Giants' prospect Chris Stratton off to a nice start

Giants' pitching prospects Chris Stratton has gotten off to a hot start in A ball. In three starts he has been dominate allowing less than one base runner per inning, striking out 26% of the batters he has faced and keeping the ball in the park.

This is excellent news after he was sidelined at the end of last season and could force the Giants to promote him quickly, at the start of the season I expected him to start in High-A San Jose but the Giants took the safer route which makes sense giving his limited professional experience.

Even better here is a nice quick report from Baseball Prospectus on his early season success:

A first-round pick of the Giants last year, Stratton’s professional debut was cut short when he suffered a concussion after being struck in the head by a batting practice line drive. His injury forced him out for the remainder of the season and the Giants’ Instructional League, causing him to slide a little under the radar as members of his draft class posted impressive numbers and made names for themselves during his absence.

With a blazing start to the 2013 season, Stratton may not fly under the radar much longer. Stratton has a 1.08 ERA in three starts at Low-A and he could be forcing the typically slow-moving Giants to promote him to High-A in the first half. Stratton’s total package isn’t sexy, featuring two plus pitches in his fastball and slider, two average pitches in his curveball and changeup, and plus command projection.

What Stratton does well is sequence pitches, change sight lines and avoid the fat part of the bat. As a member of a Giants organization that has an apparent knack for successfully developing highly drafted pitching prospects, Stratton’s future could be as bright as the start to his first full season.

I had him rated as my number two prospect to start the season and so far he has only shown that it was wise to rate him highly. I hope that he continues to impress, the Giants could certainly use more high ceiling starting pitching depth.

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On the Brandon Belt and Brett Pill Platoon

First came the news that Brandon Belt was on the team then came the news that Belt would be splitting time at first base with Brett Pill in a left/right platoon. Over at Bay Area Sports Guy I explained why this really isn't a big deal and might actually be better for the team and Belt in the long run.

An excerpt:

Belt has had a bit of a strikeout problem in the upper minors and especially in the majors. This could be one way to get him experienced with Major League pitching without giving him too much to try to adjust to at one time. If you look at his splits in both the Majors and the minors, he has struck out at a much higher rate when facing left-handed pitchers. Last year he struck out in 29.4 percent of his plate appearances against lefties in the Majors and in 31.1 percent of his minor league plate appearances against lefties. Against righties his strike out numbers are much better: 26.6 percent and 17.2 percent, respectively.

Read the whole thing.

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John Barr: Scouting the Giants’ Draft (LINK)

Fangraphs was able to get an interview with Giants scouting director John Barr who along with the rest of the front office have done a very good job of finding and developing talent. Barr talks about the organizations philosophy and some of the interesting prospects that the Giants have in the minors right now.

Let me first say that you still have to draft good players and they have to be mentally and physically ready to go out. You’re still trying to draft the best players, because you’re trying to add value to your organization. That allows your general manager to have the flexibility to either decide to continue the development of that player — and then have him go to the big leagues for you — or put him in a trade to bring back talent. You can’t draft solely on what the major-league team may need, because that need will change over time as players go through the system.

“That said, there are trends [in the industry]. The scouting directors putting together their draft boards put weight on certain things that are important to them. They’ll do that each year, so their drafts may end up being similar. There is also the idea that you are looking at your organization and asking, ‘OK, where are our strengths and where are our weaknesses?’ Even though you don’t want to line up your draft based on that, you are certainly mindful of it.”

This is really a must read.

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Allocation of Talent

I am in the middle of catching up on the backlog of things on my reading list after being on vacation for a week and found something that I found to quite interesting and thought it would be worth a share (If this has already made the rounds sorry for the duplication on a week old post).

The article in question is from Marginal Revolution and revolves around an email sent by economist and baseball fan J.C. Bradbury talking about the allocation and ways that talent is evaluated in the different major leagues.

