FanGraphs Baseball

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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In a spring-training game on Wednesday afternoon, Juan Nicasio struck out 10 Orioles. In fairness, everybody who pitched in the game for the Pirates struck out 10 Orioles, and I just struck out 10 Orioles while I was writing this sentence, but Nicasio is opening some eyes after what was a pretty quiet arrival in Pittsburgh. When he was brought in, the thought was he’d serve as a possible long reliever. Now there’s even talk about him starting.

It’s the middle of March, and Nicasio has racked up exactly zero regular-season innings, so it’s not like we know how this is going to play out. Pitchers open eyes in spring training all the time before coming apart when the games start to mean something. Nicasio, however, clearly has the stuff, and the narrative is building. After Wednesday, there’s a distinct feeling that Juan Nicasio is the Pirates’ latest pitching success story.

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Ben and Sam preview the Blue Jays’ season with Joshua Howsam of Baseball Prospectus Toronto, and George talks to Sportsnet columnist Shi Davidi (at 19:49).

Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Minnesota / Milwaukee / New York (NL).

This afternoon, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the New York Yankees. In this companion piece, I look at that same New York farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Yankees have the 5th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH, due in no small part to the system’s depth. As you can see below, the Yankees have a lot of prospects projected for one or two WAR.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

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