I have a secret to tell you. Most writers don’t read the comments on their articles. I know, I know, but your well-thought-out rejoinders and witty jokes! It’s mostly a bandwidth issue: there are just so many words. But we pop in from time to time, and boy am I glad that I did this Monday, because I got a softball question to answer (get it?):
Yes! Forget CBA negotiations and lockouts and missed spring training. Forget major league baseball, too. Heck – for this article, forget baseball! Today, like the 1992 Springfield champions, we’re talking rec league softball.
The question is an apt one, and far more useful for the average slow-pitch softball player than an examination of backup sliders or novel sinkers or whatever the heck it is I’m normally writing about. It’s a simple question: how aggressive should you be on the basepaths in a world where almost no one makes outs? For the rest of this article, I’ll be applying the same math that we use for steals in the majors (that golden 75% success rate target) to decide whether to go for an extra base on a single. It could also apply to a steal, if that’s something your league does; I haven’t played in a few years, but the basepaths weren’t exactly lively when I did. For today’s article, though, we’re not going to consider the etiquette or technique, merely how to make your opportunities mathematically advantageous. Read the rest of this entry »
Some articles need an elaborate introduction, but not this one. Let’s cut straight to the chase:
That is a graph showing the number of plate appearances, by team, given to below-replacement-level hitters last season, with pitchers excluded so as to not penalize the DH-less National League. The hallmark of a good team is the strength of its roster, from stars to regulars to the benchwarmers. It’s worth noting that the Angels, with a roster characterized by a serious imbalance of talent, rank seventh by this measure. It’s also worth noting that the Rays, a club littered with usable bats and arms, rank 28th.
We can create a similar graph for pitchers, using total batters faced rather than plate appearances:
During the 2022 Hall of Fame election cycle, I introduced S-JAWS, an experimental version of my starting pitcher metric, in the service of evaluating candidates on the Golden Days and BBWAA ballots. I promised to return to the topic for a broader look at pitchers from other periods, but before doing so took a littledetour related to the representation rates and demographics of the players elected to the Hall. This larger exploration helps to illustrate the importance of looking at the situation in a new light.
Like JAWS, S-JAWS is a Hall of Fame fitness metric based upon Baseball Reference’s version of WAR, though those shouldn’t be the only factors under consideration in a Hall of Fame case, whether we’re discussing pitchers or position players. They’re nonetheless critical to my analysis, a useful first-cut mechanism to tell me, “Is this a candidate worthy of consideration for a spot on a ballot?” but as I’ve stressed through my annual series and elsewhere, other factors such as awards, postseason play, and historical importance are germane as well. Whether we’re using JAWS or S-JAWS — both of which you can see on the Starting Pitchers page at Baseball Reference — that doesn’t change. In fact, that page now defaults to sorting by S-JAWS, though you can see rankings by JAWS or any other category you choose, whether it’s WAR or innings pitched or ERA+ or some other stat.
Like JAWS, S-JAWS uses an average of a pitcher’s career and peak WAR (best seven seasons at large) for comparisons to the averages of all Hall of Fame pitchers. The idea behind S-JAWS is to reduce the skewing caused by the impact of 19th century and dead-ball era pitchers, some of whom topped 400, 500, or even 600 innings in a season on multiple occasions. The way I’ve chosen to do this is by prorating the peak-component credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings. I chose 250 because it’s a level that the current and recent BBWAA candidates rarely reached, and only one active pitcher (Justin Verlander) has, albeit by a single inning a decade ago. Over the past 22 162-game seasons — in other words, every one since 1999, save for the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign — only eight out of 44 league leaders topped 250 innings, with Hall of Famers Roy Halladay, Randy Johnson, and Mike Mussina accounting for five of those eight seasons. Only two of the past 32 league leaders topped 250 inning, Halladay in 2010 and Verlander the following year, and between them they were a grand total of five outs over the threshold. The various emphases on pitch counts, innings limits, and times through the order make it unlikely we’ll see such levels again, at least on a consistent basis, and while we can debate, lament, and discuss whether it’s worth trying to reverse that trend, that’s not my focus here. Given the current trends in the game regarding starting pitcher usage, five or 10 years from now, looking at candidates on a 200- or 225-inning basis might make more sense, but I think this is a reasonable place to start the adjustments (I’ll have a look at a 200-inning basis at some point). Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Fransoso is a great fit for a Mariners player-development machine that thrives with a process-based philosophy. Seattle boasts one of the top farm systems in the game, and Fransoso, a 31-year-old University of Maine graduate who played multiple professional seasons, is an up-and-coming hitting instructor who is fully-invested in that approach. His tutelage has thus far been at the lower rungs of the minors: He spent last season working with many of the organization’s best position-player prospects in the Arizona Complex League, and this year, he’ll be the hitting coach at low-A Modesto.
