Looking Forward to... AL Central Relievers

The Tigers' bullpen was possibly the biggest cause of their difficult path to the AL Central championship in 2014, and to their ultimate flop in 2013. Mr Dombrowski, however, seems to have concluded that new faces aren't going to change much, so the Tigers go into 2015 with largely the same cast that proved wanting in 2014. One major change is the addition of Tom Gorzelanny. Given the comment about Brad Ausmus' trusting his veterans in this article, it seems likely that Gorzelanny is going to be given the first crack at being the premier left-hander.

For the purpose of measuring relative strengths in the bullpen, I have selected four relievers to represent each team, guessing at which four will pitch the highest-leverage innings. Using the same method I used in the post on rotations, here are the respective quartets:

In neither of the first two in this series did any team have such an advantage over the others as the Kansas City Royals have over their AL Central rivals in the bullpen. Kelvin Herrera, ranked third behind Greg Holland and Wade Davis, is as good as the best of any of the other bullpens save the White Sox' David Robertson.

The Tigers' problem is that no lead looks safe with Joe Nathan as the closer. He has been booed in Florida, which is not going to help matters, either. However, taking the Tigers' bullpen as a unit, the righty set-up men, Al Alburquerque and Joakim Soria, look a bit more solid than their equivalents on the Cleveland Indians, the Royals and the Minnesota Twins. It looks as if the Tigers' fate is going to depend a lot on how many left-handed hitters they are going to face in high-leverage situations.

Looking Forward to... AL Central Rotations

Mr Dombrowski's trade of Doug Fister and Max Scherzer's rejection of a $144 million contract (which, to be fair, he bettered), completely undid the excellent Tigers' rotation of 2013. The question is whether the 2015 rebuild is strong enough to carry the Tigers into the post-season, where its shortcomings might be easier to hide.

How does it stack up against the other rotations in the AL Central? Here is a chart—

The numbers are a metric of my own invention, using linear weight values for strikeouts, non-K outs, hits, home runs and walks to create a 'Pitching Runs'. The result isn't intended to be predictive of anything, but an estimate of the relative strength of each pitcher based on 2015 Steamer projections. I used six pitchers for each rotation because the fifth starter can be said not to exist.

As one can see, the Cleveland Indians' rotation is quite deep, with Corey Kluber a clear number one, and getting strong support from Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar. It is almost 50 per cent stronger than the Tigers' one, mostly because Justin Verlander and Anibal Sanchez are not quite as strong as the Clevelanders' #2 and #3.

Worse, from the point of view of Tigers' fans, is the way the White Sox have apparently just as good starters in Jeff Samardzija and Jose Quintana backing up their #1, Chris Sale, as the Tigers have behind David Price. However, the fall-off in the White Sox' rotation is the worst in the division. The Royals and Twins lack a true ace.

The Tigers have their work cut out for them this season, even if Justin Verlander should bounce back. Before, their rotation strength was not just individual quality, but also depth. They will need to hit more consistently this season, to make up for a weaker back half of the rotation than we would have expected in recent years.

Looking Forward to... 2015 AL Central Lineups

Apologies for the Winter hiatus. My wife's breast cancer has returned, and so I have had more to do than normal. However, I hope to return to my traditional semi-regular posting schedule with the season upon us. She seems to be doing very well so far, although we won't know how successful the treatment is for another 6-8 weeks.

I have an unfinished post I started composing around the time Mr Dombrowski signed Victor Martinez, which was an analysis of the effects of the Anthony Gose deal (but not the Yoenis Cespedes one) on the Tigers' lineup. Since we are now getting projections from the likes of FanGraphs.com and Baseball Prospectus, I thought I would look at the lineups, rotations and bullpens of the AL Central contenders to see how they match up.

Those projections are not happy reading for fans of the Detroit Tigers. The Tigers have made a habit of making the pursuit of the division title a bit more exciting than their player talent is generally reckoned to allow. FanGraphs.com sees something of a dead heat between the Cleveland Indians and the Tigers, while the PECOTA projections at Baseball Prospectus give the Tigers a narrow advantage. We all know that projections are just projections, and how Lady Luck can break your heart.

I have used Steamer Projections, available at FanGraphs, to work out the projected wRC+ of the different AL lineups, reproduced in a PNG here:

The lineups are arranged by position, and based on projected PA also at FanGraphs.com I have made my own combined calculation where platoons or usage does not reflect about 500 PA per position. Being projections, one is more interested in assessing the approximate relative strength of the lineups, as opposed to achieving some kind of precision. As you can see, the Tigers still manage to have the strongest set of regulars, on paper. This is despite Miguel Cabrera's injury struggles last season, and the fact that realistically we have to expect J.D. Martinez to do it again. The strongest challenge should be mounted by the Indians. The White Sox look a bit disappointing to me, based on what I've been hearing about their off-season all off-season. The Twins are in the middle, and the Royals bring up the rear.

At this stage, the problem for Tigers' fans is that we as yet have no clear idea about how ready Victor Martinez and Miguel Cabrera will be for the start of the season. If they miss three or four weeks between them, that might be enough to close down a good portion of that twenty-run wRC+ advantage over the Indians. Having said that, I was impressed with what I had heard so far of Tyler Collins PAs this spring training. I'm a couple of games behind, though. He has been getting solid contact off front-line pitching, not just off the younger bullpen filler that tends to appear as end-of-game padding. Some good PAs as cover for one of Victor Martinez and Cabrera will go a long way towards keeping the Tigers' lineup strong.

Rip Van Winkle Day: Wild Card Nationals?

Well, I'm going to resume a probably-erratic posting schedule for the 2012 season. There are some good reasons why I stopped posting, not many of which had to do with the last post. Some of them will come out in subsequent blogs.

I have resumed doing old-fashioned sabermetric analysis this season of the Nationals, with some of your old Big Bad Baseball Annual ideas such as QMAX. In due course I'll be updating some of the data I used to keep. The Bullpen Goat of The Day no longer applies, I'm delighted to report.

In the meantime, Replacement Level Yankees Weblog (RLYW) has for a few years now run some simulated seasons to project what the math suggests is going to happen when we get to the end of game 162, using player projections. RLYW has just updated their preseason projections with the results of the first three weeks of this season. The big news is that the results show the Nationals as one of the newfangled Wild Cards. Getting into at least a one-game playoff would do something for the morale of the long-suffering Washington baseball fan, wouldn't it?

Pitcher Options

You probably already know that Livan Hernandez has signed with the Nationals. Here's his Marcel projection, in line with those at this entry I posted yesterday. I'll throw in Miguel Batista as a bonus.

            ERA      FIP
Livan      5.29     4.79
Batista    5.28     5.18

On the basis of their projections, Batista looks the weakest candidate. Livan's FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, which just counts home runs, walks and strikeouts) puts him ahead of Balester, JD Martin and Olsen(!), but his ERA is the worst of everyone's.

I actually came to write a post about rotation candidates with options still available, and the Livan news ensures that I get a longer post than I had planned.

The simple fact is most of our rotation candidates still have options. We can be confident that Lannan and Marquis are set. Olsen seems to be 'a lock' according to Mr Riggleman. The people who fill out the last two spots will presumably be those who do well in spring training, with one caveat — if they are out of options, they have to clear waivers to make it down to the minors.

This may affect two pitchers. One, I'm sure of: Matt Chico is out of options. I also think he's potentially good enough to draw a waiver claim. The other — JD Martin — might have option problems. The option rules are a bit complicated, given the kind of data one can access easily. Martin appears to have been a six-year free agent, so if he's been on a 40-man roster any length of time he can easily have used up his options.

As a consequence, I'm designating Chico as the likely #4 starter. He could get a bullpen role, but there's actually a logjam there. That's a story for another time.

6 March 2010 EDIT: Brian @ Nationals Farm Authority has a full options run-down here. Seems JD Martin still has all his options left.

All Pitching, All the Time

That's the spirit of Nationals' coverage so far this season. We've had the excitement of Stephen Strasburg's bullpen session combined with the news that Mr Riggleman thinks he'll be starting the season in the minor leagues. We had Mr Riggleman's word that Drew Storen was headed in the same direction. Finally, we have all sorts of rumours.

I did a bespoke projection for Chien-Ming Wang just the other day, but this time, more as food for thought, I'm going to present the straight Marcel projected ERA for Nationals' rotation options as listed by CBS Sportsline. ERA is obviously earned-run average. FIP is one of those relatively newfangled sabermetric stats that gives a value to home runs, walks and strikeouts that can be turned into an ERA value. It has a better predictive ability than ERA. It's worth mentally adjusting it for defence, in that a good defence will reduce the FIP, and a bad one will increase it.

           ERA        FIP
Lannan     3.98      4.58
Marquis    4.23      4.35
Olsen      4.66      4.85 (shoulder injury)
JD Martin  4.41      4.81
Mock       4.76      4.21
Martis     4.37      4.76
Detwiler   4.26      3.95 (hip surgery)
Balester   4.83      4.90 (ribcage woes)
Stammen    4.42      4.45 (elbow chips)
Chico      4.65      4.72 (elbow surgery)
Wang       4.81      4.19 (shoulder surgery)

I've left off a few names, like Jordan Zimmermann, who isn't going to pitch this season, and some of the veterans lurking around the camp.

To say the least, we've got a lot of options. Also, there are some things that are hard to credit based on what we have seen so far, such as Balester posting an ERA under 5. Basically, going forward, one would expect on this basis to open the season with a rotation of:

Lannan, Marquis, Olsen, JD Martin and Mock.

Next man off the cab rank would be Martis, or maybe Chico. What will happen when Wang is fit is anyone's guess.

Of course, player options are going to play a part in the final outcome. And spring training will render these statistics more or less believable. After all, they are projections, not predictions.

