Archive for Daily Graphings

With the move of the Houston Astros to the American League, and the unfortunate fact that both leagues will have an uneven number of teams, interleague play is destined to change this year. As cross-platform play goes from something that happens in the middle of June, once a year, like some sort of strange exhibition mini-season, to something that happens every week, the National League will have to re-evaluate their past strategies for American League parks.

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Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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People have expected big things from Freddie Freeman. I know this because Freeman is a professional baseball player, and all of those guys — each and every last one of them — was at one point considered a future star. The backup catcher, the disappointing first baseman, the 36-year-old in triple-A — former superstars, somewhere, thought to have the brightest of futures. Sometimes they fulfill their promise and most of the times they do not.

I know this also because, among professional baseball players, Freeman was and still is highly regarded. He was drafted 78th overall in 2007, two picks after Giancarlo Stanton, and before 2009 he cracked Baseball America’s top-100 list of prospects. Before 2010, he cracked the top-40; before 2011, he cracked the top-20. Freeman debuted in the majors before he turned 21, and he was established as a regular before he turned 22. Players who do that often become good players, relative to the other players, and unbelievably, inconceivably great players, relative to us.

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We begin.

Brett Myers is on the Indians now

On a one-year contract, with a second-year club option. The whole deal is said to be worth $7 million, and Myers will go back to starting after spending all of 2012 in the bullpen. In two bullpens, as it were. Myers has done this before, as he was basically a full-time reliever in 2007, and then a starter between 2008-2011. If the Indians turn out to not like Myers as a starter, they can move him back to relief — he’s their player, after all, and he’s demonstrated his versatility — but he’s a starter first. And the Indians’ top starter is arguably Justin Masterson or Zach McAllister, so, yeah. There’s a need.

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Update: As pointed out to me on Twitter, the CBA explicitly prohibits (page 90, section c) teams and agents from agreeing to avoid the qualifying offer in the way I suggest below. So, this entire post is now academic. But still kind of interesting, perhaps. The points about the imbalanced incentives are still true, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the MLBPA negotiate significant changes into the next agreement.

This winter marked the first off-season under the new terms set out by the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which included a complete overhaul of the free agent compensation system. Back in November, teams had to decide whether their free agents were worth a one year, $13.3 million contract offer in order to receive a draft pick if the player chose to sign elsewhere. Only nine players received the qualifying offer, and in David Ortiz’s case, it was mostly academic, as he was working on a two year deal with the Red Sox and never even made it to free agency.

Interestingly, of the eight players who did receive a qualifying offer and elected for free agency, half of them remain unsigned. Adam LaRoche has a standing two year offer to return to the Nationals, but has had problems drumming up enough interest elsewhere to force Washington to give him the third year that he’s looking for. And then there’s Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse, and Rafael Soriano, who each remain without a team and seemingly without any serious suitors. While we don’t actually know what conversations have taken place between teams and agents, speculation exists that the loss of a draft pick has been a significant deterrent to clubs pursuing these players.

That speculation gains some steam when we look at the prices for players who did not receive a qualifying offer, but were eligible to receive such an offer. Among those who didn’t receive an offer for 1/13: Read the rest of this entry »

In 2012, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing a variety of people from baseball. This year’s list includes 46 MLB players, 19 top prospects, 12 coaches, 11 scouting directors, seven former players, six managers, five general managers and 15 who fall into other categories.

Here’s a selection of best quotes from the 2012 FanGraphs Q&A series.

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“What we do with the data, internally, may be different than what other teams do. We’re always looking to find ways to improve the way we process data, and use data, and build our own internal metrics to, again, help with the process of assigning value to players. But really, fundamentally, all data starts externally.” — Ben Cherington, January 2012

“If you’re an extreme fly ball pitcher, that helps you at Petco. When the ball gets hit into the air, it hangs up and maybe doesn’t travel as well because of the coastal situation we have — the heaviness of the air.” — Bud Black January 2012

“Choo probably has the most raw power on our team, but Carlos is right up there. And he had a very good season. If you take away that batting average that so many people pay attention to… if you walk the way he walks, then the batting average isn’t such a concern to me.” — Manny Acta, January 2012

“Keeping your hands inside the ball is part of it. You can’t really hit the top inside part of the ball without the hands being in. That’s my way of dumbing it down for myself.” — Lonnie Chisenhall, January, 2012

