Archive for Research

Take a turn around Twitter or any major baseball news source and you’ll hear a familiar echo about the former best team in baseball; the offense hasn’t been the same since the deadline.  When the A’s traded away Yoenis Cespedes for Jon Lester, the impact to the lineup was noticeable.  They wagered they could get the same level of production out of some combination of Jonny Gomes, Stephen Vogt, and Sam Fuld.  In the first half of the season, the A’s were a top-six team in wOBA, OBP,and wRC+ all while being second to last in BABIP.  It’s safe to say they were rolling. Now they aren’t.  Since the deadline, the A’s have become a bottom-third team in all the aforementioned stats.  It’s easy to look at these stats and say that Cespedes was clearly the catalyst of something in the offense.

While much has been written about the rumors of Oakland emphasizing clubhouse chemistry the last couple years, Cespedes has never really been written as one of the chief leaders in that category.  We typically hear names like Coco Crisp, Scott Sizemore, the aforementioned Jonny Gomes, and Sean Doolittle mentioned there.  Cespedes by all accounts was just a crazy athletic guy who didn’t really cause any trouble, but wasn’t exactly a team leader.  Yet the fact remains: the A’s have refused to hit since the deadline. Sure, 17 games isn’t a gigantic sample size, but it’s pretty reasonable when evaluating team performance.  Baseball Prospectus just three years ago theorized that a reasonable prediction could be made of a team’s overall season after fifteen games,  so we’ve got something substantial to work with.  Is there another pattern, though?  Let’s take a look at the team’s month by month performance.

We see a steady decline here in the A’s performance, not a sudden jump.  The A’s started off really hot, leading the league in most offensive categories in April.  A notable decline can even be seen in May, as the A’s began their meteoric rise to the top, though they held steady in the top three in most categories.  In June, the team dipped even further, down to a mark that was only slightly above average.  They looked to be leveling off there to a rather league-average team in July, which wasn’t encouraging, but maybe suggested a possible rise back up to looking like a playoff team. In August, though, the wheels have come off.  The A’s have dipped below league average in most categories, and their win totals have suffered as well.  Can we blame all of this on Cespedes?  Let’s take a look at some wOBA numbers for chief contributors to the Oakland offense:

It’s a bit cluttered, but the dark blue line in the middle labeled wOBA is the team as a whole; see the steady decline as we’ve noted.  In April, we see all of these guys hovering between a .300 wOBA and somewhere above .420.  Nearly all of them are now either .300 or far below it; the one exception being Josh Donaldson, who has picked it up again since a dismal June.  Even Cespedes, having been traded to the Red Sox, is having an unremarkable August since performing poorly in July.  Let’s take a look at a wRC+ graph, with some of the members removed for clarity:

Here we see six players who routinely batted in the top five in the batting order having horrible Augusts.  Stephen Vogt and Brandon Moss, two lefty platoon bats being pressed into full-time duty in the outfield lately, lead this group with a 91 wRC+, which is below the average line.  John Jaso, Coco Crisp, and Derek Norris have been downright horrible, with wRC+’s in the barely digestible territory. So yes, the A’s have been bad since Cespedes has left the team.  It’s clearly not just the loss of his bat; the vast majority of the team, outside of Josh Donaldson and the surprisingly resurgent Eric Sogard and Josh Reddick, have been really, really bad.

So if the whole team is flailing, perhaps Cespedes was more of a sparkplug than we previously had attributed?  More importantly, did Billy Beane fail to see a trend here?  The A’s were trending downwards in hitting as demonstrated, so why the need for pitching?  Well, the A’s were unfortunately not exactly trending very well in pitching either.  They were third in pitcher WAR through April, but then plummeted to 19th in May, and further dipped to 21st in June before rising a bit to 17th in July. The A’s were a decidedly middle of the road team when it came to pitcher WAR, and FIP seems to agree, ranking them about the same spot everywhere.

So why make the trade?  If anything, this trade has only served to confuse fans.  What do we make of a team with three above-average catchers who all tank right after a trade for a top-flight starting pitcher?  While all the fans are clamoring for Jimmy Rollins to come and help the middle infield, we’ve got Eric Sogard being one of the few bright spots in the offense, and nobody seems to care. All we know is that the A’s are in trouble.  Whether it’s because Cespedes was the glue or because the A’s are peaking at the wrong time, they’re all of a sudden facing down the dire straits of a one-game coin flip at the end of the season, despite being the most aggressive pursuer at the trade deadline. The A’s can cling to a few bastions of hope; maybe their BABIP dropping all the way to .260 in August shows that they’re just a bit unlucky.  It’s either that or face the fact that sometimes the best-laid plans of mice and men fail, and pray that Jason Hammel doesn’t have to start the Wild Card game.

San Francisco Giants backup catcher Hector Sanchez is a ball magnet.

Every single time he plays — and this is no exaggeration — he takes a savage beating behind home plate. Foul tips rock his hockey-style catcher’s mask at least three or four times a game. He also takes baseballs to the shoulders, fingers, feet and groin like you would not believe.

So to no one’s surprise, Sanchez finds himself on the disabled list with a concussion. And the Giants are taking their time bringing him back, as the team is all too familiar with concussions caused by multiple blows to the head (Mike Matheny’s playing career came to a screeching halt because of multiple concussions sustained when he strapped on the tools of ignorance for San Francisco back in 2006).

While it may seem cruel to add insult to injury, now is the perfect time for the Giants to part ways with Sanchez.

The trouble is that Sanchez’s bat is a ball magnet, too — and not in the good, solid contact kind of way. He simply can’t stop swinging at pitches in or out of the strike zone.

