Have you seen what Yonder Alonso is doing this spring? You might not recognize it. If he qualified, his .421/.560/.789 line would the third-best in baseball. While it’s easy to dismiss a spring fling from an established player, this player spent the offseason thinking differently. Now he’s moving differently at the plate, too.
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The Reds’ pitching staff was absolutely dreadful last year. Their rotation and bullpen were both the worst in baseball. With a ghastly -0.5 WAR, their staff was the worst since the 1800s, which basically means it was the worst of all time.
Not much has changed since last year. Here’s the current depth chart for the Cincinnati rotation:
| Name | IP | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | BABIP | LOB% | ERA | FIP | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brandon Finnegan | 171.0 | 8.2 | 3.9 | 1.4 | .297 | 73.0 % | 4.42 | 4.66 | 1.4 |
Anthony DeSclafani  |
136.0 | 7.7 | 2.4 | 1.2 | .305 | 72.8 % | 4.06 | 4.14 | 1.9 |
| Scott Feldman | 133.0 | 6.1 | 2.6 | 1.3 | .305 | 69.6 % | 4.65 | 4.65 | 1.1 |
| Robert Stephenson | 119.0 | 8.9 | 5.5 | 1.5 | .301 | 71.8 % | 5.07 | 5.25 | 0.5 |
| Bronson Arroyo | 117.0 | 5.0 | 2.2 | 1.8 | .299 | 68.8 % | 5.34 | 5.44 | 0.1 |
| Homer Bailey |
93.0 | 7.6 | 2.8 | 1.2 | .309 | 70.7 % | 4.37 | 4.27 | 1.1 |
| Cody Reed | 81.0 | 8.3 | 3.1 | 1.3 | .306 | 72.8 % | 4.24 | 4.38 | 0.9 |
| Tim Adleman |
37.0 | 6.6 | 3.0 | 1.5 | .300 | 70.3 % | 4.90 | 5.03 | 0.1 |
| Austin Brice | 19.0 | 8.0 | 4.2 | 1.3 | .306 | 70.8 % | 4.79 | 4.88 | 0.1 |
| Amir Garrett | 9.0 | 7.9 | 4.7 | 1.3 | .303 | 71.6 % | 4.77 | 4.94 | 0.1 |
| Keury Mella | 9.0 | 6.4 | 4.2 | 1.4 | .306 | 69.1 % | 5.27 | 5.32 | 0.0 |
| Nick Travieso | 9.0 | 6.4 | 4.0 | 1.4 | .301 | 69.4 % | 5.12 | 5.23 | 0.0 |
| Total | 933.0 | 7.4 | 3.3 | 1.4 | .303 | 71.3 % | 4.62 | 4.72 | 7.4 |
Brandon Finnegan is at the top, which is fine, I guess. After that, however, things go downhill in a hurry — especially with Homer Bailey and Anthony DeSclafani slated to open the year on the DL. For example: both Bronson Arroyo and Scott Feldman are apparently not only still pitching, but are penciled in for 250 innings in Cincinnati’s rotation. The rest of the list is made up of unproven youngsters. Each of them has some promise, but none have had much success in the major leagues, either. Hence their middling projections.
This is Kate Preusser’s second piece as part of her month-long residency.
It’s no secret that there’s considerable overlap between bookish types and baseball fans, all tucked cozily in the center of that particular Venn diagram. Distance readers have an inborn patience for the nine-inning drama of a baseball game. These are a people who understand the three-act structure, exposition leading to rising action leading to the climactic moment; this past World Series, in fact, felt a little like the baseball gods had taken a Khan Academy class on Aristotle’s Poetics.
But there’s a narrative that most serious baseball fans have come to reject, and that’s the one of spring training. Every year there seem to be pieces poking fun at the cliches of spring training — Best shape of his life! Swing mechanics change! Learning a new pitch/grip/arcane religious philosophy! LASIK! — and those pieces exist because these cliches persist, so much so that poking fun at spring-training cliches is now itself a form of cliche.
I’m going to be up front with you: that headline is seriously misleading. Based on what we can tell, Miguel Sano is probably not a good defensive player. Last year, though, to try and get the club’s offense going, the Twins decided to try Miguel Sano in right field. Regret kicked in pretty quickly.
He played right field most days for the first couple of months of the season, until a strained hamstring put him on the disabled list for the entire month of June. During the month that the team didn’t have to watch Sano chase balls around the outfield, they decided that they didn’t really want to see that ever again. When he returned to the team at the beginning of July, he was promptly moved back to third base. He split his time between there and DH over the rest of the year.
As a pretty large human being, Sano certainly doesn’t look like an outfielder, and while we only saw him out there for a little over 300 innings, the early returns weren’t particularly positive.
Here’s the thing about catch probability: It’s existed for close to two decades. It’s at the heart of what we refer to as the advanced defensive metrics. Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating — they couldn’t exist and do anything without catch probabilities in some form. It’s just that, for the longest time, those probabilities were generalized, educated guesses. You might’ve heard that baseball has entered the information era.
Here’s a weekend tweet from Daren Willman:
Here’s the new @statcast catch probability leaderboard we introduced @sabr https://t.co/I1NDOCRVFO
— Daren Willman (@darenw) March 12, 2017
If you missed the link in there somehow, here it is again: the Statcast Catch Probability Leaderboard. We have most of two years of Statcast information, and now we’re getting to see it applied to player defense. Specifically, in this case, outfielder defense. If you don’t entirely understand what catch probability is, here’s the MLB.com glossary entry. Take a given fly ball or line drive to the outfield. What are the odds a given batted ball is caught? Statcast can tell us, by considering hang time and necessary distance to cover. This is the start of something beautiful.
