Archive for Kevin Jepsen

What you’re reading when you’re reading these words is Carson Cistulli’s most recent submission to the All-Joy Team. If you’re unfamiliar with the project, then you’ll want to read the introductory posts (yes, plural!) some time before you shuffle off this mortal coil.

In the meantime, you’ll be fine knowing that this is an attempt to compile a 25-man roster of current players most capable of providing joy to the sabermetrically inclined.

After reaching some pretty frenzied heights in our most recent episode of All-Joy Team — i.e. the hit show that everyone’s talking about — today we take a more conservative, but no less legitimate tact.

For each of the five players below (1B, CF/LF, SP, RPx2), I’ve used leaderboards to some end. Of course, as a new season unfolds, this sort of search will produce different results, will identify new players as All-Joy worthy. Is that a problem? maybe you’re asking. To which I reply: absolutely not. Like with the seasons — that, or NBC’s late-night programming — change is the rule and not the exception for the All-Joy Team.

Regard:

1B, Brian Myrow, Pittsburgh (1,3)

One Method:

1. Go to the CHONE projections here at FanGraphs.
2. Sort all hitters by wOBA.
3. Find the first player to’ve recorded exactly zero MLB plate appearances last year.
4. Ta-da!

Alternatively:

1. Go to BP’s Minor League Equivalent Average page.
2. Painstakingly, copy and paste the Peak Translation hitting leaders for each league into your off-brand spreadsheet program.
3. Sort by EqA.
4. Find the first hitter over 27.
5. Hint: It’s also the only hitter over 27.
6. Ta-da!

The player upon whom you’ll settle in either case is Brian Myrow.

True Fact: If you confront Sean Smith about Myrow’s optimistic CHONE projection, he will stab you in the eye.

LF/CF*, Chris Heisey, Cincinnati (1,4)

The Method:

1. Go to the CHONE projections here at FanGraphs.
2. Sort all hitters by WAR.
3. Find the first player to’ve recorded exactly zero MLB plate appearances last year.
4. If he’s also a former 18th round draft pick, that’s even better.
5. Ta-da!

True Fact: Heisey is currently towards the bottom of a pretty crowded outfield depth chart in Cincinnati. His fate is also largely, tragically in the hands of Dusty Baker. Translation: Pray for him.

Note: Exact position TBD.

SP, Billy Buckner, Arizona (2,4)

The Method:

1. Go to the Pitcher Leaderboards for 2009 here at FanGraphs.
2. Set the Min IP to 50 and sort by name.
3. Export both the Advanced and Basic pages to CSV.
4. Attempt to open both documents by means of your off-brand spreadsheet program.
5. Wait like eleventy minutes for said documents to open.
6. Copy the data from the Basic stats over into the Advanced one.
7. Subtract xFIP from ERA for all players.
8. Sort by difference.
9. Find the first pitcher with an xFIP under 4.00.
10. Also, he can’t have won a Cy Young before.
11. Ta-da!

Quick Quiz: Can you guess the former Cy Young-er just above Buckner in ERA-xFIP?

True Fact: Billy Buckner once played for the Royals but escaped by means of an elaborate, Shawshank Redemption-type plan.

RP, Brandon League, Toronto (2,4,5)
RP, Kevin Jepsen, LA Angels (2,4)

The Method:

1. Actually, it’s identical to the Buckner method until Step 9. You just find the first relief pitcher instead.
2. Actually, Jepsen and League have basically the same difference (around 1.40).
3. Ta-da?

True Facts: League’s splitter was the toughest pitch to hit in 2009. Also, he was hand-picked by Seattle GM Jack Zduriencik, who is never wrong. Kevin Jepsen, for his part, throws what I’m prepared to call a “dazzling” cut fastball. Also, he made Jeter look silly in last year’s ALCS.

Wow. (Or as the young women of the Greater Los Angeles area might say: Wowskis.) That was a great baseball game.

One day after I wrote about the rather predictable nature of Game One, this happened:

Some facts you might like to know about the game in question:

* The average Leverage Index (aLI) was 2.07. That’s higher than the Game 163 I used last time as, like, the platonic ideal of excitement. (It occurs to me now — as it should’ve done already — that an extra inning game will almost by definition feature more high-leverage situations. So I ask myself: Are extra inning games better than nine inning ones? Not as a rule. I mean, I’ve definitely seen some dull extra inning games.)

* Alex Rodriguez recorded both the highest and lowest single WPA plays of the evening. His home run off Angels reliever Brian Fuentes in the bottom of the 11th inning was worth .429 WPA. In the very next inning, he recorded a -.165 WPA when he flew out to center off Ervin Santana with two out and the bases loaded.

* Mariano Rivera recorded the highest total WPA: a mark of .393 in 2.1 innings of excellent high-leverage work.

On Kevin Jepsen

I’ve been meaning to set aside some space for Jepsen in this Angels playoff coverage, but’ve failed to do so. Well, some of the things he did in last night’s game made it hard to ignore him any longer.

