On Friday I wrote the following on Kyle Gibson in my Quick Looks piece:
He increased his Zone% a bit from 2013 t0 2014 (41.9% to 43.6%) and saw his K% increase (12.2% to 14.1%) and BB% drop (8.4% to 7.5%).
While, it may seem intuitive that throwing strikes leads to better strikeout and walk rates, I have never seen it tested. I will remedy this issue right now.
In our last séance together, we confided to you our passion for Ender Inciarte. That passion was sparked by our attempt to identify hitters who, over the course of the 2014 season, figured out something new about hitting, and were recognized as such by opposing pitchers. In doing that, we also came across hitters who appear to have been tamed during the season, in that they were both seeing better pitches and chasing more bad ones, with declining results. We provided lists of the top- and bottom-20 hitters, according to this metric. One of the top guys was Ender Inciarte. Now we’ll interrogate (as they used to say in Deconstructionland) those lists, see how they answer, and try to separate signal from noise.
You all know by now that last Tuesday night, I participated in the LABR Mixed league draft. It’s a 15-team league with standard 23-man active rosters and a six player bench. I drew the 11th pick.
On Tuesday night, I participated in the 15-team LABR Mixed League draft (full team recap coming Monday). If you were following the draft live and/or were active on Twitter during the evening, you may very well be aware of the firestorm that erupted after my second round selection. I drew the #11 draft slot, which meant that my second round pick was the 20th. I settled on Billy Hamilton and I will explain why.
There is a long list of things for which you will not find us useful. On that list are, among other pastimes, auto repair, ballroom dancing, cat sitting, and identifying with microscopic precision how good players whom the world already knows to be good are going to be this season. We mention this because we are starting to see articles identifying “sleepers” for the coming season, and most of the guys identified strike us as being wide awake.
For example: we like Kolten Wong a lot. Indeed, as we will come to discuss in the fullness of time, we drafted him in our slow draft. But he’s a good example of the players who are turning up on sleeper lists, when in fact he’s well known to anyone who played Fantasy Baseball or followed Reality Baseball last season.
Here’s a young, highly touted prospect with a good minor league record who’s given the starting second base job in St. Louis, craps out, is banished to Louisville, comes back refreshed, and performs well. Why wouldn’t you have him in your sights?
Yesterday, I discussed four pitchers whose xBB% marks were well below their actual BB% marks. Given their penchant for throwing strikes, they look like good bets to improve their control this season. Today, I’ll check in on five starting pitchers who posted walk rates below their xBB% marks. A jump in walk rate could be in their futures, which would result in a higher ERA and WHIP, all else being equal.
Humans are really good at pattern recognition. It’s what makes us who we are as a species. In some ways, we’re too good with patterns. We see them even when they aren’t there. There is an important phrase in statistics that not all of us take to heart – correlation is not causation.
Today, I want to talk about potential false patterns. Put another way, when we pick a player to outperform his draft position, we should have a reason.
Along with the xK% formula I devised and updated last year, I also developed an xBB% equation. Unfortunately, it isn’t as good as the expected strikeout rate formula, as our community has really struggled to determine how the various underlying skill metrics should interact to result in an expected walk rate. That said, my version is still the best I’ve seen, so it’s better than nothing. But there are seemingly consistent underperformers and overperformers, so don’t take a pitcher’s xBB% as gospel.
Welcome. We are two brothers, aggregate age 122 years, of which roughly 106 have been spent as stat geeks and baseball fans, probably in descending order of intensity. One of us, Michael, resides in Manhattan and is a former academic economist, self-described as an idiot savant in econometrics. He’s why you’ll keep reading, if you do. The other, Dan, resides in Albany, New York, the hub of civic virtue, and knows how to type. He also knows just enough about economics and statistics to translate for the multitudes when his brother is speaking in tongues.
Astonishingly, Michael was a Fantasy Baseball virgin until last year, when his brother tarnished his theretofore-unsullied innocence by recruiting him to replace an owner who went AWOL at the last moment in a $50 buy-in league. It might as well have been an introduction to freebase, and overnight, homemade multiple regression analyses started popping up like toadstools. We’ll share the results of one recent study with you next time: an attempt to identify hitters who were pitched to differently, and reacted to the pitches they saw differently, in the second half of the 2014 season, betokening (we surmise) a newfound respect among their opponents. You don’t need our help to figure out that you might want to draft Nolan Arenado or perhaps Jedd Gyorko. But how about Ender Inciarte, Ike Davis, and Delmon Young, all of whom we recommend?
Last week, I dug into the 2014 ESPN Home Run Tracker data and identified six hitters who applying the findings of my previous analysis are candidates for HR/FB rate downside this season. Today it’s time to take a look on the other side of the coin, those hitters who appear to have some serious upside. This time I’ll check in on the bottom of the “Just Enough” percentage (JE%) leaderboard. The thinking here is that an errant gust of wind here and there or a millimeter difference in where the bat meets the ball could push balls that had been fly outs to head just over the wall.
