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Scouting Explained: The Mysterious Hit Tool, Pt. 1.

It’s the mysterious hit tool because everyone seems to agree it’s the most important tool in an evaluation, for a hitter or a position player, and it’s also the hardest to project, with the most components of any other tool.

If a scout could project pitcher health and the hit tool perfectly, he would be shockingly close to perfect in his evaluations. Since no one is solving pitcher health any time soon, I’m going to focus on the hit tool: we actually have all the information we need in most cases, it’s just hard to weight the factors correctly. Click here for the introduction to this series explaining how to scout.

Collecting The Information

When scouting major and minor league players, scouts normally are assigned a team and given 5 or 6 games to watch every player on that team. It works out that you should see all the pitchers in this span but also, once you scout a hitter for 4 or 5 games (with an off-day mixed in) you get the amount of information you need.

In most cases, after 4-5 games there’s not much marginal benefit from seeing another game or two and a scout would be better off getting those couple extra games 4-6 weeks later, rather than tacking on more at-bats at the same time. Getting early and late looks on a player in the same season is much more valuable than knowing intimately what he’s like at just one point, as the hit tool is all about history and track record, not a snapshot.

Depending on the scout, this standard process could include one batting practice or sometimes as many as three to get a feel for the broad abilities the player brings to the table. Most scouts stick behind the plate the whole game at pro games to focus on the pitchers, while some scouts, particularly on special assignment to see a few players rather than a whole team, will go down the side to see the open side for some at bats.

In the amateur world where scouts are often just focusing on a couple players and hitters can have raw mechanics due the lower level of pitching/coaching talent, it’s not unusual for scouts to spend the whole game down the side. In pro ball, and specifically at Double-A and Triple-A, it’s almost impossible to hit over .250 with mechanical problems unless you have huge bat speed or raw power to make up for it. At those levels, evaluators are much more experienced and can pick out the more subtle swing flaws quickly from behind home plate, which most scouts agree is a harder place to assess hitting mechanics.

What They’re Looking For

If you ask scouts for a short list of the things they’re looking for in amateur hitters, the list would include 1) athleticism/looseness 2) bat speed 3) some feel for the bat head 4) some sense of a plan at the plate, to recognize pitches/adjust and other plate discipline type things. I specify amateur hitters because that’s the level where stats mean nothing and scouts are purely looking for raw abilities that can be developed.

In batting practice, you’d like to see an easy swing with low effort looseness, quick hands and some pop to all fields with the ability to turn on a pitch and yank it out of the park, but something more varied than pull-only, home run derby approach. Many hitters show you all of their raw power in BP and some seem to go out of their way to just hit low liners gap-to-gap. You’d like to be able to grade raw power and have an instinct about how you might grade the hit tool after BP, but some hitters make that harder on the evaluator than others.

In games, that same factors are in play but one of the things that comes to experienced evaluators that isn’t as evident to casual fans is comfort in the batter’s box. Sometimes scouts will talk about how “the game was too fast” for a hitter and this is the sort of thing you notice when you have a big library of hitters in your mind to consult and compare to what you’re seeing. That phrase is a catchall for “the hitter looks uncomfortable,” “he seems to be guessing on pitches,” “the pitcher is dictating the at bat to him,” etc.

It may seem too subjective for that sort of thing an integral part of an evaluation, but it’s amazing to me how often a quick observation like that will be backed up by a hitting coach, the stat line, later at-bats and often the player himself telling you he was out of sorts. This is very common at the amateur and low professionals levels with hitters that look good in a uniform but haven’t produced. Often, if a scout gets that impression about a player in multiple games at different points in the season, particularly a player that’s been in pro ball for years, it’s an indicator of a real problem.

Billy Hamilton Had To Learn To Play Defense, Too.

One of the more fascinating stories of last winter was the Cincinnati Reds’ intention to replace the departing center fielder Shin-Soo Choo with the completely unproven Billy Hamilton. While it obviously made sense that Cincinnati had no intention of paying Choo anything like what he got from Texas — a move that looks great right now — they were also subtracting Choo’s .423 OBP from a lineup that had been merely middle-of-the-pack even with him. It’s not entirely a stretch to say Choo’s presence was the biggest part of why Brandon Phillips had suddenly looked so good last year. Phillips declined in nearly every way between 2012 and 2013 then saw his RBI total jump from 77 to 103 in large part because he was hitting behind Choo’s .423 OBP, rather than the out-making ways of Zack Cozart and Drew Stubbs.

That being the case — and because Cincinnati’s main offseason acquisition was the inexplicable decision to give Skip Schumaker two guaranteed years — most of the discussion around Hamilton centered om whether he could get on base enough to take advantage of his fantastic speed. He wasn’t going to match Choo’s OBP, of course, but could he even get on base enough to stay in the big leagues, or to avoid being a one-man out machine out of the leadoff spot? To his credit, after a tough start, he has been more part of the solution than the problem — especially if you can forget he took the worst swing in the history of baseball.

