Back in my day — the mid-2000s — baseball was a simpler game. Batters socked dingers, with or without the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Teams batted slap hitters second, fast hitters first, and aging sluggers third. Catchers were valued by their bat and their throwing arm, none of this framing nonsense. And pitchers? Pitchers helped everybody out by throwing fastballs all the time, particularly on the first pitch. Seriously, take a look at this graph:

Year after year, pitchers have examined the mix of pitches they throw to lead off at-bats and decided to lop a few fastballs off the top. It’s not quite monotonically decreasing; there have been tiny upticks in a few years, and 2008 was lower, potentially due to classification issues in the first year of data. But this is as close as a trend can get to slapping you in the face.

The first pitch of an at-bat isn’t always the most important one — in a 3–2 count, one borderline pitch can be the difference between a baserunner and an out — but the difference between a 1–0 count and an 0–1 count is huge. That’s why pitchers have historically leaned on fastballs, which are easier to control; throwing a pitch outside the zone is a sure way to end up behind in the count.
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Pitchers are scary. I know this because I recently watched an outing by Matt Brash, who, despite his nonexistent command that day, used a scorching heater and two breaking balls to stymie a formidable Astros lineup. He walked six, but those free passes went along with five strikeouts and just two hits allowed. The Mariners won by a score of 7 to 2. So it goes.

Pitchers are scary, and they’re getting scarier, in large part because they’ve developed the ability to throw harder and harder. It probably doesn’t even bear repeating at this point, but because it’s the subject we’re on, let’s refresh ourselves. Back in 2008, the first year with PITCHf/x data, pitchers averaged 91.8 mph on their four-seam fastballs. Last season, they averaged 93.8. That the league as a whole has gained two miles per hour is indicative of substantial change.

It’s 2022 now. It’s early, but so far, pitchers have been averaging 93.9 mph on their fastballs, for an uptick of 0.1 mph. Such a small difference might not seem like much, or something we should focus on right now. But this is merely a cursory glance. We haven’t even separated the starters from the relievers, and it’s the latter group that most people associate with triple-digit wizardry. Are bullpens hiding the fact that rotations aren’t quite stretched out yet due to an abbreviated spring? Let’s find out:

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The Colorado Rockies are projected to be gobsmackingly bad in 2022. Look no further than the summary of this season’s positional power rankings: They have three positions that rank 30th and six below 20th, which works out to a cumulative last-place finish. Most of it traces back to a lack of certifiable talent on Colorado’s roster. But some of it, inevitably, is a function of Coors Field. Today, I will mainly focus on the fact that at home, the Rockies allow lots and lots of runs. The common thinking is that this is because Coors is an environment conducive to home runs. While true, there’s another factor that arguably matters more. Check out this graph:

When a fly ball or line drive is hit at Coors, the resulting .459 BABIP has led all of major league baseball by a laughably wide margin for the past few years. The gap between the Rockies in first place and the second-place Red Sox (.421) is equal to that between second place and the 15th-place Orioles (.393). If you’re wondering why, the outfield at Coors is absolutely enormous, so much so that it’s hard to believe just three men patrol it. The thin air helps the ball travel, but crucially, there’s also a lot of space for it to land. It’s a two-part mechanism that captures why offense can get out of control in the Rockies’ home park. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, there was a question raised on Twitter that sparked a good amount of discussion:

Which is most important for a hitter?

— Jason Ochart (@JasonOchart) March 4, 2022

It’s a straightforward premise with a not-so-straightforward answer. Bat-to-ball skills came out on top, but there’s a convincing case for each option. Bat speed matters most due to a strong correlation between exit velocity and overall production. Bat-to-ball skills matter most because without a sufficient rate of contact, it’s difficult to translate raw power into in-game power. Swing decisions matter most because good ones lead to favorable counts, which in turn lead to favorable results.

This author leans toward bat speed. It’s also the option that received the fewest amount of votes. This isn’t to say one side is in the wrong — the truth is that all three skills are integral to offensive production — but I’m here to defend what seemed like an unpopular choice. As far as I can comprehend, the remaining two are predicated on, or at least amplified by, the existence of bat speed.

Onto the case! It’s a little unorthodox, though, because I didn’t start off to prove a point. Before seeing that poll, I’d been working on a metric to evaluate a hitter’s swing decisions. It didn’t turn out as hoped, so I’ve put it on hold for now, but at least all that effort didn’t go to waste, because how hitters perform according to that metric indirectly reveals the importance of bat speed. Specifically, I’m going to narrow in on 0–0 counts, for three reasons: They’re the most ubiquitous; this article can’t go on forever; and the numbers get a bit wonky in other counts. See, there’s a reason why it didn’t work out. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re still in a relatively new era of pitch design. Just this past year, we saw several successful pitchers embrace a sweeping breaking ball. Last month, Justin Choi wrote about one of those pitchers, Julio Urías, and noted that his new sweeper generates a great number of popups and lift. It’s not just Urías; in general, sweepers have a tendency to generate balls hit in the air at a rather skewed clip:

It’s strange behavior not just for a non-fastball, but for a breaking pitch especially; as you can see, sweepers have nearly double the popup rate of their fellow breaking balls:

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This past Saturday, as part of the ongoing collective bargaining agreement negotiations, Major League Baseball sent its second proposal on core economic issues to the Major League Baseball Players Association. We’ve already covered how the two sides differ on pre-arbitration compensation, and examined how changing the arbitration eligibility rules would alter player salaries based on recent arbitration awards. MLB and the MLBPA have also laid out proposals regarding the competitive balance tax, proposals that would have strikingly different effects on team spending.

