FanGraphs Baseball

11:43

:

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at the pitching matchup between the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs tonight, the Mets appear to have a significant advantage. Jacob deGrom has been one of the best pitcher’s in the National League, posting both a sub-3 FIP and ERA this season, while the Cubs counter with Kyle Hendricks, a young pitcher who put together a fine year in the middle of the Cubs rotation. The Cubs, having burned the team’s two best pitchers in Jake Arrieta and Jon Lester in the first two losses, now have to face the Mets’ best pitcher after dealing with Matt Harvey and Noah Syndergaard already. The matchup looks to be a mismatch, but Hendricks is better than his overall numbers appear.

deGrom had a fantastic regular season, finishing sixth in National League with five wins above replacement. His arsenal is Pedro-lite, as Owen Watson wrote last week, and allowed the right-hander to strike out more than 30% of hitters in the second half. Among NL pitchers, only Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Madison Bumgarner produced a strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) higher than deGrom’s mark of 22.2. Only 17 qualified NL pitchers produced even a strikeout rate higher than deGrom’s 22.2% K-BB%. The Mets’ ace has started two games in the playoffs, pitching 13 innings, striking out 20 against four walks, and leading the Mets to two of their three playoff victories in the Division Series. In those two games, the opposing pitcher have been Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke, respectively, and in the latter game, he helped clinch the series over the Dodgers. Giving the Mets a 3-0 series advantage would likely have a similar effect on the Cubs. In Kyle Hendricks, deGrom has downgraded when it comes to the opposing pitcher; Hendricks is no Greinke or Kershaw. That said, he has performed well all season long, even if only in short outings.

Hendricks has produced a solid season, recording an average ERA and a better than average 3.36 FIP (86 FIP-) to go along with 3.4 WAR in 180 innings this season. At the end of last month, Dave Cameron wrote that as Hendricks stopped using his cutter and increased the use of change, Hendricks pitched even better, making him the front-runner for the Cubs third starter in the playoffs. That change has yielded a phenomenal 26% whiff rate on the season, per Brooks Baseball. He used the pitch to get multiple strikeouts in Game 2 of the Division Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. The pitch moves down and away to left-handers, like this pitch against Brandon Moss.

Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s something weird. I’ve noticed on Twitter that when Blue Jays fans refer to last night’s ALCS Game Three, they seem to give the credit to the Jays. They say things like, “The Jays were crushing the ball.” But when Royals fans talk about the game, they do it in a Royals-centric context, taking credit away from the Royals, as in, “Cueto sucked.” This isn’t to knock on either fan base. We all do this. I sure do. The truth though, as is often the case, lies in the middle somewhere. The Royals, Cueto especially, pitched badly. The Blue Jays, Troy Tulowitzki and Ryan Goins especially, hit well. But, when parcelling out the blame and/or credit, one can’t be binary about it. Unlike pooping the bed, it’s not an all or nothing thing.

Cueto ended up with a final line of two innings pitched and eight runs allowed. To my eye he struggled, and I doubt your eye would say much different, but based solely on his stuff I wouldn’t have guessed he was eight-runs-in-two-innings bad. Partially because that’s reeeeeeally bad (that’s an ERA of 36.00!), but partially because he just didn’t appear all that awful. So maybe more of the credit/blame for the outcome should fall on the Blue Jays. But then again, I’m not a scout, so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.* I was curious to see if I could figure out who should get the credit and how much.

*Maybe?

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in July, the Royals and Blue Jays added big name stars to load up their rosters for a deep postseason run. Looking at their team, Kansas City decided they needed a #1 starter, and so they gave up a trio of good young pitching prospects to bring Johnny Cueto over from Cincinnati. The Blue Jays also landed an ace of their own in David Price, but they didn’t stop there, also making a big move to bring Troy Tulowitzki north of the border to take over at shortstop and bolster their offense.

