A couple of weeks ago, you the attentive reader, will surely have observed the introduction of our depth charts and standings pages. It was a long time coming, and we remain pretty freaking excited about it. As such, we thought that every two weeks that we’d take a look at some sort of change or happening or goings-on that occurred.

We’re not going to cover every team, because let’s face it, there really is only so many times that one can write a variation of “the Marlins aren’t even trying” without wanting to scrape out your eyebones with a rusty screwdriver. But we’ll still try to pry out an objective look in some way. This week, we’ll take a look at the three biggest movers — one positive and two negative — in terms of ranking of projected full season winning percentage. (One note — the looks here are from last Tuesday, the 14th, to this morning, but in future editions we’ll likely use Monday as the cut-off day for a number of reasons, nearly all of which involve my sanity.)

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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.

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It’s hard to imagine the White Sox having a more depressing start to the season. They are stuck in last place in the American League Central, and their hitting has been abysmal. When you remove pitchers’ hitting from the equation, the White Sox wRC+ is tied for dead last in baseball with the Marlins, who are not even trying to field a competitive team. And while usually the team has fan favorite Paul Konerko to look to as a bright spot, even he has stumbled badly out of the gate. With the AL Central suddenly seeming rather competitive, the question arises — is it time for the White Sox to blow it up and sell?

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Give this to Jeff Keppinger: he’s a long way from history. Keppinger, to date, has started 29 games for the White Sox, and he’s still searching for his first base on balls. That’s a long streak to start a season, but it’s far from the longest streak. Two years ago, Brent Morel of the same White Sox didn’t draw his first walk until start 33. In 2009, John McDonald went 35 consecutive starts without a walk. In 2003, it was 39 consecutive starts for Jose Molina. In 1995, Mariano Duncan didn’t walk until start 46. And blowing everybody else out of the water, there’s Rob Picciolo circa 1980. That year, Picciolo walked on October 2 and October 5. Through October 1, Picciolo had zero walks, 77 starts, 92 games, and 267 plate appearances. Picciolo’s streak isn’t out of Keppinger’s reach, since Keppinger’s streak is still active, but it’s not unlike thinking about a perfect game in the top of the fifth.

Give this to Jeff Keppinger: he isn’t the only player in baseball this year without a walk drawn. There’s also Jarrod Dyson, and Joe Mahoney, and Brent Lillibridge, and dozens and dozens of others. All the players without a walk have totaled 1,275 plate appearances. But 125 of those belong to Keppinger, and no one else without a walk has more than 31. Among the walkless, Jeff Keppinger has more than four times as many plate appearances as the runner-up.

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How far can a player go on base running alone? Probably not too far. Speed as a tool is obviously quite valuable, especially at an elite level, as it feeds both into the ability to provide value on the bases and in the field. Strictly in terms of offense, though, how good can a player be with a terrible bat and good base-running skills? Just for fun, here are five recent individual seasons with the biggest differential between base-running value and batting value.

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Truth be told, I don’t know all that much about Chris Cornell. Were I in charge of a massive Chris Cornell museum, I’d constantly be thinking to myself, “I don’t know how this happened.” But I know a few years ago, Cornell went solo and released an album that was a complete departure from his previous music. It sold, but people didn’t really like it that much, and before long Cornell was back to being Cornell again. Soundgarden released “King Animal” in 2012 and the solo album is just this weird thing that people remember. Maybe Cornell had to try it, just to see.

A little under a month ago, Dave Cameron wrote an article here titled “Adam Dunn’s Failed Experiment.” Dunn, of course, is one of the first guys you think of when you’re playing three-true-outcome free association, as he built a solid career upon dingers, walks, and strikeouts. Dunn was always a patient sort, but he got off to a miserable start in 2013, and that was accompanied by a curious uptick in aggressiveness. Cameron highlighted a quote showing that Dunn was going to be more aggressive on purpose. Dunn was pretty good in 2012, all things considered, and no one would’ve predicted him to try to change things up at 33, but he made a change and the early results were deplorable.

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Matt Harvey placed an exclamation point on his excellent start to the season Tuesday night with 9 one-hit innings, let’s take a look at how he’s doing it with a slant towards the visual.

Harvey is one of the hardest throwing starters in the league on a typical night, and he had a little extra on his stuff against the WhiteSox, averaging over 95 miles per hour on his fastball.  I’ve captured, stabilized and overlaid a selection of his primary pitches below.

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Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.