To compare the two approaches, I started with the actual tax regime from the previous CBA, which was in effect from 2017 through ’21. I made one modification: the abbreviated 2020 season led the league and the union to bilaterally amend the CBA to drop the competitive balance tax for that season. Payrolls also ended up being quite different than their original projections due to the 60-game slate. For the purposes of this analysis, I’ve turned each payroll into a full-season number and calculated the tax as if 2020 were a regular year (hopefully, how the new CBT handles a pandemic will not be relevant for future seasons). Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t tell you with any kind of certainty when the 2022 season will start or how many games will be played. I can’t even definitively say if there will be a season at all. But one thing seems nearly inevitable: When we have baseball, it’s not going to be identical to the product we saw last year. For one, the designated hitter, used for the shortened 2020 season in the National League, appears likely to become a permanent part of both leagues, ending the doctrinal schism between the junior and senior circuits. Another likely difference? The playoff structure.

It’s no secret that the owners are highly interested in expanding the playoffs again. Over at The Athletic, Kaitlyn McGrath, David O’Brien, and Katie Woo teamed up to discuss the various goings-on here. The owners have proposed expanding the playoffs to 14 teams, with only the team with the best record in each league getting a bye and everyone else thrown into a best-of-three Wild Card series. The players, meanwhile, have proposed conceding an expanded playoff structure of 12 teams, with multiple byes for top teams.

From the standpoint of the owners’ interests, the best teams winning often isn’t necessarily the ideal outcome. The World Series championship is basically a MacGuffin. MLB doesn’t need it to actually be important, it just needs the public to believe it is. And since the public appears to believe that the best team will win a short series far more often than it actually does, the more teams you can stuff into a postseason without making it seem like chance (rather than talent) is driving the outcome, the better. Who cares if a 107-win team loses two of three games to an 83-win team? They were probably chokers anyway! Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I released a study of the average compensation that players who qualify for Super Two arbitration receive in their pre-free-agency years. Today, I’m replicating the same study for players who reached standard arbitration. This should help add numerical context to the negotiations between the league and the MLBPA around pre-free-agency compensation – though those negotiations aren’t going well at the moment.

As a reminder, I’m looking at the production and subsequent-year salaries of every player since 2013 to establish a rule of thumb for what players can expect to receive in arbitration given their production in the preceding year. The methodology will follow, but first, here’s the high-level summary of what players have received based on their service time, position, and production:

This table displays the amount of money a given player should make above the minimum salary based on who they are and what they did. Just as with the Super Two numbers, this broadly makes sense – players receive less per unit of production than they would in free agency, but their compensation gets close and closer to free agency levels (roughly $6.5 million above minimum salary per WAR) as they go further into arbitration. Read the rest of this entry »

One major point of contention in this offseason’s collective bargaining impasse is compensation for young players. In the two sides’ competing proposals, the existing Super Two system, which each year awards an additional year of arbitration to some pre-arb players with two-plus years of service time, has come up repeatedly. Whether it’s being replaced with an algorithmic solution, increased pay for some players based on performance, or an expansion of arbitration within the two-plus group, compensating these pre-arb but multi-year players is a key point of debate as the lockout wears on.

If we want to understand this debate, we need to understand how Super Two players have been compensated in the existing system. Without that context, the dispute can feel more theoretical than consequential, and it is obviously very consequential to the players involved. To that end, I decided to look at the last eight years of Super Two awards and come up with a rough heuristic for how their compensation relates to their production in those years. From there, I’ve created some rules of thumb, which I’ll share with you here before we get into the nitty-gritty details of how I did the calculations. Here it is, separated out by player type:

This table displays the amount of money a given player should make above the major league minimum based on how many times they’ve been through the arbitration process, their position, and their previous year’s production. Broadly speaking, the numbers make sense — players receive less per unit of production than they would in free agency, but their compensation gets closer and closer to free agency levels (roughly $6.5 million above minimum salary per WAR) as they go further into arbitration. Now let’s talk about how I got to these numbers, and the merits (and limits) of using this style of calculation to model arbitration awards. Read the rest of this entry »

This time last year, I investigated where vertical approach angle (VAA) seems to matter most. The short answer: at the top of the strike zone for four-seam fastballs and at the bottom of the zone for sinkers and two-seam fastballs. This piece, which is adapted from a presentation I did as part of the 2022 PitcherList PitchCon, will provide much-needed additional context, like benchmarking and watermelon-colored heat-map-style graphics.

For the uninitiated — which could be many of you — VAA is the angle at which a pitch approaches home plate… vertically. Despite its usefulness, the concept has experienced slow uptake in the public sphere. I think that’s largely due to a lack of data, which, for nerds like me too entrenched in baseball Twitter, has shrouded the metric in mystery. Why are scouts and college baseball R&D departments valuing VAA so highly, why have I barely heard of it, and how can I find it?

To answer the last question: Statcast is granular enough that, fortunately, we can calculate VAA using physics. So, let’s calculate it! Thanks to Baseball Prospectus‘ Harry Pavlidis (who credits baseball’s renowned physicists), here are the equations: Read the rest of this entry »