The Braves have had a pretty lousy season, and General Manager Frank Wren has lost his job because of it. The team announced today that John Hart will take over as interim GM.

The Braves have dismissed general manager Frank Wren. John Hart has been named as the interim GM.

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) September 22, 2014

Speculation to date has focused on Hart or former GM John Schuerholtz taking more active roles in the baseball operations department, and the placement of Hart as interim GM, leading a formal GM search that includes Schuerholtz and Bobby Cox, seems to confirm those reports. Previous rumors have suggested that the most likely outcome is that either Hart or Schuerholtz will directly oversee baseball operations, with assistant GM John Coppolella getting promoted to the GM role.

Eno did an interview with Coppolella back at the 2010 winter meetings, which you can read at that link.

Yesterday, in these electronic pages, FanGraphs contributor and Italian-American street tough Mike Petriello published a much-deserved paean to Cleveland’s Carlos Carrasco, which right-handed pitcher has recorded the second-highest WAR among all pitchers over the last month and the absolutely lowest park- and league-adjusted xFIP among 111 qualifiers over that same interval.

Among Petriello’s observations is one concerning Carrasco’s split-change to the effect that it (i.e. the split-change) is simultaneously absurd and nearly impossible to hit — appended to which comments, and for the pleasure of the wide readership, were technicolor video examples of the pitch in question.

With a view towards facilitating even more pleasure for that same readership, what I’ve done below is supply three additional examples of Carrasco’s split-change from 2014 — the objectively most impressive examples, actually, where most impressive is defined as those changeups which feature the greatest overall movement relative to a spinless ball and also induced a swinging strike.

For each pitch, I’ve included the relevant batter, the date, the velocity, and then both the horizontal- and vertical-movement figures relative to a spinless ball from the catcher’s perspective, such that a negative horizontal figure denotes armside run from a right-handed pitcher.

No. 3
Batter: Michael Morse   Date: April 25th
Velocity: 88.8 mph   Movement: -6.0 in. by -3.2 in. (6.8 in.)

Footage:

Read the rest of this entry »

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is one of the the hallmark statistics available at FanGraphs and to match its prominence on the site, we’ve updated and expanded our Library entry on WAR. This week, you’ll notice more information in our basic WAR primer and a detailed page on how to calculate WAR for position players.

We’ll be updating the pitcher specific WAR page in the next couple of weeks and there is a blog post that walks you through a complete example of the position player WAR calculation. Look for it in the FanGraphs Library.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, come to our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats (Wednesdays at 3pm), or get in touch with me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 if you want to learn more.

I’m an unabashed fan of Denard Span, and for my money, he remains one of the game’s most underrated players. But I’ll admit that when I saw this a few hours ago, even I was surprised.

Below, a side by side comparison of Span and Jacoby Ellsbury since the start of the 2012 season.

Over the last three seasons, Span has essentially been Ellsbury’s equal. They walk the same amount, and while Ellsbury has a tick more power, Span strikes out a little less. Their slash lines are almost identical, and once you adjust for the offensive environments they’ve played in, Span’s wRC+ is actually a point higher, even with less power. Ellsbury’s a better base stealer, but UZR and DRS like Span’s defense a little more. They aren’t perfect clones, but the differences are small, and the overall value has been very similar.

They’re basically the same age — Span was born in February of ’84, Ellsbury in September of ’83 — and have the same general set of skills. Ellsbury’s additional power allows one to see him as a player with a bit more upside — his 2011 season did happen, after all, when he hit as many home runs that year as Span has in his career — and he’s been a slightly better player over his entire career. If you look at their whole big league resume, Ellsbury is at +27 WAR in 3,800 plate appearances, while Span is at +22 in 4,000 plate appearances. On a per-600 PA basis, that gives Ellsbury roughly a +1 WAR advantage.

But the entirety of that difference comes from one year (which occurred four years ago), when Ellsbury was maybe the best player in the game while Span dealt with symptoms from a concussion. That season happened, and it counts, but we’re now on year three of Span and Ellsbury being basically the same player.

The Nationals have a crowded outfield, and the assumption has been that they may look to trade Span this winter. But he’s going to make $9 million next year, and the market just valued a very similar player as a $22 million per year player on a long-term deal. It might be easy to think that Span is a replaceable part, given the team’s depth, let’s not underestimate Span’s impact on the Nationals, and assume that he’d be so easy to replace. Denard Span is really good.

The Athletics just signed a deal to make Nashville their Triple-A affiliate. After fifteen years, the River Cats will leave Sacramento behind. The move will push Oakland’s Triple-A team further away, but it may give them a more neutral run environment and a nicer home park. Perhaps proximity is overrated?

