Archive for ESPN Insider 2010

The San Diego Padres lost Sunday. This qualifies as news because lately they’ve been playing like the best team in baseball. Before Sunday’s loss, the Padres had won eight consecutive games, including sweeps of divisional foes Arizona and San Francisco. And in ESPN.com’s latest MLB Power Rankings, San Diego is No. 7.

Although superstar first baseman Adrian Gonzalez is doing his thing, hitting home runs in each of the past four games, the key to the Padres’ early success is a bunch of no-names.

Chase Headley, a former hotshot prospect who previously struggled to adjust to the big leagues, has found his stroke in April. His .371 batting average easily paces the team. Although the third baseman is not a huge power threat, he has seven extra-base hits and six stolen bases, providing all-around value. Based on FanGraphs’ wins above replacement statistic, Headley has been worth 1.1 wins (compared with Gonzalez’s 1.0), making him the team’s co-MVP through the first three weeks of the season.

Headley isn’t the only low-profile guy carrying his weight. Outfielder Will Venable has provided some much-needed power to a lineup that lacks punch beyond Gonzalez. His .262 average might not look like much on the surface, but nine of his 16 hits have gone for extra bases, giving him a ridiculous .312 isolated slugging percentage on the season. (Isolated slugging is simply slugging minus batting average, which allows us to measure the power output of a player by excluding singles.) For comparison, Prince Fielder of the Milwaukee Brewers posted a .303 ISO last season.

Wrapping up the trio of unheralded early-season Padres hitting stars is catcher Nick Hundley. Like Venable, his .262 batting average isn’t all that impressive, but instead of supplying power, Hundley is busting out the walking stick. He’s drawn eight free passes in 13 games, driving his on-base percentage up to .380, a remarkably high number for a backstop. Although the base on balls is a less sexy way to derive value, there is no more important offensive skill than the ability to get on base.

It’s unlikely that Headley, Venable and Hundley will continue to perform like stars because none of them has a track record that suggests he can sustain his performance. But if you’re looking for the reason the Padres are in first place, look no further than these three. And considering none of the members of the trio is older than 27, it’s possible they’ve turned a corner in their development. If they all continue on their current career-year course, the NL West will be a lot more interesting.

Livan Hernandez saw his unlikely scoreless streak end at 17 innings yesterday, as he gave up the first of two solo home runs that would give him his first loss of the season. It was the kind of start that serves as a lesson for why wins and losses don’t matter, as the Nationals offered no run support. But the loss does nothing to taint what has been the best April of Livan’s career, coming in a season where even the most optimistic of projection systems saw him as a 5.00 ERA pitcher. There are a lot of explanations for why Hernandez won’t be sustain his success going forward — his 9-7 strikeout-to-walk ratio, for instance — but none more so than a hitless streak that would make Ubaldo Jimenez jealous.

Hernandez has pitched from the stretch in 29 plate appearances this season, and in none of those has he allowed a hit. In all, opponents are hitting a ridiculous .000/.138/.000 when their teammates are on base against Livan, which explains why two solo home runs on Thursday are the only runs that have crossed the plate in the 24 innings Hernandez has pitched this season.

At FanGraphs, we track a stat called Left on Base Percentage, which monitors the rate that pitchers strand baserunners. League averages usually hover between 70 and 72 percent, and while better pitchers can routinely be above-average, pitchers of Livan’s ilk see a great deal of variance. Stranding runners is a huge part of run prevention, which is why the season Hernandez had his best LOB% (2003 – 78.7 percent) corresponded with his best full-season ERA (3.20). And the year of his worst LOB% (2008 – 64.8 percent) led to a career-worst ERA (6.05). This season, Livan’s Left on Base Percentage is a perfect 100 percent, a rate difficult to sustain for three starts, much less an entire season.

In his career, which spans 2,750 innings, Livan has been identical with the bases empty (.780 OPS allowed) and with runners on base (.782 OPS allowed). His stuff doesn’t get better from the stretch, his delivery isn’t more deceptive. People will say that Hernandez is succeeding because he is “bearing down” with runners on base. This is not true. He is merely in the midst of an amazing stretch of good fortune. While a career revival makes a good story, this is a tale more likely to end with regression to the mean, and another below-average, innings-eating season for Hernandez.

What would you have said if I had told you before the season began that the Padres would be leading the NL West on April 22? Odds are you would have called me crazy, and justifiably so. But here we are, and that’s because crazy things happen, especially in short time frames.