His OBP is at least around .300, which isn’t good, but isn’t the .250 that some of us — myself included — feared it might be. He’s shown a little bit of power, with six homers. While being caught 21 times on the bases is unacceptable for a player with his speed, that’s the kind of thing that can be eliminated with experience, and he’s still added a considerable amount of value on the bases. He’s a below-average hitter, but that can be tolerated as long as he’s not a complete disaster of a hitter. And he hasn’t been. He’s probably the best candidate in a weak National League Rookie of the Year class.

But while we were spending so much time talking about whether Hamilton would hit, and how many bases he could steal, it was easy to forget he was about to become a major league center fielder. For the first four years of his career, he was a middle infielder. He first played center in 2012 during his stint in the Arizona Fall League. Now that we’ve seen him in center for nearly an entire season… hey, this might just work out.
Remember, first, that for as certain as it would be that Hamilton would be a downgrade on offense from Choo, it was nearly as certain that he’d be an upgrade on defense. That’s without even really knowing what kind of defender Hamilton would be, because Choo was a decent-ish corner outfielder who was completely miscast as a center fielder. The usual caveats about defensive metrics and sample sizes aside, Choo’s 2013 was easily one of the worst outfield defensive years in the majors. It seemed difficult that Hamilton could be worse than that.

Today, Hamilton is just barely outside the Top 10 in our “Defense” metric, which includes a positional adjustment. Among center fielders, he’s tied for eighth in DRS with 8, and tied for seventh in UZR/150. Perhaps you’re not blown away by those positions and wonder why I’m not giving credit to someone like Ender Inciarte, who tops Hamilton in both. Maybe I should. But the point isn’t to say Hamilton is the “best,” because he isn’t. The point is he’s been surprisingly good for a man with so little outfield experience.

It’s not like anyone was setting reasonable expectations about it, either. Back in December, Reds general manager Walt Jocketty seemed pretty sure:

We feel confident he can be a good leadoff hitter. He’ll give us great defense.

Here’s the Cincinnati Enquirer, from March:

According to fangraphs.com, Choo was the worst center fielder in Major League Baseball in terms of Ultimate Zone Rating at -16.1. Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez was the best at 26.4. A rating of 0.0 is considered average. Hamilton should be close to Gomez.

Is that all? It’s been important that he has, too, because even with him, the overall Reds outfield defense has been middle of the pack. Right field, largely thanks to a hobbled Jay Bruce, has been poor. Left field, with Ryan Ludwick and Schumaker doing their best to drag down some good Chris Heisey work, has been a net negative.

There’s also the always-fun Inside Edge fielding reports, which break down plays into 0% likely to be made, 1% to 10% likely, etc., and it’s there where Hamilton’s speed has allowed him to do things few others can. In fact, 189 outfielders have played at least 100 defensive innings this year, and 179 have managed zero or one of the “nearly-impossible” 1%-10% play. A few have managed two. Only Hamilton and Kevin Kiermaier have three. Among those who have had at least six opportunities, Hamilton’s 27.3% success rate is the best. These are tiny samples, of course. Let’s not pretend they aren’t. Still, let’s enjoy Hamilton doing ridiculous things in the outfield.

Unsurprisingly, these are all going to be Hamilton using his incredible speed to make fantastic diving catches, like this one from May 1:

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You won’t be able to tell in the replay, but this catch on May 19 against Anthony Rendon didn’t just look pretty: It came in the 14th inning and very likely prevented the game from ending.

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If Choo had started running to get this ball in Pittsburgh during batting practice, I’m not sure he’d have made it in time:

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Again, no one’s arguing that single-season defensive metrics are above reproach. Yet you can argue that of the 11 Reds seasons with at least 500 center field innings since 2002, Hamilton’s is easily going to be the best:

Season Name Inn DRS RZR OOZ ARM RngR ErrR UZR/150 Def
2014 Billy Hamilton 1092 8 0.956 65 3.7 10.3 1.2 19.5 17.1
2009 Willy Taveras 839 7 0.926 65 4.3 4.6 0 15 10.4
2012 Drew Stubbs 1107.1 2 0.955 58 6.1 2.4 -1.3 9 9.1
2010 Drew Stubbs 1229.2 -1 0.918 57 1.9 -0.6 -0.7 0.9 2.7
2008 Corey Patterson 798 9 0.935 55 0.2 -0.1 -0.3 -0.2 1.2
2007 Josh Hamilton 555.2 1 0.898 18 1.3 -1.4 -0.3 0.1 0.6
2011 Drew Stubbs 1329 -4 0.945 72 4.4 -8.1 0.3 -3.2 -1.2
2013 Shin-Soo Choo 1333 -17 0.911 72 -0.4 -16.1 -0.4 -17 -14.6
2005 Ken Griffey Jr. 1065.2 -11 0.719 43 -2.2 -17.5 0.7 -23.2 -17.2
2004 Ken Griffey Jr. 656.1 -13 0.735 32 -0.8 -20.7 0.9 -39.7 -19.6
2006 Ken Griffey Jr. 870.1 -14 0.832 31 -0.2 -20.4 -0.7 -30.6 -19.9
This is why, while I hardly want to get into the defense and WAR arguments that have been pervasive lately, each of the three major sites have Hamilton as a 2-to-3-win player. A lot of that is because of his speed, of course. But not all of it. Defense matters, and in his first major league season at a relatively new position, Hamilton’s been a pleasant surprise.

