Over the last year I made a series of studies on Statcast and I thought it would be interesting to write a little overview article to summarize my findings.

In June I looked at the launch angle profile of the league. The average went up of course, but it accelerated faster at the top than at the bottom, so we have not reached a stage of consolidation yet where the league is moving closer together in launch angle, which ultimately should be expected (the LA is increasing at the bottom but less than at the top.

That means there still is room for more growth in elevating but mostly in the bottom half of launch angle.

In the above I found that there are limits to elevating. I found the top guys usually average 11-16 degrees of launch angle. Below that players definitely can benefit from elevating more.

Then I was looking at the cost of too much elevation. A common theory is that swinging up more leads to more Ks because you are not really matching the plane of the pitch. I found a small effect there but nothing really big.

However I did find that there is a BABIP cost, especially if it comes with pulling the ball, and confirmed that with more research and found out that elevating more without a BABIP cost is possible if you get off the ground while limiting pop-ups and high outfield FBs above 30 degrees like Daniel Murphy does very well, while the 50+% FB guys with 20+ degrees of average LA tend to have low BABIPs, especially when coupled with pulling a lot to sell out for power.

I also looked at the relationship of EV and LA and unsurprisingly found out that between like 8 and 20 degrees, exit velo doesn’t matter much, while above 20 degrees almost all production comes from homers. Balls above 20 degrees and below 95 MPH are basically worthless so you need a certain minimum power to make elevation work. Off the ground is always good, but for some it might make sense to stay between 5 and 20 degrees.

Not quite related to that topic, I also created a formula for the relationship between power, patience, and K rate. An old argument between sabermetric and traditional writers was whether Ks matter. We know that Ks are not worse than other outs and high-K hitters do not perform worse, but that is also because there is a selection bias against high-K, low-power guys. Everything being equal, low Ks is better, and I found a pretty linear relationship between K, BB, and ISO.

If production is equal, Ks obviously don’t matter, of course.

If you could pick any catcher to have on your team for the next, say, five years, who would you pick?

The first name that probably comes to most baseball fans’ minds is Buster Posey, who has been the undisputed best all-around catcher in the game for the past several years. Additionally one might think of rising stars such as Gary Sanchez, Willson Contreras and J.T. Realmuto. One is not wrong for doing so, as the four names I mentioned are all fantastic players and certainly deserve credit for being some of the top catchers in the game. But if I had to choose just one catcher to have on my team for the next five years, I would not pick any of those guys.

I would pick Austin Barnes.

Some might think I’d be crazy for picking a guy who was a backup catcher for almost all of last year. But Barnes was, in my opinion, the Dodgers’ deadliest secret weapon. Everyone knew about the sudden emergence of Chris Taylor and Cody Bellinger, but Barnes often got lost in that conversation. While he didn’t receive as much playing time as the average starting catcher, he was one of, if not the best catcher in baseball in the playing time that he did receive. Among catchers with at least 250 PA (Barnes had 262), he ranked first in wRC+ with 142, ahead of Sanchez’s 130, Kurt Suzuki’s 129 and Posey’s 128. Relatively small sample size aside, Barnes was the best hitting catcher in baseball last year.

So if Barnes was the best hitting catcher in baseball, why did he spend almost the entire year as a backup? Well, we can’t blame Dave Roberts too much for that one, considering that they also had Yasmani Grandal, a guy who has established himself as one of the best catchers in baseball with his elite framing skills and power. However, while being a switch hitter, Grandal has always been worse as a right-handed batter than as a left-handed batter, (106 wRC+ vs. 117) and had considerably less power against lefties (.138 ISO vs. 211), so Barnes was used mostly against lefties while Grandal played most games where the Dodgers faced a right-hander. And while one could argue that Barnes’s success was a product of playing against more favorable matchups, he actually had a reverse platoon split, hitting worse against lefties than he did against righties (136 wRC+ vs. 147).

In the middle of the season while Barnes was posting better numbers than Grandal and the Dodgers were in the division race, I do think that it was actually smart of the Dodgers to continue playing Grandal over Barnes the majority of the time, since Grandal was an established player and there was understandable skepticism that Barnes would maintain these numbers. It’s not uncommon for mediocre players to ride an insane BABIP-fueled hot streak for a month or two before regressing back into mediocrity. Just look at Sandy Leon’s 2016. But as Barnes started to get more at-bats and Grandal started to regress in the second half, it became clear that Barnes was not just a fluke, but a legitimately really good player.

