Archive for Daily Graphings

Major League Baseball Advanced Media and YouTube announced an expanded partnership on Monday that will result in thousands more hours of baseball highlights that will be available for free on the video site. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the content of the highlights and the timing of their availability on YouTube will continue to be strictly controlled by MLBAM. In other words, fans with dusty VHS collections will continue to receive take-down notices from MLBAM and YouTube if they upload their favorite games or highlights.

Still, the expanded MLB-YouTube agreement is a step in the right direction for baseball fans hungry for free content.

Read the rest of this entry »

The sample size is small — just 24 plate appearances — but the numbers still jump off the page. Four weeks into the season, Mike Carp is hitting a stratospheric.455/.500/.864. Seven of his 10 hits have gone for extra bases.

The 26-year-old outfielder will obviously come back to earth, but he still might be one of the best under-the-radar acquisitions of the off-season. The Red Sox acquired him from the Mariners in February for a PTBNL.

Carp was an enigma in Seattle. In parts of four seasons, he hit .255/.327/.413 and occasionally drove baseballs long distances. What he didn’t do is prove that he could stay healthy and provide consistent production. Jettisoned to Boston, he is intent on proving he is capable of both. Only time will tell, but Carp is swinging a hot bat.

——

Carp on his hot start: “Being healthy is a big part of it. I missed a lot of time last year with the shoulder injury, so it’s about finding my rhythm. The more reps I get, the better I see the ball and better rhythm I have.

“I wasn’t getting at bats the first couple weeks of the season, but I’ve gotten a few lately and that’s helped me lock in a little more. I feel great at the plate. I’m just trying to stay short and use the whole field. I’m going up there with a good plan and sticking to it. I kind of got away from it [Saturday] and had a rough night, but I rebounded [Sunday] and got back to what’s working for me.

“I’m itching for as many at bats as I can possibly get, but I also understand the concept of a team. We have a very deep bench and it’s nice to be able to keep guys fresh.”

On hitting at Fenway Park: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the best things about really getting into the regular season is that we’re starting to get some meaningful data. One of the best things about getting meaningful data is that it’s accompanied by a lot of meaningless data. True insight can be gleaned from the former, but fun? You can have fun with both. Let’s talk about pitchers stealing bases.

A year ago, pitchers combined for seven stolen-base attempts. The year before that, they also combined for seven, and the year before that, they combined for three. Then six, then ten, then 12, then seven, then nine…it isn’t often that pitchers get on base, but it also isn’t often that, once on base, pitchers attempt to steal. Pick your favorite reason, or combine them. They want to avoid injury. They want to conserve their energy. They aren’t properly trained for aggressive base-running. They don’t want to distract their hitters. They don’t want to give up a rare opportunity to not watch from the dugout. They want to actually exchange words with the first-base coach. Nobody thinks about pitchers stealing because pitchers don’t steal. On April 25, Cliff Lee tried to steal. On April 26, Andrew Cashner tried to steal.

Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, Jon Heyman noted an odd thing on Twitter:

i am not a hater of WAR stat, but if someone can explain to me how starling marte & bryce harper are both 1.7, please do

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) April 29, 2013

He was quoting Baseball-Reference’s WAR calculation, and the two are indeed tied at +1.7 WAR on B-R. Here, we have Bryce Harper (+1.5 WAR) ahead of Starling Marte (+1.2 WAR), but the point still basically stands; WAR thinks Harper (1.200 OPS) and Marte (.835 OPS) have both been pretty great this year, with just a small (or no) difference between them. What Harper has done with the bat, WAR believes that Marte has mostly made up with his legs in baserunning (+3 run advantage) and defense (+3 run advantage), as well a slight bump from getting 12 extra plate appearances.

There’s no question that Harper has been a better offensive player, but there are questions about the defensive valuations, because defensive metrics aren’t as refined at this point as offensive metrics are. It is much easier to prove that Harper has been +10 runs better with the bat this year than it is to prove that Marte has been +3 runs better defensively by UZR, or +7 runs better defensively by DRS. There are more sources for error in the defensive metrics, and Heyman’s tweet led to a discussion on Twitter about the usefulness of including small sample defensive metrics in WAR.

