Archive for Daily Graphings

On the surface, Brett Myers seemed to handle his 2012 transition from the rotation to the bullpen pretty well. He notched 19 saves and eight holds between stints with the Astros and White Sox against just two blown saves. He posted a sharp 3.31 ERA, good for an 81 ERA-.

But it wasn’t all happiness for Myers, as he was on the unfortunate end of four walk-offs. Hunter Pence hit a solo home run off Myers with one out on May 15th. The other three times, Myers’s game ended with runners still on base in threatening situations: a runner on third and one out after a Dexter Fowler walk-off triple on May 28th, runners on first and second and nobody out after a Hector Sanchez walk-off single on July 14th, and a runner on second and two outs after a Jamey Caroll sacrifice fly on July 28th.

Those four situations — the runners he stranded (all allowed on by him, although one reached on an error) and the outs at the time — resulted in a combined run expectancy of 3.25. Myers pitched just 65.1 innings in 2012. Even accounting for the nine outs Myers would have needed to record to finish those four innings (and therefore realize the full run expectancy), these 3.25 runs would increase his ERA to 3.59 — a significant difference.

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As vice president of on-field operations, Joe Torre is Major League Baseball’s point man on rule changes. If Torre doesn’t think a rule change is warranted, a proposed change isn’t going to get very far. He’s not the final arbiter — rule changes are made only by a vote of the owners and the players’ union — but he is the gatekeeper of rule-change ideas.

In the past several years, Torre’s been fending off requests to consider rule changes on home-plate collisions. Those requests reached a fever pitch in May 2011 after Scott Cousins voilently collided with Buster Posey, knocking the Giants’ catcher out for the season. Just days later, Astros’ catcher Humberto Quintero and Pirates’ catcher Ryan Doumit suffered serious injuries after home-plate collisions. Torre is a former catcher, and many hoped his experiences behind the plate would make him receptive to protecting catchers from head-on collisions. But, in fact, the opposite has been true.

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When scouts evaluate the players on the field, they use a 20-80 scale as shorthand to describe a player’s tools and/or his overall ability. Receiving a 50 on the scale means that one is major-league average, and for every 10 points up or down the scale, the scout believes the player is one more standard deviation above or below major-league average. An 80 is incredibly rare because one would have to be 3 standard deviations above the mean (or in the top 0.1-0.2 percent of players), and it’s a representation of the truly, truly elite. But the question becomes what those grades represent. When someone says that a player is an [insert grade], what should we actually expect them to do statistically at the major-league level? Armed with some advanced statistics and z-scores, I went to find out.

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Tommy John surgery might have been the best thing that could have happened to George Kontos. In 2009, the Giants’ right-hander was in Triple-A for the first time, and he had the kind of stuff that would make him a big leaguer in somebody’s bullpen: A 92-mph fastball and a wipeout slider that usually produced more than a strikeout per inning. That isn’t to say that he didn’t have some of the flaws inherent with a fastball/slider guy with only passable control, but he was well on his way. Then he felt that signature elbow pain, went under the knife, and a year and a half later, the reliever came out from the experience having changed two important facets of his game for the better.

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Let’s talk World Baseball Classic.

I believe one of the key impediments preventing American and Canadian baseball fans from true excitement about the WBC has to do with limited knowledge of foreign players. We are, as some economists might say, rationally uninformed. To learn the necessary statistics and fun bits about the teams and players would take too much time and effort, considering the difficulty language barriers present.

Lo and behold! I happen to speak and, to a lesser extent, read Chinese! Allow me to act as your conduit; your semi-skilled cultural guide for, if nothing else, the Chinese-speaking teams. Allow me to not only translate some of their more useful statistics, but also present some slices of their personalities.

Let’s examine three of Taiwan’s best hitters: (1) Ngayaw Ake, (2) Yi-Chuan Lin, and (3) Szu-Chi Chou:

Top wOBA+ Numbers*, 2009-2012

*Not park adjusted.
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Last week, the Seattle Mariners inked their ace, Felix Hernandez, to a $175 million extension for the next seven years. The dominating righty will be entering his age-27 season this year, meaning the contract will through his age-33 season. That is, unless, he injures his right elbow.

Embedded within Hernandez’s contract is a clause that gives the Mariners a club option for an eighth season — at a paltry $1 million — should Hernandez miss at least 130 consecutive days due to any kind of procedure to his right elbow. The Mariners negotiated this clause after some concern over what their doctors saw in the pitcher’s MRI.

