Archive for Daily Graphings

If you weren’t a baseball fan between 1968 and 1984, you probably aren’t very familiar with Tom Burgmeier. Even if you know the name, chances are you don’t realize he was one of the top workhorse relievers of his era. Over 17 big-league seasons — mostly with the Royals, Twins and Red Sox — the lefthander appeared in 745 games and threw 1,258.2 innings.

Burgmeier was no slouch. An American League All-Star in 1980, he finished his career with a record of 79-55, 102 saves, and a 3.23 ERA. Displaying excellent control, he walked just 2.7 batters per nine innings. As for the innings themselves, they rarely came one at a time, even though he finished 370 games.

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David Laurila: How did being a relief pitcher in the 1970s and early 1980s differ from today?

Tom Burgmeier: Back in my era, it didn’t matter when you came into the game, whether it was the third inning, fifth inning, or whenever. You pitched until you got in trouble. Nowadays everything is designated. A guy is a long man, so if it gets past the fifth inning he never comes into the game. They have a sixth-inning guy and a seventh-inning guy. They don’t have an “eighth-inning guy,” he’s called a set-up guy. Then you obviously have your closer, who is another one-inning guy.

All through my career, if you came into the game in the fifth inning, you got them out in the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. You stayed in there until the ninth unless you had a bona fide closer. When I was with the Red Sox, we had Bill Campbell and Bob Stanley. and we were all reliable for multiple innings. That’s what we did. It kind of bothers me to see a guy come in and have really good stuff, and strike out the side, and the next inning there’s someone else on the mound.

DL: You were a closer in 1980 and saved 24 games.

TB: By definition I was a closer. In total, I had 19 saves that were more than one inning. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I took a look at year-to-year correlations for hitting metrics. This post follows up by doing the same thing with pitching metrics. Here, with a bit of commentary, are the results.

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Like my work last year around pitcher aging and velocity decline, I am always looking for reliable indicators or signals of change in players. One thing I’ve been interested in trying to better understand are changes in performance that might signal or herald a large droop-off in performance in the following year.

Projection systems do a very good job of predicting performance, but my thought was there must be some way to better predict the 2011 Adam Dunns of the world.

So, one Saturday morning I decided to do some statistical fishing.

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This post is a follow-up to a post from last Friday night, entitled Calling Balls and Strikes Against Catchers. Given the timing, you might have missed that post, so you should read through it for some background. Or you can skip reading through it, since I’m about to give you a quick summary. Within that post, I presented some evidence, based on 2012 PITCHf/x data, that catchers were given more generous strike zones while batting than non-catchers. That is, umpires called fewer strikes on catchers than you’d expect, and the difference in rates for catchers and for non-catchers came out to about one strike per 100 called pitches.

I pursued it off a comment tip, and I found the results to be of some interest. However, there were also some potential sources of error. I looked only at 2012, and I didn’t even look at 2012’s complete picture, limiting myself instead to regulars and semi-regulars. I decided this was worth digging in a little deeper, so I called on Dark Overlord David Appelman to supply me with greater information. What’s presented below is far more thorough, and therefore, far more acceptable.

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It won’t be long before the e-mails start arriving in your inbox. “Don’t miss any of the action! Watch all* out-of-market regular season games on MLB.tv. Purchase the entire 2013 season now and save!” And there will be glossy pamphlets from your cable or satellite provider: “Act now to add MLB Extra Innings to your viewing package.  Watch every* out-of-market MLB game from the comfort of your home.”

The asterisks are necessary because neither MLB.tv nor MLB Extra Innings provides access to every out-of-market regular season game to every purchaser of their product. For one, the games broadcast exclusively on national TV — FOX’s Saturday Game of the Week and ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball — are excluded. Under the current MLB-FOX agreement, which will expire at the end of the 2013 season, only FOX may broadcast MLB games during a certain time period on Saturdays. That leaves many teams with the decision to either schedule Saturday games in the evening, outside the FOX window or have some Saturday home games not broadcast locally. And it leaves fans shut out from every game played on a Saturday afternoon, other than the one FOX broadcasts in their area.