To this point, neither player has quite lived up to expectations. Cueto ran a 4.76 ERA after coming over to the American League and his first round playoff performance was a mixed bag. Tulowitzki, meanwhile, didn’t hit for the kind of power he’s known for, and after missing most of the final season due to a shoulder injruy, he’s been overmatched by the high quality pitching teams have thrown at him in the playoffs.

So in the third inning of the third game of the ALCS, the two July acquisitions met in a moment that looked like it might define the 2015 postseason for one or the other. The Blue Jays already led 3-2 and had a couple of runners on base, but they’d seen the Royals come storming back before, and with Marcus Stroman looking hittable, building a big lead early was going to be important. For Cueto, a double play or strikeout that could let him squash another rally would give him a chance to turn his outing around, as he did after a poor early start in the deciding game of the division series.

And given how poor Tulowitzki has looked in the playoffs, the Royals had to like their chances. A big part of Tulo’s excellence has been his ability to avoid strikeouts in an era where everyone swings and misses with regularity. In 32 postseason plate appearances this year, however, Tulo had already struck out 10 times, and on Sunday, he looked like he just didn’t want to swing. Despite his pedigree, Tulo hadn’t exactly struck fear into anyone’s heart with his recent at-bats.

So, in the biggest at-bat of the game, Cueto decided to go after him. He threw a first pitch cut fastball at 88 mph at the top of the strike zone, and Tulo fouled it off. Perhaps emboldened by the shortstops inability to get around on a pitch below 90, Cueto decided to challenge him with a 93 mph heater, going even higher up the ladder, to see if he could get a swinging strike to get the count to 0-2. Only, this happened.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

The people are growing accustomed to watching the Mets win, and as a side effect of that, the people are growing accustomed to watching Jeurys Familia come in to try to finish the job. Familia has yet to allow a postseason run, and even if you didn’t know anything about him before, you’d be able to tell just from observation that he’s far from a weakness. They say the biggest vulnerability on the Mets is the soft underbelly of the bullpen, and though that would be true for most teams, the Mets make it extra tricky, because the starters often work deep, meaning they can hand the ball to Familia almost directly. Which means there’s almost never any let-up.

What Familia has turned himself into is one of the true reliever elites. It hasn’t always been a smooth and easy path to the top, as Familia has previously fought his own command and struggled to retire left-handed hitters. Both of those are common problems for hard-throwing righty relievers, but Familia this year has overcome them, blossoming into a shutdown closer Terry Collins will trust to get more than three outs. And the thing about Familia is that it goes beyond just his being successful — these days, he arrives at his success on a path all his own.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jake Arrieta, Zack Greinke, and Clayton Kershaw are going to be the top three finishers in this year’s NL Cy Young Award voting. This is about as much of a lock as sports award voting gets. They have been that dominant, and that far ahead of the pack. Dave Cameron has written here several times on the race between those three and no others, and that settles things for me.

This means the New York Mets have done something no other baseball team ever has: they have beaten the top three finishers in their league’s Cy Young voting in a single postseason. They defeated Kershaw in Game 1 of the NLDS, aced out Greinke in the deciding Game 5, and on Sunday night, in Game 2 of the NLCS, Arrieta took an L for the first time since July 25 (or June 16, if you give him a pass for getting beaten by Cole Hamels‘ no-hitter).

Yes, yes, I know: it’s probably best to “Kill The Win,” which strongly implies collateral damage upon the loss. I acknowledge the arbitrary component that goes into assignment of pitcher losses. However, if I let that forestall me, we won’t have any fun and we won’t learn anything. So instead let’s have some fun and learn something.

It isn’t just a single-league mark the Mets have set. If you count the top three finishers in both leagues, only the 2015 Mets have ever beaten three top-three vote-getters in one postseason. They join eleven clubs that have managed to beat two.

Read the rest of this entry »

Johnny Cueto’s changeup is currently flatter than it’s been in five years. Literally. To some extent, everything in his arsenal is flat right now, but it’s most radical when you look at the changeup. With that wiggle in his delivery and a possibly falling arm slot, it’s easy to find a culprit. But he’s wiggled forever, why has he lost his drop now?

