Archive for Featured

Only three teams threw the ball faster, on average, than the Royals this year. Not surprising when you’ve got youth like Yordano Ventura, Greg Holland and Kelvin Herrera throwing fire on the regular.

Only one team threw the ball slower, on average, than the Giants this year. Not surprising when you have distinguished gentlemen like Tim Hudson, Ryan Vogelsong, and Jake Peavy stepping on the rubber three out of every five games.

This difference in velocities has ramifications for pitch mix, of course. The Royals threw fastballs more often than the Giants. The Giants threw breaking pitches more often than the Royals. In fact, the Giants threw more breaking pitches than anyone in baseball.

Is one team better equipped to handle the strength of the opposing team?

Read the rest of this entry »

I had slightly higher hopes for this post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased with the final result. But when I first cooked this idea up, my plan was to utilize the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards to pull velocity, horizontal movement, vertical movement, whiff rate and groundball rate to determine the nastiest pitches we’ll see in the World Series. But, there were a few problems.

While more velocity generally makes a pitch nastier, that’s not always true, especially in the case of offspeed pitches. More movement definitely makes a pitch nastier, but movement is hard to compare across a PITCHf/x leaderboard because a lot of it is dependent on arm slot and you get some funky values from guys who throw with funky motions.

So then, I was left with just whiff rate and groundball rate, but I actually kind of like that. Those are two of the best outcomes, and they’re the direct result of some of the things we weren’t able to capture, such as velocity, horizontal movement and vertical movement. The most dominant outcome of a pitch, for a pitcher, is a swing and miss. But not all guys dominate by getting whiffs, and so they don’t all pitch that way. Some guys dominate by getting weak contact, and ground balls yield the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types (grounders, flies and line drives). But the guys who really dominate are the ones who get the best of both worlds: whiffs and grounders.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few years, I’ve been pretty down on the Royals as a contender, most notably writing a pretty harsh review of their side of the James Shields trade. Then, before the season began, I stated that I didn’t see the Royals as legitimate contenders this year, even though they were becoming a trendy pick in the national media. And finally, on July 21st, I suggested that the Royals punt on 2014 and trade Shields before he gets to free agency, given that they had fallen into third place and were seven games behind the Tigers in the AL Central.

Since that last piece was published, the Royals have gone 49-24, including their current 8-0 postseason run that has let them to the World Series. A moribund franchise has been rejuvenated, and the Royals have achieved the exact result they were hoping for when they made the Shields trade in order to speed up their timeline. If the Royals had listened to me at any point along the way, they probably wouldn’t be in the World Series right now, so it’s time for some self-examination. What did I miss? Is there a lesson to be learned here?

Read the rest of this entry »

Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Twins, Astros, Red Sox, Cubs & White Sox

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

The Cubs have the deepest system I’ve written up so far and the most impact talent, with much of it at the upper levels.  There’s a case to be made that this is the best system in baseball and  it has to be in the top five, but I’ll hold off on an official determination until I’ve formally evaluated all of the candidates. The rebuilding of the organization and system is evident in looking at the types of players I rank below; a number of prospects from the 2013 July 2nd spending spree, aggressive over-slot bonuses on high upside draft prospects, solid low minors prospects acquired in trades along with hitting on nearly all the high profile, big money signings in recent years.

There’s still some position fits to work out before the fanboys will see their ideal lineups of the future in living color (see Russell and Schwarber reports for new information on that front), but the Cubs are being proactive to try to solve this, with multiple position players converting to a position of long-term need (catcher) during instructs this fall (more notes below).  There’s a reason this system seems a lot like the last team I evaluated, the Red Sox, because both are among the best systems in the game and were put together with the same kinds of principles and resources along with some of the same top executives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the National League Division Series, Giants outfielder Michael Morse met with manager Bruce Bochy and the team’s brass to talk about his spot on the team. He felt good. His oblique was finally healthy. He’d been taking full swings in batting practice. He was ready to go.

There was one problem. “I didn’t have enough at-bats,” Morse said after the Giants won Game Five of the National League Championship Series and emerged as NL champions Thursday night. “For me, I wouldn’t feel comfortable at the plate.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the late innings of of the ALCS, I had but one thought: The Orioles have no chance here. With the exception of stolen bases, that series was basically “the Royals way” in a nutshell. Get better starting pitching than you’d expect, scratch out just enough offense, receive some outstanding defense, and turn the game over to Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland for the final three innings.

The Royals haven’t discovered some new market inefficiency there, because “have good relievers” isn’t exactly cutting edge. It’s easier said than done, of course, because as difficult as it is to find one reliever like that, the Royals have come up with three of them. It’s why it’s very much selling Davis short when we refer to the deal that brought him to town as “the James Shields trade,” because while Shields has obviously pitched significantly more innings, Davis’ impact has been enormous. It’s the redundancy there that’s really incredible, because if one has an off night — which rarely ever happens — Ned Yost still has two others at his disposal.

