SBNation.com User Blog: colintj

Tracking Gavin Floyd's decline in health

colintj — Fri, 03 May 2013 06:01:20 -0000

For the sake of reference, I put together a graph to give you some idea of how long Gavin Floyd has been trying to fight through this. The spike in the graph dates very clearly to around the time when he first went to the DL last year.

Just to clarify what you're looking at: I took every start from 2008 onward and created a moving average of his walk rate with a step of 22 starts. So Start No. 1 is his first of 2008 and the last one is Start No. Whatever from 2013. Why 22? Because that gives you approximately 550 batters faced per step averaged. Why 550 BF? Because, loosely, that corresponds with what Russell Carleton found is the point where walk rate stabilizes.* Yes, it is somewhat arbitrary. No, this is not definitive. The value of this chart is more along the lines of this.

Unlike, say, John Danks or Chris Sale, nothing really jumped out to me watching Floyd, even though he clearly had problems in 2012, and they were definitely elbow related. His mechanics seemed more variable and he went through extended bouts where one pitch or another wasn't working. But reading back through the SSS archives, we assumed that this was just Gavin as we had known him. Just, y'know, a little more extreme.

In the same way that I assumed Danks would more or less back to his old self by about now, I assumed that Gavin's elbow trouble was just a blip. Considering the Sox history with Tommy John-type injuries, it seemed a solid assumption. But, again, this speaks to exactly what we're trying to do here in assessing the Sox' capacity to keep guys healthy. What exactly is it that they're doing? Looking back through the timeline, it doesn't seem to have worked here. But the fact is, it's basically a black box we're dealing with. All we have is input and output. This can be very misleading and, without a good theory of what it is Herm Schneider et al. are doing to create this output, we can't be sure.

To quote the great Michigan empiricist Betsey Stevenson**:

Don't fall into the trap of thinking about an empirical finding as "right" or "wrong". At best data provide an imperfect guide. Evidence should always shift your thinking on an issue; the question is how far.

*Technically, and if he's got a google alert for his own name maybe he'll tell us if I've got this right, what he did was take data for pitchers and divided that data into halves and then checked to see how well the halves correlated. He did this at a number of different sample sizes and found that at about 550 batters faced, the correlation between the two halves was .5. Meaning that given that number of batters faced, we can judge the true talent of that pitcher's walk rate to be the average of the measured walk rate and the league mean. At least that's what I can recall at this juncture. Readers of this end note will be wise to remember that I have still not taken an actual statistics course.

**Since the byline on the article is actually Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson it could be either or both writing. But the idea of a quote coming from two people I think lends a certain confusion and takes away from the punch of the quote. I also like end notes and being technically correct, so here we are.

John Danks injury: Torn shoulder capsule diagnosis makes for a tough road back

colintj — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 00:28:19 -0000

John Danks is having a rough spring so far by all accounts. He came into Tuesday's start with an 11.74 ERA, reports have his velocity down, and he didn't assuage concerns about either after another ugly outing. It's bad enough that Danks is finally beginning to concede that he could be somewhere besides Chicago on Opening Day.

No one wonders where this is coming from. Danks clearly wasn't himself last year in the few starts he did make, and rehab following a diagnosis of a subscapularis tear didn't make things better. When he finally did go under the knife, we found out that Danks' subscapularis injury had healed, but that the underlying problem turned out to be a torn shoulder capsule.

I'll be honest and own up to not having paid any attention at all to these details, largely because I'm spoiled as a White Sox fan. Oh, somebody's injured? Well I'm sure they'll come back better than ever. I mean Jake Peavy tore his lat muscle off the bone, and the only thing that got in the way of his return was his bulldoggery. Yeah, it sucks that they're injured, but it's not like it's going to be a problem beyond the time missed due to surgery, right?

This time, unfortunately, might be different. The shoulder capsule problem is a relatively rare diagnosis and gathering details on those who've had the same issue has also been problematic. But the preliminary research is not promising given the names on the list: Johan Santana, Chris Young, Dallas Braden, Chien-Ming Wang, Pedro Feliciano, Tim Byrdak Mark Prior, Robb Nen, John Maine, Tomo Ohka and Rich Harden.

As far as I can tell, none of those guys have come back to be the pitchers they were. To be sure, some of the guys on the list had non-capsule shoulder problems. Prior, of course, had a bunch of things wrong with him. Nen was old, and so were Ohka and Feliciano. Maine had non-capsule problems and Young had labrum surgery back in '09.

Basically, it's very difficult to isolate a pitcher who is only dealing with a shoulder capsule tear. The rigors of playing baseball and, in particular, being a pitcher means that establishing what causes what is difficult. But we should be able to talk about what it's like to rehab from the capsule surgery specifically.

In which case, let's turn it over to Susan Slusser:

Only a handful of pitchers - Johan Santana, Braden, Chris Young, Chien-Ming Wang - have had the surgery ... Most people aren't familiar with this kind of injury, but my impression, from talking to team medical people, is that plenty of pitchers are dealing with this kind of injury and just trying to strengthen the shoulder to avoid surgery. When most orthopedists won't do it, the procedure is relatively new and the results uncertain, it's unfair to blame Harden [for trying to avoid surgery]. He was repeatedly advised not to undergo surgery. You might recall that Braden had to visit several orthopedists last summer before finding one who would do surgery.

That's interesting for a couple reasons. As Slusser notes, "most" orthopedists won't perform the procedure. New York pitchers don't seem to have a problem getting recommendations for the surgery. Braden and Harden don't have NYC connections, but all the others do. As does Tim Byrdak, who had the operation performed after Slusser wrote the post.

For instance, this quote from Dr. Jonathon Glashow suggests that the injury is what matters, not the surgery. Regarding Santana, he says:

The big distinction here, and the important distinction, is whether the rotator cuff is involved. If it’s simply the capsule, plus or minus the labrum to a small degree, his return is much more predictable and quick. If his cuff is damaged more than they think -- and you may say, 'Well, they have an MRI,' but MRIs are less than perfect -- then I think there’s a big question mark whether he comes back at the same level and how long it takes him to come back. Some MRIs are better than others. And even in the best-case scenario, it’s never until you look inside that you know exactly. The question is not going to be fully answered until somebody looks in there and says, ‘Hey, his cuff is fine. Great. It’s maybe five or six months.’

That's five to six months before throwing, for the record. The whole interview is worth a read. In terms of gleaning where the Sox fall in this debate, obviously Danks had the surgery and projected he'd be ready to get going by Spring Training. Moreover: Danks had six months from August through February to get ready to begin throwing.

Glashow is an NYC-based doctor (he was formerly the team doctor for the New York Rangers). I bring up the geographical connection because the guy who pioneered the surgery happens to be the Mets' team doctor, David Altchek, also based in New York. The Slusser list also misses Bret Saberhagen, who seems to be the first big-time MLBer to undergo the procedure.

It's also worth remembering that the Sox were fairly decisive. They gave Danks time to rehab, saw relatively little improvement and chose with Danks' consent to figure out what was wrong via arthroscopy, then fixed him up. One of the surgeons was the same guy who fixed Peavy's detached lat, Anthony Romeo.

Nonetheless, Harden's caution and the relatively few procedures performed, despite the injury being more common than we know, suggests that Slusser's summary isn't wrong. Clearly, there are just a few teams out there who think of this as routine, as Herm and the team docs would seem to. That would be far more damning, but the track record of the White Sox, not to mention Romeo's past success, makes any conclusion hard to reach.

And picking out a prognosis for Danks isn't helped by the fact that almost none of the pitchers in the sample are much like him. Wang, Braden, Harden, and Young all had other shoulder issues. Only Santana seems to have been especially healthy in the shoulder prior to the problem.

What is clear is that all of the pitchers have struggled to return to pitching consistently, and that the condition seems to cause a substantial dip in both velocity and command. Clearly, the shoulder capsule is a tricky thing. The low profile of the injury and the lack of industry consensus on treatment suggests, even if the anatomy is understood, that the precise condition parameters that enable shoulder capsule function are known with certainty by few, if any.

Given what little we do know, it seems wise to temper our expectations. The old John Danks may not be walking through that door any time soon.

A Few Thoughts On Gavin

colintj — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:14:16 -0000

A fine mahoke to you all. Pardon the excessive absence--or don't--but I thought it might be of some interest to go over exactly why Rick Hahn might be interested in sending away Gavin Floyd for Jason Kubel, a part Rob more or less describes as "bit" in his post earlier today.

On the team as constituted, yes, there is a role for Kubel. But it likely won't make up for the departure of Gavin Floyd. A lot of people for a variety of reasons have problems with Gavin, most of which I don't understand. I think I do understand where the problems come from. For one, Sox fans are spoiled. White Sox pitching has been outstanding since Don Cooper took up his post a decade ago. Combine that with Sox hitters dropping more than a few steaming piles against mediocre righties and it gets really hard to maintain perspective.

But for real: Gavin is solid and he's underpaid. You can't drop him and expect that production to be made up by Jason Kubel. Not even if he's starting. Gavin's been a 3 win pitcher on average over the past three seasons. Kubel's been basically replacement level.

So how can that trade begin to make any sense? It starts with all of Kubel's salary being paid for. Kubel's replacement level, so he should be making league minimum rather than the $7.5M he's actually owed this year. But that in itself doesn't really do a whole lot for the Sox. With just Kubel and his paid-for salary in the bag, the Sox still have a hole in the rotation and only $9.5M to fill it. Even if they were able to sign a starter at that salary, he'd likely be worse than Gavin. The Sox would end up paying the same salary figure and worse off. They have no real incentive to pull that deal.

Okay, so Kubel, his salary and a prospect? That could work. But I don't get the feeling that that would be everything. Hahn would have lost a starter off a team that's supposedly going to compete this year. And now they've got an extra left fielder in Dayan Viciedo. Dayan plus the salary they've freed up plus some other prospect throw-ins could land a legit starter who would both be paid more and perform better than Gavin.

On the other hand, that's awfully convoluted. Hahn's role, according to my blithe reading of the wikipedia entry, would be as market maker. It's not an easy one in a relatively illiquid player market and the odds are against it all working out. But at least each of those moves adds up and strikes me as rational. The world in which Hahn is feverishly calling around the league looking to make a slim profit on each of a cascade of deals is one I want to live in. And, barring an out-of-nowhere coup, it's basically the only way forward for a team that lacks the salary freedom and prospect depth to easily compete this season.

The Chris Sale Project Is Struggling With A Sextant

colintj — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 07:27:44 -0000

Welcome! Another installment of The Chris Sale Project is at hand, ready to demystify the various aspects of the performance and, if you will, existence of Chris Sale. We CSPers took to the streets to poll the fandom and determine what in particular requires address (no, not that kind). Turns out the number 1 concern was "WTF the Royals? Seriously, the flipcrappin' Royals?"

Yeah, the Royals. If you missed it, the Royals took the first game in what would be a three game sweep (hooray!) by working over Chris Sale prettay prettay good. Which totally sucked for White Sox fans generally, we're sure. But imagine how the array of technicians manning our state of the art baseball performance measuring machinery must feel. We've got everything turned up to 11, we're leaned in, only for Sale to deliver a giant fart. Caw indeed, friends.

After evacuation of the premises and subsequent re-entry, we processed the data and came to a conclusion. Namely, that the best we can say is that it was probably the whole "speeding baseball off his pitching hand" thing. As you'll recall, Chris Sale took a speeding baseball off his pitching hand, went through a battery of tests administered by Herm Schneider (observed with the utmost diligence by a designated CSP task force) and was declared okayish to pitch.

We suspect that Sale's bulldogitude--a portmanteau of "bulldog attitude" meant to convey the determined mien of none but the grittiest pitchers, for the uninitiated--led him to stay on the mound despite the resultant lack of command. Which, given the alternatives, was not a terrible choice. Humber, lacking said bulldogitude, can't be expected to have done much better, can he? Which reminds us: a certain faction in the CSP is positive Philip is French. Research and background checks are yet to be performed, but c'mon. Explains a lot, right?

In any case, Sale's stuff was not lacking but his command was. That's very much in line with what we'd wager a man with the heart of a champion but the protective flesh and flab of a carcass post-condor would produce in those circumstances. Ergo, we are mostly sure that he'll be fine going forward.

Which brings us to worry number 2, or as one respondent put it, "What's with all the f@#%@#ing home runs, that bum?!" Worries about the quality of our sample and the spelling of said respondent aside, we posit that this issue is merely regression to the mean.

Consider, for instance, the home run Billy Butler hit in the 6th on Friday:

We suspect you might figure this out on your own, but it's the light blue square labeled "3". Our double agent CSPer working at Brooks tells us this pitch was tagged at 94.6 mph. Is there anything about that pitch that's especially hittable? The nasty factor on such pitches typically clocks in the "yeah that's pretty nasty" to "gross" range. While Steve Stone and Hawk Harrelson were all but calling Butler the next Frank Thomas and are obviously wrong in saying as much, the guy can hit a little. C'est la vie.

If Butler doesn't hit this thing out, people might still be talking about his sudden "issue" with homers, but we suspect far fewer. Things are only ever a problem until we start losing. And then they're unfixable problems until we start winning again. Which is why we generally regret asking people without impressive statistical acumen much of anything. I mean, it's our job to tell you which is glorious truth and which filthy lie, right? What's with all this opinion having? We digress.

