Torii Hunter is a bit of an enigma when it comes to discussing defense. The now-retired outfielder isn’t a big believer in shifts — or data in general — yet he understands the importance of positioning. A nine-time Gold Glove winner, Hunter had a way of being in the right place at the right time when he patrolled center (and sometimes right) for the Twins, Angels and Tigers.

Hunter was at Twins training camp earlier this spring, working with the club’s young fly-chaser mix. His tutorials were called for. Minnesota’s starting outfield projects to be still-wet-behind-the-ears Byron Buxton, flanked by former infielders Eddie Rosario and Miguel Sano. Compounding the trio’s inexperience are a large Target Field outfield and a pitching staff that induces a lot of balls in play.

Talking to Hunter a few weeks ago, I was struck by his paradoxical approach to positioning. Yes, you need to know where a batter is likely to hit the ball. No, data isn’t particularly helpful. Shifting is overdone, if not unnecessary.

When Hunter and I parted ways — our conversation continued beyond what was captured here — he smiled and said, “That was a good argument.” Regardless of how you define it, our back-and-forth elicited some interesting commentary. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam preview the Astros’ season with Houston Chronicle Astros beat writer Evan Drellich, and George talks to Evan’s Houston Chronicle colleague, Jesus Ortiz (at 31:38).

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Don’t lose sight of the fact that the biggest story in baseball right now could have been the smallest. Adam LaRoche up and retired because the White Sox wanted to cut down on his son’s presence around the clubhouse. I’m sure you’ve already read all about this, but Drake LaRoche has a history of being around all the time, going back to when Adam was with the Nationals. The White Sox requested that Drake not be around so much, and they probably didn’t anticipate that LaRoche would walk away from thirteen million dollars. This could’ve all stayed behind closed doors, and we never would’ve known, but it’s a story because it’s been blown up to the greatest possible magnitude. The regular season is right around the corner, but this is what matters today.

The story presents with two sides, so it’s only natural to want to pick a favorite one. It’s no different from when people want to figure out the winner of any trade. On one side, there’s the organization, that says it wants to do what it can to keep the team focused and disciplined. On the other side, there’s LaRoche, who obviously cares enough about this to willingly forfeit an absurd amount of money, not to mention the rest of his career. Ultimately, this is a clubhouse matter, and barely public, so we’ll never be sufficiently informed. Yet based on what’s knowable, it’s challenging to arrive at any conclusion other than “well I’ll be damned.”

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This is the leaderboard. It actually shows up under “Pitch Value,” and not “Run Value,” but I prefer “Run Value.” For the sake of being most accurate, it might be filed under “Pitch Run Value,” but now that’s too many words. Don’t worry about it. Let’s move ahead.

I feel like we don’t use these numbers enough. What they show, for hitters: how many runs above or below average a given hitter has been against the various pitch types. We don’t use the numbers much because we don’t understand them very well, and because maybe they don’t stabilize very quickly, but the results aren’t all random. I went ahead and did some exploring, and I’ve pulled some nuggets of interest below. This way, all of us can learn together!

My pool of players: players who batted in 2015, and who have also batted at least 750 times since 2002. Why 750? Because 750 is what I used. The exploration I did grouped everything into two columns. I looked at performance against hard pitches, those being fastballs and cutters. And I looked at performance against everything else, those pitches being sliders, curveballs, changeups, splitters, and knuckleballs. These are the “softer” pitches. For hard and soft, I calculated run values per 100 pitches. Off we go!

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Addison Russell already had one of the twenty-best debuts by a shortstop we’ve seen in the free agency era. But two adjustments — one made last year, and one made this spring — could end up driving the 22-year-old beyond his projections this year. Particularly because both adjustments spoke to his biggest flaws.

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So, on Tuesday, I announced a meetup I’d be hosting in Toronto on April 8th, for those of you who won’t be attending the home opener to get together at a bar and watch the game. The space we had reserved at Tallboys had room for 30 people, and you guys bought up all the available spots in less than a few hours. In order to try and accommodate more people who expressed interest in attending, we’re moving the get together to a different bar: Firken on King.

