A few weeks ago, I wrote about some interesting platoon splits of a couple of left-handed hitters who had my attention. When I started looking at some right-handed hitters who had splits I wanted to discuss, they also turned out to be players with a big impact this year: the winner of the 2013 National League batting title, the most exciting young player in years, and the hero of last night’s NLCS game. Their splits are interesting in themselves (at least to a certain type of baseball fan), but also are concrete way of thinking about more general principles with respect to platoon skill.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I worked for the Rockies, we spent a lot of time talking about Todd Helton’s hall of fame candidacy. When Helton recovered from a hairy intestinal issue in 2006 to post the seventh four-win (or better) campaign of his career in 2007, the going thought was that if he was able to just to do that a few more times, he would be a shoo-in for the Hall. He stood at 51.1 WAR through the end of his age-33 season, and had plenty of other accolades on his resume — five-time All-Star, three-time Gold Glove winner, four-time Silver Slugger, one of just 10 players to play in the Integrated Era to be a career .300/.400/.500 hitter, 10th all-time in on-base percentage, etc. Honestly, some of the debate was which statistical markers were the most impressive. And with the Rocktober run in the books, Helton was no longer the longest tenured player to not have played in the postseason.

But then age caught up to Helton in a big way. In the past six years, he has been able to add just 5.1 WAR to his ledger, and now after a poor swan song he stands in the gray area from a hall perspective. However, it hasn’t all been doom and gloom these past few years. So rather than wallow in what-ifs, I thought today we could look at five of the best moments from the final five seasons of Helton’s career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to our friends at Baseball Info Solutions, we have batted ball information dating back to 2002, which gives us data on 11 full seasons and 60% of the 2013 season. It might not be quite as catchy of a time frame as the “Dead Ball Era” or “Steroid Era”, but it’s our own little stretch of baseball that we care about. Sometimes I refer to it as the “UZR era”, since that’s one of the more common stats cited that uses batted ball data, but other stats have the same timeframe here on the site.

One of the more common batted ball stats cited around here is HR/FB ratio, as the data has shown to be not particularly predictive, yet can have a huge impact on a pitcher’s results. If he’s giving up fly balls that are staying in the yard, that can lead to very good results — hello, Matt Cain and Jered Weaver — but those results can also be kind of fickle, as 2013 Matt Cain is demonstrating with aplomb.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Cuddyer just finished going streaking. His 27-game streak, which lasted from May 28th to June 30th, was the longest since Dan Uggla’s 33-gamer in 2011. While he didn’t reach the 30-game benchmark that many sites use, 27 games is nothing to shake a stick at — Cuddyer’s streak was just the 135th of 25 or more games since 1916 that happened during the same season (there were also 18 that spanned two seasons, but I don’t count those. If you have a problem with that you can go suck a lemon). I didn’t have the time to go through all of those streaks, but I did have a chance to take a look at the streaks of 30 or more games, and I thought we could put Cuddyer’s streak into perspective.

Read the rest of this entry »

In his Major League debut for the Mets, 23-year-old Zack Wheeler struck out seven hitters in his six innings of work. Of those seven strikeouts, six came on fastballs — and of those six, four came on whiffs induced by fastballs.

This got me wondering, what pitchers this year have generated the largest percentage of their strikeouts off of their fastball? And how many generated those strike outs on swings and misses on fastballs*?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to come right out and say this is another FanGraphs article about batter pace. That is, the average amount of seconds between each pitch thrown to the batter, as determined by PITCHf/x time stamps. I haven’t gone to this well in a while, and I know it doesn’t appeal to everyone, since pace doesn’t mean much when it comes to determining future or present performance. Pace is a peripheral detail, and while I personally occasionally find it fascinating, you’re free to leave now. I’m not misleading you about what’s to follow.

Go to the batter leaderboards and sort them by pace, in descending order. Or don’t, and let me tell you what you’ll find anyway. You’ll find Carlos Pena at No. 1, which isn’t unusual, because Pena has always taken forever. Then you’ll find Troy Tulowitzki, then Kelly Shoppach, then Robinson Cano, then Travis Hafner. These are some pretty different players, and it’s hard to know on the surface what to make of this. But one of these things is unusual. Historically, these have been four slower-than-average hitters. Also, there’s Tulowitzki.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, the Rockies sent Josh Rutledge to Colorado Springs. To be certain, Rutledge was not playing well, and there is a decent chance that Rutledge really isn’t that good in general. Then again, he may also need to just figure out who he is. He was semi-rushed to the majors, as he skipped Triple-A, and there is anecdotal evidence that his game has changed since his hot start.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first round of the Major League draft is just a little over three weeks away, and the Houston Astros will select first for the second consecutive year. Right now, the consensus belief is that there are two college pitchers — Mark Appel of Stanford and Jonathan Gray of Oklahoma — who are a step ahead of the rest, though University of San Diego third baseman Kris Bryant is putting on quite the power display and could be an option if the Astros preferred to build around bats rather than arms. However, the decision for the Astros may not be made simply on talent alone.

Last year was the first draft under the new bonus structure, which assigns a fixed amount of dollars to each team based on where they pick in the draft, with some pretty severe penalties for exceeding those limits. Now, if a team is interested in paying over the slot value for a pick, they’ll have to borrow the money for that overpayment from another pick, making the draft as much a game of cost management as it is talent acquisition.

Read the rest of this entry »

How far can a player go on base running alone? Probably not too far. Speed as a tool is obviously quite valuable, especially at an elite level, as it feeds both into the ability to provide value on the bases and in the field. Strictly in terms of offense, though, how good can a player be with a terrible bat and good base-running skills? Just for fun, here are five recent individual seasons with the biggest differential between base-running value and batting value.

Read the rest of this entry »