Introduction

A couple months back, I introduced a new method of calculating pitch values using a FIP-based WAR methodology.  That post details the basic framework of these calculations and  can be found here .  The May and June updates can be found here and here respectively.  This post is simply the July 2014 update of the same data.  What follows is predominantly data-heavy but should still provide useful talking points for discussion.  Let’s dive in and see what we can find.  Please note that the same caveats apply as previous months.  We’re at the mercy of pitch classification.  I’m sure your favorite pitcher doesn’t throw that pitch that has been rated as incredibly below average, but we have to go off of the data that is available.  Also, Baseball Prospectus’s PitchF/x leaderboards list only nine pitches (Four-Seam Fastball, Sinker, Cutter, Splitter, Curveball, Slider, Changeup, Screwball, and Knuckleball).  Anything that may be classified outside of these categories is not included.  Also, anything classified as a “slow curve” is not included in Baseball Prospectus’s curveball data.

Constants

Before we begin, we must first update the constants used in calculation for Jule.  As a refresher, we need three different constants for calculation: strikes per strikeout, balls per walk, and a FIP constant to bring the values onto the right scale.  We will tackle them each individually.

First, let’s discuss the strikeout constant.  In July, there were 47,449 strikes thrown by starting pitchers.  Of these 47,449 strikes, 4,585 were turned into hits and 13,750 outs were recorded.  Of these 13,750 outs, 3,725 were converted via the strikeout, leaving us with 10,025 ball-in-play outs.  10,025 ball-in-play strikes and 4,585 hits sum to 14,610 balls-in-play.  Subtracting 14,610 balls-in-play from our original 47,449 strikes leaves us with 32,839 strikes to distribute over our 3,725 strikeouts.  That’s a ratio of 8.82 strikes per strikeout.  This is exactly the same as our from 8.82 strikes per strikeout in June.

The next two constants are much easier to ascertain.  In July, there were 26,244 balls thrown by starters and 1,328 walked batters.  That’s a ratio of 19.76 balls per walk, up from 19.36 balls per walk in June.  This data would suggest that hitters were slightly less likely to walk in July than previously.  The FIP subtotal for all pitches in July was 0.52.  The MLB Run Average for July was 4.17, meaning our FIP constant for May is 3.65.

The following table details how the constants have changed month-to-month.

Pitch Values – July 2014

For reference, the following table details the FIP for each pitch type in the month of July.

As we can see, only three pitches would be classified as below average for the month of July: sinkers, cutters, and changeups.  Four-Seam Fastballs and curveballs also came in right around league average.  Pitchers that were able to stand out in these categories tended to have better overall months than pitchers who excelled at the other pitches.  Now, let’s proceed to the data for the month of July.

Four-Seam Fastball

Sinker

Cutter

Splitter

Curveball

Slider

Changeup

Screwball

Knuckleball

Overall

Pitch Ratings – July 2014

Four-Seam Fastball

Sinker

Cutter

Splitter

Curveball

Slider

Changeup

Screwball

Knuckleball

Monthly Discussion

As we can see, Cole Hamels takes the top for this month due to the  strength of his overall repertoire.  Hamels was classified as throwing five different pitches in July (Four-Seam, Sinker, Cutter, Curveball, and Changeup) and managed to earn at least 0.1 WAR from all five.  The most valuable pitch overall in July was Ian Kennedy’s Four-Seam Fastball.  The least valuable was Drew Hutchison’s Changeup.  As far as offspeed pitches, Garrett Richards’s 0.5 WAR from his slider lead the way.  The least valuable fastball was Hector Noesi’s cutter.

On our 20-80 scale pitch ratings, the highest rated qualifying pitch was Chase Whitley’s changeup.  The lowest rated pitches were the changeups thrown by Drew Hutchison and Mike Minor, Hector Noesi’s cutter, and Josh Beckett’s curveball.  The highest rated fastball was Drew Hutchison’s four-seam fastball.

Pitch Values – 2014 Season

Four-Seam Fastball

Sinker

Cutter

Splitter

Curveball

Slider

Changeup

Screwball

Knuckleball

Overall

Year-to-Date Discussion

If we look at the year-to-date numbers, AL FIP and MLB WAR leader Felix Hernandez still sits in the top spot.  Current MLB FIP leader Clayton Kershaw ranks ninth.  The least valuable starter has been Marco Estrada.  On a per-pitch basis, the most valuable pitch has been Ian Kennedy’s four-seam fastball.  The most valuable offspeed pitch has been Garrett Richards’s slider.  The least valuable pitch has been Marco Estrada’s four-seam fastball.  The least value offspeed pitch has been Marco Estrada’s changeup.  Needless to say, it’s been a rough year for Marco.  Qualitatively, I feel fairly encouraged by the year-to-date results so far.  The leaderboard is topped by two no-doubt aces, both of whom currently in the top two in their respect leagues in FIP, and Marco Estrada comes in at the bottom after posting the highest FIP among qualified starters so far.  For reference, the top five in the year-to-date overall rankings are currently 1st, 12th, 10th, 2nd, and 9th on the FanGraphs WAR leaderboards respectively.