First, the offensive side of things. As mentioned earlier, Barnes had the best wRC+ among catchers with at least 250 plate appearances. He hit .289 with a .329 BABIP, which is a little high but certainly not unsustainable considering his above-average batted ball profile. His quality of contact percentages were all roughly or slightly below league average, but what sticks out is that he hit line drives 6% above league average, and instead of strictly pulling the ball, he went up the middle and used the opposite field a lot. Barnes maintaining a .289 average in the future is a completely reasonable proposition.

Perhaps the most undervalued part of Barnes’s game was his above average power. He had a .197 ISO, so he wasn’t just some singles-only slap hitter. To put that into context, Barnes had more power than Corey Seager, Hanley Ramirez and Joc Pederson. So while he hit line drives to all fields and was no slouch in terms of power, probably the most impressive part of his offensive profile is his plate discipline. Barnes walked 14.9% of the time while striking out only 16.4% of the time. His BB/K of 0.91 was second among catchers behind only Posey’s 0.92, and 11th in all of baseball. This was due to his tremendous plate discipline and selectivity. He swung at only 17.4% pitches outside of the strike zone, whereas the average MLB batter swung at 29.9%. And when he did swing at pitches outside of the zone, he made contact 7.8% more often than the average batter. While he did swing at pitches in the zone at a below average rate, due to his selectiveness, he made contact with the pitches he did swing at in the zone 7.3% above league average at 92.8%. This is the sign of a batter with a truly great eye, swinging at the pitches he was confident he could hit while laying off the ones he couldn’t. As a result, he swung and missed only 4.7% of the time.

But let’s get back to the original question that I’m trying to answer: why I would pick Barnes over any other catcher to have for the next five years. A lot of people might pick Posey due to his track record, but I would pick Barnes because, as I’ve explained, I believe he can sustain the numbers he put up this year. Plus, Posey has been declining in the last few years, specifically in his isolated power, which has been worse than Barnes’ ISO in every year of Posey’s career except in 2012 when he won MVP. One could technically argue that Posey is still better than Barnes due to the tiny edge in BB/K, but while Posey has similar overall plate discipline, he also walks 4.2% less than Barnes and has been experiencing a power decline as he’s gotten older. His ISO last year was .142, .055 lower than Barnes. Plus, he’s three years older and on the wrong side of 30. Plate discipline is a skill that ages well, but power is not, and the fact that Posey has about equal plate discipline and significantly worse and declining power easily puts Barnes over the edge for me. I’m a believer in the notion that strikeouts don’t matter that much as long as you walk a lot, so I’ll gladly take Barnes’ extra walks over Posey’s lower strikeout rate, meaning I prefer Barnes’s plate discipline and power over Posey’s. Posey’s career accomplishments can’t be denied, and I’m sure he’ll still be great in the next few years, but I would much rather take my chances with a less-proven Barnes.

Defense (which is also extremely important for catchers) is a whole other story I’ll get to after I wrap up my analysis of his offense. But as far as offense is concerned, Barnes simply has a much more impressive and well-rounded offensive profile than any other catcher in the game today. Does he do everything better than everyone? No. Sanchez has more power and Realmuto is a better baserunner. But Barnes is the best overall hitter among them, walks more than all of them except for Alex Avila and Andrew Knapp (who are clearly worse catchers than Barnes for a myriad of other reasons), strikes out less than most of them, has above average power, and has speed. Using Bill James’s Speed rating, or “Spd,” Barnes gets a 4.9, which puts him 4th among catchers, a tick behind Realmuto and Chris Hermann (5.0) and Christian Vazquez (5.1). Catchers have always been notoriously slow, so to have a serviceable runner who can steal bases and take an extra base from the catcher position is extremely valuable, especially considering how awful most other catchers are at running. His baserunning is admittedly far from perfect, as evidenced by his -1.6 BsR, but he definitely has the speed and athleticism to steal more than the four bases he stole this year, and really anything you can get out of the catcher position in terms of baserunning is valuable, considering that there are MLB catchers who go multiple seasons without even attempting to steal a base. Barnes’s combination of contact, plate discipline, power and speed are the most well-rounded of any catcher in baseball, and it’s a coach’s dream to have a player with the amount of tools that he has.

