Archive for Ken Giles

Gabe Kapler has cast a wide net for the Phillies’ closer committee, using four different relievers to start off a final inning in a save situation since removing Hector Neris as the full-time closer. Neris, who has been a part of that mix, flubbed the one high-leverage situation he has had over the last three weeks. Luis Garcia has been entrusted with several high-stakes situations lately, but it may be hard for Kapler to trust him as a setup reliever, much less as a closer, going forward. Garcia has allowed six runs over his last three innings, and in each of the Phillies’ last two games, he has bequeathed a save opportunity onto a teammate after making a mess in the ninth inning.

On Sunday, Garcia gave way to Tommy Hunter after allowing a single and a double against the Brewers, but he got into more serious trouble in Tuesday’s series opener against the Rockies. Garcia started off the ninth inning with a comfortable 5-1 lead, but he allowed four consecutive singles before handing a bases-loaded, no-out save situation over to Seranthony Dominguez. The Rockies continued to go station-to-station against Dominguez, as Chris Iannetta singled in Gerardo Parra to cut the lead to 5-3. DJ LeMahieu’s sacrifice fly shaved off another run, but Dominguez retired Charlie Blackmon and Nolan Arenado for his third save.
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In the Astros’ series finale against the Mariners on Wednesday, we saw Hector Rondon get the save, even though incumbent closer Ken Giles had not pitched in three days. The Astros did not have a save situation in Thursday night’s opener against the Rangers, but with a four-run lead heading into the bottom of the ninth inning, they had the next-closest thing. Rondon was likely available after having thrown 20 pitches the night before, but A.J. Hinch went with Giles in the final frame. As has been his wont, Giles had some difficulties in a non-save situation, allowing a run on a pair of doubles, but it was more than good enough for the Astros to walk away with a 5-2 win.
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The last time we saw Ken Giles on the mound for the Astros, a Gary Sanchez three-run homer and Aaron Hicks single knocked him out of the game, and then he punched himself in the face. On Thursday night, it was Gleyber Torres who dealt the finishing blow to an Astro reliever’s save hopes.

With the Astros up on the Yankees, 5-3, heading into the top of the ninth inning, A.J. Hinch passed on giving Giles a chance at the save, even though his primary closer was available. Instead, he opted to go with Will Harris, who kicked off the inning by walking Neil Walker and then loaded the bases by allowing back-to-back singles. Brad Peacock was summoned to bail Harris out and get the save, but on his second pitch, Torres stroked a game-tying single into left field. Two batters later, Hicks scored on an Aaron Judge ground out.
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With managers relying more on relievers and less on starters last season, and with the emergence of fantasy-relevant non-closers like Chris Devenski, Chad Green and Archie Bradley, fantasy owners have been taking more interest in relievers who aren’t in line to get steady saves. Andrew Miller has long been on the fantasy radar, and he is currently owned in more than 60 percent of ESPN and CBS leagues. However, Bradley and Adam Ottavino are about as popular as some lower-end closers, as both are owned in more than one-third of the leagues on ESPN and CBS. Devenski, Green and Dellin Betances aren’t far behind in popularity.

On Thursday, the season reached its three-week mark, so we are not quite one-eighth through the schedule. In 2017, only five relievers exceeded 80 innings, but so far this season, there are already 43 relievers who have pitched at least 10 innings. Not everyone in this group will keep up this pace, and it’s not hard to imagine that some who stay on this pace will wear down and may even need some DL time.
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As we enter the weekend, the Milwaukee bullpen continues to be the most volatile situation to speculate for saves. The word from the Brewers today regarding Corey Knebel was unfortunately bad news. According to the Milwaukee manager, Craig Counsell, Knebel will miss “a minimum of six weeks” with his left hamstring strain. For those who missed the injury, it was a lot worse than it sounds. Knebel fell to the ground after delivering a pitch in the 9^th inning down 6 to 0 in Thursday night’s game against the Cubs.

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The sheer amount of data points we have at our fingertips these days, while immensely useful, can be overwhelming. Seemingly, any one player, particularly this early in the season, can surge to the top of the leaderboard of your most trusted stat. One of my favorite heuristics for identifying sustainable breakout performances is very simple. Based on a handful of my favorite peripherals, I filter the leaderboards for those performing above average across all of them, in effect isolating standouts while hedging against the inherent volatility of performing well in a single stat. It’s not perfect but it’s a quick-and-dirty methodology that serves its purpose. 

Last week, I presented a list of pitchers who were better than average across K-BB%, swinging strike rate, Zone-Contact percentage, and ground ball rate. I focused on a few available starters while promising to cover some of the relievers this week. Lowering the innings threshold a tad (min. 14 IP), here are the relief pitchers all boasting better than average performances across the board in the aforementioned stats along with their ownership rates in Yahoo! leagues.

