Stealofhome

Yeah he had a reaction like woah awesome to something the manager said.

Introducing Speed Unit I previously looked at how aggressive or not the Brewers have been this year at taking the extra base. But that doesn't tell the whole story, as it does not account for stolen bases. And I have a few more questions about some of these baserunning statistics. As mentioned before, the baserunning values listed on Baseball Savant are: More on the stats at Tom Tango's blog. Fangraphs has their own version of baserunning value which is calculated using weighted stolen base runs (wSB), Ultimate Base Running (UBR), and weighted GDP (wGDP). The UBR portion of Fangraphs baserunning, created by Mitchel Lichtman, is most closely related to the Baseball Savant calculation, but it does have a different method. So while Baseball Savant uses Statcast metrics of runner speed, arm strength, and runner position, UBR uses play-by-play information of changes in run expectancy due to the runner advancing. While both of these statistics can be useful for comparing modern baserunners, what is an analyst to do when neither Statcast nor play-by-play data is available? What if you only have basic statistics like PA, 1B, 2B, 3B, HR, SB, and CS? Well fortunately, our ancestors had to deal with such a problem and created a solution. One of those people was Bill James, who invented Speed Score back in 1987. It takes six factors--stolen base percentage, stolen base attempts, triples, runs scored, grounded into double plays, and defensive position and range to calculate an estimate of a players speed. That value can also be found on Fangraphs as "Speed." In 2005, Bill James' Speed Score was revamped by 'Patriot' into Speed Unit. 2024 Brewers We can take all of the various implementations of speed to get a sense of the current Brewers roster: Data from Fangraphs here and here and Baseball Savant. One thing to note is that Fangraphs Base Running Runs are counting stats, while the Bill James and Patriot Speed Scores are rate stats. So where Oliver Dunn has only been worth 0.8 runs on the bases this year, he has performed well when given the opportunity. There is quite a bit of disagreement between UBR and Statcast on Yelich, Frelick, and Perkins. From the previous analysis, there were differences in aggression between these players and perhaps they need to still find a happy medium. They might be good at knowing when to go, but getting caught at the wrong time and taking away win probability from the team on the bases. Three of the young speedsters--Chourio, Frelick, and Perkins--have lower stolen base value than expected. Joey Ortiz has the sprint speed to be a good baserunner (28.3 ft/s, 78th percentile), but none of his numbers are all that great. Comparison If we zoom back out to the entire Major Leagues, how do these stats compare to each other? In particular, how well does Speed Unit estimate a statistic closer to true baserunning value like Fangraphs Base Running? If we look at the statistics for the 395 players with at least 500 PA from from 2021 through 2023, we get this relationship, with a correlation coefficient of 0.84: The obvious discrepancy between the two statistics was already mentioned. Speed Unit is a rate stat and Base Running is a counting stat. Players with fewer plate appearances will have fewer opportunities to add or subtract runs by nature. Another big limitation for Speed Unit comes from extreme pinch runners. For most players, their normal statistics at the plate will balance pinch running appearances out, but there are some outliers. Terrance Gore and Billy Hamilton are recent examples of specialty pinch-runners. The speed unit calculations all compare their stolen base and runs scored values with their hitting numbers, but these players' ratios are off. Still, when setting a high enough value on plate appearances and looking over a large enough sample, the simply calculated Speed Unit can describe upwards of 85% of the variation of Fangraphs Base Running. Not bad for scratches on an ancient tablet. Historical Brewers After finding the value and limitations of an estimator like Speed Unit, we can do the fun stuff. Now that we're no longer limited to the modern Statcast era, play-by-play results, or even the Major Leagues, who are some historical players in the Brewers organization who have had notable speed seasons? Here are the top 10 in the Major Leagues since 1978, led by Scott Podsednik's 70 stolen bases and 7 triples in 2004. But we're not limited to the Major Leagues, how about the best Speed Unit seasons for the Brewers in the Minor Leagues? Finally, we can look at the same two tables but find the top 5 Speed Seasons by decade since 1978 for both the Major and Minor Leagues: What do you think, any interesting names? Any notable seasons missing?

Thank you for the info!

Is it possible to do custom HTML tables in any part of the site (especially blogs)? I would like to put in an interactive, sortable table like the ones shown here. Are there any custom HTML options other than what is shown in the header above the reply text box?

