Early 19th century French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord argued — according to late Romanian aphorist Emil Cioran, at least — argued that it’s preferable “to follow one’s inclination rather than to make one’s way.”

Having pointed his internet browser to this site, the reader has already exhibited a willingness — in part, at least — a willingness to follow his inclination. What follows, however, represents an opportunity for that same reader to indulge his inclination to an even larger and more substantial degree.

As of press time, talented Cleveland starter Carlos Carrasco had struck out talented Kansas City outfielder Alex Gordon in each of the latter’s four plate appearances tonight (box). What the footage below documents are two pitches from the second of those plate appearances — both swinging strikes and both a result of Carrasco’s changeup.

The reader will find that his or her inclination is to meditate upon these animated GIFs for an extended period of time, committing them to what may or may not be called “spiritual memory.” Is that a real term or one just invented by the author right now? It neither matters nor does anyone care.

Moving on, here’s the first of those changeups to Gordon, in real time:

Read the rest of this entry »

With our new probable starters leaderboard, you no longer need to manually enter in all of the day’s starting pitchers yourself.

This particular leaderboard will also auto-populate all of the batters from the day’s lineups as they are announced.

You’ll always be able to access the current day’s probables from the link on our live scoreboard.

Last week we made some changes to the custom dashboard on the player pages, which allow you to choose exactly which stats you would like displayed in the order of your choosing.

The first update is that all the stats on the site are now available to you. For a long while there was only a subset of all our stats, but this is no longer the case.

The second change we made is that the custom dashboard now scrolls within the page so it doesn’t bleed over the boundaries of the site indefinitely. There are a non-trivial number of custom dashboards that basically include all the stats on the entire site, which makes for an extremely wide custom dashboard.

As I’ve monitored feedback on the change, some people like the scrolling, but others are very opposed to it. So, we’re going to have a poll to decide how to set the default behavior. Unless the results are overwhelmingly in favor of one particular choice, we will have an option in the custom dashboard to toggle the scrolling on/off.

We’ve quietly added a few new stats to our batted ball section.

First we have percentage of balls a batter pulls, hits to center field, and hits to the opposite field. This will make it much easier to figure out the general direction a player hits the ball without going to the splits pages and pulling out a calculator.

Pull% – Percentage of balls in play that were pulled by the batter
Cent% – Percentage of balls in play that were hit to center field by the batter
Oppo% – Percentage of balls in play that were hit to opposite field by the batter

Then we have how hard each ball is hit as provided by Baseball Info Solutions. It’s important to know that these are all relative to the batted ball type. For instance, a fly ball might be classified as hard, but if that ball were a line drive, it could potentially be classified as medium. If you are interested in seeing how line drives/fly balls/groundballs are classified into soft/medium/hard, we have that information available on the splits pages.

It’s also important to know that prior to 2010, these were all graded visually. From 2010 onward, the batted ball type, hangtime, and distance hit are all used to calculate the soft/medium/hard classifications.

Soft% – Percentage of balls in play that were classified as hit with soft speed.
Med% – Percentage of balls in play that were classified as hit with medium speed.
Hard% – Percentage of balls in play that were classified as hit with hard speed.

First, Pedro Martinez pointed out something really fun about hitters at the plate, and how they basically tell the pitcher where they want the ball as they step into the box. Watch the waggle.

So I asked Tim Hudson and Madison Bumgarner if they’d ever heard this before. Neither had, but they did shed some light on why this Bat Waggle Finding may not be super useful to all pitchers.

Bumgarner said he wouldn’t use it much, but that’s because he doesn’t really plan for hitters that way. Scouting reports? “We can get em, I don’t really,” he said. “I got everything in my memory bank.” He’d tried planning for each hitter before, but then he said he got too rigid and had a hard time adjusting. “I don’t have a gameplan when I go out there — I mean I have my gameplan going out there, but my game plan is to get outs and adjust as I need to, and try to read the situation. I’m not dead set on what I’m going to do before the game starts.”

