FanGraphs Baseball

This is an oversimplification, but to be a successful starting pitcher in the current era, you have to maintain some reasonable level of effectiveness for something like 25 batters per start. If you can’t pitch into the sixth and seventh innings with regularity, you aren’t going to remain a starting pitcher for very long. In the past that number was higher and in the future it might be lower, but if you don’t have the tools to remain effective for two or three turns through the order, you’re destined for the bullpen.

Pitching is multidimensional, which means that in order to pitch well enough to remain a starter, you need some combination of skills which push you across that threshold. Command, endurance, and stuff all play into the equation. Command is the ability to throw your pitches where you want them and endurance is the ability to maintain your command and stuff over multiple repetitions. Stuff is more complicated because it is partially a measure of individual pitch quality (defined in many ways) and the number of pitches you have at your disposal.

In other words, if you have average command, decent endurance, and the world’s greatest fastball, you can probably get by if your other pitches are only okay. But you can also get by without a great fastball if your command is elite and you have three solid pitches. There’s no single path to success.

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For the last three years, the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals have been engaged in a feud over television rights fees. As both Wendy Thurm and I have previously discussed, the origins of the dispute date back to 2005, and Major League Baseball’s resolution of Baltimore’s objections to the Montreal Expos being relocated to Washington, D.C. (territory belonging at the time to the Orioles).

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

Still not satisfied, the Orioles and MASN then went to court in 2014, asking a New York judge to overturn the arbitration award on the grounds that the panel was biased. After initially blocking MLB from enforcing the arbitration decision that August, presiding Judge Lawrence Marks gave MASN and the Orioles a more lasting victory on Wednesday, officially vacating the arbitrators’ award.

As a result, the Orioles and Nationals are back to square one in their dispute, potentially impacting both teams’ 2016 offseason plans.

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It’s really easy for me to get sucked into our Clutch leaderboards. We spend so much time focusing on true-talent levels, because true talent is what’s mostly stable, but timing is a huge part of winning or losing, and just because it’s hard to predict doesn’t mean it can’t be analyzed later on. We have win-probability numbers since 1974. On a per-plate-appearance basis, the most clutch position player has been Jim Leyritz. The least has been Ron Kittle. The most clutch active position player has been Willie Bloomquist or, if you figure he’s about to retire, Eric Hosmer. The least has been Giancarlo Stanton. Doesn’t mean Willie Bloomquist has quietly been a better hitter than Giancarlo Stanton. It’s just, timing closes the gap. (It remains an enormous gap.)

Because of the Royals, I’ve thought about Clutch a lot lately. Good offensive timing was a critical part of their run to the playoffs and then to the title. And when you think of the Royals lineup, you also immediately think about strikeouts, and about how they don’t collect very many. It’s only natural to try to establish a link between one and the other. I’ve tried to glance at this before, but now I’m coming at it in a different way. And I’m also trying to investigate a different but related point. Question No. 1: is there a link between Clutch and strikeouts? Question No. 2: if there is, has it changed at all lately, with velocity and strikeouts on the rise?

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Aaron Harang may or may not have thrown his last pitch. The 37-year-old right-hander is a free agent, and as of last report was unsure of his future. He spent this past season – his 14th in the big leagues – with the Philadelphia Phillies. A hulking 6-foot-7, Harang has 128 career wins and a pitching style similar to that of Chris Young.

Harang’s four-seamer averaged 89 mph this year, and it hasn’t been as high as 90 since 2010. It’s not a normal slow fastball. Like Young’s, it induces a plethora of in-the-air outs when thrown up in the zone. Unlike Young’s, its effectiveness has little to due to spin rate. Per StatCast, Harang’s four-seam spin rate is 2,319 rpm, which ranked him 396th out of 500 pitchers who threw at least 100 four-seamers. Young ranked 53rd.

Harang talked about his approach to pitching when the Phillies visited Fenway Park in September.

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Harang on location and command: “I’ve always been good at locating pitches. As a kid, I’d go outside and duct tape a strike zone on a wall, and learn to hit that box. I’d play catch with it. I’d pitch little games to it. I’ve always been able to throw strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 606
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 performs an autopsy on the World Series, metaphorically speaking.

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 43 min play time.)

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Alex Gordon is going to be a hot commodity on the free-agent market. Little thought will be given to exercising his current 2016 option, and then he’ll be available to anyone and everyone. The FanGraphs crowd expects him to sign for something in the neighborhood of five years and $90 million, and the crowd can end up low when predicting the higher tier. Relative to other free agents, the crowd puts Gordon’s contract between Chris Davis‘ contract and Jeff Samardzija’s contract in total cost.