What does Jeremy Lin tell us about talent evaluation mechanisms? This article argues that the standard benchmarks for evaluating basketball and football players at the draft level are flawed. The argument is that Jeremy Lin couldn’t get the opportunity to succeed because his skill wasn’t being picked up by the standard sorting procedure. This got me thinking. Baseball sorts players in a different way than basketball. In professional basketball (and football), college sports serve as minor leagues, where teams face a high variance in competition (the difference between the best and worst teams in a top conference is normally quite large), with very little room for promotion. There is some transferring as players succeed and fail at lower and higher levels, but for the most part you sink or swim at your initial college. This is compounded by the fact that the initial allocation of players to college teams is governed by a non-pecuniary rewards structure with a stringent wage ceiling, which likely hinders the allocation of talent. At the end of your college career, NBA teams make virtually all-or-nothing calls on a few players to fill vacancies at the major-league level. In baseball it’s different. Players play their way up the ladder, and even players who are undrafted can play their way onto teams at low levels of the minor league. At such low levels, the high variance in talent is high like it is in college sports; however, promotions from short-season leagues through Triple-A, allow incremental testing of talent along the way without much risk.

I've always found the different ways that the major leagues have developed their talent to be quite fascinating. I am not so sure I necessarily agree with the conclusion that the way that football and basketball bring talent into their leagues is sub-optimal because there are few occasions like the Lin situation where a player falls through the cracks only to become a star even though there is a great incentive on the parts of general managers and scouts to try and find these players.

Anyway I find that this is an interesting thing to ponder.

UPDATE: As I continue to read through my RSS reader I notice that David Pinto weighed in on the topic as well. Here is his take.

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Teams You Don't Want to Face in the Playoffs

Jonah Keri has a new article on Grantland today talking about the teams that you wouldn't want to face in the playoffs and it got me thinking.

He bases his teams on the work done for Baseball Prospectus by Nate Silver and Dayn Perry (which Obsessive Giants Compulsive is always reminding us about when we need to calm down about the lousy offense) that says that playoff success is based primarily on three things:

1. A pitching staff with a high strikeout rate
2. A dominant closer
3. Great team defense

Keri explicitly leaves off the Giants because he is looking for upsets and as the defending champs, they don't fit the mold as a team that would be an underdog. I don't blame him for this at all, but it still leaves us with the opportunity to see how the Giants measure up.

1. A pitching staff with a high strikeout rate:

The Giants rank number one in the majors with a K/9 of 8.25 for the entire pitching staff. They are number one with a K/9 of 8.11 for their starting pitchers and number three with a K/9 of 8.54 for their relief pitchers.

I think that it is pretty safe to say the Giants have a pitching staff with a very high strikeout rate.

2. A dominant closer:

Brian Wilson hasn't been nearly as good this season but he still ranks as an above average relief pitcher and if you look at him since 2009, to try to control some of the variation in year-to-year numbers, he is one of the top ten relief pitchers in all of baseball with a FIP of 2.61 and a strikeout rate above ten.

In addition, the Giants have shutdown setup guys that make for an embarrassment of riches. Jaiver Lopez is death to left handed batters (but really shouldn't face too many righties) and Sergio Romo has been arguably the best reliever in baseball this season with a ridiculous stat line of 1.20 FIP with a K/9 of 12.66.

This may not be as slam dunk as the high strikeout rate category, but I think the Giants meet the criteria pretty well.

3. Great team defense

This is probably the weakest part on the Giants resume.

The team plays a bunch of below average, older veterans in the field but makes up for it with some splendid defenders in others. When everything is taken into account, they are an okay team but maybe only slightly better than average.

The team UZR for this season is 7.3 runs saved which ranks eighth in all of baseball. When we look at UZR/150, they come in at 1.4 runs saved per 150 defensive games played, which is good enough for ninth place.

The Giants have the ability to play a better defensive team but they often sacrifice defense to try to scare up some more offense. The ratings say that they are above average but at times they don't look it with guys like Jeff Keppinger and Orlando Cabrera moving awfully slow up the middle.

UPDATE: Julian from Giants Nirvana poinst out the Baseball Prospectus defensive efficiency has them ranked as the sixth best team, which is in line with UZR. Maybe they are actually a team that is pretty good defensively or at least better than what I expected.

Thoughts:

When you look at everything the Giants have, they are well suited again to make a run at the playoffs. The trouble for them will be getting there.

