Archive for Daily Graphings

Saturday night in Seattle, the Mariners were playing the Rangers, and the score was 1-1 going into the top of the eighth inning. Carter Capps relieved Joe Saunders, and the broadcast warned that Capps shouldn’t walk leadoff batter Craig Gentry, because Gentry is one of the quicker runners in the league. Also because you shouldn’t walk anybody if you can help it. Capps subsequently walked Gentry, and Gentry scored, and that run would prove to be the winning run in a 3-1 final. Gentry walked on seven pitches and a full count.

It was a walk not without its controversy, although it looks like a bigger deal now than it seemed at the time. With the count 2-and-2, Capps threw Gentry a fastball in the low-away quadrant that easily could’ve been called strike three. Gameday shows that the pitch was within the strike zone, and during the game other strikes were called in the area. The pitch was ruled ball three, and the next pitch was a far less controversial ball four. Hence the walk, hence the run, hence the loss. It didn’t sit very well with Carter Capps, not that the one pitch was the reason the Mariners lost the ballgame.

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The Lexington Legends had been the Low-A affiliate for the Houston Astros for quite some time. Walking around Whitaker Bank Park, you would see images of Hunter Pence and that one time Roger Clemens pitched there. Those images aren’t there anymore after the Astros bolted and the Royals came in. This is a little sad because this would have been the year to see the Low-A Astros team as opposed to the years of yuck before that, but the Royals are a nice consolation prize. Here are some prospects of note from my four days in Lexington last week.
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And now we’re to the second part of the second edition of The Worst Of The Best. In this part, as in the second part of the first edition of this series, I encountered a problem where I logged into MLB.tv too often in too narrow a window of time. What happens then is you get your account suspended! Very temporarily. So it is something of an inconvenience, hence the delay in getting this post up on the page. So be prepared if you’re ever going to load a bunch of different MLB.tv archive games all willy-nilly. Don’t load them from Gameday or from the scoreboard page; load them through the actual MLB.tv window itself. Having had this problem twice, it’s clear that the penalty after the first infraction wasn’t enough of a deterrent to teach me a lesson, but I won’t worry about my cognitive function until or unless it happens a third time.

Incidentally, when I did something like this last year, sometimes people would write in about really ugly swings, wondering why those didn’t show up on the list. Like, swings where the batter fell down, or something. Those are bad swings, but these are the swings at the wildest pitches, which is different and which is based on PITCHf/x instead of observation and judgment. Someone, probably, should keep track of all the swings where batters fall down. But because that information isn’t easily recovered on a computer, I’m not going to worry about it, myself. Here are wild swings at pitches way out of the zone. That’s all this is, and nothing more. Off to the top five, or the bottom five, depending on your perspective.

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A lot of position players have had torrid starts to the season. Justin Upton and Michael Morse have each hit six homers. Chris Davis is slugging 1.100. Adam Jones already has 18 hits. Coco Crisp has an eight-game hitting streak. But none of the hot starts this month are even in the range of Barry Bonds’ April of 2004.

In April, 2004, Bonds put up just some ridiculous numbers. You already knew that, of course. But let’s take a look back, shall we? That April, he drew 39 walks. That puts him in some rare company, as only eight other players in history have done that — Max Bishop, Jack Clark, Roy Cullenbine, Lou Gehrig, Ralph Kiner, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. In fact, April ’04 was the third time Bonds had done it, and he would do it another two times in ’04, putting him at five times overall — two more than Ted Williams.

To put it in further context, since 1947, there have been 2,159 players who have qualified for the batting title who have walked fewer than 39 times for the entire season. Just last season, there were 37 such players. Even if you took Bonds’ intentional walks out of the debate, Bonds walked 21 times of his own accord during the month, and there have been 413 players who have qualified for the batting title since 1947 who have walked 20 or less times in a season. Last season, there were two such players — Delmon Young and Alexei Ramirez.

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Hello friends, and welcome to the first part of the second edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here is a link to the first part of the first edition, in case you don’t know what this is. So, read that, or just read on because it dawned on me I don’t know how I’m supposed to introduce these things each week. I don’t feel right just launching into the images and the commentary, but I also don’t know how I’m regularly supposed to start with something original and fresh. This sort of meta-commentary right here isn’t going to fly every time so I’m all but out of ideas. It’s April 12.