I am currently in the process of finalizing a MLB/MLBPA licensed board game, in the realm of Strat-o-matic.  However, with the license, I will be able to offer player cards with player photos, team names and logos.

The game has been about 90% developed, and I’d like to hire someone to review all of the statistical calculations, to ensure that they make sense for providing the most accurate and realistic gameplay.  In addition, there are a handful of statistical elements within the game (primarily defensive ratings, etc), for which I could use your thoughts on the best way to calculate the rating.

I’m looking to hire someone (or a group of people, if you’d like to play the game and test it amongst yourselves) for approximately $2000 for this project.

Please email me at pdurkee7528@msn.com if you’re interested in the job.

Thanks!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been 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 used 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. In the future, I plan to engineer an alternative methodology to go along with this one, that takes into account how a player performs in the majors, rather than his just getting there.

For hitters in Low-A and High-A, age, strikeout rate, ISO, BABIP, and whether or not he was deemed a top 100 prospect by Baseball America all played a role in forecasting future success. And walk rate, while not predictive for players in A-ball, added a little bit to the model for Double-A and Triple-A hitters. Today, I’ll look into what KATOH has to say about players in Rookie leagues. Due to varying offensive environments in different years and leagues, all players’ stats were adjusted to reflect his league’s average for that year. For those interested, here’s the R output based on all players with at least 200 plate appearances in a season in Rookie ball from 1995-2007.

Just like we saw with hitters in the A-ball leagues, a player’s walk rate is not at all predictive of whether or not he’ll crack the majors. Unlike all of the other levels I’ve looked at so far, a player’s Baseball America prospect status couldn’t tell us anything about his future as a big-leaguer. This was entirely due the scarcity of top-100 prospects in the sample, as only a handful of players spent the year in rookie ball after making BA’s top-100 list.

The season is less than 40 games old for most rookie league teams, which makes it a little premature to start analyzing players’ stats. But just for kicks, here’s a look at what KATOH says about this year’s crop of rookie-ballers with at least 80 plate appearances through July 28th. This only considers players in the American rookie leagues — the Appalachian, Arizona, Gulf Coast, and Pioneer Leagues, meaning it excludes the Dominican and Venezuelan Summer Leagues. The full list of players can be found here, and you’ll find an excerpt of those who broke the 40% barrier below:

What stands out most is that KATOH doesn’t think any of these players are shoo-ins to make it to the majors. Even those who are hitting the snot out of the ball get probabilities that fall short of what we saw for unremarkable performances in Double-A. Kevin Padlo, for example, gets just a 73%, despite hitting a ridiculous .317/.463/.619 as a 17-year-old. Its hard to do much better than that. I think this really speaks to how little rookie ball stats matter in the grand scheme of things. A good offensive showing is obviously better than a poor one, but numbers from this level need to be taken with a huge grain of salt. A hitter’s performance against pitchers who are fresh out of high school just can’t tell us much about how he’ll fare when matched up against more advanced pitching at the higher levels.

Next up, I’ll complete the series by looking at stats from short-season A-ball. Teams at that level are also only a few weeks into their season, but at the very least, it will be interesting to see how KATOH feels about SS A-ballers in general. Next week, I’ll apply the KATOH model to historical prospects and highlight some of its biggest “hits” and “misses” from the past.

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

Tip: Click on any acronyms for an explanation in the FanGraphs glossary of terms.

With his final turn in the rotation for July completed, we’ve now had almost exactly one full year of Sonny Gray – one year of the 24-year-old starting pitcher, the up-and-coming staff ace, the dueler of Playoff Verlanders. In that year, we’ve seen him do some great things, like going eight innings with nine Ks and no runs against the Tigers in Game 2 of the 2013 ALDS. We’ve also seen MLB Fan Cave forcing him to prank New Yorkers as a result of some unknown fine print embedded in his rookie contract. Above all else, the one thing we’ve always known is that Sonny Gray has a really good curveball. Let’s take a look at it for all of its 12 to 6, 80-MPH Uncle Charlie glory, from a game against the Astros in August of last year:

How good is his curveball? He has never given up a home run off of the pitch, with the only extra-base hits against the curve in his career being four doubles. In the past calendar year, Sonny Gray has saved more runs with his curveball than any other pitcher in baseball, and is behind only Corey Kluber and Yu Darvish in Runs Saved/100 curveballs. Having watched Kluber a lot, I suspect his slider/slurve is actually being classified as a curveball; I think it looks like a slider, but PITCHf/x doesn’t, so I will defer to the all-knowing pitch computer. Regardless, with the metrics we’re about to examine, Sonny Gray has one of the best curveballs in the game. What we’re going to focus on specifically are the advances in his curve’s effectiveness, spurred on by an adjustment in the way he throws the pitch.

