Link Roundup

Here are a few interesting things to read that I found on the World Wide Web.

CC’s Scorched Earth Policy

Over at Fangraphs, David Golebiewski reviews the change in Sabathia’s strikeout rate this season.  After noting that Sabathia is getting less whiffs on his secondary pitches, Golebiewski demonstrates that Sabathia is getting more groundballs and double plays this season than before.  This could be a harbinger of things to come as Sabathia ages, so it’s good to see him be able to adjust and get good results despite an apparent change in the way he approaches hitters.

Time to give Javy Vazquez a breather

At RiverAveBlues Mike Axisa argues Javy Vazquez needs to sit the next few plays out.  He recommends DLing Vazquez and bringing up Ian Nova from AAA.  Nova would make the next start against the Seattle Mariners and either be skipped the second time through the rotation (thanks to an off-day) or keep his spot in the rotation to give the starters and extra day of rest.  This seems like a capital idea to me.  I’d be in favor of bringing Nova up and having him make two starts.  I wouldn’t mind Sabathia, Burnett and Hughes having a little extra time off.  Last year, the starters seemed to point to extra rest down the stretch as a reason why they were able to stay effective deep into October.

Minor League Baseball: Investing in the Future

I’m linking this in the minuscule chance that you haven’t read it.  Mike Ashmore of Trenton Thoughts put together an incredibly detailed look inside the life of a minor league baseball player and it’s definitely worth the time it will take to read it.  One of the more bizarre things to me was reading about nutrition .  If I was in charge of a professional baseball organization, ensuring that players had access to healthy food would be one of my first goals.

The Bullpen Usage Chart

Joe Girardi’s birthday is coming up in October.  What do you get for the man who probably has everything he could want or need?  Just in time for the playoffs, you can create a bullpen usage chart for him to file inside his binder.  Via Hardball Times, Daily Baseball Data has created a tool to help you quickly evaluate which relievers are the best-rested and best-suited for coming into the game.  Click through and read all about it, and get your copy ready in October.

Expanded Horizons: Mariano Rivera, Outlier

Finally, from Baseball Prospectus (subscriber only, sorry) comes a piece by Tommy Bennett seeking to answer the following question: “who is the best relief pitcher in baseball?”  Bennett starts by looking at the WXRL and SIERA for all relievers in 2010, and then calcualting the how many standard deviations each reliever is away from the mean in each category and then adds the two scores together.  This is a simple enough methodology, and it yields a top 10 list of the following relievers: Wilson, Bell, Marmol, Soria, Kuo, Thornton, Benoit, Bard, Adams and Gregerson.  There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it leaves out an obvious contender for the top spot.  As Bennett puts it:

The problem with this list, and with any list like it created in the last 10 years really, is that you could just throw it out. Who needs a list like this when the answer to the question “who is the best relief pitcher in baseball?” is so simple? You could just give the same answer—Mariano Rivera—every year and be right in a very real sense every year. It’s not that Rivera does especially bad by this metric. He actually comes in 13^th out of nearly 200 qualified pitchers. It’s that by not putting him closer to the top, the list fails to pass the smell test—it appears wrong on its face. Instead of a definitive ranking, we get a neat-o list with little meaningful difference between the individual rankings. That’s disappointing.

However, Bennett goes on to demonstrate that Rivera has tremendous skill in certain areas that probably causes him to “break” the system.  For one, Rivera is able to prevent hits and sustain a consistently lower BABIP.  As Bennett puts it, “These pitchers—who basically only pitch with maximum effort in higher than average leverage situations—can in fact show the ability to limit hits more than starting pitchers”.  However, this skill isn’t unique to Rivera : other talented relievers like Billy Wagner have the same tendencies.  What is unique to Rivera is his ability to prevent home runs.  Bennett labels Rivera is “a rate environment extremophile”, which is an awesome phrase.  The upshot of this is that good estimators can do a great job with mostly every player in baseball except guys like Mariano Rivera.  ”A pitcher like Rivera, who is extreme in almost every way possible, simply doesn’t rate properly if you use the same metrics used to measure other guys.”  It’s a great read, and it will be interesting to see if future research bears this concept out further.