The topic of Charlie Furbush and his elevated (but small sample) home run rate came up for discussion between Jeff Sullivan and I over the weekend and it got me thinking. That’s not true. It would be impossible for it to have gotten me thinking; otherwise I need to talk to the Red Cross about some new and unusual first aid techniques. It did direct my thinking however and the first hypothesis that came to my mind was that to wonder if maybe Furbush’s pitch locations played a part in his home run proclivity. Specifically, I wondered if Furbush was elevating his pitches. That seemed a plausible engine for more home runs.

However, such an explanation relies on an assumption that elevated pitch location does in fact open up a pitcher to a higher home run rate. Usually that’s in part attributed to simply more fly balls coming from pitches above the knees and not actually an increase in home run rate as we typically (per fly ball or ball in air) measure it. I decided to look at both. Using pitch F/X, I grabbed all the batted balls and separated them into horizontal bands. It turned out that the two plots (one using home run per ball in air and the one below) aren’t radically different.

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A month ago, Albert Pujols agreed to terms with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. It was a deal that the media and public mostly ignored due to the intense coverage of the trade that sent Nick Schmidt to the Colorado Rockies as the player-to-be-named-later in San Diego’s Huston Street acquisition. Who could  forget what a monumental day that was? Apparently desperate to get back in the limelight, Pujols and the Angels have released final terms on the contract between the two. I now will cede to their wishes and relay that information.

Pujols will be guaranteed $12 million this year, followed by $16 million in 2013 and then $23 million in 2014. That’s followed up with $1 million raises each season, concluding with a $30 million payday in 2021. There’s a bunch of other stuff in there, and that’s probably what took so long to write out and agree upon. But these are the most important figures, totaling $240 million for sure over 10 years.

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Are home runs more likely at the beginning of games when the air temperature is typically marginally warmer than at the end? That is the question that I recall in my head, but I am unsure if it drove me to split home run rates by inning or if it formed as a question that could possibly be addressed by data cross tabbed in that manner. Regardless of which came first, I did end up looking at home runs per inning, but I don’t think you can say much of anything about temperature changes during the game from this.

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As a Mariner fan, I was searching for a distraction yesterday. The terrible news of Greg Halman‘s death this morning weighs heavily and I wanted to think about anything else for a little bit. There is no proper transition to the run-of-the-mill machinations of the baseball offseason. Any attempt seems glib and unimportant; because it is. Baseball is just a game and countlessly more important things will happen and be ignored today than a rumor about Andrew Bailey, but it gave me an escape for a moment.

It’s not that the rumor or tweet itself is of much importance. The Athletics are shopping Andrew Bailey around and in a seller’s market for closers, appear likely to trade him. That is hardly a surprise. Andrew Bailey is really good and valuably cost-controlled for the next couple years. Of course teams are interested.

However, the rumor kicked off a thread in my brain and I realized something. Under the new CBA, free agent compensation has changed and a direct consequence is that almost all relief pitchers will fall outside Type A now and in the future. It used to be that if you were a team that believed it to be in need of an outside closer, you could dip into free agency, but have to pay market price and likely surrender a high draft pick. Or you could attempt to trade for a closer, pay less salary, keep your draft picks and even have a chance to add some when said closer went to free agency.

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The Houston Astros are heading to the American League and baseball is headed toward balanced divisions (numerically at least) and 10 playoff teams. There are many fans in Houston upset at the move, but one aspect that they ought to consider being excessively happy about is the team’s improved playoff probabilities under the forthcoming new alignment.

Currently baseball is a mess of uneven odds. The squads in the AL West only have three foes to compete with for a division crown while the Astros and others in the NL Central have five each. Furthermore, American League teams only have ten others to battle with for the current single wild card spot. National Leaguers must outpace 12 others in the race for baseball’s second chance bracket. Between the years of 1995 (no playoffs in 1994 remember? Good thing the new CBA’s already done) and 2012, there were four separate probabilities for making baseball’s postseason depending on which division a team played in.

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The Braves traded Derek Lowe in a salary dump in another seeming example of team’s not looking much beyond won-loss and ERA records. Options are being picked up and contracts are being voided. Tony La Russa retired. There is plenty of news afoot about established Major League stars and quasi-stars. This is not about one of those.

