Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat

I think you are taking a brief statement I made to include things I didn't say. I never said or even hinted that JJ was seeing less strikes. I said that my observation was that he was swinging at more pitches outside the strike zone than I remember. My apologies if I did. I thought you were taking issue with the Sackmann study I cited, which found that most hitters hit for a higher AVG and SLG and actually walk a bit less when hitting in front of the pitcher. As far as whether he's swinging at more pitches outside of the zone, fortunately we don't have to use our eyes for that. The same fangraphs page I linked to earlier has the data (O-Swing %): http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=3797&position=SS 2005: 18.05% 2006: 18.08% 2007: 21.61% 2008: 20.12% He's right in line with his career totals, and he's swinging at slightly less balls this season than last. Wanna know what I think Hardy might be doing differently that might be hurting him? Look at the percentage making contact on those swings: 2005: 59.46% 2006: 61.70% 2007: 67.77% 2008: 76.92% This is the one piece of swing data that shows a meaningful change this year. Last year was his career high in outside of zone contact %, and this season he's jumped nearly another 10%. He's striking out too little. Yeah, I said it. He needs to miss the pitcher's pitches he swings at more often, so that he can make good contact on a hitter's pitch, even if it means he ends up striking out more often. When there's 2 strikes, he still needs to try to take a decent hack instead of hitting a little dribbler. He needs to be more Hall-like in his approach. Not much more Hall-like, heaven knows we don't need another Hall in the lineup, but a little bit more. By contrast, Hall needs to be A LOT more Hardy/Kendall-like in his approach.

Owen, listening to the show right now. That was quite a trap you set for Heller there when you said "Are you arguing that Hardy wasn't seeing as many strikes?", at least assuming you'd seen the numbers I posted and were ready to nail him with those. Too bad he wriggled off the hook..."It's more complicated than that..." I also thought you were spot on with the "nerds and pitch counts" stuff. I laughed out loud about the Bob Gibson bit.

It also isn't useful to look at player population as a whole and then determine that every individual will conform to that standard. It is probably true that not every player will benefit equally from hitting in front of the pitcher. Certainly not in a sample as small as 1/4 a season. The relevant question, however, is whether it is sensible to attribute Hardy's struggles to a phenomenon that not only cannot be empirically verified, but upon empirical investigation, looks to tend to cause exactly the opposite effects we hypothesized. No matter how many times Rock falls all over himself to explain how difficult it is to hit in front of the pitcher, that doesn't make it true.

As a response to some posts here, and in case Owen wants to tell Heller he's wrong, J.J. Hardy has seen a higher percentage of strikes so far this season than any other season of his career: http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=3797&position=SS Look at the bottom of the page, the stat you're looking for is "Zone %". Here are the relevant numbers: 2005: 55.21% 2006: 53.98% 2007: 53.72% 2008: 55.63%

Another really good example is pitch counts and innings limits, especially for young pitchers. Every organization does this now. As recently as 10 years ago, you were ridiculed if you thought that letting a 22 year old kid throw 140 pitches was a foolish risk. In fact, the entire evolution of starting pitcher usage from the 3 man rotation where every outing was a complete game to the current 5 man rotation with dedicated short relievers illustrates this point rather nicely.

I'm certainly not going to try to psychoanalyze J.J. Hardy from a vantage point a million miles outside of the organization. If the motivation for the change was to put the "burden" of hitting in front of the pitcher on a vet like Kendall's shoulders, then so be it. It probably doesn't make a huge difference anyway, and it's at least possible it was messing with Hardy's head. The only thing I want to make abundantly clear is that the only attempt I've ever seen to check whether it was actually harder to hit in front of the pitcher than elsewhere in the lineup reached exactly the opposite conclusions that conventional wisdom would suggest. This is about the third time I've linked to this Jeff Sackmann piece, so I apologize to those who've already looked at it: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-benefit-of-batting-eighth/ So, in short, if the idea is to help get Hardy going, I don't think it will work. Now, Hardy may start hitting better (which would be not in the least bit surprising given that he is a much better hitter than he's shown so far), but if that happens, in my view it's a coincidence.

