Hughes' declining strikeout rate

Phil Hughes picked up his 14th win of the season yesterday, allowing three runs in six innings to beat the Royals. He didn't record a single strikeout in the start, which is something he had only done one other time in his career (a 1 2/3 inning effort against the Orioles in 2009). Hughes' strikeouts per 9 innings rate now sits at 7.35, which is the lowest it's been all season. Through May, it was around 9, and through June it was in the 8s. Yet, Hughes has maintained a similar rate of contact throughout the season. I've prepared a two-axis graph with one side showing cumulative K/9 and the other showing cumulative whiff rate (swings-and-misses per swings), centered around approximated league averages for both metrics. I find plotting whiff rate and strikeouts to be significant since swing and misses correlate well with strikeouts.

Other than his first two starts of the season (the second of which was a 10 strikeout, 1 hit performance against the A's), his whiff rate has not seen the decline that his strikeout rate has --- in fact, his whiff rate is currently slightly higher now than it was in the middle of May. So, to me, it appears that the recent dip is more of a typical regression than a decline in ability.

Gameday data is from MLBAM.

WSJ on Brett Gardner

Link dump! I appreciated this recent article from the Wall Street Journal that details Brett Gardner's interesting (or not interesting, depending on how you look at it; I prefer the former) season at the plate. It's brief, but very informative.

If only he'd hit it in the air

Something that's great about Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus is they allow you to directly download tabular data from the site. So, it makes it relatively easy for us to get answers to questions we may have. For example, I was thinking the other day about batters and homers per fly ball. HR/FB is a good thing to look at for hitters because it gives an extremely good look at raw power by isolating a lot of variables. Technically, HR/FB+LD could be better since line drives can turn into home runs, but HR/FB is a good baseline (and is what Fangraphs has). Anyway, I got to thinking about certain players who might not be maximizing their power by simply not hitting the ball in the air enough. So this morning, I took some Fangraphs data, put it in Excel, and plotted HR/FB along with flyball percentage.

As I had anticipated, there is some sort of correlation between FB% and HR/FB%. What I like to do with these graphs is gauge the overall strength of the correlation and then identify the outliers. The point furthest over to the right with a HR/FB of just under 20% represents Mark Reynolds' season. He obviously has great power, and maximizes it by hitting a lot of fly balls. Then there's the one up at the top, with a HR/FB of 26.7%. That's Joey Votto, who leads the league in HR/FB but only has a fly ball rate of .344. But the one that originally caught my eye was the point in the middle of the y axis but way off to the left. Say hello to Derek Jeter, who is having a rough season by his standards. At .728, his OPS is lower than it's been since 1995. At .111, his isolated slugging average is on par with where it was in 2008, in which he produced the lowest mark of his career. Yet, his HR/FB is above league average at 14.5%, and is also above his career average (going back to 2002*) of 13.1%. What gives? He's hitting the ball on the ground 66.8% of the time, which is a career high. And even with the increase in groundballs, his batting average on balls in play (.311) is significantly lower than his career average (.357); the extra groundballs don't seem to be helping him at all.

By the way, the discussion of Jeter or any other player in a post like this serves simply to point out an anomaly; the point of this is not to suggest that Derek Jeter hit more flyballs, even if such an adjustment wound up being beneficial to his performance.

Data are from Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference. *2002 is when Baseball Info Solutions started tracking batted ball data.

Rivera's mistake

Last night, Mariano Rivera had an uncharacteristic outing in that he allowed four men to reach base in less than an inning. First, he faced Michael Young, who hit an infield single. This is where each pitch to Young crossed the plate:

With a runner on first, Rivera then had to battle Josh Hamilton, who found a hole between first and second.

With two runners on, Vladimir Guerrero came up and sent a first pitch sinker to the left side. It wasn't hit hard at all, but it would have been another hit if not for a diving and (then) game-saving stop by Alex Rodriguez.

With first base open, the Yankees elected to walk Nelson Cruz and put the force play at every base, bringing up David Murphy with the bases loaded. This was where Rivera made his only mistake. He fell behind 3-0 on Murphy with pitches that were, for him, wild. After battling back to make it 3-2, he was forced to throw a cutter too far to the center of the plate, and Murphy was ready for it.

