Bill James Handbook 2016

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The moment you believe you start to finally understand the game, baseball provides a rude awakening. This time last year, the San Francisco Giants were the toast of baseball. Well, next year will be another even year; their three World Series titles this decade have all been on years that ended in an even number. No one could quite believe that the Royals had made their run to the World Series, but it was clear that the Tigers were the class of the AL Central. Ditto for the Nationals in the NL East.

Continuing in the AL East, the Orioles had wrapped up their second playoff appearance and first division title in the last three years, but the Red Sox were primed for a rebound. Meanwhile, the Yankees were too old, and the Blue Jays were up to 21 years since they had last reached the postseason. The Athletics were sitting on three consecutive postseason berths and always seemed to find a way to win despite their payroll limitations. The Rangers were too thin in their rotation behind Yu Darvish and looked fated for another 90-loss season.

Most assuredly, the Pirates were a wonderful success story, but the 89-loss Cubs and the 92-loss Astros were still several years away from being competitive.

The 2015 season was incredible drama and the perfect illustration why one can never sit comfortably on their opinions and apparent knowledge of the game. It may not have been enough time for you to process everything that has changed from last year to now, but a ton of overtime hours were worked to ensure that The Bill James Handbook reached bookshelves by November 1, and the Handbook is the perfect source to help you set your story straight.

After the season that he had for the Cubs, Jake Arrieta needs no introduction. He led all pitchers in Win Shares with 27 this season, just edging out Zack Greinke’s 26 and several clear of the rest of the field. But did you know that the team’s closer Hector Rondon was tied for 12th in baseball with 16 Win Shares, more than any of Jon Lester, Jason Hammel, and Kyle Hendricks?

Much of the Astros’ success has been driven by their young stars like Dallas Keuchel and Carlos Correa, but did you know that the Astros have led all teams with 2,757 shifts on balls in play over the last two seasons? Baseball Info Solutions estimates that the team has saved 47 runs with those shifts in that time. Based on an estimation of 1 extra win for every 10 extra runs, that puts the Astros’ progressive defensive strategy at just short of five additional wins since 2014, or right around the value of players like Jacoby Ellsbury, Albert Pujols, and Brandon Phillips.

No one would have blamed you for calling Yu Darvish’s season-ending Tommy John surgery in Spring Training the final nail in the Rangers’ coffin, but then you probably would not have expected former Brewer Yovani Gallardo to increase his slider usage by four percent compared to 2014 and produce his best ERA as a full-season starter in his career.

Josh Donaldson quite suddenly became one of the best players in baseball in 2013, and so it is somewhat understandable that the Athletics believed they were trading him at his peak value to the Blue Jays. Instead, Donaldson upped his previous career high of 29 home runs from 2014 to 41 this season. Of course, the Blue Jays knew that Donaldson had a great chance to improve his power production in their home ballpark. Since 2013, O.co Coliseum in Oakland has allowed 25 percent fewer home runs to right-handed hitters than an average park, second lowest in the AL. In contrast, the Rogers Centre in Toronto has allowed right-handers to hit 14 percent more home runs than an average park, fourth best in the AL. Now, right-handers Donaldson, Troy Tulowitzki, and Edwin Encarnacion are all a part of that infield. That’s not really fair to the rest of the league.

The Yankees may have entered the season with a roster full of veteran players, many of whom were past their peak seasons. However, several potential new stars emerged and helped breathe new life into the team. Greg Bird did a more than admirable job of filling in for the injured Mark Teixeira over 46 games at first base. He actually hit 11 home runs over that time. One might expect that the left-handed Bird could have benefited from the short porch in right field of Yankee Stadium; after all, left-handed hitters have hit 29 percent more home runs in that park than an average park since 2013. However, Bird actually hit 6 of his 11 home runs on the road. The Bill James Projections are optimistic that with more than 500 at-bats, Bird could club 25 home runs in 2016.