The bomb Rosales hit in Sale's start against the A's was basically similar. Wasn't behind in the count or anything. It was up in the zone and not nearly as hard thrown. But certainly far from anything one might call "a cookie" as certain beschnozzled announcers say.

The other two from those games were far more deserving of such a label, but here we would like to make a point: so what. As incredible as Sale has been this season, he still throws probably 5 or 6 such pitches a start. Were one to watch for them, one would find them. Just because we're worried you won't believe us, here's every slider Sale's thrown this year to RHB by location:

More than a few that qualify as less than quality pitches by location. Yet Sale has given up 13 HR all season. Let's say half of them have been given up on sliders (probably a high estimate). He's thrown 354 to righties this season. If only 25 qualify as hangers (probably a low estimate), that's still only 20% of hangers leaving the yard. Throwing bad pitches is bad because of how much worse they are than good pitches. Not because they're always absolutely crushed.

Nope, Chris has given up a few more HR lately because he was bound to. As a percentage of the number of fly balls allowed, his HR total was very low up until a few starts ago. Now he's at 10%, which is just about the average in the major leagues.

Just as, we feel we must mention, the White Sox are probably not so talented as to consistently win 8/10 games from the Rangers, Angels and Blue Jays. Just as the Sox are probably not such a stewing, rotting mess of garbage to regularly lose 5 of 6 to the Royals. That's baseball, and that's variance around a mean. Or as one weirdly fatalistic and for some reason southern twanged respondent put it:

"I reckon we're just a buncha tennis balls flinged back and forth over a net. I also reckon I hate tennis. Sox play Monday right?"

A Message From All Of Us At The Chris Sale Project

colintj — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 07:19:59 -0000

I've taken some heat on the ol' twitters for my obsession with Sale's velocity. Not wanting to let anyone down, I was anxious and worried as Sale delivered that first heater. Not to go right back into the sort of news that takes the "Caw!" out of your mouth, but I had this on my mind:

One thing's for certain, though: Sale's precipitous drop in velocity is a real problem and highly indicative of some sort of injury to the pitching arm. Just because he's not reporting pain doesn't mean he's not injured - plenty of pitchers throw while injured though they display no symptoms.

That's Kyle Boddy, my hired (except free) gun on all things biomechanics. I need guys like him because pitcher injuries are fairly significantly beyond my ken. The vast majority of baseball commentators, for that matter, don't know much about what they're looking at. Just as with the vast array of people, claims and techniques Moneyball threw in front of the public, this brand of science brings to the fore a reservoir of information and subsequent conclusions the response to which an individual fan should rightly find difficult to manage. But they should be very very willing to figure it the hell out.

Because, let's face it, the potential import is undeniable. What happens with Chris Sale is huge for a franchise that's drained of reserves and has all its money on the table. Can you think what this team would be like without him? The payroll would be the same, only we'd have no chance in the division.

Now, Boddy's not exactly telling Caesar to avoid the capital; fate is not known. He's cool with the Sox plan to have him out there. It's something more like, if we knew there are a bunch of dudes with knives down the way, maybe just chill at home for a while. Without an explicit diagnosis enabled by higher tech and access than fans are permitted, all we have are radar readings and every dip, contort, fling, grimace, stare and smile.

Having seen every one of those this year, here's what i think: this guy is the best pitcher I've seen in a Sox uniform. I don't have an editor, this is just me, right now, with a functioningish brain. The guy is absolutely fantastic. I can't believe how savvy he is, how intense he is. Do you remember that look on his face for that relief appearance? Pure malice. Toward whomever. He was a man denied, furious.

But he's back where he knows he belongs and he's so good and so weird that we really really do not know how much time we have with him. His nickname is the Condor! It was supposed to be a joke, but this is baseball. Do you remember Carlos Quentin's 2008? How well? And how well will you? Does anyone even care about Loaiza's 2003? Humber's perfect game? How about compared to Buehrle's? We remember Frank. We remember Mark. So I'm telling you, emboss in those synapses these starts and remember because right now, he's that damn good. It's August, there's a pennant to win and he's going to pitch until he falls down.

2012 might not be all we get of Chris Sale, but it might be all we get of 2012 Chris Sale.

The Chris Sale Project De-drydocks

colintj — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:36:30 -0000

Ladies and gents, your 2012 White Sox. This jerry-rigged mess of duct tape and cardboard tubes keeps winning somehow. Last night, the CSP band of analysts, merry-makers and assorted hangers on assembled to take in the Project's namesake's return from the ignoble exile fatigue imposed upon him. And, glory be, Chris Sale proved that he's got at least a few starts left this season and that he might be the ace this franchise really, really needs. He was successful and that's great and who cares how or why!

Right, that's how I write these things? Actually, I'm getting the sense that it's supposed to be dry, worried, nitpicky and velo-centric. Well then. Sale's average on his fastball was a hair under 93 mph, a smidge better than his season average. And you know what? I might go so far as to say it was a clear difference maker.

To wit, point the first: Royals hitters spent much of the night with their oppo swings. Opposite field hitting is not in fact the panacea some suggest. Why? Because it's much harder to get extra base hits and extra base hits lead to runs. That's not to say damage can't be done, but if the fly balls allowed aren't getting pulled, chances of success are higher.

Two, Sale struck out 7 of the 30 batters he faced, a return to form. That's pretty much dead on his season average which had been falling as his velocity fell. So fewer balls were batted and those that were were easier to defend. The effects of added velocity were not hard to find.

The end result was dominant: 2 runs over 8 IP, 7 K to 0 BB.

That's velocity. And of the nitpickery or--let's hope not--sheer drudgery, evidence suggests his command was not all there. He managed just one whiff from his slider all night and, perhaps more importantly, had a difficult time throwing his fastball up and in.

The latter fact seemed at least somewhat responsible for the two runs, both home runs. Francoeur's homer was what you get when a strong dude with no regard for the strike zone sits dead red with his oppo swing loaded. He's one of a pretty small number of guys in the league who can do what he did there. Which is why, despite everything about him that's so obviously crap, he still has a job. Frenchy didn't have to fear the fastball in jamming him and Sale couldn't get it in there to make him think otherwise.

Butler was somewhat similar, though the 2-0 count was also a factor. In the 5th, he was in the same count, went soft away and coaxed a K. AJ figured they could get him inside this time, but the spot was not at all good. Butler, like Francoeur, was sitting fastball in a location and got it.

Those were pitches, with lesser velocity, Sale was managing to avoid. Personally, I'd rather have stuff than rely on immaculate command if I have to choose. Those two relatively lackluster pitches weren't the only ones Sale threw last night and, in general, he was still throwing a solid number when his stuff was less good. I'd argue he was luckier before. This Sale is one whose command I expect will improve as he gets back into the groove. But if the velocity sticks, utter dominance is on the table.

Ho-hum, what's new. The guy's got a 2 something ERA.

Brushing Up On Francisco Liriano

colintj — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 20:55:03 -0000

By now, Liriano is known league-wide for his great stuff and results that only sometimes match. For his career, his 4.33 ERA is well above his 3.69 FIP. That's twice the difference of Javy Vazquez, well known around these parts for the same problem. In figuring out Liriano's exact value to the White Sox, figuring out where that difference comes from is essential. It's obvious that the aspects of pitching not captured by of his strike outs, walks and home runs allowed have been a drag on his career. But how and why?

For starters, that 0.64 runs/9 difference is maybe more like a 0.4 true difference after regressing somewhat. Still bigger than Javy's career line, but at least a bit more manageable. FIP, you may recall, estimates the runs a pitcher should allow just using strikeouts, walks and home runs as inputs. That means the difference in his ERA is rooted elsewhere. The remaining culprits are BABIP and pitching with runners on base.

His career BABIP is .306 while the AL average from ‘06-’12 excluding ‘07 is .297. I'm excluding '07 because he was injured that season. That’s over the 2200 balls in play he's allowed, or a difference of like 20 non-HR base hits. We said that there’s an approximately .4 run difference per 9 innings in his FIP and his true ERA talent. Over his career (783.3 IP), that’s a 35 run difference. Could those 20 base hits could have been worth 35 runs?

To find out, we need to know the run values of base hits over outs, which means we need to know linear weights. Here are the original run values for events above an out calculated in the Book:

Those aren’t exact for the seasons Liriano has pitched, but it's good enough for government work. 35 runs per 20 base hits is 1.75 runs per base hit. Given that not even a HR is that valuable, we can't explain all of Liriano's problems with BABIP. But it does go a long way. 15 singles and 5 doubles (a reasonable distribution) is 17 runs.

Now, that's 17 runs on average. If your timing sucks and you, whether through luck or skill, tend to give those base hits up with men on base, that 17 could be far worse. Remember Javy's incredible penchant for the blow up inning? About as much fun as reading a blog post full of arcane arithmetic. Most indications we have suggest that pitching from the stretch is barely different than pitching without runners on, so ascribing a cause for the issue is difficult.

And but so it turns out he tends to give up more base hits than expected and on top of that, he doesn’t do a great job of pitching to the situation. Which is kind of weird, right? We know he's got great stuff and you might be inclined to think that suggests he should have skills in preventing base hits. Stuff that's hard to hit should also be hard to hit hard.

In Liriano's case it doesn't hold. Somehow, hitters when they do make contact, are doing an unexpectedly good job of hitting the ball hard. And, worse, they seem to tend to do it more often with runners on base. Over the course of his career, it's made the difference between being good and great. On top of that, he's had some bad luck and that makes things look even worse.

Given the symptoms, there are two areas in need of examination: mechanics and mentality.

As regards the former, feel free to google "Francisco Liriano mechanics" and peruse at your leisure. The headlines read something like "sorting out mechanics aids Liriano". Which, like, if he were actually able to do that, you'd think that kind of story would be somewhat less prevalent.

Evidently, we should expect those kinds of issues. It will be hard to pick them out though. Without watching in super slow motion, the only thing to do is to watch a ton of pitches. Eventually your sub-conscious will start flagging the bad ones for you. That's my method anyway.

Fortunately, I'm not the White Sox pitching coach, Don Cooper is. And as often seems to be the case, he seems to have picked out a few things he thinks he can fix. Whether or not they prove fixable will likely come down to Liriano's mental and emotional capacity for learning and trust. Guys who have mental issues may or may not mesh well and if they don’t experience success rapidly, they may not see any reason to trust his coaching.

I can't speak to Liriano's abilities in that regard, though I think his performance certainly leaves open the possibility that he's lacking in it somewhat. Remember, he's getting hit hard in spite of his stuff, not because of it. Maybe he's the kind of guy who throws sliders because he likes throwing sliders, misses early in the count and is forced to throw fastballs in fastball counts as a result. That kind of guy may or may not take well to coaching.

The bottom line is that it doesn't matter too much. The Sox absolutely needed to add some depth to their staff with Sale's velocity issues and the variety of injuries afflicting the roster. With no change, he's probably a slightly below average starter. If Coop can fix him, his upside is huge and they may score some trust that leads to a contract in 2013 and beyond.

Oh, and we discovered that the answer to the question "Can a high ceiling solid floor veteran starter be acquired for something less than Dan Hudson?" is yes. Everything's coming up Milhouse!

Brushing Up On Whoever I Feel Like

colintj — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 05:54:17 -0000

Phil Humber

I'm glad he's back and I'm glad he had a good start. An informal poll of whoever I happened to read over the past month shows everyone hates Phil Humber and thinks he's terrible. That same poll from 2011 had everyone singing hallelujahs he was so dang good. Why couldn't he have thrown that perfect game last year? It would make things so much less confusing.

But yeah, remember how we ended last post with a discussion of regression? Let's do a quick refresher course. Results, the things we see happen on the field, are some part real talent and some part luck. The game being what it is, the exact same pitch in the exact same count to the exact same batter in the exact same conditions yield different results. That's baseball. If we could run those conditions infinity times, we'd have a perfect idea of what that split of outcomes would look like.

But we can't, so we have to guess. And what we know is that most major league baseball players aren't excellent. They're average. So we guess that a good performer is some part good and some part average.

So Humber's stuff is pretty much the same, but he got hurt. We could probably guess that was hampering his command and that's why he's giving up so many fewer ground balls than normal despite the same stuff. Either way, he's a major league pitcher. If his command comes back, he can be a bit above average. If it doesn't he'll be below. Either way, we're gonna need him.

Dylan Axelrod

Let's say Phil Humber is a slight worse Gavin Floyd. There's some sense in calling Dylan Axelrod a more than slightly worse Phil Humber. He's so far showed off a great slider, but everything else is below average. Sometimes there are nights when his command is immaculate or his fastball doesn't get hammered, so he can get some Ks and look pretty good.

Mostly though, he just doesn't have enough to cope with major league hitters for too long. The longer the Sox are forced to put him out there, the less of a talent gap there is between the Tigers' staff and ours. That said, he works pretty good as a middle or long reliever in lower leverage. Against a righty-heavy lineup, he could even do a little damage. Most teams aren't going to let him face too many of those, but following a lefty starter he ends up with a pretty decent matchup.

