Archive for Daily Graphings

Apropos largely of nothing — except his notable performance, I suppose, in this past Saturday’s Arizona Fall League Rising Stars Game — I’ve dedicated considerable attention to Reds (now) outfield prospect Billy Hamilton in these electronic pages over the last 48 hours.

Hamilton, because he has a tool (in this case, speed) considered by many to be generational, has produced excitement among prospect analysts. In some cases, that excitement is analogous with optimism about Hamilton’s future as a major leaguer; in other cases, it’s more of an aesthetic judgment than any sort of projection about Hamilton’s career.

I wanted, briefly, to speak to the first point — and, specifically, to establish some sort of framework (however rough) for what speed is actually worth in terms of runs and wins.

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Everyone knows that bunting runners over is the key to scoring and winning baseball games! No, wait, it’s dumb, and should never be done! Okay, bunting is sometimes smart, sometimes not. Isn’t sabermetric analysis of strategy great?

Jokes and stereotypes aside, it does seem that discussion of the pros and cons of bunting around the nerd-o-sphere is more nuanced than it used to be. While the allegedly old-school first inning, runner-on-first auto-bunt has fallen out of favor, we also realize that bunting can make sense for a number of reasons in certain situations: keeping fielders honest, increasing run expectancy, and occasions where playing for one run makes sense. As yet another annual tradition, let’s check out some of the most successful bunts of the 2012 regular season as measured by Win Probability Added (WPA).

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For the Mets, three years of Jason Bay was enough. This afternoon, they announced that they have agreed to part ways with Jason Bay, meaning he’s being released from his contract. Joel Sherman has the details.

Bay is getting all $21M he is owed, the $16M salary, the $3M buyout and the $2M left on a signing bonus. Some is being deferred #Mets

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) November 7, 2012

The Mets don’t get any financial relief in terms of actual payouts, but by deferring some portion of the money he was set to be paid in 2013, they can reduce the actual value of those payouts and create a little extra flexibility for this off-season. Because the Player’s Association has fought hard for guaranteed contracts, players are unlikely to accept contract buyouts, but this is probably the best result for both parties.

Now, Bay gets to pick his own landing spot for 2013, and he should pick an AL team that can give him some at-bats at DH in hopes of a rebound season. Bay was terrible last year, but he was an average-ish hitter as recently as 2011, and it wouldn’t take a large bounce back to make him a decent enough platoon DH for a team that already had a part-time left-handed bat in their starting DH spot.

At age 34, it’s also quite possible that Bay is just done, but at least now he gets a chance to save his career and get a fresh start in a new organization. And now Mets fans don’t have to watch him play anymore. Win-win, as they say.

Bully for the 2012 Detroit Tigers. While the Tigers fell a little shy of winning the World Series, they did manage to accomplish more than 28 other teams, and they got as far as they did in large part by riding their superstars. Justin Verlander, obviously, was the star of the pitching staff, and Max Scherzer and Doug Fister did more to get noticed as well. In the middle of the lineup were Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder, and in Year 1 of that arrangement, there’s no room for complaints. It was the fault of neither Cabrera nor Fielder that the Tigers finished four games short.

From the beginning, Cabrera and Fielder were regarded as the toughest back-to-back hitters in baseball. On 161 occasions, Miguel Cabrera batted third, and on all 162 occasions, Prince Fielder batted fourth. Cabrera finished tied for tops in baseball in wRC+. Fielder finished sixth, between Andrew McCutchen and Edwin Encarnacion. The 2012 Tigers had two of the top six hitters in baseball. The Brewers had a good tandem, and the Blue Jays had a good tandem until Jose Bautista got hurt, but the Tigers’ tandem was incredible.

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If you’re reading FanGraphs, you’re probably familiar with Nate Silver. He’s known nationally now for his political projections at Five Thirty Eight, but of course he made his name on the internet writing about baseball, creating the PECOTA projections, and penning some of the best articles about the economics of baseball written over the last decade.

Even if you’re not a political junkie, it was hard to get away from discussions about Nate Silver over the last few weeks. The final few weeks of the election saw a Nate vs Pundits fight that looked like something straight out of Moneyball. Last night, my Twitter feed probably had more references to Nate Silver than either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. Needless to say, the performance of his model was a major storyline during last night’s election, especially if you were following the election through the eyes of people who write about baseball for a living.

