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Bryce Harper went and had himself a game Wednesday afternoon, and now, we can say these things, and not be lying: Harper is sitting on a career-high wRC+. He’s sitting on a career-high isolated power, and a career-high walk rate. Harper, by the way, is still 22 years old. It’s always mandatory to put that in somewhere. It’s a pretty big part of the picture.

It makes sense, then, to talk about what’s going on with Harper’s development. The world’s been waiting to see if he can ever try to catch up to Mike Trout. Ben Lindbergh has written about what seems to be a gain regarding Harper’s eye. Harper, also, has worked to calm down his swing a little bit, at the suggestion of his hitting coach and his manager. Back in April, Matt Williams said this:

Williams said the single to left was a particularly important example of what Harper needs to do to be successful and hit for a high average.

Williams liked to see Harper shooting balls the other way. Harper has long been personally obsessed with shooting balls the other way. Wednesday, the first of Harper’s three homers was slugged the other way. What you’d think is, maybe, Harper’s getting even better at using all fields. Truth be told, at least to this point, Harper’s gotten better at using just one of the fields.

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When reports emerged in January that the Yankees were intending to contest the home run milestone bonus agreement the team entered with Alex Rodriguez back in 2007, it was unclear whether or not the matter would ever actually come to a head. Following a season-long suspension for performance enhancing drug use, no one knew for sure whether Rodriguez would even make the Yankees’ opening day roster, let alone be given enough playing time to hit the six home runs necessary to tie Willie Mays at 660 (triggering the first of five potential $6 million milestone bonuses under the 2007 agreement).

Rodriguez, of course, did make the team and ended up hitting his 660th career home run on Friday evening in Boston. As a result, attention has once again focused on whether the Yankees have any realistic hope of escaping the milestone bonus agreement.

As I noted back in January, because the bonus agreement has never been released publicly, it is difficult to fully assess the Yankees’ chances of escaping the $6 million payment. However, while there is still much that we don’t know about the contract, recent developments have shed some additional light on the legal arguments the Yankees will likely rely on when attempting to avoiding paying Rodriguez under the agreement.

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The Brewers season is over. Already a mediocre team that needed to catch a lot of breaks in order to contend, Milwaukee has gotten off to an 8-18 start, watched two of their best players end up on the disabled list, and on Sunday night, they fired their manager. They currently stand 11.5 games behind the Cardinals in the NL Central race, and the season is only a month old. By the time the trade deadline rolls around, they may be 20 games out, and even the lowered bar of the second Wild Card can’t save the Brewers 2015 season. Which is why they’ve already told other teams that they’ll likely be an early seller, and are just waiting for buyers to decide it’s time to upgrade in order to start moving veterans for things that can offer more help in the future.

However, according to Buster Olney, the Brewers are hanging a not-for-sale sign on their best player.

The Brewers have made clear to other teams assessing possible trade options: They are not willing to deal catcher Jonathan Lucroy.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) May 5, 2015

This shouldn’t come as any big surprise, as even rebuilding teams have rarely moved their franchise players lately. Whether it was Felix Hernandez, Troy Tulowitzki, or Giancarlo Stanton, we just haven’t seen non-contending teams be willing to put legitimate frontline players on the market, preferring instead to build around their best players rather than use them as chips to try and stockpile a larger quantity of talent. It’s one thing to trade role players and guys on expiring contracts, but no one seems particularly interested in getting rid of the kind of player that is very hard to get back.

But I think there’s a strong case to be made that the Brewers should go against the grain here. Jonathan Lucroy is a great player, but I think the Brewers are probably better off trading him than they are keeping him.

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The modern baseball statistical analysis revolution has largely been about one thing; weeding out the noise, and getting to the root of a player’s true talent. DIPS theory, which posited that the only things that pitchers truly should be held accountable for were strikeouts, walks and homers allowed, represented a major step forward, and brought terms like BABIP and FIP into the game’s lexicon. What those new metrics assumed, however, was that all other batted balls were more or less created equal. Now, with the advent of StatCast, we all know, publicly, that is not the case. Read the rest of this entry »

If there was one overarching theme of this last offseason, it was the surprise push towards contention from a lot of teams that didn’t quite look quite ready to win. The Padres were the most aggressive unexpected buyer, eschewing rebuilding to instead load up for a run in 2015, but they weren’t the only team to decide to capitalize on the current unprecedented level of parity in the sport. Over in the AL, the White Sox made a similar series of moves, bringing in Jeff Samardzija, Melky Cabrera, Adam LaRoche, David Robertson, and Zach Duke in their offseason makeover. With Chris Sale and Jose Abreu at the top of their games, Rick Hahn decided to push in on 2015 and see if they could follow in the Royals footsteps.

The pre-season forecasts, though, never really bought into it. On Opening Day, our Playoff Odds page had the White Sox going 78-84, with just an 8% chance of winning the AL Central and a 6% chance of winning one of the two Wild Card spots; the Rangers and Twins were the only AL teams with a lower chance of reaching the postseason. There was a scenario where things broke right and the White Sox became legitimate contenders — the Astros are currently in the midst of that scenario at the moment — but it was going to require the team’s role players step up and fill some of the areas where the team was expected to get replacement level production.

That hasn’t happened.

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Over the winter, the Padres, Nationals, and Rays agreed on a big three-way trade that shipped Wil Myers to San Diego, Steven Souza and a bunch of other stuff to Tampa Bay, and a couple of prospects to Washington. Joe Ross was the only named prospect at the time of the deal, but the Nationals also received a PTBNL, who was quickly reported to be Trea Turner, the Padres first round selection from last June’s draft.

Because draft picks are not eligible to be traded for 12 months from their signing date, the Padres and Nationals are not allowed to confirm that Turner has indeed already been traded, and he remains in the Padres organization at this time. However, it’s public knowledge that Turner will be changing organizations mid-summer, creating an awkward situation where the Padres are stewarding another team’s asset. As I wrote after the trade was made and Turner was unofficially revealed as the PTBNL, this was a bad situation for all to be involved in, and likely required a rule change.

Well, as of today, that rule has officially been changed. An email has been sent to all 30 MLB teams regarding this adjustment, and reads as follows, as told to me by a source who got the email:

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A few weeks ago I took a look at Major League Baseball players’ declining share of overall league revenues, noting that the players have gone from receiving just over 56% of MLB’s revenues in 2002 to around 38% today. That post went on to identify a variety of factors that have converged to reduce the percentage of league revenues going to the players, including increased revenue sharing, MLB’s growing television revenues, and more efficient front office decision-making.

One factor that I touched upon briefly in my prior post, but that probably merited a more extended discussion, is MLB’s luxury tax. As I explained the last time around, the luxury tax has helped dampen many of the larger market franchises’ willingness to spend on payroll, as teams will now incur a fine ranging from 17.5% to 50% – depending on how many years in a row the club has exceeded the luxury tax threshold – for every dollar they spend on player salaries over $189 million per year.

Because most clubs will only raise their payroll when they anticipate that each additional dollar spent on player salary will generate more than that in added revenue, the luxury tax provides a natural disincentive for most teams to cross the payroll threshold. Now, rather believe that an extra dollar in payroll will generate at least $1.01 in added revenue, teams must instead anticipate that any increased salary obligations above $189 million will generate anywhere from $1.18 to as much as $1.51 per dollar in new revenue in order to justify the expenditure. As a result, the luxury tax has caused most of MLB’s largest market franchises – the teams that the Major League Baseball Players Association has historically relied on to help drive the free agent market – to become more financially prudent in recent years.

But even this basic account doesn’t fully reflect the impact that the luxury tax has had on the players’ declining share of league revenues, as changes to the luxury tax structure since 2002 have increased the penalties for teams exceeding the payroll threshold, while also significantly lowering the threshold as a share of the average MLB team’s revenues.

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Brady Anderson’s title within the Baltimore Orioles’ organization is Vice President of Baseball Operations. According to the team’s media guide, the 51-year-old former all-star “collaborates with Dan Duquette and manager Buck Showalter on player development and roster management.”

Anderson, who hit .256/.362/.425 over a 15-year career, isn’t your typical ex-player. He spends a lot of time in the clubhouse – his multi-faceted role includes working with hitters — but he’s equally comfortable interacting with the analytics department. A stat geek for most of his life, Anderson is well-versed in sabermetrics.

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Brady Anderson on stats and understanding value: “I’ve always been interested in statistical analysis. From the time I was five years old I was quizzed by my dad and my uncle about members of the 500-home-run club, the 3000-hit club, and a variety of other stats. It was just part of what seemed like normal conversation to me, because that was the environment in which I lived.

“I was drafted in 1985, and remember getting the Bill James “Historical Baseball Abstract.” I used to enjoy his rankings of players and his rationale for his rankings. I also grew up reading Ted Williams‘ “The Science of Hitting.” I used to travel with it and read it frequently while in the minors. Read the rest of this entry »

When MLB added a second Wild Card in each league for the 2012 season, making a version of the postseason got easier. More teams were invited into the season’s final month, even if you want to make conditioned arguments about how adding the extra teams changed the nature of in-season roster decisions. Over three seasons, we’ve had six second Wild Cards who averaged just under 90 wins per team per season. It’s a small sample as far as trends go, but the values have been lower in the National League and have generally decreased each year.

As a result, we can essentially say that the average second Wild Card will win about 90 games this year. It might be more or less, but it’s a fairly safe starting assumption. It’s an assumption you take into account when thinking about your team’s chances of making the playoffs. We’ve seen teams make the postseason with fewer wins, and in an age of increasing parity, 88 might do the trick as well. In general, a 90 win team has performed well enough that they will very likely make the playoffs under the current regime.

Which brings us to the 14-7 Houston Astros who currently lead the AL West by four games on April 30. The Astros, if you haven’t noticed, have been bad for quite a few years, and there was an expectation entering the 2015 season that they would remain relatively unimportant to the AL playoff picture. They averaged 58 wins over the previous four seasons, and while they built a team that our Playoff Odds machine projected for 78 wins in 2015, that’s a far cry from the amount needed to make the postseason, as we just learned.

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BABIP is a really hard thing to predict for pitchers. There have been plenty of attempts, sure, but nothing all that conclusive — probably because pitchers have a negligible amount of control over it. So naturally, when I found something that I thought might be able to model and estimate pitcher BABIP to a high degree of accuracy, I was very excited.

My original idea was to figure out the BABIP — as well as other batted ball stats — of individual pitches from details about the pitch itself. Velocity, movement, sequencing, and a multitude of other factors that are within the pitcher’s control play into the likelihood that a pitch will fall for a hit (even if to a very small degree). But much more than all of those, pitch location seems to be the most important factor (as well as one of the easiest to measure).

I got impressively meaningful results by plotting BABIP, GB%, FB%, wOBA on batted balls, and other stats based on horizontal and vertical location of the pitch. So I came up with models to find the probability that any batted ball would fall for a hit with the only inputs being the horizontal and vertical location (the models worked very well). I even gave different pitch types different models, since there were differences between, for example, fastballs and breaking balls. I found the “expected” BABIP of each of each pitcher’s pitches, and then I found the average of all of those expected BABIPs — theoretically, this should be the BABIP that the pitcher should have allowed.

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