Modern golf analysis teaches us that there is an optimum launch angle for every velocity. Find that optimum angle and you win the kewpie doll. Guys today "dial in" that angle by changing driver loft, shaft and ball configurations to get it just right. Ball changes allow you to optimize spin rates to ball velocity. It makes a difference. A big one. It is one reason guys are so much longer today on the average. A few minutes in the machine gives you tons of info for tweaking your equipment.
I wonder if Smoak's launch angles are "tweeners," not enough to get the ball to the 4th row and too much for the ball to a smoking rope gapper. Spin rates? What do they look like?
does anybody study that stuff in baseball? Matty?
Of course you can't "dial in" the perfect combo, but it would be interesting to see.
moe
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I/O: The Mariners have hit the ball harder, more frequently, than ANY other major league team. They're #1 of 30.
CRUNCH: And here's a "picture" of the ESPN stats table ... if you enlarge it, you might be able to read it, a little bit. Next up, Rickey Henderson's baseball card on the head of pin.
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The naked eye concurs. The Mariners have hit the ball into wayyyy more share of their hard outs. It is Dr. D's considered opinion that the table's core idea is basically accurate.
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Does that mean that the Mariners have one of the best offenses in baseball, camouflaged by ballpark and bad luck? Well .... that's another conversation, about an 8-part article. But, you do realize, the Mariners are (alliteratively) already approximately average in runs scored, not even considering the park or the strength of pitching opposition.
They look better than their results, and they look like they could get way better. Spectator has written on this quite a bit, the weird things that have gone wrong for the M's.
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AGAIN Justin Smoak -- by velocity and trajectory of batted balls -- "scientifically" and "logically" is a good hitter. And, again, on the scoreboard -- bases gained and bases lost -- he is not a good hitter. Not for a first baseman.
I mean, his OPS+ is 111 as it is, and you're supposed to hit .700 on the above outs. 70% doubles and homers, basically.
Granted, he has some doubles and homers, which would count in the above "BABIP" calculation, but still ...
- He leads MLB in this bad-luck category,
- The above is just hard hit balls that landed in the outfield, and
- SABRMatt has been telling us about Smoak's batted ball velocity since Matty's days with the Yankees
From a technical standpoint, Smoak has finally crushed some pitches low-and-in, which should be any lefty's wheelhouse. (Was it Spectator who first pointed that out?) If Smoak combined his line drives with another ten homers a year off Low-And-In Pitches ... via the Screen Drill ... then we'd be cooking with peanut oil.
Once again we have the will-o-wisp of Smoak's potential to long for.
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M's should hit fifth gear, and win 21-of-26 any time now, probably Tuesday. Or maybe they'll start the streak the day after. If not then, for sure by Thursday.
At least we ain't Jack,
Dr D
Comments
Alas, there is no demand for intense physical analysis of baseball...the people who run the sport think such information will only add confusion to their perspectives on the game and its players...the players think only in terms of working hard enough, for the most part, not in terms of studying their craft.
Golf is definitely more of a learned-man's game to play...and golfers, because they are lone wolves, not team players, are on their own to figure out how to improve. The lack of a team structure to train them makes them smarter at finding the flaws in their game and getting the results on their own. The last great revolution in baseball will be, IMHO, the dawn of individual coaches and training programs and the end of the minor league one-size-fits-few system of coaching and development.
Regarding the Mariners, I think there may be some bad luck, but I also think we are being out-scouted.
The Yankees tracked this batted ball information with much more detail than ESPN does...and, without giving away precisely what they look at, I think it is safe to say that I had access to several years worth of high quality batted ball info...and found, to my grim LACK of surprise, that the Mariners had been the unluckiest team in baseball EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. since record keeping began for this sort of thing (2008).
Every year, they had regular players near the top of the unlucky list when comparing their actual offense to the offense you expected.
In 2013, it was Ackley, Smoak, Seager, Montero (short sample) and Bay (yep...he was a good hitter in 2013 according to our guesses).
In 2012, it was Ackley again, Smoak (to a lesser degree), Montero, Carp, and Casper Wells leading the unlucky pile.
In 2011 it was Seager, Smoak, Olivo and (believe it or not) Ryan.
