Archive for Daily Graphings

Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

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If I had to distill the core purpose of FanGraphs down to a two-word remark, I’d assert that the purpose is to “answer questions”. Given a third word, I’d assert that the purpose is to “answer baseball questions”. That’s really what we’re all doing here; that’s really what we’re all doing almost all of the time. Many of the questions we try to answer here are important, in a baseball sense. They’re questions like “is this player good?” and “is this player going to be good?” and “why is this player good?” Other questions are less important, like “how many players bunted for doubles in the 2012 regular season?” I specialize in examining the unimportant questions, and today we’ll tackle another.

The goal is expressed in the headline: I want to talk about who’s going to throw the fastest pitch in the upcoming baseball season. There’s no trophy for the achievement (yet), and the fastest pitch might not even go for a strike, but we’re a people who love us some fastball velocity, to the extent that we dress it up with fancy words like “velocity” instead of simpler, more accurate words like “speed”. Surely, a player would be honored to know if he threw the league’s fastest pitch in a season. Pitchers like velocity, too. We all think velocity is important, so let’s talk about the pitch with the most velocity.

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Joey Votto wasn’t always Joey Votto. Not only is his mother happy about that fact — it would have made for quite a delivery — but his journey from the 44th pick in the 2002 draft to the hitter he is today covers a lot of ground. Talk to him about pulling the ball, infield fly balls, swing planes, and batted ball distance and you quickly understand that this is a man that studies and understands his craft. Learning his story from him can help us understand baseball better.

“I was a big pull hitter in high school, but when I tried to do that in Midwest League, I failed,” he said when we talked about hitting. He’s remembering it right, too — his .231/.348/.287 line in that league was very un-Votto-ian even if the walks were there. But since then he’s changed his approach in order to use the entire ballpark.

“The ability to spread the ball all over the field prevents shifting,” he said, and with his current approach, Votto thinks he’s “a tough guy to defend.” Specifically, Votto thought that the shift (and avoiding it) might be part of the reason why his .359 batting average on balls in play leads all hitters with with more than 2000 plate appearances since 2008.

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Here on the site, we’re currently doing a series called the Positional Power Rankings, going through each team’s strengths and weaknesses at each spot on the field. Well, this is also a positional power ranking of sorts. The position is each team’s financial health. The ranking? More like placing the teams in tiers: the teams most constrained by their finances; the teams in the middle; and the most financially-successful teams.

We can’t get to the same level of precision on team finances because we have to rely on publicly-available information that we haven’t generated, and that publicly-available information lacks the kind of details we’d need to really flesh out the small differences between franchises in the same tiers. However, we do 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.

Today we begin our look at the financial health of all thirty major-league teams, starting with the bottom ten. Tomorrow we will look at the middle ten and on Friday the top ten. We will focus on ticket-generated revenue (attendance), local TV revenue, and player payroll. That leaves some holes, to be sure, particularly where team owners are carrying significant debt. Some of that information is publicly-available, but not all, and even the publicly-available information may not accurate or verifiable. This isn’t precise, but hopefully, it’s still informative.

With those caveats, let’s begin.

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Jedd Gyorko is ready to take over as San Diego’s regular second baseman. He’s also prepared to fill in at third base, the position he’s played since being taken in the second round of the 2010 draft. With Chase Headley now on the disabled list, Gyorko (pronounced JER-ko) could play one of the positions on opening day.

Gyorko can swing the bat: The 24-year-old right-handed hitter went .311/.373/.547 with 30 home runs last year between Double-A San Antonio and Triple-A Tucson. One of the top prospects in a loaded Padres system, he will contend for National League Rookie of the Year honors if he plays to his capabilities.

Gyorko addressed his development — on both sides of the ball — prior to Wednesday‘s game at the Peoria Sports Complex. Also weighing in were manager Bud Black and hitting coach Phil Plantier.

——

THE DEFENSE:

David Laurila: When were you first approached about playing second base?

