Play Free Fantasy Baseball, Win Prizes and Support CAC!

May 14, 2013 at 9:57 am by Franklin Rabon under Atlanta Braves

Hey guys and gals, this promotion we ran last year was incredibly popular amongst our readers, so we’ll be running it monthly again this year. Essentially you get to play fantasy baseball for free, win prizes and help support Capitol Avenue Club all at once! Further details below. Have fun!

DraftStreet.com turns the season long grind into quick hitting one night leagues and the best part is that you can win cash every single day. You draft a team for one night and get paid out as soon as the games end that night. DraftStreet is at the forefront of this new trend in the fantasy world and is giving us a great promotion to celebrate Justin Upton and Chris Johnson’s thrashing of their former team: a FREE one-day fantasy league with $200 in prizes exclusively for Capitol Avenue Club.

Click Here to sign up now!

This free contest will be Pick ‘em style drafting. The way Pick ‘Em leagues work is you have 8 tiers of players and each tier will have players to choose from. All you have to do is select 1 player from each tier. There’s absolutely nothing to lose and it takes 5 minutes to build a team. You can adjust your roster up until rosters lock on Friday (5/17) at 7:05 est and it will be pickem style just like last month, at which time your rosters will lock and the Live Scoreboard will be available.

Game 38 – Not Martin Prado (21-16) @ Martin Prado (21-17)

May 13, 2013 at 8:30 pm by Mark Smith under Atlanta Braves

MVP: Chris Johnson .212 WPA, Justin Upton .139

LVP: Wade Miley -.305 WPA

Well, that was fun.

9:40 PM on Sports South

Lineups

Chase Field

Whatever you do, don’t hit it to center. It’s about as far away as it is in Turner Field, but the wall is way higher, making for a good batter’s eye but poor launching pad. Hitting it to either left or right, however, is a much better bet unless you’re unlucky enough to hit right down the lines where there’s a cutback. Chase Field is a hitter’s park – part of the Justin Upton skepticism – but keep the ball out of center field.

D’Backs ISO Maps

The Diamondbacks offense has been a lot of Gerardo Parra and Paul Goldschmidt and little of anyone else so far. AJ Pollock is a rookie without much of a track record, but he seems susceptible away. Didi Gregorius hasn’t been up long, but he’s been on fire while trying to derail the naysayers who questioned his bat. Paul Goldschmidt is a masher, and Mike Minor should be careful tonight. Cody Ross can also knock around a lefty or two, and the ball should be kept away from him. Miguel Montero is a good hitting catcher, but he’s got a hole up-and-in. Our friend Martin Prado is here, and he does most of his damage in, something that he should do a little more of instead of poking the ball the other way. Gerardo Parra is more of a batting average hitter, but he’s got some pop if the ball is left in the middle of the plate. And our friend Josh Wilson is also here, but he’s not much to worry about. The key here is avoiding letting the 3-4-5 hitters do serious damage, and with two of them being lefty mashers, Minor will have his work cut out for him.

Wade Miley

Wade Miley is a pretty good pitcher. He’s not necessarily going to overpower you – throws about 91 – or strike you out – about 18.5% over the past season+ – but he’s not going to walk you or let you hit it out of the park. As you can see from the maps above, he keeps the ball down, and he does get a lot of grounders – 1.35 GB/FB in his career. He does this primarily pitching off his fastball about 73% of the time, adding a slider in (especially for the kill), and throwing a change-up to RHH. Against lefties, he’s mainly fastball/slider, but righties will need to look out for the change as well.

Tonight

Happy Mike Minor Day everyone! Two fairly under-appreciated young lefties will take the mound for their respective teams in this one. This is also the first game between Justin Upton, Martin Prado, and their former employers, so the entire world will be watching these games in anticipation of which narrative they can pull out of their you-know-whats. Ultimately, these three games won’t tell us much about either player, how they were treated, how they felt they were treated, etc., but don’t be surprised when someone tries to make a big deal out of it.

5.13.13 CACast: Medducks or Medsucks?

May 13, 2013 at 3:48 pm by Franklin Rabon under Atlanta Braves

or directly download the MP3

Download this episode (right click and save)

Game 35 – Braves (21-13) @ Giants (20-15)

May 10, 2013 at 8:30 pm by Mark Smith under Atlanta Braves

(Sorry about the lack of post last night. A few things came up yesterday – no big deal – that didn’t allow me to get to it.)

