Spring training is here, the trade rumors have quieted a bit, and it seems as if Cleveland’s 40-man roster will be comprised of players already in Goodyear, Arizona.

Many fans have voiced their displeasure with the Indians’ lack of willingness to spend money on upgrades. The front office believes that with the way the division is set up, and with the current mix of young players and recent acquisitions, the Indians are in a position to continue winning into September and beyond, depending on if and when some of the young players breakout. President of Baseball Operations Chris Antonetti also suggested that they would be willing to make midseason adjustments depending on roster needs and the market at that time.

Nevertheless, that has not sat well with the Indians fan base. It is easy to be upset when the free agent market has been as glacially slow as it has been. Let’s not forget though, prior to the team’s World Series run in 2016, the Indians opened the season with Marlon Byrd, Rajai Davis, and Collin Cowgill starting in the outfield. It is a long season and one that is full of surprises.

One of the young Indians outfielders who may be poised for a breakout season is Greg Allen. Allen was a sixth-round pick in the 2014 draft from San Diego State University. Although his 2018 slash line of .257/.310/.343 may not raise too many eyebrows, there is much more than meets the eye.

Allen played in 91 games for the Tribe last year as well as 47 for the Triple-A Columbus Clippers. He had a difficult transition to the majors partly due to the fact that from the end of spring training, he was optioned and recalled five times.

That type of uncertainty would be difficult for any player to have in the back of their head, let alone a rookie trying to find a spot on a playoff contender. Last season, Allen was twice called up for as few as two games until being optioned back to Columbus. Read the rest of this entry »

The Franklin Institute is a science and research museum located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Among its many draws are a giant heart you can walk through, the SportsZone where you can sprint the 40-yard dash and compare your time to professional athletes, and a Changing Earth exhibit made entirely of sustainable materials that focuses on the ways the planet has transformed over time. Through all of that, plus rotating feature exhibits, it’s easy to lose sight of a tried and true experiment: The Ruler Drop Test.

If you never performed the experiment in middle school, the Ruler Drop Test is exactly as it sounds. Take a ruler — or, in the case of the Franklin Institute, a yardstick — and hold it vertically between your index finger and thumb on your dominant hand, about one-fourth from the bottom. Then release it and see where you can catch it. The shorter the distance between where you let go and where you catch it, the faster your reactions are. Science!

It’s a simple experiment, but it is illustrative. And with how it’s centered on vertical drop and expectations, it could help us understand how the Houston Astros have used advanced technology and data to tweak pitchers’ repertories to reach new levels of success. Read the rest of this entry »

In the winter between the 1980 and 1981 baseball seasons, one of the best catchers of all time informed his club, the Cincinnati Reds, that he would no longer catch more than two days each week.

Part I can be read here.

Who would he be if he didn’t catch?

That thought didn’t really surface for Johnny Bench when he told the Reds he wanted to limit his time behind the plate. But once he demanded a trade -– to the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies, no less -– it started to swirl to the surface.

Fortunately, Reds GM Dick Wagner had kept quiet about the discussion the two had about Bench’s future. Bench himself stayed mum, so much so that the media who covered the Reds began to notice. While he could be moody, especially as nagging injuries continued to wear down his body prematurely, Bench was no shrinking violet.

But in the spring of 1981, he was becoming one.

In the meantime, Wagner had longtime Reds farm director Sheldon “Chief” Bender start quietly looking at Philadelphia’s younger talent. Bender, who had spent decades managing in the minor leagues before overseeing the feeder systems for both the St. Louis Cardinals and the Reds, had a way of spotting talent as well as finding scouts who could do the same. Bender had as much to do with the Reds’ success on the field in the 70s as anyone.

Bender got his scouts out, but not en masse. He wasn’t clued in to what was going on, but being a baseball lifer, he knew when and how to trust his instincts. Right now, his instincts told him the club had an aging star in need of a new position without a position to give him, and that meant a trade. He was determined to find a player worthy of Bench as a return.

In the meantime, Grapefruit League contests were played, and a players’ strike loomed over the game. In a way, it wouldn’t matter who played where, since it didn’t look like the 1981 season would be completed anyway. That was a thought had by each man involved, but only privately. No one wanted to voice that fear.

Wagner decided a week after his conversation with Bench, just prior to breaking camp to go north and start the season, that if a move was going to be made, it needed to be before Opening Day. He wanted a complete team from the start, since no one was sure how long the season would go on.

In that, his logic was sound, as it would turn out the 1981 season would indeed be interrupted by a players’ strike starting on June 12. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Gsellman of the New York Mets had a fairly average 2018. After struggles in the rotation during 2017 due to injury and ineffectiveness in facing batters a third time, as well as losing two miles per hour on his sinker compared to the previous year, Gsellman was moved into the bullpen full time. The plan initially worked, with an uptick in velocity and an improved strikeout percentage during April. Unfortunately, the rest of his season was filled with highs and lows, resulting in an 86 ERA+. However, his curveball did improve drastically in 2018.

Changes to Movement

One of the main ways Gsellman’s curve improved was his added spin rate. In 2017, his curveball had 2606 revolutions per minute, and in 2018 it was 2699 rpm. An increase in spin rate leads to an increase in the movement of the pitch. These two graphs demonstrate how this increase in spin rate translated into movement from 2017 to 2018. The first graph shows changes in vertical movement and the second one shows changes in horizontal movement.

These graphs express how Gsellman has added more bite to his curve (vertical movement from -4.3 to -6 inches) and a bit more depth to his curve. Visually, we can see this using the power of GIFs. The first GIF is his curve from 2017 and the second one is from 2018.

The 2018 curve breaks more sharply and also breaks from right to left more, as opposed to its 2017 counterpart, which is more of a tight vertical break. This added spin was most likely due to an increase in the pitch velocity increasing (80.2 mph to 81.8 mph). Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball fans have seen it time and again: a starting pitcher will twirl a masterpiece, but because his team doesn’t score, he’ll be tagged with a loss. Or a reliever will come into a game, pitch to one or two batters, and end up with the win.

The vagaries of assigning wins and losses to pitchers are a well-known irritant to serious baseball fans (though perhaps not to old-timers like Bob Costas or John Smoltz). Here is the pitching decision statistic explained:

The winning pitcher is defined as the pitcher who last pitched prior to the half-inning when the winning team took the lead for the last time.

The losing pitcher is the pitcher who allows the go-ahead run to reach base for a lead that the winning team never relinquishes.

Often timing — particularly the timing of a team’s offense — affects the statistic more than a pitcher’s actual contribution to his team’s win or loss. In other words, the decision frequently fails to reflect which pitcher made the biggest difference for the winning team (or was most detrimental for the losing team). In these cases, it simply tags the pitcher lucky or unlucky enough to pitch at a certain time in the game.

In an effort to create a more accurate stat to reflect a pitcher’s contribution to his team’s win or loss, I’d like to propose new stats, which I’ll call the “WPA-Win” and “WPA-Loss.” Let’s start with the WPA-Win:

The “WPA-Win” is given to the pitcher on the winning team with the highest WPA for that game.

I’ll address how to calculate the “WPA-Loss” (which is more complicated) later in the article. For now, we’ll just assume it goes to the pitcher on the losing team with the lowest WPA. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curveball: Kazuhisa Makita (60.0 mph)

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

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

Slider: Kazuhisa Makita (70.6 mph)

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

Changeup: Dan Jennings (69.7 mph)

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

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

Fastball: Kazuhisa Makita (81.2 mph)

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the winter between the 1980 and 1981 baseball seasons, one of the best catchers of all time informed his club, the Cincinnati Reds, that he would no longer catch more than two days each week.

But what if Reds general manager Dick Wagner, the man who dismantled the Big Red Machine, took exception to the demand, and dealt with Bench like he did Tony Perez, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, and Sparky Anderson?

“If Johnny wants to come to the Phillies, I’ll be happy to find another position.”

The words could have been considered tampering. The speaker could not have cared less.

The speaker was Pete Rose, doing what Pete always did, having fun with the sportswriters. Why not? His Phillies were world champs, and there was no reason to think they couldn’t repeat, just like his Reds teams did in the mid-70s. Back then, he had one of the greatest players at his position alongside him in Johnny Bench, just like he did now in third baseman Mike Schmidt.

The Phillies didn’t really have room for Bench, what with the solid Bob Boone behind the plate, Schmidt at third, Bake McBride in left (with young Lonnie Smith ready to take over), and the newly arrived Gary “Sarge” Matthews in right field. Sarge had averaged over 20 home runs and 70 RBIs across the four years before for the dreadful Atlanta Braves as one of the few bright spots for that woeful franchise.

Pete was about to turn 40, but he felt strong. His knees were still good, and as long as he had those, he felt like he could not only play, but play at the high level to which he’d grown accustomed.

He didn’t really think much of his comment — but when it made it to the papers in Tampa, Reds GM Dick Wagner thought about it. A lot. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of this entry »