Hudson laughed when he heard the youngster’s prep work. “Don’t ask any young stud about their prep work,” the veteran Giants starter said. “They haven’t had to figure it out. They just throw the glove out there and get shutouts.”

But when Hudson goes to prepare for the game, he gets fairly granular. “I look at the scouting reports and tendencies, what they can hit, what they can’t hit,” Hudson said. “Pitches in certain counts and certain zones. Breaking balls, where in the zone. If there are some red flags with a hitter, you want to know those.”

This isn’t all pitchers all the time, but Hudson and Bumgarner prepare for the game with drastically different styles. And, in both cases, as cool as this Bat Waggle thing is, it’s not super useful. Either the pitcher isn’t looking to scout the hitter that way, or the pitcher has already seen the heat maps that tell you that Albert Pujols likes high pitches.

Danny Salazar threw three curves in the major leagues before this year. Today, he threw two to Sal Perez. Here’s the second one, which froze Perez and allowed Salazar to steal a strike.

Considering that Salazar’s problems have mostly been in the command department, not the stuff section, a pitch that batters won’t swing at but can thrown into the strike zone could be a tremendous asset. At 82, with nice drop, it’s also going to be useful for whiffs and grounders — that’s one of the harder curves out there (would have been top 20 in velocity if it qualified last year), and that’s above-average drop, both good signs for a curveball.

You might not have realized it, but last night’s slate of games had seven teams reach double-digit run totals. Throughout the night I began to notice there were quite a few games with really high run totals. Then last night while watching the Astros pile runs on the Padres into the 9th inning, armed with a laptop and some SQL code, I set out to research how often this many teams score 10 or more runs on a given day.

MLB Game Days with Teams Scoring 10+ Runs

It turns out this hasn’t happened since 2012, and it has only occurred on nine days over the last decade of baseball. One of those days in 2007 had eight teams break double digits, and all of these days occurred on days with 15 games being played. Yesterday, there were only 14 games played due to the postponement of the White Sox – Orioles game. Most of the occurrences happened earlier in the 2000s when the run environment in Major League Baseball was higher. Today’s low run environment makes days like yesterday less and less likely.

This also gives us a chance to look at how a team’s runs per games are distributed to find out how likely it is that one team scores 10 or more runs in a game. They don’t follow a normal, bell-curve distribution, but instead it’s more skewed (and roughly follows a negative binomial distribution). I’ve illustrated the distribution below using actual results. This represents the percentage of games that a single team scores a certain number of runs.

The run scoring is skewed heavily to the right. I’ve called out the percentage (6.9%) of team-games that have had 10 or more runs scored, so they don’t happen very often. I have the box going all the way out to 30 runs, because that’s the record the Rangers set in Baltimore in 2007. Seven teams having 10 or more runs on one day is obviously less frequent than having just one team do it especially when there are only 28 teams playing instead of 30.

For those of you interested in reading more about run distributions, I have already laid out the math behind modeling run and hit distributions with the negative binomial distribution, and Tom Tango has produced a more accurate but slightly more complicated distribution as well.

Well, this should be… something.

Tomorrow’s game between the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox will begin at 2:05 p.m. ET and will be closed to the public.

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) April 28, 2015

Due to the ongoing civil unrest in Baltimore, the Orioles and White Sox games have been canceled the last two days, and now the final game of the series will be played in an empty stadium. Additionally, the Orioles will now travel to Tampa Bay for this weekend’s series with the Rays, and they will act as the home team while playing on the Rays’ home turf.

While moving games to another team’s ballpark has happened before — Carlos Zambrano threw a no-hitter for the Cubs against the Astros while playing in Milwaukee, in fact — playing a game without allowing fans to attend is a new one to me. I imagine it will be an odd experience for all involved, with no ambient noise or reactions to the events occurring on the field.

But the game will count in the standings all the same, and from a purely I-don’t-know-what-to-expect perspective, this might go down as one of the more interesting games of the year. Of course, the situation in Baltimore is far more important than any game or sporting event, and I hope that every resident of the city remains safe during this time of unrest.

