I Can't Stop Watching This

Via Baseball Prospectus, Koji Uehara and the art of the high five:

Four Things You Might Not Have Known About Ted Williams

I figure you know he's in the Hall of Fame and considered by some to be the best hitter of all time. But here are some less well-known aspects of The Splendid Splinter:

1. He was very unpopular in his day and feuded constantly with the press. In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, published in 2003, Bill James likened him to Albert Belle. I think the modern analog is probably Barry Bonds (pre-PEDs): prodigious talent widely viewed as a big jerk. 
2. His career in baseball was shortened by two stints in the military, as a naval aviator in 1942-45 and a Marine Corps pilot in 1952-53. Although he was widely regarded as a skilled pilot for the Navy, apparently setting records in his training to be a combat pilot, he did not see active combat during World War II. In the Korean War, although he was called up as a reservist, he flew 39 combat missions and received numerous commendations. Many enlisted ballplayers simply played on a service baseball team. Williams flew combat aircraft.
3. After his baseball career, Williams became an expert deep-sea and fly fisherman, hosted a show on fishing, and was named to the International Game Fish Association Hall of Fame in 2000. He is one of only three athletes to be named to more than one professional sports hall of fame.
4. During his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1966, he spoke out for inducting Negro Leagues stars into the Hall. I was reminded of this yesterday by this fantastic piece by Joe Posnanski. Williams was way ahead of his time--Satchel Paige was the first Negro Leagues player in the Hall of Fame in 1971--and saying what he said, during all the Civil Rights turmoil, was as gutsy as it was foresighted.

This is the Age of the Internet

As I've said, I wouldn't vote for Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame, but I won't be upset if he gets in. I don't get that excited over it. That doesn't stop some journalists, though:

For years, Morris’ Detroit Tigers were in the AL East with the Yankees and, counting his many postseasons, I got to see him 30-40 times and never once was he not the best pitcher on the mound that day.

The author is Bill Madden of the New York Daily News. He joined the paper in 1978, so he was presumably in attendance at some of these games in which Morris started against the Yankees and was, he claims, the best pitcher on the mound that day (stats for each team's starter shown):

Date    Pitcher        IP  H ER BB  K
9/8/79  Ron Guidry    7.1  5  3  2 10
        Jack Morris   3.0  6  4  3  1
8/16/81 Dave Righetti 6.0  4  1  3  7 
        Jack Morris   4.2  4  4  5  0
4/14/83 Dave Righetti 6.2  7  3  1  7
        Jack Morris   7.0  8  5  5  4
5/17/83 Jay Howell    5.2  1  1  3  4
        Jack Morris   5.0  6  5  2  1
9/25/85 Joe Niekro    5.0  4  1  4  2
        Jack Morris   5.0 10  7  3  4
4/20/87 Rick Rhoden   6.2  5  1  4  5
        Jack Morris   7.1 10  8  7  2
6/21/88 Al Leiter     3.1  3  0  3  4
        Jack Morris   1.2  5  5  3  2
9/10/88 Rick Rhoden   9.0  7  4  0  3
        Jack Morris   6.1 11  6  3  7
9/29/89 Eric Plunk    8.0  3  0  4 10
        Jack Morris   8.0 11  4  3  7

Now, did I cherry-pick those starts? Of course I did. (But so do people who base Morris's candidacy on Game 7 of the 1991 World Series.) Overall, Morris was decent against the Yankees, with a 17-12 W-L record. But:

• His ERA was 4.30 and his WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) was 1.38 against the Yankees. Much has been made of Morris's career ERA 3.90, which would be the highest in the Hall. His career WHIP was 1.30. His ERA and WHIP against the Yankees were worse than his middling career averages.
• Morris's prime years were 1979 to 1992. During that time, the Yankees had a winning percentage of .524. That works out to an average record of 85-77. That, as it happens, was the Yankees record in 2013. Do you think "juggernaut" when you think of the 2013 Yankees? They were an okay team, but not playoff-bound. It's not like Morris was 17-12 against the Joe Torre Yankees. 