Of course, these offensive tools would be valuable at any position. But what really makes Barnes special is that he’s additionally a fantastic fielding catcher. In Baseball Prospectus’s Fielding Runs Above Average, which combines framing runs, blocking runs, throwing runs, and basic defensive components such as fielding ground balls, Barnes ranked 9th among all catchers and 8th in FRAA_ADJ, which takes out the “normal” FRAA components that are included in all players’ FRAA and instead focuses just on a catcher’s framing runs, blocking runs and throwing runs. If Barnes had played the same amount of innings at catcher that Grandal played, while defending at the same level, he would have had 23.7 FRAA, which would have been 2nd among catchers behind only Austin Hedges, and 25.5 FRAA_ADJ, which would have led baseball. Barnes is an elite defensive catcher. To say exactly how good he is would be tough due to the imperfectness of these fairly new defensive statistics and the relatively small sample size. But another argument one could make for starting Grandal over Barnes could be that Grandal is a great defensive catcher, which he undoubtedly is, but Barnes is just as good if not better. Additionally, Grandal had an alarming 16 passed balls in 2017, his second straight year leading the league in passed balls, while Barnes had just three. While Barnes is a fantastic defensive catcher, he’s also shown that he can play a serviceable second base as well due to his agility and athleticism that few catchers have.

Overall, there really just isn’t anything Barnes can’t do. He hits for average, gets on base, has great plate discipline, can hit for power, plays a great defensive catcher, and can even play second base. He’s a little old for a rising star, but still relatively young as he’ll be playing his age-28 season in 2018, and I would prefer to have him on my team than a younger catcher like Sanchez, Realmuto or Contreras. Posey’s entering a power and age decline, and while Sanchez and Contreras may be “flashier” with their towering home runs, I believe Barnes has a more well-rounded toolset that will age well and provide value even if he does happen to struggle with the bat, which I don’t think he will due to the reasons explained earlier. Realmuto is basically Barnes with slightly less power and far worse plate discipline, but is more well known by most fans, mostly due to him having already established a starting role. A case could certainly be made for any of these guys over Barnes, but after looking at the strengths, weaknesses, and tools of each player, I would be extremely confident to pick Barnes over star catchers such as Posey, Sanchez, Contreras, Realmuto, Grandal, Mike Zunino, and any other active catcher. Am I overreacting to 262 plate appearances? Maybe. But after looking closely at the stats and watching Barnes develop as a player, I am fully confident that he will blossom into one of the best if not the best catcher in the game over the next five years.

I wondered how the power revolution changes the impact of power on winning. Does the abundance of HR mean that HRs are less valuable? Or are they even more necessary?

For that I compared 2017 and 2008. 2008 is kind of an arbitrary cutoff; I used it because it was 10 seasons ago and not a completely different game.

In 2008 the top-10 HR-hitting teams averaged 86 wins, and in 2017 just 82 wins. Also in the top 10 in HRs in 2008, three teams had losing seasons, and in 2017 it was a whopping five teams. So it seems being a top-HR team helps less.

However, when looking at the bottom 10 HR-hitting teams, it is 74 wins for both years. Three teams of the bottom 10 in HRs had winning seasons in 2008 versus just two in 2017. So it didn’t become easier to succeed as a no-power team.

The league also got closer together in HRs. In 2008 the bottom-10 average was 127, and it as 1.6 times as much for the top 10 (197). In 2017 it was 172 for the bottom and just 1.3 times as much for the top (230).

Of course park factors and year-to-year variations play a role, but last season Colorado wasn’t even in the top 10 for example.

So it seems power is at least as much needed to win as it used to be, but it isn’t really much of a difference maker anymore, it is more a baseline needed to win. But teams like the Rays and A’s who hit tons of homers in a pitcher’s park show that you can’t really build around power as a main skill; you need to make sure you don’t suck at power, but since you can’t really separate anymore with power, you need other primary skills.

I would probably say make sure to be in the top third in power, but once you are there, don’t sacrifice other stuff to get even more power.

That is especially true for defense. The A’s led the league in average launch angle and were fourth in HRs. Since they were only seven HR behind the Yankees and four behind the Astros in a vastly less hitter-friendly park, we can probably say they were the top HR-hitting team.

