Archive for The Change

Check out the first baseman end of season rankings. Brandon Belt hit .280 with 18 homers and nine stolen bases. He was the 15th first baseman, worth almost ten dollars. Freddie Freeman hit .276 with 18 homers and three stolen bases. He was the 21st-best first baseman, worth under five bucks. Huh.

You know why they ended up on different ends of the spectrum, of course. Partially because Freeman was hurt a bunch this year, and partially because the Braves offense was Lilliputian, the Braves’ first baseman had 128 runs plus RBI, while Belt had 141. It may not be fair that Belt was worth twice as much as Freeman because the Braves offense was no good, but it happens.

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Injury is perhaps the greatest vehicle of luck in sports. The haphazard bounce of the ball, twinge of the tendon, strain of the muscle — these things not only rob the player of playing time, but they also keep them from performing at 100%. And though we’ve had some success predicting injury, mostly on the basis of past injury, we haven’t come that far. Even the most basic advice with respect to injury wouldn’t have helped us avoid this trio of injured backstops, anyway.

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As the season draws to a close, and the Red Sox try to push their record to .500, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The rotation didn’t end up working out, really, and there’s more than one high-priced acquisition that fizzled in his first year. But if you sort the leaderboards for the worst players in baseball this year, one name drifts to the top: Pablo Sandoval.

The easiest analysis is to say that he’s been better in the past and will be better again. And one-year defensive samples are certainly part of this story, so he could easily get back to being a decent defender and recover his value that way. That said, Sandoval has lost nearly forty points of adjusted offense, and that seems extreme. It’s even worse for second place on the losers list, as Victor Martinez has lost a whopping 90 points of weighted runs created plus from last season to this one.

Victor Martinez just showed us the worst single-season drop-off since free agency began.

Can we just pencil Martinez and Sandoval into their career numbers when they’re on the wrong side of this single-season dropoff leaderboard?

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Earlier today, we published my conversation with Joey Votto about aging, and within the post is a graph that didn’t necessarily fit the narrative but should contain an interesting tidbit for we fantasy players.

Take a look at this graph again, except instead of looking towards the end of the graph where the old guys are hanging out, look at the beginning of the graph. Under 25, it looks like hitters with pull percentages under 45% have a little more growth left in them than their pull-heavy counterparts.

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We may not have found a way to measure hanging breaking balls today, but one table in particular caught my eye as being maybe useful for fantasy players. On this table, you’ll see the curveballs with the biggest range in movement with a few outcome stats included. If we sort through this list mentally, it seems possible to find our hanging curveballs.

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We know, not only because of Taylor Jungmann, but also from the Brewers’ starter, that not all pitches thrown seldomly with good results will remain as successful when thrown more often. Sometimes pitches are successful because they are rare and unexpected. Any batter can hit an eephus if you tell them it’s coming, but your average eephus gets 7% swinging strikes, mostly because they are surprising.

That said, we have some research on what makes curves and changeups good in terms of movement. So if we combine a pitch with elite results in a small sample with an appraisal of how good the movement and velocity on the pitch, we should be able to say with some confidence that the pitch is good.

In order to find our subjects, I merely set the filter low for pitch types (40 pitches) and looked for starters with elite results on changeups, curves, and sliders. It takes 150 plate appearances for strikeout rate to be stable, so this is probably a small sample even for pitch type ‘strikeout rate’, but we’re scouting here, trying to find the elite before they are actually elite.

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Mike Trout hurt his wrist in late July. Since then, in the 101 plate appearances headed into his game last night, the Angels outfielder has hit .224/.347/.388 with two home runs and a caught stealing. He’s been 11% better than league average, but that’s like 50% below average on the Trout scale. Is he still hurt?

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Here’s the saddest thing about velocity changes in pitchers: it looks like you’re screwed either way. Velocity is mostly good for results, but Tommy John pitchers both a) threw harder across pitch types when they were healthy and b) showed velocity loss the year they had surgery. So, either way according to Jon Roegele’s research at least, it could be seen as a negative even if you show up as a velocity gainer on our lists today.

On the other hand, it’s probably better to combine velocity loss with things like a drop in zone rate and an inconsistent release point — things that Josh Kalk put into his injury zone work — and not just rely on velocity loss alone.

That said, a tick on the gun is still worth something in run prevention. And so let’s look at which pitchers are happy or hurting on the radar gun.

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Ground-ball rate stabilizes fairly quickly. Usually, you’ll hear this factoid in the first month of the season as we look at April stats and try to render prognoses on the rest of the season. Of course, ‘stabilizing’ means that there’s about a 50/50 chance the data is meaningful in that small sample.

Hidden in that fact is the key to today’s look at the player population. Players change. They change their batted ball mixes in season, too, not just in April. And if you look at month-long samples, you’re pretty close to that stabilization point again. You want about 30 games to believe in ground ball numbers, and your qualified batters typically play around 25 games in a month.

And, since we’re now comparing July to June instead of April to all of last year, and we’ve already admitted that players change their mixes, it’s useful to remember that this is not some sort of skeleton key that will figure it all out for us. Still, we need to know which players are altering their batted ball mixes, because it might stick, and it might mean something going forward.

And for Christian Yelich, Adam Eaton, Brandon Crawford and even Jung-ho Kang… we could be seeing the future.

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Rookie hitters are performing better this year than they ever have in the free agency era. Right now, rookie non-pitchers have a 93 weighted runs created plus, one better than in the second-best year for rookie hitters (2006). That’s also impressive because there are only four years in which rookies have managed a wRC+ over 90.

We spend so much time drooling over rookies that this might be a sobering result. The best rookie class of all time is still 7% worse than league average with the stick. You *could* use this to argue that rookies are a bad scene in redraft leagues.

Of course, that number is an overall number. If you focus on the rookies that have done well, they were almost all well-regarded, right?

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