FanGraphs Baseball

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Earlier in the week, Rob Manfred laid out some ideas that the sport could consider to both increase run scoring and improve the pace of play. While those seem like competing priorities, there is some evidence that both can be obtained simultaneously, though it seems unlikely that either restricting the shift or implementing a pitch clock would move the game in both directions. Instead, if MLB wants to make changes that serve both interests, they should probably pick a different approach.

If there’s been one significant change to the game over the last 30 years that has both extended the amount of standing-around-doing-nothing time during games and tipped the balance in favor of run prevention, it has been the expansion of the modern-day bullpen. Jonah Keri and Neil Paine covered this well in a piece at FiveThirtyEight last August, and because I like the graph they used in their piece, I’m going to steal it and embed it below.

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Periodically over the next few weeks, I’m going to take an early look at the six divisions in a slightly unorthodox manner. Utilizing batted ball data, we’ll go back over the 2014 season and attempt to calculate each club’s true talent level. Making adjustments for teams’ offensive and defensive K and BB rates and team defense, we’ll calculate each team’s true talent 2014 won-lost record. Then, we’ll take a look at the current Steamer projections for 2015, evaluate key player comings and goings, and determine whether clubs are constructed to be able to handle the inevitable pitfalls along the way that could render such projections irrelevant. The second installment of this series features the NL Central. Read the rest of this entry »

Have I mentioned lately how helpful the chats can be when it comes to finding things to write about? You guys don’t know how valuable you are. Dozens upon dozens of questions, if not hundreds upon hundreds, and out of those questions, longer posts can occasionally germinate. This is one of them! Because I’ve noticed a recurring kind of question about Drew Hutchison, and how much he might be capable of in 2015.

Pulling an example, from earlier January:

Comment From BJ Birdie
Drew Hutchison had a 26% k rate and 7% walk rate in second half of 2014 after changing his slider (slower, more vertical movement), what do you think his chances of a major break out are in 2015?

Dave Cameron: I think the research has shown that trying to use second half performance to predict future breakouts is a fool’s errand.

Dave’s right, of course. The smart thing to do is to always bet against a breakout, as foretold by an encouraging second half. But that’s also boring, and one figures encouraging second halves can sometimes mean something for the season to come. We’re all just here to analyze, right? So, let’s do some analysis. What on earth was the deal with Drew Hutchison’s slider?

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves & Athletics

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, November Update, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

The Braves’ off-season reload has been well-documented, trading veterans Jason Heyward, Justin Upton and Evan Gattis, along with some smaller deals. 8 of the top 13 prospects on this list have been acquired this off-season, along with their 4th best young big league asset. This targeting of high upside pitching turned a below average system into my 6th ranked system.

It’s a confident bet on the organization’s ability to develop young arms, some with specific issues that the team thinks Roger McDowell can fix along with a bet that the Braves’ pro scouting is better than the competition. Judging from the success the club has had in waiver claims and in the minor league portion of trades, that belief appears to be well-founded. We’ll likely see one or two years of the Braves not being playoff contenders, but the 2017 team is being set up to possible start another long run of success, just as the club’s new stadium is set to open.

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In September of 2013, Billy Hamilton made his MLB debut. As a pinch runner. It’s wonderful to see Billy Hamilton be a pinch runner. A few days before his 20th birthday, Tim Raines made his MLB debut as a pinch runner, and all six games in his September callup was as a pinch runner. He played 15 games the next season, 7 of which was as a pinch runner. (The season after that, 1981, is when he established his star.)

I see nothing but positive about this kind of development. The only reason we see it in September is because of the loosening of the roster rules. Now, rather than expanding the rosters during the season, or declaring a 15- or 20-man roster on a game-by-game basis, what would happen if we changed the substitution rules?

Say you bring in Hamilton to pinch-run for the catcher. At the end of the half-inning, the manager currently has two choices: (a) choose whether to bring in a new catcher and knock Hamilton out of the game or (b) double-switch Hamilton into the game, with a new catcher. In either case, the original catcher is knocked out of the game. But, what if we add a third option: (c) allow the manager to keep the original catcher while knocking Hamilton out of the game. The substitution still knocks one player out of the game, but now the manager gets to decide which of the players involved gets the boot.

And you can extend that to pinch hitting as well. And if you do that, you can also do away with the DH. You can now bring in a pinch hitter for your starting pitcher in the second inning, without knocking out the pitcher (but you do lose the PH): You simply let the PH hit, and then that guy is out of the game, while the pitcher remains. And the same applies for a defensive substitution: at the end of the half-inning, you decide which of the two players is knocked out of the game.

You still have to worry about your bench and when to allow your pitcher to bat or not. But, you now give the manager a bit more flexibility. And if he wants to have a speedster on the roster, without thinking he’s burning through two roster spots (i.e., knocking out both the original catcher and Hamilton), he’s only burning through one.