Read the rest of this entry »

The wheels started spinning for me Friday afternoon. I was absentmindedly scrolling through numbers, looking for anything relevant to the NLCS, when I came upon something on the Baseball-Reference Cubs splits page. I’ll show you the exact thing I saw:

Go ahead and squint. You’ll make it out. You see categories, designating power and finesse pitchers. Then you see the Cubs’ hitting statistics. They’ve been much, much worse against power pitchers, and while everyone is much, much worse against power pitchers, the Cubs still look worse if you adjust for that. That’s what the last column shows. I made a note to try to write this up. See, the Cubs are playing the Mets, and a lot of the Mets happen to throw super hard.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hitters, we generally accept, are capable of controlling their balls in play (BIP) to some degree. They don’t have complete control — for example, BABIP is a much less reliable statistic than strikeout rate in the absence of huge samples — but when we see a batter with a high BABIP it’s less suspicious than it would be if that were a pitcher.

Interestingly enough, the year-to-year correlation for BABIP for hitters is quite low. The r-squared is just 0.08 (with 1 being a perfect 1:1 relationship and 0 being no relationship), even when weighting by the number of balls in play in both years. There isn’t quite a total lack of a relationship: the model’s p-value — that is, the measure of the probability that input variables have no effect on the output — is effectively 0, indicating that there almost certainly is a relationship. But knowing a hitter’s BABIP one year doesn’t tell us all that much about what it will be the next.

In graphical format, it’s easy to see the existing-but-not-very-strong relationship between a hitter’s BABIP one year and his BABIP the year after. (The size of the dots in this graph reflect the total number of balls in play the hitter had in the two years.)

I’ve always wondered, though, if batters have any ability to control things on a more granular level than this. For example, do hitters have a lot of influence over whether their ground balls turn into hits? Maybe something like BABIP on ground balls is pretty stable from year to year, and the rest of the hitter’s BABIP is just pure luck from his other kinds of batted balls. Or maybe the three are all separate skills over which the batters have a good degree of control, and the instability comes from a hitter having a down year in one category but a good year in the others.

Read the rest of this entry »

We watch playoff baseball in part to see the stars of the game write their legacies. Whether they become legends or eventual disappointments, the October stage grants them a chance to produce the alluring commodity we most crave in this wild month of baseball: narrative.

We know the names. Reggie Jackson; Kirk Gibson; Carlton Fisk. We can see their postseason highlight reels in our heads just by reading the words on the page; we know the accompanying commentator clips so well that the audio plays along with them. They’re more than legends — they’re woven into a historic fabric, embedded in our consciousness as touchstones for the game’s future.

Somewhere in our minds, amid the grocery lists and afternoon meeting agendas, Gibson is pumping his fist as he rounds the bases. Fisk is waving it fair. And a Yankee Stadium crowd is yelling “Reggie. Reggie. Reggie.” They’re all there, because they’re now part of who we are as a collective baseball mind.

And so we come to Daniel Murphy, who’s not yet one of those household names. An important part of the Mets during the past few years, yes, but never what anyone would call a superstar. Only now, after fueling another Mets win in the NLCS over the Chicago Cubs by homering in his fourth consecutive game, he’s becoming something else — a one-man show, a phenomenon, a postseason hero in the making.

This is happening because most professional baseball players are capable of doing extraordinary things for short periods of time. The greatest among them are able to stretch those periods, shortening the downtime between each episode. However, sometimes we need to recognize when someone’s performance is not just a hot streak; oftentimes there have been legitimate improvements made, and those coincide with a streak at just the right moment, like crucial at-bats over a few playoff series. That’s exactly what’s happening to Daniel Murphy, and it’s cause for us to look deeper into the forces behind his incredible run in this year’s playoffs.

To begin with, Murphy made a conscious decision to pull the ball more often in 2015. Take a look at the percentage of balls he has hit to the pull side since 2008 (as a note, he missed all of 2010 due to injury):

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.