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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 24, 2023 12:46:16 GMT -5
It seems as if the the Sox may know something about Yu.
They picked him up on waivers, then non-tendered him and pretty clearly had a deal with him to give him an MLB contract at somewhat less money once they cleared a 40-man space ... which took until ST when they put Story on the 60-day. And there's nothing in his career that warrants an MLB deal. I was baffled.
Was he any different as a hitter in his brief turn with the Sox last year, all 27 PA of it?
Actually, yes. He had 512 PA previously with an .068 walk rate. With the Sox that was .192. That 182% increase has a 1 in 53 chance of being random.
I'd blow that off as a fluke (especially since he's walked just once this year!) if it weren't for the fact that they were behaving as if they'd gotten Chang to do something different and better.
And how about this: he's been such a standard-issue middle-infielder backup that b-Ref doesn't even name SS as one of his positions. He had 148 innings at SS when he joined the Sox, versus 386 at 1B, 280 at 2B, and 327 at 3B.
This year there are 49 guys who have had the minimum 10 "attempts" at SS. The stat you want here is Success Rate Added, which is not a counting stat like Outs or Runs Above Average.
Chang ranks 2nd. (Kiké ranks .... 49th.) And the eye test corresponds, it seems (I haven't seen enough games to have my own opinion.) It's absolutely the case that guys can do off-season work to improve their range -- Xander did that before last year. It's also true that he may have been this good defensively all along and no one cared. I look forward to the inevitable feature story if he keeps this up.
And by "this" I of course also mean the bat. He slugged .938 in the first round of the WBC and was named MVP of Pool 1. He put up a .200 / .156 (28) {xwOBA / wOBA (PA)} starting the season but in his last 4 games is .558 / .391 (16), and his average distance of 208 would lead the team on the season. His average launch angle has gone from 7.4 to 14.6 and his EV from 84.8 to 89.0, so the change appears to be largely getting the ball into the air to utilize his surprising power. Which may or may not be enhanced from last year (he always had a bit of pop in the minors).
If he keeps this up, it changes the roster calculus completely ... suddenly we'll be rooting for Arroyo to get hurt --- at exactly the same time as Mondesi comes off the IL.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 24, 2023 12:03:00 GMT -5
The whole narrative that Masa struggled a bit from the beginning (see Pete Abraham in today's Globe) is just wrong. Are memories that fleeting?
In his first 8 games, through 4/8, he had a .344 xwOBA and .344 wOBA in 37 PA. That was good! 115 wRC+. The xwOBA was exactly 50th percentile for regulars (30+ PA).
He then got a day off, and a couple of days later he was reported to have a hamstring strain. In this 5 game stretch he was terrible -- .187 / .145 (21 PA).
Since then he's .415 / .495 (18). A chunk of the positive karma is real, given that he pulled two balls for homers yesterday.
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It so happens that there does appear to be an adjustment period for some elite Japanese hitters who come to the states ... based on a sample size of two, Ichiro and Hideki Matsui.[1]
You can't make this stuff up.
Both Ichiro and Matsui hit mild OPS bottoms on May 1.
Ichiro had a 109 wRC+ on that date an was 128 after, a gain of 19 points,
Matsui had an 82 wRC+ on this date and was 115 after, a gain of 33 points.
So, I'll be curious as to what numbers Masa has after May 1's game ...
[1] Suzuki started off red hot last year and then struggled the rest of the season, so he's not typical and not yet proven elite. Ohtani had a 189 wRC+ in 70 PA through May 10 of his rookie season, an 87 in his next 130 PA, and a 187 in 167 PA after August 3. He was also much younger than the other four guys and also does not appear to be merely human.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 23, 2023 23:37:38 GMT -5
Updated AL East W/L% with first-order schedule adjustment:
Rays .789 Sox .669 Jays .660 NYY .633 O's .596
SOS: Sox .648 Jays .570 NYY .543 Bal .429 TB .425
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 23, 2023 20:20:49 GMT -5
The Brewers needed insane luck on balls in play in game 2 to avoid being swept.