To start, let’s take a look at the top-15 starters by wCB and wCB/C for the past calendar year:

As stated before, Gray is at the top in both of these categories. We should put a little more stock into wCB/C, as it normalizes all pitchers to runs saved per 100 pitches, taking away the advantage that one player might have due to throwing a certain pitch more frequently than another player. This is important for what we’re looking at, because Sonny Gray throws a lot of curveballs. How frequently does he throw curveballs? Here are the leaders for percentage of curveballs thrown over the last calendar year:

The words “second only to Scott Feldman” don’t come up very often, but here they are. Gray throws his curveball a ton. Not only has he always leaned on the curve as a major weapon in his arsenal, but he has actually increased his number of curves thrown since he came into the league every month except for May (when he maintained his % thrown) and June of this year, when he seemed to temporarily lose a feel for the pitch and threw more changeups. However, his first start of July had Gray saying this after holding Toronto to one run over seven innings:

“That was the idea, to really get (it) going again,” Gray said of the curveball. “I think the last five or six starts it’s been OK, but it hasn’t been a big factor. We did some things a little different this week and I was able to find that again.”

Over the last 30 days, Gray has thrown the curveball more than ever, up to over 32% for the month. Not only that, he has found more effectiveness in the pitch, with his whiff % on the curve up to a career-best 19.2% during July. There’s also reason to believe that this isn’t simply a good month for Sonny Gray’s curveball – what we are now seeing is the fruition of a change of approach with the way he throws the pitch that has been coming for some time now. Let’s take a look.

Here we have the release speed of Sonny Gray’s curveball for every start since he was called up:

He’s throwing the curve harder than he ever has, adding over three miles per hour since he started pitching in the majors. That’s not a small change. On top of the speed increase, he’s cut about 2.5 inches of vertical movement off his curve between his first start in the majors and now:

Finally, he’s added more three-dimensional depth to his curve in the form of a top-3 best horizontal movement over the past calendar year. Only Corey Kluber and Charlie Morton have had better horizontal movement on their curves in that time period.

Add all of that up, and we have this 84-MPH curve from his last start against the Orioles:

It now looks more like a slurve, with its high release speed and nasty late break away from right-handed hitters. As Eno Sarris included in his great article from October of last year, Gray said he “adds and subtracts” with the same grip on his curve to move between the 12-to-6 and slurve (which is sometimes classified as a slider) varieties. However, it seems as if he has leaned more toward the slurve option as time has gone on.

One question that arises out of this is “why throw the slurve more?”

Given his whiff % on the curve has increased as he has added velocity, I’d say that fact alone has supported the move to the slurve over the 12-to-6. However, there’s another potential reason that isn’t strictly rooted in statistics, and could be more about what goes into an elite pitching approach: by increasing his arm speed and flattening out the vertical movement of his curve, Gray can further deceive batters into thinking he’s throwing hard pitches before the bottom drops out. His struggles to find consistency with the changeup are well documented, so why shouldn’t he adjust his best breaking pitch to better fool hitters for whiffs and weak contact? As we’ve seen with Yu Darvish, the pinnacle of an ace approach may be one that includes a “great convergence” of arm slots and release points, in which every pitch looks hard until it’s not, or until it is.

Gray’s horizontal release points for all of his pitches are closer to one another than they ever have been during his major league career. Not surprisingly, his curveball and fastball were released on average at the almost identical horizontal point during his May and July starts, when he posted career-best whiff rates on his curveball (18.6% & 19.2%, respectively). June was an aberration, as Gray seemed to lose his release point in general and was tinkering with his delivery, leaning more on the changeup:

Sonny Gray has work to do on parts of his game before he takes the next step into the true elite of starting pitchers. His walk rate has actually increased this year to 8.5%, owing mostly to a lack of fastball command in deep counts, and his changeup is still very much a work in progress as a third pitch. However, his adoption of the hard curve and syncing of arm angles is a positive step toward dominance, and is a sign that he knows what works; he’s now perfecting it.

And now, my first go at a DShep Darvish-like GIF of Sonny Gray’s 12-to-6 curve from last August along with his harder slurve from his last start to compare:

Earlier this week, Hall of Fame outfielder Carl Yastrzemski told the media that he believes that DH David Ortiz is second to only Ted Williams as the greatest hitter in Red Sox history. Many people believe that Yaz is the next-best hitter after Teddy Ballgame. I want to determine who is the better hitter.

