FanGraphs Baseball

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.

MONDAY
2016 New Pitch Tracker by Jason Collette
The data appear to suggest that, more often than not, the introduction of a new pitch leads to more success.

Grading the Offseasons for All 30 Teams by Dave Cameron
For the sake of authenticity, Cameron handwrote the first draft of this post all in red pen.

How to Search Your Favorite Baseball Sites with Launchy by David Temple
Temple examines a product marketed as a “keystroke launcher” — a phrase which, when uttered in German, will get you kicked out of the schnitzel house.

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This will be the 9th and final question I will ask. And I think it’s the toughest one. But, you guys keep surprising me, so, let’s get into it.

The question relates to how you see pitchers and the impact of their fielders. We have two pitchers, let’s call them Stephen Strasburg and Adam Wainwright. And they are pitching in the same game.

Strasburg pitches a complete game, striking out 13, without walking anyone, or allowing any extra base hits. But he does allow 10 singles, or at least, he and his fielders allow 10 singles, and that leads to 2 runs.

Wainwright also pitches a complete game, he also doesn’t walk anyone, but he only strikes out 4. He only allows 7 singles, or at least, he and his fielders allow 7 singles, and that leads to only 1 run.

The only thing you know is what I’ve told you. If you wish to infer more, like perhaps the Cardinals fielders helped Adam more than the Nationals fielders helped Stephen, go ahead. If you wish to infer that Wainwright allowed softer hit balls than Strasburg, you can do that if you want. You decide how to interpret the information I’ve given you.

The question:

The worst time to strike out is with a runner on third base and less than 2 outs. In fact, it’s runner on 3B and exactly 1 out. The pitcher knows it, the batter knows it, the fielder knows it, the runner knows it. The fans know it. Everyone is extremely aware that getting the second out changes the entire dynamic of the situation, since now only a positive event can score that runner on third base.

We can even quantify this situation rather precisely. With a runner on third and 1 out, we expect around 0.94 runs to score to the end of the inning. But with 2 outs, it’s all the way down to 0.37 runs. A strikeout in that situation is worth an astounding -0.57 runs.

On the other hand a sacrifice fly clears the bases, gets an extra out (run expectancy down to 0.09 runs), but adds a run to the scoreboard, so the total run value is 1.09 runs, or a net gain of +.15 runs. The sac fly is one of the very few times that trading a base for an out is a net positive.

We have a potential swing of 0.72 runs between a “bad” out and a “good” out. With everyone in the ballpark well aware of the situation, and with outs so common place, it’s clear the pitcher is going to do his best to pitch in a way to increase strikeouts at the cost of perhaps an increase in low impact walks with first base open. And the batter is going to do his best to counteract that, and not try to strike out at the cost of perhaps a tiny bit of power. Everyone is changing their strategy.

But remove the specific context, and an out is an out.

So, how do you want to account for this specific play?

So far, we’ve looked at seeing the overall impact be the same, but for different reasons, like the bases loaded walk versus the solo HR. And you are either given a choice of “same” or “this one is better”. It’s been designed to see if you prefer a DIRECTION. In the above case, the direction is based on whether the event matters.

Now, we’ll have two situations that have an overall different impact. We have our trusty solo HR. We all love the HR. It gives us a guaranteed run. It tells us about the hitter, and if given better circumstances, we can dream of even more runs.

If I ask about a double with a runner on second, I’d get into the same question as with the bases loaded walk: the impact is exactly one run, and we’re left with the same state that we entered. And 80% of Fangraphs readers will prefer the solo HR to the double with the runner on 2nd.

But how about a bases-clearing double? Any way you want to measure it, the impact is going to be alot(*) more than the 1 run from the solo HR. Run expectancy tables tell us it’s 1.7 to 2.2 runs depending on the number of outs.

(*) “Get over it.” — Scalia

So, how much of a hurdle are Fangraphs readers willing to climb to keep their allegiance to the event in a context-neutral setting, and ignore the context of a somewhat inferior event, but in a highly more leverageable setting?

One of the things people enjoy about sports is the role they role they play in starting conversations and debates. People enjoy arguing, especially about trivial matters like “who was the best hitter of all time?” and “who’s the best shortstop in the game right now?” These exchanges satisfy one’s desire to engage in battles of wits without challenging someone’s moral character, which is what often happens when debates turn to more sensitive topics such as politics or religion.

Sports allows for fierce debate with extraordinary low stakes. Think about how much time we’ve spent arguing about the difference between Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera! While you might think those conversations were tremendously unproductive, I would submit that they provided many people with a confrontational, emotional, and intellectual outlet. We’re a species blessed with language and reason, but cursed with imperfections in both. Arguing about the performance of athletes allows us to exercise those muscles without inadvertently causing real damage to society.

In that realm, I would like to present a baseball question to which you have probably devoted almost no attention. If you could take the best attributes of baseball’s backup catchers and fuse them into a single, lovable backstop, what components would you choose and how valuable would the resulting Frankenstein Catcher be?

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Projecting pitchers too far into the future can be pretty dicey. Elbow problems lead to Tommy John surgery and a 15-month recovery period. Shoulder problems can end careers. Fastballs drop in velocity and effectiveness fades. As a result, teams would prefer to be pretty careful when investing money in pitching. The problem for teams, however, is that pitching is expensive. An average starter costs nearly $100 million on the free-agent market, and good pitching costs double that amount. Good, cheap pitchers are young, and while they might remain good, they will not remain cheap. Teams then choose to invest in this risky position by extending young, cheap pitching with the hope of avoiding the free-agent market. Sometimes it works, like with Madison Bumgarner and Chris Sale. Other times, like with Cory Luebke, the team gets very little in return. This spring, there is a great crop of young pitchers teams should be looking to lock up long term, led by Gerrit Cole, Jacob deGrom, and Sonny Gray.

