To be honest, I didn’t want to write about the “tanking” story anymore. After Buster Olney and Jayson Stark both wrote extensively about the issue in December and January, I published something of a rebuttal, and since then, follow-up discussions haven’t proven particularly useful, as both sides seem pretty entrenched in their interpretations. Olney and Stark are firmly in the camp that this is a huge systematic problem for Major League Baseball, and others — such as Joel Sherman — have also published pieces suggesting that MLB needs to intervene, so this issue isn’t going away.
Yesterday, Stark wrote another piece on the issue, soliciting comments from Tony Clark on whether the MLBPA is going to make this an issue in the CBA. Clark was diplomatic, keeping his options open, but didn’t really say anything particularly newsworthy. But there was an interesting comment in Stark’s column, from Stark himself, that I think is worth discussing.
Determining profits and losses for baseball franchises is a speculative task. When teams say they’re losing money, we can take them at their word or ignore them. They don’t open their books, so how much money teams make or lose is subject to factors outside of publicly available knowledge — and, therefore, equally subject to a lot of potential “massaging” on the part of the teams themselves.
That state of affairs might change slightly in the near future, however. Liberty Media, owners of the Atlanta Braves — as well as a majority stake in Sirius XM and a substantial stake in Live Nation Entertainment — are planning to offer stock in their separate divisions. As a result, they’ll have to provide more information to the public on the Braves’ operations. The Braves are claiming losses over the past few years, although in a cash sense, those losses are a bit deceiving, and the team is set to make money this season after slashing payroll.
There was a time, not all that long ago, that almost all Atlanta Braves games were broadcast nationally on TBS. The cable network, owned ostensibly by the same person who owned the Braves, Ted Turner, used the Braves to get publicity for his cable network, and the Braves were able to reach a broader base of fans. In the middle of the Braves’ great run of success, Time Warner bought Turner’s broadcasting company and the Braves, and the new owners continued to put Braves games on TBS. Changes to this once symbiotic partnership, however, brought an end to TBS’s almost daily Braves telecasts and saw the team enter one of the worst television contracts of the last few decades.
Pitchers know hitters. They’ve got to. Sure, for the most part, pitchers want to trust their stuff and hit their spots and any deviation too far from one’s comfort zone is a concession to the hitter, but pitchers have got to know hitters, lest they be made to look silly. Example: pitcher faces high-ball hitter, throws high ball, gives up dinger. Well, duh. We told you he was a high-ball hitter, dumb-dumb. Why’d you put it there?
This is why pitchers read scouting reports, and watch videos, and look at heatmaps, and converse with their peers, and use their human brain to rethink past matchups against whichever opponent looms next on the docket. So they don’t look like a dumb-dumb. That’s all anyone’s trying to do, really. Competitive edge, work ethic, drive, determination — those are all just codewords for “Please don’t let my peers judge me.”
That’s why Mike Trout stopped getting the low fastball last year. It wasn’t for baseball reasons. It was so that anytime a nearby group of people shared a laugh over This Week’s Meme, the group’s laughter would no longer be misconstrued by the dumb-dumb pitcher who threw Mike Trout a low fastball as a public and personal lampooning.
But it turns out nobody is perfect, and that’s why we’re all insecure. Mistakes are made, constantly, by every kind of person at every kind of job. Making mistakes is one of the things humans are best at. All we can do is try to be better at learning from mistakes than we are at making them, and oftentimes it feels like an uphill climb.
Say, speaking of which, plenty of pitchers made mistakes to Nolan Arenado last year. Did you know he hit 42 homers? Don’t believe me? Look, here they are!
Now we have something different to talk about. Now we have something different we have to talk about. You’ll notice I’ve drawn a red line that splits the field in two, and you’ll notice that 40 of the black dots representing home runs are to the left of that dividing red line. You could say Nolan Arenado has a type.
On September 1, 2015, the Nationals and Cardinals played a game where the Nationals took a big lead, only to give most of it back almost immediately. The Nationals kept trying to hold on, until the end, when the Cardinals won the game on a 3-run HR.
Let’s look at that ninth inning. First up was Jason Heyward. He grounded out. That context-neutral run value of making an out is -0.25 runs (or -.027 wins). Making an out to start the inning with the bases empty is only worth -0.225 runs (or -.024 wins). Therefore, the base-out timing value of the out is +.025 runs (or +.003 wins). It looks like this:
-.027 wins: Heyward’s out
+.003 wins: low impact timing of out with bases empty
But we know more information. It was a 5-5 game to start the bottom of the 9th. This is a higher leverage situation than random. Heyward’s out actually reduced the chance of winning by .050 wins, not .024 wins. That is, the impact is felt twice as much as a random leadoff situation. So, there’s yet another .026 wins to account for. This is what it looks like:
-.027 wins: Heyward’s out
+.003 wins: low impact timing of out with bases empty
-.026 wins: high impact timing of out in 9th inning of tied game
The question to ask yourself (not to me, but to yourself), is how much do you want to credit Heyward for making an out in this situation: do you want to just credit him with a random out, because he was just plucked into this situation, or do you want to credit him with making an out as the leverage was lower impact (bases empty) or even high impact (9th inning of a tied game)? Is an out an out, or does the out depend on the situation?
Let’s continue. Yadier Molina also got an out. Going through the above machinations gives us this:
-.027 wins: Molina’s out
+.010 wins: low impact timing of out with bases empty
-.019 wins: high impact timing of out in 9th inning of tied game
Now the fun begins. Cody Stanley doubled.
+.081 wins: Stanley’s double
-.056 wins: low impact timing of double with two outs
+.043 wins: high impact timing of double in 9th inning of tied game
So, in a random situation, a double with two outs is not that valuable. It’s less valuable than a random walk. That’s why we have a huge -.056 win value to account for its low impact. But at the same time, this puts the winning run on base in the bottom of the 9th. This is enormously high impact. How you approach valuation will decide how you want to credit Stanley and his double.
