Blessed Day Watching Baseball

Today was the first chance this spring I have had to watch a baseball game. It was so totally enjoyable and relaxing to listen in to the flow of the announcers, hear the cracks of the bats and pitches popping the catcher's mitt. Being a Spring Training game, I was able to see some prospects play, see the relaxed fans and listen as running steps ran through first on ground outs. While I have been enjoying the game for over a half a century, baseball always seems new and wonderful. Those feelings overcome all the negativity that I otherwise hear about the game.

South-central Florida has three different sports talk radio stations. And during the week I listen when I can and flip back and forth. I would never dare call any of them and that is okay because they hardly take calls on talk radio these days.

One of the stations is a Fox Sports affiliate, the other a CBS Sports station and then there is ESPN. I mostly prefer the Fox station as they have rock-solid personalities to listen to (except probably Andy Slater). Despite the riches of options, I cannot listen to them for long.

You can pretty much guarantee what will be discussed on these stations these days (and most of the year). Number one seems to be Lebron James and the Lakers. Number two seems to be that player the Lakers wanted and New Orleans foiled them with a gleam in their eyes. Following those two are the Celtics, the Knicks, the NFL draft and the current situation (ad nauseam) with the Steelers' erstwhile wide receiver.

Baseball was briefly discussed when Bryce Harper signed. Most panned the contract for the Phillies stating the team was crazy. So my ears perked up when one of the shows brought up baseball that was not free agent related. To my dismay (but not surprise), most of the talk was negative. Baseball is in trouble, they said. Baseball is boring, they said. Baseball is only enjoyed by people with the average age of 50 they said. Baseball is no longer the center of American life, they said.

Radio, like television, lives and dies by advertising revenue. And advertising revenue these days seems to mean targeting to young people between 18 and 35. According to all wisdom, that is the age group that sparks the economy. That age bracket is the one which spends money. As such, it has been determined that the NBA is most important to the targeted age bracket followed by the NFL. None of them want to hear about baseball.

That could be true and it could be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The length of the game is ALWAYS cited as a problem. The lack of action is another big one. And the fuzzy third is that Major League Baseball discourages the individualism and spontaneity of its players.

Let's discuss these three for a brief moment. I am not going to get all technical about it with facts and figures. I could if I wanted to. But I am a fan. And albeit, I am one of those older fans they talk about and outside the target audience. But baseball is only too long if you do not love the game. That's it, plain and simple. One of the radio "experts" cited extra-innings as a killer. Seriously? That thought has been so loud lately as to have baseball's commissioner consider starting extra innings with a runner on second. What an abomination that would be!

There is an ebb and flow in a baseball game. It takes a lifetime of playing and watching the sport to enjoy that tidal ride. If you are a marginal fan, I can see how that could be boring.

I am not against doing away with some of the really tedious things. Stopping Gary Sanchez from going to the mound 45 times in a half inning was a good idea. I thought that helped a lot. I am not totally against a pitch clock as long as it includes an element for the batter too. I like the idea of not so many pitching changes in an inning. Tony La Russa really started that mess, didn't he? As long as the ancient (there, I said it) ebb and flow of a game is not messed with, speed it up where you can. But even as it stands now, baseball is never too long for me. Ever.

The second one is related to the first. Much is talked about how baseball has become a three-outcome affair. Either it is a strikeout, a walk or a homer. And it is true that strikeouts are at an all-time high and homers are way up there as everyone preaches launch angle these days. But does that really make it a three-outcome game?

Okay, I lied, I will throw a couple of numbers out there. Last season, strikeouts, walks and homers accounted for 62,478 plate appearances. That is a lot, eh? In 2010, that number was at 54,697 and in 2000, the number was 55,286. That is quite a jump. If we assume that 55,000 was the old norm, then last year's rate was a 12% increase. And last year was the first time there were more strikeouts league-wide than hits. So far, I seem to be making the point for the naysayers.