To the first three hitters, Rivera made all the right pitches, but had terrible misfortune on the placement of the groundballs he induced. He then got too careful with Murphy, and paid the price.

Gameday screenshots are courtesy of MLB Advanced Media.

Quick Strasburg refresher

Stephen Strasburg will make his return to the Nationals' rotation this evening against the Marlins. The Nationals say he won't go more than 90 pitches. Before his bout with shoulder stiffness at the end of last month, he had a pretty ridiculous start to his career. In his 9 starts (spanning 54 1/3 innings), he struck out 75, walked only 15, and allowed 14 earned runs for a 2.32 ERA. His FIP and xFIP were even lower, at 1.89 and 2.15, respectively. Here is a brief reminder on his stuff, along with some pitch results.

Pitch 
Pitch#   
Pitch%     
FF
107
45.4%
FT
107
12.6%
CU
213
25.1%
CH
142
16.7%

He has two kinds of fastballs (a riding four-seamer and a sinking one), a curveball, and a changeup.  They're all deadly.  The four-seam/sinker distinction isn't that clear in the data, so take it with a grain of salt.  I have the four-seamer averaging over 97 mph, and the sinker just under.  He's maxed at 100.4 mph with the four-seamer; that puts him tied (with Cardinals' reliever Mitchell Boggs) for 8th in the majors in maximum velocity, and in 3rd among starters (behind Justin Verlander and Ubaldo Jimenez).  The curveball breaks a lot and is as hard (82 mph) as many pitchers' sliders.  Likewise, his changeup (just under 90 mph) is as hard as many fastballs.  Something that's intriguing about Strasburg is that while he possesses the 100 mph fastball, he still uses over 40% offspeed pitches (25.1% curves, 16.7% changeups).

Whiffs are always fun, and with Strasburg, they're everywhere.  Here are his four pitches (again, I'm not entirely confident in the fastball classification) according to whiff rate, which in this case is swinging strikes divided by total swings.  The 2010 league averages come from an article posted on the Hardball Times by Harry Pavlidis, whose work is always first-rate.       

Pitch
Whiff Rate
League Whiff Rate
FF
.223
.164
FT
.143
.128
CU
.356
.261
CH
.553
.307
ALL
.307
.211

Strasburg's reliance on his off-speed pitches has helped him keep the ball on the ground at a solid rate. In graphical and tabular form, here is the full batted ball breakdown on the 121 Strasburg offerings that have been hit into play so far. (click for larger image)

There ya go. By the way, I'm sure I'll be posting about Strasburg A LOT in the future.

Gameday PITCHf/x data is from MLB Advanced Media; it can be easily accessed via this tool.

Follow-up on Morrow's near no-no

I'm not a huge fan of the Game Score statistic, but it does give a good idea of how well a pitcher pitched. Well, if I'm doing my arithmetic right, Brandon Morrow's game score this afternoon was 100, which is insanely rare. Like, insanely rare. There were only two 100+ game score performances in the 2000s, supplied by Curt Schilling in 2002 and Randy Johnson in 2004. Both had scores of 100. For what it's worth, Kerry Wood has the highest game score for a 9 inning game, set in May of 1998 with his one-hit, no walk, 20 strikeout shutout. The Baseball-Reference Play Index (to which I am not subscribed) says that there are only 8 other 9 inning, 100+ game score games in history. I can guarantee that before long, there'll be a post on the B-Ref blog with more information about the historical implications of Morrow's outing.

Morrow's one-hitter

Brandon Morrow just missed no-hitting the Rays earlier this afternoon. After retiring 26 of the first 29 men he faced (two walks and an error behind him), he allowed an infield single (deflecting off the glove of Aaron Hill) to Evan Longoria with 2 outs in the 9th. Morrow struck out a ridiculous 17 batters, and got 20 swings and misses along the way. Against 72 swings, that's a .227 whiff rate, which is spectacular (but isn't far off from Morrow's average this year. That says something about his strikeout ability.). Walks have been a problem for Morrow, but he only allowed two free passes to the Rays. Factor in the complete game, one-hit shutout, and you get a Game Score of 100, which is the best in the majors for 2010. Congratulations to Mr. Morrow.

Gameday PITCHf/x data is from MLBAM.