We all know that the Twins hit ridiculously well with runners in scoring position (RISP) last year. Just how clutch were they? Well, their OPS with RISP was .826 (2nd in MLB, after the ballpark-boosted Rangers), far higher than the overall team OPS of .748. Now of course, many analysts have demonstrated that teams on average tend to hit better with RISP than without, but Minnesota's performance last year was of a staggering magnitude.

In this post I discuss two topics:

1. Is hitting with RISP a "skill", i.e. can we expect the Twins to repeat to some extent?
2. If not, how "lucky" did the Twins get last year? How big of a hit does our expectations for next year take?

I think the conclusion is quite positive. If you're interested, please read on after the jump.

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I had actually planned to spend part of my winter break on determining whether or not Justin Morneau is truly an RBI Machine by parsing through Retrosheet event files and letting other batters "stand in his stead", so to speak, to see how many RBIs they would generate if given the same opportunities as our favorite Canadian. However, this project proved too onerous.

Instead, I used my half-baked program to spit out some 2008 baserunning numbers for the Twins, more specifically how often each offensive player scores on a single or double from 1st, 2nd and 3rd base, respectively. I present the data after the jump – feel free to ignore it if you're not really in the mood for reading a bunch of decimal numbers today.

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Carlos Gomez kills me. With reckless abandon he has been hacking his way through plate appearances ever since Opening Day. If he somewhere down the line turns into a decent hitter, I will give the Twins' coaching staff full credit, because he simply doesn't seem to be able to adapt to anything by himself.

Yet, a couple of days ago someone on this site (I forgot who it was – sorry) suggested that Gomez might have altered his approach recently and actually patched together some good at bats along the way. This got me thinking a bit, and I decided to investigate the surmise.

To evaluate Gomez' "maturity" at the plate, I look at two stats: pitches per plate appearance (P/PA) and the percentage of plate appearances in which he swings at the first pitch (1PS%). This is obviously a gross simplificiation, but bear with me here. It's impossible to find (free) monthly splits for these numbers anywhere on the web, so I created a so-called spider which downloaded the necessary data from MLB.com's 2008 Gameday data. I then extracted the parts I needed for my research and the final output is a couple of interesting (albeit ugly) graphs.

I think you'll find my findings about Gomez' maturation encouraging, so please take a minute to review them.

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A couple of days ago I made a half-assed attempt at evaluating Nathan's abilities with regards to pitching in the eighth and pitching more than one inning. As both BeefMaster and Johnny Safron correctly pointed out (I like to refer to this as the "Saffron Beef Critique"), simply grouping Nathan's performances by the length of his outings gives false impressions. For example, a (rare) appearance in which he gives up a walk-off HR after having gotten just one out in the 9th ought to be considered as the same type of outing as his trademark 1-2-3 9th innings.

Thus, I decided to run the numbers one more time, but this time I parsed the Retrosheet event files from 2004 to 2007 (Nathan's four full seasons as a Twin) in order to break down his pitching line by the situation in which he entered the game (the entry point).

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I thought it would be interesting to check out Nathan's stats broken down by number of IP, so here they are (courtesy of Retrosheet and a little tinkering with R). I've lumped all Nathan's four full seasons (2004-2007) as a Twin together in the following.

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Pretty much everybody around here seems to want to ditch Livan Hernandez in favor of Francisco Liriano, the Second Coming of Johan "Should've Won 3 Cy Young Awards By Now" Santana. So, much like I did with the question of batting Gomez 9th, I decided to grab some perspective by calculating the added run value of simply releasing Hernandez and calling up Liriano to take his place.

My question is this: How many more runs will the Twins prevent the opposition from scoring if Liriano gets Livan's remaining 11 starts?

Creating projections

First we need to gauge each player's true talent level. This is easy to do for Hernandez; I just plug his stats and birth date into The Hardball Times' in-season Marcel projection spreadsheet. This yields that Livan should be good for a 4.74 (fielding independent) ERA over the remainder of the season, meaning that his aggregate ERA for the 2008 season would end up at 5.11.

It's a bit more difficult for Liriano, since I want to base my analysis on his excellent work in Rochester this year as well. It's not right to just plug in his minor league totals, since the level of competition obviously doesn't match what he would face in MLB, and furthermore, Marcel bases its projections on major league averages.

Thus, I went to Baseball Prospectus to look up Liriano's minor leagues stats translated to a major league context. This transforms the Franchise's 3.10 International League DERA (defense independent ERA) into a 4.09 major league DERA. I typed the relevant translated statistics into the Marcel pitcher projection spreadsheet as a separate 2008 row, and voilà: We get a 3.63 true talent ERA for Liriano.

