You’ll Never Guess What’s Happening in Spring Training
Everyone knows not to make too much of spring-training numbers. This is a time for everyone to be optimistic. Good results are signs of improvement; bad results are to be dismissed because, come on, the games don’t even count. No one takes this time of year too seriously. Not even the players! But especially the fans. Look around. The current league leader in batting average is Mike Freeman. The current league leader in OPS is Billy McKinney. The current co-league leaders in at-bats are Raimel Tapia and Sam Travis. The Marlins, at 7-4, have a better record than the Nationals and the Dodgers. This is all practice. It’s practice, with the pointless quirk of keeping score.
But a funny thing happens when you have enough high-level baseball players playing enough practice games. As noisy as all the individual numbers are, when the sample size gets large, you can start to see real signal. Even in spring training, baseball has a way of finding its level — spring numbers often predict what we’ll see league-wide the subsequent summer. As such, I’ve gone in to investigate, because I’m impatient. This year’s spring training is roughly 40% complete. The league is past 15,000 total plate appearances. What might we be able to tell about the 2018 regular season? The answers might surprise you. (They will not surprise you.)
I’ve only put this together now because, well, the data is out there, and I wanted to play with it. Of course it would be more useful to do this in three weeks. It’s always better to wait for more information. I didn’t wait. That introduces some extra uncertainty, but we can just keep that in mind. This is just taking a glance. Already, the data backs up what we would’ve imagined would be the case.
There are a bunch of images to follow, stretching from 2006 – 2018 for spring training, and from 2006 – 2017 for the regular season. These are plots of league-wide rates, and, for the regular-season lines, I’ve included only non-pitchers, since pitchers mostly don’t bat in the spring. To kick things off, here’s a look at walk rates.
The thing you’ll notice in so many of these plots is how the two lines mirror one another. That’s important; if they didn’t mirror one another, there wouldn’t be a point to investigating spring-training results in the first place. The whole idea is that spring, on the league scale, can be predictive. So what do we have here? Right now, there’s a spring walk rate of 9.1%, which is the highest in the sample. It’s up from last spring’s 8.4%, which was up from the previous spring’s 8.0%. Because it’s still early, conventional wisdom suggests the pitchers might be rusty. Rusty pitchers might walk more batters. So, yeah, that’s of course one consideration, but what this suggests is that regular-season walk rate could rise again. Last year’s rate was the highest it had been since 2010.
Moving on! Now the same plot, but for strikeouts.
Have I already told you how unsurprising the numbers look? The numbers I found are unsurprising. Strikeout rates continue to rise, right? So far this spring, compared to last spring, the strikeout rate is up an entire percentage point. Last spring, compared to the previous spring, the strikeout rate was also up nearly an entire percentage point. This is the counterargument to the idea of pitchers being rusty — if they’re rusty, well, they’re still getting their whiffs. I don’t know what’s supposed to slow down the strikeout trend. We’ve been given zero reason to believe the trend was about to stop. Indeed, this spring so far suggests we’re in for yet another strikeout hike. And, well, why wouldn’t we be? That’s modern-day baseball.
The big thing you might be wondering about is the home run. I’ve calculated the rate of home runs on contact. Is there any hint of the home run flattening out, or going back down? Well, no, don’t be silly. The home run is back, and then some!
You can see the explosion around 2015. That’s been exhaustively documented, and one thing to keep in mind is that the home run took off around midseason 2015, so, in spring training, they were still playing under, shall we say, the previous conditions. The spring rate reached a new high in 2016, and then it edged slightly forward again in 2017 (not seen in the plot because of rounding). As for 2018? We’ve seen a massive spike. Technically, this rate is up only half of one percentage point, but, to put it differently, the spring homer rate in 2018 is up from the spring homer rate in 2017 by 11%. An 11% increase in home runs! Once again, I don’t know why anyone would expect the league-wide homer rate to stop increasing. That would probably require a change to the ball, and no changes, at least publicly, have been implemented. The earliest possible sign is that the league will again establish a new home-run record.
This is all kind of interesting, because it might provide a window into the future. It’s also kind of not interesting, because we sort of assumed the future already. Walks up, strikeouts up, home runs up. It’s like saying the planet is going to get warmer. Nothing at all ground-breaking; it’s just fun to see how even random spring-training rosters can foreshadow the regular season. While I’m here, I’d like to show you three more plots. These are maybe less meaningful, but I still find them sufficiently notable for inclusion. This first one is annoying, but bear with me. I can’t find anywhere that has basic spring-training batted-ball rates. All they have at MLB.com are ground outs, and air outs. This works only as a half-decent proxy, but anyhow, observe the ratio of outs on the ground to outs in the air.
I’m operating under the assumption that out rates themselves haven’t budged too much, whether a ball be on the ground or in the air. Spring-training BABIP — and, for that matter, regular-season BABIP — have hardly moved. So, the early sign here? More air balls this spring. We’ve been waiting to see a fly-ball increase, since people started talking about swing changes. There’s the faint whisper of something happening. To be monitored. Right. How about sac bunts?
