The Jay Land

The Jay Land (With apologies to T.S. Eliot)

APRIL is the cruellest month, losing
Games out on the cold land, freezing
Ligaments and desire, whiffing
Dead bats causing spring pain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
T.O. in forgetful snow, feeding
Too much hope with press releases.
The offseason surprised us, coming towards the ‘dome
With a shower of money; we stopped in the blizzards,
And went on in sunlight, into the beer garden,
And drank pitchers, and talked for hours.
Buehrle, Johnson, Reyes, Dickey, Cabrera, it is done!
And when we were children, listening on the radio,
My friend’s, he took me out for some hacks,
And I was terrible. He said, Jon,
Jon, swing more softly. And out it went.
In the fields, there you feel free.
I read, much of the season, and go to Cuba in the winter.

Softer, Worse, Slower

A quick post-mortem (literally) on Dickey’s start last night…remember from last post how sitting consistently around 79 mph was one of the keys to his Cy? Here’s a graph of his velocity (all types of pitches) from one of his stellar starts – a 12K one-hitter against the Rays as an example of how he’s throwing when at his best. Except for fastballs and at the very end of the game, Dickey threw over 80% of his knucklers in the 78-80 mph range back then:

And now here’s the same thing for him last night:

Not so much. It’s hard to tell, but it almost looks like he’s gone back to the ‘slower’ version of his knuckler that he for the most part ditched last season. Dickey also threw more fastballs than usual, including two that left the yard off the bat of Will Middlebrooks. The first time, Dickey seemed frustrated after allowing 4 consecutive hits to start the game, and put it on a tee for him on the first pitch — perfectly down the middle, straight as a board, letter high, 84 mph. Surprise value kinda goes out the window when you throw a meatball like that.

The second time, Dickey fell behind 3-0 on knuckleballs and then threw three fastballs in a row: 1) Called strike, 2) swinging strike 3) giant bomb on exactly the same pitch as in the first inning. I kind of get it if Dickey wasn’t feeling the knuckleball anyway, but seems like an odd call. Middlebrooks, again, was not so surprised.

Incidentally, I was in the first row behind the VIP section for that debacle (the best seat I have ever had and most likely ever will) and Dickey’s knuckle looked awesome as he warmed up between innings. He threw a half-dozen wicked darters for strikes that made me gasp, but once the cameras were on seemed to have trouble finding the plate with anything other than the slower, tumbling variety.

Dickey’s Knuckler — Harder, Better, Faster

To make a long story short, as soon as R.A. Dickey was acquired this offseason I set off to write the definitive work on why he was so great last year and what to expect in this one, and completely and utterly failed. It turns out quantifying and/or predicting the evolution of that damn pitch is just about as hard as hitting, calling, or catching it…I mean, let’s face it — the man has discovered a pitch that nobody has ever thrown before which makes him great at an age that nobody has ever become great. There is simply no comparison, no career arc, no regression to the freaking mean. And if you saw any of his shutouts last year, it was clearly not a sample size or once-around-the-league-with-a-new-pitch type of thing.

Ah well…not that anybody made any solid predictions as to where his numbers were going to wind up this year on the spectrum running from a) pretty decent as he has been for most of his late career through b) Cy Young winner as he was last season, all the way over to c) best-ever-what-the-heck-is-even-going-on-who-gave-this-guy-the-cheat-codes-to-baseball that he was for about a month in June.

And I did make some pretty graphs as I floundered about. Here’s a nice one, about the speed of his knucklers last year (red) compared to his previous seasons (blue):

Averages can be misleading…Dickey actually threw fewer knucklers over 80 mph last season than in the previous two — but he used to throw two slightly different knucklers, one in the low 70′s, and one in the high, and then started to favour his harder one heavily last year. Here it also looks like he managed to bunch up his fast knuckler at the top of his range (without overthrowing it) much more often as well.

Annnnd this next one might shed some light on why that is the case:

There’s probably a better way to show this than bar graphs, but before last year, Dickey could only get his slower knuckle over the plate for strikes consistently. 50% is kind of a magic number for me in terms of first pitch strikes, fastball strike %, etc…anything below it is either trouble or a chase pitch. The fact that Dickey was able last year to throw his 74-78 mph knucklers in the zone more often than not has to have been a huge factor in his instant success — it makes his strikeout pitch the same as his get-me-over pitch. And even when it wasn’t over the plate it was getting more strikes — it’s no big surprise that hitters miss Dickey’s knuckler more the faster it is — but they also swing at it more often.

It’s simply a much better pitch at the higher velocities…more swings, more misses, more chases, only slightly less often in the zone.

Speed	In Zone %	Swing	Miss %	Chase %
Under 75 mph	53	25	40	15
75-80	49	34	39	21
80+	49	39	53	27

Now here’s where I got kind of lost…Dickey throws harder knucklers on 0-2, 1-2 counts, and although side-to-side movement on a knuckler is basically random, his harder ones do tend to stay ‘up’ more. Here is a chart of movement, with pfx from side to side and pfz the vertical ‘rise’ on his knucklers compared to gravity.

Speed	Pfx	pfz
Under 75 mph	-1.03	-0.26
75-80	0.34	1.00
80+	0.36	2.54

So while the movement on his pitches is random, you could say that R.A. has some control over his knuckler in that he locates with softer ones and then puts hitters away with his hard ones — but last year, he just threw them all hard and in the zone and was incredibly effective as a result.

Also, Dickey’s knucklers that veer up and away from right-handed batters are by far his most effective – not entirely surprising, since that is the the only pitch movement that is totally unique, and not replicating the general movement of either a curve/slider (down and away), changeup/2-seamer (down and it) or 4-seamer (‘up’ and in). The only other pitch that sort of does that is Mariano Rivera’s cutter, or the Doc’s at his best — they travel almost exactly side to side instead of like a semi-slider.

R.A. Dickey Knucklers by direction
Dominant Movement	In Zone %	Miss %	Swing %	Strike %	Hit %
Up left (into RHB)	0.50	0.33	0.30	0.43	0.0600
Up right (away from RHB)	0.47	0.49	0.29	0.49	0.0427
Down left	0.47	0.26	0.32	0.38	0.0747
Down right	0.54	0.29	0.34	0.44	0.0646

Hitters swing through them almost twice as often as ones that sink down and in, and get fewer hits when they do make contact. Especially from the television perspective, it’s a strange thing to get used to — his best pitches are the ones that stay up and over the plate, which for most other pitches is a sign of a mistake. Coming off a start where he didn’t have the greatest control it will be interesting to see if he goes back to his slower knuckler to try to get more strikes until he can consistently locate the hard one that won him the Cy.

