It’s a simple thing to say, but there’s an important interplay between the swing and the miss when it comes to pitching. In order to get a swinging strike, you need to get the batter to swing and you need to get them to miss. These are, in effect, two different skills, even if the best pitchers are awesome at both. And so it’s not surprising that we have two different metrics for that moment — whiffs per swing (whiff% in some places) and whiffs per pitch or swinging strike rate (swsTR% here). We probably need both. Is one better?

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Washington Nationals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
Despite recording about -5 runs on just errors alone, third baseman Ryan Zimmerman managed to produce three wins in 2013, a figure which ZiPS expects him to approximate in 2014. Here’s what ZiPS likely knows about Zimmerman: that his defensive figures have been decidedly less impressive in recent years than previously. Here’s what it can’t know: that one reason for Zimmerman’s decline is a combination of shoulder weakness and perhaps even some manner of anxiety which have conspired to affect his throwing accuracy.

Reports this offseason suggest that Zimmerman will receive a modest number of starts at first base, in place of Adam LaRoche. This idea has merit to it. Not only might it allow Zimmerman to avoid having to contend daily with the throwing obligations of third base, but one also notes that Zimmerman is expected to outhit LaRoche by ca. 30 points of wOBA.

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A year ago, pretty much everyone picked the Nationals to win the NL East. Why not? They’d won 98 games in 2012, and they’d done so without full seasons from Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Jayson Werth. They’d done so without a real center fielder, since Rick Ankiel and Roger Bernadina had started 64 games there while Harper was still in the minors or otherwise unavailable, a problem that newcomer Denard Span was intended to fix. They’d also won 98 without Rafael Soriano, a seemingly luxurious addition who had been added to a bullpen that was already solid, and without Dan Haren, who was a risk but had many years of excellent performance behind him and wasn’t being counted on to be more than the fourth starter.

No one wanted to say that the Nationals were going to top 100 wins, but plenty of us thought it. In a division with only one other serious contender, they seemed like a lock. They seemed like the safest bet in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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The Tigers have six good starting pitchers, if you believe that Drew Smyly should be able to transition back to starting after a successful pitstop in the bullpen. Steamer projects all five of their current starters for at least +3 WAR next year, and it’s not at all crazy to think that Smyly will be a +2 to +3 WAR pitcher as a starter, given his track record and stuff. The desire to move Smyly back into the rotation meant that had someone to go. For the last few months, the rumored trade candidates have been Rick Porcello and Max Scherzer.

Those guys can officially unpack their bags, however, as the Nationals have solved the Tigers pitching problem by relieving them of Doug Fister instead. And they did it at a shockingly low price, considering that Fister is one of the game’s most underrated pitchers. But let’s deal with what they gave up first.

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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:

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Analytically-focused baseball hobbyists are not supposed to fall for the temptation of round-numbered accomplishments. Sure, round numbers are easy to remember (40-40 is easier to remember than, say, 34-41 or something), but over time they can appear to have a meaning or value beyond simply being an arbitrary, if memorable, landmark.

That is all a qualification to this post. When looking into top recent single-season bunts for hits numbers, I ran across many of the usual suspects — Juan Pierre, Willy Taveras, and the like. Actually, it started when I was checking out Starling Marte’s season. It has been a weird one for the Pirates’ left fielder. He has been a key element in the Pirates’ run to the playoffs this year despite not having the typical left field offensive profile. He relies heavily on getting drilled to get on base. But even if one has serious doubts about his defensive numbers, he has had a nice year at the plate (.282/.343/.447, 122 wRC+).

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Episode 376
Washington Nationals prospect Zach Walters is (a) a shortstop playing at Triple-A in just his age-23 season and also (b) one of the minor leagues’ top home-run hitters. He’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 15 min play time.)

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There probably were some analysts who liked Jayson Werth’s seven-year, $126 million contract for the Nationals when it was signed prior to the 2011 season, but no names spring to mind. It was not that Werth had been a bad player. There was actually an argument to be made that the contract was market value for a player of Werth’s projected value, but it was an open question as to whether a team in Washington’s situation should have been paying market value at that point, as Dave Cameron noted at the time.

The last point was based on the question of whether or not the Nationals would be good enough during the first part of the contract to justify making such an aggressive move. After a near-.500 2011 season, the Nationals held up their end of the deal in 2012, going 98-64 and winning the Natinal League East. They lost to the Cardinals in NL Division Series, but given the excellent young talent they seemed primed to make a few more runs with Werth still is his decent years.

But Werth was not really holding up his end. In 2011, he did not hit that well, and in 2012, he missed about half the season due to injury. This season, the Nationals are having an extremely disappointing season given the expectations raised by 2012. Many things have gone wrong for Washington this year, but Werth is not one of them.

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Monday night in Washington, the Braves beat Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals by a 3-2 score. The beginning of the Nationals’ MLB.com game recap reads so casually you almost skip right over the astonishing part and miss the absurdity. Quote:

WASHINGTON — The Nationals entered Monday night with nine chances remaining to cut directly into the Braves’ 12 1/2-game lead in the National League East. They wasted the first of those chances in the opener of a three-game series, as Justin Upton’s go-ahead solo home run in the eighth inning lifted Atlanta to a 3-2 victory.

Braves in first, check. Nationals with chances left, check. Nationals with a blown chance, check. Twelve and a half games. Wait. Now thirteen and a half games. Because the Braves won. The number is inserted as if the gap isn’t completely ridiculous. The number is inserted as if Nationals fans ought to be holding out hope.

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