Here it is from the man himself, A 37 year old daughter, two grandkids, a 23 year old in the Padres organization, and a 9 year old and 5 year old. Not sure if they are the ones who join him in the presser or not.

Here's the splits: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=peralfr01&year=2024&t=p#innng

Even as of today, according to Fangraphs, Chourio sits at 1.6 WAR. Worst career with at least that much this young is Rick Manning. Just keep Chourio away from Dennis Eckersley and all should be good.

I wonder if the players on the 40-man are taught or feel more pressure to not use the challenge system, since it doesn't exist in the Major Leagues? I've thought about that with Tyler Black, too. It seems that he uses it well but then struggles with the strike zone in the Majors since he can't challenge any more. It is good to see Weimer hitting, though, with a 1.053 OPS in July, after two straight months of .510 and .570.

I understand that everything is relative in terms of signing bonuses and finances in professional sports, but could you imagine being so good at baseball as a 17-year-old, that someone would give you over 3 million dollars just to work for them?

He definitely seems to be playing with more confidence ever since his game-winning catch in LA. I like to see the growth!

Yep, it does appear that they set the bar a bit higher in terms of percent likelihood to be successful on taking the extra base. From what I gather, the above numbers only include baserunning without stolen bases. But there still might be some room for growth if Ortiz, Turang, and Chourio can be as aggressive as Perkins and as smart as Yelich.

I may be turning into an old man, but all I can think is that our culture is returning to all of the bad music and fashion of the 80s.

That's what I was thinking, too. Perhaps there's a way to add in points for distances over 450 feet which would make a balance between hitting a lot and hitting a few very long. Or perhaps only count HR over a certain distance. Something like that could incentivize the longer home runs.

Then-Brewers AAA player Joey Meyer hit the longest verified HR in professional baseball history at 582 feet in 1987. An interesting story about it this year here. Christian Yelich has the longest for the Brewers in the Statcast era, also in Denver, at 499 feet. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=0a69f2b8-97b9-43b2-80fc-7cce53f49a06

This is month-old news, but an interesting scenario with Thyago Vieira tipping pitches for the D-Backs, so his manager had him balk on purpose to move the runner over. https://www.mlb.com/dbacks/news/thyago-vieira-balks-on-purpose-in-d-backs-loss-to-white-sox From watching the video, it looks like Maldanado takes a few steps in toward the batter on offspeed pitches.

That's...a play! Sounds like when you forget your co-worker's name and say, hey...you!

FYI, it's 6 PM and 1 PM central.

Looks like the Timber Rattlers game is suspended and will be resumed tomorrow, pushing back Devin Williams?

Yep, looks like that works. I added a test draft and it shows up as unpublished on my blog page, but I don't see it anywhere else. The Publish Time option goes away when that is toggled off. Thanks!

