Archive for Daily Graphings

The distinction between observed performance and true talent is one that is, in a way, intuitive, yet tends to be elusive. Even the most careful of us can slip from talking of one to talking of the other. Determining the difference for a specific skill or a specific player can be difficult, but the general idea itself is not so hard to understand. Even the most casual fan of baseball understands that pretty much any player can go 0-4 or 4-4 in any given game without thinking that player’s true talent batting average is either .000 or 1.000. That understanding already contains the basic notion of a proper sample size and its relation to true talent. The reader can peruse the appropriate sections of the Sabermetric Library to get caught up.

Instead, this post is going to look at some specific metrics for hitters (in the near future I may do a similar post for pitchers) and compare how well they correlate from from year to year. This gives us an idea of how these assorted metrics compare (relative to each other) with respect to predicting a player’s future performance (another way of saying true talent). I have included a couple of tables for reference, along with some brief commentary.

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When plans were revealed for Marlins Park’s left-center home run sculpture, people freaked out. When the sculpture was actually constructed and emplaced, people freaked out all over again, having been given a better sense of scale. The thing drew criticism from all corners, and while I’m sure some of that was just piling on, and while I’m sure some more of that was just standard Internet overreaction, people had a lot to say about the aesthetics of the monstrosity. People were not prepared to see in real life what they would…see in real life…in left-center field, and for a while it seemed the Marlins’ sculpture was more frequently discussed than the actual Marlins.

But it wasn’t only the beauty of the thing, or the lack thereof, that made for a topic of discussion. There were also some on-field concerns, some actual baseball concerns, that I believe were first voiced by Greg Dobbs. Quote:

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Allen Craig is a bit of a beast. Reading through last year’s list of accomplishments can be dizzying. Craig is also turning 29, and he only has one full season under his belt.

The reasons it took him so long to get here are specific: He got injured some, a legendary player blocked him at first base and his glove didn’t allow him to play where his team needed him. But there is a chance that he’s so very, well, Cardinal. Look around his team and you can see it. Matt Carpenter debuted in his age 25 season. David Freese (26), Adron Chambers (24), Shane Robinson (25) and Jon Jay (25) were all “older” debuts. Once again, there are specific reasons for each of these, and there’s also a chance this is part of the Cardinal Way.

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Jeff Karstens‘s free agent case was, to me, one of the most intriguing of the offseason. I covered it multiple times at multiple outlets. I thought the Pirates’ decision to non-tender Karstens was curious — the club has little starter depth beyond A.J. Burnett, James McDonald and Wandy Rodriguez; Phil Irwin was the fifth best starter in the organization according to ZiPS, including minors-bound first overall pick Gerrit Cole. Things only looked worse following the Francisco Liriano debacle — his two-year, $14 million contract remains on hold, in the same limbo as Mike Napoli’s would-be deal with Boston.

Although I understood why Pittsburgh might not want to take the risk on Karstens — he has dealt with regular injuries and has never thrown more than 162.2 innings in a season. Given a likely budget crunch, it’s easy to see how Pittsburgh might be better served with a sure thing. But I thought Karstens and his 3.59 ERA and 3.94 FIP since 2010 (49 appearances, 41 starts) could be an intriguing value play for which a team would pay at least $5 million — meaning, considering the non-tender, Karstens wouldn’t return to Pittsburgh.

Tuesday, Karstens reportedly signed a $2.5 million contract with the Pirates. I was wrong on both counts of my prediction, a good reminder of the imperfect information available to those of us who try to foresee these things from outside MLB organizations.

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Coming into the offseason, Rafael Soriano had a choice: return to the Yankees in 2013 for $14 million, or opt out, collect $1.5 million, and become a free agent. Consensus around these parts was that Soriano should stay put. Soriano opted out. The Yankees extended to Soriano a $13.3 million qualifying offer, and there was a strong argument that Soriano should accept it and stay with New York. Soriano turned it down and entered the market with compensation reducing his appeal. Many of those players who declined qualifying offers have struggled to find the contracts they wanted. For a while, Soriano’s market, at least publicly, wasn’t developing. It was unclear for a while what was going to happen to Rafael Soriano, and it was easy to conclude that he’d made the wrong decisions.

Soriano just signed a two-year contract with the Nationals worth $28 million. He turned down $14 million over one year, a year in which he wouldn’t close much, and ended up with $14 million over two years, years in which he’ll at least initially be the closer. There’s also a $14 million vesting option at the end, just in case the contract wasn’t good enough for Soriano already. Soriano, and his agent Scott Boras.

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Michael Bourn is a pretty terrific defensive center fielder. Last year, he was the best defensive outfielder in baseball by UZR (after you account for the positional differences), grading out as 25 runs above an average defensive player, and it wasn’t a one year aberration, as no player has a higher FLD+POS rating over the last four years either. With over 6,500 innings big league innings, we’re not dealing with problematic small samples either. Bourn has been a tremendous defensive asset this far in his career.

