Archive for Daily Graphings

Technically, or literally, the year’s longest plate appearance was probably this one, in which a visiting Miguel Cabrera insisted upon the re-drawing of the batter’s boxes. The discussions and subsequent work by the groundskeepers caused something like a nine-minute delay before Cabrera flew out on the very next pitch. So that’s one way of looking at this, but that’s probably the most annoying way of looking at this. Let’s look at this in a more standard way.

On May 12, 2004, Alex Cora batted against Matt Clement in the bottom of the seventh in Los Angeles. The first pitch was a ball, the second pitch was a strike, the third pitch was a ball, and the fourth pitch was a strike. The next 14 pitches were also all strikes, and the 18-pitch at-bat culminated in an Alex Cora home run. Even though video highlights are no longer widely available — I remember first seeing this on RealPlayer — this at-bat has stuck with me ever since. Sometimes I forget the number of pitches, but I always remember Alex Cora, Matt Clement, a long at-bat, and a home run.

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It has been a fun and exciting week of awards and the debates around them. Now it is time to get serious. We have just finished celebrating the best players of the 2012 season, whether or not one agrees with those officially recognized as such. Snarky jerks (present writer very much included) have had fun at the expense of the worst. Only one task remains: acknowledging those in the middle, the most average position players of 2012. One might think this is no big deal. I disagree. Isn’t the bulls-eye right in the middle of the target?

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I’m not overly interested in MVP postmortems. I’m happy it’s over, and we can move on to other things. But, yesterday’s results have inspired me to do one final post attempting to help a center fielder get the recognition he deserves for his 2012 season. And that center fielder is Austin Jackson.

24 different players were named on the 28 AL MVP ballots. Austin Jackson was not among those 24 players. Not a single writer saw fit to even throw him a 10th place bone. Seven writers found room for Alex Rios. Four found room for Jim Johnson. One found room for Raul Ibanez, which… you know, let’s just move on. But no one jotted Austin Jackson’s name down even once, even though he was quite clearly one of the 10 best players in the American League this year, no matter what way you choose to view baseball.

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It’s the bottom of the eighth inning. Men are on first and third base, there’s one out and your team is down by one run. The opposing team has one of the best ground-ball pitchers on the hill, and the infield is playing back and is looking for a double play. All you need is a fly ball to tie the game and significantly swing your chances of winning.

So who do you want at the plate?

It’s likely that the opposing manager will either bring in a ground-ball specialist or just tell the pitcher to stay away from pitches that could be hit in the air to the outfield. Knowing who you’d want to hit requires an understanding of what pitches are the most likely to induce a ground ball — and what hitters manage to hit fly balls against those pitches most often.

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Hector Santiago reads FanGraphs and throws a screwball. The former puts the Chicago White Sox southpaw in the minority among big-league players. The latter makes him quite unique.

A handful of present-day hurlers pull the occasional screwball out of their back pocket, but none feature the pitch. Santiago doesn’t either, but if he wins a job in the starting rotation next season — a distinct possibility — there is a good chance it will become his signature offering.

The 24-year-old New Jersey native worked out of the bullpen in 42 of his 46 appearances this year, which impacted his repertoire. As he explained during a visit to Fenway Park, “It‘s tough to come in for one inning and throw screwballs. As a starter, you have more opportunities to throw it.”

Santiago wants to start, and knows what he needs to do to earn that role. Along with reintroducing more screwballs to his mix, he said he needs to “work on a two-seam fastball, something that is going to sink down out of the zone, so I can get more ground balls.” His GB-rate was 38.2, which he’s well aware of. He hasn’t yet established himself as a starter, but he’s already a stat-savvy screwball artist.

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Santiago on his repertoire and approach: “I basically try to go after hitters and hit my spots. I’m a guy who is mostly on the inner half to right-handers and away to lefties. I try to get it down and in to righties and down and away to lefties, and let them basically get themselves out. How my ball moves is a big part of how I pitch.

“I watch at a lot of video, especially when I’m getting hit, or when I’m missing and think some of the pitches are balls or strikes. I go back and check the k-zone to see how the pitches were moving and where they finished up. That’s especially true on my off-speed. I feel that I can see pretty well on my fastball — where it’s going to go and where it lands — but with my off-speed, sometimes I think it’s a good pitch, just off the plate, and when I go back in, it’s more on the plate than I expected. When I get hurt is when I‘m missing over the middle of the plate. That‘s when they‘ll run into it.

