Archive for Teams

I was previewing the Angels and Mariners series that began on Tuesday, kicking off the final nine games of the season for both teams, when I noticed how well the Angels ranked in my metrics. That the Angels are good is no surprise, but the magnitude to which they had improved since they last played the Mariners at the beginning of September caught my notice.

Since that last preview, the Angels went 15-7 with a massive 104-58 run differential. But where did has the dominance burst forth? Over those 22 games, the offense posted a .734 OPS which is only three points above the American League average. On the pitching side, the staff has a 21.7% strikeout rate, a 6.4% walk rate and 3.4% home run rate compared to league averages of 19.4%, 8.2% and 2.8%. That’s an above average line, but not an outright dominant one.

Lacking a breakout in either the bats or arms, it really highlights how well the defense has played. Read the rest of this entry »

First there was man, and then there was baseball. Soon after baseball there were baseball statistics, because there’s no sense in male competition if you don’t have a record of who’s good and who’s not. Baseball was played in ballparks, and in time people came to notice that different ballparks affected the game in different ways. Eventually people put numbers to park factors, and after there were park factors, there were park factors broken down by handedness. This is where we are today, with the focus being on how specific environments affect specific players. Later on, we’ll know a lot more than we know today, but today we know plenty, relative to what we knew just a few years ago.

As we’ve come to understand park factors, we’ve come to understand the importance of sample sizes. Many prefer multi-year factors over single-year factors, because single-year factors can be misleading. That’s when you’re dealing with events that happen a lot, like walks or strikeouts or singles. Even with multi-year factors, you can observe wild swings with events that happen more rarely. I’m talking here about park factors for, say, hit batters, or park factors for triples. With that in mind, the updated righty park factor for Progressive Field for triples could end up looking a little silly. Let me explain.

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On August 15, Major League Baseball suspended San Francisco Giants outfielder Melky Cabrera 50 games after Cabrera tested positive for testosterone, a substance banned under MLB’s Joint Drug Policy.  The suspended began immediately. Including the Giants’ game that day against the Washington Nationals, San Francisco would play 45 games from the time of Cabrera’s suspension through the end of the regular season.

Now that the Giants have clinched the National League West title, they are guaranteed to play at least another three, and as many as five, postseason games in the Division Series. These games will count as part of Cabrera’s suspension. Under the Joint Drug Policy (Section 7.H.), a suspension for a certain number of games includes all regular season and post-season games the player would have been eligible to play. “A player shall be deemed to have been eligible for a post-season game if he was on the Club’s active roster  . . . immediately preceeding his suspension.”

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This upcoming offseason was poised to be one filled with excitement surrounding the starting pitchers available on the free agent market. Teams were poised to open up their wallets in hopes of signing Zack Greinke, Matt Cain, or Cole Hamels — but the market quickly dried up once Cain and Hamels signed contract extensions with their current teams.

An intriguing name should join the market this winter, however, as CBS Sports’ Jon Heyman reported last week that the Chicago White Sox are not expected to exercise Jake Peavy’s 2013 option worth $22M. Instead, they are expected to pay a $4M buyout and allow Peavy to sign elsewhere.

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I recall that Tangotiger likes to think of pitchers as batters as a control group. Here we have a bunch of non-hitters put into hitting situations, and so their statistics in such situations are worthy of investigation. The best control group might be American League pitchers, pitchers who’ve never been in the National League before — NL pitchers, obviously, get more than a little batting practice — but even NL pitchers get only a fraction of the batting practice that position players get, because they are pitchers and they all need to work on their pitching. All of them. So they work as an effective control group anyway.

Within that control group, though, there exists a variety of batting approaches. Not every pitcher as a batter is alike, nor would we expect them to be. There’s Yovani Gallardo, who bats like a power hitter. There’s Barry Zito, who tries his damnedest to get his bat on everything and who doesn’t at all concern himself with the quality of actual contact. There’s Tommy Hanson, who sucks. Every pitcher as a batter is at least just a little bit different from all the others, and this all brings us to Ian Kennedy. Today you’re going to learn something about Ian Kennedy that you presumably didn’t know, and that you presumably didn’t think you would ever bother to know.

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Episode 247
Marc Hulet, author of the site’s organizational top-15 prospect lists and assorted other minor-league coverage, discusses four players — Tony Cingrani (Reds), Corban Joseph (Yankees), Wilmer Flores (Mets), and Daniel Vogelbach (Cubs) — and the larger concerns each raises with regard to prospect analysis generally.

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 39 min. play time.)

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Being a Mariners fan, I’m spoiled by the fact that I get to watch Brendan Ryan play defense almost every day. I’m anti-spoiled by the fact that I also have to watch Brendan Ryan play offense almost every day, but memories of watching Yuniesky Betancourt in the field are still fresh in my brain, and it’s difficult for me to imagine that there’s a better defensive shortstop than Ryan currently in the major leagues. I don’t even know what such a shortstop would look like; seems to me that, if there’s a fieldable ball in play, Ryan will turn it into an out or two, provided it’s somewhere within screaming distance of his starting position.

Ryan, absolutely, is one of the best. Some of the numbers suggest that he is indeed the very best. Even ignoring the numbers, his ability is readily evident to the casual observer. If there’s one guy who’s better, though, he plays in Atlanta. And he isn’t Tyler Pastornicky.

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Alternate headline: Yu Darvish Stops Being Polite, Starts Getting Real

Yu Darvish pitched again on Thursday, and Yu Darvish dominated again on Thursday. Unlike when he dominated the Mariners in his previous outing, this time he dominated a good team on the road, allowing a run over eight innings against the Angels. The Rangers beat the Angels, which the Angels found particularly devastating, and while it wasn’t all Darvish’s fault, it was a lot Darvish’s fault. Said Michael Young afterward:

“Yu has just been awesome,” said 3B Michael Young. “I hope people are appreciating what they are seeing, because rookies don’t usually get stronger as the season goes on. It’s usually the other way around. Guys are running on fumes as the season is ending. Not Yu. He’s getting stronger and better. He’s just been rock solid.”

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While I wrote most of what I had to say about the AL MVP discussion a few days ago, I do have one more question I want to ask – what’s so different about Cabrera this season compared to 2010?

Most of the case for Cabrera’s candidacy rests upon the idea that he’s having an historic offensive performance, and that denying him the award would be some kind of historical injustice. But, if we look at his 2012 season and his 2010 season side by side, can we really make the case that this year is all that different from what he did two years ago?

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There has been a lot of banter about the Most Valuable Player Award this week. While the National League has an even field with multiple candidates, it’s the American League — with  Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera — that’s gotten most of the attention.

At the center of the debate is baseball’s triple crown, an incredibly rare achievement that is within reach for Cabrera. The fact that Trout is going to finish with the better season, regardless, has led many to pooh-pooh the fact that Cabrera has the chance to become just the 14th player since 1901 to win the elusive title. And while the triple crown in and of itself doesn’t signify greatness, it has only been won by great players. And most often, the league’s best player has won it.

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