Archive for Daily Graphings

With another week in the books, our digital Brewers aren’t any easier to figure out. In fact, it’s been much the opposite. Today, we’ll take a deep dive into the pitching staff, which has already seen a good deal of turnover 12 games into the season, and see if we can settle on roles for a mixed and largely interchangeable group.

First, there’s the Injured List contingent:

Knebel was the only pitcher to start the season on the shelf, but he’s got company now. Brett Anderson is ready to return, having missed only a single turn in the rotation, but the prognosis on the other two is decidedly worse. Lindblom will be back sometime in July at the earliest. And Claudio won’t be back — his rotator cuff injury is a season ender.

Anderson’s imminent return creates an interesting decision. The starting rotation is full of question marks and maybes. The top two feels relatively set; Brandon Woodruff and Adrian Houser are both staying in the rotation unless they get hurt. After that, we have some decisions to make. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Following South Korea and Testing for COVID-19

South Korea could provide a roadmap for a return to play for major league baseball. According to the AP, the KBO is hoping for an early May restart.

On Wednesday, the country recorded 53 new infections, marking the third consecutive day that has seen new cases around the 50-mark. The downward trend from a Feb. 29 peak of 900 is increasing the chances of the 10-team Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) League not only starting in May but also playing a full 144-game season.

“If the situation continues to improve from here and on, teams will start facing each other in preseason games beginning on April 21, and we should be able to get the regular season started in early May,” KBO secretary general Ryu Dae-hwan said after a meeting with club general managers in Seoul.

While a lot can happen in a month, that’s certainly some promising news on the baseball front as well as for South Korea. One of the key factors for success in South Korea has been testing:

Dr. Angela Caliendo said Tuesday that South Korea’s experience “shows you the importance of testing.”

“I do think the testing they did in South Korea was very important in controlling their outbreak,” said Caliendo, an infectious diseases professor at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School.

With their widespread testing program, South Korean authorities were able to identify infected people, isolate them and trace their contacts with other people, who then also could be tested.

If the United States had adequate testing, “you could consider areas of the country that are at different points of the virus” spread progression, Caliendo said during a call with reporters arranged by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Read the rest of this entry »

Where in the player ranks do MVPs come from? As unpredictable as baseball can be, this particular question has a very simple answer for the most part. If we go back through the years, there aren’t too many award winners whose origins deviate too much from a few common paths. MVPs largely are who we thought they were: established superstars, former top prospects, former first round draft picks. In some cases, all of the above are true.

But the stories of how those MVPs ended up with their particular teams can still be intriguing. Some were drafted by the team with which they won the award, including a few, like Bryce Harper and Joe Mauer, who were drafted first overall. Others were traded away only to find success (and some shiny hardware) on another squad.

Here’s a look back at how the NL MVPs of the 1990s were acquired.

Barry Bonds was just one several college baseball stars being considered for the first overall pick in the 1985 draft. Despite his obvious talent, there were some questions about his makeup — his reputation for being cantankerous didn’t begin when he arrived in the major leagues — which may have contributed to him slipping to the Pirates, who held the sixth pick in the draft. Read the rest of this entry »

As strange as it sounds right now, a day will come when baseball people start thinking about how to win baseball games again. That might not be until spring 2021, if COVID-19 forces Major League Baseball to sit out an entire calendar year. But there is still a chance it happens sometime in the next couple of months, and if that’s the case, teams will be preparing for a season unlike any they’ve played before. In addition to all of the structural changes that might be necessary for games to proceed, the simple fact of the season being considerably shorter than normal could change the way teams approach the games. In light of this, one strategy for teams to consider is a return to the four-man starting rotation.

Four-man rotations — or at least, the concept of throwing your best arms on three or fewer days rest — used to be fairly commonplace in the majors. In a piece by Russell A. Carleton at Baseball Prospectus from 2013, he found that around 40% of starts occurred on what we’d now call “short” rest as recently as the early 1970s. Soon after reaching that recent peak, however, the practice nosedived, with short rest starts happening less than 10% of the time by 1984 and continuing to free-fall until reaching a point of near-extinction over the last two decades.

