FanGraphs Baseball

The American League edition of this post ran yesterday, and can be found right here.

There’s no sense in bogging the top of this down with words, really. My comments on the history of the Gold Glove, its improvements, and defensive metrics can be read in yesterday’s post. For those interested, I will re-publish the qualification rules and selection process before we begin:

Regarding eligibility, I used the same qualification rules used by Rawlings for the official award. If you’d like, you can find those here. Once having my player pool, I pulled three advanced defensive metrics for consideration: Defensive Runs Saved, calculated by Baseball Info Solutions, Ultimate Zone Rating, calculated by Mitchel Lichtman and used as the in-house FanGraphs metric, and Fielding Runs Above Average, calculated by BaseballProspectus and used as their in-house defensive metric. I summed the three, then averaged them together to figure a “total” defensive runs saved number.

For catchers, things are a bit trickier, so instead I’ve just broken it down to the three major components of catching: controlling the run game (rSB, from FanGraphs), framing (from BaseballProspectus) and blocking (also from BP). These numbers are all represented in run values above or below average, and summed to give us a total defensive runs saved figure for catchers. UZR doesn’t exist for pitchers, so only DRS and FRAA are used.

To the awards!
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The season is over. The games have been played, the asses have been crowned. That’s the end. All done.

Except of course, no, not at all. Baseball season is like outer space, or an order of breadsticks at WTF Thursday’s Neighborhoodish Restaurant. It never ends. But before we move on to the business of baseball’s business, our topic for the next [checks watch] five months, let’s look back just a tad. You’ll recall, in a bit of foreshadowing, that I graded the Royals’ division-winning celebration in September. It has been suggested by some that, now that Kansas City are champions, I should grade their World Series-winning celebration, and see how it stacks up. See if they’ve learned anything over the last month. So, rather than think too hard about a different, more original topic idea, I thought, “Yeah. Sure.” So here we are! Exciting!

We’ll start where we started last time: the beginning. Which is really the end. It’s here:

With two strikes, Wade Davis threw a fastball inside that may or may not have caught the corner. Didn’t matter. The game was already over. Wilmer Flores, already focused on his off season of deep disappointment akin to learning that WTF Thursday’s Neighborhoodish Restaurant closes at 9pm — meaning endless breadsticks are a myth — took the pitch. I’ve watched the play over and over and despite solid video evidence to the contrary I’m not convinced Flores didn’t wander back to the dugout three pitches earlier.

In any case, let’s get to the grading. You may (not) recall that the Royals’ division-winning celebration garnered 58 out of 70 possible points, or 83%. Not bad. But let’s see if the Royals can improve on that effort, or if I even remember what the categories are.

*****

Appropriate Excitement Level

Heh. Remembered that one.

Look, I really want to talk about the appropriate excitement level. I mean, heck, it’s the heading and everything. And sure, fine, the Royals were super excited. Ten points out of 10, boys. Well done. But the thing I keep noticing after Davis’ strikeout of Flores is Flores. Just watch this.

Davis throws the game’s final pitch.

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Four days. It took MLB all of four days to bring us the first transaction of the off-season, as the Mariners and Rays got together on a six player trade that ships some interesting players in both directions. The full trade, as announced on Thursday evening.

Tampa Bay receives:

SS Brad Miller
1B Logan Morrison
RHP Danny Farquhar

Seattle receives:

RHP Nate Karns
OF Boog Powell
LHP C.J. Riefenhauser

While this is a six player deal, for simplicity, we can mostly break this down into three one-for-ones.

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The worst called ball of the season was literally a fastball in the middle of the strike zone. That makes it genuinely the worst called ball imaginable, with the consolation being that it at least didn’t matter very much. When I’ve written these posts in the past, I’ve noted that the bad called balls look worse than the bad called strikes. There is no called-strike equivalent of a ball on a pitch down the middle. You’ll never see a called strike on a pitch at the eyes. You’ll never see a called strike on a pitch in the dirt. I think the default is to call a ball, unless the pitch does enough convincing, and there are limits to that. Still, one post has to be followed by the other. Writing about the worst called ball means I have to write about the worst called strike. That’s below, and I’m sorry it isn’t more visually hilarious, but this is still the worst of something, over seven months of baseball, and the devil is in the details. The devil loves details.

The second-worst called strike of the season? I’ve already written that up, because it was the worst called strike of the season’s first half. It was a lefty strike, thrown by Max Scherzer to Odubel Herrera to open a ballgame. The pitch measured 11 inches away from the nearest part of the strike zone.

Unsurprisingly, the worst called strike of the whole season is similar, in that it’s a lefty strike away off the plate. Over time, we’ve grown kind of used to the lefty strikes getting called, but the thing about this is lefty strikes are balls. The zone shouldn’t extend off the plate in either direction, for anyone, but it has and it does, and hitters have to live with that. The second-worst called strike was 11 inches away from the zone. The worst called strike was 12 inches away from the zone. That’s 9% worse. Pretty big gap when you’re at an extreme.

