Chris Carter finally signed! With the Yankees, for $3 million plus incentives. Chris Coghlan also finally signed! With the Phillies, on a minor-league deal for $3 million plus incentives. On the one hand, these players couldn’t be any more different. But there are similarities, too, if we look at them through the lens of the market and its needs.
The bad news is that we have the Padres projected for baseball’s worst record. The good news is that’s not really surprising to the Padres, and Keith Law recently ranked their farm system at No. 3. They tried the whole go-for-it thing, and it blew up, so they reversed course. To this point, it’s gone well, and probably better than was expected. You can look at the Padres and see how they could eventually return to being competitive.
What that doesn’t mean is that the rebuild is complete. The Padres will have more selling to do, and as I look at their roster, I see a team poised to do one of the things the Brewers have done. Milwaukee has done well to sell off parts of its bullpen, bringing real prospect value back in exchange for Jeremy Jeffress, Will Smith, and Tyler Thornburg. They’re all effective pitchers, but they don’t mean much to a could-be cellar-dweller. You might know the Padres for having a suspect pitching staff, but the bullpen should be of considerable interest. And if events go well enough, then come July, the Padres might end up in charge of the late-inning reliever market.
The Dodgers have, and have had for a few years, one of the very best farm systems around. That leads to them receiving a certain amount of coverage, so you couldn’t in good conscience consider the Dodgers’ system in any way underrated. Yet so much attention has been focused on the elites — Corey Seager, Joc Pederson, Julio Urias, Cody Bellinger, and so forth. The major story of the system is the top of the system. Which, in turn, can undersell the best of the others.
We spent time last year singing the praises of Jharel Cotton, who has since been traded away. Cotton kind of got lost in the mix. Similarly, we’ve spent time singing the praises of Jose De Leon, who has also since been traded away. The De Leon perception suffered from the nearby presence of Urias. Maybe the fact that those two have been traded means the Dodgers weren’t big fans after all. Maybe it doesn’t mean that. But they’re major-league pitchers, and if the Dodgers just demonstrated anything, it’s that you can need a lot of those in a summer.
Why, then, deplete the depth? Well, Cotton got another starting pitcher. De Leon got a starting second baseman. Those are good reasons. Brock Stewart is another good reason. Fairly quietly, Stewart surged forward in 2016, by pulling off two very fundamental tasks: throwing a bunch of strikes, and missing a bunch of bats.
Over at The Ringer yesterday, Ben Lindbergh wrote a fantastic piece on what MLB teams are doing to protect their intellectual property in the wake of the Astros’ hacking scandal. But while Ryan Pollock tackled the question of how an organization might protect itself from malevolent outside intrusions, Lindbergh’s piece focused on what teams are doing about the inevitable transfer of their ideas that come from the relatively free movement of front office employees and the increasing availability of qualify data in the public sphere.
If you’ve been paying attention to the types of posts that have gone up on InstaGraphs over the winter, you’ve noticed all the job postings; MLB teams are greatly expanding their research and development departments, and because front office employees mostly don’t sign long-term contracts, a good number of these positions are filled by people who were already working for another club in some capacity. Interns move into analyst roles, analysts become managers, and managers can switch organizations to land director jobs. And this cross-pollination of employees means that ideas are difficult to keep internal, since you can’t force someone to unlearn the processes that were valued by their former employer.
And that’s just the issue teams face when one employee goes to work for one other organization. Team employees are not guaranteed to always stay within the circle of working for the organizations themselves, and sometimes, they move into public-facing roles. Lindbergh himself interned for the Yankees back in 2009, and his time in their baseball operations department informed his opinion on catcher framing, which he’s since written extensively about in the public arena.
Perhaps even more interestingly, Tom Tango joined MLBAM last year, and is now working on developing Statcast-related tools that will help the public better understand how to use tracking data for player evaluation. Tango spent a good chunk of the last decade working for the Blue Jays, Mariners, and Cubs, and while he’s not going to just come out and say “This is what the Cubs look for in a pitcher”, it’s a good bet that the processes he’s building are going to look reasonably similar to the ones that were being used internally by the front offices he worked for. And now, any team in baseball that knows how to use Baseball Savant will have access to those ideas, raising the baseline for the minimum level of understanding of how to use Statcast.
Quoting from Lindbergh’s piece:
As more and more Statcast data trickles out to the public, we’re approaching a point when the stat-savvy fan can form a nearly complete picture of a player’s performance on the field. Teams have already reached that point, but they also have a handicap that narrows the gap between public and private knowledge: They lack the public’s ability to crowdsource with a brain trust whose size is limited only by the moderate difficulty of communicating online. “Now more so than ever,” the former scouting exec says, “secrets are harder to keep secret from the public at large. An enterprising independent analyst is likely to come closer to reverse-engineering insight into a team’s roster-building process than many clubs would be comfortable admitting.”
