Position: LA Angels Assistant Baseball Systems Developer

Location: Anaheim

Description:

The Assistant Baseball Systems Developer will help build and maintain application and database systems to assist in the decision making process of the Baseball Operations Department.

Responsibilities:

• Work with the current development to team to help design, develop, improve, and maintain new and existing applications and data systems.
• Develop web-based applications displaying data at multiple levels of detail.
• Design ad hoc SQL queries to facilitate baseball operations.
• Implement and optimize advanced algorithms for player projection from software prototypes.
• Continually work with baseball operations staff to identify features and areas of improvement within the player information system to facilitate a user-friendly research tool.
• Integrate new information sources and multimedia displays into player information and tracking system.
• Communicate results to appropriate staff members through presentations, written reports, and tools.
• Other duties as assigned by members of the Baseball Operations Department.

Qualifications:

• Experience with at least one object oriented programming language, preferably C# or Python.
• Familiarity with SQL querying and database design principles (experience with Microsoft SQL Server a plus).
• Comfortable with modern web development technologies including HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Knowledge of the software development lifecycle and industry best practices.
• Working familiarity with advanced statistical concepts, particularly those relevant to sabermetric player projection techniques that include experience implementing statistical calculations, derivations, and graphical representations into software applications.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field from a four-year college or university or equivalent work experience.

To Apply:
Please apply here.

On Friday night, the Dodgers were set to start LHP Alex Wood against the Mets in New York, but he has been scratched due to tightness in his triceps. To replace Wood, LA is calling up 19 year old sensation Julio Urias to make his big league debut.

To say Urias has earned the promotion would be an understatement. Just 19, even making it to Triple-A is an accomplishment, and for most pitchers in the PCL, the goal is to just not suck too badly. For instance, two years ago, a 21 year old Noah Syndergaard ran a 4.60 ERA/3.70 FIP, as he controlled the strike zone but got torched for a .389 BABIP, thanks to the fun-sized ballparks and offensive environments that make the league a hitter’s haven.

Urias, though, is running a 1.10 ERA/2.89 FIP in his first 41 innings in the PCL, and four of the five runs he’s allowed came in one appearance, back on April 16th. He allowed the fifth run in his next outing on April 22nd, a five inning affair where he gave up just two hits, walked one, and struck out eight. He’s pitched in five games since then, and posted the following line.

26 IP, 13 H, 0 R, 6 BB, 24 K.

In the toughest environment for a pitcher in baseball, Urias is destroying the competition. As a 19 year old.

So tomorrow, we’ll get to see how ready he is to get big leaguers out. His initial test, pitching against the defending NL champs in Citi Field, is not an easy one, but Urias has been dominating hitters in less-than-friendly environments all year. There is always a tremendous amount of uncertainty when it comes to projecting pitching prospects making the leap to the big leagues, but with Urias doing what he did to Triple-A batters this year, it was time to see how well he’ll handle the transition.

Steamer’s already sold on Urias, projecting him for a 3.43 ERA/3.58 FIP over the rest of the season, which would work out to put him on a pace for +3 WAR if he were to pitch a full season’s worth of innings. Whether the teenager can live up to those lofty projections and the hype that surrounds him is something we’re all about to find out.

An interesting nugget from a recent edition of the always-excellent Ken Rosenthal notebook:

White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper accepted responsibility for Jeff Samardzija’s struggles last season, telling reporters, “Man, I failed.”

Samardzija, with the benefit of hindsight, takes a more magnanimous view, saying that Cooper only was trying to help him. As it turns out, the foundation of his early success with the Giants came in his final two starts with the White Sox, a one-hit shutout of the Tigers and a strong seven-inning effort against the eventual World Series champion Royals.

Samardzija, 31, said he made an adjustment in September after realizing that he was tipping pitches based upon the time he stayed set in the stretch — coming out of it quickly, he threw a fastball or cutter; taking more time, he threw a slider or split.

A handful of times each year, an article will surface with a pitcher, manager, or even reporter, suggesting that a struggling starter might be tipping his pitches. Seems like, more often than not, these suggestions are sort of brushed aside, either because they’re viewed as nothing more than an excuse, or because without any explanation regarding the nature of the tipping, they’re just viewed as hearsay. Well, Rosenthal provided some pretty specific explanation, and so I went looking to see if I couldn’t find some good ol’ Jeff Samardzija pitch-tipping in action.

Read the rest of this entry »

Giancarlo Stanton has always had a lot of swing and miss in his game, offsetting all the whiffs with ridiculous power displays on his way to being one of the game’s elite sluggers. So when you look at Stanton’s 2016 numbers, it’s easy to just look at the overall line (which includes a 115 wRC+) and note the unsustainably low .256 BABIP — he’s at .324 for his career, given that he hits the crap out of the baseball — in thinking that everything is going to be fine once that corrects itself.

