Nolan Arenado, Ball Magnet

This morning I was scrolling through baseball stats at the mlb.com mobile site, and I noticed something curious. This is the list of major league leaders for assists: 

Rk		Tm	G	Inn	A ▾	Pos Summary
1	Troy Tulowitzki	COL	27	234.0	101	SS
2	Aaron Hill	ARI	29	260.0	92	2B
3	Starlin Castro	CHC	26	230.0	91	SS
4	Alexei Ramirez	CHW	29	260.0	90	SS
5	Brian Dozier	MIN	26	238.2	87	2B
6	Jimmy Rollins	PHI	24	204.1	87	SS
7	Nolan Arenado	COL	30	267.0	83	3B
8	Marcus Semien	CHW	29	251.0	83	2B-3B
9	Jose Altuve	HOU	28	249.1	81	2B
10	Ben Zobrist	TBR	30	237.2	80	2B-OF-SS

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/2/2014.

Tulo, Hill, Castro, Ramirez, Dozier...all make sense. They're middle infielders, and middle infielders get a lot of ground balls. But there's the Rockies' Nolan Arenado tied for seventh. He's a third baseman. That seems out of place.

Arenado is in just his second year, but he's already won plaudits for his glovework. He won the National League Gold Glove last year as a rookie, and he hasn't let up this year. Still, how unusual is it for a third baseman to rank in the top ten in assists?

Really unusual, it turns out. As in, it hasn't happened since baseball expanded in 1961. The only third basemen in the 53 seasons since then to have finished in the top 20 in major league assists were Brooks Robinson (No. 13 in 1967), Ron Santo (No. 15 in 1967, No. 20 in 1966), Brandon Inge (No. 19 in 2006), Clete Boyer (No. 19 in 1962, No. 20 in 1961), and Graig Nettles (No. 20 in 1971). Nobody's been close to the top 10 until now.

Is this a fluke? I figure there are three things that could give Arenado a big advantage. First, handedness. Right-handed batters hit grounders to the left side of the infield more than left-handed batters, and managers load up on right-handed batters in order to gain a platoon advantage when they face lefties. Do the Rockies feature an unusual number of southpaw pitchers, resulting in opposing lineups full of right-handed batters, hitting grounder after grounder to third?

This year, lefties have pitched 37% of Colorado's innings. That's a lot. But it's not extreme: The Rangers, White Sox, Angels, Rays, Phillies, and A's all have had a greater proportion of innings pitched by lefties. So Arenado's pace isn't because he plays behind a steady stream of left-handed pitchers. 

How about the pitchers' tendencies themselves? Do Rockies pitchers, in an effort to keep batted balls out of the thin air at Coors Field, generate tons of ground balls? 

Again, yes, but it's not dramatic. Rockies pitchers have induced grounders on just under 49% of balls in play. That's high, but not highest: The Pirates, Phillies, Giants, and Dodgers have all gotten more. So that's not the explanation.

Finally, how about games played? Have the Rockies played more games than others, giving Arenado a chance to see more balls hit his way? Again, kind of yes. The Rockies have played 30 games so far, second-most in the majors. But other than the Tigers, every team's played at least 26. Maybe when the games even out, two of the players below him on the list above, Marcus Semien and Jose Altuve, will pass him. But that's probably it, at least on that basis. (And no, Arenado's assists aren't inflated by shifting, because, as Rockies Zingers points out, the Rockies do relatively little shifting.)

More likely, he just slows down. When a player's on pace early in the season to do something that's never been done before, the easy answer is to assume that he won't do it, either. But for a while here, I'm going to keep track of Arenado's assists and see if he can keep hanging with the middle infielders.

The Most Miserable Time of the Year

No, not the holidays. I’m down with the holidays.

I’m talking baseball. There aren’t any games, obviously. The biggest news is contract signings, which, because of the amount of money Jhonny Peralta, who was suspended for 50 games last season, is getting, has led to a new round of teeth-gnashing over PEDs. And the Hall of Fame ballot was released.

I don’t know what annoys me more, articles about PEDs or articles about the Hall of Fame. (Lately, there has been a convergence, amplifying the annoyance.) They have nothing to do with what goes on On The Field of Play. Worse, the Hall of Fame voting season allows sportswriters who don’t even write about baseball (really: you don't have to be currently following baseball to vote) to pontificate about a game that you and I know more about.

And the controversies…The cause célèbre in recent years is Jack Morris. Personally, I wouldn’t vote for him.* But if he gets in, as I expect he will, good for him. No hard feelings. It won’t ruin the Hall for me. But you can be sure that the pro- and anti-Morris prose will go over the top, what with this being his last year on the ballot.

I get more upset by deserving players who don’t get in. Ron Santo, probably one of the ten best third basemen of all time, didn’t get in until 28 years after he retired and two years after he died. That was classy. A Hall of Fame without Tim Raines, possibly the second best leadoff hitter of all time, doesn’t work for me. I get more upset by exclusion than inclusion.

But we are now in the midst of sportswriters and baseball fans and all sorts of baseball commentators talking about how nobody should get in who isn't of the same caliber as Willie Mays, or how nobody should get in at all because Barry Bonds took steroids (some writers returned blank ballots last year to "protest" PEDs that Raines and Craig Biggio, to name two, didn't take), mixed in with people complaining about how much money players make today.

When do pitchers and catchers report?

*Morris was a regular starter from 1979 to 1994. During that period, there were seven pitchers with over 2,800 innings pitched: Morris, Charlie Hough, Dennis Martinez, Bob Welch, Nolan Ryan, Frank Tanana, and Dave Stieb. Of them, Morris had the worst career ERA, even adjusted for playing in a hitter’s park at Tiger Stadium. His most-wins-in-the-1980s can be attributed to fantastic run support: 4.9 per game, 0.6 better than the league average. That's a lot. None of the others got more than 0.2 over average. So he had a high ERA (3.90--that'd the worst among pitchers in the Hall) and a won-lost record that as much a product of his teammates as his doing.