As Melvin Upton steps to the plate and readies for the pitch, Buster Posey appraises him. First, he looks at his feet as they dig in. Gradually, his eyes move up Upton’s body, brazenly staring as he takes in information. Down pops the sign as the catcher moves his attention to the pitcher.
It’s not just idle ogling. He’s looking for clues. Which ones?
Apologies for walking on trodden ground. None of what’s below is new. Many of you already know everything in here, but I feel like this is a good opportunity to review why our position is our position. I’ll do my best to keep this simple and short. Just like all the world’s best analysis!
Over the last little while, I’ve written a few things about Clutch. The specific stat might be difficult to explain to the average fan, but the idea is a basic one. Teams with high Clutch scores have had really good timing. Teams with low Clutch scores have had really bad timing. Timing is important! This explains a lot of the difference we see between actual wins and BaseRuns wins, which you can just think of as “expected wins.” This year, the five most clutch teams in baseball so far have beaten their BaseRuns win total by a combined 45. The five least clutch teams in baseball so far have fallen short of their BaseRuns win total by a combined 43. It’s hugely important, and this isn’t a one-year phenomenon.
While working on something Erasmo Ramirez said — that his slider was always in the zone anyway, so he should probably use it to steal strikes rather than for swinging strikes — it became obvious that breaking pitches are much less effective in the zone than out when it comes to swinging strikes. Curves, in particular, are much better outside the zone. You get about one third of the whiffs on a curve in the zone as you do outside of the zone.
Separately, I’m working on a piece for The Hardball Times Annual about command. In it, a few pitchers talk about the difficulty of commanding breaking pitches. “Nobody throws anything that’s truly straight,” is how Trevor Bauer put it.
While sorting the in and out of zone whiff rates, and thinking about command, it came to me that the two are related. Maybe that’s a duh, but a big part of quantifying command is the problem of breaking balls and changeups and their movement. A breaking ball in the zone may often be a hung breaking ball, which contributes to the lower whiff rates.
Let’s take a look at the pitchers that have the most disparate results on their non fastballs inside and outside the zone first, and then try to find a way to spot these pitchers by movement.
In a very short while, the Rangers and the Astros will kick off a crucial four-game series, with the AL West up for grabs. There will be three more meetings between the teams after this series is complete, so any mistakes can be made up for, but this race is coming down to the wire. It’s currently the closest race of the divisions, and while the Rangers are already close at 1.5 games back, they were literally inches away from an even smaller deficit before the Astros rallied past the Angels on Sunday. The Astros know they can lose their position. The Rangers know it’s theirs for the taking.
In a lot of ways, this isn’t what people expected. Even just several weeks ago, by which point we’d come to believe in the Astros, the Rangers didn’t look like a threat. After the games on July 31, the Astros were up two games on the Angels, and seven games on the Rangers. The Rangers’ odds of winning the division were a hair below 2%. Now they’re a little above 22%, gaining about a game on the Astros a week. Since the beginning of August, the Rangers have gone 25-15, second-best in the AL. Since the same point, the Astros have gone 19-20, sandwiched between the Yankees and the Rays. What’s happened to cause the Astros to lose much of their advantage?
Fans of Major League Baseball have long held an emotional investment in favorite players and teams, spending time and money on the sport and receiving widely varying emotional returns depending on results. If Fantex and Los Angeles Angels starter Andrew Heaney get their way, fans and investors will soon be able to invest in the future earnings of the Angels left-hander. Heaney and Fantex, a company that has previously struck similar deals with multiple NFL players, have agreed to a contract that will pay Heaney $3.34 million in exchange for “10 percent of all future earnings related to his brand, including player contracts, corporate endorsements and appearance fees,” according to Ken Rosenthal. A deal like this will attempt to provide pre-arbitration players like Heaney a form of insurance against future injury or a downgrade in performance without signing a team-friendly contract that keeps players from free agency. While this concept has been around for quite some time, in practice, these deals are still in their infancy and come with some drawbacks.
Almost two years ago, Fantex made news by announcing an agreement with star running back Arian Foster of the Houston Texans. The deal, similar to the one for Heaney, would have paid Foster $10 million in exchange for 20% of Foster’s future earnings. Before the parties could follow through on the deal, Foster was injured and the IPO never got off the ground. The deals with Fantex are subject to getting enough investors to pay for the initial guarantee to the players. For Heaney to get paid, enough investors must first meet the IPO amount, in this case $3.34 million.
In some ways, this model may look like a long-term version of daily fantasy games, where fans can put forth a relatively small sum of money in the hopes that a player will play well and provide a return on the money they have deposited. I spoke with Fantex co-founder and CEO Buck French about the potential comparisons and he was quick to refute them, stating that they do not consider themselves in the same market. “[Daily fantasy sports] is totally different. It’s not investing. Either you win or you lose… A single game outcome will determine whether you win or lose.” French cited a Wall Street Journal article stating that 1.3% of daily fantasy players win 91% of the profits in the first half of the MLB season. French said that, in Fantex, people “invest in future cash flow stream and collect dividends. They aren’t trying to beat out a whole bunch of people.”
