FanGraphs Baseball

The FIP statistic was created because of the inherent shortcomings of ERA; so much that was reflected in the traditional pitchers’ statistic was totally out of their control, and the new metric credited and debited hurlers for that which they did. As it turns out, FIP isn’t perfect either, as not all types of batted-ball contract are created equal. Still, FIP is preferable to ERA in just about every way imaginable, and is a much better anchor upon which to base pitcher evaluations. In any given year, however, there are pitchers who are much better (or worse) than both their ERA and FIP, once you adjust for quality of batted ball contact allowed. Today, let’s look at the two ERA title-qualifying AL starters who were most significantly better than both their ERA and FIP in 2014; Drew Hutchison and Jake Odorizzi. Read the rest of this entry »

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I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to understand and appreciate the potential impact of pitching coaches. I mean, I always had some suspicions, and I was one of those people really interested in Rick Peterson back in the day, but, in March of 2006, the Mariners traded Matt Thornton to the White Sox for Joe Borchard. You have to understand what Matt Thornton was at the time — though he had a big arm, he’d been infuriating with Seattle, incapable of throwing consecutive strikes. I remember being overjoyed about his departure; he’d walked one of every six batters, proving himself completely and utterly unreliable. A big arm without any control? There are a million of those. They just about never figure it out.

Instantly, Thornton figured it out. Because Don Cooper figured it out. Cooper had figured it out a couple years earlier.

 The left-hander always possessed a gifted arm, with a fastball in the mid 90s, but also has battled control issues. Thornton mentioned that Cooper noticed the flaw two years ago, while watching game film on him, at a time when the White Sox were interested in acquiring the one-time first-round draft pick from Seattle.

“I kidded him by saying, ‘You could have sent me a little note or something,'” said Thornton with a laugh. “It may have been a little different for me.”

Thornton, as a Mariner, threw 59% strikes. His first year with the White Sox, he threw 67% strikes. He’s maintained the same rate ever since, and though Thornton’s career is just about up, he’s 38 years old, and for a time he was a premier lefty reliever. He’s totaled more than $20 million in career salary. If it weren’t for Don Cooper, who knows what would’ve happened with Thornton’s professional path? Would he still be set for life? Would he be a realtor?

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This morning, Kiley McDaniel rolled out his much-anticipated FanGraphs Top 200 prospect List. If you haven’t had a chance to look through it yet, I strongly recommend that you do so. As a complement to Kiley’s rankings, I’ll be taking a quick look at how the players he ranked grade out according to KATOH — my methodology for projecting prospects’ career trajectories using solely minor league statistics.

I’ll start with a bit of a primer on the system. In sum, KATOH uses a series of statistical regressions that look at a prospect’s age and league-adjusted minor league stats. After taking all of this data into account, it spits out probabilities that a prospect will reach certain WAR thresholds through age 28. If you’re interested in a more nitty-gritty, technical explanation of how KATOH works, feel free to check out my pieces on KATOH for hitters and pitchers over at The Hardball Times. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we gave you a little bit of a tease, giving you a glimpse into the making of FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect List. This morning, however, we present the list in its entirety, including scouting grades and reports for every prospect rated as a 50 Future Value player currently in the minor leagues. As discussed in the linked introduction, some notable international players were not included on the list, but their respective statuses were discussed in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read any of the prior prospect pieces here on the site, I’d highly encourage you to read the introduction, which explains all of the terms and grades used below.

Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards our YouTube channel, which currently holds over 600 prospect videos, including all of the names near the top of this list. Players’ individual videos are linked in the profiles below as well.

And lastly, before we get to the list, one final reminder that a player’s placement in a specific order is less important than his placement within a Future Value tier. Numerical rankings can give a false impression of separation between players who are actually quite similar, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the precise placement of players within each tier. The ranking provides some additional information, but players in each grouping should be seen as more or less equivalent prospects.

If you have any questions about the list, I’ll be chatting today at noon here on the site (EDIT: here’s the chat transcript), and you can find me on Twitter at @kileymcd.

Alright, that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to this.

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Ben and Sam preview the Diamondbacks’ season with David Raposa, and Sahadev talks to AZCentral Sports Diamondbacks beat writer Nick Piecoro (at 23:26).

Episode 532
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the precarious balance for an organization between playing for the present and building for the future.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 35 min play time.)

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I’m never really sure how much to review recent articles. Last week I wrote a lot about pitch comps. Compared Henderson Alvarez‘s changeup to Felix Hernandez‘s changeup. Compared guys to certain signature pitches like Aroldis Chapman‘s fastball and Clayton Kershaw‘s slider. Wound up with this Marcus Stroman absurdity, in which Stroman is flattered by some of the strongest comps in the game. The basic idea: Stroman’s regular fastball shares the same traits with Johnny Cueto‘s. His sinker shares the same traits with Roy Halladay‘s. His curveball shares the same traits with Jose Fernandez’s. And so on. The whole idea was comparing pitches to other pitches based on average velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. It’s a little informative, and sometimes a lot of fun.

I wanted to put together this follow-up, which serves to caution you not to make too much of a good comp. There’s more that goes into a pitch than how it moves, and how fast it moves. There’s definitely more than that, when it comes to how a pitch works within a given repertoire of many pitches. And, our examples: Cole Hamels and J.A. Happ. Last week, when I ran some pitch comps, I found that Happ’s changeup compares the strongest with Hamels’ changeup. For one thing, we know Happ’s changeup isn’t as good as Hamels’ changeup. For another thing, it goes deeper than this.

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As the author has apparently had cause to mention here before, Apophatic [ap-a-FAT-ik] Theology is the method by which one endeavors to describe God by describing what God is not — the suggestion being that fewer persons and places and things belong to that latter category than the former.

Applied to something less substantial than an all-seeing and -knowing deity, however — like a human man, for example — apophasis [uh-PAW-fa-sis] naturally becomes a more time-consuming endeavor, on account of how human men are little more than walking husks of carbon consumed by vanity. Applied to the sort of very flawed human man who’s also the one composing this document, the process would become nearly infinite.

Which, what I mean to say is: among the many things I’m not, one of them is an expert in the field of college baseball. Accordingly, what follows ought not to be regarded as an attempt to analyze all collegiate baseball prospects. Instead, what I’ve done is merely to assemble — after having consumed the broadcasts of several games this weekend, read reports concerning others, and manipulated data from some of the top conferences — what I’ve done is to assemble a collection of five players whose performances this weekend were notable for one reason or another.

Here are some qualities which might contribute to a prospect’s notability for the purposes of this post:

• He appeared within Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early draft rankings; or
• He played well relative to his age/level of competition; or
• Video is available for him from this weekend; or
• He possesses some other compelling feature.

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The original graphics and text omitted the Brewers, Cardinals, and Yankees. They have since been corrected.

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed the current hashtag contest, #FaceofMLB, being run by MLB Network or the RBI Baseball advertising campaign. Social media has become an important platform that Major League Baseball teams use to communicate with their fans, especially during the off-season when there aren’t baseball games to watch or attend.  Twitter has also been touted for allowing teams or players to interact directly with fans, removing the need for an intermediary.  To measure that interaction, I gathered the timelines and favorited tweets from all 30 MLB clubs’ official Twitter accounts from November 1, 2014 until February 10, 2015 and ran an engagement analysis.

This particular analysis looks at how much effort each MLB team makes to interact with its fans, and not simply which team has the most followers. I’m looking at engagement three different ways: volume of tweets, media sharing and fan interaction. First, let’s look at volume of tweets.

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