More to the point: Why do people say things like "Never once was he not the best pitcher on the mound that day" when it can obviously be refuted? Did Madden do the cursory check that I did of the Baseball Reference game logs? If not, didn't he realize that some schlub like me would? I'm not picking on him; this is something I see all the time: people saying things that can easily be proven wrong. I'm not sure who it was who said "this is the age of the Internet, we can fact-check your ass," but it was a while ago, and not enough people have taken heed.

Los Angeles Angels, Hipster Throwbacks

The Angels' manager, Mike Scioscia, gets criticized by analysts for his reliance on one-run tactics like sacrifice bunts in a lineup full of sluggers like Pujols, Hamilton, Trout, and Trumbo. But one area where he goes decidedly against conventional thinking is his use of closers.

The Bill James Handbook has a section on relievers. Among other things, it counts, for each reliever, the number of long outings they make (over one inning) and the number of tough save opportunities (defined as when the pitcher enters the game with the tying run on base) they have.

For closers, the guy who gets the save at the end of the game, long outings have become rare. Here's a graph I did. It shows the number of saves of longer than one inning* per 100 games played per year over the last 40 years. 

What the graph is telling you is that in 1984, 21 out of every 100 games ended with a reliever pitching more than one inning in order to get a save. That was the high water mark. This year, we set a new low in both the total number of 1+ inning saves (70) and number of 1+ inning saves per 100 games (2.9). 

A lot of critics, both traditionalists and stats guys, don't like this trend. They say there's nothing magic about limiting relievers to just three outs, particularly since that one inning may not be the key one. Say you had a one-run lead against the 2013 Tigers. They have Cabrera, Fielder and Martinez due up in the eighth, and Peralta, Infante, and Avila after them. Don't you want your best pitcher going after the heart of the order in the eighth with the game on the line? But that's not how managers play it: the saves guy, the closer, comes in for the ninth inning only. As a result, the later innings are played more to the statistic--the save--than to the game situation. 

Last year there were 37 pitchers who got at least 10 saves last year, and only 42 games in which a reliever got a save in which he pitched more than one inning (and fewer than three, as explained in the footnote below). Here are the pitchers with two or more:

Player	Games	ERA	IP	H	ER	HR	BB	SO	WHIP
Ernesto Frieri	7	1.64	11.0	3	2	1	6	19	0.82
Koji Uehara	4	0.00	5.2	2	0	0	0	7	0.35
Edward Mujica	4	3.00	6.0	6	2	2	0	3	1.00
Sergio Romo	3	0.00	4.0	4	0	0	0	6	1.00
Mariano Rivera	3	0.00	4.0	2	0	0	0	2	0.50
Joaquin Benoit	3	0.00	4.1	3	0	0	1	5	0.92
Tony Watson	2	2.25	4.0	2	1	0	0	2	0.50
Jose Veras	2	0.00	3.0	1	0	0	0	2	0.33
Fernando Rodney	2	3.00	3.0	4	1	0	2	4	2.00
Bobby Parnell	2	0.00	2.2	1	0	0	1	2	0.75
Kenley Jansen	2	3.38	2.2	1	1	0	1	3	0.75
Jim Henderson	2	0.00	2.2	1	0	0	2	3	1.13
Josh Fields	2	0.00	2.2	0	0	0	0	4	0.00
Sean Doolittle	2	0.00	2.2	3	0	0	0	3	1.13
Aroldis Chapman	2	0.00	3.1	1	0	0	4	5	1.50
Rex Brothers	2	0.00	2.2	1	0	0	1	2	0.75

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Play Index Tool Used

Generated 12/22/2013.

Number one on the list is the Angels' Frieri. Bill James tracks long outings in the Handbook, though it's not clear to me what his definition is. In any case, Frieri led the majors with 17, as many as the second- and third-ranked pitchers (Kevin Gregg, Cubs, 9; Addison Reed, White Sox, 8), combined.

