Johnny Cueto came off the disabled list and started for the Reds last night. He had been on the disabled list due to a sore right oblique; it was the same injury he experienced during last season’s playoffs. His unique twisting windup seems to be the reason that he’s suffered the same ailment twice now, and he has said he might consider changing his delivery to correct the problem in the future.
In Sports Illustrated’s 2013 baseball preview, Tom Verducci wrote a great profile of the Tampa Bay Rays and their approach to optimizing the performance of their pitching staff.
One topic that was especially interesting to me was the apparent importance the Rays place on the 1-1 count. Verducci recounts how pitching coach Jim Hickey described the organization’s focus on getting opposing batters into 1-2 counts:
The Rays believe no pitch changes the course of that at bat more than the 1-and-1 delivery. “It’s almost a 200-point swing in on-base percentage with one ball and two strikes as opposed to two balls and one strike,” Hickey told the pitchers.
Win probability said the Reds had a 4.3 percent chance of winning when Devin Mesoraco stepped to the plate against Craig Kimbrel. There were two outs and nobody on base. Win probability obviously didn’t know Craig Kimbrel was pitching.
According to Tom Tango’s run frequency calculator, given Kimbrel’s career .154/.240/.208 line against, a run is expected to score off Kimbrel 2.3 percent of the time with two outs and the bases empty. Actual win probablity, then, is more like 1.0 percent, considering Atlanta would be expected to win half the times Kimbrel gets out of the inning with a tie.
Naturally, then, Mesoraco and Shin-Soo Choo hit back-to-back home runs, and the Reds left with likely the most improbable walk-off win of the season.
Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.
Through five starts, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright has a 1.93 ERA, 1.09 FIP, and 2.13 SIERA. Of the 144 batsmen to face Wainwright, 37 struck out and just 1 walked — Bryce Harper in the 6th inning of last Tuesday’s game. Wainwright has induced a career-high 55.8% groundball-rate; he has held opponents to 8 earned runs, 9 runs total, scattered across 37 and 1/3 innings.
Wainwright is not “on fire.” He is fire. Butane lighters hang pictures of him on their bedroom walls. Local volunteer firemen warn children about Wainwright during school visits.
So how does an excellent pitcher produce results like a deity pitcher? For Wainwright, the tactic appears to be: (a) Throw a full spectrum of fastballs, (b) select from that fastball spectrum at an increasingly unpredictable rhythm, and (c) pitch against the right teams.
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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.
As Jeff Sullivan just pointed out, Shin-Soo Choo leads the majors in on base percentage, thanks to his willingness to endure pain for his team’s gain. #2 in the majors in OBP is teammate Joey Votto, Cincinnati’s star first baseman. The Reds acquired Choo to boost the top of their batting order, and in the first three weeks of the season, he has teamed with Votto to create havoc. Even with Zack Cozart and his .243 OBP in the #2 spot, the Reds lead the Majors in runs scored because of the sheer quantity of opportunities those two have created for their teammates.
And yet, because of how Major League Baseball has historically been covered and the numbers that are often used to tell the stories of the game, Brandon Phillips is the guy putting up numbers at an historic pace, as his 21 RBIs in 18 games put him on a trajectory to make a run at Hack Wilson’s all time RBI record. And now, his own manager is propagating the myth of who is really responsible for the Reds early success.
“On-base percentage is good. But RBIs are better,” (Dusty) Baker said.
You’re reading FanGraphs, so you’re probably predisposed to dislike that quote. Just for fun, though, let’s go through the numbers.
You like factoids, so go ahead and choose your factoid. Shin-Soo Choo has already been hit by nine pitches. Shin-Soo Choo’s hit-by-pitch total is more than twice as high as that of the current runner-up. Shin-Soo Choo has accounted for 5.2% of the league’s hit-by-pitches while accounting for 0.4% of the league’s plate appearances. No non-Reds team in baseball has been hit by more pitches than Shin-Soo Choo this season. Shin-Soo Choo has reached base more often by hit-by-pitches than Jason Heyward has reached base by hits. Shin-Soo Choo already has the second-worst UZR in baseball, ahead only of a guy with the yips. Whoops, I don’t know how that got in there. The point is this: Shin-Soo Choo has been hit a lot, already. There is a variety of ways in which this point can be illustrated.
It’s not a total negative, or even that much of a partial negative, because Choo is leading off for the Reds and leadoff hitters are supposed to get on base. When you get hit by a pitch, you are entitled to a base! Through three weeks or so, Choo has made fewer outs than non-outs, and this is a guy in the Reds lineup who isn’t Joey Votto. As long as Choo can get hit and not get hurt, it’ll be an overall positive, and Choo hasn’t gotten hurt to date.
The Reds received a scare when Johnny Cueto was placed on the disabled list with a strained lat muscle. As he returned to Cincinnati for further testing yesterday, the minor leagues’ hottest pitcher took the mound in Louisville awaiting to hear whether he would replace Cincinnati’s ace. In three Triple-A starts, Tony Cingrani destroyed the International League: he struck out 26 batters in 14.1 innings. But is he ready? Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes, a little comment can send you down a wormhole. Brandon Crawford is a glovely young man, and we talked about platoon splits — he doesn’t remember having trouble with lefties in the minors — and a few other topics, but it was one thing he said about his defense that popped.