Jeff, I am a new user - started reading your blog in January. Long-time M's fan; currently living in Phoenix area. Started reading Mariner blogs 3 years ago - USSM & LL. I'm not technically competent at the advanced stats, although I appreciate their value while realizing they have limitations. One other introductory fact -- I am a MOTIVATED fan because I have a $500 bet in Vegas on the M's season wins, taking the over @ 71.5 games. So the 3-1 start looks awfully good to me. I appreciate the approach you and your contributors take -- trying for insight into players' current performance and then using that info to anticipate the future. Your balanced and open method provides, for my money, the best understanding of players' results and the current state of the team in the entire M's blogosphere. I particularly like that you are not wedded to a set dogma, but follow the data wherever it goes. A perfect case in point is your earlier analysis of Ichiro A & B. (Kudos to Jack and Wedge for apparently seeing the same trends and moving Ichiro behind Ackley to take advantage of his "professional hitter" approach.) I now read your blog first and skip the others when time is tight. Don't know how often I'll post, but, again, I appreciate your great work - keep it up!
...............
Q. Question was whether a #3 Ichiro would tighten his strike zone and be more effective. How's that workin' out for yer?
A. "It's not enough to be a great player. You must also play great." - Bobby Fischer
When it's garbage time, Ichiro plays like it's garbage time. Last half hour in the gym, three hours in, dudes are just hanging at half court picking cherries.
When Ichiro is playing in meaningless baseball games, -25 games out of first, with guys hitting .179 ahead of him in the lineup, Ichiro goes up and flails away for hits. This approach produces worse stats overall, and he probably knows this, but "200 hits" has been the little roach pet that he twigs around in the dungeon cell.
In 2010, he had a lot of fun with this little insect companion, logging 214 hits as the Mariners scored their 513 deadball-era runs. In 2011, the little roach pet died on him. Fortunately for him, the Americans entered Berlin and threw the dungeon door open.
.
Q. Four games in, batting #3 in a dynamic* lineup behind Dustin Ackley, is his strike zone better?
A. Four games in, his strike zone is the best of his career. That's my eye, but you don't care about that, so let's run the numbers you do care about.
| OOZ Sw % | OOZ Ct % | Sw% | Ct% | 1st Str% | SwStr% | |
| 2006 | 25 | |||||
| 2007 | 27 | |||||
| 2008 | 29 | |||||
| 2009 | 32 | 49 | 89 | 52 | 5 | |
| 2010 | 35 | 50 | 89 | 59 | 5 | |
| 2011 | 36 | 49 | 90 | 58 | 5 | |
| 2012 | 20 | 100% | 40 | 96 | 68 | 1 |
| ML AVG | 28 | 64 | 45 | 79 | 60 | 9 |
The full table is here at Fangraphs.
.
Q. I'm nowhere near the dweeb you are. What does any of that even mean?
A. Scan down the first column, on the left. Since 2006, Ichiro has been fishing for more, and more, and more, pitches outside the strike zone. BOOM! :: John Madden :: Ichiro now swings at NOTHING outside the zone.
And check the 100% in the 2012 line. When Ichiro does go outside the zone a bit, it's because he's going to hit the ball.
..........
See the 68% for 2012 strike percentage? That means that pitchers are coming after Ichiro. They've got to, correct? He's no longer stepping into the box with two out and nobody on.
But see the 40% for 2012 swing percentage? Ichiro is seeing far, far better pitches, and yet is pulling the trigger vastly less often.
See the 1% swinging strike percentage this year? When Selective Ichiro pulls the trigger in 2012 and lets the bat fly, the pitcher had better have his glove in combat position.
.
Q. In layman's terms, he's doing what?
A. He's going out there and putting a pro at-bat on.
Rather than standing in there and whaling at whatever comes in - see ball, hit ball, and may the base on balls be forever cursed to oblivion - Ichiro is stalking pitches.
Four inches off the plate, he takes a Bruce Lee half-position arm block, then stops the bat, lays it down, and walks to first base. Four inches onto the plate, Ichiro bisects the mosquito with that katana blade and smokes a hot shot one-hopper through the infield.
.
Q. It's four games.
A. Thing is, it was a shot called before the pitch. ;- ) If you're looking to do a little catchup DVR viewing, you've got this article and this article.
