Andrelton Simmons is solid with the glove. He makes all the plays he should. Andrelton Simmons is spectacular. You should see his arm. Really, though, Andrelton Simmons is spectacularly solid.
Ninety-nine — a number rarely seen once, let alone multiple times from the same pitcher. In his last start, Mauricio Cabrera touched 99 mph enough for teammates charting in the stands to chuckle and shake their heads in disbelief.
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Win probability said the Reds had a 4.3 percent chance of winning when Devin Mesoraco stepped to the plate against Craig Kimbrel. There were two outs and nobody on base. Win probability obviously didn’t know Craig Kimbrel was pitching.
According to Tom Tango’s run frequency calculator, given Kimbrel’s career .154/.240/.208 line against, a run is expected to score off Kimbrel 2.3 percent of the time with two outs and the bases empty. Actual win probablity, then, is more like 1.0 percent, considering Atlanta would be expected to win half the times Kimbrel gets out of the inning with a tie.
Naturally, then, Mesoraco and Shin-Soo Choo hit back-to-back home runs, and the Reds left with likely the most improbable walk-off win of the season.
After a dominant spring, many hoped Julio Teheran had turned a corner. His disappointing 2012 campaign was attributed to a variety of mechanical changes, but offseason reports suggested Teheran had corrected those flaws. His tour of the Grapefruit League appeared to validate winter reports, as he struck out 35 batters in 26 innings and posted 1.04 ERA. While Teheran’s spring was cause for optimism, his first start of the regular season didn’t go so well, and the performance suggests there’s still more work to be done.
Last season, we discussed Teheran’s inconsistencies. Entering 2012, Teheran was ranked FanGraphs’ fifth best prospect in baseball, but he struggled to live up to the hype. To pinpoint the cause of his problems, I watched a random start from the 2011 season. On July 26 against the Durham Bulls, Teheran’s fastball velocity sat 93-95 MPH and frequently neared triple digits. His curveball, while erratic, showed promise. It featured a tight 11-5 break and, when thrown well, caused the Triple-A Rays to flail. His changeup was his best offering. After he established his fastball, hitters were helpless against his low to mid 80s changeup. His three pitch arsenal was electric and justified Marc Hulet’s ranking. Here are a couple of GIFs of Teheran pitching against the Mets in September of 2011, so you can see the movement for yourself.
There are, I imagine, several questions one could ask about Roy Halladay. Does he eat breakfast? does he eat granola for breakfast? Which is his favorite breakfast granola? But, regarding Halladay as a baseball pitcher, there is one particularly pressing question: will he ever get back to being what he was? It would’ve been nearly impossible for Halladay to conclusively answer that question on Wednesday in Atlanta, and indeed, in the aftermath of Halladay’s start, the question remains unanswered, conclusively.
The good news, if you missed it: Halladay finished with nine strikeouts. The bad news, if you missed it: the rest. Halladay allowed five runs in 3.1 innings, and he became the first pitcher in recorded baseball history to record nine strikeouts in so brief an outing. Of course, we know better than to look at innings thrown — more meaningful is the number of batters faced, and in that regard Halladay’s start was not unprecedented. Four times before, pitchers have struck out nine of 15 batters, while Halladay faced 19 Braves. Dan Osinski once struck out ten of 16 batters. Just last April, Marco Estrada struck out nine of 17 batters. But anyway, this isn’t about establishing an historical context — this is about Halladay, and what he is, and what just happened.
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!
When I originally published my findings around CLIFFORD — my metric for predicting players that are at a higher risk of experiencing a collapse in their wOBA (defined as a drop of at least .30 points of wOBA) — I presented a limited number of players for 2013. The list only included six players that qualified under the criteria. As a reminder, players that experienced a significant decline in three out of four metrics (Z-Contact%, FA%, UBR, Spd) were tagged as CLIFFORD candidates. These players had 3.4 times the odds of collapse (53% versus 25% for non-CLIFFORD players).
The single largest driver of collapse was change in Z-Contact% — the percent of pitches in the strike zone that a batter swings and makes contact with. Hitters who saw their Z-Contact% decline by at least 1.4% had 1.68 times the odds of collapsing than those that did not experience such a decline. Since there were far more players that qualified with their Z-Contact% than the full CLIFFORD criteria I thought it would be helpful to share that data with everyone.
Behold!
After the Braves acquired Justin Upton, uniting him and brother B.J. Upton on the same team, our very own Jeff Sullivan got curious about brothers playing together, and presented some salient information on the brother effect. Or more to the point, the lack thereof. I became curious about it much after that (I’m slow), and while Jeff already did the pertinent research, nobody has ever accused me of doing pertinent research, so I thought today we could look at the best seasons put together by brothers on the same team.
Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, are being released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Blue Jays / Brewers / Cardinals / Cubs / Diamondbacks / Dodgers / Giants / Mariners / Marlins / Mets / Nationals / Orioles / Padres / Phillies / Pirates / Rangers / Rays / Reds / Red Sox / Rockies / Royals / Tigers / Twins / White Sox / Yankees.
Batters
Basically every starter for Atlanta — plus the Francisco/Johnson platoon at third — appears likely to produce something between two and four wins above replacement. For obvious reasons, that’s more of a good thing than a bad one — on account of, I mean, more wins is better than fewer wins. If there is a downside to having such a balanced roster, it’s that upgrading at midseason is more challenging. Last season, for example, the Chicago White Sox had the blackest of possible holes at third base. Therefore, their late-June acquisition of Kevin Youkilis represented a considerable improvement over the status quo. As of now, the possibility that the Braves will have such a glaring weakness is on the low-ish end of things.
Posing some difficulty to those who would prefer to draw strong conclusions about Atlanta based on these projections is what one might call, were he/she in the mood, the Brian McCann Shoulder Situation. The very good Braves catcher had surgery on his right shoulder in October — of which procedure Dan Szymborski’s math computer is entirely unaware. Reports suggest that McCann should be ready by mid-April, but even that timetable is liable to futz around with McCann’s “real” projection for 2013.