They tried to sell out for power and it clearly wasn’t enough to make up for historically bad defense and other flaws.

So teams definitely shouldn’t sacrifice in other regards; there is enough power around to not put bad defenders or super low OBPs in the field to get more power.

Power is as important as it ever, was but it is not possible to dominate with it anymore like the 1927 Yankees did. Now it is now one necessary skill of many and well-roundedness is the name of the game in 2017. Same can be said for contact-hitting. People said after 2015 that contact was the future. However, low-power slap hitting didn’t prove to be successful, but with power now available so easy, teams now might be able to cut back on the Ks a little without sacrificing power like the Astros did, because super high Ks can suppress on-base percentage when it doesn’t come with Adam Dunn-like walks.

Last month, the sabermetrics community descended into complete and utter anarchy over the latest and greatest debate on WAR. Industry heavyweights like Bill James, Tom Tango, and our own Dave Cameron all weighed in on the merits of baseball’s premier metric. After the dust settled, Sam Miller published an article on ESPN igniting a different sort of debate on WAR.

Miller’s piece noted that aside from the possible flaws behind WAR itself, each corner of the internet is calculating it a different way. For pitching specifically, FanGraphs (fWAR), Baseball Reference (rWAR), and Baseball Prospectus (WARP) all publish measures of WAR that oftentimes have significant disagreements. But that’s by design.

These three metrics were brilliantly characterized by Miller as so:

• rWAR – “What Happened WAR”
• fWAR – “What Should Have Happened WAR”
• WARP – “What Should Have Should Have Happened WAR”

The rest of the piece is outstanding, and comes highly recommended by this author. In the aftermath, though, Tom Tango of MLB Advanced Media responded with the following challenge:

For you aspiring saberists: take the 10 pitchers that fWAR and rWAR most disagree with in year T, and tell us how they did in year T+1. Do that for say the last 5 years. Repeat the exercise with fWAR, WARP, then with rWAR, WARP. Report your findings. https://t.co/BjtbBRYhMd

— Tangotiger 🍁 (@tangotiger) November 28, 2017

Given that I humbly consider myself to be an aspiring saberist, I took that challenge. Well, I first took the challenge of college final exams, but then the pitching WAR challenge!

The dataset from which I worked off included 1165 qualified individual pitching seasons spanning from 2000-2016. For each season, I collected the player’s fWAR, rWAR, WARP, RA9-WAR, and RA9-WAR in the subsequent year. As Tango suggested, using RA9-WAR to look retrospectively at our 3 competing pitching metrics will be the most effective way to measure the differences amongst the metrics themselves.

For those interested in the raw data, feel free to check it out here, and make a copy if you’d like to play around with it yourself.

Given the nature of the dataset, a logical first place to start was with a straightforward correlation table and go from there. That correlation table is displayed below.

As expected, small differences do exist between the various metrics in their abilities to predict future performance. In the sample, fWAR leads both WARP and rWAR by slight margins. For all you statheads out there, a linear regression on the data returns statistically significant p-values for fWAR and WARP, but not rWAR.

So that was fun, wasn’t it? With all of the nitty gritty math out of the way, let’s dive into a few examples. Miller already highlighted Teheran’s strange 2017 season, but as it turns out, there are far more extreme instances of metric disagreement.

Take Felix Hernandez’s 2006 season for example. His first full season in the bigs culminated in an underwhelming 4.52 ERA, but a 3.91 FIP and a 3.37 xFIP were promising signs of future success. Similarly, the WAR metrics were unable to come to any sort of consensus.

By WARP, the 20-year-old Hernandez was the 14th best pitcher in 2006. He was surrounded on the leaderboard by names like Roy Halladay, Randy Johnson, and Greg Maddux. By rWAR, his 2006 season ranked 135th alongside Jose Mesa, Cory Lidle, and interestingly enough, Greg Maddux.

fWAR, on the other hand, seems to have found a happy medium between the other two metrics. Sure enough, it was also the most accurate predictor of Hernandez’s RA9-WAR in 2007.