Pedro Hernandez

Yikes, right? He had a pretty okay fastball for a bit and not much else. Showed a lot of chutzpah and if any organization can teach a breaking ball, it's this one. He seemed like he had an idea of how to pitch to minor leaguers. You don't have to squint too hard to see a future LOOGY with some possibility of more.

Addison Reed

I think I'm finally over wishing he'd throw more sliders. Right now, that pitch is not where he wants it to be. His results, with as few as he's thrown, have only been average. He's had about as much of the element of surprise on his side that you can get and he's not getting tremendous results. In the very least, we have to say it's not a plus pitch right now.

The fastball, however, is the opposite. It's rather good. I don't love the movement on it, but he does seem to be able to cut it a bit and let it ride a bit. I think he's doing a good job with disguise, his command is solid and the velocity is pretty righteous. He's not elite right now but Don Cooper is the exact person for this job.

Matt Thornton

Easy Heat is in the process of becoming a somewhat different pitcher. He's throwing more sliders than he has in the past. And it's getting a little better at getting whiffs. His fastball velocity is in decline somewhat and he's trying to adapt. Theory: it's obvious he's not going to get through the contract as an elite guy without figuring out a slider, so the organization is finally giving it some attention.

Alright, that's pretty much it. If I missed somebody you wanted to read more about, ask in the comments or use the ol' twitters.

The Chris Sale Project Commandeers A Ship

colintj — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 04:25:28 -0000

Jim's on furlough and I'm driving the bus, so the plan is not to just talk about Chris Sale today. The pitchers in general are in such a state of flux with a relative dearth of commentary from a scouting perspective. I'm going to cover anyone I've got something to say about in a later post.

Ok, so about Sale. For one, I don't think he should have been out there for the 8th inning. Or, rather, I think he should have been pulled once it was clear he was starting to fade and the situational leverage went up. It's absolutely the case Sale is the kind of guy we need to lean on given everything else going on with the staff. But he didn't look himself for an inning or two. It happens and it's not hard to spot. His velocity starts to dip noticeably and/or there's an abnormal variance in it. And but so if things look screwy and his mechanics start to falter, that's when injuries happen. We should probably avoid letting that happen, right?

Another point about Sale: I've mentioned before and I want to reiterate just how good his command has been. He's lost 3 mph off every pitch he throws and despite all that he's actually lowered his ERA and FIP. That's nuts.

His stuff has been good. His command has been absolutely stellar and it's given him a lot of leeway with his velocity. His fastball goes up and down in speed a lot and it registers as weird to me and presumably it's been somewhat weird for the Sox staff. But so far it looks like he's been picking a velocity that enables him to hit his spots. His strikeouts are sometimes there, sometimes less so. But his command is almost always spot on and when he's performed badly, it's been when he can't place the ball where he wants. That's what I saw against KC in those 7th and 8th innings and that's why I wanted a reliever in.

So there's that. The other important bit is that it's hard to know what exactly is sustainable at this stage. He just hasn't been pitching for long enough to be very certain. For instance, it's hard to do a good projection for a guy who's only just moved to starting. Typically, that means you lose a bit of stuff, but your walks don't change much. Sale's lost stuff, but he seems to have lost more than usual in order to gain a great deal of command.

For his career, he's at about an average walk rate. So is that the real Sale? Should we expect regression all the way to the MLB mean? Or has he taken a definitive jump forward? If all we had ever seen was this season, we'd expect he had superior command. I'm sure everyone here thinks he has superior command. Then again, everyone here hates Phil Humber now and loved him last year.

Whatever your theory, you need to expect some regression. But how much?

The Chris Sale Project Gets Mast

colintj — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:13:59 -0000

Against Minnesota yesterday, Chris Sale really didn't have his best anything. He wasn't laboring, but there did seem to be a hangover effect from going toe to toe with Zack Greinke. In any case, it was still plenty against a Twins lineup that happened to be a particularly bad matchup against the Condor as the Twins' best bats outside of Josh Willingham are all left handed. The rest of the lineup was a bunch of whodats like Trevor Plouffe and Brian Dozier who need luck to really do any damage against superior stuff.

To me at least, it seemed as though Sale recognized all of this. He never had his best velocity and on top of that his command was far from great. Fortunately, he appears to have learned a lesson about pitching at less than 100% Rather than continue to try to make pitches in the vein of those he normally does, Sale threw more off-speed pitches than usual and made sure to put them in the zone wherever they may land.

This sort of pitching led to a decent number of hard hit balls, including Dozier's HR. That particular slider may have been Sale's worst on the season. Not that it really mattered. The movement on his change and slider were too much and he refused to give in and let them beat him on his relatively lackluster fastball. And of course, it certainly helped that the Twins weren't especially inclined to work for free passes. Even so, Sale (with AJ calling the game) kept his off-speed stuff in the zone and made sure nobody could sit on his fastball.

That quality best links his start yesterday against his masterful performance against the Brewers last Friday. And the Crew, let it be known, were far better equipped to attack the southpaw than were the Twinkies:

Without having plugged and chugged everyone, I came up with what are probably the best three hitters against lefties for each team. Thanks to this nifty Excel spreadsheet from Whelk at DRays Bay (ht: Sky Kalkman), we can get a more exact idea of just how much the Twins were in thanks to their roster construction. With Willingham and to a much lesser extent Span representing the dangermen in the Twins attack, Sale really didn't have much to worry about even though he wasn't at the top of his game.

Side note: interestingly, Span is one of those rare hitters with reverse platoon splits. So I'm not confident that nifty Excel spreadsheet handled that aspect of the projection ably. Either way, the table speaks to the problems the Twins have against lefties. Maybe I should have bothered to run Trevor Plouffe or Jamey Carroll's numbers. I doubt it.

Against the Brewers however, Sale had to navigate far more treacherous waters. As usual, his body language told the story. Rather than repeat his over-amped-ness as was obvious against the Dodgers, Sale was focused, collected and absolutely confident in his catcher's pitch selection:

Those are the pitches Sale threw on 3-2 last Friday. The 2 fastballs clocked 93-94 mph and induced a pop up each time. The 4 off-speed pitches all ended in strike outs, including a devastating slider to Maldonado with Rickie Weeks on third and two outs.

In other words, Sale was filthy all night and as ballsy as it gets. That's really all there is to say about it. When he's dominant like that, it shows up everywhere. On the box score, on TV, whatever. All there is to say is "wow", "goddamn" and "sheeeeeeeeiiit".

The Chris Sale Project Is Not A Ghost Ship

colintj — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 04:03:22 -0000

Last Friday, Chris Sale delivered the worst start of his major league career. Certainly it was disheartening to watch, but if there's a silver lining, it's that it sets up a nice comparison with everything else he's done so far in 2012. In my mind, it really gets after what makes an ace an ace. Or Sale an ace, anyway.

Notably, I don't think it was a matter of stuff. Just looking at the data really doesn't get you too far. For instance, his velocity was right on par with his season averages. Yeah, he debuted a slider with different movement than usual, but it's hardly the first time he's done that this year. And on top of all that, his change-up was undeniably good.

This should not be all that surprising, of course, as that's precisely what I've documented in my posts over the last four weeks. As you'll no doubt recall, I went hunting for correlations between Sale's whiff rate on his slider and key variables one might suspect were responsible for its success or lack thereof. I'll spare you a repeat of the unpretty graphs, but Sale's slider whiffs were apparently unaffected by the velocity at which he threw it nor the movement he imparted on the ball. On top of that, I found very weak correlation between the speed of the pitch and the corresponding movement. In sum, all were things I expected to find some supporting evidence for and came up completely empty.

It's possible sample size issues explains some of the inability to find correlation, certainly. But given how rapidly whiffs stabilize, it's not exactly the most robust explanation for the data. It seems to me that the thing to do is to take what I found at face value and figure out how to fit it to some narrative.

So but which narrative? Let's begin by stating that the lack of correlation between velocity, movement and whiffs does not at all suggest that Sale could throw any kind of lollipop roller of a breaking ball he pleases if he aims to strike batters out. Rather, the best guess is that Sale is bundling his breaking balls with a combination of velocity, movement, timing and location that results in frequent batter bafflement.

This is where the start against the Dodgers comes in. If we are willing to buy that Sale's slider was still within useful bounds of velocity and movement, we can see just how important location and timing are to Mr. Bones' success. Further bolstering the natural experiment, Sale threw the vast majority of his sliders after he got ahead of the batter. He elected to throw his slider in just one 2- or 3-ball count all game. That is, on top of movement and velocity, we can also hold timing constant to some degree and focus primarily on the importance of location in the success of the pitch. And that location looked like this:

He missed badly away to righties with his slider as many times against the Dodgers as he had in his five previous starts combined. And, if you follow the narrative I favor, these bad missed made batters less inclined to swing overall. When Sale did manage to find the zone, the location was bad enough that they were less likely to whiff if Dodger hitters did decide to swing. The poor outcome is apparent in the numbers: of the 30 sliders he threw on the evening, just two ended in whiffs. Typically, he'd get 5-6 on that number of sliders. In the counts he threw them in, that's something like 2-4 outs deferred.

And of course, that analysis is limited to the results from actually throwing the pitch. It doesn't say anything about his reduced opportunity to use what's normally a plus pitch in less favorable counts. It also ignores the struggles he had with location generally, which means those deferred outs are all the more likely to lead to walks and extra base hits than normal. I'd liken it to having to pitch around an error per inning.

Fortunately, I don't see the problem persisting. As I mentioned on twitter and in the comment thread, he looked to me like he was overthrowing and in the process threw his mechanics out of whack. Jim guessed that he was over-excited for his matchup against Kershaw and I think that's a fairly likely culprit. Chris has definitely acted the part of an intense, high strung emotional pitcher so far this season. He wants to compete and win and he tries to step up his game when it matters most. Hence, hi response to giving up a couple base hits early on some bad fastballs was to throw as hard as possible and dominate the opposition.

Not an ideal response, certainly, but I empathize with the approach and I like what it suggests about his future. Most interestingly, I think it suggests that Don Cooper is the guy responsible for putting that slower 88-91 mph fastball in his arsenal. A guy lacking confidence in certain parts of his game plan is going to stick with the stuff he thinks he's best at and has ben doing the longest. Until Coop was able to cool him off, that was the big heater at the expense of the slow one.

Obvs, I'd like to think this will mean he'll drop the pitch as he gets stronger and the Sox drop the helicopter parents schtick. A man can dream.

Oh Hey A Gamethread

colintj — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 02:32:48 -0000

Current Series

Dodgers lead the series 1-0

Fri 06/15	WP: Ronald Belisario (2 - 0) SV: Kenley Jansen LP: Matt Thornton (2 - 4)	6 - 7 loss
Chicago White Sox South Side Sox @ Los Angeles Dodgers True Blue LA Saturday, Jun 16, 2012, 9:10 PM CDT Dodger Stadium Philip Humber vs Chad Billingsley Clear. Winds blowing out to right field at 5-10 m.p.h. Game time temperature around 65. Complete Coverage >
Sun 06/17		3:10 PM CDT

Current Series

Dodgers lead the series 1-0

Fri 06/15	WP: Ronald Belisario (2 - 0) SV: Kenley Jansen LP: Matt Thornton (2 - 4)	6 - 7 loss
Chicago White Sox South Side Sox @ Los Angeles Dodgers True Blue LA Saturday, Jun 16, 2012, 9:10 PM CDT Dodger Stadium Philip Humber vs Chad Billingsley Clear. Winds blowing out to right field at 5-10 m.p.h. Game time temperature around 65. Complete Coverage >
Sun 06/17		3:10 PM CDT

The Chris Sale Project Luffs Less

colintj — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:27:37 -0000

Well that was better, no? It's not as if Chris Sale threw all that much harder against the Angels than in previous starts. But it did seem to be something of a difference maker nonetheless. And, yeah, the Angels are shuffling a bit at the moment, but that's a talented squad with real hitters that will eventually get their act together. Outside of Pujols' bomb, Sale kept them in their rut while looking far more like the pitcher we hope he can be.

Perhaps most importantly, he seemed to have a much clearer idea not only of what to do with his fastball but on top of that managed to actually do it. Since the season began, he's shown a substantial variance in the velocity of his fastball, dropping all the way to 88 mph at times and peaking at 95 or so. It looked as though he was trying to throw two separate pitches, but managed to succeed only sometimes. Often, he'd go with his best fastball early only to putter out as he got deeper into games.

Against the Angels, he seemed more judicious. Indeed, his out pitch in this particular outing was the harder fastball. In two strike counts, Sale brought the gas and the end result was a whiff rate in the vicinity of 30% for all fastballs thrown. This is all the more impressive given who the Angels sent to the plate. As mentioned, I think there's plenty of talent on that team. But they also started a lineup consisting entirely of hitters who had the platoon advantage against Sale. That his best fastball would be so effective against them is a feather in his cap.

Moreover, he had what was likely his best change-up of the season ready to attack the all-RHB lineup. Sale's change has been iffy from the start, though this was far less noticeable when his slider was wiping out the opposition. As that hasn't been the case of late, compensating with a viable change-up would certainly go a long way. It still did not register as a legitimate plus offering in my eyes, but it was solid.

