| 9:08 |
: Sorry!
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| 9:08 |
: Let’s get started.
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| 9:08 |
: I’ll stay late.
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| 9:08 |
: Do the Red Sox have enough pitching to do well in the postseason if they make it? Price-Porcello-Pomeranz-Rodriguez doesn’t sound bad at all.
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| 9:10 |
: I think it’s competitive, but nights like tonight give me pause.
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| 9:10 |
: Despite adding Kimbrel and Carson Smith last offseason, will Dave Dombrowski target more bullpen arms in trades this offseason?
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Near the end of the game between the Blue Jays and Rays yesterday, the camera panned to center field. Evan Longoria was at the plate, and the Jays broadcast team was talking about the third baseman’s power. “He’s got some power to right field, too, now, and I think that’s why you’ll see the outfielders, especially the center fielder and right fielder playing a couple steps back,” said Dan Shulman. “Look at how deep Kevin Pillar is in center field. That’s only a couple of steps, it seems like, for Pillar, from the warning track!” he continued. “We have not seen Kevin Pillar play that deep,” concurred Buck Martinez.
It was impressive. That little dot in center is Pillar. Looks like a wallflower at a middle-school dance.
He was 361 feet from the plate at that moment. It makes sense, given Longoria’s spray chart this year. You’ll notice that Pillar is shaded a little bit to right, which is where Longoria hits many of his deep outs.
Source: FanGraphs
But the Blue Jays were pushing the envelope a bit. Call it situational defense, maybe, because Pillar was playing more than 30 feet further back than the average center fielder against Longoria this year. Given that there were two outs in the eighth inning of a tie game and Brad Miller and Nick Franklin were scheduled to hit behind Evan Longoria, there’s a certain amount of making sure to stop the big hit doesn’t sink the team. In a league where it probably pays to play deep, this was playing just a bit deeper on a guy who hits them deep.
Last week, we updated our mid-May analysis of park factors based on granular batted-ball data, showing the offense-inflating impact that a hot summer can have, especially in certain parts of the country. This week, let’s take a look at the season-to-date overall and fly-ball park factors for all 30 parks, one league at a time, focusing on some interesting park-specific information.
First, here’s the quick-and-dirty on the method used to calculate these park factors. Through August 21, 106,962 balls were put into play during MLB regular-season contests. They resulted in an overall batting average of .328 and slugging percentage of .537, while fly balls generated a .328 AVG and .895 SLG. Line drives generated a .661 AVG and .872 SLG, and ground balls a .237 AVG and .258 SLG. (Oh, and pop ups have generated a .018 AVG and .028 SLG.) Each BIP type was split into “buckets” separated by 5-mph increments. The top fly-ball bucket begins at 105 mph, and the top liner and grounder buckets begin at 110 mph.
For each ballpark, the actual production derived from that park’s actual BIP mix was compared to the projected production, assuming that each BIP bucket generated MLB average production for that BIP type/exit-speed combination. Convert everything to run values, and voila, park factors, both overall and by BIP type.
Are you a baseball fan? Do you have access to the internet? I bet you do, because it’d be weird for you to be reading this post otherwise. Well, baseball fan who has access to the internet, it’s your lucky day, because Tom Tango’s Fans Scouting Report is back, and you can go participate in it!
By Tango’s own admission, this is his favorite project. He (and us here at FanGraphs, since we house the results on our both our player pages and leaderboards) are always looking for your help. Last year, Mike Trout only got eight votes. Hopefully he’ll get more this season!
This season, there is an added incentive, for the nerdiest among us. I’ll let Tango tell you all about it:
This year more than any, it comes at a perfect time, thanks to Statcast. Over the coming months, I should be able to come up with a Statcast-based version of a Fielding Scouting Report that mirrors this project. And we’ll be in a great position to compare the results of what the fan sees to what the radar/camera sees.
Well that’s just all sorts of awesome. So go vote and help give the 14th year of Fans Scouting Report its most robust data set ever!
On Monday, the Oakland Athletics promoted a couple of hitting prospects from Triple-A: Renato Nunez and Matt Olson. Both Nunez and Olson came off the bench on Monday to make their big-league debuts. With Billy Butler out of the picture, and Danny Valencia likely soon to follow, Nunez and Olson might see a decent chunk of playing time these next two weeks.
