Archive for Teams

Only three teams threw the ball faster, on average, than the Royals this year. Not surprising when you’ve got youth like Yordano Ventura, Greg Holland and Kelvin Herrera throwing fire on the regular.

Only one team threw the ball slower, on average, than the Giants this year. Not surprising when you have distinguished gentlemen like Tim Hudson, Ryan Vogelsong, and Jake Peavy stepping on the rubber three out of every five games.

This difference in velocities has ramifications for pitch mix, of course. The Royals threw fastballs more often than the Giants. The Giants threw breaking pitches more often than the Royals. In fact, the Giants threw more breaking pitches than anyone in baseball.

Is one team better equipped to handle the strength of the opposing team?

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I had slightly higher hopes for this post. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased with the final result. But when I first cooked this idea up, my plan was to utilize the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards to pull velocity, horizontal movement, vertical movement, whiff rate and groundball rate to determine the nastiest pitches we’ll see in the World Series. But, there were a few problems.

While more velocity generally makes a pitch nastier, that’s not always true, especially in the case of offspeed pitches. More movement definitely makes a pitch nastier, but movement is hard to compare across a PITCHf/x leaderboard because a lot of it is dependent on arm slot and you get some funky values from guys who throw with funky motions.

So then, I was left with just whiff rate and groundball rate, but I actually kind of like that. Those are two of the best outcomes, and they’re the direct result of some of the things we weren’t able to capture, such as velocity, horizontal movement and vertical movement. The most dominant outcome of a pitch, for a pitcher, is a swing and miss. But not all guys dominate by getting whiffs, and so they don’t all pitch that way. Some guys dominate by getting weak contact, and ground balls yield the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types (grounders, flies and line drives). But the guys who really dominate are the ones who get the best of both worlds: whiffs and grounders.
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There’s no shortage of reasons why the Giants find themselves in the World Series for the third time in five years, really, and you can start anywhere. Maybe that’s Jake Peavy, a disappointment in Boston and now a revelation in San Francisco. Or rookie Joe Panik, filling a hole that was so bad it had led to Dan Uggla desperation, or the hilarious story that is Travis Ishikawa. There’s help from outsiders like Mike Matheny & Randy Choate, not to mention the Pirates deciding they’d rather have Edinson Volquez on the mound for the wild card game rather than Gerrit Cole. There’s been 18-inning playoff games, and the complete disappearance of Tim Lincecum, and the much more explainable absences of Matt Cain, Angel Pagan and Marco Scutaro, and 12 October runs that came in without the benefit of hits.

For an 88-win team to get to the World Series, a lot has to go their way. Much of it is going to be of their own doing, and some of it is going to be the usual insanity that comes in short-series baseball, which is less about crowning the “best” team and more about rewarding the right team, the one that did what needed to be done at the appropriate times.

This Giants team has all of that and more, and certainly Bruce Bochy and his staff have earned the credit they’ve been given. But in our rush to try to identify all the unusual ways that a team that always seems to be more good than great keeps getting this far in the playoffs, it’s easy to look past some of the more obvious reasons, like the fact that the Giants have two of the best players in baseball. Ace Madison Bumgarner is really, really good. So, of course, is Buster Posey.

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So we’re all set, then, for a weekend without any baseball. The Royals did away with the Orioles in the minimum number of games, and the Giants almost did that same thing to the Cardinals. So out of a possible 14 LCS contests, we got nine of them, and now we’re set up for a showdown that isn’t exactly improbable, but that wasn’t predicted by (m)any. The Royals are in the World Series, after winning 89 games and after having once been 48-50. The Giants are in the World Series, after winning 88 games and after having once been 63-57. It’s going to be a World Series between two wild-card teams, and that’s absolutely terrific.

Major League Baseball is getting what it wanted from this postseason. And I don’t just mean in terms of the drama, although I think we’ve all been aware of that. The series haven’t been long, but the games have just about all been close. As one example, during the regular season, 19 percent of all plate appearances occurred with a score deficit of at least four runs. In the playoffs, that’s dropped all the way to 9 percent, and there were only three such plate appearances in the whole ALCS. It’s absurd how suspenseful and electrifying this has all been, but then that’s something more particular to this postseason. The wild-card thing is a bigger-picture issue.

It’s … I don’t know, what’s a good word? Controversial? The argument against being, wild-card berths dilute the level of talent in the playoffs. So perhaps the wild-card teams are undeserving, and then what does that tell you if you get a pair of them in the championship? What does a World Series title tell you about a team, if it’s a series between two teams who failed to win their divisions?

It tells you that a team beat another team in a baseball tournament. It tells you nothing more, and it’s not designed to tell you anything more. Tournaments thrive on drama and unpredictability. What baseball’s got set up is a hell of a tournament, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a couple of wild-card teams surviving to the end. In another sport, we’d call them Cinderellas.

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Not long ago, a prominent national baseball writer declared that Madison Bumgarner is the one pitcher you’d want starting a must-win game for your team in the playoffs. The statement’s certainly debatable, but at the same time the feeling is understandable — Bumgarner’s tough as nails, and he’s been on a hell of a run. He’s been on the radar for years, having spent plenty of time pitching in the postseason, and there’s something that comes to mind when you think about Bumgarner: his signature cutter. Or slider. Whichever. No matter the name, they describe the same weapon, and it’s something Bumgarner has thrown before almost 40% of the time. Madison Bumgarner? Awesome cutter. Yeah. The association’s automatic.

