Recently, after the completion of the various divisional series, I compiled win probability added (WPA) for the current postseason. In this post, I’ve updated that data to include all three rounds of the postseason thus far through Game 6 of the ALCS. Since WPA is accrued, many of the players at the top will have a higher WPA because they’ve played more games.
Ben and Sam follow up on a story from last week and discuss the Royals’ rotation secrecy, Ruben Amaro’s new job, managing for the Marlins, and more.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
No matter what happens in the next seven games, we’ll be motivated to learn a grander lesson from it. Not many picked this World Series matchup anyway, so we’ll search ourselves for a takeaway. Why did we look the wrong way?
The problem with going too far down this rabbit hole, other than not finding very much, is that these teams couldn’t be any more different. Name a facet of the game and the Mets and the Royals are on opposite sides of the leaderboard. You have to squint to get them in the same neighborhood anywhere really.
Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the giant and large 2015-16 free-agent market.
Below are links to ballots for five of this year’s free agents, all of them starting pitchers once again.
Other Players: Brett Anderson / Nori Aoki / Alex Avila / Mark Buehrle / Marlon Byrd / Asdrubal Cabrera / Yoenis Cespedes / Wei-Yin Chen / Bartolo Colon / Johnny Cueto / Chris Davis / Rajai Davis / Alejandro De Aza / Ian Desmond / R.A. Dickey / Stephen Drew / Marco Estrada / Doug Fister / Dexter Fowler / David Freese / Yovani Gallardo / Jaime Garcia / Alex Gordon / Jason Heyward / Torii Hunter / Chris Iannetta / Austin Jackson / John Jaso / Kelly Johnson / Matt Joyce / Howie Kendrick / Justin Morneau / Daniel Murphy / David Murphy / Mike Napoli / Dioner Navarro / Gerardo Parra / Steve Pearce / Alexei Ramirez / Colby Rasmus / Alex Rios / Jimmy Rollins / Geovany Soto / Denard Span / Justin Upton / Juan Uribe / Chase Utley / Will Venable / Shane Victorino / Matt Wieters / Chris Young the Outfielder / Ben Zobrist.
Zack Greinke (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Greinke:
*That is, a roughly average number of innings for a starting pitcher.
**Prorated version of 2016 Steamer projections available here.
| 11:58 |
: The Dan Szymborski Chat: 1+some decimal hours of your life that you are 100% Guaranteed to Never Get Back. Or your money back! Win a taco!
|
| 11:58 |
: (Note: You will not win a taco)
|
| 11:59 |
Is it fair to say Jeurys Familia is challenging Wade Davis for best reliever in baseball at this point? He has really hit a new level this year. |
| 11:59 |
: Having a sweet run lately, but wouldn’t put him as challenging Davis quite yet.
|
| 11:59 |
Who will win the WS??? In how many games? (someone had to ask). |
| 11:59 |
: Mets 7.
|
In any given nine-inning baseball game, there are upward of 250 pitches thrown. More than half of those pitches, more often than not, are going to be thrown somewhere in the range of 90-97 mph. They’re all going to move somewhere between two and 12 inches, and most of them will travel through the same theoretical three-square-foot box. It’s easy for these pitches to begin blending together. That’s why we appreciate the ones that truly set themselves apart. These ones are easy to spot.
This is similar to a post I did last year around this time. The mission: find the 10 individual pitches deemed nastiest by my subjective criteria, hopefully learn something about those pitches and what it is that makes them so effective, and then see them in action so we have a reference point and something extra to keep an eye out for the in World Series.
How it’s done: I expanded a bit on last year’s criteria. Last year’s criteria, it was just whiff rate and ground ball rate, per individual pitch. Those are the two best common results-based outcomes a pitch can have. A complete swing-and-miss, or the weakest contact of the three main batted ball types. This year, I folded in two process-based characteristics along with the results, adding velocity and spin rate, with spin data coming from Statcast. Two big things that make a pitch aesthetically pleasing, to us, are speed and movement. Velocity and spin rate should capture that. Two big things that make a pitch effective, to pitchers, are whiffs and grounders. We’ve got that down. Oh, also, an executive decision I made and forgot to mention: for four-seam fastballs, I substituted pop-up rate for ground ball rate. Felt like the right thing to do, given four-seams are the one pitch, more than any other, thrown up in the zone with no intention of getting grounders. Anyway, I calculated z-scores for each of the four selected characteristics, for each pitch type, added them up, and found 10 pitches that stood above the rest. These are those 10 pitches.