As of this morning, Baseball Prospectus still has them as the favorites in the NL West with a 75% chance to win the division, but with their poor play as of late, they have lost a lot of ground. Getting back on solid footing with a .500 road trip would be a big step forward for this team and could take them a long way in getting into the playoffs where they have the "secret sauce" to make a nice run at another World Series title.

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Wait... Barry Zito Wasn't an Ace When the Giants Signed Him?

Jonah Keri writing at Grantland has a new article up about using advanced pitching statistics that could have avoided some of the recent really bad pitching signings. Yes, that includes the Giants and Barry Zito.

Here is what Keri said about Zito:

Even in Zito's Cy Young season, his fielding-independent profile suggested a pitcher more than a run worse than his ERA would suggest — and nowhere near that 23-5 record. In fact, Zito's ability to miss bats was already waning by the time he won that Cy Young in his third big league season, at age 24. His strikeout rate dropped from an excellent 8.7 per 9 innings in 2001 to a slightly above average 7.1 in 2002 to a poor 5.7 in 2003. With the help of some great teams behind him,3 Zito's superficial stats continued to look strong even as he struck out fewer batters, walked more batters, and gave up more home runs. All that time, Zito's home ballpark propped him up. From 2002 through 2006, Zito posted an infield fly ball percentage of 15.6, third-highest among all qualified starters. Oakland-Alameda County/Network Associates/McAfee/Overstock.com/O.co Coliseum contains enough foul territory to house all of Antonio Cromartie's kids, and Zito was a soft-tossing fly ball pitcher who squeezed all he could from that environment, including .245, .243, and .239 BABIPs during that five-year stretch.

Giants general manager Brian Sabean and owner Peter Magowan ignored Zito's peripherals, dreamed of the guy they'd seen a half-decade earlier, and envisioned a new Giants ace whose charisma would turn the Barry Bonds Era into the Barry Zito Era. A past-his-prime Zito tried to throw his 85 mph fastball and diminished curve in a park that favored pitchers but didn't proffer that huge infield fly edge, and his lackluster performance finally caught up to his superficial numbers. And here we are.

Yeah, that doesn't look too good in hindsight (actually, it doesn't look to good if you were rating the deal at the time).

Here is some more stuff that shows the drop off in Zito using FIP- where 100 is league average and every point below means one percent better than league average (with the opposite true for numbers above 100).

2000: 81
2001: 82
2002: 90
2003: 91
2004: 100
2005: 103
2006: 110
2007: 107
2008: 109
2009: 101
2010: 106

In the three years before he was a free agent, Zito averaged 104.33. In the four years since, he has averaged 105.75. Zito has been pretty much exactly what you would expect, which is a pitcher who is right about league average.

The Giants paid for his name recognition, his Cy Young, and All-Star selections. They got pretty much exactly what the advanced stats said he should be.

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Stats Guru looks at Tim Lincecum's Changeup

Tim Lincecum is a great pitcher but he has been in a bit of a funk as of late. David Pinto over at Baseball Analytics takes a look at his change up and suspects that what is causing him to be hittable is his change up.

Once June came around, Lincecum started leaving the pitch relatively up:

Tim Lincecum, change up location, June 2011Tim appears to be throwing the pitch the same way, as an examination of the spin showed no obvious changes. With the pitch up in the strike zone, however, batters are making contact.

You should check out the full post because there are some awesome heat maps.

I do have a few things that I wonder however is that in June he has to date only thrown 14 change ups in this sample which I have to wonder if that is a big enough sample to draw any sort of conclusions from. (Update 2:20 pm Per David Pinto via Twitter: this was only for change ups put into play, previously batters were 0 for 31 on his change up, with 15 K. No walks or HBP.)

From watching him I would think that his problem has come a lot more from not being able to locate his fastball and with this pitch not a weapon hitters having the ability to sit on the breaking pitches.

Regardless cool graphs and something interesting to check out.

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Digging Deep into Vogelsong's Sucess

Mike Fast has a splendid article on Ryan Vogelsong up on Baseball Prospectus. I highly recommend that you read it. This one doesn't even require a subscription to view.