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There are few reversal of fortune so dramatic as the 0-2 home run. When pitchers corner a batsman into an 0-2 count, said batsman has hit .154/.160/.216 through the 2013 season. The following sample of at bats combine for an immaculate 1.000/1.000/4.000 slash.

Let’s take a look at them.
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Earlier, we took a look at the young season’s most impeded home run so far, which is the home run that faced the most opposition from the game conditions at the time. All necessary data was recovered from the ESPN Home Run Tracker, which is among my most favorite of Internet resources. If we look at one extreme, then, it follows that we should look also at the other extreme, or else the matter will feel incomplete, and this is a website devoted to completeness. And so we now turn our attention to the home run that has gotten the biggest boost from the game conditions. Home runs like this are probably more interesting than home runs that remain home runs despite strong winds and cold conditions, because these might be identified as “lucky”.

In terms of impeded home runs, we had one dinger at -20 feet, and another dinger at -17 feet. So it was a close race, and the error bars probably overlap. Here, in terms of aided home runs, we have one dinger at +64 feet, and another dinger at +43 feet. That’s a much bigger difference, but there might still be some error-bar overlap, for reasons we’ll get into. Let’s look at the home run in question!

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Adam Dunn arrived in the Major Leagues in 2001. Since then, he has led the major leagues in both walks (1,172) and strikeouts (2,046) and is third in home runs (408), and his career stands as something of the perfect example of the Three True Outcomes. Of the 7,256 times he’s walked up to the plate, 3,702 of those PAs (51%) have ended without defensive involvement. Dunn has perfected the slow pitch softball style of baseball and turned that skillset into a pretty effective big league career.

And now, at age 33, Dunn is participating in an experiment to become an entirely new kind of hitter. Two weeks in, and it’s hard to call the experiment anything other than a total failure.

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When FanGraphs was in Arizona earlier this spring, our merry band of nerds made our way to a Jarrod Parker vs Chris Sale afternoon tilt. The result on that 16th of March — an 11-5 win for the White Sox and bad performances from the two starting pitchers — was mostly unimportant to everyone in involved. But a few innings sitting behind the plate did provide some insights, including some reasons why those results were unimportant.

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Is a pop-up the same as a strikeout? No, of course not, by definition they are very different things. A pop-up requires contact, whereas a strikeout requires no contact, or at least very little contact, or a two-strike foul bunt. Pop-ups and strikeouts look nothing alike, to the eye. However, to the numbers, pop-ups and strikeouts look very much alike. On one level they are very different, and on another level they are very similar.

A few weeks ago, Dave asked whether infield flies should be included in FIP. The idea is that IFFBs have little to do with defensive skill, and pop-ups are effectively strikeouts, in terms of plate-appearance result. Pop-ups don’t advance runners, and pop-ups are almost always outs. They’re not literally always outs, but then, a batter can reach on a strikeout if the ball gets away from the catcher. So while pop-ups lead to outs slightly less often, they’re still just about automatic.

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As we explained yesterday in Part 1 of the series, we’re looking at the financial health of all thirty major league teams. The focus is on attendance, local TV contracts, and estimated 2013 payroll. We’re not ranking the teams one to thirty because we lack the kind of detailed information that would make such a ranking meaningful. We do, however, have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.

We’ve grouped the teams in tiers. Today we look at the ten teams in the middle.

In alphabetical order, by team name:

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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!

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I’ve been a little tardy in picking up the ball for the fifth part of this series, and for that I apologize. I hope it was worth the wait. In case you’re new to the series, here are parts one, two, three and four.

Vetoed trade: December 2003, the Texas Rangers send Alex Rodriguez to the Boston Red Sox for Manny Ramirez and Jon Lester.
Completed trade: February 2004, the Rangers send Alex Rodriguez and cash to the New York Yankees for Alfonso Soriano and player to be named later (Joaquin Arias).
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From the esteemed Dan Hayes of CSN Chicago:

White Sox pitcher Chris Sale confirmed Tuesday his representatives have had discussions with the club about a contract extension.

(snip)

“We’ve been kind of back and forth but nothing too crazy right now,” Sale said Tuesday when asked about extension talks.

Think of the headline potential. “Sale Extended: Now Through 2018!” That is SEO gold right there.

