With opening day fast approaching, now is a good time to look and see how much value remains in the pool of leftover free agents. Here, I will examine the best hitters left on the market. I will do the same for the pitchers on Sunday.
“What? No offers? I raked more than your gardener last year!”
Teams have done a remarkable job in snapping up almost every scrap of free agent hitting talent this year. Unlike in past offseasons, when good players in their late-30s were unable to find jobs and had to retire, most aging sluggers—Jim Thome, Vladimir Guerrerro, Hideki Matsui, Miguel Tejada—have found homes for the upcoming season. Kenny Lofton, at 40, could not find employment after a 2007 season in which he got on base at a .367 rate, knocked 38 extra base hits, and stole 23 bases, all while playing good defense in left and center field. After the 2008 season, Frank Thomas, Jim Edmonds, and Ray Durham all failed to land jobs. Thomas and Edmonds had declined significantly, but each still could have provided value. Durham’s exile was mystifying, as he had just come off a season where he put up a .380 OBP, 35 doubles, and six home runs in 426 plate appearances, also playing average defense at second base.
Continue reading ‘Bottom of the Barrel: Hitters’
“He’s more machine, now, than man.”
Ichiro Suzuki is a singular talent. He is fast. He seems to be all over the outfield, and he steals bases with great success—45 while being caught only twice in 2006. He has a legendary cannon for a right arm. And he hits like a machine. He has racked up over 2,000 hits in just nine major league seasons, and was the second fastest to reach that milestone. He does not hit many home runs or a particularly impressive number of doubles or triples. He piles up his hits by putting the ball on the ground and running to first base. Joe Posnanski recently explored Ichiro’s hitting prowess, coming to the conclusion that he is one of the few truly unique players in history.
What if Ichiro were slow? What if he were not able to knock out so many ground ball hits? Baseball Reference lists batting average splits by hit trajectory. I compiled the American League splits on grounders from 2003 through 2009. The league statistics for the first two years of Ichiro’s career, 2001 and 2002, differ significantly from the next seven, possibly due to different methods of categorizing ground balls. Thus, I omit those first two years. During the latter seven seasons, American League players consistently reached base at a .240-.245 average on grounders. Ichiro beat the average in every year, with a high of .368 on ground balls in 2007.
Continue reading ‘Ichiro, Grounded’
Eric Chavez, once destined to be among the best players in A’s history.
The Minnesota Twins gave Joe Mauer, who may be the best catcher ever to play baseball, the fourth largest contract in history this week. To the $12.5 million he was scheduled to make in 2010, the team added eight years and $184 million. The Twins typically have been a small market team, but their new stadium will move them into the mid-market, on par with teams like Seattle and Toronto. Mauer is the first player they have ever extended with a long-term, high-value contract. Writers immediately lauded the Twins for keeping the St. Paul native, whom they had drafted and brought up through their system, rather than allowing him to jump to the Red Sox or Yankees in free agency.
In light of Mauer’s signing, I decided to look at a homegrown player on the other end of his contract, which was also the first long-term, high-value signing by his small market team. In early 2004, the Oakland A’s signed Eric Chavez to a six-year, $66 million extension that covered the 2005-10 seasons. R.J. Anderson at FanGraphs and Sal Baxamusa at The Hardball Times have looked at the contract in retrospect, reconstructing what the team knew at the time to figure out whether the reasoning behind the deal was sound. Both concluded that it was.
Continue reading ‘Eric Chavez and Scott Rolen’
Look at that. Boom. Goneski.
Steroids have been one of the defining issues in baseball over the past decade. A generation of ballplayers have participated in or been affected by The Steroid Era, and we soon must decide how to treat their records and accomplishments and whether to put the best of them in the Hall of Fame. Though baseball now tests for steroid use and enforces bans, testing has not fixed the problem. Steroid use is a result of underlying forces that have no realistic solution, and as long as there is huge money in sports—a situation which will persist as long as there are millions of obsessed fans—there will be pressure to skirt the rules. The ideal of sports as pure athletic competition is a fantasy; baseball, like any other sport, is entertainment. Organizations like Major League Baseball must do their best to protect participants from destroying their bodies, but in the end we must accept that there will be a certain amount of cheating and cease demonizing the cheaters.
A few weeks ago, I argued that we should treat the accomplishments that occurred during The Steroid Era the same way as we treat those from any other era. I listed many reasons that selectively tagging certain records with asterisks is arbitrary and unfair. Either we throw out the whole era and erase it from the record books, or we accept all of it with a healthy understanding of the context and standards of the time. Clearly, I favor the latter.
Continue reading ‘Steroids: The Future’
Jack Cust, reigning king of the K.
On Sunday, I looked at some of the characteristics of the top strikeout machines in baseball history. A natural question follows: how much value did these players provide to their teams?
