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May 22, 2015 BP UnfilteredEverything You Could Have Learned This Week, 5/22/15Earlier this week, I moved into a new apartment. It's much better than my old one: It has a couch, a better kitchen with a dishwasher and a roommate who's not a slob. I also bought a new TV and a PlayStation 4. I learned that having nice things is better than not having nice things! So, party at my place, and you're all invited. We'll watch MLB.tv and debate the existence and merits of lineup protection and talk about what else we did or could have learned.
Weekend/Monday
Thanks to the new pace-of-play initiatives, the average length of nine-inning games is down eight minutes in 2015 versus the comparable time period in 2014. The effect has been slightly stronger for games with more batters...
Despite baseball's recent lackluster postseason TV ratings, the sport can still be a very strong draw in some regional markets, even in relation to other sports' playoffs: Baseball Is Beating The NBA And NHL Playoffs In Local TV Ratings, by Maury Brown, Forbes
Wednesday was a playoff bevy for sports fans with playoffs in both the NBA and NHL, and a great baseball game nationally, but in 14 of 24 markets, it was not hockey or basketball or even that Mets-Cubs that people were watching, but Major League Baseball on their local regional sports networks.
Pinch-hitters become better at pinch-hitting when the do more of it. (Pinch-hitting, in case you couldn't tell.) Which leaves them in a bit of stick situation, because pinch-hitting is becoming less common: Coming in Cold 2: Lifting the Pinch-Hitter's Penalty, by Shane Tourtellotte, The Hardball Times
We need to be cautious in drawing conclusions here. The obvious, reflexive one is that players do better at pinch-hitting the more they pinch-hit. One could suggest that managers pick out the players who do well in this role and give them increased opportunities, thus producing the effect by selection rather than practice. It’s hard to see them managing this by the necessarily small sample sizes, so if it happens it may be instead due to seeing good processes at the plate during these chances.
Successful collusion cases in the past contained more than circumstantial evidence, which is a knock against Barry Bonds' case: Assessing Barry Bonds' Collusion Case, by Eugene Freedman, Baseball Prospectus
Unlike the circumstances of 1985-1987, there is no smoking gun in the Bonds case. Nobody has come forward to expose a conspiracy. There are no rumors of a meeting in which the Commissioner told club officials not to sign Bonds. No club official has made statements to the press about wanting to sign Bonds but being prohibited or restricted in some way.
Tuesday
Consider the landscape now. There’s not that much closer uncertainty. David Robertson just got a big free-agent contract. Andrew Miller was paid well and installed as a closer. Same with Luke Gregerson. Francisco Rodriguez got significant money. Huston Street just signed an extension. The Dodgers went against the grain only while Kenley Jansen was sidelined. The A’s talked about jumbled roles only with Sean Doolittle hurt. The Rays talked about how they didn’t consider Brad Boxberger the closer, but he’s been used like a closer, and only while Jake McGee has been out. Blue Jay uncertainty came out of Brett Cecil uncertainty. Marlins uncertainty came out of Steve Cishek struggling. Rangers uncertainty came out of Neftali Feliz being bad. Addison Reed was closing for the Diamondbacks until he was too ineffective. The teams that’ve been without set closers planned on having closers. It’s just that plans have gone awry.
Wednesday The combination of fielders staying down and holding tags longer is causing baserunners to adjust their sliding technique in response. Specifically, the hard, direct pop-up slide is growing in popularity and utility.
Thursday
We now have a model that suggests a real (if still slight) relationship between batted ball speed and the likelihood of committing an error. But that curve changes extremely slowly. The lower bound of the probability a 120-mph batted ball produces an error (1.8 percent) is smaller than the upper bound of the probability a 60-mph batted ball produces an error (2.5 percent). In other words, it's still possible that the relationship between batted ball speed and error likelihood is totally flat. ... The two curves on this graph represent the likelihood of an error when the home (blue) and road (orange) team is batting. The shaded portions represent the 95% confidence interval based on the number of ground balls observed at that speed. Speeds were grouped in 10-mph buckets with a 5-mph overlap, so the first dot covers all grounders hit between 50 and 60 mph, the next covers between 55 and 65 mph, and so on. And whereas the home team's fielding percentage decreases on harder-hit balls, the road team stays oddly consistent -- and relatively error-free! -- over the meaty part of the curve.These data suggest home teams get the benefit of the doubt on would-be errors: a ground ball hit at the same speed is more likely to be called an error if the home team is fielding than if it is batting. If the relationship were flipped, you could argue that some of it was due to the visitors' inexperience with the nuances of an individual ballpark. But it seems unreasonable to argue that visiting defenders get more reliable away from their home grounds. Besides, scorers are incentivized to turn close calls for home batters into hits (to boost batting averages), and close calls for visiting batters into errors (to help keep down ERAs).
Friday In other words, if a team is truly in the cellar right now, it probably doesn’t have a lot of hope. Nearly 60 percent of World Series winners — 61 of 107 — were above .600 on May 15, and 41 of them had a winning percentage over .650, which is a 105-win pace.
Lost gate revenues are the biggest stumbling block to reducing the MLB season, even though that's not an entirely convincing argument: MLB's biggest obstacle to a 154-game season: money, by Jayson Stark, ESPN
"You know what I find interesting?" mused one baseball official outside the commissioner's office. "That at the same time we're hearing talk of going to 154 games, we're also hearing talk that revenues could grow to $15 billion a year."
DIPS is a LIE. (Not really, but there is a now-quantifiable amount of skill involved in how pitchers are able to reduce hard contact.): A Baseball's Exit Velocity Is Five Parts Hitter, One Part Pitcher, by Rob Arthur, FiveThirtyEight
That’s not to say pitchers hold the upper hand. In my models of batted ball velocity that incorporate the pitcher, batter and ballpark, the batter’s effect dominates the pitcher’s. A ball’s exit velocity after a bat strikes it is about five times more the batter’s doing than the pitcher’s. This fact seems to partially vindicate FIP — batters really are the ones in control.
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