The Royals may not succeed with the formula fans are used to seeing, but that does not mean they aren’t a great team. With 56 Defensive Runs Saved in 2015, the Royals just missed being the best defensive team in the AL this season (the Astros were tops in the league with a shift-driven 57 Runs Saved). The Royals have saved more runs over the last three seasons combined than anyone else in the AL, and their total of 179 Runs Saved in that time is 62 more than the AL silver medalist Orioles. The Royals were also one of the top baserunning teams in the AL; only the Blue Jays produced more Stolen Base Gain (+42) than the Royals’ +36. Of course, both teams would have needed a lot of work to catch up to the Rangers’ total Net Gain of +142, built on an incredible +119 Baserunning Gain, which factors in runner advancements from first to third on singles, second to home on singles, first to home on doubles, and baserunning out avoidance.

All of those statistics and many more can be found throughout this Handbook. We hope that you enjoy everything the 2015 season had to offer that we have captured in these pages, and we look forward to wondering how we ever could have been so wrong about the 2016 season this time next year.

Scott Spratt

October 15, 2015

Starting Pitcher Rankings

Joe Rosales

In sports, we often hear people use the metaphor of a bulldog to describe certain players. It is usually associated with players who exhibit a determined intensity to the way they play the game. Usually, these aren’t athletes that succeed through any sort of finesse to their game. They come right at you with dogged determination to impose their will on you. Is this a reflection of how actual bulldogs really behave? Who knows? But it makes for good imagery.

One pitcher that has been referred to as a bulldog is Max Scherzer. When he signed his current mega-deal with the Washington Nationals before the start of the 2015 season, his new manager (and now old manager), Matt Williams, noted Scherzer’s bulldog mentality as one of the reasons that the Nationals signed him. And, while the metaphor may be a bit overused in general, it actually seems appropriately applied to Scherzer, especially as it relates to his theoretical and entirely hypothetical quest to be the World’s #1 Starting Pitcher.

Clayton Kershaw is unquestionably the best pitcher in baseball. When a player wins three Cy Young Awards in four years plus an MVP Award, you don’t need a ranking system to tell you that he’s the best. But, of course, we do have a ranking system, which was developed by Bill James four years ago. And when you look at the rankings that appear in the following pages, Kershaw unsurprisingly leads by a lot. That said, if you look closely at the table, you will see that on July 1st, Scherzer was only just barely behind Kershaw for the top spot. In fact, the next day, July 2nd, Scherzer actually took the lead. However, his reign only lasted five days until Kershaw took the crown back, at which point Kershaw proceeded to start pitching like Clayton Kershaw again and run away from the field.

When Scherzer took over first place, he was hitting a peak (he had just thrown a no-hitter 12 days prior) while Kershaw was hitting a valley. You could look at Scherzer’s brief time in pole position as a five-day hiccup for Kershaw. However, in 2014, there were another 35 days when Kershaw relinquished the top spot in the rankings, and it was Scherzer again that was the one who took it from him. There are seven different pitchers that have occupied the #2 spot in the rankings since Kershaw first ascended to the throne on May 16, 2013, but only Scherzer has managed to actually move in front of Kershaw.

Hence the bulldog metaphor. Kershaw is a historically great pitcher, reaching sustained heights that most others aren’t capable of. But that hasn’t stopped Scherzer from determinedly trying to establish himself, doggedly nipping at Kershaw’s heels, and every so often finding a way to break through, however briefly.

This is what is so fun about these rankings. They help us measure pitchers against each other, combining how well they have been doing recently with their career achievements. A great season will allow a pitcher to make significant moves up the rankings, but one great season isn’t going to give him the top spot.

For example, Jake Arrieta had an amazing season in 2015. He jumped from 63rd at the beginning of the season up to 4th overall by the end. But he had already started to build a track record for himself in 2014 when his performance lifted him up from 154th to 62nd (the rankings continue to fluctuate every day, even over the offseason, hence Arrieta falling one spot from the end of the 2014 season to the beginning of the 2015 season…for full details on how the ranking system works, see Bill James’ article on www.billjamesonline.com from September 18, 2011 called The World’s #1 Starting Pitcher).