In fact, I don't think this slider-gets-worse-change-gets-better trend is an accident. My best guess is that neither of his offspeed offerings are really great on their own but are instead very dependent on the usage and velocity of his fastball. Yes, this is true of all pitchers, but I submit that it is particularly true in Sale's case.

The slider seems to be most effective when Sale can threaten to throw his best fastball in any count. The movement on the pitch isn't ideal, but when he's throwing his hardest it's just difficult enough to pick up out of his hand that it's a serious strikeout pitch.

Without his best velocity available in any count of any at bat, the slider becomes more of an early count show-me pitch that he needs to throw for a strike. If he can do that, he can go lesser fastball/slider early in the count and switch it up to a best fastball/change-up combination to get the whiff.

If that's true, moving to a curveball rather than a slider wouldn't be the worst thing for a guy who throws from that arm slot. Scioscia's starting 9 is further evidence that when managers see him on the mound, their first move is to clear LHB from the lineup card. That makes a true slider less relevant to Sale's success and a curve is traditionally a pitch with a much smaller platoon split. If the lanky lefty could pick a 77-79 mph curve with 5-6 inches of drop rather than a slurvy slider at 78-80 with 3-4, he might be well advised to do so.

Slider or curve, I think that's a fairly plausible hypothesis regarding the importance of his fastball velocity. There's a lot of season left and the actual testing of said hyp. is still to be done, granted, but the Angels start was encouraging. He looked like the kind of number 2 pitcher the Sox always seem to have in abundance. They're vulnerable, sure, but they've got a plus pitch or two, good command and no fear. Not too shabby for a 23 year old who's yet to reach his two year anniversary of being drafted.

...That really sounds like it should be the end of the post doesn't it? I couldn't think of a better way to wedge in the following but was still convinced I needed to mention it. The following: I really, really wish Chris Sale would hit the weight room in earnest. Or, if he did that, take in enough calories to actually add some meat to those bones. If a kid who looked like he does came into a college football or basketball program, they'd add 20 lbs to his frame in a year and another 10 or 20 over the next. Baseball really needs to get over its fear of proper weight training.

The Chris Sale Project Issues The Full Ahead

colintj — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:48:07 -0000

Well that was a bit of a whirlwind adventure in media mismanagement wasn't it? When last I wrote, I expected not to be writing this column for a while. That was my expectation because the White Sox insisted Chris Sale was no longer going to be starting. Then they insisted the opposite and he started on Saturday.

In any case, I only just went back and watched the start. Didn't catch it on Saturday, but I was relieved to hear from a few folks that he looked pretty good. I'm not sure I agree. It was an up-and-down outing, with a lot of frustration. The Royals never really hit him hard outside of Billy Butler's double on a serious fastball up and out of the zone. Beckham's error didn't help, neither did a number of bloops. But, ultimately, all was not well.

His velocity was basically shot after the first inning or so and he averaged under 92mph on the fastball yet again. This worries me, as the normal loss of velocity as the game wears on is much much less than the massive drop-off Sale experienced. Let's assume for a bit that's not related to injury/excessive fatigue and consider how he looks as a pitcher with a fastball that sits 90-92. That's still useful, right? As long as he's got an off-speed pitch or two, right?

Uh, well, the thing is according to PitchFx he threw 19 sliders and got 0 whiffs. None. If you click through to the link, you can also see the pitch's average movement. At this point, it's we might as well call it a curveball. Any pitch that averages 6 inches of vertical drop usually ends up with that designation.

For reference, that's 3 times the drop he averaged last season. Sale's first two starts featured a different slider than he threw last season, but they still had legit slider action. Since then it's been curvier and curvier. Whether he can tell or not, he's not throwing the same pitch and it's become very obvious to hitters. I don't think it's too far out there to suggest that curves are much easier to recognize than sliders. Or that the success of a slider is dependent on disguise.

The one real plus from the Royals start was that his change-up finally got a few whiffs. As a guy who previously considered that his bread and butter pitch, it's strange that he's struggled with it so much. If it turns out this whole thing is a process to produce three legitimate pitches, I think the Sox can live with that. We might like to think otherwise, but there's no really good reason not to sacrifice 2012 in exchange for subsequent season performance.

That's fine and I hope we get there. The fact is the pitcher that showed up on Saturday had two perhaps three below average pitches combined with good command. That's a far cry from what Sale showed he can do earlier this season, not to mention all of last. Though that's still probably more valuable than his performance as a closer would net.

Anyway, let's go back to the Coop/Ventura v. Kenny Williams tiff. Since it appears that at no point did anybody want Sale shut down, maybe Coop thought the pen would be a good place to work out his slider kinks? Perhaps? Consider a few facts: in Sale's lone relief appearance, the slider of 2011 re-appeared, only to vanish on Saturday. According to Kyle Boddy, it doesn't look like Sale's mechanics have changed much, at least on the fastball. To me, that suggests that there isn't a major injury. Similarly, fatigue can change mechanics but they don't seem to have done so. Take all that and add it in combination with the expression on Sale's face in his relief start and his conversation with the umpire on Saturday.

Chris Sale has a lot on his mind. It's probably getting to him. Something about pitching in relief triggered some muscle memory. As pissed as he was, he was still more comfortable mentally. And for whatever reason, the pressure accompanying the starting gig has him fiddling and thinking. A lot. So the fastball velocity goes way up and way down, the slider changes from start to start and things look awry.

We saw what Sale's floor looked like on Saturday. And if the Sox can find someone to play Crash Davis to his Ebby Calvin Laloosh, we might just find out what his ceiling looks like somewhere down the road. Until then, Sale may be responsible for a free steak or two.

The Chris Sale Project Abandons Ship

colintj — Mon, 07 May 2012 03:14:32 -0000

Soooo you know how this whole column was going to analyze each of Sale's starts as he progressed through 2012? Perhaps you've heard by now that Sox management is moving him to closer, purportedly for the remainder of the season. As long as that proves to be the case, this will be the last entry in the ol' project, despite the substantial pile of terrible nautical allusions I stocked up on just for this.

That's not to say SSS won't be watching Sale closely from here on out. Let there be no doubt: whatever happens, Chris Sale's career matters a lot. Whether or not he proves able to start full time is a serious test of the organization's specific ability to groom and protect young pitchers. This in turn will speak to its overall (dys)functionality. The White Sox of the past decade have founded whatever success they have had on pitching. Don Cooper is very likely the best in the business at coaching them. Herm Schneider is the best in the business at keeping them healthy. Together, they are the Sox' competitive advantage. If that's been compromised in some way, I don't know how the Sox intend to compete over the long haul.

My personal theory is that they're fine but that a degree of rot afflicts the chain of command and resulted in at least some missing starts for Jake Peavy, not to mention the trade of Dan Hudson. This might be the case. Or maybe Coop and Herm just aren't perfect and everything is as it's always been. All we know is what happened, we don't know how the individuals that comprise the Sox management interacted to produce those fateful decisions. As such, turning Chris Sale into a legit number 2 starter or better suggests organizational health. Anything short of that is evidence of the opposite.

The version of Sale we had prior to his elbow tweak pointed the way forward for this team. He threw smoke, had a killer breaking ball, enough of a change-up and command of those pitches. A whole season of that and he's the best player on this team. Not best young player. Not best pitcher. Further qualification unnecessary B-E-S-T. And on top of that, he's being paid peanuts--Or carrion? Is that what condors eat? It doesn't cost much is the point. Signing, coaching, and protecting young talent is how you compete in major league baseball. It's also the sort of thing the Sox have not demonstrated they can do well. There are a handful of guys on this team under 27 and Sale was the only one who projected to be above average. Our minor leaguers are the worst in MLB.

In other words: if that version of Sale never materializes, the Sox are that much closer to a day of reckoning they've long staved off. They'll survive as long as Peavy, Rios and Dunn are as good as they were signed to be. And they'll certainly contend if on top of that Morel, Beckham, Viciedo and Danks figure it out. But the last couple seasons should make clear how incredibly lucky we'd be if all of those propositions played out in our favor.

The probable scenario is we'll stay mired in this .500ish morass, which once again might be enough in this crap division. And that might be enough to distract us from what a failure two division titles in seven years really is. What's more likely, though, is that we'll just have the one and be stuck watching Sisyphus roll the damn rock up the damn hill. Will Sale be ready to start? Can Paulie somehow keep it going? Is there really nobody at all in the farm system? And so on and so forth unless the organization develops the capacity to consistently stock the farm and major league team with cost controlled talent. Until then all we've got is a sheet full of depreciating assets. The clock is ticking.

The Chris Sale Project Lists Ever So Slightly

colintj — Tue, 01 May 2012 04:43:50 -0000

The numbers were all there. Last Wednesday, Chris Sale threw 8 innings without giving up a run while striking out 5 and issuing no free passes. Past the surface, however, things weren't so sparkly. For instance, this was the first start Sale allowed more fly balls than ground balls. But by far the biggest issue was Sale's velocity. After averaging about 93 mph per fastball in his first three starts, he dipped down to 91.4. The slider was off by a similar margin and his swing-and-miss rate was way down across the board. All in all, he managed just 4 whiffs on the day and it's hard to deny that Sale's best stuff, for whatever reason, was not available to him.

Fortunately for us, the A's can't hit. Making matters worse for Oakland, Bob Melvin for whatever reason penciled 4 lefties into their lineup. A solid slider and a 91 mph heater is still enough for all but the best LHB and Oakland possesses none of those. Sale compensated somewhat with what seemed like improved fastball command and did not seem at all fazed given the complications. Meanwhile the A's made it clear their aim was to swing early in the count and make sure they saw the least number of pitches possible.

So yeah, Sale's numbers looked good and with any kind of offense he would have pulled out a win. But all I can think about is whether or not we should be worried.

I'm ever the panicking sort so I tried to reassure myself with some simple statistics. The first was a simple check to make sure the gun wasn't off. I checked Matt Thornton's velocity and it was just fine. So the problem was definitely Sale, which after watching I assumed would be the case. I also thought Sale's average heater against the A's would be at least a standard deviation from his norm. It very nearly was. IMMIR* there'd be something like a 40% chance that it wouldn't be mere randomness leading him to throw a single fastball that slow. Which means there's very little chance that mere randomness lead him to go an entire start throwing that slow.

Now, if you've ever pitched, you know there are days when your stuff just isn't there and you can't figure out why. There's something bodily wrong, but you can't name what it is and it goes away and all is well the next week. So that's option 1. Alternatively, it could be that Sale chose to throw that slow. I doubt that, considering he clearly used two fastballs, one around 91-92, another 87-88. If you're already choosing to throw that slow, keeping the extra slow one in the bag is kinda weird in my opinion. If you are forced to throw that slow, maybe you keep it in there for the sake of seeming/feeling more wily.

And then of course there's the super sad possibility that he's seriously injured in some way. It could be the case, but I'd like to think it's not. I went back and watched some of his bigger heaters and he didn't seem to be over-exerting to throw that hard nor did he seem to grimace or change his mechanics. Overall, it didn't seem to me like anything had really changed. If you forced me to say what if anything had changed, I'd say how much he was flexing his trunk. So perhaps his back was a little sore?

Mostly I think this will be illustrative of what it means to watch every single start as closely as possible. Normally I'd say "huh, his velocity is down," file it into the ol' subconscious and forget about it until the next start. And I do mean "forget" and "subconscious". My popsci understanding of how The Great And Mysterious Human Brain works is that that's the subtle pattern recognizer part of the brain. The conscious just turns that recognition into words. Normally when I'm watching a pitcher, I try to let suggestions bubble up and see if they make sense without consciously analyzing them too much.** But this column is of course the exact opposite. I need an angle each and every start and that aspect inverts what I understand to be the optimal process.

That is, am I focused on this because I should be? I still say yes. The point of properly applied statistics is to give just such concrete foundation to the suspicions of the flimsy fickle human brain. So long as they're properly applied, I think this bears watching. My guess says he's fine. The stats as I've applied them say we need to guess one way or the other.

*If My Math Is Right...no guarantees. I'm feeling pretty dumb today.

**No seriously, sometimes I try not to analyze things to death.

The Chris Sale Project Isn't A Schooner

colintj — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:15:49 -0000

Lost somewhat in all the entirely deserved praise of Philip Humber's perfect game was Chris Sale's own breakout performance last Friday. In case you've already forgotten, Sale struck out 11 over 6 1/3 IP while giving up 3 runs on 7 hits. And yes, it is the Mariners and they still managed a decent number of runs, but that kind of swing-and-miss number has a whiff--intended--of league ace to it. For all the White Sox success on the mound during the Cooper Era, they've rarely had the kind of guy that strikes fear into the hearts of opposing batters. Kenny's philosophy has been to have a staff full of number 2's; good but not unbeatable.

