“You never know where help will come from — until you look for it.”

— Tobias Funkë, Arrested Development

News broke last night that Florida police arrested Manny Ramirez on battery charges concerning his wife. Just a few months ago, Ramirez was preparing for another MLB season and had a gold-plated opportunity for redemption.

Since then, though, the former Cleveland Indians and Boston Red Sox slugger has journeyed down a divergent path from his most recent team, the Tampa Bay Rays.

Rewind to the beginning of the season: The Rays management willingly admits 2011 would be a “reloading” year — which is to say the team anticipated a good, but not good-enough performance.

Sure, they had the pitching — what with David Price, James Shields and three young and above-average starters in Jeremy Hellickson, Wade Davis and Jeff Niemann — and they had the defenders — again boasting some of the league’s most valuable fielders in Evan Longoria, Ben Zobrist, and B.J. Upton — but they also had holes aplenty.

For one, the Rays lacked a legitimate DH and a proven first baseman. In hopes of putting power in the DH spot and getting the team a few lucky bounces away from the playoffs, they signed Manny Ramirez to a $2M, 1-year contract — deemed by many as a triumph of Friedmanonics — and Johnny Damon to a $7M $5.25M (excluding incentives), 1-year deal. But even with these additions, the Rays had little chance to out-talent the Red Sox and Yankees in 2011.

The story, as any good story goes, proved quite unpredictable.
Read the rest of this entry »

Going into the 2007 draft, all the buzz was about David Price. The left-hander from Vanderbilt was a veritable lock for the #1 pick in the draft, giving the Tampa Bay Devil Rays — fresh off a 101-loss season — a top arm to go along with 2006 top pick Evan Longoria. Price was a bona fide ace, an All-Star in the making that already had two plus pitches in his fastball and slider.  As was expected, he rose quickly through the minors and has already established himself as one of the top pitchers in the majors in only his second full season.

But this story isn’t about David Price. Instead, this story is about the best pitching prospect selected in the 2007 draft. It’s about the best pitching prospect the Rays have ever had. It’s about Matt Moore.

Read the rest of this entry »

A fair amount of Most Valuable Player and Cy Young discussion has been going around lately, and while it seems a bit early with a month left in the season, I suppose it is understandable. There has been less discussion of Rookie of the Year. I don’t blame anyone for that. I really don’t get that worked up about the individual year-end awards. (I’m not quite brave enough to say that I don’t care, maybe if Greinke hadn’t won in 2009 the story would have been different.) And if I’m not that pumped about the MVP or Cy Young races, why should I be excited about Rookie of the Year?

Still, a number of rookies have been impressive this season, so it is worth discussing. Brett Lawrie, for example, has hit so well in only 26 major league games that he’s already at two WAR for the season, right of there with the best of the American League rookie hitters. What if he (or Desmond Jennings, or whatever player you want to pick) keeps this up? What if they put up more value than any other rookie in less than half of a season? Would you vote for them for Rookie of the Year?

Read the rest of this entry »

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

-Mark Twain

In 2010, James Shields led the league in hits allowed, home runs allowed, and earned runs allowed. Many among the Rays faithful protested last year when Joe Maddon tabbed Shieldsy to start game two of the ALDS, wherein he failed to complete five innings.

“He’s broken,” said some. “He shouldn’t even be on the playoff roster!” fumed others.

He finished the 2010 season somehow once again topping 200 innings, but his ERA was over 5.00, his FIP was above 4.20, and his fans were frustrated. Despite his career-best 3.55 xFIP, a career-low LOB%, and career-high BABIP (a whopping .341), many — even among the sabermetric-slanted — doubted he was merely a product of bad luck.

Well, in 2011, his statistics have sung, “Cy Young!” all season long: 2.96 ERA, 3.36 FIP, and 3.11 xFIP. And most impressively: a league leading 10 complete games and 4 shut outs.

For a guy who has pitched 200+ innings in 5 straight seasons, he sure never showed a knack for complete games before:

He went two years without a single complete game, and then BAM! suddenly he has 10 in one season (at least; he starts again tonight). How’d he do it?! Is it just a luck swing-around?! Did he change his approach?! Is his Bradley Woodrum-esque quasi-Amish beard to blame?

The answer: Yes to all.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next 48 hours everyone in and around baseball will be busy analyzing the rosters of minor league teams in anticipation of September call-ups. But perhaps the most interesting name who is currently on a 40-man roster, Matt Bush, may not get the call at all. By now we all know Bush’s story – the bust that was the first overall pick in the 2004 draft. The immature teenager who made more headlines for his transgressions off the field than his play on it. Fast forward to 2011, and not only has Bush overcome his personal demons with substance abuse, but he has put his career on a major-league path.
Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball games are not perfect simulations. They’re not good ones, or even mediocre ones. They’re downright awful. When we design, engineer and execute proper simulations or models, we are often dealing with scales on the order of thousands of repetitions to become comfortable with the probability of the results. Baseball runs through it once.

