Archive for Daily Graphings
The Rockies Want Josh Fogg, And It Makes Sense
As Ken Rosenthal reported earlier this week, the Rockies are looking to add a starting pitcher. This should surprise nobody — the club was an easy last place in the majors in both ERA and FIP last season, and even adjusting for Coors Field leaves them 28th and 26th (last and second-to-last in the NL) respectively in ERA- and FIP-.
What did surprise me was who their target should resemble:
The team wants to add one more capable starting pitcher, major-league sources say — someone who could throw 150 to 175 innings and produce a ERA in the 4.50-4.75 range. Someone like right-hander Josh Fogg, who pitched for the Rockies in 2006-07.
Huh? Him?
Injuries Equal Opportunity For Hunter Morris
In Milwaukee, Hunter Morris will battle former shortstop Alex Gonzalez and fringe big leaguer Taylor Green for the opening day nod at first base. On paper, it seems like the odds are in his favor. However, Morris’ arbitration clock and Corey Hart’s timetable for returning to the lineup will weigh heavily in the Brewers decision. For a three-to-four week stopgap, it might not be worth it to the organization — Especially when the Brewers are projected to finish with a .500 record.
Recently, Marc Hulet ranked Morris as the 11th best prospect in the Brewers system. He was the third best first baseman I scouted in person in 2012, but this was more indicative of a weak group at the position than Morris being a top prospect. Oliver projections have the left-handed hitter posting a .256/.302/.476 triple slash line and 1.7 WAR if given everyday reps, but this strikes me as generous. While Morris’ power is not in question, the rest of his skill set is.
Video after the jump
Bruce Rondon And Unlikely Likely Closers
by Eno Sarris
February 22, 2013
First, Tigers’ general manager Dave Dombrowski said young fireballing right-hander Bruce Rondon would be given “every shot” at closing this coming year. Then there were rumors that the Tigers were “targeting relievers capable of closing.” Last week, the manager said he doubted that anyone would be “anointed the closer out of spring training.” Whether or not there’s a real difference in the team stance at any of these points, there do seem to be some different ideas being put forth about the team’s perception of the closer’s role.
As Spring Games Begin, Local TV Issues Still Percolating
Spring training games kick off today with four tilts: two in the Grapefruit League and two in the Cactus League. All 30 teams will be in action in Saturday. Same for Sunday, when live television broadcasts start. That’s right. Major League Baseball, live on your television for the first time since October.
Well, if you live in the right place and have the right cable and satellite operators.
If you’ve been following my posts over the past several months, you know what I’m talking about. I wrote about every nook and cranny of the baseball-on-television landscape. I dissected the local TV contracts for all 30 teams. I analyzed the Dodgers’ proposed new TV deals. I examined News Corp.’s billion-dollar investment in the Yankees’ YES Network. I explained how the new revenue-sharing program in the collective bargaining agreement is flexible enough to capture the new local TV revenue. I talked about MLB’s blackout policy and the lawsuit trying to put a stop to it. I looked at the dispute between the Orioles and the Nationals over rights fees from MASN and the one between Fox Sports San Diego and several cable companies that kept the Padres off hundreds of thousands of televisions in San Diego last season.
As the 2013 spring season gets underway, many of these disputes remain unresolved and new ones are on the horizon. Plus, there’s a growing sense that the extraordinarily rich local TV deals we’ve seen in the past few years are reaching a tipping point. That is, that the live sports programming bubble may about to burst.
Should MLB Punish DUIs More Harshly, Like PEDs?
On February 6, Todd Helton was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. A week and a half later, he publicly apologized. His manager, Walt Weiss, who is also his former teammate, stood behind him all the way. “We have all needed a little grace from time to time. He stepped up and faced the music,” Weiss said at a news conference with Helton. “Now it’s time to play ball.” Helton received no further punishment from the league or from his team. Weiss picked a curious metaphor to announce that Helton will miss the first couple of games of spring training to conserve his strength, but would then play as normal. “For a guy like Todd,” Weiss said, “there’s no reason to put your foot on the pedal right out of the gate.”
Helton was not the only one to be quickly forgiven by his team. Mark Grace was arrested outside Phoenix last August, his second DUI arrest in 15 months. The Diamondbacks fired him as an announcer, but this spring, they rehired him as a special instructor. In the wake of Helton and Grace’s arrests, a number of people have been writing articles about the curious disconnect between the way we think about performance-enhancing drugs and the way we think about drunk driving. But is it a fair comparison? After all, PEDs affect baseball on the field. DUIs are off-field offenses, and they are handled by the courts. Should baseball subject its players to additional punishment?