To do this, we have to look at the wOBA or weighted on base average which weighs the values of the many different ways a player gets on base based on each way’s ability to produce a run and puts them into a single analytical number. The formula for this statistic is listed below:

wOBA = (0.690×uBB + 0.722×HBP + 0.888×1B + 1.271×2B + 1.616×3B +
2.101×HR) / (AB + BB – IBB + SF + HBP)

The graph of the wOBA for Ortiz, Yaz, and the average player at each of the ages that they have played at can be seen in the graph below:

Source: FanGraphs — David Ortiz, Carl Yastrzemski

Although it was only a slightly better wOBA in his best ten seasons (non-consecutive), Ortiz’s .409 is superior to Yaz’s wOBA of .404. I only used their best 10 seasons because Ortiz’s career is not over yet so Yastrzemski would have a larger sample size of seasons. However, these numbers are just the beginning. Below is a graph of each player’s wOBA for a specific year compared to the league average of that year:

Source: FanGraphs — David Ortiz, Carl Yastrzemski

Using this graph, I determined each player’s ten seasons in which they had the greatest range between their wOBA and the league’s wOBA. In this situation, Yaz had a .107 greater wOBA than the league did in those ten seasons, compared to Ortiz’s .092. That is a .15 difference, which is greater than the .05 difference for the wOBA for each player’s ages shown in the first graph.

If I could take either one of these players based solely on offensive production, I would choose Yaz because his production compared to the league average of the era that he played in is greater than that of Ortiz.

Thanks for the selfless comments Yaz, but you are the second-best hitter in Red Sox history.

Jose Abreu has seemed a virtual lock for the AL Rookie of the Year Award ever since Masahiro Tanaka went down with what could be a season-ending elbow injury. Abreu has done nothing but hit the hell out of the ball since storming into the Majors after fine-tuning his craft in Cuba. Rookies like Brock Holt and George Springer have had nice seasons of their own, to be sure, but they’re certainly no challengers to the might of Abreu.

Then, of course, there’s the best rookie that mostly nobody’s heard of. Let’s say hello to Mr. Kevin Kiermaier. A 31^st round pick in 2010, Kiermaier fought his way through the minors and finally, after a single game appearance last year, was called up for good on May 17^th. He’s since appeared in every game since May 31^st.  In 57 games (198 plate appearances), he’s hit .311/.362/.544. More importantly, he’s produced a .391 wOBA and 157 wRC+. Those are certainly pretty numbers. But can he keep it up? Kiermaier hit well at almost every level in the minors, but was always known for his superb glove work. Let’s look at his and Abreu’s numbers together, shall we? All stats herein are as they were prior to the inception of action on Monday the 29^th.

Abreu is numerically the greater offensive producer, if only by a slim margin. He’s only out-produced Kiermaier relative to the league (wRC+) by two points, but his wOBA is indicative of the fact that he’s driving the bar a lot further (.619 slugging percentage versus Kiermaier’s .544). Yet while chicks most certainly dig the long ball, it isn’t everything.

Kiermaier’s .362 OBP is a fantastic mark. It’s about twenty points higher than Abreu’s, and it’s incredibly beneficial for his spot in the lineup. For all his famous lineup tinkering, Joe Maddon has been primarily using Kiermaier out of the 9 spot of late. He even went as far as batting the pitcher (Alex Cobb) eighth on July 23^rd in an inter-league game against the Cardinals so that Kiermaier could bat ninth. Putting him there allows him to serve as what basically amounts to a second leadoff hitter when the lineup turns over, and there’s one more runner on base for the big boppers in the heart of the order.

Kiermaier also is much more of a two-way player. UZR and DRS are both very pleased with his defensive skill set. That’s not a surprise, as many scouting reports on Kiermaier always gave glowing reviews of his instincts and range in the field. It’s that defense that has allowed him to be right on Abreu’s tail in total value, in far fewer games. While UZR says that Abreu isn’t a total loss at first base, DRS says he leaves much to be desired. Naturally, first basemen traditionally aren’t employed for their gloves, but nobody complains when someone like Carlos Santana comes along and dazzles on both sides of the ball.

Now, the hard part. We want to extrapolate Kiermaier’s value over the same time span that Abreu’s accrued his, but how? It would be easy to simple do it over the same number of games played. However, “games played” doesn’t account for late-inning substitutions, or early exits. A better (but still not perfect) way of looking at it would be to extrapolate it over innings played. This is still not perfect, as a batter can hit in the top of an inning and then be replaced in the field in the bottom, and vice versa. However, I’m not a good enough statistician to develop my own metric for this (check back with me in a few months) and I can’t find anything out there to show just how much time a player has seen.

I used Baseball-Reference’s game logs for this, as they have a count of how many innings the player saw. Here’s how these numbers work out.