But consider there are around 185,000 plate appearances a year (last year was 185,154). Strikeouts-walks-homers accounted for 33% of the total of plate appearances. So basically there is 67% of the time when something other than those three events happen. That 2010 number accounted for 29.7% of plate appearances. By percentage, that really is not that big a leap

Look, I have railed against strikeouts over the years more than most. I hate that statistics do not seem to care that Aaron Judge strikes out 200 times a year. I do. Think how good he would be if he halved that?  But are they making the game boring?  I would argue that strikeouts excite people. We already know that homers do.

The lack of offense is a more important issue than the three-outcome thing. While we are not at Deadball Era offense in the modern game, offense has taken a hit from analytics and positioning. Even saying that, I am really against legislating against shifts because it is a strategic part of the game. It is up to the batters to adjust, not the rules. And they will eventually. Baseball is cyclical. It always has been.

The third thing is the individualism, flair, personality issue. While some of the "unwritten" rules discourage celebrations and individualism, I think baseball players are trending toward being more personable. Video games and 24-hours sports programming on the MLB Network (for example) is showing the players more as people.

But I am more than okay with the players doing their jobs and grinding it out day after day. After all, the complete freedom of expression now has players in the NBA and NFL saying things like they are their own CEOs and the sport cannot tell them what to do. Uh, excuse me, but the fans are paying the teams and the teams are paying you, so sit down, shut up and play.

I am not saying that the current MLB is not without its problems. Having teams that can "tank" to get better draft picks by trading their young, expensive talent is a problem. That is not fair to the fans of those cities. Having teams that rake in as much profit from television contracts, salary-tax payments and the staggering money handed over from The MLB Network and MLB.com and not turn those profits into better talent in their dugouts is a real problem. Just ask Pirates and Royals fans.

There is a pseudo-salary cap in place. There should be a salary basement as well. The minimum team payroll should be set at $80-$100 million. The minimum salary should be at a million a year. Players need to start making money when they are younger because the free-agent model has changed (and it should change). And there are other things like pitcher health, for example, and the playing of important games far too late into the night so children can watch is a huge problem

But overall, Major League Baseball is still a beloved game by a LOT of people. It still has the second highest revenue in all of major sports. I think if some of the radio energy was actually put into MLB, then the perception would change. While I am not going to get into the way that Fox and CNN try to bend perception, the fact is that they do. And it hurts us as a country. Having the sports media down-talk baseball and instead try to increase its relevance in their thinking would go a long way to change how young people think about the game.

Either way, MLB has been one of my strongest passions my entire lifetime and one of my true joys. I was so glad to watch a game today. It never gets old. Only I do. And I do believe that this game that I love will still be kicking strong as long as I am on this earth.

The New Moneyball And The Corner Bakery

My first admission is that I am 62-years-old. As a fan of some 56 years of MLB, I have to fight my inner Murray Chass (or Tony La Russa apparently) and not be a curmudgeon about baseball analytics. I use them. I enjoy them as rating tools. But there is just something about the entire game being run by them that rubs me in all the wrong George Orwell places.

My curmudgeon side will complain that analytics is the cause of shifts in baseball and lower batting averages. They are the cause of being unhappy that Justin Verlander's career was petering until he went to Houston. Can't a guy I don't like die a graceless death already?

My inner Murray Chass will bemoan strikeouts that are just outs when I will never accept that or that they are worth it if launch angles create more homers along the way. I won't ever be able to figure out why Designated Hitters who never touch a glove all season get negative dWAR. I'll never understand how Didi Gregorius never rates higher defensively than he does or how the defense of a lousy hitter makes him a better player than a really good hitter.

My second admission is that I long ago accepted that is the game now as we know it. I get it. I am, after all, the kid who played multiple Strat-o-matic baseball game seasons each summer knowing they were an early form of statistical analysis. I will never be an Eno Sarris, but I've done my best to understand as much as I can about what the numbers mean. It's okay. I'll deal.

