Archive for Teams

Giancarlo Stanton is struggling and Giancarlo Stanton’s teammates are terrible. These two things are true. These two might be related. It would make sense that these things are related, because the drop-off from Giancarlo Stanton to the guys hitting behind him is absurdly large.

Stanton has played in 16 games this season, and has hit third in all 16 of those games. The cleanup spot behind him has been a rotation of Greg Dobbs (8 games), Placido Polanco (5 games), and Joe Mahoney (3 games). If you go by the rest-of-season ZIPS projections, Mahoney is the best hitter of the bunch, forecast for a .677 OPS, with Dobbs and Polanco both coming in at .650. Weighted for the number of games played, then, you could say that Stanton has been “protected” by three players with an aggregate OPS projection of .665, a 269 point drop off from his own .934 rest-of-season ZIPS forecast.

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It’s still April and the samples are still small, but we’re over 10 percent of the way into the 2013 season and a few statistics are beginning to stabilize. Approach-related statistics in particular are starting to reach the point where the regression can be a little less aggressive. Swing rate begins to tell a bit of a story after just 50 plate appearances, for instance.

It’s a pretty intuitive result — the batter’s choice to swing is less dependent on pitcher quality and independent of fielder quality. By now, qualified players are in the 75-100 plate appearance range, and so we can get an idea of who is making a big change to their approach this year.

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The Mets boast a quartet of Dominican arms who rank among the top-15 prospects in the organization. Jeurys Familia, Rafael Montero, Luis Mateo and Domingo Tapia are off to strong starts. And with Rainy Lara and Gabriel Ynoa pitching well in Savannah, the core of young, Dominican arms will only continue to grow.

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Some weeks, there are major developments in the business of baseball — like a team signing a new local TV contract. Some weeks, there are little developments on the big developments. My posts tend to focus on the big developments, but that leaves you in the dark on the little developments, unless those little developments become big developments down the road.

This week has been full of little developments in stories I’ve written. Rather than wait until they blossom into big developments — if that ever happens — I’ll run them down here.

StubHub loses fight in California Legislature

On Tuesday,  I wrote about a bill pending in the California State Assembly that would prohibit ticket sellers from placing restrictions on ticket re-sales, like what the Los Angeles Angels have done this season. The Assembly Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism and Internet Media had a hearing on the bill Tuesday morning and were none too pleased with its provisions. The Committee gutted the bill, and left in only the provision to outlaw computerized ticket-buying software that brokers often use to scoop up tickets to high-demand events. The Committee is stacked with members from southern California, where the entertainment industry holds tremendous sway, so the bill’s demise isn’t surprising.

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Earlier Thursday, Dave Cameron made a simple observation regarding the Los Angeles Angels and their batch of position players:

Every Angel with 40+ PAs has been an above average hitter this year, except for Josh Hamilton. fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?p…

— David Cameron (@DCameronFG) April 25, 2013

All right, neat. Now keep that in mind as we go forward.

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Used to be, earlier in his career, Alfonso Soriano was the very model of an undisciplined hitter. He got a lot of press, because he was a Yankee, and back in 2002, Soriano drew 22 unintentional walks while striking out 157 times. He also mashed 39 dingers, so it’s not like there was much reason for Soriano to change. But as time has gone by, it seems like Soriano has drawn less attention for his hacking, probably because it’s become entirely familiar. And probably because he’s managed to have a hell of a career, so it’s not like the hacking really dragged him down. Soriano with a different approach might not have been as good as the Soriano we’ve been able to observe.

But Soriano’s still very much a hacker. As a rule of thumb, if a young hitter is pretty undisciplined, he’s likely to remain pretty undisciplined as an older hitter. That is, if his career survives. Soriano, for his career, has four times as many strikeouts as unintentional walks. That makes for a similar ratio to those belonging to Reed Johnson and Jeff Francoeur. During the PITCHf/x era, 515 players have batted at least 500 times. Soriano’s rate of swings at pitches out of the strike zone is the tenth-highest in the group. That Soriano has a career .351 wOBA is a testament to his ability to punish a variety of pitches, but the hacking still gets him in trouble, and Thursday provided a wonderful example. Thursday, in a game between the Cubs and the Reds, Soriano went and had himself an unforgivable plate appearance in a critical spot. Or what would have been a critical spot, if the Cubs weren’t dreadful.