The Sox had a .435 to .304 edge in xwOBA but somehow the Crew had the wOBA edge .356 to .311. That's .052 karma versus - .124.
What's the over / under for last date someone says they're not a playoff contender?
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2023 16:26:19 GMT -5
What is the context? This is hypothetical, so let’s see. I don’t think they’ll finish in last, so it won’t matter. But what context am I supposed to see it in? We’re in a hard division? Well… so would be all the teams ahead of us? Half of whom the Sox outspend? Injuries? Don’t most teams deal with injuries? (Springs and Stanton just went down, for example). Again, I don’t think they’ll finish last. I don’t even think they’ll miss the playoffs, necessarily (though who can say with so much to go). But if they do finish last and miss the playoffs, I am definitely not going to look on any bright side after nearly a half decade of soon soon soon. It would be like Westmoreland is running the media office. You are, of course, overlooking the fact that they went to the ALCS all of two seasons ago, in what for me was the most enjoyable non-WS-winning season of the century.
But that aside... yeah, it takes a long time to turn a big boat. A good half decade I'd say. (How long did the Astros and Orioles suck before they started to turn around?) My feeling so far this season is that it's the first time they're really built around a new wave of talent, rather than grasping at the shreds of the 2018 era and spackling it with stopgaps. Betts, Benintendi, JBJ, Bogaerts, Vazquez, JDM, Eovaldi - all gone. Devers is the unambiguous star of the team now. Verdugo's coming into his own. And the core of the pitching staff is a whole raft of young talent: Whitlock, Houck, Bello, Crawford, Winckowski.
Maybe it'll all fall apart. But in the hypothetical scenario where they do win 85+ games, I'd say it would in fact be a sign that the ship is finally pointed in a different direction.
... who have 28 years of inexpensive control between them. Winck would be a back-of-rotation stater for most teams, but the couple of mph of velo that pitchers gets when they move to the pen boosts him more than most.
The other thing happening here is that no one understands what happened last year. People translate W/L to talent and then stop thinking.
They were a 98-win team outside the division. The bullpen was very good and the hitters were reasonably good situationally.
Within the division the bullpen was terrible and the hitters were awful situationally. When you get a disparity like that, it is psychological. And you could see the hitters pressing. That stuff doesn't carry over, but the Sox seemed to have looked for hitters less prone to it (specifically, swapping JDM for Turner) as well.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2023 16:04:31 GMT -5
Most people have made peace with the fact that the club is not in the running for the best team in baseball. If they meet mildly optimistic expectations and the cookie does not crumble in such a way that produces lots of glory, then that'll be fine with me. They very much are. I was saying that before the season started and they went 11-10 against teams otherwise playing .635 ball.
And that's with Sale and Whitlock having one good start each, Bello having 2 good innings, and Paxton yet to pitch -- and those are the 1 through 4 startrers.
I love the fact that almost nobody gets the opponent-quality thing. It keeps them underrate and as underdogs.
If they can get everyone healthy, a projected late-season batting order against RHP:
Verdugo Devers (or Yoshida) Story Yoshida (or Devers) Kiké Casas Duvall McGuire
Turner.
I invite folks to look at the 7 through 9 hitters on all the playoff teams last year.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2023 15:28:39 GMT -5
I track this every year ... how clutch has the team been?
They are 6 -1 in comebacks after a Win Probability of .750+ has been established by the opposition.
Take-home lesson of the details below: the better the offense, the more valuable great long relief is -- a team-building principle that seems to be underrated.
The Sox have been the first team to get to a .750 Win Probability just 7 times.
When doing do, they've won 86% of the time, which is to say, they have just the one loss. That was when they had a .772 in the 5th inning of the last Rays game. One of the wins was the 10th-inning walkoff game, where they were down to .208 after getting to .759 in the first.
When being the first team to fall below .250, they've won 36% of the time, which is to say they're 5 - 9. Other than the Duvall miracle -- which was officially a comeback from .050, but was really .000 when the last out was in the air -- all of those deficits came early: in the 3rd of the opening game of the Tigers series (.229), in back to back games against the Angels in the 4th (.206) and 1st (.170), and last night in the 5th (.229 again).