This is far from an exact science. Abreu and Kiermaier didn’t produce exactly that many wins every inning they plated, but it’s how the numbers work out. Now, if Kiermaier’s fWAR/I (fWAR per innings played) is multiplied by Abreu’s total innings played, the result is an fWAR total of 5.425. So far this season, Mike Trout leads all of baseball with 5.7 fWAR. Troy Tulowitzki is in second place with 5.1. That’s assuming, of course, that Kiermaier maintains his current level of play. And as I said before, “But can he keep it up?” The answer to that is “I haven’t a clue.” Here’s why.

There are two glaring realities. One is that Kiermaier hits a lot of ground balls. His BABIP would seem to indicate that’s he’s getting lucky, and his grounders are finding holes in the infield. For what it’s worth, here’s the league leaders in ground ball rate out of everyone who’s qualified for the batting title. It’s a mixed bag for sure. There are some good hitters around Kiermaier’s range, like Yasiel Puig, Alexei Ramirez and Melky Cabrera. Derek Jeter’s made a heck of a career out of a high ground ball rate and good BABIP. So while that isn’t an immediate cause for concern, it’s something worth watching to be sure. For reference, here’s his Brooks Baseball spray chart on the year.

The other is that southpaws have completely owned him. While right-handers are more common (and Kiermaier certainly has no problem with them), in the age of specialized bullpens it’s one awful quality to have. Managers (and the think-tanks in front offices) are surely catching on to this. Eventually, the scouting report will read to get a lefty reliever to face him in high-leverage situations, if they can. This also, of course, could be a result of small samples sizes. Kiermaier only has 43 plate appearances against lefties, and 155 against right-handers. Another thing to keep an eye on going forward.

However, what Kiermaier is doing is not wholly unsustainable. Players have made livings on putting ground balls in the right spots, and good players at that. However, the projections for the rest of the season aren’t too pretty. ZiPS predicts that he’ll produce a .259/.312/.385 line for the rest of the season. Steamer has him at .257/.311/.382. The projection systems are generally not too far off from reality, but it’s fun to think about what could be. Will Kiermaier end up being a 5-win player? The odds aren’t good. It’s certainly possible, though, and if it does happen prepare yourselves for a wonderful offseason debate on whom the rightful winner of the Rookie of the Year Award really was. In the meantime, let’s marvel at how darn good this former 31^st round pick has been.

Nicolas Stellini is a student, college baseball announcer, and amateur baseball writer. Check him out over at @StelliniTweets. 

Social media is fun a tool to use. It makes following the news a lot easier. You can find hundreds of stories within a matter of minutes on Twitter. I was scrolling through my twitter feed when I found this cute little rumor:

#Royals and #RedSox could match up on a trade, as Kansas City reportedly likes Andrew Miller and John Lackey: http://t.co/Sw8ipEDAm6

— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) July 29, 2014

This is just rumor, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Royals are in  hot pursuit for those two arms, but  it is a rumor worth exploring.

Dayton Moore wants his team to win this year, and that’s not completely unreasonable. After all, Moore gets paid to build competitive teams, and if he consistently put lousy products on the field he wouldn’t hold onto his job very long. However, the Royals situation isn’t as competitive as Moore would like to think.

The problem appears to be that the Tigers have the AL Central locked up with nearly a 90% chance of winning the division. That would leave the Royals in the midst of a wild-card race. A wild-card berth is not as valuable as it used to be because it results in a one-game toss up. This year, that one-game toss-up would be a difficult one for a team like the Royals to win because they’re likely to face one of the two of the best teams in baseball: the Angels and the Athletics.

In a hypothetical situation where the Royals somehow secure a wild card, they get to face either the Angels’ dynamic offense — including Mike Trout — as well as a fortified bullpen, or they could face the all-around, well-built Oakland A’s. While it’s extremely hard to predict the result of one game, and I don’t possess a magical crystal ball, the odds that the Royals advance to the ALDS don’t look very promising. Given the likelihood that the Royals a) don’t make the playoffs and b) if they do it would most likely be through a wild card matchup that they’re unlikely to win, they should probably not be looking to acquire the services of John Lackey and Andrew Miller.

Based on the work that Jeff Sullivan did a couple of weeks ago, we know that a team that acquires an ace like David Price would roughly increase their playoff odds by about 10%. This is a rough estimate, but that’s the upside of adding someone like Price. I doubt that Lackey would increase playoff odds by 10%, but ZiPs/Steamer projects Lackey to have between 0.9 and 1.1 WAR for the rest of the season. For context, Shields is projected have a WAR of 1.3 for the rest of the season, and Price is projected to have a WAR of 1.5 for the rest of the season.

The difference between Price and Shields is marginal for the rest of the season. However, the difference between Lackey and Price is somewhat significant, so just to be a little more accurate, we have to scale back those increased playoff odds — for Lackey — from 10% to 8%.  I have done no calculations; we’re just simply guesstimating here.

