Archive for catchers

So, a quick note about my philosophy. I won’t draft a player early because he has multiple position eligibility. Maybe in deeper leagues I could consider it but I’d rather draft the better player over a guy who can cover two positions.

Bit of a strange statement considering the title of this article. I get that. So what am I going on about?

Well, whilst doing my rankings, I looked at why Buster Posey was so much higher than other catchers. Sure, he’s a pretty complete hitter. 20+ home-runs and a .300 average is nothing to be sniffed at for any position player. Throw in the number of at-bats he has compared to most other catchers and the runs and RBI soon start to add up too.

But there’s a hidden piece of value in Posey if you look hard enough.

You see, in pretty much any league you’ll play in, Posey will have first-base eligibility. But you’re not drafting him as a first baseman. No, no, no. He’s your catcher. A key component in your fantasy team.

So why does first base eligibility make a difference with Posey? Well, let me paint a picture.

You draft Paul Goldschmidt with your first pick and Posey with your fourth. First week of the season and Goldschmidt gets hit on the hand with a pitch, breaking bones and sending him to the DL for three months.

This could be any first baseman you draft in the opening three rounds, which will be most of your league.

Now are you going to find a decent contributor at first base off waivers, compared to everyone else’s first basemen in your league? No you are not. Repeat after me; “Ben Paulsen is not going to reduce the hurt you feel if Goldschmidt gets injured.”

However, is Posey a suitable comparison to most other first baseman the rest of your league already own? He’s pretty darn close.

But could you find a decent contributor at catcher off waivers, compared to the rest of your league? Sure.

In standard leagues, each team should only be drafting one catcher. Maybe the team getting Schwarber will get another and use the Cubs slugger as an outfielder when he earns that position eligibility.

So let’s consider the top 11 catchers who will be drafted in 10-team leagues. That leaves the likes of Realmuto, d’Arnaud, Mesoraco and Gomes possibly available. How much worse than the likes of Martin, Vogt and Norris will they be?

So I’m not advocating getting Posey in the second round or anything crazy. But if you reach late in the fourth round and no one’s bit the proverbial bullet, don’t be afraid to be the first to draft a catcher.

So following on from this, let’s take a look at another example. Let’s say, oh I don’t know…Logan Forsythe?

Another who in most leagues will be eligible at first and second base. It’s unlikely you’ll be using him as a first baseman or even a corner infielder.

I’ve got Forsythe as the 12th second baseman in my rankings so he’ll be a middle infielder at worst. Again, if your first baseman gets hurt early in the season, you’re not going to be able to find another who’ll compare against your rivals.

But will you find another decent middle infielder? Looking at the current rankings, these are the middle infielders probably going undrafted in 10-team leagues: Jean Segura, Alexei Ramirez, Marcus Semien, Devon Travis and even Cesar Hernandez.

Just think of this? How much worse are any of those five compared to the Elvis Andruses and Brett Lawries of the world? The consider how much worse are the C.J. Crons and Joe Mauers compared to even Freddie Freeman or Eric Hosmer. Yeah, there’s a much bigger gap.

So what does that boil down to? The level of replacement of course. So it’s a Fantasy version of WAR. I guess you can call it “FWAR”. Just make sure you say it in a seedy kinda way for emphasis.

Just some food for thought as you enter into drafting season.

In the world of sports, the catcher position is kind of weird. Catchers start each play out of bounds, facing a different direction than their teammates. On a more micro level, baseball’s most important in-bounds/out-of-bounds determination, the strike zone, isn’t static as it is other sports; it’s determined on every pitch, and the catcher has a role in making that determination. In a non-contact sport, they’re covered in protective armor. Those of us with lousy knees are in awe just of their ability to do all that squatting.

Catcher is also the only position on modern rosters where there is planned redundancy. Thirteen-man pitching staffs have more or less eliminated platoon tandems, but catching tandems persist. The Pirates don’t carry an extra center fielder to give Andrew McCutchen a rest in the second game of doubleheaders. The Nationals don’t have a second right fielder to play instead of Bryce Harper on day games after night games. The Yankees don’t roster a spare third baseman in case Chase Headley gets hurt or tossed from a game. But every team has to have two catchers, and each of them sees a decent amount of playing time. (The catchers for those three teams in particular, as we’ll see.)

Further, the impact of a catcher injury can be significant. A disabled catcher’s replacement could well be unfamiliar with his pitching staff and opposing hitters’ tendencies, impairing his ability to call a game. He may not know the league’s umpires and their interpretation of the strike zone. He might not be up to speed on his infielders’ shifting tendencies and how that may affect pitch selection and location. And his presence probably means extra work, and extra fatigue, for the team’s other catcher. Just ask a Boston Red Sox fan about the importance of healthy catchers. (That’s a rhetorical suggestion. I don’t recommend actually doing that, unless you want to hear a long exposition about the importance of good free agent signings, a reliable starting rotation, offensive production from your first basemen, keeping your closer and second baseman off the DL…really, it can go on for a while.)

