As Dave C. noted we are getting to the teams that have a shot at sneaking into the playoffs if a number of things break their way. The Tigers are such a team. With their talent, and with the benefit of playing in the AL Central, they have a non-negligible chance of at post-season play. That is not say they should be considered the favorites in their division. In fact most projection systems see them as a sub-80 win team and the third best, if not worse, team in the division.

On the position player side they have one true super star in Miguel Cabrera, who at 26 is an amazing player — producing five-plus-win seasons in four of the past five years. After that, though, the position player talent on the team is relatively poor. CHONE sees Johnny Damon as the position player after Cabrera, which is not a ringing endorsement. Joining Damon on the wrong side of thirty in the Tigers’ starting lineup are Gerald Laird, Brandon Inge, Adam Everett, Magglio Ordonez and Carlos Guillen. These five guys, over half of the Tiger’s starting lineup, are not only declining but probably at best slightly-above-average and more likely slightly-below-average starters.

The starting lineup rounds out with two guys who have never had major league at-bats, Austin Jackson and Scott Sizemore. It is nice to have this young, cost-controlled talent, but that is for the next post on future talent here we are looking at current talent and, again, these guys are probably below-average major leaguers at this point. On a positive note the Tigers have a solid fourth outfielder in Ryan Raburn, which is important with Damon and Ordonez in the starting lineup.

The rotation is probably a little better. Justin Verlander broke out in a big way last year and is a legitimate number-one starter. After that Max Scherzer and Rick Porcello are talented young pitchers who would be assets in most rotations. But each is not without concerns, Scherzer for his health and Pocrcello for the likelihood of BABIP-based regression. And although only the best teams can boast good pitchers one-to-five the bottom two-fifths of the Tigers’s rotation — two of Jeremy Bonderman, Dontrelle Willis, Nate Robertson and Eddie Bonine — seems particularly suspect.

There is talent on the team for sure, Verlander and Cabrera are superstars, but the supporting cast has too many below-average players. The position players particularly are a mix of guys either whose peaks are a little too far off in the future or too far removed in the past — or guys who never had much a peak to begin with. As I said at the beginning it is a team that should win around 80 games and will only make the playoffs if things break right.

I have finally joined the 2008 and got on Twitter. I cannot promise anything great from my feed, but I like how easy it is to follow baseball news and read other analysts’ passing thoughts. It has already paid off in the form of the idea for this post. This morning Sky Kalkman tweeted:

Andy Sonnanstine: trade bait, rotation candidate, bullpen filler, or AAA veteran?

I had sort of forgotten about Andy Sonnanstine, but the tweet reminded me what an interesting pitcher he is. Sonnanstine was worth over 3.5 wins for the Rays in 2008, but then things fell apart in 2009. Part of that was bad luck on his BABIP and HR/FB, but part of it was also based on his performance. Sonnanstine doesn’t strike out many batters or get that many ground balls, so he needs to have a great walk rate to succeed. That is what he did in 2008 — walking just 1.7 — but in 2009 it increased to 3.0, erasing much of his value.

The increase of walks was not from missing the strike zone — his pitches were in the zone just as much — but, rather, from batters swinging less often at his out-of-zone pitches. Here are those numbers by pitch type:

             O-swing        O-contact
           2008   2009     2008   2009
Fastball   0.23   0.23     0.83   0.80
Cutter     0.22   0.19     0.73   0.72
Slider     0.40   0.35     0.55   0.69
Curve      0.29   0.26     0.57   0.86

The rates on his fastball were essentially the same, but for his cutter, slider and curve the O-Swing rates were way down. This turned many more plate appearances into walks. Another big problem was that the O-Contact rate on his slider and curve were way up, although this was not responsible for the increase in walks it does show these pitches were easier to hit.

Interestingly Sonnanstine also threw his cutter much more often in 2009. According to my pitch classifications, it went from 28% of the time in 2008 to 44% in 2009. Mostly this change came at the expense of his fastball which went from 35% to 24%. It could be that hitters do better on the cutter after seeing it more often or because they are expecting it. But I do not see evidence for this on an at-bat level. That is there was no trend for batters to do any better on the second or third cutter they see in an at-bat than the first cutter they see in at-bats against Sonnanstine.

