To be clear, there are two postings here.

Position: Kansas City Royals Baseball Systems Developer

Location: Kansas City

Description:
The Kansas City Royals Baseball Club is seeking a highly motivated developer to support baseball operations. The ideal applicant will be able to manage multiple concurrent projects that facilitate enhanced communications, reporting, and other interactions between teams internal to the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Assist in development tasks and data operations.
• Assist in daily task monitoring to ensure data health, quality assurance, and reliability of systems.
• Support schema and testing of databases of various sizes.
• Develop, test, and optimize performance and accuracy of scripts used to calculate derived data.
• Automate, manage, and report data lifecycle based on retention and storage requirements.
• Explore novel tools to visualize data and explore models by implementing UI/UX in HTML, CSS, JavaScript/JQuery in conjunction with lead developer.
• Collaborate with baseball operations staff to create and improve internal analysis and informational tools.
• Apply mobile technology enhancements.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the Giants took a 1-0 lead over the Dodgers into the 9th inning. They lost anyway. At this point, the team’s lead-blowing prowess has become so well known that it wasn’t even really a surprise, and the last week has cemented the tire-fire status of the team’s relief corps. They gave up two in the ninth to lose by one last night. They gave up two in the ninth to lose by one on Saturday. They gave up five in the ninth to lose by one last Tuesday. In the last seven days, the Giants bullpen has handed over three should-win games with three outs to go, and as a result, the Giants are now six games back in the NL West race, and tied with the Cardinals for the second Wild Card spot.

Those words make it sound bad, but I thought some graphs might more adequately represent the disaster that was the Giants bullpen over the last week.

This is a scatter plot of shutdowns and meltdowns, a couple of relief pitcher metrics we track here on FanGraphs. A shutdown is any relief appearance where the team’s win probability goes up by at least six percentage points during the outing, and a meltdown is an appearance where it goes down by at least six percentage points. The standard ratio of shutdowns to meltdowns is a little under 2:1, though for high leverage relievers, they usually earn those roles because they do much better than that.

As the graph shows, the Giants ratio last week was 1:7. They had the fewest shutdowns in MLB and the most meltdowns. Their bullpen essentially only pitched well when the game wasn’t really on the line, and then was a total disaster if the game was close.

So let’s look at the league’s relievers total Win Probability Added last week, or in the Giants case, Win Probability Lost.

I probably didn’t have to highlight the Giants line there; you likely would have known it was them even without the assistance. They racked up nearly -2.0 WPA last week, which is astonishingly bad for a seven day stretch.

Let’s finish up with a table. Here is how hitters performed against various Giants relievers in high leverage situations over the last week, thanks to our handy new splits tool.

That isn’t so much closer by committee as it is a Jonestown Massacre reenactment. Bruce Bochy has taken a good amount of flak for his bullpen management in the second half of the season — especially his loyalty to Casilla — but no one could look good managing a group of pitchers who did that.

The Giants still have a chance to turn this around and make the playoffs, but they’re going to need their bullpen to pull it together. Like tonight.

We can all agree that Mike Trout is probably the best player in baseball, right? And if Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, that means Anthony Rendon is not the best player in baseball, right? OK, so it’s settled. Rendon is good, but he’s no Trout. That being said, let’s have fun!

This year, 188 players have batted at least 400 times. Of those, 90 have a walk rate that is at least a hair better than the league average.

Of those 90 players, 49 have a strikeout rate that is at least a hair better than the league average.

Of those 49 players, 28 have a BABIP that is at least a hair better than the league average.

Of those 28 players, 14 have an isolated slugging that is at least a hair better than the league average.

Of those 14 players, five have a baserunning rating that is at least a hair better than the league average.

Of those five players, three have a defense rating that is at least a hair better than the league average.

The three players we’re left with: Mike Trout, Anthony Rendon, and Jonathan Lucroy. These players are above-average at walks, contact, hits, power, baserunning, and defense, at least as far as the 2016 season is concerned. The defense rating uses UZR, and maybe you don’t love that, but DRS likes Trout even better. We know that Lucroy is a strong defensive catcher. And DRS likes Rendon, too. So it makes for an interesting group. These are regular position players who have made positive contributions across the board. Trout’s positive contributions have been the most positive, but if you’re looking for well-roundedness, Rendon is very nearly by himself.

Injuries mostly spoiled what Rendon tried to do a year ago. If you go back two years, though, there were 209 players who batted at least 400 times. Going through all the same process as above, one would’ve been left with just two players: Anthony Rendon and Alex Gordon. So Rendon has had a season like this before, and now that he’s healthy again, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s back to being fantastic.

He could even maybe be an MVP candidate, were it not for an awful first month. Since the beginning of May, Rendon has been good for a 127 wRC+ and a WAR of 4.5. That puts him right around his 2014 pace, and back in 2014, it was Rendon who felt like the underrated borderline superstar. Last year did nothing to help his perception, but now he’s back and just 26 years old. He’s not as flashy as Bryce Harper, and he doesn’t have the offensive potential of Bryce Harper, but Rendon does a little bit of everything, which makes him enormously valuable. It really shouldn’t be a secret why the Nationals have been so good even with Harper mysteriously coming somewhat apart.

Once before, Rendon has been among baseball’s most underrated players. Now he’s back to being exactly the same. When you think about the Nationals, you think about Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg. You’re doing your own self a disservice if you stop there.

Just a little more than a week ago, the Indians had a reportedly healthy Danny Salazar, a totally healthy Carlos Carrasco, and their odds of winning the World Series, according to our projections, sat at 13.4%. Aside from a 24-hour window back on July 5 during which Cleveland’s odds jumped up to 14.2%, last week’s figure was the highest of the year for the soon-to-be American League Central Division champions.

Of course, Salazar is no longer healthy, having finally given in to the right elbow that’s been barking at him for much of the season. He seems unlikely to contribute again until 2017. And of course, Carrasco is no longer healthy, having been knocked out just two pitches into his most recent start after being struck by an Ian Kinsler line drive and fracturing his throwing hand. He won’t contribute again until 2017.

Understandably, this has provided a huge blow to Cleveland’s odds, which our own Corinne Landrey touched upon this morning. While the Indians will still have a better shot at winning it all than all but seven teams come October, their odds have been cut from 13.4% to 9.3% in the blink of an eye, a 30% decrease that couldn’t occur so quickly without a devastating injury or two. Our projections have long viewed Cleveland as either the strongest contender for the American League pennant, or at least the team most likely to stand in someone else’s way. No longer is that the case.

Read the rest of this entry »