But then I saw this video on Twitter. And the ever smug, I-know-more-than-you, Brian Kenny introduces Mr. Sarris to talk about the new Moneyball and how analytics is taking over the game from every angle right through player development. I remember when the (very pleasant) Mr. Sarris was a hack blogger like the rest of us. Good on him for carving a career out of figuring this stuff all out. I root for people like him.

So anyway, I watch this video and instead of marveling at how far technology has come in baseball, I got this sinking feeling. There is a sort of innocence lost in being able to parse the game into its minutia.

For some reason, the thought process made me think of cookies. Yes, this is the time of year I think about cookies. I am really good at making cookies. My cookies taste better than ANY cookie I've ever bought at the grocery store. Why is that? Nothing you can buy in a package tastes as good as it did when we used to go down to the bakery and buy from a nice man and his wife. THOSE were cookies!

Is there a similarity here? I think there is. The act of making cookies in mass production came from information. The basic formula is how a company can mass produce cookies that consumers will buy despite not tasting as good as their bakery forebears. Use the cheapest materials, find artificial replacements for real ingredients and design machinery and packaging to produce a somewhat tasty, cheaply-made bulk product for the masses.

All those cookie decisions were made by analyzing data. And these companies, whether it be Nabisco or Keebler rely on tons of data to balance performance versus cost. It sounds similar does it not? The bottom line is maximizing the dollar.

But some of the magic was lost. Bakeries cannot compete with mass production. They make a better product but it costs more. I feel a loss not making a special trip to a bakery and smelling the delicious odors and trying to understand what the owners were saying.

Some of the magic of baseball is being lost for me. Does that make me Murray Chass? Gosh, I hope not. Players do not play their entire career with the same team. Next year's roster will look totally different than this year's. A hit up the middle is no longer a hit. Strikeouts with a man on third with one out are okay. No, it's not!

When a rookie came into a league, it was like trying a new cookie recipe. Would it be a winner or a disappointment? Now rookies are measured from molecular structure to entire psychological profiles. Sure, some still flop. But young players just seem to have it so much more together than they did even ten years ago.

I am having a problem describing what I am feeling here. The game just seemed more basic and rooted in my past. If my scorecard read, "5-3," it meant that the third baseman fielded the grounder over by third base, not between first and second (and no, I am not advocating doing away with shifts). There was more mystery to the game which made it unpredictable and accessible.

I wish I could express things better. Let's just say that the attached video that started this thought process made me feel like I had lost something. Cookies no longer melt in my mouth (unless I make them myself). And baseball feels more like a science project than a game.

Whiffing wonders - flipping a Marlon Byrd

Anyone who has read my stuff for a while understands that I am not fond of strikeouts. I have often jousted against the notion that an out is an out is an out. I respectfully disagree. Strikeouts give the batter no opportunity to have anything other than an out where a batted ball will give the batter a 30% chance to get on base. One of the few scenarios where a strikeout is better than a batted ball is a double play. Knowing my predilection to this part of baseball is my discovery that Marlon Byrd has done something in 2014 no player in the history of baseball has ever done before. Marlon Byrd struck out 150 times more than he walked in 2014.

Byrd had a pretty good offensive season by most standards. He had a 110 OPS+, hit 25 homers and drove in 85. In the world of the Phillies, that’s really productive. But when I saw that he had struck out 185 times and only walked 35 times, I was amazed and wondered if anyone had ever done that before.

Using Baseball-reference.com’s handy play index feature, I first looked for players with over 150 strikeouts in a season with less than 50 walks. That did give me a list of 57 all-time players. But I wasn’t sure if that was all inclusive. For example, Mark Reynolds once struck out 223 times and walked way more than fifty times. So then I searched players with more than 150 strikeouts in a season no matter how many walks there were. After all, you need a whole bunch of strikeouts to have 150 more of them than walks. I then subtracted the walks from the strikeouts in each case.

