FanGraphs Baseball

Walking around Wrigley Field before tonight’s game had a different feel to it. The everything-is-possible electricity that permeated last week’s NLDS showdown against St. Louis was gone. There was energy in the air, but it was a nervous energy. Cubs fans seemed apprehensive, if not a little bit scared.

You couldn’t blame them. Not only was their team down two-games-to-none, the losses came with Jon Lester and Jake Arrieta on the mound. The bats were turned stone cold by Mets’ pitchers at frosty Citi Field, and now they were up against Jacob deGrom, the best of a talented New York staff.

They cheered to mask their fear. Prior to the first pitch, a “Let’s Go Cubbies” chant drowned out the introduction of the New York starters. Solo homers by Kyle Schwarber and Jorge Soler proceeded to raise the roof. The annulment of a Mets run – courtesy of a ball-in-the-ivy ground-rule – elicited one of the loudest sighs of relief you’ll ever hear.

Beyond that, the noise appeared almost obligatory in nature. It was cheering for the sake of cheering. Base runners were at a premium for the home team all night, while the visitors had no shortage of traffic. Sloppiness also marred the effort. Chicago didn’t play a clean game, with a Trevor Cahill wild pitch the most egregious of the mistakes. It brought in a run, and the Cubs – despite their best efforts – weren’t scoring many of their own.

The atmosphere was subdued by the later innings. Smatterings of applause greeted the final outs of the top of the ninth inning, but nothing more. It was uncomfortably quiet in the bottom half. The Mets won 5-2, but it felt like 10-2.

Drizzle is falling as fans file out of the ballpark. It’s only fitting, because while a glimmer of hope remains, their fears are coming to fruition. The Cubs are on the brink of elimination.

First things first — by sheer coincidence, Ben Lindbergh wrote about something similar this morning at Grantland. This is a link to the post, and if you missed it, this is another link, and you should read it, and it’s good! It’s never fun to have article overlap, but as I’ve noted before, I’m stubborn about writing ideas, and more importantly, Lindbergh went about doing his research in a different way. So what follows is my own spin on things. It won’t surprise you that we arrive at similar conclusions.

Here’s a theory. The Royals have been successful in the playoffs, right? Already, today, they’ve gotten to R.A. Dickey, not that he’s the ordinary type of postseason pitcher. In the playoffs, the Royals have been able to hit. In the playoffs, pitchers overall tend to be better. A year ago, the Royals were an excellent contact team. This year, the Royals were maybe the best contact team in a very long time. So, does it make sense that being a contact team might provide some sort of playoff advantage? Are contact teams less vulnerable to going quiet against the best pitchers in the game? Not that all the best pitchers make the playoffs, but, you see where this is going. The pitchers are good. Does the offensive style really matter?

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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 (once again) corner outfielders.

Other Players: Nori Aoki / Alex Avila / Marlon Byrd / Asdrubal Cabrera / Yoenis Cespedes / Chris Davis / Rajai Davis / Alejandro De Aza / Ian Desmond / Stephen Drew / Dexter Fowler / David Freese / Alex Gordon / Chris Iannetta / Austin Jackson / Kelly Johnson / Howie Kendrick / Justin Morneau / Daniel Murphy / Mike Napoli / Dioner Navarro / Alexei Ramirez / Colby Rasmus / Jimmy Rollins / Geovany Soto / Denard Span / Juan Uribe / Chase Utley / Matt Wieters / Ben Zobrist.

Jason Heyward (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Heyward:

• Has averaged 566 PA and 4.9 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 5.2 WAR per 600 PA* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 6.0 WAR in 610 PA in 2015.
• Is projected to record 4.3 WAR per 600 PA**.
• Is entering his age-26 season.
• Made $8.3M in 2015, as part of deal signed in February 2014.

*That is, a roughly average number of plate appearances for a starting player.
**Prorated version of final updated 2015 Steamer projections available here.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Heyward.

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You can detect the nervousness. The Royals stormed out to take a commanding series lead, but then Johnny Cueto’s own arm abandoned him, wrecking not only Game 3 but also a potential Game 7 as well. So there’s some discomfort there, some uncertainty, and now in a short while the Royals are going to throw Chris Young at the best offense in the league in the center of a homer-happy ballpark. If Young were a bad pitcher, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place, but I don’t think he’s perceived as a trustworthy pitcher. So the thought is the Blue Jays are in a good place to go and tie this series up.

I don’t think we can help the way we feel about Young. He’s unusual and by no means overpowering, and everything we’ve learned about pitchers gives us reason to be skeptical. He puts the ball in the air. He doesn’t pound the zone. He doesn’t miss a ton of bats. Young’s whole game is suppressing quality contact, and being skeptical of that is like Sabermetrics 101. Yet Young, for his career, has posted a better-than-average ERA. The same has held true of late, following his career revival. Young has a real chance this afternoon, our own doubts aside. As always, it’s just going to take precision.

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Every year, up until this one when he retired, Carlos Quentin was my guy. You know the one. “This is it, guys! This is the year Carlos Quentin stays healthy for a full season and hits 40 bombs!” I’d say in March. That never happened, of course, because Carlos Quentin never stopped getting hit by pitches and injuring himself in other ways, but Quentin was one of the classic “when/if” players. “When he plays a full season… If he could just stay healthy…” Quentin was always productive on the field, it’s just he was never actually on the field.

