SB Nation User Blog: colintj

So what did we learn today with this obnoxiously long article? Well I took a pitcher's 10 best and...

colintj — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 03:26:49 -0000

So what did we learn today with this obnoxiously long article? Well I took a pitcher's 10 best and worst starts of the year, in which you'll remember there was an ERA difference of about 8, and found no meaningful differences in terms of what he threw, the velocity/movement of his pitches, where he threw them and when he threw them. I think I've established that there was practically no difference in how he pitched in his good starts compared to his bad starts.

Does this show that all peaks and valleys of performance over a long season are simply due to luck? Of course not. Burnett is only one pitcher. However, I believe that this is a strong piece of evidence to support that notion to some extent. I hope someone smarter than me will develop a way to quantify the expected production of a pitcher using PITCHf/x data. Then we could apply it to the population to see if the phenomenon I found today holds true for most pitchers.

THT (ht: Tango)

White Sox WAR per 150 games by position in 2009

colintj — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:42:26 -0000

Pos	bRAA	fRAA	pos adj	WAR	2010
C	-5.5	-5	12.5	2.2	1.75
1B	16.5	2	-12.5	2.6	1.75
2B	-10	-0.5	2.5	1.2	3.35
3B	-4.5	-8.5	2.5	0.95	1.25
SS	-2	-0.5	7.5	2.5	2.65
LF	8.5	-14.5	-7.5	0.65	1
CF	-29.5	5.5	2.5	-0.15	2.35
RF	8.5	-13.5	-7.5	0.75	2.85
DH	13	0	-17.5	1.55	0

sum	-5	-35		12	17

see here

The 2009 data is prorated to 150 games from fangraphs. As you can see in the total, the Sox were about 4 wins below average holding pitching constant. Fangraphs WAR totals actually saw the 09ers as an 82-83 win team and credits the pitching staff with ~23 WAR. That difference evaporates if your evaluation of, say, Jose Contreras' '09 production is dimmer than theirs.

The 2010 CHONE projections are the WAR150 of the projected starter with amended defensive projections, taking these two excellent projection sets into consideration. Pierre is in left, with DH presumably Kotsay and Jones. As larry has noted, Quentin's health is important in this design, so it may just be that Quentin will be eased into the DH role if he can't play as well in the field as Kotsay or Jones. This is presumably the sort of flexibility they're talking about when it comes to signing a DH who can pass in the field.

Thoughts From So Far

colintj — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 19:26:55 -0000

More photos » by Darron Cummings - AP

Nice sute.

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1) The team is right when it says it's done its major acquisitions.

Kenny's bought 5 guys for the 25 man roster in Vizquel, Kotsay, Jones, Teahen and Pierre for about $9M. That's 1.5-2 expected WAR, which they'll probably get. But the Sox aren't leveraging themselves one way or another based on the performance of the supporting cast.

2) The 2009 White Sox opened the season with 3 very specific deficiencies: 3B, CF, and Starter Candidate #5

Consider: Last year's 79-80 win talent was basically without Rios, Beckham and Peavy and (though Rios didn't help much) the former two had collectively below replacement antecedents in Fields, Betemit, Anderson and Wise. Peavy meanwhile replaces the 4 starter amalgam worth probably 1.5-2 WAR in '09. So let's say Rios' value is 1-3 wins over '09 replacement, Beckham 3-4, and Peavy 1-3. That's 87-88 wins total.

3) True Talent In '10

Eyeballing it, CHONE has the Sox winning 87ish games, ZiPS a couple fewer while Bill James and the fans (perhaps expectedly) are the most optimistic. So the Sox right now are baseline in the 86-88 win range.

4) The Sweet Spot

Nate Silver, from Baseball Between The Numbers:

The most sensitive part of the graph--what we'll call the sweet spot--is between about 86 and 93 wins.

