FanGraphs Baseball

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’ve got Coors Field on the mind. And while usually I’m able to flit from one subject to another — probably too easily, to be honest — when I think about Coors, it tends to stick, because the Rockies are one of baseball’s greatest experiments and we still aren’t quite sure what to make of them or what to make of baseball at altitude. The game that’s played within Coors Field is recognizably baseball, of that there’s no question, but it’s the oddest brand of baseball that exists in the major leagues, so it’s fascinating to consider as many angles as is possible. Just what is it really like to play there?

For this post, I want to examine pitch selection. And not just for pitch-selection’s sake; this should, in theory, reflect what effects people think Coors has on pitching. There’s a thought out there that Coors is bad news for breaking balls. What would we expect, then? A reduction in breaking-ball rate in Colorado, because teams and pitchers aren’t idiots. Let’s say Pitcher B has an optimal mix of 60% fastballs, 20% breaking balls, and 20% offspeed pitches. Let’s say he senses that he doesn’t have a good breaking pitch on a particular day. Then we might expect, I don’t know, 65% fastballs, 10% breaking balls, and 25% offspeed pitches. That’s the theory. So what do we see in Colorado? That’s what these big giant tables are for.

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Blackouts suck. We don’t like them. This isn’t news. What is news is that Major League Baseball is driving hard to get the ball rolling on lifting blackouts, potentially for good. Yesterday, Maury Brown laid out an idea for this over at Forbes. And as it turns out, the league is trying to execute just such a plan.

The plan, in case you don’t feel like clicking both links, involve the league getting its biggest media partner, FOX, on board with streaming games. Brown notes that 37 percent of all games last year were shown via FOX regional sports networks (or RSNs). That’s a pretty huge chunk. Comcast checks in next at 17 percent. That gets you up to 54 percent, and then it is drips and drabs from there. While a big network like FOX might be able to unilaterally make these moves, there is going to be a couple of sticking points. The first, as Brown notes, is who exactly gets to stream these games? Obviously MLB wants the exclusive rights, since they have a decade-old product that people know and love. FOX doesn’t appear to see it that way, and it’s hard to blame them. That really rolls up into a second sticking point, which is cost.

In thinking about this the other day, I postulated on Twitter about the creation of a Super Premium MLB.tv package. The theory goes, essentially, that you would add to the normal $130 cost of an MLB.tv Premium account in order to get a service that would solve your blackout problems.

The Plan

Each cable company charges a carriage fee for carrying it. We know that last year, NESN — which is owned jointly by the owners of the Boston Red Sox and Bruins (though mostly by the Red Sox) — charged as much as $4.22 for its carriage fee. As a long-running RSN, with a very dedicated fan base, that is probably close to the top of the food chain. ESPN, which charges the largest carriage fee, charges less than two dollars more than that.

Continuing to use NESN as the example, when we multiply that over 12 months — 12 rather than six since NESN charges the carriage fee every month and not just during baseball season — that comes out to a high end of $50.64. Let’s call it $50 for simplicity sake. So, the plan would be to say to MLB.tv subscribers who live in the Red Sox territory, and can presumably get NESN as part of their basic cable package, that if you want a version of MLB.tv with no Red Sox games blacked out, you can get that for $180. During commercials, instead of the six or seven MLB.tv ads you normally get ’til you have them memorized, you would get the normal NESN ads, with the MLB.tv ads spliced in every now and then in place of a NESN house ad (which, as any Red Sox fan will tell you, are plentiful).

Doing it this way satisfies a number of things. First, NESN doesn’t need to lose money on carriage fees. That’s huge, since carriage fees are essentially the way these networks stay in business. Second, it wouldn’t hurt ad rates during games — the customer base would be the same, they’d just be watching on different mediums. Theoretically, that shouldn’t change much, except maybe ads with small words in them would need to be rethought if they want to impact customers watching on smaller mobile devices. Not a huge deal, as advertisers should already be taking this sort of scale into account. It would also allow MLB.tv to recover a modicum of revenue from the few ads that they sell each season (not that they need that money, or can’t find a way to get it in some other fashion).

The best-case scenario for the RSNs, of course, would be to have that loyal consumer who not only buys the super-premium MLB.tv package, but also doesn’t cancel their cable package. Going back to NESN, they show a lot more than Red Sox games. In fact, the actual Red Sox games only make up a tiny portion of their programming each year. Less than half, certainly. They also show Bruins games, Hockey East college hockey games, and a number of other live sporting events, as well as long-running shows like Charlie Moore Outdoors. So, there is a chance that a lot of consumers, even if given the option to purchase this super premium MLB.tv package and get rid of cable, wouldn’t actually get rid of cable. That’d be sweet, because then the RSN would be double dipping the carriage fee, and could maintain their customer base for ads that run during all the non-Red Sox game-times. And if the NHL or NBA worked out similar deals, RSNs could be triple or even quadruple dipping, depending on the teams that play on that particular RSN.