Maybe, maybe not. Like I said, I wouldn't trust that he's a true talent reverse platoon differential pitcher based on a sample that size, but he does throw a cutter, and switch hitters have been known to turn around and bat right handed against Rivera because of how tough that pitch makes him against lefties. Not saying DiFelice's 83 mph version is anything like Rivera's, just that it is possible that he is actually better against lefties than righties.

Thanks for the link Owen. Caught the end of that conversation in my car, got home, and just listened to the rest. Keith Law is one of my favorite nerds. Or did he stop being a nerd when an MLB team hired him? He does still seem to know an awful lot about statistics and uses economics terminology like "sunk cost" (Gagne) in conversation, though. Anywhoo, enjoyed it. You should try to get that huge nerd Neyer on some time if you can.

He's gone because DiFelice can go longer if needed, even spot start, albeit ineffectively, versus LH bats at least. He'll be gone soon too. DiFelice was substantially better against LH hitters than RH ones in AAA this year (592 OPS against lefties, 736 against righties). It's just 22 innings, so it's hardly conclusive, but I'm guessing that you're basing the above on the whopping 3 AB he's had against lefties in the majors. minorleaguesplits.com doesn't currently have any data before '08, so unless you know somewhere else to get additional info, I'm pretty sure the '08 AAA data is the largest sample available to look at. I do agree with you that they'll send DiFelice down soon (I was expecting it today) - probably whenever they remember that Mitch Stetter is a much better pitcher than the lunatic they just signed for no good reason, as Mr. Briggs pointed out a few posts ago. No one in the thread seems to care very much what they do with DiFelice, and that's pretty perplexing to me. Nobody seems to realize just how dumb it will mean the Brewers are if at any point this season Julian Tavarez is on the roster and Mark DiFelice is in AAA. DiFelice has demonstrated rather conclusively over the last 1 1/4 seasons that he's among the 12 best pitchers in the organization (and it's not like he didn't have any success in the minors before that). Who cares if he's 31 and throws 83 mph? Somehow or another he misses bats and hits his spots well enough to have a K/BB ratio around 10 over the aforementioned span in AAA. Doubtless that will drop a lot in the majors, but you've got to think he could keep it at least at 3 or 4 to 1, which is significantly better than anybody on the team other than Sheets. I think Tavarez has to be considered clearly below replacement level at this point. Quite frankly, I find it insulting that Melvin would try to pass him off to Brewers fans as a "veteran closer". I don't even care that he's anything but a likable guy, I'm just angry that he's terrible and we're turning away from significantly better internal options to give him yet another chance to demonstrate how washed up he is.

Peripherals are useful, but don't tell the whole story. That's true, but the relevant question is whether they tell more of the story than ERA. Your assessment of his 06 and 07 ERA+ is spot on, if anything, I'd say he might have been more valuable than you give him credit for. But ERA+ is a lot less useful for projecting future performance than peripherals are. He wasn't the same pitcher in 06 and 07 that he had been previously, even if his results weren't awful. Things have gotten even worse for him this season. There's a reason why Boston, a smarter-than-your-average-bear organization, released him. As far as Bush goes, his peripherals have fallen off a cliff this season. Something is wrong - either health-wise, mechanically, or just psychologically. He isn't pitching anything like the guy that people (quite reasonably) thought was better than Suppan. That guy struck out around 7 and walked around 2 per 9 innings. This year: 4.5 K/9, 3.5 BB/9.