Kenny undoubtedly has his own team-specific version of this general calculation, but the suggestion from here is that it probably makes a certain amount of economic sense for Kenny to nab a DH now that he's set up his team right in the sweet spot. Beyond that, the hated Twins have set themselves up to compete having made an excellent addition to a solid squad in JJ Hardy. Again eyeballing CHONE and ZiPS, the Twins are within striking distance, largely canceling out the Sox' advantage in the rotation with Mauer and friends. As it stands, the Twins have a distinct advantage at DH in Jason Kubel, whom ZiPS and CHONE see as worth a very average 2 wins, which Cust or Thome could certainly take back.

[updated to include the following - colin]

5) Asinine Speculation About Prospects

It's always hazardous to guess at Kenny's thoughts, but...let's at least brush up on what kind of prospect package he'd be willing to put together. The only way to make it really count would be to include either or both of Tyler Flowers and Dan Hudson. The team seems to have treated Flowers and Hudson as pieces of the puzzle in turning this core into a long term contender. Hudson appears to be DJ Carrasco's replacement until he proves he's better than Freddy Garcia, which is a nice way of getting Hudson consistent low leverage multiple inning work and making sure Freddy stays focused on keeping his job.

For Flowers, the assumption is apparently that he has the backup backstop spot on lockdown. When I squint, I see where Kenny's going with it: it's a cheap stopgap that turns into a carrot for Flowers and puts him in a position to succeed in a platoon with AJ. His high K rate is going to bother him the most early on, so ABs against lefties will ease him in. But what really matters is him sticking as a defender. CHONE and ZiPS have him as better than 1 WAR per 150 games as long as his defense isn't atrocious. If that's the case, then it's a possibility Kenny, giving Flowers spring training and the first third of the season to show he's ready with the bat, flips AJ before he gains 5 and 10 rights. Of course since there is something to gain from bluffing that The Boogeyman might be that ready, it's not necessarily the case that Kenny's credible here. The conventional wisdom is to make sure your prospects get as many reps as possible.

Teams Paid $6.5 - 7.5 MM per WAR in '09 Offseason

colintj — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:52:33 -0000

Teams Paid $6.5 - 7.5 MM per WAR in '09 Offseason

"The dollar per win mark here was lower at just $5.79 million, however, this doesn't capture the true cost, since players signing mult-year contracts will likely be worse at the end of their contract than during the first year studied here. Even with this bias, the $5.79 million mark is far more than the usual $4.5 million mark. An additional counterintuitive finding is that players signing multi-year contracts tended to perform worse than their single-year contract contemporaries. This multi-year term was not significant, however, so the result isn't generalizable. Still, it was surprising to find the effect going in the opposite direction than what one would expect in 2009.

While 2009 could have been just a bad year for free agents - this is further evidence that the $4.5 million per win mark commonly used may be, if not wrong, at least obsolete. Using this 2009 data from two different data sources, again shows the dollars per win value above $6 million. While estimates based on projected WAR may yield a different figure, the reality is that teams are paying much more than that (or at least they did in 2009). Interestingly, 2009 was seen at the time as being a depressed free agent market, where teams could pick up relatively cheap bargains. At $6.5 to $7.5 million per win, there were very few bargains to be had."

One note: this hasn't been corrected for any kind of Winner's Curse. Free agents are paid by the team willing to pay the most. The market's actual valuation of the player would be something like an average of all available offer sheets. This is not a measure of what all teams were willing to pay, only what it took to sign those players.

That said, I doubt that inflation brings it back in line with the accepted $4.5MM/WAR figure. I think it also makes Kenny's approach more sensible as I'm fairly certain trades are less susceptible to such phenomena.

The 2010 Fan Projections! | FanGraphs Baseball

colintj — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:47:16 -0000

The 2010 Fan Projections! | FanGraphs Baseball

Like the Fan Scouting Report, but on fangraphs. Uses sweet drop down menu instead of making you do all the work. Do it.

How Much Does A Club House Cancer Cost His Team?

colintj — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:17:05 -0000

How Much Does A Club House Cancer Cost His Team?

