Everything You Could Have Learned This Week

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Today, I learned from my very knowledgeable father that, even though the state's flagship educational institution uses them as a mascot, Badgers are not seen in Wisconsin. But I also learned, through a quick search of Wikipedia, that my father was wrong, and that Badgers are indeed found in Wisconsin, and even in Michigan. So in the end, I learned that nobody can be trusted! Not even me!

Overall, voters and coaches have been competent enough to prevent someone like Bryan LaHair from getting into the All-Star Game. He's one of a kind: Splitting LaHairs, by Patrick Dubuque, Baseball Prospectus

If a pitcher's location suggests that he pitches to contact, he's going to pitch to contact, no matter how hard he throws: Why doesn't Nathan Eovaldi strike out more batter?, by Murphy Powell, Beyond the Box Score

Those are pretty good whiff rates in the upper part of the strike zone and right above it, which leads me to believe that Eovaldi’s aversion to getting strikeouts is probably by choice. If you have the stuff to get swings and misses, pitching to contact seems like a conscious decision, and it’s worked out fine.

Let's look at this from the pitcher's perspective. It's easy to look at Keuchel on the A's (290 outs on his ground balls) vs. Keuchel on the Rays (266) and say "Wow!" but of course, that's the extreme case. Still, it's worth noting that even guys who are middle-of-the-pack when it comes to inducing ground balls, like Kluber and Dickey, would see four extra outs if they played in front of an above-the-median team like the Brewers instead of a below-the-median one like the Yankees. That may not sound like much, but turning an out into even a single is worth something like .75 runs of value. Those four grounders are three runs of value, and that's just kinda muddling around the middle of the table. For someone like Kluber, going from a bad situation like the Rays even to the Brewers at no. 10 would be worth 11 ground balls turned into outs, which would be on the order of eight runs. Given the old "10 runs equals one win" standby, if we assume that everything else is equal about the two teams (yes, that's silly, but just go with it for a moment), we can start to make statements like "Corey Kluber or R.A. Dickey could actually be worth most of a win more just by moving from a bad situation to a good-but-not-amazing one, at least as far as infield defense goes."

Whereas Donaldson’s elbows and shoulders had noticeable movements to help deliver the bat, Goldschmidt moves his upper half just enough to get the barrel where it needs to be. His rear elbow never gets higher than his hands or shoulders. Looking at his front shoulder you can see how it’s pretty level to the ground until it moves up as the bat comes forward.

Very few people on the planet can move the bat like Goldschmidt as he launches. From the front view you can see his barrel flatten and blur behind his back shoulder before moving forward. Donaldson does this too, but look at how Donaldson uses his rear elbow and shoulder to accomplish a move Goldschmidt pulls off largely through his top hand. Albert Pujols is a hitter who uses his top hand similar to how Goldschmidt does but even he had some back-elbow “row” to help power the move.

Judging the ball by how loud it sounds off the bat seems like it would be intuitive for an outfielder, right? Well, actually...: The Physics of Sound at the Ballpark, by David Kagan, The Hardball Times

Umpires have gotten better, especially at calling what pitches should be strikes: Umpires Are Less Blind Than They Used To Be, by Noah Davis and Michael Lopez, FiveThirtyEight

While umps call balls no differently than they did seven years ago, they’re accurately gauging strikes at much higher rates. This distinction is so large that Brian Mills, a professor of tourism, recreation and sports management at the University of Florida, cites the increasing size of the strike zone as accounting for about half of the league’s 50-point drop in OPS since 2008.

In other words, steroid testing isn’t the only change responsible for MLB’s drop in offensive output. It’s also more called strikes.

Looking at the period from 2011 to -13, the TTO group maintained their offense reasonably well, producing a wRC+ of 115, although the average WAR over that period dropped to five wins above replacement. The non-TTO group slightly improved their wRC+, moving up to 123 and maintaining their average WAR at 8.6 over the three-year period. The three true outcomes are often associated with old-man skills, so the decline in WAR could have been the result of a steeper decline, but the results of this small exercise are hardly definitive.

Only four pitchers — Richards, Dellin Betances, Kenley Jansen, and Davis himself — have crossed the 95-mph threshold on more than 1% of total pitches thrown. So Davis’s game-ending offering to Votto represents both (a) a rare occurrence in the context of the league but also (b) a not entirely surprising occurrence, given the identity of its author.

It’s clear that the trend was strongest during the game’s pre-MLB primordial age, when a good team could get through the short season with two underhand-throwing pitchers. But it has held up to a lesser extent in recent years: From 1996 (the first post-strike season) through 2014, the correlation was minus-0.38. Compare that to the figure for 2015: 0.01, no correlation.

As the graph reveals, only four years in major league history have seen a correlation poke above zero: 1903, 1947, 1995, and 2015. This would be the first non-strike season with a correlation above zero (however slightly) since the year Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.

Baseball players are indeed aging more slowly (statistically) today, and it probably isn't due to steroids and whatnot: Maybe Players Aren't Aging Differently After All, by Peter Bonney, The Hardball Times