SurhoffRules

Interestingly, (or not) there may appear to be some loose association between OBP and P/PA in 2019, with most teams (27) being within 1.5 StdDevs of the average. Two additional teams clock in within +/- 1.8 stdDevs. Houston being the special case of 2.5 stdDevs, with a league leading .352 OBP while finishing 7th from the bottom in P/PA with 3.87....go figure. Note: I have absolutely not looked at historical trends for what is/isn't normal.

Totally back of the napkin math, but based on 2019 numbers: Raising team OBP by .005 points would raise the opposing pitch count in the same manner as increasing team Pitches Per Plate Appearance by .0148. All thing being equal you could make the average opposing pitchers throw 5 more pitches a game by raising your team OBP from .323 (lgAvg) to .363 or by increasing you team PperPA from 3.93 (lgAvg) to 4.05.

I think you could make an argument that Bundy's career in Baltimore was disappointing even if he wasn't an outright disappointment. He went from a 19 year old phenom to a useful part (depending on his salary), and that's disappointing. He definitely has value but we'll always remember what could have been. I'm happy that most people (I feel correctly) pin his reduced performance on injury, rather than attitude or work ethic. I feel like he's got a reasonable shot at being productive for a while longer in the league. Gausman on the other hand was a solid pick and had a good career here given his pedigree and his draft position. Stoman is the only pitcher ahead of him in career WAR in the 1st round of his class. He was durable, effective, and pretty much ready MLB ready when he was drafted. The Orioles got a good pitcher at #4 and Gausman performed as expected for a upper round, filled out, college pick. I enjoyed watching him pitch and hope he can rebound a bit from his last season.

I'm looking at his FF release point data because I don't know what else to try and grab. After start the season his vertical release point dropped about an inch around his sixth start and then continued to drop until settling about 2-3 inches lower for the last few months. Horizontally, the sixth games marks the start of a 2.5 inch drift outward over the course of a season. His first six starts look pretty similar, and then he drifts down and outside for the next month and a half before settling into a reasonable range around June. The spin rate results look much more immediate but maybe he tweaked something and then found his way into a new slot to maintain it.

That is interesting. His velocity in the first 6 starts was the same as it was all year (he carried an amazingly consistent FB from start to start). Eyeballing it it looks like his first six he spun at 2250ish and then jumped up to about 2400ish for the rest of the season. I wonder if he tweaked something intentionally or just found his groove.

My favorite effect of the reversed spin for Bradford was the fact that his slider (spinning perpendicular to the plate) had less downward force (due to spin) acting on it than his fastball. He's the only player I can think of off the top of my head with a vertical rise on his breaking pitch(+1-2 with out gravity). Even given the slower speed (more gravity bringing it down) his FB and SL dropped nearly the exact same amount. Bradford's Brooks Baseball Page

Mean's average velocity was pretty constant month to month around 92 mph. So this means that he increased his spin rate from 2300 (24) to 2438 (25.5)? That's a pretty significant bump from what I recall reading.

I recall reading a number of spin related articles on Fangraphs and Hardball times and the only firm takeaways I could recall is that the time from well a ball is not spinning (in the hand during the throwing motion) to the point were is has been spun is silly small (fractions of a second) so a pitchers spin tends to be very much tied to their specific body type/throwing style. Pitchers with higher release points tend to impart more spin. Spin rate tends to scale linearly with FB velocity. Pitchers avg spin rate is pretty consistent across seasons but it is possible to change your spin rate by altering your release or mechanics (that is to say there are examples of pitchers who have changed their spin rates going forward). High spin pitchers tend to be more effective than low spin pitchers on a number of metrics (K, pop-up, etc), but a similar correlation is found when you look at dSpin per velocity. That is to say, since spin rate scales linearly with fastball velocity the further a pitcher is away from the average spin on a FB with the same velocity, the more effective the pitch is (think Koji Uhera FB, his spin rate wasn't silly high if I recall, but it was very high for a pitch with such pedestrian velocity).

I feel like Chad Bradford managed a few FBs that crossed the plate higher than he released it.......Okay, pedantic comment is over now.

He'll likely be the highest Orioles ROY vote share finisher since Rodrigo Lopez.

I'm always happy when numbers and eyes line up. I've enjoyed watching him play but a lot of time I'm left thinking...that would've been much less exciting if he hadn't taken a step and a half in the wrong direction to start his route. Hopefully it's something he can improve on since he's quick and has decent hands from what I can see.