"Isn't it possible that when a superstar acts like a disagreeable moron, the other players kind of shrug and accept it? If the social norm is that some superstars are a**holes, and you just have to get used to it if you wan to win, then it might cause no harm at all."

Phil Birnbaum rounds up some relevant studies and examines the problem of clubhouse cancers. The individual in question here is Milton Bradley, but there are obvious parallels to FNS. Worth a read.

Brushing Up On Freddy Garcia

colintj — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:33:54 -0000

More photos » by Kathy Willens - AP

Don't let them see you sweat.

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Can a pitcher actually succeed as a starter (or at least stave off replacement level) without breaking 90 mph with his fastball? Certain lefties, I suppose, have the capacity. Outside of the end of Greg Maddux's career, though, there are vanishingly few examples of right handed starters making any kind of career out of junkballing. That's the only way Freddy Garcia is going to make his bones at this point. And, surprisingly, he's posted a well above average FIP in 6 starts so far, including 2 against the Red Sox and 1 against the Yankees. What the hell, right?

It's common knowledge that throwing hard is desirable and the Tigers, for one, have made a season out of throwing hard and harder. How to pull off the opposite? Fortunately for us, Dave Allen exists.

In his own words, regarding the graph below:

To see how these two factors interacted I plotted fastball success by horizontal location for three groups of four-seam fastballs: all fastballs, those over 95 mph and those under 87.5 mph. The result below is just for those pitched to RHBs, so the inside is negative numbers and outside is positive numbers. The error bars are the shaded bands. The run value is the change in run expectancy so negative is better for the pitcher.

And here's Velocity vs. Vertical Location:

Command is obviously a great equalizer, as batters simply have little problem recognizing a fastball out of the zone. All of the difference comes in what happens when a strike is thrown. What really sticks out is that the below average fastball's best possible location is no better than a grooved average fastball. So, there's a lot of pressure to throw strikes when Freddy throws his fastball AND to avoid throwing his fastball as much as he can. If he's going to be average, he's got to make it up with his off-speed stuff.

So let's refer to that platoon splits by pitch chart I've been using recently. To compensate for his crap fastball, he's got to have a good change/split and a good slider. I pulled up his most recent start against the M's and his excellent start against the Red Sox on Brooks to see what it looks like Garcia's tossing. He's throwing a splitter from what I could tell. He starts on that grip and changes off it much like Contreras did with his forkball. He's not throwing a ton of them and the early returns are pretty meh. In case you're wondering what to look for, Dave Allen summarizes:

Changeups that have very little movement (close to 0,0) get crushed. Those with extreme vertical movement, either lots of rise or lots of sink, are very successful. Since changeups are thrown in opposite handed at-bats even those with neutral run values are good pitches.

Freddy's splitter isn't really either of those. As Allen says, getting out opposite handed batters is a difficult task anyway so having a merely average change/split is useful. But the exercise here is to see if Freddy's got the stuff to be average-ish. Against lefties, we should really expect him to struggle. That hasn't happened so far, in fact the opposite has been true. In '09, Señor Sweaty has allowed a .191/.263/.382 line. The culprit is a minuscule BABIP, 70 points below his career average. If all we do is add that 70 points back in, the slash line becomes .261/.333/.452. That's more or less what I'd expect to see in the future. He'll have to cut down on free passes significantly to achieve average performance with his current stuff.

So he's going to be vulnerable to lefties. If he can really shut down same-handed batters, he might be able to make up the difference. And here, there's actually some hope. For one, his contact rate allowed is still quite good and in line with career averages. This suggests a good slider that's generating whiffs; obviously it's not the fastball doing it and he simply hasn't thrown enough splitters for them to be primarily responsible. Compare Freddy's contact rate to qualified starters in '09. He'd be right up there with enough starts. Putting the Brooks chart side by side with yet another Allen chart, it seems at least possible Garcia's slider is in a smallish sweet spot. In his wee sample size, he's had BABIP issues against RHB. If it were a more reasonable .300, he'd have a .253/.282/.405 slash line against. That would be pretty useful and it's probably a lot more than we can expect. Put simply, I have a hard time believing he'll be able to keep his BABIP and ISO down with such a hittable fastball.