This summer, while attending a Phillies-Pirates game during which the Pirates used both of their catchers, my friend wondered whether the Pirates had the skinniest catchers in the league. (Francisco Cervelli is listed at 6’1″, 205, Chris Stewart 6’4″, 210). While actually putting in the time to figure this out (the answer appears to be “yes,” if you can trust listed heights and weights), I noticed that Cervelli and Stewart had caught all but 17.1 innings for the Pirates in 2015. This was in August, but it remained the case for the entire year. Cervelli caught 1099.2 innings and Stewart 372.2. Combined, that represented 98.8% of all the Pirates’ defensive innings last year. This struck me as notable, as the Pirates had lost the durable Russell Martin to free agency over the winter, replacing him with Cervelli, who’d never played more than 93 major league games in a season previously. The Pirates are famous for their use of analytics, including monitoring player health, with an eye toward injury prevention. Maybe that’s working. Or maybe they’ve figured out something with skinny catchers. Either way, I wondered whether the Pirates’ tandem represented something unusual.

To check, I looked at every team’s catchers since the 1969 start of divisional play. Using this year’s Pirates as my model, I looked for teams for which the top two catchers caught 98.5% or more of all innings. Last year, the average team’s catchers caught 1,446 innings, so I was looking for teams for whom top two catchers were on the field for all but 21.2 innings, on average.

It turns out the Pirates weren’t unique. Brian McCann and JR Murphy caught every inning for the Yankees this year. Wilson Ramos and Jose Lobaton caught all but nine innings for the Nationals. Carlos Ruiz and Cameron Rupp were behind the plate for all but 18 innings for the Phillies. That’s about typical. Since 1969, there have been 240 teams whose top two catchers caught at least 98.5% of all innings during the season, or a little over five per year (closer to four and a half if you exclude strike-shortened seasons).

But totals don’t tell the whole story, since baseball’s expanded from 24 teams in 1969 to 26 beginning in 1977, 28 beginning in 1993, and 30 beginning in 1998. The graph below shows the percentage of teams, per season, with two catchers handling 98.5% or more of the workload. The overall average is 18.6%. There’s a very slight downward trend to the line–the slope is -0.03% (yes, I got the decimals right)–meaning that catchers have been becoming a little less durable over the years, but almost imperceptibly so. (I was tempted to say “a little less durable or managers are giving them more rest,” but other than the occasional Kyle Schwarber, who primarily plays another position but can catch in a pinch, teams just don’t carry three catchers any more, so rest for one catcher in a tandem means playing time for the other.)

(The outlier on the high side is 1994, when there were only 117 games played.)

Teams for which two catchers caught 98.5% or more of innings won, on average, 85 games during the non-strike-shortened seasons. That’s not super impressive, considering the selection bias inherent in this sort of analysis. Specifically, teams with two catchers handling virtually all of the time behind the plate are teams that not only avoid catcher injuries, but also have two catchers good enough that they’d want to have them there all year, contributing to overall team success. In 2014, for example, the Red Sox had three catchers with over 400 defensive innings, in part because none of them could hit: A.J. Pierzynski (540 innings, 71 wRC+), Christian Vazquez (458.1 innings, 70 wRC+), and David Ross (418.1 innings, 71 wRC+). (See, I told you not to ask a Red Sox fan about catchers.)

Still, 85 wins is decent, four games better than .500–that’s the Angels this year. Of the 213 teams for which two catchers caught 98.5% or more of innings in non-strike-shortened years, 77, or 36%, won 90 or more, which is generally good enough to get you into the postseason these days. So there’s certainly an advantage to getting all the work out of two catchers.

So has anybody cracked the code on keeping their two catchers healthy? I looked for teams that had three or more seasons in a row with two catchers handling 98.5% more of innings. If teams have a secret sauce, they should show up on this list with regularity:

Nope. The closest thing there is the Yankees, who had streaks with Thurman Munson in the 1970s and Jose Posada around the turn of the century. The only other teams to appear more than once are the Johnny Bench Reds and two iterations of the Pirates, over a decade apart and 30 years ago. There’s nothing in this table suggestive that it’s a matter of skill, rather than luck, to keep two catchers on the field all season. Specifically, these teams generally had an All-Star caliber No. 1 catcher who avoided injury with various guys in the backup role. That’s about it. No team has cornered the market on that formula.

So maybe that’s making the criteria too tough. Maybe I should be looking just at back-to-back 98.5%-plus inning performances. Given that, on average, 18.6% of teams had two catchers with 98.5% or more innings caught since 1969, random chance suggests that a team with two dominant catchers has about a one-in-five chance of repeating the following year, like flipping a coin that comes up heads 18.6% of the time. A rate of repeat significantly above that could indicate skill rather than luck. Of the 236 teams, 1969-2014, that had two catchers with 98.5% or more innings caught, 60 repeated the following year, or 25%. That’s not a statistically significant difference (using an N-1 chi-square test, if you were wondering). In other words, there’s no reason to believe that a durable catcher tandem is a matter of anything but good fortune.

So feel good about keeping your two catchers healthy this year, Yankees, Nationals, Pirates and Phillies. Especially the Pirates (111 wRC+) and Yankees (104 wRC+), who got above-average offensive performance from their catchers as well. (The 69 wRC+ Phillies and 62 wRC+ Nationals catchers were among the worst in baseball.) Just don’t assume you’ll be able to keep those two guys on the field all of 2016 as well.

The bulk of the work I do pre-draft and in-season is essentially based on an SGP (standings gain points) projections and ranking system. I use SGP data from leagues that match the format and settings of the league I’m ranking for (ideally from 10+ years of data from the actual league, where possible). While I usually do my own projections for 30-40 players of specific interest, in general I’m happy to utilize the projections published by experts that actually know what they’re doing and do it for a living. Specifically (and in no particular order) I use Steamer, Pecota, and Baseball HQ.

These lists may not be useful in ‘absolute’ terms – again, the data I’m using here reflect the SGP settings I use that reflect the league I play in. However, I still believe the lists offer an interesting way to notice a) how each projection system differs on its view of individual players, and b) general overall differences in each projection system. Blindly following a projection set is probably going to be better than randomly picking players by throwing darts at the wall. But you can squeeze a lot more value out of these rankings and the projections you use by gaining a deeper understanding of how each set of projections work, and what ‘biases’ and tendencies might be part of the numbers.

What I like to do each year is generate ‘top X’ lists of players at each position for each projection set I use, then play around in the results to spot any glaring differences.  Is one projection overly conservative on expected ABs? Is one projection set basically expecting a repeat of last year’s career year? I can use that as a starting point to drill down into some of the numbers to see what might be behind the differences. Personally, I find it all too easy to get overwhelmed at all the different numbers available to be looked at – far too often I find myself deep down the rabbit’s hole, spending three hours looking at average fly ball distance on balls hit on the second Wednesday of the month on even-numbered days or something. I find this approach helps me narrow in on specific players or numbers of interest. And the benefit of doing this by SGP, broken down by category, is that it is easier to see specifically how each player is projected to impact each category. Player stats will not win your fantasy league, roto points will win you your fantasy league: I get a better understanding of the player’s ‘value components’ and how it impacts the particular league I play in.

First, a quick overview of SGP. Standings Gain Points is a way to measure the contribution of each player to your overall roto league standings. Larry Schecter’s excellent book, ‘Winning Fantasy Baseball’ is a great primer on the subject. Other places to read about SGP online are here and here. In a nutshell the system looks at the average stats needed to gain one point in the standings for a particular rotisserie category. For example, suppose in your league over the past 10 years, you needed 10 HRs to gain one point in the HR category standings. A player projected to hit 30 home runs would be credited with 3 SGPs for the HR category. Tally up all the SGPs the player is expected to add (or subtract) for all categories, and you get a total SGP score.

There’s a ton more to it, but that’s the basics – ever tried to figure out if the guy hitting a lot of HRs but no average was more valuable (and if so, by how much) than the guy hitting for a decent average and some SBs but no power? Now you have an idea.

In this first article, I look at at Catchers. I’ll add reports on all the hitter positions over the next couple of weeks. A reminder that these rankings are based on SGP values which are basically unique to my specific league, so your numbers will differ if you play in a different league format, but again, we’re looking a relative differences, not absolute numbers (For the record, the league format for the SGP rankings here: Standard 12-team 5×5 roto, 1 catcher, three OF and two util, 1250 innings cap).

Here is the list of top 12 catchers ranked by my league’s SGP, based on Baseball HQ projections:

Figure 1. Top 15 catchers by SGP & BHQ projections

Nobody should be surprised to see Buster Posey at the top of any catchers list; he’s there because he has such a huge advantage over everyone else at the position in Batting Average. And he has a full point advantage over the next tier of players. Gomes and Mesoraco at 2^nd and 3^rd? Probably more of a surprise. Gomes has legit power, and the batting average isn’t a fluke (career BABIP: .323). Mesoraco had a career year last year – his 25 HRs in 440 PA is only 6 fewer than he hit in 1,100 PAs in 2013, 2012, 2011 combined. Yes, he plays in a tiny crackerjack box of a park. But his FB% jumped 10ppt (33.8% to 43%) from 2013 and 2014, while his HR/FB rate more than doubled, from a constant 10% or so in 2011-2013 to 20.5% in 2014. Color me less than convinced. And with only .44 points separating them, the next four players (Gomes, Mesoraco, Gattis and Lucroy) are basically interchangeable.

Russell Martin’s ranking gets a big boost from expected SB contribution; if those SBs dip he falls quite a bit. Would anyone be surprised if a catcher that turns 32 in February and was only 4-of-8 in stolen base attempts last year doesn’t run that much in 2015?

Conversely, if Zunino can boost his average a bit, he could be excellent late-round value. He gets a massive -1.52 hit to his SGP total after hitting less than his weight last year. On the one hand, one could possibly expect a bit of an uptick in the batting average; his BABIP last year of .248 was the lowest mark he’s recorded at any point for a full season going back to 2012 and his days in the Arizona Fall League. On the other hand, he struck out 33% of the time last year, so…yeah.

Finally – what’s surprising about this list is who’s not on it – no d’Arnaud, no Rosario.

Figure 2. Top 15 catchers by SGP & Steamer projections

The first thing to notice about this list – in general the total ‘SGP’s provided are considerably lower than for the BHQ group above. At 8.90 total SGPs, Wieters wasn’t even in the top 10 in the BHQ list; 8.90 SGPs almost makes him a top-5 pick on this list. The numbers suggest that Steamer is a bit more conservative (or BHQ overly optimistic) in its forecasts, particularly for HR and RBIs. My understanding is that BHQ’s projections are largely based on playing time projections, so perhaps the numbers will change as we get closer to spring training and the start of the season and jobs are won/lost etc. It will be interesting to see how (if) these numbers change.

Looking at the list itself, Posey and Gattis again in the top five, no surprise there. McCann in the top five looks somewhat surprising (despite a rather big gap between Gattis and McCann). Maybe Steamer remembers that McCann still hit 23 HRs last year and still plays in a favorable park? His LD% was stable last year, GB% down a tick, FB% up a tick. His HR/FB rate was down quite a bit from 2013, which is surprising given that the conventional wisdom suggested he was moving to a more favorable ballpark…but his 2014 HR/FB rate was almost exactly in line with his average since 2008. Steamer might also be expecting an uptick on that awful .231 BABIP from 2014, although not sure if it’s factoring in the increased defensive shifts he saw last year. Less than .50 points separate d’Arnaud at #6 and Ramos at #11. Of the group, Wieters is now the grizzled veteran of the bunch and looked like he was on his way to a career year before getting hurt last year. If he’s healthy, he ironically could be the ‘safe’ pick of the bunch.

Grandal makes an appearance. Interestingly, Steamer is forecasting almost exactly the same number of Runs, RBIs and HRs this year – in the same number of at-bats – as last year, despite Grandal moving from a horrible Padres team (last year at least) to a much better Dodgers team (last year at least). I’d normally expect a bit of an uptick in those numbers.

Spoiler alert, but this is the only projection where Chirinos comes in the top 15; Steamer appears to be a bit more optimistic in projected at-bats, giving him a bump in Runs and RBIs that he doesn’t enjoy in the other projections.

Figure 3. Top 15 catchers by SGP & Pecota projections

Pecota loooooves it some Gattis, putting him in the top spot over Posey. The Pecota rankings for catchers have fairly clear tiers: Gattis and Posey at the top, a substantial gap to McCann, Martin, and Lucroy, then another gap, followed by only a point or so between d’Arnaud at #6 and Iannetta at #14. Iannetta actually only shows up here because Pecota is significantly more bullish on Iannetta across the board vs the other projection sets; this almost certainly is due to differing views on ABs; Pecota’s AB projection for Iannetta is about 80 ABs higher than the BHQ projection, and over 150 more than the Steamer projection.

The difference between the Pecota numbers for Yan Gomes and the BHQ numbers are interesting – BHQ projects Gomes as one of the top 3-4 HR hitters at the catcher spot; here he’s projected to be 8th.

Martin again gets a big SB bump, which just manages to offset a rather large Avg hit (particularly compared to, say the BHQ projection, where the Avg hit was minor). Pecota is probably looking at his .290 average last year and figuring it’s a .336 BABIP-fueled fluke; Martin hadn’t had a BABIP over .290 since 2008.

Zunino again projects to have great all-around numbers except for the black hole at Batting Average. If he somehow is able to hit even .250, Zunino would likely be a top-five fantasy play behind the plate.

Looking at all three rankings, the projections differ – sometimes significantly – on some players. The BHQ-based SGP rankings loved Yan Gomes and Mesoraco; Steamer and Pecota, not so much. At the other end of the spectrum: Salvador Perez was ranked 7th in all three projection systems, largely because he’s one of the few catchers expected to make a reasonably-sized positive contribution to batting average. Although we saw last time that maybe targeting batting average wasn’t all that important…