Last Post About BABIP Ever I Swear To God

Seeing that I don’t even have the time to wrap up the rather interesting stuff that I’ve been working on for months, I think this blog is just going to become a depository for completely ridiculous statistical statements this season, as was its original intention. So here weeee goooooo! Arash Madani, are you freaking kidding me?

Anthony Gose’s ascension to the big-leagues was fast. His progress in the show –15 stolen bases and a batting average of .340 with balls in play through 56 games with Toronto last season — was encouraging.

As I’ve ranted, BABIP is interesting for pitchers, and almost completely useless and/or misleading for everyone else. Having a high BABIP is equally likely due to a low contact rate (or luck — HR hurt it, too). If you take huge cuts and strike out instead of making weak contact on every 2 strike count, congrats! Your BABIP goes up! (Isn’t this just a terrific modern stat?) Obviously Madani trying to imply that this means Gose’s speed means he often reaches base when he does put the ball in play, but the real reason is that if Gose’s AB were extrapolated over an entire season, he would have struck out the 5th most times in major-league history (with only Adam Dunn and Mark Reynolds above him). Ummm, yeah…that’s highly encouraging for a powerless slap hitter with great speed…totally…

Romero Getting That Sinking Feeling…

At first I was excited to learn that Romero is using pitch f/x information to diagnose his 2012 woes, but that passed quickly to outrage at the fact that it was provided in the form of printouts from Brooksbaseball by Brandon freaking Morrow. It continues to flabbergast me that teams show basically no interest in applying modern technology and analysis to get the most out of their multi-million-dollar investments on the field.

Romero is obviously open to and interesting in using this type of information, and the pitch f/x system takes an incredibly detailed picture of every pitch he throws. Yet, it takes a combination of internet hobbyists and a fellow pitcher taking the initiative for such stunningly useful and freely-available information to make its way to Romero, so he can be “amazed” by it. Le sigh. With apologies to Archimedes: give me a laptop and a place to stand in the dugout, and I will change your WAR!

Because yeah…in my not-so-humble opinion, Morrow botched the analysis (although obviously a standing ovation for him doing anything at all). When you look at more of Romero’s career than just the last two seasons, there is just no way to come to the conclusion that the key to Romero’s struggles is a lack of sinkers. He threw considerably more sinkers to RHB in 2012 (19.3%) than he did in 2010 (14%), and almost as many (16.1 compared to 17.5) to LHB. It was a mix that worked for him fine two (and three) years ago, not something that changed before the debacle that was Romero’s 2012 season.

***Note*** It’s up for debate/kind of arbitrary where your pitch-classifying algorithm draws the line between fastball and 2-seamer/sinker, as there is overlap in terms of movement as well as velocity. The way I split them, it’s a much more modest overall drop than Brooks’ numbers in terms of 2-seamers anyway, from 25% to 18% between 2012 and 2011. Here are a couple of graphs of pitch f/x ‘movement’ to give you an idea of the blurring between the two offerings, and because my contract stipulates I have to include at least one (x,y) chart per article:

The real reason for there appearing to be a sudden drop is that Romero’s sinker use soared in 2011, most likely to compensate for his AWOL changeup. As I argued at some statistical length a while back, everything else about Romero’s repetoire pales in comparison to the fact that his change now moves like a completely different pitch, with almost 6 (!!) inches more drop than average. But, with that transformation it has turned from being his primary offspeed pitch (and a great one at that) to hittable trash that he is quite rightly completely unwilling to throw to lefties.

Unless Ricky is trying to redefine himself as a true sinkerballer, the 26% of 2-seamers he threw in 2011 is very high, not some kind of career norm that he needs to return to in order to find his old levels of success. The one good thing about Romero’s sinker comments was that he seemed to be willing to throw it for strikes and let it be put in play. The percentage of Romero’s 2-seamers that were located in the zone fell to an ludicrous 34% last season, so concentrating on pounding the zone with it in spring training can’t hurt. Romero certainly should be getting more strikes and grounders by throwing it to contact instead of as a chase pitch — but he’ll never be the Ricky of old without his changeup.

Follow-up on Josh Johnson’s Curveball

I probably would have done more of this if I wasn’t completely statistically gassed by the time the fact that Josh Johnson even HAD a curveball rolled around. But as pointed out in the comment, any excitement over a new pitch has to be tempered by the fact that it won’t be a novelty for long. Only time will really tell, but here’s a look at the evolution of JJ’s new pitch as the year progressed:

1a) Movement – Side-to-side (pfx)

Pfx is where the ball ended up along the horizontal plane compared to where it would have without spin, in inches. Clearly, there is a lot of variation from one pitch to the next but also a downward trend, which means the pitch moved less from right to left as the season went on.  Also, there was less spread, which is most likely a sign of increased consistency from JJ. His first 200 curveballs had a standard deviation of 1.93, and his last 230 were at 1.79 (to try to get at what that means in baseball terms would be stupid).

Also, see that patch right over the 200 mark where every single curve is below 4? That corresponds to July 4-18, 3 starts where JJ got shelled in an otherwise excellent stretch.

1b) Movement — Up-down (pfz)

I took the liberty of splitting these pitches up by start to address the elephant in the room — right in the middle of those three crappy starts mentioned above, Josh Johnson’s curveball dropped an extra half foot for one start (immediately after the All-star game, incidentally). Then for the rest of the season, the ‘drop’ on his curve steadily decreased. Experimenting with a new grip? Broken nail? Craft your own narrative…

1c) Movement — Bend (break_length)

Looks like an increasing amount of ‘bend’ early in the season, then a shaky patch around the all-star break, and a downward trend at the end of the season. The single start highlighted in red is his August 25 start, which was his one other blowup of the year after the break. For some reason leading into that start his curveball started to flatten out, and then was atrocious as the Dodgers pounded him for 10 hits and six runs through three innings.