The prediction occurred before 0 games. Let's re-predict it, after 4 games. Starting to get stoked?
...........
It's four games, yes. We don't say that Ichiro's .350 is in the bank. We say that so far in 2012, he's tightened his swing and the results are as advertised.
Whattaya know, he's hitting .353 with a .478 SLG and a high ISO. His groundball ratios are perfect for him, 2.2. He is getting on top of the ball and lining it hard all over the park. He's Ichiro 2004.
Ichiro's done it for four games. Batting #3, behind Dustin Ackley, with the M's winning, it says here that Ichiro will continue to swing as though the games matter.
.........
Stat of the day: Ichiro 2011 WAR = 0.2. Ichiro 2012 WAR = 0.2.
.
Q. The title mentioned Chone Figgins. You're light.
A. All of Figgins' plate discipline stats are analogous.
Dig this chart. Figgins' Outside Zone Swing % last year was 25%. Guess what it is now? 9%. He is, ahem, selecting pitches that he can handle. And THEN when he does swing, he accelerates the 1-wood through the tee and hits himself in the back with the followthrough.
Stat of the day: Figgins 2011 WAR = -1.3 WAR. Figgins 2012 WAR = 0.3.
Figgy + Ichiro WAR last year = -1.1. Their combined WAR so far in four games: +0.5.
............
We ran the stats for LrKrBoi29, but the centerfield camera should have been all you needed. Their .350 batting averages aren't random stats, much less being "small sample sizes" (sic!). Their production is a result of their swinging good.
It's not enough to be a great player; you must also play great. These two have.
.
Q. Leaving Eric Wedge ... where?
A. I don't say that Figgins and Ichiro have banked 100 runs each. What we do know is that Figgins got his pprrrrrecious leadoff spot and now he is trying his level best to bring his A game.
SSI predicted that the #3 spot would affect Ichiro's strike zone and game. First four games, this "hit during rallies" tonic seems to have settled Ichiro's sour stomach.
If this holds up -- even partially -- we are all going to have to re-think ML managers' preoccupation with batting orders. Sabermetrics has no idea what causes a player to have an UP or DWN year. Maybe batting order is a frequent factor.
Cheers,
Dr D
Comments
by the end of last year and during spring training I couldn't stand to even watch a Figgins at bat on gameday, let alone on TV. Literally I would close my gameday browser when he was up figuring i would want to waste the 2 minutes watching the pitch results come in.
But 2 vintage annoying (to the opponent), bunting, waterbug, line driving hitting games from Chone later and a lot of the built up vitriol toward him is already starting to ebb. I figured that there was nothing Chone could do to assuage my dislike of him, but here I am already kind of secretly rooting for him :) And ::gasp:: the top of the order for the mariners is ::fainting away:: EXCITING! Woot! For the first time in a long time I actually watched a Figgins at bat and was rewarded for the spending of my time! I could get used to that!
It is pretty amazing what the mind and psyche can do to a person. It occurs to me that in the entirety of Figgins Seattle experience we have not had a two game run like this from him... period. At least not to my memory. In fact I can not even recall one single game where he looked as good as he did the last two nights. And not just with the bat, but smiling, high fiving his team mates, bouncing around on the base paths like he did in his Angel days. Even the way he tried to block the short stops view of a ground ball when he was on second the other day was vintage Chone shenanigans which had been missing during his entire Seattle tenure. If THAT Chone is back... hmmmm then I am really going to have to re think how badly i want him off this team :) Next year included!
Also the overflow is starting to get crazy. Seager is starting to write his name in stone. Figgins looks like he wants to stick around. Carp and Guti are ready to come off the DL soon. Big Piggy is hitting 500 ft bombs. Saunders is going no where... Seriously where are these guys going to play??? The last real blac hole in the lineup is Olivo. Wedge need to just put Montero behind the plate and lets get a real batter to DH for us! :)
Is it too late to make that bet? How much do you get if they beat 70 games?