Say that the Royals decide to add a guy like Lackey, and they get the upside of a 8% increased chance of making the playoffs. That still only puts them at roughly a 22.7% chance of making the playoffs. That’s assuming that Lackey performs the way the projections expect him to perform. There’s still a chance that they make a run for a wild-card spot, but the other thing to take into consideration is the price of Lackey and Miller.

Relievers are considered extremely valuable assets if you’re going to the playoffs — so the price on Miller is going to be high — especially if you plan on being in wild-card games, as the strategy in those one-game matchups is to empty the bullpen.

Boston controls a large part of the market, because as the Rays have started winning they’re probably having second thoughts on moving Price. Boston has many arms, and as we’ve seen this week with the Peavy trade, they’ve committed to being sellers at the deadline. They have two of the best available pitchers on their roster: Lester and Lackey.

Therefore, since they have two of the better pitchers on the market the asking price is probably going to be high even on Lackey, given that the next best pitchers available are Bartolo Colon and A.J. Burnett. Rumors have been circling that the Red Sox want at least an average major-league starter in return for a package of Lackey and Miller. There would probably have to be some sort of prospect thrown in, as well. Selling the farm to increase your odds of making the playoffs that aren’t that high to begin with isn’t the best use of the Royals’ resources.

You could make the argument that trading for Lackey is justifiable because he has 2015 club options for a team-friendly $0.5 million, and if the Royals are building for 2015, then they would be bolstering their rotation. The problem is that Lackey’s contract is done after one year — at which point he would be 36 years old — and his skills would be declining. Trading a young player that you could control for multiple years for an aging veteran that you control for one year doesn’t sound like a very good deal.

The Royals simply are not in the position to upgrade with the present in mind. They should probably think about selling rather than buying, but they still want to be relevant in 2014. If the Royals are set on hanging around for a wild card, they should follow the model that the Yankees have set of acquiring low-cost/high reward upgrades; a guy that you hope to squeeze two months of good baseball out of. Otherwise, paying a premium for a pitcher when your team is unlikely to make a run at the playoffs is not the best move that the Royals could be making right now.

Streaks in sports are looked at a lot, just Google hot hand baseball, basketball, etc.  There is a lot out there on whether or not players can actually get into a groove or if it is completely luck-based.  I want to look at team streaks though, not that this hasn’t been done before, and see which teams are the streakiest so far of 2014 to see which teams might have a run in them as they are chasing the playoffs.

To measure this I wanted to treat all games as part of a streak, so each game was given a value.  A loss is defined as -1 and a second loss in a row would then become -2 and so on until the team won which would then be given a value of 1 with additional wins adding on top of that until a loss occurred.  If you then just look at the standard deviations of each team by this measure it should be easy to see who has been the most streaky.  One of the expectations of this measure would be that this would lead toward higher values for teams farther away from .500 as you have to have to string together wins (losses) to diverge significantly above (below) that mark, but those teams also don’t tend to have long losing (winning streaks) so their one-directional streakiness keeps them from being at the top of the list.

Streakiest (St.Dev.)                                              Least Streaky (St.Dev.)

Tampa Bay (3.14)                                                  LA Dodgers (1.62)

Boston (2.89)                                                          Baltimore (1.89)

Kansas City (2.76)                                                 St. Louis (1.89)

Detroit (2.75)                                                         Pittsburgh (1.91)

Atlanta (2.70)                                                          Arizona (1.97)

*data through games on Sunday, July 27th

Streakiness, or lack thereof, does not make you a good or bad team.  Detroit and Atlanta are streaky and good, Boston is streaky and bad, and Tampa and KC are streaky and near .500 on the season.  On the not streaky side Arizona and the Dodgers are on extreme opposites of the spectrum.  Just to make sure the measure didn’t bias a lot as you moved away from .500 in either direction I modified it by taking the standard deviation as a percent of the greater of wins or losses.  The top 5 still included Tampa Bay, Boston, KC, and Detroit in a slightly different order with Atlanta falling to 6th and being replaced by Miami.  The low end behaved similarly, so I will stick with the first measure as it looks like there is no bias toward good or bad teams.

One of the other things I wondered was whether or not streaky teams had high volatility in their runs scored or given up.  Looking at both standard deviation of runs scored and allowed, and then those as a percentage of average runs scored/allowed it does not look like this is the case.  The correlations for volatility in runs scored or allowed with streakiness are low, so I took it a step farther and looked only at teams that have high relative volatility in both runs scored and runs allowed.  This group has an average streakiness rank of 11.3 versus and expectation of 15.5, so maybe there is something there, but it is not even close to convincing.  I am going to need a lot more than one partial season of data to see what makes a team streaky.