For example, you might remember that, after Jepsen’s first offering to Jeter in the eighth inning, he (i.e. Jeter) stepped back from the plate, eyes wide and smiling a bit, and said something along the lines of, “Wow.” That pitch was Jepsen’s cutter — his only one of the night, actually. But Jepsen has thrown it about 25% of the time this year and recorded a 1.48 wCT/C on it. It’s been his main complement to the four-seam fastball.

After the cutter, two such four-seamers followed. They were both balls, but both featured about 13.5 inches of upward movement, a little over four inches of horizontal movement (towards Jeter), and were thrown at 96.6 and 96.5 mph, respectively. Not bad.

The last two pitches were excellent. The first (and fourth of the PA) was a fastball very similar to the two that preceded it, except basically right over the plate. It had a little less vertical movement (12.5 inches) than the two before it, a little more tail (-5.2 inches), and came in at 98.5 mph. Jeter swung and missed.

Finally, with the count at 2-2, Jepsen threw a slider. A nasty one. And even though, like many sliders, this one registered what seems like little movement (2.1 inches of x-movement and 1.7 inches z-movement), it makes more sense to look at pitches like these in context, I think. In particular, it makes sense to look at the break of a pitch as compared to its pitcher’s fastball.

In this case, we know the break of the fastball Jepsen had just thrown (12.5 x-inches, -5.2 z-inches). If we take the absolute value of (slider x-movement minus fastball x-movement) and also the absolute value of (slider z-movement minus fastball z-movement), we get something we can call Total Movement Delta (TMD). In this case the TMD of Jepsen’s slider to Jeter as compared to the fastball that immediately preceded it was 18.2 inches — for a pitch that was recorded at 89.9 mph by GameDay. By comparison, among the pitchers who threw at least 50 IP this year and threw the slider at least 2% of the time, the highest average velocity of said pitch was 90.0 mph even, recorded by Angel Guzman. Next on the list is Brandon Lyon at 89.2 mph. So Jepsen’s was up there, is the point.

And the larger point is, of course, is that Jepsen threw a pitch that was both (a) real fast and (b) had a ton of movement. That Jeter swung and missed is hardly surprising.

Prospect ranking season is just around the corner. In anticipation of that, we present an intro series looking at some of the players who deserve mentioning but probably will not be appearing on their teams’ Top 10 lists. The popular series is back for a second year.

The Graduate: Kevin Jepsen, RHP
Despite being a rookie in ’09, Jepsen was one of the Angels’ best relievers – especially with the loss of veteran set-up man Scot Shields to injury. Jepsen was a little too hittable with 63 hits allowed in 54.2 innings, but he maintained solid walk and strikeout rates: 3.13 BB/9 and 7.90 K/9. He kept a lot of balls out of the air with a 57.1% ground-ball rate. Jepsen’s ERA of 4.94 was misleading; his FIP was just 2.86.

The Riser: Chris Pettit, OF
We could talk about a number of prospects here, including shortstop Rolando Gomez and pitcher Ryan Chaffee, but let’s focus on the more MLB-ready player: outfielder Pettit. He doesn’t have a huge ceiling but the 25 year old has been a consistently-good hitter, save for an injury-marred 2008 season. In 2009 at triple-A, Pettit hit .321/.383/.482 with 30 doubles in 371 at-bats. His usually-solid walk rate took a hit down to 7.7% but he kept the strikeouts in check: 16.7%. Pettit doesn’t have a huge ceiling but should be an excellent fourth outfielder (along the lines of the Cubs’ Reed Johnson) in an organization that has aging starting outfielders who could need plenty of rest.

The Tumbler: Mason Tobin, RHP
It wasn’t really Tobin’s fault that he stumbled in 2009, thankfully one of few top-rated prospects to do so. The talented right-hander has been inundated with injury problems since turning pro and has appeared in just 11 games in the past two seasons. Tobin, 22, has solid stuff, including a low-90s fastball, slider and changeup, and the Angels organization was converting him from starter to reliever when his latest DL stint occurred.

The ’10 Sleeper: Manuarys Correa, RHP
Correa’s numbers were not as flashy as some of his teammates (Chaffee, Tyler Chatwood) but he maintains a high ceiling thanks to a repertoire that includes a 90-93 mph fastball, plus slider and changeup. Just 20 years old, Correa allowed 176 hits in 163 innings of work in low-A. He showed good control with a walk rate of 2.37 BB/9 but his strikeout rate was puzzling (given his stuff) at just 3.81 K/9. Correa had nice numbers against southpaws with a .247 average allowed and a ground-ball rate of 50.7%. The Dominican Republic native just needs experience and time to learn the nuances of pitching to professional hitters.

Bonus: P.J. Phillips, 2B/CF
Listed as the sleeper in the ’08 review series, I had high hopes for Phillips from the time the Angels nabbed him in the second round of the 2005 draft. Unfortunately, the athletic brother of Brandon Phillips just has not been able to make the necessary adjustments against professional pitchers. His chronically-low on-base percentage and hack-tastic ways negate most of the value in his bat. Not even a repeat season in the hitters’ haven known as Rancho Cucamonga could light a fire under this faltering prospect.