Introduce ISO Last time, I looked at how well a basic calculation like Speed Unit can compare to an in-depth statistic like Ultimate Base Running. It turns out that it does pretty well. How about bat speed and exit velocity? I have been told that Isolated Slugging is a is a crude measure of ball speed, but that was before Statcast was around. Isolated slugging is calculated as (2B + 2x3B + 3xHR)/AB, or SLG - AVG. Is that true? How about some other hitting statistics? How well can we estimate a hitter's bat speed or exit velocity based solely on basic hitting stats? This becomes an important exercise when we want to look at data during times and places when bat speed and exit velocity are not available. Baseball Savant makes it pretty easy to compare the yearly values of many of these statistics. I encourage you to follow this link to an interactive scatter plot and check out some of the correlations yourself. ISO and Exit Velocity Here's the first one I was most interested in. These are all individual player seasons and we can see a 0.36 correlation coefficient for the 1392 qualified player seasons since 2015. That means ISO accounts for just 36% of the variation in average exit velocity for a batter -- a crude measure indeed. But better than nothing, and there is a clear trend. But we can also look at the career values for the players during the Statcast era as well. That is actually a much stronger correlation. Clearly there is some seasonal variability, even in average exit velocity for batters. There are some speedsters down on the bottom left (Billy Hamilton, Dee Strange-Gordon, Billy Burns, and Victor Robles) and some of the game's top hitters in the top right (Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, David Ortiz, and Mike Trout). Oneil Cruz stands out as having a lower ISO than expected based on his average exit velocity, and I'm not really sure what is happening with him. It doesn't appear that he is hitting a lot of ground balls, so perhaps he is just hitting the ball hard right at the fielders. I'll leave that as an exercise for the curious Pirates fan. William Contreras is the Brewer the farthest away from the average line. His ISO of 0.159 would predict an exit velocity of 88.5, but his actual exit velocity is 91.7. We might expect his slugging to increase a bit based on this. Barrels But exit velocity is not the end-all, be all. Some players track their "Barrels." Those are batted balls with the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle. This is Aaron Judge's realm, where he leads all players by nearly 5% over the last 9 years. This is actually an even better correlation. It makes sense--the better you strike the ball, the more likely you are to hit doubles, triples, and home runs. Bat Speed How does this compare to the newer statistic that we have in 2024 of bat speed? Exit velocity and bat speed are correlated to each other, but not perfectly. For instance, Christopher Morel is 6th in qualified hitters in bat speed this year at 76.3 mph, but his average exit velocity is 69th at 89.6. For the Brewers, Joey Ortiz stick out as someone whose average exit velocity would be expected to be higher based on his bat speed. His 74.4 mph, 46th-ranked bat speed doesn't align with his 204th ranked exit velocity of 87.9 mph. Despite swinging 8 mph harder than Turang, he produces almost the same exit velo. So far, ISO doesn't correlate very strongly to pure Bat Speed, but we do only have part of a year's worth of data. We've already seen the increase in quality from a full year to multiple year's worth of ISO and exit velocity. But ISO, Exit Velocity, Barrel%, and Bat Speed are not the only things we can compare. Bat Speed has even less of a correlation with wOBA than ISO, at 0.12 so far for qualified batters. Luis Arraez and Steven Kwan prove that a batter doesn't have to swing hard to be productive, and Brice Turang is looking to build his own career using a similar strategy. Historical Brewers I'll close this like the previous article, by looking at some of the top historical Brewers seasons for isolated slugging. These are players with the highest consistent exit velocities and highest barrel rates. But these values are not simply taken as the raw isolated slugging percentage. These values are calculated as a z-score, using the average and standard deviation of the league's ISO that year. Ryan Braun shows up twice, in 2007 and 2012, but not in his 2011 MVP year. Christian Yelich appears in 2019, but not his MVP season of 2018 (though he should have won that year anyway). Onto the minor league leaders: A rookie Rock shows up again, as he did for the abbreviated 1970's Speed Unit table. Finally, the top 5 per decade for both the Major and Minor Leagues:

Yes I do. So can you toggle off the publish and then submit to effectively create a draft? I wasn't sure if that's what happened and didn't want to post something accidentally.

I was particularly concerned when Chris Hook came out for a mound visit and then Freddy immediately gave up a double on the second pitch. Then Chris Hook said "that's why I wanted a fastball." Rock was on it all night that the Nationals were sitting on the slider. So Freddy, and William trying to be leaders in the clubhouse, are willingly disregarding the coach's instruction? It just seemed like a bad moment.

Sometimes I'd like to just get some thoughts down or get an outline of ideas, but I can only find ways to either schedule or post a blog. Is there any way to save a draft now or include that as a function on the site?