A few days ago, during the World Series in fact, news came out that the Houston Astros had re-signed Brandon Barnes to another Minor League contract with a Spring Training invite. Big whoop, you think sarcastically to yourself. And you’d be correct to think so; a Brandon Barnes transaction is not worthy of a lot of hoopla. You probably don’t know who he is. Many Astros fans probably don’t know who he is. He’s a career minor leaguers who has never been rated a top prospect and over 71 games at Triple-A this past season he batted .197.

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During the Sportscenter running before the start of yesterday’s World Series game, ESPN did a segment on some trends associated with cold weather* baseball. The numbers discussed ranged from biometric data (your grip strength and reaction time ability both decrease dramatically in cold weather) and some of the resulting baseball numbers such as that batting average drops and errors increase in cold weather.

*Link goes to one produced about football, but the same biometric data applies.

I do not think any of the above should surprise you. I found it fairly intuitive. I can recall with great clarity that my fingers do not seem as dexterous when suffering from cold. What I hadn’t done before though was make the explicit connection between the biological nuisances of cold and the dynamics of a baseball game. Think about how reduced grip strength can impact a pitcher. Some of his control is going to be diminished, but probably not evenly so as offspeed pitches require more of a grip than a fastball does. And writing of fastballs, think about how an increase in reaction time affects a hitter trying to distinguish between pitches and then make contact with a 90+mph pitch.

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This post is not about the ongoing playoffs. I wanted to give fair warning to those that are only concerned with that. I did draw inspiration from the playoffs however. I was watching the Tigers-Rangers game during the curious third inning hit by pitch and went to the internet to see if it mattered that the pitch hit the dirt first before the player* when I began researching players proficient at finding their way on base via the plunk.

*it does not seem to matter according to second-hand sources, but could not find that outlined in the official rule book

When discussing players that get hit by pitches, Craig Biggio’s name is typically among the first to come forth, or possibly Don Baylor depending on the age of the people involved in the conversation. Neither of them interested me however when it comes to plunkings though and for the same reason. Both Biggio and Baylor had large strikeout and walk totals to go with their painful free passes.

In contrast, consider Ron Hunt. A second baseman during the expansion era, Hunt made a couple All Star games but otherwise made little dent in baseball history, except in being hit by pitches. Ron Hunt was hit 50 times in 1971, which destroyed the previous record by a whopping 19. That number is made more interesting to me by Hunt’s 58 walks and his 41 strikeouts. He was hit more often than he struck out! That’s an incredibly rare, if not, unprecedented achievement over a full season. Hunt’s 50 times reaching base via getting hit accounted for almost 20% of his OBP. If, somehow, all 50 of those had been outs instead, Hunt’s OBP would have been 80 points lower.

While 1971 was the clear pinnacle, it was by no means unique for Hunt who led the league in HBPs for seven straight seasons despite usually playing only about 120 games a year. Past the Hughie Jennings era, nobody has a higher HBP per game rate than Hunt though two recent players, F.P. Santangelo and Carlos Quentin, do have slightly higher HBP/PA rates over shorter careers. Quentin’s might be difficult to keep up now that HBPs have stopped their mid-2000s climb.

Over Hunt’s career he ended up with 243 HBPs, 555 walks and just 382 strikeouts. Hit by pitches accounted for over 20%. Only Fernando Vina has managed to have a similar combination of the three, though he had many fewer walks and played during a time (the “Steroid era”) that had about 60% more HBPs than Hunt’s mid-60s to mid-70s time frame. Overall, I’m not sure that contextually, there a player that made a bigger use of getting hit than Ron Hunt.

Baseball games are not perfect simulations. They’re not good ones, or even mediocre ones. They’re downright awful. When we design, engineer and execute proper simulations or models, we are often dealing with scales on the order of thousands of repetitions to become comfortable with the probability of the results. Baseball runs through it once.

Granted there are lots of smaller, more repeated samples within the larger single sample. That helps keep some of the noise down, but not nearly all of it, or most of it. Baseball is a noisy game dominated in many ways by what is commonly called luck and people by nature are just terrible coming to grips with that.