If you haven’t already heard, Nate’s model did pretty darn well. As in, he got every projection right, going 49 for 49 in states that have projected winners and nailing the fact that Florida was basically a coin flip. But, I’m not writing this post to talk about how Nate Silver is a witch or to bleed political discussion over into yet another area of your life, but instead, I think that there’s an important takeaway from this that applies to baseball and what we do here at FanGraphs: the fact that imperfect models with questionable inputs can still be quite useful.

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Alex Anthopolous and his Blue Jays were a well-oiled waiver-claiming machine for the last two weeks of October. Starting on October 17th, the Jays claimed Scott Cousins, Cory Wade, Tyson Brummett, Bobby Wilson, David Herndon and Scott Maine off waivers.

This is a group, as a whole, with 1.6 career WAR. Still, these moves aren’t about filling high-profile roster spots, they were about depth, and the Blue Jays had 40-man roster spots open. The problem is, they wouldn’t stay open for long. The Jays had six players on the 60-day disabled list, and those players would eventually need the spots taken by those marginal waiver claims.

Chances are, though, at least a few of these players were never intended to remain on the 40-man roster. Tyson Brummett was ourighted and passed through waivers unclaimed this time around — unsurprisingly, as he has just 0.2 MLB innings at age 28. This is what Anthopolous and the Jays were likely trying to accomplish — pass these players through waivers to create depth beyond the 40-man roster, an are he had to dip early and often in 2012 as the Jays suffered constant injuries.

The latest two couldn’t sneak through — the Jays designated David Herndon and Scott Cousins for assignment on Halloween, but both were claimed yesterday by the Yankees and Mariners respectively.

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Extreme performances are exceptional performances, so it stands to reason that there are relatively few extreme performers. Granted, there are a lot of different ways in which one can be extreme or exceptional, but still, most players fall somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t make those players uninteresting on its own, but it also definitely doesn’t make those players more interesting. Extremes are interesting.

There are two Chris Youngs in baseball, and they’re independent of one another, linked only by profession and coincidence. Still, it’s fun to compare them on account of their names, and one notes that Outfielder Chris Young has a career 16.3 WAR, while Pitcher Chris Young has a career 16.3 RA9 WAR. It’s never been a secret that Pitcher Chris Young occupies an extreme. Two of them, in fact. Not only is Pitcher Chris Young extremely tall; he’s also extremely fly ball-prone. Since 2002, Young has posted the lowest groundball rate in baseball. I suppose one could argue Young is also extremely fragile.

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Last Friday I wrote this post in which I estimated the amount of postseason ticket revenue to be shared among the Commissioner’s Office, the postseason teams, and the players on each postseason team. The Friday post linked back to another one I wrote in early October in which I explained the formulas used by Major League Baseball to divide postseason ticket revenue. Those formulas were agreed to by the owners and players in the Collective Bargaining Agreement that went into effect for the 2012 season, and will govern through the end of the 2016 season.

In the comments section, several readers asked about revenue generated by concessions during postseason games and by sales of postseason-related merchandise. They wanted to know if those revenues were shared among the Commissioner’s Office, the postseason teams, and the players on postseason teams using the same formula. The short answer is: No. The long answer is that concession and merchandise revenue are shared among all 30 teams, not just the ten teams in the postseason.

Now I will explain the longer answer.

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So much of what makes pitchers effective at the major league level is their ability to keep hitters off-balance. Sure, a 95 mph fastball with movement and a Lord Charles curveball help, but even these physical tools are only as effective as a pitcher’s ability to create uncertainly in the hitters mind from pitch to pitch.

One — admittedly crude — way of looking at this is whether a pitcher throws the type of pitch that’s expected in a given count. Does a pitcher throw fastballs in “fastball counts”, or do they throw off-speed pitches? Pitchers that throw counter to expectations are often said to “pitch backwards”. The Rays’ James Shields is someone that has been referenced as such a pitcher over the past few years.

But exactly how backwards does Shields pitch? And who are some other pitchers that fit into this category?

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Adam Wainwright is fixing to get paid. He’s under contract for $12 million in 2013, but he likes St. Louis enough that he’ll give them a chance to sign him this offseason, according to Derrick Goold’s Monday piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Finding a comp for his contract talks depends heavily on how you weight his different defining characteristics. Is he just a great pitcher worthy of a contract that should fit in with the current top 25 highest-paid starters? Is he a 31-year-old starting pitcher — is his age most important? Is he a right-hander first and foremost? Is his ground-ball rate more relevant than his pitching mix? Or is it most important that he is signing an extension with his team and not hitting the open market?

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