Earlier this week, I posted about the best bunts of the 2013 regular season according to Win Probability Added. You can read about the basic idea (and its limits) there. Now that we have looked at the best, why not a few of the worst?
The St. Louis Cardinals need a shortstop and have a surplus of talent with no obvious places to fit onto their roster. The Colorado Rockies have a superstar shortstop but need more good players than they currently have. These facts have people — including noted scribe Ken Rosenthal — speculating about what a Tulowitzki-to-STL deal might look like. In fact, it is probably now the most interesting trade rumor of the off-season.
For their part, the Rockies say that they aren’t interested in trading Tulowitzki. When you have one of the best players in the game signed to one of the most team-friendly contracts in the game, there shouldn’t be a huge sense of urgency to unload said player and contract. Over the summer, I rated Tulowitzki as the 13th most valuable trade chip in baseball, sliding in between Miguel Cabrera and Stephen Strasburg. For the Rockies to move Tulowitzki, the offer would have to be substantial.
The Cardinals have substantial talent though. Matt Adams looks like a nice player, but he’s blocked by Allen Craig at first base. Trevor Rosenthal wants to start, but there isn’t an obvious spot for him in the rotation at the moment. If Jaime Garcia is healthy by next spring, the Cardinals won’t even have room for all the starters they already have, not even counting the potential for Rosenthal or Carlos Martinez to transition back out of the bullpen. The team also has Kolten Wong now blocked by Matt Carpenter at second base, and if they end up re-signing Carlos Beltran, they’ll probably have to trade Jon Jay whenever Oscar Taveras proves ready for the big leagues.
So, yeah, the Cardinals have expendable talent that is basically the envy of every team in the sport. They have enough depth that they can probably target any player they want and make a serious offer that at least forces the other club to listen. The real question, though, is should they?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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*?
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.
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.