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4/22-4/25 Red Sox vs. Tigers Series Thread
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Post by James Dunne on Apr 22, 2019 7:43:29 GMT -5
4/22 Red Sox (LHP Chris Sale 0-4, 8.50, 18.0 IP, 14K:5BB) vs. Tigers (LHP Matthew Boyd 1-1, 2.96, 24.1 IP, 36K:7BB) 7:10 pm ET, NESN/WEEI 4/23 Red Sox (TBD) vs. Tigers (RHP Spencer Turnbull 0-2, 3.43 21.0 IP, 24K:7BB) 7:10 pm ET, NESN/WEEI 4/24 Red Sox (LHP Eduardo Rodriguez 1-2, 7.20, 20.0 IP, 21K:7BB) vs. Tigers (RHP Tyson Ross 1-2, 3.38, 24.0 IP, 17K:9BB) 7:10 pm ET, NESN/WEEI 4/25 Red Sox (RHP Rick Porcello 0-3, 8.47, 17.0 IP, 15K:13BB) vs. Tigers (RHP Jordan Zimmermann 0-3, 4.94, 27.1 IP, 19K:8BB) 7:10 pm ET, NESN/WEEI MLB StandingsRed Sox Hitting StatsRed Sox Pitching StatsMLB ScoreboardMLB TransactionsA note regarding moderating of the gameday threads in 2019: As the disclaimer has always said, in the past, we have been very liberal in moderating the Gameday threads. They're meant to be a lot less formal than other threads on the forum, so to moderate them the same way would be silly. However, we do ask posters to maintain a certain level of decorum in these threads, and we plan on moderating the Gameday threads a little more actively this season. In particular, we ask that posters refrain from being overly repetitive with their posts (if you've made your point, let it go), refrain from monopolizing the discussion (if you are making more than a couple posts in a row, you probably need to slow down a little bit), and of course, follow the Ground Rules ( link). The point is to make these threads worth participating in and fun for all posters, from our long-time fixtures to people just signing up today. -The Management
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Post by jimed14 on Apr 22, 2019 7:51:46 GMT -5
Will be interesting to see how the pitching holds up. Very tired bullpen right now.
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Post by James Dunne on Apr 22, 2019 8:04:10 GMT -5
Detroit is scoring, by far, the fewest runs per game in the AL. They're averaging 3.05, with Cleveland the next worst at 3.95. Their pitching has been surprisingly good, but this will hopefully be an opportunity to get a little bit of length from Sale, Rodriguez, and Porcello.
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Post by chrisfromnc on Apr 22, 2019 8:58:31 GMT -5
Just looking at Chris Sale's pitching line is incredible. Come to think of it, the best line of the bunch is "TBD".
Now consider that other than the opening series, this is almost certainly the best any of us have felt about the 2019 Red Sox. Strange start to a season, for sure.
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Post by umassgrad2005 on Apr 22, 2019 9:46:29 GMT -5
They go 3-1 and put the league on notice. 😁
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Post by huskies15 on Apr 22, 2019 9:57:40 GMT -5
Time for Sale to look like himself. This Detroit lineup is trashhh
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Post by James Dunne on Apr 22, 2019 10:11:27 GMT -5
Matt Barnes has allowed exactly three fly balls this season, and two have gone out of the park. The only MLB player with a lower xFIP this season is Luis Perdomo of the Padres, who has faced seven batters.
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Post by jimed14 on Apr 22, 2019 10:21:16 GMT -5
Matt Barnes has allowed exactly three fly balls this season, and two have gone out of the park. The only MLB player with a lower xFIP this season is Luis Perdomo of the Padres, who has faced seven batters. And one was on an inside curveball that was hit to RF. |
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Post by James Dunne on Apr 22, 2019 10:26:06 GMT -5
Matt Barnes has allowed exactly three fly balls this season, and two have gone out of the park. The only MLB player with a lower xFIP this season is Luis Perdomo of the Padres, who has faced seven batters. And one was on an inside curveball that was hit to RF. Yep, though he left it up more than he should have against a guy who is dangerous to miss against. But I agree with the more general point - that pitch where he threw it usually isn't going to have that outcome. |
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ericmvan
Veteran
Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,933
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2019 10:37:43 GMT -5
Latest adjusted xwOBA for the pen. Number in parens in average Leverage Index, which tells you how Cora has been using him:
.242 Barnes (1.70)
.260 Workman (1.15)
.264 Walden (1.31)
.299 Brewer (1.01)
.328 Hembree (0.65)
.342 Brasier (1.73)
.365 Thornburg (0.17)
Brasier unadjusted for opponent quality was .389 coming into the Rays series and .252 during.
