Ben and Sam banter about a hard-to-believe baseball ad, then answer listener emails about the NL Central, GM metadata, Aaron Sanchez, deceptive debuts and more.
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Over the last few weeks we have taken a position-by-position look at ball-in-play data for both hitters and pitchers, assessing their respective contact quality/management ability. Next up: a macro-type evaluation of overall team performance in those areas. An overview of this series appeared in this space last week.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a division-by-division look at each team’s granular data through the All-Star break, ultimately comparing their actual won-lost records to projected ones based on exit speed/angle of every ball in play hit and allowed by each club. About 90 games’ worth of balls in play is a fairly substantial sample size, one that enables us to make fairly educated guesses about the true talent level of each team. Today, we’ll begin to drill deeper into the data.
If you’re a general manager itching to cause a stir among your team’s most devoted fan base, you can announce that you’re moving one of your most promising pitching prospects into the bullpen. For as little as some fans might actually know, one thing that’s widely understood is that a good starting pitcher is better than a good relieving pitcher. More valuable, anyway. So fans are inclined to be patient, letting pitching prospects sort their things out. Moving to the bullpen is often considered a last resort. Something that should happen only to lesser players. Fans don’t love when it’s a move that’s made early.
And just generally speaking, I’m sympathetic to that perspective. I’m mostly in alignment — I, too, like being patient with prospects. I want starters to have time to develop. But on the other hand, there’s the case of Edwin Diaz. Before the year, Baseball America ranked Diaz as the No. 2 prospect in an admittedly lousy Mariners system. Early in the season, the Mariners announced that Diaz was being transitioned to relief, citing an inability to learn a third pitch. At the time, the decision was questionable. I suppose it still is, and forever will be. But, why do teams move starters into the bullpen? Because relievers can move quickly, and the best ones can become hugely important. Diaz, already, has become hugely important. Diaz is already pitching like one of the very best relievers in baseball.
When a player puts up a great first half that departs considerably from his established levels, it’s generally expected that the player will come back to earth in the second half. This is regression in its simplest form, and it’s baked into the sort of projections which appear at this site. This isn’t to say the player won’t continue to be good, just that he might not be as good as he showed in the first half. The same is true for players with uncharacteristically poor first halves. We expect them to figure things out and get back closer to their prior performance level. We can look at many indicators of the poor performance — BABIP is usually prominent — and tie some of the performance to bad luck. Sometimes it’s injuries. Another avenue we can travel down is to look at exit velocity.
Over the winter, I looked at players who under- or overperformed their average exit velocities in the first half of 2015 and then compared it to their second-half production. Standard caveats about the importance of launch angle and somewhat incomplete data apply, but those players who most outperformed their exit velocity in the first half last season saw massive drops in production in the second half. Here’s the methodology I applied in February (and repeated a few weeks ago in looking at players who underperformed last season):
I created IQ-type scores for exit velocity and wOBA from the first half of last season based on the averages of the 130 players in the sample. In each case, I assigned a figure of 100 to the sample’s average and then, for each standard deviation (SD) up or down, added or subtracted 15 points.
Once the IQ scores for both stats were calculated, I subtracted the IQ score for exit velocity from the IQ score for wOBA to find the players with the biggest disparities.
Here are the overperformers from the first half of last season — i.e. the players whose production most exceeded their exit velocity:
| 2015 1st Half wOBA | 2015 2nd Half wOBA | Diff | |
| Bryce Harper | 0.482 | 0.438 | -0.044 |
| Anthony Rizzo | 0.407 | 0.356 | -0.051 |
| Starling Marte | 0.337 | 0.337 | 0 |
| Charlie Blackmon | 0.356 | 0.331 | -0.025 |
| Brian Dozier | 0.357 | 0.280 | -0.077 |
| Brett Gardner | 0.373 | 0.271 | -0.102 |
| Adrian Gonzalez | 0.371 | 0.333 | -0.038 |
| Buster Posey | 0.377 | 0.346 | -0.031 |
| Jhonny Peralta | 0.355 | 0.277 | -0.078 |
| Victor Martinez | 0.313 | 0.262 | -0.051 |
| AVERAGE | 0.373 | 0.323 | -0.050 |
As you can see, players who outperformed their exit-velocity numbers in the first half of 2015 produced a collective wOBA that was 50 points lower in the second half of that season.