“When I came into pro ball, I was a one-pitch guy. They helped me develop a changeup, and I started to be able to spin a slider in there. I can work in other pitches now. I can throw my changeup for a strike, or out of the zone, I have a cutter now. I can throw my slider early in the count or behind in the count, although it’s still a work in progress. And then there’s my screwball.” Read the rest of this entry »

Toward the very end of the regular season, I wrote a post entitled The 2012 Season In Inside Home Runs. It was what it claimed to be — it highlighted the most inside pitches to be hit for home runs, as determined by PITCHf/x. Though the season wasn’t yet completely over, nothing about the post would be different now. No extremely inside pitch was hit for a home run the rest of the way.

At the time, it looked like the post might mark the beginning of a series. Here we continue the series, because I am a man who keeps his promises, or what might be interpreted by some as promises. In this part two, we’ll look at the most outside pitches to be hit for home runs, as determined by PITCHf/x. Now, PITCHf/x didn’t properly capture every single pitch of the entire season, which means PITCHf/x didn’t properly capture every single home run of the entire season, but it captured nearly all of them. I’m pretty confident the list that follows is right on.

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Every so often, someone somewhere will write a “worst owners ever” list. It’s almost always timely, since between the four major sports there is always at least one horrendously incompetent or actively malign owner who is justifiably despised by fans. And it ticks off two key attributes for successful search engine optimization: the format easily lends itself to a photo gallery and a few casually-written sentences of snark. Most recently, there has been a glut thanks to Jeffrey Loria’s latest fire sale.

I’ve previously written about Loria and also Fred Wilpon, two of the most-criticized owners in baseball. But their perceived sins are very different. Loria has been criticized for being an unethical miser, profiting off the Expos and Marlins while keeping those teams impoverished, while Wilpon spent on his team but the Mets went broke as a result of the economic downturn and lingering fallout from the massive Ponzi scheme run by Wilpon’s friend and business partner, Bernie Madoff. So how do we determine an intellectually defensible process for making a non-arbitrary list of the worst owners in history?
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I know I’m preaching to the choir here. I know the horse is dead and buried. We’ll talk about something else tomorrow, I promise. But, today, I have one final thought on the MVP discussion, and specifically, about the idea that a player on a non-playoff team has limited value. As Mark Bauman put it:

The Angels finished third in the AL West. Without Trout, where would they have finished? Unless you believe that they would have been 15 games worse without Trout, the correct answer would still be third.

The Tigers finished first in the AL Central, after a substantial struggle and a period of underachievement. Their subsequent advance to the World Series, of course, has no place in this election. But they did manage to make a push late in the regular season to overtake the White Sox and qualify for the postseason.

This is, for a lot of voters, a big issue. Cabrera’s team made the playoffs, and they wouldn’t have without him. Trout’s team didn’t make the playoffs, and they could have not made the playoffs even if he spent the whole year in the minors. So how valuable could Trout really have been?

To that question, I’ll ask one of my own – if you really buy into that argument, how can Trout even appear anywhere on your ballot?

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On Wednesday, David Price was named the winner of the 2012 American League Cy Young Award, to some degree of disagreement. R.A. Dickey was named the winner of the 2012 National League Cy Young Award, to some lesser degree of disagreement. On Thursday, Buster Posey will presumably be named the winner of the 2012 NL Most Valuable Player Award, and Miguel Cabrera will presumably be named the winner of the 2012 AL Most Valuable Player Award. There exist some odds that someone else might win in the NL and/or the AL; those odds are long. Posey’s almost certainly beating his competition, and Cabrera’s almost certainly beating his competition, where by “his competition” I mean “Mike Trout“.

In terms of the attention it’s been given, the AL MVP race has dwarfed the NL MVP race. People more or less just accept that Posey will win, even though we don’t know exactly how valuable he was. The other side is heated, and it’s been heated for, what, months? At least several weeks. I guess “months” and “several weeks” mean the same thing. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of in-between. People tend to be either firmly on Trout’s side, or firmly on Cabrera’s side. Thursday evening, one side is going to celebrate. What’s funny is it’s hardly going to matter.

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Seeing prospects in person is my passion. In 2012, I was fortunate enough to visit parks in five different leagues — collecting information and video on 200 legitimate prospects or more. The lists released over the next few weeks will highlight the best prospects I’ve seen in person at each position during the 2012 season. The rankings will be adjusted based on projected position at the major league level, not present position (in italics if ranking includes position shift). After writing the first three lists, I realized there’s really no way to keep statistical information out of the equation completely and focus on scouting/projection alone. This has caused me to hedge my bets a bit on high ceiling talents and focus more on the complete player. Additionally, understand this is not meant to be a complete list of the best prospects at each position across all of Minor League Baseball, but the best of what I’ve seen.

Previous Rankings:
The Catchers
The First Basemen
The Second Basemen
The Third Basemen
The Shortstops
The Corner Outfielders
The Center Fielders

1. Domingo Tapia, New York Mets

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