This weekend, the Hagerstown Suns are finishing the first half of their season while Bryce Harper continues to nurse a sore thumb. He’s scheduled to participate in Tuesday’s Sally League All-Star Game (including the home run derby). After that? There are rumors he’ll be promoted.
When Harper was assigned to Hagerstown in March, Mike Rizzo made it clear that he “has a specific plan in place for Harper’s ascension through the minor leagues, but he declined to share it with reporters.” In a May interview, Rizzo revealed some aspects of his plan. Harper would not play for the Nationals in 2011, and Rizzo believes that Harper “needs to touch every level of the minor league system – A-ball, Double-A, Triple-A and the big leagues. He’s going to do some Arizona Fall League action.”
From what I can tell, Rizzo’s approach to management is methodical; he tends to make plans and stick with them (in contrast to Jim Bowden, who took much more of a fly-by-the seat-of-your-leather-pants approach). When Harper’s bat got hot in early May, sources close to the team (like Bob Carpenter—presumably using information that team officials provided on background) began mentioning the Sally League All-Star game as the target date for Harper’s next move.
The interesting question is whether Harper next move will be to Potomac, or if he’ll be promoted directly to Class AA Harrisburg. Byron Kerr mentioned rumors that Harper might skip Potomac “because the Woodbridge field is not in good shape.” Tom Boswell and Jim Bowden have also suggested that Harper might be advanced directly to AA. On the other hand, Rizzo’s statement that Harper “needs to touch every level” would appear to rule out skipping High A (though some commenters have noted that when he listed the levels, he just said “A-ball” without separately mentioning High Class A).
If Harper doesn’t skip Potomac, I think it’s difficult to see him advancing to the Nationals during 2012. The most likely scenario would have him spend most of the remainder of this season in Potomac, followed by a brief promotion to Harrisburg to ensure eligibility for the Arizona Fall League. In 2012 (assuming he avoids injury and plays well), he would spend the first half in Harrisburg and the second half in Syracuse. In 2013, he could be brought up to Washington in late April, giving the Nationals control of his contract through 2019.
A promotion to Harrisburg next week, on the other hand, would appear to be consistent with a plan to bring him up to the Nationals by June of 2012. The team, however, would retain control of his contract only through 2018. Would it really make sense to give up Harper’s age 26 season to get half of his age 19 season? No, it wouldn’t, which is why I think that Harper won’t skip Potomac and won’t join the Nationals until late April of 2013.
Update: Mark Zuckerman of Nats Insider and Adam Kilgore of The Washington Post provide some more information on the outfield drainage problems affecting Potomac’s Pfitzner Stadium in Woodbridge, Virginia. If the Nationals are reluctant to have Harper play in Potomac due to field conditions, it’s possible that they could leave him in Hagerstown for a few more weeks, then bypass Potomac and promote him directly to Harrisburg in early August.
Which is the better predictor of team’s future wins—its win-loss record or its run differential? Everyone who is familiar with the stats-centric sites knows that it’s the latter. The Nats’ run differential has been better than their W–L record for a while, and after tonight’s 10–0 pounding of the Cardinals it has gone positive—263 runs scored versus 262 runs allowed. On that basis alone, we might expect the Nats to play .500 ball going forward.
The thing is, the Nats team that’s playing right now is better than the team that put up the +1 run differential in its first 68 games. Playing Ryan Zimmerman instead of Jerry Hairston, by itself, is probably worth at least +3 wins over the remainder of the season. The injured Adam LaRoche ineffectually used up 177 plate appearances; giving those PAs instead to Michael Morse and Laynce Nix, even assuming that these two red-hot hitters cool off some, should be worth another one or two wins.
Has the team been playing over its head? (I’m talking about the first 68 games, not just tonight’s game, where of course we were playing over our heads.) My sense is that the starting pitchers have been a bit over their heads and are likely to revert some. The Nats’ starters rank 10th in the National League in both ERA and FIP, but 16th (last) in xFIP, suggesting that they may have been somewhat lucky in issuing fewer home runs than expected.
For the batters it’s more of a mixed bag. The team’s batting average on balls in play was only .278 before tonight’s game, last in the league. I wouldn’t attribute that all to bad luck—the struggles of LaRoche and Iván Rodríguez have doubtless been more attributable to declining skill than to luck—but I think that several players—especially Jayson Werth and Danny Espinosa (at least batting from the left side) have been somewhat unlucky. On the other hand, Morse and Nix have been somewhat lucky.