Regarding that, I want to show you a table. You know our pitch values? You know our pitch values. Positive numbers are good. Bigger positive numbers are more good. Here are Bumgarner’s year-to-year pitch values, from his player page:

Based on that, a year ago, Bumgarner really improved his fastball. And this year, his cutter wasn’t much of a weapon. Let’s do more! Here are 2014 season splits:

All that fastball value came in the second half. As a matter of fact, after the All-Star break, Madison Bumgarner’s fastball was the most valuable pitch in baseball. The cutter? It was fine, and it’s still fine, but it’s not what it has been. And Bumgarner doesn’t seem to mind. Despite the cutter association, the Madison Bumgarner we’ve been seeing for months is, more than anything else, an elite fastball pitcher.

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Heading into the 2012 season, Carlos Martinez was the 22nd-best prospect in the game, according to ESPN, and the 27th-best according to Baseball America. He was ranked in everyone else’s top 100 as well, including here. A year later, he was 38th, and 39th. Despite this, the Cardinals have never given him a real shot to prove that he can be anything other than a middle reliever. It’s time someone gave him that chance.

Armed with what has been referred to as two pitches near the top of the 20-80 scale, Martinez has talent that all scouts dream of. And when he reached the majors at age 21 last season, he put it on display. He didn’t get the chance to start, but with the Cardinals in the thick of the playoff hunt, this wasn’t a major surprise. He got one spot start at the beginning of August, didn’t fare very well, and was moved back to the ‘pen. Plenty of hot shot prospects have broken in via the bullpen, and then gone back to being starters when the season starts anew in April. But between the Cardinals’ seemingly crowded rotation and some excellent work as a reliever in last year’s National League Championship Series, Martinez found himself back in the bullpen to start 2014.

This time, he didn’t take to the bullpen as well. Perhaps that is because his manager, Mike Matheny, couldn’t figure out what to do with him. In one stretch in April, Martinez had consecutive gmLI’s of 3.02, 0.52, 0.75, 1.46, 0.14, 2.13 and 0.03. We rail against rote bullpen roles frequently, and with just cause — managers should try to put their teams in the best position possible to win games. But even this approach has its limits. In case gmLI’s are a little foreign to you, here’s what the situation was when Martinez entered the game in those seven appearances:

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Probably my favorite sub-plot of this manic Royals conquest is the team’s 25th man, Terrance Gore, who had played in 11 major league regular season games before this most iconic of winning streaks. In fact, including his postseason appearances, Gore has played only 33 games above single-A, and is now a World Series contestant.

One way to easily identify Gore on the field is his uniform number 0, an under-utilized quirk that is an easy way to gain my affection. (Much respect also to Adam Ottavino.) There are other easy ways to identify him: he’s by far the smallest person on the field, somewhere around 5’7”, and he is only summoned off the bench in order to pinch-run in late-inning situations, and almost always for designated hitter Billy Butler. The substitution for Butler is doubly brilliant on the Royals’ part: slow Billy is taken off of the basepaths, and inexperienced Terrance does not have to play high-leverage innings of defense. In his sixteen games as a Royal, Gore has only been allowed two plate appearances, neither of them in the postseason.

Gore’s inclusion on the roster is a brilliant example of an entire Major League organization working in orchestration. Anticipating his usefulness as a playoff bench weapon, the Royals promoted Gore from High-A Wilmington to Triple-A Omaha at the beginning of August, and then from Omaha to Kansas City at the end of the month. Come playoff time, and Gore effectively replaced Raul Ibanez on the 25-man roster, with the hoodied Ibanez looking more and more like a coach as he watches and encourages from the dugout.

It has been easy to compare Gore to Herb Washington, a track champion and an Oakland A from 1974-75. In his two years in the big leagues, Washington appeared in 110 games, stole 31 bases, and ended up with more World Series rings (1) than career plate appearances (0).

To compare these two players is actually disrespectful to Gore. For Washington’s career, he successfully stole on 31 of his 50 attempts — an unremarkable 62% — and went 0 for 2 in the playoffs. To wit:

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Chicago Cubs. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Chicago’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Cubs system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Cubs system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Kyle Schwarber, C/OF (Profile)

Calculating a projection for Schwarber presents some difficulties insofar as (a) he’s clearly more valuable at catcher than left field, presuming he’s an average defender at both, but also (b) he’s probably not an average defensive catcher. Not currently, at least. As McDaniel notes, however, the Cubs are committed for the time being to developing Schwarber behind the plate. His offensive profile, complemented by the benefit of a catcher’s positional adjustment, would conspire to create an impressive major leaguer.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Twins, Astros, Red Sox, Cubs & White Sox

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

The Cubs have the deepest system I’ve written up so far and the most impact talent, with much of it at the upper levels.  There’s a case to be made that this is the best system in baseball and  it has to be in the top five, but I’ll hold off on an official determination until I’ve formally evaluated all of the candidates. The rebuilding of the organization and system is evident in looking at the types of players I rank below; a number of prospects from the 2013 July 2nd spending spree, aggressive over-slot bonuses on high upside draft prospects, solid low minors prospects acquired in trades along with hitting on nearly all the high profile, big money signings in recent years.

There’s still some position fits to work out before the fanboys will see their ideal lineups of the future in living color (see Russell and Schwarber reports for new information on that front), but the Cubs are being proactive to try to solve this, with multiple position players converting to a position of long-term need (catcher) during instructs this fall (more notes below).  There’s a reason this system seems a lot like the last team I evaluated, the Red Sox, because both are among the best systems in the game and were put together with the same kinds of principles and resources along with some of the same top executives.

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Before the National League Division Series, Giants outfielder Michael Morse met with manager Bruce Bochy and the team’s brass to talk about his spot on the team. He felt good. His oblique was finally healthy. He’d been taking full swings in batting practice. He was ready to go.

There was one problem. “I didn’t have enough at-bats,” Morse said after the Giants won Game Five of the National League Championship Series and emerged as NL champions Thursday night. “For me, I wouldn’t feel comfortable at the plate.”

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