“I’ve heard a lot of people call me a finesse pitcher, and I like that… At the same time, when you say finesse pitcher, you make it sound like you don’t throw hard, or whatnot. If I want to, I can get it up there. And I do, every game.” — Drew Smyly, January 2012

“The overall approach to mechanics and injury prevention would have to change — people would have to broaden their horizons a little bit — and I’m not sure that’s ready to happen. There would have to be more of a willingness to think outside the box.” — Josh Outman, February 2012

“A lot of people think Lincecum’s mechanics are bad, but according to the way we do it — the studies I’ve done — they aren’t as advertised. They’re not bad. He’s just a big-time tilter who rears back.” — Logan White, February 2012

“Mechanically, his delivery is an up-tempo, high-paced, high-energy delivery, somewhat in the Lincecum mold. Trevor [Bauer] is 6-foot-1 and he gets every bit of his 185 pounds into his delivery. Whereas some may call it a max-effort delivery, I call it a maximum-optimum delivery.” — Ray Montgomery, February 2012 Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’m the guy at FanGraphs who’s most interested in the field of pitch-framing research, so, hey there, here comes another post about pitch-framing. The idea of the importance of receiving a pitch correctly has been around forever, but only more recently have people begun to feel like they can measure who’s good and who’s bad at it. You know the good ones are represented by Jose Molina, and you know the bad ones are represented by Ryan Doumit. There are calculations that use PITCHf/x data to figure out strikes above or below average, for catchers.

What isn’t quite so clear, yet, is how we should interpret those numbers. Catchers aren’t all catching the same pitchers in the same ballparks in the same counts with the same umpires and the same opposing batters. It’s complicated, because of course it’s complicated, and I’m interested in the idea of some guys being harder to catch than others. Some guys will be more and less easy to frame. At its core, this is because some pitches should be more and less easy to frame. Catching a 95 mile-per-hour fastball is going to be different from catching a 70 mile-per-hour lollipop curve.

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In 2012, four left-handed pitchers touched 93-plus on my radar gun. In Onelki Garcia and Chris Reed, Dodgers prospects accounted for half the list. This is nothing new. Two minor league baseball seasons living in the Atlanta area has yielded many hard-throwing Dodgers prospects. What’s new is every top prospect I’ve seen from the Dodgers has been right-handed before this.

Big arms, along with deep pockets have allowed the Dodgers to acquire three All-Stars in the past six months. Trading Nathan Eovaldi, Rubby De La Rosa, Ethan Martin, Josh Lindblom and Allen Webster would decimate most minor league systems. For the Dodgers, it’s simply a sign to reload.

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The Pirates completed a trade on Wednesday that sent Joel Hanrahan and Brock Holt to the Red Sox for Mark Melancon, Jerry Sands, Stolmy Pimentel and Ivan De Jesus. The deal increases organizational depth for the Pirates and gives them a solid reliever in Melancon. The deal also effectively makes Jason Grilli the new Pirates closer. Grilli, who was recently re-signed to a very affordable two-year, $6.75 million contract was probably the better bet to close in Pittsburgh even with Hanrahan present.

The subsequent trade of Hanrahan only enhances the value of the contract he signed. Grilli certainly would have been paid more money had he entered free agency as a closer or a reliever seeking closing opportunities. Given his numbers over the last two seasons, it wouldn’t have been crazy to suggest him as a legitimate closer candidate somewhere. Instead, even with strong interest from about half of the league, Grilli stayed in Pittsburgh on a team-friendly contract fit for a 7th or 8th inning reliever.

While Holt, Sands, De Jesus and Pimentel all play a role in this deal, the trade really benefits the Pirates by increasing the cost-effectiveness of their bullpen and allowing them to reallocate their savings to other areas of need. The Pirates essentially replaced their closer with a better and cheaper alternative, brought back another cheap reliever whose peripherals closely match that traded closer and signed a starter with the savings.

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One of the very most important principles in the field of baseball analysis is the concept of park factors — having an understanding that the game can play differently depending on the environment. I don’t think this is unique to baseball, but it’s most evident in baseball, where a game in old Coors Field would be very different from a game in recent Petco Park. All decent analysis has to take park factors into account. Otherwise, you’re just leaving way too much off the table.

But most people, when they think of park factors, consider what happens to the baseball once it’s put in play. This park increases doubles; this other park reduces home runs. These are the easiest park factors to understand, absolutely, and they’re generally the easiest to explain. Fenway Park has the Green Monster, which does things. Coors Field is at elevation, which does other things. I don’t need to explain this stuff to you.

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