Bob Melvin is up to date on advanced stats and baseball’s technological advancements. As the manager of the Oakland A’s, he has to be. The game’s original Moneyball club is in much the same position they were when Kevin Youkilis was being dubbed “The Greek God of Walks” — monetarily challenged, they need to be as progressive as possible to compete.

When it comes to communicating ideas with his players, Melvin is careful not to introduce sensory overload. After all, not everyone on the roster is a Brandon McCarthy or a Jed Lowrie.

“It’s our job, as a staff, to be able to reach the players who want this type of information,” said Melvin. “Some can handle it, while for others it might be a distraction. Certain guys need information in layman’s terms. You have to take the principles and present them in a language they can grasp, because when you’re in a game, you can’t have too much clutter in the your brain.

“We’re a cutting edge organization that is always looking for advantages. With things like exit velocities and spin rates… we hire people to look at that. The people above me — David (Forst) and Billy (Beane) and these guys — do a good job of helping spoon-feed it down to the people we feel can handle it, and benefit by it.”

According to Melvin, more than aptitude is at play. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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TAMPA, Fla. – Most pitchers try to avoid having Tommy John surgery at all. Sean Burnett wanted it a second time.

The former Pirates first-round pick went to see Dr. James Andrews again after he dealt with elbow pain early in 2013, nearly 10 years after the first surgery on his left elbow. Said Burnett to Ryan Lawrence of PhillyVoice:

“They went in to fix the flexor tendon and Dr. Andrews said it was the ligament. It wasn’t torn, but it was completely stretched out and looked pretty beat up. It was 10-years old (from the first surgery). He wasn’t going fix it, hoping that the surgery for the flexor issue would do something, but the first day I threw after four months I knew it was still a problem.”

Burnett knew his left UCL wasn’t right so he did something you hear few, if any, pitchers attempting to accomplish: he tried to tear it. He went back to the Legacy Golf Club room at which he was staying while rehabbing in Tempe, Arizona, stacked pillows up against his bed’s headboard, and started throwing baseballs with as much violence and velocity as he could into them. I asked Burnett about this bizarre strategy earlier this week.

“I needed to pop it until he would fix it, so I tried to pop it in the hotel room each night,” Burnett said. “It didn’t work but maybe it sped up the process a little bit.”

Did he disturb any neighbors?

“I don’t throw hard enough,” Burnett said. “I had enough pillows up there.”

In May of 2013, Burnett “finally” felt his ligament “pop” in an outing against Seattle.

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Mike Trout plus almost anybody else seems like a fair answer to the question of which team has the best 1-2 punch in baseball. I probably wouldn’t fault anyone who was willing to trade their best two players for just one Mike Trout, even if it was just for this season. Looking at the question a little more objectively, however — with this year’s projections — reveals that Mike Trout plus nobody would rank (a) in the top half of major-league teams’ best duos, but also (b) nowhere near the top. Also Trout doesn’t play with nobody, as the Angels have a few other decent players and might contend for a playoff spot if things break right.

As for the best one-two combo in terms of combined WAR, a reasonable person could make a few other reasonable guesses. Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo form an impressive pair. Mookie Betts and Chris Sale are fantastic for the Red Sox. And then there’s Bryce Harper and Max Scherzer, Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey, Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa. All of those are good guesses, but it’s actually the Dodgers who occupy the top spot, with Clayton Kershaw and Corey Seager barely edging Mike Trout and the still very good Andrelton Simmons.

As great as Mike Trout is, Clayton Kershaw’s 7.4 projected WAR is less than a win from Trout’s 8.2. While the Angels’ shortstop has a good 3.4 projected WAR, Corey Seager’s 4.5 WAR makes up for the difference between Kershaw and Trout.

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Baseball provides its audience with great data. We’re blessed with a large number of observations and very high-quality record keeping. Even before MLB announced a radar and video tracking system designed to capture seven terabytes of data per game, we had box scores going back a century and 40 years of play-by-play logs. Thanks to organizations like Retrosheet, SABR, and Baseball-Reference, baseball’s data is also very accessible.

Unsurprisingly, baseball fans are excited about the full implementation of Statcast because the system brings with it the promise of new and exciting data. Exit velocity! Time to the plate! Route tracking! While I share some of that excitement, Statcast has my attention because of something else it promises to offer: completeness.

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In 2017, I am probably more interested in Adam Eaton than I am any other player in baseball. As the centerpiece of a controversial blockbuster, coming off a monster season where a lot of his value was tied a huge swing in his defensive value, Eaton was always going to be a fascinating experiment for paying a perceived premium price for outfield defense. But it gets even more interesting, because the Nationals are switching him from right field back to center field, so we throw a position switch in the mix as well, and get another data point on whether his weird splits between RF and CF actually mean anything.

So when the MLBAM guys released their outfield catch probability leaderboard last weekend, Eaton was naturally one of the first players to examine. And when Jeff took an early look at the published 2015-2016 data, he found that Eaton ranked seventh in Catch+, or whatever we might want to call plays made above the averages of the buckets they had opportunities in. And when he looked at the catch data relative to the range portions of UZR and DRS, he actually found that the Statcast data showed that Eaton had the largest positive difference, suggesting that, by hang time and distance traveled variables, Eaton may have been even better defensively than the public defensive metrics thought.

So yeah, Eaton is really interesting. But the more I dig into Eaton’s defensive data, the more remarkable it all gets.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a beautiful Javier Baez tag, then preview the Mets’ 2017 season with Ted Berg of For The Win and the Orioles’ 2017 season with Jake Mintz of Cespedes Family BBQ.

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Over the last couple years, the author has published a periodic statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.

What follows represents the most current such report for the 2017 college campaign.

As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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