What is especially cool is that none of these deficits have persisted to the next the inning. Either they get out of a jam right there, or they score in the bottom half of the inning.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2023 6:31:37 GMT -5
In the four games before today Casas had a 137 wRC+. You people want to send him down to AAA for a 10-game slump that may have ended last weekend. His games divide really clearly between bad and good.The xwOBA is either .261 or below (12 times), or .361 or above (4 times).
And the sequence goes:
6 bad, 1 good, 4 bad, 1 good, 1 bad, 2 good, 1 bad.
Numbers here are xwOBA / wOBA (PA) ...
He was .241 / .225 (50) through July 15th. Since then he’s .338 / .338 (21), and .417 / .386 (12) over the last 3 games.
He was .319 / .307 (16) vs. LHP through April 15, which was actually promising, and in the last five games he's .447 / 563 (6), which gives him .354 / .377 (22) on the season. If you knew he'd have that line as of this date, what would you have predicted for his overall numbers?
Through the 18th vs. RHP he was .180 / .165 (39). Ouch. Over the last 3 games he’s .431 / .372 (10).
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2023 6:23:43 GMT -5
Kluber has been so bad. I dunno how you let him keep starting games. Piggy-back for Bello? This team knows that they aren't a playoff team, as bad as he's been you really are not losing much giving him a few starts. If he turns it around maybe you get a few lotto tickets at the deadline. I'll cut you some slack, but I think it's likelier that the team things they'll win the WS.
And so far they have a winning record against teams that have played .635 ball when not playing us (the O's opponents have played .436 ball). And that's with Sale having just one Sale-like outing with more to come, etc.
I said before the season that they could be the best team in MLB without any out-of-left-field surprises, just by having all the many guys with upsides performing at a reasonable really good level.
Well, it looks like we have gotten some nobody-saw-that-coming boosts. Nobody foresaw Jansen returning to his glory-years form by throwing harder than he ever has in his career, or Josh Winckoswki being a lights-out long reliever.
And among the upside guys, Verdugo and Duvall have been better than anyone hoped, and after the latter went down Duran has stepped in and is doing the same.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2023 5:29:36 GMT -5
Guys. David Hamilton is ready! Letâs give this kid a chance at SS! Verdugo Devers Turner Yoshi Kiké Duran Wong Casas Hamilton Iâd love to see this lineup against Burnes on Sunday. I agree, he's ready for AAA. What's with the weird characters in your posts ? Example: Letâs If you write something in another app (MS Word, e.g.) and paste it in, you get stuff like that. PITA in that you can't use an external spelling correcter.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 22, 2023 0:49:38 GMT -5
He's been the 10th best reliever in baseball by fWAR and 13th by WPA over the last three years, so I mean, as far as relievers go, the bolded is just inaccurate. fWAR not withstanding, he’s clearly not the same guy that he was in the 2016-2018 timeframe. The only problem is that they are paying him as if he IS still that guy. Actually, his monster years were 2015-2017. It sure as heck looks like the incompetent Red Sox F.O. figured out the reason for the decline and fixed it, as much as possible given that he's 6 years older. I just took a look at all the Stacast data from March / April of every available year, which fortunately starts at 2016. (I could have gone back further with pitch/fx data, but the different methodologies add noise.) That eliminates the possibility that he always throws harder in April.
2016 and '17 are very much alike. There's some variance in the less-good years but no good reason not to lump them together.
This is, of course, his cutter, which he throws most of the time.
Years Vert Rel Hor Rel Velo Perc. Spin Sink Fade Mvm 2016-17 6.29 -2.02 93.0 94.3 2543 17.0 6.9 10.8 2018-22 6.31 -1.65 91.7 93.0 2608 15.5 7.4 10.7 2023 6.27 -2.05 94.9 95.7 2614 18.1 3.4 7.8
The first thing you see is that they restored / fixed his horizontal release point, which had been reduced by 36%.