Drawbacks

There are a number of drawbacks. The first is the aforementioned ad rates. In talking to Nathaniel Grow, our resident sports business expert, he mentioned that the RSNs probably aren’t keen on being able to say that their customer base has shrunken dramatically for all those times when a live baseball game isn’t being played. So that’d be an issue, and the number one reason why the cable companies or RSNs might force you to keep your cable package as a part of any agreement between MLB and FOX. That would not alleviate the problem for people who are blacked out of a specific team without having the opportunity to watch them on their local cable package.

Another drawback is that this plan is, as Homer Simpson would say, needlessly complicated from MLB and MLB Advanced Media’s perspective. While it might be peachy keen for the RSNs to sit back and collect stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks, MLB would be put in the position of expending energy on a product that sees the revenue split between it and its partners. And what of the total cost? Sure, Red Sox fans could justifiable have to pay an extra $50, but what about Astros fans, whose RSN hasn’t been able to get on the air and whose viewership is going to be much lower given all the tanking the Astros have done the last few years. In other words, should the package cost a different amount for each team? Or should they set a price based on the most expensive market and go from there? There’s no easy answer, and there would undoubtedly be some headache-inducing accounting issues, at the very least. For RSNs that are owned by a team, it wouldn’t be as big of an issue, since the league already has relationships with the teams, but it would still require a lot of logistical thinking.

Still another issue is for the fans with overlap, be it geographic or otherwise. A couple of examples. Say you live in New York, and are accustomed to watching the Mets and Yankees on TV. Now under this plan, if you want stream both blackout free, you can, but you would be in the position of having to buy a super-super-premium package, where you pay to eliminate blackout restirctions for both teams. Is that fair? Or, say you live in the Chicago area, and you as a Cubs fan married a White Sox fan. Do you want to pay for the privilege to stream both teams blackout free? Perhaps there is a compromise, but that seems unlikely.

The extreme version of this, of course, is areas such as Las Vegas and Iowa, where as many as six teams are blacked out. Do you pay to alleviate all six blackout restrictions, in a package that could end up being close to $400, or do you simply pick the one team you want to see and live with the blackouts in other areas? That is, of course, if MLB allows such options. Which, as we mentioned above, just might not be in the cards.

…

Baseball fans don’t like blackouts, or anything else that restricts their access to the game, and these sometimes artificial restrictions are as old as the game itself. That is unfortunate. What is encouraging though is that the league is working on the problem, and has generally been at the forefront of digital streaming in sports — so much so that their technology is used as the “backbone” when companies and leagues make streaming products. So while we may have to pay for the privilege, hopefully the blackout restrictions will be solved soon, say the next five-10 years. Whether it’s a super premium package like what I have suggested here or something else, the initial solution probably will be messy. There are a lot of cable companies involved and a lot of money at stake, and so a clean solution seems unlikely right from the jump. And of course, none of this addresses what is the ultimate problem — the territory rights and how they can be resolved. But that is for another day. This reported agreement between MLB and FOX is a nice first step. Hopefully we’ll see more steps soon.

Dayan Viciedo was supposed to be good. In retrospect, we probably should have known better. He now finds himself a free agent, and the question is whether or not there is a team for him.

In his initial signing story back in 2008, there is a lot of excitement. It is intimated that the South Siders traded Nick Swisher and Javier Vazquez in order to make room for Viciedo. That seems like a stretch, but we can say that the team did some planning in order to get them there. Just before the chess moves are mentioned, the article also casually mentions — in the seventh paragraph — that the White Sox would like him “drop some weight.” He was already at 246 lbs., and they wanted him to get down to 230.

Despite the risks (like that he swings at everything), which Baseball America noted in their 2009 capsule on him, his debut was hotly anticipated. As Marc Hulet detailed in that September, 2009 piece I just linked to, Viciedo had hype. As a 20-year-old Cuban refugee playing his first ball stateside in Double-A, you can see why. Alas, he didn’t do much in that 2009 season. In 2010 though, he stepped up his slugging, from .391 in Double-A in 2009 to .493 in 2010 in Triple-A. Not a bad jump, and ever since his full-season debut in 2012, he’s been able to bop. Not at an elite level, but at an above-league average level:

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Did you know the Rockies tend to put up big home and road splits? Of course you did. The Rockies are the very most important example of why park effects matter. Also, the most obvious. Over the past decade, the Rockies rank first in baseball in total runs scored at home, by more than 200. Over the same period, the Rockies rank last in baseball in total runs scored away from home, by more than 100. Hitting in Coors is easy! Hitting not in Coors is hard. Or so the Rockies make it look, at least.

