Tuesday, I wrote about trends in negative WAR position players in the league since 2002.
Generally speaking, about 20% of all players that accumulate >=100 plate appearances in a season will finish with negative Wins Above Replacement (using FanGraphs' measure for WAR).
In that analysis, I ranked teams in terms of the percent of players with >=100 PA's with negative WAR they had on their rosters relative to their total position players during that time frame.
A number of commentators here and at other sites asked about the distribution of positive WAR players by team.
The graphic above shows the breakdown of total negative WAR players and then positive WAR players for various ranges for each team since 2002. The table is sorted on the negative WAR column, from least to greatest percentage. Each column is also heat mapped from largest (dark green) to smallest (white) percentage.
A few observations:
Thanks to nifty constructs like Wins Above Replacement, we can tell when a player in the major leagues actually provided less value to a team than a replacement-level player available on the free agent market or within a team's minor league system.
Every year there are players that finish with a negative WAR--meaning their accomplishments (if we can call them that) actually provided negative value to a team compared to an available replacement. Now, some times this happens because a player succumbs to injury, but often times the player just had a plain bad year.
I was curious about the rate at which we find negative WAR players in the league and if the rate has changed at all over the past few years.
I decided to use the WAR calculation from FanGraphs--mainly because the data was much easier to download than Baseball-Reference--and looked for the rate of negative WAR seasons by year across the major leagues.
Generally speaking, since 2002 the average percent of position players with >=100 plate appearances in a season that will post a negative fWAR is right around 20%.
(To read the previous article, click here )
Digging deeper into the numbers based on some great comments from readers I discovered to errors in the data. To be specific, because of a few miscodings of stadiums (e.g. New Yankee Stadium, etc.) some years were counted multiple times. The new data set included 36 parks and stadiums and there were 6.7 seasons on average per venue.
I re-ran the analysis and here are the results:
| Re-run of the Analysis | Original Analysis | |
| Overall Correlation (Park Factors_Runs to Wins) | .18 | .11 |
| Hitter-friendly Parks (>= 1.05) | -.46 | -.42 |
| Pitcher-friendly Parks (<= .94) | .11 | .10 |
| Neutral Parks (between 1.04 and .95) | .04 | -.25 |
As you can see, even with the mis-codings the results are very similar, aside from the neutral parks. Since 2004, there has essentially been no relationship between a team's home park run environment and their chances of winning. However, we still see the sizeable negative relationship when looking at extreme hitter parks.
(Now, I also have to note that we are dealing with a small N here as we have averaged performance across the 36 parks. The individual correlations certainly are not significant at the .10 level or higher, so take into that this is directional at best when thinking through the results.)
So the question still remains what explains the pattern. Why are extreme hitter parks seemingly such a structural disadvantage for teams?
(An updated version of this article can be read here.)
We are all familiar with the idea that across major league baseball some parks favor hitters while some favor pitchers. The dimensions of the park combined with other features can increase or decrease the run scoring environment.
After opening Citi Field in 2009, the New York Mets saw a significant decline in their ability to score runs. The team averaged 681 runs scored per year from '09-'11 compared to 812 over the previous three seasons. Additionally, management worried that pitchers were developing bad habits while pitching at their spacious home park that led to worse performances on the road.
Let's set aside whether we think that reasoning is legitimate. The question I came away with was whether the kind of home park a team has increases or decreases their chances of winning games. If a team has a pitcher-friendly home park, does that create issues for them on the road that they cannot overcome? What about a hitter-friendly park?
A few months ago, when Indians pitching coach Tim Belcher announced that he was stepping down from his post, I found myself reading up on his own accomplished playing career. It turns out that Belcher was an extreme pitch-to-contact hurler: his career K/9 rate was just 5.6, and in seven of his 14 seasons he struck out less than five batters per nine. He was still an effective pitcher—in 1996, he was worth 5.3 bWAR despite a 4.3 K/9 rate—but he definitely didn't miss too many bats.