In the less-good years, his cutter had the same total movement (calculated by me; thank you, Pythagoras) as in his prime , but it lost vertical movement and gained horizontal. The cutter is not a chase pitch, it's a miss-in-zone pitch. A small change in horizontal movement to the gloveside is just going to tweak the position on the bat towards or away from the bat end. A change vertically helps you get weaker contact or miss bats entirely. It's the same thing as with a four-seamer, where the amount of "hop" or rise (relative to gravity) is exalted, while the degree of armside run is more like a footnote.
This year he's getting more sink on the cutter than ever, at the expense of gloveside run, which is half what it was in his prime. He's lost 27% of his total movement.
I had assumed that his big boost in velo was a restoration to his prime but in fact, he's throwing harder than ever. The change in perceived velo is smaller -- 1.4 rather than 1.9, which suggests some change in mechanics.
The question I can't answer is how these changes relate to one another, since I know nothing of pitching biomechanics. That velo and movement are a trade-off seems like a reasonable guess (a 1.0 or 1.5 mph gain in velo is actually very big in terms of getting results). Obviously, if he could have changed his horizontal release point back to his prime, he would have done so long ago, so it seems that the Sox came up with a mechanics tweak that allowed him do that did that. It's also possible that the "correct" release point follows from doing other things better, that is, it's not directly causative but is instead a marker that his mechanics are optimized.
I kind of suspect that they made two separate tweaks, because a one-tweak fix would have likely occurred to someone already.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 21, 2023 22:52:55 GMT -5
I need a stats Duran tweet like I need air to breathe. I’m so ready to be in on him Last night I ran some numbers for him and others and somehow put it into the Twins threads. I don't know if anyone saw that! Here's the Duran bit:
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All numbers are xwOBA / wOBA (PA) except where noted.
Duran is .551 / .433 (17) since his recall. In that time frame (last 4 days) he leads MLB in xwOBA, minimum 15 PA (64 qualifiers). More reasonably, he's 6th among 189 guys with 10+ PA, 97th percentile. It's hard to do that unless your a decent hitter, at least, and of course he looks like a completely different hitter. Easy to see him ending up with Tapia's spot, when Duvall comes off the IL.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 21, 2023 12:43:25 GMT -5
Who's hot?
All numbers are xwOBA / wOBA (PA) except where noted.
(Statcast, BTW, seems to have recalibrated xwOBA, so numbers for past performance will be different that previously cited.)
Duran is .551 / .433 (17) since his recall. In that time frame (last 4 days) he leads MLB in xwOBA, minimum 15 PA (64 qualifiers). More reasonably, he's 6th among 189 guys with 10+ PA, 97th percentile. It's hard to do that unless your a decent hitter, at least, and of course he looks like a completely different hitter. Easy to see him ending up with Tapia's spot, when Duvall comes off the IL.
Kiké started .243 / .245 (51). Since the 14th he's .373 / .441 (29), but just adjusting for the legit pulled HR off of Ryan on Wednesday lifts it to .403 / 441. He ranks 19 of 180 in wRC+, minimum 20 PA, in this stretch. I think it's too soon to declare that we're seeing post-adjustments 2021 Kiké, but the every day he keeps this up improves the odds.
( Verdugo has been hot (or simply that good) all year -- just look up the numbers!)
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 20, 2023 6:20:09 GMT -5
At least Casas has taken better swings his last few at bats, but nothing is falling in soft or hard. If you're going to barrel a 108.5 mph liner 371 feet, and scorch a 106.9 barely-a-grounder, and get nothing for it ... be thankful it was in a blowout game.
He had a great game as they swept the Tigers on 4/9 (HR and 2B, 107.4 and 105.8) and barrelled a 110.8 lineout in the 9th two games later, against the Rays ... but then went back to struggling (.182 xwOBA in 26 PA before that stretch, .195 in 25 PA after it, before last night). We can hope that this is the start of some goodness, though.