For a point of comparison, the big guns from last year:
.254 Brasier
.276 Barnes .287 Kimbrel .299 Hembree .314 Kelly
I said during the winter that they wanted to find two guys better than Hembree to bump him down to 5th guy in the pen. I thought that was doable once the prospects got into the mix. But they seem to have found them already, and Brewer has moved ahead of Hembree on the depth chart as well.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Apr 22, 2019 11:18:37 GMT -5
Is that the Statcast XWOBA? Because they make clear that's supposed to have no predictive effect.
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Post by jimed14 on Apr 22, 2019 11:23:05 GMT -5
Is that the Statcast XWOBA? Because they make clear that's supposed to have no predictive effect. But it is somewhat a measure of how well they actually pitched in the past, eliminating luck and defense. It's the most accurate descriptive stat so far IMO, especially in small sample sizes. Now they need to add shifting and quality of opponent. |
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Post by telson13 on Apr 22, 2019 11:50:08 GMT -5
Detroit is scoring, by far, the fewest runs per game in the AL. They're averaging 3.05, with Cleveland the next worst at 3.95. Their pitching has been surprisingly good, but this will hopefully be an opportunity to get a little bit of length from Sale, Rodriguez, and Porcello. That first game looks like a horrible mismatch, only the polar opposite of what one would expect. Matt Boyd averaging 13K/9? Baseball is weird. |
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Post by telson13 on Apr 22, 2019 11:50:23 GMT -5
Detroit is scoring, by far, the fewest runs per game in the AL. They're averaging 3.05, with Cleveland the next worst at 3.95. Their pitching has been surprisingly good, but this will hopefully be an opportunity to get a little bit of length from Sale, Rodriguez, and Porcello. That first game looks like a horrible mismatch, only the polar opposite of what one would expect. Matt Boyd averaging 13K/9? Baseball is weird. |
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Post by telson13 on Apr 22, 2019 11:52:40 GMT -5
Detroit is scoring, by far, the fewest runs per game in the AL. They're averaging 3.05, with Cleveland the next worst at 3.95. Their pitching has been surprisingly good, but this will hopefully be an opportunity to get a little bit of length from Sale, Rodriguez, and Porcello. That first game looks like a horrible mismatch, only the polar opposite of what one would expect. Matt Boyd averaging 13K/9? Baseball is weird. |
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Post by jimed14 on Apr 22, 2019 11:53:59 GMT -5
OK, that's enough telson.  |
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Post by umassgrad2005 on Apr 22, 2019 12:12:55 GMT -5
Is that the Statcast XWOBA? Because they make clear that's supposed to have no predictive effect. But it is somewhat a measure of how well they actually pitched in the past, eliminating luck and defense. It's the most accurate descriptive stat so far IMO, especially in small sample sizes. Now they need to add shifting and quality of opponent. It's not predictive though in small sample sizes, if at all. It's useful to see if luck one way or another was involved, yet it doesn't say we've found great bullpen arms. If you want proof go back and read Eric's numbers from a month out from the trade deadline last year and then what happened. If anything it would likely be like DRS where years of data starts to give you a clearer picture. Years of BAbip data and stuff like that. So while I think we all enjoy the data, I think Chris point is you can't be saying we've found two guys better than Hembree from that data. One bad inning and that data will look totally different for all those guys. |
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Post by jimed14 on Apr 22, 2019 12:25:05 GMT -5
But it is somewhat a measure of how well they actually pitched in the past, eliminating luck and defense. It's the most accurate descriptive stat so far IMO, especially in small sample sizes. Now they need to add shifting and quality of opponent. It's not predictive though in small sample sizes, if at all. It's useful to see if luck one way or another was involved, yet it doesn't say we've found great bullpen arms. If you want proof go back and read Eric's numbers from a month out from the trade deadline last year and then what happened. If anything it would likely be like DRS where years of data starts to give you a clearer picture. Years of BAbip data and stuff like that. So while I think we all enjoy the data, I think Chris point is you can't be saying we've found two guys better than Hembree from that data. One bad inning and that data will look totally different for all those guys. I'm not going through this crap again. Good luck finding relief pitchers using years of BABIP data, when they become elite and fall apart all the time from season to season. Even then, they only get about 60-70 innings a year anyway which is about 1/3rd of a starter's season and still not enough to judge performance because the sample is too small. Relief pitchers REQUIRE you to evaluate them in tiny sample sizes. How the hell are you going to figure out if a pitcher who has a 0.00 ERA over 12 innings might have become a good pitcher without xwOBA? Yeah I know you'll want to argue, so I'll just pretend that we've made 50 posts to each other and end it now. You win. (for the board's sake) |
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Post by umassgrad2005 on Apr 22, 2019 12:52:46 GMT -5
It's not predictive though in small sample sizes, if at all. It's useful to see if luck one way or another was involved, yet it doesn't say we've found great bullpen arms. If you want proof go back and read Eric's numbers from a month out from the trade deadline last year and then what happened. If anything it would likely be like DRS where years of data starts to give you a clearer picture. Years of BAbip data and stuff like that. So while I think we all enjoy the data, I think Chris point is you can't be saying we've found two guys better than Hembree from that data. One bad inning and that data will look totally different for all those guys. I'm not going through this crap again. Good luck finding relief pitchers using years of BABIP data, when they become elite and fall apart all the time from season to season. Even then, they only get about 60-70 innings a year anyway which is about 1/3rd of a starter's season and still not enough to judge performance because the sample is too small. Relief pitchers REQUIRE you to evaluate them in tiny sample sizes. How the hell are you going to figure out if a pitcher who has a 0.00 ERA over 12 innings has become a good pitcher without xwOBA? Yeah I know you'll want to argue, so I'll just pretend that we've made 50 posts to each other and end it now. You win. (for the board's sake) There isn't and won't ever be a stat that tells you a reliever has become a good pitcher in 12 innings. |
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Post by jimed14 on Apr 22, 2019 12:54:57 GMT -5
I'll remember that the next time you are judging relief pitchers.