I’ve written before about the strong correlation between team WAR and team winning percentage, and others have followed up with similar analysis more recently. However, all those articles have focused on full season or multi-season data samples, and since the question was raised and I hadn’t yet seen it answered, I became curious about whether WAR would actually correlate better at this point in the year if we just assumed every player in baseball was an average defender.

Essentially, if we just removed defensive metrics from the equation, and evaluated teams solely on their hitting and pitching, how would our WAR calculation compare to team winning percentage? And how does WAR correlate to team winning percentage based on just April 2013 data, when we’re dealing with much smaller sample sizes?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros are not a good baseball team. But, as Tyler Kepner detailed in the New York Times this weekend, they are a baseball team with a plan. Whether or not that will lead to wins this season is another matter, but the fact that they have a plan is shining through, even amidst the deluge of runs allowed. Read the rest of this entry »

As you read this, the Boston Red Sox have the best record in all of major-league baseball, unless you’re reading this at least a few days after it was published. The Red Sox’s success is less of a surprise than the Blue Jays’ lack of success, but nobody expected Boston to start this well, and the organization is well on its way toward restoring the city’s confidence in the team. The Red Sox have gotten to this point by getting valuable contributions from their position players and from their pitchers. That will not be the only obvious sentence in this post.

We should pause to acknowledge what the Boston pitching staff has done to date. If the season were to end today, we’d all be left wondering, “wait, what?” But eventually we’d get over it and look at the statistics, and the statistics would show that the Red Sox have the highest team pitching strikeout rate in baseball history. As a team, the Sox have struck out 26.7% of opposing batters, and second place would be the…2013 Tigers, at 25.8%. Third place would be the…2013 Reds, at 23.3%. Fourth place would be the…2013 Royals, at 23.2%. So times have changed and strikeouts are up, but for the sake of perspective, the Red Sox as a team have a higher strikeout rate than both Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax. This is, of course, a team effort, but the greatest individual contribution so far has been made by Ryan Dempster.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the season season started, members of our staff took a shot at prognosticating the season, despite the fact that we all know You Can’t Predict Baseball. Of the 31 authors who participated, 15 of them — myself included — selected the Blue Jays as the favorites to win the AL East, and nine of the 16 who didn’t pick Toronto to win their division had them as a wild card club. The Blue Jays off-season makeover convinced most of us that they were a good team with a good shot at playing in October.

It might only be April 29th, but there’s a pretty good chance that 24 of us are going to end up being wrong, because while we’re still in the first month of the season, the Blue Jays season is in jeopardy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Triple-A is weird. It’s the second-most-skilled level in American professional baseball, but it doesn’t have a lot of “prospects.” Many of these players have played or will play in the majors, but they aren’t considered as exciting because there’s a much clearer image of what kind of players they are. Lower-level players have more projection and potential, which makes them more interesting, but they aren’t as skilled as those in Triple-A. In fact, Triple-A players are largely what they are with little projection left — and most of them are role players.

But Sean Gilmartin is not supposed to be a role player. The Braves took Gilmartin with the 28^th overall pick in 2011 out of Florida State University, and he was frequently ranked in the top five in most Braves prospects lists from this past off-season. When the Gwinnett Braves headed into Louisville this past week, I went to take a look.

Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:

Read the rest of this entry »

I still don’t really know what I’m supposed to do in these introductions, and I suspect it would be unprofessional to use this section to throw out links like this. I guess for the time being I might as well just repeat myself, since I’m at a loss and nobody reads these for the introductions anyway. Hey you guys! This is the second part of the fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best, and here’s last Friday’s wild-swings article. You’re going to see the five swings from the past week at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, as determined by PITCHf/x and me. Only included are full swings — not checked swings — and I’m also going to make a point of excluding swings on hit-and-runs, since those aren’t really up to the hitter. Maybe they’ll earn honorable mentions. I haven’t actually encountered one of those yet.

For the purpose of this series, I don’t care about funny-looking swings where the hitter loses his balance and falls down. So don’t look for those in the body, although you’re free to post them in the comments because they’re still hilarious and embarrassing. And as I noted earlier, don’t expect to see these posts next Friday, since I’ll be out of town and, more importantly, not at a computer. I’m going to go ahead and guess I couldn’t compose a post like this from a smartphone. That sounds like the terms of a prison sentence. The Friday after, we’ll be back in business, and now on this particular Friday, we’ll proceed with the list, in the usual descending order. I think this has been enough words.

Read the rest of this entry »