Zimmerman's Tommy John Primer

Ulnar Collateral Ligaments
are fragile when you throw
really hard.

The Reds have fortunately managed to largely avoid entanglement in ulnar collateral ligament repair surgery this year, but it is a major topic of interest in baseball because of the recent spike in the surgery that we are seeing.  Jeff Zimmerman penned the first part of an excellent primer on Tommy John Surgery at Hardball Times.  Of note: 20% of pitchers who have the surgery just don't make it back, velocity does NOT increase in the years following the surgery, and pitchers typically struggle their first year back.

The latter is probably well-known.  But the first point is not well appreciated, and the second is an important myth.  A few month ago, on Effectively Wild, Stan Conte, the VP of Medical Services of the Los Angeles Dodgers, was on for an interview about pitcher injuries.  One of the points he made is that the myth of increased velocity resulting from Tommy John surgery has resulted in some ridiculous scenarios.  Among them are stories of fathers requesting the surgery for their completely healthy sons in hopes of helping them to add velocity.  Can you imagine?

Zimmerman's next piece will investigate probable causes of the injuries.  The biggest culprit in conversations I've read and heard are fastball velocities, which continue to rise.  I'm looking forward to seeing the data on that, and whether those claims hold up.

Update:
I received this tweet last night.  It provides two great links to Jon's work that addresses my last paragraph:

@jinazreds I looked at TJ surgeries and pitch velocities at BtBS in two parts: http://t.co/enLjjKZHqG and http://t.co/LDLTlR3rI4
— Jon Roegele (@MLBPlayerAnalys) July 1, 2014

Update #2:
Here's Zimmerman's second part, with an excellent summary of his findings (all of which I agree with):

1. Pitchers are developing their shoulders better. This leads to a pitcher’s elbow giving out before his shoulder.
2. Pitchers are throwing at a higher velocity, which means more stress on the elbow. More stress means more of a chance for a snap or rip.
3. Younger pitchers are putting undo stress on their arms at too early an age, with too many innings and not enough rest time. The pitchers are damaged goods before they make it to the majors.

Branch Rickey & Allen Roth in 1954

In the history track in Sabermetrics 101 this week (the 4th week), we read an article by Branch Rickey that appeared in Life Magazine in 1954 describing his and Allen Roth's efforts to develop a model that would predict team success.  Here's the model that is at the heart of the article:

To break it down:

• The top row is the Offense term.  It is essentially OBP + 0.75*ISO + Clutch.  Clutch was a catch-all term that tracked how often a team scored once runners were on base, and includes clutchiness, baserunning, luck, etc.
• The bottom term is the Defense term.  It includes opponent batting average, the Walk+HBP term of opponent OBP, Opponent "Clutch", and a strikeout term (weight 1/8th...this was presumably necessary because it's just the extra value of a strikeout over and above what is already tracked in the batting average term).  F is fielding (independent of the other values), which Rickey & Roth basically punted.  In fact, they have a great line in the article: "There is nothing on earth anybody can do with fielding."  They just assigned it a zero and moved on, hoping it wouldn't matter that much.

Therefore, the equation amounts to:

Offense (O) - Defense (D) = G

Where G is a stat that will track run differential quite well.

Neat, right?  

There are some problems that I see.  First, it seems like the ISO term is confounded with the R term, because a lot of the value of extra-base hits lies in driving runners home (and vice versa).  The second is unquestionably the over-emphasis on BABIP when tracking pitching performances (especially when they start relating this to individual pitcher performances; this was pre-Voros McCracken, after all!).  And there's also the lack of separation of the unique effect of the home run.  And finally, the units are sort of a mish-mash of arbitrary ratio units, rather something that has immediate meaning like runs or wins.

In short, it's not Base Runs.  But it seems to work pretty well, based on the work they did on it in the 50's.  The article itself is a great read, with a ton of great quotes.  I highly recommend it.  It's neat to think that this kind of thing was happening 60 years ago...and how hard it must have been to do the analysis, before the days of excel, mysql, and statistical packages!***

***At one point in the article, they mentioned sending off their data for six weeks(!) to a stat department at an institution for "correlation analysis."  What would have taken a couple of hours today (mostly just getting the data together) took WEEKS of work using mechanical calculators, slide-rules, and lots of paper computation.

Reds Odds Rising

Just because I wanted to capture it...the Reds are back to 0.500 entering today's game, and  playoff odds are at their highest since the season began:

They have a tough opponent coming to GABP for tomorrow's game against the Toronto Blue Jays.  And they're still a bit of a long shot.  But it's fun to start dreaming again. :)

Brayan Pena having great year behind the dish

Early on, the story with Brayan Pena was the surprising offensive performance the Reds got from him during April.  His bat has cooled off a lot since then, and his overall hitting numbers are now more or less on par with his career numbers: 80 wRC+ in 2014, 73 wRC+ career, 80-81 wRC+ projected by ZiPS and Steamer over the rest of the season.  That's good for something like a 0.3-0.4 WAR catcher by the end of the season.