Looking Forward to: Chien-Ming Wang

The general consensus is that Wang is a very good deal for the Nationals. He once was a decent mid-rotation pitcher, and his 2009 season looks like an aberration, possibly the result of some injury troubles. (You can find a very good summary of all this here.) Consequently, he projects none too badly, with a Marcel* ERA of 4.86, as the worst case.

We can use some new-fangled sabermetrics to take more measured assessment, perhaps. One of the problems with the widely available projections is that they are mass-produced. They take a bunch of assumptions and throw them at all players indiscriminately. There is nothing wrong with this. Bespoke projections would take a lot of time, and not actually add very much to the accuracy. In the case of someone like Wang, though, it's worthwhile to dig deeper.

Last year, David Gassko of The Hardball Times introduced something he called Luck-Independent Pitching Statistics (work out the unsightly acronym for yourself). I'm going to look at Wang using some of Gassko's ideas, with a leavening of my own 'keep it simple, silly' mentality.

What I'm going to do is to use the ratio of different types of outcomes to a plate appearance. I'm limiting myself to balls hit on the ground, balls hit in the air, line drives, strikeouts and walks. Enough work has been done to tell us what a given batted ball is worth. Using this data, and imposing it on a pitcher's own career patterns, can give us some idea of what is likely to happen.

First of all, what patterns can we deduce from Wang's career so far? The interesting ones for our purposes are a steady fall in groundballs in play, a steady rise in strikeouts and walks. His line drive rate started low and has risen to around the average. His outfield fly ball rate has been in the low 20s except for 2009. My educated guesses based on the data is that these trends are going to produce in 2010 something like:

LD%      GB%      OFFB%      IFFB%      K/9      BB/9      
18.8    52.0      22.4        6.8       7.7       4.9
(MLB 09 
median)

For the strikeouts and walks I used the average rate of change on a year-to-year basis and added it to the 2009 ratios. That may overestimate things, especially if Wang alters his approach under a new pitching coach. That's an eye-watering BB/9, and I won't be surprised if he does.

To translate that into something more meaningful in terms of traditional statistics, we need to take a guess as to how much playing time Wang will get. I've assumed 15 starts, which converts on the basis of his past seasons to about 97.3 innings pitched. His worst-case projected Batting Average Against is .279 (Marcel again). That altogether means:

In-Play Outs     Strikeouts     Walks     Non-HR hits     Home Runs
  209                83           53         93              10

Yesterday you caught me using Runs Created, but this time I'm going to use a different run estimator, because it's better. This is BaseRuns. Converting those totals of Strikeouts, Non-HR hits, etc into runs, we get an estimate of 57 runs allowed by Wang, in 97.3 innings.

Which works out to an ERA of 5.28. Ugh.

Riggleman's comments are interesting. He's basically saying that he anticipates Wang to be a good fall-back option if Balester and/or Mock don't turn out well. Balester's 2010 Marcel projection (since that seems to be the projection du jour) is for a 6.72 ERA. Mock comes in at 4.81, but his projection doesn't show a full-time starter's innings, and relievers generally have better ERAs than starters. Mock's starting ERA might be a lot closer to 5.28 than 4.81.

Wang's an interesting gamble, but he's still a gamble. If he can cut his walk rate, the Nationals might win the gamble. Otherwise, it's more of the same again in NatsTown.
________

* Marcel is a very basic projection system, monitored by TangoTiger of The Book Blog.

Looking Forward to: the 2010 Nationals Lineup

I visited Rotoworld today and looked at their depth chart for the Washington Nationals. So, we all want to know, how good is that lineup?

Of course, we all know there are several decent projections systems available. These take three or four years worth of a player's statistics, weight them, average them out, and then adjust for things like age and park to make a guess as to what the player will do during the next season. Out of every seven projections, about five will be reasonably accurate. Projections tend to underestimate good players, and overestimate bad ones. En masse, you're hoping things even up. There's BPro's 'deadly accurate' PECOTA, there's ZiPS at Baseball Think Factory, there's CAIRO at Replacement Level Yankee Weblog. We can use these to take a stab at just how many runs the 2010 Nationals' lineup will produce. In this case, I'm going to work with the CHONE projections, rather than do the proper thing and average them all out. (I'm lazy/busy — take your pick.)

First, though, let's set some parameters here. Using basic Runs Created per 27 outs (as opposed to one of the Tech versions), let's see the average for each position in the 2009 National League:

C          2.7
1b         4.1
2b         3.2
3b         3.2
ss         3.1
lf         3.5
cf         3.4
rf         3.4
Avg        3.3

Now, using the same formula, and the CHONE projections, let's see how Rotoworld's starters compare:

Pudge      1.7
Dunn       3.5
Kennedy    2.0
Zimmerman  4.0
Guzman     2.5
Willingham 2.8
Morgan     1.9
Dukes      2.3
Avg        2.6

The word for it is 'ugh'. The Nationals only beat the average at one position. Worse, they are markedly below average everywhere else.

But, as Charlie Slowes puts it, 'You never know'. Maybe the 2010 Nationals can defy statistical tendencies, and beat enough of those projections that the team can seem respectable.