Archive for Daily Graphings

After Aroldis Chapman, it’s easy to argue Tampa Bay’s Jake McGee was the league’s best left-handed relief pitcher last season. He recorded a 1.95 ERA (third behind Chapman and Eric O’Flaherty) and a 1.81 FIP (second behind Chapman) over 55.1 innings for the Rays. He racked up 73 strikeouts against just 11 walks (6.6 K/BB) in the always-tough AL East, and he did so with mastery of hitters from both sides of the plate. McGee held 90 lefties to a .256/.289/.376 (.289 wOBA) line and dominated 122 righties to the tune of a .097/.157/.134 (.120 wOBA) line. Remarkably, this comes just a year after right-handers torched McGee with a .487 wOBA (59 TBF).

Now, with the Rays searching for a bat and the Nationals searching for a left-handed reliever and a suitor for Mike Morse, McGee could become the subject of trade rumors. The pertinent questions: How much of McGee’s improvement was real? Can he continue be a legitimate threat against both lefties and righties?

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Adam LaRoche lost a lot of 2011 to injury, okay, and in 2012 he had himself a bounceback season, okay. Sometime during the season, the Nationals approached LaRoche — a free-agent-to-be — about a contract extension. Nothing was agreed to; the Nationals were willing to give LaRoche two years, and LaRoche was seeking three years, citing a desire to stop bouncing around. Come the offseason, the Nationals extended to LaRoche a qualifying offer, and LaRoche turned it down; LaRoche was seeking three years. LaRoche kept on seeking three years. On Tuesday, LaRoche re-signed with the Nationals. He re-signed for two years, with a mutual third-year option. I’ll quote Amanda Comak:

“[The negotiations] were pretty much not moving for a couple months,” LaRoche said. “It got to a point at one time where I really thought ‘OK, I probably am not going back to Washington.’ We were in talks with some other teams and things were looking promising and Washington wasn’t budging.”
[…]
The deal, which a source said is the same one that had been on the table for the first baseman for much of the offseason[…]

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Adam LaRoche finally gave in and took the Nationals two year contract today, after having sat it on it for most of the off-season. He’ll return to Washington and play first base, which means Mike Morse will not be playing much first base, and that means Mike Morse is going to get traded. Two years ago, Morse was really good. Last year, not so much. Teams thinking about acquiring Morse are going to have to figure out whether they think 2011 was a fluke, or whether he’s an impact bat who just had a down year while struggling with some health issues.

Because, let’s be honest, you’re only acquiring Morse for his offensive capability. The Nationals didn’t consider him an outfielder any more, which is why he’s available in the first place. His career UZR/150 in the OF is -15, which is pretty close to the line at which you see teams decide that the lack of range is too much of a problem to continue the experiment. He’s also been a negative baserunner for most of his career, and last year, only David Ortiz, Jesus Montero, Prince Fielder, and Billy Butler were worse at advancing around the bases. Morse is a guy who fits best as a 1B/DH, and if he doesn’t hit, he’s not particularly useful.

So, will he hit well enough at age 31 to justify not only his $7 million salary, but also the talent required to outbid other suitors and strike a deal with the Nationals? To find out, I decided to look at how other hitters have done, focusing on guys who have succeeded in a not too dissimilar way from what Morse has done the last three years.

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Because of all the angst about this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, there have been a lot of words spilled trying to fix the process. I’m one of many who have suggested that, at the bare minimum, they need to expand the ballot to cover more than 10 slots. Others have offered their own suggestions, from changing the electorate to more clearly defining a player’s eligibility.

There are a lot of interesting opinions out there for ways to improve the Hall of Fame, but they generally start with the premise of tweaking the established methodology. Sometimes, though, I think it’s useful to think about changes without considering what is already in place, to ask yourself what you would do if you could just start from scratch. So, let’s do that with the Hall of Fame.

What would the Hall of Fame look like if we were building it anew in 2013? I’m sure it would be different for each of us. Maybe you’d move it to another location, where it could be more easily accessible to the public at large? Or maybe you’d pick a set proportion of each generation to be represented, so that each age of baseball was equally represented? There are a lot of practical changes you could make that would make the Hall of Fame very different than what it is now.

For, me, though, there’s one thing that stands above the rest as a way to make the Hall more interesting, and to settle most of the problems we have with the enshrinement process as it currently stands; a tiered Hall of Fame.

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The best result from a first pitch? Has to be a dribbler to the mound, right? We spend all this time chasing the swinging strike and drooling on triple-digit velocity, and there’s a future Hall of Fame pitcher who made his living getting first-pitch sawed-off million-hoppers to the second base side — Greg Maddux.

But if you’re not Greg Maddux, the first strike is the nexus for a game of cat and mouse. We’ve found that throwing a first-pitch strike is one of the best ways to get your walk rate down. But if the league throws too many meatballs on 0-0 counts, batters should swing more. It might be the best pitch they see. If the league then throws fewer strikes for the first pitch, batters would find themselves looking more. I don’t know if it’s game theory, but it’s certainly a theory about this game.