McCracken adds, “I think a lot of folks would be surprised at how little ‘secret’ information there really is at any one team, and even further surprised at how little benefit that ‘secret’ information confers.” Mariners director of analytics Jesse Smith sees it the same way: “Hypothetically, by the time someone has taken a statistical method elsewhere, has been able to implement it and is in a position to use that information to influence the decision-making of other teams, we would probably be onto the next thing.”
Because ideas can move within organizations, or from behind the walls of a non-disclosure agreement into the public sphere, teams can’t rely on long-term sustained advantages from discovering a new idea or a new way of evaluating a player or skill. As Lindbergh said, in 2009, the Yankees may have beaten the league to quantifying the value of catcher framing, but by 2011, Mike Fast had proven the concept in public, and even after the Astros snapped up Fast for themselves, the advantage diminished quickly for the early adopters, since everyone started looking for catchers who could steal strikes, or at least not give them away.
And that’s why there was one particular line in Lindbergh’s piece that perhaps best encapsulates how teams are looking to get long-term advantages now.
“The real secret is in the discipline that it takes to implement strategy.” Another NL R&D director stresses, “The execution of the ideas is far more important than the ideas themselves, and so that tends to be the most difficult thing to reproduce in another organization.”
This is where it seems the current advantage really lies. As Travis Sawchik outlined in his book Big Data Baseball, the Pirates didn’t necessarily have any brilliant new ideas that helped turn their franchise around, as plenty of other teams were aggressively shifting their defenders or looking for harmony between their pitchers and their defenders. But what they did, perhaps better than anyone during the last few years, was get information from the office to the field, and get buy-in from players that doing things differently was going to make them more likely to win.
At this point, it seems the value is less in the quality or proprietary nature of a team’s ideas, and more in the vehicles that move those ideas around. Teams are now spending more resources on people who can help bridge the gap between the front office and the coaching staff or the players themselves. With guys like Brian Bannister making an impact by helping the Rich Hills of the baseball world become something more than what they were thought to be, the value won’t be in having someone in the organization who advocates for a plan as simple as “throw more curveballs”, but will be in having someone with enough credibility that the players will actually throw more curveballs.
This doesn’t mean that new ideas have no value, of course, but it does seem like MLB is well past the time when a team can simply figure out what the next undervalued statistic is and turn that into a winning roster. With a very short shelf life on actual proprietary ideas, the new way to beat your opponents may be about better implementing well-accepted concepts in a way that actually makes a difference on the field. It’s no longer just about finding new ideas and then exploiting those ideas for maximum gain, but in figuring out how to deploy ideas that might make a small difference on a wide scale.
After all, as Travis wrote yesterday, the idea of the ideal swing plane being an uppercut isn’t really a new idea anymore, but teams who end up with a Josh Donaldson or a Justin Turner — a player whose value was dramatically altered by a data-driven change in their process — can get a lot of value out of the implementation of that idea. It isn’t a secret, but there are still huge differences in how well even stale ideas get put into practice, and that seems to be the way that the best teams in baseball are currently separating themselves from the rest of the pack.
So, when someone inevitably asks what the next market inefficiency is in baseball, I’ll probably shorten my answer to “communication”. With ideas themselves no longer conveying huge advantages, it’s the ability to turn even somewhat obvious beliefs into actual action that can give an organization a legitimate, sustainable edge.
| 12:02 |
: Good morning from Arizona. |
| 12:02 |
: Chat, go. |
| 12:03 |
: What happened to Giolito’s mechanics that made him struggle? |
| 12:04 |
: Pretty sure Giolito has said publicly that they tried to make him more upright, but I don’t know that that’s why he struggled. It just seems illogical, on the surface, to mess with one of the better pitching prospects in baseball like that. |
| 12:04 |
: Which Cody Reed do you feel will have the better career? I feel Cincinnati’s Reed has been a bit disappointing but still think he’s got more upside than Cody Reed Arizona. |
| 12:04 |
: CIN’s Cody Reed I think will be a fine mid-rotation starter. I do not ARI’s Cody Reed to be a prospect. |
A classic Super Bowl is behind us, large trucks are headed to Florida and Arizona, and spring is in the air — at least in some places a distance from my Wisconsin residence. We’re entering the home stretch of our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality, utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data. Last time, it was National League right fielders. Now, it’s the catchers’ turn. We begin with a look at the 2016 AL regulars at that position.
As Ken Rosenthal reported Monday, Sergio Romo has found a home in Los Angeles, signing a one-year deal with the Dodgers and switching sides in one of the game’s most spirited rivalries. Romo will always be associated with the Giants, part of three World Series-winning teams, but he’ll pitch for the Dodgers in 2017 and it’s going to take some getting used to for everyone.