Meanhile, Kiké now has a .363 xwOBA and .419 wOBA in the games since he busted out of his slump. In that stretch he's 2nd to Verdugo in wOBA and 3rd in xwOBA after him and Refsnyder, among the regulars (Wong and Duran have great numbers in fewer PA).
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 20, 2023 5:36:50 GMT -5
What do you do with Kluber at this point? Is it phantom injury time yet? Do they trade him? I don't see continuing to throw him out there ahead of better options as a viable strategy for any more than 1-2 more times through the rotation if he doesn't show any progress. He was signed to be the 6th guy in the depth chart, challenging Pivetta for 5th. Houck has probably pushed him down to 7th. He may well be their 8th best starter, given how Crawford is pitching.
They're planning on going to a 5-man rotation next, so I can see this being his last start until they need him again. He could become the long man while Crawford joins Winck as a high-leverage multi-inning guy, the difference being that Crawford goes 4 innings frequently so he can move into the rotation any time he's needed. I think he's too good to send down.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 19, 2023 18:08:03 GMT -5
First post since PropBoards fixed their problem!
Kluber has a .280 xwOBA and .282 wOBA in his two starts since opening day.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 19, 2023 6:26:45 GMT -5
The Sox have played .500 ball ....
Against teams that have played .632 ball when not playing us. Every team we've played has been above .500 when not playing us.
The Blue Jays have played .611 ball against .477 opponents.
The Yankees are .588 vs. .507.
The O's have played .588 vs. .430.
The Rays are .833 vs. .467.
Correcting for SOS (very crudely!)
.800 Rays .632 Sox .595 Yankees
.588 Rays .518 O's
And the projected 1 through 4 starters, all coming off injuries, have had 2 1/2 good starts between them ... which all came in the last start of the three that have pitched so far.
The offense is 16th in wRC+ and 7th in Win Probability added.
Casas has a .354 xwOBA and .379 wOBA, in 20 PA -- vs. lefties.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 19, 2023 4:12:48 GMT -5
I'm not sure if folks have grasped just how many Twins mistakes it took for the Sox to tie the game in the 8th. Five different guys had to screw up, four of them on the same play! I don't think I've ever seem that before.
1. Obviously, Vazquez has to interfere with McGuire. If he doesn't, the grounder he hit towards third almost certainly gets there more quickly; they might have been able to force Kiké at second, and maybe even turn two.
2. This is easy to miss. There's a man on first and a slow roller is hit to third, played well off the bag. You're the pitcher. What do you do ordinarily? You cover third. It takes somewhat less time for the pitcher to run from the mound to third then it does for a man on first to run to second and then to third. This is why you never see guys go from first to third on grounders to third.
What do you do if you know that catcher's interference has been called? Unless you are absolutely certain the ball is dead (and of course in fact it's alive), you go cover third, ASAP. If you are at all unsure what to do, you ... go cover third. What's the downside if you're wrong?
And in fact Griffin Jax does break for third. (I actually recovered my recording of the game and replayed the play to see if he did.) But he does do very late ... "oh, f***, I should be covering third!"
3. Jose Miranda fields the ball. He may well be thinking, throw it to first and get the out, which activates the interference, which in turn will keep Kiké at 2B. But what if you throw the ball away, or Donovan Solano butchers your throw? At this point, you know that the runner will be safe no matter what you do, so the only concern is keeping the tying run at second ... when the pitcher has failed to cover third. The safest way to do that is to eat the ball and make a beeline for the third base bag. McGuire will reach 1B, which nullifies the interference; it will be scored as a fielder's choice that didn't result in an out. Kiké will stop running.
Admittedly, it would have been a smart move to rescue Jax from his blunder without the risk of something bad happening over at first. Miranda does the obvious instead ...
4. The throw is a good one and Solano handles it well. But here we go from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous. Solano sees Kiké running to third and comes off the bag before the throw reaches him, so that the can release the ball a few steps closer to third and maybe get Kiké. You can see him cocking his arm to throw ... and then he sees that, unfortunately, no one is covering third.
