Archive for Daily Graphings

One of the most important doctors in baseball history, Lewis Yocum, died of liver cancer yesterday at the age of 65. Yocum was an intern in Frank Jobe’s clinic when Jobe pioneered UCL replacement surgery in 1974 — Tommy John surgery is now ubiquitous in baseball, and Yocum was one of its greatest living practitioners. Numerous players tweeted that he had saved their careers; scroll to the bottom to see a few of them.

Though he was the Angels’ team doctor, taking that position over from Jobe, he treated players across the league, both position players and pitchers. In 2010, Will Carroll wrote that Yocum and James Andrews were both so mutually prominent across baseball that “one former GM jokingly said that he thought Yocum and Andrews had negotiated some sort of territorial agreement. “This side of the Mississippi is Andrews,” he laughed. “That side is Yocum.”” After Yocum died, Carroll compiled a long list of players whom Yocum was known to have personally treated. (The list is incomplete and skewed toward recent players, but it gives some sense of Yocum’s breadth of impact.)

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Major League Baseball will kick off its amateur draft on Thursday, June 6. MLB Network and MLB.com will cover the draft live starting at 7:00 p.m. EDT. The pick-by-pick coverage will include the First Round, Competitive Balance Round A, Second Round, and Competitive Balance Round B — 73 picks in total.  The remainder of the draft will take place on June 7 and 8.

We will get you ready for the amateur draft — also known as the Rule-4 draft — with two posts. Today in Part 1, we’ll provide a refresher on the new rules put in place in the most recent MLB-MLBPA collective bargaining agreement. We’ll then show how those rules were applied in coming up with this year’s draft selection order.

In Part 2, we’ll explain the bonus slots for each selection, the total bonus pools for each team, and look back at bit at how spending has changed in the last five years.

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One of the most interesting fields of study in baseball over the last few years has been that of pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving, or pitch-stealing, or whatever you want to call it. This is the stuff that’s made Jose Molina nerd-famous, and it’s drawing more attention with every passing month. Framing has been discussed on ESPN. It’s been discussed on MLB Network. It’s been the subject of countless player interviews, and what’s been revealed is that a great amount of thought and technique goes into how a catcher catches a pitch. Catchers don’t just catch the baseball. They catch the baseball with a purpose.

Research has uncovered a few outliers, like Molina and Jonathan Lucroy and, say, Jesus Montero and Ryan Doumit in the other direction. It’s interesting these guys can be given such different strike zones, since the strike zone is supposed to be consistent for everybody. And it’s interesting that, as much as people come up with run values in the dozens, it’s hard to identify the actual effect. For example, Rays pitchers this year have allowed a higher OPS throwing to Molina than when throwing to Jose Lobaton, the other guy. Last year, Molina again had the worst numbers. It reminds me too much of Catcher ERA for my tastes, but you’d think you’d see something. Instead, you see little. Where is the value going?

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Last offseason, the Diamondbacks participated in a three-way trade that brought them shortstop Didi Gregorius, and that cost them Trevor Bauer. Other pieces were involved, but we’re not going to talk about them here. Arizona drew some criticism, as people weren’t sure Gregorius would stick as a regular shortstop, but general manager Kevin Towers saw to it to compare Gregorius to a young Derek Jeter:

“When I saw him, he reminded me of a young Derek Jeter,” Towers said.

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Ian Kennedy cut his finger recently while washing dishes. As a result, Tyler Skaggs got the start in the early game of Monday’s Memorial Day twinbill against the Rangers, and he acquitted himself quite well. The start threw into sharp relief just how necessary Kennedy is to the Dbacks plans, both current and future. As we move further away from his breakout season, it is fair to wonder — is Kennedy about to be the odd man out in the Arizona rotation?

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Watch Austin Wilson do anything on the field and you’re struck by his athleticism. Six-foot-five, 244 pounds of muscle, he glides across center field in the Sunken Diamond on defense. During batting practice, no bat makes a more satisfying sound than his.

But with parents that hold multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard and Stanford, obviously the Stanford center fielder is more than a collection of high-end body parts. In fact, his makeup could go a long way toward smoothing out the wrinkles in his game as he proceeds to the professional leagues. It has already helped.