I’m not trying to imply that it was all due to his curveball, but I find it really cool that there are usually completely obvious reasons for a sucky start rather than all the hocus-pocus about ‘not being sharp’, or ‘leaving a few pitches up’ we hear. I mean, of COURSE he’s not going to spill the beans on national TV after the game, but you know JJ was thinking ‘what the heck is wrong with my curveball, we gotta get on that’ after that game. Someday, every pitcher will get post-game reports like this, as umpires do (did?) with QUESTEC.

2a) Results — Miss %

What I did here was plot for every swing whether the result was a hit or miss, and then run a rolling average (series=15). So apparently the league started to make more contact against JJ’s curve after a certain point

2b) Results — Hits

Same thing, with hits/balls put in play. Sample size is starting to become an issue, but that’s a very clear spike in the middle of the season.

2c) Results — In Zone %

2d) Results — Chase out of zone

Just including these to be complete…nothing really pops out as conclusive for me.

TAKEAWAYS:

• Johnson tightened up his Curve into more of a pure 12-6 as the season went on.
• He was getting more and more drop on it until the all-star break, when something went horribly wrong. From then on, that trend reversed.
• It was getting more and more ‘loopy’ until late in the season, when again, after a terrible start, things started moving in the opposite direction.
• The league was more and more able to make contact with his curve as the season went on.
• This lead to more and more hits coming against it until the midway mark, at which point, yep, things reversed dramatically.

Lumping all this together, I would say that Johnson was working on making his curve more and more nasty as the league was catching up to it, and then somewhere around the mid-way point (possibly spurred on by it falling apart) wisely switched his focus to making it more controllable so he could place it more effectively. But that might be just because I know that’s what happens to every rookie pitcher and it makes sense that it would for a veteran with a new toy…

3ai) Random — average # of Strikes in count when throwing curveball

Just a cute, not-particularly-scientific way of seeing if he was throwing it more often later in the count, i.e. a punchout pitch, as the year went on. Yep. With one crazy stretch where he gave up on it. Doing the same thing for this slider suggests that he went back to using his slider later in the count after the break:

3aii) SLIDER — average # of Strikes in count when throwing slider

Annnnnd I’ll just bury at the very bottom of another long post a semi-apology to Bot Elliott after he clarified the Johnson #3 comment during in his online chat with: “Right now they have a lot of No. 3s or maybe Morrow is a No. 2 and Johnson could be if his shoulder allows him to add missing MPH”. That is without a doubt the most informed reason for saying that, although I still think it’s quite the bombshell to drop without any context or attempt to back it up.

Update: Ok, I take that back. Random comments from mystery men at the winter meetings is just not compelling journalism. YOU’RE IN THE HALL OF FAME, BOB. Have an opinion! Say something! Don’t just pass on this scuttlebutt like it’s this incredible inside information but you just…can’t…give up your source. Putting together that Lawrie runs and Gibby is a red light did not exactly require Deepthroat in the parkinglot, y’know?

Pitch f/x — Under the Hood with Josh Johnson

May as well start this monster of a post off with a bang and slag a Hall-of-Fame baseball writer: has anyone else noticed that Bob Elliott constantly spices up his articles with highly-controversial statements from ‘veteran evaluators’ who sound a lot more like they’re coming from an old Blue Jays fan, or maybe, you know, himself, than they do anything that a real scout would say? From today’s Sun:

“I like the trade, I like Buehrle and Johnson, but they’re a couple of No. 3s for me,” said one veteran evaluator. If you’re going for it — and it appears by everything they’ve done to date, that they are — they need someone else.”

“They really don’t have a dominant No. 1, a Dave Stieb, Jack Morris, Juan Guzman, Pat Hentgen or Roy Halladay.”

While I’m also of the mind that the Jays’ rotation has not been solidified this offseason as much as most people think, calling Josh Johnson a third starter (whatever that means, anyway) demands an explanation. The only way that statement makes any sense at all is if you think he now has diminished stuff due to his arm injuries, know nothing about him except his ERA last year, or are making argument that a #1 who is injured half the time is the same thing as a #3.

Because after labouring through the first two months of last season (really his first six starts — remember that number!) Johnson essentially returned to his career numbers, which made him the clear #1 the Blue Jays were counting on when they made the trade (although he might not be quite at the dizzying heights of *snort*Jack Morris during his time with the Jays, or *chortle* Juan Guzman). With such a history of arm problems, Johnson could equally well boom or best — but there’s no reason to think he has settled into Buehrle-style solid mediocrity.

Anyway, we just have to trust that the Jays are still haunted by the name Mike Sirotka and have done their due diligence up the wazoo about his physical state…but let’s look at what pitch f/x has to say about Johnson’s 2013 and his prospects going forward. To begin, here’s how the man himself saw his 2012 season:

“I’d say maybe the last 15 starts, I felt so much better than before,” Johnson said. “I was kind of fighting myself, fighting my body, trying to do this or that, maybe trying to find a little bit more velocity. But once I relaxed and just trusted myself, it just kind of came out.

“I don’t know if I was throwing any harder or anything like that. But you could tell with the depth that I had on my slider and my curve ball, and the location of my fastball got much, much better.”

1. Fastball

It’s the “trying to find a little bit more velocity” that pops out for me here, because if we isolate his four-seam fastball, that is indeed the case. Trust me for one second here — basically every healthy mature pitcher sees his velocity subtly but steadily increase throughout the season. But Johnson’s average fastball velocity flew up over the first couple of months, and then declined for the rest of the season as he became more effective.

[Edit: Ok, that's a little Mickey Mouse so here's pitch-by-pitch instead of game-by-game, with a rolling average of 5 in black that drops about 3mph through the heart of the season]

Things start to look really scary when you compare his velocity to his previous years. Even at his peak in 2012, Johnson was only back up to where he was in 2011 before he got injured, and then went in the wrong direction (the start of 2009 is missing in the following graph because pitch f/x wasn’t entirely set up yet).  

If that doesn’t scare you, it should. As soon as a power pitcher known for his 95 mph heater and a killer slider starts talking about ‘hitting his spots’ and not being concerned about his velocity…run. Anyone remember B.J. Ryan? Seem Tim Lincecum lately? You can talk heart and location and pitching all day but strikeouts matter. And unless you’re a control pitcher to begin with, losing 2-3 mph on your fastball without anything to compensate for it is obviously going to affect your K rate in some way.

But wait…all is not lost, because for some reason last season Johnson’s K numbers DID steadily progress to the point where they were right in line with his old self.

So what gives? Did he find exceptional control at the expense of velocity? I don’t think so. Here’s how often his fastball was thrown in the zone as the season went on:

Obviously being in the zone is not the final word on fastball control, so let’s try another stat that I made up — the % of pitches that were “paint”, i.e. within a few (in this case, 2) inches of the border of the strike zone. I know, I know…I’m lumping in 3-0 fastballs with pitches that actually matter, but it’s not like Johnson became some control artist on the outer half when he started backing off on his velocity — if anything, other that a few crazy games late in the season, he was throwing less paint than when he was trying to throw his fastball harder.

[Edit: I take that back. If you take a rolling average of paint pitch-by-pitch, it does show a minor improvement in his ability to paint over the season, with low stretches in April and July when he was getting shelled.]

 

Enough charts, time for a table! In pitch f/x terms, “Breaklength” is the maximum distance a pitch deviates from a straight line from hand to glove. I think of it as the size of the ‘bend’ in a fastball, or the ‘loop’ in a Curve. ‘Pfz’ is how much a pitch resists the pull of gravity, and correlates to the ‘explosiveness’, ‘hop’, ‘giddy-up’, or whatever you want to call how much a 4-seamer seems to ‘rise’.

Josh Johnson’s 4-Seam Fastball
Year	MPH	Breaklength	Pfz	In Zone %	Miss %	On Fringe%
2009	95.04	3.25	10.05	50	31	19
2010	94.73	3.27	9.90	49	40	21
2011	93.81	3.76	8.95	58	23	22
2012	92.77	3.91	8.45	52	18	21

Again, scary stuff. Johnson has lost an inch and a half of fastball ‘hop’ and batters are swinging through his fastball half as often as they did a couple of years ago. You can make the argument that he is moving towards a more accurate, moving fastball, but that does sound a lot more like a decent number three than the top-of-the-rotation stalwart the Jays need.

2. Slider

Ok, onto the next part of his self-evaluation — did his breaking stuff show improved ‘depth’ and pick up the K-slack?

First let’s look at his signature pitch, the slider. Unfortunately, results against a single off-speed pitch can be highly deceiving because so much is based on context. If you have lost fastball control, it might look like your slider has fallen apart, because you never get to throw it in 2-strike counts where a hitter has to defend the plate. Or, if your fastball velocity is down, guys don’t have to cheat to catch up to it so they don’t bite early on your slider.

But anyway, the graphs below are my case that although he did manage to locate his slider where it belongs out of the zone more often, it wasn’t any more effective in terms of swings-and-misses. Opposing batters got far fewer hits off it, but I think that equates to fewer hung sliders, and not ‘increased depth’ that would help with punchouts. Swing and miss rates correlate directly to K% (without the fluctuation, basically), and for Johnson’s slider they actually declined in the second half last year.

Compared to previous seasons, here’s how his slider matches up:

Josh Johnson’s Slider
Year	MPH	Breaklength	PFX	PFZ	Miss %	In Zone
2009	87.55	7.31	2.15	2.07	48	45
2010	87.86	7.07	2.45	2.69	46	44
2011	85.82	8.06	2.69	1.09	52	23
2012	86.91	7.37	2.45	1.68	53	29

The PFX/PFZ numbers are interesting — he has traded about a half-inch of sideways movement for a half-inch of drop. As I manage to work into every single post these days, that seems to be a bad thing. Sliders seem to be more effective when they cut straight sideways instead of sinking and bending, more like a cutter than a curveball.

And that seems to have an effect on how he is using it — as a chase pitch rather than a hard-to-hit potential strike. While the overall miss % has risen, that’s only because the number of them thrown in the strike zone has plummeted (@#$@#$ context!). Taking only sliders that were thrown for strikes, Johnson’s Miss % has fallen sharply: 27%/26%/14%/21%. While he is using it in a more conventionally recommended way, it is not as fast, not as hard, not as nasty. And he seems to know it.

3. Curveball

I hope you’re ready for some good news, because I sure as hell was at this point. Since Johnson only really started throwing it last year, there’s not a lot to compare Johnson’s curve to, but here we go:

Josh Johnson’s Curve
Year	MPH	Breaklength	PFX	PFZ	Miss %	In Zone
2011	77.71	12.46	5.17	-5.65	14	34
2012	78.43	12.01	4.48	-5.20	42	36

A 42% miss % on a curve is pretty darn good for a third pitch. Even in 2011, just having it lead Chipper Jones to remark: “Oh, OK, he’s got a curveball now…I hope he doesn’t throw that too many more times.”

But now the kicker — here’s Johnson’s K’s per game in 2012 broken down by pitch type:

See the flatline over the first six starts on his curve, after which point it was just as important a strikeout pitch as his slider? Yeah, having an 6.61 ERA and a .359 BAVG against might lead you to trying something new…now take a look at the % of curveballs Johnson threw as the season progressed:

AHA! So THAT’S how he managed to keep his K’s up when all of his other pitches seem to be less effective. I know these graphs are ugly and unscientific, but there’s more to the story than him throwing his curveball 14% of the time or whatever it was over the entire year. What started as a completely non-existent offering was making up more than 20% of his pitches by the end of the year. That’s ridiculously high — Buehrle has a nice floater, and he threw it 11% of the time last year. Gio Gonzalez uses it as his only breaking pitch and he’s only at 21%.

Josh Johnson used to be able to get away with throwing two plus-plus pitches and a show-me change. After a series of arm problems, he’s just not that dominating power pitcher any more. Half a dozen starts into last season, that became obvious to him and/or his coaches, and he started using a pitch in strikeout situations that he had only tinkered with in the past. It worked amazingly well for him, and he started to get more and more confidence with it as the season went on until he was just as effective as he used to be when his repertoire was much more nasty, but predictable. It saved his year, and possibly his career — and what we get to see in Toronto is the first complete season of him with a full repertoire. Excited again?

POSTSCRIPT: Ok, I’ve been really sick the last few days so I didn’t even read the rest of the quotes from Johnson where he talked to the media about his curve, hence why I’m so excited to have ‘stumbled’ upon the fact that it was a revelation last year. It sounds like John Buck might have been the one to recognize it as a plus offering and prod him into throwing it more and more as the season went on:

This was my first full season to pitch with it and to throw it that much. I was learning the whole year. Good thing I had John Buck back there because he helped me out tremendously. Whenever I was in doubt he would put it down, kind of gave me that re-assurance that this is the right pitch, let’s throw it. So I could (learn) how to throw it and when, where to throw it, things like that.

YES-YES!

Here’s some Stieb trivia on an ancient post from this blog, as well as an old Bob Elliott article that touches on his compulsive ‘jock-adjusting’ and team-blaming.

HALE = PLAYOFFS

It’s a real shame the Jays lost Brian Butterfield along with John Farrell; his ability to turn above-average infielders into elite ones will certainly be missed. Would he have made a good manager, though, and was it worth it to give him the reins to keep his infield coaching skills around? I was never as enamoured with his in-game strategy and it could have been another Farrellesque invocation of the Peter Principle — where a team is forced to promote a guy from being a very good coach to being not a particularly good manager.

But relaxxxxx. Now there’s a Hale behind the bench. We’re in the best hands there are. Here’s former player Lou Merloni gushing about his time spend under Demarlo. And Peter Gammons preemptively calling this a ‘coup’. Obviously I’m a little too close to the situation for my comments to carry much weight (we won the three-legged race together at the last reunion), so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that our conversation as we were unlacing our shared limb and accepting the trophy went something like this:

“So how did you acquire such a sterling reputation around baseball for studying opponent’s tendencies anyway, Demarlo?”

“Well son, it all comes down to rigorous statistical analysis of advanced pitch tracking data.”

“Hey, that’s kind of my thing, too! It must run in our shared DNA.”

“No kidding! Well, I’ll give you a call if I ever end up in Toronto needing a right-hand man who is a pitch f/x expert willing to work long hours for peanuts to make the next Moneyballesque statistical revolution happen in his home town.”

“Haha, not like that’ll ever happen, but I’m taking you up on your offer if it does!”

I’m going to have to cut off the memory playback there because at this point apparently my giant dog, Falcor, flew both of us away from the Blue Meanies and onto Lollipop Island where we watched Joe Carter hit back-to-back home runs to win the 2013 world series. But other than that last bit, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how it went down*.

*If you think this is a stupid post, imagine the photoshop job that I decided wasn’t worth it.

The Complete Shea Hillenbrand Interview — Exclusive!!

At first it seemed odd that notorious dickhead and abrasive personality Shea Hillenbrand would be so gracious and contrite when asked to comment on the re-signing of John Gibbons as the Blue Jays manager, but after some cutting-edge journalistic work we at the Mockingbird have managed to uncover both sides of the AP interview quoted in part by the Star. Here now, in its entirety for the first time, is the complete and unedited interview with Shea Hillenbrand:

ASSOCIATED PRESS: Hello, Shea? This is the Associated Press calling. As you may or may not know, John Gibbons has recently been re-hired as manager of the Blue Jays. Just wondering if you had any comment on that?

SHEA: “That’s awesome. He’s a great guy.”

AP: What? No, I said JOHN GIBBONS. Former manager of yours. The guy who stopped playing you halfway through the season, challenged you to a fight during the ensuing fallout, and then refused to stay on as manager if you remained on the team. Do you have anything to say about him or what happened between the two of you?

SHEA: “I think he handled the situation that we had very professionally and I didn’t handle it professionally at all.”

AP: Wow, really? Gotta say I’m a little surprised. Did NOT think you were going to say that. Ok, well so much for that story…hey, how are all your wacky animals? Do you still have the rabbits and the lemur and the miniature horses and all those fucking tortoises? Did you ever get the Zebra and Buffalo you wanted? Ha ha ha. I mean, you run a petting zoo now, right?

SHEA: “All I know is that during my time with him he was a really good manager and I think he did a really good job with what he had.”

AP: Yeah, yeah, you already said that. Big of you. I was talking about…wait. Something’s wrong. Are you in trouble, Shea? Is he there? Don’t say anything…just use his first name in a sentence if you can’t talk to me right now./p>

SHEA: “I think John’s going to be a great addition to that ball club and he’s a great guy.”

AP: OH god. I’ll send for help. You just hang tight, Shea. I knew this wasn’t over.

*click*

 

In other news, pitcher Ted Lilly was spotted wearing dark sunglasses over a large black eye at his annual charity bowling event. When asked about the shiner, he changed the subject instead to his admiration for John Gibbons, explaining that in retrospect he realized he had been a complete asshat during the incident in 2006, and that neither then or at any point in time had Gibbons physically assaulted him in any way.

The return of GIBBY?!!

Nothing bad to say about this move — amazingly, I’m a big John Gibbons fan. You really have to learn to appreciate his hammy Texas drawl and ‘awhh shucks’ manner as performance art; I am reminded of the two American surfer dudes in Alex Garland’s “The Beach” who are actually quantum physicists adopting the guise out of convenience because it’s what everyone expects of them. Underneath Gibby’s ‘old salt’ media persona is a modern manager who doesn’t make bullpen mistakes, doesn’t over-manage when things are going bad, and is tactically astute. What more can you ask? Not that it would have made a difference, but I thought it was pretty embarrassing when Jim Leyland was bringing the infield in early and conceding the lead late during the World Series.

Oh, yeah — Gibby also knows when to throw down.

As the most memorable event of his first stint as manager, you’ll see this video replayed a lot this week as evidence  that Gibbons is the tough guy that the Jays’ lax clubhouse needs — but with the caveat that he might be a bit of a hothead who instills discipline in his players through physical violence (he also reportedly challenged Shea Hillenbrand to a fight during the “this ship is sinking” debacle, although who knows how serious a comment it was and c’mon…who didn’t want to slap Shea silly at some point?). Even at the time, few people read between the lines to understand that assaulting Ted Lilly on his way back to the clubhouse was actually a pretty reasonable course of action under the circumstances. Let’s go back for some context:

It was a sad time during a pretty good season: the Jays were in the hunt through the first half and then lost 9 out of 10 to start July against terrible Oakland and Seattle squads and the need-to-beat Yankees. 9 games back with a month to go, the playoffs were realistically out of reach, but there was a lot to be said for finishing strong with a young, improving team in anticipation of an even better 2007 (which was a complete, unmitigated disaster — but that’s another story).

Lilly had been struggling along with the Jays’ bats, which exploded for a eight-run lead against pesky Oakland through two innings. And then Lilly responded by taking the mound in the third and fucking around. There is no other way to put it: he walked Erik Chavez to start the inning on a ‘aren’t-I-clever’ 3-2 curveball nowhere near the plate; then later dropped down and threw the first sidearm pitch of his career, which made Bobby Kielty do a triple take before he hammered it 422 feet. Sadly pitch f/x wasn’t recording details back then, but I remember hearing that he threw a knuckleball he had always tinkered with in the ‘pen and wanted to try out in a game. It was one of the most unprofessional, selfish, idiotic performances I have ever seen on the mound. (Bengie Molina might agree by the way he is glaring at Lilly in the video before things even get started).

Of course, none of this was touched with a ten-foot pole after the fact, but it’s clear as day that when Gibby got out there he was more than just frustrated at a pitcher having a bad day. Lilly can be seen aggressively repeating “I’m trying to win the game”, which is only a response to something along the lines of “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

And then, despite having allowed back to jacks and frittering away five out of the eight-run lead with two more on base and one out, Lilly had the gall not just to protest, but “say something he shouldn’t have said” to his manager on the mound. Again, I’ve never seen anything like it — guys are usually highly apologetic when they mutter under their breath and don’t make eye contact as they hand over the ball. Lilly looks at Gibbons with utter distain and then starts dressing him down on national TV.

I’ve always thought that Gibby understood the bigger picture — everyone knew that Lilly was on his way out of Toronto at the end of the year. He had mentally cashed out on the season and was acting like a primadonna despite not pitching like one, as if the team’s desperate need to re-sign him placed him above criticism. Faced with a ridiculous performance and then a intolerable undermining of his authority, Gibby decided to draw a line in the sand. Throwing a punch and risking injuring one of your stars would be insane. Eating one (yes, you can see his bloody nose if mlb.tv ever gets those games archived) shocked the hell out of everyone and showed how deadly serious he was beneath the southern charm.

Funny thing is it also set a fire under Lilly’s ass — he pitched like a man possessed in September and then completely predictably signed with the Cubs for less money that the Jays offered. Where he proceeded to do the second most unprofessional thing I have ever seen on a pitching mound the very next year as he imploded during a critical playoff start.

Update: Cathal Kelly also reports Gibbons once got into a legendary shouting match with Richard Griffin. I don’t care if he was dead wrong, the man is somewhere between action hero and modern saint.

Blue Jays Blockbuster — Following the Money

Boy, getting to know the business side of baseball sure takes a lot of the fun out of being a fan. Big trades used to be like opening presents on Christmas day: a consequence-free deluge of sparkly new toys to marvel at and get ready to have fun with. These days the wrapping is barely off the latest backup catcher and I can’t help but run to Cot’s Contracts and figure out exactly what we’re paying for all this.

But that’s what it all comes down to when you’re faced with management that sees the on-the-field product in strict terms of return on short-term investment. It may not be “our money” — but the fact is that if Rogers doesn’t spend it wisely, the lack of immediate on-field results and ensuing attendance increase will cause them to doubt that fielding a premium-quality team is really worth it, and WHAM! We’re back watching another slightly-better-than-average club for the next two decades or so.

The last time Rogers was almost goaded into spending dough on the rotation, the team ended up with a bait-and-switch boondoggle — Wells instead of Lilly and Meche — that sent the Jays back into a rebuilding phase overnight. So how does the latest round of acquisitions rank in terms of bang-for-buck, as compared to the dreaded free-agent market we always hear we are so wise to avoid? Wait…didn’t most of these guys get signed to these exact same contracts on said dreaded free-agent market last year?!?

Exhibit A: Mark Buehrle (3 years, 48 mil = 16 mil/per)

Exactly one offseason ago, the Marlins signed Buehrle to a 4-year pact that averaged out to 14.5 million a season over four years. Back then, pundits chuckled at how much the team was overpaying out of a misguided attempt to buy a winner for the new stadium because while Buehrle is ridiculously durable, he is also just a tick above average at this point in his career (even after his rather astute late-career move to the NL).

Anyway, since the original deal was overly generous AND back-loaded, the Marlins have managed to wiggle off the hook and dump their mistake on us (hey, that’s AA’s signature move!) after paying just 6 mil for one season along with Buehrle’s 4-million signing bonus. Even granting a lower-than average risk of decline in his mid-thirties because he’s a slow-tossing lefty, 16 million a season is way, way, too much to pay for a guy who is a minor upgrade on Henderson Alvarez, ten years older, and on the wrong side of his career slope. That’s ok though, I’m sure we’ll be compensated for doing the Marlins such a big favour later in the trade…

Exhibit B: Jose Reyes (6 years, 114 million = 19 mil/per OR the almost certain option of 5 years, 99 million, or 19.8 mil/year)

Have the Blue Jays ever traded for such a major contract? At almost 20 million dollars a year in salary (unless you think Reyes is going to be worth paying 22 million dollars at age 36) this is the big-name investment in the team everyone has been waiting for. And again, the Jays take on a slightly worse version of the deal that was widely reviled when the Marlins gave it to Reyes last season, when he was coming off a crazy contract year that to nobody’s surprise he in no way lived up to, regressing instead to his gradually-declining career numbers.

Reyes is an upgrade, but not a lineup-changing one that it makes sense to throw top dollar at. His glove drifted from not good to really bad last season, and other than 40 steals, Escobar had better production in 2009/2011. As well, turning 30 is a very scary time for speedy middle infielders. If people are going to scoff at the idea of Prince Fielder’s body holding up until he’s 36, I’ve got binders full of dynamic middle infielders wearing down in a hurry in their early 30′s. Imagine having made a major five-year investment in Jimmy Rollins at 30. Or Roberto Alomar at…errrr…33. “Young player” tools do not decline gracefully, and Reyes is on his way down what could be a very slippery slope.

Not that the team doesn’t get a lot more palatable. Reyes is a legit leadoff man who will be fun to watch when he’s healthy (triple=most exciting play in baseball), and Escobar was a lazy, underperforming, dickwad. But if coming into this offseason, AA had announced that Reyes had somehow become available and that he was planning on offering him a five-year, 100-million-dollar contract in order to beef up the offence, it would have been deemed an incredible waste of money at what clearly should not be the Jays’ #1 priority (especially when it leaves us with a backup player staring at second). But frame it as a trade, and wooooooooo! We rooked those guys by getting something for nothing!!! Unless you believe/it is true that free agents just won’t sign in Toronto of their own free will under any conditions, it just doesn’t make sense to get excited about trading quality prospects for players that the team could have been right there bidding on the previous season at a better price/year with no players given up in return.

So that’s two parts of this deal that sees the Jays taking on the Marlins’ mistakes and paying more than market value for these players, which means we’re going to get it alllll back in the super-sweet third part of the deal in exchange for all the prospects we threw into the deal, right?

Exhibit C: Josh Johnson (1 year = 13.75 Million/per) 

Crap. Not so much. Johnson is the top of the rotation arm that the Jays actually need, and the one that they were willing to take on the other two bloated contracts for. His deal is also the only one of the bunch worth giving something up for, as it would almost certainly take more than 13.75 million to replace Josh Johnson on the free agent market next year. But not that much more.

Anibal Sanchez is essentially the same age and quality of pitcher (heck, he had a slightly better year than Johnson and his velocity isn’t down post-surgery — see my pitch f/x post on Johnson coming soon), and he’s asking for 15 million for six years, or 1.25 million more per season over five additional years. That means for the right to pay a similar pitcher in his prime 1.25 million dollars less, and to have him under contract for just one year instead of six, the Blue Jays took on two contracts that were bad when they were freely available last year and have since gotten worse, and gave up Alvarez, Hechavarria, Marisnick and Nicolino. How exactly is this better than blundering around in free agency again?

Exhibit D: John Buck (1 Year, 6 million)

It seems petty to mention it when there are 100-million dollar contracts flying around, but this is another part of this “trade” that is less of a “trade” and more of a “we’ll save you some money”. Since he left Toronto, Buck has completely fallen off the rails and doesn’t even have the defensive prowess of Mathis to compensate for hitting around the Mendoza line. So the Jays take on four million dollars for a clear downgrade at catcher, which is widely reported thusly: “also acquired in the deal is catcher  John Buck, who hit .281 with 20 HR during his last stint with the Jays”…

I don’t mean to be a total grinch. This will make for much better baseball in Toronto next season. But this trade is being over-celebrated because the media looks at it like fantasy baseball, our guys for their guys — in which case it’s highway robbery. The truth is, under baseball’s current economic system, the only time a team ‘wins’ this kind of payroll dumping transaction is when in exchange for prospects they get players on the cheap, which is clearly not the case here. While it looks terrible for the Marlins in terms of talent lost and the direction of the franchise, these were such bad contracts when signed that it is isn’t a huge haul of talent for the roughly 50 million bucks a season the Jays are absorbing, either. Considering that the two top pitchers out there are asking for 15 and 25 million dollars a season respectively and it’s hard to imagine having to spend more than 30 million on the rotation, anyway, without the need to pay Reyes like a superstar and give up some good young players.

If all this happened because Rogers is opening the floodgates and finally making a big, sustained push for the playoffs and the hearts of fans, then great. For rather a lot of money and prospect value the team has managed to improve at a very thin position, leaving room for even more investment in left field. But if this was Anthopoulos’ one chance to get big results from the long-awaited cash infusion, then he didn’t get the value that he needed in order to make the making the postseason next season more than a faint hope — which could mean this round of rebuilding the Blue Jays just jumped the shark.

Under the Hood with Pitch f/x: Esmil Rogers

The backup infielder we got for John Farrell for a reliever who throws 96? Deal! I love this trade, but at the same time it highlights what made dumping Snider (no, I haven’t let it go) mediocre at best: while stockpiling hard throwing relievers and hoping you strike gold is a much better acquisition strategy than overpaying for closers, you just don’t have to pay very much on the open market for hard-throwing middle-reliever longshots. Esmil Rogers doesn’t have a lot less lightning-in-a-bottle potential than Brad Lincoln, his washed out-starter-with-one-stellar-run-as-a-reliever pedigree is the same, and the Jays picked him up for a spare part and a non-prospect, with the trade deadline nowhere in sight.

It also throws cold water (although with Izturis now signed, maybe AA is taking another swing at it) on what seemed like an increasingly obvious offseason move after acquiring an extra middle infielder in Mike Aviles– sending Yunel Escobar packing. Even before the eye black, this was a sticky situation for Alex Anthopoulos, as he’s right back in the over-a-barrel situation that he had Atlanta: facing heavy pressure to replace an unpopular player with serious attitude issues at a very thin position, when said player is at his all-time lowest value and will almost certainly rebound next season. The Braves’ front office must be enjoying all this FAR too much after enduring Alex Gonzalez at SS in 2011.

Anyway, here’s the pitch f/x lowdown on Rogers. Obviously he throws gas and has had trouble finding the plate, but you’re going to hear a lot of garbage, as usual, about the rest of his repertoire. First, THE DUDE DOES NOT THROW FOUR PITCHES. In fact , no matter what Fangraphs junky pitch algorithm says, he only sorta makes it to three. For starters, he threw 9 changeups all last year. That’s not a “show me” pitch, it’s a “tinkered with” and possibly an “oops, that one slipped” pitch. It was not good when he was a starter and is now basically extinct.

His fastball on the other hand averaged 95.8 mph out of the pen last season, which is . And then you really have to look at something that gives you the bigger picture of the movement on his stuff (I’m too lazy and BrooksBaseball’s new player cards are pretty sweet) to realize that  his breaking balls are all very similar, to the point where you might just  be seeing things in the clouds when you classifying them as different pitches :

If you’re a numbers rather than a graph person, check out the table at the top of the link above — Brooks’ pitch classifier identifies two  distinct breaking pitches, but they are apparently the exact same except that his curveball is four miles an hour slower and drops four inches more than his slider. It also throws in a handful of (brown) cutters that are apparently two miles an hour harder and drop two inches less. None of this is very likely…of course everyone’s ‘stuff’ gets smushed together at the higher velocities, but the differences  that are being picked out and given the neat labels of “curve” and “slider” are smaller from the variation in movement and velocity between one slider and the next. For all intents and purposes we’re looking at the same (erratic) pitch.

Now I don’t know — Rogers may actually have three different grips and have his catcher call them at different times, in different locations, etc, but the reality is they are at most minor variations on a theme, as opposed to what we really think of when counting pitches — things with fundamentally different movement  and/or speed for a batter has to time and react to. Based on the little I know about the difference between throwing cutters/sliders and curveballs, I’m inclined to think of it as one hard biting pitch that he can throw slightly harder or softer depending on the situation so it ‘bites’ or ‘slurves’ more.

Yet another possibility is that  these ‘curves’ are just hanging sliders. As C.C. Sabathia first pointed out, and I keep quoting because he was absolutely right in every way, sliders are more effective when they are thrown harder and “break” less (and even more so when they stop ‘sliding’ downwards and go more straight sideways, as they tend to do more and more through the year — like the reverse of Rivera or Halladay’s cutter) and are thrown harder. The slower, bendier, breaking pitches that Brooks’ identifies as a curve (my algorithm just calls them all sliders) are in the zone more  often, chased out of the zone less often, and missed less frequently. Bad third pitch, or errant second one…does it matter?

Rogers’ Breaking pitch(es?) in 2012 by Velocity
Mph	In Zone%	Swing %	Miss %
86-88+	38	34	53
84-86	39	29	48
82-84 mph	44	22	43
Under 82 mph	33	26	0% (7-for7)

Anyway, the point is that this speaks to the ‘type’ of pitcher that Rogers is, and why, despite throwing very, very, hard and striking out a ton of batters, Rogers was moved to the bullpen and then traded by first Colorado and now the Indians for not much, despite seemingly having found command of his lightning-bolt stuff in the second half  of last year. While he’s at a great age/development level and has tremendous stuff, with his 1-2 repertoire, he is purely a back of the bullpen flamethrower and not a potential Morrowesque conversion project, or even deep rotation depth. Really, his value all comes down to whether he can maintain what was an unusual amount of control over a small sample size last year, in which case he’s another Lincoln/Delabar/Santos in the Jays’ collection of Right-handed one-Inning Setup/striKeout guys (trying really hard to invent the term RISKGYS here).

Shutdown Innings Join the Wall of Statistical Shame

Just a quick pillory of ‘shutdown innings’, a concept that is sadly making its viral way into Baseball’s consciousness despite having all the validity of ‘pitching to the score’, ‘clutch hitters’, and the rest of that baseball folklore that sounds plausible at first, but then less and less the more you learn and the more you use your brain. Let’s go to Richard Griffin for a sweeping introduction to the idea:

There are two sets of circumstances when you should step up if you’re a No. 1 starter. First is when your team scores runs for you. The shutdown inning is imperative to winning and to leading. Romero failed in those situations, miserably.

This is followed by a long stream of numbers, without any real explanation as to exactly why this is true. I mean sure, yeah, it sounds great to ‘keep the lead’, and ‘not let them back in it’, etc, etc — but obviously if the opposing team scores three runs in the first inning, nobody gives a crap if your starting pitcher allows runs in the second and then none the rest of the way or spreads them out over his remaining innings. What we’ve got here is really a ham-fisted attempt to statify a pitcher’s performance in high-leverage situations (those cases where the game is late and close and your team scores to go up by one), but there’s so much irrelevant data thrown into this method of collecting it that anything read out of such a “stat” is just a mirage.

Because the whole concept is wonky…just for fun, imagine there was a guy who for some freakish reason only allowed runs immediately after his team scored. So the worst example of this supposedly lead-killing, win-stealing phenomenon. Compared to other pitchers with the same ERA, this choke artist would actually have the lead much more often, since he would never give up a lead before the offence got going — and get more wins, since he would never give up leads when his offence went cold (i.e. he would pitch better in higher-leverage situations).

That’s a ridiculous example, but illustrative of the fact that there isn’t anything to the numbers or the logic behind ‘shutdown innings’ being an important factor to your overall effectiveness. Really, it’s a slightly-hidden form of the old momentum-and-emotions-heavily-influence-the-game theory — that somehow ‘giving the lead right back’ deflates your team to the point that they go up to the plate hating you as a pitcher and a person and fail at hitting out of spite and/or a sudden lack of confidence mystically tied to your performance in the last half-inning. Which is silly twaddle long disproven, if you want to get into it.

Incidentally, Griffin’s argument that “There is statistical evidence that even within his starts, Romero’s primary issues were mental, not physical” is garbage as well. Griffy makes the classic mistake of presenting inflated numbers (to support his preconceived notion) without anything to compare them to or any kind of idea of what a reasonable amount of deviation is. Taking into account that Romero’s ERA after May 23rd overall was 6.85, the fact that his ERA in a much-smaller sample size of ‘shutdown innings’ was 9.77 is not at all significant, let alone conclusive proof of a “mental block” caused by Joe Maddon. But at least those numbers come to a non-redundant point, unlike his “throwing more balls than strikes with two strikes leads to a higher ERA” followup…

Bruce Walton Joins Jose Bautista in Reading This Blog

Giant pat on own back time: you can follow this link or just scroll down a little to where I said this about J.A. Happ upon his arrival in Toronto.

“One thing I would consider is ditching Happ’s Curveball…”

Apparently Bruce Walton and the Blue Jays agreed, because when Happ went to the bullpen for a couple of starts he did not use his curveball once, and after returning to the rotation dialed the use of it way, way, back. In his last start before breaking his right foot, Happ threw just 3 curveballs while striking out 9 batters.

Month	Happ’s Curveball %
April	14.6%
May	13.5%
June	13.4%
July	5.9%
August	7.1%
September	3.2 %

In his short time has a starter with the Jays, ditching the curve lead to a slightly better walk rate for Happ and crazy strikeout numbers (39 in 33 1/3 innings), although starts against Baltimore, Tampa and even Detroit padded those totals, as they lead the majors in whiffing against lefty sliders. Still, other than one shaky start against the Yankees, Happ looked promising during his transition to the AL East and has the potential to eat some quality innings next year — especially if Bruce Walton continues to read this blog and tweak his repertoire according to latest pitch f/x numbers, ha!