It is unclear as to when he realizes that all he had to do to keep Kiké at 2B was to catch Miranda's throw while keeping his foot on the bag. You know, like first basemen usually do. As a good rule of thumb. Given that he did come off the bag, it seems as if he has no idea what happens after catcher's interference is called ... and who's going to tell him?
Allowing McGuire to reach first automatically cancels the interference and the play on the field stands. McGuire reaches on an error by Solano, very likely the only "decided not to tag first base" error of this season (and perhaps of all time). The play-by-play at ESPN.com has Kiké reaching third on the Solano error, which is probably incorrect given that Solano made the error because Kiké was already well on his way to third, and I think we can rule out time travel. Kiké just went to third "on the play."
What is true is that Kiké was not returned to second base on the error by Solano. You don't see that very often in play-by-play descriptions. Someone will write a long note of explanation for Retrosheet.
5. Jarren Duran then hits a grounder to regular second baseman Nick Gordon, who started the game on the bench sporting a .241 OPS (not a typo) and is now in the game after they pinch-hit for his backup.
Successful teams are know for picking each other up (metaphorically, not physically). The struggling Gordon now has a chance to pick up four of his teammates simultaneously by simply making a good throw to the plate to get Kiké. That would have to have been a world's record, right? Maybe 800 metaphoric pounds!
As you well know, it's quite a bad throw, and the game is tied. And later, we win!
Whatever it takes, right?
Thank to old friend David Lairila for looking up the interference rule and explaining it over at FanGraphs.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 18, 2023 16:59:41 GMT -5
There have been 184 relievers who have faced 25 or more batters in relief. Crawford ranks 5th in xwOBA and 1st in wOBA.
There are 230 guys who have faced 20+ batters; Sox have 4 of the top 42 in wxOBA. Crawford's 8th, Jansen's 19th, Winck is 36th, and Schreiber 42nd.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 18, 2023 12:27:00 GMT -5
Now that we have Statcast data ...
That was actually a decent outing by Bello, in terms of what was predictive. If you give him credit for fanning Ward in the first, he had a .328 xwOBA, which is pretty much MLB average.
And that includes his apparent meltdown after not getting strike 3 to Ward in the first, and giving up a pure Fenway homer to Renfroe.
.300 xwOBA through the Renfroe homer, entirely because of Ohtani.
.649 next 4 PA
.207 last 10 PA
Excluding the four PA meltdown, he was .234. Exclude the Renfroe homer, and it's .230.
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Why such a small difference?
tma, dr version: ("tma" = "too much analysis." But "take my advice" works, too!)
Because homers like that are unlucky for good pitchers.
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Renfroe's HR had a .280 xwOBA, with a .143 xBA and .568 xSA. Which is to say, when you hit a ball 355 feet way up in the air, so that it's caught if the outfielders can touch it, it's an out 86% of the time and a homer 14%.
Hitters like Renfroe have a skill for getting the homer and not the out, by pulling the ball. And the pitcher throwing to him knows this. It's a weakness of xwOBA that a pitcher who gives up such a homer always gets credit for an above-average PA.
What is true is this: there is no such thing as a pitcher who is really good but has a specific problem with allowing guys like Renfroe to go yard. If that's not clear, there's obviously no such thing as a pitcher who isn't very good but has a skill for not allowing the Renfroes of the world to go yard.
Which is to say ... hitters can gave a real, distinct skill for pulling the ball and getting homers thereby, even if their are other hitting skills are average or even below. But a pitcher's skill at preventing these homers is not distinct; it's just a function of their overall pitching skill.
So when a pitcher who is good, or is going really well, gives up a homer like that, that is not predictive. A good pitcher can be unlucky with pulled fly balls and a bad one can be lucky.
Now, it seems very likely that the Renfroe homer was part of the meltdown after getting squeezed on strike 3. But it's possible that it took the 1-2 whammy of getting hosed by the ump and then making an uncharacteristic mistake that caused him to lose his cool.
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And what about the meltdown? Pitching at an odd time, rain delay, full house for a special game, season debut ... it seems very understandable.
