Archive for Baseball

What’s 0/573?

Baseball Savant knows, but they also know it’s useless information. This is precisely why they do not display it. And it’s a shame that they don’t display it.

If they did, it would show that David Fletcher is in the zeroth Percentile for Barrels.

For a quick refresher, Barrels are “a batted ball with the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle.” To qualify, a ball must be hit at least 98 mph. For that exit velocity, a launch angle of between 26-30 degrees is required. For every single mph increase, the range of acceptable launch angle degrees increases by two or three, up until 116 mph. At that level, any ball hit between 8-50 launch degrees is considered Barreled.

Fletcher didn’t do that once in 2021. Instead, he mustered eight “close calls” among his 573 batted ball events. Read the rest of this entry »

Our beloved pastime has a long history of over-the-hill veteran players serving important mentor roles around the game, but the primacy of the Competitive Balance Tax and the perpetual crush of roster spot competition and “efficiency” has rendered these players largely moot. Players like the 40-something version of Jason Giambi, a bench bat for years on the strength of his contributions to his team as a leader beyond just his metric value, have grown frightfully rare. It is sad to see that sort of quasi-player/coach fade to memory.

As I look over the U.S. Olympic Roster, I see an awful lot of well-loved veterans who have lost a step over the years and, with that lost step, any serious hope of a consistent job under the new normal of roster construction. But I am convinced there remains value to the game of baseball to have players like Todd Frazier, Edwin Jackson, Scott Kazmir, and David Robertson around the sport beyond what they contribute to the back of the baseball card. A glance at the current free agent list reveals a small glut of other interesting, memorable players, such as Matt Kemp, Ryan Braun, Matt Wieters, and Neil Walker, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »

When trying to determine a batter’s overall offensive value using a single statistic, one of the most popular metrics to use is weighted on-base average (wOBA). wOBA is calculated as a ratio of a linear combination of “outcome” statistics (unintentional walks, hit-by-pitches, singles, doubles, triples, and home runs) divided by, essentially, the number of plate appearances.

With that being said, could one predict whether a given player’s wOBA will be above a certain threshold using “process” statistics such as plate discipline and batted ball parameters? In particular, if we know a player’s zone contact rate, chase rate, and average exit velocity, could we predict with any confidence whether that particular player’s wOBA will be above, say, .320?

Using Statcast data and a bit of machine learning, I have decided to train a shallow neural network to try to do just that. I’ll be using snapshots of the Jupyter Notebook throughout the analysis to try and make it a little easier to follow. Read the rest of this entry »

When WAR was first introduced, it attempted to answer a baseball question that has existed as long as teams have played professionally: how much can one player contribute to a team’s record? It is an ongoing debate to this day, but WAR is widely recognized as an excellent measure of overall performance. WAR numbers for major league players are regularly cited and recognized by both Major League Baseball and the Elias Sports Bureau. However, there is another question behind WAR, also long predating the existence of the statistic, and it’s a question that has yet to be answered by it. When a front office is deciding whether or not (or how aggressively) to pursue a player, they’re ultimately searching for the answer to one question — how many more games will we win if we get this guy?

Enter pWAR.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few summers ago, Walker Buehler and the Los Angeles Dodgers came to Baltimore at the very end of the season. That night my buddy and I couldn’t figure out why the Dodgers, and the overwhelming mass of their fans in attendance, were so pumped about winning a single game in Baltimore. Once we saw staffers in ties and headsets running out with the “Division Champions” t-shirts, we realized what was going on.

Needless to say, Buehler was excellent, going 7 innings with 11 Ks and — because it was the 2019 Orioles — gave up no runs on four hits. During the game, while surrounded by very excited Dodgers fans, I mentioned that Buehler’s delivery seemed so efficient that his motion looked exactly the same every time he threw the ball. If you’ve ever worked on physical mechanics of any kind, be it baseball swings, golf swings, freestyle swim stroke, running stride, or maybe just proper form sitting at a desk to avoid that “work from home/pandemic backache,” you know how hard it can be to exactly replicate a motion over and over again. Buehler amazed us in his ability to do just that. We know that repetition in delivery mechanics leads to success in various forms, so with that in mind, the point of this analysis is to look at release point consistency and how that correlates with resulting pitching metrics. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 season brought unprecedented rule changes, one of the most puzzling among them being the “extra inning runner.” Ostensibly in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and speed up play, commissioner Rob Manfred decreed that once a game progresses past the ninth inning, a runner would be placed at second base to begin the frame.

Manfred’s blatantly obvious motives turned baseball fans — a demographic notorious for their acceptance of changes to the national pastime — against it. If there is any defense to be made for the addition of the extraneous runner, it’s that shorter games helped save pitchers’ arms in what’s already been an utterly brutal season for pitcher injuries.

This seismic rule change also created a correspondingly large shift in how teams strategized after a game surpassed nine innings. Teams, even the more sabermetrically inclined among them, began to employ traditional tactics. In order to determine how clubs played with a free runner, I charted every extra inning of the 2020 season. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s safe to say the Boston Red Sox have been underwhelming this season. As a Red Sox fan who follows the local media, it’s overwhelming to hear just how underwhelming they have been. If you have followed Boston sports media during this baseball season, you would think the team is tied with the Detroit Tigers for the worst record in the league. In fairness to Boston sports pundits, the team has a wealth of talent that has played below their usual standard for most of the season. This has the local radio shows calling to trade the beloved Mookie Betts, suddenly turning on ace Chris Sale, and openly criticizing manager Alex Cora, not even a year after he was hailed the Bill Belichick of baseball.

Oh, how quickly the tides turn in the city of Boston.

The team has certainly regressed from their magical 2018 season. That’s just the way baseball works sometimes. But the true mystery to me has been Andrew Benintendi. The Red Sox left fielder was coming off a fantastic 2018 season that saw him post a WAR of 4.3 and a wRC+ of 122. These numbers have dipped to a 2.6 and 112, respectively, through 115 games. No, it isn’t the most dramatic decline in the history of baseball, but Benintendi was a key part of Boston’s success in 2018. Of all the players to take a step back this season, I wasn’t necessarily expecting it to come from him.

Traditionally, the critique of Benintendi has been that he is an elite hitter against right-handed pitching and less than stellar against left-handeders. This trend has come to a screeching halt in 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

The Evil Empire is no more.

Throughout history, the Yankees have been portrayed as Major League Baseball’s chief oppressor, needlessly feasting on the weaker, less financially able organizations. For the most part, they’ve fit the bill, never shying away from adding megastars like Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, and CC Sabathia, and thus annually accumulating a payroll much richer than the rest of the league.

Factor in a staggering 27 World Series Championships and it’s not hard to see why opposing teams are a tad resentful. But times have changed.

The 2019 Yankees are built on young talent and depth. Gary Sanchez ($669,800), Gleyber Torres ($605,200), Luke Voit ($573,200), and Clint Frazier ($563,300) are the only Yankees with double-digit home runs and have been major contributors in stabilizing their first-place lineup with franchise-cornerstone Aaron Judge ($684,300) on the IL.

Not only that, but the Yankees have often recently been outbid while vying for the services of marquee free agents.

Most notably, Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, two of the youngest, most talented free agents on the market in history, were both rumored to be interested in joining the Yankees this winter. Machado was dined, but never officially offered a contract. The Yankees chose DJ LeMahieu instead. Harper was supposedly never even given a phone call. Brian Cashman and company felt better bringing back aging Brett Gardner to man left instead.

Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, making approximately $55 million total this season, have a combined 1.8 WAR.

DJ LeMahieu alone, making $12 million in 2019, has 2.4 WAR.

Most recently, the Atlanta Braves outbid the Yankees for the services of former Cy Young Award winner Dallas Keuchel, with the latter viewed at one point as the favorites to land the star.

Most fans were upset. They shouldn’t be. Read the rest of this entry »

The Baseball Project is a baseball-themed rock supergroup. The active roster includes:

Scott McCaughey [Young Fresh Fellows, The Minus 5, R.E.M.] (Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards, Bass, Percussion, SF Giants)

Steve Wynn [The Dream Syndicate, The Miracle 3, Gutterball] (Vocals, Guitars, New York Yankees)

Linda Pitmon [The Miracle 3, Zuzu’s Petals] (Drums, Vocals, Minnesota Twins)

Peter Buck [R.E.M.] (Guitars, Bass, Banjo, Washington Senators)

Mike Mills [R.E.M.] (Bass, Vocals, Atlanta Braves)

The Baseball Project started when McCaughey and Wynn met and discovered a mutual love of The National Pastime sometime around 1992. It wasn’t until 2007 that the pair sat down to write and records songs. “We don’t have any rules about what constitutes a baseball song,” McCaughey explains on the band’s website. “It can be anything from a character study of an obscure guy from the 1920s, to something that just happened, to something completely ridiculous like Extra Inning of Love, which takes the baseball-as-love metaphor and tries to stretch it as far as it will go. They can be fictional songs or non-fictional songs. The great thing with baseball is, we’ll never run out of things to write about!”

The Baseball Project has released three albums, performed The Star-Spangled Banner and Take Me Out to the Ballgame at numerous ballparks, and recorded the theme song for Adult Swim’s animated series Squidbillies in 2013.

Their songs are endlessly catchy and often dense with baseball references. Here’s one of their best, with 30 footnotes to fill in any backstory you may not already know. Read the rest of this entry »

The infield shift is a much-maligned defensive strategy, hounded as one of the worst analytics-based changes to baseball. Multiple times each season there will be some conversation about banning the shift, and each time pros, ex-players/managers, commentators, and analysts will chip in with their two cents. But for now, the shift is here, and it is as popular (with the fielding teams) as it has ever been. Just under 26% of all pitches were thrown with some form of infield shift in place in 2018, 22% of at-bats had a shift for the entirety of it, and 30% had at least one pitch shifted.

As you can see, left-handed hitters are far more likely to be shifted than their right-handed counterparts, with 46% of left-handed ABs seeing a shifted pitch versus 19% for righties. This makes rudimentary sense as the shifted players for a left-hander are closer to first base, so they have a greater chance of impacting the play to first and therefore stopping a potential single.

I have taken players who have 100-plus at-bats in 2018 both against a shifted and non-shifted infield, then I compared the outcomes. There were 132 such players, and their combined number of at-bats was 72,389 (39% of the seasons total). I have split these up into four categories based on the handedness of the batter and the pitcher.

Read the rest of this entry »