Getting back to Sky’s question, I think I would take a little from column a, a little from column b and a little from column c. That is start him off in the pen as a long reliever — since the Rays have five better starting options — but with the eye to trading him if anything of value comes along or moving him to the rotation if needed. He has a relatively small platoon split, doing fairly well against LHBs, so deploying him as a long reliever would be a nice way to leverage that talent. Also his very deep repertoire of pitches plays well as a long reliever where he might have to face batters multiple times. These skills also mean he might be better suited as a starter if he can get things back together, which might mean throwing his fastball a little more often.

Earlier today the Nationals announced that they have unconditionally released Elijah Dukes. Instantly speculation arouse as to whether the release was due to an another off-field incident, but the Nats told Ben Goessling that it was “strictly a baseball decision” and news of no such incident has emerged. Still you have to think that Dukes’s history of off-the-field issues played some part in the release. Eitherway it looks like the Nationals will go with some combination of Justin Maxwell, Mike Morse and Willie Harris in right. And, because of his defensive abilities, Harris probably does not represent much of a downgrade from Dukes, so the move will most likely not have much affect on the team’s outlook for 2010.

Dukes came over to Washington before the 2008 season and went gangbusters. He was worth nearly three wins in just over 300 PAs by hitting a 135 RC+ with good defense in right. But in 2009 everything fell apart: his walk numbers dipped (but were still good), his power fell off and his defense took a hit. As a result he played below replacement level.

At just 25, and with his minor league numbers and good 2008, it entirely possible that 2009 was just a hiccup and that Dukes could be on his way to a solid career as a Major League outfielder. So it is surprising that the Nationals, who are definitely not in win-it-now mode, do not take more of a chance on Dukes. Plus in spite of his poor 2009 and history of off-the-field problems Dukes would seem have at least some trade value, but Ben Goessling tweeted that Rizzo could not find any takers on for a potential Dukes trade.

The release is another twist in the career of a guy who has worlds of ability, and lately, at least, had seemed to be keeping himself out of trouble. Still he will most likely not be out of a job for long as his youth, cheapness and potential are just too much to be passed up all 29 other teams.

In terms current talent — ability to win games and potentially reach the playoffs in 2010 and 2011, irrespective of contract situation — the Houston Astros rank in the bottom fifth. The FANS project them to win just 72 games, and other projection systems, CHONE, THT and CAIRO, similarly see them as a low-70s team, if not worse.

The talent on the current roster is underwhelming. There are probably only four players who can be considered solidly above average (projected to be worth over 2.5 wins): Lance Berkman, Hunter Pence, Roy Oswalt and Wandy Rodriguez. Berkman and Oswalt, 34 and 32, respectively, almost assuredly have their best years behind them and are more likely three- or four-win rather than five- or six-win players. Also Berkman might not even be ready for opening day, with upcoming surgery to remove loose particles from his knee. Pence is a good, three-win corner outfielder. Rodriguez had a great 2009 with a sub-four FIP and over 200 innings pitched. He is arguably the team’s best player and a four-win season is with in the realm of possibility. These four guys are good players, but none is a true superstar, and collectively they form too small a core of good players.

After those four players, Carlos Lee and Michael Bourn are both projected at about two wins each by CHONE, with the FANS a little more optimistic. With Pence they form an okay outfield. But after that there is little talent on the roster. Joining Berkman in the infield is all-glove, no-bat Pedro Feliz; not-much bat, not-much glove Kaz Matsui; and Tommy Manzella, who is projected to play just below replacement level. If Berkman misses some time he will be replaced by another near-replacement leveler Chris Shelton.

The back three-fifths of the rotation is slightly more inspiring. After Rodriguez and Oswalt the Astros will go with Brett Myers and two of Bud Norris, Brian Moehler and Felipe Paulino. As Carson pointed out Paulino and Norris pitched fairly well last year, with xFIPs of 4.10 and 4.38, respectively, and even with likely regression, they would form a not terrible back end of a rotation. But the Astros might go with Moehler, who is likely a worse pitcher. The bullpen, led by Brandon Lyon and Matt Lindstrom, and bench are poor.

This is a team with just very little talent. The team lacks a top-tier superstar, has few solidly above average players, and is going to start too many at- or near-replacement-level players in 2010. There are few teams, maybe just one or two, with worse talent or a smaller chance at reaching the playoffs in 2010. And the talent on the team in the second half of 2010 and 2011 could be even worse as a trade of Oswalt or Berkman, or both, is not a bad idea – except for the meddling owner may not allow it.

Wrapping up my series on first-pitch aggressiveness I am ready to address the second question I put froward in Monday’s post: to see whether it first-pitch aggressiveness against good pitchers pays off. Before I do that, though, I want to address a suggestion from the comments section of Monday’s post who wanted to see Monday’s chart broken up by batter quality.