The idea: highlight the bad. The deeper idea: acknowledge the greatness by highlighting the bad. Everything is PITCHf/x derived, so I’m limited by PITCHf/x completeness and accuracy, but that sounds worse than it is because PITCHf/x is pretty damn complete and accurate. Every time I do something like this, someone leaves a comment to the effect of “I can’t believe [X] didn’t make it.” Believe it. Maybe, just maybe, PITCHf/x got things wrong. More probably, the example you’re thinking of just didn’t meet the qualifications. This is a top-five list. It can only have five things. Let’s look at and talk about those five things, now.

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This post is going to be short and sweet, but given what transpired last night and David Temple’s plea to Quentin on Tuesday, I got curious about where the pitch locations of Carlos Quentin’s HBPs actually have been. We all know he hangs over the plate, and that he gets hit by a lot of pitches, so I asked Jeff Zimmerman to query out PITCHF/x data and create a plot of where Quentin has been hit since 2008.

During that span, Quentin has been hit by 95 pitches. Here is where those pitches were located.

There are four pitches that were plotted against the upper corner of the strike zone, to the point where we wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been called strikes had they not hit Quentin.

This is going to be harder to see from the plot, but there are 25 HBPs represented there that were between -1.0 — the inside corner to an RHB — and -1.5 on the horizontal axis. The labels on the x axis are in feet, so you could otherwise say that Quentin was hit by 25 pitches that were recorded to be no further than six inches off the inner part of the plate.

I asked Zimmerman about the frequency of HBPs in that area. According to Jeff, 0.02% of all pitches thrown by Major League hurlers in the -1.0 to -1.5 range result in a hit by pitch, or 2 HBPs per 10,000 pitches thrown in that area. For Quentin, 0.4% of all piches in that range result in an HBP, or 40 per 10,000 pitches.

Quentin’s rate of being hit by pitches within six inches of the inside corner is 20 times higher than the Major League average. It is, at the minimum, a little hard to have sympathy for the guy.

For the record, last night’s pitch from Greinke was plotted at -1.504, so it is just barely outside of that sample area. It was certainly inside and off the plate, but most batters would not have been hit by that pitch.

You’ve almost certainly heard the news by now – last night, Zack Greinke hit Carlos Quentin with a pitch, Quentin charged the mound, and in the course of the scuffle, Greinke suffered a broken collarbone. While a timetable hasn’t been released yet, he’s headed for the disabled list, and the question is how many months of the season he’ll miss due to the injury.

In the wake of the news, Dodgers manager Don Mattingly offered up the following sentiment:

“That’s just stupid is what it is,” Mattingly said. “He should not play a game until Greinke can pitch. If he plays before Greinke pitches, something’s wrong. He caused the whole thing. Nothing happens if he goes to first base.”

Mattingly isn’t the first to suggest that the suspension for a player who injures another player should be equal in length to that player’s injury, as the notion passes our internal sense of fairness. Why should a guy who puts another player’s health in jeopardy get to keep playing while the guy who he injured has to sit on the sidelines? That’s not fair.

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Late Thursday night, the New York Times reported that Major League Baseball purchased documents from a former employee of Biogenesis, the Miami anti-aging clinic at the center of MLB’s investigation into performance-enhancing drugs. The Times also reported that a player linked to the clinic by recent news stories had also purchased documents from a former — but perhaps different — Biogenesis employee. The player allegedly bought the documents with the intent to destroy them.

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The biggest baseball event of Thursday night came outside of game action. In the top of the sixth inning of the Dodgers-Padres game in San Diego, Zack Greinke hit Carlos Quentin with a fastball on the wrist on a 3-2 count. After one step towards the mound, Quentin bull-rushed Greinke. As Quentin charged, Greinke threw his shoulder into Quentin’s body, and the result was a broken collarbone for the Dodgers’ starter. There is no timetable for Greinke to return to the mound; he will be examined by doctor Neal El Attrache on Friday.

Although we occasionally see this kind of aggressiveness from players without any prior provocation, it usually indicates some sort of history, either between player and team. A look into the pair’s past suggests there was already tension brewing, and said tension came entirely from Quentin’s end.

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On Wednesday, we took a look at the top farm systems in baseball. Today, we’ll take a look at how the top prospects stack up against each other. We’re essentially looking at the same principles that we were looking at in the farm systems. How do the prospects rank after the lists are averaged together? Where are the true gaps/tiers in prospects? And how good is the prospect class overall? Let’s take a look.

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