Archive for Essential

Spin rate is becoming ever more important to baseball analysis now that we have access to more reliable measurement devices. Namely, Trackman. But there are other technologies as well which are being used by high school, college, and minor league teams. Trackman is the big name, though, since it has been adopted by MLB, NPB and KBO along with many colleges and even a few high schools.

Trackman uses Doppler radar to measure the movement of the ball. I want to paint a picture in your mind of what this may look like, in the eyes of the radar. Remember, we’re trying to track the ball here. Read the rest of this entry »

Some fans call him Superman, and for good reason. He hits for average and for power; he draws walks and barely strikes out; he plays premier defense at a premium position. He’s won Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, three Silver Sluggers, a batting title, a Gold Glove, and oh by the way, three World Series rings. Read the rest of this entry »

Hyun Soo Kim signed with the Orioles before last season on a two-year deal. He struggled mightily in spring training and because of the nature of his contract, the major league team was forced to roster him. After just 17 plate appearances in April, he became a decent semi-regular in the lineup. The left-handed hitter got on the strong side of a platoon with Joey Rickard or Nolan Reimold being the other half.

He became a decent fantasy option in daily transaction leagues by posting a .329/.410/.454 in until July 10th when he went on the DL with a hamstring injury. After the injury, he hit only .275/.353/.386. The second half numbers are decent numbers, but not as good as before the injury.

With the new StatCast data, I examined it to determine if there was a drop in Kim’s exit velocity around the time of the injury. Using a 10-day rolling average, the available data may not look like it but the rolling average generally stays around 7 mph of the overall average. Additionally, there was  no huge pattern change around the time of the injury.

The problem is that StatCast is not able to collect all the available data as documented at FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. The missing data is normal weak groundballs or high infield popups. I am not going to regurgitate the reasons and the exact details from the previous articles but I am going to take a step forward in accounting for the missing data.

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When I started this series which attempts to determine the projected fantasy value for prospects, I knew today’s step would be the hardest. The issue was converting various pitch grades (and control) into a workable framework for a pitcher’s overall production value. I thought I may not end up with a workable answer, but the following results have promise beyond just grading pitches.

I was able to piece together work from various articles and gave each pitch a grade based on the ERA scale. Combining per-pitch-ERA’s with a control value, it looks like we can estimate a pitcher’s overall value.

A pitching prospect is usually given a value on each of their pitches and a command and/or control grade. For example, the MLB.com’s grades for their top rated pitcher, Lucas Giolito, are:

Pitch: Grade
Fastball: 80
Curveball: 70
Changeup: 55
Control: 55

Read the rest of this entry »

I will continue to help define how to value a prospect for fantasy purposes. Last week, I examined how major league position players’ production lines up with the standard scouting grades. Today, I go the other way and look at how graded prospects perform in the majors.

I believe I am making this study about two years too soon. I would love for there to be more MLB information after the player received his grades and his 4-5 year production. I don’t have that luxury right now. I feel any answer I come up with will be a nice anchoring point but will need to be adjusted later.

To do this study, I took the grades given by Baseball America (2011 to 2014) and MLB.com (2013 to 2014). With each of these players, I looked at those who had 300 plate appearances in their career. With this fairly encompassing group, I would only able to match of 118 seasons. In some of these cases, the same player was compared. For example, both BA and MLB had their own 2013 grades for Xander Boegaerts. Like I said, a person can shoot about 20 different holes in this study, but I am just working with what I have been given so far.

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You smell that? That’s the smell of spring in the air. Baseball is around the corner and draft season will be in high gear before we know it. We already ran our first set of rankings that you hopefully got a chance to check out as they were rolled out. You can either bookmark the Rankings filter which will show you all posts dealing with rankings or you can access them by position in the sidebar:

In a post later today, I’ll be covering all of our draft tools in more depth, but let’s get to what you came here for, the spreadsheet!

Not only does it contain all of the rankings from the seven of us, but we’ve also added Steamer Projections and a cross-off capability that allows you to assign each player to the team that drafted him while putting a line through his name and numbers. Thanks to Jeff Zimmermann, Tanner Bell, and Danielle Mason (Justin’s wife) for their work on this. As with our rankings, this is our first run, so we will be making enhancements where necessary. In fact, if there is anything you’d really like to see on future updates, please let us know. If it’s feasible, we’ll try to get it on there. The next update of this spreadsheet won’t come until March when we update the rankings.

Without further ado:

ROTOGRAPHS FIRST RUN RANKINGS SPREADSHEET

There was a misalignment in OF and RP in the first upload here which skewed some Steamer Projections. It has been fixed. If you downloaded before 12:58 PM Central on 2/19, please re-download. 

After talking a bit with Eno Sarris about his pitch type benchmarks, we decided to change up the process a bit. Instead of taking the full average of all of the pitches thrown in a category, we limited the pool to only pitchers who had thrown 20 innings from 2011 to 2013. And we limited the number of pitches we counted to ones that had been thrown 50 times. Hopefully this takes out gimmick pitches and small sample anomalies, for the most part. We’re focusing now on regularly-thrown pitches from somewhat-established pitchers.

We also decided to take the median value within each pitch type. This is a better representation of what’s out there — the old way could have allowed the very excellent pitches to pull the benchmarks north of what could actually be considered an average pitch. We also decided to show you where the 40% benchmark was — the ‘good’ but not ‘above average’ pitches. There are a lot of pitches thrown here that are neither ‘show-me’ pitches nor are they ‘strong’ — think ‘useful.’

Eno will take a look at Matt Cain to bring this all into focus after the new table of benchmarks.

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Batters always seem to heat once summer rolls around. While some players may like to play in the summer versus the cooler months, the warmer weather also increases hitter production. Over the the rest of the year, our authors will be giving our readers a heads up for any possible games which may be hitter or pitcher friendly.

Weather has a significant effect on the distance a ball travels. In his book, the Physics of Baseball, Robert K. Adair noted a 10 degree temperature increase leads to an extra four feet on a 400-foot fly ball and each one mile per hour following wind speed means an extra three feet. For example, a fly ball hit at Wrigley field will travel 38 feet further on a day with the wing blowing out five mph and at 80 degrees versus an early spring day when the wind is blowing in five mph and the temperature is 60 degrees. This information shouldn’t be used to start Wade Davis over King Felix, but if an owner is deciding between a couple of similar players, it could be used as a tie-breaker.

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