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Last week, Mike Trout hit for the cycle. When asked for a comment, coach Mike Scioscia said, “If I’m a betting man, I’ve got to believe there’s another cycle in his career somewhere.” That got me wondering.

Whenever I was in a math class where probability was being discussed, the question often in the back of my mind was, “How can this be applied to baseball?” One of the things I love the most about baseball is how well it lends itself to situations of probability, compared to most sports. I’m not sure what that says about me. Anyway, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to refresh my memory (and hopefully some of yours) on how to crunch the numbers on situations like this. Don’t worry — the principles work on useful things other than just calculating the odds of that gimmicky achievement we call the cycle. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Reynolds knows who he is. The Cleveland Indians corner infielder is a slugger in the three-true-outcomes mode. His walk rate is maybe a little short of a purist’s TTO, but the long balls and strikeouts are certainly there. Reynolds has left the yard 193 times in 3,140 at bats; in three seasons, he has gone down by way of the K over 200 times.

The 29-year-old former Oriole and Diamondback is working to lower his strikeout rate and improve his RBI numbers. He’s making strides in both areas, and is doing so without a loss of power. So far this season he has 12 home runs and a .515 SLG.

Reynolds talked about his evolution as a hitter — and what it feels like to hit a baseball more than 400 feet — when the Indians visited Fenway Park this past weekend.

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Hello there, people who wish their best qualities were more widely appreciated, and welcome to the second part of the seventh edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here is a link to the second part of the sixth edition, from last Friday. You should click on that link for purposes of brushing up. Once it’s open, you should click on all of those links. Every last one of them. You should click on all of my bold text, just to see if it’s a link. Maybe I inserted some jokes in there! Only one way to find out! Probably, there are multiple ways to find out, but this is the easiest. Just get clicking. Click click click. Click on FanGraphs links. You could learn, or something.

So where earlier we looked at wild pitches, like usual, here we’ll look at wild swings, like usual. Specifically, swings at pitches far away from the center of the strike zone, from between May 17 and May 23. Excluded are checked swings, which is always frustrating, because a lot of the crazy swings I see in the data end up being checked. Also excluded are hit-and-run swings, but so far those have just been excluded in theory, since I have yet to encounter one. It’s all based on PITCHf/x, there are .gifs and things to follow, and I hope you have an appetite for misjudged secondary stuff. We move on to the top-five list, and also, we have two bonus .gifs! Free bonus .gifs! It’s your lucky day!

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Hello there friends and normals and industry professionals, and welcome to the first part of the seventh edition of The Worst Of The Best. The first part of the sixth edition, from last Friday, is linked here for your convenience. Now, that was some week of baseball we just watched, starting last Friday. There were so many comebacks and close competitions, and also some scores that were surprisingly lopsided. Did you see the big game? I couldn’t believe the hits that there were. I was really impressed by the level of play, and the outcome was well earned. Maybe they will be able to build off of it going forward in the rest of the season. But one thing’s for sure: the season is long, with many twists and turns. You never know what could happen next!

This is where we talk about pitches that wound up really far from the center of the strike zone. The window we’re covering this time is May 17 – May 23. It’s a top-five list, based on PITCHf/x information, and there are going to be a lot of .gifs and screenshots. I feel like every week I end up with more image files than the week before. This series idea seemed so simple at first. Now it consumes my entire Friday. You guys get everything I have. Some pitches just narrowly missing: Rafael Soriano to Gregor Blanco on May 21, and Jeremy Hellickson to Melky Cabrera on May 22. Also, I’ve excluded a Ronald Belisario pitch to Jonathan Lucroy from May 21. Though it was the week’s third-wildest pitch, it appeared to be a fastball intentionally thrown behind Lucroy’s back, after Andre Ethier was buzzed a couple times. I can’t call a pitch wild when it’s intended to send a message. But, maybe it was an accident. A very convenient and coincidental accident. In that case, this would be my mistake. Thankfully no one holds me accountable for anything. I doubt my superiors even read this. If they do, they are charming fellows. If they don’t, they smell. Time to pull you guys back in with the start of the list. This got out of hand.

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