The Metropolitan: Happy days are here again
Spring training! Plus: Rojas speaks to the media & Tebow retires
Good Morning,
Today we will talk about exit velocity and why Pete Alonso could be due for a bounce-back season, but we start with the news.
⏰ Catch me up on the first day of Spring Training…
🍎 START OF SPRING: Mets pitchers & catchers officially reported to camp yesterday. And manager Luis Rojas met with the media for the first time to give his overview of the team.
Some key takeaways:
BRANDO-ESQUE: “We feel like we're gonna be a contender,” Rojas told SNY. “But we've got to go and perform, and it starts right now in the spring.”
WORKPLACE: “It’s been disappointing,” Rojas said about the recent reports of sexual harassment from former Mets employees. “Those misconducts, they’re just unacceptable. We should have a safe environment to work. A safe workplace. And everyone should feel safe around here.”
THIRD BASE: “It’s really tough right now to commit to any role,” Rojas said when asked about J.D. Davis as the starting third baseman. “I’ve got to stick with our versatility. J.D. is a guy that’s played left too. We’re thinking of that. He improved a lot at third base. But we want to keep that versatility always open. Multiple guys are going to play multiple positions. That’s where our roster is.”
OPENERS: Rojas indicated that he will be “open-minded” to using openers (aka, opener-minded) to occasionally start the first 1-2 innings of games.
THOR: “Noah threw today, threw a side. He looked really good,” Rojas said. “We're still on schedule with him, in what we said in the past [meaning June].”
🏈 TEBOW RETIRES: A football emoji felt appropriate for this news item, even though Tim Tebow announced his retirement from professional baseball on Wednesday. In fairness, Tebow did play two more games for New York in the NFL than in MLB (2-0).
GIVING THANKS: “I want to thank the Mets, Mr. Alderson, the fans and all my teammates for the chance to be a part of such a great organization,” Tebow said in his statement released by the team. “I loved every minute of the journey, but at this time I feel called in other directions. I never want to be partially in on anything. I always want to be 100 percent in on whatever I choose.”
SANDY ALDERSON: “By reaching the Triple-A level in 2019, he far exceeded expectations when he first entered the system in 2016 and he should be very proud of his accomplishments.”
THE GOOD AND BAD: Tebow was set to enter his fifth Spring Training with the Mets as a non-roster invitee, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way considering his career .223/.299/.338 slash line in the minors. While his presence inspired many outside of the game, he also took a roster spot from more deserving players.
ECONOMICS: As the minor leagues have been turned upside down due to the pandemic, a Baseball America analysis showed Tebow’s popularity generated $1.6 million in extra revenues for South Atlantic League teams in 2017, alone.
In other news…
🗣 BULLPEN HELP: The Mets continue to monitor the free agent market with reported interest in reliever Trevor Rosenthal, as well as veteran right-hander Jeremy Jeffress, per Anthony DiComo.
🗣 STARTER HELP: The Amazins have “serious interest” in free agent starter Taijuan Walker, Andy Martino confirms.
🤩 SUPERSTAR: New Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor ranks 15th on MLB Network’s Top 100 Right Now list.
🔝 PROSPECTS: Four Mets made FanGraphs’ Top 133 prospect list: Francisco Álvarez (31), Ronny Mauricio (42), Matt Allan (96), and Mark Vientos (130).
📊 ANALYTICS: The Mets have eliminated the quality control coach position (a position manager Luis Rojas held before his promotion and Brian Schneider had last season before moving to a new role) so they could create a direct line of communication between the analysts and coaching staff.
🧓 by Jeffrey Bellone
The return of baseball brings with it the usual clichés about the pop of the catcher’s mitt and the crack of the bat. We talk about these things to heighten our emotional connection to the game we grew up watching. But they are also sounds we have used to approximate performance, such as the speed of a fastball or the quality of contact on a swing.
In fact, our ears have been trained to listen for the crack of the bat in alerting our eyes to see how hard the ball was hit.
After Major League Baseball installed fancy cameras in every ballpark, baseball observers gained a new way to understand the game through tracking information. This “Statcast data” tells us more precisely what our ears and eyes have always been trying to express.
We now know exactly how hard a ball was hit by measuring its exit velocity, or the speed by which it came off the bat immediately after making contact, which turns out to be more than a descriptive number. Research is starting to show that the distribution of hard hit balls could be predictive of future performance. I wrote about this last week in reference to James McCann’s 90th percentile exit velocity compared to J.T. Realmuto’s.
And there may be an interesting lesson to be learned about Mets slugger Pete Alonso as he enters his third season (more on this in a minute or two).
