More on pitch framing.

The Yankees are only a month and a half into Ichiro’s new contract, and it already looks like they will rue the day the two sides reached a deal. Well, perhaps the business side of the organization is pleased, but I digress. Ichiro is hitting .239/.280/.328 through 145 plate appearances, and finally broke a 22 at-bat hitless skid last night. At this point, it is hard to be optimistic about him going forward.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Ichiro is scuffling. From 2011 through 2012, Ichiro ...

Good stuff. Take a look.

Fascinating stuff.

If you take the Astros’ plan, and Manwaring’s comment about copycats, to their logical conclusion, then at some point in the not-too-distant future, almost every team — save, perhaps, for a few with gifted offensive catchers for whom framing aptitude is less paramount — could have someone squatting behind the plate and stealing extra strikes. But sweeping changes to the sport rarely come without unforeseen consequences. That kind of mass movement toward catchers with ...

DGAFism spreading across the land…

There are many factors. More teams and more overall games mean more strikeouts. There also are more power arms, more starters who can touch 94 mph, more relievers who finish games throwing 98.

Some are more subtle. Without question, the influence of Sabermetrics has played a role, much to Harold Reynolds’ chagrin. The new math – analyzing baseball using the game’s statistics – has produced a new crop of hitters who are conditioned to take pitches, ...

This article is bobblelicious!

Really good discussion, not just of the good (Molina, J) and bad (Doumit) of pitch framing, but approaches to fixing the issues:

For Diamondbacks bullpen coach Glenn Sherlock, a former minor league catcher and an experienced catching instructor whom Arizona GM Kevin Towers credits with turning Miguel Montero into a good framer, the first fix is glove height. “I think catchers’ targets at the bottom of the zone is so important,” he says. “You see a lot of catchers who have high targets and take ...

With the Yang-Mills existence problem seemingly solved…we now move on to the Heyman existence problem. Or something.

And sometimes there isn’t much you can do. I wrote what I did about Hawk Harrelson and The Will To Win because at some point, you have to come to the conclusion that someone isn’t worth talking to anymore. Hawk’s problem wasn’t that he was wrong, it was that he was stuck in a frame of mind that starts from conclusions and will, when it cares to, circle back around to ...

Ryan made the point that there are studies that seem to show that the stolen base is not as effective or important as people used to assume. Ryan will tell you he’s not especially a fan of some of these advanced statistics, but he’s also an open-minded guy and we have had some fun discussions and disagreements through the years. Anyway, I think he was simply making the fair point that while statistics may show that attempting steals is not necessarily a prudent play—and he concedes that ...

And had an increase in workload of more than 766 tries in the previous seasons!

Most Wins with Mets, 1983-2013 Draft Picks

1. Bobby Jones: 74-56
2. Mike Pelfrey: 50-54
3. Rick Aguilera: 37-27
4. Jon Niese: 37-36
5. Dillon Gee: 23-19
6. Aaron Heilman: 22-23
7. Jason Isringhausen: 21-24
8. Bobby Parnell: 17-19
9. Pete Schourek: 16-24
10. Jeff Innis: 10-20
11. Joe Smith: 9-5
12. Matt Harvey: 7-5
12. Dave Telgheder: 7-5

Now you get an idea of how rare it is for Harvey, a 2010 first-round pick, ...

Sometimes you can just see when a kid coach is due.

Now, it’s all trickling down to the high school level.

Several Carroll coaches, many armed with computers in the dugout, are taking the same approach as Beane and his brethren when it comes to evaluating their rosters and putting players in the best spots for them to succeed.

Manchester Valley’s Shawn Hampt is one of them.

Using all kinds of percentages and probabilities, Hampt is able to get his point across to his players in a way ...

For more than 16 years, Lowe’s proud past combines with a promising future!

Drew Davison of the Star-Telegram has an interesting article up in which Derek Lowe expounds on the increasing prevalence of statistical analysis in baseball. The Rangers signed Lowe to a Minor League contract in March and was eventually added to the bullpen. Lowe, who turns 40 years old on June 1, posted a 5.52 ERA as a starter for the Indians, but found success in the bullpen after the Indians released him and the ...

7. OK, where does Cabrera rank among all-time right-handed batters?

Right now he’s playing his age-30 season. He has 327 home runs, which ranks 11th—more than Willie Mays had through age 30 but fewer than Andruw Jones or Juan Gonzalez. He’s fifth in RBIs, behind only Jimmie Foxx, Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols and Hank Aaron, and is a good bet to pass Aaron and maybe Pujols (70 behind).

8. Those are old-school stats. What about some of your fancy sabermetric stuff?

OK, let’s look at OPS+ ...

Wow! If this continues…Daugherty will be writing for BPro by the year 2046!