Taking a step back, I now wanted to determine which of the three metrics was the most accurate predictor of a pitcher’s future RA9-WAR. Just as Tango does, we’ll call the current season”Year T” and the next “Year T+1.” The results of this exercise are displayed below.
Yet again, we see a slight victory for the FanGraphs WAR metric. However, with over 1100 seasons in our sample, no single metric stands apart from the others. After all, they are designed with the same goal in mind: measure pitcher value. As you’ll see below, each metric usually ends up with a similar result to the others. (Click to view a larger version)

What happens, though, in instances like Teheran’s? When the metrics have stark disagreements with each other, which metric remains most reliable? To answer this question, I dug up the 10 most significant head-to-head disagreements among each of the metrics, and again looked at which version of WAR best predicted the RA9-WAR in Year T+1. Those results are listed below.

What stands out to me here is not only that fWAR still appears to be the best forward-looking metric, but also that in nine of its ten most significant disagreements with rWAR, the DIPS approach to WAR won out.

Just as in “The Great WAR Debate of 2017,” this discussion too is entirely dependent on what one intends to use WAR for. Here, we’ve established fWAR as an excellent forward-looking metric. Depending on who you ask, rWAR likely serves its best purpose illustrating, as Miller put it, what did happen. WARP may either be many years ahead of its time, or could still use a fair amount of tweaking. Or both. No matter, each version of pitching WAR comes with its own purpose, and each purpose has its own theoretical use.

Jake Arrieta turning himself from a Baltimore castoff to a Chicago Cy Young Award winner was a fascinating thing to watch, especially considering how it happened. This wasn’t just a guy who benefited from a change of scenery. When Arrieta adopted a new look, it was much more than his jersey color that changed.

The alterations were covered in a great 2014 Jeff Sullivan article titled Building Jake Arrieta. Among the things noted in that piece was his new release point that was primarily the result of pitching from the third-base side of the rubber.

Sullivan noted changes in Arrieta’s delivery yet again this May, pointing out an even more extreme horizontal release point in a piece titled Jake Arrieta Has Not Been Good. How extreme? Well, he’s throwing like a giant. No, not the kind that play in San Francisco. Arrieta has achieved nearly the exact same release point as Minnesota Twins pitcher Aaron Slegers, who at 6-foot-10 is one of the tallest hurlers to ever grace the mound.

Among the 562 right-handed pitchers Baseball Savant has data on from 2017, only three of them averaged a release point of at least 6.2 feet vertically and 3.3 feet horizontally: Arrieta, Slegers, and Brewers reliever Taylor Jungmann. Jungmann only thew 0.2 innings for Milwaukee last season, so there’s not much to unpack there. Below is the release point chart for Arrieta, courtesy of Baseball Savant:

And here is the chart for Slegers:

And finally, below is a graph showing how Arrieta’s horizontal release point has evolved over his career. You can see the dramatic dip to his first full season with Chicago in 2014. Things leveled out somewhat from there to 2016, but then there’s another noticeable dive last season.

Arrieta’s horizontal release point was farther toward third base than 98.6 percent of right-handed pitchers last year. It’s easy to see why a pitcher would want to create a unique look, as hitters aren’t accustomed to picking up a ball from that point, but how much does that really matter? Well, by the sound of this Francisco Cervelli quote from an MLB.com article in October 2015, I’m guessing it matters a lot.

“What makes him so tough is he throws the ball from the shortstop,” Cervelli said. “He’s supposed to throw straight. It should be illegal.”

Given Arrieta’s struggles, however, you can’t help but wonder if maybe he has taken this too far. He hit a career-high 10 batters and led the league in wild pitches for the second-straight season. Coming into 2017, Arrieta had averaged up just 6.2 H/9 and 0.5 HR/9 as a Cub. Last year, those numbers ballooned to 8.0 H/9 and 1.2 HR/9. His quality of pitch average also dipped from a score of 5.31 over his first three seasons with the Cubs to 4.98 last year.

The free agent market has been slow to get moving, but you’d have to figure things will start to pick up once the calendar turns over to 2018. It’ll be interesting to see if Arrieta’s new team tries to tweak some things with his mechanics. If nothing else, he’s shown a great openness to experiment.

Arrieta used his feet to get his arm into an angle that only a much taller pitcher should be able to achieve. Is it possible another set of eyes could get him pointed back in the right direction in 2018?

Tom Froemming is a contributor at Twins Daily and co-author of the 2018 Minnesota Twins Prospect Handbook.