| 11:48 |
: it’s February!
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| 11:48 |
: we’ll chat at noon
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| 11:49 |
: chat soundtrack: Pixies – Come On Pilgrim
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| 11:49 |
: and then probably also Surfer Rosa because Come on Pilgrim is so short but damn if that’s not one of the best EP’s ever
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| 12:02 |
: Are you the prospect guy or just the weird name guy? I forget.
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| 12:02 |
: weird name guy only
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I don’t believe I’m out of line when I say that, of life’s most enjoyable pleasures, many are to be used, collected, consumed, or practiced in moderation. “You can have too much of a good thing,” they say. Food and alcohol, for example. Both delightful. Both substances which, were I unaware of the consequences of surplus consumption, I would regularly consume in excess. Both substances, in fact, which I do regularly consume in excess, despite being completely aware of the consequences. Likewise, I’ve taken nary a vacation which I didn’t find overindulgent. Don’t get me wrong — a break from the norm for a bit of traveling is always welcome, but I’m perpetually exhausted by the degree of stimulation that comes with falling asleep and waking up in a new bed, having to process an unfamiliar environment and having to create and enact routines that differ from the ones to which I am accustomed. Perhaps I’m just outing myself as a homebody, but without fail, I long for the comforts of a familiar bed, environment, and routine approximately 24-48 hours prior to the conclusion of any extended trip.
I recently sought to find an example of overindulgence in a baseball. A player whose approach, for example, was perhaps hindered by too much of a good thing. It was sort of an offshoot of the post I wrote yesterday which concerned Miguel Sano’s surprisingly disciplined approach against breaking balls. In that post, I found, among other things, that Sano took plenty of early at-bat breaking pitches for balls, and so he found himself in plenty of hitter’s counts, and not only that, but he capitalized on his abundant hitter’s counts by amping up his aggression and attacking pitchers when he had the upper hand.
It’s a fairly fundamental strategy, but there’s a most extreme everything, and someone had to be on the other end. There has to be someone who finds themselves in plenty of hitter’s counts but, for whatever reason, actually becomes notably less aggressive and less attack-oriented when they hold count leverage over the pitcher.
So I ran some BaseballSavant queries and I produced a couple lists in a spreadsheet that showed me overall swing rate, and ahead-in-the-count swing rate, and I calculated the difference between the two. Some interesting names popped up near the top — Xander Bogaerts, Matt Carpenter, Anthony Rizzo — but something seemed off, and I realized an unaccounted-for variable in my search: not all batters are pitched the same when they’re ahead in the count. Certain hitters get far more or fewer pitches to hit when ahead in the count, and so their swing rates are partly dictated by the pitcher. To control for this, it would be wiser to search only for the difference between overall in-zone swing rate and ahead-in-the-count in-zone swing rate. This was a search that yielded a particularly intriguing result.
| name | OVR Z-Swing% | AHD Z-Swing% | Z-Swing% DIF |
| Paul Goldschmidt | 62.4% | 46.8% | -15.6% |
| Adam Eaton | 61.7% | 47.3% | -14.4% |
| Jace Peterson | 64.8% | 53.1% | -11.6% |
| DJ LeMahieu | 64.1% | 52.5% | -11.5% |
| Ben Zobrist | 56.6% | 45.5% | -11.0% |
Here’s your chance to vote for the 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award winners.
The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.
To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.
The production of new data by means of new recording technology is exciting — and the more data we get, the better we can become at analyzing said data. We have come a long way since PITCHf/x was made available, but we still have much more to learn. We also now have Statcast data with defensive numbers and figures — as well as exit velocity for hitters and against pitchers — and right now that data is very interesting. But a lot of people are all working very hard to transform the data from merely interesting to actually useful. If it remains interesting without becoming useful, it is still fascinating information to have, but also trivial from an analytical perspective. Organizations want the information to be useful. Exit velocity, one of the streams of data rendered available by Statcast, appears to have the potential to be very useful. Right now, however, I am still unsure what we have, and I am not alone.
As Ben Badler of Baseball America recently noted on Twitter:
Common thing I’m hearing from execs: They have an enormous amount of new data, but they’re still learning to turn it into usable information. Even the more data-driven organizations are still just scratching the surface of separating signal from noise and understanding what has predictive value.
Back in September, I gathered a bunch of exit velocity data on major league pitchers, and attempted to make some sense of it. There seemed to be some evidence to suggest that if a low exit velocity was a repeatable skill, then it might be helpful in limiting home runs. Not exactly groundbreaking, but at least from my perspective, interesting. Others have studied the data and found that exit velocity was five parts the responsibility of the hitter and just one part the responsibility of the pitcher, so perhaps in retrospect, I should have focused on hitters. Below represents my current attempt.
Location: Toronto
Description:
The primary focus of this position will be to learn how decisions are made in all areas of Baseball Operations, develop a familiarity with those processes and then develop tools and conduct research to incorporate data into the decision making process.