Disagree with your assessment of the last two years. If you look at the more telling peripherals, Tavarez actually deteriorated in 2006, but some good BABIP luck kept his ERA down that year. His K/9 dropped from the mid 6s to under 5, where it has remained ever since. His BB/9 jumped from 2.6 to 3.9, and he's never gotten it back below 3. This year he's collapsed completely, walking 33% more guys than he's struck out, which is why Boston released him. But he has been very bad now (FIP around 5.00) for more than 2 seasons. But what choice did Ned leave Doug? He demonstrated yesterday that unless Doug gives him another "trusted veteran reliever", he's just gonna run Mota out there for at least two innings every single time the Brewers are in a close game. Any chance Mota has of remaining effective this season (probably not a very good bet anyway) would vanish entirely very quickly under those circumstances. Still a stupid signing, especially if they send down DiFelice to make room.

I love how Haudricourt calls him "veteran closer" Julian Tavarez. He's got a grand total of 22 saves in 16 major league seasons. Half of those came in one season, so he probably was the annointed closer...for part of one season...for a recent vintage Pittsburgh Pirates "major league" team. Now, mind you, I don't think saves tell you anything meaningful about how well a guy pitched, and I think the modern closer role as invented by Tony LaRussa is utterly stupid. But I'll bet dollars to donuts Tom Haudricourt doesn't think either of those things. I wonder if that was Melvin's phrase? Is Haudricourt deliberately misleading the public or is he just passing along the branding strategy that Melvin conceived to explain the thoroughly inexplicable?

I will keep that in mind and simply continue avoiding beer as much as possible. It has worked like a charm so far.

According to DirecTV's guide feature, we get 0 HD games this weekend. Meanwhile, I'm flipping channels and the Kitchener-Belleville minor league hockey game that is on the NHL network is not only HD, it's better looking HD than any FSN Brewer telecast ever is. There is something basically wrong with any world in which these two statements are true.

Out of 1-5, 3 should NOT be your best hitter... but actually, your worst. Thought I'd add a brief note here to explain why this is true. Those of us nerdy enough to have read the studies that produced this finding tend to just state it as fact, and everybody not-nearly-nerdy-enough to have read them just shrugs. We're up against 100 years of conventional baseball wisdom on this, so... The problem with the 3 spot in the lineup is that, owing entirely to the 1st inning, it comes up with 2 outs and nobody on significantly more than any other spot in the order. And when there's 2 outs and nobody on, it really doesn't matter what you do (short of a solo homer, which might as well come leading off the next inning), your team is probably not going to score any runs. With 2 outs, getting a runner on first only bumps the run expectancy from 0.1 to 0.2. Hit a double, and you've only managed to get it to 0.35. By way of contrast, the cleanup hitter leads off more innings than anybody outside of the leadoff hitter (again, owing entirely to the 1st inning going 1-2-3). With 0 outs, getting a runner on first increases run expectancy from 0.5 to 0.9. Hit a double, and you're looking at 1.14 runs on average. These are much larger swings, indicating the result of that AB is much more important. Managers have been putting the team's best hitter 3rd all this time because they believe that the 3 hitter gets the most ABs in important RBI situations. Those who've crunched the numbers have found that this really isn't the case. What he does get is slightly more almost totally inconsequential ABs than the guys hitting 2nd, 4th, and 5th, with approximately the same number of high leverage, RISP-type situations. Your two best hitters should therefore hit 2nd and 4th. But this has such a small marginal effect on the amount of runs you're likely to score that it's probably not worth the trouble of convincing Prince Fielder or Ryan Braun that he shouldn't be insulted by being asked to hit in a spot in the order he probably views as reserved for slap-hitting middle infielders. That's why I almost never participate in lineup threads.

This question has already been asked in this thread, though not in as direct a fashion, but: Why, if Kendall is so all-fired good at calling a game, and Estrada was so lousy at it, and catcher game management is so terribly important, have Villy, Bush, and (to a lesser extent) Parra all pitched worse this season than they did last season, while Sheets and Suppan are about the same? With Cameron / Kapler / Gwynn in center and Braun off of 3B, the defense behind them should be (at worst) no worse than last year. I do think Kendall is better at calling a game (everybody does, who am I to disagree?), I just don't think it matters nearly as much as some seem to think it does. If it did, there'd be some way to measure the effects it has on pitcher performance. Nobody's ever found a way to do so, and lots of smart people have tried.

I sure hope they aren't sending DiFelice down. I get where the Winkelsas comparisons are coming from - they're both 30+ year old career minor leaguers that none of us had ever heard of. The critical difference is that Winkelsas never did anything in the minors to demonstrate that he might be better than a replacement level pitcher. DiFelice, on the other hand, did. Over the last 1+ seasons - he struck out better than 1 per inning at AA and AAA, with a 10-1 K/BB ratio. This thread has also reminded me that I put less stock in radar gun readings than almost anybody. I only find low velocity worrisome when it might be a symptom of an injury (i.e. somebody who should be throwing 94 is topping out at 89). If AA and AAA hitters couldn't hit DiFelice's 84 mph cutter, big leaguers should have a fair bit of trouble with it too. I cannot for the life of me understand why McClung is starting tomorrow, with a pitch count limit of 80 and an established walk rate way too high to expect sustainable success, instead of DiFelice. Everybody else (both within the org and without) just says, "duh, he throws 97 mph." Sigh.

Rivera isn't very good. But Kendall isn't very good either. Even with his insanely hot start, his OPS+ is now down to 80, which is right around Rivera's career mark (78), and is probably all we should realistically expect out of either of them. I prefer Kendall's OBP-heavy 80 OPS+ to Rivera's SLG-heavy 80 OPS+, but that (plus defense) is why Kendall is the starter and Rivera is the backup. That Kendall WANTS to play every day, and that every organization he's ever played for has let him, are not intelligent reasons why he should. I don't know whether Kendall would hit any better with more days off, but it seems like a reasonable supposition. If the dropoff to Rivera were more substantial, I could see playing Kendall as often as the Brewers do. It isn't, so they shouldn't.

I'd say that depends entirely on said beautiful woman's objectives for the evening. What's more, while I'm not a beautiful woman, I can't imagine my thought process on the question of beer vs. mixed drinks would have been altered much if I were. Having surveyed the gut of every male in my direct genetic lineage, that thought process went something like this: "There, but for a carefully cultivated predilection for vodka and rum, and a willingness to do 15 minutes worth of crunches or sit-ups at least a couple of times a week, go I."

I don't see it as a guess, but I guess that's gonna depend on your opinions about markov chains and statistical modelling in general. Here's a nice article that talks about the history of linear weights as a concept and also goes into the math a bit for those interested. http://danagonistes.blogspot.com/2004/10/brief-history-of-run-estimation.html

I'd have to see some numbers on that. Trying to oblige. Not sure you'll be satisfied, because I can't find anywhere where this is broken down by base-out state. So I'll have to make do with the average value of each event across all possible base-out states. These are the linear weight values of the offensive events in question from the NL in 2007: strikeout: -.292 groundout: -.312 flyout: -.278 When the defense makes an error, it's still scored as a groundout or a flyout (or if it's the kind of error that changes a single into a double, etc, it's still scored as whatever kind of hit it originally would have been), so the value of the occasional defensive screw-up should be factored in there. I got these numbers here: http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/baseball/lwts/lwts_intro.html So, in general, flyouts are better than strikeouts, but strikeouts are better than groundouts. EDIT: Hey, found what I was looking for after all. Here are breakouts based on the 24 base-out states. No differentiation between groundouts and flyouts here. Look in the "out" and "K" columns, which fortunately are adjacent: http://www.tangotiger.net/RE9902event.html This is for 1999-2002, so the numbers might actually be slightly different today. We're not in quite as drastic a high-offense context anymore. But I doubt the greater than / less than relationships would change much. Basically, what you'll see is that a K is as good as (or slightly better than) an out except when there is a runner on 3rd and less than 2 outs, and when there is a runner on 2nd and nobody out. Dr. Wood is not entirely off-base here, it's just that the impact of these situations is sufficiently low to disregard Ks when constructing a roster or a lineup. A revision of the original controversial statement might go something like: "Strikeouts should never be considered worse than other outs when it comes to player evaluation, but there are certainly instances in which strikeouts are worse than other outs."