However, teams are no longer as willing to pay for past performance as they used to be, as front offices are now populated with people who are more interested in projecting a player’s future than they are with paying for an established track record. So, while Bourn’s defensive performances are notable, they’re only worth paying for to the extent that they inform our understanding about what they mean for his defensive value in the future. Now 30-years-old, Bourn’s getting further and further from his peak, and defensive skills seem to plateau earlier than offensive skills, so there’s some legitimate questions about just how much of his defensive value he will retain in future years.

To try and shed a light on that question, we can identify players who were valuable defensive outfielders in their twenties, and then see how much of that value carried over to their thirties. If you’re Michael Bourn, or Michael Bourn’s agent, you might want to stop reading now, because the answer probably isn’t something you’re going to want to hear.

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Scott Boras has several clients who are yet to be signed for the 2013 season. Three of those clients — Kyle Lohse, Rafael Soriano, and Michael Bourn — received qualifying offers from their former teams, and rejected those offers. As a result, whatever teams sign those players will give up a sandwich round draft pick in June’s Rule 4 draft and a percentage of its draft bonus pool. Much has been written here and elsewhere about this new compensation system, which replaced the Type A/Type B free-agent system used in the old collective bargaining agreement. Not surprisingly, Boras isn’t too fond of the new rules, not only for their effect on his current free-agent clients, but for the effect on future clients who may be skipped over by teams that have lost a significant percentage of their bonus pool.

But Boras doesn’t look solely to the new rules as the reason his three big free-agent clients are still unsigned. No, he says teams are just being stingy with their payroll. Too stingy, he says, in light of booming MLB revenues. According to Boras, most teams have lower payrolls heading into the 2013 season than the highest payroll those teams had from 2000-2012. “Only five teams have higher payrolls,” Boras told Murray Chass over the weekend. “Everybody else is below even though revenue is up 200 percent and franchise values are up 300, 400 percent. What we’re seeing is not many teams are spending on payrolls despite the fact that their profits are extraordinary. You’d expect teams to have their highest payrolls, but they don’t.”

Is Boras right? Are payrolls lagging behind the growth in MLB revenues?

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Note: I found some errors in the data. Data below has been corrected, as well as some conclusions — BP

Yesterday, Jeff Zimmerman examined how Tim Lincecum’s performance has depended to some extent on his ability to pitch to the edges of the plate. Last year, Lincecum was one of the worst starters in the game in terms of the percentage of his pitches thrown to the black. Coincidently (or not so coincidently), Lincecum suffered through his worst season as a professional.

As with many things, Jeff and I happened to be investigating this issue of the edge simultaneously. Of course, we were not the first to dabble in this area. Back in 2009, Dave Allen noted that differences in pitch location–specifically horizontal location–led to differences in BABIP.

Like Dave, I was curious about the overall impact that throwing to the edges–or the black–has on overall performance. My thinking about pitchers throwing to the edges naturally led to some hypotheses:

1. Throwing a higher percentage of pitches on the edges leads to lower FIP.
2. Throwing a higher percentage of pitches on the edges leads to lower ERA.
3. Throwing a higher percentage of pitches on the edges leads to lower BABIP.
4. Throwing a higher percentage of pitches on the edges is associated with lower four-seam fastball velocity.

I think the first three hypotheses are intuitive, but the last one stems from the idea that as a pitcher ages and loses zip on their fastball they cannot remain successful unless they increase their avoidance of the heart of the strike zone.

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People will tell you that practice makes perfect. This is untrue, at least as far as it has to do with humans. Humans will forever be imperfect, and a better and more accurate saying would be “practice makes better”. If you’re trying to do something, and you practice it, you’ll probably do better than you would have had you not practiced it. This is the whole idea behind practice, so I’m glad we finally have this cleared up.

Major-league baseball players have practiced baseball. An awful lot! For years and years and years, on a regular basis, and you could even make the argument that games are just practice for future games. Everything is practice for the next such opportunity. What we can figure is that these players are better for having practiced, and without so much practice, they might and presumably would be worse. We can’t really measure the effect of practice, though, since they’re all practicing all the time. We don’t have a practice-less control group.

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In a foot race, I’d place my money on Roman Quinn over any prospect not named Billy Hamilton. Heads up, it would be close — very close. 2012 was a historic year for minor league base stealers as Hamilton attempted 192 steals and was successful 155 times — breaking the record held by Vince Coleman. This feat overshadowed Astros prospect Delino Deshields Jr. as his paltry total of 101 stolen bases paled in comparison. In 2013, a new prospect will push triple digit steals if given the green light — Phillies shortstop prospect Roman Quinn.

Video after the jump

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