Ben and Sam talk to Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Pirates beat writer Travis Sawchik about his new book, Big Data Baseball.
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I don’t need to explain pitch-framing to you. Some catchers are better at catching pitches than others. Everything under human control has people who are better at it than others. Some of you are thankful that pitch-framing is a skill. Some of you wish that it didn’t exist. It’s an interesting and complicated conversation, getting into whether the strike zone is something to be earned, or an absolute right. It’s also an important conversation, but for the moment, it’s known that some teams get different zones than others do. Been this way for ages.
When we talk about pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving — there still isn’t a consensus term — we’re almost always talking about the backstops. Those are the players, after all, who are doing the catching part. So the natural process is to generate data and see which catchers are the best and which catchers are the worst. Only infrequently do you see steps back. Less is said about the pitchers doing the throwing. Less still is said about the hitters being thrown to. We understand that the strike zone is a little different for everybody. So which teams get the greatest and smallest overall benefit?
Clayton Kershaw is in unfamiliar territory. The three-time Cy Young award winner and consensus best pitcher in baseball finds himself sporting a 4.24 ERA in mid-May, prompting questions about what might be wrong. As we’ll see, luck has largely been unkind to Kershaw, and he’s due for a big regression toward better numbers; however, he hasn’t been the Kershaw we’ve seen for the past two years in one important part of his game, and that has led to some poor results.
Pitchers can’t control everything on the baseball field. After the ball leaves their hand, control is ceded to the batter, the defense, and luck. Also chief among the factors pitchers have little control over: the rate of men they leave on base, the rate of balls in play that go for hits, and the rate of fly balls that go for home runs. Metrics like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and xFIP try to take out a lot of the variability in a pitcher’s stat line influenced by things outside of their control, attempting to measure only what the pitcher is responsible for.
Kershaw has been a victim of some of those factors in 2015. First of all, there’s the rate of balls in play that have actually gone for hits. Here’s a chart of Kershaw’s batting average on balls in play against him over the course of his career compared to league average:
This year batted balls have been finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield, something Kershaw doesn’t have much control over. Once those batted balls start finding gloves, they’ll start getting turned into outs more often.
Kershaw’s rate of runners left on base in 2015 has been unlike years past as well. Here’s a chart of the rate at which he’s stranded runners on base over his career compared to league average:
Most players make it to Major League Baseball without a fully refined skillset. Some players make it to the majors with a particular skill so great it outweighs a lack of skills normally required to function at the major-league level. Sometimes, it is an electric fastball despite a lack of command or secondary pitches. For Dee Gordon and Billy Hamilton, it was elite speed. For players like Yadier Molina and Jose Iglesias, their defensive skills so outweighed their offensive ineptitude that they were brought to the major leagues without the ability to hit anywhere near a major-league level.
Jose Iglesias never hit well in the minor leagues, but his glove has earned him repeated promotions and a starting shortstop job. Iglesias’s development as a hitter was slowed further by losing 2014 due to stress fractures in both legs, but he’s been very successful putting the ball in play this season, capped by a recent extra-inning single that knocked in the winning run in Detroit’s 4-3 10-inning win against the Cardinals on Saturday. At just 25 years old, he has a hitting profile similar to current BABIP sensation Dee Gordon, and while Iglesias could still develop as a hitter like Yadier Molina or other defensive-first shortstops like Ozzie Smith or Omar Vizquel, his hot start is not likely to last.
Iglesias was called up for a week in 2011 as a 21-year-old for the Boston Red Sox when he was hitting .259 with just two walks and no extra-base hits in the early part of the season. He received just four plate appearances before returning to the minors. He was called up again in September to receive a couple more trips to the plate, after hitting just .235/.285/.269 in close to a full season in the minors. In 2012, during the Red Sox lost season, Iglesias again earned a callup, this time after hitting .266/.318/.306 in his final full Triple-A season. He notched just eight hits in 77 plate appearances at the big-league level, but already received comparisons to Omar Vizquel. He began 2013 in Triple-A and hit just .202/.262/.319 before making the big leagues for good.
Mat Latos throws a pitch that nobody in the big leagues throws. For good reason, too. He has no idea where it’s going.
“I was told in high school that it would never be a realistic pitch in the big leagues,” Latos said when I asked him about the pitch that he gripped like a knuckle curve but released like a changeup and was neither his breaking ball nor his changeup. Yeah, I said, sure, but what is this pitch?
Three years later, the Houston Astros’ 2012 draft is looking pretty good. Carlos Correa, their first overall pick in that year’s draft, absolutely annihilated Double-A pitching in the season’s first month. Unsurprisingly, his performance culminated in a promotion to Triple-A last week. Lance McCullers, Houston’s 41st overall pick that year, also earned a promotion with an outstanding start in Double-A. However, the Astros didn’t send McCullers to Triple-A, but straight to the majors. He’ll make his big-league debut tonight against the Oakland Athletics.
Heading into the season, McCullers looked like he was at least a year or two away from breaking into the majors. He was coming off of a rough 2014 campaign, where he pitched to a disappointing 5.47 ERA and an equally disappointing 5.73 FIP in High-A Lancaster. The biggest culprit for his struggles was his spotty command, which manifested itself in a 13% walk rate and 4% home-run rate (1.7 HR/9).
But things have been much different for the 21-year-old this year. He was nearly unhittable in his 29 innings with Double-A Corpus Christi. He struck out 37% of the batters he faced, and allowed just one homer. The hard-throwing righty posted a laughable 0.62 ERA, and his 2.26 FIP suggests his performance wasn’t entirely a fluke.