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Post by Guidas on Apr 22, 2019 13:23:01 GMT -5
OK, that's enough telson. I get the idea he may think the game is a horrible mismatch, but I could be misreading his copy. |
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Post by Guidas on Apr 22, 2019 13:27:25 GMT -5
Gio is now free of his contract - sign the Gio!
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Post by James Dunne on Apr 22, 2019 14:09:07 GMT -5
Gio is now free of his contract - sign the Gio! I'll second this one. |
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Post by jimed14 on Apr 22, 2019 15:15:01 GMT -5
Gio is now free of his contract - sign the Gio! Weird that they released him assuming it wasn't an opt-out. He had a 3.27 FIP with decent peripherals. edit- I see that it was actually an opt-out where the Yankees refused to add him to the 40 man roster. |
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ericmvan
Veteran
Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,933
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2019 15:16:32 GMT -5
Is that the Statcast XWOBA? Because they make clear that's supposed to have no predictive effect. But it is somewhat a measure of how well they actually pitched in the past, eliminating luck and defense. It's the most accurate descriptive stat so far IMO, especially in small sample sizes. Now they need to add shifting and quality of opponent. But it is somewhat a measure of how well they actually pitched in the past, eliminating luck and defense. It's the most accurate descriptive stat so far IMO, especially in small sample sizes. Now they need to add shifting and quality of opponent. It's not predictive though in small sample sizes, if at all. It's useful to see if luck one way or another was involved, yet it doesn't say we've found great bullpen arms. If you want proof go back and read Eric's numbers from a month out from the trade deadline last year and then what happened. If anything it would likely be like DRS where years of data starts to give you a clearer picture. Years of BAbip data and stuff like that. So while I think we all enjoy the data, I think Chris point is you can't be saying we've found two guys better than Hembree from that data. One bad inning and that data will look totally different for all those guys. I'm not going through this crap again. Good luck finding relief pitchers using years of BABIP data, when they become elite and fall apart all the time from season to season. Even then, they only get about 60-70 innings a year anyway which is about 1/3rd of a starter's season and still not enough to judge performance because the sample is too small. Relief pitchers REQUIRE you to evaluate them in tiny sample sizes. How the hell are you going to figure out if a pitcher who has a 0.00 ERA over 12 innings has become a good pitcher without xwOBA? Yeah I know you'll want to argue, so I'll just pretend that we've made 50 posts to each other and end it now. You win. (for the board's sake) There isn't and won't ever be a stat that tells you a reliever has become a good pitcher in 12 innings. You know, I'm not supposed to be paying any attention to the Sox. I happen to be compiling these stats because it doesn't take much time, and ditto for sharing them here, but if people are going to start silly "arguments" by willfully forgetting what we all know, I'll stop sharing them!
So some points, in roughly the order they were raised.
1. If the folks running Statcast are indeed warning folks that xwOBA has "no predictive effect," they're just overstating the truth to ward off stupid complaints. Can you say "irony?" Sher you can.
Any decent stat is it least partially predictive, in the sense that there will be a correlation between a player's stats at present and stats in the future. xwOBA is the best available descriptive stat, so of course it has predictive value. More so than xFIP-, SIERA, or anything else, which is why I've stopped using everything else.