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The end of August is supposed to signal the start of the pennant chase in baseball. It is the stretch drive toward division championships and Wild Card berths to accord entry into the playoffs where then a pathetically small number of games will determine for most people what team was the best for that season. If this year’s crop of contending races seems a bit lacking in drama that is not entirely the product of your imagination.

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The Mariners won today, beating the Indians by a 9-2 score. Jokes about the Mariners inept offense aside, there’s not much usually inherently interesting in the typical line score of a 9-2 game. Where this game picked up a noteworthy angle was in the last column of the line score, the errors. The Mariners committed four of them while the Indians were charged with zero and yet, the Mariners still won and won handily.

Four errors in one game does not happen all that often, and the team winning happens even less often. In fact, digging into Retrosheet, there were 1,021 such games in their records and the error-happy team had prevailed in only 191 of them for an 18.7% winning percentage. As a side note, there was no meaningful split between the home and road winning records here.

My initial research was spurred by a request for similarly errored games, but if I open it up to games with four or more errors for one team and zero for the other then the sample size expands to 1,342 and a 17.3% winning percentage for the erroring team. It’s merely two data points – and there are far more robust studies showing the same effect – but it makes sense that as the sample lets in games with more errors, the winning percentage drops. Errors are not the greatest measurement tool we have given their subjectivity, but they do have a correlation with losing.

Of course, I had to carry it to the logical conclusion and find the game or games with the largest disparity between errors. That turned out to be this game between the Oakland Athletics and the Kansas City Royals with the Royals (of course) committing a whopping eight errors to Oakland’s zero. Unsurprisingly, the Royals were trounced 11-2 in that game, although only four of the Athletics’’ runs were deemed due to the errors. The widest spread still resulting in a victory for the sloppy team circles back around to the Mariners in this game where despite seven errors and a 7-2 deficit to the Brewers in Milwaukee, the Mariners came back and won 10-8 on the road. Now that’s winning dirty.

A five home-run game has never happened for a hitter, but it has happened for pitchers plenty of times. It’s certainly less of a positive achievement there, but just as notable. Or more notable because it’s actually happened and I can note the times that it has. It happened another two times already tonight, as noted by Jeff Sullivan.

CC Sabathia surrendered five home runs to the Rays, all from different hitters, and Carlos Zambrano gave up five to the Braves, two coming from Dan Uggla and his now 32-game hitting streak. On their own, they are worth noting and then moving on. A pitching giving up five home runs is certainly unusual but it’s not incredibly rare. James Shields, Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey have allowed six in a game once and that’s only looking at the past decade. All in all, there have now been 34 instances of a five-homer game since 2000. For reference, over the same time period there have been a total of 39 triple plays turned. What I did notice however, is that Sabathia’s five home runs were all solo shots and that’s a much rarer event.

In the entire Retrosheet era, there are only 22 other cases of a pitcher giving up at least five solo home runs in a game. James Shields ruins a bit of the fun by having done it so recently as 7 August 2010 when five of the ultimately six home runs hit off him were solo dingers. More fascinating is that Tim Wakefield has actually done it twice. In the aforementioned six home run game in 2004, five of the home runs were solo shots in Detroit. The other was a two-run shot and Wakefield only allowed 2 non-HR hits over his five innings that game. Prior to that, in 1996 pitching at Fenway to the White Sox, Wakefield served up solo home runs to Frank Thomas (three times), Danny Tartabull and Robin Ventura. Similar to the other game, Wakefield only allowed a single hit that wasn’t a home run and completed six innings. Amazingly, the Red Sox won both those games.

Turning from the opposite of solo home runs, in case you needed another daily fun fact, the most amount of runs allowed by a pitcher via the long ball in one game is 11. Gio Gonzalez was responsible in July of 2009 by the Twins in Oakland of all places (and Oakland won despite being down 12-2 at one point) and Shawn Chacon was brutalized by the Angels in Colorado in 2001, which makes way more sense.