You knew this, but the sac bunt is dying. It’s not dying among pitchers, because pitchers can’t hit, but among non-pitchers, hardly anyone bunts anymore, unless it’s for a single. Compared to 2016, the sac-bunt rate last spring was down 30%. And, compared to 2017, the sac-bunt rate this spring is down 50%. This isn’t just about sabermetrics pointing out how bunts are often wasteful. Hitting is harder than ever before, and making contact is harder than ever before, and more batters are dangerous now than ever before. Just about everyone in baseball is capable of hitting at least ten homers a season. And there are also fewer bunt opportunities in the first place. The sac bunt is dying for a variety of reasons. But it is surely approaching its death, among hitters who are able to hit.
At last, there’s the matter of hit batsmen.
I have no idea what to do with this. Maybe it’s all just noise. Maybe it’s a reflection of league-wide pitcher rust. But right now, this spring, the hit-batter rate is up 32%. Last spring, there were 396 hit batters. This spring, we’re on pace for 524. I have no idea why this would skyrocket, but if it does skyrocket, in the regular season, don’t say you weren’t warned. Spring training was right there, and it was trying to send you a message.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Increased velocity?
Drat, wrong again. Yet still exceeded expectations, Jeff.
My guess with the hit batsmen is that it is still early in Spring Training and teams thus far have been rolling out more pitchers with control issues. Once those guys start heading to minor league camps and ML players get more innings, that rate should drop.
I also wonder if pitchers also have a reduced feel earlier on which results in more HBP than normal. I definitely don’t want to see that kind of spike in HBP in the regular season!
To test this, It would be interesting to look at the leaderboard of pitchers who have committed the most HBP so far this spring. And maybe do an x-y plot of pitchers with the most HBP vs how many major league IP they had in 2017. But I’m not having much luck finding that data. It looks like it should be in Baseball Savant, but I’m getting back null results. Then again, I’ve never looked for SP results in Baseball Savant prior to this. Is there something obvious I’m doing wrong?
My first thought regarding increased HBP was that there could be a newer emphasis on pitching inside and reclaiming the inner corner.
My thought too. If you want to combat a larger home run trend, reclaiming the inside corner with velocity is the way to go. Of course you are going to nail a few batters, but that might not necessarily be a bad thing for pitchers. As old school as it is, making a hitter uncomfortable in the box is still an effective strategy.
Cactus league HR look to be down from last year. That’s the league where the ball is more important as Arizona has high altitude and low humidity and their results may be more predictive
Also, presumably MLB teams will store ball in air conditioned rooms in season. That will have an effect
Temps in the Phoenix area have been incredibly cold so far, daytime temps for the first couple weeks of Spring Training were in the low 60s, high 50s. Last year it was much much warmer.
I, in fact, was able to guess what was happening in spring training. Do i get a prize or something?
y axis on the bb% graph is really confusing really confusing
Dumb mistake. Fixed!
What about catcher interference? I read all the way to the end and where is the catcher interference? I desire a refund.
Are stolen base rates as predictive? What are they showing?
The last one is easy. When guys keep getting bigger, they are easier to hit.
Could pitchers be experimenting with harder or bendier (i.e. less controllable) pitches further inside this Spring? That might be one way to try to combat the home run surge, seeing as climbing the ladder hasn’t really worked.
Three true outcomes for the win!
At this rate defensive skill will have a value of zero before very long.
Go ahead and roll out your Willie Calhouns and your Rhys Hoskinses in LF, everyone!
And Matt Kemps!
Time to roll out an OF of Adam Jones, Andrew McCutchen and JD Martinez! Put Matt Kemp on your bench as the 4th OF! Grab yourself a Rougned Odor and go ahead and put Johnathon Villar out there at SS!
“Spring training was right there, and it was trying to send you a message.”
Whoa. Meta.
That moose signed w/ the royals for a 6.5 miles guarantee for a year (a big year 2 option at 15 mil)
They’re gonna walk or homer anyway, if ya can’t strike em out, throw at em.
great article.
as far as the causality wall goes, i’d throw “increasing length of at bats” and “decreasing fastball ratio” at it and see if they stick.
increasing length of at-bats contributes to bb%, k% and maybe a little rising hr%, since hitters are waiting for driveable pitches in the air.
decreasing fastball ratio helps with k%, increased bb% due to lower strike% for non-fastballs, and slight homer% since breaking pitches are less often hit, but if hit have more hr%.
in other words, knowing pitch per pa and pitch mix trends would help shed light on some portion of this.
Is something like an increase in the walk rate really that meaningful? I mean, we’re talking about less than one more walk per 100 PAs.
Please can we have naive-Bayes confidence intervals on every value on Fangraphs from any binomial distribution?
Hi there, I just joined as a member and though I love the content on Fangraphs, I find the scaling of these graphs to be visually dishonest/deceptive. For example, the strikeout rate graph makes it look like Ks have increased by 4 times or 400% when it’s only increased by 5%. I’d be much happier if they were all scaled to 0 instead of some arbitrary range that make the changes seem more extreme than they actually are. We can all do math, don’t try to trick us.
Are you missing a data point in the “Homers on Contact” graph? At 2013 the spring training numbers go up, but in the regular season line there is a perfectly straight line going from the 2012 point to the 2014 point.
“But right now, this spring, the hit-batter rate is up 32%”
…I had no idea Aaron Loup had even pitched that many innings this spring