FanGraphs Baseball

Last night, the Cubs saw their ace, Jake Arrieta, give up four runs in five innings in their Game Two loss to the Mets. Given how recently he seemed completely impossible to hit, it was bit jarring to see Arrieta struggle, and multiple observers noted during the game that his velocity appeared to be down from what he was throwing during the regular season. Jesse Rogers post-game recap on ESPN was even headlined “Jake Arrieta’s velocity dip spelled doom for Cubs…”

In discussing the issue with various Cubs after the game, Rogers noted that Joe Maddon saw it as well.

“In the game there, if that [radar] gun was correct on the field, he might have been down a mile an hour or two, that’s what I saw,” Cubs skipper Joe Maddon said. “And when that happens, the breaker, the commitment to the breaking ball is not as definite from the hitter’s perspective, because they’re able to see everything better.”

Arrieta himself noted that he knew his stuff wasn’t as good.

“I knew the high-end velocity wasn’t necessarily there tonight,” he said. “Threw quite a few changeups to offset that.”

He’s not kidding. After throwing just one change-up total in his previous two postseason starts, Arrieta fired off 10 change-ups against the Mets last night. The change-up isn’t a pitch he features much, as only about 5% of his total pitches this year were changeups. The fact that 11% of the pitches he threw were change-ups last night does suggest he didn’t trust his normal repertoire as much, and was looking for ways to get outs without his best stuff.

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Once upon a time, this was a post about how the Cubs lineup was a good matchup for the Mets pitchers. It’s what I’d planned to write if/when the Mets knocked out the Dodgers in Game 5 of the NLDS, but then Corey Seager forgot to cover third base and Andre Ethier caught a foul ball so that became a thing instead.

Now, here we are. The Mets-Cubs series was billed as a battle between New York’s young pitching and Chicago’s young hitting. There were a couple things in the numbers that initially led me to believe the Cubs might have a neutralizer but, so far, it’s been all Mets.

That neutralizer was fastballs. The Mets pitchers, see, throw a lot of fastballs. Correction: the Mets pitchers don’t throw an unusually high number of fastballs; the fastballs they do throw, though, you notice. Think Jacob deGrom, and you think fastball. Think Noah Syndergaard, think fastball. Matt Harvey pops into your head, you probably think “pitch count” or some similarly annoying storyline, but after that, you think fastball. That’s not to say the Mets’ fantastic young rotation doesn’t have other good pitches, too, but, if you’re like me, it’s the fastballs that stand out.

They all throw them hard, and they all throw them well. Theoretically, a team that stands the best chance against the trio of deGrom, Syndergaard and Harvey is one that can hit the hard fastball. Harvey and deGrom throw 95. Syndergaard throws 97. The Cubs, this year, had the second-best slugging percentage in the league against fastballs 96+. An arbitrary cutoff, sure, but the point is: high heat hasn’t crippled the Cubs. Guys like Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo and Kyle Schwarber — can’t just blow it by them. There’s got to be other ways to get them out.

Let’s now turn our attention to Schwarber in particular. Until Daniel Murphy started happening, maybe no other player did more in the postseason to make a name for himself than Schwarber. When he’s hit the ball, mostly, it’s gone a long way. He hit one into a river, and rivers don’t happen inside baseball stadiums. He hit one onto a roof, and that roof now has a shrine on it. Anyone who didn’t know about Kyle Schwarber before, knows about him now.

Same goes for pitchers. You hear about the league adjusting to young players who come up and experience immediate success. The book getting out. Weaknesses in a hitter can reveal themselves by the way the league begins pitching to them.

And now, Kyle Schwarber’s rate of pitch types seen, by month, since entering the league:

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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 corner outfielders.

Other Players: Nori Aoki / Alex Avila / Asdrubal Cabrera / Chris Davis / Ian Desmond / Stephen Drew / Dexter Fowler / David Freese / 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.

Marlon Byrd (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Byrd:

• Has averaged 587 PA and 2.4 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 2.5 WAR per 600 PA* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 1.0 WAR in 544 PA in 2015.
• Is projected to record 0.4 WAR per 600 PA**.
• Is entering his age-28 age-38 season.
• Made $8.0M in 2015, as part of deal signed in November 2013.

*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 Byrd.

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The postseason always provides some surprising storylines, but this year, nothing has been more unexpected than Daniel Murphy turning into Babe Ruth. The Mets second baseman is mostly known for his extremely high rate of contact — he posted the lowest strikeout rate of any hitter in Major League Baseball this year — but has turned into a super slugger in the playoffs, hitting five home runs in the Mets first seven postseason games. While the team’s pitching staff is their greatest strength, Murphy’s success against the best pitchers in baseball is a big reason why the team is two wins away from reaching the World Series.

But even given his recent power surge, his home run off Jake Arrieta in the first inning of game two remains something to marvel at. Not just because hitting a home run off Jaker Arrieta is impressive, but because the home run was one of the least likely we’ve seen all year.

