Archive for April, 2017

A Pair of Low-owned Hitters – Alonso and Bonifacio

It’s foolish to put much stock in spring training numbers, but one of the spring’s hottest hitters has carried over a revamped approach and spring training success to the regular season. Now, I believe he’s an ownable commodity in mixed leagues as shallow as 12 teams if they use a corner infielder and/or a utility spot. The second player I’m covering this week wasn’t who I initially had in mind in the same outfield. While checking in on slugger Jorge Soler, I found myself intrigued by his rookie teammate who was recently promoted to The Show.

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The Daily Grind: Athleticism, Feats of

A programming note: there will be a Daily Grind this Sunday. I skipped the last two Sundays due to holiday and scheduling conflict.

AGENDA

  1. Feats of Athleticism
  2. Weather Reports
  3. Pitchers to Use and Abuse
  4. Players to Avoid
  5. SaberSim Says…
  6. TDG Invitational Returns!

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PITCHf/x Forensics: Shelby Miller

Poor Shelby Miller. After last year’s disastrous debut with the Diamondbacks, Miller was looking forward to getting back to his previous Cardinals and Braves form. The season started well enough – his spring training was filled with reports about his increased velocity, and how well he was pitching.

In my initial calculations of STUFF for the 2017 season – Miller was up from 0.56 in 2017, to 0.84 in 2017. That is a huge increase that shows great promise for turning a career around. But now – the dreaded third opinion from Dr. James Andrews, and the discovery of a strained flexor muscle, and a torn UCL, which could lead to Tommy John Surgery, or at minimum, a year off with rehabilitation.

What risk factors were present that could have lead to Shelby Miller’s UCL tear? Let’s look at the research.

Table 1. Known risk factors for UCL reconstruction from research.

The interesting thing about this analysis – is that the 2016 iteration of Shelby Miller has no risk factors that particularly jump out at you. He’s right in the moderate area for everything, save for pitches per game – but that value is quite comparable to every other starting pitcher, if not lower. At the same time, this is a case of the sum of all parts – a compounding situation where it’s death by 1000 paper cuts.

Miller broke into the league in 2012, and his Stuff has remained relatively stable since. The biggest change in his Stuff has been this season – and, I’ve tried to take into account the change in data by re-normalizing Stuff to only 2017 data, and subtracting 0.4 mph from the fastball velocity.

Figure 2. Shelby Miller fastball velocity and Stuff, 2012 to 2017.

2017 is clearly a change here – the velocity is up significantly, and that’s not really something that happens when someone gets older. There are a lot of variables in play that we can’t quantify – how quickly did Miller gain this velocity in the off season? What did his training regime look like?

Interestingly, it has been noted that Miller suffered a flexor muscle strain, as well as the UCL tear. Given the urgency that Miller and the Diamondbacks had in accelerating Miller’s return to good-ness, there is a chance signs of discomfort were ignored along the way. When a flexor-pronator muscle is strained, the tension that the muscle originally supported during pitching is now transferred to the ligament. If you’d like to know more about this – there’s a very interesting discussion on flexor-pronator muscle tears/strains on the “fixing pitchers” podcast – http://fixingpitchers.com/podcast/baseball-pitchers-ice-games/.

This is a very important note for young pitchers – do not ignore your body’s warning signs. If something doesn’t feel right, tell your coach and get it looked at by a doctor.

There are no red flags in this analysis for Shelby Miller – but had the strain been noticed a bit sooner, there is a chance he wouldn’t have torn his UCL.

References

Whiteside, D., Martini, D. N., Lepley, A. S., Zernicke, R. F., & Goulet, G. C. (2016). Predictors of Ulnar Collateral Ligament Reconstruction in Major League Baseball Pitchers. The American journal of sports medicine, 0363546516643812.


Roto Riteup April 28, 2017

Sonny Gray made his Triple-A rehab outing Thursday night and he did fairly well. He was on a 75-pitch assignment with the Nashville Sounds and tossed six shutout innings and issued seven strikeouts with no walks and two hits.