I noticed this today, however:

Pena (highlighted) is already at +9.5 context-specific runs saved by his framing skills!  If you remove context (specific count), he's only +3 overall.  But that's still very solid when we're just over a third of the season played.

Entering the season, Harry Pavlidis projected Pena at +4 runs from framing alone.  Therefore, he's probably already shot past that projection.  This is great to see, and is consistent with what some of the twitter-verse told me as the season began.

Pena's other fielding numbers have been good: 36% CS rate (26% league average), and +4 runs by Chris Dial's catching system against stolen bases, passed balls, and errors.  I don't like him that much as the team's backup first-baseman, but he's been everything you could ask in a backup catcher.  And, very clear, he has been a terrific guy in the clubhouse.

Quick bit of prognostication: if we split the difference between the context-specific and context-neutral framing numbers (+6 runs), give him +4 runs for his other fielding performances, that gives him +10 runs on the season.  If he can double that, he'd end up a +20 fielder, which is worth 2 WAR.  I don't know if he'll do that, but even 1-1.5 WAR by season's end would be a solid performance from a backup!

Pirates Series Preview

Today I previewed the Pirates series at Red Reporter.  They're kind of the anti-Reds: great offense, lousy starting pitching.  The net result is pretty much the same; both teams are a tick below .500.

The Pirates were forecasted by many to regress from their fairy-tale season last year, and they have.  They sit a game below 0.500, a consequence primarily of their struggling pitching staff. While their rotation was a strength last season, they have struggled this year to put together good outings.  Even more problematic, their top two starters, Francisco Liriano and Gerrit Cole, recently found themselves on the disabled list with a strained oblique and shoulder fatigue, respectively. 

The good news for the Pirates is that their offense has been dynamite.  Their 105 wRC+ is the second-best in the league, and the arrival of Gregory Polanco might mean they could get even better.  The Reds' pitching staff could well have their hands full trying to contain the Pirates' bats.

Replay Is Working, but Not For Reds

The implementation of expanded replay has come under a fair amount of fire this year.  We've all seen a scenario like this: after the obligatory dawdle while his video guy looks at the play, the manager challenges a ruling on the field, and we all watch a number of angles at home while the umpire at MLBAM makes his decision.  The replays seem to clearly show that the call was incorrect...but, after a minute or two of a wait, the call in the field is upheld.  The reason?  No clear and indisputable evidence that the call was wrong, despite it being pretty clear that it actually is.

This scenario has both hurt and helped the Reds this year, but either way it is maddening to watch.  Replay is supposed to help get calls right.  If it's upholding the wrong call, then what is the point of going through this?

On this point, I saw this tweet come across my twitter feed a few days ago:

That'st the 233rd play that's been overturned in barely more than two months. (http://t.co/Yo6oTnxPhJ) Yeah, I'd say replay is a good idea.
— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) June 12, 2014

I thought it was a really good point.  Replay isn't perfect.  But with every overturned call, we're seeing mistakes being fixed that otherwise would have been upheld.  Umpires still blow calls, and replay still fails to correct some of them.  But we've already seen hundreds of incorrect calls fixed this season.  Hundreds!

The link in that post is to Baseball Savant, which is happily tracking all of the replay challenges this year via pitchf/x data.  It's a great resource.  As of now, the number of overturned calls has risen to 246 calls, which is 47% of all challenges.  Here's how that number has evolved this year:

The blue line is a cumulative average for the entire season.  What we can see is that the rate of calls being overturned started at or around 40% in April, but then rose steadily through May and has flat-lined around the current 47%.

The 9-day moving average is a bit more revealing.  It seems as though the replay umpires began the season being pretty conservative for the first two weeks.  Then, they started to routinely overturn just over half of the calls from that point on...with a strange dip that occurred at the end of May/beginning of June (~23 May through 3 June).  I don't know what happened during that dip, but the rate of overturned calls dropped down to 30% for a brief period.  I'm going to speculate that the umpires are still making adjustments to their internal criteria for when to overturn calls.  Therefore, we might have seen a short-term adjustment to be more conservative, which was then quickly relaxed.

Replays and the Reds

So, if the MLB average is that just shy of half of all challenges are successful in getting a call overturned, why does it seem like the Reds almost always lose their challenges?