Jedd Gyorko: Josh Byrnes called me as I was heading into the offseason. He said he wanted me to start getting some balls at second base and that it would probably be the position I’d be playing when I came to spring training. It was good to know that early so I could get in a full offseason of second base. I actually played there one year in college, so it’s not completely foreign to me.

DL: Did you have any issues with the move?

JG: I don’t think it would have mattered what I said, really. Read the rest of this entry »

Many find that the easiest part of writing is the actual writing. Writing is just putting words onto a page. The more challenging part of writing is coming up with ideas for things to write about, and as far as baseball writing is concerned, that’s especially true around this time of year, when spring training is still going on despite near unanimous disapproval. So the baseball writer finds it particularly convenient when an idea is handed to him by somebody else. Tuesday afternoon, Brandon McCarthy presented an idea:

? for my stat enthusiast followers- in last 5 years, has any team’s opening day starter started the season with an off-speed pitch?

— Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32) March 19, 2013

Just like that, Twitter provides something pursuable. Thanks to PITCHf/x, Gameday, and MLB.tv, we can try to answer McCarthy’s question, and though the data gets less accurate the further back you go, that’s the data’s fault, not the user’s fault. Let’s see what’s out there.

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I was just down in Arizona with a lot of the rest of the FanGraphs crew, and as such, I found myself involved in a number of baseball conversations, with people from the crew and with others as well. One of the many conversations turned to Jesus Montero as a defensive catcher. One person who covers baseball on a daily basis for a newspaper couldn’t believe that Montero managed to throw out Mike Trout as a would-be base-stealer. One respected baseball talent evaluator referred to Montero as perhaps the very worst defensive catcher in the majors. Immediately, I knew this would be something worth exploring in greater depth.

The newspaper guy actually made the mistake of saying Montero threw Trout out twice. That didn’t happen, but it did happen once; Miguel Olivo managed to throw Trout out twice. One other time, Trout stole successfully off Montero, meaning for the season Trout was 1-for-2 with Montero behind the plate. He was nabbed on October 3, in the final game of the regular season.

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If for some reason you have been under a rock for the past week or perhaps you’ve been cranking up the INXS, putting on your mother’s coke bottle eye glasses, and hollering “Where’s the cat at” until the Right Field Positional Power Rankings were unveiled, be sure to acquaint yourself with the methodology of the following. The quick and dirty is that the projections are a hybrid of Steamer and ZiPS, it takes into account expected playing time and players at multiple positions.

Right field seems like a place you put slow-footed sluggers that can murder the ball at the plate, and yet I remember playing a lot of right field because it was thought that I would do the least amount of defensive damage at the position. The combination of big offense and bad defense at the position might be changing — look closely at this year’s crop and you could be underwhelmed by the bats, and you’ll also see some players that produce despite low-powered plate production. And yet, one of the most exciting young (and, yes, powerful) players in baseball is atop the chart at the position — at least the Marlins have one thing going for them.

Right field — maybe not as sexy as your father’s right field, but still fairly attractive.

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Prospect lists are one of the best parts of the off-season. Marc Hulet published his top 100 yesterday as the culmination of several months of work, and Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, John Sickels and a plethora of websites have published others. Each group puts myriad hours into analyzing, calling, writing, editing, re-analyzing and finally publishing their work. But even after all that, they usually come to several different conclusions. I decided — instead of focusing on a specific list — to generate a list that combined each of these lists into one.

The idea of community or consensus lists isn’t new. Sites have done it before, but I’ve added some wrinkles:

Read the rest of this entry »

If it seems like you’ve read dozens of articles about Aroldis Chapman potentially being a starting pitcher over the years, it’s only because you’ve missed hundreds more. This is an old topic, as is usually the case with relievers who appear to have the potential for more. The Reds invested a lot in Chapman when they first signed him, and as of 2012 he’s mastered the bullpen. Coming into 2013, Chapman was to move into the rotation, but now it’s a question again. Sometime within the next few days, the Reds hope to decide whether Chapman will open as a starter or a reliever. We’ve done this before, and we’re doing it again.

This has all come to a head once more because of something Chapman said over the weekend. From an AP article:

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