For a team that seemingly gets the most of their forty-man roster, you’d think the A’s would want their Triple-A team closer by than Nashville. Need Drew Pomeranz for a start? He’s just a bus ride away, ready to go. Need an extra infielder tonight? Call Sacramento and tell them to get Andy Parrino in his car.

Turns out, the A’s don’t actually shuttle more than your average major league team. Below is a table that shows the number of callups by team. The third column shows DL activity (both on and off the DL) as a sanity check — a DL’ed star begets a minor league callup, after all. Courtesy ProSportsTransactions.com:

20 teams have made more minor league moves than the A’s, despite the fact that only eight teams had more disabled list moves.

So it seems the team decided that the benefits of moving to Nashville outweighed the benefit of having the team closer by for thirty-odd moves a year. Fresno was available, for example.

What were the benefits to Nashville? Well, Nashville is building a new 10,000 seat park that will open next year, so that’s nice. That means better facilities for their young players, and perhaps better health outcomes. The contract is fairly boilerplate with little room for negotiation, and there’s absolutely no chance that the Nashville stadium sweetened the deal at all.

But the Athletics also move into what looks like a more neutral run environment. We don’t know yet how the new stadium will play, but the PCL Pacific Western Division — Sacramento, Reno, Tacoma, Fresno — holds three of the highest-scoring teams in the league. In the new American South division, Memphis scored the most, and it came in ninth overall in the PCL.

If there are ancillary benefits to having your Triple-A team close, there are also ancillary benefits to a more neutral run environment. For the ease of travel — not only for players, but for scouts and team employees — the team acquired a park that may keep their players more healthy while also allowing their pitchers to develop in a more normal run-scoring division.

Earlier today, the author published a post regarding rather young Mets shortstop Wilmer Flores and how — somewhat surprisingly, given basically every scouting report about him — Flores had played a mostly average shortstop over 400-plus innings.

Said post included select footage — both of Flores misplaying relatively harmless ground balls and also Flores recording outs on batted balls that are converted less than 50% of the time. What it lacked, however, was any footage of Flores making actual, normal shortstop plays. The purpose of this current post is to address that pressing issue.

Here, for example, is Flores cleanly fielding and throwing to first a ground ball by Miami third baseman Casey McGehee in the fourth inning of the Mets game last night:

And here’s Flores doing basically the exact same thing two innings later:

Finally, here’s Flores backhanding a Donovan Solano grounder in the ninth and, once again, making an entirely acceptable throw to first:

And because it exists, here’s a final GIF of that last play, except from a different angle:

Two years ago, Mike Trout had the best age-20 season of all-time, by Wins Above Replacement. Last year, Trout had the best age-21 season of all time, by Wins Above Replacement. This year, Mike Trout will not have the best age-22 season of all time, because he’s regressed a little bit and also because holy crap Ted Williams.

But just because Trout hasn’t had the best season of any player ever at this age doesn’t mean we can’t have fun appreciating where his updated career totals have him relative to everyone else who has ever played the game. So, here are the five best players through their age-22 season, by WAR.

Modern defensive metrics have error bars, of course, and that goes double for numbers from 100 years ago, so you can essentially do whatever you want with those DEF numbers and adjust accordingly; this list is not gospel. But there’s Trout at the top, and even if you ignored defense and position to just rate by offensive runs above average, he’d fall all the way to #2, behind only Ted Williams.

But that’s not unexpected; the guy who ranks #1 in WAR at both age-20 and age-21 should rank at the top of this leaderboard. So instead, here’s a slightly more fun list; the best players through their age-23 season, all time, by WAR.

Trout is virtually tied with Mickey Mantle for #4 on this list, ranking behind only three Hall of Famers. And Mike Trout has not yet had his age-23 season. That will be next year, and with another reasonable Trout season, he’ll pass Williams and take the top spot on that list too.

Things will get a little harder two years from now, since Ty Cobb put up 47 WAR through his age-24 season, meaning Trout will need 18 WAR over the next two years to catch him. He can do it — he’s put up 18 WAR the last two years — but it’s not a shoo-in, and so in a few years, we might actually have a list of best careers through a specific age where Trout is not #1. But it wouldn’t be too shocking if he caught Cobb and ended up atop that list too.

Let’s appreciate what we’re seeing here. The term generational talent gets thrown around too much, but Mike Trout is a generational talent.