10:15 PM on Sports South

Lineups

Probably won’t be around for the start, but I’m assuming this is the easiest thing to find. If not, head to Baseball Press.

AT&T Park

AT&T Park is a perfect example of how a place can be a pitcher’s park overall while not affecting each hitter the same way. Left-handed hitters will have more problems here, but right-handers aren’t at a disadvantage. Looking at right field, the fence is nearly as far back as the one at Turner, and although it’s closer down the line and to straight right, there’s a massive wall there. The upshot, as we saw last night, is hitting it back in that nook in CRCF (Center Right Center Field – like NNW or the ilk) will get you an automatic triple. Basically, it hurts home runs, but it does help create triples. Left field plays pretty fair, though the sea level altitude does it make it slightly more difficult to hit the ball out.

Giants ISO Maps

The Giants lineup isn’t a bad one, but it’s not a force, either. Angel Pagan starts things off, and he does pretty well for himself as one of the more underrated players in the game, though most of it is as a guy who does a lot of things well but not exceptionally well. Marco Scutaro is a nice piece, but the outer half of the plate is a definite weakness. Pablo Sandoval and Buster Posey make a formidable duo, and they’re followed by Hunter Pence, who isn’t too bad himself. Gregor Blanco does much of his damage by getting on base, not by power. Brandon Crawford has shown a shocking amount of power early on in 2013, but I’m not convinced it’s more than a hot streak, which has tailed off over the past few weeks. And Brandon Belt rounds the lineup out in his usual enigmatic way – showing flashes but not putting it together often enough to be another lineup stalwart. His progress could make this lineup a very good one.

Matt Cain

Matt Cain isn’t off to a good start this season as his 5.57 ERA suggests. There are two main reasons for this. One is that his walk rate has increased while his strikeout rate has remained near career levels, and the other is an absurd 16.7% HR/FB rate (7% career). The homer rate is likely to go back toward career norms, and my guess is that the walk rate will as well. The velocity has dropped about a half a mile per hour, but he still throws plenty hard. The main change seems to be in his secondary usage, where the use of his slider has increased, with fewer curves and changes. Overall, you can expect a decent amount of fastballs and curves from Cain, and the use of his slider and change depend on what hitter he’s facing. Cain is off to a slow start, but he’s still nothing to mess with.

Tonight

Tim Hudson looks to continue his brilliant work as of late. His HR/FB rate is up to 15.4%, but like Cain, he’s not likely to stay there, though he has seen a decrease in the amount of groundballs this season – 1.72 GB/FB against his 2.51 career mark. The nice thing is a serious uptick in strikeouts this season – 18% against a 16% career mark – without a real rise in walks. Let’s hope the Braves continue Cain’s struggles and take another series as we’re about T-minus 3 games from seeing Heyward’s return.

(As always, thanks to ESPN and Brooks Baseball for access to the above information.)

Some Answers To The Julio Teheran Changeup Mystery

May 10, 2013 at 9:30 am by Andrew Sisson under Atlanta Braves

Julio Teheran threw well last night, 7IP, 7H, 3ER, 0BB and 3K on 93 pitches. After getting off to a shaky start, he eventually settled down allowing the Braves to take game one of the four game series. There were a number of positives to take away from the start: no walks, a plethora of groundballs and most importantly, the kind-of-sort-of return of his changeup.

According to Brooks Baseball, Teheran threw the change 10 times last night, which is quite a bit considering he only threw it 16 times his his first five starts. There had been a lot of rumors tossed around to the reason why it was basically scrapped, was it Laird? was it McDowell? was it Teheran?

Well, Teheran discussed the usage post game (thanks to DOB for the quotes),

“I started throwing my old changeup, the one I was using the year before. So I started throwing it today and it worked.”

On why he got away from it…

“Because I wasn’t throwing it for strikes. So I was trying to get away from it and got another grip. I came back to it today and it worked… I was trying to throw it for a strike to the middle of the plate and over to the right side… Yesterday I was like, I want to throw the changeup tomorrow. I was feeling it before the game, that grip.”