The point of Carleton’s study was not to find out when the four-man rotation died out, but why it did. To that end, he came up with little statistical reasoning. Pitchers who threw on short rest did not seem to perform any worse than they’d be expected to on full rest, nor did any cumulative effects seem to wear them down faster over the course of a full season. This was true regardless of the time period, too, which means it didn’t seem to have anything to do with whether a pitcher was more or less conditioned for it. The best explanation for why teams broadly and swiftly shifted to a five-man rotation was simply fear of injuring arms, and hoping that more rest might prevent that.

Carleton’s piece didn’t take the extra step of actively calling for the four-man rotation to return, but plenty of others have. Major league teams, however, have been taking steps to limit the responsibilities given to starting pitchers, not expand them. In 2014, David Price led the majors with 248.1 innings pitched, while 34 pitchers reached 200 innings, and 65 reached 180. In 2019, Justin Verlander’s league-leading innings total was just 223, with 15 pitchers reaching 200 innings, and 33 pitchers reaching 180 innings. Over a full season, a four-man rotation could add as many as eight starts to a pitcher’s workload, amounting to 40-50 extra innings of work. It would be rather shocking to see a team take that kind of step over 162 games. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, I asked our readers a series of questions about what the season might look like as a means of showing our relative optimism (or pessimism) about the state of things in our country and in baseball. We are now a few more weeks down the line, so I’d like to see if your perceptions have changed. Feel free to answer the questions even if you did not participate in Round 1. The questions below mirror those asked two weeks ago. Thanks for your time. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Zimmermann stood out in Orioles camp this spring. That wasn’t entirely by accident. The 25-year-old left-hander had begun opening eyes last season, and he reported to Sarasota having visited Driveline over the winter. No wheels were reinvented during his week at the Seattle-area facility, but his mechanics did undergo some fine-tuning. And not from scratch; Zimmermann had already started down that road thanks to Baltimore pitching coordinator Chris Holt.

Last year was Holt’s first with the Orioles, and Zimmermann was fairly new himself. The Baltimore native joined the organization in July of 2018, coming over as part of the trade-deadline deal that sent Kevin Gausman to Atlanta. The Braves had taken Zimmermann in the fifth round of the 2017 draft out of the University of Mount Olive, where he earned a degree in business management.

Asked about his course of study, Zimmermann told me that he considers himself a good problem solver, and if baseball didn’t work out he’d have laid the foundation for a career in project management. Analogy in mind, I posited that being a pitcher tends to lend itself to problem solving.

“Hopefully not, but yes,” responded Zimmermann, who logged a 3.60 ERA in 140 innings last year between Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk. “That’s one way to look at it, but I prefer to see it more as critical thinking and processing things in the moment. When you’re on the mound, you don’t really think in an analytical way; it comes across more as intuition. But you are creating a strategy for certain hitters, and whatnot, before the game. That follows along the lines of problem solving.”

The juxtaposition — intuition on one side, critical thinking on the other — prompted me to ask if he considers pitching to be more of an art, or more of a science? Read the rest of this entry »

Trying to predict how a reliever will perform from one season to the next can be a pretty frustrating exercise. Some amount of uncertainty surrounds all players, but being a pitcher makes things a little more difficult and being a pitcher who is often asked to throw with max effort with little to no rest complicates further still. And even after we move past those factors, we’re faced with a smaller sample of outcomes for bullpen arms. A 60-inning season is a complete season for a reliever, considerably fewer innings than a starter throws and many fewer batters faced than the number of times most starting position players come to the plate. Trying to predict reliever performance in half a season is even more difficult; attempting to put a value on relievers in a potentially condensed, shorter season becomes quite challenging.

Consider that last season, there were 158 qualified relievers with at least 48 innings pitched. Ken Giles produced 1.9 WAR, ranking 10th in baseball among his bullpen brethren. Brett Martin ranked 60th among relievers with a 0.8 WAR and Matt Albers ranked 130th as a replacement-level reliever. Now, let’s cut those seasons in half. Giles still ranks 10th with just under a win, but he’s now closer to Matt Albers in half a season than he was to Brett Martin in a full season. It is considerably harder to tell, in terms of results, the difference between a good and bad reliever under those constraints. This is further complicated by the fact that the smaller the sample size, the less likely that the results will match the actual performance.