While what has happened so far can’t be taken as gospel of what will happen over the rest of the season, we can see that some things have shifted. By looking back at preseason projections and applying them to what has already occurred, we can get an updated look at how teams and players may perform this year. To explain the methodology, I’m going to use the Phillies as an example.

In the April 5 edition of ESPN The Magazine, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections predicted that Philadelphia would win about 93 games. They have won 9 of their first 14 games already, so does that mean they are going to win 84 games the rest of the year to bring their total to 93? No. We wouldn’t expect them to play worse the rest of the year just because they got off to a good start.

Our best assumption is that they are still a 93-win team the rest of the way, so we simply take their projected win percentage (.571) and apply it to their remaining games (148), making their updated projection 94 wins. They have added a win to their preseason expected total by playing so well in the first two weeks of the season.

For an updated look at how ZiPS thinks your team will finish the season, here are the updated projected standings through April 20, rounded to the nearest win:

Even though they are currently leading the NL West, the Padres are still projected as the third-worst team in the majors, behind the Blue Jays and Astros. The Jays are also off to a good start (9-7), but keep in mind that they have yet to play the Yankees, Rays or Red Sox.

The Red Sox’s falling into third place was the only major change when comparing the update with the original predictions. For the preseason ZiPS predictions in The Mag, the Red Sox were projected to win the AL East. After their slow start, they are now projected to miss the playoffs. That slow start created a large hole that they now have to dig out of, and with two good teams in the division, it won’t be easy. While Boston’s slow start isn’t reflective of how good the Sox are as a team, their place in the standings may just be “real,” because they now have to play better than their true talent level in order to close the gap. They may be able to do it, but it will now be an upset if the Red Sox make the playoffs.

Kosuke Fukudome wasted no time winning Cubs’ fans hearts in 2008, hitting a game-tying three-run home run in his major league debut, and blistering the baseball in his first month in the majors. At the end of his first April, he was hitting .327/.436/.480 and looked like a star.

The rest of the season didn’t go quite as well. Fukudome hit .241/.340/.355 from May through September, showing little power and earning a late season benching. In 2009 we saw much of the same. In his 89 April plate appearances Fukudome hit .338/.461/.592, an improvement even over his hot April 2008. The rest of the way he hit .245/.360/.393, again a bit better than 2008 but still a disappointment after another torrid start.

He’s again off to a good start — he’s hitting .297 — yet Cubs fans have been conditioned to expect much worse once the calendar turns to May. Why has he hit so much better in April than the rest of the year?

It is tough to assign cause to such a small sample, however, we can see a discrepancy in his batted ball types in April compared to the rest of the season. In the first month of the year, Fukudome hits the ball in the air and drives it with some regularity, as seen in the graph below. It shows the percentage of flyballs to each zone divided by total balls in play, with the colors showing slugging percentage — the redder the better. As you can see, he turns into a groundball machine as the season wears on. And after driving the ball to right field seven percent of the time in April, that number drops to three percent the rest of the year.

If you’re more of a numbers person than a graph person, Fukudome’s career GB percentage in April is 41 percent, compared with 50 percent the rest of the year.

At a glance, it might seem like hitting ground balls isn’t all a bad thing. Ground balls, after all, produce hits at a greater rate than fly balls. But that only touches on one dimension of hitting — and even then, it’s not a particularly compelling argument. Last year in the National League ground balls produced a .234 batting average, while fly balls produced a .224 average. (Line drives, the third type of batted ball, had a .728 average.) But slugging percentage on fly balls is considerably higher than on grounders. NL hitters slugged .595 on fly balls last season, while they slugged just .255 on ground balls. It’s pretty hard to hit a groundball over the wall.

While some hitters can benefit from hitting the ball on the ground, Fukudome does not profile as one of them. He possesses the power to hit near or in the middle of the order, having hit 31 homers for the Chunichi Dragons in 2006. However, he doesn’t take advantage of this power once the calendar flips to May. He’s off to a strong start again, and he has kept the ball in the air at a greater frequency than in his past two seasons. Maybe it’s Fukudome’s year, but until he shows the ability to hit fly balls and line drives in the later months, don’t expect an improvement.

On Saturday, the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets played one of the classic National League games of all time. After 20 innings and 652 pitches, every player on both rosters — save Oliver Perez, Chris Carpenter, Brad Penny and Adam Wainwright — had been used. Position players pitched two full innings and one (Joe Mather) took the loss for Tony LaRussa’s team.