Apparently, the club was reassured enough by their medical staff to sign the mammoth deal, even though the track record for long-term pitcher extensions isn’t the greatest. But how confident should the team be?
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Note: if Google spreadsheet below isn’t working, click here for one the author has uploaded himself after having modified only slightly from Szymborski’s original.

With the release last Thursday of the ZiPS projections for the Cleveland Indians, now all 30 major-league teams have been caressed tenderly by proprietor Dan Szymborski’s math computer.

While we wait — as if sitting atop some combination of pins and needles — for ZiPS to be added to the projection leaderboard area here at the site, Szymborski has released a spreadsheet including all the ZiPS projections for 2013.

Click this hyperlinked text to visit the full spreadsheet for the 2013 ZiPS projections.

In the meantime, some observations:

• Highest Projected WAR (Field Players): Mike Trout, 8.0

• Most Defensive Runs Saved: Craig Gentry, +15

• Highest Projected WAR (Pitchers): Justin Verlander, 6.4

• Lowest ERA: Craig Kimbrel, 1.57

• Yankees Prospect Corban Joseph: 579 PA, .242/.313/.389, 87 OPS+, 1.0 WAR

The Arizona Diamondbacks outfield roulette continued today, as they announced they’d shipped a pair of low level minor leaguers to Chicago in exchange for Tony Campana. Yes, the Diamondbacks just traded for another outfielder, despite the fact that their OF is already one of the most crowded in baseball. With Adam Eaton and Gerardo Parra in the fold, it doesn’t seem entirely clear why Kevin Towers felt that the organization needed another speed-and-defense center fielder.

What is clear, though, is that Campana can help a big league team even though he can’t hit. In fact, Campana might be one of the most interesting bench players in baseball.

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There are a lot of projection systems floating around the nerdy baseball universe. Here on FanGraphs, we host a lot of them, including ZIPS, Steamer, Oliver, Marcel, and the Fans projections, and then there’s other systems like CAIRO and PECOTA that are hosted elsewhere. Of all the baseball projection systems, PECOTA is probably the most famous because it was created by Nate Silver, and Nate Silver is now pretty famous for his post-baseball career. So, when PECOTA releases their annual projections, mainstream writers pay attention. And Chicago writers, particularly, like to talk about PECOTA’s projections, mainly to remind everyone how wrong they’ve been about the White Sox.

For instance, here’s a piece by a local radio anchor that trots out all the usual ad hominem attacks about geeks and their numbers. And here’s another one of this year’s entries, which just gives up on factual information completely:

What is it about the White Sox’s rosters and farm system that Baseball Prospectus doesn’t like?

To answer that question, I decided to do research on who writes these inaccuracies year after year. What I found shocked and disturbed me.

It’s Nate Silver.

My whole world of reality collapsed at that moment.

How could it be the guy I religiously read for pinpoint accuracy in politics? How could it be that Silver is an accuracy genius in politics, but yet when it comes to the White Sox he transforms into the accuracy of a Republican pollster?

After composing myself, I discovered a possible reason. Silver lived in Chicago for many years near Wrigleyville and is rumored to be a Cubs fan.

Maybe being a Cubs fan is a weighted bias even Silver’s methodology can’t overcome.

I’m not here to defend PECOTA — BP can do that if they’d like — but I will just insert some facts into the discussion. Like, for instance, that Silver grew up in Michigan as a Tigers fan, not a Cubs fan. Or, that Silver hasn’t been in charge of the system since 2009, and the code has been essentially rewritten since he left. And, of course, it would be remarkably silly for any forecaster to create a system that intentionally downgrades the projections of a specific franchise, since that would simply make the system less accurate and hurt his own credibility. The idea that PECOTA has some kind of anti-White Sox bias because Silver went to the University of Chicago and attended some Cubs games is worthy of the tin foil hat brigade.

That said, I do think it’s interesting that the White Sox have regularly outperformed PECOTA’s expectations, and I think it’s worth actually investigating, as opposed to what Michael Tomaso did. So, let’s investigate the White Sox overall performance since 2005.

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Red Sox prospect Rubby De La Rosa is in pitching purgatory. Fully healthy since late in the 2012 season, the right-hander with an electric fastball is nowhere to be found on 25-man roster projections. I don’t expect this to last long since De La Rosa has the arsenal to force his way onto the staff. For now, however, the Dominican will be forced to wait his turn.

It seems like an eternity ago, but De La Rosa’s debut in Dodger blue was impressive. His 3.55 xFIP in 60 2/3 innings included ratios of nearly a strikeout per inning and ground ball rate approaching 50-percent. He walked too many batters — A carry over from Double-A, but De La Rosa was only 22. Time and ability was on his side. Read the rest of this entry »