It makes perfect sense. Starters having more pitches to fall back on. Relievers usually only have one or two good pitches, so the pitcher has less options to make adjustments.

This lines up well with what Jeff Zimmerman and I found regarding pitcher aging and how it differs depending on a pitchers role.

Let’s take the example of strike outs. Jeff and I found that while starting pitchers were able to mitigate against their decline in velocity–and therefore experienced a less drastic decline ...

What’s going on with Martin Prado?

Worst Baserunners through May 22, 2013
Player Net Gain
Justin Smoak -17
Martin Prado -15
Allen Craig -12
Nelson Cruz -12
Albert Pujols -10
Chris Carter -10

One, two big schools
All the worlds are
Colliding all around you

I was going to write something today for SI.com re Votto. Specifically, that Votto represented one of the clearest cases of Old-v-New schools of thought, re hitting production. The idea was discussed when The Technician was sitting on 4 HR/20 BI. Now, he’s up to 7 and 22. Both #s are subpar for him and, in fact, for a No. 3 hitter. The obvious question being, can a guy who ranks 11th among NL 1Bs in BI be seen as having a ...

For 1982, each voter should rank their top 13 players from both leagues combined.

Balloting is scheduled to close at 4pm EST on 06 June 2013.

Anyone can vote, even if you do not normally participate in Hall of Merit discussions. If have never participated in an MMP election, just post a preliminary ballot in the discussion thread by 05 June 2013.

For detailed rules see one of our previous ballots.

Baseball Fates, please note (please?): I’m just playing around here! None of these things will actually come to pass; it’s just a way of expressing how hot he’s been so far.

Miguel Cabrera finished Thursday’s game #45 with a .391 BA, .701 slugging, 1.168 OPS, 14 HRs, 55 RBI, 39 Runs, 72 hits, 129 total bases, and an OPS+ well north of 200.

The projection multiplier from 45 to 162 is 3.6, so….

  Heads up, Hack? Bourn’s gift to Miggy (plus Thursday’s daily dinger) put him on a ...

“locked-in” with Tom Tango and Morgan Ensberg!...(also check out Kevin Goldstein’s FB page which has been having a terrific back/forth)

Below you will find an unedited transcript of an email correspondance between myself and Morgan Ensberg.  This exchange is a result of Ensberg taking a position with Brandon McCarthy on Twitter, and seemingly against me.  As this thread will show, we don’t really disagree on anything, once we were able to say more than 140 characters to each other.

As ...

Light at the end of the ridiculously low-ceilinged tunnel.

The Cubs have actually played pretty good baseball when sequencing is not considered. By wOBA differential, they’ve been a well above average team. Their record is almost entirely a reflection of the power of the timing of various events.

In our Win Probability section, we track a stat called “Clutch”, which basically looks at the wins a team has gained or lost due to the leverage of the game when their positive or negative ...

And not clicking on Verducci is quickly becoming another one!

1. Hitting in the major leagues is fundamentally broken

What will it take for teams to start admitting that this passive-aggressive, run-up-the-pitch-count philosophy isn’t working? Apparently almost a decade of declining results isn’t enough. Entering this week:

• The number of hits per game is down for the seventh straight year.

• On base percentage has been stagnant or down for the seventh straight year.

• Strikeouts ...

Interesting stuff.

John Farrell and Torey Lovullo looked down toward the Twins bullpen. They saw some stirring, as Minnesota lefty reliever Brian Duensing had grabbed a ball and tossed it a few times.

Then Duensing sat down. It was then the Red Sox manager and his bench coach knew they had put the right people in the right places.

“It’s a good feeling,” Lovullo said after the Red Sox’ 12-5 win over the Twins Saturday night, “when all the puzzle pieces fit perfectly.”

The puzzle Lovullo ...

Welcome back, JM Catellier…and his “own unique statistical formula”!

The average 20th century Hall of Fame starting pitcher has 258.3 career wins. That number is dragged down by Sandy Koufax’ 165 victories, but he can’t be omitted from this exercise as I consider him the best starting pitcher to ever throw a baseball.

Former Boston Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez retired following the 2009 season with just 219 wins and only two 20-win seasons. Is it possible that he’s a first ballot Hall of ...

Wonder if Paul Anka can pen another hit after this nosedive…

But the thing that was most striking about Pujols is that he was always exactly as good as he had been the year before. He never had a bad year. He never had anything RESEMBLING a bad year. They called him “The Machine.” If you take the WORST statistical totals he had those first 10 years – that is, the lowest batting average he had over those 10 years, the fewest home runs he hit, etc.—you STILL come up with this season:

.312 ...

I’m going to start using emanded. That is all.

I was surrounded in the clubhouse the other day, with no escape. Two players wanted—emanded—to know why there was even an MVP debate last year in the American League.

So technically, the great debate from 2012 rages on. Six months after the winner was announces, we are still talking about it.

These two players, like a seeming overwhelming majority of players, couldn’t understand why anyone supported Mike Trout in the apparently ongoing ...

Is this really true?

Baseball teams change at a glacial pace. I’m not talking about how a team does in a given season…that can change quite dramatically…I’m talking about what a team is: the broad scope of a team’s talents, their strengths and weaknesses. A team that’s good at converting a double play generally stays good at turning the double-play, just as a team with a terrible bullpen can’t make that bullpen a strength, at least not quickly. A team that gets lots of production ...

Wonder if this includes yesterday’s gripping Trevor Ploof…

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Advanced defensive metrics tell us what our eyes have likely suggested all season—that the Twins’ defense, for the most part, has very limited range.

It’s true that Twins fielders, collectively, don’t make many errors on balls hit to their range radius—but that radius is not very large. And it’s impossible for a fielder to make an error on a ball he can’t get to.

Ultimate Zone Rating ...

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 ...