How Much Does Rakuten Believe Kazuya Fujita's Defense is Worth?

The Rakuten Golden Eagles have re-signed (he did not exercise his domestic free agent option, so instead of just agreeing to a contract for the year, they extended him) starting 2nd baseman Kazuya Fujita to a 3 year deal worth 240 million yen, or about 80 million yen a year. Fujita is mainly known for his defense, and in my opinion, is the best defensive 2nd basemen in Japan, and possibly the best defender in the NPB as a whole, regardless of position. However, the NPB doesn't have the advanced defensive metrics (that are flawed as well) we easily access when looking at MLB players. The only thing close is range factor, which is crude, but does like Fujita a lot. In this post, I wanted to take a stab at estimating how valuable, in terms of money, Rakuten thinks Fujita's defense is.

The first step in doing this is to estimate how valuable the other parts of his game are, which should be easier. Defense is the toughest to quantify statistically, so we should look at how valuable his offense is, and assume that Rakuten, using simple metrics, value his offense about the same. In 2013, Fujita was worth -9.84 runs offensively against average but 11.21 runs against a fictional replacement level of .32 winning percentage. For the rest of this post, I'll be using average as the baseline instead of replacement, because it is easier, and a little less confusing when it comes to position players, as all three aspects of the game will be weighed against (Pacific) League average. Fujita's offense has been declining, as these are his adjusted OPS's over the last three seasons against league average:

112 OPS +, 100 OPS +, 91 OPS +
 
I think it is safe to say that Fujita, at age 31, will probably keep declining, or at least hold serve. A safe estimate for the three year contract would be Fujita being 10-15% worse than league average when it comes to batting, probably around 10-12 runs below average over full seasons. With positional adjustment, we can convert that to 8-10 runs a year.

Fujita is also worth nothing when it comes to the basepaths, with a grand total of 22 steals in his entire career. Out of the 68 qualified batters in the Pacific League in 2013, his 3 steals were tied for 33rd best in the league. He's not quick, but he isn't especially a baseclogger either, so we will conservatively estimate that he is worth 1-2 runs less than average per year.

So if Fujita was an average defender, we would estimate that he would be 9 to 12 runs worse than league average over a full season. A MLB comp might be someone like Jose Altuve, someone who plays 2nd with average defense (according to DRS), with below average offensive value and not much baserunning value. However, no one thinks Fujita is an average defender, and that is the purpose of this post, as we are attempting to see how much Rakuten thinks the defense is worth. However, there is another step that we haven't gotten to yet, and it may be the toughest. While we have an estimate of how much Fujita is worth, without defense, when it comes to wins and losses, we haven't converted that into money yet. In the MLB, a win is generally considered to be worth about 5 million dollars, or perhaps 6-7, depending on who you ask. However, we need to convert this into NPB salaries (and adjust for currency as well). So we need to look at how much NPB teams are paying for players, and more specifically, runs and wins.

According to the salary data collected by Yakyu Baka, the average NPB player made about 36.55 million yen, or about 365,000 American dollars (for the purpose of this post, we are assuming that 100 yen is 1 dollar, even though it is a little more than that. However, I'll keep most of the discussion to yen). So Fujita will make over double what the average player will make, but it seems far too simplistic, especially not taking in account things like service time and leverage to say that Rakuten values him twice as much as they would a league average player.

First, I wanted to look at the domestic free agents signed in 2013, and see if their 2013 WAAs had any predictive value when it came to what they will be paid in 2014. I just used a simple wins above average using runs created offensively, and just ERA WAA (split up between leagues) for pitchers.

The first problem we encounter is that there are only 8, which is really too small of a sample size to make any conclusions. Secondly, the worst player according to the simple WAA is the most expensive player, paid mainly for his past success. For these reasons, it seems tough to use those free agent contracts to project value.

So it may be more helpful to look at how Rakuten values wins and dollars, or at least how much they paid in 2013 for players versus the output they got. I limited the look at 7 individual players, the 5 foreign players and the two players on the team that were former MLB players. These players would most simulate "open market signings", which we are assuming Fujita is.