It doesn’t take a fancy tracking camera to tell us that not all batted balls are the same. All else being equal, a hitter would prefer to hit the ball harder than softer, even though baseball is a funny sport where a slow ground ball can turn into a game-winning hit, while a sharp liner could land right in the opposing fielder’s glove to end the game.
The problem with using “average” exit velocity, as many modern analysts do, is that it doesn’t reflect the distribution of batted balls. For an easy example, a batter who hits two balls at 75 MPH will have the same average exit velocity as a batter who hits one ball at 50 MPH and another at 100 MPH. However, they likely would have had different results. The slugging percentage for balls hit between 75-80 MPH was only .246 last season; whereas, it jumps to 1.064 on balls smashed harder than 95 MPH. You’d rather go 1-2 with a home run than 0-2 with equal soft contact.
It is this logic that explains why focusing on the distribution of batted balls is important in evaluating a hitter and in predicting their future performance. And we can start to do that by looking at hard hit rate, which tells us how often a batter hit the ball faster than 95 MPH.
You can see in the graphic above that once you reach that 95 MPH threshold, the corresponding results are significant relative to the difference in hitting the ball at, say, 70 MPH versus 80 MPH. And if we add launch angle into the equation, we can use “barrels” or barrel percentage to find out how often a player not only makes hard contact, but lifts the ball at such an angle that it is most likely to turn into a home run.
A properly tuned model would weigh each batted ball differently based on their individual exit velocities and launch angles to produce a prediction on performance.
What does all of this mean? Research by Jeremy Siegel at Pitcher List shows 90th percentile exit velocity (so the 10% of balls hit the hardest) is more predictive of next-year performance than either average exit velocity or hard hit rate.
Thinking about it logically, we discussed earlier why the average of all batted balls can be misrepresentative of expected results, but even hard hit rate might undervalue the degree to which players make solid contact. The question then becomes which area of the curve to focus on in trying to identify the most meaningful hard hit events. Initially, I looked at the 90th percentile in my analysis of McCann and found his results somewhat similar to Realmuto’s.
But discussing this approach with MLB Advanced Media architect and Statcast guru Tom Tango, he suggested to look at the average of the top 80th percentile, and in doing so, we get a different picture.
As you can see, the two catchers go from having similar results in 2020 (using average exit velocity) to very different results (looking at the average of their most meaningful hard hit balls).
Extending this approach to the rest of the Mets roster, we learn even more.
While this is not fully predictive, it is reasonable to assume that hitters with the greatest margin between their “average” exit velocity and the average of their hardest hit balls have the potential for performing better in the future than a glance at their statistics might suggest.
Interestingly, Pete Alonso has the widest such gap on the Mets. He also had the 9th highest 90th percentile exit velocity in baseball last season. This means Alonso’s average exit velocity in 2020 might undervalue his true talent for hitting the ball really hard.
More research needs to be completed, but the fundamental point remains: the harder the ball is hit, the more damage is done, so understanding the profile of batted balls can tell us a lot about an individual hitter.
And as kids with mattress-pressed gloves head to their local diamond to impersonate the players reporting to Spring Training this week, it is fun to think about that familiar sound we all grew up hearing — the crack of the bat — and how it still tells us a lot about the game of baseball; we can just measure it more precisely now.
⚾️ The San Diego Padres’ 22-year-old star Fernando Tatis has agreed to a 14-year, $340 million contract extension, per multiple reports.
⚾️ Due to COVID restrictions at the Canadian border, the Toronto Blue Jays will open the 2021 season at their spring home in Dunedin, Fla., according to Sportsnet.
⚾️ Oakland Athletics catcher Sean Murphy will be sidelined for several weeks after having surgery for a collapsed lung.
🔗 The Mets really need to stop being Wilpon-ian, by Joel Sherman, NY Post: “Yes, the Mets traded for Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco. But many competitors and agents are shocked that they did not capitalize further in a free-agent landscape in which few were bidding to pull down Bauer, Realmuto and, especially, Springer. When will the field be this wide open for them again?”
🔗 Dom Smith participates in virtual conference about Negro Leagues film, by Bill Ladson, MLB.com: “On Wednesday night, the Mets had a private screening of “The Other Boys of Summer,” a documentary that was directed by Lauren Meyer about players who had fun showing their talents in the Negro Leagues.”
SMITH: “It was a beautiful film,” Smith said. “Growing up in a different generation, you only hear about the Negro Leagues and things the players went through and the obstacles they had to overcome. For me, to actually hear the personal stories, it really hit home. They really had to persevere tough things.”
📺 Watch the full Luis Rojas press conference.
And we leave you with this video of the Mets doing baseball things again…
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