Of course, we can’t expect to go the rest of the season without any injuries. Nix and Jason Marquis probably will be (and should be) traded. Jordan Zimmermann will be shut down after he reaches his innings limit. Nevertheless, I think the Nats really do have a realistic shot to play +4 wins over the rest of the season and end up .500 or higher. The improvements are starting to show.
I know I’m probably just caught up in the euphoria of our fifth consecutive win, but this is the best I’ve felt about this team since that fluke first-place run in 2005 (and we all knew that was a fluke, whereas now we seem to be progressing toward the real thing). Finishing above .500 is a worthy and reasonable goal for the remainder of this season.
This is just for fun. I ran across a site (http://www.minorleaguesplits.com/mlecalc.html by Jeff Sackmann) that features a calculator for major league equivalencies. I recommend treating these with caution—with essentially no players transitioning directly from low Class A to MLB, we really can’t test whether the translations are accurate. Also, the site doesn’t include any 2011 data, so it’s probably out of date. Nevertheless, I love looking at MLEs, so this still seemed like a fun calculation.
I fed the calculator the following actual data for Bryce Harper from his play with Hagerstown (South Atlantic League) through June 9:
206 AB, 40 R, 70 H, 14 2B, 0 3B, 14 HR, 43 RBI, 33 BB, 49 K, .340, .433, .612, 12 SB, 5 CS
Here’s what the calculator says his stats would be if he were with the Nats:
221 AB, 21 R, 50 H, 9 2B, 0 3B, 7 HR, 23 RBI, 18 BB, 58 K, .226, .283, .368, 8 SB, 6 CS
For the fans who are calling on the Nats to bring up Harper right away, these numbers should be sobering. There’s a huge talent gulf between low-A ball and the big leagues.
I think the MLEs will get to be more interesting when Harper makes it to Double A. In the meantime, though, I’ll try to update these occasionally as he progresses through the low minors.
- Tom Boswell of The Washington Post on the emergence of Danny Espinosa.
- Dave Cameron of fangraphs.com on how underrated Ryan Zimmerman is.
- Rob Neyer of Baseball Nation on the Nats drafting Anthony Rendon.
- Laynce Nix saves a June 1 win over the Phillies with his diving catch of Domonic Brown’s bases loaded drive.
- Life presents a slideshow of the ugliest uniforms ever.
- An old, but still relevant, article by Aaron Gleeman of The Hardball Times on Liván Hernández‘s incredible pitch counts.
Except where noted, all statistics are for the month of May only.
Record:
11–17 (.393) for May – falling to 23–31 (.426) for the season.
Pythagorean Record:
14–14 (4.07 R/G – 4.21 RA/G). The Nats’ record in one-run games this month was 3-9.
MVP for May:
Danny Espinosa (.207/.305/.543, 28 G, 106 PA, 8 HR, 15 R, 18 RBI, 135 wRC+, 1.2 fWAR). It seems kind of weird for the most valuable player to have hit .207 for the month. Based on hitting alone, Michael Morse (.403/.422/.774) would be the obvious choice, but considering Espinosa’s superior defense at second base and advantages in playing time and baserunning, I agree with fangraphs WAR that Espinosa was the most valuable player.
Most valuable starting pitcher:
Jordan Zimmermann (1-2, 3.23 ERA, 5 G, 30-2/3 IP, 8.8 K/9, 2.35 BB/9, 0.6 HR/9, 2.61 FIP, 3.38 xFIP, 5 of 5 quality starts). Despite the losing record, he’s really the only viable candidate this month.
Early in the season, small samples are the bane of statistical analysis. But now that we’re nearly 50 games and one-third of the way through the season, we’re starting to get samples that are large enough to really be indicative of performance. Let’s take a look at the Nats’ starting rotation (all of whom have now pitched at least nine starts and 50 innings).
As Steven at FJB has noted, run scoring is down and the old performance standards may be deceptive. I like to look at things by seeing where players fit within a distribution, so I went to fangraphs and looked at all starting pitchers with at least 30 innings pitched through May 25 (a total of 143 pitchers). I sorted them into quintiles; for each quintile I’ll list all of the NL East pitchers, with the Nationals in bold. (Note that within each quintile, I’ve sorted them by team, not by level of performance.)