Fredi as also discussed Teheran’s changeup last night…

“Julio did a terrific job, for a guy who hadn’t pitched in about nine, 10 days. He did a terrific job. After the second inning we asked him, or we made him throw his changeup more often to the left-handers. For me, that’s what got him over the hump, to be able to keep those left-handers off his fastball and off his breaking stuff. And he gave us a great outing, he really did… Young kids. Young pitchers. Maybe he didn’t have the confidence he had before. You’ve got to make them do some stuff sometimes. Today, I hope he takes it to his next start, because that pitch tonight was an equalizer, especially against the left-handed hitters.”

So, it appears Teheran simply lost command and confidence in the pitch, leading to the lack of usage. It is still unclear why he changed the grip last season. Of course, it is a positive sign he has gone back to the original grip and upped the usage a bit last night. In a perfect world, Teheran regains the confidence and feel for the pitch with his old grip and continues to throw it with regularity from here on out. However, the changeup is the ultimate feel pitch, a good changeup is thrown with the same arm speed as a fastball, allowing the grip to take care of the speed and movement. Being able to put it back into his arsenal of pitches is key because he’s going to have a hard time surviving and succeeding at this level with a mid-low 90′s fastball and an inconsistent breaking ball.

At the end of the day, it is good to finally get some answers to end the speculation. I always assumed it had something to do with his feel for the pitch and not an outside force. Originally, it was a plus pitch and his top secondary offering, one of the main reasons he was such a highly-touted prospect (3 of the 6 whiffs yesterday were on the changeup). Hopefully last night was a progressive step in the right direction.

With Kimbrel, The Good News Is The Bad News

May 9, 2013 at 8:52 pm by Franklin Rabon under Atlanta Braves

A lot of hands have been wrung throughout Braves fandom recently over the surprising struggles of once dominant closer Craig Kimbrel. He’s gone from being not just automatic, but completely demoralizing to the other team, to Durbin-esque in recent weeks, giving up key home runs repeatedly.

This has lead many Braves fans to speculate on what’s wrong with Kimbrel. I’ve seen repeated mentions of his velocity being down (possibly due to an undiagnosed injury, because Twitter doctors can smell injuries from 200 miles away), over-reliance on his fastball, different release point, or just plain old lack of mental toughness.

Let’s first address the physical claims, because most of them are easier to dismiss, because they’re just not factually true.

Here are Kimbrel’s careeer velocity, release point and movement numbers, courtesy of Brooksbaseball.net:

and here are his numbers for 2013:

We see that Kimbrel has ‘lost’ 0.1 MPH on his fastball. Given the sample size in 2013, this is even inside the possibility this is even just due to inaccuracy in radar guns. 0.1 MPH isn’t even remotely close to statistically significant, let alone being practically different from a ‘difficulty of hitting the baseball’ standpoint. Attributing Kimbrel’s struggles to loss in velocity is simply factually incorrect, and the product of lazy analysis by those who are simply unwilling to actually research their opinions before spewing them. I was recently engaged on twitter by a fan who said “it’s not up for debate that he’s lost velocity, I watch every game, it’s clearly 2-3 MPH less.” While he was right, that it’s not up for debate, it was because he was so factually incorrect that it’s not up for debate that he was wrong; this clearly shows why the common rebuttal to most analysis of “do you even watch the games?” is a non-starter. When we watch the games, as humans, we’re extremely prone to all sorts of known cognitive biases. I do believe this follower wasn’t being disingenuous, and actually did believe Kimbrel’s velocity was down, but due to confirmation bias, he was simply wrong about that factual matter. I watch every game, either from my seat on the 10th row along the first base side of the infield, where I have a pretty good view of what’s going on, or from my TV, where I have access to slow motion replay, and often times I do BOTH, thanks to MLB.TV replay. Even as such, I still don’t trust my eyes and memories when it comes to matters that can easily enough be looked up given the vast resources we have at our disposal today.