I assure you...even in 2010, the Mariners were both horrible and ridiculous unlucky.
They're not just bad because theyb lack talent...they're bad because they are one of the "dumbest" teams in professional sports. Not in the sense that they lack intelligent people in their employ...but in the sense that they are constantly being annihilated by their opposition on the matter of advance scouting and adjusting to how other teams try to defeat them.
It seems like 'advanced scouting' could create 'unlucky hitters' by defensive positioning--but what else?
And what does a hitter do to become less 'unlucky'?
Matt says, "...that the Mariners had been the unluckiest team in baseball EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. since record keeping began for this sort of thing (2008)."
When you have 30 teams, it says something to be unlucky 1 season. If it's random, is it what? 1 in 900 to be THE unluckiest 2 seasons in a row? THE unluckiest from 2008-2012, if it's truly random, comes out to a 1 in 24,300,000. And they're on pace to do it again? That would be 1 in 729,000,000. Doesn't pass the sniff test.
Every time I bring up some new thing of why my beloved team is on the wrong end of the luck spectrum, my wife rolls her eyes...understandably so. Because it is not reasonable to believe odds like that without some other factor. There is something else at work here. We just don't know what that something else is.
Not impugning your idea here Matt...your revelation actually suggests there is something VERY wrong with the Mariner Organization and their hitting...simply because it's not reasonable to believe that luck would account for 5 seasons in a row. Is there any other team that appears non-random in any way? It would be cool to look at how other teams populate that list every year...
Sorry, but this smacks of "dumb" analysis. Your conclusion isn't found anywhere in the data. For THE SAME team to be the unluckiest team every year can't be because 29 other teams play the shift perfectly or know how to pitch to hard contact without getting hurt, etc. The obvious reason THE SAME TEAM has these results is climate.
This does not surprise me in the least, though it is great information (Thanks Matt!). One year of bad luck, shame on bad luck. Year after year? Shame on the franchise. Maybe this is what should be meant by the phrase "dumb luck." Technically it means that luck has no intent, purpose or genius behind it. It is akin to "blind luck." But in the M's case, perhaps you have bad luck precisely because you are dumb. If so, it starts at the top of the food chain. The dumbest person is the one who thinks he is smart when in fact he is not. If this doesn't characterize Howard Lincoln I don't know what does. Piniella said after he left "Howard doesn't know HOW to win." And Howard has been proving it ever since.
If so, and it makes sense, they are also being out-managed, out-coached, out-GM'd, and out-ownered.
Over the Zduriencik years the Mariners had at their disposal an incredible stockpile of high draft choices and fungible trade assets, enough that if used wisely and developed properly we would have every reason to expect them to pull a Tampa Bay-style turnaround. They did not. I have frequently asserted, and continue to do so, that the problem with Jack's regime is not mostly the theory, it's bad execution of the theory.
+1 Silentpadna. There's a reason. We may not be able to precisely delineate it, but there's a reason. The Mariners are considered a joke franchise throughout baseball for a reason. Blind luck will get you to the World Series once in 37 years. Barely minimal competence will get you there two or three times in that span.
Great comment, as usual from one of our Jedi Masters. :)
That was rather my point...that the Mariners keep appearing on "unlucky" leaderboards...that every year we keep doing this to ourselves as fans...I remember posting back in 2007 and 2008 how unlucky a bunch of our hitters had been. In 2004 too. We didn't have as much info as we do now to confirm just how unlucky we've been...but this is ten years of bad luck! I can't be ten years of bad luck. Something is really...REALLY wrong.
And it's bad luck in so many different forms! This most recent version, in which all of our hard hit balls are caught and all of theirs fall in, looks like bad advance scouting and outdated defensive positioning. The ongoing saga of the bad luck we keep encountering in the development of hitting prospects - the process is good...we pick the right kinds of prospects now - and yet they still fail. Over and over and OVER. No team can be THIS snake bit!
And before that...we were underperforming pythag (2002-2003). We had the talent and the offensive production, but not the wins to show for it.
We've been abused by the umpires (calling an unfair strike zone it seems).