Earlier this month, Fransoso discussed the Mariners’ developmental philosophy and the some of the young hitters he’s been helping to hone.
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David Laurila: You joined the organization in November 2019. What were the conversations like during, and immediately following, the hiring process?
Michael Fransoso: “Very process-based. Andy McKay was our farm director, and everything kind of flows through him. He’s very process-based, and also big into the mental game. That was huge. I felt like all of my conversations with the hitting department aligned. Everybody was on the same page in terms of the Mariners’ process — how we want to develop hitters — and they were able to deliver that message to me in a clear way. Really, it’s about dominating the zone.”
Laurila: I think it’s safe to say that all teams want their hitters to dominate the zone. What is the actual process?
Fransoso: “When you hear ‘dominate the strike zone,’ you might think it means ‘swing at strikes and take balls,’ but it’s not that simple. We want it to be simple, but hitting isn’t simple. Dominating the zone is more of a mindset. It’s also an individual approach to manage that hitter-pitcher matchup. When you break it down, the only thing a hitter controls is whether we swing at that pitch. We don’t have control over what the pitcher throws, how hard he’s throwing, or the break. We don’t even control whether it’s a ball or strike, because that’s up to the umpire. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re still in a relatively new era of pitch design. Just this past year, we saw several successful pitchers embrace a sweeping breaking ball. Last month, Justin Choi wrote about one of those pitchers, Julio Urías, and noted that his new sweeper generates a great number of popups and lift. It’s not just Urías; in general, sweepers have a tendency to generate balls hit in the air at a rather skewed clip:
It’s strange behavior not just for a non-fastball, but for a breaking pitch especially; as you can see, sweepers have nearly double the popup rate of their fellow breaking balls:
This past Saturday, as part of the ongoing collective bargaining agreement negotiations, Major League Baseball sent its second proposal on core economic issues to the Major League Baseball Players Association. We’ve already covered how the two sides differ on pre-arbitration compensation, and examined how changing the arbitration eligibility rules would alter player salaries based on recent arbitration awards. MLB and the MLBPA have also laid out proposals regarding the competitive balance tax, proposals that would have strikingly different effects on team spending.
To compare the two approaches, I started with the actual tax regime from the previous CBA, which was in effect from 2017 through ’21. I made one modification: the abbreviated 2020 season led the league and the union to bilaterally amend the CBA to drop the competitive balance tax for that season. Payrolls also ended up being quite different than their original projections due to the 60-game slate. For the purposes of this analysis, I’ve turned each payroll into a full-season number and calculated the tax as if 2020 were a regular year (hopefully, how the new CBT handles a pandemic will not be relevant for future seasons). Read the rest of this entry »
While the end of the ownership lockout looks increasingly far away after the owners’ latest proposal to the players underwhelmed, at some point, major league baseball will return. And when it does, there’s a lot of unfinished business remaining before actual games can be played; at this point, 56% of the positive projected player WAR in 2022 is still available on the free agent market. One prominent name in that group is outfielder Seiya Suzuki. When teams can talk to and sign free agents again, the four-time Nippon Professional Baseball All-Star is expected to draw heavy interest and provide an exciting alternative to the other top outfielders remaining on the market, such as Michael Conforto and Nick Castellanos.
The Hiroshima Toyo Carp may have struggled to get out of the .500 range in recent years, but Suzuki has provided plenty of highlights and one can easily understand why a player like him would intrigue teams in the other hemisphere. Last season, his 38 home runs lapped the rest of his team (Ryosuke Kikuchi was next with 16 dingers), while his 1.073 OPS bested all of his teammates by more than 200 points; that last number also led NPB by a significant margin. Suzuki will play most of the 2022 season as a 27-year-old. Even if he’s not necessarily a significant improvement on Conforto or Castellanos, Conforto’s 2021 dimmed his profile somewhat and Castellanos is a few years older. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Craig Goldstein discuss the owners’ latest CBA counterproposal, why analyzing Competitive Balance Tax surcharges isn’t exactly riveting, where the owners and players are still furthest apart, why the deadlock is about money—and not even that much money—more so than structural change, MLB’s argument for not paying minor leaguers during spring training, ethical consumption under capitalism, daydreaming about a better-run MLB, how and why some media members misrepresent the negotiations, how and when the lockout will end, and more.
Audio intro: Ty Segall, “Play” Audio outro: The Avett Brothers, “Locked Up”
Dan Szymborski
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