I took Tango’s suggestion:

Right, what the others have been saying. Chipper is a career .400 (wOBA) hitter. I’d rather see five charts with the breakdown at those levels:
.380+ hitters
.350-.380
.320-.350
.290-.320
under .290

Here are the z-swing rates for these five groups of batters for first pitches and subsequent pitches by pitcher xFIP. The color of the line indicates the group with the lightest gray the worst hitters and black the best. The dotted lines are for first pitches and solid for all others.

Sorry that the graph is a little cluttered, but that is the point. There is noclear relationship, if I had included the standard errors for these lines the five first-pitch ones would overlap completely and the five subsequent-pitches ones would as well. All five groups have pretty much the same swing rates and no clear trend depending on the xFIP of the opposing pitcher. So Jones’s first-pitch aggressiveness against good pitchers is unique compared to not only the average batter, but also compared to his peer group of very good batters too.

Ok now we can turn our attention to how this behavior affects the result of an at-bat. I break at-bats into one of four groups: those with first pitches in the zone and swung at, in the zone and taken, out of the zone and swung at, and out of the zone and taken. For each group I calculate the wOBA of the at-bat and plot against the pitcher’s xFIP. Color indicates whether the pitch was in the zone, black in the zone and red out. Line style whether the pitch was swung at, solid swung at and dotted taken.

First look at the first pitches out of the zone (red). There is a huge difference, no matter at the quality of the pitcher, in the result of at-bats when these pitches are swung at or taken. The difference between starting an at-bat 1-0 versus out-of-zone contact or starting 0-1 is great, even against poor pitchers. I think this goes a long way in explaining batter’s low swing rates on first pitches. Batters cannot tell for sure whether the pitch will be in the zone, and better to not swing.

On first pitches in the zone there is not quite as much difference, but the size of the difference expands as the pitcher gets better. So not swinging at a first pitch in the zone against a good pitcher results in a great deficit (versus swinging at it) than not swinging at a first pitch in the zone against a poor pitcher. This would suggest that swinging at first pitches more often against good pitchers is a good idea. But only if you have a good idea whether the ball will be in the zone or not, because the disadvantage of swinging at a first pitch out of the zone is just so great.

I think this is the reason Jones is well poised to exploit this difference and swing so often on first pitches against better pitchers. Few batters have his ability to swing at balls in the zone and not those out of the zone.

Last week I looked at Chipper Jones’s first-pitch aggressiveness. This aggressiveness is a little surprising because Jones has extraordinary plate discipline, with more walks than strikeouts in his career. Jones explained it as a way to not get behind good pitchers. It turned out this was the correct, as Jones swung more often against first pitches in the zone from low-xFIP pitchers than high-xFIP pitchers. On subsequent pitches in the zone this relationship was lost and he swung at a relatively constant rate.

This result led to a number of natural questions the two most pressing: how does this compare to other hitters and how much of a role does it play in Jones’s success?

Here I address the first question. I repeated the graph from Thursday for all batters rather than just for Jones. That is, I looked at the Z-Swing rate (swings at pitches in the zone) for first pitches and subsequent pitches based on the pitcher’s xFIP. The curves are below with standard errors indicated. For comparison, I added Jones’s curves as dotted lines but omitted his standard errors to keep the graph from being too cluttered.

There is a striking difference. The average hitter swings much less often at first pitches than all others, but with no discernible trend based on the quality of the pitcher. This is very different from Jones’s first-pitch curve, which drops off rapidly as the pitcher xFIP increases. On subsequent pitches, the average hitter’s swing rate increases compared to his first-pitch rate, but again has little relationship with the xFIP of the pitcher. Here, Jones is not different than average.

So it looks like the average batter is not making the same effort as Jones to not get behind the best pitchers. This is surprising. I thought we would have seen this trend — just to a lesser extent — with all hitters, but that is not the case. Tomorrow I will look at the effect this has on at-bat results.

Yesterday, I looked at an exchange between Jon Sciambi and Chipper Jones concerning how often the latter swings at first pitches. Some commenters bristled at the idea of a broadcaster giving hitting advice to Chipper Jones. I don’t disagree with that take That was never Sciambi’s intention, and, anyway, what I found interesting about the interaction was more the idea that, when a player is confronted with these new metrics – especially a player as good as Jones – there is the possibility that his response can give us deeper insights into the game. Again quoting Jones’s response to ‘Duk:

“There are certain pitchers, quite frankly, that you can’t get behind,” Jones said. “You want to be aggressive and the first hittable fastball that you get is the pitch you want to put in play. Because they’ll bury you if they get ahead of you. You can’t let them do that.