Olson’s numbers have trended in the wrong direction since his 37-homer season in the Cal League in 2014. He slashed .249/.388/.438 in Double-A last year and only managed to hit .235/.335/.422 in the PCL this year. Throughout his minor-league career, Olson has demonstrated good power and a willingness to draw walks. He’s also a 22-year-old with a 6-foot-5 frame, which suggests he may still have some untapped upside. But his underwhelming performance, defensive limitations and 24% strikeout rate don’t bode particularly well for his future in the show.
KATOH pegs Olson for 3.7 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 2.8 WAR by KATOH+, which integrates Baseball America’s rankings. To help you visualize what his KATOH projection entails, here is a probability density function showing KATOH+’s projected distribution of outcomes for Olson’s first six seasons in the major leagues.
To put some faces to Olson’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the newest Brewers prospect. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Olson’s performance this year and every Double-A season since 1991 in which a first baseman or corner outfielder recorded at least 400 plate appearances. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.
When a below-average lineup in 2015 was followed by a quiet offseason and a Michael Brantley shoulder surgery, it was easy to make a case against Cleveland’s preseason playoff hopes that started and ended with the lineup. Yet here we are, now, in September, and Cleveland is all but a lock to win their division. They’ve gotten here due in large part to a lineup that’s exceeded expectations (third in runs scored, 10th in wRC+) and kept pace with the pitching (third in ERA-, seventh in WAR) and defense (fourth in UZR, 10th in DRS). They’ve gotten here by crushing offspeed pitches, at a near-historic rate.
The words “Ubaldo Jimenez” and “good start” haven’t appeared together often this year. In fact the word “start” itself hasn’t always applied. But with his team clinging to a Wild Card spot and still within reach of a division title, he picked a great time to throw four good starts in place of an injured Chris Tillman.
Jimenez’s first two years with the Baltimore Orioles are a study in contrasts. In 2014, he walked nearly 14% of his batters en route to a 4.48 xFIP. Although the Orioles won the AL East and took Jimenez to the ALDS, they left him off the ALCS roster. But in 2015, Jimenez harnessed his funky mechanics, got more ground balls, walked fewer batters, and had a much better 3.83 xFIP.
This year has more resembled 2014 than 2015. Although Jimenez is walking fewer batters than in 2014, he’s striking out fewer, too, leading to a lower strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%). After beginning the season in the rotation, here’s what happened:
His four starts in place of Tillman were good. Jimenez struck out only 15.9% of the batters he faced, but he cut his walk rate to a stingy 5.6%. He also threw the team’s first complete game since 2014.
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: My apologies for the delay. Had some technical difficulties this morning and fell behind on my post-writing. Will start this thing up ASAP, hopefully about 10 minutes or so!
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| 12:20 |
: ok!
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| 12:20 |
: let us chat1
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| 12:20 |
: Hello, friend! YOU’RE LATE
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| 12:20 |
: Hi, Bork!
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: Sorry for making you wiat.
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Last September, a starting pitcher emerged who would go on to be one of the more popular under-the-radar “breakout” picks of the winter. Acquired from Miami in the Mat Latos trade, Anthony DeSclafani was a 24-year-old with middling results across his 31 starts last year, including a 4.05 ERA and a 12.2-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%). The results on their own were more than serviceable for an innings-eater type pitcher, but they weren’t exactly exciting. Until you looked at September, that is.
In September, his ERA clocked in at an unappealing 4.93, but the underlying peripherals were fantastic. He struck out 24.8% of batters while walking just 3.4% and maintained a solid 47.1% ground-ball rate — all of which left him with a 2.27 FIP for the month. A bit of bad luck in batted balls and sequencing made it possible for numbers-friendly fans to uncover what really happened with DeSclafani that month and feel like you were unearthing a great secret, because not only was DeSclafani putting on a hidden great performance, it was accompanied by the always enticing logical explanation.
Take a look at DeSclafani’s pitch-usage chart from 2015 and you’ll find that, at the end of the season, he largely scrapped his changeup and dramatically increased his curveball usage. Additionally, he decreased his reliance on the four-seamer. Great run-prevention numbers may not have initially accompanied the adjustment, but the peripherals indicated that DeSclafani had taken a step forward and could be in store for a strong 2016 campaign. And, as it turns out, that’s exactly what’s happened.
Episode 681
Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses Matt Bowman, park effects, and assessing a prospect’s ability to benefit (or not) from information; attempts to identify those skills which might allow a pitcher, like Mike Leake or (nearly) Rick Porcello, to bypass the minor leagues entirely; and explores an anxious moment from his own sporting youth.
This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.
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 08 min play time.)
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