For one possible answer, I will refer to Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which puts the value created by all players on the same scale. Considering a player’s value in a vacuum would be misleading, so WAR instead starts with the idea of a replacement player. If Albert Pujols were injured, the Cardinals would not play their games with first base unmanned and eight batters in the lineup. Someone has to play every position, and there is a baseline value to simply having a warm body occupy each spot in the field and the lineup. The theoretical replacement player represents the production teams could acquire for effectively no cost. This might come in the form of a minimum salary free agent, or a player available in trade for trivial return. Implementations of WAR generally estimate replacement level production as a fixed value below average production.
Continue reading ‘More on the Whiff Kings’
Rob Deer, the original master of the strikeout.
There is a charm to players who strike out at extreme rates while still providing value to their teams. In a certain way, they are masters of futility. They step to the plate, fail to put the ball into play, and return to the bench far more often than their peers. The ability to succeed despite this huge shortcoming and provide positive offensive contributions is a testament to the myriad ways a player can be successful in the major leagues. These players are not great hitters, and they often are not great defenders, either. Somehow, they find a way to keep themselves on the field.
Strikeouts have climbed steadily over the past few decades, going from around 15 percent of at bats in the 1970s to nearly 20 percent of at bats in the 2000s. According to the leaderboard at Baseball Reference, 13 of the top 20 pitchers in career K/9 either are active or retired within the past five years, including seven of the only nine in history to have struck out more than a batter per inning for their careers. Though other rates, such as batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging, have changed little over the years, strikeouts (as a percentage of at bats) have shown a near-linear increase. Here is a graph of the decade-by-decade MLB totals for the former three rates:
Continue reading ‘Hail to the K’
Jeter prepares himself to lower some other player’s BABIP.
I recently explored the characteristics of the theoretical modern .400 hitter. I focused on single-season statistics and noticed that Pujols regularly put himself within striking distance of .400 by hitting many home runs with few strikeouts. The batting average on balls in play (BABIP) he would have required to reach .400 in his best seasons was lower than for any other active player.
However, while picking out Pujols’s best seasons shows that he has put himself in good position for .400 several times in his career, it does not tell us how likely he is to reach it in the future. Recent averages give us a better idea of this. I compiled three-year totals for all players’ individual home run and strikeout rates and calculated the BABIP each player would require for .400 if those rates stayed constant. The 10 players closest to .400 are in the following table. The first two columns are the percentages of the player’s at bats that ended in home runs and strikeouts. BIP per 502 PA stands for balls in play per 502 plate appearances, the number needed for an official batting average. Each of the first four columns is an average of 2007-09 statistics, and I excluded players who played less than two full seasons (1200 plate appearances) or did not play in 2009.
Continue reading ‘How to Hit .400, Part 2′
Cole Hamels does a little stretching on the mound.
I posted this past Wednesday about the Year-After Effect and how it relies on regression toward the mean to give the appearance of a causal relationship. I later realized I had missed an additional comment by its creator, Tom Verducci, from earlier in the week. He claimed in his Phillies spring postcard that Cole Hamels was a “Year-After Effect victim” in 2009. I was curious what he meant by this, because Hamels did not go on the disabled list or suffer a performance decline in 2009. Here, I will address the flawed way in which Verducci identifies players as support for his theory.
Hamels threw 79 more total innings in 2008 than he had in 2007, and was one of Verducci’s top candidates for the Year-After Effect in 2009. After posting a record of 14-10 with a 3.09 ERA in 2008, Hamels went 10-11 with a 4.32 ERA the next season. He also threw fewer innings in 2009, dropping from 227⅓ to 193⅔. By these traditional measures of performance, it does appear that he had a worse season in his Year After. However, it is now well known that these measures depend too much on factors outside a pitcher’s control—fielder skill, run support, luck—to tell us anything meaningful about how well he actually performed. In 2001, Voros McCracken changed the way we think about pitcher performance by demonstrating that pitchers have little or no ability to control the rate at which batted balls become hits. They do control the rates at which they strike out batters and allow walks and home runs. Here is a table with Hamels’s performance in each of these areas for 2008 and 2009.
Continue reading ‘Hamels and Pitcher Performance’
Every offseason, Tom Verducci publishes a list of pitchers in danger of experiencing what he calls the “Year-After Effect.” Also known as the Verducci Effect, it applies to young pitchers who see a substantial increase in their workload from one year to the next. There is a higher risk, Verducci argues, that these players will experience either a stint on the disabled list or a performance decline in the year after the workload increase. Here is Verducci’s explanation for why the Effect occurs:
Pitchers not yet fully conditioned and physically matured were at risk if clubs asked them to pitch far more innings than they did the previous season — like asking a 10K runner to crank out a marathon. The task wasn’t impossible, but the after-effects were debilitating. I defined an at-risk pitcher as any 25-and-under pitcher who increased his innings log by more than 30 in a year in which he pitched in the big leagues. Each year the breakdown rate of such red-flagged pitchers — either by injury or drop in performance — was staggering. (Tom Verducci, “10 for ‘10: Young aces among those at risk of Verducci Effect,” Sports Illustrated, February 16, 2010.)
Continue reading ‘Year-After Regression’
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