So instead of saying, “He is swinging too often at the first pitch,” we can say, “Huh, maybe this is part of the reason for his success.” This take was well articulated by Tangotiger over at The Book Blog.

Taking that tack we can look at how Jones approaches at-bats against different pitchers. Here I looked at the rate Jones swings at pitches in the zone separated out as first pitches and all others based on the opposing pitcher’s xFIP. Standard errors of the fit curves are indicated.

The results are just as Jones said; against pitchers with a low xFIP, presumably the certain pitcher he was referring to, he is just as likely to swing at a first pitch in the zone as he is to swing at subsequent pitches in the zone. But against average-or-poor pitchers he swings much less often at first pitches in the zone than subsequent pitches in the zone. So Jones’s aggressiveness on first pitches is seen just against better pitchers.

The obvious question is the extent to which other hitters show this same trend, and, if they don’t, how much it factors into Jones’s success. More generally, it raises questions about how hitters respond differently when facing good pitchers. The converse, how pitchers pitch differently to the good hitters, has been examined, but I am not aware of studies on this.

A little over a week ago broadcaster Jon Sciambi wrote a great piece at Baseball Prospectus about a conversation he had with Chipper Jones. Scaimbi noted that Chipper saw the second fewest fraction of first-pitch strikes in the majors, but in spite of this Chipper has reputation as a first-pitch hitter and thus, maybe, he would be better off laying of some of those first-pitch offerings. Sciambi then recounts how Chipper took a fat 91-mph first-pitch fastball and then turned to the broadcast booth and scowled Scaimbi. Click over to the link and check out a great picture of the scowl and generally a very good article.

Sciambi, who notes that he got the numbers from FanGraphs, was quoting F-Strike%, which is the fraction of at-bats for a batter (or pitcher) that start 0-1 or have the ball put in play on the first pitch (i.e., at-bats in which the batter swung at the first pitch or it was called a strike).

A closely related number, which I think also addresses this question but that we do not have on the site is the fraction of first pitches that are in the strike zone (regardless of whether they are swung at or called a strike). Chipper sees the second fewest number of first pitches in the zone. Using the pitchf/x zone the average is 42%, and Chipper’s 32% is second only to Prince Fielder.

So what is Chipper doing to those first pitches compared to the rest of the league and compared to all pitches he sees. These numbers are from the pitchf/x data so they might differ slightly from the Plate Discipline numbers here, which are from BIS. The ranks are out of the just over 300 players who saw more than 1000 pitches last year.

                          Swing Rate
When           Where   Average     Chipper     Rank
All Pitches     Zone      0.65       0.73      43th from top
First Pitches   Zone      0.41       0.67       8th from top

All Pitches     Out       0.32       0.23      16th from bottom
First Pitches   Out       0.16       0.14     108th from bottom

First off, looking at all pitches, Chipper is in the great position of swinging at an above average of pitches in the zone while a below average number out of the zone. That shows his amazing plate discipline: the ability to tell the difference between a pitch in and out of the zone, and swing at the former and take the later.

On first pitches all batters swing less often, at both in-zone and out-of-zone pitches. Chipper does as well, but to a much smaller extent. So much so that Chipper enters the top ten swing rate on first pitches in the zone, and on first pitches out of the zone he swings at almost a league average rate, a big jump compared to his tiny out of zone swing rate on all pitches.

So yes, Chipper does swing at a lot of first pitches compared to all batters, and especially compared to his normal pitch rate. He explained why this is to ‘Duk at Big League Stew saying:

“[Sciambi] was just talking about me being overly aggressive, but yet I still drew 100 walks last year. They get mad at me because I don’t take enough pitches. But if I’m drawing 100 walks and hitting .300 … ”

Jones finished the sentence with a shoulder shrug and I asked him to explain why it wasn’t possible for him to take the first pitch on a more frequent basis.

His response echoed the same argument he used with Sciambi.

“There are certain pitchers, quite frankly, that you can’t get behind,” Jones said. “You want to be aggressive and the first hittable fastball that you get is the pitch you want to put in play. Because they’ll bury you if they get ahead of you. You can’t let them do that.

