http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2010/09/post_10.php

Generally, people like to use K/9 to compare pitchers’ strikeout rates, but Rich Lederer at Baseball Analysts instead looks at how many batters a pitcher strikes out per 100 pitches. In other words, it’s how efficient a pitcher is at striking out batters. Sort of. You have to get down to #45 to find your first Met, Jon Niese at 4.97K per 100 pitches.

Leave a Comment

In the past, Manuel, Pelfrey and pitching coach Dan Warthen have described the right-hander’s struggles as equally mental and physical. But after Monday’s loss, Manuel indicated that the bulk of Pelfrey’s issues are lodged somewhere in his brain.

I just see a guy that kind of loses confidence,” Manuel said. “I see a guy that doesn’t have the presence on the mound.”

- Anthony DiComo, Mets.com

Mike Pelfrey has made 28 starts this season. He has been a great pitcher in just under two-thirds of them: He’s 13-1 with a 1.62 ERA in the 17 starts in which he’s allowed 3 or fewer runs. The Mets are 15-2 in those games. In his other 11 starts, however, he’s been an awful pitcher: 0-8 with a 10.19 ERA. The Mets are 1-10 in those games.

Now, if you arbitrarily split up any pitcher’s starts into two groups, as I just did for Pelfrey, you would get these sorts of results — doing so falls into the “statistics” category of lies. He’s not really two pitchers, one with a 1.62 ERA and the other with a 10.19 ERA. Mike Pelfrey is just one pitcher with a 3.96 ERA, one who has good starts and bad starts, just like all pitchers do. Yesterday was a decidedly bad start for Pelfrey, as was his previous start, but he was coming off a run of four solid performances before that.

It certainly seems as though Mike Pelfrey has been having a particularly Jekyll and Hyde season . . . or a particularly Jersey Shore/Mad Men season, if that analogy makes more sense to the big TV watchers out there. Month to month, start to start, or even just inning to inning, it seems that Pelfrey can be getting groundout after groundout, when it suddenly just blows up in his face. He retires ten of the first twelve batters he faces yesterday. Then a walk. Then another walk. A double. Single. Flyout. Walk. Single. And he’s out of the game.

I think because Pelfrey has these sorts of extended meltdowns — and they’re never just quick three-run home run blowups, they’re always tedious, painful slap-happy single-and-walk-fests — people are quick to assume that Pelfrey’s problems are mental. Why else would someone pitching so well suddenly lose it? Someone gets on base, Pelf gets rattled, and it all just slowly falls apart for him. It’s a confidence issue. He gets nervous with men on base. He can’t pitch on the road.

Generally, I tend to dismiss these sorts of assertions as armchair sports psychology, something which normally can also be referred to as “BS.” For example: “Carlos Beltran doesn’t look like he’s having fun because he’s not smiling. He must hate baseball/playing for the Mets/rainbows. Trade him.” Or: “Jose Reyes is always smiling. He’s not taking baseball seriously enough. Trade him.” These sorts of things. No one really knows what’s going on inside a player’s head, sometimes not even the player himself. When a pitcher looks uncomfortable, maybe it is because he doesn’t want to throw the ball . . . or maybe his underwear is just riding up. It’d be really hard to distinguish between these two scenarios just by watching. So I tend to not even try.

But I sometimes think there might be something to be said for Mike Pelfrey’s problems being of the mental variety — not in a “Mike Pelfrey is crazy, let’s lock him up” sort of way. More in a, “Mike Pelfrey might not understand the sort of pitcher Mike Pelfrey is” kind of way.

And Mike Pelfrey is indeed a certain type of pitcher. Among National League pitchers with enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, Pelfrey is fifth from the bottom in strikeouts per nine innings pitched. He’s somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of walks, but he’s also the sixth best at preventing home runs. So he doesn’t strikeout, walk, or allow many batters to hit home runs. In other words, he leaves a lot to the gloves of the defense, the park, and all sorts of other things that aren’t him.

If you look at pitchers like Mike Pelfrey — that is, not nefarious hand lickers, but ground ball pitchers who don’t walk or strikeout many batters — you’ll see that most are susceptible to the same sort of ups and downs that have marked Pelfrey’s young career.

• Fausto Carmona went 19-8 with a 3.06 ERA for the Indians in 2007; he went 13-19 with a 5.89 ERA over the next two seasons, before bouncing back with a 4.05 ERA for a last place Cleveland team this year.
• Livan Hernandez had a 9-12 record and a 5.44 ERA last season; he has suddenly improved to a 9-10 record and a 3.81 ERA for the Nationals this year.
• Zack Duke posted a 4.06 ERA with the Pirates in 2009; he has a 5.24 ERA in 24 starts this season.
• Joe Blanton went from 12-8 and a 4.05 ERA with Philly last year, to 6-6 with a 5.25 ERA in 2010.
• Mike Pelfrey went 13-11 with a 3.72 ERA in 2008, 10-12 with an ERA of 5.02 in 2009, and he’s 13-9 with a 3.96 ERA this season.