Simply put, Sanchez is not a good baseball player, while his replacement, Andrew Susac, is.

Sanchez has been one of the worst players in MLB this season. Take a look at how he’s fared in some key statistical categories, along with how those stats rank among fellow National Leaguers with a minimum of 170 plate appearances:

This chart essentially shows that Giants fans have selected an appropriate nickname for Sanchez. They call him “Hack-tor”.

Susac, on the other hand, is known for his plate discipline. He’s never had a BB% lower than 12.9% in four minor league seasons (Sanchez’s career BB% is 4.0%). Susac’s slash line for AAA-Fresno this season was .268/.379/.451. Hopefully he never goes back.

In 26 plate appearances for the Giants this season, Susac has a .250 average and a .308 OBP. He’s swung at just 22% of pitches outside of the strike zone (compared to 47.1% for Sanchez) and he’s struck out only 19% of the time (31% for Sanchez). Perhaps most importantly, Susac has already been worth 0.1 WAR, meaning he’s added value to the team even though he’s played in only parts of 10 baseball games. Comparatively, Sanchez has been worth -0.2 WAR in 66 games, meaning that even an average minor league replacement player would have been more valuable.

And Susac is an average replacement-level catcher at worst. In fact, it’s hard to argue that he is that bad. So there’s essentially no question that Susac is superior to Sanchez.

In a baseball era where it is increasingly accepted and known that getting on base — not making outs — is the most important baseball skill, Sanchez has proven himself to be a free-swinging out machine.

That’s why the era of Susac ought to be upon us. What’s more, backup catcher is an especially interesting position on this Giants team.

There is increasing sentiment within the organization that Buster Posey needs to be moved out from behind the dish. He’s arguably their most valuable offensive player, but as a catcher, he requires frequent days off, and the physical demands of catching already seem to be wearing Posey down.

Offensive skills deteriorate faster for catchers than for non-catchers, so as Posey ages and navigates the seven remaining years of his 9-year, $163 million contract, the Giants are absolutely right to seriously consider moving Posey to a less demanding and offensively-crippling position.

Third baseman Pablo Sandoval will be a free agent after this season, and if he walks away, it will create a glaring hole at third base — a hole that could be filled by Posey. Posey played all over the diamond in college, including shortstop and pitcher, so it’s at least possible that he could man the hot corner next year and beyond. If Posey moves to third base, Brandon Belt could stay at first and Susac could settle in as the everyday catcher.

But if the Giants re-sign Sandoval, there could be a logjam if the Giants indeed have intentions of getting Posey out of the squat.

Belt has good speed (he has 23 steals in 409 MLB games and he’s only 26 years old), so it’s possible he could play a decent left field, allowing Posey to play first base and Sandoval to stay at third. This is not ideal, and I understand that it’s possible Belt will not be a good defensive outfielder (but hey, he can’t be worse than Michael Morse, can he?).

Even if Posey remains behind the plate, he gets a lot of rest (as most catchers do), so it’s important to have a good backup catcher if at all possible. That’s why it’s time for the offensively skilled Susac to leapfrog the offensively challenged Sanchez on the organizational depth chart.

Sorry Sanchez, but Susac is the catcher of the future. It’s time to let him play.

I know that I’m not alone in saying that one of my favorite parts about baseball is the projection of young players. In fact, I’d probably even say that I enjoy dreaming on what young players could be even more than I enjoy players for what they actually are. It’s one of the reasons I follow the Cubs and Twins (get well soon, Byron) farm systems as closely as I do the A’s and Dodgers big-league clubs. Obviously, it’s especially exciting when a group of young prospects on the same team all come up and meet expectations, as rare as that may be. To take it one step further, it’s just the best when all of that talent is concentrated in one positional group (pitchers, infielders, outfielders). So in an effort to combine my love of projection with what is currently happening on the field, I’m going to take a look at a couple of the most exciting young units in baseball.

Here are the top ten outfields as currently ranked by fWAR:

Of the top ten, only two teams are currently starting an outfield where all three players are 28 years old or younger. Now, it would be pretty funny if I said they were the Orioles and Blue Jays just to make you angry, but since you’re a person who ostensibly reads titles before you read articles, you know that these two teams are the Pittsburgh Pirates and Miami Marlins. Spoiler revealed.

Anyways, both young outfields are clearly extraordinarily talented. Each unit has an excellent case as the most promising outfield for the next five or ten years. That said, it’ll almost surely be a young outfield that exceeds them, because if baseball does nothing else, it destroys our expectations each and every season.

But focusing on the task at hand, the two outfields are very similar if you look at them in a certain arbitrary way. They each feature one superstar (Andrew McCutchen and Giancarlo Stanton), a strikeout-prone “tools” guy (Starling Marte and Marcell Ozuna) and a skinny corner guy with all-star potential (Gregory Polanco and Christian Yelich). Now, those descriptions don’t really matter, but they’re interesting nonetheless. What does matter, however, is performance on the field.

The Pirates outfield has probably been the more hyped unit so far, and I think the majority of people would choose them to be better going forward as well. Their core three is currently the more productive, and they blow away the Marlins in production over the next four years, using the Oliver projection system.

If the projections turn out to be correct, the Pirates outfield is going to be, on average, 4.8 wins per season more valuable than the Marlins. But I have a couple of issues with these projections.

First, wow do they hate Marcell Ozuna. This is somewhat understandable considering Ozuna never was that highly regarded as a prospect, and some people thought that the Marlins were making a mistake by promoting him to the big leagues so quickly last year. But as he’s shown since his call-up, Ozuna is actually pretty valuable. In only 70 games in 2013, he was worth 1.6 fWAR. In 2014, he’s been hitting for power and been worth nearly 2 wins with a month and a half left to go in the season. He’s not a perfect player (28.7 K%), but I think it’s fair to say that he’s not the borderline replacement-level guy that he is projected to be right now.