How about pressure situations? As noted above, Bill James defines a tough save as one in which the reliever enters the game with the tying run on base. Here are the leaders from last year:
   Pitcher         Team   Opportunities  Saves
   Ernesto Frieri   LAA         6          5
   Joaquin Benoit   Det         3          2
   Kenley Jensen    LAD         3          2
   Bobby Parnell    NYM         3          2
   Edward Mujica    StL         3          2
   Mariano Rivera   NYY         2          2
   Fernando Rodney  TB          3          1
   Rex Brothers     Col         2          1
   Danny Farquhar   Sea         2          1
   
There were also eight pitchers with one tough save opportunity that they converted. But that's it. As with long saves, Frieri led the pack, easily.

It's not like the Angels are channeling the 1980s. The record for saves of more than one inning in a season was set by Bruce Sutter in 1984, when he had 30. Frieri had 7 last year. But it's a step; that's the most in the majors since 2010. Let's hope we move toward using the closer when the situation dictates, not just in the top of the ninth.       



*There are three ways a pitcher who finishes a game can earn a save: if he pitches at least an inning with lead of no more than three runs; if he faces the potential tying run on base, at bat, or on deck; or if he pitches at least three innings. I excluded the last type of save from my analysis, because they're typically not all that hard. On August 28, Brett Anderson of Oakland inherited a 10-1 lead over the Tigers when he came in to pitch the seventh inning. Although he gave up three runs in the eighth, he pitched the last three innings of the game, which the A's won 14-4. He got a save. I think you'd agree that that's not a particularly valuable save. So I limited my definition of long saves to ones that are more than one inning but less than three. 

What Happens When a Pitch is Thrown: Part 2 - Strikes and Balls

Here is the story behind this series.

In the first entry, we determined that just under 45% of pitches are in the strike zone, and pitchers who get it in the strike zone regularly, particularly those who exceed 46%, do better than those who don't. But I noted that throwing into the strike zone isn't the same as getting a strike, because the umpire can get the call wrong in or out of the zone and the batter may swing at a pitch outside the strike zone. So now we're going to just look at strikes.

How often is a pitch a strike? Per Fangraphs, of the 709,916 pitches thrown last season, 451,242 were strikes. That's 63.6%.

Is there a difference between the leagues? A little bit: 63.4% in the American League, 63.7% in the National League. I'm guessing here, but I assume the difference is due to pitchers batting. We've all seen pitchers flailing away at pitches outside the strike zone.

Is there a difference between starters and relievers? Starters get strikes on 63.7% of pitchers, relievers 63.4%. That surprised me since, as we saw in the last post, relievers throw more pitches in the strike zone. Digging deeper, AL starters and relievers are about the same: 63.4% starters, 63.3% relievers. The larger difference is in the NL: 63.8% starters, 63.4% relievers. Again, I assume that's because starters are more likely to face the other team's pitcher than relievers, who are more likely to face a pinch hitter with better strike zone command

Is there a difference between right-handed and left-handed pitchers? Not enough to care about. It's 63.4% for lefties, 63.5% for righties. 

Does it matter? I broke all pitchers into ten groups, based on the percentage of their pitches that were strikes. The top group, Group 1, had strike percentages between 67.7% (NL Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw) and 83.3% (the Phillies' John McDonald, who got 10 strikes on the 12 pitches he threw - the most for a guy you've heard of is 73.9% for Boston's closer Koji Uehara). The lowest 10%, Group 10, got strikes on less than 60.5% of their pitches. Here's how the 10 groups fared in terms of ERA, WHIP (walks and hits per inning), and percentage of batters struck out, walked, or allowed a home run:
   Group ERA  WHIP   %K    %BB   %HR
     1  3.16  1.10  22.0   4.8   2.4
     2  3.39  1.17  21.8   6.4   2.5
     3  3.80  1.23  20.3   6.5   2.7
     4  3.52  1.24  20.4   7.1   2.3
     5  3.72  1.25  20.9   7.8   2.7
     6  3.86  1.32  19.0   7.3   2.5
     7  4.00  1.33  19.8   8.4   2.5
     8  4.14  1.39  20.0   9.6   2.5
     9  4.61  1.47  17.4   9.3   2.5
    10  4.64  1.55  16.9  12.3   2.5