On the question of RA vs. ERA, I find myself increasingly wishing that the latter would just drop out of existence entirely, whether you're talking about starters or the pen. Errors are assigned, it seems, in an increasingly bewildering fashion with each passing season. The thinking behind the creation of the stat was sound - you want to somehow be able to divide the blame for runs allowed between bad pitching and bad defense, but I don't think using errors as your signpost for bad defense really gets you anywhere. If you want to cleanly separate pitching and defense, we've got a much better metric these days - FIP. The only problem is that there is a small element of pitcher skill being omitted - some pitchers really do have BABIP skill. But over the short haul (say, less than 5 full 175 IP seasons), the signal to noise ratio on that skill is so low that, statistically speaking, you're better off just regarding BABIP allowed as 100% luck, at least for the purposes of projecting future performance. So, FIP is a better predictive stat than ERA. If you want a descriptive measurement that tells you how valuable a pitcher was over some stretch (say, for Cy Young voting), I prefer RA to ERA because while both have a ton of "but, how much of that is fielding?" noise, at least with RA you know that up front (no claims are being made to separate pitching and fielding). In my opinion, the extra information contained in ERA (how many of the runs "wouldn't have scored" if it weren't for the strangely-assigned "errors") is very close to completely worthless (predictively AND descriptively), so I'd rather just use the metric that is a purer measurement of something (RA). Since this isn't a very big deal (ERA tells you very close to the exact same thing as RA), and since the mainstream loves its traditional stats, you won't see too many stat geeks digging in on this particular point. Gotta pick your battles, after all. With relief pitchers, I think that the best descriptive stat needs to take into consideration how many runners you put on and allow to score (or leave to the next pitcher), how many more/less of the runners you inherit score than would be expected, and how important the situations you pitch in are. WPA ain't perfect, but all of that is in there.

If we could somehow guarantee that all such opportunities came for the hitter in the 2 spot, I would agree that strikeouts would become a worthwhile stat to consider in filling out the lineup card. That's not how it works, though. If anything, the 2 spot is much more likely to see a bunch of opportunities to hit into double plays (so long as the team is at least smart enough to use a high OBP guy in the leadoff spot).

What do you want to know? If you want to know how good a reliever HAS BEEN, particularly in a single season, WPA is a good one. The problem with ERA is that it assigns relievers no blame or credit for one of the most important aspects of the job - stranding inherited baserunners. It sounds like you want to evaluate how well Melvin's past bullpens have performed. I'd be tempted to use WPA if that's what I was doing. Stay away from WPA if you want to project future performance. It is not a predictive stat. If you want to know how well a reliever is going to pitch in the future, I'd look at FIP here or xFIP, which normalizes the rate of homers allowed, here (plain old FIP is available as well). Finally, if you want to know how effectively a manager employed his relievers, use leverage index, particularly gmLI, which gives you the average importance of the situation when a pitcher entered a game. If the best relievers do not have the highest leverage index numbers, the manager was bringing in the wrong guys in the most important situations.

Never? For major league hitters, this is one "never" that is essentially true. A lot of analysts like to look at strikeout rates in the minors (along with walks, obviously) as a way of guaging a positional prospect's control of the strike zone, and to what extent he's being overmatched by the pitchers at that level. And strikeouts are among the most important stats for pitchers at any level. But for major league hitters, I would agree that strikeouts are never important. Having a 2 hitter that is a 3TO kind of guy is actually a bit of a boon, in my mind, because it removes a lot of the temptation for the manager to employ 1 run strategies that give up outs right before the best hitters come up. To the extent that lineup order matters (not very much), #2 is not where you should stick a contact-hitting-productive-out-machine, as has traditionally been supposed. It's where your best hitter should go. If we're not ready to stick Braun or Fielder there (with the other one 4th), we might as well go with Cameron so we don't see quite as many outs sacrificed to the gods of small ball.