With that in mind, here are the overperformers from the first half of this season:
| wOBA | wOBA IQ | Exit Velo 1st Half 2016 | Exit Velo IQ | wOBA IQ-Exit Velo IQ | |
| Brandon Belt | .394 | 124.0 | 86.2 | 79.4 | 44.5 |
| Derek Dietrich | .365 | 113.1 | 86.2 | 79.1 | 34.0 |
| Jose Altuve | .400 | 126.2 | 88.7 | 94.5 | 31.7 |
| Anthony Rizzo | .419 | 133.3 | 90.3 | 104.5 | 28.9 |
| John Jaso | .327 | 98.9 | 85.0 | 72.1 | 26.8 |
| Cameron Maybin | .359 | 110.9 | 87.1 | 84.9 | 26.0 |
| Ian Kinsler | .358 | 110.5 | 87.3 | 85.9 | 24.6 |
| Mike Trout | .415 | 131.8 | 90.8 | 107.5 | 24.3 |
| Jose Iglesias | .281 | 81.6 | 82.7 | 58.0 | 23.7 |
| Daniel Murphy | .410 | 130.0 | 90.7 | 106.6 | 23.4 |
| Didi Gregorius | .339 | 103.4 | 86.4 | 80.2 | 23.1 |
| Charlie Blackmon | .371 | 115.4 | 88.4 | 92.6 | 22.8 |
| Dexter Fowler | .381 | 119.1 | 89.0 | 96.5 | 22.6 |
| Lonnie Chisenhall | .348 | 106.7 | 87.0 | 84.4 | 22.4 |
| Stephen Piscotty | .366 | 113.5 | 88.2 | 91.6 | 21.9 |
| Matt Carpenter | .414 | 131.5 | 91.3 | 110.6 | 20.8 |
| Starling Marte | .353 | 108.6 | 87.7 | 88.4 | 20.2 |
| AVERAGE | .371 | 115.2 | 87.8 | 89.2 | 26.0 |
Milwaukee shortstop Orlando Arcia has been on the prospect radar for a few years now, but his stock has risen significantly over the past year or so. He’s been posting impressive strikeout and stolen-base numbers since his age-16 season in 2011. Though, prior to 2015, he did so with minimal power. He only managed an .093 ISO in A-ball in 2013 and 2014, which was helped in part by his 10 triples. While still an interesting prospect, it didn’t look like he’d ever hit for much power.
The power finally began to show up in 2015, however. His eight homers matched his total from the previous two years combined, which helped prop his ISO up to .146. That power bump has carried over into 2016, as Arcia had already matched last season’s total in just 100 games at Triple-A. His strikeout and walk numbers have both ticked in the wrong direction the past couple of years, but that was a sacrifice worth making in exchange for bringing his extra-base-hit totals to more respectable levels.
| 12:03 |
: Happy post-deadline Wednesday.
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| 12:03 |
: I’m a bit under the weather today, so I don’t know how long I’ll make it, but I’ll take questions until I need to go pass out.
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| 12:04 |
: Does Matheny suck? He seems to suck.
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| 12:05 |
: At some point, Mozeliak is going to have to tell him to stop double switching so often, and to stop taking Holliday out of close games.
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| 12:05 |
: His overmanaging is hurting the organization.
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| 12:05 |
: What would a Noah Syndergaard/Nolan Arenado trade look like?
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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Los Angeles NL at Colorado | 20:10 ET
Stewart (5.0 IP, 70 xFIP-) vs. Anderson (54.0 IP, 79 xFIP-)
Here’s a syllogism regarding Brock Stewart, who’s scheduled to record his second-ever major-league start tonight:
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Radio.
Brandon Guyer is currently baseball’s Hit-by-Pitch King. You could take that to mean this year, as Guyer leads all batters with 23 hit by pitches this season. Or you could take it to mean lately, as Guyer leads all batters over the last two years with 47 hit by pitches, and his 58 over the last three leaves him just one behind Anthony Rizzo’s league-leading total, despite Guyer having half the plate appearances over that stretch. Or, you could even take it to mean all-time, because if you set a career plate appearance minimum of 500 and search the entire history of modern baseball dating back to 1921, no one’s been hit more frequently than our recently anointed Hit-by-Pitch King.
HBP%, 1921-present, min. 500 PA
The gap is remarkable. Throughout the entire history of modern baseball, at this particular skill, Brandon Guyer is truly a one-of-a-kind. And make no mistakes, it is a skill. Maybe “skill” isn’t the word you’d immediately think to use, but another way to think about a skill is the ability to repeatedly do something others can’t as a means to gain an advantage over the opponent. Most often, we see that manifested in a batter consistently getting hits, or stealing bases, or drawing walks. Oh, Guyer can hit, too, but where he really gains his edge is the being hit.
Eno Sarris wrote about this a bit when the Indians acquired Guyer at the deadline for low-level prospects Nathan Lukes and Jhonleider Salinas. The reason the Indians went out and got Guyer is because he can play all three outfield positions with what appears to be above-average ability, and mostly because he’s been one of baseball’s very best bats against left-handed pitching since he began receiving regular playing time in 2014. As Eno put it, Guyer improves the Indians’ ability to both hit lefties, and be hit by lefties. But plenty of batters have been able to hit lefties. Nobody in the history of the sport’s been hit like Guyer, so that’s where our focus turns.
The Red Sox made Andrew Benintendi the seventh pick in the draft last summer after he hit a torrid .376/.488/.717 as a sophomore at Arkansas, giving him easily the highest OPS in the SEC. Benintendi wasted no time proving his mettle in pro ball. He kicked things off by slashing .313/.414/.556 between two levels of A-ball, pairing a minuscule strikeout rate with loads of power.
Benintendi’s done more of the same in 2016, only this time at High-A and Double-A. He’s posted equal strikeout and walk rates — both 9% — while also hitting for power and stealing bases. The end result has been an unequivocally excellent .312/.378/.532 batting line. Considering he grades out as an above-average center fielder by Clay Davenport’s numbers, there really isn’t anything Benintendi can’t do.
Episode 673
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. During this edition of FanGraphs Audio, he guides the program’s host through the morass of transactions which occurred at baseball’s non-waiver trade deadline.
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 57 min play time.)
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