My second issue is that I just can’t get comfortable projecting Gregory Polanco as a 5 fWAR player just yet. He’s obviously a top prospect holding his own in the majors, but five-win players are really good. Only 19 position players were more valuable in 2013 than the 5.2 fWAR that Polanco is currently projected to reach by 2018. I certainly won’t be shocked if he reaches that level, but man, as fun as prospects are, sometimes they bust for no apparent reason. I’ll need to see a full productive season before I feel good about calling him a future MVP vote-getter.

Unfortunately for the Pirates’ case in this argument, the outfield fWAR top ten that I posted at the beginning of the article largely reflects the contributions of a player whom I have not mentioned thus far: Josh Harrison. At just 27 years old himself, Harrison has continued to be productive after what most assumed was just a hot couple of months. However, with Polanco now in the majors, it looks as though Harrison will be playing in the Pirates infield over the coming years, assuming all of the outfielders are able to retain their health. So it will likely be up to Polanco to replicate Harrison’s 2014 numbers (144 wRC+) going forward, a tall task even for someone as talented as he. Combine that with the possibility that Andrew McCutchen begins to decline upon hitting 30 in a couple years, and the Pirates outfield may not look quite as pretty as it does on paper at the moment (though it’ll still probably be really good).

Now, rather than continue to list reasons why you shouldn’t choose the Pirates, let’s talk about one final reason why you should choose the Marlins in our completely meaningless debate. Talent aside, the Marlins’ greatest advantage over the Pirates is their youth. Stanton is actually the oldest of Miami’s outfielders at the decrepit age of 24, while Ozuna and Yelich are 23 and 22, respectively. As a group, they certainly have the longest way to go to reach their ceiling, but they also have the most time to get there. And if you’re like me, you may be inclined to be on upside.

When choosing between these two outfields, there’s really no wrong option, as cliche as that may sound. They each have a combination of current production and future projection that we simply don’t see very often. Personally, despite all of the reasons I listed against them, I’m still inclined to go with Pittsburgh, but the choice is harder now than it was when I began this post. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll be able to sit back and enjoy both units, hopefully for the next decade or so.

This article was originally posted on gappower.wordpress.com, a site you’ve definitely never been to. I’ve checked. You can also find me on Twitter, at least occasionally. 

The premise of this article is a very simple one: which hitter has been the most average in 2014? Considering this question led me through a very simple process, and to a very sad answer (I urge you not to look at the links until the end because suspense). To the leaderboards we go!

Seeing as we’re looking for the most average hitter (not considering defense), and wRC+ is a hitting statistic designed to compare hitters against the average, it seems like a natural starting place. Considering only players with wRC+ between 95 and 105 gives us a list of 24 players.

Next, let’s look at wRC+’s partner in crime: wOBA. League average for wOBA is .316, so this round we’ll be restricting our list of 24 even further, only looking at hitters with wOBA between .310 and .320. Doing so cut our list (almost) in half! We are now left with only 13 players, progress!

Now that we’ve condensed the list based on production, it’s now time to look at the composition of said production. Our average player should have a BB% of about 7.9, and a K% of 19.8. Adjusting our leaderboard leaves us with the three most average hitters in the league. One of these three is not a surprise. The other two are very sad surprises.

But we want 1 average player, not 3, so to narrow it down to the end, I have included another filter for ISO, because our most average hitter should hit for an average amount of power. This final filter leaves us with the single most average player in the major leagues, and fair warning, it will sadden you:

Evan Longoria: BB%: 8.8 / K%: 18.8 / ISO: .139 / BABIP: .287 / OBP: .324 / SLG: .390 / wOBA: .312 / wRC+: 102

League Average: BB%: 7.9 / K% 19.8 /ISO .140 / BABIP: .301 / OBP: .319 / SLG: .396 / wOBA: .316 / wRC+ 100

There was a time when Longoria was to baseball what Mike Trout is today (well maybe not quite on the same level). He came up in 2008 and was the the star of the Rays in their surprising march to the World Series. He showed off 100% not-fake, seemingly-superhuman powers. From 2008 to 2013, Longoria’s wRC+ was 15th in baseball, in a virtual tie with David Wright (who happens to be one of the other most average players). He was also the single most valuable position player by WAR (36.1) in that time. For the first 6 years of his career, Longoria was a model of offensive consistency.

2014 has been a different story though. I’m not the first to write about Longoria’s down year, so I’ll refer you to the works of Jeff Sullivan and James Krueger. The bottom line: Longoria’s bat speed is down, which is killing his power and his ability to hit inside fastballs. This can be seen in his power numbers: a .139 ISO is a far cry from his career ISO of .225 (for reference, David DeJesus has a career ISO of .140). Longoria’s only hitting 9.7% of his fly balls for home runs, compared to 15.5% for his career.

His power hasn’t fully disappeared, but it’s nowhere close to what it was. It’s this sort of sharp power decline that usually suggests some sort of injury à la Matt Kemp (.236 ISO in 2012, .125 in 2013 following a shoulder surgery). Longoria is not expected to miss much time with his latest foot injury, and as Krueger points out, Longoria himself has attributed these struggles with mechanical issues. However, if I were a betting man (or at least old enough to legally gamble in casinos), I would put money on the Rays’ third baseman undergoing some sort of procedure over the offseason.