To some extent, Troy Tulowitzki has had a similar career. Tulowitzki’s injury history isn’t quite as extensive as Quentin’s, but his on-field production, when healthy, has always lent itself to a similar “when/if” discussion each offseason. Point is, with Tulowitzki comes some manner of certainty, due to his obvious talent, but also seemingly endless untapped potential.

This year, though, for the first time since his age-23 season, Tulowitzki’s season-end numbers were just average, as indicated by his season-end wRC+ of exactly 100. Add in the shoulder injury that Tulowitzki’s currently playing through, and the Blue Jays have been left playing the “when/if” game that’s typically reserved for the offseason.

So right now, with Tulowitzki, you’re looking for clues. Clues that the perennial preseason when/if MVP candidate is still in there, lurking underneath the cracked shoulder blade and the underwhelmingly average season. It’s a never-ending upside game with Tulowitzki, and clues are the currency for upside. As long as the Blue Jays have a couple clues, they know that, while the consistency may not be there, Tulowitzki still owns the potential to be a game-changer on any given trip to the plate. Last night, the Blue Jays received a clue:
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Two things you’re sure to find this time of year are unpredictable baseball outcomes and women and men who failed to predict those results. While I’ve managed to accidentally correctly predict the 2015 postseason so far, one need not look further than the present author’s own preseason predictions to find evidence of very incorrect baseball prognostication.  They’re everywhere because predicting baseball is inherently challenging. In order to do it well, you have to accurately predict the quality of the players and then the order in which events unfold in games involving those players.

Due to the nature of baseball, it’s relatively common for teams that are objectively worse than their opponent to win playoff series. If you put this year’s Tigers into a five game series against the Royals and let them play over and over, the Tigers would win a decent number of those series even though it’s pretty clear the Royals are the better team. Unfortunately, because the world is not yet an interactive computer simulation, we only get to observe one series between each set of opponents per year. Even if we knew for sure which team was better, that still wouldn’t ensure that we could predict the outcome. A .500 true talent team can outplay a .550 true talent team for a week. That’s just the nature of the game.

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It’s easy to dismiss the Cubs starter for Game Three, Kyle Hendricks. I did it earlier today, when I called him a two-pitch pitcher. I mean, he throws a cutter and a curve about 10% of the time combined, but both pitches are fairly substandard by whiffs and grounders, and with two strikes, they all but disappear. He doesn’t have much faith in them.

He can locate his sinker well, though, and has a good change. In fact, his changeup whiff percentage this year is second only to Cole Hamels‘ among starters that have thrown the pitch more than 150 times. So you could call him a two-pitch guy.

Except that he has two changeups.

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There are things that are different about R.A. Dickey, of course. No one pitch was thrown as often as the 2,840 regular season knuckleballs that Dickey threw this year. No other qualified pitcher threw any knuckle balls this year by PITCHf/x. The starter who threw the fewest fastballs other than Dickey threw three times as many. No pitch gets equal swinging strike results in and out of the zone like the knuckleball. Dickey can throw with injuries that would fell other pitchers, mostly because he throws at about 75% effort. He has no Ulnar Collateral Ligament.

And yet, despite the fact that Dickey is a one-pitch pitcher who throws a unique pitch that people seemingly can’t figure out no matter where he throws it, there are also conventional aspects to his craft. And to a certain extent, they’ve come to the fore this year.

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Ben and Sam banter about Johnny Cueto and the differences between the most boring parts of baseball and other sports, then answer playoff-related listener emails.

Last night, John Hirschbeck ejected Troy Tulowitzki from game three of the ALCS after Tulowitzki complained about Hirschbeck’s called strikes against him in his previous at-bat as he took the field for the top of the eighth inning.

It was a strange ejection, as you don’t usually see a guy on the field thrown out when he’s 50 feet away from the umpire who tosses him, and while we obviously don’t know what was said, there didn’t appear to be any kind of emotional reaction from the Blue Jays shortstop that necessitated an ejection. In his post-game comments, Tulowitzki asserted that the ejection was premature:

“I think it was obvious I didn’t agree with the called third strike,” Tulowitzki said. “And there were other pitches that were questionable. I’m walking out to the field, and he’s looking at me. And I told him that wasn’t a strike. And it was a quick trigger. Obviously he was either holding on to something or something was going on. But I didn’t think what I did was going to eject me from the game.

“Obviously, you don’t want to get ejected right there. Unfortunately, I was. But it will be interesting to see what he has to say.”

Clearly, the bar for what constitutes an ejection should be higher in the postseason; the stakes are so high, the last thing the league should want is a game being decided by backups forced into the game because an umpire had a short fuse. So it would be interesting to hear Hirschbeck’s side, and his rationale for why he had to eject Toronto’s shortstop from the game. Unless he provides a compelling alternate version of events, this event won’t help his reputation as an umpire with too quick of a hook.

But, without defending the ejection, it should be noted that Tulowitzki was wrong about the pitch that ultimately got him ejected. In fact, the Blue Jays complaints about the strike zone seem pretty weak when you actually look at the balls and strikes Hirschbeck called last night.

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