Patrick Flood

Liking Players Based on Personality

By Patrick Flood on Sep 03, 2010, 11:04 am

And I suspect that we also assign players personalities based on their behavior on court, which may or may not be fair. A bunch of our readers have lambasted Roddick for his behavior toward the line judge in the match he lost, which confirmed for them that he’s a classic American boor. Tennis writers say that’s not true, that he’s amusing and wry — which, again, isn’t to trump the outsider view, or to excuse how he belittled the judge. It’s merely to point out that we make unconscious associations that we think are purely tennis ones. I’ve seen Federer berate umpires, curse and mope, and after losing at Wimbledon he gave a notably sour and petulant post-match news conference. But no one accuses him of being a Swiss boor, because he has an image as a gentleman.

Anyway, I agree with you that we ultimately root for players with whom we can, however dimly and distantly, identify, or whom we dream of being like. Like you and a lot of other fans, I just can’t relate to Djokovic either. But man, I would love to own his ground strokes and ability to scoot around the court.

This is the first and last time I’ll ever link to something related to tennis, but I’d guess that this applies to all sports. As fans, we don’t REALLY know what the players are like; all we have to go on is their behavior on the field and what we read about them. Sometimes we probably get it wrong.

How Many Runs Did Jeff Francoeur’s Arm Save?

By Patrick Flood on Sep 02, 2010, 5:29 pm

I know, I know. I’m sorry, and I promise this is the last Francoeur post I’ll ever write, but I thought this was interesting. Kevin Burkhardt brought a question up during the SNY telecast — what a great word, by the way, “telecast” — of last night’s game: How many runs did Jeff Francoeur’s arm save the Mets? Was it enough to make up for his awful, awful offense?

As it turns out, people keep track of these sorts of things, and then figure it out for us. It should be obvious by now, but the Internet was invented so that silly pictures of cats and baseball statistics might become more widely available.

Francoeur recorded 11 outfield assists for the Mets this season, the most in the National League. 11 runners cut down would be quite impressive on their own, but that’s just part of the story — the threat of Francoeur’s arm also caused baserunners to hold up and not risk advancing first-to-third or second-to-home on hits to right field. How many extra bases did he save on reputation?

Thankfully, people keep track of those sorts of things as well. See here:

			Single w/ Runner on 1st		Single w/ Runner on 2nd		Double w/ Runner on 1st		Flyout, <2out, Runner on 3rd		Flyout, <2out, Runner on 2nd		Baserunning Totals
Year	Tm	Lg	Opp	Held	Opp	Held	Opp	Held	Opp	Held	Opp	Held	Opp	Held	Held%
2010	NYM	NL	51	34	33	18	20	13	11	3	27	18	142	86	60.6%

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 9/2/2010.

So there you go. Baserunners had 142 opportunities to take an extra base on Francoeur and were held up 86 times, 60.6% percent. The National League average for runners holding up on hits to right field is 49.3%, which would come out to 70 holds in the 142 opportunities baserunners had against Frenchy. In other words, Francoeur saved the Mets 16 bases with his arm, in addition to the 11 assists.

How many runs is 11 assists and 16 bases worth? The three major fielding systems, UZR, Total Zone, and Runs Saved, all have an answer:

UZR: 6.6 runs
Total Zone: 8 runs
Runs Saved: 10 runs

So he saved somewhere between 6.6 and 10 runs, the best outfield arm in baseball — but that’s not counting Francoeur’s range, which is not rated as impressively by those systems. Francoeur isn’t the fastest rightfielder and didn’t always get the best jump on balls. His grin, on the other hand, needs to be rated using megawatts.

But simply ignoring those other factors, would his arm alone make up for his awful offense?

Not at all. Because of his NL low on-base percentage, both Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference valued Francoeur’s offensive contribution to the Mets as minus-12 runs below average. He simply made too many outs to be effective. At best his arm offset 10 of the runs lost with his bat, and at worst just 6.6. He was still a negative no matter how you cut it.

To better illustrate this, let’s take the 11 outs and 16 bases Frenchy saved the Mets with his arm, and add them onto his offensive line. We’ll take those 11 assists and turn 11 of the outs Frenchy made into walks; then we’ll add 16 bases onto his total bases. We’re taking his defense and turning it into offense. If we do that, his new slash line goes from this:

.237/.293/.369

To this:

.237/.317/.420

Which is a whole lot better. His OPS just jumped 75 points, from .662 to .737, and is now only a tick below the National League average of .743.

But even with those added walks and total bases, Francoeur’s .737 OPS would jump him only two places, from last in OPS among NL rightfielders to third-from-last. He would still be a below-average hitter playing a position that stresses offense. He would still be in Lasting Milledge territory.

So did Francoeur’s arm make up for his poor hitting? Sorry Frenchy lovers. It didn’t. Francoeur’s arm is the best in baseball, but he was so bad at the plate that it wasn’t enough to matter.

Yeah. That’s Probably Not Going to Happen.

