Walk around AT&T Park and ask people inside and outside of the organization what’s wrong with Matt Cain and you’ll get a different answer every time:
“He’s tipping his pitches from the stretch.”
“It’s just the Cardinals, that’s all.”
“The Cardinals got our signs from Bengie Molina.”
“It’s his command.”
It’s worth trying each pair of pants on, but there’s also one person who might have special insight on this matter. Matt Cain.
Welcome to the second edition of The Fortnight. Read here for our initial post, and here for the explanation of our depth charts and standings pages, which fuel The Fortnight in its utmost.
This week, I thought we’d take a look at the teams whose projected full-season run differential has changed the most since we last left off. Stats for this edition run from May 21 through the games on June 2.
“I’m probably leading the league in bad contact, too.” — Marco Scutaro
We talked for a few minutes, Marco Scutaro and I, about hitting and contact before a game a few weeks back. When I told him he’s leading the league in contact rate since 2010, he offered the response above with a slight frown and a flick of the bat. He swung a bat the whole time we talked, even. But his voice never really wavered — it never betrayed either the physical effort he was putting into choosing his bat for the day or the matter-of-fact humor that accompanied his answers.
In Sports Illustrated’s 2013 baseball preview, Tom Verducci wrote a great profile of the Tampa Bay Rays and their approach to optimizing the performance of their pitching staff.
One topic that was especially interesting to me was the apparent importance the Rays place on the 1-1 count. Verducci recounts how pitching coach Jim Hickey described the organization’s focus on getting opposing batters into 1-2 counts:
The Rays believe no pitch changes the course of that at bat more than the 1-and-1 delivery. “It’s almost a 200-point swing in on-base percentage with one ball and two strikes as opposed to two balls and one strike,” Hickey told the pitchers.
The hard-throwing, 24-year-old Matt Harvey has quickly become a must watch when he toes the rubber for the Mets. Called up in late July of last year, Harvey and his blistering fastball (94.6 average velocity) currently sport a 31.3% strikeout rate and an ERA- of 25 — no, not 75, 25. In 2013, Harvey has made four starts, lasting at least seven innings in each appearance. He has only allowed one home run and a paltry 10 hits in 29 innings.
Harvey does feature a number of pitches, but he’s heavily reliant on his four-seam fastball, throwing that pitch 60% of the time. That ranks him fifth among all qualified pitchers in 2013. And that fastball has been deadly.
According to the PITCHf/x leader boards at Baseball Prospectus (powered by Brooks Baseball), Harvey has induced a .042 ISO (2nd best) and a .167 BA (3rd best) against when using his fastball. David Golebiewski from Baseball Analytics recently wrote about Harvey’s ability to win with the high fastball. The numbers were eye-popping. Harvey so far this year has induced whiffs on high fastballs 48.4% of the time, and he’s throwing upstairs over 50% of the time.
I was curious how this compared to others this year and in previous years. So I did some digging.
Sometimes players are described as “bad-ball hitters.” Or, sometimes players will be described as having strike zones that range from the head to their heels. Vladimir Guerrero used to own these tags, and once upon a time, so did Nomar Garciaparra. It is possible to succeed while swinging at everything, and nobody personifies that today better than do Robinson Cano and Pablo Sandoval.
A lot of position players have had torrid starts to the season. Justin Upton and Michael Morse have each hit six homers. Chris Davis is slugging 1.100. Adam Jones already has 18 hits. Coco Crisp has an eight-game hitting streak. But none of the hot starts this month are even in the range of Barry Bonds’ April of 2004.
In April, 2004, Bonds put up just some ridiculous numbers. You already knew that, of course. But let’s take a look back, shall we? That April, he drew 39 walks. That puts him in some rare company, as only eight other players in history have done that — Max Bishop, Jack Clark, Roy Cullenbine, Lou Gehrig, Ralph Kiner, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. In fact, April ’04 was the third time Bonds had done it, and he would do it another two times in ’04, putting him at five times overall — two more than Ted Williams.
To put it in further context, since 1947, there have been 2,159 players who have qualified for the batting title who have walked fewer than 39 times for the entire season. Just last season, there were 37 such players. Even if you took Bonds’ intentional walks out of the debate, Bonds walked 21 times of his own accord during the month, and there have been 413 players who have qualified for the batting title since 1947 who have walked 20 or less times in a season. Last season, there were two such players — Delmon Young and Alexei Ramirez.
Sometimes, a little comment can send you down a wormhole. Brandon Crawford is a glovely young man, and we talked about platoon splits — he doesn’t remember having trouble with lefties in the minors — and a few other topics, but it was one thing he said about his defense that popped.
