Archive for Teams

Last April 4, Adam Jones swung at the first pitch two times. He swung at the first pitch five times on April 6, and then he swung at three more first pitches on April 14. By bedtime April 20, he was up to 16 first-pitch swings. The next day, he added four more.

Teammate J.J. Hardy also swung at the first pitch 16 times. All season. Out of 438 first pitches.

Hardy has never been aggressive early on. His highest-ever first-pitch swing rate is 11.9%, set as a rookie. His career rate is 8%, against a league average north of 27%. Last year, though, he was particularly patient. Not that Hardy is aggressive in any count, but I’ve highlighted him in this plot of first-pitch swing rates and all-other-count swing rates.

The next-lowest first-pitch swing rate was more than twice as high. Hardy’s other-pitch swing rate isn’t so weird, around 47%. But he swung at the first pitch just 3.7% of the time. The other players in his peer group, by other-pitch swing rate, went after the first pitch 25.7% of the time. It’s not that Hardy would never go after the first pitch, but every single time, it came as a surprise.

You’d figure Hardy might be really selective then, right? Welp! Of the 16 first-pitch swings, seven came at pitches out of the zone. Seven swings put the ball in play, but Hardy wound up with one hit, on a grounder. Perhaps it’s additionally worth noting that Hardy took all of three first-pitch swings when there was no one on base. When he was aggressive, mostly, he was just trying to move runners around.

It should go without saying that I don’t know exactly what Hardy’s plan is, because I’m not J.J. Hardy. He might just feel a lot more comfortable after he sees one pitch out of the hand. But just looking at this from the outside, Hardy could probably stand to just pay closer attention from the on-deck circle, because he’s been taken advantage of. Unsurprisingly, Hardy last year had one of the league’s very highest first-pitch zone rates. And no other hitter in the game had a higher percentage of his plate appearances advance to an 0-and-1 count. Hardy went through that count in about 61% of his trips. The average was 49%. If anything, it might be strange these rates weren’t even higher.

Again, hey, Hardy’s his own man. He’s coming off a much better season than the one he had the year before, so more power to him for his 2.3 WAR. He’s not doing everything wrong. But that’s an Orioles lineup full of guys unafraid to take an early hack. Maybe Hardy’s just trying to be different on purpose, but it seems to me he’s doing himself a disservice by watching as much as he does. There has to be a better way to get yourself prepared.

A team can’t make their season in March, but they can lose their season before it begins. Last week was an awful week for the Rockies.

At the moment, the Rockies and the baseball world aren’t concerned about when Chad Bettis will pitch again. They just want him to be healthy, after the 27-year-old starting pitcher learned last week that his testicular cancer had unexpectedly spread. Bettis was declared cancer free back in January.

From Nick Groke’s story in the Denver Post:

His prognosis for a healthy recovery is good, in the 90 percent range, he said. Bettis will start chemotherapy treatment in Arizona sometime soon. And he and his wife Kristina are expecting their first child later this month.

But Bettis’s return to baseball this season is in doubt. “Optimistically? This year,” Bettis said. He was given a broad timeline of potential outcomes.

“You never know how these things will unfold. From our standpoint, we’ll have to make some adjustments,” Colorado manager Bud Black said. “We feel good about what will happen. He will keep his chin up and his chest out and press forward.”

There’s no certain timetable for Bettis’s return, but he’s likely to miss a significant amount of time.

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It is perhaps important to maintain some perspective. Carlos Martinez is 25 years old. He was born in the Dominican Republic, and when he was 18, he spent his first year with a Cardinals affiliate. Last month, he agreed to a $51-million contract extension. Martinez is already a massive success story as a professional. Barring some unlikely series of catastrophic decisions, he and his family will never have to worry about money again. We should all be so blessed.

So the Martinez path is already something like four or five standard deviations better than the usual. But, you know, we’re bad at perspective. We tend to think of these people as baseball players first, and, say, just last week, we got to glimpse Martinez as a baseball player, pitching in a competitive environment for the first time since signing the multi-year guarantee. I want to show you two pitches I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

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A few weeks ago, Cincinnati Reds general manager Dick Williams was one of several executives to weigh in on the question: “How necessary is it for an MLB front office to pick a direction and stay the course?”

Williams gave an expansive answer, addressing the fact that he leads a small-market team in full rebuild mode. But while he covered a lot in his four-paragraph contribution, much was left unsaid. A lot has changed since he replaced Walt Jocketty as the Reds’ general manager 15 months ago. Many of the particulars have flown well below the radar, so I followed up with the former investment banker to get a deeper look at what’s been happening behind the scenes in Cincinnati.

