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July 4, 2015 Everything You Could Have Learned This WeekJune 29-July 3, 2015Good day, and welcome to a special Independence Day edition of Everything You Could Have Learned This Week. This series has its origins in the American Revolution, in fact: My great great great great great uncle, Ebenezer MacDonald, was an old town crier back in Northampton, Mass., and he used to do something much similar to this every Saturday afternoon, standing in the town square and reciting all the week's new baseball knowledge for the townspeople to hear. Well, that was until the British cracked down on Ebenezer, afraid the new knowledge he was spreading would embolden the citizens to rise up against the old RBI and wins-dominated regime of old. In fact, an important part of the First Amendment to the Constitution can be attributed to Ebenezer. During the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, when Ebenezer happened to be in town for business, he opened a window at Independence Hall and shouted from the outside: "Don't forget to include a part about the freedom of assembly for the purpose of the dissemination of baseball knowledge!"
Ultimately, they only used that first part.
Weekend/Monday Strikeouts are indeed up, but a number of factors, such as more judicious starting pitcher management, are combining to endanger high-strikeout performances: We're Seeing More Strikeouts, But It Takes Many More Pitches To Get Them, by Rob Arthur, FiveThirtyEight
The problem is that it often takes a lot of pitches to get a strikeout. On average, in 2014, strikeouts required 4.5 pitches per plate appearance while outs on balls put in play took only 3 pitches. Every strikeout a pitcher gets drives them closer to their pitch-count limit even as it increases their Game Score. Any pitcher working on a record-challenging game must therefore contend with his manager, whose goal is to preserve the pitcher’s arm for another day. Kluber’s potentially historic performance was disrupted by just such reasoning, and it prevented him from getting a chance, however small, to break Kerry Wood’s record.
Tuesday
An aesthetically appealing pitch is part movement, part a lot of other things, like camera angle and catcher behavior: Chaz Roe and the Mechanics of Aesthetics, by Jeff Long, Baseball Prospectus
Part of the reason Roe's slider seems so ridiculous is because of how Caleb Joseph reacts to the pitch. His glove appears to be squarely in the middle of the zone, but has to jerk his left arm over to the first base side to catch the pitch. The movement of the glove and subsequent pull of his entire upper body make the viewer think that even Joseph didn't expect the pitch to move quite that much. In reality, Roe likely just missed his spot—which is understandable when a pitch moves more than two feet—and Joseph was surprised at the location regardless of the movement.
Wednesday
So, your favorite pitcher's getting Tommy John surgery? Bummer. At least it isn't Thoracic outlet syndrome: Thoracic outlet syndrome and pitcher effectiveness, by Nick Lampe, Beyond the Box Score
The injury has the potential to seriously hurt a pitcher's velocity, although this hasn't been the case in all situations. While pitchers like Chris Carpenter and Shaun Marcum saw a noticeable drop in their velocity, Matt Harrison saw his velocity increase as he became further removed from the surgery. The positions you associate with offensive production (or lack thereof) have been fairly constant throughout baseball's history: An Unchanging Truth: Positional Offense Through History, by Wendy Thurm, FanGraphs
But do you still need to sacrifice offense for good defense up the middle? Aren’t we over the days of the scrappy second baseman and lanky shortstop? Shouldn’t this be one of the modernizations made possible by 21st-century athletes? Look at Troy Tulowitzki. Look at Chase Utley. Look at what Barry Larkin and Cal Ripkenand Roberto Alomar did on the field and at the plate. When Tory Hernandez looks at those players, he sees once-in-a-generation talent. If there were more Tulowitzkis out there playing professional baseball — or thinking of playing professional baseball — there’d be plenty of teams willing to play those guys at shortstop, instead of pushing them to first base or the outfield.
Thursday
A readjustment of the strike zone, back to its 2009 standards, could have an effect on a "thousands of runs" sort of scale: The Commissioner Speaks: Imagining a Redefined Strike Zone – The Hardball Times, by Jon Roegele, The Hardball Times
If the bottom of the strike zone reverted to its 2009 height, this analysis estimates about 1,000 additional runs would be scored over the course of the season. If we augment the 2014 run total by this difference, it brings the runs scored per team per game up from 4.07 to 4.27. Once again, this closely matches the run environment experienced in the league in 2012. Friday
The bulk of talent at the major league level now lies — to a greater degree than in quite a while — with its young players: Baseball's Kids Are All Right, by Rob Arthur, FiveThirtyEight Except today’s kids can do something those 2001 ones couldn’t: rake. With an average mark of 94.6, young hitters are putting up the best Weighted Runs Created+ (wRC+) since that marvelous 2007 class (which was at 99.2). The average wRC+ is set at 100, so the young players are adding decent hitting to their superlative defense. Much of the hitting stems from a power surge: The young hitters are racking up a slugging percentage of .400, slightly better than the league average of .397. July 4th projections of teams' records are more accurate than those on opening day (but just barely so): The Variation of All Things, by Matthew Trueblood, Baseball Prospectus
We have here a sample of 90 team seasons, and an opportunity to look at which ended up closer to their preseason projection, and which ended up closer to their midseason one. Of the 90, I see 15 teams whose Opening Day expected win total better reflected their finish than their July 4 projection. By my count, 29 more teams either didn’t see a significant change in expected record over the first three months of their seasons, or ended up with a record more or less halfway between the preseason and midseason expectations. That leaves 46 teams—the slimmest possible majority in this sample—for whom the first half was valuable information, the kind one would be foolish to disregard.
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Baseball's Kids are All Right was misleading - presenting a graph that only goes as far back as just where the steroids era began to boom. Weighted Runs Created, sure, shows the proportion of runs created by young players has increased - but that doesn't show they are hitting better (or "raking") compared to earlier generations of young players. Plus, a couple of years is not a trend or a new phenomena, it might just be a glitch. Anyway, as some of the commenters eluded to, the steroids era allowed an extrordinary number of hitters have a super-extroridanary post 30 years old career. The report only just confirms that we have returned to normal.