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Who do you think is the slowest player in major league baseball? No fair guessing Bartolo Colon. Allow me to re-phrase. Who do you think is the slowest position player in major league baseball? You probably have a few names floating around in your mind. Many of them are probably catchers. I can tell you I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a worse runner than Jesus Montero. Montero wasn’t just slow, but his technique was so bad he had to spend the offseason learning how to run. Montero is a 23-year-old high-level professional athlete. That whole chapter was embarrassing. Maybe it’s still embarrassing; I haven’t seen the new, improved Montero in 2013.

Montero, then, is a candidate for MLB’s slowest player. So are other catchers, like Jose Molina. But allow me to direct your attention to Paul Konerko, who isn’t a catcher, but who is old and defensively unremarkable. Konerko has very quietly had an outstanding career, and Konerko has very quietly been perhaps the slowest player in the league. If he wasn’t the slowest player before, he certainly hasn’t gotten quicker with age.

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There are a lot of projection systems floating around the nerdy baseball universe. Here on FanGraphs, we host a lot of them, including ZIPS, Steamer, Oliver, Marcel, and the Fans projections, and then there’s other systems like CAIRO and PECOTA that are hosted elsewhere. Of all the baseball projection systems, PECOTA is probably the most famous because it was created by Nate Silver, and Nate Silver is now pretty famous for his post-baseball career. So, when PECOTA releases their annual projections, mainstream writers pay attention. And Chicago writers, particularly, like to talk about PECOTA’s projections, mainly to remind everyone how wrong they’ve been about the White Sox.

For instance, here’s a piece by a local radio anchor that trots out all the usual ad hominem attacks about geeks and their numbers. And here’s another one of this year’s entries, which just gives up on factual information completely:

What is it about the White Sox’s rosters and farm system that Baseball Prospectus doesn’t like?

To answer that question, I decided to do research on who writes these inaccuracies year after year. What I found shocked and disturbed me.

It’s Nate Silver.

My whole world of reality collapsed at that moment.

How could it be the guy I religiously read for pinpoint accuracy in politics? How could it be that Silver is an accuracy genius in politics, but yet when it comes to the White Sox he transforms into the accuracy of a Republican pollster?

After composing myself, I discovered a possible reason. Silver lived in Chicago for many years near Wrigleyville and is rumored to be a Cubs fan.

Maybe being a Cubs fan is a weighted bias even Silver’s methodology can’t overcome.

I’m not here to defend PECOTA — BP can do that if they’d like — but I will just insert some facts into the discussion. Like, for instance, that Silver grew up in Michigan as a Tigers fan, not a Cubs fan. Or, that Silver hasn’t been in charge of the system since 2009, and the code has been essentially rewritten since he left. And, of course, it would be remarkably silly for any forecaster to create a system that intentionally downgrades the projections of a specific franchise, since that would simply make the system less accurate and hurt his own credibility. The idea that PECOTA has some kind of anti-White Sox bias because Silver went to the University of Chicago and attended some Cubs games is worthy of the tin foil hat brigade.

That said, I do think it’s interesting that the White Sox have regularly outperformed PECOTA’s expectations, and I think it’s worth actually investigating, as opposed to what Michael Tomaso did. So, let’s investigate the White Sox overall performance since 2005.

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All baseball managers have strategies, and all manager strategies are supposed to function to maximize a team’s chances of winning. They don’t all work out that way, of course, and one need only explore the world of sacrifice bunts, but the managers’ hearts are in the right place. When managers get involved, they do so because they believe their involvement will bump the chances of winning the game. And managers don’t like to concede a game before it’s over, and one could never be critical of a manager for not giving up. There always exists some chance of victory, before the conclusion, and there’s something noble about pursuing long odds. But the necessity of managerial involvement follows a spectrum. In close games, in high-leverage situations, it makes the most sense to try something strategic. In not-close games, there’s hardly any benefit, so while such strategizing isn’t pointless, it is the most pointless.

As a sort-of example, the Giants closed out the Cardinals in the NLCS in Game 7. The Giants were up 1-0 after one, 2-0 after two, and 7-0 after three. It was still 7-0 at the seventh-inning stretch, with the Giants at home. They’d add two more runs, just for the hell of it. In the top of the eighth, Bruce Bochy replaced Santiago Casilla with specialist Javier Lopez. In the top of the ninth, with two outs, Bochy replaced Lopez with closer Sergio Romo. Bochy managed as if the game were close when it wasn’t, and there wasn’t much in the way of benefit. But Bochy gets a pass, because (A) whatever, and (B) it was Game 7 of the NLCS and those are high stakes. This was essentially pointless strategizing in a very important baseball game.

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