It's in that sense Sale's 11 really gives us something to dream on. For comparison, Sox starters managed just one start with more than 10 Ks last season, for which we may thank Edwin Jackson. On April 7 2011, EJax took down 13 Rays on strikes and looked every bit the world beater SSS thought he might be. But, for one, we were pretty sure he was gone after the season was over. And two, it's not like Edwin hadn't been around the block. As a fan, there was just not great reason to get invested in much beyond the result he provided that day. Except maybe to keep score in any debates over, say, whether he was better than Philip Humber.*

Sale is different. Like the respective early days of Gordon Beckham and Carlos Quentin before him**, the Sale-as-starter experience is excitement enough whatever the records say. There's just so much that we don't yet know. And it's this that gets to what's so intoxicating and repulsive about being a sports fan. I watch with a happy-queasy feeling that only caring too much about sports seems to provide. It's a weird mix of dread that everything will go wrong and hope that for once everything will be perfect, I guess? I like thinking about it in terms of recent Sox history. Perhaps he's 2005, writ small, a savior rather than The Savior. Maybe he's 2007. Or '08. Or '09. Perfect happens but you can't tell it is until it's over. And until we know we get/are forced to watch.

Sale's slider was the big story of his start and he was far more like his start in Cleveland in terms of usage. Of the 110 pitches recorded by Brooks PFx, just under half were sliders. He threw about that number of fastballs and just 8 change-ups. If it wasn't authoritatively settled last year ("LALALALALACANTHEARYOU," said Keith Law), it's clear that Sale is no longer a fastball-change pitcher. He throws the slider in all counts at any time and has a really good feel for it. Arguably he's placing it better than his fastball right now. Considering Montero's bomb, Kelly's double and (iirc) Ackley's two hits were all off heaters, you could actually make the argument he should have thrown it more.

The other interesting bit about Sale's slider is that its movement is pretty slurvy, which is generally regarded as not a good pitch in the majors. There's a surprising amount of both horizontal and vertical movement for a pitch that usually has a little of one or the other. I still don't have a good grip on what passes for good or bad movement, but it's hard to argue with the results. Which, now having totally buried the lede, I should tell you about. Batters are whiffing on almost half their swings. It's a ridiculous number that's sure to come down and we should definitely keep the competition in mind, but the early returns on Sale's breaker are astounding. It's all the more impressive considering how much he's thrown it against RHB and more all the more that his whiff rate with it against RHB is exactly 50%.

His fastball looks good too, though like I said he seems to be having more trouble locating it than the slider for whatever reason. The whiff rate is solid and he gets so much horizontal movement due to his arm angle that batters from both sides are having trouble getting lift when he locates. Unfortunately against the M's it seemed like he got burned pretty much every time he left it in the zone at all. I'm fairly sure that won't be true as he goes forward, but it's not going to keep him from nibbling until he realizes that it's okay to miss on the plate. It probably won't matter, but it'd be nice if he could be as efficient as possible. Every pitch he can save now is one he can use if the Sox end up in the hunt.

*I nailed the hell out of that one.

**Who was before that? Joe Borchard? Brian Anderson? Josh Fields? It's hard to even remember feeling that hopeful about those guys, if ever I did.

The Chris Sale Project Leaves The Harbor

colintj — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 06:41:07 -0000

Hello all and welcome to an exciting new feature this season on SSS we're inventively calling "The Chris Sale Project". As the title would suggest if I were more creative, I'll be following the lanky lefty as he progresses over the season in his new role as a starter. I'll throw various stats around but I also intend to give opinions on his mechanics, where I think he's at mentally, etc. Sort of a start to start close reading of his performance and body language. That is, it will be less about addressing the prevailing wisdom proffered by non-bloggy media sorts and more about totally overanalyzing everything that happens on the mound while he's out there. Jim will cover the former more than thoroughly I don't doubt.

For the moment though, let's consider various reasons why some have suggested he might not stick as a starter. The worst/dumbest reasons have to do with massively overvaluing the value of even the best relievers. Larry demolished a rambling piece of nonsense--no doubt intently scrawled in crayon--by Joe Cowley that seemed to take that point of view. Even if Cowley had managed to be more coherent he'd still be wrong. No, I want to address another sort of Sale-to-starter criticism that will help us establish a baseline for analysis going forward, namely that of Keith Law.

Yes, yes I know. He's definitely the worst and I'm not here to lend him credence considering his self involved insistence on not coming to terms with being obviously wrong. But way back in 2010, KL actually laid out a spot on rubric by which we may judge Sale's suitability as either a starter or a reliever:

If you like Chris Sale, you see a 6'6" left-hander with an arm slot close to Randy Johnson's, a plus fastball and change, and a potential front-line starter. If you're a skeptic, you see a sidearming lefthander without an average breaking ball and a long arm action that will be tough to repeat 100-plus times an outing. I'm more in the latter camp than the former, and I think Sale's pro future is reasonably likely to come in the bullpen.

He'll sit 92-93 as a starter and has touched 96 a handful of times this spring, with good sink on the pitch that comes from the low slot, helping him generate groundballs. He turns his low-80s changeup over well, surprising given his arm slot, but it's more of an action change that relies on its downward movement and big-league hitters will lay off it when it's out of the zone. He's thrown a loopy curveball and a harder slider, with a better chance to make the slider work from that low slot, but neither is an average pitch and he primarily works with the fastball and change.

His arm action is ugly, long and complex in the back with a high elbow, and he drifts forward in a crouch more commonly seen on sidearmers and submariners. If I did draft him, I'd see if I could raise his slot just enough to get him better angle on the slider and get him to take advantage of his height. His current delivery, slot, and repertoire make him look a lot like a reliever to me.

In sum, the velocity isn't in doubt. It's a matter of mechanics and secondary offerings that have and will determine his future. Which brings us to Sale's first two starts. Unfortunately Brooks has been down for me all day, so I don't have the varied and obscure bits of data that normally I would bring to bear in such an analysis. But if you saw either or both starts, you certainly didn't see a pitcher lacking in either confidence or skill in throwing a major league slider.

Against Cleveland he pitched backward a surprising amount. By which I mean he threw a lot of sliders early in the count and looked to get outs with his fastball rather than vice versa. In that mode, he got batters to whiff on nearly 40% of their swings against his slider. I'll grant that Cleveland's lineup is lackluster, but it definitely suggests that the offering remains a quality one. Today, Sale was more traditional in his approach: he threw just one off-speech pitch of his first 11 pitches. But even with a different strategy, he was still very successful. By my count, he induced 11 swings and got five whiffs, including two on Fielder and one on Cabrera.

Much more subjectively, his delivery of the pitch seems to vary somewhat. He knows to trust the game AJ calls, but I think some dissonance develops when AJ puts down slider and Chris is thinking fastball. A lack of conviction isn't necessarily the problem (though that's what Hawk suggested). Any time you're knocked out of your groove and start to think about the process of pitching, about what you're throwing, you're not at your best. Now that he's starting, Sale knows his stuff isn't going to be quite as good. And he knows he's got to save a bit for the 6th and 7th.

Allowing that kind of vulnerability to occupy any sort of conscious brain space is problematic and I think that's been a persistent feature/bug of his first two starts. He nibbled throughout against the Indians. On Sunday, he seemed to be telling himself to be sure not to bounce his slider. He's also consistently gone to a 90-91 mph fastball, almost like a note on his bag lunch. "Remember to pace yourself. Love, Your Perhaps Excessive Self-Awareness".

I don't think this is a long term issue, as experience and hence his unconscious will gradually take back control over more and more of those moments. At which point that conscientiousness will hopefully be applied more fruitfully after games, buoying his confidence during struggles and reining in his ego in successes.

Or maybe that's not it at all. It's only been two damn ass starts. You guys got any thoughts on nicknames?

SSS Community Projection 2012: The Hitters

colintj — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 03:31:44 -0000

And we're back for day two of the ever-important community projections. Today we peer collectively into one giant crystal ball and divine the future of White Sox hitters in 2012. Just like last year, I'm asking you to project three things:

1) wOBA

2) Plate appearances

3) Defense

Of the three, PAs is obviously the most straight forward. In your opinion, how many PAs will the batter in question receive this season?

Defense is a little more complex, but can be translated pretty easily. At the position I assigned, is the defender above or below average? If he's merely a tick above his peers, call that +2.5. Well above? Maybe that's worth +7.5. If you're judging Broomy McWearsaglove, that might be worth the full -15.

Just to avoid confusing the noobs, I neglected to mention in the above graph that those values as far as I'm concerned are denominated in runs. I'm betting the scale should be obvious enough to either the regulars or the neophytes that we won't run into any problems. Worked well enough last year, so here's hoping.

Lastly, there's wOBA. It's an all encompassing hitting stat that's easier/better for me to work with than asking separately for your batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage.

.320 is average. .330 is a bit above, .310 is a bit below. Last year, Paul Konerko hit .383. Gordon Beckham hit .284. In fact you can click through to see what your favorite Sox did last year in case you're curious. Also, if it's not clear yet, it's scaled to on base percentage. So just as .350 would be a well above average OBP, it's similarly a well above average wOBA. The difference between doing the defense projection and doing wOBA is a slightly different scale.

If you're interested in the technicalities, wOBA is just the rate at which the batter produced runs adjusted to the OBP scale. As I quoted last year:

wOBA is a rate stat, like on base percentage, that expresses how many runs a batter manufactures per plate appearance. It weights PA results (walks, singles, doubles, outs etc.) based on how many runs that result is worth on average. Singles are worth less than doubles, but more than outs. Home runs are king.

Further explanation is available here and here.

SSS Community Projection 2012: The Pitchers

colintj — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:26:24 -0000

Hi everybody! It's that time of year, apparently. I would have completely forgot had KenWo not reminded me. But don't take that to mean the community projections don't mean anything to me. It's just that nothing means very much of anything to anyone on the west coast. We're a very laid back, mellow people, man.

Introductions aside, I'm doing the same exact thing as last year, warts and all. Except maybe I'll remember to ask you for your username. We'll see! For pitchers, all I want is your personal projection for a given pitcher's innings pitched and ERA. We'll save the (not at all) hard stuff for tomorrow.

Seriously, there's no reason you shouldn't do this. If you can read, you can project pitchers.

Follow the links:

Innings Pitched

ERA

Gamethread: White Sox vs. Brewers

colintj — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:44:40 -0000

Free whitesox.com webcast today.

Lineup per Sox' Twitter is:

2B Bridge

C AJ

RF Rios

1B Konerko

SS Ramirez

CF Danks

3B Morel

LF Mitchell

DH Kuhn

SP Peavy

Scouting John Danks

colintj — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:35:27 -0000

Table data taken from Texas Leaguers for the 2011 season. Four-seamer and two-seamer got combined since I don't actually think he has a two-seamer. Slider got renamed for better illustration of the pitch's lack of quality.

Fastball

Danks' fastball is average-ish. It's a four-seamer with a nice amount of rise but somewhat more than ideal run. The whiff rate against both RHB and LHB suggests it's below average, as 19% and 15% respectively were average for all lefty fastballs in 2010 (relievers included). But we're dealing with some fairly crude metrics here, with similarly rough averages to compare them to. What we know about typical fastball velocity and movement says Danks is right in that nice clump of average-ishness and I'm willing to round up having watched him for so long.

We must also consider another mitigating factor where his heater whiff rate is concerned. Namely: the cutter. Most lefties don't have two out pitches for their encounters with RHB, which I would be willing to guess puts Danks' fastball at the mercy of selection bias. That is, he trades off the possibility of a whiff upstairs on the fastball for a cutter up and in. There's still plenty of chance for a swing and a miss, but if the whiff isn't there Danks can still get a weak grounder out of the exchange. Four-seamers lead to fly balls and fly balls lead to home runs. Better to be safe than sorry in two-strike counts, no?

So perhaps that's it. Or perhaps there's something beyond the actual movement and velocity that's causing the pitch to suffer in performance. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Change-Up

If we trace the movement of Danks' change on Dave Allen's heat map we see it's in that nice green blob suggesting a solid pitch. Not so much movement that he achieves dominance, not so little that it gets raked:

via baseballanalysts.com

That's not quite a fair analysis, as I'd rate it a plus pitch on the whole. Its whiff rate against RHB is 15% above all lefty changes thrown in 2010. For some weird reason, it's almost 40% worse against LHB. I'm not sure exactly what explains the gap, but at least some of it is sample size. Since 2009, Danks has thrown more than 1400 to righties and just over 200 to lefties. Even after weighting the results, the pitch comes out above average compared to all changes thrown to all batters.

If I had to guess what's guiding the numbers there, it's the fact that it's very much a "feel" pitch for him. Some days, he's on the mound and in absolute control, putting it just on or just off that outside corner at will. Others, it's just not there. He'll leave it up, leave it out and often he'll end up visibly frustrated with it. And but so with only 200 pitches, it doesn't take that many bad luck outings to really screw with the numbers. He's incredibly entertaining to watch when he's feeling it as he'll absolutely breeze through lineups. It's also worth mentioning that I think his disguise of the pitch is excellent. Even when the command or movement isn't there, he gives very little if anything away in the delivery.

Cutter

Ah, the piece de resistance. I don't have any averages to compare this to, but it's clearly a plus pitch. The real key is just how hard he throws it. On average, it's faster than Buehrle's four-seamer and a decent number of other notable lefties for that matter. Picking it out from his fastball is nigh impossible as it's just a smidge slower and ends up a full 6 inches farther inside than the expected four-seamer. For reference, that's more than a third of the plate. That far inside is almost always off the barrel and often enough it's off the bat entirely. Ground balls and whiffs, what more could you want?