Career:

2013:

Looking at usage charts, we see that Kimbrel’s fastball usage is up by 8% (and since he’s a two pitch pitcher, his curve usage is down 8%). One line of argumentation goes that Kimbrel has over-relied on his fastball, allowing hitters to ‘tee off on it’ because they’re seeing it so much more. Simply put, an additional 8% of the time over such a small sample simply isn’t enough of a difference for that to be the case. Consider an at bat, this comes out to less than one additional fastball per at bat, which simply isn’t enough of a difference for a hitter to alter the way he approaches facing Kimbrel. Further, since Kimbrel will only face a hitter once per game, it’s not like seeing those additional fastballs allows hitters to better track the pitch, like might be the case with a starting pitcher. Even at that, given the nastiness of Kimbrel’s stuff, it isn’t clear that it would matter anyway. Steve Carlton was a starting pitcher with essentially the same two pitches, and it didn’t really matter. Carlton even always threw his pitches to the same two locations (fastballs up and in and sliders low and away).

Further, his pitches aren’t moving in a statistically different way. While his point of release has changed a bit (he’s releasing the ball from a slightly lower point), that should show up in contact rates (which haven’t really changed) more-so than HR/FB rates.

Another claim is that Kimbrel isn’t throwing the high fastball as much, and that the low fastball is easier to hit out. First, this defies all common baseball knowledge. Common baseball knowledge says that low fastballs are harder to hit out, while high fastballs are easier to hit out, but harder to make contact with. And while we can’t always trust ‘common baseball knowledge’ we’d at least need some sort of statistical evidence before we went around challenging it. And while there is some evidence that high fastballs are harder to make contact with, there isn’t any evidence that it would change HR/FB ratio without changing contact rate first. Kimbrel isn’t having trouble missing bats, his trouble is coming from what happens when contact is made. Finally, the location change is barely even noticeable anyway:
Fastball Location for his Career:

Fastball location in 2013:

Some difference, but not really a substantial one. Certainly not enough to explain a more than doubling of his HR/FB rate.

A point we’ve alluded to that we’ll now make explicit is what has changed with Kimbrel’s results? Strikeout, walk and other rates, again, aren’t statistically significantly different. What has changed is Kimbrel’s home run to fly ball ratio.

Career:

2013:

The HR/FB ratio jumps off the screen, while other rates are roughly in line with his career.

Simply put, HR/FB ratio is by far the most unstable rate for a pitcher of any statistic there is. Even for starting pitchers, it usually takes 2 or more full seasons to have any idea what a pitcher’s real HR/FB ratio really is. In Pizza Cutter’s landmark rate stabilization study, HR/FB ratio didn’t even come remotely close to stabilizing for starting pitchers over an entire season. The point is especially poignant for relievers. As Pizza Cutter said:

Now consider the sample and stat that we’re fretting so much about with Kimbrel, the sample is 52 PA. It typically takes close to 2000 PA for a pitcher’s HR/FB to begin to stabilize.

What we have to consider here is the “signal to noise” ratio. That is, how much of the results we’re seeing are due to a real change in skill, and how much are random variation. Given the sample size and variance of the statistic that’s giving Kimbrel so much trouble, we’re talking about 98.75% noise and 1.25% signal. That means that for the 52 plate appearances Kimbrel has faced hitters this season, HR/FB ratio is literally 99% random chance. Not a change in skill, not something the pitcher is doing differently, but purely random variation. We’re essentially trying to come up with explanations for a coin flipping contest when we try to explain why Kimbrel’s HR/FB ratio has jumped so much. While there might be some change in skill involved, it’s several hundred times more likely that it’s just pure dumb luck, that it’s not even really worth considering “what’s wrong with Kimbrel” at this point. It’s dramatically more likely he’s the same pitcher he’s always been, just running into small sample weirdness. Fans hate “small sample size weirdness” as an explanation, but this is largely why average fans aren’t professional MLB general managers.

Craig Kimbrel had an incredible season last year, but the problem is, even over a full year, a reliever’s performance is over a relatively small sample, and is thus prone, as pizza cutter stated, to an absurd amount of random variation. This is why it’s an absurd idea to pay any reliever a lot of money, even coming off a year like Kimbrel had last year. Because even if they do perform at an obscenely great level, you simply cannot depend on that type of performance from year to year.