Responsibilities:
Qualifications:
To Apply:
Interested applicants must do the following:
Episode 629
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 examines a pair of befuddling trades, each involving a club from the National League West.
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.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 45 min play time.)
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There’s a lot to talk about with any five-player trade. And with the trade that sent Jean Segura from the Brewers to the Diamondbacks, there are plenty of noteworthy angles. There’s the matter of Segura’s offensive upside vs. Segura’s offensive reality. There’s the matter of the Diamondbacks clutching onto their highest remaining draft pick, and there’s the matter of the successful if partial Aaron Hill salary dump, and there’s the matter of Isan Diaz being an awful interesting prospect. There’s something else the Brewers received, though, and while Chase Anderson doesn’t have Diaz’s breakout potential, you can think of him as the quieter upside play. Anderson is going into the rotation, and he could remain there for years.
Anderson’s whole presence to this point has been quiet. He’s been an unremarkable pitcher on an unremarkable team, and though he’s made just 48 big-league starts, he’s already 28 years old. He doesn’t have a top-prospect background, nor does he have a top prospect’s velocity — Anderson’s specialty has been an outstanding changeup. The numbers last year backslid, and Anderson wound up on the outside of the picture, looking in. Yet the Brewers still saw something they liked.
I’ll tell you what this was supposed to be about. Over the weekend, Howie Kendrick was in the news, since he re-signed with the Dodgers. I was going to take the opportunity to write about how Kendrick just about never hits a pop-up. It’s one of those things that helps explain why he’s been able to run high batting averages, and even though I know I wrote about this very thing like a year ago for Fox Sports, Kendrick didn’t hit a single pop-up in the most recent season. Nor did he hit a single pop-up in the previous season. So, by our numbers, Kendrick has gone more than two regular seasons without a pop-up, which is insane and well worth re-visiting. Who doesn’t like to read about the weirdos?
But, you know, ideas evolve, especially when you give them a few days to simmer. Kendrick, pretty clearly, is exceptional in this regard. However, he’s not unique. You might be thinking right now about Joey Votto, and Votto is also pop-up averse, but this past year there were just two regular players who successfully avoided pop-ups: Kendrick and Christian Yelich. This is fitting, because over the past five years, if you set a 1,000 plate-appearance minimum, Yelich and Kendrick own the lowest pop-up rates in baseball. They both feature phenomenal bat-to-ball skills, reflected by these numbers, and they’re valuable because of the extra singles they can scratch out.
So, Kendrick doesn’t hit pop-ups. Yelich doesn’t hit pop-ups. By at least one source, neither hit a pop-up in 2015. Might it be possible to crown either the 2015 pop-up champion?
Ben and Sam banter about Billions, the amazing Willie Davis, and a strange Fox Sports article, then conduct a quiz show.
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On Wednesday, we took a look at the anomalous offensive outcomes of 2015: we had oppo homers from batters who have never hit them before, some of the slowest men in baseball hitting triples, and a guy with below average ISO marks hitting an almost 500-foot home run. It was a great reminder that baseball is really, really weird, and every season there’s at least few events that you will rarely — if ever — see again.
Today, we’re going to revisit that same idea except with defense. We can always watch highlight reels of the best defensive plays of the year, because watching Mike Trout perch on top of the wall in center field to rob a home run is a singular pleasure. It’s simple human nature to enjoy that. What highlight reels lack, however, is the context of the players making the plays: we expect Andrelton Simmons to go in the hole at shortstop to pick a ground ball, leap in the air, and fire a bullet across the diamond to get the runner at first. We do not expect Jhonny Peralta to do the same. That’s why if Peralta made that exact same play (he didn’t, but just suspend your belief for a moment), it wouldn’t necessarily be more impressive on an overall level, but it certainly would be on a personal one. For Simmons, that’s business as usual. For Peralta, it’s a once or twice in a career event. That deserves recognition — and celebration.
The usual caveats apply, given that we’re looking at only one-year samples of defensive data. There’s a lot of noise here — we know that. The aim of this post is to find the joy in that great mixture of noise and talent. There are a spectrum of posts on this illustrious website: toward one end we find incredible batted-ball breakdowns of pitchers and hitters that stretch our understanding of baseball; toward the other, we find the carnivalesque atmosphere of a GIF-addled home run post. This piece will stumble gleefully, Mardi Gras crown askew, in the direction of only one end of that spectrum.
On the technical side, we’re employing a few types of data for this pursuit: UZR/150, DRS, and Inside Edge fielding data, the latter of which ranks each defensive play made on a six-step scale of how often an average fielder at the position would make the play in question — from the categories of “Impossible” to “Almost Certain.” I’ve also used Baseball Reference’s always useful play index, as well as some Baseball Savant. Now onto the findings!
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