I think quintiles are interesting because people often talk about pitchers in terms of numbers one through five (“he’s a potential ace” or “he’s just a number four or five pitcher”). Looking at quintiles, an average team would be expected to have about one pitcher from each quintile. Good teams, obviously, tend to have pitchers concentrated in the top quintiles, while poor pitching teams will have them in the lower quintiles. We’ll see that in what follows.
First, here are the quintiles for ERA– (that is, ERA that has been adjusted for park effects and normalized so that 100 is “average”).
First quintile (ERA– of 42 to 78): Jair Jurrjens, Tommy Hanson (ATL), Josh Johnson (FLA), Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt (PHI)
Second quintile (79 to 92): Ricky Nolasco, Anibal Sanchez (FLA), Dillon Gee (NYM), Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee (PHI)
Third quintile (93 to 107): Brandon Beachy, Tim Hudson, Derek Lowe (ATL), Livan Hernandez, Jordan Zimmermann (WAS)
Fourth quintile (109 to 129): Jonathon Niese (NYM), Tom Gorzelanny, Jason Marquis (WAS)
Fifth quintile (131 to 201): Javier Vazquez, Chris Volstad (FLA), Chris Capuano, RA Dickey, Mike Pelfrey (NYM), Joe Blanton (PHI), John Lannan (WAS)
I notice that four of the Phillies’ five pitchers are in the top two quintiles, while none of the Nats’ pitchers make it higher than the third quintile. All five of the Braves’ pitchers are in the top three quintiles, while only one Mets is above the fourth quintile.
There’s still a lot of noise in ERA statistics. A measure that tends to be more stable in small samples is xFIP, which is an ERA-like measure that is based just on strikeouts, walks, and fly balls (to pick up a pitcher’s home run tendency). Although these seem like a small number of indicators, they correlate very well with pitching ability. The following distribution looks, to me at least, like a more accurate distribution of pitching talent:
First quartile (xFIP of 2.26 to 3.22): Brandon Beachy, Tommy Hanson, Derek Lowe (ATL), Josh Johnson, Ricky Nolasco, Anibal Sanchez (FLA), Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee (PHI)
Second quintile (3.24 to 3.58): Jair Jurrjens (ATL), Chris Volstad (FLA), Joe Blanton (PHI)
Third quintile (3.59 to 3.94): Jonathon Niese (NYM), Roy Oswalt (PHI), Jason Marquis, Jordan Zimmermann (WAS)
Fourth quintile (3.94 to 4.32): Tim Hudson (ATL), Chris Capuano, RA Dickey (NYM), Tom Gorzelanny, Livan Hernandez, John Lannan (WAS)
Fifth quintile (4.33 to 5.57): Javier Vazquez (FLA), Dillon Gee, Mike Pelfrey (NYM)
This distribution really emphasizes how good the pitching is that the Nationals face in the NL East—nine of the top 29 starting pitchers in baseball as measured by xFIP pitch for Atlanta, Florida, or Philadelphia. (Maybe this helps explain why our batters our struggling!)
So, what do I take away from this analysis? I find it pretty sobering. The notion that all the Nationals need to do to have a competitive pitching staff is to wait for Stephen Strasburg to return and watch Zimmermann develop into a number two starter is naive and wrong-headed. That might be good enough to produce an average rotation in another division, but in the NL East, it simply wouldn’t be enough to be competitive. Along with Strasburg and Zimmermann, we’ll need at least two more first or second quintile starters if we hope to compete with the Phillies, Braves, and Marlins. One of Marquis, Hernandez, or Gorzelanny might be adequate as a number five. As I discussed in an earlier post, Lannan probably won’t or shouldn’t be around much longer.
Mike Rizzo has his work cut out to develop, trade for, or sign two more high quality starters. But he can’t expect to win if he continues to field a team with average-to-below-average starters.
According to traditional statistics, John Lannan‘s career has been on a downward spiral the last two seasons. Here are his ERAs for the 2008–11:
3.91 / 3.88 / 4.65 / 5.03
and his ERA+:
110 / 109 / 87 / 76.
Opponents’ batting average against him have increased:
.252 / .266 /.302 / .303
as have opponents’ OPS against him:
.728 / .750 / .799 / .825.
The share of quality starts has declined:
68% / 58% / 48% / 40%.
Baseball-reference.com’s wins-above-replacement statistic (rWAR), which is based on runs allowed with an adjustment for team defense, shows Lannan declining from an above average pitcher to one who is below replacement:
3.0 / 2.8 / 0.1 / –0.3.