We've had our stadium cause a run of miserable failures for right handed hitters like Adrian Beltre (who hit everywhere else he played!) and Jeff Cirillo. We've lost heart-breaking post-season series to lesser teams (2000 Yankees, e.g.) and it looked pretty convincing (they crushed us EASILY).
Time and time again, players would arrive with high hopes, fail, and then leave, and immediately succeed elsewhere.
This goes back TWENTY YEARS.
Sorry...that is not bad luck. It's bad baseball. The Mariners are a bad franchise and it continues to this day.
If we were a better franchise, we would tell our batters to hit the ball LESS hard?
Or do a better job of 'hitting 'em where they ain't'?
Good scouts can tell a defense where to play a hitter. But that same scouting applies to every other team, right? So what is it that causes our hard hit balls to wind up in more outs?
Just blaming Lincoln and Z doesn't seem to address the question.
Or maybe I'm missing something obvious...
The Mariners are not failing because of their draftpicks. Zduriencik got here in 2009, and it takes a few years for the farm product to mature. We are now looking at:
- An OF with a 112 OPS+ (Ackley, tho it's 93 for his career)
- A 1B with a 112 OPS+ since the start of 2013 (Smoak)
- A 3B with a 111 OPS+ career (Seager)
- a catcher with a 93 OPS+ career, and rising (Zunino, who is also a tremedous pitch-framer)
- a brand-new CF who is opening eyes (Jones)
- Not one, or two, but THREE shortstops who have OPSed .900+ in AAA (Brad, Nick & Chris)
- A decent BOR pitcher with a 100 ERA+ (Elias) with TWO ultra-top-tier arms returning to the roster in a couple weeks (Paxton and Walker)
And more. The farm ain't barren, and there are plenty of decent talents still on the way.
If your farm gives you pitchers 3-5 (and 6-8), basically your whole bullpen outside of your closer (at least two of whom are better pitchers than your closer) with more on the way, and 4 position players who are plus offensively with one minor star for sure in Seager... what exactly do you have to do to build a contender?
You ALREADY have an ace, and lucked into ANOTHER ace on the cheap in Iwakuma. We should roar down the tracks like a freight train once Paxton and Walker get here...
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Except Morrison is bad (and injured) and Hart has scuffled (and is now gone for two months) and Bloomquist is worse than useless, and Almonte got a month to set himself on fire in the outfield, and our RH outfielder was "surprisingly" injured again (sorry Guti) and we had no useful backup plan, and...
It's not the kids, DaddyO. We might wish Smoak was a star, and Franklin would just OPS .900 at short against the AL and NL instead of the PCL, and Ackley would compete for batting titles, but we HAVE enough young talent to free up cash for an ace or two, a 240 million dollar middle infielder, and more.
But Jack - for a dude who has an undeniable ability to select talented players who have no pro experience - has very little ability to select hitters who DO have a pro track record. Every time he's gone for a guy hoping for a bounceback year, it's blown up in his face. Then those guys can go elsewhere and succeed (hello, Mr. Morse). Of course, Morse played most of the year here with a broken wrist that was misdiagnosed by our team docs (see my shout about an incompetent medical staff for further rants on that subject).
The guy needs his minor-league self (and cohorts like McNamara) to save him from his major-league self. If this team falls down, he'll be about out of time. The only thing that might save him another year if that happens, ironically, would be a team sale. Can't get a new FO til after the sale goes through.
Jack's plan had better work this year, for his sake. I just hope he doesn't pull a Bavasi and throw away talent trying to add in guys who won't fix the problem. Taijuan and Paxton can't come back soon enough - but I hope they find a good RH hitter under the rosin bag or something.
~G
I didn't say it was the draft picks. I merely included the draft picks along with fungible trade assets as the kind of advantageous assets that should have allowed the M's to succeed better than they have. I should have added payroll capability (as opposed to payroll deployment) to allow for free agent pursuit. In my previous post on this thread I confess I can't delineate the problem (or problems) behind the Mariners' run of what appears to be bad luck, but I agreed that there simply MUST be something behind that bad luck. As to whether the farm is poised to finally contribute in a way that it has not previously done, IMHO (and who am I to disagree with you), that remains to be seen. Perhaps the best that can be said is that the farm OUGHT to be ready to contribute and APPEARS ready to do so. But until it ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTES I am not prepared to concede the point given the Mariners' history.
