We know early spring-training coverage, February coverage, is littered with Best Shape of His Life stories. While there’s no database to track the impact and predictive power of these stories, the general sense is they generally do not correlate with dramatically better performance in the following season.

In a FanGraphs chat a couple weeks ago, one questioner asked me to what types of stories I pay attention early in the spring. What really matters this time of year? It’s a good question. One story line that does interest me in February — something that can perhaps provide real value and change — is the addition of a new pitch.

Jason Collette was kind enough this week to track every reported pitch addition to date in 2017. Perhaps the new pitch about which we should be most excited isn’t really a pitcher adding a new pitch at all, but bringing back an old one. Eno Sarris is excited about the return of Dylan Bundy’s cutter, a pitch once described as “a supreme piece of aerodynamic filth” by former-BP-writer-turned-Cubs-scout Jason Parks. Imagine Andrew Miller with another weapon or Joe Ross with a much-needed changeup.

But perhaps no one needs a new pitch more than one lefty experimenting with one this spring: Reds reliever Tony Cingrani. (And no group in baseball needs more help than what was a historically poor bullpen in Cincinnati last season.)

Cingrani told MLB.com the cutter he began developing this offseason is “just another way to get guys out… [The cutter] feels comfortable.”

But Cingrani really has had only one way, to date, to get major-league hitters out. Among all pitchers who tossed at least 40 innings last season, Cingrani led baseball in fastball usage, throwing his four-seam fastball 89.5% of the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout much of the offseason in this space, we’ve been taking a look at hitter contact quality, using 2016 granular exit-speed and launch-angle data as our guide. We’re down to the last two installments, in which some non-qualifying hitters from both leagues will be reviewed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now to analyze my favorite polling project every year. We’re a site known for its math and projections. Most of the time, we just do the math and supply the projections, and that’s the end of it. Less attention is given to community feedback. In this project, you, the community, fed back!

This is a link to our projected-standings page, which tries to forecast the 2017 regular season based on Steamer, ZiPS, and our manually-maintained team depth charts. You see projected records there, but that doesn’t mean you have to like them or agree with them. On Tuesday, I asked you all to weigh in on the American League projections. On Wednesday, I asked you all to weigh in on the National League projections. I don’t know why I just linked to those posts, because there’s no point in voting anymore, because I’m already analyzing the results right here. Two things I can tell you right off the bat: The community is high on the Rockies, and down on the A’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Perspective matters a great deal when you’re trying to look at a question and find the unfiltered truth. It’s true of all statistical analysis, but it becomes even more obvious when you’re trying to find comparable historical players.

Where do you set the cutoffs? How far back do you go in the player pool? How far back do you go in the player’s own career? If you manipulate the variables, you can get all sorts of different results. That’s why it’s so hard to analyze a player simply by finding other, similar players. The very idea of similar is difficult to pin down.

Take Yasiel Puig, for example. Pull the strings a little differently each time, and his comps vary wildly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On December 2, new Diamondbacks general manger Mike Hazen announced the hire of Mike Fitzgerald to lead the Diamondbacks’ analytics department. Perhaps Fitzgerald’s most notable contribution in Pittsburgh, where he was the No. 2-ranking analyst, was pounding the table for then free agent Russell Martin — and, at the same time, the power of pitch-framing — at the close of the 2012 season.

On December 2, the Diamondbacks elected to non-tender incumbent starting catcher Welington Castillo, which surprised some in and around the industry. Castillo led an Arizona catching group that finished 26th in framing runs last season, according to Baseball Prospectus.

On December 2, the Diamondbacks reached an agreement with catcher Jeff Mathis on a two-year deal. On a per-pitch basis, among catchers who received at least 1,000 pitches last season, Mathis was was the ninth-best framer, according to StatCorner, and the best free-agent catcher available by that measure. While in a reserve role last season, Mathis graded out as the 13th-best defensive catcher in baseball, according to Baseball Prospectus. Castillo ranked 95th. New Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said at the winter meetings that there is no clear-cut No. 1 catcher and that Mathis will split the work load with Chris Herrmann.