Still, it got me thinking about how anyone could come back in the late innings against that group, and when Buster Olney’s column yesterday pointed out that the Royals were an AL-best 65-4 when leading after six innings, it really drove home how rarely such a thing happens. But there’s still that “4” out there, so it’s not like it never happens, and by diving into the Baseball-Reference innings database, we can see that they also blew a game apiece when leading after seven and eight.

So, how did it happen? How, other than waiting for the inevitable imperfections of humanity to show up, do you beat the unbeatable? Let’s break it open. First, a note: There’s actually slightly more occurrences than the six times B-R indicates. Why? Because they have it defined as “leads after X innings,” and that’s not always how baseball works. For example, the Royals could be tied or behind at the end of an inning, take the lead in the top of the inning, and then blow it in the bottom of the inning. That would be a late lead blown, but not counted because a lead was never held at the end of a full inning. Sometimes, also, the bullpen could blow a lead and be saved by the offense later.

I’ve accounted for that as much as possible, but with the understanding that there may be one or two that slipped through the cracks, here’s how you come back from a deficit against the Kansas City bullpen in the late innings. Spoiler alert: Mostly, you don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing this underneath a framed ESPN magazine cover from the 2010 baseball preview. The cover features Cliff Lee, Felix Hernandez, and Ichiro Suzuki, and right up top are these words: “Outs are in — and so are the Mariners”. It’s funny now, and it was given to me half as a joke, because of course the 2010 Seattle Mariners were a total catastrophe. But I remember the feeling, the state of things back then. The 2009 Mariners had set a UZR record, and then the front office brought in Chone Figgins and Casey Kotchman. The goal was to win by prevention, and the prevention was there, but what happened was the Mariners prevented their own scoring too and lost 101 times. Things changed rapidly for the organization. There was a missed opportunity to have defense front and center on a national stage.

We’ve never been real shy about WAR, and as such, we’ve never been real shy about the more advanced defensive metrics. FanGraphs didn’t exactly invent the concept of baseball players with good gloves, but statheads have argued for years that defensive players deserve more respect, that a guy can be incredibly valuable because of what he does in the field, instead of the box. Naturally, there’s been resistance, because hitting is a lot more visible, and nothing in the field is as valuable as a home run. And, absolutely, offensive value does have a higher ceiling than defensive value, just because of the limited opportunities. But defense, as a concept, needed a mascot. It needed a representation that would allow more people to understand how significant it can really be. Defense needed a team like the Royals.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a sort of check list you can go to when a pitcher’s performance changes. You run down the possible reasons, and if there’s no box checked, you shrug and figure a few bounces have gone differently and that was all that happened.

So what do you do when a pitcher has a breakout performance, then suffers a setback and then looks like he’s re-found what he’s lost? Especially when that pitcher doesn’t have any obvious checkmarks on the checklist? What do you say about Shelby Miller’s up-and-down year so far?

Read the rest of this entry »

Due in large part to Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, analytical baseball ideology has often sold as a necessity for low-revenue franchises to compete with teams who have vastly more resources. The A’s story was written as brains overcoming riches, and a number of teams in smaller markets decided to emulate their success. Over the past decade, the front offices most known for their analytical decision making processes inlucded teams like the A’s, Rays, Indians, Astros, and Cardinals, and because of this, Moneyball was the catch-all phrase for poor teams that used analytics to compete with teams that didn’t need it.

Except that story hasn’t been entirely true for quite a while now. It’s an easy story to tell, because low revenue teams have used these kinds of tools to allow themselves to make up for their revenue deficits, but the notion of analytics being only for small market teams is outdated and now just not correct. The Red Sox were probably the first big market team to really buy into the combination of efficient spending while maintaining a very high payroll, but the Yankees weren’t far behind, with a significant analytical department of their own. And of course, the Dodgers already hired one analytically-oriented GM, with Paul DePodesta running the team in 2004-2005, though that didn’t last.

When the Cubs new ownership wanted to build a sustainable winner, they poached Theo Epstein from Boston, and are now not too far away from being a very scary competitor for the rest of the NL Central. And now, the Dodgers have lured Rays GM Andrew Friedman out of Tampa Bay, making him the President of Baseball Operations for the team with the largest payroll in baseball. With Friedman heading west, arguably the four most historic franchises in MLB — and certainly four of the teams with the highest revenue potential — fit the mold of a Moneyball front office. This kind of structure is no longer the domain of poor somewhat less rich teams, and this transition serves to make the Dodgers an even more formidable opponent in the NL West.

Read the rest of this entry »

Evaluating The Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Twins, Astros, Red Sox & Cubs

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

The Red Sox have the deepest list yet in this series, to go with plenty of top-end talent as well.  Be sure to read the Eduardo Rodriguez report to see more about the decision the Red Sox had to make on the trade deadline, which I and other clubs found pretty interesting.  It’s a testament to amateur scouting and development to have so many top picks (8-14 on the list are all Red Sox 1st rounders) and high international bonuses all show up on the list, without many busts. You can fault Boston for relying too much on young players in 2014, but indications are they are about to spend a bunch of money this offseason and they have among the best groups of young talent in the game.

Read the rest of this entry »