

Rollins talked about his defensive game when the Phillies visited Fenway Park earlier this week.

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Sometimes, when I’m supposed to be working, I read things that don’t have anything to do with baseball. Sometimes I’m able to salvage that lost time by twisting my new information into a vaguely baseball-y angle. So it’s been today, when, this morning, I scanned Erik Klemetti’s Eruptions blog. There’s a good new post up, focusing on the matter of trying to predict earthquakes around the globe. (Hint: don’t do it.) I can’t think of a way to write about baseball-y earthquakes. But within that post, toward the start, is a discussion about patterns, and the perception of them where they sometimes don’t exist. Now this — this could be something to put up on FanGraphs.

Contained within the post is a link to this piece at Scientific American. The author talks about “patternicity,” or, as he puts it, “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” This might be a pretty familiar concept to you, and the author advances an evolutionary argument for its existence. There’s a reason, it’s asserted, that we’re so good at finding patterns. There’s a reason we try to find patterns where no patterns exist.

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As I write this, the Pittsburgh Pirates are tied for the second best record in baseball. They also happen to be tied for second place in their own division, because the Cardinals are the only team with a better record while the Reds have matched Pittsburgh’s 33-20 start, making the NL Central the most competitive and most interesting division in the sport right now. The Cardinals are Reds are both excellent teams, and we should expect both to continue to win at a good clip over the rest of the year, but what about the Pirates? Is this another first half mirage that will lead to a second half collapse, or do Pittsburgh fans finally have a contender to root for?

I think the answer to both of those questions is probably yes; the Pirates are playing over their heds and will likely regress over the next four months, but their strong start and their overall talent level should keep them in the race to the very end.

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When I realized that the Pawtucket Red Sox were coming into town, I was actually pretty excited. There was a chance to see pitchers Allen Webster and Rubby De La Rosa and position players Jackie Bradley Jr., Jose Iglesias, and Bryce Brentz, and that’s quite a bit of quality on a Triple-A team. By the time the PawSox rolled into town, however, only three of those players were still with the team. De La Rosa had a mild injury to his side the Tuesday before the team came to Louisville, and he would skip his next start. And Jose Iglesias was promoted before the games I intended to watch. Three solid prospects remained. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Marmol doesn’t have the highest career walk rate in baseball history. That honor belongs to Mitch Williams, who walked one of every six guys he faced. But Marmol isn’t far behind, and he’s the leader among actives. Marmol has a higher career walk rate than Jason Giambi. He has a higher career walk rate than Brian Giles and Mike Schmidt and Jeff Bagwell. Walks are just part of the package, and Marmol isn’t some kid anymore, so it’s not like they’re about to go away with a mechanical tweak. This is in part due to the fact that Marmol is hard to hit, so he ends up in a lot of deep counts. This is more in part due to the fact that Marmol has had really lousy command.

Control is said to be the ability to throw strikes. Command is said to be the ability to hit spots. We don’t have a measure of command, but we can assume that a guy with Marmol’s walk rate doesn’t list it as a strength on his hypothetical English-language pitcher resume. The walks are part of the reason the Cubs see Marmol as expendable. They’re part of the reason he doesn’t have much of a market, and they’re part of the reason he’s no longer closing. Everybody knows command is a Carlos Marmol weakness. And now we have fun with a quick project.

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Three years ago, Derek Norris was a highly-regarded catcher in the Washington Nationals system. Known more for his bat than for his glove, he was battling injuries and scuffling at the plate in the High-A Carolina League.

Norris was subsequently traded to Oakland and broke into the big leagues with the A’s last summer, where he appeared in 60 games. This season the right-handed hitter is splitting time behind the plate with left-handed-hitting John Jaso.

Norris remains an unfinished product. The raw power is there — as are improved plate discipline and defensive skills. What’s eluded him so far are consistent performances. His home run jumpstarted the A’s to a win on Tuesday night, but overall he is hitting just .216/.340/.336 in 141 plate appearances.

Norris talked about his development when the A’s visited Fenway Park earlier this season.

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BeerGraphs — a website devoted to the analytics of beer — is now alive. Very soon it will have sortable leaderboards and everything. And it’s been too long since we had a FanGraphs meetup anyway, so let’s do another one. Where better to have a top-flight beer and watch some good baseball than the Public House attached to AT&T Park in San Francisco? Please come and talk baseball (or beer) with our merry band:

June 7, four until ?, Public House at AT&T Park, San Francisco

Eno Sarris (FanGraphs, BeerGraphs)
Howard Bender (FanGraphs)
Wendy Thurm (FanGraphs)
Steve Berman (Bay Area Sports Guy)
Grant Brisbee (SBN)
King Kaufman (Bleacher Report)
Patrick Newman (NPBTracker)
Ian Miller (Productive Outs)
Adam Cacioppo (BeerGraphs)
Aram Cretan (Freewheel Brewing)
Rob Conticello (Clandestine Brewing)
Adrian Kalaveshi (Clandestine Brewing)

Sometimes it’s the things you don’t write that make you look smarter. A few weeks ago, I nearly wrote something celebrating Michael Saunders‘ improved plate discipline. I wasn’t quite feeling it, though, so I went and did something else, and then Saunders embarked on a miserable slump. That’s not the first time something like that has happened. Additionally, there were a few times I wanted to re-visit the Rick Porcello narrative, pointing out that his spring-training strikeouts didn’t lead to regular-season strikeouts. I never wrote anything to that effect, and now Porcello is striking guys out. Again, I look smarter by not looking like an idiot. Over the last 30 days, Porcello’s posted baseball’s third-lowest xFIP. Here’s a selection of strikeout rates over the same span:

• Stephen Strasburg, 27.0%
• Matt Harvey, 26.6%
• Shelby Miller, 26.2%
• Rick Porcello, 26.0%
• Tim Lincecum, 23.9%
• James Shields, 23.7%
• Clayton Kershaw, 20.4%

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Passive Hitter“, which examined the change in the rate of swings in Major League Baseball over the last 25 years. While a host of writers have written about the rise of Moneyball philosophies as a reason for why strikeout numbers are on the rise, I noted that the data shows that hitters are actually swinging at basically the same rate now as they did two decades ago. The evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that hitters have become significantly more passive at the plate.

However, as several readers pointed out, the point being posed most repeatedly by Tom Verducci isn’t that hitters are not swinging often enough, it’s that they’re not swinging often enough in the right situations. As a follow-up to his original post, he wrote this last week:

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When baseball fans think of players who get hit by pitches, they probably think of Craig Biggio, Don Baylor, or, in more recent times, Carlos Quentin, and rightly so. Those players did (and do) get hit often. But how much does their career offensive production rely on the hit by pitch? That is a different matter — some players who get hit a lot do a lot of other things well, and are thus less reliant on pain for offensive profit. Using our old friend linear weights for measuring offense, here are five modern players who have the great proportion of their offensive production from getting hit.

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