Granted there are lots of smaller, more repeated samples within the larger single sample. That helps keep some of the noise down, but not nearly all of it, or most of it. Baseball is a noisy game dominated in many ways by what is commonly called luck and people by nature are just terrible coming to grips with that.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have discovered something marvelous! We only need to know four simple measures to predict what a hitter can do: Their walk rate, strikeout rate, home run rate and BABIP.

For weeks now, we’ve been exploring and playing with my initial discovery, and now we’re to the point where I feel comfortable calling it Fielding Independent Batting (FIB) — an homage to Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), which predates it and partly inspired it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was lucky enough to be in attendance for last night’s game between the Rays and Red Sox, where I got to see something rather rare: a triple play. In the fourth inning of the game, the Rays had runners on first and second with no outs, and Sean Rodriguez hit a sharp grounder right to Jed Lowrie at third base. Lowrie took two steps to the base and then started an easy 5-4-3 triple play. But as fate would have it, this play wasn’t even the first triple play turned this week. The Brewers turned an impressive 4-6-3-2 triple play on Monday against the Dodgers, the first time that sort of triple play has happened since 1972.

So naturally, these two plays have now turned my mind toward all things triple-play-related. Looking for some odd tidbits of information on these triple plays, or on triple plays in general? I’ve got you covered.

Read the rest of this entry »

A five home-run game has never happened for a hitter, but it has happened for pitchers plenty of times. It’s certainly less of a positive achievement there, but just as notable. Or more notable because it’s actually happened and I can note the times that it has. It happened another two times already tonight, as noted by Jeff Sullivan.

CC Sabathia surrendered five home runs to the Rays, all from different hitters, and Carlos Zambrano gave up five to the Braves, two coming from Dan Uggla and his now 32-game hitting streak. On their own, they are worth noting and then moving on. A pitching giving up five home runs is certainly unusual but it’s not incredibly rare. James Shields, Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey have allowed six in a game once and that’s only looking at the past decade. All in all, there have now been 34 instances of a five-homer game since 2000. For reference, over the same time period there have been a total of 39 triple plays turned. What I did notice however, is that Sabathia’s five home runs were all solo shots and that’s a much rarer event.

In the entire Retrosheet era, there are only 22 other cases of a pitcher giving up at least five solo home runs in a game. James Shields ruins a bit of the fun by having done it so recently as 7 August 2010 when five of the ultimately six home runs hit off him were solo dingers. More fascinating is that Tim Wakefield has actually done it twice. In the aforementioned six home run game in 2004, five of the home runs were solo shots in Detroit. The other was a two-run shot and Wakefield only allowed 2 non-HR hits over his five innings that game. Prior to that, in 1996 pitching at Fenway to the White Sox, Wakefield served up solo home runs to Frank Thomas (three times), Danny Tartabull and Robin Ventura. Similar to the other game, Wakefield only allowed a single hit that wasn’t a home run and completed six innings. Amazingly, the Red Sox won both those games.

Turning from the opposite of solo home runs, in case you needed another daily fun fact, the most amount of runs allowed by a pitcher via the long ball in one game is 11. Gio Gonzalez was responsible in July of 2009 by the Twins in Oakland of all places (and Oakland won despite being down 12-2 at one point) and Shawn Chacon was brutalized by the Angels in Colorado in 2001, which makes way more sense.

Four years ago, the Rays discovered a hidden gem. It took a last-minute injury for them to even place Carlos Pena on the roster, but that turned out to be one of the most beneficial injuries in team history. In 2007 Pena broke out, hitting 46 runs and producing 51 runs above average. His 167 wRC+ ranked fourth in the majors. While he never reached that level again, he still turned in two more high quality seasons and helped lead the Rays to the AL pennant in 2008. All of that from a guy who originally didn’t even crack the 2007 roster.

This year the Rays have another breakout on their hands, and once again it comes from a player who didn’t make the team out of spring training. Casey Kotchman started the season in Durham, but he played only one game for the Rays AAA team. Manny Ramirez‘s abrupt retirement paved the way for Kotchman’s recall, and Dan Johnson’s ineffectiveness opened a spot for him in the starting lineup. He’s taken full advantage, and is currently working on his finest season as a major leaguer. But unlike Pena, it’s unclear whether Kotchman’s improvements are replicable in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »