As we creep ever closer to the 2016 season, there’s still one position we haven’t covered from 2015. For the final time, we look back at the season past and determine which players were the most valuable at each position. We enter the magical realm of the bullpen, where no man should venture lest he get bubble gum placed atop his hat.
Yesterday, I borrowed PITCHf/x data from Baseball Savant to investigate how changes in batted ball velocity affected batting average on balls in play (BABIP) to a hitter’s pull side. If you’re too lazy to click, the short of it is: more velocity coincides with a better batting average. However! Lefties consistently fare worse than righties on ground balls to the pull side at all batted ball velocities.
This phenomenon can perhaps be attributed to the defensive shift. Or to the ease with which second and first basemen can convert singular outs at first base compared to their shortstop and third base counterparts due to the distance (and, thus, difficulty) of the throw. Or, most likely, to both.
But that’s not why I’m here. I’m not in the business to speculate — not today, at least. I’m just here to provide the facts in the form of some numbers I crunched in Microsoft Excel that, if you read yesterday’s post, you will probably find interesting. It has a nifty graph, if words aren’t your thing.
There aren’t a lot of ways to predict closer change. Don’t go looking at ERA, projected or past, it’s not useful. Nor are three-Year Fielding Independent Pitching stats, even if those give you a bigger sample. Experience closing? Nah. Shutdown percentage? Nope. It’s not even important whether the pitcher was the favorite or a bullpen committee member. Depth of arsenals — and platoon splits on pitches — seem important, but aren’t really.
These things don’t seem to matter much when it comes to closer changes.
The list of things that might matter is super short, and the effects not so large that you’d want to stake your life on them. Reliever strikeout rate and velocity is important — new closers have higher rates and more velocity than the closers they replace, at least. Closers have slightly more experience in general (they are older). And lefty closers are about half as likely as you’d expect given the population of lefties in the game. Closers usually come from the end of the bullpen, so role is important.
We could use these facts to create a list of relievers that might close this year, really. If you then somehow controlled for the excellence of the closer in front of them, you could even sort this list for likelihood of change. Then we’d have the Non Closers Most Likely to Close This Year. Seems possible.
One of the more exciting effects of offseason player movement is the opening up of closer roles. When established closers sign somewhere else or get sent packing as part of a trade, us fantasy nerds have all the fun of speculating who steps up to fill the vacated role and how likely it is that the pitcher holds the job all year. After the Yankees stole traded for incumbent Reds closer Aroldis Chapman, there was a gaping hole at the back end of the Reds bullpen. Since the Reds are clearly in rebuilding mode, it’s highly unlikely they go out and trade for or sign another reliever to fill the void. So at the moment, all signs point to J.J. Hoover opening the season as their closer. We’ll expand on the battle and other options when we begin our depth chart discussions in the coming weeks. But today’s post is all about Hoover.
If you’ve been reading any of my writing this winter or listening to the podcast, then you’ve heard me reference a draft I started back in November (click link for pics of first 23 rounds) during a trip to Arizona for Baseball HQ’s First Pitch Forums. It’s one of the NFBC Draft Champions 50-round draft-and-hold leagues. We did the first 23 rounds live and we start the final 27 today.
I picked 15th out of 15 in this draft and part of that was for today. I knew that 15th pick gets the first pick of the second part and the time in between often pushes some strong options up the rankings who otherwise would’ve been gone if we started from round 1 today. By the way, NFBC does the Kentucky Derby Style draft slotting where you pick your spot from what’s available. So I was 5th or 6th I think to make my selection and once 1, 2, and 3 were gone, I decided to jump back to 15 to be on the elbow with added benefit of the first pick in the winter session.
I’m interested in who y’all think I should take. Mind you, I’m not polling and then automatically taking the top choice, especially if it’s not a runaway vote. I just find this split-draft really interesting and I’d like to cash in my advantage so I figure talking it out with y’all will help.
I’m on the clock as of noon central with an 8-hour timer. I’m certainly not looking to take very much of that time at all since I’ve been sitting on this pick for quite some time. So after about 1 pm central, comments on who I should take will be moot as the selection will have been made, but then you can just make fun of me for picking incorrectly.
Before we get to who is available, let’s take a gander at my team (who says “take a gander”?):
There’s a saying – nobody cares about your fantasy team. Generally speaking, it’s true. When people in the real world find out I’m a fantasy baseball writer, they’ll start telling me about their team. Usually, they play in a hopelessly shallow format. My eyes glaze over. I nod in the right places. I think about the chores I need to finish in the next few days.
Looking over some recent real and mock fantasy drafts, one name which is coming up as a potential sleeper is Jose Reyes. His fantasy value is unknown with his projected value being quite a bit different than the position he is being taken in fantasy drafts. Dan Swartz had him ranked 34th using Steamer projections while he was actually going 151st in NFBC drafts. The reason for the huge difference comes down to his pending criminal charges for domestic abuse. While the legal, ramifications may take a while to go to court, MLB has enacted a new domestic violence policy which has yet to be tested. I can see why people are reluctant to draft Reyes. Well, here is an attempt to put a reasonable fantasy value on him for 2016.
Estimating games missed
To get the expected games suspended, I went with two methods to find the answer, asking the crowd and asking the expert. Both sources generally agree with the time missed.
For the crowd, I asked my Twitter followers how much time they expected Reyes to be suspended. Most people put the value between 25 and 50 games with an average value near 35 games.
Then I moved on to FanGraphs legal expert Nathaniel Grow. When I asked him how he expected the situation to play out, here is his response.
While Reyes’ status remains uncertain, a suspension somewhere in the 25-50 game range would probably be a reasonable, conservative estimate of the punishment he is likely to face from the league.
So somewhere between 25 and 50 games, which is around where the crowd put the number. I will take the view of a conservative owner and go with a 50 game suspension to figure out his value. If an owner wants to take a chance, they could assume fewer days missed.
Welcome to the annual series: ‘A Minor (League) Review of 2015.” This series is a great way to receive a quick recap of the ’15 minor league season for your favorite club(s), while also receiving a brief look toward the 2016 season and beyond. It can also be a handy feature for fantasy baseball players in keeper and Dynasty leagues.
The Graduate: Taylor Jungmann, RHP: Jungmann was someone that I liked coming out of college but his three-plus year minor league career was underwhelming based on the expectations placed on a first-round pick. Despite the early struggles, the right-hander had an excellent freshman season for the Brewers and quickly solidified himself as a key cog in the starting rotation for this rebuilding club. Look for him to be a solid, middle-of-the-rotation innings-eater going forward.
Baseball Savant, a website maintained by Daren Willman, is a thing of beauty. Aside from some great leaderboards and applications, Willman hosts a database of PITCHf/x data. Using it without a game plan is like entering the Amazon without a machete — it can be unwieldy and overwhelming. Navigating just right bears ample fruit, however. I would like to share some of my fruit with you.
Because in 2015, PITCHf/x data began including batted ball velocity for most balls in (and out!) of play. Batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is a critical component to player success, and while there has been plenty of focus on it in the last decade — more so than, say, pitch framing, which is a popular but still-raw area of research — the baseball community would still benefit from a better understanding of BABIP, especially in light of more frequent employment of defensive shifts.
Intuition tells us that a harder-hit ball in play will have a greater probability of resulting in a hit. (Indeed, my expected BABIP equation from last year that helps corroborate such a claim.) Specifically, in regard to ground balls and defensive shifts, a hard-hit grounder will have a much greater chance of clearing a crowded first-base line than would a softly hit grounder.
Enter Baseball Savant and its very granular PITCHf/x data. Read the rest of this entry »
Finally, it’s the last recap of my projections from the 2015 season! The Pod Projections are derived using the methodology outlined in my just released eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance. As usual, Steamer and I is a comparison of my projection to Steamer’s. Steamer was significantly more bullish on James Shields, who moved to the National League and joined the Padres, both of which should have boosted his fantasy value. It didn’t of course, as his ERA and WHIP both jumped, despite a career high strikeout rate.