This is a lot more dramatic than the chart in the last entry, which divided pitchers by their ability to pitch in the strike zone. Throw out the freak ERA for Group 3 (or, more accurately, blame it on CC Sabathia, Dan Haren, R.A. Dickey, and Joe Blanton), and every successive group is worse than the one before it. Getting strikes is clearly important, the more the better. The top 10, Group 1, has starters like Kershaw, Cliff Lee, David Price, and Jordan Zimmermann, and relievers like Uehara, Mariano, and Kenley Jansen. The best pitchers get the most strikes.

A fair question to ask: Why is getting strikes a bigger determinant of pitching success than getting pitches in the strike zone? Ah, that's where things start to get interesting. Next post.

What We Know So Far: The more strikes a pitcher gets, the better he fares.

Let's Hear It For the Minnesota Twins Bullpen

Last year, starting pitchers pitched 65.7% of innings and recorded 62.5% of strikeouts. The reason they got proportionately fewer strikeouts is that there are a lot of relievers who come in for one inning throwing as hard as they can. But overall, starters pitch the most innings and get the most strikeouts. 

With one glaring exception: The Minnesota Twins. The Twins relievers got more strikeouts than Twins starters. (I heard this on a Fangraphs podcast.) That's partly because Twins starters pitched only 60.1% of the team's innings, the fewest in the majors. Still, a normal spread between starters and relievers would result in Twins starters getting 56.9% of the team's strikeouts. Instead, they got only 48.4%. The second-lowest was Colorado, with 55.5%. I don't know whether there's ever been a team before whose bullpen got more strikeouts than its starters. I kind of doubt it.

Twins relievers weren't exactly flamethrowers, as their 7.9 strikeouts per nine innings ranked 23rd in the majors. But the Twins starters got only 4.9, more than a strikeout per nine innings worse than the second-worst team, again the Rockies. Twins starters had the lowest strikeout rate of any team since the 2006 Royals.

The Twins have stressed a "pitch to contact" pitching philosophy in recent years. They've certainly delivered on the low strikeout part. But given the team's worst-in-the-majors-by-far 5.26 starters' ERA, they've either got the wrong approach or the wrong personnel (probably some of both). It makes for an easy comparison for incoming starters Ricky Nolasco and Phil Hughes, though.

What Happens When A Pitch is Thrown: Part 1 - The Strike Zone

This is the first of a series of posts. I'm not sure how many - we'll see where it goes.

Baseball can be described as a series of events. In the last game of the World Series, for example, Boston won 6-1. On a more detailed level, the Red Sox took command by scoring three in the third and three in the fourth, the biggest hit being Shane Victorino's bases loaded double in the third. But at the most granular level, the game was determined by the 284 pitches thrown in the game, and what happened with each of them. We're going to look at how that works.

When I say we're going to look at this, I'm not using the editorial we. I'm going to ask a lot of questions and try to provide answers. Most of the time, I'm finding out the answers for the first time. We're going to find out things together.

So here goes.

How often is a pitch in the strike zone? There are several places to find this. I used Fangraphs, which has customizable leaderboards. I looked up the percentage of pitches in the strike zone. The answer, in 2013, is 44.7%. This isn't the same thing as the percentage of pitches that are strikes. (I'll get to that next.) Sometimes a pitch in the zone is erroneously called a ball. Sometimes a pitch outside the strike zone is erroneously called a strike. Often, a batter will swing at a pitch outside the strike zone. All those can turn pitched strikes into balls and pitched balls into strikes. Here, we're just looking at the percentage of pitches that cross the plate in the strike zone. The answer, as I said, is 44.7%.