2. My two adjustments try to do what jimed says they need to do to improve xwOBA. Figuring out the degree to which pitchers control the horizontal launch angle -- the direction to which balls are hit -- is a terrific challenge. And that's just the ability to get folks to hit fly balls to center rather than down the lines. If we're trying to figure out whether they have the ability to get hitters to hit into a shift rather than go the other way, that's tougher.
What I discovered was a robust correlation between Cent% and wOBA - xwOBA. Guys who had a lot of balls hit to CF got better results than their xwOBA said they would. So I adjust for that. It happens to close the Barnes - Brazier gap by .023, for instance.
I'm also just grabbing BP's opponent quality (oppRPA+) and adjusting for that. It's a noisy adjustment but it's removing, at this point of the season, huge amounts of noise. Workman's ahead of Walden because he gains .033 on him with this adjustment.
3. Everyone knows that we're looking to find some good relievers from a bunch of candidates. So we focus a lot of attention on watching them pitch and evaluating their stuff.
However, the results that pitchers get bias our evaluations of their performance tremendously. No one in the media identified Chris Sale's start at Fenway vs. Toronto on 4/9 as even good, let alone terrific, because he got 10 ground balls that were collectively weaker than average (.187 xwOBA versus the MLB average this year of .229) and allowed an actual .489 wOBA. (I also don't think anyone in the media understands that a single out that gets turned into a hit costs you, on average, close to 0.8 runs.)
The best descriptive stat serves as a complement to our eyeballs.
We've talked a lot here about how good and legitimate Marcus Walden has looked. You don't think that may have been biased by the good results he was getting? Through his first 8 appearances Ryan Brasier had an (unadjusted) .410 xwOBA, which is precisely what Nathan Eovaldi and Rick Porcello averaged (not weighted by BFP per game) over the first three turns around the rotation. And no one noticed because he was 3 for 3 in saves with a 1.19 ERA.
It boggles my mind that anyone, let alone someone as sharp as Chris, could fail to get that reporting that Walden has a .264 xwOBA is intended to complement and confirm our subjective evaluation, but would be meaningless without it. We start by thinking he's been pitching really well. We also know that we could be wrong about that. The numbers tell us that we are not wrong.
4. Everyone knows that relievers are volatile. Walden could stop throwing strikes tomorrow. Workman's velocity could suddenly take a vacation. But positive results are not without predictive value.
A run like Brasier had last year when we first called him up, or the one Walden is having now, tells you how good a guy can be. If you discover you have a guy who can be that good who wasn't on your radar at all, that's huge. That Walden is in the mix at all as a bullpen solution is huge. That he's currently being used as if he's their third best reliever is huge, because Alex Cora knows more about all of this than all of us put together. It may well not last, but to pretend it's not meaningful Because Reliever Volatility is silly.
Workman's a more complicated story, one I am resisting the temptation to understand by spending two hours with his pitch/fx data. The simple version is that we have a guy with known upside and the known ability to turn into the pumpkin version of himself at any moment. In the long run, it's probably only moderately predictive that he's been this good so far. When someone uses a phrase like "better than Hembree," yes, it's mostly a description of what's happened to date. But I also think it's true that our sense that Brandon Workman is actually a better pitcher than Heath Hembree, if that statement actually does have any possible truth (and I'm not sure it does), has been strengthened.
What I really mean there -- and again, I think that everyone gets this and people are arguing just to argue -- is that right now Brandon Workman has been doing a job we needed him to do, he is doing it legitimately without luck, and that we all plan to watch him and hope that a) he continues to do so and that b) when and if he starts to falter, we will have an alternative in place to pick up the slack.
And that things absolutely do look better for the future because Workman has been excellent so far compared to how they would look if he had sucked. I think we all understand that they only look somewhat better rather than hugely better.
5. I find it funny that umass points to my strenuous argument that we didn't need a reliever at the deadline, which for a while looked idiotic largely because Joe Kelly started sucking. What happened after that? Like, in October?
The last time we had a really long argument about whether a reliever had truly taken a step forward based on a combination of eyeballs and numbers in a SSS, it was my claim that Matt Barnes had become good enough to be the #2 reliever on a pennant contender.
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On a fresh topic, two related roster notes --
-- It's too bad there's no AAAA guy actually pitching well enough at Pawtucket to be the mop-up guy, because it would be a good idea to send Thornburg down to get regular work. But he may go down when Eovalidi comes off the DL, depending on how well Poyner does.
-- If at some point everyone currently on the IL were healthy and no one else had gone it, they would have to option Brewer. The alternative would be to trade Hembree, but you'd only do that if you had a lot of depth in the minors behind Brewer as the 5th and last short guy in the pen. And that depth would start with Thornburg.
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