Now the good news for the Rays is this: even as the league-average hitter, Longoria is still very valuable. Dave Cameron ranked him 9th in his trade value series, no doubt in large part due to his superb defense and very team-friendly contract. Projections have Longoria finishing 2014 with 4.0 WAR. If the cost of a win is approximately $6 million, then he’s worth about $24 million in 2014, but only being paid $7.5 million. Even if Longoria continues to be a league-average bat with excellent defense, he will be very underpaid and very valuable. Really goes to show how great that contract was, huh?

Even more fortunate for Rays’ fans is that given Longoria’s career history, this sort of drop off in offensive production likely is not representative of his true-talent level. While his days as a ~135 wRC+ hitter may be behind him, 119 games is not a huge sample size and Longoria is still just 28. It’s likely that Longoria’s production increases closer to his career averages (Oliver has him 126 wRC+ for next year, which definitely passes the sniff test). The fact remains: Evan Longoria, despite being the most average hitter in baseball, is still one of the most valuable. Now we’ll just have to see what happens to that other average-hitting third baseman.

Last Saturday’s Athletics vs. Twins game turned out just about as everyone expected, with Oakland winning the game 9-4 in what was a noncompetitive contest after the 5^th inning. Minnesota chose to debut their #8 prospect, starting pitcher Trevor May, in a road game during a lost season against a team with the best run differential in the majors. They did this, one can only suspect, because they are the Minnesota Twins. From experience we may infer the answer to the question “what happens when we give a young man his debut against a pitching meat grinder?”, and so it was that Trevor May struggled, and struggled mightily. May lasted only two innings, gave up four earned runs, walked seven batters, and did not record a single strikeout. This is strange for many reasons, the main ones being that Minnesota is a pitch-to-contact team in its approach, and because no one has walked at least seven batters and not struck anyone out in their debut since Ricky Romero for the Blue Jays in August of 2012.

However, we’re not here to talk exclusively about Trevor May, even though his wild performance on Saturday night partially allowed this article’s existence. We’re here to talk about Eric Sogard, who quietly had a strangely historic night during an otherwise fairly pedestrian Oakland win. Eric Sogard is known, if he is truly known outside of the Oakland fan base, for two things: coming in second during this past off-season’s “Face of MLB” contest, and for his prowess with the glove.

Sogard doesn’t really hit: he’s currently slashing .216/.305/.271, and he hit his first home run of the year last week, a 349-foot missile down the right field line. Eric Sogard is one of those major leaguers who is in the league because he does one thing very well, and because he plays for a team that has the luxury of being able to carry a player whose value is determined almost entirely by defense. Make no mistake, Eric Sogard is a very good defensive second baseman: he has a UZR/150 of 8.5 that puts him 8^th among active 2B this year with a minimum of 500 innings played. He is not, however, great with the bat.

That being said, let’s look at Eric Sogard’s batting line from Saturday night against the Twins, when he batted in the 9^th position:

0-1, 1 R, 4 BBs, 1 SB

Eric Sogard walked four times while batting in the 9^th position in the lineup on Saturday night. Take a moment to let that fact sink in, because it’s crazy. How rare is it for a batter in the 9^th position in the lineup to walk four times? Since 1914, it has only happened 14 times including Sogard this past weekend. He’s the first member of the Oakland Athletics to ever do it. Only two other players since 1914 have accomplished this and also stolen a base in the same game: Desi Relaford (2002) & Brady Anderson (1990). On top of all of that, Sogard also made an error – because in a game when weird things are happening to a defensive second baseman, of course he did. He’s now the only player in baseball history to have walked four times in the 9^th spot, stolen a base, and made an error in the same game. That’s reaching a little bit, but hey, baseball history!

Just pointing out the rarity of this phenomenon isn’t really interesting enough, though. Let’s go a little deeper. Specifically, let’s ask ourselves this question: “how many pitches did Eric Sogard ‘get to hit’ on Saturday night?” By “get to hit” I mean pitches in the strike zone that have a high likelihood of good contact – i.e., not “pitcher’s pitches” on the corner low and away or nasty breaking pitches located perfectly. Yes, this is subjective, as every hitter is different in their preference of locations to swing at and hit thrown pitches, but we’re more generally going to look at pitches that were over the plate and hittable. We know the answer to this question isn’t going to be a lot of pitches, given the four walks. However, for a light-hitting second baseman batting in the 9^th spot, who should expect to be challenged over the plate in almost every at-bat, it’s a fun question to ask. It also allows us to look at some GIFs.

I’ve gone ahead and split up every at-bat that Eric Sogard had on Saturday into different GIFs and overlaid them with circles: green for balls and red for strikes. Sogard saw 22 pitches on Saturday, which tied him for the team lead with Derek Norris. Let’s dig in.

1^st AB, 2^nd inning – 2 out, none on, P Trevor May:

Sogard saw four pitches, all four of which were balls. Only the first pitch of the at-bat was close to in the strike zone, and Sogard was either taking all the way or correctly identified the pitch as a changeup and laid off.

Pitches to hit tally: 0

2^nd AB, 3^rd inning, 1 out, 1 on: P Samuel Deduno:

This was the biggest battle of the game for our nerd power-harnessing second baseman, as he saw seven pitches and went to a full count. The 2-0 strike might have been the most hittable pitch Sogard saw all night, even though it was low in the zone and breaking slightly toward the outer half of the plate. The 3-1 pitch, called a strike, probably could’ve been called either way, and Sogard pulled a 3-2 liner foul off of an inside fastball off the plate before taking his second walk.

