July 18, 2015

Everything You Could Have Learned This Week

July 15-17, 2015

by Ian Frazer

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Wednesday

Perhaps the most interesting response to the question about objectivity, however, came from the reporter who insisted on remaining anonymous. This writer said he believed that complete objectivity was possible, but on the question I asked about whether he had ever broken the “no cheering” rule, he said, “I have. Sometimes it cannot be helped. When you follow a team for a full season, it’s hard not to get a little emotionally invested. As long as it’s clear that you can remain objective, and as long as it’s a very occasional vocalization or something, it’s not really that big of an issue.”

There is a great deal of cognitive dissonance in that reply. Perhaps what he’s really speaking about is the concept of fairness mentioned by McCullough and other writers I corresponded with. But objective? I don’t know if I can believe a reporter is objective when he says he cheers for the team.

Pinto estimates he gets at least 10 emails a day from prospective players. Most are quickly shuffled to his trash folder. It’s not that Pinto enjoys crushing dreams, but most emails don’t give him the information he needs.

Don’t spend paragraphs gushing about your love of the game, everyone does that. Feel free to tell the prospective manager that you’ll work hard, but that isn’t going to get you a call or a job.

Do send a clickable link to your college stats (or even better your pro stats if you were released by an affiliated team). Do include the name and contact information for your college coach. Have an area scout who saw you and liked you? That’s even better. Include their names and ideally their contact information as well.

You need to make the job of the manager or player personnel director as easy as possible. And it’s vital to be able to provide the name of an impartial evaluator who can vouch for your ability.

Defensive shifts in the infield have become common in today's baseball landscape, but outfield positioning has received far less attention. One reason is that outfield alignment is more difficult to track through broadcasts as companies like Baseball Info Solutions and Inside Edge have been doing with infield shifts.

Second, aggressive positioning in the outfield lags behind its infield counterpart in extremity, so it's less likely to grab the attention of the broadcast booth or the viewers at home. A center fielder shading to his left or right, or taking a few steps deeper or shallower, against a particular batter has been in practice for decades, at least. The same goes for no-doubles defenses. However, it's not as if teams are going to start stacking one side of the outfield with all of their outfielders.

Visually, infield shifts are more extreme than outfield shifts, but positioning outfielders more efficiently is something that could have a larger effect because of the effect on extra-base hits. There are likely fewer shift candidates in the outfield than the infield, as the distribution by direction of balls hit to the outfield is typically more spread out than on balls hit in the infield. But in cases where the data indicates that outfielders should be heavily shading one way or another, teams stand to gain an even greater benefit from playing the percentages than they do in the infield.

Port said the scores of umpires went up every year he was in his position, finishing at about 94-95 percent for balls and strikes. Those grades have continued to rise over the last four years, to what one major league source estimated at an average of 95-96 percent, with nearly all umpires falling into the range of 92-97 percent accuracy – the low end of which would have represented the very best grades when QuesTec was first introduced in 2001.

“I think right now,” said one MLB official, “we’re probably calling the strike zone as accurately as we’ve ever called it.”

But an accurately called strike zone means, by rule, calling a pitch on which any part of the ball glides by the hollow of the knee while crossing any part of the plate. In this case, the improved accuracy has come at the expense of offense.

The performance of this type — solid plate discipline and clout, but abhorrent results otherwise — doesn't come around every year. Someone like Drew really is one of a kind.

For whatever it counts, Drew has earned his output this season, for better or for worse. He's lowered his O-Swing% to 20.6%, compared to a career rate of 24.0%, and has upped his contact rate to 86.4%, from an overall 81.8% level. He's also put the ball in the air to a much greater extent: His fly ball rate has jumped to 50.7%. At the same time, many of those fly balls have stayed in the infield (12.6%), and he's hit the ball hard only 20.8% of the time. Put it all together, and you get a recipe for, well, whatever Drew has done.