February 10, 2012
Now Available for 2012 THT Essentials: Now Available The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012, an annual "must buy" for all baseball fans, is now shipping. Read this article to learn more about it.
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Tuesday, September 29, 2009Anatomy of a player: Marc RzepczynskIn a complete ripoff of THT great Josh Kalk's old format, I'd like to take a look one of the very talented, yet basically unheard of, young pitchers in the game. As you may have guessed by the title, I'm talking about Marc Rzepczynski, a 24 year old left handed pitcher on the Blue Jays. In nearly 270 innings pitched in the minors over the past few years, he has had a lot of success. He struck out 9.5 batters per 9, walked 3.3 per 9 and allowed just 5 home runs. His FIP was 2.82. To top that off, over 63% of his balls in play have been on the ground. Those are legitimate Brandon Webb type numbers. Earlier this year, Rzepczynski was called up and made his major league debut the potent Tampa Bay Ray's offense, and pitched admirably, giving up just 2 hits and 1 run over 6, while striking out 7 batters. So far this year, he has totaled 61.1 innings for the Jays and has continued to pitch well, with a 4.10 FIP (in the AL East mind you) and a GB rate of over 50%. More impressively, in my opinion, he has continued to strike out nearly as matter batters as innings pitched. Let's take a look at how he's getting it done. First, his stuff, organized by vertical vs. horizontal movement:  His fastball has a lot of variance in the movement; however, it appears that he really only throws a two-seamer. You can see a rather dense cluster at about (9,3), which is classic two-seamer territory for a lefty. Only a small amount of his fastballs were straighter, and given that they were in the exact same speed range as the two-seamers, those appear to be more accidental than by design. It's worth mentioning that he gets a ton of horizontal movement on the fastball. The maximum amount of movement on the fastball was nearly 15 inches, and he routinely gets over 10 inches. Despite only throwing ~1000 pitches, he ranks 17th in fastballs thrown by a lefty with at least that much break. If you put it on a rate stat, he ranks second in the majors behind Ross Detwiler. He also throws a lot of sliders, nearly 40%, and the occasional changeup. Now, let's check out his fastball location:   Given the obscene amount of break that his fastball generally gets, we would expect it to generate a lot of groundballs. To righties, that seems to be the case, as nearly 50% of balls put in play on the fastball have been on the ground. For lefties, the percentage is slightly higher, but it's a much smaller sample size. He's also shown a strong dislike for missing bats with the fastball. Only 3% of his fastballs have been swung on and missed, compared to a league average rate of about 5%. Overall, his fastball doesn't seem like a great pitch, or at least it hasn't been so far. He doesn't locate it very well, throwing just 55% of them for strikes; and while his GB rate is solid, it's not good enough to offset the anemic swinging strike rate. FanGraphs' pitch values agrees, have his fastball worth -1 run per 100 pitches. The good news is that his slider has more than made up for the negative value on his fastball. FanGraphs has it at +2.9 runs per 100 pitches, which means it's been one of the most valuable pitches in the game. While the movement or velocity on it isn't particularly stunning, he gets a lot of separation on it from the fastball and locates it very well:   You can see he gets a ridiculous amount of swings and misses on pitches outside of the strike zone. He's shown the ability to consistently get swinging strikes on pitches down and to the third base side of the zone. His GB rate is also very good, at 46%. As I mentioned earlier, he throws the slider nearly 40% of the time, which is one of highest usage rates in the majors. Rzepczynski is definitely one of the more interesting young pitchers in the game. Guys who can get swings and misses and GB's at the rate he is are usually perennial all stars. The cool part is that he gets it done while throwing offspeed pitches 40% of the time and a sub 90's fastball. Monday, September 28, 2009Debunking the debunkerFrom Rays Index: How many times have you seen it written or heard somebody say: Apparently at least one time less than it needs to be said. The thrust of the post: What we see is a very clear trend. As a pitcher’s ERA+ goes up (bigger values are better, 100 is average), their win total goes up. Are there exceptions? Of course. Every statistic has exceptions. But even in the face of contradictions, we still see a very strong correlation (r-squared = 0.51). Um. Sure. Pitchers who have a better ERA tend to win more games. (Shocking, I know!) But so what? I mean, it's great that we have a statistical measure that can tell us Zack Greinke has been one of the ten-best pitchers in baseball this season. I guess. He's sixth, three wins behind leader Adam Wainwright. Now, of course Wainwright has walked more batters, struck out fewer batters and given up more home runs than Grienke (and, for those worried about it, given up more earned runs as well) in spite of the fact that he gets to face a pitcher hitting in lieu of the DH for most of his games. So how does Wainwright win more games than Greinke? Run support. The Cardinals have scored 5.51 runs per game while Wainwright is on the mound; the Royals have scored only 3.77 runs per game when Greinke pitches. In other words, wins are a great stat for evaluating pitching, if you think that having Albert Pujols as your first baseman instead of Billy Butler is an important aspect of a pitcher's performance. You can of course continue to use wins if you don't need a pitching stat accurate enough to tell you that Carlos Zambrano has pitched better than Braden Looper this year. In short, pitcher wins tend to work well in groups (if you look only at pitchers who qualify for end-of-season awards, yeah, the group of 15-win pitchers on the whole is going to be better than the group of 10-win pitchers). But they can be highly misleading if you want to use them to compare two individual players. And for the kicker: The problem with this post, is that taking a pro-Wins stance leads some to believe that we are anti-other stats. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Stats like ERA+, FIP and tRA are still better measures of how good a pitcher is (although we have minor quibbles with each). However, that does not mean Wins is a useless category. Nor does it mean there are 95 better ways to evaluate a pitcher. (Emphasis mine.) But there isn't an absence of other stats! Here, let me help you out: There. Now you never have to worry about having no other pitching stats except for wins ever again. Problem solved. Again, to review:
Most Recent 100-win season for all franchisesWell, the Yanks did it again - posted another 100 win season. That ended their hellish drought where their fans were deprived of triple-digit regular season success since 2004. That leads me to wonder - what is the most recent 100-win season for all 30 franchises? Other questions to ponder: What's the oldest team to never win 100? What team has gone the longest without doing it in the NL? In the AL? Overall? Once you've taken your guesses, look below, where the results are given from most to furthest recent, broken up into fives for clarity's sake: 2009 NYY 2008 LAA 2005 STL 2003 ATL 2003 SFG 2002 OAK 2001 SEA 1999 ARI 1998 HOU 1995 CLE 1988 NYM 1984 DET 1980 BAL 1977 PHI 1977 KCR 1976 CIN 1974 LAD 1965 MIN 1946 BOX 1935 CHC 1917 CWS 1909 PIT Never: (from newest to oldest franchise): TBR, FLA, COL, TOR, SDp, MIL, DCN, and the oldest - TEX. Making up for Texas's near half-century without doing it, the other teams in the AL West are all among the seven most recent to do it. In the franchise's 109 year history, all of STB/BAL's 100 win campaigns came under one manager: Earl Weaver. I never would've guessed that most teams have done it since the Dodgers last such season. I certainly wouldn't have guessed the Red Sox had such a long drought. Actually, they came close one year, winning 99. They would've claimed #100 in the season's finale, if it wasn't for Bucky Dent. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||