First, watch the home run for yourself.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Ben, Harry Pavlidis, and Jeffrey Paternostro review the weekend’s ALCS and NLCS action and preview the pitching in ALCS Game 3.

Justin Grimm wasn’t credited with a save when the Cubs vanquished the Cardinals on Tuesday. That doesn’t make his contribution any less important. Fourth-inning runs count just as much as late-inning runs, and St. Louis was poised to erase an early 4-2 deficit.

Grimm entered the game after starter Jason Hammel – shaky through three frames – issued a lead-off walk. He promptly induced a chopper, but third baseman Kris Bryant, in his effort to turn two, bobbled the ball. All hands were safe. Through no fault of his own, and with apprehension gripping Wrigley Field, Grimm was in a pickle.

The righty was more than ready. Grimm initially warmed in the second, and he got hot again in the third. When he finally strolled to the mound in the fourth inning, Joe Maddon handed him the ball and said, “Hey, man. Be you. Do your thing.” 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.
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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, including the four main center fielders and first of many corner outfielders.

Other Players: Alex Avila / Asdrubal Cabrera / Chris Davis / Ian Desmond / Stephen Drew / David Freese / Chris Iannetta / Kelly Johnson / Howie Kendrick / Justin Morneau / Daniel Murphy / Mike Napoli / Dioner Navarro / Alexei Ramirez / Jimmy Rollins / Geovany Soto / Juan Uribe / Chase Utley / Matt Wieters / Ben Zobrist.

Dexter Fowler (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Fowler:

• Has averaged 562 PA and 2.3 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 2.4 WAR per 600 PA* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 3.2 WAR in 690 PA in 2015.
• Is projected to record 1.7 WAR per 600 PA**.
• Is entering his age-30 season.
• Made $9.5M in 2015, as part of deal signed in January 2015.

*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 Fowler.

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The mission for the Royals is actually complicated. They need to be able to score, of course, which means they’ll need to score against pitchers like David Price and Marcus Stroman. They’ll need to contain every member of the Blue Jays lineup, because it’s not like you can ever afford to take a hitter off in the playoffs. But let’s be real — as far as the focus is concerned, many eyes are going to be on how Royals pitchers deal with Toronto’s offensive core. While it won’t be everything about the series, the Jays have grown accustomed to watching the same sluggers blast through all their opponents. The Royals are going to want to stop that.

Toronto had the best offense in baseball, in largest part because they had three of the best hitters in baseball. According to the FanGraphs leaderboards, among qualified hitters, Josh Donaldson ranked seventh-best in the majors. Edwin Encarnacion ranked eighth, and Jose Bautista ranked ninth. Bautista was tied with someone named Chris Davis, just ahead of one Andrew McCutchen. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and just to maximize the terror, the Blue Jays bat the three back-to-back-to-back. It’s on the Royals to figure out how to get them out. And I can offer a little bit of advice, although it’s less helpful than it might appear.

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If you somehow missed the seventh inning of Wednesday’s ALDS Game 5 and now somehow find yourself here at this website, do yourself a favor: go watch it. On the days following games like that, after we’ve been through something as grand, troubling, exultant, and trying as that seventh inning, we spend most of our time trying to make sense of it all: not only the fact that what we witnessed could only happen in this singular game of baseball, but that we’ve never seen anything like it before. Just think: there are more games like that in the future. How crazy is that knowledge? How will we possibly survive all of them?

Even though many of you, like me, are probably still dealing with the fallout of increased blood pressure, rapid heart rate, and psychological trauma, we all have a job to do, and mine is to somehow analyze a piece of what went on Wednesday. We already had Jeff breaking it down with his usual aplomb. We had Eno looking into the rules associated with the plays in question. And, perhaps most pertinent to this article, Dave weighed in on the line between emotion and sportsmanship.

There’s a part of that final subject that we’re going to key in on: emotion. We try, in many ways, to capture how players perform in different situations. We can look at dozens of splits on our player pages. Leverage is the situation that immediately comes to mind when we’re talking about intangible forces that can impact performance. The closest we get to measuring an emotional response is how players perform under pressure — how clutch they are.

But what about anger? We don’t measure that, and it’s understandable why we don’t — measuring anger is impossible or impractical with the tools we have right now. It would also be a pretty strange thing to measure, but we also measure plenty of strange things.

That brings us to what happened on Wednesday in the bottom of the seventh inning. By this point, the top half of the inning had already included the go-ahead run scoring on a deflected ball being thrown back to the pitcher, multiple instances of fans throwing objects onto the field, and the Blue Jays playing the game under protest. To say that tensions were running high would be a gross understatement, especially for the Blue Jays.

So, when Bautista stepped to the plate in the bottom of the inning during a tie game that hung in the balance, it’s not a stretch to say he was probably feeling a bit of frustration, maybe even anger. Then he did this:

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