Pitches to hit tally: 1

3^rd AB, 5^th inning, 1 out, none on: P Samuel Deduno:

Deduno had just given up a two run homer to Stephen Vogt in the previous at-bat, so he might’ve been a little rattled when facing our young hero. Sogard walked on five pitches, with the 1-0 high fastball strike the best pitch to hit. However, when you’ve already walked twice, why start swinging now?

Pitches to hit tally: 2

4^th AB, 6^th inning, 2 out, 1 on: P Ryan Pressly:

Nothing to swing at. The two low and away pitches were the closest to strikes, but they were also easy takes after two pitches high and outside that weren’t close. Four walks achieved.

Pitches to hit tally: 2

5^th AB, 8^th inning, 2 out, 1 on: P Anthony Swarzak:

At last Eric Sogard is bested. After a high and outside pitch was taken for a ball, allowing us to dream of the first-ever five walk night out of a hitter in the 9^th spot, Sogard swung at a nasty low and away pitch on the corner and meekly chopped out to the pitcher. Not even Sogard’s blazing speed could rescue him this time. Unfortunately, that was not a pitch to hit/swing at.

Alas, poor Sogard, we knew him well.

Final pitches to hit tally: 2

To wrap it all up, here we have a GIF of all of the pitches Sogard saw on Saturday (from the catcher’s perspective). I’m viewing the strike zone that was generated by the system with a healthy bit of skepticism, as it’s not adjusted for the batter or the umpire. Still, it gives us a concrete idea of how many pitches Sogard saw that were worth swinging at:

The answer is two or three at most, which is insane, because the Minnesota Twins have the fifth-lowest BB/9 in the majors, and Eric Sogard is hitting around .215 with one home run.

Baseball is great because Giancarlo Stanton hits majestic 500 foot moon shots, but it’s also great because guys who are 5′ 10″ (on a good day) defensive specialists who platoon at second base draw four walks against a team that is known for pitching to contact. Players like Eric Sogard aren’t barred from the history books, even though they’re often overlooked in favor of the mashers chasing home run titles; they simply make their history in a very different and sometimes more interesting way. Maybe we have to dig for it a little. Or maybe Eric Sogard just needs to not swing for a whole game and let the stars align.

This post is dedicated to my good friend Adam Sax, who is nice enough to help me out with the deep stats (and the last GIF) and is the biggest Sogard fan I know.

After watching Nelson Cruz this year and all the noise he has been making, on top of a recent report by Buster Olney stating, “The average distance of the fly balls pulled by Ryan Braun this season is down 42 feet, from 302 to 260…”, it inspired me to look up the numbers for players suspended in the Biogenesis case. The big four suspended were Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, Nelson Cruz, and Jhonny Peralta. Other position players involved and suspended were Everth Cabrera, Jesus Montero, Francisco Cervelli, and Jordany Valdespin.

This article will focus on the big four with the exception of A-Rod because he has been suspended all season. Obviously enough this is a small sample size so take heed. I will be making a couple of assumptions, the main one being that these players had been using steroids for at least 3 years (2010-2012) prior to their being caught and suspended. The other assumption being that enough time has passed for the effects of the steroids to have worn off and that their bodies/abilities are back to their more natural state.

The main thing that jumps out at you is that Cruz and Peralta are statistically putting up some of the best numbers of their careers (without a doubt, top 3)! Braun, however, is having his worst season of the 4 above, while Peralta and Cruz both are having their most powerful seasons yet. Their HR/FB rates are each at their highest as well as their ISO numbers, while again Braun’s are at his worst of the 4 seasons. Looking at WRC+ and OFF, Peralta is having his 4th best season ever, Cruz is having his 2nd best ever, and Braun is having the worst season of his career to date (with the possible exception of 2008).

Using ESPN’s hittrackeronline.com I looked up each player’s True Distance on home runs this year as well as the average exit speed velocity of their home runs. Ryan Braun has lost 3 mph which has correlated to a shortage of almost 20 feet on his balls. Nelson Cruz has lost about 2 mph and 20 feet off his home run balls from his peak of the four years. Jhonny Peralta, on the other hand, is showing his best numbers this year.

So what does all this mean? In summary, I believe the main thing we can take away from this is that each player who used steroids should be assessed on a case by case basis. Every player is affected differently. We cannot group all steroid users together. Using the above statistics as proof, after being charged in the Biogenesis case, 2 players are having among the best seasons of their careers while another is having his worst. In addition the best all-around athlete and youngest of the 3 (so therefore closest to his prime) is the one who is struggling most, Ryan Braun! Whether it is the HOF vote, or evaluating future value of perceived steroid users, we can’t lump them all into the same group and assume that they will automatically decline. Yes, using steroids is absolutely cheating, however it doesn’t necessarily mean that those players wouldn’t have been just as productive had they chosen legal supplements or nothing at all.

Big-league teams today employ a myriad of data-driven strategies to eek every last drop of value from the players on their rosters. Many of these strategies consist of matching up hitters and pitchers based on their handedness. Between lineup platoons and highly-specialized bullpens, managers today go to great lengths to ensure they’re putting their players in the best possible situation to succeed.

It’s easy to see why. With very few exceptions, Major League hitters hit much better against opposite-handed pitching. In terms of wOBA (vs. opposite-handed – vs. same-handed), lefties perform about .031 better against righties, while righties hit .043 better against lefties. Yet not all platoon splits are created equal. Players like Shin-Soo Choo, David Wright, and Jonny Gomes are notorious for their drastic splits, while others put up comparable numbers no matter who’s on the mound. Ichiro Suzuki and Alex Rodriguez are a couple of the no-platoon-split poster boys.

Ok, so some batters have bigger platoon splits than others, but is there any particular reason for this? Take Choo for example. Is there something inherent to his skill set or approach that causes him to struggle against lefties?

