Sweeney has “warning track power,” but he looks good doing it.
The Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, who play just a few miles from each other on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay, have very similar players manning right field. Ryan Sweeney of the A’s and Nate Schierholtz of the Giants are young, tall, rangy outfielders who hit from the left side. Both are quite good at making contact, and both have the range to handle center field, though only Sweeney has played the position in the majors. Both look the part of the big, power-hitting, major league corner outfielder. However, neither actually hits for much power.
A big part of the reason these players lack power is that the balls they hit in the air do not travel very far. Baseball Reference provides batting splits by hit trajectory. I compiled the MLB-wide numbers from 2008 through 2010, the years in which Sweeney and Schierholtz have had most of their appearances. During that period, 8.9 percent of fly balls and 2.2 percent of line drives went over the fence for home runs. Those are averages for all players, and are modest compared to the rates of true power hitters. Ryan Howard, for example, has had more than 27 percent of his fly balls carry out of the park.
Continue reading ‘Powering Up in the Bay’
Silva has never been big on strikeouts, but he was effective for the Twins.
The Chicago Cubs and Seattle Mariners swapped bad contracts back in December, when the Cubs sent left fielder Milton Bradley to the Mariners in exchange for starter Carlos Silva. At the time, the general consensus was that while the Cubs had to deal Bradley, the Mariners won big by dumping Silva on them. Here, after a quarter of a season, is a look at how the two sides have fared thus far.
The Cubs signed Bradley to three years and $30 million after his great 2008 season in Texas. Chicago was Bradley’s eighth team, and he had demonstrated a tendency to make things difficult for his employers. Bradley was not bad, but not great, on the field in 2009. Off-field problems were what made it impossible for the team to keep him. For the Mariners and Silva, the problems were based on performance. They had signed him away from the Twins for four years and $48 million prior to the 2008 season. His first season with Seattle, despite looking bad on the surface (4-15 record, 6.46 ERA), was in line with his performance in previous years. He was injured and ineffective in his second year, allowing 29 runs in 30⅓ innings and walking more batters than he struck out. The following table compares his career rates before and after Seattle signed him.
Continue reading ‘Silva and Bradley’
Old Man Moyer plying his trade.
Jamie Moyer has had an unorthodox career. Through age 32, he pitched about 1,100 mediocre innings for four teams and had a losing record. As he moved into his mid-30s, an age when most pitchers decline quickly, he got much better. Since turning 33, he has thrown nearly 3,000 above-average innings and racked up over 200 wins. Now, at 47, he is pitching his fourth full season for the Philadelphia Phillies. As I detailed in a post a couple of weeks ago, he is the ultimate soft-tosser in today’s game. He is a straightforward, fastball-changeup pitcher whose average heater comes in at 81-82 miles per hour and has maxed out at around 84 this season. He has relied on command and deception to survive for years with some of the slowest stuff in the game.
Continue reading ‘Catching Up with Niekro’
Braden’s perfect game came against one of the best offenses in baseball.
Dallas Braden threw a perfect game in Oakland on Sunday. Within a few hours, analysis started to pop up around the web. Jack Moore of FanGraphs was one of the first on the topic, looking into the chances of Braden’s feat and finding them to be about one in 66,000. Probability is a tricky thing, and with so many variables like park factors, the defense, the batting team, and slight changes in a pitcher’s skill over the years, it is not really feasible to come up with accurate numbers. However, with some very imprecise estimates, I will check Moore’s work and add additional thoughts on the general probability of perfect games.
Moore used approximations in his calculation, and he left out hit batsmen. A perfect game involves 27 straight outs; to calculate its probability, it is necessary at some point to raise to the 27th power, so tiny differences really add up. I added up the hits, walks, hit batsmen, and bases reached on error that Braden had allowed in his major league career before Sunday, for a total of 467. Before Sunday, he had faced 1371 batters. Divide the first by the second, and this results in a career .34 probability of a batter reaching base against Braden. This means there was about a .66 chance that he would retire each batter, and raising .66 to the 27th power gives the probability that he would, on command, do it 27 times in a row.
Continue reading ‘Perfect Braden: Fun with Powers’
Pokey Reese knew how to show off a good one.
One of the many great things about baseball is the granularity of data available. There are statistics for every player and team in every situation. Yesterday, I learned that the Tampa Bay Rays had allowed the fewest runs through 29 games of any American League team since 1981. This type of specificity may be excessive, but some situational statistics can be illuminating.
One interesting set is batting splits by count. Often, during a broadcast, commentators offer the batter’s average or on-base percentage “with two strikes,” or “on an 0-2 count.” These “splits” represent a subset of the player’s performance that is limited to the given situation. Presumably, this gives viewers a better idea of how the player will perform than overall numbers would show. However, caution is necessary when drawing conclusions from splits.
Continue reading ‘Batting Splits: The Count’
More and more, teams are going to guys like Jack Wilson, who have slick gloves and put the ball in play.
Tom Verducci published a column yesterday lamenting the lack of contact in modern baseball. He cites rising walk and strikeout rates and lower numbers of balls in play as reasons the game is steadily losing an essential part of its charm. He makes some good points; it is immensely more enjoyable to watch Ichiro slap and run than to see Kevin Youkilis take a six-pitch walk without removing the bat from his shoulder. When my friends and I are watching a game, we refer to the walk as “the most boring play in baseball.” The pitcher misses his spot, and the hitter drops his bat and trots to first base. It is good for the team that is batting, but it is not fun to watch.
However, Verducci’s claim that walks and strikeouts have been on the rise for decades is only partially true. An article by Sky Andrecheck from the offseason demonstrates that walk rates have fluctuated over the past 30 years but have not shown a general upward trend. And while Verducci correctly points out that walks have risen for five straight years, they actually dropped every year during the first half of the decade and are no higher now than they were in the mid-1980s. Strikeouts have certainly climbed steadily, going from 12.5 percent of plate appearances in 1980 to about 18 percent today. As I described in my posts on high-strikeout players, the main ways to overcome a ton of whiffs are to walk a lot and to hit home runs. Walk rates have not changed a whole lot, so as the game has allowed in more high-strikeout players, home run hitting has increased to compensate. This increase is necessary to balance the negative effects of strikeouts, because players without power who strike out a lot cannot provide much value. However, while high-strikeout sluggers have been on the rise for a while, Verducci’s calls for changes to the game may be premature.
Continue reading ‘Saving Baseball’s Charm’
Tim Kurkjian of ESPN wrote a column this week bemoaning the mental mistakes that have supposedly become more and more common among young baseball players. Today’s players, he argues, lack the instincts for smart, fundamental baseball that players had in the past.
Mistakes in today’s game are as common as 4-3 ground outs, and they’re not always accompanied by consequence. It is the frequent refrain of veteran managers and instructors every day: Young players today are bigger, stronger, faster and more talented than ever, but some of them, if not a majority, don’t know how to play the game. (Tim Kurkjian, “Mental Mistakes a Real Drag on the Game,” ESPN, April 30, 2010.)
Continue reading ‘Playing the Right Way’
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