Archive for Daily Graphings

When Bill James speaks, many in the baseball committee listen intently–as they should. James, while certainly not always correct in his theories (and, really, who is), can always be counted on to provide the larger community with excellent food for thought.

In this most recent case, James claimed that ground ball pitchers have essentially been overrated. Per Rob Neyer:

Any analyst can give you a long list of reasons why ground ball pitchers should be the best pitchers. The problem is, they’re not.

Make a list of the best pitchers in baseball. Make a list of the best pitchers in baseball, in any era, and what you will find is that 80% of them are not ground ball pitchers. They’re fly ball pitchers.

…

What I have never understood about ground ball pitchers, and do not understand now, is why they always get hurt. Show me an extreme ground ball pitcher, a guy with a terrific ground ball rate, and I’ll show you a guy who is going to be good for two years and then get hurt. I’m not saying this about Chien-Ming Wang and Brandon Webb; I was saying this before Chien-Ming Wang and Brandon Webb. They’re just the latest examples. Mark Fidrych. Randy Jones. Ross Grimsley. Mike Caldwell. Rick Langford. Lary Sorensen. Clyde Wright. Fritz Peterson. Dave Roberts. They’re great for two years, and then they blow up. Always.

Now, there is a lot that can be teased out here, but I want to focus on the last part of James’ claim–that ground ball pitchers are more injury prone. Are ground ball pitchers (specifically, extreme ground ball pitchers) more injury prone?

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Think fast! Tell me something Mike Trout isn’t very good at. If you said “winning Most Valuable Player awards”, you’re not wrong. If you said “ice hockey” you’re also not wrong, probably. But in terms of on-field baseball skills, Trout is across-the-board outstanding. There are, of course, some things he’s better at than others, and one notes that he just had twice as many strikeouts as walks, but Trout hits, he waits, he fields, and he runs. Trout doesn’t have a weakness — he has only relative weaknesses — and as for strengths, while it’s not as sexy as hitting dingers, Trout’s a hell of a base-runner. Our metric gives him 12 extra runs for his base-running in 2012, which is incredible. And of Trout’s 54 attempted steals, he was thrown out only five times.

One time, in the season finale, Trout was thrown out stealing by Jesus Montero, and we already wrote about that. It was notable, because Trout’s a good base-runner and for a catcher, Montero’s a heck of a DH.* (*Not really, because his hitting wasn’t good either.) But I wanted now to write a follow-up, about the other times Trout was thrown out stealing. I’ve been supplemented with information from BIS, covering the four times Trout was gunned down trying to take second. He was, for the record, 43-for-47 going for second, and 6-for-7 going for third. The latter situation is different, so we won’t get into it here. Let’s focus on those four. How, exactly, did teams manage to throw Trout out, where so many other batteries failed? Are there any patterns we can observe? We will proceed individually.

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In Arizona, the Cleveland Indians were a “must see” franchise for me. A few years ago, their Lake County (Ohio) affiliate left the South Atlantic League for the convenience of the Midwest League. This created a blind spot in my scouting coverage remedied by my time in the Cactus League.

Current buzz surrounding the Indians organization is centered around a pair of young shortstop prospects in Dorssys Paulino and Francisco Lindor.

Lindor, a 2011 first rounder posted a .257/.352/.355 triple slash line in Single-A.

Paulino combined for a .333/.380/.558 triple slash line across two levels of short season baseball as a 17-year old.

There’s no question about both being top flight prospects within the organization, but the debate over the shortstop of the future continues to be a hot topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you make it a habit to read FanGraphs only on Fridays (and if you do, what’s up with that?), you’ve likely read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. So you know the score. We’re taking a look at team financial health as we head into the 2013 season. You also the know which teams are in the top tier, because you’re smart and can figure that out for yourself. But we’ve come this far, so we’re going to complete the exercise. We’re nothing if not true to our word.

The top tier teams, in alphabetical order by team name.

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Is a pop-up the same as a strikeout? No, of course not, by definition they are very different things. A pop-up requires contact, whereas a strikeout requires no contact, or at least very little contact, or a two-strike foul bunt. Pop-ups and strikeouts look nothing alike, to the eye. However, to the numbers, pop-ups and strikeouts look very much alike. On one level they are very different, and on another level they are very similar.

A few weeks ago, Dave asked whether infield flies should be included in FIP. The idea is that IFFBs have little to do with defensive skill, and pop-ups are effectively strikeouts, in terms of plate-appearance result. Pop-ups don’t advance runners, and pop-ups are almost always outs. They’re not literally always outs, but then, a batter can reach on a strikeout if the ball gets away from the catcher. So while pop-ups lead to outs slightly less often, they’re still just about automatic.