An excerpt:

Once Vogelsong took hold of that rotation spot, he didn’t let go. Nine starts later, his ERA stands at 1.81, a mark bested only by Josh Johnson at 1.64 and Johnny Cueto at 1.68, and ahead of the leader among official qualifiers, Jered Weaver, whose ERA is 2.06.

Vogelsong’s performance this year is all the more surprising because he entered the year with a 5.86 career ERA, compiled in 315 innings pitched for the Giants and Pirates from 2000 to 2006, as described in John Perrotto’s article last week. He spent the 2007-2009 seasons in Japan and returned to the United States for the 2010 season, hoping to catch on with the Phillies but being sent to the minors instead. His performance in the minors in 2010 was not particularly stellar. How is it, then, that Vogelsong has been among the best pitchers in the league in 2011?

He proceeds to break down the PITCHf/x and batted ball details. The conclusion that he comes to bodes well for the Giants chances to repeat. "The pitcher who produced that 5.86 ERA five years ago appears to be gone, replaced by one who knows how to use his stuff to good effect."

Read the whole thing. It's worth your time.

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Are Giants Good ... Or Just Lucky?

Rob Neyer has noticed that the Giants are winning despite being outscored and asks the question: are the Giants good or just lucky?

Here is his answer:

Here's the thing, though. For all the Giants' "knowing how to win" and their sterling pitching staff, they did outscore their regular-season opponents last season by 114 runs. In fact, their run differential was typical of a 94-win team (they actually won 92 games). The year before that, with the same manager and many of the same players (or pitchers, anyway), they won 88 games with the run differential of an 86-win team.

So we've got two full seasons, over the course of which the Giants won exactly as many games as you would expect, considering their runs scored and allowed. What tells us more about the fundamental nature of the San Francisco Giants: 324 games in 2009 and '10 -- not to mention all of baseball's history -- or 67 games in 2011?

I'll go with the former, because that's the sort of person that I am.

I can't blame him for reaching that conclusion, either. The Giants certainly have been fortunate this season. One of the things about baseball is that close games leave more of a chance that bad teams will beat you. It's pretty rare for a good team to be blown out by a bad team. Over the course of a year, the record in close games will be around .500, but they will have a much better record in games where the margin is 5+ runs.

The Giants are the opposite of this, this season they are just 3-6 in so called "blow outs."

The other thing that is concerning for the future is they're being outscored at home by 12 runs and should be more like 14-17 at home instead of their current 19-12.

While I agree with Neyer that the Giants have been playing over their expected winning percentage, I think what they have currently shown on offense will not continue forever. Even the 2009 Giants averaged over four runs per game and they had seven players accumulate more than 200 at-bats while producing a wRC+ below 90.

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Aaron Rowand Career Profile

Aaron Rowand is featured today for John Sickels' continuing series Career Profile.

Worth a full read, but here is a quick excerpt from his first two years in the minors:

Rowand spent all of 1999 with Winston-Salem in the Carolina League, hitting .279/.336/.504 with 24 homers, 15 steals, 33 walks, and 94 strikeouts in 512 at-bats. His production was safely above average in most respects, though the BB/K ratio reflected concerns about his eye. I gave him another Grade B in the 2000 book, writing that his performance in Double-A would tell us "if he will develop into a slugging star or merely a good hitter."

Moved up to Birmingham for 2000, Rowand hit .258/.321/.438 with 20 homers, 22 steals, 38 walks, and 117 strikeouts in 532 at-bats. He still showed power and a good glove, but the plate discipline issue was getting worse, and his overall production was only slightly better than league context. The MLE on his OBP was about .290. I gave him a Grade C+ in the '01 book, noting that I hadn't given up on the idea that he could improve.

Sickles had concerns about his eye and that has definitely been the case in his career walk rate of 5.6% and a strikeout rate of 20.8%. He has had good years, but not worth what the Giants shelled out to get him after his career year.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

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Interview with Giants Pre/Post Game Host Marty Lurie

There is an excellent fan post on McCovey Chronicles from user Goofus that did an interview with Giants pre and post game iron man host Marty Lurie.