Pelfrey is not a unique phenomena. When a pitcher allows a large number of balls in play, more and more things being to fall outside the realm of his control. The quality of the defense behind him becomes more important. The size and location of the ballpark. The location of seagulls in the outfield.

Basically, when you’re the type of pitcher Pelfrey is, more things are just going to happen. When a strikeout pitcher makes a good pitch, the batter swings and misses and that’s sort of it. The hitter strike outs. When a groundball pitcher makes a good pitch, the batter hits a grounder — but sometimes those grounders find holes. Sometimes the second baseman has bad range and doesn’t reach the ball, or makes an error. A good pitch turns into a hit. And sometimes two good pitches turn into two hits in a row. And sometimes three good pitches in a row wind up hits. And so on. Over the course of an inning, a game, or even an entire season, that sort of luck doesn’t always even itself out. So you get the ups and downs that have marked Big Pelf’s time with the Mets.

In fact, if you look just at the things Pelfrey can control, he hasn’t pitched all that differently any of the past three seasons. His xFIP — an awkwardly named ERA-like statistic that only looks at a pitcher’s strikeouts, walks, and flyball rate, the things he has the most control over — is almost exactly the same over the past three seasons: 4.49 in ‘08, 4.52 in ’09, and 4.45 this season. It’s the things he can’t control which have made the biggest difference.

I’m not sure if Mike Pelfrey realizes this — and I think that’s the “mental” problem he has. Pelfrey, like most pitchers, seems to take personal responsibility for everything that happens when he’s on the mound. When things start to go wrong, when someone sneaks a single up the middle on him, sometimes it appears that he’ll tinker with his approach, as if it he did something wrong . . .  even when the hit wasn’t necessarily his fault. Pelfrey might be trying to correct problems that don’t exist, and that’s when the canary dies and the meltdowns begin.

Or maybe that’s just my imagination. Maybe Pelfrey is just a contact pitcher, and sometimes everything goes right for contact pitchers, and sometimes everything goes wrong for contact pitchers. Maybe that’s all it is.

But that’s not an explanation with a lot of satisfactory “this is why it happens” behind it, which can make us uncomfortable. So we look for something else, and Pelfrey is up and down and licks his hand a lot and-he-does-sort-of-look-crazy-now-that-you-mention-it. And we end up assigning confidence issues to Pelfrey . . . mostly because he sometimes has trouble keeping his hand moist. When he pitches well, he’s mentally on track, and when he’s not pitching well, he’s a crazy train.

I don’t know if there really are two Mike Pelfreys, one crazy and one not. I’d guess there’s just one who gives up a lot of contact — sometimes it goes well, and sometimes it doesn’t, and we assign credit and blame to Pelfrey when it’s really just defense and luck. Maybe the only crazy ones are us.

Photo via Keith Allison’s Flickr. CC 3.o

Leave a Comment

http://www.amazinavenue.com/2010/9/6/1670919/reasons-to-keep-watching

James K at Amazin’ Avenue pretty much nails every reason to keep watching the Mets this season, though I would add my own favorite reason, “the possibility of seeing some really, really bad baseball.”

Mets-Pirates next week? I couldn’t be more excited — and there’s no sarcasm being conveyed here. Two young, bad, poorly run teams battling out in meaningless September games actually gets me excited. Maybe there’s something about seeing highly paid athletes comically failing on the highest stage that makes me more comfortable with my own failures, but I find myself attracted to bad baseball like a fly to a bug zapper. I want to see errors, missed bases, Oliver Perez facing Lastings Milledge, the whole thing.

So, if you’re into bad baseball, that’s one more reason on top of the ones James lists to keep watching the Mets.

Leave a Comment

http://joeposnanski.com/JoeBlog/2010/09/04/an-even-closer-look-at-the-count/

No, not him. Joe Posnanski takes a look at hitter’s batting averages and OPSs based on the ball-strike count.

Leave a Comment

Shaq wandered into the wedding ceremony of Kristen and Wes Schifone at the Four Seasons in downtown Boston, much to the delight of the newlyweds. Shaq didn’t show off his epic moves on the dance floor, nor did he spit out some serious rhymes with the band, but it was a memorable visit to say the least.

This is all kinds of awesome. Click here for the full story and all the pictures. My favorite photo is the one above for a) Shaq with the bridesmaids and b) the guy in the background who is so psyched because SHAQ JUST SHOWED UP AT THE WEDDING. (h/t to Ball Don’t Lie)

Leave a Comment

http://straightsets.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/open-house-day-5-the-players-we-like-and-hawk-eye-v-foot-faults/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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.

Leave a Comment

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:

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.

Leave a Comment

http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/mets-havent-surrendered-yet/

“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.””

Leave a Comment

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.

Leave a Comment

http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2010/9/1/1663640/how-do-hitters-fare-against-really

Yes. Yes it does.

Leave a Comment