He’s on his way to joining the team as early as Tuesday when they take on the Minnesota Twins. The word on this particular injury has to do with the fact that there could be more underlying issues in his shoulder. So proceed with caution. Read the rest of this entry »


Field of Streams: Episode 258 – Intramural Heroes

Episode 258 – Intramural Heroes

The latest episode of “Field of Streams” is live!

In this episode, Dylan Higgins and Matthew Dewoskin discuss bailing on Robert Gsellman, the NFL Draft, Chris Coghlan’s epic dive, the White Sox battling for first place, Matt’s Ryan Schimpf joke, offending Joe Panik with a Tyler Collins comparison, Ty Blach being interesting (maybe), JC Ramirez potentially thriving as a starter instead of a reliever, Kyle Hendricks’ regression, being excited to reset the contest picks in May, and Matt’s softball update.

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Bullpen Report: April 27, 2017

Happy Thursday, folks. Just a quick couple of notes out of the bullpens this evening.

Take a deep breath before this one. Bud Norris notched his fourth save of the week and is now 4-of-5 in save chances while manning the closer’s role for the Angels this season. In 12.2 total frames on the bump, Norris owns a 3:1 K:BB with a 2.84 ERA (2.03 FIP). The spike in cutter usage/effectiveness seems to be at the root of the 32-year-old’s rebirth as a relief arm. As it stands, we have the Angels situation as “yellow,” but as the days pass and saves continue to be converted, it’s hard to say that Cam Bedrosian is a lock to earn his ninth-inning role back when reinstated from the disabled list. If you’re scrambling for saves, you’re grabbing Norris (if you haven’t done so already) where you can as he’s available in more than 65% of Y! Leagues at the time of this writing.
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Minor to the Majors: Minor League Plate Discipline

Our Dark Overlord, David Appelman, finally acquired a minor league pitch-by-pitch database as seen by the new minor league stats available like Contact and Groundball rates. I hoped it would help to better understand the disconnect between a prospect’s Hit tool grades and major league results.  I made some progress but created more questions than answers.

When I examined the database, I was hoping to find some batted ball information as Eli Ben-Porat used at the Hardball Times. No such luck. But there was some x,y data … for every pitch.

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Let Us Avoid Wasted Plate Appearances

Statcast has given us many new ways to evaluate quality of contact.  You can look at exit velocity and launch angle (although I wouldn’t recommend it). You can look at my xOBA, or MLB’s xwOBA (cough). You can look at Value Hits, or MLB’s Barreled Balls. Each of these focus primarily on great contact, or frequency of good contact with respect to plate appearances.  However, bad contact is important too, right?

In the past I have written about Poorly Hit balls, which you may find interesting to read. These combined with Value Hits paint a picture of the upper and lowest levels of contact a batter creates or a pitcher surrenders. Well, there is a different way of looking at these figures, and with my notoriously bad ability for naming things (the title of my senior thesis in college was “Introduction”), I have come to call this “Wasted At Bats.”  Others have told me that’s a terrible, misleading name.  To which I have no response other than “I’m sorry.” But let me explain.

This stat, which I will call henceforth “Wasted”, represents the ratio between plate appearances that end in a near automatic out to at bats that end with a near automatic extra base hit.  The formula is simple:

(PH% + K%) / VH%

You know strikeouts are almost always outs. Very, very rarely can a batter reach first base, although it *can* happen.  Well, PH% (Poorly Hit) are somewhat similar, although not *quite* as automatic. Poorly Hit balls are outs about 98% of the time. Not automatic, but as close as you’re going to get.

To put this in perspective, Bartolo Colon has 309 plate appearances in his career to date. He has five extra base hits. Base hits on Poorly Hit balls are about as common as Bartolo Colon extra base hits.  It happens, but don’t count on it. Read the rest of this entry »


The Daily Grind: Poll of the Future Results

I tinkered this guy out of my lineup yesterday in favor of Jake Lamb. Whoops.

AGENDA

  1. Poll of the Future Results
  2. Weather Reports
  3. Pitchers to Use and Abuse
  4. Players to Avoid
  5. SaberSim Says…
  6. TDG Invitational Returns!

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AL Starting Pitcher Z-Contact% Regressers

Last week, I discussed the American League starting pitchers that have improved their Z-Contact% the most. Let’s now check in on the pitchers whose Z-Contact% has risen the most.

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