An excerpt:

McC: You’re doing the radio pre-game and post game shows on weekends. Do you see your role as journalist, commentator, cheerleader, or therapist for distraught fans after a tough loss?

ML: I think I’m a baseball historian and a fan. I’m like everybody else; I can’t wait for it to start and I can’t wait for the next day’s game. That’s what I bring to the table. I’ll set the game up; I’m excited about what’s going to happen and afterwards take the game apart and talk about what happened, what should have happened, how they played it and then get you ready for the next day.

I do understand that there’s a rhythm to a baseball season and you can’t panic and do knee-jerk reactions. I mean, Huff has a bad game on Sunday. You can’t say, "That’s it. He can’t play right field anymore." You have to be patient and even it costs you, he’s your #3 hitter. You have to be patient with a guy like Brandon Belt and let him get his at bats. You have to be patient and see what you have as a team. So in that regard, yeah my job is to be somewhat of a therapist for the fans during the rough parts. The key to this team will be the bullpen; that’s the most important job of a manager.

Read the entire thing. It's definitely worth your time.

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Blaming Brandon Belt?

That is a provocative headline to say the least and it's part of the story that Howard Bender of SF Giants Report goes with for explaining the Giants early season losses due to a less then stellar defense.

The Giants current 1-3 record can be tied to Brandon Belt’s presence on the Giants roster. After all, if he doesn’t make the team, then Aubrey Huff is playing first base and we would have either Nate Schierholtz or Aaron Rowand over in right, both of whom would have made those plays yesterday. But what are you going to do, blame the kid for being too good? Of course not. But like every great crisis…and after hearing some of the panic-laden fans, this is apparently being deemed a crisis….we need a scapegoat. Someone is to blame for this start to our title defense, and the people want answers!

In reality, he finds fault with Bruce Bochy but I don't blame him for going with the attention getting headline. Bochy should be the one who is behind the decision and he's the one that should be raked over the coals. I don't agree with this, but here is Howard's point:

And I’m not going to sit here and trash Huff for his play. That’s like blaming your waitress because the kitchen screwed up the temperature of your steak. The guy is out there giving it his all, but is sadly over-matched in the field. He’s certainly not out there thinking “Man, I hope I can screw this up somehow and make myself look like an idiot out here.” He’s giving it everything he has, but what he’s got is just not enough for the outfield.

Again, the kitchen in this case is Bochy. We have the players to make this right, but he isn’t using them. You want to keep Huff in the lineup regularly? Fine. Move him to left field where the ramifications of his shoddy defense have a slightly lower impact. Put Burrell’s ass on the bench and get either Rowand or Schierholtz into right field, though, and make this right.

I can see the logic in this argument but I can't get behind it. I don't think that Bochy made a dumb move or even the wrong move in this situation. The defense wasn't great and Bochy could have put out a more athletic lineup, but there is no reason to believe things would have unfolded the same way had he done it.

The opening day roster was a series of trade offs. Once Cody Ross went down with an injury, the Giants could have gone one of two ways; sacrifice offense for some defense or sacrifice defense for offense. Neither is particularly fun or an easy decision to make and Bochy decided that having the best offensive lineup was the better trade off to make and the one that gave the Giants the best chances of winning.

I would stand by that decision if I were him. In the short term, defense is much more fluky than offense. This should be fairly apparent to people that are stat inclined. The general rule of thumb is that it takes three seasons to get a good read on a player's defense but only a few hundred at-bats to get a good read on a player's offense.

Over the course of a four game series, an offensive player is going to get 15-20 at bats and maybe have the opportunity to make a handful of plays in the field. If I am the manager, I am more concerned about those at-bats than plays that may or may not happen.This isn't to say that I would downplay defense. What I'm saying is over a short horizon, with all things being equal, I'm willing to trade defense for a better offense.

It's easy to second guess after the fact, but Bochy made the right move to put out his best overall team (even if it wasn't his best defensive team) on the field and it burned him. Sometimes it happens, but you can't let fluke events force you to make stupid decisions going forward.

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