It turns out that exactly 200 batters have struck out more than 150 times in a season. Of those 150, 67 have struck out at least a hundred more times than walking in their season.  That is 33.5%. Of those 67, 23 have struck out 120 or more times than they have walked. Mark Reynolds has done it four times. Chris Carter has done it twice. Pete Incaviglia did it twice. And Pedro Alvarez has done it twice.

Obviously, Pete Incaviglia was a man who played before his time. In fact, no player before 1963 ever struck out 150 or more times. Dave Nicholson was the first ever to reach that total in 1963. That season, Don Lock also broke the magic 150 mark).

The following chart shows how exponential the growth of the 150 strikeout season has become. In our current decade, now only five years in, we have seen 65 such seasons. For the chart’s purposes, I doubled that amount to give a projected total to show the growth of such seasons. In fact, in 2014 alone, ten players struck out at least 150 times, the same amount as the entire decade of the 1970s.

And so it only makes sense that we have finally reached such a pinnacle of strikeouts that for the first time in the history of baseball, a player has struck out 150 more times than he has walked. We have flipped the Marlon Byrd.

The top ten seasons in more strikeouts than walks:

1. Marlon Byrd – 150
2. Mark Ryenolds – 147 (2009)
3. Jose Hernandez – 146 (2001)
4. Danny Espinoza – 143 (2012)
5. Chris Carter (2013), Drew Stubbs (2011) – 142
6. Mike Zunino (2014) – 141
7. Jim Presley (1986), Juan Samuel (1984), Mark Reynolds (2008) – 140
8. Pedro Alvarez (2013) – 138
9. Ian Desmond (2014) – 137
10. Jose Hernandez (2002), Chris Johnson (2014) – 136

I know that this issue drives me crazier than it should. But I can’t get over the fact that if Marlon Byrd had struck out 85 times instead of 185 times and put the ball in play those 100 times, he would have had 29 more hits (using a .291 BABIP for MLB with two strikes in 2014). If you gave him 29 more hits, even if they were all singles, his triple slash line would go from .264/.312/.445 to .313/.358/494. Strikeouts have risen to insane levels and we have finally flipped the Byrd.

Swimming against the strikeout tide

Never in the history of Major League Baseball has the strikeout been as prevalent as it is in today's game. The rate has risen every year and 2014 stands to break another record as the average strikeout rate in baseball is 7.73 strikeouts per nine. Even so, there are a few throwbacks to a bygone era whose current strikeout rates would not have been league average unless they pitched way back in 1981.

There are currently six pitchers who have pitched at least 50 innings who have a strikeout per nine rate less than 5.0 per nine. They are: Paul Maholm (3.96), Nick Martinez (4.22), Kevin Correia and Chris Young (4.48), Bronson Arroyo (4.92) and Kyle Gibson (4.93). Two of those pitch for the Twins.

It gets worse for the Twins from there. There are eighteen pitchers who have logged twenty innings or more this season with less than five strikeouts per nine innings and five of them are Twins. And Matt Guerrier would be on the list too if he had two more innings pitched. Throw them strikes, boys, and let them hit the ball!

The K/9 rate might not actually be the best way to look at strikeouts and pitchers. There is also strikeout percentage, which is all about the percentage of strikeouts per plate appearance rather than by inning. It might be a truer picture.

There are 21 pitchers whose strikeout percentage is less than 15% and who have pitched at least 50 innings. There are 55 who have done the trick with 20 innings or more. Just to give you some perspective, 20.3% is the Major League average. So these guys really are swimming against the strikeout tide.

Only one pitcher is averaging less than 10% for a strikeout rate with 50 or more innings and that is/was Paul Maholm. If you go to twenty innings or more, there are four: Mike Pelfrey (8.4% [!]), LaTroy Hawkins--otherwise known as Methuselah--(9.8%), Scott Carroll and Maholm at 9.7%.