I am a fat man, I always have been rotund, I hope to someday not be; I work at it, but the fact remains I am large. Not surprisingly then, I grew up thinking that running, or really any exertion of movement was HARD. The day I most dreaded in high school was not big hard tests, or trying to find someone to take to the prom, it was the mile run :) You know the one day in PE where every one has to run a timed mile for some unknown reason ;) So it may surprise you to find that now I am a long distance runner. I mostly do 10ks and half marathons, but I have done a full marathon and I just did my first sprint triathlon this weekend. I started doing more distance running just as a way to try and lose weight and because I am a masochist ;) I probably would have given up because running was just SOOOOOO HARRRRRD and I figured I would never be able to run more than a mile or two and never faster than 14 minutes a mile or so. However one of the seminal moments in my running career was when I finally accepted an invitation to run with a friend (before this point I was too embarrassed by how slow and short I would go). Well the time comes and I meet up with a friend to run and we start off and sure enough I am dragging down the pace, huffing and puffing, barely able to keep up. I feel myself really wanting to tell my buddy we need to stop, or at least take a rest when something strange happened. My buddy started talking. It was nothing in specific that he was saying, he just started a conversation, and through my gasps and gulps for air I contributed some, but mostly I was just listening to him wax poetic about whatever was going on in his life, we talked about sports some, and our girlfriends at the time, you know whatever, and before I knew it we were back at our starting spot! Huh, "weird" I thought to myself, we must have taken a short cut back to the cars. But much to my surprise when my friend reported our running distance and time we had gone 3 miles in about 32 minutes! Not only a distance record for me, but a mph record as well. And as I stood there in disbelief I also realized I wasn't breathing nearly as hard as when we had started!
So I asked my friend (a much more experienced runner at that point) what happened? What changed? And he told me, "you are thinking about this running thing TOO MUCH. You THINK it will be hard so it IS hard. You THINK you should be breathing hard so you DO breathe hard. You THINK you are slow so... guess what? YOU GO SLOW! When I got you to stop thinking about running (by starting a conversation), you immediately starting going faster and breathing easier!" To this day I have never ran slower than a 10 or 11 minute mile even on my longest running. I am not even sure I could WALK at a 14 minute mile pace today. That one experience took away the entire stigma that I had in my mind about running. A stigma that had been so ingrained into me that I couldn't get out of it on my own, it took someone else shoving it into my face and saying, Look see! I told you it wasn't that hard! For me to finally get it.
Anyway, bottom line is that I am a believer in the power of the mind, especially as it pertains to sports and pre conceived notions of ourselves. If Figgins sees himself as a lead off guy only, then... maybe that truly is the only thing he can excel at! If Wedge finally figured out that Figgins mind was only going to let him feel successful from the lead off spot then good for Wedge to make it happen. There is no way to look at Figgins this year versus the last couple years and not see a huge difference in not only Figgins baseball actions, but his demeanor and charisma as well.
The brain and mind are truly miracles!
Odds on bets on baseball season victory totals are usually 1:1 - i.e., the house returns the amount bet and pays $1 for each $1 bet. In my case, if the Mariners win 72 or more games, the casino will pay $1,000 ($500 return bet and $500 winnings). If the Mariners win 71 or less games, the house wins. Although I am not sure, I believe that the sports books stop taking bets on season total wins as soon as the first games are played. Otherwise they would be continually adjusting the odds for each win/loss. Most interesting prop bets on Mariners were: Felix number of season victories: 14.5 over/under point & Ichiro number of season hits: 190.5. Didn't bet either, figured the better bet on the M's team victory total.
Hope you can post often!
High compliment that you offer with the "following data wherever it goes." That's what we're tryin' to do, though our biases may be no weaker than anybody else's :- ) ... at least we admit that we have them...
..........
I am rivted by Vegas' take on probabilities, not because we want to push gambling on this site of course, but simply because of the light bulbs of knowledge that the oddsmakers bring to the table. If you can help us with the numbers per se, without an emphasis on laying down the actual green, that would be a nice contribution to the discussion.
I'd have thought that Vegas would give you a re-set point on the W over/under... maybe like 74 wins for the M's now or somesuch ... lot of suckers see a 3-1 start and pile on the bandwagon...
Knew a boxer one time who used the term "Self Talk" constantly, and everything in his life turned to gold ...