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Williams on rebuilding in a small market: “Rebuilding in a smaller market has its challenges. Because of that, we’re being extremely prudent with our investment dollars. When some of the bigger-market teams are going through a rebuilding phase, they can do a one-year signing of a guy making $8-10 million. He’ll be a good contributor to that club, then be a flip candidate to bring back prospects at the trade deadline. Smaller-market teams can’t go out and do a bunch of those deals when they’re in a rebuilding phase.
 
“Attendance tends to drop off more quickly for small-market teams in a rebuild period and that can have a big effect on revenues. Bigger-market teams… usually have a higher and more solid attendance base, so they can sort of weather the down times a little better.
 
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The Mariners are trying something that has never been attempted before. In Jarrod Dyson, Mitch Haniger, and Leonys Martin they’re rolling out three legitimate center fielders that were center fielders last year. We’re in love with fly balls right now, but fly balls will not love Seattle this season.

There’s obviously some precedent for strong defensive outfields. The Cubs and Royals, for example, have both appeared in the World Series recently thanks, in no small part, to their ability to take away hits. But even if you stretch the definition of center fielder, something approximating Seattle’s current experiment appears to have been attempted only three times previously. And even then, it doesn’t appear to have happened exactly this way. While the three outfielders themselves don’t think it’s a big deal, there might be a few reasons no other teams have tried this.

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PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – When Jake Odorizzi arrived to the Rays’ spring headquarters in February of 2013 following Tampa Bay’s trade of James Shields to Kansas City, he was summoned into a conference room at the Rays spring training facility, which rests in a rural and remote part of southwestern Florida. Present in a conference room were then-general manager Andrew Friedman and pitching coach Jim Hickey among others. Odorizzi remembered the meeting was informal and relaxed, but there was an important message presented, one Odorizzi had never heard in his professional career.

“They said ‘We like what you do. We like your stuff,” Odorizzi recalled to FanGraphs in the Rays’ clubhouse last week.

For years, Odorizzi had heard from coaches and others in the Kansas City and Milwaukee organizations that he needed to make significant changes to his pitching philosophy. Odorizzi felt his fastball played better in the upper reaches of the strike zone, but the Brewers, who selected Odorizzi with the 32nd overall pick in the 2008 draft, and later the Royals — where Odorizzi was traded as part of the package for Zack Greinke — informed Odorizzi he must pitch in the lower part of the zone.

“When I was with Milwaukee early on, and with Kansas City in the lower minor levels, I was never really a lower-in-the-zone type of guy,” Odorizzi said. “When I was in Milwaukee, they kind of told me in a roundabout way ‘Well, if you don’t learn to pitch down in the zone, you’ll never make it to the big leagues.’ This was in 2008, 2009 which was, shoot, nearly 10 years ago. Pitching up in the zone consistently, purposefully, was unheard of. You pitch down in the zone, you get ground balls. I could pitch down in the zone, but I had more conviction when I did not consciously think about it and let [the fastball] do its own thing, let it take off a little bit.

“It was comforting for me to finally have an organization [the Rays] say ‘We like what you’re doing.’”

Odorizzi is an interesting pitcher at an interesting point in time. In recent years, the ground ball, and pitching down in the zone, has become more and more valued as shifts have increased dramatically and proliferated, as teams try and better avoid extra-base hits. The top five ground-ball seasons on record at FanGraphs have all been posted in the past five seasons. But the philosophy has become so common that hitters like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez have begun to adjust and preach a get-the-ball-in-the-air philosophy, which can be an effective counter-punch to the popular two-seam pitching approach.

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Episode 722
Kate Preusser is the managing editor of Seattle Mariners SB Nation blog Lookout Landing. She’s also (a) FanGraphs’ inaugural writer-in-residence and (b) the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Would you like to nominate someone for a residency? You can do that here.

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 1 hr 7 min play time.)

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BRADENTON, Fla. – Gerrit Cole was really never himself last season, certainly never his 2015-self — his best self — when he finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting.

The trouble started early when Cole sustained an injury while working out in the offseason, rib inflammation which disrupted and delayed the beginning of spring training for him. From that point, as he tried to play catch up, his season was interrupted three times by trips to the disabled list.