The good news is nobody cared.

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Ben and Sam talk to Kansas City Star Royals beat writer Andy McCullough about why the Royals won the World Series and what their offseason might look like.

The 2015 season will forever go down as (literally) a banner year for the New York Metropolitans. A National League championship pennant will forever fly above Citi Field, and with youthful pitching studs Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler in place for the foreseeable future, a competitive future appears assured. As someone who has spent many years in a major league front office, I can assure you, however, that the page is turned from the present to the future at record speed in the game of baseball. The Mets, and all 29 other clubs, must quickly take stock of who they are and put the wheels in motion toward the club they which to become moving forward.

There is no such thing as a perfect ball club in this day and age. The champion Royals themselves lack offensive power, and their starting rotation was far from fearsome. One can easily make the argument that the Mets owned the starting pitching advantage in each and every World Series contest. Obviously, the Royals’ superior team defense, bullpen, position player durability and ability to make contact more than offset their shortcomings.

The Mets are a very curious case. On the last day of July, they stood 30th and last in the major leagues in runs scored. It’s pretty unique to travel from that low point to playing meaningful games in November. Their other chief weakness, which just happened to be the one that reared its ugly head when the stakes were the highest, was the Mets’ subpar team defense.

While no one would have placed the Mets’ overall defensive ability on par with that of their World Series opponents, both old-fashioned and new-age metrics agree that the National League champions profiled (at worst) as an average defensive club. You want old school? The Mets ranked fifth in the NL in fielding percentage, and made the fifth-fewest errors. You want a little more new-school? They ranked second in the NL in defensive efficiency, i.e., turning batted balls into outs. So far, they look positively above average.

Let’s get a little more cutting-edge, and move on to FanGraphs’ team defense page. Here we find the Mets 17th in overall defense, 13th in UZR/150, 19th in error runs, and 10th in range runs. Now we’re talking straight up major league average.

What if we were to take a look at the issue from a somewhat different perspective, both incorporating batted ball data into the equation, and evaluating team defense from a head-to-head perspective; how did clubs perform defensively as compared to their opponents over 162 games, in the same ball parks, with the same weather conditions?

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A while back, Jeff wrote this article on an Edinson Volquez pitch to Jose Bautista in the ALDS, and a commenter left this comment:

This is a good comment. I like this comment. I decided to investigate this comment. And, as it turns out, StroShow was spot on.

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Yesterday, Carson Cistulli revealed the results of our Contract Crowdsourcing project, listing the aggregate salary projected for 82 different free agents this winter. The project is a very useful tool to get an understanding of what a broad spectrum of perspectives see as fair market value, but the nature of aggregation means that the totals — especially on the high-end — will almost always end up being a bit lower than what the players actually sign for. After all, players don’t sign for the median value of all of their offers; they take the highest one, in most cases.

So, as a follow-up, I’ve put together my predictions for the 50 largest free agent contracts signed this winter. I did this last year too, though I took some pretty big wild guesses when it came to putting players and potential teams together, so some of my guesses look pretty ridiculous in hindsight. I did get a few contract terms right, and managed to match the Yankees with Chase Headley and had the Tigers re-signing Victor Martinez, but we’ll see if we can clear last year’s pretty low bar.

Obviously, this is mostly just for fun, since predicting what teams will do in advance is very difficult. But it also serves as a chance to talk about what I think teams may do in general this winter, even if the specific players end up going elsewhere. As we did last year, we’ll go team by team, then put the full table of contracts at the end. Just for fun (or because that’s how I sorted the list in Excel), we’ll go in alphabetical order of team nickname.

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The Gold Glove Awards are getting better. They really are! Two years ago, when I did this post for the first time, the numbers and the MLB finalists agreed on 28 selections. Last year, it was 30. This year, it’s 32. Furthermore, there appear to be fewer notably egregious selections. There are still a couple here and there, and we’ll get to those, but the days of Rafael Palmeiro — or even Derek Jeter, for that matter — winning Gold Gloves are behind us. When MLB decided to begin folding advanced defensive metrics into the selection process, everything improved markedly.

For the thousandth time: no defensive metric is perfect. However, they’re the certainly better than fielding percentage, the eye test, and “who is the best hitter,” and they’re currently the best public way we have to evaluate defense, so they’re what we use. For a while, Gold Gloves were held to a high standard. It was an honor to win them. They meant something. Then, there was a stretch when the Gold Glove became a farce. People realized they weren’t being given to the best defenders — they weren’t being given to good defenders, even — and it was all a joke. Now, the Gold Gloves are earning their back their status, and that’s a good thing. The awards should matter. It’s nice to see the players who deserve to be recognized, recognized.

So let’s recognize. The way the finalists are determined now is part manager/coach vote, part metrics. But what if it was all metrics? Just the objective numbers, and no human bias. That’s what I aim to do here.
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12:01

Comment From Hairgame HELLO BROTHER

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