Read the rest of this entry »
The Fans Versus The Algorithms
Here on FanGraphs, we host several different projection systems, most of which are algorithms that take a player’s performance history and then mix in things like regression and aging curves to develop a forecast for 2013 production. But, we have one set of projections that is very different from the rest – the Fans Projections.
Instead of being based on any kind of mathematical model, these are simply crowdsourced from our readers, with you guys creating the projections with your various opinions about player performances for next year. While there are certainly some imperfections with any kind of crowdsourcing project, the widsom of the crowds has also shown to do pretty well in situations like this, and over the years we’ve done the Fans Projections, we’ve seen that the system actually holds its own when stacked up against the algorithms, though it does require one manual adjustments in order to make the system work properly: deflation.
Put simply, you guys are just too darn optimistic — I guess that’s why you’re called fans — and annually overproject total WAR by something like 20%. So, if you look at the data from the Fans Projections next to something like ZIPS or Steamer, you’ll see some huge discrepancies, but a lot of those simply have to do with the scale, and once the Fans Projections are deflated to create a more accurate overall total, many of the variances go away.
Not all of them, though. There’s one clear type of player where the Fans and the algorithms disagree, and it’s probably a telling area, given what we know about the fine line between hope irrational exuberance. That type of player? Prospects.
O Brother, You’re Right Here!
After the Braves acquired Justin Upton, uniting him and brother B.J. Upton on the same team, our very own Jeff Sullivan got curious about brothers playing together, and presented some salient information on the brother effect. Or more to the point, the lack thereof. I became curious about it much after that (I’m slow), and while Jeff already did the pertinent research, nobody has ever accused me of doing pertinent research, so I thought today we could look at the best seasons put together by brothers on the same team.
Q&A: Don Baylor, D-Backs Hitting Coach
Don Baylor was equally adept at hitting baseballs and getting hit by baseballs. The erstwhile slugger was plunked 267 times, ranking him fourth all-time, and he banged out 2,135 hits, including 338 home runs. In 1979, as a member of the California Angels, he led the American League with 139 RBIs and captured the MVP award.
Baylor is also adept at teaching hitting. Currently in his third season as the hitting coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks, he previously served in that capacity for the Brewers, Cardinals, Braves, Mariners and Rockies. He managed the Rockies from 1993 to 1998 and the Cubs from 2000 to 2002.
Baylor shared his hitting philosophies — including what he learned from Frank Robinson and Tony Perez — in a spring training conversation last week.
——
David Laurila: What was your hitting philosophy when you played?
Dan Baylor: Going all the way back to when I was in high school, I didn’t strike out a lot. What I swung at, I usually hit. I popped up, grounded out or hit a line-drive somewhere. “Bat, meet ball,” was my philosophy.
When you play in the minor leagues, you kind of get an idea of who you are, and by the time you get to the big leagues they have expectations for you. When I was coming up with the Orioles, Frank Robinson was in right field. He was well into his 30s by then and I was kind of picked, along with Merv Rettenmund, to take his place. As a young guy, all of a sudden you have that pressure of 30 home runs and 100 RBIs. That’s kind of how the baseball world evolved for me.
DL: Was Robinson a mentor to you?
DB: Frank was a great mentor for me. He was for a lot of young players — and for veterans, as well. He taught you what to do in certain situations. He was a clutch player, there’s no doubt about it. With the game on the line, he wanted to be the guy. I kind of grew into that. Come the seventh, eighth, ninth innings, I wanted to be the guy to decide the ballgame.
DL: Tony Perez has said that with a runner on third base, all he cared about was the RBI. It didn’t matter if he made an out in the process. Is that a good approach? Read the rest of this entry »
The Differences Between Predictions and Projections
In my Monday post about the White Sox recent success beating preseason projections, I included a statement that I’ve mentioned a few times over the last few years:
But also, please just keep in mind that projections are not predictions. They are a snapshot of what we think a team’s median true talent level might be, and it should be understood that there’s a pretty sizable margin for error based on things that projection systems simply can’t forecast, and also the errors that come from having imperfect information or imperfect calculations.
I wrote about this distinction a couple of years ago, but I think it’s worth delving into the differences again. For one, FanGraphs has gotten a lot larger over the last few years, so many of you might not have read that piece, but also, I think there’s a few things that I could have stated better in that article, and I want to give more context for why I see the distinction as meaningful rather than being a semantical argument with no practical use.
Let’s start out by acknowledging that predictions are a subset of projections. Or, to put it another way, predictions are projections, but a projection isn’t necessarily a prediction. I know that’s a bit of a tongue twister, and seems like a semantical difference, but think of it like this: Mothers are women, but not all women are mothers. No one would suggest that it is simply semantics to clarify whether a women is or is not a mother. There’s a meaningful difference there.