If you hadn’t noticed, Major League teams have decided that the best way to use their current financial windfall is to keep their best players for essentially their entire careers. It wasn’t long ago that single team lifers like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were the outliers, but now, it is becoming unusual for an elite player to not sign a mega-contract with his original franchise. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen the following players commit to spending the great majority of their careers with just one Major League team:
Joe Mauer, Joey Votto, Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki, Evan Longoria, Felix Hernandez, Matt Kemp, David Wright, Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, Yadier Molina, Ryan Zimmerman, Justin Verlander, Adam Wainwright, and now Buster Posey.
Maybe not all of these players will stay with their current teams for the duration of these contracts, and a few might end up going elsewhere after these deals expire to squeeze an extra year or two out of the end of their careers. These aren’t necessarily contracts “for life”, but they do cover enough of the prime years of the game’s best players that it ensures that their legacy will be forever tied to one franchise. This represents a significant shift for Major League Baseball since free agency began.
Great players still change teams, of course. Albert Pujols left the Cardinals. Prince Fielder left the Brewers. David Price is almost certainly going to leave the Rays. Robinson Cano might leave the Yankees, though I’ll believe that when I see it. It isn’t true that every great player now retires with the team that brought him to the Majors. But there’s no question that MLB teams are moving to make that the more common occurrence, and fewer stars are waiting to get to free agency before cashing in on massive paychecks.
Unless you make it a habit to read FanGraphs only on Fridays (and if you do, what’s up with that?), you’ve likely read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. So you know the score. We’re taking a look at team financial health as we head into the 2013 season. You also the know which teams are in the top tier, because you’re smart and can figure that out for yourself. But we’ve come this far, so we’re going to complete the exercise. We’re nothing if not true to our word.
The top tier teams, in alphabetical order by team name.
Due to an unfortunate data error, the numbers in this story did not include park factors upon publication. We have updated the data to include the park factors, and the data you see below is now correct. We apologize for the mistake.
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What’s all this, then? For an explanation of this series, please read the introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.
Third base is a little deeper than it used to be, and only a handful of teams have little to no hope of being productive at the position. The devil is in the details at the hot corner, as there has been very little turnover among the top 20 teams here. Teams that have quality reserves or prospects coming up the pipeline see a bump here, as we’re looking holistically at the position and not just at the nominal starter. This is an important consideration across the diamond, but particularly so at third given how physically demanding the position is. Only six third basemen suited up in 150 or more games last year. Compare that to 13 at second base and 11 at first base and shortstop, and it becomes clear that depth is important at third base. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have adequate depth, hence the bump for the teams that do.
Let’s get on to the rankings!
It sounds like the Yankees have one more name to take off of the list of potential Mark Teixeira replacements. Aubrey Huff is saying he is “pretty much retired.” Although earlier in the off-season he sounded like he still wanted to play, not surprisingly, there was not much interest in a 36-year-old first baseman coming off of a 87 wRC+ in 2011 and a 76 wRC+ in 2012. That should not be how we remember Huff. As Craig Calcaterra noted this mornining, Huff actually had a pretty nice career, and is hardly unique in having to have the game tell him it is time to say goodbye rather than the other way around. There are worse ways to go out than winning two World Series rings in three years. Huff is no Hall of Fame candidate, but his career is interesting for other reasons.
(I guess there is still a chance that Bruce Bochy will get nervous about Brandon Belt and give Huff a call, but we will leave that possibility aside for now.)
It might be hard to believe this after Sergio Romo closed out the World Series and probably wrapped up the stopper role going forward for the Giants and Team Mexico, but there was a time when the prognosis for his career was much more negative. After all, he’s a small righty (five-foot-ten and a buck-eighty-five) with a fastball that doesn’t normally crack 90 miles per hour who throws his slider more than half of the time. Given what we might know about injuries and platoon splits, there was probably one role waiting for him in the bigs: ROOGY.
But Sergio Romo is not a Righty One-Out GuY. I asked him why.
Tommy John surgery might have been the best thing that could have happened to George Kontos. In 2009, the Giants’ right-hander was in Triple-A for the first time, and he had the kind of stuff that would make him a big leaguer in somebody’s bullpen: A 92-mph fastball and a wipeout slider that usually produced more than a strikeout per inning. That isn’t to say that he didn’t have some of the flaws inherent with a fastball/slider guy with only passable control, but he was well on his way. Then he felt that signature elbow pain, went under the knife, and a year and a half later, the reliever came out from the experience having changed two important facets of his game for the better.
“I know we were playing Philadelphia, and I want to say we played the Dodgers after that. End of July some time. I kind of realized that, hey, you gotta help the team out somehow. … Sometimes you get lost out there, and you try to start playing to prove yourself, playing for yourself, however you want to say it, but if you go up there and remember that this is a team game, and you’re there for them, you’re going to play better personally in return.” — Brandon Belt
No matter how many player interviews you’ve read, this quote from Brandon Belt fits right in. There’s little to separate it from the post-game interviews that laud camaraderie and perseverance above strategy and nuance. That’s fine — admit too much and you’ve given your competition information. There is one aspect of this quote that might be a little different than most quotes, though. Belt basically provides the exact date on which his 2012 season turned for the better.