Other pitchers that rose significantly in the standings in 2015 include two Cleveland Indians pitchers, Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar. Carrasco climbed 92 spots up to 28th, while Salazar ascended 81 spots up to 50th. Combine that with Corey Kluber at #8, and that’s a pretty formidable rotation. Although, it’s tough for that to measure up to a Cubs rotation that has the #4 pitcher (Arrieta) and the #9 pitcher (Jon Lester) in it, or a Dodgers rotation that not only has the best pitcher in the game, but the two best pitchers in the game (Kershaw and Zack Greinke).

And Scherzer? He ended the season ranked #3, 50+ points behind Kershaw. That’s a daunting deficit to be sure. But after throwing a second no-hitter of the season in his last start, we can be sure that Scherzer shouldn’t be counted out for top dog status somewhere down the line.

The Starting Pitcher Rankings presented in this section capture the rankings as they stood on the first day of each month during the season, as well as the last day of the season. You can also find these rankings updated on a daily basis on www.billjamesonline.com.

Starting Pitcher Rankings

Stolen Base Attempt Times

Bill James

Rico Noel’s actual first name, according to Baseball Reference and Wikipedia, is Jablonski. Seems improbable, doesn’t it? I can see why he prefers to be called Rico.

Rico stole 90 bases for Lake Elsinore in 2012, and was 62-for-67 in stolen base attempts in the low minors in 2011, so probably, growing up, he was the fastest kid in Lawton, Oklahoma named Jablonski, I’m guessing. Also, I’m pretty sure he could outrun Ray Jablonski, who played for the Cardinals in the 1950s, which probably makes him the fastest major league player ever named Jablonski.

More impressive than that, he may also be the fastest player in the major leagues, period, at least the fastest going first to second. At Baseball Info Solutions we use some really sharp frame-counting software to record the times of every player going first to second on a stolen base attempt; not all stolen base attempts, because when a runner is picked off first and breaks for second that obviously is different, and attempts to steal third are different because sometimes runners get a 20-foot lead off of second base. Also, we don’t use the times on Hit and Run attempts. Anyway, we get very precise times for every runner on steal attempts of second base.

Jablonski Rico Noel was released by the San Diego Padres in the middle of last summer, and was signed by the Yankees, who called him to the majors to be a pinch runner in September, when the rosters go to 40 men (which, by the way is a GREAT rule. I hope the powers that be never listen to these jabberdonkies who are always complaining about the 40-man roster in September. That rule has been on the books since my grandfather was a kid, and I like it. When you’re fighting for the pennant, you should be able to use every weapon you can lay your hands on.) Anyway, Noel attempted to steal seven bases, and was 5-for-7 as a base stealer. That’s not a fantastic record, but Noel’s average time going first to second was 3.47 seconds. That’s a fantastic time.

Billy Hamilton was second at 3.48; that’s not a surprise…Jarrod Dyson third, that’s not a surprise. This chart presents the data for every player who had six qualifying stolen base attempts. The difference between the top of the chart and the bottom of the chart—the difference between the fastest base stealer in the majors and the slowest—is a half a second. Alex Gordon was the slowest; he was 2-for-7 stealing bases, which I’m pretty sure is below the break-even percentage. Jay Bruce, though, was still 9-for-14 stealing bases, and David Peralta, a native of Carabobo, Venezuela whose nickname is Freight Train, was 9 for 13, because it’s tough to stop a train from stealing second.

Of course, stealing a base successfully is a complex business; it involves not merely speed, but also the ability to get a lead without being picked off first base, the ability to break at the earliest possible instant, the judgment to know when you can run and when you can’t, who you can steal against and who you can’t, the ability to avoid the tag at second base, and probably numerous other skills. Joc Pederson has a really good first-to-second average time, but nonetheless was 4-for-11 stealing bases.