Full disclosure: I'm not sure I have any real conclusions on this topic, I just had some analysis I wanted to share and virtually "think out loud." Raw data from Baseball Savant: Yearly Baserunning Value Total Baserunning Value Baserunning Value The Brewers have built an impressive and speedy roster, led by Garrett Mitchell, Jackson Chourio, Blake Perkins, and Brice Turang -- all with a sprint speed of over 29 feet per second. That value is calculated by Baseball Savant as: 29 feet per second would equate to an 11.3 second 100 meter time (not quite Olympic material), 19.8 mph, and a 4.14 40-yard dash (better than any recorded in NFL history). Of course, those times are not perfectly equal, since the difference between one and four seconds is an eternity in the world of sprinting, but it does put things in perspective. Along with raw sprint speed, Baseball Savant also calculates the run value for each base running opportunity: More on the stats at Tom Tango's site. Christian Yelich Christian Yelich is the Brewers' poster boy for creating runs on the base paths, with the 4th-most runner runs in MLB since 2016, behind Trea Turner, Kevin Kiermaier, and Billy Hamilton. He has done this, despite having a slower sprint speed than many others who have provided similar amounts of damage on the bases. Clearly, he is a smart and efficient runner. But much of the running value that he has provided is due to the fact that he is such a good hitter. He has a lot more opportunities to add value because he is on base more often than many others with similar speed profiles. If we look at the running value added per opportunity, his standing slips a bit. Since 2016, Yelich's sprint speed has ranged from 28.1 to 28.9 ft/sec, with a median of 28.4. If we look at the runners with a similar sprint speed, we find players like Brett Gardner and Ozzie Albies who have about the same sprint speed but are more aggressive than Yelich. Albies is an interesting comparison -- he has 75% fewer at-bats than Yelich, but is worth just 87% fewer baserunning runs. The difference seems to be in the value under runs lost on the basepath due to holding. That is, Yelich will not risk taking the extra base often enough. When compared to all other runners near his same speed over the past 8 years, Yelich has an average attempt rate. He attempts taking the extra base 40% of the time and runners with similar speed advance 39% of the time. Baseball Savant will take you right to the video of the plays where Yelich should have gone for the extra base and there are a few similarities. The highest run value lost of his holds is only -0.24 and is a misplay by a deep second basemen. But Yelich wasn't running hard enough out of the box to take advantage of it. (Not sure how to or if I can embed all of these videos, so they're left as links). https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=c4b987d2-c773-4fb6-854a-bced6446f78f There are other plays similar to this: https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=17811a50-aa96-401a-bc75-f3fa09a095f8 Looks like he is jogging out of the box, thinking it was a home run or an out. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=a0aa8650-6d9d-4ee1-af05-d5c489da2cd9 Up by 8 in the game, so might have not been as aggressive, but didn't read the line drive properly to fall in. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=8d4f2379-f72f-453c-9a4a-35a854f76046 Didn't read the fly ball well enough to know that it would fall. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=5c068b59-4f5b-47a2-9a51-3753b60a7ff5 Didn't read the fly ball to score on one over the fielder's head. So it appears that Yelich will sometimes misjudge where the ball is hit, either on his own or other people's fly balls. There aren't a lot of egregious errors, but just so many of them that they add up. Brewers But I also wondered if the reduced aggression on the bases is something the team implements. It's hard to say that since they are currently 2nd in steals in all of MLB, but that is to be expected because of their team speed. Baseball Savant gives a statistic that shows how often the baserunner attempted to advance in comparison to the average runner. But that doesn't tell the whole story, since a faster baserunner is more likely to advance. So how do the Brewers compare to other runners with similar speed in the same situation? It does appear that all of the Brewers speedy runners are less aggressive than their counterparts when it comes to taking the extra base. Everyone, except for Blake Perkins. And his smart baserunning has led to an impressive amount of value on the bases for how few opportunities he has had. He would be worth nearly one run more if he hadn't run into an absolute perfect throw from Fernando Tatis Jr. https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sporty-videos?playId=e99b100b-0f86-4232-a3cb-69a0cfcb8e8b Perhaps Jackson Chourio, Brice Turang, Sal Frelick, and even Christian Yelich could tweak their aggressiveness up 3-5% and add even more value stealing another 90 feet? But how is their aggression or passivity affecting them in terms of runs on the basepaths? Well that's where it's interesting and I'm not entirely sure how to parse this into a conclusion. If we take their running value and divide by opportunities to advance, we see some interesting trends. Blake Perkins is clearly very aggressive, but only average in comparison to runs per opportunity, though that is skewed by one good play from Tatis. But Jackson Chourio is very passive and also average in runs per opportunity. Brice Turang and Joey Ortiz are substantially below league average for their speed in terms of runs of advancing on the bases for the chances they get. But if we look at their runs of advancement when they try to go, now they are a little closer to league average at their speed. Both Turang and Ortiz come a bit closer to the average. So perhaps Ortiz, Turang, and Chourio can gain some lessons from Yelich on how to read balls a little better and take an extra base here and there. Perhaps Hoskins, Bauers, and Contreras can be a little more aggressive. The Brewers are currently ranked 8th in MLB for baserunning runs, oddly enough much of those coming from being too aggressive. They have four plays at the plate where they were thrown out, along with five more plays that lost at least -0.74 estimated runs. It appears that they could be more aggressive based on their speed, but have lost more runs than nearly any other team because of being too aggressive. If nothing else, it is an interesting jumping off point to discuss how the team has approached baserunning this year.

Sixto Lezcano walks off the Cubs to win the Brewers 1980 home opener. 1e70c372-211900b9-6c496a42-csvm-diamondx64-asset_1280x720_59_4000K.mp4