All of us with Surhoff related monikers should probably be proactive and reflect if there's anything about our posting habit we should change in light of the new organizational direction......but seriously I'm not overly bothered by any of this. I simultaneously empathize with Surhoff, am a bit surprised by the candor (and number) of his quotes, and am also not at all surprised that a roving minor league instructor's contract was not renewed as part of a massive change in organizational structure. If he wants to stay attached to the game I wish him all the best finding a new position. Maybe his path and Baltimore's will cross in the future, I loved watching him play.

It wouldn't surprise me if Bundy turned in a few mid-3 ERA, 190+ inning season before he retired (barring injury). His stuff was electric at draft time but there were plenty of references to his make up and work ethic. I think hes got a decent shot at sticking around the bigs and putting up some seasons to be proud of.

This means Bundy will finish up with 30 starts and about 160 inning. He stayed on the mound for a third straight year and was a more effective than last 2018 as his innings per start dipped once again from 6.03 (2017), to 5.52 (2018), to 5.33 (2019). He definitely kept us in more games than not. He went 6 or more in 10 of his 29 starts and was replaced somewhere in the 6th inning (start or end) 15 times though. So there were only 4 games where he didn't carry the team into 6th. We all hoped for better with Bundy (understatement, I know), but given how his velocity collapsed it's been somewhat satisfying to see him changing things up to stay productive and in the MLB. Hopefully, he can complete the transition as he enters his age 27 season and throw up another solid season or two. There's almost always a place for in the MLB for a pitcher that can take the mound 28-31 times a year and keep his team in the game.

Bundy will get 1 or 2 more starts depending on how things shake out. I'd like to see him finish strong. He has an outside shot of getting his ERA+ to 100 if my back-of-the-napkin math holds up. He'd need 7 shutout innings or 10+ innings at 1.59. He's done neither of those things this year from what I can tell but he'll face the Jays one more time and he pitched moderately well in his one start vs. Boston this year. Stranger things have happened. Wishful thinking.

Name K/9+'00 K/9+Car WAR Career Brian Meadows 55 66 2.7 Jimmy Anderson 68 55 3.4 Brian Rose 75 74 0 Jeff D'Amico 83 83 7.1 Tomo Ohka 83 74 11.1 Jim Parque 85 82 1.6 Scott Downs 87 102 8.1 Carl Pavano 88 80 21.1 Joe Mays 91 69 5.4 Scott Elarton 91 81 -0.5 Mike Johnson 92 94 -0.5 Chris Fussell 94 94 -0.7 Doug Davis 96 100 22.4 Paul Rigdon 98 89 0.2 Jaret Wright 100 99 7.1 Eric Gagne 104 149 13.4 Kelvim Escobar 113 124 23 Eric Milton 115 99 12.3 Tim Hudson 120 86 45.2 J.C. Romero 124 111 1.3 Kyle Farnsworth 128 138 6.8 Scott Williamson 162 157 5.6 Your class of 2000 (24 year old, min 50 innings). Lot of noise and lots of folks that ended up in the bullpen. Remove Hudson from the list and the above average and below average look pretty similar. I still agree with you and suspect one year isn't enough data to see a trend.

Since 2013 (per Fangraphs) there have been 999 qualifying starters seasons. 243 were thrown by pitchers with an average fastball under 90 mph. Discounting the 10 of those that were thrown by Wakefield and Dickey you're left with these medians(couldn't get ERA+ in the FG custom report for some reason). Age ERA K/9 BB/9 H/9 >= 90 27 3.68 7.82 2.72 8.4 < 90 31 4.02 6.22 2.54 9.27 Digging a litter further these starters made up over 40% of those seasons under the 90mph mark were thrown by guys like this: Name Avg Age Seasons Mark Buehrle 32.0 9 Bronson Arroyo 33.0 7 Jered Weaver 28.4 7 Paul Maholm 27.5 6 Aaron Harang 34.0 5 Barry Zito 31.2 5 Derek Lowe 36.0 5 Jason Vargas 29.8 5 Livan Hernandez 34.0 5 Ted Lilly 33.0 5 Andy Pettitte 37.3 4 Bartolo Colon 41.5 4 Dallas Keuchel 27.8 4 Dan Haren 32.5 4 Doug Fister 29.3 4 Joe Blanton 27.5 4 Kyle Hendricks 27.0 4 Kyle Lohse 33.5 4 Mike Leake 27.0 4 Randy Wolf 32.5 4 Wandy Rodriguez 31.0 4 I suspect the ERA gap between the real soft tossers and the rest of the league is much less than it would be if the list wasn't heavily selected for productive veteran pitchers who were allowed to continue pitching as they lost velocity. Loving what Means is doing, but I think it's fair that folks would be rosier on his future if he had a few more mph on his fastball. I think he's certainly focused on the things in his toolbox that he needs to be to have a shot at a long and productive career.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that my preference towards quoting BB over FG is mostly because I find the color scheme and left anchored grids of BB far easier for my eyes to parse than the green/grey/white/black with the grid placed in the center part of the page. I wish I could pretend it had anything to do with a deeply held opinion on the quality of their data.

