Author Archive: Mike Podhorzer

It was a relatively unexciting trade deadline as fewer big names switched uniforms than usual. No, I don’t have any actual data to back that up, but I feel like I’m probably right. Anyhow, one of the bigger names to switch teams was Sonny Gray, as he departs the West coast for the East, joining the New York Yankees. Let’s analyze the park factors, the team defenses, and offensive support to help determine how this affects his value over the rest of the season.

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It’s been a forgettable year for Jonathan Lucroy. He has posted the lowest wOBA of his career and despite playing in a historical time for home run power, his ISO has slipped below .100 for the first time since his 2010 debut and HR/FB rate sits at just 6%. His Brls/BBE has dipped to a lowly 2.4%, versus 7.7% last year, so his weak performance doesn’t appear to be a fluke. He has simply lost all semblance of power. Where did it go? Who knows. But if anything could wake up a dead bat, it’s Coors Field!

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As I have been known to do, let’s take our every-so-often look at American League starting pitchers who are currently making a surprise appearance atop the last 30 day strikeout rate leaderboard. Since pitchers change so much more frequently than hitters, whether due to fluctuations in velocity or an adjustment to pitch mix, it’s far more valuable to analyze small sample pitching performance than hitting performance.

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A flurry of trades as we inch closer to the non-waiver trade deadline are going to boost the values of many players not currently on a deep league roster. But for now, I got two outfielders for you.

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We still have about a week to go before the non-waiver trade deadline, but already deals are being made. Yesterday, both Jaime Garcia and Trevor Cahill were shipped off of their non-contending teams to the American League. Let’s see how the league, park, and team switches could affect their values.

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There are a lot of players in Major League Baseball. There are even more in the minors. I’m not a prospect guy and rarely know names much outside the top 10 in baseball. So when a player is called up, I often times never heard of the player and unless I know him as a top 10 prospect, I generally don’t even bother to do the research to determine if he’s worth a pickup. In a shallow league, 90% of the time, the answer is no. But then that hitter keeps hitting home runs and I wonder to myself “who the heck is this guy?!” Let’s discuss some of those players that led to such a reaction.

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Earlier this year, I introduced the new xHR/FB rate that uses Statcast’s Brls/BBE (barrels per batted ball event) metric. While the equation was for hitters, Brls/BBE is still a useful data point for pitchers. Luckily, the Statcast leaderboard has the exact same metrics for pitchers as hitters, including Brls/BBE. Let’s lets discuss some American league starting pitchers from a Brls/BBE and HR/FB rate perspective. Given the hitter xHR/FB rate formula, you know that Brls/BBE and HR/FB rate correlate rather strongly. A mismatch will typically mean some sort of regression in either of the stats.

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Is your team not on fire? Are you trying to roll along with Brandon Guyer? Well then, it’s your lucky day, because it’s time for the weekly deep league waiver wire!

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Yesterday, I took the first dive into the intriguing waters of Statcast’s Sprint Speed metric. After comparing correlations with other speed-related stats to Spd Score, I now want to see which players are actually faster and slower than Spd would have use believe. Because Spd uses some context-dependent metrics, it could sometimes give us a false impression of a batter’s true raw speed.

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In April, Statcast quietly introduced a new speed metric dubbed Sprint Speed. It wasn’t until late June that Baseball Savant made the leaderboards publicly available and we now have data going back to 2015. I have been meaning to dive into the data to find any incremental value, and finally the day has come. From the leaderboard page, the metric is described as thus:

Sprint Speed is Statcast’s foot speed metric, defined as “feet per second in a player’s fastest one-second window.” The Major League average on a “max effort” play is 27 ft/sec, and the max effort range is roughly from 23 ft/sec (poor) to 30 ft/sec (elite). A player must have at least 10 max effort runs to qualify for this leaderboard.

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