FanGraphs Baseball

During last night’s Wild Card game live blog, there were a few readers (presumably Yankee fans) who were very upset with the strike zone being called by home plate umpire Eric Cooper.

10:42
Comment From Hank
Cooper is a joke – that one was 4-6? off the plate!

Comment From Cb
Why is Sipp getting the benefit of the doubt on all these 3-ball count pitches on the edge?

Comment From Will
I don’t think it’s been atrociously bad, but saying “it’s fair because both teams knew about it” ignores the fact that walk-heavy teams will be more burned by a pitcher-friendly zone than a free-swinging team like the Astros.

Comment From The Hamburglar
Cooper’s zone is notoriously high. Once again, this does not explain the constant outside pitches going the Astros way

As we talked about pre-game, Eric Cooper is a known pitcher’s umpire with a tendency to call more strikes than average on pitches at the top and bottom of the zone. And that’s exactly what he did yesterday. From our box score page, a graphical representation of every called ball and called strike from last night’s game.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

It should be pretty well understood that there isn’t one “right” way to pitch. Some pitchers succeed by throwing curveballs, others with changeups. One may get by with grounders, while another flourishes with fly balls. Corey Kluber works out of the zone for whiffs, and Bartolo Colon bombards it for balls in play. Every pitcher is different. It’s important to find what fits one’s unique style, and stick to it.

Dallas Keuchel has found what works for him. And he’d never looked less like himself in Tuesday’s superb Wild Card start than on his final pitch of the evening:
Read the rest of this entry »

Just as we all anticipated, Kris Bryant put together an extremely impressive rookie campaign. After he spent the season’s first two weeks in the minors, the Cubs set free their 23-year-old top prospect, and he proceeded to rake.  Bryant put up a .275/.369/.488 batting line on the strength of 26 long balls and a 12% walk rate, which yielded a 136 wRC+. Throw in that he graded out as a plus defender at third base, and the end result was a remarkable 6.5 WAR — easily tops among rookies, and was the 10th-highest figure of any hitter period. The Cubs seem to have a very special player on their hands.

We all knew Bryant had star potential long before he was called up. That’s why he got so much love on pre-season prospect lists, and also why KATOH liked him more than almost any other prospect. But now that he’s a year further along on that trajectory, we can be a bit more certain of what his career might look like. So, using this new data, let’s see what Bryant’s rookie campaign might tell us about what lies ahead. As I did yesterday in my piece on Carlos Correa, I performed a some weighted Mahalanobis distance calculations to generate a list of players whose seasons were most similar to Bryant’s. For more details on my methodology, see yesterday’s Correa post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jake Arrieta’s multi-faceted single-grip slider is sweet, but he’s had that for a while. There has to be something he changed to get better this year. There is something he’s changed, actually. He’s completely flipped his fastball usage.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a rule, life is characterized predominantly both by crippling doubt and also other kinds of doubt. Less susceptible to that sort of doubt is Houston outfielder Carlos Gomez, depicted here recording a home run against Masahiro Tanaka — with regard to which home run Gomez exhibits something much closer to unambiguous certainty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Six months ago, we were all idiots. We were all idiots because we figured the Yankees were idiots for letting Masahiro Tanaka pitch. It felt like elbow surgery was inevitable, UCL tears being things you don’t just play through, so it felt strange to see the Yankees in denial. Oh, we all thought we knew what was better. Turns out the Yankees might’ve been on to something. Turns out those doctors have more than just pieces of paper. Tommy John might still be an inevitability. Greg Holland pitched through something like this for a year. The elbow still got him. The elbow might still get Tanaka, but tonight he’s starting a playoff game. Tonight, he’s the guy, at least until Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances are the guys. It’s safe to say now it worked out.

Remain in the flashback, though. Go back six months to when Tanaka made his first start. There was so much attention on his fastball — on its usage, and on its velocity. Observers thought the fastball would be a dead giveaway. They thought the injury would make the fastball worse, and they thought Tanaka wouldn’t be able to cut it without a decent fastball. Just about everyone, after all, builds off the fastball. It’s the pitch at the center of the pitch-type solar system.

In the end, Tanaka’s fastball actually gained velocity this season. He started 24 times, with a mid-3s ERA, and his average fastball was up the better part of one mile per hour. In a sense, the fastball wasn’t a giveaway. But if you stare long enough, you see two things. One: overall, Tanaka was pretty good. Two: Tanaka’s fastball was pretty bad.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros and Yankees are set to meet tonight in the first postseason game of 2015, with the winner advancing to play the Royals in the division series. While both teams are likely to do everything they can to win tonight’s game, there is one potentially significant variable they won’t be able to control; the called strike zone. So that’s preview what we might look for from the home plate umpire tonight.

17 year veteran Eric Cooper is going to be behind the plate for the Wild Card game. Per Baseball Heat Maps, here’s Cooper’s called strike zone compared to the league average (warmer colors indicate more calls in that area).

RH hitters

LH hitters.

The first thing that stands out is that Cooper has a very tall strike zone, calling far more pitches than the average umpire at both the top and bottom of the rulebook zone. He’s especially generous at the very top sliver of the zone with a right-handed batter at the plate, which is also a very tough area for hitters to make contact on. He offsets the height of his zone to some degree by having a fairly narrow strike zone compared to the average umpire, calling fewer pitches away against both lefties and righties, but the effect isn’t as large as his large vertical zone.

As you can see at the charts available over at Baseball Savant, Cooper calls an above average pitches out of the zone as strikes, and has one of the lowest rates of calling pitches in the zone balls. Overall, he’s a pitcher friendly umpire, and hitters are going to need to protect the plate more often than they normally would, especially on high and low pitches.

Interestingly, neither Keuchel nor Tanaka attack the top of the strike zone that regularly, as both are primarily trying to keep the ball down, so there’s not a clear advantage to either side based on the umpire tendency with regards to the starting pitcher. But both teams are likely to use an army of relievers, and Cooper’s zone could work out pretty well for a pitcher like Houston’s Josh Fields, who likes to pitch up with his fastball.

Ben and Sam give an update on ongoing competitions, draft playoff teams, and answer emails about play-in games, Clayton Kershaw, a Tigers scoring mystery, and more.