Forget for a minute that the save statistic is a semi-bogus creation that serves only the player doing the saving, and the minion who represents him. Or that closers are the most overrated members of any baseball team, easily replaced and often interchangeable. I’ll see your Rafael Betancourt and raise you an Edward Mujica.

No, let’s fix on the notion that closers are one-inning, certain-situation ponies. Because ...

Ever since Michael Lewis’s Moneyball came out in 2003, there’s been this conception that baseball managers’ hunches and instincts don’t matter that much. But it seems to me that in your managing during last year’s postseason, you were definitely following a few hunches, weren’t you?

Sure. [Laughs] All the information you can get, it’s critical to your decision making. We have great advance scouts and an operations staff who really do a tremendous job of helping me. But at the ...

Well…it is K8 and not K/9.

I began thinking of this often this week as I was watching local high school teams play the game. Specifically, Michigan City and La Porte.

I became frustrated watching these players, particularly at the plate. In my opinion, too much first-pitch swinging is going on, which flies directly in the face of stats like on-base percentage, who many people - myself included - feel is a greater indicator of batting success than the more popular batting average.

If the ...

Loads of Natedictions…but here’s the baseball content.

We asked Nate Silver to gauge how predictable different things in life were: from politics to cricket, from terrorism to sexual orientation. Here’s how he scored ten different areas, on a prediction scale of 0 to 10

Baseball: 8-9

Silver made his name building a system to forecast player performance in baseball, called PECOTA. So, unsurprisingly, he thinks the game is pretty predictable.

In fact, he thinks the systems are so good now ...

The Verducci Effect of discipline, in the classroom.

Verducci’s first gripe came with the perceived taboo by swinging 3-0. There is a .12 correlation between swinging 3-0 and R/G, but there is a .38 correlation between getting to 3-0 counts and runs. I think hitters should only be swinging 3-0 if they have a great ability to leave the defense out of the equation, a.k.a. hit the ball out of the park. Teams who hit more home runs generally score more runs, so encouraging all teams to swing more ...

Less Winkeler - More Ted McGineley!

There was a time I loved talking baseball.

It was easy to spend hours discussing the relative merits of Stan Musial, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Ted Simmons, George Hendrick, Mark McGwire and Adam Wainwright.

However, thanks to sabermetrics, those days are past. The concept of sabermetrics, a pure mathematical analysis of baseball, first surfaced in the mid-1960s. The science of sabermetrics, and it is a science, tells us that batting average and RBIs don’t ...

Occasionally, saber nerds come out of their basements long enough to make children. And sometimes, those children play Little League baseball. Little League may only vaguely resemble “real” baseball, but that doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it.

DiSarface: I was kidding. I WAS ONLY KIDDING!

Gary DiSarcina would like to set the record straight: He was joking.

Baseball Prospectus more than 10 years ago introduced “The DiSars,” an award given to the player who went the deepest into a season without drawing a walk. The concept has continued to this day—all in the name of the then-Anaheim Angels shortstop who Baseball Prospectus said “proudly stated that it was a goal of his to not walk all season.”

Did DiSarcina really say he wanted to ...

Fagan inspection: Find defects in Josh Hamilton’s game.

What follows isn’t an attempt to predict the rest of Hamilton’s season; it’s an attempt to use several advanced statistics to provide a deeper look at how poorly he has played so far in 2013. Keep in mind that the calendar has just barely crept into May, so we’re dealing with small sample sizes.

The stat: .248 wOBA

What wOBA doesn’t stand for: Would *Oyster Burns Approve?  How it relates to Hamilton: Hamilton isn’t drawing ...

just alright.

The larger point of course is that Jesus Montero probably isn’t a catcher at all, and thus it doesn’t matter if his bat may compare well with Wilson Ramos’ or even Miguel Montero’s. Catchers generate so much value because of their scarcity; this makes Montero’s 123 wRC+ elite. But give the same hitting stats to a 1B, and he’s barely above average (Paul Goldschmidt’s 123 and position got him 2.8 WAR last year). Add in the base-running penalty because, well, you know, ...

This should be acted out in full Rick Santelli sub-human meltdown fashion.

One thing I like about listening to Jim Palmer on the Orioles’ telecasts is he’s not afraid to beat a topic to death if he feels strongly about it. For instance, take the so-called “quality start.”

Take it. Please, take it. Pretty please.

Take it and bury it along with every other irrelevant statistic you can imagine. You think the game-winning RBI was meaningless? That little number was a sabermetric gem compared ...

Move over, Corky Graham! New WAR correspondent, Jon Heyman is on the scene!

Jon Heyman: i am not a hater of WAR stat, but if someone can explain to me how starling marte & bryce harper are both 1.7, please do

It’s a hardly a clown question, bro. 

Heyman is citing the Baseball-Reference version of WAR, and as of this writing, the two men are rated as equal in their performance so far in 2013. Our own WARP has Harper at 1.9 WARP, with Marte at 0.8. That’s not a knock on Marte. Harper has ...