One of my favorite parts of the trade deadline happened right at the deadline itself. As the deadline passed, a Mariners writer or two tweeted out that no trades had been made. Then, a few minutes later, it was announced that J.A. Happ had been traded to the Pirates. It happened suddenly, and it arguably only happened because A.J. Burnett had gotten injured. There were never any Happ rumors to speak of; the MLB Trade Rumors archive doesn’t show anything. Happ was essentially unwanted and mediocre. I forgot who he was traded for, so I looked it up, and I’ve forgotten again. Deadline additions don’t get much less sexy than this.
But sometimes the present doesn’t give a crap about the past. Since getting traded to the Blue Jays, David Price has been worth 1.8 WAR. Makes sense; he’s an ace. Since getting traded to the Pirates, J.A. Happ has been worth 1.4 WAR. Makes less sense. All the other traded starters have done worse. Johnny Cueto’s done worse. Cole Hamels has done worse. Scott Kazmir has done worse. They’ve all done worse. I just came across an article a few minutes ago suggesting that maybe Happ should start the Pirates’ wild-card game. That’s insane, but it still speaks to how shocking this has been. Happ has pitched like a valuable pitcher, after the Pirates got him for basically nothing. Baseball’ll get ya.
So you know what the next section is. The next section is: what? What is this? What do the Pirates have J.A. Happ doing? I’ll do my best to try to explain.
Lately there’s been some talk about Yoenis Cespedes as an MVP candidate. Jon Paul Morosi wrote a piece advocating for Cespedes at Fox yesterday, Richard Justice wrote a similar piece for MLB.com, and those are just the ones I saw in between cleaning up randomly placed pockets of cat vomit and carting my kids around town to their various appointments. So there might be more. Articles, not cat vomit. There is definitely more cat vomit.
To check, I did that thing where you start typing a search into Google then stop and let it suggest what you might want. Here’s what my Google suggested when I typed in “Yoenis Cespedes.”
So this is now a thing, apparently. Yoenis Cespedes: MVP candidate.
I went to a baseball game in Oakland last night. This wouldn’t have any bearing on this article if not for this: I drove to the game, and in that 30-minute drive to the stadium, the Washington Nationals went from clawing their way back into some sort of contention in the NL East by beating the Mets to looking up October beachfront condo rentals. When I got in the car, there was the prospect of an interesting September division race. When I got out of the car, poof — that was all but gone. One inning, three pitchers, six walks, and six runs after the start of the top of the seventh, the score of the game was tied at 7-7, and all it took was a home run off the bat of Kirk Nieuwenhuis in the eighth to finally sink the Nationals.
If you follow either or both of these teams, yesterday’s seventh inning was an encapsulation of how the season has unfolded. The Mets have been one of the best stories in baseball; the Nats have been 2015’s poster child for the biggest gap between performance and preseason expectations. One of the most alluring things about baseball is how large season trends can play out in the microcosm of a single inning, and so the seventh inning saw a shift in win expectancy inline with the arc of the Nationals’ season, from spring training to today:
At one point, with two out and one on in the top of the seventh, the Nationals had a 99.2% expectation of winning the game. And, while late 7-1 leads are blown in games many times during the course of an entire baseball season, when they happen in this sort of context and with this kind of futility, it’s our responsibility to break them down.
Back before the 2012 season, Frank McCourt owned the Los Angeles Dodgers. He had purchased the team in 2004, inheriting a club that featured a $105 million payroll in 2003. Nearly ten years later, he sold the team to the deep-pocketed Guggenheim-led group — handing over a club that also featured a $105 million payroll. Major League Baseball revenues had doubled during McCourt’s tenure as team owner — and salaries for players increased at something close to the same rate — but the Dodgers, sitting in one of the biggest media markets in the country, stuck to the status quo after fielding one of the bigger payrolls in baseball at the beginning of the century. The Dodgers have finally caught up with the times (some would say surpassed) in terms of payroll, but while their $300-plus million payroll might seem enormous, the team would still be right in line with the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox if those two teams had not slowed their spending in recent years.
Prior to the arrival of the Dodgers’ new ownership and $8 billion cable deal, the Yankees were the only team to exceed a $200 million payroll. The Yankees crossed that threshold in 2005, but kept their spending fairly static over the following decade, only getting above $225 million once (in 2013) and falling below that mark last season. Their total outlay on players was often somewhat higher, given the luxury-tax payments the team was forced to make every season. Given the Yankees’ spending over the last decade and the Dodgers’ spending over the last few seasons, it might appear that the luxury tax is not much of a deterrent towards spending, but as Nathaniel Grow detailed back in May, the luxury tax has kept spending down at upper levels.
Around little-league parks, and even on the back fields of certain schools and organizations, you might hear a common refrain from the batting cages. “Chop wood, chop wood,” is how Bryce Harper mimics the coaches he’s heard before. The idea is that a quick, direct path to the baseball — like an ax chop — is the best way to get quickly to the ball and create the backspin that fuels the power.
Turns out, pretty much all of that is wrong.
