Archive for Teams

So far this October, we have been treated to some great playoff games.  Most of us watched these games at home in our living room, or perhaps at the local sports bar.  A select few of us have had the chance to watch the games live at the stadium.  Due to the high demand for playoff tickets, most teams conducted some type of lottery to determine who gets to purchase tickets at face value.  Those who aren’t lucky enough to win the lottery can still get into the stadium by purchasing tickets on the second-hand market.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a lot of variation in the second-hand cost of playoff tickets between the different teams.  There are many factors that go into this variation, including regular season ticket cost and how recently the team has gone to the playoffs, among other things.  For example, the Cubs have had the highest playoff tickets prices this year, which is due to the fact that they have a passionate fan base, and that they haven’t been to the playoffs since 2008.

I wanted to see if it would be possible to create a model that predicts the cost of ALDS/NLDS ticket prices based on other factors.

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First things first — by sheer coincidence, Ben Lindbergh wrote about something similar this morning at Grantland. This is a link to the post, and if you missed it, this is another link, and you should read it, and it’s good! It’s never fun to have article overlap, but as I’ve noted before, I’m stubborn about writing ideas, and more importantly, Lindbergh went about doing his research in a different way. So what follows is my own spin on things. It won’t surprise you that we arrive at similar conclusions.

Here’s a theory. The Royals have been successful in the playoffs, right? Already, today, they’ve gotten to R.A. Dickey, not that he’s the ordinary type of postseason pitcher. In the playoffs, the Royals have been able to hit. In the playoffs, pitchers overall tend to be better. A year ago, the Royals were an excellent contact team. This year, the Royals were maybe the best contact team in a very long time. So, does it make sense that being a contact team might provide some sort of playoff advantage? Are contact teams less vulnerable to going quiet against the best pitchers in the game? Not that all the best pitchers make the playoffs, but, you see where this is going. The pitchers are good. Does the offensive style really matter?

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You can detect the nervousness. The Royals stormed out to take a commanding series lead, but then Johnny Cueto’s own arm abandoned him, wrecking not only Game 3 but also a potential Game 7 as well. So there’s some discomfort there, some uncertainty, and now in a short while the Royals are going to throw Chris Young at the best offense in the league in the center of a homer-happy ballpark. If Young were a bad pitcher, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, but I don’t think he’s perceived as a trustworthy pitcher. So the thought is the Blue Jays are in a good place to go and tie this series up.

I don’t think we can help the way we feel about Young. He’s unusual and by no means overpowering, and everything we’ve learned about pitchers gives us reason to be skeptical. He puts the ball in the air. He doesn’t pound the zone. He doesn’t miss a ton of bats. Young’s whole game is suppressing quality contact, and being skeptical of that is like Sabermetrics 101. Yet Young, for his career, has posted a better-than-average ERA. The same has held true of late, following his career revival. Young has a real chance this afternoon, our own doubts aside. As always, it’s just going to take precision.

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Every year, up until this one when he retired, Carlos Quentin was my guy. You know the one. “This is it, guys! This is the year Carlos Quentin stays healthy for a full season and hits 40 bombs!” I’d say in March. That never happened, of course, because Carlos Quentin never stopped getting hit by pitches and injuring himself in other ways, but Quentin was one of the classic “when/if” players. “When he plays a full season… If he could just stay healthy…” Quentin was always productive on the field, it’s just he was never actually on the field.

To some extent, Troy Tulowitzki has had a similar career. Tulowitzki’s injury history isn’t quite as extensive as Quentin’s, but his on-field production, when healthy, has always lent itself to a similar “when/if” discussion each offseason. Point is, with Tulowitzki comes some manner of certainty, due to his obvious talent, but also seemingly endless untapped potential.

This year, though, for the first time since his age-23 season, Tulowitzki’s season-end numbers were just average, as indicated by his season-end wRC+ of exactly 100. Add in the shoulder injury that Tulowitzki’s currently playing through, and the Blue Jays have been left playing the “when/if” game that’s typically reserved for the offseason.

So right now, with Tulowitzki, you’re looking for clues. Clues that the perennial preseason when/if MVP candidate is still in there, lurking underneath the cracked shoulder blade and the underwhelmingly average season. It’s a never-ending upside game with Tulowitzki, and clues are the currency for upside. As long as the Blue Jays have a couple clues, they know that, while the consistency may not be there, Tulowitzki still owns the potential to be a game-changer on any given trip to the plate. Last night, the Blue Jays received a clue:
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Two things you’re sure to find this time of year are unpredictable baseball outcomes and women and men who failed to predict those results. While I’ve managed to accidentally correctly predict the 2015 postseason so far, one need not look further than the present author’s own preseason predictions to find evidence of very incorrect baseball prognostication.  They’re everywhere because predicting baseball is inherently challenging. In order to do it well, you have to accurately predict the quality of the players and then the order in which events unfold in games involving those players.

Due to the nature of baseball, it’s relatively common for teams that are objectively worse than their opponent to win playoff series. If you put this year’s Tigers into a five game series against the Royals and let them play over and over, the Tigers would win a decent number of those series even though it’s pretty clear the Royals are the better team. Unfortunately, because the world is not yet an interactive computer simulation, we only get to observe one series between each set of opponents per year. Even if we knew for sure which team was better, that still wouldn’t ensure that we could predict the outcome. A .500 true talent team can outplay a .550 true talent team for a week. That’s just the nature of the game.