What we have here is a rule that:
a. has no roster impact (you always lose a player)
b. is unobtrusive (no one is really going to notice anything)
c. allows the DH to disappear from the rulebook
d. gives the manager great flexibility

Downside? You tell me.

UPDATE: Based on one or two comments, I don’t think I was clear enough: at the end of the half inning, the manager chooses which player he loses for the game. In the above situation, if he goes for option c, he’d knock Hamilton out for the game, and the original catcher is allowed to stay. The same applies for a fielding sub: Hamilton could have come in as a defensive sub in the 8th inning in CF. At the end of the half-inning, the manager decides whether to knock Hamilton out of the game, or knock the guy he had replaced out of the game. There is NO “re-entry”. Someone will get knocked out of the game, just like it is today.

By this point you might feel like you know enough about the Carlos Carrasco story. Carrasco is coming off what looks like a breakthrough season. It was also his age-27 season, and previously, he was mostly regarded as a bust. He first showed up in the Baseball America top-100 before 2007, when the No. 1 prospect on the list was Daisuke Matsuzaka. Carrasco was one of the headliners of the Phillies’ trade for Cliff Lee. That was before Lee got traded to the Mariners for what’s turned out to be busts. And that was before Lee got traded to the Rangers for whats’ turned out to be busts. Carrasco had a delayed emergence, is the point. He’s why it’s hard to ever give up entirely on a former top prospect.

Yet it’s worth remembering that 2014 wasn’t a total victory for Carrasco from start to finish. It was only down the stretch that he seemed to put all his pieces together in the right places, and before his final stint in the rotation, he looked like just a pretty good reliever. There was something that clicked upon Carrasco’s final return to starting, and it seems to me it bodes well for his future in the role.

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9:00	Comment From Rated Rookie

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Like it or not, this is the time of the year that we write about players like Casey Janssen. There aren’t a whole lot of alternatives. Janssen himself just signed on with the Nationals, to some degree replacing Tyler Clippard at the cost of $5 million guaranteed with a second-year mutual option. The Nationals aren’t expecting Janssen to be as good as Clippard. The Nationals shouldn’t expect Janssen to be as good as Clippard. There’s a reason why Janssen came relatively inexpensively. The year he’s coming off — it was a decidedly unusual year.

There’s a ready-made excuse: Janssen took a quick trip during the All-Star break, and he returned from said trip with food poisoning that cost him a told amount of weight and an untold amount of energy. We’ve all probably experienced food poisoning at some point, and though we’ve experienced varying degrees of severity, it makes sense that it takes a while to get back to feeling 100%. And Janssen didn’t have to get back to feeling 100% as a normal person; he had to get back to feeling good enough to succeed as a pitcher in the major leagues. Janssen’s first half was better than his second half. We don’t know how much the illness damaged Janssen’s statistics.

But the food poisoning might explain only part of the picture. He was fine early on, and he was fine toward the end. Physically, I mean. Yet the numbers are strange, given Janssen’s record. It’s easy to focus on the strikeouts. It’s not just the strikeouts.

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Yesterday, the author published a post intended for an audience of roughly zero readers and purporting to have been written with a view towards identifying the Jose Bautista of the Ivy League. In reality, what the post did was to combine my curiosity about current Ivy League hitters with principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting a hitter’s future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

What follows is a much briefer version of that same thing, except in this case for the 2014 season of the Southeastern Conference.

To review very briefly: for hitters in the low minors (i.e. a level similar to the better collegiate leagues), the metrics most predictive of major-league success (besides age) are strikeout rate (K%), isolated power (ISO), and batting average on balls in play (BABIP). What the author has done is to combine regressed versions of those three metrics into an index stat, where 100 is league average and above 100 is better than league average.

Using that methodology (about which one can read more thoroughly in yesterday’s post), here are the top-10 hitters from the 2014 SEC baseball season by what I’ll continue to temporarily call KATOH+ (in homage to Mitchell’s system). Note that xK%, xISO, and xBABIP denote expected strikeout rate, isolated power, and batting average on balls in play, respectively.

Some assorted observations:

• The relevant league averages for the SEC in 2014 were as follows: 15.1% strikeout rate, .096 isolated power, .319 BABIP. For reference: that’s a lower strikeout rate, almost identical ISO, and higher BABIP than one finds in the Ivy League.

• By this methodology, former Kentucky first baseman and recent Houston second-round draft pick A.J. Reed was obviously the best hitter in the SEC last year. Among other of his exploits, he produced the highest expected isolated-power figure last year by over 150 points. Ruthian, is a reasonable adjective with which to describe that feat. Kiley McDaniel recently ranked Reed 13th among Astros prospects.

• Among returning SEC hitters, Sikes Orvis of Ole Miss produced the top batting line (by this methodology) in 2014. Logan Nottebrok of Texas A&M also deserves some recognition — not only because he occupies a more difficult area on the defensive spectrum than Orvis, but also because his .248 BABIP likely undersold the quality of his season.