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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In the midst of reformatting and updating my retrosheet database, I got re-interested in the game duration field that Retrosheet tracks. I started digging into comparisons, plotting game duration on one axis and various other variables on the other in order to see if anything struck my fancy. Such posts will come at a later date, but while doing that, another thought struck me: How long of a game does the average person find ideal?

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The momentum working through the media is that the Mariners are handing the fifth starter job to prospect Michael Pineda unless he bombs over the remainder of Spring Training. The reasons for doing revolve around Pineda being the team’s best option for that spot, the team not wanting to hurt their relationship with Pineda down the line, and the team not wanting blowback from the union or other players.

A year of Major League service time takes 172 days on the roster to achieve and no player can earn more than one full service year per season. That means if a player such as Michael Pineda spends 171 days on the Major League roster in any season from 2011 through 2016 and 172 or more in the other five seasons, he will end the 2016 season with 5 years and 171 days of service time, making him not a free agent until after the following year.

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It was a disappointing 2010 season for Anaheim. They finished in third place in the AL West and with a below .500 record for the first time since 2003. With lots of money to spend and a natural motive to improve, most people figured the Angels would be big players in all the major free agents this winter. Instead, they struck out on nearly every target. Rightly or wrongly, a hard line stance on contract offers to the likes of Carl Crawford and Adrian Beltre resulted in those players signing elsewhere and leaving the Angels with no big move to hang their hat on. Perhaps out of desperation came the trade for Vernon Wells and the assumption of his entire contract. How does that impact the starting lineup?

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Oakland may have surprised a few people last season by being more competitive than was expected, but they should not sneak up on anyone this year. Is the young pitching shaping up into a potential competitive window again? That’s where most of the focus is drawn to, but the rest of Oakland’s roster could wear teams down in unexpected ways. The lineup has pop, the gloves can catch and the bullpen has been bolstered. In short, Oakland lost little talent this winter and padded their depth in needed areas. Will it be enough?

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The discussion a month ago about Matt Cain and his –and teammates’—home run suppression had me thinking about park factors and the nature of comparing unadjusted stats like RA to ones like xFIP. It feels at times that people will point to the gap between a pitcher’s ERA and his FIP or xFIP as proof that said pitcher is a statistically significant outlier at having control over one of the results of pitching that the DIPS theory rejects. Where I think a disconnect forms is that those assertions ignore that controlling for “luck” factors like BABIP and HR/FB is not the only thing that metrics like FIP do. They also attempt to control out the pitcher’s home park and the defensive skill behind him.

If we want to examine the question of whether a metric like xFIP underrates Matt Cain (or anyone) because it ignores some aspect of Cain’s skill at controlling his batted balls then we need to first isolate that part of the spread between his ERA and his xFIP. That means making corrections for park and defensive skill.

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The annals of baseball history are littered with interesting stories and stat lines. Being the young sap that I am, much of that history is unknown to me which is why I dig around in our databases from time to time so that I can come across stories like this one.

Herb Washington was a world-class sprinter. Literally, he held world records in both the 50 and 60-yard sprints. He also played baseball in high school but stopped after his Junior year. About six years later, Charlie Finley signed him to the Oakland Athletics for the 1974 season to be used as a pinch runner.

That was not an unprecedented move for Finley, but what ended up being special about Washington is that despite appearing in 110 games total across 1974 and 1975, Washington never once came to bat nor spent even an inning in the field. Read the rest of this entry »

Overall, I enjoy Spring Training. Still, there are parts about the whole event that I dislike. Aspects such as heightened speculation over insignificant bench roles, discussions about offseason workouts and people taking small samples too seriously are almost a rite of passage now. Something to be endured before baseball can begin again in earnest. I could do without those parts.

Those are mostly outweighed however, by the good bits. Baseball returning at least in spirit for one and despite the many fluff pieces, there is a growing amount of actual news to digest. Spring Training is also a chance to travel to usually warm destinations, see something resembling baseball for slightly cheaper than normal and have greater access to players and staff than you would have at a regular Major League game.

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Albert Pujols and the Cardinals being unable to come to an agreement on a contract extension has been the big news of the week and provoked a lot of commentary speculating on the motives of all those involved and what the implications might fall out from this.

I am uninterested in predictions about what will happen since even the best are no better than mildly informed guesses, but I am interested in how people view Pujols as a possible asset outside the abstract. That is, suppose nine months from now you are the General Manager for your favorite team and Pujols’ agent calls you up and tells you that if you offer the most money, Albert will sign there. How much do you offer? What’s your breaking point?

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About three weeks after the exchange of arbitration figures where Josh Hamilton requested $12 million and the Rangers countered with $8.7 million, the two sides have reached a contract agreement that will cover this and next season. It is being reported as a two-year, $24 million deal. In essence, this deal can be summarized as Hamilton “wins” his 2011 arbitration case and cedes any possible raise for 2012.

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On a list of the highest single season infield hit totals since FanGraphs began tracking the statistic in 2002, Ichiro Suzuki occupies the first seven spots. Across all seasons, Ichiro’s 391 infield hits totally dwarfs every other hitter in baseball. The next highest is Luis Castillo with 248. By sole dint of his impressive cumulative total, it is tempting to award Ichiro as the best infield hitter in baseball, but is that a reasonable conclusion?

Ichiro bats leadoff and is incredibly durable, routinely garnering among the top number of plate appearances among hitters each season. That translates to lots and lots of opportunities to rack up infield hits. Instead of looking just at raw totals this illustrates a need to look at rates so that I can attempt to control for Ichiro’s advantage in opportunities.

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Gil Meche’s career appears to be over, a casualty of his shoulder injuries. The news comes a decade after Meche first went under the knife for his shoulder, having labrum surgery in 2001. It would take him until 2003 to make it back to the Majors. I bet that today is a rather bittersweet day for Meche, but that he made it back at all was a tremendous success for him. Sticking around for eight seasons and getting to land a giant paycheck is remarkable.

It’s not a surprise that Meche has run into further injury problems. Certainly one can question some of his usage patterns in 2009 as well. He never seemed to be the same after the complete game shutout against Arizona that took him 132 pitches to finish. Not that anyone should point to that as definitive proof of anything. Still, it is a sad way for it to end and only at 32 years old as well.

The ending of Gil Meche’s tenure with the Royals also provides an opportunity to look back on the contract that he signed with them after the 2006 season. At five years and $55 million, it was a stunner of a deal, a huge investment in a notoriously talent fickle pitcher with an extensive injury history. While Meche pitched superbly for Kansas City during the first two years of the deal, he fell apart after 2008 with –who could have guessed?—injuries.

According to our WAR and salary equations, Gil Meche amassed nearly $41 million worth of value in 2007-8. He seemed a lock to prove a great investment for Kansas City. The sad end to the story reminds us all that multi-year contracts require us to think about them over multiple years. The tendency is to remember only the deals signed over the most recent off-season. That is a large blind spot, especially since the likelihood is that due to health and age, a newly signed free agent will have his best season in the one immediately following his signing.

Remember to keep perspective on contracts that span multiple seasons. You never know when they will go off the rails. As for Meche, he ends his career with decidedly average career numbers, but for Mariner and Royal fans, he will not be soon relegated to the dustpan of forgettable players. He will always be present in my mind when I think of frustratingly talented pitchers who can just never seem to put it all together. Whether it’s because of his contract, his many injuries and comebacks, his tantalizing potential or his tragic end, Meche will be remembered.

The last post introduced the topic at hand and looked at the San Francisco Giants as they were the team with the biggest overall spread between their team FSR and UZR ratings. They happened to have much higher UZRs than FSRs in both years.

The two other highly outlying dots on the same side as the Giants are the 2009 Mariners and 2010 Diamondbacks. On the other side of the disagreement line are the Colorado Rockies. Read the rest of this entry »

When attempting to judge a player’s defensive skills, I prefer to look at a couple different metrics. Chief among them is the Fans’ Scouting Report (FSR) and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR). Both are on the same scale, runs relative to average, but come to their conclusions in disparate ways. The FSR ratings come from surveys filled out by fans while UZR is entirely algorithm-driven. They take such different paths, but how close do they come to arriving in the same place?

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The Texas Rangers finally found a player in Adrian Beltre to take their obscene amount of money this winter. Throughout their pursuit of Cliff Lee earlier and Beltre recently, writers mentioned the new cable television contract that the Rangers locked in this winter as a motivator for the Rangers to spend money this offseason. Knowing how persuasive initial reports can be in forming long-term memories of facts, I wanted to address this deal by itself. The first news came from USA Today and stated that it was $3 billion over 20 years. That turned out to be grossly inflated, and, within a few days, we had multiple reports of a more reasonable figure of actually about $1.6 billion.

That is still a very large number and easily sticks in your mind. Furthermore, it seemed to represent a dramatic increase in revenue for the Rangers. A number I saw quoted often was that the Rangers currently make only $20 million from television right now, which would make this new deal a fourfold increase. That certainly would be a huge raise, but it does not appear to be accurate.

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Cliff Lee spent all of 2010 in the American League earning 7.1 WAR. Now in the National League, Lee swings a lot of value from the AL to the NL. If you thought an American League team was, on average, say five wins better than a National League team in 2010 then Cliff Lee could have lessened that gap to four wins all by his lonesome had he spent the year in the NL.

That thought got me thinking about the rest of the transactions this winter concerning players switching leagues. Read the rest of this entry »