Recently I’ve taken a look at early season changes in contact rate and fly ball rate because of Russell Carleton’s research showing we’ve reached the point in the season where the sample for those statistics has become ‘reliable.’ There has been some debate in the comments about what reliable means and how much the small season sample can help us in predicting what a player will do the rest of the season.

I look at it like this. For the statistics that have crossed that reliability threshold,  we can look at the players who have seen the biggest changes in either direction and feel safe that their skill has improved or decreased to some degree. That doesn’t mean regression isn’t coming. It just means that at the end of the year it wouldn’t be a surprise to see a player with an improvement or decline from their career mark in a particular category. Although the improvement or decline at the end of the year is not likely to be as extreme as it is at this point in the season.

Today I want to look at the hitters who have seen the biggest changes in ISO because a fair number of players have now crossed the 160 AB threshhold shown in Carleton’s research. Below are the guys who have seen the biggest increase in ISO. After that, we’ll examine whether some other statistics back up the power surge. And a little bit later we’ll see if we can’t figure out how much regression to expect. Read the rest of this entry »

Predicting the future performance of baseball players is a wildly frustrating endeavor. When projecting a hitter’s stat line, it’s impossible to account for the player having a BABIP that’s nowhere close to their career average. When projecting a pitcher, it’s hard to know when their HR/FB rate is going to swing drastically away from their career average. The shifts in “luck” make projecting seem like a fool’s errand at times.

But it may be even more frustrating when something within the player’s control changes completely. When predicting the future, you largely have to rely on the assumption that what the player puts into the equation will remain relatively the same. But of course that’s not the case. Hitters will lose plate discipline out of nowhere. Pitchers will lose the ability to induce swings and misses. It just happens. But it’s often very hard to know when those changes are going to happen.

Another example of the input changing is a shift in the mix of pitches a pitcher will use. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since the boss, Mr. Eno Sarris, showed me how to use the VLOOKUP function in Excel, I can’t stop comparing recent numbers to past rates. The function makes it easy to put this season’s numbers in one sheet, past season or career numbers in another sheet, and then pull the past numbers and place them right next to the corresponding season numbers for any sample of players.

Instead of billing a client from 1:15-3:05 yesterday afternoon at work, I toyed around comparing 2012 and career fly ball rates to 2013 numbers. I chose those two because we’re at the point in the year where most qualified hitters have a sample of 80+ balls in play, which is the point at which FB% stabilizes according to Russell Carleton.

The first thing I looked at was whether the hitters with the highest fly ball rates in 2012 had seen a shift so far this season. The idea was that the guys who cut down on the fly balls would see a corresponding rise in average given that fly balls go for hits somewhere in the neighborhood of 13%-15% of the time, while ground balls are hits roughly 25% of the time and line drives about 71-73% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

John Lackey | Boston Red Sox | @ Tampa Bay on Tuesday

Adding John Lackey is somewhat like having a huge bowl of ice cream 30 minutes before bed. You hate yourself and know it’s not really good for you. But you can’t help yourself can you? It’s hard to turn down a few scoops of your favorite flavor, and it’s hard to turn down a name you recognize that is currently attached to a 2.82 ERA and 3.23 xFIP.

Lackey has those numbers thanks to a 24.7% K% and 7.2% BB%. He can probably maintain a walk rate like that, but the K rate will likely regress. His swinging strike rate isn’t terrible at 8.1%, but he’s not going to strike out more than a batter per inning at that rate. And his velocity isn’t quite what it used to be. Expect him to settle in the 18%-19% range.