I separated pitchers into three groups from last season: pitchers with at least 100 innings, qualified relievers, and pitchers with at least 20, but less than 40, innings on the season. Then I ran some correlations between WPA, which shows how the actual results on the field mattered to the team, and ERA, FIP, and WAR, to show some measures of performance.

Read the rest of this entry »

In case you’ve been living under a rock — and if so, good for you, great distancing, take a bow — there’s been one major development in baseball in the past few days: per Jeff Passan, the league is reportedly in the early stages of formulating a plan that would see games played in empty stadiums in Arizona as soon as May or June. (MLB has said it is not committed to any specific plan at this time, and will prioritize public health and safety in its decision-making.)

This is a bold plan, one that feels very out of line with how other sporting events are reacting to COVID-19. Wimbledon, which takes place in July, has already been canceled. The Olympics, scheduled for August, have been delayed a year. A plan to start up a major sports undertaking months before those dates will be fraught with hurdles. Let’s cover some of those, along with the potential workarounds, while keeping in mind that the entire plan is subject to forces well beyond MLB’s control.

How Many Personnel Would Be Isolated?
The first sticking point in the plan is the sheer number of people the league would need to isolate. In his piece on the plan, Ken Rosenthal reported that league and MLBPA officials are discussing rosters in the 50-player range to allow for the injury- and performance-related promotions and substitutions that teams normally make. That’s 1,500 people in isolation right there, and that’s only players.

Would players with families be allowed to bring their loved ones with them? It’s hard to imagine union approval if families aren’t allowed into whatever housing facility the league uses. The alternative — leaving spouses, partners, and children completely cut off from players — sounds terrible right away, but it’s even more unthinkable given the strained state of national resources. Read the rest of this entry »

Few players have ever been more closely identified with a single team than Al Kaline. A bonus baby who debuted at age 18, and the youngest batting champion ever at 20, Kaline played every single one of his 2,834 professional games as a member of the Tigers, and remained part of their organization for 67 years. While he didn’t always have an easy time adapting to the expectations placed on him at such a young age, he aged with grace and humility, and became “Mr. Tiger.” In a career that ran 22 seasons, from 1953-74, he collected 3,007 hits and 399 home runs — yes, there’s a story to that missed milestone — and won 10 Gold Gloves as a right fielder. In 1980, he was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, and became the first Tiger ever to have his uniform number (No. 6, chosen in honor of Stan Musial) retired. After his playing career ended, he moved into the broadcast booth and then into an advisory capacity, most recently as a special assistant to general manager Al Avila.

On Monday, Kaline, who had recently suffered a stroke, died at the age of 85 at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

“In my book he’s the greatest right-handed hitter in the league,” Ted Williams said of Kaline in 1955, the year he became the youngest player ever to win a batting title.

“I have always referred to Al Kaline as ‘Mister Perfection,’” Tigers manager Billy Martin, who managed Kaline from 1971 to late ’73, once said. “He does it all — hitting, fielding, running, throwing — and he does it with that extra touch of brilliancy that marks him as a super ballplayer.”

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a daily series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

MLB Is Pursuing A Return To Baseball In May

Despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread throughout the United States and the rest of the world, Major League Baseball is reportedly attempting to move forward with a plan that would open the 2020 season as early as next month. According to ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the plan clearly has numerous potential hiccups, but is also being advanced with the support of “high-ranking public health officials.”

As one might expect, this version of the 2020 season would look very different from any we’ve seen before. Games would be relegated entirely to Arizona, with teams playing at Chase Field — the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks — as well as the 10 spring training complexes, and other nearby fields. Only essential personnel would be allowed inside the stadiums, which means no fans in the ballparks. The league has discussed potentially forgoing dugouts in favor of players and coaches sitting six feet apart from each other in the stadium seats, in order to promote social distancing. Passan’s report also mentions the elimination of mound visits from pitching coaches and catchers, seven-inning doubleheaders to make up for lost time in April and early May, and the use of an electronic strike zone, so that umpires can maintain a six-foot distance from the batter and catcher. Once teams report to their respective facilities, there would be another two-to-three week spring training period, followed by the start of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »