FanGraphs Baseball

You want to know how the sausage is made? It’s the holiday season, which means there’s not a lot going on. Sure, there can be moves like the Mike Leake signing, but the league overall is about to mostly shut down for a short while. But we’re supposed to write anyway, so I got to thinking and I decided to try to write something about Scott Kazmir. The only question was, what about him? What, that is, besides a simple WAR analysis, which could be done in a paragraph. So I searched and I searched until I found something of moderate interest. I hope that you end up moderately interested.

In a sense it’s funny to have to search for something interesting to say about Scott Kazmir. To the average person, what’s interesting is that he’s a major-league baseball player, and more than that, he’s one of the good ones. To the average baseball fan, what’s interesting is the course that Kazmir’s big-league career has taken. By that I mean he was out of affiliated baseball in 2012. Of the general population, Kazmir is one of the most interesting people. Of the general population of baseball players, Kazmir is one of the most interesting players. Yet this stuff is a given. We’re all familiar with his history. Kazmir is a free agent, and what’s of greatest significance is what he’s become.

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Yesterday, I ran an exercise on this site that required some audience participation. The premise was simple enough: the Royals, for the third consecutive year, haven’t looked like an elite team based on the third-party projection systems we host here on the site. The Royals, of course, have been an elite team, despite what the projections say, so there’s been some understandable hesitation in taking those projections at face value.

I simply asked everyone to take a look at each individual player projection, and either take the over, the under, or push. The idea is that, through crowdsourcing, we might be able to spot the individual places where the community thinks the projections are missing on guys, and then manually adjust the team projection from there.

And now for the seemingly ever-necessary reminder: The projections are not meant to be taken as gospel. They’re to be used as a guide. Anyone who reasonably understands what we do here on FanGraphs should get that, by now. We — we being the authors of FanGraphs — have no say in the projections. Just because the numbers say one thing doesn’t mean that every author has to agree. I can’t change the fact that the projections say what they do. I’m just here to report, and analyze, and think, and discuss.

The numbers are calling the current Royals roster a 78-win roster. That seems sort of silly. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find too many folks who’d think that sounds right. I’d certainly take the over, at least. Let’s see what the crowdsourcing results say. You should be able to click this image to view a larger version:

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Yesterday, December 21, was the deadline for 2016 Baseball Hall of Fame ballots to be submitted. As followers of the process are well aware, quite a logjam has materialized in recent years, due to a confluence of factors, most notably the influx of so-called “steroid era” players, some of whom meet every possible criterion applied to prior candidates, only to be refused entry by the BBWAA. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, two of the ten best baseball players of all time, by any measure, with or without PEDs, languish at the gate of the Hall, ironically gaining just enough votes to deny other worthy candidates the game’s ultimate honor.

Edgar Martinez is one of these players, and arguably might be the one single player (perhaps along with Mike Mussina) whose candidacy has been damaged the most. He became Hall-eligible before Bonds and Clemens, and posted early vote totals that historically would suggest future induction. The tidal wave of talent following him onto the ballot, however, has stopped his vote total in its tracks; this is already his seventh year of eligibility, and to make matters worse, players are now allowed only 10 tries before their name is removed from the ballot and turned over to the Veterans Committee, whose specialty is electing no one.

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Word for a while has been that Mike Leake was looking for a five-year contract worth something in the neighborhood of $80 million. The most recent thing we wrote about him was called The Upcoming Mike Leake Mistake. The Cardinals have now signed Leake to a five-year contract worth exactly $80 million, with a mutual option that won’t be mutually exercised. The Cardinals are without Lance Lynn and John Lackey, and they missed out on David Price and Jason Heyward, so it’s easy to see this as an overpay from a team in an increasingly desperate state. Mike Leake isn’t who you turn to for big, huge upside. He’s Mike Leake. As pitchers go, he’s pretty boring.

Think about it for just one minute, though. It’s fine to have an immediate response. We all have immediate responses. Immediately, nothing seems particularly special about Leake. But the Cardinals have earned some benefit of the doubt, right? They’re not an organization you’d characterize as desperate, or impulsive, or reactionary. They thought their way through this. According to reports, they preferred Leake over Jeff Samardzija. They obviously like Leake enough to give him this sort of long-term guarantee. Let us now attempt to justify this contract. Really, it isn’t that hard.

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It is well known that pitchers are less effective the third time through the order. And if you know it and I know it, you can be sure that major league managers know it, as well.

The numbers speak for themselves. As the lineup turns over, a typical starting pitcher’s OPS-against climbs from .705 to .731 to .771. Going strictly by those stats, lifting your starter when he reaches less-effective territory makes sense. But if it’s the middle innings and he’s pitching well, is automatically turning to the bullpen prudent, or is it an overreaction?

At the Winter Meetings, I asked a cross section of managers for their opinions on the third-time-through dilemma. Here are their responses, edited for clarity and concision.

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Brad Ausmus, Tigers: “The problem is the balance. I don’t disagree. I think the numbers show that the more times a hitter sees a pitcher, the more success that hitter is going to have. I don’t think it’s a secret. Before the numbers showed it, we knew that was the case. The balance is allowing the starters to go deep enough to not overuse your bullpen.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve written a lot about opt-out clauses. Yesterday, I again attempted to show why opt-outs are a benefit to the player and come at the expense of taking power from the teams. Through all of these conversations, however, we’ve been focused on how opt-outs are currently being used in MLB; to give high-end players the chance to land a significant raise in the midst of a contract that already pays them an awful lot of money. Right now, opt-outs are luxury items that allow elite players to get both the benefits of a shorter-term commitment to a single franchise coupled with a long-term insurance policy in case things don’t work out as they hope.

But there’s nothing that says opt-outs have to be used in that manner, or for that type of player. And in thinking through various scenarios where opt-outs could be placed into contracts, I wonder if the rising acceptance of these kinds of deals might actually end up being a boon to lower-revenue franchises and players at the other end of the spectrum.

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Look at the rumors for the White Sox. They concern a certain part of the team. Though the club is ostensibly starting Melky Cabrera, Adam Eaton, and Avisail Garcia in the outfield, they’re supposedly looking for another outfielder now. Given their respective projections, that makes things particularly awkward for Avisail Garcia.

That’s not really the only thing that’s unsettling about Garcia’s situation.

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Pitch sequencing, in my opinion, is the next big thing in the field of baseball research, and despite what Samsung might like to tell you, it isn’t here yet. There has been some tremendous work done, but we’re still a long ways away from aggregating findings into one clearly defined picture of how pitch sequencing exactly works.

But we might as well continue to add to the findings. I looked at one aspect of pitch sequencing – shifts in the called strike zone – last month. Next, I’m looking at how best to set up different types of pitches. We’ll start with four-seam fastballs, and, so as to keep it simple for now, focus just on the fastball and on the pitch immediately beforehand. Not pitches before that in the same at-bat, not pitches to the same batter earlier in the game, not pitches to that batter from a different game.

Intuitively, you might expect changing speeds on the batter to be an effective way to mess with their swing and timing. A changeup, then, should be a good pitch to set up a fastball – changeups are generally 10-plus mph slower than the same pitcher’s fastball. Curveballs, too, should be decent setup pitches, as should sliders to a lesser extent. (Sliders are usually thrown harder than curves.) As it turns out, though, it doesn’t quite work that way.

Contact% = Foul balls + balls in play per swing

There’s some year-to-year variation, but, by and large, changeups are ineffective ways to get swings and misses on the fastballs which follow them. Now, bear in mind, the scale here isn’t so large – it’s a few percentage points each way. But it’s still pretty clear that changeups, as well as curveballs, don’t help the pitcher throw a better fastball the next pitch.

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