Along the way, there were plenty of swings in momentum. At FanGraphs, we use a statistic called “Win Probability Added” to measure the change in likelihood of a team winning as events unfold. For example, when Skip Schumaker hit a double to open the second inning, he added 6.1 percent to St. Louis’ chance of winning the game.

As you can see by the accompanying game graph, there were some single plays that stand out. Some of these swings in win probability were directly due to managerial decisions, and now that we’ve had a day to digest this epic game, it’s still hard to understand what La Russa was thinking with some of his decisions in extra innings.

Perhaps his most harmful was the decision to double-switch out cleanup hitter Matt Holliday, because it allowed the Mets to intentionally walk Albert Pujols and take advantage of the situation. Even with Holliday under the weather, choosing to have the pitcher’s spot due up behind the game’s best hitter is simply a poor choice.

On two separate occasions (in the 12th and 14th innings), the Mets took advantage of Holliday’s absence by intentionally walking Pujols to load the bases. Both times, La Russa chose to let a relief pitcher swing the bat in situations where an out would decrease their odds of winning by 15.4 percent, a staggeringly high total for one play. La Russa left actual hitter Bryan Anderson (and his career .362 on base percentage in the minors) on the bench while his pitchers flailed away.

Even if you think Anderson isn’t much of an offensive force, the gap between he and a relief pitcher at the plate is enormous. The average major league pitcher got on base just 18 percent of the time last year, and as relievers, Jason Motte and Blake Hawksworth bat infrequently, so that even overstates their abilities. With two chances to win the game, La Russa chose to let two of the worst hitters in the sport swing the bat.

Even still, those plays may not have been the biggest errors of the night. Ryan Ludwick’s caught stealing in the 19th inning cost his team 21.6 percent in win probability. Had he been ruled safe, the Cardinals odds of winning would have increased by just 4.2 percent. In other words, he would need five successful steals in that situation to cancel out just one caught stealing, and Ludwick had a career 57 percent success rate prior to the attempt. Henry Blanco, the Mets catcher, has thrown out 43 percent of all base stealers in his career. The odds were simply not in Ludwick’s favor, and getting thrown out was a huge blow to the Cardinals. It was yet another bad decision on a night full of them. The Cardinals threw away three great opportunities to win, and eventually, the Mets won by default.

The Astros are off to a rollicking 1-8 start, finally getting a win yesterday against the Cardinals after opening the season with eight consecutive losses. They aren’t losing a bunch of close ones, either. Through the first nine games, Houston has allowed 45 runs while only scoring 19. According their Pythagorean Win expectation, they have earned their 1-8 record. But are the Astros really this bad? After all, they do have former All-Stars such as Carlos Lee, Roy Oswalt and, when he returns from injury, Lance Berkman.

However, even before Berkman’s DL stint, the Astros were expected to be terrible. CHONE’s “optimistic” projection forecasted the Astros for 72 wins this season. CAIRO, another projection system, saw the Astros being even worse in 2010, at 69-93.

The Astros have been heading this direction for a while. While Wandy Rodriguez and Hunter Pence are good players in their prime seasons, and Michael Bourn is a useful piece, Berkman and Oswalt aren’t the forces they were a few years ago, and Carlos Lee’s bat is heavily offset by his poor fielding. (And right now, Lee is “hitting” .086 with zero extra-base hits, so he can’t even fall back on his bat.) Other than that core, there is altogether too much reliance on players best suited for the part-time duty (Kaz Matsui) and others who may not be suited for the major leagues (J.R. Towles). The pitching isn’t quite as disastrous, but that’s only relatively speaking — the drop-off after Oswalt and Rodriguez is sharp, and the bullpen is nothing special, despite general manager Ed Wade’s predictably silly $15-million investment in Brandon Lyon this past winter.

Despite the fact that it is only the second week of the season, it is no longer early in Houston. With a 1-8 start to the season, the Astros would have to win 59 percent of their games the rest of the way to end up with 90 wins on the season. This team simply isn’t good enough to play at that level for five and a half months. It’s too early to say that they’re definitely the worst team in baseball, but it’s not too early to write off their playoff chances.

Most baseball fans — even those who count themselves among the TMI readership — were probably a little surprised to find that someone named Colby Lewis had not only signed with the Texas Rangers this offseason, but was immediately considered a prime candidate for a starting rotation. If the name sounded somewhat familiar, it’s because Lewis entered 2010 with over 200 Major League innings under his belt, having made appearances at the highest level every year but one from 2002 to 2007. As for the quality of those innings, well, you be the judge.