There’s something that would bother me about Kelvin Herrera. To be clear, it had nothing to do with his personality. And it had nothing to do with the fact that he was successful. Herrera should be successful. Have you watched him? The last two years, he’s run a 2.06 ERA. He’s allowed a .570 OPS, and while maybe that doesn’t mean a lot to you without context, how about this as context — Kenley Jansen has allowed a .569 OPS. David Robertson, .581. The numbers have been there for Herrera. He’s been a reliever with a triple-digit fastball and some statistics to match. Nothing about that is weird.
What would bother me was that, just from watching Herrera for a few minutes, you’d think he’d be a high-strikeout pitcher. Just from being aware of his velocity, you’d think he’d be a high-strikeout pitcher. I know we might make too much of strikeouts around here. I know I shouldn’t have been too bothered when Herrera was still finding ways to succeed. But the last two years, he’s been a flamethrower with the same strikeout rate as Chad Qualls. Compared to the league, Herrera actually ran a strikeout rate that was slightly below average for a reliever. It’s a small thing, maybe a petty thing, but it’s a thing my brain struggled to understand. Whenever I looked at Herrera’s numbers, I’d expect them to be something different.
Something like, say, what Herrera’s done in these playoffs. Since really emerging as a shutdown reliever for the Royals, Herrera’s struck out a little more than a fifth of the hitters he’s faced. Against the Astros and Blue Jays, however, he’s struck out about half of the hitters he’s faced. Herrera in this postseason: 33 batters, 16 strikeouts, .438 OPS. The heat, as you know, has been there. But it’s been accompanied by something different, something new. Kelvin Herrera tinkered with a slider, and he learned to harness it just in time.
Mounds are set to specifications. They need to be elevated 10 inches above the rest of the field and slope at a rate of one inch per foot over a span of at least six feet. The front edge of the rubber has to be exactly 60 feet, six inches from the rear point of home plate.
They may be the same, but they don’t all feel the same. Jonathan Broxton, Steve Cishek and Jason Motte told me that each one is a little different. Cardinals pitching coach Derek Lilliquist opined that they’re all the same, but then compromised his claim by saying “some can change your feel, change your mechanics a little bit.”
But again, they’re set to specifications. Motte told me he saw the grounds crew measuring the Wrigley Field mound as the team was preparing to travel to Pittsburgh for the Wild Card game. As Lilliquist put it, “At the end of the day, it’s still 60 feet, six inches, with the same slope.”
Motte also told me that “It’s not like you can do anything to try to gain some kind of home field advantage by giving pitchers an advantage, or a disadvantage.”
Why then the different feel? Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Royals put me in a weird position. It’s not because their two consecutive pennants make skeptical and critical analysts look stupid — we went over that a year ago, and previously, we went over the same stuff with the Giants. If anything, that part of this is just funny. No, the Royals put me in a weird position, because they make it tempting to believe in ideas that run contrary to what I’ve been taught. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s vibe. I’m not supposed to believe in a team’s unkillability. I’m not really supposed to believe in powerful and particular things, because baseball is intensely competitive, and it doesn’t make sense that one team would ever have a secret. I’m not supposed to believe the Royals are more special than any other team. Than, say, the Blue Jays. And I’m not saying I do believe in the Royals’ magic. They’re just pretty good at sucking me in. It’s a baseball team that makes me think twice about assumptions I have about baseball teams.
The ALCS isn’t going to have a Game 7. Would’ve been fun, but this was a plenty good way to wrap up. The ALDS between the Rangers and the Blue Jays came to an unforgettable conclusion, a very wild and unpredictable conclusion, but aside from the tie-breaking home run, that memorable inning turned on a series of defensive mistakes. Just before the homer, the whole inning was sloppy. That might’ve been baseball around its most entertaining. What we just saw in Game 6 was baseball in the vicinity of its best. The Royals and Blue Jays competed in a classic, and, of course, the Royals won. They’re the Royals, after all. I don’t know exactly how we got here, but I can tell where we are on the map.