Anthony Robbins calls this "Transformational Vocabulary" and I am more guilty than you were about it. Cannot overstate the power involved, and yours is an extremely vivid example ...
Thought that was kinda the nature of over/under lines... where is the 50:50 proposition...
Wonder where SSI posters would have that. Tough for me to even make a guess, considering we have no idea what their intentions are as to the starting rotation. If Paxton and Hultzen were going to be up, with Erasmo allowed to compete for yet another spot, I'd have zero problem going 82 or higher...
If there were such a thing as "5:1 odds to win 90" that would be decent also...
Hector Noesi has no margin for error...if he's not locating, he's an absolute meatball. Which means he has no place in my rotation if I'm the Mariners.
George Sherrill needs to be gone. NOW.
The Rangers are evil incarnate and must be destroyed...I'm tired just watching the game...I can't imagine how hard it is to actually FACE that line-up. WOW.
Doc,
Those same fangraph pages indicate something quite unlikely to continue.
Figgins career O-swing percentage is 8%. His career # is 20%. 8% is unsustainable when you're reputed to have a good eye and your career # is 2.5 times greater. His career O-contact % is 76%. His current 100% is unsustainable.
He is swinging at bad pitches way less frequently and whacking them way more frequently than is even close to sustainable over a season.
More importantly, 37.5% of his batted balls have been LD's this season. Way unsustainable. The last two seasons he had %'s of 18 and 20. His good '09 year included a LD% of 24%. His smokin' '07 year included a LD% of 26%.
What we have here is a very small sample. That sample leads you to believe that Figgins is a Ted Williams, or something.
Experience says no way.
The key for the M's is to find the right team, eating a whole year's worth of salary in the process, to deal him to while the numbers are so out of whack.
When they come down to earth (soon), Figgins becomes a Punch and Judy hitting expensive utility guy.
Jack needs to make it clear, we'll buy this years's slary, you buy next.
With that offer, and before he becomes Figgins again, we might find a buyer.
moe
For the reasons you cite, we can be sure that Figgins and Ichiro aren't going to maintain their plate discipline #'s, any more than they're going to maintain .400 AVG's.
The question is whether they're going to maintain SOME FRACTION of that. It's like if Blake Beavan came out and fanned 14, 12, 17, and 11 men in his first four starts. He ain't going to do THAT going forward, but has he maybe figured anything out?
Seager
I've gotta start with him. Sure, he's not going to hit .400 either, but if he hits .275-.280 with 25-30 doubles (or MORE!) and some big hits in key situations, you've simply GOT to play him at least 5 games a week.
Ackley
Last night showed he's human. But he's bound to build on last year and hit better than .290 with some power.
Shortstop
Looks like it's going to have to be manned by committee, as Ryan's injury history led us to expect. Kawasaki the likely beneficiary, but I hope Seager is at least give a chance to show if he can play the position as well as, say, Rich Aurelia.
MOTO Madness
Montero seems to have been sick a lot. Has the stress and burden of being viewed as an Offensive Savior and Future HOF'er taken it's toll on him? Hope not, but if need be when Carp comes back and gets in a groove he can take some DH at-bats. The M's have been doin' what they been doin' without much contribution from Smoak and Montero. We definitely DO need power in the lineup, as the Rangers amply demonstrated last night.
Olivo
Watching Olivo makes me wish even more that Montero sticks as a catcher. The pitchers like throwing to him, but I can't stand his habit of whiffing on pitches. Not as a batter, as a catcher. To borrow and butcher some Little League trash talk, "We want a catcher, not a hairy scratcher." I still can't figure out how it seems he gets a PB or two AND a (catcher's fault) WP every game and still barely breaks double digit passed ball totals for the season. Seems like it should be triple digits.
Casper Wells
The Invisible Man.
Michael Saunders
Despite a great spring training and start, and despite a determination to implement less timid approach, why is it I feel like Saunders is gonna end up doing little better than what he's done in the past? Should he bring his big training rubber band to the plate to put around his knees?
Justin Smoak
There's a disconnect between my hopes and my fears. I must admit I'm beginning to wonder if there's some fundamental weakness that will frustrate him and keep him from making the necessary adjustments to MLB to reach his potential. He wouldn't be the first hyped player to suffer that fate even after showing flashes of superior ability.