On the other hand, another approach to evaluating pitchers, which is championed by fangraphs.com, emphasizes fielding independent statistics. Lannan’s fielder independent pitching (FIP) doesn’t show much trend:
4.79 / 4.70 / 4.47 / 4.38.
The resulting wins-above-replacement statistic (fWAR) doesn’t show a decline, but instead shows a pitcher who’s been persistently mediocore:
1.3 / 1.5 / 1.2 / 0.3.
The difference between the two sets of statistics largely reflects opponents’ batting average on balls in play, which is counted in rWAR, but is excluded (because it is not independent of fielding) from fWAR. For Lannan, opponents’ batting average on balls in play has steadily increased:
.266 / .272 / .319 / .331.
In his six starts since April 25, Lannan has allowed 22 runs in 32-2/3 innings. If his performance doesn’t improve over his next few starts, we could very well see him being sent back to Syracuse or Harrisburg.
Like many Nats fans, I have a soft spot for John. He was one of the Nats’ few bright spots during those dreary 2008-09 seasons. While he wasn’t what you’d really like as your team’s number one starter, he usually did pitch well enough to keep the team in the game—sort of like Liván does now. He and Zim are about the only remaining links to those teams, and it would be sad to see John go. I wish him well.
Most link lists follow one of two philosophies. On the one hand, there are what I think of as news aggregators—lists that cover the news on a topic and try to be relatively comprehensive. In the Natosphere, Federal Baseball is a good example of a site that takes this approach. The other approach is to search the Web for unusual and interesting articles and use your link list bring them to the attention of your readers. Rob Neyer is probably the premier example of this approach, especially on his old ESPN blog (he doesn’t seem to do it as much now that he’s at Baseball Nation).
I’m going to use a little different philosophy here. I’m going to try to address one of my chronic issues with the Web—where do I find that really cool article I remember reading a few months ago? The articles I’ll be linking to are the ones that I think I may want to look at again three or six months from now. Think of it as a set of bookmarks that I’m sharing with the public.
So here we go.
- Tom Boswell of The Washington Post uses the occasion of Harmon Killebrew’s passing to reflect on his development as a young baseball prodigy and the lessons learned for Bryce Harper.
- Dave Cameron of fangraphs.com compares Harper to other 18-year old prodigies, asking if Harper may be the best prospect ever. Some of the comparisons he makes include Alex Rodriguez, Adrian Beltre, and Ken Griffey, Jr. Pretty heady company.
- Rob Neyer of Baseball Nation admires the “perfection” of Liván Hernández—in the sense that Liván is perfectly average.
- Harper of Nationals Baseball dishes out some rare praise to the Nationals for giving Ian Desmond, Danny Espinosa, and Wilson Ramos time to develop.
- I must have watched Roger Bernadina‘s amazing catch two dozen times now, and I’m sure I’ll want to see it again.
- Speaking of spectacular catches, Danny Espinosa had two to remember in a May 7 game against Florida, robbing Hanley Ramirez and Emilio Bonifacio of hits.
One of the more noticeable changes in the Nationals pitching this season is that the starters are going deeper into games. Last season, the starters were 29th of 30 teams in innings pitched per game, on average recording only 15.5 outs per game. So far this year, they are averaging 18.2 outs per game (almost an additional inning per game), ranking 13th in MLB.
In general, this is a very positive development. It’s certainly good to have starters go deeper into games and place less stress on the relief staff. Jim Riggleman has accomplished this without ever running up large pitch counts.
Despite my general support for this change, I do think there are a few situations where it would have been better strategy to not try to keep the starter in quite so long. One example was in last night’s game, in which Tom Gorzelanny pitched against the Mets in New York. Although he allowed only one run in the first five innings, he had not been sharp—having allowed four walks and six hits. He had faced 24 batters and his pitch count was up to 99.
In the bottom of the sixth, trailing the Mets 1 to 0, he allowed a lead-off single to Scott Hairston, who advanced to second on a flyout by Ruben Tejada. Niese then struck out, and Gorzelanny faced Jose Reyes, who was two for three against him. This is where, in my opinion, it was time to go to the bullpen. The important consideration is that pitchers tend to pitch significantly worse the fourth time through the opposing lineup, as batters have become accustomed to their pitches.