And that’s mostly true, but probably not comprehensive enough, because beyond the BABIP, Stanton’s current struggles include one actually-concerning trend. Here are his contact rates, by season, for his career.

Stanton’s Contact Rate

Season	Contact%
2010	70%
2011	66%
2012	68%
2013	68%
2014	70%
2015	66%
2016	62%

Stanton’s contact rates have always been low, but they’ve been on the low-end of the normal range. If you look at the guys who have run the lowest seasonal contact rates in the PITCHF/x era, you’ll see Stanton hanging out with a bunch of Ryan Howard‘s good seasons, some productive Adam Dunn stretches, Josh Hamilton’s last valuable year, and the recent versions of Chris Davis. You can be a good hitter while making contact at around 67-68% of the time, as long as you have elite power, which Stanton obviously has.

But he’s currently at 62%. Here’s the full list of players who have posted a contact rate that low over a full season, since PITCHF/x allowed us to start tracking contact rate.

Contact Rates Below 63%

Player	Season	Contact%	wRC+
Mark Reynolds	2010	61.7%	96
Mark Reynolds	2009	62.7%	127
Mark Reynolds	2008	63.0%	97

Mark Reynolds is not really the guy you want as your only comparison; those three seasons were his last as a semi-productive regular, and he’s kicked around the league as a barely-above-replacement-level player ever since. Of course, Reynolds doesn’t have Stanton’s power, and no one is suggesting that Stanton is headed for a precipitous cliff, but it’s worth noting that there are basically no examples of productive hitters who swing and miss this often.

The good news for Stanton is he’s sort of had this problem before. Here’s his career K% on a 30-day rolling average basis.

In the second half of 2012, Stanton struck out in 35% of his plate appearances over 180 PAs, slightly higher than his 34% K% in 182 PAs so far this year. And then in 2013, he got his K% back down to 28%, and then 27% in 2014, when he put up a +6 WAR season. But in that second half of 2012, Stanton’s contact rate was still 66%; on the low-end of his range, but a lot higher than it is now.

Stanton has never really made contact this rarely for very long before, and when you swing and miss this much, all the power in the world doesn’t bail you out. Stanton is still the best guy on the planet at crushing baseballs, but for him to get back to what he has, he’s going to have to start hitting them more often again.

Over the course of last week, the author published the results of this site’s television broadcaster rankings — itself the product of reader crowdsourcing and an update to a similar exercise that was performed here roughly four years ago.

Click the relevant links to read about the 31st- and 32nd-ranked broadcasts, Nos. 30 – 21, Nos. 20 – 11, and Nos. 10 – 1.

The full sortable table appears below. But first, three notes:

• Teams are ranked in descending order of Overall rating. Overall ratings are not merely averages of Charisma and Analysis.
• Ratings aren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site.
• Due to an error made by the author, Toronto’s broadcast team was originally ranked 31st overall. They now rank 25th in the amended version.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the Baltimore Orioles dealt Brian Matusz and the 76th overall pick in the draft to Atlanta for minor-league pitchers Brandon Barker and Trevor Belicek. As lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen noted on Twitter, the $838,900 in bonus money tied to that pick bumps the Braves’ draft and international bonus pool up to $13.2 million, which gives them the third-largest pool in baseball. Only the Reds and Phillies have more.

Neither of the two pitchers involved cracked Baseball America’s top-30 prospect list for Atlanta heading into the year, which tells you just about everything you need to know about them: they’re fringy. Barker did earn a mention on our Braves list, but was relegated to the “Quick Hits” section.

Brandon Barker is a 23-year-old righty who’s had a moderate amount of success in a starting capacity. He spun a 3.25 ERA and 3.49 FIP in 147 innings last year, but did so with an unremarkable 18% strikeout rate. The Braves bumped him up to Double-A this year, where he’s had a good deal of success. His strikeout rate has ticked up over 22%, resulting in a 2.00 ERA and 3.46 FIP. KATOH pegs him 0.9 WAR over his first six years in the majors.

Trevor Belicek was drafted as a starter in the 16th round of last year’s amateur draft, but has worked exclusively out of the bullpen this year. He seems to have taken well to his new role. In 28 innings pitched, the southpaw has spun a 2.50 FIP with a 28% strikeout rate. However, he’s made just one appearance above Low-A, so he’s completely untested against polished hitters. The outlook for 23-year-old Low-A relievers isn’t great, so KATOH pegs him for 0.3 WAR over his first six years in the majors.