Etc.

He's also got a slider thrown at curveball velocity. It's not a good pitch. Definition of show-me. Fortunately, he's got a good feel for when to throw it and the results have been pretty good. Let's hope it stays that way.

Sum Of The Parts

Danks is very well equipped to attack RHB and for his career he's basically got no platoon splits. So far he's had enough velocity and been able to rely on that plus the cutter to get LHB out. I would guess he'd like to have a more legitimate out pitch to throw to lefties, but he's battled successfully to this point.

His command every so often will get in the way of his stuff. In particular, as noted, he'll lose the feel for his change-up and its location and movement suffer. It's not a huge problem, as his cutter is a very versatile pitch that can be thrown effectively to either side of the plate if necessary. But I wonder if learning the cutter at all didn't to some degree hinder his mastery of the change. It's the rare pitcher who can consistently move the ball in and out regardless of pitch and I do not believe Danks is an exception. At some point, he chose the cutter as his bread and butter, likely with Coop's guidance, and it's earned him a very nice payday. But every minute practicing the cutter is a minute not practicing something else. I say that not as a criticism--Coop and Danks are a terrific match--but to temper fan expectations. It would be great if he could put it all together and become a Cy Young type. That's likely not in the cards.

Scouting stuff: an amateur attempt to figure out pitching, part 2

colintj — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:41:10 -0000

So now we know about fastballs for the most part, right? No? You've forgotten already? Howsabout another Dave Allen graph:

So right, more run values. Negative is good for the pitcher, positive is bad. Outside of the whole movement/velocity thing, the big takeaway is what happens with and without the platoon advantage. The four-seamer remains a far more viable pitch to opposite handed hitters than does the two-seamer. I'm just eyeballing it, but the difference between having and not having a platoon advantage with a two-seamer is the about the same one we saw in the fastball velocity graph. In case you forgot, it's the difference between an all-star and average.

Given that, it would see we need to figure out some different sorts of pitches to offset the problems of the fastball.

Slider

From a Pitch F/x perspective, the slider is pretty cool. Many of you already know that hitters are able to recognize the slider mid-flight thanks to the light dot that shows up on the darker rest of the ball. The phenomenon is caused by the spin imparted by the pitcher which rotates the baseball like a football. The seams rotate closer to the edge of the ball and the unblemished hide stays in the middle. This kind of spin causes the ball to travel closest of any to the imaginary pitch affected only by gravity Pitch F/x compares all pitches to. The result is just a couple inches of movement vertically and/or horizontally.

While the dot can be a giveaway, the good ones are thrown too hard for the batter to actually make use of the information and change the decision to swing. That is of course unless the hitter has the platoon advantage. Here's what Brad Lidge's slider and fastball look like as a right handed batter:

If you look closely, you'll see Dave has overlaid two small black dots on the red and blue lines respectively. They represent the point in time at which the batter must decide if he will swing. Anything past this point and he won't hit anything anyway. The slider and fastball line up almost perfectly until that moment has past. But what about lefties against Lidge?

Comparatively vast difference if you ask me. And indeed, this is the going theory on why sliders in fact have a very large platoon difference and do absolutely nothing to solve the problem. Once again, the black dots are placed at approximately the point where the batter needs to make his decision to swing. Very clearly, they simply do not get to track the flight of the ball. It's all what it looks like right out of the pitcher's hand. Which means there's an exceptional premium on making everything look the same as long as possible. Hence the paranoia about tipping one's pitches. Anything too different from the fastball has to move so much that that in itself fools the hitter. The other clear difference maker, then, is expectation.

That is to say, count and randomness matters. If a pitcher sequences his pitches too obviously, he will be giving up a huge advantage. If he pitches behind the count or is otherwise forced to throw particular pitches, he's giving up a huge advantage.

Back to the slider specifically. Setting aside velocity, Dave's work has shown that the more horizontal movement away from the batter, the better the slider tends to perform. This may not hold up for sliders without the platoon advantage, but it's something I look for in the numbers in deciding the quality of the pitch.

Honestly though, I don't feel like I can look at the movement of a slider and guess it's quality. I've spent a lot of time looking and I think fastball velocity, disguise, etc. are probably far more critical variables. When it comes to sliders especially, I want to know more than just movement. And what I really want to know are the results. In particular: how often do batters swing and miss at the pitch in question? Fortunately, Texas Leaguers has a web app that accesses the Pitch F/x database and tells me what I need to know.

From there I compare those numbers to what is perhaps my favorite table currently known to mankind. Bojan Koprivica wrote a crazy good and long article that covers much of this territory, but with more of a sabermetric focus and concluded with this. I'd put it in the post itself, but it's so big that the formatting for everything goes to crap. For the record, "it" is a season's worth of pitches categorized by type and divided up by platoon advantage and results of those pitches.

Anyway the table says that with the platoon advantage batters whiff on north of 30% of sliders they choose to swing at. Without the platoon advantage, the whiff rate is 10-15* fewer percentage points. So while we've done nothing to solve the platoon problem, we have shed further light on the White Sox struggles against these random AAAA sinker/slider types. An average two-seamer and an average slider puts the RHB in a serious bind and we'd rightly expect him to do far worse than average facing that combo.

As a meaningful aside, If you actually click through and look at the table, you'll notice a sizable discrepancy between the slider whiff rate of RHB and LHB w/ the platoon advantage. Other such discrepancies exist throughout, not to mention on Dave Allen's charts and graphs. The primary causes, I would guess, are twofold.

One, lefties tend to be better hitters because they tend to also be left handed throwers. Left handed throwers can only play the outfield and first base, which means to make it in the bigs at all, they need to be really good hitters in the first place. So there's that selection bias. The other issue I'm pretty sure is that lefties tend not to face a lot of lefties throughout their careers. This means that the hitters probably aren't nearly as used to seeing lefty sliders as righties are used to seeing righty sliders. On top of that, southpaws have somewhat less velocity than RHP, which makes it all the more advantageous for managers to sit their left-handed batters against left-handed pitchers. This also explains the LOOGY fetish of many managers.

To get back to the slider as a complement to the fastball, it's all the easier to see what White Sox brass saw in Edwin Jackson. Between his elite four-seamer and his solid slider, he really did just need to start finding the zone consistently. Dominate righties and beat lefties with the big fastball and you're above average. Indeed, while Jackson could never have been worth Dan Hudson and David Holmberg, Don Cooper turned him into exactly what the Sox thought he could be.

Of course, Jackson had an outstanding four-seam fastball which makes dealing with the platoon problem a much smaller issue. Having looked at the slider now, we're still stuck with that question. We finally address that in discussing the...

Change-Up

The most common adaptation to the problem of throwing to opposite-handed batters is having a worthwhile change-up. It's often the last pitch added to a prospect's arsenal as the need for a third pitch doesn't tend to crop up until a truly advanced level of competition forces the issue. High school ain't that.

Turning to Bojan's table, we see once again a significant discrepancy between LHB and RHB when it comes to hitting the change-up. Fortunately Texas Leaguers' app also does platoon splits for whiffs, so this doesn't really put me out. RHB whiff on southpaw changes at just under 30% while lefty batsmen are at 20%. What the slider does to RHB without the platoon advantage, the change does to them with it. LHB on the other hand don't actually struggle all that much with the change, but it's still a better option than the slider in terms of whiff rate. The real difference maker is what happens on balls in play. Lefties absolutely crush RHP sliders, changes far less so.

Going back to Dave Allen's work, he's found that changes with extreme movement either up or down make for the most effective pitches. This makes me wonder if in fact what he's found is that the best change ups are just those followed by the best fastballs. Presumably, the guys who put a lot of movement on their changes are able to do much the same with their fastballs. In any case, he also made a fascinating chart comparing run value to the difference in velocity between a given pitcher's change-up and fastball:

As Dave concludes, it's very important that that change sit in that 5-12% slower window. This all gets back to what we said about the slider: it needs to look the same, but it needs to be slower and move off the barrel of the bat as it breaks. Disguise is absolutely critical and hence, the movement and velocity we can find in the Pitch F/x data can be very useful. Even so, while I feel like I have a better gauge for changes than sliders, ultimately what I look at is whiff rates when I'm checking out the numbers.

A quick note on the splitter: I really don't have any good data about it, though I imagine there are a good number of them in the data regarding change-ups since they tend to be misclassified for each other by the Pitch F/x algorithms. They do function similarly, though from what I've seen they move slightly differently. Splitters seem to have less running action and very little vertical movement. From my own experience throwing the pitch, this makes sense. Just from the grip, getting a lot of spin on the ball is difficult. You'll get even less spin if you throw it with a stiff wrist, which I believe is fairly common.

Curveball

The curve is an odd duck. The slider and change are sorta/kinda mirrors of each other. They're the out pitch either with or without the platoon advantage respectively. The curveball on the other hand is pretty rarely a pitcher's big strikeout generator. It's not an uncommon pitch, but it's typically differently used. For instance, regardless of the platoon situation, it's thrown about 10% of the time. Weird, but it makes a little more sense when you check out Dave's data.

The curve has a good amount of movement and it's the rare pitch with a lot of negative vertical movement. Meaning, it bites hard downward. Even the most downward moving sliders fail to break 3 inches, which is well below average for a curve. In addition to the vertical movement, it also breaks toward the glove side arm of the pitcher throwing it. These two components of its movement help determine its efficacy in the platoon dis- or advantage.

With the platoon advantage, the horizontal break is the biggest variable in its success. The more the pitches moves away from the batter, the better. Without, the downward bite is what matters more. This meshes with what Mr. Allen found with success of the slider and its horizontal movement. Even more interestingly, this finding meshes with what the typical curve looks like from RHP and LHP. Lefties, whom we know face very few LHB, throw an average curve with 6 inches of drop, but not quite 4 inches of horizontal cut. Righties on the other hand are at just over 5 inches for each component, more of a swiss army style pitch.

It's also worth mentioning the kinds of curves that show up. If you were looking at the distribution of curveball speeds, I'm guessing you'd find two sorts: fast and slow. The best kind is definitely the fast, the kind that makes Gavin Floyd who he is as a pitcher and has helped Josh Beckett dominate when he's on his game. But the most common variety is what I often refer to as the show-me curve. It's slower and move obvious. There's no disguise intended, but rather it's very difference from every other pitch--it's the slowest pitch in majors outside the knuckleball--is what makes it worthwhile. The show-me is an early count pitch that steals a strike without a swing. And given that it's thrown 10% of the time, a batter can't expect to see it even once per PA. Gavin, on the other hand, threw his twice as often over the last two seasons. Remember: how often a pitch is used says a lot about its quality.

Cutter

The pitch that launched Esteban Loaiza's Cy Young candidacy and made John Danks into the excellent pitcher he is today. Unfortunately, there's not a ton of data on it since it's still a fairly rare pitch. It's definitely on the rise though and it's my favorite pitch in the game. It's a true equalizer. Here's that graphic that opened the post with the cutter added back in:

You'll notice the error bars are much bigger for the cutter. That's a sample issue. Once again we see that LHB are a real bear to deal with, but that it's an excellent alternative to a two-seamer. That's potentially where it's real value lies. A pitcher without excellent velocity, but can throw a two-seamer and a cutter has the best of both worlds. Additionally, I'd wager the cutter isn't that difficult to learn to throw, as it's more of a re-imagination of the slider than an actually new pitch. If you've already got a two-seamer and a slider, you're well on your way.

Though as Dave says, it's more of a cross between a four-seamer and a slider. But I like to think of it as a slider thrown harder. You subtract horizontal movement for some gain in vertical movement and velocity. The ideal cutter has some amount of rise to it and, hopefully, little to no running action to the pitcher's throwing arm. The ideal location, if you've ever watched Johnny Danks pitch, is right under the hands.

Out of the hand, a batter reads fastball, presumably with a good amount of horizontal movement on it. The resulting pitch, however, is 5-10 inches farther inside than expected. The result, if not a whiff altogether, is very often a weak ground ball. And for pitchers trying to cut it in the big leagues, it can solve a lot of problems. More grounders from the guys with the platoon advantage? Who wouldn't want that? Especially if you're a AAAA sinker/slider RHP.

That said, if it were so easy to learn, it'd already be in more arsenals. Still, I expect the pitch to increase significantly in popularity, the unfortunate side effect of which may well be making Don Cooper less of a competitive advantage for the White Sox. Fortunately, we're not there yet, largely because adding pitches is a repetition-intensive activity. And if you're a pitcher who struggles repeating his mechanics or are already in need of fine tuning without the addition of another pitch, you simply might not have the time to waste trying to add yet another thing you're not good at.

Conclusions, Errata, Apologies

Oof. I'm already past the 2500 word mark, so it's time to wrap this sucker up. Sorry, knuckle- and forkballs. Maybe next time, Eephus pitch.

All it really comes down to is answering the question: how are you going to get guys out? For me, and perhaps this has been a point of over-emphasis, I like to break that up by platoon. It puts things in relief. First, check out the fastball. Can he get grounders? Can he throws strikes? Then check out how this guy's going to get whiffs from lefties and from righties. It's a pretty straightforward list and the end goal is projecting three things. Ground balls, strike outs and walks. If you can avoid the latter and get the former two, you're set. It's the specifics that get the word count up.