There are other restrictions on the MLB Extra Innings and MLB.tv packages, particularly for fans who live in areas without an Major League Baseball team but within the broadcast territory of several teams. Iowa, for example, doesn’t have its own MLB team but is within the broadcast territory for the Cubs, Brewers, Royals, Twins, Cardinals, White Sox. That means fans in Iowa can’t watch those six teams on MLB.tv or Extra Innings because those games are considered “in-market” in Iowa. You can see the MLB broadcast territories on this map:

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Last season, the Rockies had what was arguably the worst season in their 20 as a franchise. There were plenty of culprits — a porous defense and Troy Tulowitzki getting hurt yet again were two large factors. But the chief culprit for Colorado’s 98-loss season was the worst starting rotation in franchise history. In response to this, the Rockies have gone out and signed Jeff Francis, Miguel Batista and Chris Volstad. These signings probably will have no material effect on the team’s rotation, but if they do, they won’t be signings that push the Rockies toward contention, but rather mediocrity.

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With Stan Musial passing away over the weekend, Jesse did a nice workup of his career numbers, noting that Musial stands as one of the best hitters to ever play Major League Baseball. But, the more I looked at his player page, the harder I found it to wrap my head around his combination of power and contact rates.

Musial struck out 696 times in his entire career, spanning nearly 11,000 plate appearances, and his strikeout rate was nearly half of his career average (5.5%) during his peak years. In 1943, Musial struck out 18 times in 701 trips to the plate, a strikeout rate of just 2.6%, the third lowest mark of the year. In that same season, Musial racked up 81 extra base hits, and he posted a .206 ISO, good for fifth best in baseball. We just don’t see guys who are elite power hitters and elite contact hitters much anymore.

Of course, the game has changed a lot over the last 70 years, with a drastic increase in strikeouts being one of the most prominent changes. A 5% strikeout rate today is more impressive than that would have been during Musial’s day, but while we have things like wRC+ that adjust for historical offensive levels, I didn’t have a great feel for what context adjusted metrics for the individual strikeout and power numbers would be. So, in order to get a better sense of what Musial’s numbers would look like if we brought them into the modern game, I decided to scale his numbers to the norms of 2012.

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FanGraphs keeps track of pitcher Pace, which you already knew. Here’s a definition of what pitcher Pace is, in case you need to brush up. The data comes from PITCHf/x timestamps, and while Pace doesn’t have any meaningful correlation with wins and losses — that is, it doesn’t make you better to speed up or slow down — it does have a meaningful correlation with what we might call “watchability”. While we’re all ultimately in it for the baseball, it’s a lot more fun to watch a game with a fast tempo than a game with a slower tempo. A game with a fast tempo makes the baseball more concentrated. Somebody just signed Miguel Batista the other day, and I’m not interested in looking up who, but that was a bad move as far as watchability is concerned. Batista, like other slow pitchers, can be dreadful to watch.

Pace is interesting, because it describes part of the viewing experience. So Pace can be fun to play around with. In late September, I decided to look at opposite extremes. What Pace tell us is that Mark Buehrle is the fastest-working pitcher, and Carlos Pena is the slowest-working hitter, because Pena has a whole routine he gets into. I was curious to see what the Pace would be in their head-to-head matchups. The results basically split the middle between Buehrle’s Pace and Pena’s Pace. Buehrle made Pena speed up, but Pena also made Buehrle slow down. Science!

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You know who don’t steal a lot of bases? Pitchers. Also big guys, but specifically, for our purposes here, pitchers. For one thing, pitchers are infrequently on base. For another thing, pitchers are infrequently well-trained at running the bases. For still another thing, there’s an injury risk, as attempted base-stealers can hurt their hands or their shoulders. In short, the potential costs are determined to outweigh the potential benefits, so pitchers stay put. We’ve written about this a little before.

National League pitchers bat somewhat often, but their steals are few and far between. Last year, three NL pitchers successfully stole bases. The year before, three again. The year before, three again. The year before, three again. NL pitchers haven’t accrued double-digit stolen bases in a season since 1989, when they combined to steal ten. American League pitchers bat far less often, and so their steals are even fewer and farther between. Last year, zero AL pitchers successfully stole bases. The year before, zero again. The year before, zero again. The year before, zero again. As a matter of fact, the last stolen base by an AL pitcher came in the summer of 2002.

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In this week’s edition of “As the Upton Waits”, the Mets and Braves inquire, while the Rangers continue to lurk in the periphery.

Maybe the Texas Rangers are employing a brilliant strategy of waiting out the Arizona Diamondbacks before swooping in and acquiring 25-year old Justin Upton. Or, maybe the Rangers lucked out when Upton rejected a trade to the Mariners for Taijuan Walker, Nick Franklin and a pair of relievers. Regardless, the Rangers still find themselves in the best position to land the young right-fielder. Read the rest of this entry »