Hoping to find an answer, I ran some regressions in search of attributes that might make a player more likely to have an exaggerated platoon split. I tested all sorts of things out there — from walk rate and swing% to a player’s height and throwing arm — but didn’t come away with much. Aside from a hitter’s handedness, attributes that proved statistically significant included: a hitter’s overall wOBA, his line drive rate, his strikeout rate, and his contact rate on pitches out of the zone, but even those relationships are extremely weak. It takes .100 points on a batter’s wOBA, or a 10% increase in K% or LD%, to move a batter’s platoon split by just .010 points. This tells us something, but not a ton, and at the end of the day, these variables account for a nearly negligible 4% of the variation in hitters’ platoon splits. Here’s the resulting R output. My sample included all batter seasons from 2007-2013 with at least 100 plate appearances against both lefties and righties, excluding switch hitters:

Good hitters or guys who strike out frequently might be a little more prone to having large platoon splits. But for all practical purposes, a player’s ability to hit one type of pitching better than the other seems to be a skill that’s independent of all others. Aside from going by a player’s platoon stats, which can take years to become reliable, there’s little we can do to anticipate which hitters might fare particularly bad against same-handed pitching. And with the exception of players with long track records of unusual platoon splits — like Choo and Ichiro — it’s generally safe to assume that any given hitter’s true-talent platoon split is within shouting distance of the average: .043 for lefties and .031 for righties.

Many are questioning the thought process behind Ruben Amaro Jr. standing pat at the non-waiver trade deadline.  The Phillies have a lot of veterans under fairly large contracts.  According to Philly.com, when asked about why he didn’t move some of his veterans, Amaro stated

“In this day and age, I think one of the most over-coveted elements of baseball are prospects,” Amaro said. “I don’t know how many prospects that have been dealt over the last several years have really come to bite people in the a**. I think what’s happened is, I think teams are really kind of overvaluing in some regards.”

I thought it would be fun to actually go back and see how many prospects or minor league players who were traded at the deadline panned out.  I went back to 2005 and used every single transaction that involved both an MLB player and a prospect (I considered a prospect a guy who had never been in the MLB, or a guy who had been in the MLB but had yet to achieve rookie status).  I also strictly used trades that were done on July 31, in each year from 2005-2011.  I skipped 2012 and 2013 because it’s harder to get a gauge on whether or not prospects traded will make it or have any success.  Also, from 2011 until now, prospects have had about three years to get to the big leagues and I felt that was a good place to end. 

There were 53 transactions in that time, some very minor, some very major, and some in between. I took each transaction and compiled each player’s WAR after the trade (WARAT).  I still applied this criteria if there was a player who was traded on two different July 31s.  For example, Jake Peavy was traded twice, so his WARAT will be different from one trade to the next.  Some players appear as prospects and MLB guys as well, like Jarrod Saltalamacchia, who was traded as a prospect, and later on once he was not considered a rookie anymore.

I will look at the percentage of prospects that never made it, the percentage that made it but provided negative WAR, and the percentage that made it and provided positive WAR.  I will then look at the MLB guys who were traded and the percentage of guys who provided positive and negative WAR for the remainder of their careers.

The data I found was very interesting.  There were 85 “prospects” traded and 66 MLB guys traded. Below is a table with each trade.  In parenthesis, I noted whether each player was a prospect (P) or an MLB guy at the time.  I will then have their WARAT, or WAR after trade.  If a prospect never made it to the show, I use the abbreviation “NMI.”

 As you can see, some trades worked out better than others.  Of the 85 prospects, 72.9% of them (62) made it to the big leagues.  So, that means 23 prospects, or 27.1% of those traded, never stepped on a big league field.  Of the 62 that made it, 32 were good for positive WAR after the trade, 21 were worth negative WAR, and 9 were at 0 WAR. The WAR of all the prospects that made it adds up to 97.8.  That’s an average of about 1.2 WAR per prospect. 

Now we can analyze the MLB guys. There is a wide variety of age in the group of 66 MLB players.  Some were traded fairly early in their MLB careers; some were traded as their career was winding down.  I found that 69.6% of these players (46) were good for positive WAR after they were traded.  19 players (28.7%) were worth negative WAR, and 1 player was worth zero WAR after the trade. When you add their WAR together, you get 178.8, averaging 2.7 WAR per MLB player traded.

So, on average, teams were trading an MLB guy that would be worth 2.7 WAR for the rest of their career, for a prospect that would turn out to be worth 1.2 WAR in that same time period.

In addition, if you add up the total WARAT for each individual trade, the MLB player’s WARAT was higher than the prospect’s WARAT in 32 of the 53 trades (60.3%).  The prospect’s WARAT was higher in 17 of 53 trades (32%).  Finally, there were three trades that cancelled each other out, and were neutral.

There are many ways to look at this and some things to keep in mind.  It may seem like trading an established big leaguer is not smart from these numbers.  However, it depends on the situation a team is in.  Also, most of these “prospects” have yet to finish their MLB careers, so they are still in the process of racking up WAR. Good examples include Kluber, Masterson, Moss, Murphy, Andrus, Davis, and Feliz. On the other hand, some of the MLB guys were traded when they were still pretty young.  Saltalamacchia, Martinez, Teixeira and Encarnacion are examples, but they are still older than most right now.  These guys are providing most of the WARAT for the MLB guys. Also, some of the MLB guys were so old that they only lasted another couple years in the MLB. 