Scouting stuff: an amateur attempt to figure out pitching, part 1

colintj — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:55:03 -0000

These posts would be almost totally lacking in actual data and evidence without Dave Allen, Bojan Koprivica and Trip Somers. There are more I've read since Pitch F/x was born and I could start a list, but it would be long and linkless since my brain's just pretty much shut down at this point.

Okay, so now is the time on South Side Sox when we talk pitching, pitchers and pitches. Since I have done and plan to do scouting profiles on Sox pitchers and opposition hurlers as 2012 winds it's way toward spring and then into the season, it seems like a good idea to talk about what I look at, how I think I know what I know and all that. This will totally skip mechanics as while I have some thoughts on that, I don't have actual evidence or good language to talk about. This is strictly about what happens once the ball leaves the pitcher's hand.

Fastball

The best place to start is with the most basic pitch, the one everybody has. Or a version of it, at least. I'm going to try to illustrate a few terms and basic concepts for the sake of clarity limiting the discussion to the heater. Now, when it comes to the fastball, I think everybody knows that velocity is a big deal. It's really that simple. Throwing hard is a substantial advantage that negates numerous other issues with the pitcher in question. To wit:

These graphs may seem a little weird. But the idea is that Dave has plotted what happened to different fastballs according to location, outcome and velocity. Negative runs is good. Positive is bad. And if .01 runs seems like a small number, consider that's on a per pitch basis. The course of 200 innings pitched runs in the neighborhood of 1750 fastballs (that's a round-ish number). At .01 runs per pitch, that's the difference between a 3.21 ERA and a 4.00 ERA. And that doesn't even take fully into account the synergistic effects. You'd be willing to bet a slider following a 97 mph fastball is better than one following 91 mph, right?

The takeaway is three-fold. First, I like charts and graphs. Second, above average velocity can solve a lot of problems. Third, you can undo all of that if you have no idea where the ball is going. In the top graph, the home plate runs from about -.5 to .5 feet, give or take a bit. Notice that's about where the colored lines start converging? In the bottom graph, the strike zone is marked by the horizontal lines. Same thing.

The last point explains at least some of Don Cooper's success. Think of guys like Matt Thornton and Edwin Jackson. Thornton is an obvious success story whose nickname Easy Heat makes it pretty clear what he's good at. But when he was with the Mariners organization, he couldn't hit the ocean with the broadside of a barn door. Then he moved to Chicago (thanks Joe Borchard!), learned a bit from Coop and eventually peaked as one of the very best relievers in the game relying almost solely on his incredible fastball. When he first got to the South Side, Coop didn't do too much more than point him in the direction of the plate.

After first learning to throw strikes rather than the alternative, Cooper further honed his skills such that Thornton developed legitimate command, or the ability to locate a pitch very near the intended target. That's in some contrast to control, which is just avoiding base on balls. The difference between command and control comes down to what's often referred to as stuff, or the quality of the pitches regardless of location. The quality of a pitch can be further broken up by velocity and movement. The more velocity and movement, the better the stuff, the less important exact location is in avoiding walks.

So, let's go back to Edwin Jackson, who has always had great stuff and in particular excellent fastball velocity. Under Cooper, Jackson started 30 games between two seasons and dropped his walk rate a full walk per nine innings. In doing so, he moved from his crappy career walk rate and actually manage to walk fewer than average hitters over that span. And if you watched him pitch last year, I'm guessing you wouldn't say he actually had a whole lot of command. From year to year, his command really didn't change a whole lot. What changed was his focus on merely getting the ball somewhere in the zone.Coop gave him the confidence to put the ball in a place where his stuff could actually make a difference. And lo, his ERA was almost a full run lower with the Sox compared to his career average thanks to Cooper's tutelage.

All this because Jackson--finally--consistently found the strike zone w/ his 95 mph fastball. Believe it or not, like most everyone else, I focus on velocity before anything else. It's fun to watch, yes, but it really is a huge difference maker, especially on a game to game basis where you never know if that's the start the pitcher happens to have it all figured out. But of course, a fastball like Thornton's or Jackson's is relatively rare. The average fastball in MLB is about 91 mph. That means for most, movement is a big concern and a primary differentiating factor from pitcher to pitcher.

Before we can really get into movement, it's important to know how I talk about it. For the past few seasons, MLB has been tracking pitchers w/ video cameras in all 30 ballparks and releasing the data for free to the public. Typically, the system of data collection is referred to as Pitch F/x, which I do and will. The system measures every pitch's movement relative to an imaginary spinless pitch that is only affected by gravity. An actual non-figment pitch on the planet Earth is affected primarily by the force imparted upon it by the pitcher, the subsequent spin and of course gravity. So Pitch F/x subtracts effects due to gravity and leaves us with the pitch's movement and velocity.*

Velocity is measured just after the pitch leaves the pitcher's hand (as of course it begins to slow down thereafter) and movement is usually talked about in terms of two-dimensions, the horizontal and vertical components of the pitch's movement.

A fastball in my terminology is either a running or a rising fastball. A runner (or two-seamer) has more horizontal movement than vertical. A riser (or four-seamer) has more vertical than horizontal. Really, though, a fastball has to have a good deal more of one or the other for me to actually call it one or the other. If it's neither, it's just meh from a movement perspective. It doesn't do enough to be characterized either way. My personal rule of thumb is that it needs at least twice (two times) as much of one component than the other to deserve a special designation. I don't think you'll find that more than loosely supported in any Pitch F/x articles, but I've found it useful in 4 years of staring at these numbers.

And to be sure, it is a useful distinction. Knowing the rise and run of the fastball helps in figuring out against whom the pitch will be effective. Running fastballs induce lots of ground balls. But they are also very vulnerable to the platoon advantage. For instance, lefties do hit righty two-seamers on the ground more of than righty four-seamers, but the ones that do end up in the air get hit very hard. The slugging percentage for either ends up about the same, but the two-seamer loses out because it gives up more base hits overall.

A righty batter versus a righty two-seamer, on the other hand, is a whole different story. While the four-seamer is basically no different regardless of the handedness of the batter, the two-seamer becomes a much better pitch thanks to even more ground balls. Extra base hits become a chore to muster up so much so that a two-seamer alone is a very effective weapon as long as the pitcher has the platoon advantage.

The four-seamer makes up for it a bit, since it nabs a few more whiffs per swing than the two-seamer, but it's not a huge margin. A two-seamer is definitely preferable if velocity is equal and the pitcher and hitter are on the same side of the plate.

Of course, this has implications for the lineups a pitcher is more or less likely to have success against, not to mention the secondary offerings he requires in order to be a successful major league pitcher.

For instance, the White Sox have been a righty-dominant lineup for much of the last half of Kenny Williams' tenure. Perhaps you also remember all of those mediocre never-pitcher-in-the-bigs sinker/slider guys absolutely killing us time and time again? Some of that is bad luck, some of that is Alex Rios being the worst thing since sliced genitalia, but a good amount of it is that if those sinker/slider types are throwing strikes, they're well set up to have success against the Sox' limited lefty lineup.

That is, the circumstances that led to the success of these oh so numerous mediocre AAAA types were critical and, for them, fortuitous. Had they faced off against the Yankees, with their gobs of lefties and switch-hitters (not to mention talent), the AAAAers simply wouldn't have that kind of success. Handedness matters and pitchers for whom it matters most are often candidates for the bullpen rather than kept on as starters. In the pen, managers can limit innings and play match-ups to limit exposure to platoon disadvantages and hopefully exploit what competitive advantages they do possess. Or maybe they're just mediocre AAAA types.

End of Part I, apparently. If this seems overly simple, I'm just trying to take it slow and get everyone on board. The off-speed stuff should see the pace pick up.

*This isn't crazy exact language, I know, but I think it gets the point across. Also: atmospheric effects from say pitching in San Diego or Denver are not modeled by PFx to my knowledge and are therefore still in the data. Same thing with temperature, for that matter.

John Danks extension official, terms disclosed

colintj — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:22:54 -0000

Splicing together a couple tweets from Sun-Times beat writer Daryl Van Schouwen on John Danks' extension:

Sox announce Danks extension: 5 yrs, $65 million as reported; $8 million for 2012 and $14.25 million in each of the 2013-16 seasons.

Tom Tango's analysis isn't changed much by the particulars, though it looks like the White Sox got Danks to agree to take a little less in 2012 in order to take a little more throughout the remainder of the deal. The $8 million he will make in 2012 is about $1-2 million less than I thought he'd get this year, which is nice. In addition, Danks is taking a slight discount because he's not waiting to get to free agency. On the whole though, it's a fair market deal that works in the White Sox' favor thanks to the organization's talent for handling pitchers.

UPDATE: For the people who still need press releases, here it is.

UPDATE 2: He has a full no trade clause for 2012 and a limited no trade clause thereafter.

Return on rebuild might be a little disappointing

colintj — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 07:13:27 -0000

As I argued last week, it really doesn't seem like the Sox are in position to do much other than rebuild. But who should they swap? And who can they expect to get in return? Neither question can really be answered definitively as there's just too much uncertainty. We do know that Jerry Reinsdorf has said he always budgets his team to break even.

That may not be enough considering the substantial losses from last season, but at a minimum they'll go that far and I'd wager they're not there yet. Even with Buehrle gone, Cot's has payroll at $93M and that doesn't include Danks, Quentin and a handful of league minimum salaries. Add those in and payroll is in the neighborhood of $110M. That would qualify for the 3rd highest payroll in White Sox history, odd for a team Kenny Williams has admitted is rebuilding.

For comparison, in 2010 the Sox were set to break even with an opening day payroll of around $105M. That team won 88 games, probably pretty near the club's in-house projections. If I had to put a figure on it, I'd say $100M. That means at least one of John Danks or Carlos Quentin and perhaps one of the veteran relievers. So who should go?

That still takes some speculation, since there's just some stuff only the Sox front office knows. We do know that after Buehrle's departure and Sale drew into the starting rotation, the Sox were left without a legitimate 6th starter. Danks' replacement will be Zach Stewart or some similar option. That's a 3-4 win drop off. If the fans can't tell the difference between a 78 and 82 win team, he might as well go.

That's where the front office projections come into play and we're left guessing. But if Danks isn't bringing enough to the table to merit a spot in the rotation, Quentin certainly doesn't need to be around either. He's not nearly as valuable but he'll make almost as much money as Danks in 2012. In fact, Q should be gone no matter what. With Viciedo ready to take over, Carlos' absence shouldn't be too noticeable. From there, trading one of Crain, Frasor or Thornton gets the budget under $100M.

The question of what we'll get in return is a whole other ball of complicated wax. In a trade, there are a few considerations. For one, why not just buy a free agent? If you can get the exact same player at the exact same salary, why lose talent on top of it? Unfortunately for the Sox, Quentin makes almost what he'd get as a free agent. Unless Kenny can find a team that just can't live without him, I'd guess he'll end up in a package deal to help keep any negative press to a minimum. Any of the veteran relievers are in the same boat, so don't be surprised if Thornton/Quentin are exchanged for a couple nobodies.

Danks, on the other hand, is due a serious raise once he hits the open market. In his last year of arbitration, he'll be making in the vicinity of $10M less than he's worth. That missing money is all savings that the Sox need to make back in the trade. In trading for prospects, you get more young players who, as long as they make the big leagues, are paid dirt cheap and replace Danks' savings sometime in the future. If that's confusing to you, it could be worse.

Specifically, someone along the lines of Nestor Molina or, as has been reported, Manny Banuelos. If Kenny somehow wrangles a package bigger than an above average (but not elite) pitching prospect, be very happy indeed. Hopefully that'll be the extent of the trading necessary to offset the Dunn/Rios/Peavy damage. The same way that Danks is substantially underpaid and is worth prospects as a result means that in order to ditch any of the Dastardly Trio, the Sox would have to send prospects to match the amount Dunn/Rios/Peavy are overpaid. By my calculation, the Sox could send Dunn and Dayan Viciedo to a team and actually deserve nothing in return.

Sorry, just thought I'd throw that tidbit out there in case someone forgot why we're rebuilding in the first place.

White Sox are stuck with a rebuild

colintj — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:59:31 -0000

So apparently there's still some thought that this team as presently constructed can compete for a division title next season. Baseball being what it is, it certainly could happen. But it simply can't happen without a great deal of luck.

First, let's clarify what's meant by luck. A typical team season will see unexpected breakouts, injuries, sudden declines, the success or failure of new pitches, etc. all spread across the 25 player team. Usually these things more or less cancel out over the long run that is a 162 game season. The end result is an approximately luck-neutral season.

I say approximately because there's actually a lot of variance around a team's talent level. Everyone remembers that year the Royals fluked their way into contention for a while. The Indians last year were such beneficiaries. It's just a part of baseball that sometimes the luck all goes your way. If you combine that with actual talent you get pure dominance. See 2005. But the thing is, if a team needs that kind of luck just to compete, it's in trouble. And that's where the team is after last season's absolute debacle.

When fans try to talk themselves into 2012, they start with pitching. The Sox have consistently churned out great pitching since Don Cooper started coaching them. Even in 2007, despite bad defense and a tough home park, our staff as a whole came through to perform admirably. Yeah, the relief corps was a tire fire, but Coop kept it from spreading to the starters. As the team exists now, that kind of downside is pretty unlikely.

