The 2013 season was a banner season for players going on the disabled list. The DL was utilized 2,538 times, which was 17 more than the previous 2008 high. In all, players spent 29,504 days on the DL which is 363 days more than in 2007. Today, I take a quick look at the 2013 DL data and how it compares to previous seasons.

To get the DL data, I used MLB’s Transaction data. After wasting too many hours going through the data by hand, I have the completed dataset available for public consumption.  Enjoy it, along with the DL data from previous seasons. Finally, please let me know of any discrepancies so I can make any corrections.

With the data, it is time to create some graphs. As stated previously, the 2013 season set all-time marks in days lost and stints. Graphically, here is how the data has trended since 2002:

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, Jack Moore reviewed Josh Johnson’s inability to get hitters out while pitching from the stretch. Johnson and the Jays were very much aware of the situation, but even still, it did not improve as the season went on. In the end, Johnson limited batters to a .315 wOBA and a .307 BABIP when he worked out of a full wind-up, while opposing batters had a .440 wOBA and a .450 BABIP when Johnson worked out of the stretch. His BABIP while pitching from the stretch was 73 points higher than any other pitcher that made at least 15 starts in 2013.

The simple answer this dramatic split would be to simply point at Johnson’s BABIP and say he was unlucky. If one were to review the video from the first inning of his July 27th start against Houston, one could certainly believe that:
Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Brice is a legitimate prospect. The Marlins spent $205,000 to sign him out of high school in 2010, and he was ranked as the sixteenth-best farmhand in the Miami organization by Baseball America coming into the 2013 season, an area of prospect lists he will likely to continue to reside in this offseason. He’s just 21, has two pitches that flash plus, and has a prototypical pitcher’s body and smooth, easy, delivery.

He also has 190 career walks in 279 2/3 professional innings, including 82 in 113 frames in 2013. That’s a career 14.88% walk rate and a 15.16% mark in 2013, a number that was actually a step back from 2012 (14.08%) even though he was repeating the Low-A level (his ERA also shot up from 4.35 to 5.73, and his K-rate fell from 25.26% to 20.52%. Certainly, this past season did not bring the young righthander much good news.

Plenty of pitching prospects pair tantalizing stuff with frustrating inabilities to throw strikes, but Brice (whom I saw five different times in 2013, a virtue of living 45 minutes from NewBridge Bank Park) is an especially frustrating case because, as I said above, his delivery is one of his strengths. In this piece, I’m going to examine the root of his control problems and tie it to some more general and important lessons about the process behind throwing strikes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Players are sent to the Arizona Fall League for all sorts of reasons. The MLB-owned prospect-laden fall league serves as a domestic winter league, and so teams use it as they wish. But once you are selected as an all-star, an AFL Rising Star, you’ve got a unique stamp of approval, something akin to being an all-star in a league of all-stars. And now that the Rising Stars game has been around since 2006, we have some data to see exactly what that selection means for a prospect.

Some teams send players to Arizona because they were injured during the year and need to build up arm strength, innings pitched, or plate appearances. Some teams send players to try out a new position. Some teams send fast-track prospects from the low minors so that they preview what play in the high minors will look like. Some teams send polished picks straight from the college ranks so that they can skip a level on their way to the bigs. Some teams send prospects they might like to trade so that they might look better to future trade partners after some time in the offensive-friendly league. Most teams send players that face the Rule 5 draft if they aren’t moved to the forty-man roster.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working on an interactive tool that allows you to create spray charts using Game Day data from the past two years for a few weeks now. I’ve always loved the Katron Batted Ball tool, and it’s been a great resource of mine for years. However, I wanted to put something together that was a bit more interactive, allowed for more filtering, and made side-by-side comparisons easier.

Our writers here at FanGraphs have been kind enough to play around with it and offer suggestions. After some tweaks I am ready to officially release the tool into the wild so that anyone can use it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk about why I love Jamey Carroll. He has had — like most of us would like — his best years after the age of 30; he has played every position except catcher, including an inning of scoreless relief in 2013; he’s short; he spells his name humorously; and he plays a cop in this music video (therabouts of 1:10).