You have to take money into account as well.  For some trades, teams are not only getting prospects in return, but they’re dumping salary and now have money they could spend elsewhere in the off-season. One example of a trade that worked out really well for one team and not so well for another was the huge Braves-Rangers trade.  The Braves received Mark Teixeira, and traded four prospects that have all turned out well.  Teixeira was great for Atlanta, but was only there for half of 2007 and half of 2008, with the Braves not even advancing to the postseason with him.  The Rangers however, got guys who helped the Rangers reach the World Series in 2010 and 2011.  Be careful with the prospects you trade away.

Since I am relating this article to Ruben Amaro Jr., I will connect this data to the Phillies’ current situation.  The evidence shows it probably would have been smart for them to move their older, more expensive players for prospects, even if they aren’t considered top prospects.  Amaro stated that he doesn’t know how many prospects in past years have come back to bite teams.  Yes, not every prospect is going to pan out.  And yes, some of them could come back to bite.  However, as mentioned before, over 70% of prospects dealt at the deadline from 2005-2011 at least made it to the major leagues.  There is also a good chance that most prospects that make it will contribute positive WAR.  That’s a pretty good turnout. Hamels, Utley, Rollins, Papelbon, Howard, Burnett, and Byrd will all be north of 30 years old next year, with some over 35.  So, they do not have young guys who are already established, like Martinez, Encarnacion, and Teixeira like I talked about earlier.  They are old.  The current Phillies team has proven it’s not going to win, so why wouldn’t they trade off some of their assets, and take a chance on some prospects panning out, while at the same time free up money for future off-seasons? They are not going to win in 2015 or 2016 most likely, so even if their current players still provide positive WAR in the next two years, what’s the point in keeping them around?  Go out and completely reload and blow the roster up.  With the amount of guys they could trade, or could have traded, you’re bound to have some of the prospects you get in return pan out, as the data above suggests.  Stock up the minor league system, and take the hit at the major league level for a couple years.  Add that to the money they will be saving, and they will be well-equipped to contend in three years.

Prospects are not “over-coveted” in baseball.  The problem for Amaro and the Phillies is that they do not have the right people in charge of evaluating and developing prospects.  They have traded for prospects in the past, such as the Pence and Victorino trades in 2012 (not included above) and have not gotten good returns.  So, maybe Ruben Amaro Jr. just isn’t very good at what he does, and wants to believe that giving up major-league veterans for prospects when your team is completely out of it is not a good idea.

Over the last few weeks, I have written a series of posts looking into how a player’s stats, age, and prospect status can be used to predict whether he’ll ever play in the majors. I analyzed hitters in Rookie leagues, Short-Season A, Low-A, High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A using a methodology that I named KATOH (after Yankees prospect Gosuke Katoh), which consists of running a probit regression analysis. In a nutshell, a probit regression tells us how a variety of inputs can predict the probability of an event that has two possible outcomes — such as whether or not a player will make it to the majors. While KATOH technically predicts the likelihood that a player will reach the majors, I’d argue it can also serve as a decent proxy for major league success. If something makes a player more likely to make the majors, there’s a good chance it also makes him more likely to succeed there.

After receiving a few requests, I decided to apply the model to players of years past. In what follows, I dive into what KATOH would have said about recent top prospects, look at the highest KATOH scores of the last 20 years, and highlight some instances where KATOH missed the boat on a prospect. If you’re feeling really ambitious, here’s a giant google doc of KATOH scores for all 40,051 player seasons since 1995 ( minimum 100 plate appearances in a short-season league or 200 in full-season ball).

Before I delve into the parade of lists, I want to point out one disclaimer to what I’m doing here. KATOH was derived from the performances of historical players, so applying the model to those same players might make it look a little better than it is. Take a player like Jason Stokes for example. Although he was a very well-regarded prospect in the early 2000’s (#15 and #51 per Baseball America in 2003 and 2004), KATOH consistently gave him probabilities in the 70’s and 80’s. But part of that is likely because Stokes’ data points were incorporated into the model. If I had created KATOH in 2005, Stokes’ MLB% may have been a few percentage points higher. Even so, a few data points generally aren’t enough to substantially change a model that incorporates thousands. In other words, it’s probably safe to assume that a player’s MLB% using today’s KATOH is roughly in line with what he would have received at the time.

Now, onto the results. Here’s what KATOH thought about some of the most recent top 100 prospects:

2013 Top 100 Prospects

2012 Top 100 Prospects

2011 Top 100 Prospects

Next, lets take a look at some of the highest KATOH scores of all time, namely those who received a score of at least 99.9%. There aren’t any complete busts among these players, as virtually all of them went on to play in the majors.

All-Time Top KATOH Scores

All of the players who registered a KATOH score of at least 99.9% did so while playing in either Double- or Triple-A. This isn’t all that surprising since these are the levels closest to the big leagues. But what about the lower levels? Like we saw in Double- and Triple-A, there weren’t any complete busts among the highest ranking hitters from full-season A-ball. For both full-season leagues, each of the 20 top ranked players has either made it to the majors, or in the case of Carlos Correa, is young enough to still has an excellent chance to do so. But on the bottom two rungs on the minor league ladder, we come across a few instances where KATOH whiffed, most notably in Garrett Guzman (74%), Richard Stuart (72%), and Pat Manning (72%).

Top KATOH Scores for Seasons in High-A

Top KATOH Scores for Seasons in Low-A

Top KATOH Scores for Seasons in Short-Season A

Top KATOH Scores for Seasons in Rookie ball

Now for KATOH’s biggest whiffs. Looking at seasons prior to 2011, the following players had very high KATOH ratings, but never made it to baseball’s highest level. The biggest miss was Cesar King, a defensive-minded catcher from the Rangers organization. Though to KATOH’s credit, King did spend five days on the Kansas City Royals’ roster in 2001 without getting into a game. Following King are a couple of busted Yankees prospects in Jackson Melian and Eric Duncan. Not to make excuses for KATOH, but these guys’ high scores may have had something to do with the way the Yankees over-hyped their prospects back then. If those two weren’t on Baseball America’s top 100 list, KATOH would have pegged them in the 70’s, rather than in the high-90’s.