After a healthy 2015 during which he reached 200 innings for the first time in his professional career — a season in which he recorded a 2.60 ERA, 2.66 FIP and 5.4 WAR — Cole landed on the disabled list on June 11 for a strained right triceps. He returned to the DL on August 25 for right elbow inflammation and was placed on the DL again on September 13 with right elbow posterior inflammation after lasting 13 batters in his return from the DL. His season ended with 116 innings of work, 2.5 WAR and a 3.88 ERA. It wasn’t until the newly married Cole was honeymooning in the Caribbean in November — Cole is married to the sister of former UCLA teammate Brandon Crawford — that he said he felt healthy again.

“I did everything I could,” Cole said. “That was the frustrating part. Scratching and clawing to find answers and not getting them. I was just determined [this offseason] to put myself in the best position I could this year. I just started attacking things from Day 1. I was pretty beat up all year, and out of shape toward the end of the year. I figured I’d take every single day we had [this offseason] and try to get better. I started with small stuff initially and built from there.”

I’ve chronicled Cole’s career closely. He was handled carefully as an amateur, not permitted to throw year round like other Southern Californian kids, in part because his father read about the Verducci Effect. While the merits of the Verducci Effect have since been refuted and challenged, the general premise that overworked young arms are at greater risk of injury is generally accepted. As a professional, Cole has explored just about everything that might keep him healthy, from wearable technology that monitors stress levels and energy usage to the ancient Eastern practice of “cupping.”

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One of the most celebrated episodes of The Simpsons involves local oligarch Montgomery Burns luring professional ballplayers to Springfield so that his company baseball team can win. Homer at the Bat is the story of how these ballplayers relegate Homer Simpson and his best friends to the bench, before all being unable to play for various comedic reasons. One of those players is Don Mattingly, who quickly falls into a hair-related row with Mr. Burns, a parody of his real-life benching by Yankees manager Stump Merrill. The exchange pokes some well-earned fun at New York’s hatred of hair.

The Yankees, as you probably know, have a pretty stringent (most of the time) policy when it comes to hair. No facial hair below the lip, no sideburns, no hair that’s long enough to fall below your collar. It’s meant to make the Yankees look clean-cut, or something, while still allowing for Thurman Munson-esque bushy mustaches. Of course, we’ve seen guys like Andy Pettitte and CC Sabathia sporting some pretty serious stubble at times, but they’re veterans and they’ve earned a little flexibility, one would guess.

This brings us to young Clint Frazier, the fire-maned bat-speed-maven prospect the Yankees acquired in the Andrew Miller trade. Frazier is one of the better prospects in baseball, and he was known just as much for his long red locks as he was for destroying baseballs like they said something about his mother. He certainly wouldn’t be welcome on Mr. Burns’ team with that flow. His acquisition by the Yankees presented an obvious issue to the way he chose to wear his hair, and now things have come to a literal head: Frazier’s hair is gone.

“Distraction” was the word used to describe it. It’s hard to imagine that Frazier’s hair itself was the distraction as much as the media’s questions about whether or not he’d be allowed to keep. Sure, it may have generated questions of “Well, why can’t I wear my hair that way?” but it’s also a matter of the Yankees’ long-standing policy being tested by a rising star — and manager Joe Girardi (and Frazier himself, probably) getting tired of being asked questions about it.

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Major League Baseball has an interesting economic system, including a pay scale that is intentionally designed to limit the salaries of young players in order to funnel more money to veterans. All players with less than two full years of experience (and most with less than three) effectively have their salaries dictated to them, with no recourse to move the needle in any real fashion. Until a player becomes arbitration eligible, teams get to decide how much they want to pay a player in a given year, and there is nothing the player can do to change that number.

So, naturally, most pre-arbitration players make something close to the league minimum. With no market forces to force prices upwards, or even an arbitration panel to select between two options, there is just nothing in place to push pre-arb salaries up, and teams generally haven’t seen much value in paying higher wages to pre-arb players than they have to.

That might be slowly changing.

This week, the Cubs agreed to pay Kris Bryant $1.05 million for 2017, the highest salary ever awarded to a player with less than two years of service. Bryant’s salary is $50,000 more than Mike Trout got from the Angels back in 2014, and a $400,000 raise over what he made last year. Clearly, the Cubs wanted to reward the reigning NL MVP for helping bring the Cubs their first championship in over a century, and likely also wanted to avoid the negative publicity that would come from looking cheap right after reaping the financial benefits of a World Series title. In addition to giving Bryant the highest pre-arb contract a team has ever doled out, the Cubs also gave out substantial raises to Kyle Hendricks ($760K), Addison Russell ($644K), and Javier Baez ($609K).