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This season I had an idea for a recurring column called The Chacon Zone that never materialized (tip of the hat to @sporer for the name). The column would have been aimed at avoiding a common pitfall that I’ve succumbed to many times myself, improperly valuing saves and subsequently chasing them at my own peril. At what point does a closer’s poor performance negate the value of an occasional save?

I hoped to identify relief pitchers whose contributions in non-save categories would outweigh the Tony Cingranis and Brad Zieglers of the world. For a variety of reasons, most notably a lack of time and unusually low bullpen volatility early in the season, I never followed through. I’m hoping to rectify that with this end-of-season yet inaugural (?) edition of The Chacon Zone.

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This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

Closer/Setup Men:

Fishing for a closer?

Draft Jenrry Mejia and you may feel like doing this:

Jenrry Mejia. So pumped. pic.twitter.com/iy8HR5yrZu

— MLB GIFS (@MLBGIFs) July 26, 2014

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Our Mock Draft is complete.

Team Schwartz/rounds drafted:

C: Travis d’Arnaud/17 1B: Victor Martinez/4 2B: Arismendy Alcantara/18 3B: Josh Donaldson/3 SS: Hanley Ramirez/2 MI: Jean Segura/19 CI: Prince Fielder/6 OF: Mike Trout/1; Mookie Betts/7; Ryan Zimmerman/10; A.J. Pollock/14; Steven Souza/20; Carl Crawford/24 U: Pedro Alvarez/21

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There are a sundry of middle/set-up relievers that can succeed in the closer role if given the opportunity. A few obvious: Wade Davis if something happens to Greg Holland… Wil Myers for James Shields and who?!; Ken Giles if the Phillies can somehow find a trade partner for the grundle-grabber; and Brad Boxberger if not Jake McGee. I assume David Robertson signs elsewhere and Dellin Betances steps in.

Lets’ look at potential closers using reliever outcomes. Here are the average contact and balls in play-related outcomes for all relievers that qualified and specifically relievers with 10+ saves:

Our Filters: 

• Contact-related outcomes: For K-BB%, Ct% and SwStr%, I filtered simply by the general relief pitcher averages. Everyone below average in these 3 categories was filtered out.
• Command-related outcomes: For zone% and first-pitch-strike%, I used 1 standard deviation below average and 1.25 SD’s below average in BABIP as filters. 1.25 SD allowed me to omit only the relievers that had career BABIP’s higher than we would like to see for a closer or in general. I didn’t want to screen out Jenrry Mejia (1.24 SD below the mean) or Tim Stauffer (1.19 SD below), because there’s a possibility for BABIP regression.
• Balls In Play-related outcomes: I was lax on the balls in play outcomes. I went with a 40% Grounder rate and 45% Flyball rate as my filters versus the averages that you see above because below average fly-rates don’t mean much in places like Tampa (where Boxberger is elite but below average in fly-rates); and above average grounder-rates don’t mean as much with atrocious defense behind you (hence Corey Kluber’s unlucky BABIP, which should have been closer to .299 per end-of-season xBABIP/Inside Edge data), but I digress.

Using these filters, we’re left with a robust list of above-average relievers beyond just closers (scroll down for the noted filters):

What happens if we use the command (K-BB%)/contact (Ct% and SwStr%) related averages for relievers with more than 10 saves this year? 

…We’re left with some elite closers and then a few interesting names.

Last year, Danny Farquhar (just missed the list this year) had a top 20 swinging-strike rate – about a percent better than Fernando Rodney, but it was masked by his BABIP and left-on-base rate that killed his surface stats (4.20 ERA vs. 2.40 xFIP). This year, he actually outperformed his xFIP with a 2.66 ERA. After an early season MASH Report on Rodney’s velocity, I eyed Farquhar. At least keep him in mind next year if anything does happen to Rodney.

Josh Edgin (Mets for those of you that don’t know) has a top 65 contact-rate sandwiched between Mark Melancon and Jake McGee and even induced grounders 50% of the time. He has a pretty extensive repertoire as well. In order of usage: Fourseamer, Slider, Curve, Change, Cutter and Sinker. According to his Brooks Player Card, he has great swing and miss rates on his Curve (>56%), Cutter (50%), Slider (>42%) and Sinker (33%). Even his Change approaches 30%. This isn’t the case on his Fastball, but at 93+ MPH, it induces a decent amount of grounders (1.8 GB/FB). Keep in mind he had late-season elbow issues which effected his velocity by a MPH or so, but he could be called upon to get Mejia out of a jam. I like him better than an unhealthy Bobby Parnell and Jeurys Familia from a command perspective for another year.

