Ben and Sam preview the White Sox’ season with Tim Marchman, and Sahadev talks to Dan Hayes, who covers the White Sox for CSN Chicago (at 36:52).
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In the opinion of some, baseball is broken. Not irreparably, but it’s become borderline boring and badly in need of an infusion of offense. Pace is a problem. Games last beyond the bedtimes of millions of young fans, many of whom have short attention spans.
There are myriad issues, and they can’t be ignored simply because certain indicators suggest the sport is thriving. What, if anything, to do about them? In the opinion of John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, there are no obvious answers.
“It’s conflated,” Thorn told me a few days ago. “It’s tangled. People have a vague unease that things aren’t right — not the way the ought to be – and somebody ought to do something. The problem is, there’s no magic bullet.”
But based on historical precedent, an arsenal of options exists. For instance, following the 1968 season – aka “The Year of the Pitcher” – the mound was lowered by five inches. The measure had the desired effect: In 1969, OPS jumped from .639 to .689 and runs-per-game shot up from 6.84 to 8.14. (In 2014, OPS was .700 and runs-per-game 8.13).
It’s important to note that the game-altering move was necessitated by another game-altering move. 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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I’m back again to close out your week by talking about pitch comps. I’ve talked about pitch comps a lot lately, looking at Henderson Alvarez, and Mariano Rivera, and Cole Hamels, and so on. Pitch comps love Marcus Stroman. Not coincidentally, I also love Marcus Stroman, but this is going to be about a different guy — this is focusing on Carlos Carrasco. And while I’ve written about Carrasco already in the recent past, I want to add something to that. Carlos Carrasco throws a changeup. No one else really throws Carlos Carrasco’s changeup.
To quickly review the methodology, I use the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards and look at velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. For this, I looked at right-handed starting pitchers who, last year, threw at least 50 changeups, according to the page. For each of the three categories, I calculated the z-score difference between a given number and Carrasco’s changeup’s number. Then I simply added up the three absolute values, yielding a comp rating. That’s all the boring stuff. Below is the more interesting stuff.
The highest average fastball velocity among major-league qualifiers in 2014 was the 97.0 mph mark produced by Kansas City right-hander Yordano Ventura. What follows is an animated GIF of Georgia sophomore Robert Tyler striking out Florida State outfielder DJ Stewart — ranked 20th overall, Stewart, among Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early draft prospect rankings — on a pitch recorded at that same exact velocity. Tyler has produced five strikeouts against just 10 Florida State batters over 3.0 innings (in a game available by way of SEC Network Plus via Watch ESPN).
Here’s the fastball in question:
What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances over the first week of the college season.
As in a pair of earlier posts, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.
Jason Giambi announced his retirement on Monday, after 20 seasons as a major leaguer. For most of those 20 years, Giambi was one of the best hitters in the game. I won’t waste your time putting down the narrative of his career — Jay Jaffe already did that better than I would anyway. But I thought today that we would celebrate his career with a few choice facts and/or moments from a career that at the very least belongs in the Hall of Very Good.
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The Chicago Cubs scored a preliminary victory on Thursday in the lawsuit filed last month by the owners of several of the rooftops looking into Wrigley Field. As I explained at the time the suit was filed, the case is the latest in a series of legal proceedings challenging the on-going Wrigley Field renovations, and in particular the Cubs’ construction of two new outfield scoreboards. Unlike earlier legal challenges to the project – which are focused on trying to overturn the city’s approval of the renovation plans – the rooftop owners’ suit against the Cubs charges the team with a variety of legal violations (antitrust, defamation, unfair business practices, breach of contract).
Last week, the rooftop owners asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) preventing the team from building the scoreboards until the case is resolved. Following four hours of argument on Wednesday, Judge Virginia Kendall issued a decision on Thursday morning denying the rooftops’ request, helping clear the way for the Cubs to move forward with construction of the disputed scoreboards.
In order to receive a TRO, the rooftops generally had to show that they: 1) were likely to prevail in the case, and 2) would suffer an “irreparable” injury (i.e., one that cannot be fully remedied by money) if the restraining order was not granted. The rooftop owners believed they had established both requirements, arguing in particular that the imminent construction of the scoreboards would destroy their business. Meanwhile, the Cubs argued that the rooftops were unlikely to prevail on any of the claims they had asserted in the lawsuit, and that they could easily be compensated for any damage to their business resulting from the construction of the scoreboards through the payment of monetary damages.
You might expect the Kansas City Royals to have a big offseason after their fabled run to the World Series that reignited a love of baseball in the entire region of Missouri which doesn’t root for the Cardinals. Maybe they would sign someone to fill the offensive power void and boost run production, or try to extend James Shields, who was hitting free agency. That didn’t happen. Instead, their offseason can be summed up by the front office giving 17 million dollars to Kendrys Morales, which is still a surprisingly strange sentence to type, even a few months after the deal.
All winter, the focus on the Phillies has centered on Cole Hamels. He’s their best player, they’re an obvious seller, and the remainder of his contract is a bit of a discount relative to the current market price for frontline starting pitchers. Of course, those last two factors also mean that the Phillies asking price has been quite high, as they look for multiple young prospects in return, with the acquiring team also absorbing the entirety of the rest of his contract. For reasons that have been covered ad nauseum, no one has been willing to give up that kind of talent while also taking on $96 million in salary commitments, and so for now, Hamels remains in Philadelphia.
At some point sooner than later, now that spring training is beginning, pitchers are going to start getting hurt. Pitchers on contenders. Guys that win-now teams were counting on are going to report some stiffness in their elbow, and after a few days of assuming its just normal dead arm, they’ll be told they need Tommy John Surgery. And then the rumors will begin to kick up, and that team will get attached to Hamels as a potential suitor, and eventually, Hamels will have a new home. At least, as long as he isn’t one of the guys complaining about dead arm anyway.
From now through the trade deadline, the asking price for Hamels probably only goes up. The Phillies are already paying the cost in awkwardness of bringing him to spring training, so there’s no reason for them to give in and take a deal similar to what they’ve been offered at this point. Amaro is betting on injuries depleting the supply of arms on contending teams, pushing the demand for Hamels higher, allowing him to get the kind of return he’s been seeking all winter. As long as Hamels stays healthy, it will probably work.
But Cole Hamels isn’t the only interesting piece of trade-bait in Philadelphia. And in fact, if I was a team like the Red Sox or the Padres, I might actually target Cliff Lee instead.