But what impresses me most about him is his rare combination of no power and great plate discipline (as seen here here). There is almost no threat of a homer and only a mild threat of a double when he walks to the plate, but he still induces a walk rate near 10%. Carroll walks more than Robinson Cano and Adrian Gonzalez not because pitchers fear him, but because — as anyone who’s watched Carroll can attest — the 5-foot-11 infielder fights off a half-dozen bad pitches until he finds one he can pop for a single.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the season, I put up a three-part series (1, 2, and 3) that explained how linearly-weighted stats like wOBA, while useful for comparing players to each other, don’t necessarily reflect each player’s true contribution to their team’s run scoring.  You see, the weights used to calculate wOBA are based on league averages.  So, for a team with league average breakdowns in walk rate, singles rate, home run rate, etc., wOBA (and its offspring, wRC+) ought to work very well in figuring out how valuable a player is (or would be) to an offense.  However, when it comes to particularly bad or good offenses, or to those with unusual breakdowns, wOBA will lose some of its efficacy.

Why?  There are synergistic effects in offenses to consider.  First of all, if a team gets on base a lot, there will be more team plate appearances to go around, which of course gives its batters more chances to contribute.  Second of all, if the team gets on base a lot, a batter’s hits are generally worth more, because they’ll tend to drive in more runs.  And, of course, once the batter gets on base in such a team, it will be likelier that there will be a hit (or series of hits) to drive him in.  The reverse of all three points is true in a team that rarely gets on base.

But it goes even beyond that.  Let’s say Team A gets on base 40% of the time, and Team B gets on only 20%, but their balances of the ways they get on base are equal (e.g. each hits 7x as many singles as they do HRs) .  A home run is going to be worth something like 14% more to Team A, due to more runners being on base.  However, to Team B, a home run is worth over ten times as much as a walk, whereas to Team A, it’s worth only about 5 times as much.  That’s because Team A has a much better chance of sustaining a rally that will eventually drive in that walked batter.  Team B will be much more reliant on home runs for scoring runs.

Read the rest of this entry »

“We know we’re going to strike out. That’s just a given with guys who have power. And we have a lot of guys who can hit the ball out of the park. And that kind of goes hand in hand. But you look at some of the studies — and our guys have looked at them — and there’s not a direct correlation with strikeouts and offense.”

— Atlanta general manager Frank Wren, interviewed by Jayson Stark on 2/18/13

This quote comes from Alex Remington’s piece on these very pages back in April. When the Braves finished constructing their roster — a roster similar to what we see now — there were questions as to whether the team would strike out too much to make a run at the postseason. Well, we’ve now reached the postseason, and the Braves are still here. And they’re still striking out too, averaging over 10 Ks a game so far. They also led the NL in home runs, an achievement they were expected to sniff given their lineup. This was kind of the plan from the beginning — strike out a fair amount, but counter that with a good deal of power.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, Dave Cameron wrote a piece on RE24, explaining that, because RE24 measures offensive production with respect to the specific base-out state, one could compare it to a context-neutral offensive metric, such as Batting runs, in order to measure the effects of situational hitting.

Situational hitting is a vague term often used to laud making outs as long as it moves the runner up a base, but as I see it, all the phrase means is hitting differently depending on the situation. That is, good “situational hitting” is distributing your hits and extra base hits into the times that you hit when runners are on base, and especially in scoring position.

Subtracting Batting Runs (or Bat) from RE24 works as a good measure of situational hitting because it compares the value of the context-neutral event (single, strikeout, home run, etc) with the value of the actual change in base-out state. A single is worth more in certain situations; that “more” is measured using this method.

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday night, Rays manager Joe Maddon pinch hit James Loney for right-handed Sean Rodriguez. After a foul knubber to the right, Loney went all walk-off on Tommy Hunter.

But as much as pinch-hit walk-off home runs are the soup of Hollywood executives, they are the rarest of meats in the MLB reality. In fact, pinch hitting is most often a choice between lesser evils — a choice between a bad wOBA or a terrible wOBA.

A closer look at the last five seasons of pinch hitting reveals success has not between distributed evenly, and the effectiveness of of some pinch-hitting efforts may be a product of systematic choices rather just tough breaks.
Read the rest of this entry »