Meanwhile, over in Boston, the Red Sox offered Mookie Bets $950K, but he declined to sign the contract, saying that he had a different price in mind. Because Betts has no actual leverage, the Red Sox simply renewed his contract unilaterally at their $950K offer. Betts will now get the third-highest salary for a pre-arb player ever, but he also took what he felt was a principled stand in not actually signing a contract that pays him less than he feels he’s worth.

So, in a few high profile examples, we’ve seen teams give significant raises to their best young players, perhaps attempting to buy some goodwill or some positive publicity for the kind of money that doesn’t really have any impact on a team’s bottom line. But this is still the exception, as most teams continue to determine pre-arb prices by simply creating an algorithm that looks at a player’s statistics and gives them an extra $10K or $20K above the league minimum depending on how they’ve performed in their first few years in the majors.

By simply citing a calculation that treats everyone the same way, teams can claim some degree of equity in a system designed to be unfair to these players, and the salary-by-algorithm model takes away most of the need for negotiation. The team simply says “this is what our model spits out”, and then, most organizations leave a little wiggle room to move up $5K to $10K from the calculated wage in order to give the agent the chance to tell the player they were able to negotiate his salary up slightly.

But this kind of no-leverage-negotiation doesn’t always go well, and some teams use the renewal ability to create a disincentive to not sign the contract, which often creates a small story for the media and pushes the wage structure back into the public eye, where fans are reminded that their best young players have no real say in their early-career wages. This is likely what happened in Houston last week, when the Astros renewed Carlos Correa for the league minimum, which is $535,000 for 2017.

We don’t know the specifics of the negotiation, but in talking with people who work for other teams, the belief within the game is that a minimum renewal for a player of Correa’s stature was probably threatened in order to try and induce him to sign the contract the team offered, and then the team felt obligated to follow through once Correa wasn’t willing to sign. This is a different approach from the one Boston took, where they didn’t create a punitive secondary offer for not signing, and Betts was able to take a cost-free stance on not signing his contract. Correa’s resistance to signing for what Houston may have originally offered likely did cost him some money.

From a pure publicity standpoint, the Cubs and Red Sox certainly look better in this ordeal than the Astros do, but I don’t think this is all as simple as “Chicago good, Houston evil”.

After all, the extra money the Cubs are giving Bryant in his pre-arb years pales in comparison to the money they cost him by sending him to Triple-A to begin the 2015 season, which delayed his free agency by a year. Not long ago, the Cubs chose to use the rights given them under the CBA to create as much value for their organization as they could, even though it came at the expense of Bryant’s future earnings. The Astros could argue that they are simply doing the same thing, using the rules that everyone agreed to in order to maximize the amount of money they have available to spend on free agents.

But a league-minimum renewal for Correa certainly doesn’t help the Astros reputation, which already could use some work. Even if they don’t believe that paying Correa a bit more than the league minimum is likely to buy them any future discount in arbitration or extension pricing — and there’s not much evidence to suggest that a player is going to leave a large amount of money on the table as a thank you for giving him an extra $50K or $100K a couple of years ago — it would seem that at least a few other organizations are acknowledging that there’s some value in rewarding young superstars with raises substantial enough to show up in a player’s bank account, rather than calibrating the salary algorithm to hand out minuscule increases simply because they can.

In the end, the Astros can probably say this will all be forgotten, and they’re probably right about that. And while it’s easy to make them the bad guys here, they’re participating in the system that the MLBPA has pushed for, and the union has made little effort to escalate the salaries of young players, instead focusing their efforts on trying to get teams to be able to pay as much as possible to veteran free agents. By giving pre-arb players no leverage in negotiations, the reasonable expectation is that teams are going to hold down costs for those players, and the union has continued to agree to that system as the accepted salary scale.

But with the Cubs and Red Sox bucking the trend, at least with a few of their best players, the Astros don’t look great here. And perhaps that negative P.R. will become the thing that puts at least some upwards pressure on salaries for young superstars. With teams rolling in money from their local TV contracts, there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to holding a hard line on wages for franchise players. Even though the Cubs gesture to Bryant is probably not going to get them any kind of discount on a long-term contract, and they can’t really be lauded for player-friendly tactics given how they handled the timing of his debut, at least there appears to be some move towards compensating the game’s best players a bit more than before.

In the end, the wage structure that takes money from guys like Bryant, Betts, and Correa and gives it to less-talented veterans is still one the union has tacitly endorsed, and if the players want this system to change, they’re going to have to impress upon their union to fight for a different pay model in the next CBA negotiations. But perhaps the Cubs and Red Sox paying their stars nearly $1 million each will make it less palatable for future teams to follow the Astros model, and baseball’s equivalent of peer pressure can serve as something of a market force for players who have no other leverage.