I really liked this exchange. A broadcaster who has the knowledge and curiosity to dig into stats that other might consider arcane and also access to players asks a very germane about those stats to a player. From there a well-connected blogger can ask the player further and get him to explain those numbers. I think it shows the future of sabermetric-based reporting.

At the risk of Edwin Jackson overexposure I wanted to look at one more thing that piqued my curiosity when I was putting together my post last Thursday. Guys who predominately throw sliders and fastballs are typically relievers because of their trouble getting out opposite-handed batters, so I was interested to see how Jackson handles lefties.

His splits are interesting. Although his xFIP shows the split you would expect — 4.63 against RHBs and 5.05 against LHBs — his FIP is actually better against lefties, 4.87 to RHBs versus 4.57 to LHBs. The reason is the big difference in HR/FB rate: 12% against RHBs and 7.5% against LHBs. That is with over 330 innings logged against each. A pitcher’s ability to control his HR/FB is still a pretty open question, and his ability to control HR/FB differentially against lefties and righties even more so. But so far in his career a big part of Jackson’s game against lefties is HR prevention.

Slicing the data any further is dangerous because of sample size issues, but I wanted see whether a specific pitch type was responsible for this difference. So I looked at his HR/FB by handedness and pitch type:

HR/FB
           RHB     LHB
Fastball  0.153   0.057
Slider    0.100   0.073
Change    0       0.233
Curve     0       0

Remember he very rarely throws anything but his slider and fastball to RHBs, so ignore those last two. And even against LHBs that change is thrown rarely, so put little stock in that number also. The most striking difference, and backed up by the most number of pitches, is the difference off fastballs. A fly ball off his fastball from a LHBs is three times less likely to leave the park than from a righty.

What is going on here? How can he get such a low rate against LHBs and can we expect a rate nearly that low going forward? Here I look at the location of his fastballs to LHBs compared to all RHPs’ fastballs to LHBs. I broke the zone into bins and then color coded the bins. Red indicates zones where Jackson gets a greater fraction of his fastballs, and blues a smaller fraction.

It looks like Jackson hits the middle-away part of the plate pretty well. I think this, coupled with the speed of his fastball, is the key to his HR prevention against LHBs. These blazing fastballs on the outside of the plate are the hardest pitches to pull, and thus get any power off of.

I was listening to yesterday’s excellent FanGraphs Audio with Carson, Jack and Matt, and they brought up Edwin Jackson. In the episode, they noted Jackson’s soaring O-swing rate last year; wondered whether that had to do with his increased slider percentage; and also considered his strikingly good pitch-value numbers on his slider versus the poor ones for his fastball, in spite of that fastball’s blazing, fourth-fastest 94.5 MPH average speed. I thought those interesting observations warranted further investigation.

First offm Jackson is effectively a two-pitch pitcher, rare for a starting pitcher. To RHBs he throws his fastball 60% of the time and slider 37%. Righties rarely see his curve or change. Against LHBs he throws these tertiary and quaternary offerings a little more often, but not by much, going with his fastball 67% of time and slider 20%. So even LHBs see a fastball or slider nearly 9 times out of 10.

As Matt noted, his slider percentage increased last year, from roughly 20% in 2006-2008 to 27% in 2009. This is the big reason for his increased O-Swing%. His out-of-zone sliders get swung at 37% of the time versus 26% of his out-of-zone fastballs. (These are for the pitchf/x zone, which is a little bigger than the BIS zone used for our plate discipline section, so these numbers do not correspond perfectly). The increased use of the slider neatly corresponds to his increased O-Swings.

Like most pitchers, Jackson throws his slider more often when he is ahead and less often when he is behind in the count. In these situations there was little change in slider use in 2009. The increase in sliders came early in at-bats: in 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 and 1-1 counts Jackson threw almost a third more sliders in 2009 than previously, which accounted for the majority of the increase. So it looks like Jackson was more comfortable going to the slider earlier in at-bats and even often starting off with one.

Finally what is going on with his fastball? It seems like dialing up the speed is just not enough. On the average fastball a batter misses with 14% of his swings, against Jackson’s fastballs just 12%. And when the average fastball is put into play, it gives up a slugging of .521, but Jackson’s is .556.

Almost all pitchers need to throw a fastball at the very least 50% of the time to keep batters honest and get strikes, but it would be interesting to see whether Jackson can continue to decrease his fraction of fastballs and increase his fraction of sliders. His 27% in 2009 was already 6th most in the Bigs, but maybe he can push it north of 30% as Ryan Dempster and Brett Anderson have.