@DrungoHazewood I still get feeling that we're talking past each other a bit and that's mostly coming from my side of the conversation. I understand, appreciate, and agree with everything your saying about how the WAR numbers are put together and I appreciate the effort you put into your replies.

Fangraphs apparently thinks much less of Nick's defense as the season has progressed. They have him at -12.6 to Adams -4.7 pushing Adam's fWAR to 0.4 to Nick's 0.1 That puts Nick's contract out of the point where it provided any positive value. I do know many people prefer fWAR inputs and weight to bWARs and I should probably start quoting that.

I get what your says but I suppose I'm either not articulating what I'm mulling over well enough to contribute to the discussion or perhaps what I'm mulling over really isn't relevant. I guess what I'm trying to get at is if it is acceptable to say that WAR see's players like Markakis and Jones as very close defensively, but if we blindly flip their dWAR (-0.6 and -1.3) components Adam becomes about a -0.3 player and Nick jumps to 0.7 (I think), then a full win's worth of value is well withing the currently tolerable outcomes for their WAR. When I'm looking to assign value to someone performance, it seems a little loosey-goosey to have one component to a total WAR number that can swing a person from being a useful piece over 100 games to below replacement level. If +5 defensive runs is a rounding error why can that tolerable range impact the final replacement value to such a large order of magnitude? Perhaps its not unreasonable to say a -0.3 and a 0.7 player are that different, but I know if I was looking at signing someone in the 32-36 range it would certainly be nice to understand how they are able to produce in the field. I'm comfortable with noise within a season and noise across seasons, but perhaps my expectations (or desires) for accuracy are unreasonable at this point. The new positional based defensive metrics will start to trickle out in the coming years and I imagine we'll have a much more consistent idea of how to rate players defensively. My prediction for 2019 is that neither Markakis or Jones gets more than 2.5 million.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for tossing it out entirely or dismissing it until improvements are made. Just coming to terms that when you bundle it all up into the final WAR number, the range of what is current considered acceptable for dWAR can result in a +/- 8 million dollars of value when you look back at how a teams roster is constructed. The offensive portion of it seems to have far and away more certainty. That makes comparing the 3M contract Jones got vs the 4M contract Markakis got difficult. If Jones is -6 in the field, his contract stunk. If Markakis was 0 in the field, his contract moves from adequate to great. For a number thats certainly supposed to be compariable between players at the same position, it's a large delta in terms of allocating roster dollars. Regardless, I suspect most front offices would look at either player as a risk to underperform given where they both are in their careers and whatever their contracts do or don't look like next season will reflect that.

BBref says that Jones is better in RF than Markakis by dWAR. It also says that his RF is the same as Nick's, he's committed 5 errors to Nick 2 (in a few less games), and has less assists than Nick. I'm just a little confused because all those are components of the dWAR so I'm just not seeing what the input is that's saying Adam was worth more in the field this year than Nick. Honestly though, I haven't put a ton of effort into understanding dWAR as most of the time it agrees with my eye and I kind expect of the newer defensive metric revolution to make improvements on it anyway. Shrug.

Just for fun, the last 20 years worth of Orioles that received any ROY votes. Go Rodrigo. Year Player Vote Pts 1st Place Votes Rank 2017 Trey Mancini 31 0 3/5 2012 Wei-Yin Chen 2 0 4/5 2010 Brian Matusz 3 0 5/5 2006 Nick Markakis 7 1 6/7 2004 Daniel Cabrera 29 0 3/10 2002 Rodrigo Lopez 97 9 2/11 2002 Jorge Julio 14 0 3/11 1998 Sidney Ponson 1 0 5(T)/6

Upon closer inspection I now realize his 3 WAR is only based on 67 games. I now agree that Means chances are not as rosey as I was thinking. Still, a good season from him.