Probably, it's because the Reds have almost always lost their challenges.  The Reds are tied for the fewest challenges in all of baseball with 9 (the highest are the Cubs & Rays with 23 each).  They have won just 2 of their challenges (22%).  In contrast, the teams the Reds have played have made 14 challenges against the Reds, and have won 8 of them (57%).  Replay has not been kind to the Reds thus far.

Who is to blame?  The Reds' video guy?  Small sample sizes?  Bad luck?  I'd lean toward the latter explanations.  But...yeesh, let's hope their luck changes soon.

Optimism, Carlos Gomez, and Projections

I surprised myself with a surprisingly upbeat preview of the Brewers vs. Reds series today:

Going into their game against the Mets last night (as I wrote this), the Brewers had a 7.5-game lead on the Reds.  Now, one can't really hope for a sweep.  But can you imagine?  That'd suddenly put the Reds 4.5 games back.  With the Cardinals still hovering around 0.500, the Reds have an opportunity here.  I like the Reds pitching match-ups in all three games.  If the offense can build on what it did the last two games of the Dodger series, this could be an exciting weekend for the Reds.  Here's to optimism! Go Reds!

Somewhere recently, I saw someone write (I think for another team) that it's more fun to be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.  I'm trying to adopt that view. :)

Carlos Gomez: A lesson on the importance of
patience, scouts, and tools.
Photo Credit: Keith Allison

I also wrote a bit about Carlos Gomez.  He fits into the mold of a former top prospect who had been given up on by nearly everyone, only to discover himself.  Others include Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, although to his credit, Gomez was never DFA'd.

Some of Lucroy's best competition in the MVP race is his center fielder, Carlos Gomez.  I think Gomez is fascinating.  I find it almost impossible to believe that he's only in his age-28 season, because it seems like he's been around forever.  He was the key acquisition in the Twins' deal that sent Johan Santana to the Mets before the 2008 season.  Despite playing in the majors as a 22-year old, he was largely considered a flop in the aftermath of that trade.  He earned a strong reputation as a great defensive center fielder, but he didn't hit a lick.  The Brewers acquired him in exchange for J.J. Hardy, a deal that many (myself probably included) panned.  Hardy was often-injured, but he was a quality offensive shortstop coming off a bad season, while Carlos seemed like the definitive no-hit defensive center fielder.  Then, something happened in the second half of 2012: Gomez started to hit for power.  From July through September, Gomez slugged 15 home runs (previous season high was 8).  He continued to show that power through last all of last season, and FanGraphs estimated his season value at 7.6 fWAR (though that might be a bit inflated by a +24 run fielding rating...though b-ref gave him +38 runs in the field and 8.9 WAR, so....).  He's one of the best players in baseball.

This is the kind of thing that has taken me forever to wrap my head around.  I am a projection guy, and rely on them to guide my evaluations of players to avoid getting overly excited about new changes in performance.    In fact, MGL just wrote a great piece on the importance of this approach, which was then summarized by Dave Cameron.  But there are guys for whom I am bound to miss with this approach, and Carlos Gomez (and Bautista and Encarnacion) are cases in point.  Therefore, while I use projections, I also try to keep an eye out for toolsy guys who seem to finally be figuring it out.  In my view, the lesson is to trust your projection tools, but to still be cautiously conservative in their ability to forecast the future.  I'll always have a blind spot for this kind of player, but hopefully I'm not as blind as I once was.

Brandon Phillips might have been my first lesson in that.  Here's what I wrote when the Reds acquired him:

Previously a highly-touted prospect out of the Montreal farm system, this guy is apparently going to sit on our bench this year. He is out of options, and the Reds seem to have acquired him from the Indians because they didn't want to lose him via waivers and he's not good enough to be on their team. Phillips had a very good half-year as a 21-year old in the then-Expos' AA franchise, hitting 0.327/0.380/0.506/0.886 in 245 at bats in '02. But that's the last time he had a really outstanding, prospect-like season. He was probably rushed a bit to the majors in '03, but was thoroughly ineffective there and hasn't done a whole lot since. His '04 campaign with the Indians' AAA affiliate was decent (0.353 OBP), but he regressed a bit in '05. Krivsky mentioned in his rain delay interview with Marty Brennaman today that Phillips hit 15 homers last year in AAA, which is good. But his slugging percentage was a fairly poor 0.409, particularly given those HR totals. Overall...I wouldn't expect much from this guy's bat this season, and perhaps not ever.

Phillips might be overrated by some of the Cincinnati media, but there's no question that I missed the mark badly on this one.  Phillips has posted five seasons as an above-average hitter during his time with the Reds, has played legitimate gold-glove defense, and has topped 3 WAR five times (and posted 2.9 fWAR a sixth time).  He's been an excellent player for the Reds since almost the first day he donned the Reds' uniform.  The scouts were right.