As we head into pennant chase season this idea of streakiness may make things more interesting.  For instance, Kansas City and Detroit are atop the AL Central and streaky, which could make that race a lot more fun to watch as the standings are likely to vacillate more than most, especially since Cleveland has been relatively streaky as well.  On the other hand, the Dodgers might be harder to make up ground on as they consistently avoid long streaks.  Tampa Bay and Baltimore are on opposite ends of the spectrum with Baltimore hoping the Rays will fall back into the negative streaks after gaining a lot of ground recently.  They of course have an average streakiness Yankee team and a little bit streaky Blue Jays team to worry about as well.

Baseball has spoiled us. For the past two years baseball teams, spectators, and analysts have been in awe of the young talent in the game. Last year,  the likes of Yasiel Puig and Jose Fernandez came out of nowhere and dominated the league. The year before, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper came up  and were beyond exceptional baseball players.

This year has been a little bit dry in terms of top prospects coming up and turning into the best players in the league. George Springer has been an exciting player to watch but not dominant like Trout, Puig or Fernandez. There’s a case to be made for Jose Abreu, but he was an international signing. Abreu wasn’t developed in the White Sox’ farm system for multiple years. Instead, Abreu was major league ready upon signing his contract.

The other top prospect whose performance hasn’t been captivating — at least during his first month in the big leagues — is Gregory Polanco.

Polanco is considered an extremely toolsy young player. Most scouting reports agree that Polanco has a pretty good glove — profiling as a corner outfielder — and he has a good arm.  Polanco’s bat has been more of a projection than a reality. In the minors it was easy to see that he had some talent. In his minor league career he put up an .842 OPS. There were still some rough edges around Polanco’s game as his ability to hit for power fluctuated during his time in the minors.

There were times in Polanco’s minor-league career in which he hit for decent power, but he definitely bounced back and forth between having above-average power and power outages. In his 2014 Pittsburgh Pirates Top Prospects post, Marc Hulet described some of Polanco’s difficulties:

“At the plate, he flashes the ability to hit for both average and power but he’s still learning to identify and handle breaking balls.”

Polanco has been in the big leagues for about 40 games. In his first couple of plate appearance he looked like a pretty dynamic toolsy outfielder. However, as he has accrued more plate appearances, it has become apparent that he is still an unfinished product. Polanco has hit .247/.324/.352. which has been good for a WAR of 0.2. This is a pretty small sample size of only 183 PA’s, however Polanco has been having difficulty hitting for power. Right now Polanco is getting on base a decent amount, but his lack of power offsets the value of his ability to get on base.

Pitchers have mostly fed Polanco fastballs. In his first 40 games, Polanco has seen a fastball around 60% of the time, and that’s the pitch against which he seems to be able to have the most success. Polanco also doesn’t hit for a lot of power when he does make contact with a fastball (.044 ISO against fastballs). Despite that, Polanco was known for not being able to handle breaking balls — in the minors — so far he has actually been able to take advantage of some curveballs, cutters and sliders. All five of the home runs he has hit have come off of either a slider, a curveball or a cutter.  The story seems to be that he can catch up to the hard stuff, but doing something meaningful with it is a different story.

We’re dealing with a small sample size,  so we don’t know whether Polanco has a propensity for hitting sliders, cutters, and curveballs a long ways. Other off-speed/breaking pitches — such as sinkers and splitters — have been difficult for Polanco to hit.

Polanco is still showing good knowledge of the strike zone as he’s drawing a lot of walks this season. Despite his proclivity for drawing walks, there are some issues with his plate discipline stats. These mainly have to do with his ability to make contact. While Polanco does swing at lower number of pitches outside of the zone  — with an O-Swing%  of 28% — he only makes contact with those pitches 53% of the time.

The only good part of Polanco’s offensive performance has been his ability to draw walks. However, if you’re not making enough contact and not hitting for power, that doesn’t make you a productive major-league hitter.

Polanco has not necessarily been a great hitter in his first couple of months in the majors. I’m sure some people expected Polanco to step in and be one of the best hitters in the game. The truth is that this game is incredibly hard, and there are certainly growing pains when it comes to young players. Polanco has to figure out how to hit for more power to be a useful major leaguer. He hasn’t done that.

That doesn’t mean that Polanco won’t do it; we are dealing with a small sample size of just 183 PA’s, and it’s completely plausible that he makes the adjustment necessary to fix his problems. Polanco showed that he could adjust quickly.  That’s why he rose so quickly through the minors; he was able to adjust to the new challenges each level presented him. Demoting Polanco is completely pointless as he hasn’t been bad, and he has nothing left to prove in the minors.

Polanco now needs to prove himself in the majors, and that might just take some time.

Over the course of 162 games, there’s only so much influence a manager of any baseball team could have over their outcome. After 105 games the Mets actual record is 3 wins shy of their projected record of 53-52, making this a .500 team. Several factors contribute to this discrepancy like losing your ace pitcher to injury, scrambling for a closer to begin the season, developing a major league catcher, adapting to a new hitting coaches philosophy, and setting the most productive lineup possible just to name a few. What Terry Collins has done with this team to this point can only be admired, but help has arrived and changes must be made to maximize team production.

The move of Curtis Granderson from the cleanup to leadoff role proved to be successful as the team surged from June’s end through July. Daniel Murphy and Curtis Granderson’s slash line numbers are almost identical, batting average is the only big difference which Daniel Murphy leads Granderson by about.060 AVG points and make him a more ideal leadoff hitter. Curtis Granderson hit 6 home runs from the leadoff spot which minimized his RBI potential which essentially is the reason Sandy Alderson signed him. In moving Daniel Murphy into the leadoff spot, the Mets actually increase their leadoff OBP while putting Curtis Granderson into a role where his RBI opportunities increase dramatically.

Daniel Murphy’s SLG% is nearly that of Curtis Granderson with half as many HRs, meaning that Daniel Murphy is doing a better job of getting into scoring position than our current leadoff hitter. The only 2 reasons the Mets have kept Murphy out of the leadoff spot in the past were lack of speed on the basepaths and low OBP. Now Daniel leads our starting players in SB showing he has some speed and base running ability and his OBP is amongst the team leaders. David Wright being the best hitter on the team (despite struggles in 2014) deserves the 2nd spot in the order. His power has declined this season, however his OBP is still respectable and he should remain in a table-setting role followed by Granderson. Lucas Duda has earned his cleanup role as he’s hit over .280 in the past couple of months with at least 5 HRs per month. He is driving the ball to all fields and should be a key contributor to driving in runs once our table-setters do their jobs.

The top 4 lineup spots should be configured as follows:

1  2B Daniel Murphy        (.293/.340/.412) 28 2B, 7HR, 11SB

2  3B David Wright           (.278/.339/.401) 24 2B, 8HR, 5SB

3  RF Curtis Granderson  (.232/.339/.415) 18 2B, 15HR, 8SB

4  1B Lucas Duda               (.259/.356/.500) 22 2B, 18HR, 3SB

For the next spot in the lineup, this player has had a tale of 2 seasons. Travis d’Arnaud has adjusted quickly since his demotion to AAA on June 6th. Since being recalled on June 24th, d’Arnaud has a slash line of (.302/.337/.646). He has lengthened our lineup and has earned the spot of the 5 hitter.

5  C Travis d’Arnaud

Before June 6th demotion    (.180/.271/.320) 3 2B, 3HR

Since June 24th Promotion (.302/.337/.646) 7 2B, 4HR

Season Stats                            (.232/.298/.379) 10 2B, 7HR

Right after Travis d’Arnaud in the Mets order is when they begin to look thin offensively. Having early success in the season but struggling as of recent is Juan Lagares, the defensive wizard and minor league doubles machine. This kid showed an advanced approach to lead off the year and is capable of making the bottom of our order a productive one. He isn’t seeing the ball well like he was in the first half, but we need to remember he is in his first full season in the bigs and known primarily for his route to catch baseballs and cannon for an arm, any offense is a plus.

6  CF Juan Lagares (.271/.306/.375) 16 2B, 2HR, 2SB

7  RF Chris Young/Eric Young/Kirk Nieuwenhuis/Bobby Abreu/denDekker

Our right field position is a question mark. I’m not saying the Mets haven’t produced anything from the position, but they don’t have an everyday right fielder which is a need to be addressed in the off-season or via trade before Thursday’s deadline. Though not one player has stepped up and taken over this position, I still believe they have produced more than my “ideal” 8 hitter, Ruben Tejada. In every championship team there is that one scrappy player that is on the squad solely for defensive prowess. Through the course of the season I have seen many different Ruben Tejadas. I’ve seen the defensive shortstop, the slap hitter, the kid in way over his head, and the wanna-be slugger with warning track power. This player is undoubtedly our 8 hitter and those who look too dependently on his OBP must take into consideration how many times he has walked for the sole reason that the worst hitting pitching staff is just 4 pitches away.

Ruben has been intentionally walked 10 times, twice as much as any player on the Mets. Ruben Tejada hasn’t defended the way he has in the past which quieted his lack of offense. In a New York setting, he shouldn’t start and the Mets executives know that. Ruben is a bridge to the future, an inexpensive filler until we land in a position of contention where an offensive producer is necessary at the position. Until then we have a shortstop with a strong arm and instincts but lacks the speed to get too many balls up the middle or steal a base when we need him to. He has no power and is offensively irrelevant as his slash line below shows. A shortstop with any tools is an upgrade here.

8  SS Ruben Tejada (.226/.351/.281) 9 2B, 2HR, 1SB