The matchup with Tampa actually isn’t great. They started slow, but they’re currently 4th in the league in wRC+ and lead the league in that category so far in May. But even if you decide to pass on Lackey on Tuesday, he’s worth picking up as a flier. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2009, Eric Seidman wrote a piece here that looked into when samples become reliable for certain statistics. The piece was based off work done by Pizza Cutter. You can read the piece here for a full explanation of how the conclusions were reached, but below is a list showing how many PAs it takes for a statistic to become reliable. Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Straily| Oakland Athletics | @ Seattle on Friday

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like Dan Straily has been around for awhile. In reality, he’s still very much a prospect. He made his tenth major league start yesterday and has just over 50 career big league innings. And he’s a good prospect. He displayed good strikeout and walks skills throughout the minors, especially in the upper minors. His BB% was under 8% in stops at A+, AA, and AAA, and his K% was above 30% in about 150 innings of work at AA and AAA. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I looked at early season velocity gainers and losers. It was noted that the average fastball velocity so far is down league wide from where it was in 2012 but fairly consistent with the average fastball velocity in April 2012. But some commenters suggested that it might be useful to look at the April 2012 velocities of the guys who have seen the biggest gains and losses in velocity this year. The idea is to see if the discrepancy between 2012 velocities and April 2013 velocities is an indication of a change or just evidence that a guy tends to see his velocity dip or rise at the beginning of the year.

To gather a sample, I created a list of guys who threw 150+ innings last year and who had at least 20 innings this April. That yielded me a list of 70 pitchers. To find the significant changes in velocity, I calculated the differences in average fastball velocity between all of 2012 and April 2013. I then calculated the average difference and standard deviation to see who had made the biggest changes. Below are the guys who saw the biggest gains in velocity in April. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Cashner | San Diego Padres | @ Cubs on Wednesday

Cashner is your typical young flamethrower who racks up strikeouts but struggles with control. In 130 career innings, he has a 25% K% and 10.5% BB%. In eight career starts he has a 25.7% K% and 4.4% BB%. That’s probably a small sample size anomaly, but there’s a chance that the windup suits him.

But Cashner has another skill beyond just the strikeout ability; he gets a ton of groundballs. His career ground ball rate is 51.3%. If he can keep that rate up as a full-time starter, he’ll join some pretty elite company. In the last ten years, there have only been three pitchers with a full season of 24%+ K% and 50%+ GB% at the age of 27 or younger. Those three were Jon Lester, Francisco Liriano, and David Price. Read the rest of this entry »

Intuitively, it would make some sense for velocities to be down to begin the year. Pitchers may still be building arm strength and finding their feel. But surfing around player pages early in the season, I noticed what seemed to be an abnormally high number of guys with velocity down from where it was last year. As it turns out, velocities are down a smidge. The average four seamer velocity last year was 90.66 and is only 90.48 so far this season. However, the average velocity in April last year was 90.39. So there’s probably some truth to the idea that velocities will rise as a season progresses.

However, there are still a few starters this year that have seen their average velocity come in way below where it was last year. I compiled a list of 70 pitchers who threw 150+ innings last year and all qualified pitchers so far this season. I then compared their average velocities. Below is a list of the guys who have seen a decrease in velocity that is one standard deviation or more above the mean. Read the rest of this entry »

Felix Doubront | Boston Red Sox | Home to Oakland and home to Houston

Doubront is listed here simply because he’s widely available and gets two decent matchups next week. While it would be preferable if the starts were on the road (especially the one against Oakland), they are good enough that weekly players should give Doubront a look in H2H matchups, and daily players should give him a long look in the latter matchup.

Doubront has several problems; he issues too many walks (10% BB% in 2012), he gives up too many home runs (15.9% HR/FB), and he gives up a fair amount of hard contact (23.4% LD%). If reading that is sufficiently scary, feel free to skip to the next pitcher. But he does have the alluring ability to miss bats, and he has the ability to get strikeouts. Among pitchers with 160+ IP last year, Doubront ranked 28th in SwStr% and 17th in K%.

With the poor run prevention skills listed above, you wouldn’t be wrong to ignore Doubront. But if you’re in the market for a cheap option in daily cap leagues or desperate for a two-start option, you could do worse than Doubront with his strikeout skills and decent macthups. Read the rest of this entry »