Doug Fister is Pitching to Contact.

Doug Fister is fresh off seven scoreless innings Monday night against the Braves. Quality starts are pretty much old hat to the Nationals by now, who’re successfully running away with the NL East, but it might be a little bit surprising that Stephen Strasburg hasn’t functioned as the rotation ace. Really, that statement just speaks to the silly amount of awesome depth the Nationals possess, but with his latest outing, Fister ranks eighth in baseball in ERA among starters with 100+ innings. He’s basically even with Jon Lester. He’s slightly ahead of Cole Hamels and Garrett Richards. When Fister has pitched, the Nationals haven’t surrendered many runs, and, isn’t that the whole point?

So, people loved the Fister trade from the Nationals’ end, and clearly it’s worked out very well for them to this point. But there’s another thing that’s a little bit surprising: 2014 Doug Fister hasn’t been 2013 Doug Fister. Usually, when people have thought about the Nationals and pitching to contact, it’s been with regard to Strasburg’s electric right arm. But, Stephen Strasburg’s strikeout rate is as healthy as ever. It’s Doug Fister who’s been pitching to contact, even despite a trade to the league where the pitchers have to hit.

This is pretty easy to observe, and it’s pretty easy, I think, to explain. Steve McCatty is the Nationals’ pitching coach, and his philosophy is to be aggressive within the zone and make the hitter put the bat on the ball. So let’s take a look at how Fister has changed between the last two seasons. There are 126 starting pitchers who have thrown at least 50 innings in both 2013 and 2014. Speaking about Fister:

Contact rate: Fister has the fourth-greatest increase out of the group
Zone rate: Fister has the fourth-greatest increase out of the group
First-pitch strike rate: Fister has the third-greatest increase out of the group
Fastball rate: Fister has the third-greatest increase out of the group
Fister’s throwing more strikes. He’s throwing more early strikes. He’s throwing more fastballs — specifically, he’s throwing more sinkers — and the result of all this is that hitters are making more frequent contact. That last bit isn’t a shock; that last bit, presumably, is by design. And the Nationals won’t complain as long as Fister’s running a sub-3 ERA. With his efficiency and his quick pace, right now Fister is the very model of the sort of pitcher McCatty wishes he could see every day.

Let’s take a look at two pitches from Monday. Here are swinging strikes against Doug Fister’s curveball, by Mike Minor and by a player who is not a pitcher:

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Looks like Doug Fister, all right. To whatever extent Fister was known before, he was known to possess a quality, tight breaking ball. But here’s the thing: against the Braves, Fister threw just six of those, out of more than 100 pitches. Doug Fister’s extra sinkers have had to come from somewhere, and they’ve come at the expense of the curve. It’s practically been one-for-one.

We’ll use data from Brooks Baseball. In 2012, Fister threw 46% sinkers and 20% curves. Last year, he threw 45% sinkers and 20% curves. This year, he’s at 56% sinkers and 9% curves. With the Nationals, Fister’s curveball rate has dropped a little every month. He’s gone from throwing 21% first-pitch curves to 10% first-pitch curves. He’s gone from throwing 28% two-strike curves to 14% two-strike curves. In part because of all this, and in part because of other things, Fister has gone from throwing 62% of pitches below 2.5 feet to 51%. Fister isn’t working down as much, and he isn’t working in the dirt as much. Now he’s more about just mixing speeds and mixing edges. It isn’t common to see a successful pitcher so dramatically change his own profile.

And one is left to wonder about a few things. Like, what’s the root cause, here? Is it as simple as the difference in pitching philosophies between Washington and Detroit? Has Fister just lost the feel for his curveball, to some extent? It was a positive pitch for him with the Tigers; it’s done relative harm to him with the Nationals. Did he lose the feel early, or has he lost the feel as he’s increasingly navigated away from the pitch? You can also wonder, how much of this is Fister’s own idea? Perhaps, in front of the Tigers’ infield, Fister wanted to maximize his own strikeouts. Perhaps, in front of the Nationals’ infield, Fister is more okay with allowing balls to be put in play. Fister participates in team defensive meetings, and the situation in Washington is a little more defensively progressive. In Washington, contact would be a part of the game plan.

So because of all the questions, one has to wonder: what is Doug Fister’s true-talent strikeout rate? That is, how much of this is because of him, and how much of this is more organizational? What would Fister’s strikeout rate be if he were, say, still on the Tigers? The null hypothesis probably has to be that Fister would be about the same, and he hasn’t exactly been a strikeout machine in strikeout situations, but there’s enough there to make me curious. And then that leads to an interesting discussion about how much certain systems might affect player statistics. It would be interesting, basically, if Fister’s contact were way up in large part specifically because he pitches for the team for which he pitches.

