31 March 2014

Past Results Do Not Guarantee Future Performance

Here's a little pre-season prediction: Burke Badenhop will pitch 62 1/3 innings out of the Boston Red Sox pen this year. He will allow 62 hits, six homers and 12 walks. He will strike out 42 batters and get credit for two wins.

Here's the logic: Last year for Milwaukee, Badenhop pitched 62 1/3 innings, allowing 62 hits, six homers and 12 walks while striking out 42 batters. He was credited with two wins.

In 2012 from Tampa Bays' bullpen, Badenhop pitched 62 1/3 innings, allowing six homers and 12 walks while striking out 42 batters. A model of inconsistency, he allowed 63 hits and earned three wins. However, he has picked up two wins in four of his six seasons, finishing 2-3 in three of them.

About the only thing about the Bowling Green graduate that hasn't remained the same is his employer. Drafted by Detroit, he's thrown for the Marlins, Brewers, Rays and now the Red Sox since 2008.

It's quite likely that this will be the only time Burke Badenhop (theoretically) gets to see his name in this blog. Unless the prediction comes true. Then he's going to see it in a lot of places.


28 March 2014

The Number in Miguel Cabrera's Contract That Makes No Sense

The most surprising aspect of Miguel Cabrera's new extension, which kicks in after the current contract expires in two years, when he'll be 33, isn't that it continues to pay into his baseball dotage (age 41 season) or that it commits the Tigers to shelling out $31 million-a-year until 2024 or that it guarantees his grandchildren another $290 million or that the Detroit pulled the trigger on it a year-and-a-half before they had to.

The most surprising aspect of this story is that a guy who's hit 30%-87% better than league average every year since 2004, a guy who's topped .300 eight times, a guy with 365 home runs and 1260 RBI, who's earned eight All-Star selections and received MVP votes for 11 seasons . . . is just 31 years old. How could this be?

Miguel Cabrera entered the Major Leagues at age 20 in 2003 and outpaced league average with his bat. A fixture at third by season's end, he helped the Marlins win the World Series. It seems like a generation ago, back when Ice Cube was a rapper, Blockbuster video was the hot new thing and Todd Zeile manned the hot corner for the Montreal Expos.

By the following season Cabrera was authoring a line of .294/.366/.512 with 33 home runs. And then he proceeded to improve. Dramatically. 

Since 2004 -- that's 10 years ago -- Miguel Cabrera has been one of the five best hitters in the world. In his last three seasons, Cabrera has averaged .340/.427/.609 with 77 extra base hits (38 doubles, 37 homers) in a park not particularly accommodating to offense. That's 77% above league average, a number that's Gehrigian. Or if you prefer aMaysing (except better.)

At age 31, he's two peak seasons from the Hall of Fame, three if he experiences normal decline. And then he'll have eight more years, at $31 million-a-year guaranteed, to gild that Hall of Fame lily.

We're numb to the millions. But Miguel Cabrera's only 31 years old? That's crazy talk.


27 March 2014

BABIP: From the White House to the Outhouse

Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) burst onto the baseball landscape like a meteor, illuminating life on the diamond in its wake. By measuring the part of the game largely outside the control of the pitcher (and somewhat outside the control of the batter) it appeared to separate skill from luck.

If the Royals' Billy Bulter hits .341 on balls in play in 2012 and Shane Victorino hits .278, might that not suggest that Butler was crazy lucky and Victorino not so much? If we were making predictions about the following year, might we not temper Butler's prediction and enhance Victorino's on the notion that luck will average out?

The answer, it turns out, is: well, maybe. After cuddling up beside BABIP for several years, seamheads started to notice that it had some idiosyncracies. BABIP just likes some guys better than others. Speedsters are particular BABIP sweethearts because they can get on base without hitting the ball hard. Ichiro rocked a .357 BABIP through 2010, but as his speed has waned, he's suffered three sub-.300 BABIPs since.

Worm killers romp with BABIP because ground balls tend to find holes more often than fly balls. That's offset by the fly balls that do make safe landing, which tend to result in extra base hits. Pop-ups are BABIP death and line drives are BABIP medicine, for obvious reason. And batters can control their BABIP to some degree. The aforementioned Ichiro didn't just hit the ball; he often placed it, much to BABIP's delight.

BABIP can start the narrative, but not complete it. Certainly Butler doesn't have foot speed on Victorino, but he launched many more line drives and many fewer pop-ups than Victorino in 2012. That suggested there might be some staying power in those numbers; i.e., there might be some skill involved.