Why I’m saying that the good news with Kimbrel is also the bad news is because while nothing is wrong with Kimbrel, that’s the point, nothing is wrong with him; what we’re seeing is simply what we should expect from him from time to time. You can never expect a reliever to put up a season like Kimbrel did last year, and we should expect down years where Kimbrel blows 7-10 saves more often than a year like last year, even if Kimbrel is one of the greatest relievers in baseball history. Further, with Kimbrel, even though he’s approaching 100 saves, he simply hasn’t pitched enough for us to even know what his actual rates should and will be once they start to stabilize. While we fully accept that a starter can have an anomolously good or bad year, we often fail to realize that over his entire career, Craig Kimbrel has pitched less than an ‘ace’ starter’s full season workload. It’s entirely possible that when Kimbrel’s HR/FB ratio does stabilize, it will be higher than the ~8% rate he’s seen over the first couple of years of his career. The bottom line is that we don’t really know if Kimbrel is an ‘all-time’ level talent or merely very good. It’s not only possible that his career won’t be as good as Billy Wagner’s, it’s actually extremely likely.

Finally, one point I’ll briefly address is the claim that the reason why Kimbrel’s ‘problem’ hasn’t shown up in any of the measures we’ve examined above is because it’s mental. There is a claim floating around out there that Kimbrel has simply got into a mental funk. I’m actually not one to immediately disqualify the mental aspect of the game. Players absolutely can go through mental funks that negatively impact their performance. However, for it to be real, it has to negatively impact their performance in a tangible way. What mental toughness does is makes a pitcher less likely to throw poor pitches. A lack of ‘closer mentality’ doesn’t however make good pitches magically become hittable. Kimbrel’s 96 MPH fastball with the exact same amount of movement didn’t magically become easier to hit out of the park because it contained less will to win. Rick Ankiel’s ‘intangibles’ were absolutely real, and caused an absolutely real inability to throw strikes. If you’re going to claim ‘intangibles’ you have to be able to show how those intangibles actually impact the game, you can’t use ‘intangible’ as if a magic wand that explains away everything that isn’t immediately apparent.

If Kimbrel had ‘a problem’ and getting back to his 2011-2012 type results were simply as easy as ‘fixing the problem’ it’d almost be less worrisome, the reality is that there’s nothing to fix. We should marvel at Kimbrel’s 2011-2012 results, but to expect we’ll see it year in-year out, or ever again at all, is simply folly. And most importantly of all, we absolutely shouldn’t pay Kimbrel down the road like we expect his 2011-2012 performance.

Eric O’Flaherty Has Picked a Bad Time to Lose Velocity

May 9, 2013 at 3:56 pm by Ben Duronio under Atlanta Braves

While most of the talk is about Craig Kimbrel’s struggles in the ninth inning over the past week — which I also opined on yesterday at RotoGraphs – there should also be some cause for concern with Eric O’Flaherty.

This is O’Flaherty’s final season before free agency, which most likely means it is his final season with the Braves. Much like Brian McCann, O’Flaherty’s position is not necessarily a position of need and the team will want to fill his spot with a cheaper and younger player. The sooner it is understood that O’Flaherty will be gone, the easier it will be for you to cope with if you are the kind of person who has difficulty watching players leave. It will happen, so let’s move on from that.

The problem with O’Flaherty hitting free agency, is that his strikeouts are dropping at a rapid rate and his velocity has dipped down to 90mph from his peak of right at 92mph. Is that a huge, fearful drop? Not quite, but I can assure teams have access to his velocity readings and the fact that it is continually dropping along with his strikeout rate (22.3% rate in 2011, 20% in 2012, 15.5% in 2013) will be a big caution sign for potential users of his services.

What it means for the Braves is that we probably should not expect O’Flaherty to bounce back with quite the same level of confidence that we have in Kimbrel. If I had to estimate, I think O’Flaherty’s ERA will only rise from its current level of 2.40 rather than drop — which is considerable when you look at his 0.98 and 1.73 marks from the past few years. He still gets himself a lot of ground balls which should lead to a better ERA than FIP and xFIP, but I doubt we see the O’Flaherty we saw for the past two seasons going forward. It would certainly be great to have that type of performance, but given his weakened velocity and lowered strikeout rate, I am not very confident in that happening.

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