In 217 innings, Lewis had a 6.71 ERA with 155 strikeouts with 124 walks. He was awful. But after a couple of years playing in Japan, he showed the kind of stuff that made him a supplemental first-round pick of the Rangers back in 1999, as he had eight strikeouts for every one walk while playing for Hiroshima.

Lewis’s numbers in Japan certainly impressed a couple of the projection systems we host at FanGraphs. Sean Smith’s CHONE projections call for Lewis to end 2010 with 167 innings, a 3.99 ERA, and a 1.13 WHIP. Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projects Lewis for a 4.39 ERA in 176 innings. Not incredible, but still serviceable when one considers Lewis’s home ballpark (which ranks among the top-third of all parks in run inflation).

Yesterday’s start in Cleveland, however, might create even loftier expectations. Obviously, small sample size caveats abound here, but Lewis’s final line against the Indians was excellent. In 5 1/3 innings, he struck out 10, walked four, and allowed just two runs. Remarkably, those 10 whiffs came against just 24 batters faced, meaning Lewis fanned more than 40 percent of opposing batters.

Of particular note are the 15 swings-and-misses Lewis generated on the night. In a study published last summer, Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing finds that there is a great deal of correlation between swinging strikes and strikeout rates. Starting pitchers, on average, induce a swing and miss a little more than eight percent of the time. Last year’s strikeout leaders Tim Lincecum and Justin Verlander finished 2009 with swinging-strike rates of about 11 percent. Last night, Lewis managed to generate whiffs on a full 13 percent of his pitches.

Does this mean we can expect to find Lewis’s name among the list of strikeout leaders by year’s end? My guess is no. But he could still be a success without striking out 200 batters. In any case, his is a compelling story, and one that will be a pleasure to follow for the remainder of the 2010 season.

What do Jeffrey Leonard, Greg Briley, Kevin Mitchell, Mike Felder, Eric Anthony, Vince Coleman, Rich Amaral, Jose Cruz Jr., Glenallen Hill, Brian Hunter, Rickey Henderson, Al Martin, Mark McLemore, Randy Winn and Raul Ibanez have in common? From 1990 through 2004, each player in turn was the regular starter in left field for the Seattle Mariners. Not a single player repeated during that entire span. When Raul Ibanez occupied the primary starting role from 2004 through 2008, it marked the first time that the same person played left field regularly in consecutive years since Phil Bradley did in 1986 and 1987.

With Ibanez in Philadelphia, however, the Mariners left field carousel is back. Last year, the position was manned by Endy Chavez, Ryan Langerhans, Wladimir Balentien, Michael Saunders and Bill Hall. Saunders and Langerhans are in Triple-A Tacoma, while the other three are with other organizations.

For now, the de facto starter is Milton Bradley, but there are problems with that arrangement even without discussing Bradley’s off-field baggage. He has had surgery on both knees in the past, and in 2009 he he missed games with minor pains in his left quad, groin, right calf, right hip, both hamstrings, left knee and right quad. Safeco Field holds a vast expanse of real estate to cover in left field, and Milton Bradley attempting to cover that much ground is bad for the team’s defense and bad for Bradley’s future health.

It would be a tougher decision if the Mariners were playing Bradley in left field in order to make room for a Vladimir Guerrero-type bat at DH, but they’re not. Most projection systems have the Mariners’ current DH platoon of Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Sweeney at replacement level, meaning that they are not any better than what you’d expect to get from a player claimed on waivers. (Last year, Griffey was worth 0.3 wins above replacement, and Sweeney was 0.4.) There is no one blocking Bradley from moving to designated hitter. Not to mention the fact that Bradley had the best year of his career in 2008, when he posted a 4.6 WAR as a full-time DH for the Rangers.

With Bradley at DH, left field is opened up for a platoon of Eric Byrnes and either Ryan Langerhans or Michael Saunders; either pairing would provide solid defense coupled with enough hitting to allow Bradley to move to DH with no overall loss in left field. The Mariners are costing themselves about two projected wins with their current arrangement and, needing to make up ground in the AL West, cannot settle for another sub-par left fielder, even if that is the norm for the organization.

David Ortiz shifted his approach at the plate in 2009, perhaps hoping to generate more power on inside pitches. But instead, the results have been that he’s not pulling the ball with power.