The two minor-league arms headed to Baltimore have pitched well in the minors this year, but since they’re both 23 and don’t have much of a track record, they aren’t really prospects. It’s unlikely they’ll make any sort of noticeable impact at the big-league level. Matusz was once a top prospect, but he’s an unremarkable lefty reliever these days. He’s been all sorts of terrible this year, and the Braves have already designated him for assignment. The real asset trading hands here is the bonus-pool money. The Braves are essentially agreeing to take on the remainder of Matusz’s one-year, $3.9 million contract in exchange for more spending power in the draft.

Last week, Jeff Sullivan showed how easily pitchers can exploit the flaws in Yasiel Puig’s approach right now; simply pitch him away. He’s swinging at something close to two-thirds of the pitches on the outer third of the plate or further outside; the league average on those pitches is roughly half of Puig’s rate. While he’s never been a selective hitter, Puig’s approach is undermining his entire offensive game right now.

But the problem with chasing pitcher’s pitches isn’t just that you stop drawing walks. It has that effect too — Puig has drawn just two walks in his last 126 plate appearances, dating back to April 12th — but swinging at pitches on the fringes of the strike zone means that you are much less likely to make quality contact. Puig’s problem isn’t really that he’s swinging through pitches; his contact rates are not that different from what they were a few years ago. He’s not even striking out any more than he used to; his 20.3% K% this year is lower than his 20.7% career mark.

But there has been one huge change in Yasiel Puig’s game this year, and it’s killing his production; he’s turned into a pop-up machine.

Yasiel Puig’s Infield Flies

Season	Plate Appearances	Infield Flies	Popup%
2013	432	9	2.1%
2014	640	11	1.7%
2015	311	7	2.3%
2016	158	13	8.2%

Puig has already set a career high for infield flies in a season, and we’re six weeks in to the year. And as the season has gone on, this has only gotten worse.

12 of Puig’s 13 infield flies have come in the last 30 days. During that stretch, 39% of his fly balls have not even reached the outfield, a staggeringly high total; no other player is over 30% during the same stretch, and the guys who are over 25% are guys like Billy Burns and Didi Gregorius, and they only are that high because they rarely hit the ball in the air.

His popup rate per plate appearance over the last month is a staggering 11.8%, over five times higher than the league average. It’s easy to look at his .203 BABIP over the last month and say there’s some positive regression coming, but when you’re just hitting towering fly balls to the shortstop, that’s not bad luck; that’s bad hitting.

And that’s why Yasiel Puig is batting .180/.196/.300 over the last month. And it’s one of the main reasons the Dodgers offense is scuffling. If the Dodgers are going to contend for the NL title this year, they’re going to have to figure out how to get Puig to stop hitting so many infield flies.

Earlier today, I published a post over on the main site digging into Cincinnati’s historically bad bullpen. Within that post, I noted that the Reds’ staff of relievers entered the day with the worst team ERA since 1961, the worst team FIP since 1961, and the worst team home run rate since 1961. The consolation prize, as it were, is that their team walk rate of 11.6% was “only” 1,390th of 1,476.

Well, as I write this post, the Reds’ bullpen’s walk rate is 12.5%, up nearly a full percentage point from this morning, dropping them 70 spots on the all-time leaderboard from 1,390th to 1,460th. It’s the bottom of the seventh in their game in Cleveland, and Reds relievers have retired six batters and walked seven. Also, they’ve made history in the process. More history. More of the kind of history teams and players don’t want to make.

That history looks like this:

In the bottom of the fifth inning, starting pitcher Alfredo Simon was removed from the game and relieved by right-hander Steve Delabar. Delabar walked Jason Kipnis to load the bases and struck out Francisco Lindor. Then, with the bases still loaded, Delabar walked four consecutive batters, effectively hitting a grand slam for Cleveland while re-loading the bases with a fresh set of legs.

I asked FanGraphs researcher Jonah Pemstein to run some numbers on this phenomena, and this is what he found.

This marks just the sixth time in recorded history (dating back to 1974) that a team drew four consecutive walks with the bases already loaded, and the first time in 12 years. The other teams to achieve the feat are as follows:

• Pittsburgh, 5/9/2004
• Texas, 4/19/1996
• Boston, 5/7/1992
• Atlanta, 5/25/1983
• Boston, 8/28/1981

Not only that, but Delabar himself made history. In each of the five previous instances of a team walking four consecutive batters with the bases already loaded, at least one pitching change was made during the streak. The Reds did not make such a change:

Steve Delabar is the only pitcher since at least 1974 to walk 4 straight batters w/ bases already loaded, per FG research (h/t @japemstein)

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustFG_) May 18, 2016

At least they’re making history.