I wrote a post yesterday on Lookout Landing concerning Luis Rodriguez and his perception as that of a “battler” at the plate. I had seen and heard that adjective tossed about for him quite often and decided to try to come up with a reasonable definition for the term as I interpreted it and then check to see if Rodriguez did in fact deserve the praise. I also wanted to see if others agreed with what I came up with for a formula equivalent of battling and nobody seemed to object, so I am willing now to subject it to another audience for feedback.

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I noticed last night that the Mariners were the only team left in baseball that had yet to play an extra-inning game this season. Division-mate Oakland has already played eight. Sometimes I am content to let a little nugget like that pass off into the twitter-verse and let it die, but in this case I got intrigued enough to head to Retrosheet and see if I could dig up some context. I restricted the search to seasons starting in 1962 when the expansion to 162 games took place and started the season earlier in the year.

The best that I could do was to go by calendar dates. I would prefer to go by game counts, but that was not available to my database at this time. Luckily, calendar dates are a reasonable proxy for how many games a team has played. And the winner for the longest it has taken to play extra innings goes to the 2005 Boston Red Sox who didn’t go beyond nine until their 99th game of the season on July 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you come across a player that is putting up such ridiculous numbers that you just want to share him with others. “Hey, check out so and so,” you text or tell to the friends that you have that you know would appreciate immediately the incredibility of that person’s stats. I had that happen when I came across Glenn Abbott’s 1979 season wherein he struck out fewer than 5% of batters he faced that year. It was made even funnier that Abbott was the Mariners’ Opening Day starter that year.

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Faster players get more hits on their ground balls. That should be no surprise. There is a benefit to having speed in that you can beat more infield hits than slower players. That’s a fairly straight forward assertion, but ultimately I was a bit surprised that the gap is actually quite small.

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A pitcher’s hitting ability often goes unremarked upon. For roughly half the league, that’s fine since pitchers don’t hit. In the National League they do however, and while nobody ever expects much out of them, pitchers do occupy a spot in the batting order and what they do with it is part of the overall package of value that they deliver to the team.

On its own, that’s never a surprising statement to make. What I think is surprising is the range in values of hitting value that pitchers display. Granted they are always over small seasonal samples so I am taking care not to mention skill or repeatability here. Nevertheless, pitcher’s plate appearances do matter and managing not to be a federally declared disaster at the plate can be a stealthy way for a pitcher to add a significant amount of value.

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I am a relatively young baseball fan. As a consequence, there are a lot of players that I missed out watching first hand. Lucky for me that baseball is a sport steeped in numbers. People are biased in their recollections, but past numbers are static and simply awaiting for us to come along and figure out ways to interpret and compare them.

Sure there are the enduring numbers stuck forever on the backs of old baseball cards, but one of the revelations that comes from diving into the rabbit hole of sabermetrics is the realization of how little those oft-quoted numbers actually tell. It’s not just the standard RBI and pitcher Wins are overrated stats mantra, but the importance of era-context that’s left to the individual consumer to internalize and adjust for, if he or she is even aware of it.

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The Mariners completed one massive comeback last night against the Blue Jays. Down 7-0 in the seventh inning with one out already, the Mariners had a win expectancy of 0.3%. They came all the way back and won it with a walk-off “single” in the bottom of the ninth. What sparked their comeback was the eighth inning when, with the bases loaded, Octavio Dotel entered the game and walked Luis Rodriguez and Milton Bradley. Dotel was yanked for Marc Rzepczynski but he walked Jack Cust next. Three straight hitters drew bases-loaded walks. That piqued my interest. How often does that happen?

As it turns out that feat is not unheard of, though certainly rare. As far back as our Retrosheet data goes, there had been 108 games featuring at least three consecutive walks or hit batters (also known as “free passes”) with the bases loaded. Read the rest of this entry »

There is no use denying that as a Mariner fan I took great delight in the happenings surrounding Carlos Silva this spring. There are few players that I have rooted harder against than he, and to see his self-appraisal turn out to be delusional gave me joy at a time when Spring Training was wearing thin. With the season beginning, I was prepared to toss Silva out of mind and get on with following the many interesting stories cropping up from those that play Major League baseball.

That is, until this morning when I was greeted with the following two notices in rapid succession.

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