Technical Help ($317) · Snippets · Snippets

If you like parsing pitch data, you’ll probably jump to the conclusion that the increasing popularity of the splitter in the 1980s, the changeup in the ’90s, or the cut fastball today has something to do with it.Add in video scouting and the contemporary wealth of data, and you might well guess that it’s easier than ever to get a strikeout.This is no doubt pedantic, but keep in mind what a strikeout actually is.Set against that, you’ve got an overall decline in the number of balls in play.On average, it follows that as strikeouts have gone up, the number of balls in play has gone down over time.Today, the number of balls in play has dropped to 69 percent in the 2011 season.It may not sound like much of a difference, but this represents a fairly dramatic change.Going back to the 1950s, major league pitchers could count on 70 to 71 percent of balls in play to be converted into outs.Subsequently, pitchers have helped themselves out by settling accounts at home plate, which lowers the overall importance of defense, especially at the positions with the lowest likelihood of seeing a play, like the outfield corners, but generally every position.Practically SpeakingConsider the example of the Yankees during the age of Derek Jeter.Year after year, Jeter has rated close to or at the bottom of most of the available defensive metrics, and year after year, the Yankees seem to do just fine without much concern for what that’s supposed to mean.Instead, they cash in the benefit of having him in their lineup.Right at the time when sabermetricians were railing about the importance of discovering new and better defensive metrics and treating defense as the new market inefficiency to give the nouveau smart a competitive advantage, other teams had already taken the step beyond and figured out that just maybe bad or merely competent defenders were entirely affordable risks.Derek Jeter might be terrible, and simultaneously playable.Because strikeouts are such an increasingly large part of the game.That adaptive realization has already had an impact on today’s game.Brian Cashman didn’t despair over the fact that Derek Jeter has become a living monument at short.Few teams could afford that sort of expense, but at a time when Derek Jeter’s awful defense was already the stuff of sabermetric canards and snickering references to whatever advanced fielding metric you care to place your faith in, Cashman did.The payoffs were immediate.With lightly regarded defenders up the middle, such as the ancient, indifferent Jorge Posada behind the plate, plus Melky Cabrera’s wanderings around center, and Jeter’s status as one of the oldest men to ever play short on a contender, the Yankees bludgeoned their way to 103 wins and 915 runs scored, clubbing people to death at the plate while stranding them there on defense.Come October, the Yankees didn’t need depth in the rotation, using just Sabathia, Burnett, and old standby Andy Pettitte to start all 15 of their postseason games.When they beat the Phillies in the 2009 World Series, it wasn’t especially elegant as Burnett and Pettitte struggled, but they still managed to get 50 strikeouts in 53 innings, avoiding that defense en route to the win.How did that happen?Not least because the relief corps, armed with Joba Chamberlain, Phil Hughes, David Robertson, lefty Damaso Marte, and the great Mariano Rivera got 11 of their 32 outs on Ks in their four wins over the Phillies.Maybe the 2009 Yankees used strikeouts to compensate for a few weak defenders, and maybe they were just lucky, but what happened the following season, when the Giants won the 2010 World Series, suggests that the results were anything but random.Here again, you have a lot of the same elements.None of that mattered all that much, because the Giants’ pitching staff was busy leading the major leagues in strikeout rate, erasing 21.6 percent of all batters at home plate.Who was getting all those strikeouts?That set the Giants up to do the same thing to the Rangers, only much more handily.Strikeouts, Strikeouts Everywhere?Isn’t Nolan Ryan Retired!?!Yes, yes, he is, and so is Dwight Gooden.Bob Feller and Rube Waddell have shuffled off this mortal coil.Yet, none of that matters, because strikeouts are up without them.In 1969, teams averaged less than two relievers per game.In the ’70s, that dropped to an average of fewer than three relievers total between two opposing teams in any individual game.The process accelerated during the offensive boom between 1994 and 2006 as more runs scoring meant more relievers to cope with an increasing workload.They moved past pitching more than a third of every ballgame in 1995, generally staying there .We’ll return to that in a moment.Even a batter who manages to make contact is not guaranteed to make hard contact.That change is directly reflected in today’s spike in strikeout rates.That trend was reflected in the Giants’ World Series victory in 2010, when Bochy’s aggressive use of his pen was much remarked upon.In 2011, still counting on Schumaker at second, the Cards defied any thoughtful concerns for their defense by adding Lance Berkman to the lineup to play right field.Berkman was 35 years old and seemed older still with his bulk.Did the Cardinals care?They committed to the equally immobile David Freese at third base.They brought in Ryan Theriot and dared to move him back to short after the Cubs and Dodgers had deemed that unwise.However, they’d gotten to October without much of a strikeout staff, just 22nd with a 17.7 percent punchout clip.After squeaking past the Phillies in the League Division Series, he chucked standard operating procedures for staff management.Between the two rounds and the 13 games it took to win them, he used 58 relievers over 54 1/3 innings, getting 43 strikeouts while routinely exploiting platoon matchups.Love the strikeouts not merely for their own sake, but for their impact on team offenses and defenses.For more than a century, perhaps all the way back to the game’s earliest days, skippers understood that fewer balls go to right and left field than anywhere else, so they were only too happy to stuff unglovely sluggers in the distant corners of the diamond to reap some offensive benefit.If folks start noticing that teams are winning the World Series with designated hitters in the field, we’ll have come full circle from the elaborately exaggerated enthusiasm for the 2008 Rays and their defensive turnaround.Instead, the lasting lesson from those Rays and life in the age of strikeouts is that bullpen assembly and management is more important than ever.But every stathead from Bill James on down has been arguing for a relief reformation of rosters for a good decade now, and after the performances of La Russa and Bochy in the last two World Series, it’s becoming something easier to emptily assert than really believe in.The former can only evolve out of the latter, and