The big news associated with the MVP award announced today will be the winners, especially this year with the Trout vs. Cabrera debate. Besides the winners, the below average players who receive votes get a bit of press. Today, I will look at another group of hitters, those who had a good season, but may not get a single MVP vote.
A couple of years ago, I wondered why David Ross was taking such small contracts to back up Brian McCann in Atlanta when he seemed to be good enough to start elsewhere. Whether it was a lack of interest from other teams or Ross’ desire to stay in Atlanta, it puzzled me. When he was eligible for free agency again this season, I figured he would probably just stay in in Atlanta as he had before, since he appeared disinclined to play hardball with his employers at contract time.
However things turned out behind closed doors in the meetings that did or did not happen, Ross surprised many people by reportedly signing a two-year, $6.2 million contract with the Red Sox this weekend. Why the Braves let him go and the Red Sox are both a bit puzzling, but, as we will see, Ross, the seemingly eternal backup, compares favorably to a good number of starting catchers in the league.
With very rare exception, walks are bad, for the pitcher and for the pitcher’s team. Sometimes a pitcher will walk an opposing hitter on purpose, but sometimes that’s not even the right thing to do. Walks are just bad, as a general principle. But, of course, some walks are worse than others. There’s an entire spectrum, from okay walks to awful walks, from forgivable walks to unforgivable walks. It’s usually worse to walk a guy on four pitches, unintentionally. It’s usually worse to walk a guy with the bases loaded. It’s usually worse to walk an opposing pitcher, since pitchers are like the worst hitters ever. Now combine all three of those things.
It seems to me — and, upon checking, it seems to Dave Cameron — that the most unforgivable walk would be a four-pitch walk of the opposing pitcher with the bases loaded. Obviously, that’s something that wouldn’t happen very often, because you’re selecting for a few unlikely scenarios. But this past season, that happened two times. Two times, a pitcher was walked on four pitches to bring home a run. Once it even happened in a one-run game. Both times it happened, it happened in Arizona, in the Diamondbacks’ favor. We review, in no order. An order wouldn’t even really make sense. We’re reviewing two events. We have a list of two.
Earlier this week I posted about the Best Bunts of 2012 according to Win Probability Added (WPA). Nothing like that is really complete, however, without talking about the worst. So here, divided into some rather arbitrary categories, are some of the worst bunts of 2012.
That’s right: end of the season, time for me to hand out awards based on semi-goofy. questionable stats. Along with the Carter-Batista Award, this is one of the first I started publishing.. In fact, my very first post at FanGraphs (three years this week! Time flies when you’re wasting it.) back in 2009 was a King of Little Things award presentation. You can also check out the 2010 and 2011 versions for the thrilling results. So which 2012 hitter contributed to most his teams wins in ways not measurable by traditional linear weights?
David Wright experienced a resurgence of sorts in 2012. After four straight outstanding offense seasons, Wright’s offensive production dipped significantly in 2009 — from a 141 wRC+ to 125. In 2011, Wright’s wRC+ declined all the way to 116.
But this year, the old David Wright reappeared and the 29-year-old third basemen posted a 140 wRC+. The Mets, encouraged by Wright’s year at the plate, have not only picked up his 2013 option (which was predictable), but have also continued discussions for a long-term contract extension.
How likely we are to see Wright put up similar numbers in the future is debatable.
Regardless, one thing was clear: Wright was making better decisions at the plate in 2012. And while his plate discipline numbers were positive (e.g. -2.1% O-Swing), the overall change didn’t seem to capture how well Wright’s plate approach improved.
In an effort to tease this out beyond the basic plate discipline metrics, R. J. Anderson used Mike Fast’s “correct” decision-making approach to look at how Wright’s decision-making improved in the past three season. Anderson calculated the percentage of “correct” pitches Wright swung at in 2012, compared to the two previous seasons. He found Wright had improved his decision-making by 7%.
I decided to take an even narrower view than Anderson and focused only on the location of balls Wright swung at that were just off of the plate, or that were off the black.
After finally getting the John Farrrell situation resolved, the Blue Jays can move on to other matters coming off of a frustrating season. They have a number of decisions to make, and one of those involves the future of shortstop Yunel Escobar. The Eyeblack Incident and its clumsy aftermath (Andrew Stoeten wrote a good take on the various aspects) was a big embarrassment for the organization. There is little doubt the incident played a big role in the Blue Jays’ rumored desire to trade Escobar. Toronto’s potential success or failure to trade Escobar and get value back for him casts an interesting light on how teams view personality issues.
We’re to the point now of there being less baseball, which means we’re to the point now of there being more important baseball. The stakes are the highest they’ve been, and all those little managerial decisions people love to complain about during the regular season might at last be worth actually complaining about, because the leverage of everything is suddenly through the roof. Every little decision now could conceivably contribute to a team winning or not winning the World Series. Thursday, we all got news of one decision in particular — for Friday’s Wild Card playoff against the Cardinals, the Braves will start David Ross at catcher instead of Brian McCann.
It feels weird to imagine the Braves deliberately benching McCann at a time like this, where one game will decide whether there are subsequent games. McCann’s long been the regular in Atlanta, up to and including this season, and by and large he’s been a terrific one. You’d think that a team would go with its trusted regulars in a one-game playoff, no matter how much it also trusts its backups. But it’ll be David Ross catching Kris Medlen and the relievers, and more, the decision seems sound.
Craig Kimbrel is putting the finishing touches on one of the best reliever seasons in history. He has struck out 113 of his 226 batters faced this season, producing a 50% strikeout rate that nobody with 30+ innings in a season has matched or exceeded.
In fact, nobody has ever thrown 30+ innings with a 45% strikeout rate either. Kimbrel isn’t merely en route to establishing a new record. He is about to blow right by the existing record, which was set in 2003 by Eric Gagne. Gagne struck out 44.7% of the opposition in his Cy Young campaign. Only two other relievers have even topped 44% throughout history: Aroldis Chapman‘s 44.4% rate this season, and Kenley Jansen’s 44.0% rate last year. While relievers face such a small sample of batters, and another strikeout or two could materially affect the strikeout rates in question, Kimbrel still has a commanding lead. He has simply been unhittable this season and may have established the new benchmark for evaluating relief pitching performance in this era.
If you go to the Free Agent Leaderboards, you’ll see Michael Bourn’s name at the top, as the sort for the list is set to descending 2012 WAR, and Bourn has the highest WAR this season (+6.1) of any upcoming free agent. We can pretty much guarantee that Bourn isn’t going to sign the largest contract this winter, though, as free agent value isn’t simply based on a player’s most recent season, nor are all skills as likely to be sustained going forward, and various skills have different valuations in the marketplace. Bourn’s combination of average offense and terrific defense is a valuable package, but how will it translate into market value?
Well, before we figure out how much he’ll get paid, we first have to figure out how much of his 2012 value he’ll retain in future years, or at least, how much teams will expect him to retain. There’s no question that the average offense/great defense package can be highly valuable, but it’s also a young man’s skillset. Here is a list of every player in the UZR era (2002-2012) that has posted a +5 WAR season while running a wRC+ below 110.