Over the winter, FanGraphs’ pitch f/x guru Dave Allen studied Ortiz’s struggles at the plate, focusing on Ortiz’s power and plate discipline. He concluded that Ortiz was swinging at pitches outside the strike zone and that it was a tendency developed over time — dating back to the days of the prehistoric and lovably clutch “Big Papi” era. But that wasn’t the surprising part. What shocked Allen was the type of pitches Ortiz swung more at in 2009: high pitches and inside pitches.

The above graphs are from the catcher’s perspective. The contours are estimates of Ortiz’s swing rate (and contact rate). So for a pitch at the solid line (50 percent contour), there is a 50 percent chance Ortiz will swing at it. Ortiz will swing at a pitch between the solid and dotted contour between 50 percent and 75 percent of the time. He will swing at pitches inside the dotted line more than 75 percent of the time. The graph shows that in 2009 he was more likely to swing at pitches up-and-in as compared to in 2007 and 2008. The next graph shows the same thing but for his contact rate — the probability he makes contact with a pitch if he swings. The contour lines here are 80 percent (solid) and 90 percent (dotted). Since the area inside the 2009 contour lines is much smaller, there is a smaller area in which he made consistent contact compared to 2007 and 2008.

In his study, Allen surmised that perhaps Ortiz thought he would generate power only on inside pitches, so he forced the issue rather than taking these pitches as balls and waiting on better offerings.

But this shift in approach led to a drastic decrease in Ortiz’s power to right field. In short, he was sapped of any power when he pulled the ball. It also led to a decay in offensive production. In 2009, Ortiz posted a career low in home runs per fly ball, and he has yet to homer this season. So far in 2010, Ortiz has put only four balls into play that were not groundouts. Two went toward left field, one to center and one to right. This is counterintuitive to his aggressiveness on inside pitches.

Here’s an illustration of his drop-off in pull power:

Interestingly, pitchers are feeding Ortiz fewer changeups and more breaking pitches (specifically curveballs) this season. It could suggest other teams think Ortiz’s bat control has diminished with his wrist injuries. In fact, his wrists could be so exaggeratedly slow that when he swings expecting a fastball, he makes contact with changeups. And, sadly, that might be an improvement over Ortiz’s typical 2010 result of a grounder or infield pop. Another discouraging sign for Papi this season is that he has missed on 44 percent of his swings, while the league average is 20 percent.

Is Ortiz done? It’s too early to say. On Monday, Ortiz took a ball to the warning track in center field and wound up with a double. It could be a spark — or it could be an ember from a waning flame due to age and injury.

Outdoor baseball. Minnesota. April. Those are three things that, when put together, don’t get you overly excited about what may be in store. The historical mean temperature on April 12th in Minneapolis is 45 degrees, according to weather.com. In 1962, it was 12 degrees on this date, which doesn’t really scream take me out to the ballgame.
How will playing outdoors in the still nearly frozen tundra affect the game?

Chris Constancio wrote an article for the Hardball Times in 2007, looking at the relationship between temperature at game time and home run rate. He found a statistically significant decrease in the likelihood of a batted ball flying over the fence when the temperature dropped, which is a rather intuitive result. It’s hard to hit a baseball when your hands are frozen. Constancio writes:

“Game-time temperature is a significant predictor of whether or not batted balls leave the ballpark … A batted ball has a 4.0% chance of leaving the park during a game played in 70 degree conditions, but only a 3.5% chance of becoming a home run in a game played in 50 degree conditions.”

The teams that play outdoors at the most similar April temperatures are the Colorado Rockies and Milwaukee Brewers. The average April low in Minny and Milwaukee is 36 degrees, while in Denver it’s 32 degrees. Of course, the Twins don’t play at altitude, so they can’t expect their new park to match the offensive levels of Coors Field. And the Brewers can always close the roof at Miller Park if it gets too chilly. Look for Target Field to normally be the best pitchers park in baseball in the early months of each season.

This year, however, they may have received a gift from Mother Nature — the forecasted high for Monday afternoon’s game against the Red Sox is a balmy 66 degrees, and then jumps to a ridiculous 74 degrees on Tuesday and 78 degrees on Wednesday, threatening historical record highs. For 2010, Minneapolis is apparently going to do its best Miami impersonation, so the Red Sox and Twins should be able to put some runs on the board.

Next year, however, assuming things return to normal, prepare for a lot of low-scoring ballgames to begin the year.