Tommy Pham walked with first base open and winning runner already on base.
+.032 wins: Pham’s walk
-.020 wins: low impact timing of walk with 1st base open
-.009 wins: low impact timing of walk (run is useless)
Let’s pause here. The double put the winning run on base, and left 1B open. The walk is in fact practically useless. The win value changed by +.003 wins, which is pretty close to zero. The batter and pitcher know this, which is why we see a NEGATIVE impact of the walk in the 9th inning of a tied game, even though we are in a high leverage situation. This is unlike the double which had a huge POSITIVE impact. The entire sequencing of the situation matters. Given that the batter and pitcher are aware of the situations as they develop, the entire timing values noted above make perfect sense.
Finally, the HR by Brandon Moss.
+.150 wins: Moss’s HR
+.137 wins: high impact timing of HR with 2 runners on
+.114 wins: high impact timing of HR to win the game
In the end, the Cardinals went from a 61.4% chance of winning to 100%, adding +0.386 wins. Adding up the above, and we get:
+.209 wins: all the events in a random situation
+.074 wins: high/low impact timing for base-out situations
+.103 wins: high impact timing of inning/score (except walk)
So, how do you, the reader, want to evaluate each of these plays? How much do you want to assign to the batter (and pitcher) and how much do you just want to have some general “timing” buckets, not linked to any particular player?
A cornucopia of promising young hitters lost their rookie eligibility over the course of the 2015 season. Carlos Correa, Kris Bryant, Francisco Lindor and Kyle Schwarber are just a few of the most notable names. Each of them were consensus top prospects, and each looks primed to have an excellent big league career.
However, there was another youngster who eschewed his rookie eligibility with much less fanfare, yet whose future may be nearly as bright — at least according to the stats. As you probably deduced from the title of this piece, that player is Mets second baseman Dilson Herrera. Herrera’s minor league performance yields a KATOH forecast of 10.1 WAR over the next six years. Were he still prospect eligible, he would have landed 12th on KATOH’s top 100.
And we’re back for the second half of this polling project. If you missed the first half, which was dedicated to the American League, here you go. The idea, in short, is just to gauge community opinion of the team projections, which as of Monday are now updated to include ZiPS, instead of just being based on Steamer like before. What we all see now should be awful close to what we see on the eve of opening day, and so, with that in mind, here’s the projected National League:
NL Projected Records
Team
W
L
Cubs
97
65
Dodgers
94
68
Mets
90
72
Nationals
90
72
Giants
87
75
Cardinals
85
77
Pirates
84
78
Marlins
81
81
Diamondbacks
80
82
Padres
73
89
Rockies
72
90
Brewers
71
91
Reds
70
92
Braves
68
94
Phillies
64
98
The NL projections haven’t been as controversial as the AL projections. On the AL side, we’ve had to talk entirely too much about the Royals, and we’ve also had teams like the Red Sox go off the rails. The NL has behaved more predictably of late, but that doesn’t mean you might not still disagree with some of the projections in that table. Teams are predictable until they aren’t, and this is the whole reason behind the project. I just want to know where you think the numbers are good, and I want to know where you think the numbers are being stupid.
A request, again: when voting below, please try to consider only the information we have at this moment. You can assume that some prospects will or will not eventually show up, but don’t dock certain teams because you think they’ll subtract at the deadline, and don’t boost other teams for expected trade additions. I’m interested in what you think of the teams as we speak. Maybe you just haven’t thought that much about the expected cellar-dwellers, but don’t worry, you can’t actually get this wrong. Once more, thanks for all the help. We’ll analyze all this stuff later in the week.
Episode 635
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he discusses how players with zero to three years of service time (like Gerrit Cole) or players who rejected a qualifying offer (like Dexter Fowler and Howie Kendrick) — how players like that can take steps towards getting their money.
This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
Last week, I said I would run my next community polling project just as soon as we got ZiPS projections all uploaded and folded in with Steamer. That’s precisely the news I woke up to today, so, here we go. Steamer’s up, ZiPS is up, we have an updated playoff odds page, and here are the current American League team projections, based on the numbers and our depth charts:
AL Projected Records
Team
W
L
Red Sox
88
74
Astros
88
74
Indians
87
75
Blue Jays
84
78
Mariners
82
80
Yankees
82
80
Tigers
81
81
White Sox
81
81
Rays
80
82
Rangers
80
82
Angels
80
82
Athletics
78
84
Orioles
78
84
Twins
78
84
Royals
77
85
I know — you see the Royals in last. You can’t help but chuckle. Maybe you agree with it, and maybe you don’t agree with it, and in either case, it’s probably kind of funny. But, good news! This is your chance to sound off, in a way. Projections are given to you. They’re presented to you, and maybe you sometimes feel like you’re being force-fed. You’re not obligated to actually agree with what the projections are saying, and here, I want to know how the community feels about each individual team projection. I want to know where people think the projections are right on, and, more interestingly, I want to know where people think the projections are being stupid. Could be they’re not being stupid, at all, but I want to know about the perception. I ran this project a year ago, and I love it. I hope you also love it. Together, let’s crowdsource the projected 2016 American League standings. (We’ll all look at the National League tomorrow.)
Something I’d like for you to keep in mind: please vote according to what we know now. Don’t vote anticipating midseason additions or subtractions. It’s one thing if you think a team will or will not call up a top prospect, but don’t vote planning on trades. I think everything else is self-explanatory, so, have fun. For each team and each poll, I’ll offer brief commentary that serves little purpose since I don’t want to actually bias anything myself. I plan to examine the voting results later this week. Thank you and I love you!
