Position: TrackMan Cape Cod Data & Operations Intern

Location: Cape Cod, Mass.

Description:
At TrackMan Baseball we measure stuff – the speed, spin and movement of pitched and hit baseballs.

We do this using proprietary 3D Doppler radar hardware and software. The majority of Major League teams use our products and services for player development and evaluation. We also work with collegiate, Japanese and Korean teams, premier amateur baseball organizations, broadcasters and equipment manufacturers. Our business is growing fast. By the start of next season we will have a network of radars installed in more than 100 stadiums on three continents, and dozens of remote systems traveling the US.
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Position: Minnesota Twins Applications Programmer, Baseball Systems

Location: Minneapolis

Description:
This position offers wide-ranging exposure to current programming models and methods in a fast-paced Agile environment. As a member of the front office, collaborate with the Baseball Operations staff to develop, deliver, and maintain data driven solutions for player evaluation, player development, and statistical analytics. Ideally, the candidate will be a core .Net applications programmer with experience focused on SQL Server data integration and back-end API services to consume and present new perspectives on an evolving set of interesting sources of data. Strong communication and interpersonal skills will enable the candidate to enjoy direct relationships with product users.
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Among all the barely read posts published by the author at this site, one of the most barely read ever was this past Thursday’s effort dedicated to the Mexican League, in which post I endeavored to identify the five players within that circuit whose combination of age and performance most recommended them to a place (hypothetically, at least) within affiliated baseball.

The purpose of this current dispatch is not to comment once again upon the virtues of that Thursday post, nor to bemoan its lack of audience. Rather, it’s to (first) show and (then also) tell the reader why Mexican baseball oughtn’t be ignored.

With regard to the allure of that league, here’s a visual argument very decidedly on its behalf (from here):

And here’s a brief explanation of that visual argument: it’s an excerpt from the box score from today’s game between Mexico City and Tijuana. Specifically, it’s the part of that box score which documents Tijuana’s pitchers. What one notes is that those pitchers were Jose Contreras (formerly of the White Sox and Yankees) and Dennys Reyes (formerly of an extra-large major-league uniform). “Importer/Exporter of the Marvelous,” it reads on each of their business cards. And how do I know this? Because of Mexican baseball, is how.

QED.

Shortly before the season began, I wrote a post in which I identified minor leaguer hitters who saw stark decreases in their Zone% in the final month of the 2014 season. This research was meant to emulate work done by Rob Arthur, who found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. The player who jumped out most from my analysis was Richard Shaffer — a former first round pick in the Rays organization who had fallen on hard times since his draft year.

I wrote a follow-up piece on Shaffer a few days later, noting that his plummeting Zone% wasn’t the only reason to think he might have turned a corner. He had also reportedly made some adjustments, which were acknowledged by people in the Rays organization and by Shaffer himself. And perhaps most importantly, he raked over the season’s final month. He hit .357/.486/.768 with six homers over his final 17 games. To wit.

A little more than a month later, those adjustments seem to be working. Through 25 games, Shaffer’s belted 6 homers, and holds a 147 wRC+ in Double-A. His .260/.363/.490 triple slash is a far cry from the .222/.318/.440 he posted at the same level last season.

Lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel had the chance to see Shaffer in action multiple times this year, and was able to confirm that Shaffer indeed looks like a different player. Kiley noted that Shaffer seemed much more relaxed and comfortable at the plate than he was last season and didn’t seem quite as worried about his mechanics. He noted that the bat speed looked the same, but that Shaffer’s doing a better job of crushing mistakes and not guessing on pitches.

Kiley said he’d now put the 24-year-old ahead of fellow Rays third base prospect Patrick Leonard, who managed to crack the ranked portion of his list. He now sees Shaffer as a 40 FV player, who could wind up providing value as a part-time corner infielder. That’s not super exciting, but it’s a useful player. As recently as last summer, Richie Shaffer looked like an extreme long shot to ever become a productive big leaguer. Now, it seems like a strong possibility.

Before his start on Thursday in Milwaukee, Dodgers right-hander Carlos Frias — celebrated on multiple occasions by the present author in these same pages — Dodgers right-hander Carlos Frias had thrown 110 pitches over three appearances, including a 70-pitch start on May 1st against Arizona.

Over the course of those three appearances, Frias’s fastball sat at about 96 mph — unsurprising, that figure, given both his scouting reports and also his previous work in the majors. More notable with regard to those first 110 pitches was this, though: the absolute slowest among them was a changeup he’d thrown at 88.9 mph to David Peralta on May 1st.

This changeup:

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Scapegoat is an often-used word when a manager or coach is fired. As the saying goes, “You can’t fire the players,” and the person responsible for putting together the roster is rarely let go during the season. That puts a select few in the cross hairs when things aren’t going as expected. Or, in some cases, what many predicted comes to fruition.

The Red Sox fired their pitching coach today, 28 games into a season where their beleaguered staff is living down to its expectations. Unable to magically turn the likes of Clay Buchholz, Joe Kelly and Justin Masterson into more than what they are, Juan Nieves is now unemployed.

Somewhat surprisingly, Nieves’ replacement is not yet known. According to Ben Cherington, at least one internal candidate and one external candidate is being considered. The Boston GM did say “Nothing happened specifically, recently, that precipitated this.” Cherington said once the decision was reached, the right thing to do was make the move, even without a successor in place. Read the rest of this entry »

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:

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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.