A year ago at this time, I put together a list of potential extension candidates headed by Corey Kluber. Among the other players on the list were Drew Hutchison, Wily Peralta, Shelby Miller, Tom Koehler, and Dallas Keuchel, who I foolishly downplayed. Hutchison, Peralta, and Koehler had disappointing seasons while Miller was solid and Keuchel and Kluber were fantastic. That collection of players illustrates the risk both of locking up young talent and also failing to do so. Keuchel’s cost will soar during arbitration, making an extension expensive (and also unlikely), while extensions for Hutchison and Peralta would look like mistakes just one year later. Cleveland locked up Kluber, adding him to the list of pitchers extended over the past few springs. The numbers below were all current at the time of the relevant extension.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City.

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. In this companion piece, I look at that same LA farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Angels have the second worst farm system according to KATOH, edging out only the Marlins.

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In the previous post about the two-run reliever with the three-run lead, the Fangraphs readers leaned 80-20 toward “a run is a run”, compared to “he did his job”.

Let’s make this one similar, but tougher. We have our ace reliever entering the bottom of the 9th inning. This time, our ace reliever gives up a leadoff HR, followed by striking out the side.

We have two different relievers:
(a) we have Billy Wagner entering the game with a 2-run lead, and so, managed to squeak out of it to end the game. If you are interested, his team had a 90% chance of winning before he showed up. And the Astros won.

(b) we also had Trevor Hoffman face the same scenario with a 1-run lead. He leaves the game tied making the Padres go into extra innings, turning an 80% chance of winning into a 50% chance.

Yesterday, Dexter Fowler re-signed with the Cubs, taking $13 million for one year, or $2.8 million less than he would have made had he accepted the qualifying offer back at the beginning of free agency. Along with Yovani Gallardo and Howie Kendrick, Fowler became the third QO-offered player to accept a deal that was worse than the one they passed up, and Ian Desmond seems likely to join them in that group when he signs as well. These four players were crushed by the draft pick compensation that the QO attaches, as teams were reluctant to give them long-term deals based on perceived risks with their skillsets, but also didn’t want to surrender a valuable draft pick for a short-term asset.

The qualifying offer has worked for MLB teams, driving down free agent prices by serving as a tax on salaries for a select group of players, but because it’s so regressive in nature — and is inequitably applied — it is highly unpopular, and will almost certainly be revised in some way in the next CBA. There have been any number of suggestions for how to amend the system; I suggested removing the seven-day acceptance window a few years ago, and Nathaniel Grow pointed out that the system could work better if it moved to a multi-year offer, instead of a one-year tender that players are loathe to accept before testing the market. There’s also a pretty rational argument that the system should just go away entirely.

But those are big changes. Big changes are difficult, and often have unintended consequences, so more frequently, people prefer to make tweaks rather than overhauls. So if we look at the current qualifying offer system, agree that it needs adjusting, but limit the potential solutions to things that would be easier to agree upon and wouldn’t be a dramatic shift from what is already in existence, is there a way to make it so that players like Fowler, Kendrick, Gallardo, and Desmond don’t get stuck in free-agent limbo after they learn that the market isn’t going to give them the long-term deal they were seeking?

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It’s not that anything more needs to be done. It’s not like Mike Trout desperately needed to fix the hole in his swing, lest he be in danger of suffering a complete collapse. Things were going just fine. That hole in Mike Trout’s swing, the one that kept him from hitting high fastballs, is like the Pablo Honey record in Radiohead’s discography. Would everything be better if it were just gone? I mean, yeah, technically. But the discography, as a whole, is still essentially flawless even with Pablo Honey, so we can all live with it.

Mike Trout went and deleted Pablo Honey anyway. It wasn’t necessary for survival, but everyone knew it was a problem, and everyone knew we’d be better off without it, so Trout went and fixed the hole in his swing. He started hitting those high fastballs, and no one ever had to hear Creep again and the world was a better place. But, listen. Someone’s gotta get in there and wipe out Fake Plastic Trees, too. Not all of The Bends; the rest of the record can stay. But Fake Plastic Trees has gotta go. Maybe I’m getting greedy, asking for even more tweaks after the big one’s already been made, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

This next tweak, it doesn’t have to do with Trout’s swing. For all intents and purposes, that’s about perfect. The high fastball was the only real weakness, and that’s been patched. When pitchers stopped throwing him high, they started throwing him outside, but that didn’t really work. Maybe you’d like to see Trout swing at a first-pitch curveball or two, but that’s a very minor thing, and Trout literally never swinging at first-pitch curveballs might actually be a feature, rather than a bug. Point is: the swing, for now, requires no further adjustments, and I’ve already linked to Jeff Sullivan about a hundred times in this piece. When Trout’s swing requires another adjustment, he’ll let you know.

It was exciting last year, knowing that Trout had this weakness, and knowing that Trout knew about this weakness, and knowing that Trout planned to fix the weakness. He’s never been shy about these things. During Spring Training, he came right out and said it:

“Plain and simple, I was chasing the high pitch. Everybody knows that,” Trout said. “The majority of time, they’re balls, and I was chasing them.”

Usually, us writers have to seek out these adjustments. We’ve got to watch with a close eye, and see if the numbers back it up, and then ask the player about it. In this case, Trout came right out and told us. “Hey, everybody. Makin’ an adjustment here. Free blog content.”

The next item on Trout’s to-do list isn’t exactly a secret, but Trout’s done us the favor of letting us know he’s planning on another adjustment:
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