This new space has room for 100 people, so we’re opening up 70 more spots as of today. If you purchased a ticket on Tuesday, don’t worry, that will still be honored, and you don’t have to buy a new ticket to get into the event. Because of the larger space, however, we’ve had to up the price slightly for this second round of tickets; the cost is now $8, but still includes your first beer, so it’s still close to free to attend. The event will start at 6 pm, and we’ll hang out and talk baseball before the game starts, then settle in and watch the game together starting at 7. For space reasons, you’ll need to be at Firken by 6:30 in order to have your space guaranteed, as they’ll be opening up the area to walk-ins after that point.

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Billy Beane has been the master of the pseudo-rebuild for a long time now, replenishing the farm system while simultaneously improving or at least diversifying the big league roster. This past year has been more about subtraction from the minor league depth than addition, but internal development, a solid draft last June and some lesser moves have put the system in a better spot than it was last year. Translation: they have some more chips to play with come this July.

Though it is definitely in a better spot, it certainly isn’t without weakness. Besides Sean Manaea, there isn’t much immediate help for the big league rotation without dipping into some more of the command specialist-types that they have had to rely on the last few years, albeit with pretty good success. On the offensive side, Matt Olson, Chad Pinder and Renato Nunez are close to ready for their big league shots, as are guys like Joe Wendle and Matt Chapman, to a lesser extent impact-wise.

Recent drafts have been fairly successful keeping the pipeline operational, though the A’s have had an inordinate amount of pitchers dealing with injuries. Raul Alcantara, Dillon Overton and Bobby Wahl are all in the comeback stages of arm injuries, and young Chris Kohler is dealing with shoulder stiffness this spring. It may just be a product of their wheeling and dealing of anyone who is healthy, but it still bears watching over the next season or two to look for any patterns.

As for the surprise picks on the list, Manaea’s consistency issues drop him down a little bit for me, though I still like his potential in the rotation. Chad Pinder and Rangel Ravelo are both better hitters than most people seem to think in my opinion, while Matt Chapman and Ryon Healy have some things to prove before I’ll really buy into their offensive profiles. Seth Brown is an interesting upside prospect to watch, coming out of nowhere to hit a bunch of homers in college, getting drafted late and continuing to hit well in the low minors.

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When we tell a lie, it’s often rooted in fact. It’s tough to just completely pull a lie out of thin air; somewhere, entrenched deep down within a lie, there’s a factual base. But we start with that small fact, and we turn it into a big lie, and at first we know not to believe that lie but over time, if we continue to lie, two things begin to happen. One, the lie begins to expand. We add in new layers, hyperbolize the already fictitious tale, and turn it into something larger than we’d ever intended. Two, we begin to believe that lie. We’re not aware of this happening, but tell a lie enough times and you’ll forget where you started. That’s how you really wind up in trouble.

Rich Hill felt like a lie last season. I’m still not sure I believe it happened. And, as if I was the one who told the Great Rich Hill Lie of 2015, I began to embellish the story. Two days ago, I’d have bet good money that Rich Hill did what he did last year over 10 or more starts. Give me enough time and I’d have said he did it over a full season. But alas! Rich Hill was only literally Clayton Kershaw for four starts, not 10 or 20 or 33.

But Rich Hill being literally Clayton Kershaw for any amount of time last year still seems like a lie, and when we look at the numbers, it’s almost impossible to make sense of them. It took long enough for us to come to terms that what Clayton Kershaw does is just what he does. We can’t have a second one. When we see 36 strikeouts in 106 batters faced, what does that mean? What does five walks mean? Half of balls in play on the ground — what’s that? In just four starts, these types of numbers have so little context, it almost does more harm than good to think about them. So naturally, we go deeper.

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It’s Bold Prediction season over on the fantasy side, and since it’s in the water, it’s starting to spread. And though this bold prediction will be a silly enterprise, it’s not an insane one. It’s a prediction like any other, a dart thrown at a board with some intention and thought behind it.

The projections on our site that say that the Chicago White Sox are a .500 team poised to finish tied for second, five or six games back of the Indians in the American League central? Those represent the meat of possible outcomes, the median result of throwing thousands of player projections into a battle with each other.

But the error inherent in projecting one player adds up with each additional player added, and the error bars on those projections are relatively large. One standard deviation is around five wins, meaning that a result that is ten wins above or below the projection is not out of the norm.

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