Asking a player how he’s over-performed his peripherals is a tricky thing. I settled on a toe in the water: “Have you ever heard of FanGraphs? WAR? FIP?” From Ryan Vogelsong‘s responses to those inquiries at Giants’ Media day (“No, but Wins Above Replacement I have, all those stats, yeah” he replied), it seemed clear that the right-hander might need a little introduction to any sabermetric statistic I was going to ask him about.
“Given your strikeouts, walks, and ground balls, your FIP, which is usually more steady than ERA, has been higher than your ERA — you’ve been sort of over-performing these stats that people have come up with. I think this is really interesting because given your history, and given all that you’ve had to overcome, you’ve been under-rated in the past, too. Is there anything you can say about the way you pitch that might look like more than the sum of the parts? Is there something you play ‘up?’ How would you define yourself as a pitcher?”
It’s a wonder that Vogelsong had a reasoned, affable response to that mess. In fact, it’s a credit to the pitcher that he didn’t give this reporter the thousand-mile stare. I just asked him why his FIP has been almost three-quarters of a run higher than his ERA over the last two years.
Tim Lincecum‘s resume contains the following items: 2 time Cy Young award winner, 4 time All-Star and twice World Series Champion. With all the achievements over the last 5 seasons, he was relegated to a long relief once the Giants made the playoffs because he was no longer effective as a starter. Lincecum’s problem is he can no longer just throw the ball across the plate and hope a batter just swings and misses. If he wants any hope of returning to be the starter he once was, he now needs to learn how to pitch.
Buster Posey will be a San Francisco Giant at least through the end of the 2016 season. The upcoming season will be his first as an arbitration-eligible player. He’ll have three more of those before he becomes a free agent. That is, unless Posey and the Giants agree to a long-term contract that buys out one or more of his free-agent years. Should Posey commit to the Giants long-term? Should the Giants commit to Posey? What kind of deal makes sense?
Hard to believe, sometimes, but the reigning National League most valuable player has played in only 305 major-league games and amassed only 1,255 plate appearances. His first major-league at bat came on Sept. 11, 2009, during a brief September call-up. (He struck out). In 2010, the Giants didn’t call Posey up from the minors until late May, as Bengie Molina continued to handle the everyday catching duties. Even then, Posey played first base for a month before the Giants traded Molina to the Rangers and installed Posey behind the dish.
In 443 plate appearances in 108 games, Posey hit .305/.357/.505 with 18 home runs. His 134 wRC+ tied him with Ryan Braun for 15th-best in the National League. Posey was named National League Rookie of the Year and guided the Giants’ vaunted pitching staff during the team’s World Series run. He earned $400,000 but delivered $16.7 million in value with a 4.2 WAR.
Posey’s 2011 campaign was cut short by the devastating ankle and leg injury he suffered in a home plate collision with Scott Cousins on May 25. In his 45 games that season, Posey dropped off from his sensational rookie numbers and hit only .284/.368/.389 in 185 plate appearances. The power numbers, in particular, looked concerning but may very well have stabilized during a full season. Posey earned $575,000 but delivered $8 million worth of value in just two months of playing time.
And then there’s 2012. National League Batting Champion*. National League MVP. National League Comeback Player of the Year. World Series champion. Posey played 148 games and had 610 plate appearances and he did the most with them. He hit .336/.408/.509 with 24 home runs. He led the National League with 8 WAR, and if his base running wasn’t so poorly rated, his WAR could have reached 10. The Giants paid him $615,000 and he gave his team $36 million in value.
What does all of this mean for a possible long-term deal between Posey and the Giants?
It was announced earlier today that Barry Bonds has not been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Nobody was voted into the Hall of Fame, and there are several topics worthy of discussion, but I’m partial to the Bonds one, myself, because the voting results provide a reason to look at Bonds’ career statistics again. Asterisks or no asterisks, Bonds’ numbers are downright impossible, and looking at them is the most fun a person can have at work the most fun a person who doesn’t write from home for FanGraphs can have at work. You shouldn’t be allowed to drive and drink, you shouldn’t be allowed to drive and text, and you shouldn’t be allowed to drive and consider Barry Bonds’ career baseball statistics.
By WAR, Bonds’ best season was 2001. By wRC+, Bonds’ best offensive season was 2002. By wRC+, Bonds’ 2002 is the best offensive season in baseball history. At 244, he beats out Babe Ruth‘s 1920, at 237. Bonds also had a 234 and a 233. Ruth had a 231 and a 223. A new name finally shows up at #7. Anyway.
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