The incomparable Grant Brisbee offered a fascinating detail as he came to grips with the transaction:
(Romo) was recognizable. He was on commercials. He was reliable. He occasionally made opposing hitters look silly, as if they just picked up the sport of baseball. And he was around for nine seasons. Here’s a list of San Francisco Giants who have thrown nine seasons or more since the team moved west:
Juan Marichal
Greg Minton
Matt Cain
Gary Lavelle
Kirk Rueter
Scott Garrelts
Randy Moffitt
Jim Barr
Gaylord Perry
Sergio Romo
Tim Lincecum
How many relievers spend nine seasons with a club nowadays? It’s a rare tenure. But by relocating south to join the division favorites, he will now be part of the group setting up for closer Kenley Jansen, unless manager Dave Roberts blows our minds and begins using Jansen in non-save situations.
Everything from Romo’s demonstrative actions to his pitch mix remains interesting. He’s succeeded with below-average velocity thanks to his slider, a fascinating pitch that proves in the bullpen you can really make a career with one pitch – if it’s outstanding.
Soon, we’ll get games on television again. I know it’s hard to believe, because it seems like it’s been so long, but it’s true. It’ll only be spring training, but it’ll be baseball and it’ll be great.
Along with these televised games, we’ll hear commentators discussing key statistics. It’s very possible that, due to the rising popularity and availability of Statcast, we’ll hear about increases in spin rate when it’s relevant. That’s great! But there will be some context we won’t hear, and that context will be important.
Late last week, I published an article about Kevin Kiermaier, calling him further underrated because he’s faced an abnormally tough schedule of opposing pitchers. On the other side of things, Jorge Soler is coming off a year in which he faced one of the easiest opposing slates in recent history. This doesn’t lead to anything conclusively — worse pitchers can throw great pitches, and great pitchers can make mistakes. But what’s suggested is that Kiermaier’s true talent is higher than his numbers, while Soler probably had his 2016 stats inflated. This is an adjustment we so infrequently discuss.
If I’m going to point to hitters and their strengths of schedule, it only makes sense to look at pitchers, too. So I did that for a number of pitchers in 2016, guided by this Baseball Prospectus list. I didn’t calculate numbers for every pitcher, but I examined many pitchers at either end of the BP list. All I did was calculate the average 2016 wRC+ posted by the pitchers’ opponents. The higher the number, the tougher the average opponent. The league-average wRC+ last season, with pitchers included, was 97.
Pitchers with easier schedules
For the most part, I just wanted to look at pitchers who threw at least 100 innings. But for some smaller-sample fun, J.P. Howell’s average opponent managed just an 84 wRC+, while Matt Harvey wound up at 85. That makes Harvey’s season look only worse, although he had a pretty good reason for that.
Pitchers with tougher schedules
The gaps might not seem that big to you, I don’t really know. But for whatever it’s worth, Todd Frazier just had a 102 wRC+, and Adonis Garcia finished at 90. Steamer projects Mike Napoli for a 103 wRC+, with Kevin Pillar at 90. Imagine the difference between a full season facing lineups of Napolis and lineups of Pillars. Mathematically, it would work out to double-digit runs, so just remember this the next time you’re, say, recalling some pitching numbers from the 2016 American League East. Not every schedule is created the same, and you better believe certain pitchers can feel it.
Commissioner Rob Manfred has clearly made a priority of improving baseball’s “pace of play.” The theory goes that, since today’s youngsters supposedly have shorter attention spans than ever and aren’t all that inclined to watch players stand around between bursts of actions, the game should move at a brisker pace and the bursts of action should feature less time between them. This theory has already led to some practice, including the introduction of a between-innings clock and a rule requiring hitters to keep their feet in the batter’s box. Baseball is an old game with an old audience, and Manfred would like to see a younger audience consuming his product.
ESPN’s Jayson Stark reports that the league has submitted two new proposals to the league: one which would raise the bottom of the strike zone and another that would eliminate the need to throw four lob pitches to intentionally walk a batter. The strike-zone proposal aims to create more balls in play, while the intentional-walk proposal would simply speed up the game. These things make sense in a vacuum. Of course, baseball isn’t played in a vacuum, but in real time and with human beings, and that makes the game a very interesting collection of circumstance, accidents, and general madness.
We won’t touch on the strike-zone proposal now, although it certainly merits discussion. Stark says in his report that it’s less likely to get a green light for the coming season than the intentional-walk proposal. So, about the intentional walk, then.
It’s a trivial part of the game, really. Barry Bonds has come to the plate, and you, in your wisdom, do not wish to pitch to Barry Bonds with a man on and two outs. You present Bonds with first base instead of a potential home-run ball, and then you work to get the next batter out. All you have to do is play catch with your catcher for a few moments. If Baseball with a capital B wants to speed up the game, why not eliminate the game of catch? It’s dead weight.
Because, once again, baseball is played by human beings. The man on the mound isn’t a robot, but a pitcher. Intentional walks almost always go off without a hitch. When they don’t, it’s impactful to the game.