Episode 723
The prolific Travis Sawchik is a former beat reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and author of the book Big Data Baseball. He’s also the guest on this edition of the program, during which he discusses players like Jose Bautista, J.D. Martinez, and others who’ve been compelled to follow unconventional paths to success.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 6 min play time.)
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Last April 4, Adam Jones swung at the first pitch two times. He swung at the first pitch five times on April 6, and then he swung at three more first pitches on April 14. By bedtime April 20, he was up to 16 first-pitch swings. The next day, he added four more.
Teammate J.J. Hardy also swung at the first pitch 16 times. All season. Out of 438 first pitches.
Hardy has never been aggressive early on. His highest-ever first-pitch swing rate is 11.9%, set as a rookie. His career rate is 8%, against a league average north of 27%. Last year, though, he was particularly patient. Not that Hardy is aggressive in any count, but I’ve highlighted him in this plot of first-pitch swing rates and all-other-count swing rates.
The next-lowest first-pitch swing rate was more than twice as high. Hardy’s other-pitch swing rate isn’t so weird, around 47%. But he swung at the first pitch just 3.7% of the time. The other players in his peer group, by other-pitch swing rate, went after the first pitch 25.7% of the time. It’s not that Hardy would never go after the first pitch, but every single time, it came as a surprise.
You’d figure Hardy might be really selective then, right? Welp! Of the 16 first-pitch swings, seven came at pitches out of the zone. Seven swings put the ball in play, but Hardy wound up with one hit, on a grounder. Perhaps it’s additionally worth noting that Hardy took all of three first-pitch swings when there was no one on base. When he was aggressive, mostly, he was just trying to move runners around.
It should go without saying that I don’t know exactly what Hardy’s plan is, because I’m not J.J. Hardy. He might just feel a lot more comfortable after he sees one pitch out of the hand. But just looking at this from the outside, Hardy could probably stand to just pay closer attention from the on-deck circle, because he’s been taken advantage of. Unsurprisingly, Hardy last year had one of the league’s very highest first-pitch zone rates. And no other hitter in the game had a higher percentage of his plate appearances advance to an 0-and-1 count. Hardy went through that count in about 61% of his trips. The average was 49%. If anything, it might be strange these rates weren’t even higher.
Again, hey, Hardy’s his own man. He’s coming off a much better season than the one he had the year before, so more power to him for his 2.3 WAR. He’s not doing everything wrong. But that’s an Orioles lineup full of guys unafraid to take an early hack. Maybe Hardy’s just trying to be different on purpose, but it seems to me he’s doing himself a disservice by watching as much as he does. There has to be a better way to get yourself prepared.
Shifts. They’re everywhere! They take different forms, some more extreme or unusual than others, but this is, without question, the era of non-traditional defensive positioning. Defense will never again look like it used to, because there’s no reason to go back. I was watching a WBC game the other day and the broadcasters pointed out that one of the teams wasn’t shifting. That’s what’s newsworthy now. We take defensive movement for granted.
This is an InstaGraphs post, instead of a front-page post, because there’s nothing surprising about the images or data that follow. I just want to show you, graphically, how the sport has changed over the past decade or so. You know we have numbers like pull rate, correct? That information, on the league-wide scale, seems to be stable going back to about 2006. Here is how batted balls have been distributed:
Super consistent. Balls are being pulled as often as before, and they’re being sent the other way as often as before. Maybe you expected that, or maybe you didn’t! I’m not in your head. Let’s just move on to the more interesting stuff. Here is league-wide directional wRC+:
The pull line has stayed consistent. Yet there are recent increases in the other two lines. How about we focus on just batting average on balls in play?
Pull line down. Opposite line up! This is all very intuitive. To go one step further, here is the same plot as above, only in this one I’ve included only ground balls:
I could’ve broken out right-handed hitters and left-handed hitters, but these days there are adjustments against hitters on both sides. And anyway, all this does is prove what you presumably would’ve already guessed. Pulled ground balls were never great, but they used to be hits more than a fifth of the time. That rate has dipped, because almost everyone pulls the majority of their grounders, so that’s where the defenders are going in greater number. Grounders back up the middle have seen a slight rise in success, with a weird spike in 2014. And then the line for grounders to the opposite field has taken off. The BABIP as recently as 2009 was .287. Last year it was .373. You know what those grounders look like when the defenders have moved. They’re frequently routine rollers, hit to an area where nobody is.
The end result of all this? A decade ago, the league BABIP on grounders was .239. Last season, the league BABIP on grounders was .239. That isn’t meant to suggest that shifting in general is a complete waste of time. It’s just — it’s complicated. Baseball will find its own levels, regardless of what you want or expect.
A team can’t make their season in March, but they can lose their season before it begins. Last week was an awful week for the Rockies.
At the moment, the Rockies and the baseball world aren’t concerned about when Chad Bettis will pitch again. They just want him to be healthy, after the 27-year-old starting pitcher learned last week that his testicular cancer had unexpectedly spread. Bettis was declared cancer free back in January.
Here is an update on my current health situation. My family and I thank you for your continued thoughts, prayers and support. pic.twitter.com/oIi4CTE0AK
— Chad Bettis (@cbettis35) March 10, 2017
From Nick Groke’s story in the Denver Post:
His prognosis for a healthy recovery is good, in the 90 percent range, he said. Bettis will start chemotherapy treatment in Arizona sometime soon. And he and his wife Kristina are expecting their first child later this month.
But Bettis’s return to baseball this season is in doubt. “Optimistically? This year,” Bettis said. He was given a broad timeline of potential outcomes.
“You never know how these things will unfold. From our standpoint, we’ll have to make some adjustments,” Colorado manager Bud Black said. “We feel good about what will happen. He will keep his chin up and his chest out and press forward.”
There’s no certain timetable for Bettis’s return, but he’s likely to miss a significant amount of time.