For those who are close to Maholm with more than 50 innings, there is Nick Martinez at 10.7% in 59+ innings whose home ballpark is in Texas--not a good combination. Kevin Correia comes in at 11.3% followed by Chris Young at 12.2% and then by Eric Stults at 12.5%. These guys are fighting the tide and only Chris Young is somewhat succeeding with his offerings.

Last year, there were only five qualified starters who finished with less than 15% for a strikeout rate. The bottom two were Jeremy Guthrie and Kevin Correia. So far this year there are twelve. I don't know if that means there are more exceptions to the rule this year than last or that injuries have forced teams to go with more pitchers who do not fit today's pitching mold.

What I do know is that ten years ago (2005) there were 42 qualifying pitchers that finished with a strikeout percentage of less than 15%. While to this point, twelve is more than the two from last year, we can easily see that this is a dying breed.

Strikeouts Revisited

Everyone seems to be saying that this is the year of the pitcher. It is true that the major hitting stats like homers per game, league batting average, on base percentage and slugging percentage are all down. Strikeouts are the highest in history. Many point to steroids or the lack of them as one of the answers. Maybe. Many are saying that it's because young pitchers are given less time in the minors and are coming to the big leagues faster and thus putting better arms up in the league. Maybe. But young arms also throw more walks and have less experience under pressure. Here is one more theory and it revisits a complaint this Fan has had about modern baseball. Perhaps the blind eye to allowing high strikeout rates is catching up to baseball.

Of course, Mark Reynolds is the lightning rod of the argument. Last year, Reynolds had a 123 OPS+, so it was deemed acceptable that he had 223 strikeouts, the most in history. His line for the year was: .260/.349/.543. The arguments state that if he cut down on his aggressiveness, his slugging would go down and thus his value. Frankly, the Fan finds that argument to be full of beans. And this isn't the first time the Fan has made this argument. Very few of Reynolds homers have come with two strikes or with him behind in the count, so how do you hurt his slugging percentage if he shortens up on two strike counts? But if you can cut 100 of his strikeouts and put the ball in play, with a .300 BABIP probability, you add thirty hits to his tally. Even if those are all singles, his average would jump to .311 and his on base percentage jumps to .399.

The argument has been presented many times that an out is an out. But put the ball in play and errors happen, hits happen and that's the side of the equation that seems to be missing. What we seem to be seeing this year is that the league is striking out more thus making the batters around the league less effective.

As a microcosm of what the Fan is talking about, let's just look at the top 25 strikeout guys in the league last year and this year. Last year, the top 25 strikeout guys struck out 24% of the time. But they had a .480 slugging percentage (collectively) and a .356 OBP. Thus, their collective OPS was .836. With those kinds of numbers, it sure seems worth it to let those 25 guys swing from their heels every time up. But that mentality has caught up to us. This year, those 25 guys have struck out 25% of the time (closer to 26% actually) and their collective OPS is down to .796. The top 25 strikeout guys have lost 14 points on their OBP and more importantly, 26 points on the slugging percentage. Consider if you will that these 25 guys have struck out 1933 times so far in 2010. If you could cut that down by a third, that would (with BABIP in play) add 191 hits. That's a lot of hits being thrown to the third baseman after the third strike.

Baseball mind trusts have been willing to swallow strikeouts because of the mistaken belief that an out is an out is an out. And since many of the high strikeout guys also get on base regularly and hit a lot of homers. the strikeouts are overlooked. But this year, those guys are getting on base less and hitting homers less. How many less? Last year, those top 25 strikeout guys hit a homer 4.3% of the time. This year, those top 25 strikeout guys have hit homers 3.8% of the time. The weight of those strikeouts are getting heavy.

Many of us have played organized ball of some sort, whether it be little league or pony league or something. All of us heard after we got two strikes on us to "choke up a little." Yeah, the strikeout is an out just like any other out. But when you put the ball in play, things can happen. Hits will fall in 30% of the time. Errors will occur. But hardly anybody ever talks about that side of the equation. It's time they did.