In 2013, Butler did, in fact, maintain an above-average BABIP, losing just 15 points from his 2012 rate. But Victorino, rejuvenated in Boston, "regressed" beyond the mean and up 43 points. Some of that was the result of doubling his line drive rate and much of it was pure serendipity, from a lot of bad in 2012 to a little good in 2013.

It's even more pronounced for pitchers, whose results are affected by the defense behind them, defense that remains largely intact over the course of a season. Rookie of the Year Jose Fernandez allowed a .240 batting average on balls in play, despite fairly pedestrian rates of line drives and pop-ups induced. Fernandez looks highly promising, but BABIP strongly suggests a return to earth in 2014. 

Conversely, all-world starter Justin Verlander played second fiddle to Max Scherzer in Detroit last year, in part because of a high BABIP-allowed (.316). Verlander allowed a lot of line drives, but probably not enough to explain all of BABIP. Likely the Tiger statues at third, short and first contributed to balls getting through. A bounceback may be in order, particularly with Miguel Cabrera moving to first, Prince Fielder and Jhonny Peralta leaving town and Ian Kinsler joining the infield.(Why didn't this matter for Scherzer? A. Luck. B. An 11% higher strikeout rate. Dr. Strangeglove can't flub your strikeout.)

So BABIP is useful, particularly at the extremes, but it isn't quite the revelation originally envisioned. Pure luck is hiding in every facet of the game,but in the nooks and crannies, not out in the open for BABIP to see in its entirety.

25 March 2014

The Best and Worst Advanced Metrics, Part One

The advanced number-crunching has been shedding light on the baseball universe for well-nigh a generation now, sufficiently long, and sufficiently entrenched into the fabric of the game, that it should hardly be called new anymore. 

It's also been stirring the baseball pot for long enough that we have competing analyses, overlapping metrics and even obsolete "new" statistics.

The new analysis has given us a bouillabaisse of acronyms and measuring sticks: WAR and WARP, OPS and wOBA, FIP and FRA, BABIP and Zone Rating, and the projections systems PECOTA, ZIPS, STEAMER, MARCEL, etc. 

As you might imagine, some are more useful than others. Over the next few weeks, let's sift through them and see which make it through our colander. First, the king.

The grand, high, exalted, mystic ruler of offensive statistics is Offensive Wins Against Replacement, or oWAR, the alpha and omega of offensive stats. oWAR considers a player's offensive contributions in total, adjusts for the park and compares it to a replacement level player at the same position. It helps us compare Robby Cano to Miguel Cabrera even though the latter plays an offensive position and the former a defensive one. Indeed, it helps us compare players across eras, relative to their competition.

Suppose you want to compare 60s and 70s Yankees second baseman Horace Clarke to just-released outfielder Jeff Francoeur. You can do so, despite the passage of years and different positions. Dan Shaughnessy or Murray Chass might note that Francoeur hit over .280 four times., slammed 140 bombs and knocked in 100+ runs twice while Clark hit .280 once, totaled 27 homers his entire career and never reached 50 RBI in a season. In their eyes, Frenchy was clearly a more valuable asset at the plate.

oWAR tells a very different story. It corrects for era -- the late 60s represented the basement of offensive baseball -- and for position -- the bar is set lower for keystoners. Clarke wasn't a better hitter than Francoeur but he would have been more difficult to replace. Francoeur was worth two wins over a replacement outfielder in his career while Clarke was worth 14 wins over a replacement second baseman.

That's because, although Francoeur hit 8% better compared to league average, Clark stole three times as many bases at a much higher success rate, played a position that required more defensive skill and came to the plate 300 more times. (This assumes Francoeur is done. It does appear that way.) 

(Clarke took home about $350 grand in his career. Francoeur's grandchildren can thank the Marvin Miller and the MLBPA for $26 million in career earnings.)

The glaring shortcoming, or rather, limitation, of oWAR (and its many cousins: VORP, wRC, BWARP, etc.) is that it doesn't address the bottom of the inning. If Clarke had been a butcher in the field and Francoeur a magician, the latter might have been more valuable. (Not only isn't that the case, adding defense actually accentuates the difference. But there are other players for whom it's more of an issue.) Fielding statistics are still not wholly reliable, though they are improving all the time, which is why WAR and WARP are not yet among statistical royalty. Their day is coming, though.

Next time, we'll consider the life and times of BABIP, which created an epiphany in baseball analysis and was then relegated to the dog house.