Zach Duke did his best Craig Kimbrel impression prior to the R2M monster hitting him in August. Prior to 8/1, Duke had a 34.9% K-rate and 27.3 K-BB%. Kimbrel ended the year with a 38.9% K-rate and 28.3 K-BB%. I think August and September brought him back to his realistic value (~2.50 ERA, 1.15 WHIP). It will be interesting to see who closes for the Brewers if they let Francisco Rodriguez go. Both Duke and Will Smith have above average (even for RP w/ 10+ saves) swing-and-miss. Will Smith should have additional command next year, but Zack Duke induces grounders better which I like in my closers/in Milwaukee. They also have Jonathan Broxton. The hierarchy seemed to be K-rod-Broxton-Smith late last season. If that’s the case, they should use Duke more (former starter) and in higher leverage situations. He was equally solid against both lefties (.258 wOBA) and righties (.262 wOBA).

Oliver Perez everybody! I thought I could filter him out by his splits being a lefty, but like 2012, he was more effective vs. righties (and faced 44 more of them). The D-backs have Addison Reed, up-and-comer Evan Marshall as well as Daniel Hudson caught touching 97 MPH so if not by outcomes or splits, we can filter Perez out by opportunity.

Darren O’Day and Andrew Miller is part of one dominating Baltimore bullpen – one that gets referenced by anyone who thinks the Orioles can beat the Tigers in the ALDS. Notice that Zach Britton didn’t make either of the above lists! He was filtered out by his below average K-BB% (13.70%). It’s his 75+% grounder rate (hence the 81+% left-on-base rate and .215 BABIP) that keeps him elite in Baltimore. The only concern you can have with O’Day is a fastball velocity almost 2 standard deviations below the mean for relievers, but his arm angle combined with that slider still induces a 30+% whiff-rate on both pitches. Miller’s slider though is a world apart from O’Day’s: only Pedro Strop, Will Smith, Jake Diekman, Greg Holland and Oliver Perez induces more whiffs than Miller’s 55% according to Baseball Prospectus’ Pitchf/x Leaderboards.  I doubt we’ll see a closer-transition next year in Baltimore unless Britton’s GB/FB ratio takes a drastic dive because his HR/FB ratio, which approached 18%, could be an issue.

An xBABIP review

On the last day of the season, @jeffwzimmerman provided me with Pitch xBABIP based on inside edge data. Let’s look at some of the bigger xBABIP differentials to keep in mind:

The last column depicts the z-score for BABIP differential. Francisco Rodriguez was expected to have a BABIP about 120 points above his actual BABIP. I highlighted (red/bad; green/good) the xBABIP z-scores as well so that you know whether or not to actually be concerned meaning sure Aaron Sanchez has the 5th biggest BABIP differential (over 2 standard deviations from the mean), but a .239 xBABIP is still utterly elite (3.34 SD’s from the mean). On the other side of the equation, it’s nice to see Evan Marshall, Carlos Martinez and Adam Ottavino (albeit in Colorado) with large BABIP differentials. Marshall and Martinez even have xBABIP’s over .5SD from the mean.

The last bit of fun

It was a very fun year to be doing bullpen reports for RotoGraphs. Aroldis Chapman broke the single-season strikeout rate of 2012 Craig Kimbrel (50.2%). He struck out 52.5% of the hitters he faced. Andrew Miller (42.6%) and Brad Boxberger (42.1%) also made the top 10 seasons ever. Dellin Betances (39.6%), Wade Davis (39.1%) and Craig Kimbrel (38.9%) made the top 20. Chapman’s swinging-strike% of 20% beat ’12 Kimbrel by .8%, but he couldn’t pass ’04 Lidge, ’03 Gagne, ’04 Gagne, ’02 Gagne or ’05 Lidge. Chapman, Miller, Doolittle, Boxberger, Betances (Wade Davis and Kenley Jansen close behind) all had historical, top 20 K-BB rates. Relievers dominate this list: only ’99 Pedro Martinez (#12), ’00 Pedro Martinez (#21), ’01 Randy Johnson (#27) and ’01 Pedro Martinez (#28) make it into the top 30, but it’s clear that we have a growing list of elite relievers.

From a fantasy perspective, thanks to 45+ saves totals out of Holland and Kimbrel, we had two relievers ranked in the top 20 pitchers. If Chapman didn’t miss time and Betances and Davis consumed the closer role, we would have had 3 others. Last year, Craig Kimbrel and his 4 wins, 50 saves, 98 SO’s, 1.21 ERA and .88 WHIP campaign made him the 3rd most valuable pitcher. This year with Kershaw, Cueto, Felix and Kluber, it would have taken even more.

If we combined the 3 more dominating performances exclusive of saves this year: Aroldis Chapman’s K-rate (52.5%) and saves total (36), Dellin Betances IP (90) – who was dominating in his own right, Wade Davis’ ERA (1.00) and Wins total (9) and Sean Doolittle’s WHIP (.73) – let’s call this guy Aroldellin Dooldavis, we would wind up with a 10.95 z-sum…just above Corey Kluber (10.72), but under Clayton Kershaw (13.74), Johnny Cueto (12.95) and Felix Hernandez (12.50). Even 50 saves wouldn’t have done the trick (12.43 z-sum):