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Everybody loves a long home run, because they’re impressive, because they’re difficult. Last year, there were 96 particularly long home runs, if we somewhat arbitrarily set a minimum distance of 450 feet. That’s according to the ESPN Home Run Tracker. Giancarlo Stanton was responsible for seven of them. Miguel Cabrera was responsible for four of them, Yoenis Cespedes three of them. Phil Hughes, three of them, from the other end. Josh Hamilton hit one of them, and Curtis Granderson hit zero of them. Robinson Cano hit zero of them. Jay Bruce and Mike Trout each hit zero of them.

Michael Bourn, much like Kyle Lohse, is a fairly high-profile player who remains an available free agent as we start to think about the middle of January. Bourn, like Lohse, will end up signed to a significant contract, but Bourn, like Lohse, has seen his market fail to develop as expected. One issue might be that neither Bourn nor Lohse is a superstar. Bourn contributes an awful lot of value in the field and on the basepaths, but he strikes out fairly often, and he doesn’t hit for much power. His nine home runs last season were a career-high, by four. Bourn is 30 years old.

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A thing that happens every offseason is that available players are valued. Front offices for teams decide how much a given player deserves. Fans of teams will do something similar, as well. Fans will evaluate players, but, often, they will tend more toward the extremes. They will identify players they badly want on their teams, and they will identify players they want no part of. These are usually exaggerated responses, as the desired players aren’t that great, and as the undesired players aren’t that lousy.

Based purely on my limited, anecdotal observations, it seems like a lot of baseball fans want no part of free-agent starter Kyle Lohse. Lohse is still out there, ready to be signed, but a market doesn’t seem to have developed, and no team seems to be the frontrunner. No fan that I’ve seen is too broken up about this. Based on contract crowdsourcing, Dave Cameron identified Lohse as a poor free-agent value. Many fans feel similarly, to the point at which they aren’t particularly interested in Lohse at all. The gut response to Kyle Lohse’s name is “ugh, stay away.” Thus, I have decided here to come to Kyle Lohse’s defense, with an issuance of pro-Lohse propaganda. This player you don’t desire — he’s capable of many things.

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Stuff tends to fall by the wayside during the holidays, even for baseball blogs. Still, Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui’s retirement deserves a some attention. Even for Christmas Week, it seemed to pass quietly. So, about two weeks after the fact, here are some briefs thoughts on Matsui’s MLB career and some of his biggest moments at the plate.

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After watching Josh Hamilton sign with their division rival, the Rangers made a move this weekend to replace his bat in their line-up, signing Lance Berkman to take over as their DH for 2013. Much is being made of the fact that Berkman got $11 million after spending basically the entire 2012 season on the disabled list, but Major League teams have begun to make the correct shift towards paying for future production rather than past performance. That Berkman was injured for essentially all of 2012 only matters to the extent that it informs our understanding of his likely health and performance in 2013, and the reality is that projecting future playing time is still something of a black box.

Healthy guys get hurt. Injury prone guys stay healthy. Some guys are more likely to end up on the DL than others, but there’s still an awful lot of randomness in playing time distributions. It is much easier to project a player’s performance than it is to project his health, and Berkman hasn’t yet established a track record of injuries that should make us view him like we do Travis Hafner. At 37, we shouldn’t expect Berkman to be an everyday player, but as a DH with big platoon splits, he doesn’t need to be. He plays the easiest position on the field to run a platoon at, and with the Rangers depth, they can afford to have Berkman spend a few weeks on the sidelines if the aches and pains start to add up. For their roster, performance is more important than durability.

And if we just look at expected performance for 2013, there’s a decent chance that Berkman will put up offensive numbers that are not too different from what Hamilton would have produced.

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At the end of last May, Phil Dumatrait announced his retirement from professional baseball. It was an announcement that went largely unnoticed — note the three retweets — and that makes sense, because Dumatrait hadn’t pitched in 2012, and for his career he threw just 151 major-league innings over parts of four seasons. Many of them were not good innings, and while there are the usual qualifiers about how Dumatrait was one of the very best pitchers in the entire world, relative to his big-league peer group, he was lacking a certain something. “Ability to have consistent success,” is what he was lacking.

Dumatrait, like all professional ballplayers, once had a lot of promise. Dumatrait, unlike all professional ballplayers, was selected as early as in the first round in 2000. In fairness, that wasn’t much of a round — the two guys selected before Dumatrait have been worth negative WAR, and the six guys selected after Dumatrait fell short of the bigs — but Dumatrait found his way to prospect lists. According to Baseball America, he was seventh in the Red Sox’s system before 2002. He was fifth in the same system the next year, and the year after that, he was sixth in the Reds’ system, one behind Joey Votto. Phil Dumatrait looked like he could be something, for a while. And, ultimately, he was a big-leaguer, if a relatively unsuccessful one.

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