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Earlier, we took a look at the young season’s most impeded home run so far, which is the home run that faced the most opposition from the game conditions at the time. All necessary data was recovered from the ESPN Home Run Tracker, which is among my most favorite of Internet resources. If we look at one extreme, then, it follows that we should look also at the other extreme, or else the matter will feel incomplete, and this is a website devoted to completeness. And so we now turn our attention to the home run that has gotten the biggest boost from the game conditions. Home runs like this are probably more interesting than home runs that remain home runs despite strong winds and cold conditions, because these might be identified as “lucky”.

In terms of impeded home runs, we had one dinger at -20 feet, and another dinger at -17 feet. So it was a close race, and the error bars probably overlap. Here, in terms of aided home runs, we have one dinger at +64 feet, and another dinger at +43 feet. That’s a much bigger difference, but there might still be some error-bar overlap, for reasons we’ll get into. Let’s look at the home run in question!

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In the first game of a Tuesday doubleheader in Colorado, the Braves and Rockies played in a temperature that was measured at 23 degrees at first pitch. It’s hardly impossible to imagine temperatures that low — in some places temperatures are that low all of the time — but it’s hard to imagine playing baseball, and specifically hitting a baseball, when it’s below freezing out. Nevertheless, the Braves and Rockies played, and the Braves emerged victorious, having slammed a trio of dingers. That got my mental gears whirring.

Take an ordinary fly ball. At room temperature, it would have a given distance. In hotter conditions, it would fly farther. In colder conditions, it would fly less far. So I found it impressive that the Braves hit three home runs when it was around 23 degrees, and my initial thought was that the cold canceled out the effect of the altitude. From there, I started messing around on the ESPN Home Run Tracker, and I looked beyond Tuesday’s first game in Colorado. I started looking for the 2013 home run that has lost the most distance due to non-standard conditions.

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The hard-throwing, 24-year-old Matt Harvey has quickly become a must watch when he toes the rubber for the Mets. Called up in late July of last year, Harvey and his blistering fastball (94.6 average velocity) currently sport a 31.3% strikeout rate and an ERA- of 25 — no, not 75, 25. In 2013, Harvey has made four starts, lasting at least seven innings in each appearance. He has only allowed one home run and a paltry 10 hits in 29 innings.

Harvey does feature a number of pitches, but he’s heavily reliant on his four-seam fastball, throwing that pitch 60% of the time. That ranks him fifth among all qualified pitchers in 2013. And that fastball has been deadly.

According to the PITCHf/x leader boards at Baseball Prospectus (powered by Brooks Baseball), Harvey has induced a .042 ISO (2nd best) and a .167 BA (3rd best) against when using his fastball. David Golebiewski from Baseball Analytics recently wrote about Harvey’s ability to win with the high fastball. The numbers were eye-popping. Harvey so far this year has induced whiffs on high fastballs 48.4% of the time, and he’s throwing upstairs over 50% of the time.

I was curious how this compared to others this year and in previous years. So I did some digging.

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Yes, well obviously Roberto Hernandez is not Fausto Carmona. The name Fausto Carmona belongs to someone else, and though the history of Cleveland Indians starting pitcher “Fausto Carmona” belongs to Roberto Hernandez, the two pitchers (the one pitcher) are not the same.

What I’m saying is: Roberto Hernandez is striking out batters.

He has a 22.5% K-rate right now. His previous career high was 17.1%, but that was mostly as a rookie reliever. As a starter, his highest K-rate was 15.6%. In fact, if we dig even deeper, we find his 22.5% K-rate is the highest strikeout rate he’s ever posted over a four game period:

His recent success — underscored and even underappreciated in his 3.75 FIP and 3.60 SIERA — appears to be the product of deliberate changes. That suggests he could maintain a new level of success.
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