Said Lovullo to reporters in Washington, D.C, in December:

“We believe in the metrics. We believe in the data. We believe in trying to do as much research as possible. We have a great team of people that are working hard behind the scenes.”

It was on December 2, 2016, that the Diamondbacks joined the 21st century. And no group of players stands to benefit more than the Diamondback starting pitchers. As noted by Mike Petriello on Tuesday in an excellent piece for MLB.com, Zack Greinke is a good bounce-back candidate for 2017 due to the club’s improved framing and defense. Indeed, everyone in the Diamondbacks staff is a good bet to improve.

Greinke will be Exhibit A, though.

As Petriello notes, according to Baseball Prospectus’ values, no pitcher benefited more from framing than Greinke in 2015. It’s part of the reason I led my 2015 NL Cy Young ballot with Jake Arrieta in a tight race, as Greinke benefited from Yasmani Grandal.

Greinke fell from first to 725th last year in framing support, a 15-run drop.

Read the rest of this entry »

How necessary is it for an MLB front office to pick a direction and stay the course? Based on the responses of 10 general managers I queried on Tuesday, there isn’t a simple answer. A lot of factors go into the decision to rebuild, especially when it’s a complete teardown. Ditto going all in to win now. That typically costs money — a bigger issue for some organizations than others — and often involves trading top prospects, which compromises the future.

A third option is to remain a middle-of-the-road team, not good enough to seriously contend, nor bad enough to seriously build for the future. Addressing short-term needs to go from 80 wins to 82, more often than not, is a recipe for baseball purgatory.

Here is what the executives had to say on the subject.

———

Chris Antonetti, Cleveland Indians: “Each team has its own opportunities and challenges within its market. It’s incumbent upon the leadership within that organization to develop a path to success, and that path could look very different in one market than it will in another.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last spring, for the first time in a decade, maybe more, no pre-arbitration pitchers signed a contract extension taking away multiple free-agent seasons. There were a few decent candidates in Jacob deGrom, Sonny Gray, and Carlos Martinez, the last of whom just signed a contract extension of his own earlier this winter. None of those players signed last spring, however, and it’s a possible indicator of a chilling effect on these types of extensions. The lack of deals isn’t due to a lack of candidates, though. In fact, a few of the best pitchers in baseball might be prime for long-term extensions.

When attempting to characterize the recent history of such deals, it’s difficult to say what’s a trend and what’s a random event because only two to five players sign extensions of this sort every year. The recent drought might be a product of players and agents beginning to recognize how much clubs were benefiting from signing extensions with younger players. It’s possible, on the other hand, that teams were less likely to dole out guarantees when the outcome of the CBA was in doubt. When Madison Bumgarner signed his extension right as the 2012 season was starting, he was one of five young pitchers to do so. When Chris Sale signed his ahead of the 2013 season, he was the only one. Sale and Bumgarner’s contracts have proved to be two of the bigger bargains in the majors.

When the White Sox traded Chris Sale to the Red Sox for Yoan Moncada, Michael Kopech, Luis Alexander Basabe, and Victor Diaz, they weren’t just trading Chris Sale. The White Sox were also trading Chris Sale’s contract, which included a $12 million salary for 2017 and options for 2018 and 2019 totaling $26 million. If Sale hadn’t signed that contract, he would have been a free agent this winter and received $200 million. San Francisco has no interest in trading Madison Bumgarner — who would have also been a free agent this winter — while they’re contending, so his value to the Giants is greater as a player on the field than in a trade. His contract is similar to Sale’s and so favorable that it had some discussing whether the team should negotiate a contract extension out of fairness, which does have some precedent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a Steven Matz tweet, the Reds and Ryan Raburn, and the automatic intentional walk, then answer listener emails about misleading headshots, pitchers who rely on one pitch, the decline of player nicknames, the Yankees’ refusal to lose, Josh Reddick’s lack of clutchness, making Mike Trout run backward, and more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS