Don Newcombe began his professional baseball career as a teenager with the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League in 1944. As a rookie hurler with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1949, he quickly established himself as an ace — he was named an All-Star, started two games for the Dodgers in the World Series, and was eventually crowned Rookie of the Year. This photo taken of him during that 1949 World Series would be used as evidence in a lawsuit nearly 50 years later:

Photo by Ralph Morse / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images

Newk last pitched in the majors in 1960 with the Cleveland Indians and spent 1961 with the Spokane Indians in the Pacific Coast League trying to resurrect his major league career. After making a single start for Japan’s Chunichi Dragons in 1962, Newcombe retired from baseball as the only player in major league history to have won the Most Valuable Player Award, the Cy Young Award, and the Rookie of the Year Award (Justin Verlander has since matched this feat). Newcombe’s playing career, however, was cut short due to military service (1952-53) and a personal battle with alcohol.

After his playing career ended, Newcombe, who drank his first beer as an eight-year-old, began to imbibe heavily. He eventually lost his New Jersey cocktail lounge to tax agents and a liquor business to bankruptcy, his wife left with their three kids, and he had to pawn a World Series ring to pay his rent. Having hit rock bottom, Newcombe embarked on the road to recovery, ultimately dedicating his life to helping others who struggled with addiction. He joined the Los Angeles Dodgers’ front office in 1970 and served as the team’s community relations director, specializing in drug and alcohol awareness programs. He additionally served as spokesman for the National Institute on Drug and Alcohol Abuse pursuant to presidential appointments by Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan.

Accordingly, Newcombe was sickened to discover that a beer advertisement in the February 1994 Sports Illustrated “swimsuit edition” appeared to feature his likeness. The full-page illustrated ad for Killian’s Irish Red (owned by Coors Brewing Company) showed a seemingly generic pitcher in his windup, a nondescript infielder, and a fictional ballpark. The players’ uniforms did not show a team name or logo and did not utilize the same color scheme as the 1949 Dodgers. However, “Newcombe, along with family, friends and teammates immediately recognized the pitcher featured in the advertisement as Newcombe in his playing days.” Willie Mays and Duke Snider, in particular, recognized Newcombe immediately.

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Pitch selection is like Cold War game theory.

The pitcher/catcher (battery) and the hitter are trying to balance a guessing game of what their counterpart is thinking with their own capabilities to develop a decision or expectation about the next pitch thrown.

The battery is trying to strike the delicate balance of a pitch that will result in a strike or an out (usually by being put into play) and give the hitter the least opportunity to get on base. The hitter is trying to anticipate that decision to maximize their ability to react successfully. This becomes circular, since the hitter’s ability to anticipate correctly improves their ability to get on-base, which changes the calculus and pitch decision for the battery, which changes the hitter’s ability to anticipate correctly. Just like the nuclear stand-off of the Cold War, a low-and-inside slider hit into the gap or a Soviet Sarmak from Siberia shot down by Star Wars lasers. Same thing, right?

Pitcher: I should throw this.

Hitter: I will anticipate this.

Pitcher: Then I should throw that.

But it’s not – because baseball is fun and the Cold War was humans (not) trying to murder each other by the millions. Instead let’s say pitch selection is just like keeping secrets from your Friends:

Given this stand-off of anticipation, the battery can take one of two approaches:

1.) Complete randomness, or…

2.) Sequencing pitches that build on each other to keep the hitter off balance.

This is the old pitching-coach speak of “changing the hitter’s eye level, keeping him on his heels, and mixing speeds.” Read the rest of this entry »

When PECOTA projections were released at Baseball Prospectus in February, I’m sure that I wasn’t the only one who was surprised to see Luke Voit projected to be a top-25 hitter in the entire sport this season. We all know what Voit did in the final month or so of the 2018 campaign, and when you look back on it, there were always going to be questions of whether it was repeatable or whether he was going to go down the same path as famed Yankee flash-in-the-pan Shane Spencer.

I think there can be a comfortable medium between one-hit wonder and top-25 hitter in baseball, so I decided to do a deep dive into Voit’s batted ball profile. I then compared him to his peers based on both his profile as well as his walk and strikeout rates to find some comparable hitters and try to answer whether a top-25 projection for Voit is realistic, too high, or too low.

To do this, I took the batted ball leaderboards from FanGraphs and imported them into R. I then looked at Voit’s batted ball profile from the minor leagues, considered by Yankees officials to be part of the reason why they wanted to acquire him. I calculated his minor league averages in Ground Ball%, Line Drive%, Fly Ball%, Pull%, Center%, and Opposite%, which can be found in the table below:

Note: I only looked at minor league seasons in which he had more than 100 plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever had a baseball game on in the background in the dead of summer as you quietly go about your day, and then you catch an absolute gem from a broadcaster that stops and makes you laugh? “He got down the line in a hurry… He’s pretty fast, for a catcher.”

It’s possibly the game’s greatest backhanded compliment; an ode of sorts to the frequently lumbering yeoman who not only endure the dog days of August but who do so willingly, wearing additional gear and sitting in an awkward squat for hours. A single sentence about their baserunning abilities — or lack thereof — conveys perhaps a modestly complete understanding of what baseball is, when you stop to think about it. And it’s a delight.

This offseason has seen a different kind of speed from catchers: the one at which they’re changing teams. Maybe it’s coincidence that some of the more offensive-minded ones have reached the market together, and they’re some of the names moving between teams. While backstops make it difficult to capture their entire value in a single stat because of all they do, we can and do quantify offense. That makes it easier, if you’re a front office, to jump on a guy you know can beat the .232/.304/.372 average triple-slash line catchers produced in 2018 and see it as a win.

But the offense-oriented catchers aren’t the only ones moving between teams, and it becomes harder to separate them from each other when considering defense or the total package. It is much harder than separating, say, Mike Trout and Charlie Blackmon. And that’s what makes the catcher carousel this offseason a unique ride. Read the rest of this entry »

It is not a difficult task to recite some of the hardest throwers of 2018, such as Jordan Hicks, Luis Severino, and the like. The purpose of this article is to highlight the softest throwers of 2018. To do so, I will examine the pitcher(s) with the slowest curveball, slider, changeup, and fastball. We will ignore some less common pitches such as Steven Wright’s knuckleball (76 mph) and Hector Santiago’s rarely-used screwball (also 76 mph).

To put some modest restrictions on the analysis, the minimum is 30 innings pitched, so odd cases like Jose Reyes taking the mound are not counted.

Curveball: Kazuhisa Makita (60.0 mph)

Kazuhisa Makita signed a two-year contract with the Padres last offseason to come to the United States from Japan. Below is a clip of a 52-mph pitch in spring training. Yes, you read that correctly. 52 mph.

To add to his deceptive submarine delivery, Makita’s pitch defies the gravitational forces that would pull a pedestrian 52-mph offering to the ground, breaking just outside of the initial target. It comprises only 4.6% of his repertoire, but is at minimum a very entertaining pitch.

Slider: Kazuhisa Makita (70.6 mph)

Makita returns with a slider that edges out Brad Ziegler’s by a little under 4 mph, and he throws it just under 20% of the time. While it is interesting to see Makita take the top honor for both curveball and slider, this pattern will not perfectly hold.

Changeup: Dan Jennings (69.7 mph)

In case you were wondering, Makita comes in third, with his rarely-thrown changeup averaging 72.7 miles per hour. Here is an offering from a 2014 exhibition to Lucas Duda, then of the Mets, taken for a called third strike.

In contrast to Makita, Jennings heavily relies upon the ground ball (56.1 GB% with the Brewers last year). After bouncing around from the Marlins to the White Sox, Rays, and Brewers, he recently signed a minor-league contract with the Angels. Jennings’ most notable accomplishment last season was his one-batter start as an opener against the Cardinals, when he forced Matt Carpenter to ground out to second base.

Fastball: Kazuhisa Makita (81.2 mph)

Makita’s is king again, with a fastball that was his only pitch to register a positive value last season, so despite its pedestrian velocity, it proved to be his most effective weapon. He threw it 72.5% of the time, far beyond any other pitch. Here he is using it to strike out Trea Turner.

The location in the upper portion of the zone presents a nice contrast to the curveball from earlier.

Here again the fastball is used to complete a strikeout, this time of Ryan McMahon.

One major problem for Makita last year was his inability to keep the ball in the ballpark, even while playing half his games at Petco. He yielded a 40.4% fly-ball rate, a worse-than-average 18.4% HR/FB rate, and a resulting 5.40 ERA. As a result, he was designated for assignment this offseason and reassigned to Triple-A after clearing waivers. His 4.85 FIP and 3.71 SIERA leave some (albeit little) room for improvement, but given the modest contract he signed to come over from Japan, the Padres have little to lose in keeping the slowest pitcher in all of baseball around.

While it certainly wasn’t one of the most traditionally exciting playoff series (Mike Moustakas’ extra-inning walkoff aside) in recent memory, last season’s NLDS matchup between the NL Central-champion Milwaukee Brewers and Wild Card-winning Colorado Rockies came with an interesting wrinkle: no two contending teams in baseball were assembled more differently. While the Rockies relied on a surprisingly strong young rotation to carry an unbalanced offense and underperforming bullpen to a playoff berth, Milwaukee propped up a shaky rotation with a strong lineup and a deep, dominant bullpen anchored by Jeremy Jeffress, Corey Knebel, and Josh Hader en route to a division title. But even these differences weren’t the most striking: Milwaukee led all of baseball in wins above replacement accumulated by players from outside the organization and generated very little value from homegrown players, while their Division Series foes lapped the league in production from early-round draft picks while receiving limited contributions from other player-acquisition avenues.

This Brewers-Rockies example serves as a solid jumping-off point for this research and an interesting case study in how vastly different player acquisition strategies can succeed or fail. The objective of this study is to break down how each team obtained the players that generated their value over the course of the 2018 season, as well as to examine what a “normal” breakdown of talent acquisition avenues looks like and to examine teams that stick out in one way or another in this respect. We’ll start by detailing the methods used to undertake this research before exploring the results: Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few articles, including one by Travis Sawchik, arguing that tie games might not be as bad for baseball as you think. The truth is that not only would ties have had no impact on who reached the postseason in 2018, but they would have shaved off four minutes from the average time time.

Using regular expression to parse box score data from RetroSheet, I’ve looked at how the 2018 season would’ve been different without extra innings. Here’s a look at the postseason standings as they were compared to how they would’ve looked with ties (scored 3 points for a W, 1 point for a T, and 0 for a L):

With ties, the 2018 postseason still has the same cast of characters, although the Dodgers and the Rockies would have swapped places in the NL West, causing the Dodgers to go to the Wild Card game.

That’s only looking at 2018. When examining the past five seasons, I found that the postseason implications of tie games would be pretty minimal.

In the plot below, each point represents one team’s season. The X-axis is the number of games that would end in ties and the Y-axis is the number of places a team would’ve moved in their division.

For simplicity, I’m defining postseason implications (PS Implications) as a team missing or making a Division No. 1 or Wild Card No. 1 or No. 2 with the scoring system described above.

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The Braves have a slew of young stars, including the electric Ozzie Albies. Albies is a speed demon on the bases, a gold-glove caliber second baseman, and a force to be reckoned with at the plate. He got off to a blazing start in 2018, hitting .281 with an impressive 20 homers in the first half, earning him a trip to the All-Star Game. Albies’ luck was not so good in the second half, as his average dropped 55 points to a lackluster .226 to go with four homers. This day-and-night difference makes it hard to evaluate what exactly Albies will be, but his second-half struggles have people looking for answers everywhere. One of the most common questions raised is related to how his switch-hitting impacts his consistency at the plate. Let’s look closer at his splits.

In 2018, Albies looked like two different players when you compare his production from the left side of the plate to the right side.

From the left, where Albies gets most of his at-bats, he struggled tremendously in 2018. From the right side, his numbers looks like those of a perennial All-Star. His splits averaged out to a respectable-but-not-amazing .261 average with 24 homers and a perfectly league-average 100 wRC+ over the course of the full season. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published on my blog, cargocultsabermetrics.com. 

Developing a new pitch can be a great way for a pitcher to have a breakout season. In 2018, we saw big improvements from Trevor Bauer adding a slider, Adam Ottavino adding a cutter, and Patrick Corbin adding a curveball. A new pitch can sometimes be the missing puzzle piece when trying to figure out why a player is good and not great. For Jose Berrios, a cutter might be that missing piece.

Examining Berrios’ arsenal

Jose Berrios has one of the nastiest curveballs in baseball. Instead of having the typical downward break associated with curveballs, Berrios’ curve averages 15.5 inches of glove-side break. This results from Berrios imparting gyro spin (think bullet spin) on his curveball rather than 12-6 top spin. Because of this, Berrios generates close to no vertical break caused by Magnus force, which is just a fancy way of saying the only drop we see on Berrios’ curve is due to gravity rather than top spin.

To pair with his curve, Berrios has a four-seam fastball which generates 9.5 inches of arm side run and 16.5 inches of upward vertical break due to Magnus force (causing the pitch to drop less), a two-seam fastball which generates 16.5 inches of arm-side run and 11.0 inches of upward vertical break, and a changeup with 14.5 inches of arm-side run and 5.5 inches of upward vertical break (the changeup will drop even more than the fastball since it is thrown slower and gravity will have more time to bring the pitch down). Read the rest of this entry »

The 20-to-80 scale is one of the core tenets of baseball scouting and allows evaluators to quickly interpret a player’s skillset. Kiley McDaniel wrote an excellent series of articles back in 2014 (and provided an update this past November) explaining the scale, and while the whole series is easily worth a read, one of the key notes is as follows:

The invention of the scale is credited to Branch Rickey and whether he intended it or not, it mirrors various scientific scales. 50 is major league average, then each 10 point increment represents a standard deviation better or worse than average.

On the surface, the scale is fairly easy to understand, but somewhat harder to conceptualize what each grade actually looks like. For example, how frequently does a hitter with a 45 power grade hit a home run? How does a 60 run grade translate to Sprint Speed? I decided to investigate, drawing inspiration from a 2013 article by Mark Smith. The idea of an objective 20-to-80 scale, while not a new concept, is worth revisiting at this time because of changes in the run environment and the development of new player evaluation techniques, most notably StatCast. We’ll begin with a brief rundown on methodology before looking at each tool: Read the rest of this entry »