By Patrick Flood on Sep 02, 2010, 1:34 pm

“On Mets.com, the team is offering prorated season-ticket packages
for the remaining home games that include preferred parking options,
the ability to transfer and resell tickets electronically and “the
option to purchase your seats for all potential 2010 Mets postseason
games at Citi Field.””

MLB Teams as Faces

By Patrick Flood on Sep 02, 2010, 11:38 am

What I’ve done for today’s ‘Wednesday Graph’ is to take 10 statistics —
wOBA, K%, BB/K, AVG, OBP, ISO, Speed Score, BABIP, BB%, and FIP — and
create Chernoff faces for every major league team. I’ll also note here,
to avoid any confusion, that the BB% and K% statistics are based on
offense and not pitching.

Looking at MLB teams this way is certainly interesting — Or maybe it’s just kind of trippy. The Mets look like a child who was just told their dog ran away, which I think is entirely appropriate for the way this season has gone. The Rangers just found out they acquired Jeff Francoeur. The Rays look like Lucas Duda.

All 30 teams and the full explanation for the faces can be found here.

Does Throwing Hard Help?

By Patrick Flood on Sep 01, 2010, 4:34 pm

Yes. Yes it does.

Defense at Third

By Patrick Flood on Sep 01, 2010, 2:30 pm

Mark Simon of ESPN takes a look at the defense of third basemen Adrian Beltre and Evan Longoria, but without using UZR or plus/minus. He uses Baseball Info Solutions’ video system for judging plays, one that actually treats David Wright’s defense quite favorably.

Farewell to Arm

By Patrick Flood on Sep 01, 2010, 1:10 pm

“The TV highlights roll on, showcasing Francoeur’s typically sublime game against the Los Angeles Dodgers the previous night. He went 2 for 5, lifting his average to .373, and hit his 10th home run, a 407-foot parabola that landed midway up the leftfield stands. He saw a total of 16 pitches, on par with his economical average of 3.34 pitches per plate appearance.”

- Michael Farber, Sports Illustrated; August 29, 2005

Jeff Francoeur appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in August of 2005, smiling under a caption that read: “The Natural.” This is now laughable. The cover story has become a pot of gold, and we are all leprechauns. I highly recommend it for all the unintended-but-now-hilarious foreshadowing to his career . . . Also for the part where he hates on books. Continue Reading

Ike Davis on Strike Three

By Patrick Flood on Aug 31, 2010, 11:30 am

Davis, a rookie who strikes out 27.6 percent of the time, on occasion remains at the plate after looking at Strike 3. The implication, of course, is that Davis does not like the call. The worry would be that umpires would attach a reputation to Davis, a 23-year-old who the Mets see as the starting first baseman for the foreseeable future. . . Davis said. "Besides coming in and looking at video, and it’s usually not a strike."

Ike Davis to Andy McCullough

Rant: Hey, Ike? That pitch on the outside corner? Right. It’s technically not a strike; big league umpires almost always call it that way. They set up over the inside shoulder of the catcher so that they can call the inside corner accurately, but the outside corner becomes stretched as they aren’t directly over it. So that pitch off the plate becomes a strike. Umpires have been doing this for as long as I’ve watched baseball — which admittedly isn’t that long — but it’s about as long as you, Ike, have been watching baseball. So maybe get used to it being a strike and stop pouting.

And: end rant.

One more thing, actually: Davis might want to consider investing in eyedrops or something, because it always looks like he’s got sand in his eye when he’s hitting. That can’t help.

Ted Berg: Don’t Trade the “Core”

By Patrick Flood on Aug 30, 2010, 1:30 pm

I have one minor quibble here. Berg says, “The Mets have gotten the second-worst production in the National League out of their first basemen in 2010, the worst out of their second basemen, and the worst out of their right fielders.” — I would change that to read “offensive production,” particularly with regards to the first basemen, who have somewhat compensated for their average hitting with decent defense. The second basemen and right fielders have been so awful offensively that it really doesn’t matter what they do defensively, since they’re still going to be miserable regardless.

Otherwise, exactly what he said. Trading Reyes for Felix Hernandez might be reasonable; trading Wright or Reyes just to trade them is how nightmare, franchise-crushing deals are made.

Bradbury on Revenue Sharing

By Patrick Flood on Aug 30, 2010, 10:15 am

Despite the good intentions behind revenue sharing, doling out money to baseball’s have-nots has the unintended consequence of creating a disincentive to win. Though the correlation is not perfect, winning tends to attract fans, which increases local revenue. But a healthier bottom line means drawing less from the revenue-sharing pool. The quandary faced by poor-and-losing teams is that using the added wealth to improve their clubs increases local earnings, but these gains may be offset by reducing revenue-sharing payments.

J.C. Bradbury, a sports economist at Kennesaw State University and author of the blog “Sabernomics,” addressed the issues surrounding revenue sharing in Saturday’s New York Times. I suppose he would be the expert on these sorts of things, and it’s the best take I’ve read on the leaked financial documents. As far as I can tell, Bradbury knows his stuff.