With no further changes after Santos' departure, there are still plenty of veterans to anchor a solid if not dominant pen, along with some upside in Addison Reed. Meanwhile, the starting five is still in good order. Buehrle is of course a big loss, but Chris Sale is a good bet to provide most if not all of Mark's expected production. And with his stuff, it's possible he could break out and become a legitimate ace. The downside is that Zach Stewart is now the emergency fill-in rather than Sale if a major injury were to occur. Between Reed and Sale, most of the bases that are usually covered in a Sox staff will be. But it'll be a bit more flimsy than usual and not likely to be dominant.

The real problems are in the field and at the plate. Everyone knows about Rios and Dunn, of course. Even a substantial rebound from both leaves them respectively below average. Morel and Beckham are still more promise than substance and to expect either to be average isn't rational given their performance. Useful, sure. Not average. De Aza hasn't played a full season at the major league level. Predicting some kind of injury, even given Herm Schneider's wunderbarheit is fairly reasonable, as is regression. Expecting him to be average on the other hand? I would bet against. AJ is still AJ, except a year older. If you want to call him average, fine. But not Quentin. Too injury prone. Viciedo? You're wish-casting at this point.

That leaves us with Alexei and Paulie. The two legitimately above average position players on the whole roster. Does that sound like enough to carry a team to you? Keep in mind neither are legit MVP types. Paulie hits a ton, Alexei plays great defense and hits well enough. They can't make up for blatant holes at nearly every other position. Mediocre plus two still equals mediocre.

So here's the final tally: below average non-pitching. Above average but not dominant staff. Baseball is comprised of hitting, defense and pitching. Position players are responsible for 2/3 of that equation and that's exactly where the Sox are lacking. If I had to peg it right now, I'd call this version of 2012 an 82-83 wins in true talent. Moreover, the presence of Santos and/or Buehrle on this team do remarkably little to change that.

I actually talked myself up from 80-81 while writing this thing, so maybe things are a little better than I expected. But it's certainly not enough to head off the case for rebuilding. Even without Buehrle, this team costs $110M. How does it make any kind of sense to pay that much money to only sorta kinda maybe hope-and-a-prayer compete? And remember, Kenny has literally used the word "rebuilding". If he backs out now, it'll only be because he's not fielding anything other than lowball offers, which would change the math significantly. If Heyman is right that the Yankees consider one of Betances, Banuelos or Montero to be fair value for John Danks, then Kenny needn't worry. The rebuild is going just fine.

The future has changed!

colintj — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 07:43:13 -0000

Between the seeming impossibility of Mark Buehrle's return and the now lingering specter of John Danks' departure at the end of the season (or otherwise), the Sox' pitching staff is going to take on a whole new look over the course of the next few years. As depressing as the impending loss of Buehrle and Danks is (and it really really is), we do at least have Chris Sale to look forward to.*

Probably anyway. The worried, ever-anxious part of me wonders whether Kenny might have left Torii Hunter and a bag of chips over at Arte Moreno's and Moreno's balking at only getting Beckham in return.

But sure, let's assume all is well and that Chris Sale will be spending his time as a starting pitcher for the Chicago White Sox for some time to come and not, hypothetically, down in Arizona looking like a future Cy Young winner. If you'll recall, I peered into the crystal ball to see how it might turn out should Sale have started last season. To recap the post, Sale was very well regarded coming out of the draft. Here's Andy Seiler:

His fastball is a plus pitch that generally sits 91-94, touching 96, and he commands it with plus precision. He gets a lot of life on it due to his three-quarters release point, and it’s one of the best left-handed fastballs in this class. His best secondary pitch is a plus changeup with excellent depth and fade, and it’s a Major League-ready pitch. His third pitch is an average slider that isn’t commanded nearly as well, and there are concerns about his inability to spin a breaking ball.

Sale quickly showed that to be out of date, sporting a much improved slider. Nonetheless, my assessment of his chances wasn't exactly glowing:

Sale would likely be 92-93 mph with the fastball, presumably with a good changeup and a mediocre slider with likely struggles against batters from both sides of the plate. Against RHB, his arm slot and fastball movement would be exposed at lower velocities that would only be compensated for with good command of both the fastball and the change. LHB would of course be an easier proposition thanks to a groundball machine for a heater, but even there it's easy to imagine the somewhat slower fastball inducing fewer whiffs on the slider, especially if it too slows a tick.

After a full year in the pen, I think we can raise our expectations somewhat. For one, I probably hedged my bets to excess regarding Sale's fastball velocity. Sale's averaged a hair over 95 mph for his short MLB career and losing 2-3 mph is possible, but 0-2 is more likely. See Jeremy Greenhouse's article and this Book Blog comment thread for details, but in sum I don't think Sale is going to be an outlier. So rather than 92-93, I'm thinking 93-95 mph on his fastball as a starter.

In which case, even his arm slot shouldn't be able to knock him down to average against RHB. On top of that, I think we can officially apologize to Ms. Jackson because his slider's for real. Thanks to this post over at A's Nation and in particular this amazing table, I now have a very concrete standard to measure a pitcher's stuff against. And no matter how you dice it, Sale's slider has been nasty.

Lefty pitchers normally get whiffs on 27% of swings from right handed batters. Sale got nearly 43%. That's on a pitch without a platoon advantage after the book would have definitely been out on him after his dominant 2010. With the platoon advantage, it was almost 49% compared to the 35% league average. Obviously, it was a plus pitch.

Meanwhile, the change is still very much there. For his career, he's whiffed 37% of righties compared to the 27% league average.

It's not to say he won't come back to the ground somewhat, he will. Studies have consistently shown about a 17% boost in K's for pitchers who move from starting to relief, among other helpful stat line nudges. Starting is more difficult and taxing than relief. But even after a straight statistical adjustment, the suggestion is that Sale should be average to somewhat better as a starter. And knowing what we do about his stuff and the coaching staff, it's likely to be a matter of time before he starts to cut his walk rate and really put it all together. I'll again stick with my preferred cautious optimism and say he'll need more reps before he can start putting a dent in his BBs.

Beyond that, there are various caveats to throw out. He's skinny, his slider velo is a little lower than I'd like, his arm slot, etc. Most of them are obvious if you've seen him pitch. He's a mold-breaker, which is likely what caused his falling to us in the draft in the first place. But if ever there was an organization built to nurture this exact pitcher, it's the White Sox.

Overall, the outlook is very bright, brighter than I suspected a year ago. I'll have to ask Coop my forgiveness and a light penance. I'm hoping he'll decide sticking through the rest of the 2012 season will be more than enough.

*And nothing else.

Picking Up Jason Frasor's Option Was Stupid

colintj — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 03:02:01 -0000

Since 2006, the White Sox have won 10 fewer games than the money they've spent indicates they should have. Another way to say it is that the average general manager would have won 10 more games than Kenny Williams managed to with the players he selected over those seasons.

And that's in an organization that employs Don Cooper and Herm Schneider. As I've mentioned a jillion times, Coop and Herm turn nothing into something every season in ways that nearly no other GM can rely on. Coop has one peer in Dave Duncan. Herm's record is by far the best in his field. So Kenny's player investment work is actually worse than merely slightly below average. Most GM's don't have his in-built advantages.

As it happens, picking up Jason Frasor's option is exactly the kind of money wasting acquisition that the Sox have made a specialty of over the years. Sure, it's only one year and how much can it really hurt? It's no Mark Teahen. It's no Scott Linebrink. Or Rios and Dunn, for that matter. The suck involved here is on a less painful level, but it manages to illustrate a number of problems that have come up time and again since the World Series win.

For starters, Frasor could have been offered arbitration. If you don't mind ending up with the guy anyway, why not offer him arbitration? But really, the hope is he declines and tries to get a multi-year deal on the open market. In which case the Sox would likely have ended up with Type B compensation. That's right, the Sox passed up on a free draft pick a year after they didn't have a first round pick.

Meanwhile, they've already got a bunch of guys doing Frasor's job quite adequately. Between Santos, Thornton, Crain and Reed, the Sox should be well set at the end of ball games. So they're basically just paying for relief insurance. As JJ suggested to me over IM, it's like Kenny Williams learned the wrong lesson from 2007. If you have real talent on the field and on the mound, a couple flammable relievers isn't going to sink your team. Kenny apparently hails from the Hawk Harrelson School of Bullpen Overemphasis.

It's all the more ridiculous when you remember the Sox are deeply underwater on their assets. Between Rios and Dunn, they're very likely to have something like $15-25M providing absolutely no production and hence absolutely no revenue. That means the premium, if you're going to spend the money at all, is on upside.

And relievers rarely have upside. Let alone relievers paid at market rates. Let alone 34 year old middle relievers paid at market rate. Jason Frasor is never going to be worth more than this deal pays him by an amount meaningful enough to subtract from the downside of taking $3.75M from some other player the Sox might sign.

Oh right. Some other player. Like -- and this is all very theoretical of course -- Mark Buehrle, for one. Sox fans kind of have a thing for him from what I've heard. But yeah, that's $3.75M we can't offer him this year. Of course it could certainly be the case that he's already gone because the Sox are so far underwater on bad moves in the vein of re-upping Jason Frasor that actually re-upping Jason Frasor isn't responsible for Buehrle leaving the South Side.

In which case, that's $3.75M the Sox can't spend in the draft or in the international amateur market. Then again, it's absurd to think $3.75M could matter in reviving a farm system that is separated from the other 29 systems by a vast chasm of suck. It's not like $3.75M is more than the Sox spent in sum on the 2011 draft.* Actually, that's exactly what it is. That was a total misdirect.

In sum: the Sox are spending too much money on a position that doesn't deserve it at the expense of other positions of need on a team that doesn't have money to waste.

Unless it does. In which case all is forgiven. You're the best Kenny!

*TY KenWo

The Padded Cell: Adam Interlude

colintj — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:34:17 -0000

TP invited me to take the reins for a bit.

The flat screen is his. The old name brand recliner mottled with beer and pizza stains from way back when, his. The glass topped coffee table, the big red sectioned couch with the dog fur and the faint seriously impossible to place weird smell, the smaller bookshelf, the larger not-from-Ikea bookshelf, the twenty year old Kenwood Dolby 2.1 receiver, the dog, those were hers. Are still hers, of course. But they’re gone and she’s gone and the place is very empty and dark since he either didn’t notice or didn’t care that the sun went down.

Pretty much devoid of furniture, the living room still has to deal with the takeout remnants. Which means the white fold up overfull leftover boxes of rice (Dunn always asks for an extra; he hates when they don’t give you enough) are sitting on the still fairly-new carpet. He got through two of the three boxes, good for a .667 on-plate percentage. It’s the same on-floor percentage, he absently calculates, since one made it to the still-not-technically-full trash can.

That one was in his hand when he remembered he had to take a leak. He tossed it out on his way past the kitchen.

But yeah, she finally left. Did for herself what she needed to do for herself. She couldn’t break him out of it herself. Couldn’t even get him to the shrink since the season ended. Kenny had insisted on intervening in August and Dunn’d been assigned a sports psychologist with a doctorate from UT. Evidently they’ve got a sports-specific program with courses and a research lab. It’s not that he didn’t like the guy, dude seemed to actually have his shit together. He’s a Texan, for one and the guy told Dunn he’d cited Ball Four repeatedly in his dissertation. Fella chewed tobacco in his office and had a real-goddamned-live spittoon. His shit didn’t have nothing to do with the shrink, who’d helped a bit.

His second time—first time, he’d just filled out a crazy long survey in this tiny fuckin’ chair with one of those half-pencils they leave in church pews—his second time the guy had some helpful shit to say, Dunn thought. Told him he’d never have an adequate explanation for it. Told him the fans were never on his side. Apparently the research says fans don’t like baseball, they just like arguing. They cheer those who prove them right in arguments with their co-workers back on the cube farm.

The real question, the shrink said, is do you feel different?

At the time Dunn’d said well yeah he felt different now. He asked the shrink, what if all of a sudden no one you treated got any better, no matter what you did?

***

The mason jar is his. It’s on the mantel, next to stacks of tv show boxed sets, all of them popped open with a disc jacket or three displaced and since gone to join the rice on the floor. The team doctors presented it (the jar) with a little note attached that read, "Hey, did ya miss me?" They even drew a smiley face in sharpie on the side. The formaldehyde gives the dark room a faint stink and in the glow of the tv coming from the opposite side of the room, the appendix looks almost fetal. Like, if you let it out it’d grow and mature into some grotesque self-sufficient invertebrate. The eyes just stare, the smile empty.

Some show’s on, looks like cowboys and Indians and it’s ¾ finished with a "play all" command, but Adam’s pretty much gone. He’s been half out of consciousness ever since that regularly scheduled dump truck of calories triggered the desired anesthetic relay a couple hours back. He’s out, maybe for the night. Maybe he’ll get up at two in the morning long enough to start worrying about worrying about thinking and stagger to bed for some benadryl and candid photography.

So the tv and the jar interface. A gruff old guy looks out at the jar and growls.

"Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man — and give some back."

The jar just smiles and stares.