But the fact that stealing bases successfully has all of these other dimensions isn’t a reason to ignore the speed; rather, it is a reason to measure the pure speed if you can measure the pure speed. You can teach a player that he can run on Jon Lester but he can’t run on Wade Miley; you can teach him to read the pitcher’s move, you can teach him to get a lead. You can show him pictures of Yadier Molina with the word NO written across the face in giant letters. Maybe you can teach him how to slide, if you get to him early enough. You can’t teach a player to run like Jablonski Rico Noel.

Stolen Base Attempt Times (2B Only)

Painting the Corners

Bill James

To me, the largest revelations of the modern pitch tracking systems, which began about ten years ago, are

1) That good pitchers are able to put almost all of their pitches on the very edges of the strike zone, and

2) That pitches that stray into the heart of the plate have a real tendency to get hit hard.

After a few years of watching these strike rectangles, these things may seem to be obvious, but I tell you in all sincerity that these lessons were extremely surprising to me, and I had been watching baseball games for 45 or 50 years before those pitch zone rectangles appeared. Jim Bouton wrote about this in Ball Four, but what Bouton wrote largely suggested that pitchers could not do this. I had tended to believe that Bouton was right. But you watch a game now, and you see pitch after pitch after pitch, on the very edge of the zone. Announcers now routinely assert that a pitcher’s ability to pitch on the black is the key to his success. Announcers say a lot of things that don’t turn out to be true, and our data so far suggests that this one may not be true, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

For one thing—the point made forcefully by Ted Williams 50 years ago—the edge of the strike zone is a very significant portion of the area of the strike zone. The strike zone is about 17 inches by 23 inches, more or less, and that is about 391 square inches (measured in two dimensions. I understand the three-dimensional issue, but this is complicated enough.)

Anyway, if the strike zone was 15 by 21, that would be 315 square inches. If it was 19 by 25, that would be 475 square inches. A large strike zone, then, is 50% larger than a small strike zone, although we’re only adding or subtracting a couple of inches on each side. Ted Williams’ point about this was that if you give the pitcher an inch or two on the edge of the zone, the zone becomes much larger, and much harder for the batter to dominate. But there is a second point here: that the fact that pitchers very often throw the ball on the edges of the strike zone doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing it on purpose. Sometimes they’re throwing the ball on the edges of the zone because the edges of the zone are a significant portion of the whole of the zone. Sometimes the pitcher may be throwing the ball to the right side of the plate, but it may cross the plate on the black—but on the left side. That happens.

As Bouton said, I do not believe generally that pitchers can put the ball on a spot. Our studies of pitchers hitting the catcher’s target, for example, show that they very rarely do. Pitchers only hit the catcher’s mitt, without the catcher moving the mitt at least a few inches, about 10% of the time. Pitchers are good, but they’re not that good. They hit the black because the black is there.

My understanding before the pitch rectangles appeared on TV was that pitchers generally tried to throw strikes, but sometimes threw balls because they just missed the zone. My understanding now is that most pitchers most of the time, early in the count, do not aim at the strike zone; rather, they aim the pitch an inch or two outside the zone (inside or outside or up or down…this is all outside in one meaning of the term.) They aim the pitch an inch or two outside the zone, understanding that this gives them two ways to profit from the pitch: 1) that the batter may chase the pitch, even though it is outside the zone and in a place that is difficult to reach, and 2) that even though they have aimed for just outside the zone, they may (almost accidentally) clip the corner of the zone, and thus get a strike. Later in the count, of course, the pitcher may be in a position where he actually has to attempt to hit the zone, and this involves risk—but at the beginning, 0-0 or certainly 0-1, the pitcher is not really trying to throw the ball IN the strike zone.