To illustrate, so far this season opposing batters have hit .270 against Nats starters. In the fourth time through the lineup (admittedly a small sample of just 25 plate appearances), they’re hitting .333. Over larger samples, we see the same effect. Over Gorzelanny’s career as a starter, opponents have hit .267, but in the fourth time through the lineup, they’ve hit .288. For Liván Hernández‘s career (a much larger sample), opponents have hit .284 when he’s started, but .302 the fourth time through the lineup. The Book (by Tango, Lichtman, and Dolphin) documents that this is a systematic tendency.
Instead of lifting him, Riggleman had Gorzelanny issue an intentional walk to Reyes (a topic for another post sometime), and he then gave up a double to Justin Turner that scored both runners. Riggleman then lifted Gorzy, but the damage was done as the Nats now trailed 3–0. Of course, since the Nats ultimately were shut out, an earlier pitching change wouldn’t have made a difference. Nevertheless, I think it’s better strategy not to press a starter to continue when he’s allowed a baserunner and has started his fourth time through the lineup.
A similar situation took place in Hernández’s May 3 game against the Phillies, when he was left in the game after giving up a lead-off single to Victorino in the seventh inning (and fourth time through the lineup), trailing the Phils 2 to 1. Victorino advanced to second on an out and then scored on a single by Howard, before Riggleman lifted Liván. Another close game slipped further out of reach.
I’m not saying to never let a pitcher stay in for the fourth time through. I’m just saying—especially in a close game where the starter isn’t pitching sharply—to have a reliever ready and be ready to yank the starter at the first sign of trouble. Also, late in a close game, be willing to send in a pinch hitter for a pitcher (except maybe for Jason Marquis and Hernández, who seem to hit better than most of our bench). For example, in John Lannan‘s April 30 game against the Giants, he was allowed to bat in the bottom of the sixth of a 1–1 tie. In the seventh, he got into trouble and gave up the winning run (after another infamous intentional walk, this time to load the bases). I think the smart strategy would have been to lift him for a pinch hitter.
Ben Goessling of MASN on Sunday’s game against the Marlins:
By the time Jason Marquis took the mound for the second inning on Sunday, he had a six-run lead to play with against the Florida Marlins. That was in part because of an offense that hustled its way into a few runs in the early part of the first inning. But the biggest reason Marquis had a comfortable lead – and one of the main reasons the Nationals had done enough to beat the Marlins by the end of the first inning – was the pitcher himself.
His at-bat in the bottom of the first was a display of savvy hitting; he took two breaking balls from Javier Vazquez, knowing he’d get a fastball on the third pitch of his at-bat. And when Vazquez left it up in the zone, Marquis slapped it down the left field line against an outfield shifted well away from it. The double scored two runs, and though Marquis was thrown out trying to advance to third, the inning ended with Washington up 6-0.
Although NL pitchers don’t bat a lot, they do bat a couple of times per start, and their at bats count. A pitcher who can swing the bat, like Marquis or Liván Hernández, can add as much as half a win per season. WAR statistics—that is, “wins above replacement”—purport to be comprehensive measures of player value and should capture pitcher batting. While both fangraphs and baseball-reference sites show WAR for pitcher batting, there are problems with these data that render them less useful than they should be.
At fangraphs, the issue seems to be computational. Batting WAR for pitchers is not centered at zero, so pitchers who hit better than the average pitcher still have negative WAR. At this point in the 2011 season, only 10 pitchers have positive fWAR (led by J.A. Happ at 0.3), whereas 71 have negative fWAR. The total pitcher batting fWAR for the league is –14.0, or about a win per team. Conceptually, I think this should be zero—an NL pitcher is helping his team with the bat if he hits better than his average opposing pitcher. I don’t see how the fWAR numbers can be meaningfully interpreted—if they are added to the pitcher’s pitching WAR, NL pitchers would be at a big disadvantage to AL pitchers.
Fortunately, the other site, baseball-reference, seems to have pitching batting rWAR correctly centered around zero. My complaint there is that most table and leaderboards show pitching rWAR and a pitcher’s batting rWAR separately, without showing their sum, so batting WAR is often overlooked. For some uses of rWAR, this is a serious omission.
For example, if you just look at pitching rWAR, Walter Johnson (127.7) is third on the career leaderboard, behind Cy Young and Roger Clemens. But if you add in their batting rWAR, Johnson—an excellent hitter—moves up to 139.8, easily surpassing Clemens and nearly catching up with Young.
Pitcher batting should be routinely included in measures of pitcher value. The measure that excludes pitcher batting should be a supplementary measure, not the main measure.