Coors Field just does strange things to baseball. It’s not an unsolvable problem, and it might not necessarily be a problem, but, it’s something. Again, over a decade, the Rockies rank 14th in winning percentage at home. Meanwhile, they rank 28th in winning percentage on the road. If you observe the following table, you’ll note that the Rockies are exceptional in this way. They experience either a home-field advantage, a road-field disadvantage, or both.

It’s the Rockies, then the Pirates, some distance away. It’s pretty obvious the Rockies haven’t been as comfortable on the road as they have been in Colorado. Every team plays worse in other places, but the Rockies perform especially so, and because this is so consistent year to year, that causes people to theorize. Everyone wants to figure out why the Rockies have been so lousy away from home. Answer that, and maybe one could find a solution.

I remember reading, many many years ago, about a proposed Coors Field hangover. This was supposed to affect the bats, and the idea was that, upon reaching sea level, Rockies hitters would have to get re-accustomed to seeing pitches break normally. That is, in Colorado, pitches don’t move like they do in other places, and Rockies players get used to that. So when they go on the road, normal movement looks like abnormal movement, and then it takes time to adjust. Time that the Rockies don’t always have. I remember thinking the evidence was pretty compelling. Unfortunately I don’t have a link, but what I do have is a re-examination. I wanted to look at this for myself. Have Rockies hitters just taken a few days to get used to conventional pitching on road trips?

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Washington.

Batters
On multiple occasions over the course of Woody Allen’s 1999 film Sweet and Lowdown, jazz guitarist Emmet Ray (played by Sean Penn) announces that he’s the best in the world “except [for] this gypsy in France” (understood to be Django Reinhardt). It’s not particularly daring to suggest that, likewise, Andrew McCutchen is the best non-pitcher in baseball — except for this center fielder in Los Angeles. McCutchen and Mike Trout possess largely similar skill sets; it’s just, in most cases, Trout possesses them a little harder. Even still, McCutchen’s projection (659 PA, 6.3 WAR) is among the best published so far in this series.

Of some interest is ZiPS’ forecast for recent Korean signing Jung-ho Kang (502 PA, 1.5 WAR), which is slightly (although not substantively) less strong than incumbent Jordy Mercer’s projection (504 PA, 1.9 WAR) for 2015. A potential area of concern for Kang appears to be his ability to make contact. To wit: ZiPS projects Pedro Alvarez to post a 30.0% strikeout rate; Kang, a slightly higher 30.5% mark.

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To be honest, this might be a post I’ve already written before. It feels like that sort of thing. But I’ve got pitch-framing on my mind, again, and even if I have done this before, at least now we’ve got more data. Why not revisit something whenever you have more data?

When we talk about framing, so often the focus is on the catchers. This is appropriate because it’s the catchers who are doing the framing — sometimes with a little assistance from other sources. But it’s the pitchers who are actually affected, because it’s the pitchers throwing the balls, and the catchers are involved only after the rest of the play has been carried out. It’s not entirely clear how pitchers are impacted by their receivers. We have estimates, we have some pretty good ideas, but the reality is complex. In this post, I try to examine something simple: What happens when a pitcher goes from better receiving to worse receiving? What happens when a pitcher goes from worse receiving to better receiving? As is literally always the case when I run an investigation, there are better and more thorough ways to do this, but I’m woefully limited by my own lack of ability, and if I don’t have the quick-and-easy stabs, I don’t have anything.

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Ben and Sam talk to FanGraphs Lead Prospect Analyst Kiley McDaniel about Yoan Moncada, Cuban talent, and teams manipulating prospect rankings.

By request:

@based_ball Hey Jeff, because you’re great at this stuff, can you write an article GIFing all of Ben Revere’s outfield assists? It’d be fun!

— David Shemie (@dshemie8) January 28, 2015

Ben Revere has 19 career outfield assists. Please understand what you’re getting into: this post is going to have .gifs, so many .gifs. Probably too many .gifs. It was absolutely too many .gifs for me to try to make in a morning, with a fussy and very particular MLB.tv. Also, many of the .gifs are flat-out bad, either because the streaming was going poorly, or because the play was too long and I had to take some shortcuts. Close this window right now if you’re not into what’s coming. If you haven’t closed the window yet, hi there. These are Ben Revere’s 19 outfield assists.

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