The obligatory point of caution is this: Fister has baseball’s third-greatest negative difference between his ERA and his FIP. His ERA right now is a career best; his FIP right now is a career worst. This is Statistics 101, and this is why people aren’t big fans of pitching to contact in the first place. It’s hard to sustain an ERA-FIP gap, and most of the time those gaps tend to be fleeting. Fister’s career ERA is right on his career FIP, so he’ll have to prove that he’s an exception to the rules. But, perhaps, if Fister’s ERA does regress, the strikeouts will come out. Pitching to contact has worked to this point, as a philosophy. If it were to stop working, perhaps it would stop being the philosophy. I’m not sure how to regress numbers to a player profile we can’t easily nail down.

The Projections and You, Revisited.

As always happens around this time of year, we’re arguing the utility and accuracy of WAR as a player-evaluation statistic and model. Every year, the argument gets a little smarter on both sides, but every year, there’s the same struggle over acceptance. I’m sure we’re not done talking about this, not with Dave Cameron included as a BBWAA voter for the Most Valuable Player award, but you might recall that, a few months ago, the argument then was about the utility of projections. More specifically, it was about projections and identifying breakouts and collapses. Again, it wasn’t a new argument, but sometimes it’s the repeating arguments that manage to push us all forward.

Around that time, in the middle of June, I published a post with 20 players and 20 polls. There were five offensive over-achievers, five offensive under-achievers, five pitching over-achievers, and five pitching under-achievers. In each poll, I asked the audience to select how they felt about the player’s projection going forward. Which possible collapses or breakouts were people buying? Which were they dismissing? I know the season’s not over yet, but I thought this could be a fine time to look back on the post and on what has happened since.

The most important point in this whole post: this isn’t a study, with far-reaching conclusions. From this, we’re not definitively learning anything about projections or human intuition. We’re essentially reviewing 20 small samples of data, and then seeing what that might mean, and I beg of you not to make more of this than I am. For me, this is just sating my own curiosity. Anyhow, let us proceed to the comprehensive table:

Player Projection Poll Performance Difference
Brian Dozier 0.317 64% looks low 0.321 1%
Michael Brantley 0.334 59% looks right 0.362 8%
Lonnie Chisenhall 0.342 79% looks right 0.286 -16%
Nelson Cruz 0.355 80% looks right 0.325 -8%
Victor Martinez 0.356 59% looks right 0.406 14%
Jedd Gyorko 0.304 76% looks right 0.336 11%
Brad Miller 0.308 67% looks right 0.350 14%
Mike Moustakas 0.312 59% looks high 0.293 -6%
Domonic Brown 0.331 67% looks high 0.306 -8%
David Wright 0.347 62% looks right 0.310 -11%
Garrett Richards 3.75 58% looks right 2.59 -31%
Dallas Keuchel 3.83 67% looks high 3.75 -2%
Jake Arrieta 4.12 59% looks right 2.46 -40%
Jake Odorizzi 4.28 67% looks right 3.65 -15%
Collin McHugh 4.36 59% looks right 3.20 -27%
Justin Verlander 3.62 58% looks right 3.79 5%
Matt Cain 3.83 74% looks right 4.10 7%
Shelby Miller 3.95 61% looks right 4.94 25%
Clay Buchholz 4.12 58% looks right 3.62 -12%
Felix Doubront 4.28 52% looks right 4.60 7%
Here’s a fun fact for you: the five offensive over-achievers were projected for an average .341 wOBA. Since the post was published, they’ve put up an average .340 wOBA. Meanwhile, the five offensive under-achievers were projected for an average .320 wOBA. Since the post was published, they’ve put up an average .319 wOBA. That’s remarkable in its simplicity. Again, small samples, and again, don’t draw too much from this, but the projections have had those particular players nailed.

There’s a different story on the pitching side. The five pitching over-achievers were projected for an average 4.07 FIP. Since publishing, they’ve put up an average 3.13 FIP. The five pitching under-achievers were projected for an average 3.96 FIP. Since publishing, they’ve put up an average 4.21 FIP. Four of the five over-achieving pitchers have meaningfully beaten their June 16 projections. Four of the five under-achieving pitchers have done worse. It’s also hard to know what to make of Justin Verlander — he was projected for a 3.62 FIP, and he’s come in at 3.79, which would be a very mild decline. But he’s also yielded a 5.00 ERA, and that’s dreadful, and this is just what happens sometimes when you’re trying to analyze pitcher performance. You don’t know which category is necessarily the most meaningful.

So, about the polls. This won’t surprise you, but it’s a mixed bag. The player for whom people believed the projection the least was Domonic Brown. Indeed, he’s undershot his projection by 8%. People also figured the projections were too high on Mike Moustakas, and he’s undershot his projection by 6%. Yet, two-thirds of people were willing to buy Dallas Keuchel, and he’s basically equaled his projection. Brian Dozier has equaled his projection, despite the same kind of vote distribution. Voters were a lot more willing to believe in Keuchel than they were willing to believe in Collin McHugh, and it’s McHugh who’s continued to pitch like a front-of-the-rotation starter. Not that Keuchel’s been bad or anything, and he did have a wrist issue for some time, but before the post he had a 16.2% K-BB% and since publishing he’s come in at 7.7%.

At the other end, people were relatively unwilling to buy Nelson Cruz, and he’s sure enough slowed down. Same for Lonnie Chisenhall, despite his dinger just a little while ago. Three-quarters of people were also unwilling to think Jedd Gyorko was a pile of crap, and he’s rebounded to be better than average. The crowd kind of missed the boat on Matt Cain, who’s now out with surgery. They also missed on Jake Odorizzi.