KATOH’s Biggest Misses

And here are the major leaguers who KATOH deemed least likely to make it when they were in the minors. Its worth noting that a couple of them — Jorge Sosa and Jason Roach — made it as pitchers.

Worst KATOH Scores Who Made it to the Majors

KATOH’s far from perfect, but overall, I think it does a pretty decent job of forecasting which players will make it to the majors. That being said, it’s still a work in progress, and I have a few ideas rolling around in my head to improve on the model. Furthermore, I’m working to develop something that will forecast how a minor leaguer will perform upon reaching the majors, to complement his MLB%. I’ll be dropping these new and improved KATOH projections (for both hitters and pitchers) after this year’s World Series, when we’ll all be desperate for something baseball-related to get us through the winter.

Statistics courtesy of FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference, and The Baseball Cube; Pre-season prospect lists courtesy of Baseball America.

It’s no secret that a vast majority of Mets fans want Wilmer Flores to be playing shortstop every day. It’s also no secret that manager Terry Collins has some strange infatuation with Ruben Tejada, opting again and again to give him starts at shortstop.

Although Collins hasn’t given the media any clear reasoning as to why this is, there are a few reasons we can speculate. The biggest one is defense — Ruben Tejada has made major strides at shortstop this season, posting the highest DRS of his career. Flores, on the other hand, is a second baseman, and even his defense at second is questionable — he really profiles more as a corner infielder. However, with the other three infield positions being blocked by Daniel Murphy, David Wright, and the new-and-improved Lucas Duda, Ruben Tejada is the odd man out.

The other side of the coin is the one I’m going to be focusing on: offense. When Tejada started getting regular playing time as a 21-year-old in 2011, he showed some legitimate offensive potential, hitting line drives at an extremely impressive 28.1% rate (would have ranked 2nd among qualified batters,) good for .287/.345/.345 in 877 PAs between 2011 and 2012. Then, in 2013, he came to spring training out of shape, hit .202, got sent down, got hurt a couple times, and basically threw yet another monkey wrench into the Mets’ rebuild. The job became his to lose in 2014, and he’s hit a measly .228/.348/.280, the OBP even being inflated by the amount of intentional walks he received in the 8 hole. His 0.4 fWAR this season cancels out his -0.4 last season, making him a perfect replacement-level player.

Meanwhile, Wilmer Flores has been a top offensive prospect in the Mets system since he was signed out of Venezuela as a 16-year-old in 2007.  His numbers finally started to reflect his talent in 2012, when he hit .300/.349/.479 between high A and AA. In 2013, he exploded in AAA, and the past two seasons has hit .321/.360/.543 with 28 home runs and 47 doubles in exactly 162 games. Sure, he plays in Vegas, one of the most hitter friendly parks in AAA, but these are still numbers that demand attention — attention that he hasn’t yet seemed to receive from Terry Collins. Despite Tejada’s offensive struggles, he has still started 86 games at short this season, as opposed to Flores’ 20. One of the reasons a few Mets fans have been pointing to is the fact that Flores has yet to actually produce at the major league level, hitting only .220/.254/.304 in his 201 big league plate appearances. But is that slash-line an accurate reflection of his talent? And, for that matter, is Tejada’s?

For this mini-evaluation, we’ll use slash12’s xBABIP formula. It’s never a perfect system, but it will give us a good estimation of what these players slash-lines should look like (or at least their average and OBP.)

After inserting Ruben Tejada’s batted ball profile, we get that his xBABIP for 2014 is .329 — much higher than his actual BABIP of .288. We can then plug that backwards into the BABIP formula to determine how many hits he theoretically should have. Since the formula is (H-HR)/(AB-HR-K+SF), we can plug in everything except for hits to get (H-2)/(289-2-65+0)=.329, simplify that to (H-2)/(222)=.329, multiply both sides by 222 to get H-2=73, and we can come to the conclusion that Ruben Tejada should have 73 hits on the year, instead of the 66 he has. This would make his batting average .253 and his OBP .364 (although, keep in mind that that’s being inflated by the 10 intentional walks he’s had while hitting 8th in the order. If we decided to remove those, his OBP would drop to .345).

Now, doing the same to Wilmer Flores is slightly tricky, as we don’t have nearly as large a sample size worth of batted ball data to use. In the interest of accuracy, we’ll use his career profile, so we can at least get a sample of 201 PAs instead of his 100 this year. Plugging his batted ball profile into the xBABIP calculator, we get a result of .333, compared to his actual career BABIP of .268. Doing the same backwards math we did with Tejada, this brings his expected career batting average up to .272, and his career OBP up to .304.

Now, these are only two stats, and they only tell us so much — Flores seems to be a better hitter, but his career 4.5% BB rate is clearly overmatched by Tejada. There isn’t a formula out there for expected slugging percentage — at least, as far as I know — so we can’t really determine what that would be (and subsequently, what their OPS would be). We could assume the same ISO, which would not be entirely accurate, but it would give us a .305/.669 for Tejada and a .355/.659 for Flores. Still, I think it’s clear, both from my biased perspective as a Mets fan and my objective perspective as a baseball fan, that Flores has the brighter future offensively — but it’s up to the Mets to decide how to capitalize on it.