Over the winter, Rob Manfred made it clear that eliminating dead-time between pitches was one of his foremost concerns as Commissioner. The league experimented with a pitch clock during Spring Training, and fines were threatened at players who delayed the game unnecessarily. After the first game of the season, I looked at whether the changes worked on Day 1, and found that indeed, the pace of play was noticeably improved.

But that was based on a sample of 15 games. Often, people will obey new rules for a little while, then go back to doing things the old way. A reduction in time between pitches on Opening Day didn’t mean that we were going to see the same on any other day. But now, we’re nearly at the end of April, and Major League Baseball has played 290 games, so we have roughly 20 times the sample now of the last check-in. This still won’t be definitive, but league averages stabilize very quickly, and structural changes like this usually don’t take too long to show up. So, what’s up with the pace of play in MLB now?

The rules are working. The average time between pitches this year is 22 seconds, down a full second from last year’s mark, and roughly back to where the league was in 2012; if this continues all year, MLB will have managed to reverse three years of ever-slowing baseball in a single season.

Again, one second per pitch isn’t going to sound like a lot, but the sheer quantity of pitches makes these small differences add up. In the games played to date, MLB has seen 83,633 pitches thrown, or an average of 288 pitches per game. Shaving a second per pitch of dead time has translated to a reduction of almost five minutes per game.

MLB’s average time of game is down from 3:07 to 2:58 this year, so the majority of the nine minute reduction has come from shrinking the time between pitches. And they’ve managed to cut off those nine minutes while run scoring is actually up slightly, with total runs per game moving from 8.13 last year to 8.33 this year. The duel goals of increasing offense without extending game length seems like polarizing goals, but it is possible to do both at the same time, and so far this year, MLB is balancing those two priorities nicely.

It’s still only a few weeks of baseball, and this could all still wear off as the year goes along. But the early returns are excellent, and we should give some kudos to MLB for giving us all five minutes of our lives back without materially changing the game on the field. This isn’t mission accomplished, but it’s a pretty encouraging first step in the right direction.

The Marlins signing of Jarrod Saltalamacchia to a three year, $21 million contract was always a bit on the questionable side, given that his one good season in Boston was built on the back of a .372 BABIP. That wasn’t going to last, and his contact rates were always going to be too low for him to be much more than an average hitter. But an average hitting catcher has value, and at $7 million a year, the commitment wasn’t so huge that the deal seemed like a huge mistake.

The Marlins, however, clearly had a severe case of buyer’s remorse, and today they’ve designated Saltalamacchia for assignment, ending his tenure in Miami. They’ll have 10 days to trade him or release him, since no one will take the remainder of his contract via a waiver claim. Realistically, Salty still projects to be a reasonably useful part-time catcher that a team like Arizona, Seattle, or Anaheim should be willing to take on a fraction of the $15 million he’s owed in order to upgrade their bench.

But it’s probably also true that our WAR numbers here likely overrate Saltalmacchia’s value; by Statcorner’s estimates, he was a miserable pitch-framer last year, and then there’s this from former MLB pitcher Tanyon Sturtze:

@Ken_Rosenthal @MLBONFOX not really Ken pitchers hate throwing to him, plus the fact he isn't hitting makes it easy for the #Marlins.

— Tanyon Sturtze (@sturtze56) April 27, 2015

Obviously Sturtze doesn’t speak for everyone, but pitchers do talk, and given that four organizations have now let him go, it does seem possible that Salty’s work behind the plate could be hurting his team in ways that we’re not currently capturing. So, before you get too excited about your favorite team picking up Saltalamachcia, keep in mind that he might be closer to replacement level than current estimates suggest.

After all, a team doesn’t usually DFA a guy that has real trade value. The fact that they made this move suggests there wasn’t much of a market for him, and it wouldn’t be a huge shock to see him get released and then sign with another team for the league minimum. Salty will find another job, but this might have been his last crack a starting role.