Archive for Teams

FanGraphs already had Inside Edge data from the past two seasons, but David Appelman rolled out an upgrade this week with new material showing up on the leaderboards and on player pages. It’s an exciting development, providing new stuff we get to play around with while we wait for reams of reliable information from the new MLBAM project in the future. Because there’s a new feature on FanGraphs, I feel somewhat obligated to put it to immediate use in a post. In this post, Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford will be your guide through the near-impossible.

All balls in play are classified by the likelihood of a play being made. It’s somewhat subjective, but the classifications are: Impossible, Remote, Unlikely, Even, Likely and Routine. Most balls in play make for routine outs. No defender has converted an impossible play, which I suppose is in keeping with the definition. Last year, 8.3% of remote plays were converted into outs. Digging deeper, 6.0% of remote plays were converted into outs by shortstops. Last season, there were 31 players who converted exactly two remote plays. There were six more players who converted exactly three. Aaron Hicks converted four. Brandon Crawford converted five.

Put another way: At least in theory, remote plays capture the most difficult, yet makeable, plays. Brandon Crawford was the 2013 league leader in the category, turning five (of 24) remote plays into outs. So, below, let’s go over those five remote plays, in chronological order. No, the point isn’t that Crawford is the best defensive shortstop in baseball. Let’s just be content to watch Crawford at his best. You can get back to thinking about Andrelton Simmons tomorrow.

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So here’s the deal for the Tigers: they were planning to run with a platoon of Andy Dirks and Rajai Davis in left field. Davis is still his ordinary, healthy, surprisingly-33-year-old self. Dirks, however, is hurt, and he’s going to have back surgery, and the timetable has him maybe returning in three months. Neither the injury nor the procedure is expected to jeopardize Dirks’ career, but he’ll miss a lot of time in this year’s first half. The Tigers have a problem because one of their projected regulars won’t be able to be a regular for some time, and the guys behind regulars are worse than the regulars are.

The Tigers are trying to be a playoff team, so on the heels of the Dirks announcement, the natural question is, what’ll they do to patch this? Suddenly, the team has an obvious weakness. Playoff teams ought to address their obvious weaknesses. If you’ve mentally skipped ahead, perhaps you’ve concluded that this won’t actually be that big of a deal. It turns out I agree with you, but wait, I have several hundred words of explanation! Don’t go!

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Baseball, without question, is going to be a worse game without Mariano Rivera. It wasn’t just that Rivera was consistently excellent. It’s that he was also unwaveringly humble and gracious, being the rare sort of Yankee you could like even if you rooted for a team of non-Yankees. But Rivera’s retirement does, at least, open up some questions that previously wouldn’t have been up for debate. When it comes to picking the best at something, Rivera’s absence gives a chance to somebody else.

I was asked in my Tuesday chat to identify the new most dominant pitch in baseball. Before, the answer was automatic: Mariano Rivera’s cutter. It was that way for nearly two decades, as Rivera rode one masterful pitch to glory and a certain place in the Hall of Fame. Rivera never really declined, and his cutter topped the list because of his command, his results and his longevity. But now we’re able to entertain the idea of other pitchers and other pitches. With Rivera out of the picture, choosing another pitch isn’t blasphemous. The way I see it, there are two contenders.

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Over the last two weeks, Kansas City Royals management has stirred the pot a little bit by saying that they might not carry a backup middle infielder. Then they said the new plan would be to have Danny Valencia play a little second base. This of course does nothing to solve the problem of giving them a backup shortstop. Also, since Valencia has never played second base and is entering his age-29 season. But if the Royals are going to carry 12 pitchers, their options are limited. They could roll with just four outfielders, or they could just hope that Alcides Escobar and Omar Infante are healthy all year, or they could just try the Valencia hail mary plan. Or they could just carry 11 pitchers.

Using fewer relief pitchers is not a new sabermetric idea, of course. But if there is one team that could pull it off, it’s the Royals. Looking at relief pitcher appearances from April-August, we can see that the Royals were at the bottom of the spectrum.
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Spring is a time for big talk, for positive talk. Spring is when everyone’s sure they’re going to get better. And maybe everyone really does get better all the time. It’s just that some people get less better than others. Mike Matheny is in charge of a really good baseball team that almost won the World Series last fall. But Matheny, like most baseball people, wasn’t completely satisfied. In 2014, he wants his team to be better. And specifically, he’s also looking for his pitchers to be better… at hitting. And he thinks it’s going to happen.

“We’re going to be a better hitting group of pitchers this year,” Matheny said. “They do so much talking about how athletic they are but they were not content with what they were able to do on the offensive side last year.”

Continued:

“There were a lot of swings and misses,” Matheny said. “We were one of the worst teams in baseball with strikeouts from the pitcher’s position. That just shouldn’t be so.”

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Detroit Tigers.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Tigers or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

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

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Spring training is a time of becoming reacquainted with baseball. The pace, the play, the pitches, the plate, even the equipment — there’s a daily language that comes easier with practice. Catchers are no different, though perhaps there’s a multiplier. You have to get used to your own game, and you have to get to know your pitchers again. And one of the newest ways to measure catcher defense — framing — may have a lot to do with this familiarity.

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On Sunday afternoon in Arizona against the Dodgers, San Diego center fielder Cameron Maybin made a nice diving catch to rob Juan Uribe of an extra-base hit:

Wonderful! That’s a fantastic play, even if one perhaps that might have been made much easier by the right fielder, Rymer Liriano, although you understand if a young player with just 53 professional games above Single-A may have hesitated to call off a major league center fielder. Still, Maybin made the play, and he looked good doing it. Great play, beautiful day, all is good in the world.

Except, after spending most of the next inning looking like this…  Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Oakland A’s.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Oaklanders or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

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

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I don’t even remember what I was looking up on YouTube this morning, but there, in the sidebar, was this, and it just had to be clicked on.

It was, of course, a legendary baseball game, the rare regular-season game that interests more than just fans of the two teams involved. It wasn’t supposed to be anything special from the outset, but most people understand what happened that day — the unbeatable Seattle Mariners took a 14-2 lead over the Cleveland Indians into the bottom of the seventh, and the Cleveland Indians won.

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