yet the latter is also conditioned greatly by the former.Thus in our exploration of baseball, the interplay between our concepts and our observations may sometimes lead to totally unexpected aspects among already familiar phenomena.Over the past two decades, advances in communication technology have quickened the speed of collaboration and dissemination.The result has been a tremendous outpouring of research from a wide range of investigators, from physicists and statisticians to high school students and computer programmers.In 1900, the great mathematician David Hilbert gave an address to the International Congress of Mathematicians in which he outlined 23 major problems awaiting solutions in the coming century.Hilbert’s list inspired a generation of mathematicians.Woolner’s list likewise served as a challenge, galvanizing a number of influential studies.Now that nearly a dozen years have passed, we can review the progress that has been made toward solving the problems he posed, and see not only how far we have come since he identified these issues in the winter of 1999, but also how much work is left to be done.Separating Defense into Pitching and FieldingHow much control does the pitcher have on whether a ball becomes a hit?Can certain pitchers evoke weak contact?His research, which culminated in a widely cited article at Baseball Prospectus, showed that pitchers had little variability in preventing hits on balls in play.His work literally changed how we study the game.Fairly well understood, but opportunities for further advances remain.Evaluating Interrelationships among Teammates’ Defensive PerformancesDid playing next to quality third basemen contribute to Derek Jeter’s poor showing in fielding metrics?Could an outfield of Willie Mays, Greg Luzinski, and Pete Incaviglia be anywhere near average defensively?Did John Olerud make the 1999 Mets infield the best ever?While we’re becoming fairly good at determining overall team defensive value, and are making progress on individual fielding metrics, we still don’t have a good handle on how players can influence each other.For example, while we can calculate how well a first baseman scoops balls in the dirt, it’s hard to gauge how that affects the rest of the infielders.Research in progress.Measuring the Catcher’s Role in Run PreventionThough Casey Stengel said you have to have a catcher because if you don’t you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls, quantifying the exact contribution a catcher makes to run prevention remains an elusive goal.Who’s the more valuable player, a great hitter with a mediocre glove, like Mike Piazza, or a mediocre hitter but strong reliever such as the various members of the Molina family?Can we even say those defensive reputations are warranted?Since that time, numerous researchers including Tom Tango, Mike Fast, Max Marchi, and others have leveraged alternative approaches and technological data to develop a more sophisticated componentized look at catcher defense.Research in progress, but advancing.Mapping Career Trajectories for Defensive PerformanceWhat is the aging curve for fielders?Do the fresh legs of the youngster outweigh the experience gained from seeing thousands of fly balls?By comparing their defensive performance at each, he deduced the relative value of the positions.One potentially large flaw in this approach is the small number of players who change positions may not be representative of the entire population.Baseball Prospectus, on the other hand, uses the full sample of players and measures the difference in offensive output between positions.The two approaches tend to be fairly close at most positions, but disagree on second base and third base.Tango’s method treats them as roughly the same value despite third basemen being the better hitters.This leads to a difference of five or six runs between the two systems over the course of a full season.Fairly well understood with some difference of opinion.Quantifying the Value of Positional FlexibilityShould Ben Zobrist get extra credit for playing multiple positions?With the reduction of slots for position players on major league rosters due to the proliferation of relief pitchers, it seems reasonable that the ability to fill multiple roles would be of substantial value over and above actual performance.If so, how much value is gained from that flexibility?Should teams be looking to find players who can move between positions on a regular basis?Is there a marginal rate of return where there is a maximum number of this type of player any one team should have?Who has the better arm, Ichiro Suzuki or Jeff Francoeur?John Dewan’s Baseball Info Solutions represents the current state of the art in this arena.Fairly well understood.Evaluating the Impact on Offensive Performance of Changing Defensive Positions Up/Down the Defensive SpectrumDoes moving players around on the field affect their offensive performance?Would Joe Mauer be a better hitter if he played first base instead of catcher?Was making Bryce Harper an outfielder a smart move?Is there a direct relationship between raw offensive performance and defensive position?Whether the cause be improved health or the opportunity to bulk up, can moving to a new position catalyze a new level of offensive performance?Predicting the Impact on Career Length from Changing PositionsDid moving Craig Biggio from catcher to second base make him a Hall of Famer?How much longer would Mickey Mantle have played if he had moved to first base earlier, thereby saving his knees?Beyond the immediate offensive impact from a position change, is there a corresponding change in career length?How much of an impact does this make?Projecting Minor League Pitchers AccuratelyHow well does minor league performance translate to the big leagues?Are there certain statistics that are better indicators of future success?Combining statistical projections with scouting information improves the likelihood of a successful prediction substantially.On the other hand, Cardinals starter Edwin Jackson has always had tremendous tools, but walked four batters a game in the minors.Despite that statistical record, he continued to be viewed as a quality prospect, and has experienced some success in the majors.The biggest wild card in projecting pitchers is not ability, but injury.Whoever can predict occurrence and effect of injury will almost certainly achieve his or her place in the sabermetric annals.Creating a Better Way to Analyze MechanicsAre there pitching motions that increase injury risk?Is height that important?While the position of pitching coach is an ancient one, analyzing mechanics is a relatively nascent field.Carlos Gomez, who now works for the Diamondbacks, was probably the first person to gain sabermetric exposure by breaking down pitching motions.His work has been carried on by Kyle Boddy and others, but there is still plenty of opportunity for someone to make a mark.