There is some other stuff you can try to take from this. You can do that at your leisure! And it’s interesting that, in even the most extreme case shown, 20% of people still didn’t believe the projections. You can say that 80% of people had the right idea about Nelson Cruz, but even there one out of five figured Cruz had made an improvement. One out of five people figured that Chisenhall had made an improvement, and he’s actually gotten a good deal worse. So, each case provides a little mental fodder, for your consideration, but maybe the best thing to be done with all this is to try the same thing again in 2015, and in 2016, and so on and so forth. Maybe, in time, we could build a real sample of polling data and results. If not, at least we’d get to think about baseball.

The Cardinals Offense and the Failure to Live Up to 2013.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Cardinals were just behind the Brewers in the National League Central. Just over a week ago, the Cardinals pulled just barely ahead of the Brewers. Today, after taking three of four against Milwaukee, including yesterday’s 9-1 crushing, the Cardinals are five games up on the Brewers, who are actually now in third next to the Pirates. Over the last week the Brewers’ rotation has not exactly made its defenders look good.

While one could go on about the Brewers’ fall, the Cardinals are the main story. They have never really been out of it. At the beginning of the season, St. Louis was a solid favorite to win their division. Two months ago, when they were four games behind the Brewers, the Cardinals’ chances of winning the division were roughly the same as the Brewers. Today, they are overwhelming favorites.

The 2014 Cardinals are not clearly dominant in either pitching or hitting. In particular, on the offensive side they have not hit nearly as well as the 2013 team. Yet they again are poised to win the division. In many ways, the regression was predictable. But does that mean the Cardinals made mistakes when preparing for 2014?

In terms of just straight up run-scoring, the 2013 Cardinals led the National League in runs handily with 783. In particular, the 2013 Cardinals rightly were known for hitting well in clutch situations. With runners on base, the 2013 Cardinals (excluding pitchers) had a 241 wRC+ (.324/.389/.481) with runners on, far ahead of the next best team in the league, the Diamondbacks (110 wRC+). With runners in scoring position, the Cardinals were even better: 148 wRC+ (.384 BABIP).

Whether or not this represented some particular skill, it seems to me that people tended to miss how well the Cardinals hit last year, period. Cardinals non-pitchers led that National League with a 112 wRC+ (.278/.342/.416, .462 BABIP). Last year’s Cardinals’ hitters were not very powerful, as they were third-to-last in home runs with 124. What really made the 2013 Cardinals hitters stand out was their apparent ability to smack line drives around the field, as they had a .318 BABIP, second only to the Rockies, who play in a hitter’s BABIP paradise.

Now, wherever one comes down on the “skill” issue, it is clear from the basic numbers that the Cardinals hit better in key situations. The Clutch metric does a decent job of painting the overall picture. As a description, it basically gives an account of how many wins a team or player was worth by performing better (or worse) in key situations relative to how they performed in general. According the the Clutch metric, the Cardinals’ hitters were easily the best in the National League last year at 3.33. The next best were the Brewers at 2.35.

Now, individual players who are at the top of the league and the teams constituted from them are always “regression candidates,” but the Cardinals in particular were seen as due for serious regression when it came to scoring runs. Not only had they hit well, but they did so with a high BABIP, they hit much better with runners on and in scoring position (not generally considered a repeatable skill), and, worst of all, their BABIP was extremely high with runners on and in scoring position!

While it would have been fun for the defenders of the 2014 Cardinals if they had defied the odds and kept it up, the 2014 Cardinals offense did indeed come back to earth. They are currently 10th in National League in runs. St. Louis is seventh in non-pitcher wRC+ (102, .261/.330/.384) with a .303 BABIP (ninth). They are currently last in the National League in non-pitcher home runs with 94.

The team’s alleged skill with runners also seems to have disappeared. With runners on they have a 97 wRC+, (.256/.330/372), 12th in the National League. With runners in scoring position the Cardinals have just a 98 wRC+ (.260/.344/369), 12th in NL. Their .66 Clutch is fourth in National League, but that is not an extreme score, and given the previous numbers, clearly has more to do with late-inning performance than with hitting with runners on base.

Given that they are in the middle of the pack in terms of runs scored and are a near lock to not only make the playoffs but win the division, it is tough to criticize the Cardinals’ off-season decision making. Still, it is a sharp drop in performance. What happened? One thing is clear: the team did not simply see its luck with runners on change.

Carlos Beltran, who had a nice season for the Cardinals in 2013, left. His replacement, Allen Craig, who hit well as the Cardinals primary first baseman in 2013, was a disaster (80 wRC+) for St. Louis in 2014 before getting traded. Oscar Taveras’ future should not be judged by a bad partial season as a rookie, but he has been even worse (70 wRC+) than was Craig. Matt Adams, who finally got the first base job when Craig moved to right field, has hit decently in 2014 (115 wRC+), but not up to Craig’s or even Adams’ own 2013. The constantly-underrated Matt Holliday is still a good hitter (126 wRC+), but is significantly down from last year (147 wRC+).

Two of 2013’s superstars for St. Louis have had changes in fortune that have made a big difference for the Cardinals’ offense. The most obvious is that the Cardinals lost Yadier Molina for a big chunk of the season due to injury. While Molina has hit well for a catcher when he has played (106 wRC+), it is a significant drop off compared to last year (133 wRC+).

The other big drop was last year’s surprise superstar Matt Carpenter. In 2013, Carpenter looked like the paradigmatic Cardinals hitter: low strikeout rate, good walk rate, only decent power (11 home runs but 55 doubles), and, yes, lots of line drives (.359 BABIP) adding up to a 146 wRC+ (.318/.392/481), which would be great anywhere, but especially for a second baseman. Carpenter shifted to third this year to make room for Kolten Wong. Wong has not hit as well (94 wRC+) as last year’s third baseman, David Freese (105 wRC+) did, but the bigger change has been Carpenter’s offense. A 118 wRC+ (.275/.375/.382) is still very good for a second or third baseman these days, but is obviously not anywhere close to last year’s performance. Given what we know about the relative correlation of hitting metrics, the particular manner n which Carpenter has regressed is not very surprising: he has retained his good plate discipline and contact, but his BABIP has come down to more normal levels. He is hitting home runs a bit less frequently, but the main source of his power drop has been that his rate of doubles has gone down.

Leaving aside issues of being clutch (as the 2014 Cardinals had the best offense in the National League even setting those aspects issues aside), did the Cardinals make mistakes when planning their 2014 offense? It would be easy to point to the standings and simply say “no,” but even looking deeper, it is hard to go that far. Yes, many players have performed worse than last year. But they have not all been disasters. Matt Holliday still hits well enough, and Carpenter does, too, while playing a position that is hard to fill. I doubt many think that the Cardinals should have kept Carlos Beltran. Though Craig was pretty terrible, that was unexpected, and in any case the Cardinals had one Taveras waiting in the wings. Matt Adams has not been bad, necessarily, just worse.

In other words, most of the players the Cardinals kept around hardly projected to be easy to improve upon, and, Craig (and perhaps Wong) aside, have mostly performed well, if not up to last year. And it is not as if everything has gotten worse. The Cardinals’ big post-2013 free agent signing was Jhonny Peralta, who has filled the gaping hole at shortstop extremely well (.270/.344/.461, 127 wRC+). Peralta has not been the only surprising performer at the plate, either, as John Jay has hit .315/.384/401 (124 wRC+).

The 2014 Cardinals’ offense is not the juggernaut that the 2013 team’s was. Even if last year’s team’s ability to score runs was exaggerated by their hitting incredibly well in key spots, they were excellent nonetheless. The 2013 offense is decent. Even without pointing to the standings, though, it is difficult to say the Cardinals made a bunch of wrong moves. Molina had been one of the more durable catchers in the league for years. Keeping Beltran would hardly have helped the team in even the short term. While players like Carpenter, Holliday, and Adams have not lived up to their 2013 performances, it is not as if their 2014 numbers would have been easy to replace. And the Cardinals did quite successfully fill their major hole at shortstop.

Even before the season started, the 2014 Cardinals offense was quite unlikely to match 2013’s, and it has not. But it has been good enough, and it is hard to blame the decision making that led to it.

The Strike Zone’s Still Dropping.

Nothing groundbreaking here. The primary trend discussed has been discussed at length in other places, with far superior analysis. Here is one example! During the PITCHf/x era, through last season, umpires were granting more and more low strikes. Now we have most of a new season’s worth of data, and, guess what? Trend’s still alive. Trend’s still thriving. There’s never been a better time to be alive as a low strike, provided low strikes appreciate the company of others. We will, henceforth, focus on what I’ve elected to refer to as the zone of interest, because it is our present zone of interest:

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The black box is an approximation of the average rule-book strike zone. The red zone of interest is somewhat arbitrary, but it more than gets the job done. Sometimes you don’t need to call on superior analytical techniques. Which is good for me, because I don’t know them. Data’s on the way! Thank you, Baseball Savant.

This is a graph with a lot of information. Don’t worry about consuming it all at once — we’ll break it down piece by piece. The four lines are labeled, because, why wouldn’t they be? If they weren’t, that would be a terrible graph!

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Red line first. This line shows the rate of called strikes within the zone of interest, with called pitches as the denominator. At the start of the PITCHf/x era, fewer than half the called pitches went as strikes. It reached about two-thirds in 2012, and now we’ve surpassed three-quarters. Relative to 2009, those pitches are called strikes now 60% more often. In numerical form:

2008: 47%
2009: 47%
2010: 52%
2011: 56%
2012: 64%
2013: 70%
2014: 76%
There was a substantial leap between 2011 and 2012. Then the rate jumped another six percentage points, and now the rate has jumped another six percentage points. So, there’s no sign of a slowdown, here. Obviously, there’s a built-in maximum, but these called strikes are exploding. The lower part of the zone has never been kinder to pitchers, at least as far as we know.

Now the blue line. This shows the overall rate of pitches ending up in the zone of interest. This line isn’t nearly so fascinating. You’d think that, with the bottom of the zone opening up, pitchers would go there a lot more often. They have gone there more often, but not dramatically so. In 2008, the frequency was about one of every ten pitches. In 2011, it was about one of every nine. Over the past three years, the frequency has increased only four-tenths of one percentage point. We know that pitchers are throwing down more, and we know that hitters are looking down more, but this is a subtle thing, and the extra strikes aren’t being granted because the pitches are going there more. They’re just being granted.

Overall, this, of course, is significant. A lot of pitches go to that area, and the calls add up. The difference between 2014 and 2009 is right around 300 strikes per year per team. The difference between 2014 and 2012 is right around 125; the difference between 2014 and 2013 is right around 65. As people have reasoned, this is one of the factors behind the decline in offense. Between 2002 and 2009, there was no change in league strike rate or league first-pitch strike rate. Since 2009, the league strike rate is up a point and a half, and the league first-pitch strike rate is up a point more than that. In 2009, for every pitch thrown behind in the count, pitchers threw 1.9 pitches ahead in the count. This year, the ratio’s gone beyond 2.2. Pitcher-friendly counts favor pitchers in all ways, leading to more swings and to worse swings.

But let’s go back to the graph, and let’s consider the green dotted line and the gray dotted line. The PITCHf/x era captures two things: an era of more accurate umpire feedback, and the era in which we’ve come to understand pitch-framing as a skill. Are there more low strikes because of the umpires, or are there more low strikes because teams are more heavily favoring receiving ability?

I can’t actually really separate the two, if I’m going to be honest. But the green line averages the five best catchers in terms of getting low strikes, and the gray line averages the five worst catchers in terms of getting low strikes. Both lines have increased dramatically, but look at where the gray line has ended up: the five worst catchers this year are getting 61% called strikes in the zone of interest. The five best catchers in 2008 were at 64%. The league average in 2012 was 64%. The ceiling is still quite high, but the floor is rising.

As another way of considering this, the 2014 Blue Jays have gotten 63% called strikes in the zone of interest. That’s the worst rate in baseball, just below the Twins’ 64%. The Blue Jays would’ve been basically average just a few seasons ago. In a subtle area, things are continuing to change un-subtly.

Let’s consider every catcher with at least 250 called pitches received within the zone of interest, year to year. Each season, this gives us a sample in the dozens. Here are the standard deviations of called strike rates, as a percentage of the league mean:

2008: 24%
2009: 22%
2010: 21%
2011: 25%
2012: 16%
2013: 14%
2014: 11%
Beginning in 2011, we observe less and less spread in league-wide performance. In 2011, the gap between the five best and the five worst catchers was 48 percentage points. This year, that’s dropped to 27. Some of what we’re seeing is greater emphasis on receiving low pitches with good technique, and some of what we’re seeing are just changes in umpiring, but at least in terms of low strikes these days, there’s a lesser difference between the best and the worst. So there’s less to be gained, relative to the average. A good low-pitch framer will appear less valuable in 2014 than he would’ve in earlier years, which is an interesting thing to think about.

Do we see anything that might resemble a cap? The highest rate in 2011 was 85% strikes, belonging to David Ross. The next year, it was also 85%, belonging this time to Yasmani Grandal. In 2013, Martin Maldonado came in at 88%. This season, Mike Zunino leads catchers at 90%. The ceiling is rising slowly, and it seems reasonable to assume it’ll be around, I don’t know, 92% or so. And the floor? For a handful of reasons, presumably, the effective floor is higher than ever. Catchers are taught certain skills, and they’re selected for certain skills, and there are more strikes being called low because of those reasons, and also independent of them.

People in the past have lamented the absence of the high strike. Baseball has responded by adding strikes somewhere else. People in the past have lamented the significance of pitch-framing technique. Baseball has responded by seemingly reducing the differences between the best and the worst pitch-framers. Did you know that everything around you is constantly changing? Even the floor that you’re sitting on. That floor is nothing like it was last week, if you think about it right.

Where Do The Diamondbacks Go From Here?

Nobody could ever accuse Kevin Towers of being anything less than bold. Few teams have been as interesting as the Arizona Diamondbacks over the last few years. Setting aside the quality of his moves, the sheer volume and often puzzling circumstances surrounding them garnered Arizona more headlines than such a middling team typically deserves.

His moves cut against the grain of prizing young, cheap talent and instead focused on a loose set of criteria, most of which was derived from the ability to play above one’s tools. It didn’t make the team better but it sure spilled a lot of ink. The problem is a simple one: a general manager’s job is to win and make money for the club, not generate think-pieces and schadenfreude. The Diamondbacks didn’t win and now Towers is out as the general manager, with the search for his replacement beginning in earnest (the list of candidates is as long as your arm.)

The Diamondbacks team Towers inherited wasn’t a world beater, though it did claim the 2011 National League West crown. One could convincingly argue that the franchise is actually in worse shape now compared to Towers’ first day on the job. What exactly has the outgoing general manager left the next person to fill his chair? More than you might think.

The decision to remove Towers came just weeks after he authored a sizeable sell-off of the team’s older assets. Arizona traded Martin Prado — arguably the biggest piece of the ill-fated Justin Upton deal — as well as Gerardo Parra, Brandon McCarthy, and reliever Joe Thatcher in deals designed to lower the payroll burden for this year and beyond.

It cleared some money off the books but they were mostly minor moves, hardly stocking the shelves for a return to prominence in 2015. Let’s take stock of the Diamondbacks circa today:

The Diamondbacks have:

An extremely good player signed to an extremely cheap deal. No matter what me might think about Towers’ tenure in Arizona, he still got Paul Goldschmidt’s name on that contract, the one that will pay him a whopping $3.1 million in 2015, with three more years and an option still to come, all for less than $30 million.
Goldschmidt is around, or at worst, a 4 WAR player still closer to 25 than 30. He figures to be a middle-of-the-order mainstay in Arizona or else one heck of a trade chip, should the new GM opt to scorch the Earth. This is not a bad place to start when building a team.

Relative strength up the middle. Between archetypal Diamondback Miguel Montero, the promising (?) middle-infield duo of Chris Owings and Didi Gregorious, and A.J. Pollock, Arizona at least has some options to plug into the tough-to-fill spots in the center of the diamond.
While Gregorius and Owings have a long way to go before they are solidified as everyday players for good teams, Montero’s 2014 suggests his awful numbers in 2013 are the exception rather than the rule. Pollack is nothing if not exciting, though his true talent remains something of a mystery due to injuries.

Not a superstar between them but players with league-average in sight at positions where better options are tough to come by. Again, you could do worse than starting a team with this kind of talent.

Injured pitchers. Yes, the DBacks were ravaged with injuries this season, losing an unfathomable number of starters to injury, as rotation mainstays Bronson Arroyo and Patrick Corbin lost their 2014 seasons to the dreaded scalpel.
The good thing about injured pitchers is they usually stop being injured pitchers at some point. So the Diamondbacks have a nice pitcher in Corbin and a reliable backend guy returning, if not in time for the start of the 2015 season then sometime before 2016 (they hold a club option for Arroyo for 2016).

Beyond the pitchers hoping to return next season, there are enough promising pitchers on the farm (Archie Bradley notwithstanding) at least give Arizona more depth and better options to start games.

Too much dead money. For a team with a relatively limited budget, there are too many players performing far below their pay grade. Aaron Hill is about to become the world’s most expensive utility player, with Cody Ross serving as an overpaid fourth outfielder at the same time, Trevor Cahill’s rocky road back from oblivion has more twists as yet untaken. Throw in Arroyo and suddenly four of the Diamondbacks five highest-paid players are marginal starters at best.
It’s a tough corner to punch out of, as the trade value is minimal. The next GM needs to decide who can help the Dbacks next year and how many checks ownership needs to write to make the rest go away.

The Diamondbacks need:

Better players. Simply put, they need to either develop better players or stop the players they acquire from performing worse after they arrive in the desert. Be it the ballpark or culture or just bad luck, the Diamondbacks under Kevin Towers don’t have a strong track record when it comes to the guys they dump versus the guys they bring in.
For all their competence up the middle, they need far more production from their non-Goldschmidt corner positions if they hope to stop leaking wins as they have every season since that magical run in 2011. There is no easy way to plug these holes, short of spending money that might already be in short supply. Does adding…Pablo Sandoval and Melky Cabrera make them better than the Dodgers and Giants in 2015? That’s an expensive proposition, and an unlikely one for any incoming GM to consider.

A new identity. Do the Diamondbacks have a PR problem? The whole “grit and gamer” narrative probably got more play than it deserved but the raft of lower-ceiled players on their roster right now makes improving difficult.
Perhaps identity is the wrong word, but a shift in culture certainly wouldn’t hurt, especially if the existing culture prevents the pursuit of the “better players” mentioned above.

Mostly, “culture change” and “new identity” are just coded words meaning “they need a new manager” as the fingerprints of Kirk Gibson are all over the roster right now. Tony LaRussa calls the shots now, overseeing everything on planet Diamondback, meaning it his smudged thumb starts showing up on the club’s DNA.

As Nick Piecoro points out, the “gunslinger” reputation Kevin Towers brought to Arizona ended up his undoing. Too many moves made without proper insight from his advisors and members of his staff robbed their roster of high-performing talent. The next person to occupy the GMs’ office at Chase Field can only pick up the pieces, take stock of what is on hand, and boldly move to correct course for a franchise headed in the wrong direction as they see fit. Boldy? Maybe “carefully” is a better idea. Deliberately? Let’s go with that one.
 
Pirates rolling. Crazy how far the mentality of this franchise has come to be able to create winning streaks after being in a slump

Hamilton's defense has been great this year, he has made a ton of plays
 
:lol: that's too funny. I love how Ellis didn't even attempt to get the throw from Puig and Kershaw dove head first for it :lol:
 
Great play by Moustakas. A rain delay at this point would kill me. Gotta be Shields in this game to hold down this lead and get the W.
 
The A's are going to mess around and not make the playoffs.

Anyone know the Angels record since Richards went down? They are on a whole another level right now

James "big...." Shields pitched well.
 
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