When we think of the prototypical Most Valuable Player, we think of a burly first baseman who slugs forty homers. But that’s not always the case, not in terms of sabremetric thinking, and not for the Baseball Writers Association of America either. Jacoby Ellsbury as MVP candidate isn’t a figment of the interwebs’ imagination — there are several players who won that have a similar profile as Ellsbury.
Earlier this season, I re-introduced the two statistics Shutdowns and Meltdowns. In short, these two stats are an alternative way of evaluating relief pitchers, providing an alternative from the age-old standbys Saves and Blown Saves. If a pitcher enters a game and makes their team more likely to win, they get credit for a Shutdown; if they make their team more likely to lose, they get a Meltdown. It’s a simple enough concept, no?
Shutdowns and Meltdowns are a great way to look at which relievers are under- or overvalued based on their Saves total, and it can also be a useful tool for evaluating middle relievers. So which relievers have are being sneakily good or bad this year? Let’s take a look.
Due to a back injury to veteran Kevin Youkilis, the Boston Red Sox club has promoted catcher/designated hitter Ryan Lavarnway to the Major Leagues. He made his debut Thursday night against the Kansas City Royals and went 0-for-4 with a strikeout. Lavarnway, 24, is not going to step into the Red Sox lineup and immediate produce at the star level that Youkilis has (4.1 WAR in ’11), but he should be slightly-above replacement level in the short term.
I’ve been eagerly anticipating Lavarnway’s arrival in the Majors. Out of the five pre-season Top 10 prospect lists for Boston [Baseball America, Kevin Goldstein, Keith Law, John Sickels], the scribe from minorleagueball.com and I were the only ones to place him on the Boston lists (Law earns mega points, though, for placing both Will Middlebrooks and Xander Bogaerts on his list).
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.
Jacoby Ellsbury is having a terrific year, and has been one of the best all-around players in baseball this year. He’s been one of the main reasons the Red Sox have rebounded from a slow start, and is rightfully getting attention as a legitimate MVP candidate. He should absolutely be part of that discussion.
Over in the National League, though, Shane Victorino is performing at the same level and, at least by my perception, is getting roundly ignored. This should not be. Let’s put them side by side, shall we?
Ellsbury: .314/.369/.508, .387 wOBA, 142 wRC+, +11.2 UZR, +6.2 WAR
Victorino: .313/.390/.536, .406 wOBA, 157 wRC+, +6.5 UZR, +5.7 WAR
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.
Should Hit, or ShH — pronounced like: “Shh! Be quiet or the Nazis will hear!”
Last week, while rifling through the lump of cold numbers that is the 2011 season, I stumbled upon a self-illuminating chest of gold coins: A reliable, fielding independent hitting formula. Today, we’re going to take it to the next level and get nerdy up in this beach.
Before we proceed, let’s do some of the research I did not care to do the first time around. Here are some of Should Hits’s predecessors (though they did not directly influence the creation of ShH):
FIP for Hitters
In 2010, Matt Klaassen wrote “FIP for Hitters? Defense Independent Offense.” His work in the article — though it does stay truly defensive independent and does not bring BABIP into the conversation — probably mirrors my work the most. However, his works is different both in process (he excludes BABIP and does not use wRC+) and intention (my tool focuses on regression, not really true talent levels).
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I came across this blurb a couple days ago over at HardBall Talk (originally from ESPN Boston):
“David [Ortiz] is (too) proud and respectful to say how he feels in public, but the guy feels hurt, upset by the way that he is being ignored by the Red Sox,” said the unnamed source. “After all he’s done here and having a good season, he was at least hoping to be approached by the team to talk about his future.”
On one hand, David Ortiz has a point. He’s in the midst of his best season since 2007 — his .390 wOBA is impressive — and as one of the most-loved players on the Red Sox, it would seem like a common courtesy that the team would reach out to him about a new contract. If you can help it, you certainly don’t want to annoy one of your star players during the stretch run.
But as weird as it may sound, I think the Red Sox are actually doing Ortiz a favor. He might not realize it now, but if the Sox had reached out to him, he might not have liked what he heard. I’m certain Ortiz will end up back in Boston, but much like Jeter’s situation this past offseason, things could get messy before the end.
Maybe there’s is a better way to predict how well a hitter is doing? Rather than glancing at his OBP and SLG and OPS or his wOBA and wRC+ and then mentally calibrating that number according to an inflated or deflated BABIP, maybe we can find a simple means of combining the key elements into a single formula.
Well, I believe I have stumbled onto just such a formula.
Th’other day, when I was trying to solve the mystery of the Tampa Bay Rays and their utterly broken run expectancy chart, I began ruminating about the relationship between walks, strikeouts, and an ability to create runs. You see, the Rays tend towards true outcomes: lotsa walks, lotsa strikeouts. So, for some strange reason — be it bad luck or bad hitter-type chemistry — the Rays seem to have an inability of reaching a standard run expectancy with the bases loaded.
Anyway, I began to investigate this trifle and produced an interesting comparison:
With the flurry of rumors around the trade deadline, it can be easy for a move to sneak up seemingly out of nowhere. Theo Epstein and Dayton Moore pulled the trigger on one of those deals this afternoon, with the Red Sox acquiring second baseman Mike Aviles from the Royals for minor leaguers Yamaico Navarro, a 23-year-old versatile infielder, and Kendal Volz, a 23-year-old righty reliever.