If the pitcher actually aims at the edge of the zone, of course his chance of getting a strike increases, but, since he cannot actually place the ball exactly where he wants it to go, the pitcher who is aiming for the edge sometimes will accidentally throw the ball in the heart of the zone. The pitch that accidentally hits the heart of the zone can get an immediate resolution to the plate appearance—but not (most often) a resolution that the pitcher is anxious to get. The pitcher is smarter to delay that resolution to the plate appearance to the point at which it can no longer be avoided. By aiming the early pitches outside the zone, the pitcher reduces the probability of a pitch accidentally straying into the red zone. That is my current understanding of the problem.

The general purpose of this section is to build a better understanding of this issue. When a pitcher throws a pitch, that pitch is either:

a) Clearly outside the strike zone,

b) On the edge of the zone, or

c) Clearly inside the zone.

I proposed last summer to the guys I work with at Baseball Info Solutions that we track how many of each of those each pitcher throws. But when the data showed up, it showed only about 11% of pitches as being on the edge of the zone.

Well, that’s crazy talk, in my opinion. My view of the game is that 70 or 80% of pitches are on the edges of the zone, as an ordinary fan would describe the edges of the zone. There is really no right or wrong answer here; the edge of the zone has no precise definition. One person could say that that pitch was on the edge of the zone; another could say that it was clearly outside the zone; who’s to say? My belief is that if you sat down with 10,000 fans and watched 10,000 pitches each, you’d have a hundred million reactions there, about 70 million or 80 million of them would be yes, that pitch was on the edge of the zone. 70 or 80%. We may not be able to fund that undertaking, but I’m just sayin’.

So I kicked that back to the research department, and they came back with a second definition that showed about 40% of pitches on the black, which I still don’t think is right, but the clock is moving and there is no way to say who is right, so we’ve got to go forward and learn what we can.

Our data in this study does not show that putting pitches on the black is a major identifier of pitching effectiveness. The chart includes all pitchers who threw at least 2500 pitches in 2015…about 130 innings, more or less. Clayton Kershaw is near the bottom in terms of the percentage of his pitches that are on the black, at 38.1%. Gerrit Cole is near the bottom, and Garrett Richards, and Danny Salazar, John Lackey, Matt Harvey, Jordan Zimmerman and Max Scherzer. There is really no indication, in this data, that putting pitches on the black is a major element of pitching success.

Further, at least in this data, there does not appear to be huge variation among pitchers as to how often they put pitches on the black. The lowest on the edge percentage in the majors, among pitchers with 2500 pitches thrown, was 37%, and the highest was 45%—8% top to bottom; actually it is close to 9%, so let’s say 9%.

Also, there is not tremendous variation in pitches thrown entirely outside the zone; that ranges from 35% (James Shields) down to 24%, by Bartolo Colon and Wei-Yin Chen. The largest variation among the three categories is in pitches in the heart of the zone. That ranges from 22% (Francisco Liriano) up to 36% (Max Scherzer and Bartolo Colon), and there are many more pitches near the top and bottom of the chart than is true in the other two categories.

What does this tell us?

Well, (a) it tells us that Max Scherzer has a lot of confidence in his stuff. He’s not succeeding by nibbling the corners of the zone; he is succeeding because his stuff is so good that he can put pitches in the heart of the zone and batters still can’t hit it. (b) It tells us something, perhaps, a little bit, about how different pitchers approach the risk/reward equation of aiming for the edge and accidentally getting a little too much of the plate.

And (c), it tells us that we still have a lot of work to do before we understand this. Have we properly described the edge of the zone as 40% of pitches, or should it be 80%? How does that change with the count? Obviously you’re going to throw more pitches in the zone on 2-0 than you will on 0-2, but how many more?

And what is the results profile for each of these categories? What is the contact rate on pitches in the heart of the zone? What’s the contact percentage on the edge of the zone? What is the swing-and-miss percentage? How many hard hit balls result from pitches in the heart