Is there a difference between the leagues? Not much of one: 44.7% in the American League, 44.8% in the National League. Maybe it's a little higher in the NL because pitchers don't have to get cute with the strike zone when the other team's pitcher is at the plate; they can just throw it in the zone and there's a good chance the pitcher will make an out. I'm not going to worry about it; the difference is too small.

Is there a difference between starters and relievers? A slight one. Starters are in the zone 44.7% of the time, relievers 44.9%. Again, that's a pretty small difference. I think we can attribute it to two factors. First, relievers come into the game fresh and aren't fatigued. Second, relievers often come into pressure situations where a base on balls is more damaging than, say, a walk in the second inning with one out and nobody on. Anyway, the difference isn't large.

Is there a difference between right-handed and left-handed pitchers? Lefties are in the strike zone on 44.9% of their pitches compared to 44.7% for right-handed pitchers. I'm not going to hypothesize yet on the reason for this small difference. 

Does it matter? This is a key question when looking at any statistic: Context. For instance, last year the Dodgers won 88% of the games that they led after seven innings. Does that mean that if you want to win against the Dodgers, you need to score early, because their bullpen locks down leads after seven innings? No. In fact, that 88% success rate was one of the lowest in the majors. A figure doesn't tell us anything by itself, we need to know what it means.

So what does throwing strikes mean? To answer the question, I borrowed a method from the Bill James Handbook 2014 and divided all pitchers into ten roughly equal-sized groups, based on the percentage of their pitches that were in the strike zone. The top 10% ranges from Wesley Wright, who, in 53 2/3 innings split between the Astros and the Rays, got 48.4% of his 910 pitches in the strike zone, to the Cardinals' Rob Johnson, who threw only four pitches all year with three in the zone. Familiar names in this group include Dodgers closer Kenley Jansen (55.1%), Phillies starter Cliff Lee (53.3%), and Reds workhouse Bronson Arroyo (50.0%). The bottom 10%, all of whom got 41% or less of their pitches in the strike zone, includes Yankees ace Hiroki Kuroda (38.8%) and A's closer Grant Balfour (39.6%). So if there are good pitchers in the best and worst groups, how important is this?

Pretty important, it turns out. Here are ERA, WHIP (walks and hits per inning), and percentage of batters struck out, walked, and allowed home runs for each group:
         ERA  WHIP   %K    %BB   %HR
     1  3.67  1.23  20.2   6.5   2.6
     2  3.66  1.23  20.8   7.1   2.7
     3  3.65  1.25  21.2   7.8   2.4
     4  3.73  1.27  21.1   7.9   2.6
     5  3.88  1.30  18.2   7.2   2.4
     6  3.89  1.30  20.8   8.1   2.5
     7  3.94  1.32  19.2   7.8   2.5
     8  4.00  1.33  20.2   8.9   2.4
     9  4.08  1.37  19.2   8.8   2.6
    10  4.17  1.40  17.9   9.3   2.4

In the table, the first row is the top 10% of pitchers, the second is the next 10%, etc. This says that pitching to the strike zone is important, though not as dramatically as we might've thought. There really isn't much of a difference among the top 30%, other than that pitchers who throw more pitches in the strike zone walk fewer batters. Once you get past them, though, the ERAs and WHIPs start climbing. The dividing line's right around 46% of pitches thrown in the strike zone--below that, and performance starts to deteriorate. The one exception is home runs, which don't appear to be dependent on the percentage of pitches thrown in the strike zone. In fact, the correlation between home run rate and pitches in the strike zone is positive, indicating that pitchers in the zone tend to allow more homers.

What We Know So Far: Pitchers who throw more pitches in the strike zone are generally better pitchers than those who don't.