Here’s a look at one of his many strikeouts. This clip features McCullers’ curveball, which received 55/65 present/future grades from Kiley McDaniel over the off-season. The victim is fellow top-200 prospect Renato Nunez of the Oakland system.
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: Live from Szymborskiville, SZ, it’s the Dan Szymborski News Hour! Sitting in for Dan Szymborski is Dan Szymborski, featuring Dan Szymborski and on sports, Dan Szymborski. Also maybe a cat.
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: But first off, we start off with an unrelated brawl between presidents.
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6’4″ 210 vs. 5’10” 172, how is that even a contest |
Did you see Giancarlo Stanton’s homer that went out of Dodger Stadium? Stanton hit and the Dodger fans went “OOOOHHH!” and then 467 feet later, when they saw it go out, they went “OOOOHHH!” again. The Marlins color guy punctuated the moment by saying, “You don’t see that every night!” which indeed is true but maybe undersells it a bit. I mean I’d go so far as to say you don’t see that even every other night! In 4,000 lifetimes you and I could never do that, but Stanton did it in this one. Amazing.
Less amazing but more pertinent to this article is what kind of effect that has on the pitcher. As a former high-school pitcher (second-team all district, baby!) I’ve given up a homer or two and, in my very limited experience, when you face that guy again one of two things happens. The first is you challenge him again because he can’t hit your best stuff and also you’re an idiot. The second is you stay the heck away from throwing him the pitch he crushed in the first at-bat and probably stay the heck away from throwing him anything hittable in general. But that’s me in high school. Are major-league pitchers like that? At least one is!
Mike Bolsinger was the starting pitcher for the Dodgers last Tuesday. It was his 86 mph cutter at the top of the strike zone that Stanton hit so hard it briefly turned the fans of Dodger Stadium from Dodger fans into Marlins fans. An inspection of the relevant at-bat reveals that Bolsinger missed his location on both pitches he threw Stanton. The first cutter was supposed to be low and away but was up at the top of the strike zone. He was lucky Stanton missed it. The next one was supposed to be belt-high inside (there was nobody on base so I’m going by where the catcher set up). Bolsinger got the height right but left the pitch just a bit further over the plate than he probably wanted, a few inches which wound up endangering the well-being of anyone walking outside the left field area of Dodger Stadium.
So how did Bolsinger react to facing Stanton a second time? So this is interesting! Bolsinger threw Stanton six straight curveballs! Common perception is that you don’t want to throw too many of the same kind of pitch consecutively for fear the batter will hone in on the specific movement of the pitch. Mike Bolsinger may have many fears — groundhogs and people who don’t use coasters potentially among them — but what he definitely isn’t afraid of is throwing the same pitch twice.
Bryce Harper continued terrorizing Major League pitching yesterday, coming a double short of the cycle against the Padres. For the season, he’s now hitting .338/.476/.729, good for a 215 wRC+, and it seems pretty clear that we’re seeing the breakout season of a truly elite hitter. As Jeff Sullivan noted a couple of weeks ago, Harper has made some significant changes this year, and now that he’s pulling the ball and getting it into the air with regularity, he has turned his raw power into high-level production.
He won’t keep this up all year, of course, and will eventually return to human levels of production. But it’s worth noting that even when he does, Harper will have essentially replicated the first couple of years of Miguel Cabrera’s career. Here are their career numbers through age-22.
| Name | PA | BB% | K% | ISO | BABIP | AVG | OBP | SLG | wOBA | wRC+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bryce Harper | 1659 | 12% | 22% | 0.212 | 0.324 | 0.278 | 0.364 | 0.490 | 0.369 | 134 |
| Miguel Cabrera | 1716 | 9% | 21% | 0.223 | 0.343 | 0.300 | 0.366 | 0.523 | 0.377 | 131 |
Miggy’s age 20-22 seasons came from 2003 to 2005, so while his unadjusted numbers are slightly better, Harper actually has been more productive at the plate when you add in today’s pitcher-friendly run environment. And, of course, Harper’s line is still predominantly made up of his data from ages 19, 20, and 21, with only six weeks of his age-22 performance mixed in.
If we add in the Depth Charts rest-of-season forecast for Harper — which calls for him to hit .287/.382/.524 for the rest of 2015 — in order to create an expected line through his complete age-22 season, Harper’s career numbers would be .280/.368/.497, with a .373 wOBA and a 136 wRC+. The full list of hitters in baseball history that stepped to the plate 2,000 times by the end of their age-22 season and put up a 136 wRC+ or better? Mike Trout (165), Ty Cobb (159), Mickey Mantle (149), and Mel Ott (147). Ken Griffey Jr was at 134. Alex Rodriguez was at 130. As noted, Cabrera was at 131, and in fewer plate appearances, which skewed his numbers more towards his more developed years.
Bryce Harper is pretty, pretty good.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Cleveland at Chicago AL | 20:10 ET
Kluber (52.2 IP, 66 xFIP-) vs. Sale (35.1 IP, 87 xFIP-)
As the reader is likely aware, Cleveland right-hander Corey Kluber recorded 18 strikeouts in his most recent start. With regard to the historical significance of that performance and also by what means Kluber made it possible, dauntless polymath Owen Watson has supplied all relevant information. In this week’s edition of the Sunday Notes, David Laurila addresses another matter relevant to Kluber, paraphrased here: on the 30 occasions on which a pitcher has recorded 18-plus strikeouts in a single game, those same pitchers have averaged 7.4 strikeouts in their respective subsequent outings. Readers who are so motivated might consider choosing either the over or under on that particular figure and then compelling a friend or awkward acquaintance to select the opposite.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.