San Francisco catcher/first baseman Buster Posey is widely regarded to be one of major-league baseball’s best hitters for reasons that are based in fact. Entering the season, for example, he’d produced among the 10-best league- and park-adjusted batting lines since 2010. This season he’s continued that trend, recording not only the 14th-best batting line among qualified players, but also, since the All Star break, producing the absolute best such mark among qualifiers. In the ways a batter can be good, Posey has been.

Who else is good is Clayton Kershaw. Indeed, for as talented as Buster Posey is at hitting, Kershaw is probably better than that at pitching. You and I, we could spend all day talking about Kershaw’s abilities. We won’t do that, probably — because we’ll never meet, for one reason, and also because, even if we did meet, one of us would probably have important plans that day — but we could, is the point.

In any case, the best pitcher and nearly the best hitter met yesterday afternoon in San Francisco. Among the various results was the one depicted above in GIF form, a swinging third strike on a Kershaw slider in the eighth inning. A reasonable person might reasonably have assumed that it was the worst swing Posey had produced this season. According to data at Baseball Savant, it’s only the 13th worst — where worst, in this case, is defined as “the pitch furthest from the center of the strike zone at which the batter has also swung.”

So, a reasonable person would have been wrong, is one point of this post. Although, not very wrong, is another.

In conclusion, here are all the swings and misses Posey has recorded out of the zone this season, his swing and miss against Kershaw circled in red:

In each of the past two seasons, Chicago White Sox rookie infielder Marcus Semien has recorded among the most impressive walk and strikeout rates in the high minors. Insofar as it’s generally the case that walk and strikeout figures from the high minors translate somewhat predictably to the majors, a reasonable person — and also the present author — might reasonably have expected Semien to approximate those same figures at baseball’s highest level. That he absolutely hasn’t presents a bit of a mystery.

Last year, for example, he recorded walk and strikeout rates of 15.1% and 15.8%, respectively, in 714 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A. An encouraging performance, that. Following a late-season promotion to the parent club, however, Semien produced figures of just 1.4% and 31.0%, respectively, in 71 plate appearances. Nor has he been immune from a similarly robust deterioration in plate-discipline/contact skills this season. Regard, firstly, Semien’s walk and strikeout figures in 366 plate appearances with Triple-A Charlotte: 14.5% and 16.1%, respectively — which is to say, almost identical to his minor-league numbers from 2013. Meanwhile, his walk and strikeout rates from 205 PAs with the White Sox? Just 7.8% and 30.2%, respectively.

Here’s roughly all that same information, except in table form and featuring Semien’s minor- and major-league data from 2013 and -14 combined:

One finds that, over the last two seasons, Semien has produced a walk and strikeout differential of just -1.0 percentage point in the minor leagues, but of nearly -30 points in the majors. To get a sense of how a player with Semien’s minor-league track record might perform in the majors, consider his Steamer and ZiPS projections. Both systems call for Semien to walk in about 10% of plate appearances and strike out in about 21-22% of them — roughly league-average figures, both of them. Semien’s actual plate-discipline numbers, though, are considerably below average.

To get a sense of where Semien might be having the most difficulty, I’ve embedded the following heatmap featuring his contact rate by zone during 2013 and -14. For every zone within which Semien has recorded a sample of at least 10 swings, I’ve included the difference between Semien’s own contact rate and the league-average one.

The space outlined in a cloying shade of green represents that area within which Semien has had some success. On pitches roughly in the middle of the zone, vertically speaking, Semien has produced roughly average contact rates relative to his major-league peers — and has even outperformed them on pitches low and outside. High strikes have posed a considerable problem, however: here Semien has recorded contact rates about 12 percentage points below league average. Lower pitches on the inside part of the plate also appear to have caused Semien some troubles.

Further consideration by pitch type might serve to understand even more about Semien’s surprisingly robust deterioration of plate discipline at the major-league level. That the author is writing even these words after 5pm on a Friday, however, suggests that such an inquiry will only appear in a sequel.

The Fans Scouting Report is back for 2014, and is now open for your consideration. Rather than add too much of my own commentary, I’ll just quote Tom Tango.

Baseball’s fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn’t the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondell White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don’t need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

The Project

What I would like to do now is tap that pool of talent. I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a fielder is. Go down, and start selecting the team(s) that you watch all the time. For any player that you’ve seen play in at least 10 games in 2014, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.

Try to judge ‘average’ not as an average player at that position, but an average player at any position. If you think that Ben Zobrist has an average arm, then mark him as average, regardless if you’ve seen him play 2B, SS, LF or RF.

Crowdsourcing has proven to be quite useful in many endeavors, and this is one of the best uses of crowdsourcing in a baseball environment. So, go take part.