So he's not going to be average. I don't think SSSers were really holding out hope for such. After all, dude's had shoulder problems and can't break 90. The consensus seems to be that he's very cheap, so why not give him a go? It's just $1MM, right? And, certainly, there are hints that he's better than replacement level. And all he's got to do is take the ball until Dan Hudson's ready. If Kenny does go that route, I'd really like to see him bring on a lefty long man who can clean up for Freddy when he inevitably gets bombed by lefty-heavy lineups.

Brushing Up On Ian Snell

colintj — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:40:06 -0000

Good Stuff

The table is ripped from Kalk's tool database and meshes with what I've seen in the brooks pfx stuff, so I went with the one that charted an order of magnitude more pitches. What we see is a pretty decent repertoire. The fastball movement is pretty blah, but throws hard enough. Judging from the brooks graphs, his velocity increases as the inning wears on. He can get up to 95-96, but is usually in the 92-94 range. That's plus velocity. The slider doesn't look particularly good, but that's the hardest pitch to eyeball for me. The Kalk database says 16% of all sliders went for whiffs, which is well above average. The change up looks more like I'd expect a splitter to look, but it gets an average whiff rate and doesn't get too beat up when put in play. That's two plus pitches and an average one. We'd expect perhaps some struggles against lefties, but more or less domination against RHB. Remember the chart from the Dan Hudson BUO?

The suggestion is that an average fastball/slider combo will tear through a right handed lineup (this is actually my guess for the Sox woes against pitchers they haven't faced). Assuming Snell's stuff has been more or less the same throughout his career, what's he done with it?

Undomination

Career vs. RHB: .265/.327/.425, .320 BABIP, ~ .333 wOBA against.

Career vs. LHB: .293/.385/.483, .325 BABIP, ~ .386 wOBA against.

Well, not that much it turns out. Average righties stay average. Average lefties turn into Jim Thome. He's given up about 5 runs per 9 innings pitched over his career and it's become worse lately as his control has imploded. Lookout Landing (ht: WU!) has speculated that there are mechanical issues, especially with his foot landing. I'm not entirely sure there, since the slo-mo may be making it look worse than it is. There's a lot of shock that goes into a pitching motion in the first place. Still, it doesn't look great.

The brooks pfx was somewhat suggestive, but they really aren't calibrated to doing that kind of analysis--the data hasn't been corrected. In any case, the plots for each pitch type were very spread out and every individual pitch seemed to be doing something somewhat different than its similarly categorized brethren. This may be a visual rendering of poor control: if you don't have repeatable mechanics, it's likely that your pitches will vary more than a pitcher with repeatable mechanics. In any case, we can just point to Snell's walk rate, which for the last two seasons has been well above his career 4.12 BB/9 rate. In addition, he's had an elevated BABIP for his career and he's going to make his 125th MLB start tonight. Bad pitches get hit hard and are probably harder to defend. His lack of command is hurting him in more ways than one.

Nonetheless, he's obviously talented. It's why the M's acquired him when they had the chance. Frankly, it's too bad the Sox weren't in the running for his services. To echo some SSSers before the trade deadline, I'd be very interested to see what Coop could do with him.

Josh Fields WAR150 By Age

colintj — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:03:19 -0000

This is Josh Fields' minor league translated WAR150. His performance from his '04-'08 minor league seasons have been extrapolated out to 150 games, with defense eyeballed using his MLB UZR and minor league Total Zone ratings (which can be found on minor league splits). His age 26 season is what he actually did in the MLB this year, more or less.

This is really just an excuse to point out Dan Szymborski's recently released minor league translations that go back 30 years. They are very cool. As larry noted, some prospects simply reach their ceiling early and fall by the wayside. Knowing what we know now, Fields' probably ought to have been traded following '07. It was far less clear at the time, obviously. Just for kicks, here's Mike Cameron.