The big (?) difference

Having done the above, it's easy to see how many runs Liriano would save more than Livan. Over 9 innings, Liriano is projected to allow 1.11 runs less than Hernandez, which is 0.123 runs per IP. The Twins have 55 games left to play in the 2008 season, so that's probably around 11 remaining starts per spot in the starting rotation. Hence, if the Twins swapped Francisco and Livan right now, it would probably affect approximately 66 remaining IP (6 innings a start seems about right to me).

Multiplication shows that Liriano is then worth 8.14 runs more than Livan from this point of the season and out.

Conclusion

As in the case with Gomez, the added run value is quite a bit smaller than I expected. 8 runs is equivalent to a little less than one win in the standings. Now, one might argue that Liriano's projections are a bit conservative, since he has pitched way better as of late, and we should probably assign more weight to these stats than to the stats from the beginning of the season. However, I don't think this would change the result much.

Still, the Twins need to do this move. If they can trade Hernandez before the deadline, they would only gain from that on the major league level and maybe receive some fringe prospect as icing on the cake. It would also help Liriano's development tremendeously, as he is obviously getting tired of fanning AAA batters.

Whatever "veteran presence" Hernandez provides, it can't possibly outweigh the positives of having Francisco take his spot in the rotation.

That's my two cents - what are your thoughts?

I have been campaigning for Carlos Gomez to bat 9th (or be demoted to AAA) for some time now. To get a more objective look at the benefits of such a move I decided to do some number crunching. I want to stress that I've completely disregarded the mental aspects of baseball in the following - I'm exclusively working with the stats here.

My question is this: How many extra runs per game will the Twins score if Gomez gets to bat 9th from this point of the season and out, while Denard Span is moved to the lead-off spot?

The method

In order to arrive at an answer I go straight to The Book. In this, the authors calculate the average number of runs scored for each possible outcome of a plate appearance. They really put a lot of care into adjusting for a variety of things, including the typical situation in which each outcome is realized as well as the ball-strike count. The results are displayed in a table on p. 28 (e.g. a HR is worth 1.397 runs on average, a single is worth 0.475 runs, a caught stealing is worth -0.467 runs above what an average team would score in the inning, etc.).

The extreme case

Now, to first consider the extreme case, I focused solely on Gomez' batting and base-stealing in June and July. I looked up his splits on MLB.com and typed them into a spreadsheet where I multiplied each stat with its run value above average, as mentioned above. The bottom line was that Gomez has cost the Twins 19 offensive runs compared to the average in 194 June/July plate appearances, or 0.100 runs per PA.

Doing the same thing for Span, I found that since his call-up he has added 1 run above average in 97 PA, which is 0.013 runs per PA.

The Book also lists the average number of plate appearances per game for each lineup slot (p. 122). In AL parks, the lead-off hitter gets 4.83 PA per game, while the no. 9 hitter gets 3.90 on average. Thus, moving Gomez down to the 9th slot would give him approximately 0.93 less PA per game.

Since his performance in June and July indicates that he costs the Twins 0.1 runs per PA, moving Gomez to the bottom of the batting order would thus yield 0.093 runs extra per game for the Twins. Similarly, moving the slightly-above-average Span to the lead-off spot would add 0.012 runs per game.

Thus, the total added run value of switching Gomez and Span in the batting order is 0.105 runs per game.

via cache.lifehacker.com

The projected case

Now, obviously, no-one truly believes that Gomez will be as horrible the rest of the season as he has been in June and July. And Span will probably regress a bit towards the mean (he seems to already be doing so). Consequently, I used The Hardball Times' in-season Marcel projection spreadsheet to generate a more reasonable batting and base-stealing expectation for both players.

I went through the exact same steps as above, and the results were as follows: Gomez is projected to cost the Twins 0.038 runs per PA compared to the average while Span is projected to be almost exactly average. This means that a batting order swap would yield an extra 0.031 runs per game for the Twins.

In conclusion

The added run value was much smaller than I expected, even in the extreme case. Batting Gomez 9th would just barely amount to half a win extra over the remainder of the season. Of course there are many other ways to change the batting order, like moving Casilla and Mauer up a spot. This would most likely be worth more in terms of run value added, but I consider it unlikely that Gardy would consider this option.

I still think Gomez should be moved to the bottom of the batting order - if nothing else it might help restore his mental balance to have some pressure taken off his shoulders. What are your thoughts?

Note: The stats considered in the above analysis were 1B, 2B, 3B, HR, HBP, unintentional BB, SH, SO, SB, CS and outs on batted balls.