I don't believe I have, at any point, suggested that the Mariners' problems are 100% the result of poor defensive positioning.
I am, however, going to suggest that their problems have a lot more to do with a combination of bad advance scouting (failing to give their players a solid game plan form which they can base an attack), bad defensive positioning (failing to maximize their chance to be "lucky" on specific types of balls in play), bad coaching (failing to get the most of their talent in the strict, objective sense), and bad management (failure to deploy assets and manage personalities in a way that will generate a positive outcome).
And if you're going to blame the climate so effortlessly for the problem, might I suggest you look at the pitching side? They play in the same climate. They certainly have NOT had the same run of epid GOOD luck that the offense has had on the bad side. In fact, the same data I used in the above "dumb analysis" shows no real trend in Mariner pitchers' real world results relative to their expected results beyond a small park factor. Yes, it would be dumb to assume the park and its' weather played zero role...but the magnitudes don't match, Rob.
Rather than assuming I'm dumb...maybe you could try raising your concern for my arguments in the form of a question...posing an opportunity for an information exchange, rather than blasting at me that I'm an idiot.
To better articulate my position - I am not saying we shouldn't hit the ball hard...I am saying that the Mariners seem to lack SOME ability that other teams possess to get adjustments to the way that teams are pitching and positioning against them (and to their home park and its' known impacts)...and I'm saying that's ONE problem...not the whole problem with the franchise.
My core point, though, was that the offense has been unlucky many times in a row...unlucky more than can be explained by the park and climate of Seattle. Unlucky in ways that seem to repeat from year to year.
To echo some sentiments found elsewhere in this thread, not only is this statistically improbable, but there are some patterns in it...left handed prospects getting shifted against and not answering the shift, older right handed bats attempting to make a career comeback and coming up just short, etc...I haven't diagnosed every pattern, but I can see, from looking at the big picture, that SOMETHING is wrong in Seattle...something that has transcended managers, players, coaches, medical teams, minor league coordinators, even GMs. Something that goes to the core of the process in Seattle.
This is utterly fascinating information, Matt. Is there a public source for it or is this all proprietary data?
There's a FO issue at work with our continual failures. Hopefully this is the year we get out of it, but we're SUCH an outlier in relying on young, unproven talent to build a contender it's ridiculous. Our kids are not allowed to come up alongside the pros and be lower-bullpen guys, or #8-9 hitters, or #5 starters. We need Paxton to win 15 games the rest of the year to compete, and we need it NOW. Seager has to be a #3 hitter, Smoak a #5, rookies are leading off innings this year or closing games last year.
We have no idea what a soft landing looks like for a kid. We just bounce them off the rocks under the Cliffs of Insanity and wonder why they are breaking bones and taking a long time to reach their potential.
Mike Trout is the greatest young hitter in the league, so the Angels naturally made him do everyth... no, wait, they spent a bajillion dollars to protect him. The Rangers don't make Profar carry the offense, they have Fielder or whomever.
Bad teams make rookies be #1 starters or MOTO hitters or closers.
Sometimes it works out. The Giants have won two titles by making their rookie (Posey) be their only real MOTO bat and by having The Freak and Bumgarner and Cain do a TON of heavy lifting.
But that's the NL. You can do that over there, where pitchers bat. Hard to win the AL playing that way - and if not for an epic Padres collapse the Giants wouldn't have even made the playoffs to have their shining lights pull out the World Series for em.
Most teams add a couple of rookies a year. Nobody wins with the kind of youth we continually stuff into the lineup. I hope we're good enough to beat the odds, and that our dynamic young pitchers can come in and just wail away on the opposition while our young hitters all get it together and keep it that way.
But it's a desperate plan, not a brilliant one. And it's desperate because once again (Cano aside) our hitting acquisitions OUTSIDE the farm system have gone belly up. Fingers crossed for Franklin to do a Jeter impression and help us get wins despite that.