Again, the final season is actual major league performance. I actually just plugged in +5 fielding runs above average, but really there's a good chance he was much better. UZR only goes back to '02, his age 29 season. Fielding skill peaks from 24-28 or so, and it may be younger in the OF where it's almost all about how fast your legs can carry you. From '02 to '09, he's averaged 4 WAR per season, the level of play he established in his age 23 and 24 seasons. Nothing against Paulie, but I'm pretty sure the Sox lost that trade. I was all of 12 when it was made, so maybe there's something I'm missing.

Brushing Up On Dan Hudson

colintj — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:25:15 -0000

Charts!

9/4:

Hooray brooksbaseball.net chart!

9/8:

The Fastball

Most impressive so far has been his fastball. The movement is nothing spectacular; the spectrum of rise over run for major league fastballs is from about 1/2 to 2. The smaller the ratio, the more groundballs expected. The higher, the more swing-misses expected. Hudson's is in the vicinity of 1, so it isn't doing anything special. The velocity is where it's at. Of the 40+ he's thrown in relief so far, just 2 appear to have been below 93 mph. I can't offhand find the article I'm looking for that addressed the velocity dip in moving from relief to a starting gig. Iirc, it was 1-2 mph. He's averaged 93-95, which still leaves him in the plus range when/if he moves into the rotation. The scouting reports larry's posted in the Sox minor league fanposts have been somewhat vague, though Baseball America and Jim mesh pretty well (paywall):

Hudson’s fastball ranged from 90-93 mph, mostly coming in at 91-92.

And:

Through the first three innings, Hudson’s fastball registered between 91-93 on the radar gun. Over the last four, he was around 89-90, with an occasional 91.

There was some speculation that he may have fatigued somewhat, so extrapolating what we know so far is still something of a guessing game. There's evidence that velocity increases up until age 29 for starting pitchers, so it's reasonable to project a plus fastball. Ideally, he'd sit 92-93 and be able to add a little in 2 strike counts. As Cheat noted last week his command of the pitch is good; true to form he's yet to walk a batter in his limited work. All told, he should be able to induce weak contact and ground balls early in the count against average or worse RHB. Finishing them off with the strikeout is another story.

The Offspeed

A typical right handed slider is somewhere between 5 and -5 inches in vertical movement and 0 to 5 horizontally. Hudson's slider is pretty weird. It's actually had some tail to it so far; I thought larry was joking about the screwball. Maybe not? I'm with Cheat on this one, though: it seems to be a marginal pitch and may help explain his flyball proclivities in the high minors and his MLB stint. Bad pitches are worth more runs. If they're worth more runs, they're being hit in the air (either as line drives or fly balls). Really, though, he's not capitalizing on the best pitch available to a righty facing an RHB. This sweet graph illustrates nicely (read the whole article):

Click to embiggen. Anyway, Hudson's pitch choice alone (far more changes than sliders), assuming he's being rational, is a serious indictment of his slider. Normally, fastball/slider combo alone is enough to get same-sided batters out. It just so happens that those two pitches have the largest splits, necessitating a third when at a platoon disadvantage. Hudson is atypical in this regard, though a plus change would certainly help offset the slider problem. Hudson is already very comfortable with his, obviously, and it passes the pfx sniff test. There is significantly more horizontal than vertical movement and the velocity disparity is sufficient. It's got fade and he doesn't seem to have problems disguising it.

Putting It All Together

Jim noted a lot of K's via the fastball when he saw him in AAA, something that's very unlikely to hold up in the majors. Something like 6% of fastballs end in whiffs, way less than half of all other pitches. So we should expect his K rate to decline at least somewhat. Additionally, he doesn't have a real out pitch to RHB -- he'll have smaller splits, but only because he's not dominating righties with a hard breaking ball. Still, he should have enough velocity to get by and he's better prepared for opposite handed hitters than most young right handed starters. Kevin Goldstein tagged him with a 3-starter ceiling. That looks about right to me.