22 March 2014

If It Ain't In A Baseball Stadium, It Ain't Opening Day

Inaugurating the baseball season
  • in Australia, 
  • on a cricket field,
  • in the middle of our night,
  • on the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament,
  • two weeks before the rest of the season begins
is as relevant as a vice presidential speech. 

It's as real as calling the thoroughly-ignored play-in games of the NCAA hoops tournament the "first round."

We believe that's Opening Day the same way we believe Vladimir Putin is committed to democracy.

Let's wait until Opening Day to get excited about Opening Day. Brief respites in Spring Training, even if they count in the standings (Dodger 3, Diamondbacks 1), aren't regular season games; they're Balfour family reunions.

Yasiel Puig would agree. He went 0-5 in the leadoff spot, with three whiffs.

16 March 2014

The Next Frontier In Baseball Analysis

Okay, so that's settled. Baseball front offices have completely bought into the new analysis that values on-base percentage, slugging percentage, BABIP, stolen-base efficiency, defensive efficiency and defense-independent and park-independent pitching statistics rather than batting average, homers and RBIs, raw steals, fielding percentage and pitching wins. The sports media and ordinary fans are coming around too.

In the marketing field, they say that a corporate tagline begins to become effective just about the time the company gets sick of it. In baseball, the same thing is happening. No sooner has all of baseballdom finally acknowledged that the number crunchers were on to something (save for a handful of writers like Murray Chass and Dan Shaughnessy who have carved out a niche clinging to the Stone Age) than the seamheads have moved on.

For the past seven seasons, MLB ballparks have been equipped with cameras capturing the path, break, speed, strike zone position and result (ball, strike, hit, out, etc.) of every single Major League pitch (Pitch/FX). The information that can be gleaned from the data beggars the imagination. The percentage of pitches thrown by any given pitcher that are balls or strikes, swung at or taken, the mix of pitches, etc. are now public knowledge. Anyone with too much time on their hands can mine the data for percentage of pitches a pitcher threw outside the strike zone that were offered at by the batter and what percentage of in-zone pitches were taken for strikes. Anyone with 25 spare hours a day can compare how a pitcher approaches righties as opposed to lefties, day games versus night games, early innings versus late innings, etc. (Ditto for batters.)

Below is just one of the many charts, graphs and tables that comprise Pitch/FX's treasure trove of material (Thank you Brooks Baseball and Baseball Prospectus.) It documents Craig Kimbrel's pitch selection (one change-up his entire career!) and the average velocity and movement of each pitch type. As you can see from the headings, this is a mere tip of the iceberg.



Pitch/FX also allows us to follow the results of these pitches, as seen below in this swing rate graphic. Note how Kimbrel induces 60% of batters to take their cuts at pitches down the middle but above the strike zone. (The percentage of pitches thrown outside the zone that batters swing at is the O-swing rate. Good pitchers tend to have high O-swing rate. They are fooling people. Batters with high O-rates may be good hitters but are not very selective.)


Batters also take for strikes a third of the pitches he fires right down the middle. The percentage of pitches in the zone swung at is called the Z-swing rate. Good pitchers have relatively low Z-swing rates. Batter with low Z-rates tend to be selective hitters who walk and strike out a lot.


This information is incredibly useful for evaluating pitchers and hitters because it reveals a heretofore hidden part of the game. It is likely that Pitch/FX could have showcased and explained the special genius of Greg Maddux, whose shockingly ordinary repertoire yielded league-leading strikeout totals, probably because of a low Z-rate swing % (i.e., lots of called strikes) and a high O-rate swing % (lots of weak contact.) You can just imagine the on-field adjustments that can be wrangled out of this vast ocean insight.

The same information can disassemble a batter just as quickly. Teams are pouncing on the goldmine of data Pitch/FX is uncovering. And starting this season, there will be even more gold to mine.

Teams are now placing cameras afield to capture the movements of defenders and compare them with the most efficient path towards the ball. These cameras will monitor jump, speed and path of the defender and the speed, path and height of the ball when (if) caught. It is the next frontier and it promises quantum leaps in accuracy of defensive statistics. It will tell us why, for example, Jacoby Ellsbury's blazing speed doesn't translate to more fielded balls than average. And it will reveal the special genius of Derek Jeter, who will be getting out just in time.

All this will increase the premium of smart front offices and give low-income teams like Tampa opportunities to win with lower-cost talent. It could also reduce parity as front-office prowess, perhaps particularly in the number-crunching departments, rises in importance compared to on-field ability.

In any case, it's a bold new world and more than ever, those slow to adapt will feel the wrath of the competitive marketplace, even as they earn hosannas from dinosaurs like Chass and Shaughnessy.