Maybe Dayton Moore will be the guy who gives the contract. The Royals love Gordon, as anyone would, and he’s been with the Royals his whole career, and you might’ve noticed those Royals recently winning a championship. On their side, then, there’s new extra revenue, and there’s a natural desire to keep the same core. On Gordon’s side, he could be willing to entertain a bit of a discount, to remain where he’s been. He likes the organization, and now the organization’s successful. Good reason to stay.

There’s a lot of money out there, though. This is business, and perhaps Gordon will elect to leave Kansas City on top. People are driven to pursue new, fresh opportunities. There’s a strong chance Gordon doesn’t return, is the point. Maybe it’s 40%, or maybe it’s 90%. Gordon has been an absolutely phenomenal defensive left fielder. So because this era might be about to change, I’d like to quickly review what’s been a period of team-level defensive dominance.

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Young Tiger Nick Castellanos has two seasons under his belt and hasn’t yet turned 24. He’s shown flashes of the talent he was supposed to have as a top prospect, but he’s on the wrong side of the leaderboards so far. The second half had some good news for him, particularly when it came to his plate discipline, but it’s fair to wonder how important he will be for Detroit.

So far he’s been a net negative. Can he turn that around in a big way this upcoming season?

Only five regulars have been worse over the last two years. And it’s worse than that, since most of the guys ahead of him on the list are no longer regulars. Matt Dominguez (released), Billy Butler (DH), Jay Bruce (future DH?), Ryan Howard (future DH / future release candidate), and Dayan Viciedo (released) aren’t good company to keep.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about buying two tickets to games, Derek Jeter jerseys, and the World Series, and Play Index about extra innings.

I am not ready for November and everything that goes along with it. It’s dark early. I feel confused that there’s no baseball being played. I have been catching myself staring out the window at the fading light like a sad dog waiting for its owner to return. Winter isn’t my favorite time of the year, is what I’m trying to say. The day after the final game of the World Series marks the beginning of a liminal space many of us float through until that void ends, mercifully, on Opening Day.

Judging by the hundreds of comments on FanGraphs articles since the Royals won their championship a few days ago, it doesn’t seem like you, dear studious readers of these pages, are ready for baseball to be over either. And really, baseball isn’t over in any mortal sense; there is still the Arizona Fall League, if we require it. There are still the upcoming winter leagues. And, of course, there are these articles, where we get to relive the very best instances of strong men hitting baseballs meaningful distances.

So that’s what we’re going to do today! Let’s watch the most unlikely, improbable, and impressive home runs of the playoffs. The lowest, the highest, the furthest, the fastest. Let’s act like we don’t have a missing part of us that can only be filled with baseball. Let’s stop talking about it being winter (cough) and watch some homers.

As with the previous iterations of these articles, data has been farmed from Baseball Savant and HitTrackerOnline. Onward!

Hardest-Hit and Lowest-Apex Home Run
Michael Conforto, NLDS Game 2

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In the opening minutes of his great documentary Baseball, Ken Burns characterizes the sport in terms that are both pleasing on their own and also relevant to yesterday’s post regarding Mike Trout‘s peak, and now today’s on Clayton Kershaw‘s:

“It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time, and timelessness.”

It’s a much more succinct and effective way of making the point I attempted to make yesterday, in that today’s players don’t yet have the luxury of having a legacy, in turn making it tough to contextualize their potential place in history while that legacy is still being built. Looking at what today’s players accomplished in their primes, relative to the primes of the ghosts (both figurative and literal) who have gone before can help us do that.

Trout’s place in history has been well documented and updated since the completion of his 10-win rookie season. For the better part of three years now, you’ve been hearing all types of Trout stats, included with some sort of “under __” age filter that places him alongside the game’s all-time greats like Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays for his production, relative to his age. It’s been hard to avoid the company which Trout has kept.

With Kershaw, seems we haven’t heard that as much. Part of it, likely, is just Trout stealing the thunder. Part of it, likely, is that Kershaw didn’t begin truly dominating until his age-23 season, so the fun “under-21” stats weren’t as fun. Part of it, perhaps, is the ridiculous Kershaw postseason narrative. Probably the biggest part of it is just that pitchers are tougher to compare across generations, and it might be easier to “dismiss” the historic nature of what Kershaw has done by recognizing that it’s happened during one of the most depressed run environments the live-ball era has ever seen.

Even with the run environment considered, what Kershaw has done these past five seasons is absolutely historic.

Trout’s “peak” — his first four seasons in the Majors — already ranks as one of the 10 greatest peaks by a position player in baseball history. He’s not alone. Kershaw is currently in the midst of a top-10 all-time peak himself. We’re lucky enough to experience them both.

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