The weakest free agent class in recent memory just got weaker again, as Francisco Cervelli has now joined Stephen Strasburg in taking a mid-season extension rather than testing the open market this winter.

Sources: Francisco Cervelli has signed a three-year contract extension with the Pirates. Total money is $31 million.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) May 17, 2016

As Passan notes in another tweet, Cervelli’s rise to a $31 million guaranteed contract has been pretty remarkable, given that he was suspended as part of the BioGenesis scandal in 2013, then spent most of 2014 on the disabled list. When the Pirates picked Cervelli up as Russell Martin’s low-cost replacement, he was a 29 year old without any real big league track record of success and a tainted reputation.

18 months later, Cervelli has established himself as one of the better catchers in baseball. Since the start of the 2015 season, he ranks behind only Buster Posey in catcher’s WAR, which actually undersells his value, considering that Cervelli also rates as one of the game’s best pitch framers. For last year, StatCorner graded him out as 27 runs better than average; Baseball Prospectus had him at +19.

Cervelli is an elite defender who also hits pretty decently, making him a very valuable contributor to a contending club. Selling $31 million for three free agent years is certainly light for what he brings to the field; this is the same price Denard Span got last winter, coming off an injury-shortened season, and only a little more than Gerardo Parra got. Cervelli is clearly more valuable than those two, so relative to his true value, this is a steal for the Pirates.

But there is some logic in Cervelli taking the deal now as well. The Pirates almost certainly would have made him a qualifying offer this winter — if that still exists, anyway — and that could have potentially limited his market if he was tied to draft pick compensation. He’s also a 30 year old catcher who has a long history of health problems, and given that teams are shying away from paying big money to aging players, Cervelli probably wasn’t going to cash in on a monster contract this winter, especially because a lot of his value comes from pitch framing, which the market has shown no willingness to pay for.

If he got to free agency and rejected the qualifying offer, maybe he could get four years and $50 million, arguing that he’s similar enough in overall value to Ben Zobrist that he should get near that deal despite the fact that 30+ catchers age very poorly. But there’s risk in that plan, as Cervelli could easily get hurt or see his production tumble over the rest of the season; he’s not exactly a sure thing, and it is worth noting his offensive production is BABIP-heavy.

So Cervelli probably left some money on the table with this deal, but he also sold some real risk that he was carrying, gets a solid guarantee from a contending club that he’s comfortable with, and doesn’t have to worry about where he’s going to spend the rest of his productive days. This isn’t a max-out-the-dollars contract, and the Pirates should be thrilled with the production they’ll get for the price, but there are enough reasons to see why he did this that it seems like a nice deal for both sides.

The Atlanta Braves are 9-28, the worst record in baseball through the first quarter of the season. So, today, they did what teams with the worst record in baseball do: they scapegoated the manager.

The #Braves have fired manager Fredi Gonzalez.

— David O'Brien (@DOBrienAJC) May 17, 2016

Because I don’t think we have a lot of insight into who is a good or bad manager, I don’t really think we know whether Gonzalez was part of the problem or part of the solution in Atlanta. Clearly, this team was not going to be any good this year, and Gonzalez’s job was to try and make chicken salad out of, well, you know. The team’s offense has been a complete and utter disaster, however, with imported veterans like Erick Aybar (.185 wOBA), A.J. Pierzynski (.238 wOBA), Jeff Francoeur (.250 wOBA), and Kelly Johnson (.295 wOBA) failing to provide any value in their stop-gap roles, and the kids who have been promoted haven’t shown that they’re ready for prime time. Gonzalez’s nightly line-up was Freddie Freeman and the seven dwarves, plus whatever lousy starting pitcher he had to roll out there that night.

Certainly, a lot of guys on the team are underachieving, and this is how baseball works; when the team performs poorly, the manager gets the axe. And it seems likely that the team was going to change managers at some point, as most managers don’t survive the transition from trying-to-win through rebuilding to make it back to the trying-to-win-again phase. Gonzalez knew this was the job he was being tasked with, and he had to know that it was probably going to lead to his dismissal if things got ugly. And they have.

But it’s also difficult to see that anyone else could have done significantly better with this team. The Braves assembled a collection of replacement level old guys to try and hold down the fort while their prospects developed; the old guys appear to have declined faster than they expected. This is the price the team is paying for focusing on future value. Things will get better in Atlanta when guys like Dansby Swanson start arriving, but for now, Gonzalez was tasked with trying to coax wins out of a terrible roster. He didn’t, so now someone else will try, and thanks to the power of regression to the mean, the team will look like it improved under the new guy.

Gonzalez couldn’t win with a team that isn’t good enough to win, so now the team will try someone else. It’s how baseball works, even if it isn’t really the managers fault that his team gave him a lousy roster.