~G
Hit F/X isn't public yet...so a lot of the commentary you'll hear from certain analysts will be circumspect (not just talking about me here...there are studies on Hit F/X data at BP and the like) and it's difficult to get ahold of that information at the moment. I can't even get it now...I'm moshing off of what I saw last year and what the less accurate ESPN/BIS method produces that corroborates the same trend continuing in 2014.
I should be a bit careful, because I don't have access to 2014 pitching information to see whether the pitchers are benefiting from good "luck" now..they weren't really last year or any of the previous three other than the expected 25-40 point deflection in projected OPS caused by the weather effects and I am sort of assuming that they aren't again.
When MLBAM releases Hit F/X publicly, this kind of discussion will get a lot easier to have...not sure if that's likely in the near future though
...is that in their zeal to save money by just going with the kids...the Mariners have probably cost themselves tens of millions. Rush the kids...they fail...rush some more kids...they fail...rush some more kids...they fail...meanwhile, the team is lousy as a result...you lose 1.5 million fans in gate and the associated merchandise...and worse...those players are multi-million-dollar assets that you're breaking and making nearly worthless...good work.
If your hard hit balls result in more outs than anyone else's, that seems clearly attributable to good scouting on defensive positioning from the other team. But those same scouts are going to apply the same scouting to every other team they play...so shouldn't that neutralize any 'bad luck' that we have?
We seem to be saying we can't identify (other than personal theories) what the problem might be.
But what about the teams at the other end of the spectrum. Is there something the 'lucky' teams are doing at the plate that we're not?
At least IMHO that is highly possible.
Basically...I'm saying that not only are the other teams better at forming a game plan to beat our hitters, even if they get good contact, but they're better at forming a game plan to beat our defense too (and other teams' defenses). That our being behind when it comes to constructing a game plan is not just costing us in terms of their guys being in position to stop our deep fly balls....but also in terms of their guys getting the hits to fall in against us because they're adjusting to the way we play them (and a lot better than we adjust to what they're doing against us).
Again...I'm not saying this is the whole problem, and even if it were...it's not ALL management's fault. We are a very young team, and young players are inherently worse at APPLYING a game plan...so it may be that we have game plan WIZARDS in the dugout, but the hitters aren't doing what we tell them to do because they're young and nervous and raw.
This sort of game plan thing includes not just how to make hard contact (which we're doing) but how to read a defense and the pitches and make hard contact in the direction that maximizes your odds of something good happening on said hard contact. If the other guys put the overshift on you, and the pitcher throws the ball on the outside part of the plate...a good, experienced hitter whacks it to the opposite field...end of overshift. Our guys are griding the bat into saw dust and hitting a hard grounder or line drive or even fly ball into the shift side. It's solid contact, but it's not the type that will give you the expected probabiltiy of success given the defensive alignment. KnowwhatImean? :)
It's a complex issue...but I think there is a core problem in Seattle with teaching players how to use the opposing tema's game plan against them...or even be aware that the other guys HAVE a game plan.
Matt - Shoot me an email at terrymcdermott@verizon.net if you would. I''d like to ask you something. Thx.
I don't have data to do anything more than speculate...
That said, I theorize that the Mariners are hitting the ball hard a lot, but not hitting it BLISTERINGLY hard for one. They're catching a lot of the ball but because they aren't going with the pitch as well as they should, they're hitting a blizzard of 85-90 mph deep fly outs instead of 90-105 mph homers and fence-denters. This will look like they're hitting the ball really hard when you take averages and add up counts of "hard hit balls" and may even fool the batted ball metrics...but won't maximize your offensive output. Again though...just a theory.
Another theory is that even if they're hitting the same number of 100 mph balls...they're hitting them to predictable locations because pitchers are too easily able to figure out how they'll react to various sequences and pitch types - all of our luck estimates assume a somewhat random distribution of landing spots for the hard hit balls...but if the distributions aren't random...if there are players with severely biased spray charts, then the end result will be fewer hits than the predictive models say.
And a third hypothesis...they're could be feasting on certain pitchers while being mauled by others...if their successful hard hit balls are bunched, teams have a chance to play back to adjust (I've seen this happen a few times this year...where we crushed a SP for 5 runs in the second or third inning and then failed to score again because we hit a bunch of warning track outs that were caught the next time around).
All just theories, sadly.