Archive for Featured

Last summer, I saw Joey Votto pop out.

I traveled to Chicago, as I do every summer, to enjoy the city and catch a couple Cubs games at Wrigley Field. The Cincinnati Reds were in town and Jeff Samardzija was pitching for the Cubs. In Votto’s first at-bat against Samardzija, he doubled. In his second at-bat, Votto walked. But in the fourth inning, Samardzija got Votto to pop out to third base. I immediately recognized what had happened. Nobody I was with quite understood why I was so excited. I explained to them how Joey Votto doesn’t pop out to the infield. It ended up being his only infield fly of 2013. He did it one time in 2012. He did it one time in 2011. He didn’t do it at all in 2010.

I’ve been to a ton of baseball games. I’ve never seen a pitcher throw a perfect game, or even a no-hitter. I’ve never seen a batter hit for the cycle. But I have seen Joey Votto pop out. And as lame as it may sound, I contend that pop out is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen at a baseball game in person, alongside Greg Maddux’s 3,000th strikeout, Manny Ramirez hitting three homers and Lou Pineilla kicking his hat all over the infield.

After attending Monday’s game in Cleveland between the Indians and the Boston Red Sox, I can add another statistical quirk to the list of coolest things I’ve seen in person at a baseball game: an Immaculate Inning.
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This week, one of the key events on the baseball calendar takes place: the annual Rule 4 draft. Yup, that’s what it’s technically called, but it’s better known as the amateur draft, with 1,200 high school, college and junior college players hearing their names called over the three days of proceedings. Unlike the football and basketball drafts, the baseball version takes place a bit under the radar, with all but the most hardcore fans unfamiliar with the vast majority of the draftable players.

This is understandable, as all but the rarest of exceptions among players are not seen at the major league level for a while, unlike the instant gratification of the football and basketball drafts. This isn’t to say that the events of later this week aren’t vital to the short, intermediate and long-term future of all 30 clubs. On the contrary; the draft remains the cheapest way to turn a club around, though it does take time. There is a lot of player-specific draft content around this week, so let’s take a different tack and look at the process, the people involved – the who’s, what’s and where’s surrounding the baseball draft. Read the rest of this entry »

Among starting pitchers with at least 40 innings, here are the biggest increases and increasers in strikeout rate since 2013, by percentage points:

• Jon Lester, +9.5%
• Zack Greinke, +7.7%
• Jason Hammel, +7.3%
• Brandon McCarthy, +7.3%
• Garrett Richards, +6.9%

The Red Sox are playing well again, which means we get to write positive things about them. Among the most positive things has beenJon Lester, who’s taken a step forward after having taken a step back. Lester, for a couple years, posted ace-like numbers. The following three years he lost a lot of strikeouts, but now he’s back to the old level and then some, carrying what’s otherwise been an inconsistent starting unit. For Lester, it’s a good strategy in what remains a contract year — play better baseball. After all, better baseball means better baseball money.

An increase like Lester’s causes one to dig around for potential explanations. It’s not that he’s really throwing harder. It’s not like he’s dramatically changed his pitch mix. It’s not a matter of getting ahead more. Between 2011 and 2013, 29% of Lester’s pitches thrown were with two strikes. This year, he’s at 30%. But over those three years, under 18% of those two-strike pitches turned into strikeouts. This year, he’s at 24%. That’s a change, and it might lead you somewhere else.

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For the Astros, Jon Singleton can be bad, and better than what the team has been running out there. To date, Astros first basemen have combined to be worth -1.0 WAR, worst in baseball by most of a win. No, the same players don’t project to be that bad going forward, but they certainly don’t project well, and Singleton’s promotion has been a while coming. The platoon that’s played was always intended to be a placeholder, and the place no longer needs to be held.

Yet the Astros don’t just hope for Singleton to be tolerably mediocre. He’s one of their top prospects, maybe a tier below George Springer, and he’s 22 years old until September. Most significantly, Singleton has had a huge campaign in Triple-A after struggling through a difficult and sometimes miserable 2013. Singleton’s made a leap forward, and this one is seemingly pretty easy to explain. That also makes it easy to buy into.

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To begin:

Wow. That’s a pretty boring GIF, huh? J.A. Happ threw that pitch and Omar Infante fouled it off. Nothing to see here.

Unless, that is, you already know what happened in this at bat. The Omar Infante in this GIF doesn’t know it quite yet, but something terrible is about to happen to him.
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If you missed the inaugural post of The Best Of FanGraphs, you can do so here. In case you don’t feel like clicking through though, here is how this post is structured:

We’ll pull from the whole FanGraphs family, picking 10-15 stories that we feel you really should read before the week draws to a close. The links are color coded — green for FanGraphs, burnt sienna for RotoGraphs, purple for NotGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community. They are listed in this order as well in each day, just for the sake of consistency.

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Four weeks ago, I introduced Expected Run Differentials, using the various linear weights tools we have on the site to construct a metric to evaluate a team’s performance without any timing or sequencing factors. Essentially, this method just counts up the context-neutral value of positive or negative events a team allows, and gives us an expected result if every team had distributed those events in the same manner. While run differential strips timing out of the conversion from runs to wins, this construct strips out timing from the runs themselves, and gives us the most sequencing-free look at a team’s overall performance to date.

Since it’s been nearly a month, let’s go ahead and update the numbers and look at what we can learn from them. There’s a lot of information in the table, and each column is sortable, so you can see where teams stand either by runs scored or allowed, expected runs scored or allowed, run differential or expected differential, or the differences in each section. The table is presented by expected run differential, from best to worst, and a reminder that the differences are set so that positive numbers are always favorable for the team.

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The other week when I wrote about pitches that come in well out of the zone and what happens with those pitches, some discussion in the comments focused on the opposite – what happens right down the chute? If a pitcher is wasting 0-2 pitches, surely he’s firing down the center on 3-0, and if pitchers sometimes miss wildly outside, they probably miss to the meat of the plate on occasions, too.

There have already been 2,535 pitches thrown in 3-0 counts this season (2,227 if we exclude intentional walks), according to the awesome new HeatMaps here at Fangraphs, and so our knowledge of what happens when pitchers are far behind has a solid base. And thanks to data since 2012, we know why pitches have a strong incentive to fight back from 3-0, even with one strike – there is, obviously, an appreciable drop in expected on-base percentage in a 3-1 count, and there’s little chance the batter swings 3-0, anyway.

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“You should go look at the research again and see what the charts say,” Chris Young, the Seattle Mariners pitcher, emphatically told me one afternoon this season. We were talking about high fastballs and he didn’t agree with something I’d said.

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I’m pleased to announce that we’ve rolled out new heatmaps to the site!

There are a number of ways to customize each heatmap:

– Options to choose either a traditional 5×5 grid or a more granular 10×10 grid.

– Choose a heatmap from the viewpoint of either the pitcher or the batter.

– For the 10×10 grid, you can choose your own level of smoothing, which will change the weighting of adjacent buckets.

– Filtering on single or multiple years, handedness, and count.

– A variety of different stats to choose from.

The color grading on the heatmaps is always compared to an MLB average player for the selected time period and handedness.