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 17, 2023 0:16:25 GMT -5
Last year Alex Verdugo went 1 for 31 with a Leverage Index of .04 or less.
It took him 11 games this year to top that. He's 2 for 2.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 17, 2023 0:08:02 GMT -5
With a .300 xBA today (the rest of the team was .270), odds that Kiké hasn't turned a corner are now 1 in 1,833.
Folks probably remember that I was very high on this team's upside going into the season. I'm even higher now.
What constitutes turning the corner and what do your xBA numbers show that we wouldn't have known without them? Through April 13, which was the day before you contend KKH started turning the corner, he was at .114/.235/.295. Anyone on this board would have predicted he was going to improve on those numbers. ML position players don't struggle that badly over a prolonged period. Of course everyone knew that he would start to hit better at some point. The question after his first good game was, is it actually starting now?
The point here is that slumping guys sometimes have a single great game as a fluke, e.g., they get a couple of pitches so bad that anyone could hit them hard. So after the first good game I started testing statistically to see if we could eliminate that possibility, especially since an 11-game slump is actually on the short side.
At this point we know for certain that his slump is over, as his best 3 games on his last 14 are ... his last 3 games.
Now the interesting thing to track is how well he's hitting in this good streak, relative to his teammates.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 16, 2023 23:55:53 GMT -5
The pitcher they need to move to the pen is Sale. Preferably the pen in Worcester.
Let’s remember he’s 3 plus years away from pitching. Still throwing hard. Just no command. Just may need more time. Folks may recall that I looked at all elite hitters (6 of them, IIRC) who missed three years due to WWII and all of them returned to form. Since pitching is easier than hitting, and because you don't forget "muscle" memory, I argued that Sale would be Sale.
Just before the season started I looked at each guy's game log, and (again IIRC) three of them got off to really bad starts. All of them recovered so well that their final numbers were consistent with those their pre-war. Without going into details, that some guys do start slowly makes sense.
Given that pitchers lose their best mechanics from time to time anyway, Sale's struggles so far are are not a real cause for concern.
In the long run, when everybody is healthy, I see Sale, Paxton, and Whitlock as certain starters, Bello as quite likely, and Houck, Kluber, and Pivetta, in that order, in competition for the last spot.
Pivetta had great stuff but has been plagued by a moderate version of JBJ disease for pitchers: his lights-out stretches are too short and his bad-command stretches too long. Would pitching more often as a multi-inning reliever help his consistency? Or if his inconsistency is pitch-by pitch, as a reliever it's easier to just determine which 2 pitches are working on a given day and go with those.
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 16, 2023 15:50:25 GMT -5
With a .300 xBA today (the rest of the team was .270), odds that Kiké hasn't turned a corner are now 1 in 1,833.
Folks probably remember that I was very high on this team's upside going into the season. I'm even higher now.
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Post by ericmvan on Apr 15, 2023 21:55:05 GMT -5
This could conceivably be very big.
Kiké's xBA the previous 11 games. No typos!
.166 .057 .011 .017 .180 .115 .000 .030 .086 .158 .185
That's 44 PA, with a .103 xBA.
(Yeah, but what was his actual BA? Also .103.)
Tonight he hit two balls with an EV of 99+ and had a .525 xBA.
If he just puts up a .235 tomorrow, to get to .380 for the two games -- that improvement happens 1 in 1 thousand times randomly. [1]
More fun with numbers: Kiké's .428 in his first two games had a one in 142 chance of being random, compared to the next 11. I remember thinking he looked great at the plate in game 2, so I do think the slump started after it.
As I have mentioned often, my best guess at the typical duration of an elite hitter's slump is 12 games, which Manny did (give or take a game) fairly predictably.
Two years ago Kiké was one of the best hitters in MLB for the bulk of the season (mid-late May on).
So we can dream a little starting now ...
[1] Technically, 1 in 1044 -- T-test with two samples, assuming equal variances, p=.00096.
Kiké had a .220 xBA, which is bad, but is still better than anything he put up in his 11 game streak.
Odds of it happening by chance are 1 in 747.
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