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It’s easy to dismiss the Cubs starter for Game Three, Kyle Hendricks. I did it earlier today, when I called him a two-pitch pitcher. I mean, he throws a cutter and a curve about 10% of the time combined, but both pitches are fairly substandard by whiffs and grounders, and with two strikes, they all but disappear. He doesn’t have much faith in them.

He can locate his sinker well, though, and has a good change. In fact, his changeup whiff percentage this year is second only to Cole Hamels‘ among starters that have thrown the pitch more than 150 times. So you could call him a two-pitch guy.

Except that he has two changeups.

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There are things that are different about R.A. Dickey, of course. No one pitch was thrown as often as the 2,840 regular season knuckleballs that Dickey threw this year. No other qualified pitcher threw any knuckle balls this year by PITCHf/x. The starter who threw the fewest fastballs other than Dickey threw three times as many. No pitch gets equal swinging strike results in and out of the zone like the knuckleball. Dickey can throw with injuries that would fell other pitchers, mostly because he throws at about 75% effort. He has no Ulnar Collateral Ligament.

And yet, despite the fact that Dickey is a one-pitch pitcher who throws a unique pitch that people seemingly can’t figure out no matter where he throws it, there are also conventional aspects to his craft. And to a certain extent, they’ve come to the fore this year.

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Looking at the pitching matchup between the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs tonight, the Mets appear to have a significant advantage. Jacob deGrom has been one of the best pitcher’s in the National League, posting both a sub-3 FIP and ERA this season, while the Cubs counter with Kyle Hendricks, a young pitcher who put together a fine year in the middle of the Cubs rotation. The Cubs, having burned the team’s two best pitchers in Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester in the first two losses, now have to face the Mets’ best pitcher after dealing with Matt Harvey and Noah Syndergaard already. The matchup looks to be a mismatch, but Hendricks is better than his overall numbers appear.

deGrom had a fantastic regular season, finishing sixth in National League with five wins above replacement. His arsenal is Pedro-lite, as Owen Watson wrote last week, and allowed the right-hander to strike out more than 30% of hitters in the second half. Among NL pitchers, only Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Madison Bumgarner produced a strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) higher than deGrom’s mark of 22.2. Only 17 qualified NL pitchers produced even a strikeout rate higher than deGrom’s 22.2% K-BB%. The Mets’ ace has started two games in the playoffs, pitching 13 innings, striking out 20 against four walks, and leading the Mets to two of their three playoff victories in the Division Series. In those two games, the opposing pitcher have been Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke, respectively, and in the latter game, he helped clinch the series over the Dodgers. Giving the Mets a 3-0 series advantage would likely have a similar effect on the Cubs. In Kyle Hendricks, deGrom has downgraded when it comes to the opposing pitcher; Hendricks is no Greinke or Kershaw. That said, he has performed well all season long, even if only in short outings.

Hendricks has produced a solid season, recording an average ERA and a better than average 3.36 FIP (86 FIP-) to go along with 3.4 WAR in 180 innings this season. At the end of last month, Dave Cameron wrote that as Hendricks stopped using his cutter and increased the use of change, Hendricks pitched even better, making him the front-runner for the Cubs third starter in the playoffs. That change has yielded a phenomenal 26% whiff rate on the season, per Brooks Baseball. He used the pitch to get multiple strikeouts in Game 2 of the Division Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. The pitch moves down and away to left-handers, like this pitch against Brandon Moss.

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So here’s something weird. I’ve noticed on Twitter that when Blue Jays fans refer to last night’s ALCS Game Three, they seem to give the credit to the Jays. They say things like, “The Jays were crushing the ball.” But when Royals fans talk about the game, they do it in a Royals-centric context, taking credit away from the Royals, as in, “Cueto sucked.” This isn’t to knock on either fan base. We all do this. I sure do. The truth though, as is often the case, lies in the middle somewhere. The Royals, Cueto especially, pitched badly. The Blue Jays, Troy Tulowitzki and Ryan Goins especially, hit well. But, when parcelling out the blame and/or credit, one can’t be binary about it. Unlike pooping the bed, it’s not an all or nothing thing.

Cueto ended up with a final line of two innings pitched and eight runs allowed. To my eye he struggled, and I doubt your eye would say much different, but based solely on his stuff I wouldn’t have guessed he was eight-runs-in-two-innings bad. Partially because that’s reeeeeeally bad (that’s an ERA of 36.00!), but partially because he just didn’t appear all that awful. So maybe more of the credit/blame for the outcome should fall on the Blue Jays. But then again, I’m not a scout, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.* I was curious to see if I could figure out who should get the credit and how much.

*Maybe?

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The people are growing accustomed to watching the Mets win, and as a side effect of that, the people are growing accustomed to watching Jeurys Familia come in to try to finish the job. Familia has yet to allow a postseason run, and even if you didn’t know anything about him before, you’d be able to tell just from observation that he’s far from a weakness. They say the biggest vulnerability on the Mets is the soft underbelly of the bullpen, and though that would be true for most teams, the Mets make it extra tricky, because the starters often work deep, meaning they can hand the ball to Familia almost directly. Which means there’s almost never any let-up.

What Familia has turned himself into is one of the true reliever elites. It hasn’t always been a smooth and easy path to the top, as Familia has previously fought his own command and struggled to retire left-handed hitters. Both of those are common problems for hard-throwing righty relievers, but Familia this year has overcome them, blossoming into a shutdown closer Terry Collins will trust to get more than three outs. And the thing about Familia is that it goes beyond just his being successful — these days, he arrives at his success on a path all his own.

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