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Somehow it’s still spring training, and it won’t stop being spring training for another week and a half. We’re at the point now where everyone is beyond ready for meaningful games to begin, but just because spring training might last too long doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve a useful purpose. In spring training, pitchers and hitters can start building up their stamina. In spring training, young players can try to push veterans for jobs. In spring training, teams make money! And in spring training, players can work on tweaks during live game action without the games yet being of any real significance. Players seem to be constantly making little adjustments.

Now, the people over at Hardball Talk do great work in chronicling all the best-shape-of-his-life stories that emerge around this time of year. It’s intended in fun, but it could also conceivably be of some analytical value. Here, I want to chronicle stories of pitchers making mechanical adjustments, tweaks to their deliveries. Implementing changes they made over the offseason, or even earlier in spring. I think it would be handy to have this information in one place, even if it’s presently unclear why that might be. It could be of use down the road.

I’ve spent a lot of time on Google, and below, you’ll find what I’ve recovered. Note that changes to delivery are not the same thing as trying a new pitch — that might make for an interesting but separate reference post. Also, this is about pitchers tweaking their mechanics, not hitters tweaking their mechanics. And finally, before we proceed, please let me know in the comments if there are stories that I’ve missed. I’m almost certain that there are, and there are possibly several of them. Think of this as crowdsourcing in a way, and if you provide a link, I’ll add the information to the post. Now, the rest of the post.

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At this point, it seems like piling on to write about anything that the Miami Marlins do. But the last couple of days have produced a news story simultaneously hilarious and revealing: after two fans wanted to back out of the second year of a two-year season ticket contract, the Marlins threatened to sue them.

Of course, all baseball teams are businesses, owned by people or corporations who prefer making money to losing it. But the Marlins have pioneered a Producers approach to baseball, making money on failure rather than success. It would be conspiratorial of me to allege that the Marlins have determined that a losing team is more profitable than a winning team and therefore have intentionally sabotaged their chances of winning — like Rachel Phelps did — so I won’t. But this lawsuit helps to underscore that the team does not place a high priority on building a winning ballclub or drawing fans.
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As we rolled out the Positional Power Rankings over the last week, several people noted that there were some pretty large variances in the WAR totals between positions. Indeed, if you look at the totals by position, you see two distinct groups:

Catcher: +107 WAR
Center Field: +104 WAR
Third Base: +101 WAR
Left Field: +81 WAR
Shortstop: +80 WAR
Second Base: +80 WAR
First Base: +78 WAR
Right Field: +74 WAR

Side note: The projected WAR totals here are higher than observed WAR totals because projections essentially put a lower bound on bad performances, with very few players projected for negative WAR. Because of injuries and the non-normal distribution of variance around a player’s true mean, it’s easier to underperform than overperform projections, and inevitably, there will be below replacement level performances in MLB next year. Because of this lower bound, the replacement level in this system is more like 39 wins, so adjust accordingly. Now, back to the subject at hand.

C/CF/3B are all expected to perform at a similar level, and that production is quite a bit higher than the LF/SS/2B/RF/1B group. Instinctually, this feels incorrect, but I think it’s probably worth talking about the reasons for why positions might not be projected to provide the same value.

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You don’t know how close you came to reading a “Hand-ley Ramirez” joke. I guess now you might.

Hanley Ramirez participated in the recently-concluded World Baseball Classic. He played third base, even though he was to spend the regular season as a shortstop. While attempting to make a play in the field the other day, Ramirez jammed his thumb, and shortly thereafter he was removed. Initial estimates put him out for 2-10 weeks, pending further word. Further word is in, and it’s not good news for Ramirez or for the Dodgers. It is good news for Ramirez’s backups, if they’re selfish.

According to Ken Rosenthal, and since confirmed by others, Ramirez is having surgery to repair a torn thumb ligament. His thumb won’t be able to do anything for three weeks, and it’s estimated that Ramirez could return to action in eight weeks. Depending on the length of any rehab assignment, then, the Dodgers will be without Hanley Ramirez until mid- or late-May. Which means Ramirez is set to miss a quarter or a third of the regular season, barring any setbacks or surprises.

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As we explained yesterday in Part 1 of the series, we’re looking at the financial health of all thirty major league teams. The focus is on attendance, local TV contracts, and estimated 2013 payroll. We’re not ranking the teams one to thirty because we lack the kind of detailed information that would make such a ranking meaningful. We do, however, have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.

We’ve grouped the teams in tiers. Today we look at the ten teams in the middle.

In alphabetical order, by team name:

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