Incidentally, Cleveland's pitching staff under Belcher also had a distinct pitch-to-contact flavor. The Tribe's 6.2 K/9 rate during Belcher's two-year tenure was the worst in baseball. The phenomenon was particularly prevalent in the starting rotation, which had a league-worst 5.7 K/9 rate under Belcher. Three of the Indians' four most-used pitchers (Fausto Carmona the artist formerly known as Fausto Carmona, Josh Tomlin, Mitch Talbot) had K/9 rates below 5.3 in that span, and even staff ace Justin Masterson came in with a K/9 under 7.0.
Belcher will be replaced by bullpen instructor Scott Radinsky, who had a career 6.7 K/9 (the highest for an Indians pitching coach since Don McMahon in 1985) and once had a season in which he whiffed 8.3 batters per nine. When the news broke that the Indians were bringing in a coach who had more of a penchant for missing bats, I wondered aloud if he might guide Cleveland's pitchers towards an approach more like his own.
This, however, led to a bigger question: Do pitching coaches teach their staffs to pitch like they do? Consciously or not, it makes intuitive sense that a coach's own playing experience would affect how he does his job—any teacher focuses most on what he or she knows best, and any mentor draws on personal experience when counseling his or her pupils. But does such an effect actually exist in baseball?
A while back, our own Julian Levine noticed something odd when perusing the leaderboards at FanGraphs--historically, power hitters seemed to be worse when it came to their Clutch score.
I took a quick look at roughly 800+ players (≥3000 plate appearances for their career), and sure enough, the higher a player's Isolated Power (ISO) or Slugging (SLG), the lower their Clutch score. A player's ISO had a -.414 correlation to their Clutch score, while SLG came in at -.336.
Lots of people have taken on the issue of Clutch in terms of whether such a talent exists and whether we can measure it. (This 2009 piece by Tango is a pretty good place to start.) I don't want to get into a debate about the existence of Clutch at the moment, but rather try to understand why this relationship exists at all.
So let's start out with some general correlations of other hitting outcomes/attributes and Clutch:
Generally, the correlations are not very strong. We see the negative relationships between Clutch and things like wOBA, ISO, and SLG, but even ISO only explains a little over 17% of the variance in Clutch performance.
What's interesting is that the strongest positive correlation we see is for ground balls (GB%).
Sometimes you just want a quick way to identify players that took big steps forward or backwards from year to year. Well, now you have it.
I've put together an interactive dashboard that shows the year-over-year change in 40+ hitting metrics for players with at least 100 plate appearances in both 2010 and 2011. The tool also includes Wins Above Replacement (FanGraphs), value (in dollars), and BsR.
You can sort by any metric and select specific ones to compare for all hitters. (Click on a column and then use the sort button at the very bottom of the visualization.) Using the filter on the lower right-hand side you can also limit the output by some range in changes in plate appearances.
At the bottom, you can also select a specific player and view every change for each category without altering the larger table.
It's often said that good hitters have an ability to protect the plate and extend at-bats by fouling off pitches. We've all heard some version of this, typically during broadcasts and almost certainly during sequences where a hitter manages to work a pitcher by fouling off a large number of pitches.
A few folks have looked at this claim, in some shape or form.
Dan Fox, writing at Hardball Times in 2005, looked at a number of claims regarding hitter talent, one of which was fouling off pitches. Looking at data from 2000 to 2004, Fox found little evidence that fouling off pitches makes hitters more successful.
A few years later, John Walsh--also writing at Hardball Times--took a deeper look into "bat-handling" or "place-hitting" skills. He specifically looked at whether hitters showed an ability to foul off pitches with two strikes. He found little evidence for the skill, noting that while there was a 50% increase in the rate of fouls per pitch between two strikes and less than two strikes the effect was largely due to the increased swing rate of hitters when the are in a two strike count.
The most robust analysis that I could find looking at whether hitting foul balls was a skill as well as an indicator of "outcome" talent (e.g. actual production by hitters) was conducted in 2008 by Pizza Cutter (otherwise known as Russell Carleton). Cutter found that foul ball rates seemed to be a consistent skill (i.e. something that players replicated over time), and that high two-strike foul ball rates tend to correlate with decreased strikeouts, walks, and home runs.
Knowing all this I decided to update things a bit, looking at batter data from 2008 to 2011 for hitters with >250 plate appearances in each season.
Here's what I found:
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