Plenty has gone wrong for the Nationals in the early going. Dan Haren is basically broken, Gio Gonzalez might be and Stephen Strasburg — while pitching well — has not kept up the star pace expected of him in the early going. The offense might be just as concerning, however. Despite Bryce Harper’s continuous blossoming, a combination of injuries and underperformance has conspired to make the Nats’ offense one of the worst in the game.
A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:
After a hard-fought, closely-followed battle, Bryce Harper beat out former relief pitcher Micah Owings for the starting left field position in Washington. Okay, Owings was never really in competition to take playing time from the reigning Rookie of the Year, Jayson Werth or Adam LaRoche — the three players in positions accessible to Owings’s limited defensive upside.
But here is the deal:
B) The more time between at bats, the more a hitter struggles. (The Book.)
C) The more times a player faces a certain pitcher, the greater the advantage for the hitter — both in a game and in a career. (The Book Blog.)
All three of these elements suggest pitchers should hit, let’s say, about .145/.180/.190, or -10 wRC+ (that is, 110% worse than league average). Micah Owings — a pitcher — has, through 219 PA, hit .283/.310/.502 with 9 home runs and 14 doubles, a 104 wRC+.
Micah Owings is a good hitter. Possibly a great hitter. The Nationals have a bunch of those. But surely someone else out there could use a bench bat — or a starting outfielder — with the ability to pitch a 111 ERA- every now and then.
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Sunday was the beginning of the 2013 MLB regular season, and it kicked off with a bang, as the Astros bombed the Rangers and we all learned a lesson about the real value of a one-game playoff. Not like the stakes were the same, so the game was managed differently from how it could’ve been, but in any one given game, a team like the Houston Astros can beat a team unlike the Houston Astros. Of course, it should be noted that the difference between the Astros and the best team in baseball might be like the difference between a city’s best restaurant and a city’s 29th or 30th best restaurant. That 29th or 30th best restaurant is probably still a very good restaurant! It’s just outclassed relative to the elite. It still beats the hell out of Hardee’s.
Monday is more of a baseball extravaganza, with several games on the schedule, none of which involve the Astros. Monday feels more like a true opening day, and below, I’ve assembled some quick thoughts based on some of the early games. I didn’t watch a single inning from spring training so, for me personally, baseball couldn’t feel more fresh. It will feel like this for the rest of the day, and then tomorrow, it will feel like baseball as usual. Savor the feeling of today, or tomorrow.
As we explained yesterday in Part 1 of the series, we’re looking at the financial health of all thirty major league teams. The focus is on attendance, local TV contracts, and estimated 2013 payroll. We’re not ranking the teams one to thirty because we lack the kind of detailed information that would make such a ranking meaningful. We do, however, have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.
We’ve grouped the teams in tiers. Today we look at the ten teams in the middle.
In alphabetical order, by team name:
Due to an unfortunate data error, the numbers in this story did not include park factors upon publication. We have updated the data to include the park factors, and the data you see below is now correct. We apologize for the mistake.
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What’s all this, then? For an explanation of this series, please read the introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.
Third base is a little deeper than it used to be, and only a handful of teams have little to no hope of being productive at the position. The devil is in the details at the hot corner, as there has been very little turnover among the top 20 teams here. Teams that have quality reserves or prospects coming up the pipeline see a bump here, as we’re looking holistically at the position and not just at the nominal starter. This is an important consideration across the diamond, but particularly so at third given how physically demanding the position is. Only six third basemen suited up in 150 or more games last year. Compare that to 13 at second base and 11 at first base and shortstop, and it becomes clear that depth is important at third base. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have adequate depth, hence the bump for the teams that do.
Let’s get on to the rankings!
Last season, after joining the Nationals, Gio Gonzalez threw 3,198 pitches in the regular season, plus 209 more in the playoffs. That is an awful lot of pitches, but this article isn’t about that sort of pitcher abuse. It’s about a different sort of pitcher abuse to which the headline can also misleadingly refer. Of those thousands and thousands of pitches thrown by Gonzalez in 2012, many were thrown to opposing pitchers. It is on those pitches that we’re going to focus.
Pitchers have a lot of success when they’re pitching against opposing pitchers as batters. This is because pitchers are pitchers and not batters, and pitchers who are better at batting than pitching tend to become batters instead. Last season, pitchers struck out in 37% of their plate appearances. They struck out in nearly 42% of their plate appearances that didn’t result in sacrifice bunts. Collectively, they posted a .162 OBP. Collectively, they posted a .165 slugging percentage. Pitchers suck at hitting! You come to FanGraphs for the cutting-edge analysis.
Spring training games kick off today with four tilts: two in the Grapefruit League and two in the Cactus League. All 30 teams will be in action in Saturday. Same for Sunday, when live television broadcasts start. That’s right. Major League Baseball, live on your television for the first time since October.
Well, if you live in the right place and have the right cable and satellite operators.
If you’ve been following my posts over the past several months, you know what I’m talking about. I wrote about every nook and cranny of the baseball-on-television landscape. I dissected the local TV contracts for all 30 teams. I analyzed the Dodgers’ proposed new TV deals. I examined News Corp.’s billion-dollar investment in the Yankees’ YES Network. I explained how the new revenue-sharing program in the collective bargaining agreement is flexible enough to capture the new local TV revenue. I talked about MLB’s blackout policy and the lawsuit trying to put a stop to it. I looked at the dispute between the Orioles and the Nationals over rights fees from MASN and the one between Fox Sports San Diego and several cable companies that kept the Padres off hundreds of thousands of televisions in San Diego last season.
As the 2013 spring season gets underway, many of these disputes remain unresolved and new ones are on the horizon. Plus, there’s a growing sense that the extraordinarily rich local TV deals we’ve seen in the past few years are reaching a tipping point. That is, that the live sports programming bubble may about to burst.
This is, as you may have surmised from the title, the third in a series on trades that players have vetoed, as is sometimes their right. You can find the first two parts here and here.
There’s plenty of debate out there — you’ve seen some of it — regarding the size of the Major League Baseball active roster. You might also know it as the 25-man roster, because the roster is to include 25 men. There are people who want a 26th man, and a 27th man, and there are people who want to eliminate the 25th man. As is, there’s the related argument over whether the last spot should go to a bench bat or a seventh reliever. Most teams (all teams?) opt for seven relievers, much to a stathead’s consternation. But between a bench bat and a reliever there exists a compromise: a bat/pitcher hybrid. In theory, this is a stathead’s dream. In reality, there’s been Brooks Kieschnick. There aren’t many people who can hit well and pitch well, relative to the greater population.
Kieschnick is gone, leaving behind a .760 career OPS and a 4.59 career ERA. He hasn’t actually appeared in the majors since 2004, but now we could be seeing the passing of the torch: