Search results

  1. iayork

    Cubs Hire Craig Breslow As Director Of Strategic Initiatives For Baseball Operations

    He parlayed a fairly underwhelming amount of natural talent into $15.5 million over 12 seasons in the majors. He's a pretty good example of maximizing what you have. If he can pass that on, the Cubs should be pretty happy.
  2. iayork

    Manager's Discretion

    I have some sympathy with the umpire. Whether or not Severino had intent, the brushback could easily be read as intentional by the Sox. Porcello will certainly hit a guy intentionally if he thinks they need it. I think without the warning there was a pretty good chance a Yankee was going to get...
  3. iayork

    BOS bullpen 2018

    Sample size is too small to really get a good grasp of the variation in his spin rate, but so far his pitches fall into a fairly small range, so it doesn't seem like he's manipulating spin for deception.
  4. iayork

    BOS bullpen 2018

    Middle of the pack.
  5. iayork

    Vazquez gets 3 year extension

    Vazquez was virtually identical to Hedges last year, both with 1.5 extra strikes per game. My full list is here. I show breakdowns in detail, and explain my methods here. I looked at "noise" issues here. My results turn out virtually identical to StatCorners and just about every other framing...
  6. iayork

    Slick sliders?

    I don't think anyone could have missed the fuss over pitchers' claims that the World Series baseballs are unusually slick, and it's affecting their sliders by reducing the pitches' movement. I have no real opinion one way or the other, but I did take issue with the claim that PITCHf/x data...
  7. iayork

    Are The Yankees Really This Good?

    You'd think so, but I don't see it. It's all normalized to league average, so I can't tell if the average is getting better, but the range stays roughly constant, with the best and worst about the same distance from the mean each year.
  8. iayork

    Are The Yankees Really This Good?

    Close enough. I have Sánchez as just about neutral for framing (contributing 0.31 extra strikes per game compared to league average - virtually identical to Sandy León), while Vázquez was 6th-best in baseball at 1.36 extra strikes per game. Over the season, Sánchez contributed 28.9 extra...
  9. iayork

    Hanley undergoes left shoulder surgery

    An older article (The Effect of Debut Age on a MLB Player’s Offensive Peak and Decline) has some charts that give a better idea of the variability. For example, this chart shows OPS as a percent of peak performance by age, and you can easily see a pretty clear trend, but the outliers are...
  10. iayork

    Catching Controversy

    He's been elite. See The Red Sox Catcher Mid-Season Framing Report for July estimates, when he was 5th-best in the majors. StatCorner's framing estimates also puts Vazquez 5th-best (4000 chances or more). As of yesterday, I have him as giving his pitchers 110 strikes that a league-average...
  11. iayork

    Devers called up to Majors

    It's actually been tested. With college players, having their eyes blocked for the last third of the pitch's trajectory didn't affect their contact rate. The paper is "Contribution of Visual Information about Ball Trajectory to Baseball Hitting Accuracy", and Mike talked about it on the .com...
  12. iayork

    Devers called up to Majors

    Yes, which means he misses Paxton, Seattle's ace.
  13. iayork

    Devers called up to Majors

    Felix has actually been pretty good since coming back from the DL - 3.25 ERA, 1.194 WHIP in six games (36 innings). His last three games he gave up 0, 3, and 1 ER. He's not the terror he was even a few years ago, but he's no pushover.
  14. iayork

    Catching Controversy

    Just to add a little to their defense, the season is far along enough that framing numbers are starting to get reliable. Briefly, Vazquez is still elite (5th-best in baseball), adding the equivalent of around 8 extra runs for the team in the first half, and León is average. Details here.
  15. iayork

    Ball & Strike Challenges

    It's worse than 1%, I think, depending on what a "miss" is. We really don't know what the actual accuracy of the PITCHf/x (or, this year, the TrackMan) systems are in practice. Assuming that PITCHf/x works like every other instrument, presumably there's a roughly normal distribution of...
  16. iayork

    The Craig Kimbrel Thread

    Is it stupid? Yes. Is it exactly the argument that was used to deny Betances big bucks? Yes. Would it be used against Kimberly that way? Maybe, maybe not. Would you flip a coin on millions of dollars if it was you?
  17. iayork

    The Craig Kimbrel Thread

    Keeping in mind that we know what happens to a player's income when they forego saves and pitch the 8th inning instead, this seems like it would keep Kimbrel happy, which isn't nothing.
  18. iayork

    Your least favorite TWO YEAR Red Sox player

    I'll forgive a lot of that for his habit of rolling the ball to first base, though.
  19. iayork

    Race and the Red Sox

    Yeah, it's almost like there was some national event since last season that made racists and bigots feel empowered and emboldened.
  20. iayork

    Race and the Red Sox

    What, exactly, do you expect? Is Sabathia supposed to pull out color-coded charts and tables, cross-indexed for date and temperature, with every incident he's ever experienced in the past 17 years, on the spur of the moment when a reporter asks him? And the fact that he didn't correct for wind...