So Rakuten paid 622 million yen for the 7 players for 4.9 Wins Above Average or roughly 126 million yen per win over average. It should be noted that Rakuten has offered Masahiro Tanaka a 800 million yen a year contract to stay with the team after a 5.4 WAR season. This is a little over the rate of the other players, but at 148 million yen per win, isn't too far off (and it is safe to say that Tanaka has more leverage than Fujita had and Tanaka holds more sentimental value to Rakuten).

So with the 8 free agent signings in the NPB this year having a wins above average of just .51 total, and about 1068 million yen dolled out for the 8 players, Rakuten was much more efficient with their "foreign players" than the teams that dipped in the domestic free agent pool in 2013 (assuming these players don't perform much better in 2014). This should be kept in mind when discussing Fujita's contract, as it seems like NPB free agents were well overpaid.

If we keep the guesstimates about Fujita's non defensive value that we made above, and we assume that Rakuten is willing to match their 126 million yen per win above average, then Rakuten values Fujita's defense as worth anywhere from 15-18 runs per season, or about 189 million yen to 227 million yen per year (without subtracting what an average player would get anyway).

2013 KBO Position Player WAR Leaderboard

In case you missed it, I posted the pitcher WAR leaderboard for the 2013 Korea Baseball Organization here. This post is the position player version of the 2013 KBO WAR leaderboard. Before the list below, some quick notes on methodology.

For ease, I kept the same simple speed score method from last time. This time, I did note that league average simple speed score was 5.96, so I began by grading harder. So to keep it somewhat simple, I calculated the first method of speed score for each player, then subtracted it by .96. Then, to take account of playing time like we did with batting (I didn't do this last year), I assumed that a "full time player" had about 300 plate appearances (70 had that much in the KBO). So while I kept the run scale of doubling speed score from 5 to equal 1 run, I assumed it equaled 1 run over 300 plate appearances. So I used the percentage of plate appearances over or under to adjust the run value. But before I did that, I had to give everyone 6 extra runs to make league average 0, something I didn't do last year, just so we make sure we are weighing each player against average. Just like with last year, I am keeping the defense and speed values and the batting values separate, so if you want to ignore them, feel free, but hopefully this gives us some idea of how valuable the players' ability to steal (and by extension, run the bases) was. 

For defense, this year's method will be a lot simpler. One reason is the lack of defensive stats easily available (like with the pitching numbers, I used the numbers from MyKBO.net). So I will just use positional adjustments, the same I used last year. I will just use the rosters' position labels on homeplate.kr to determine what position a player usually is. For the purpose of this article, we are assuming that all players at each position are equal defenders, which is obviously wrong and overly simplistic, but will have to work for this article. Again, you can ignore the adjustments all together.

With the pitchers' WAR, I put every single pitcher that threw an inning in the spreadsheet. For the hitters, this isn't practical. There were 60 players who played in a game as a position player but didn't have a plate appearance. 106 of them had 10 plate or appearances or less. So I decided to post the WARs of the 129 players that had 100 plate appearances or more. This is more than I did last year.

For defense and baserunning, I only posted the league average rates, but for the batting, I used three different levels of measurements: replacement, average, and "foreign level expectation". For the batting version of WAR, I used the same simple runs created method, but as the run environment did change in 2013, I adjusted the baselines:

RC/PA League Average: .117

Replacement level (.320): .075

In 2014, KBO teams will be forced to use at least foreign roster spot on a position player (each team gets an extra foreign player as well), so I thought we needed some projection for how we expect those new players to perform. This isn't very mathematic, but without looking at past players for translations, we don't really have any idea what to expect from foreign position players. So I just used the same number baseline (which was gleaned from runs allowed per inning)  that I used for foreign pitchers in the pitcher WAR post, which is 1.1 better than league average:

Foreign Player Expectation: 1.1 * .117 = .129 runs created per plate appearance

The sum of the batting runs above average, speed score runs, and defensive adjustment (divided by 10 to convert from runs to wins) creates the Wins Above Average at the end (like last year, I didn't create an actual WAR for position players). Here is the leaderboard containing every player with at least 100 plate appearances in 2013, sorted by WAA:

2013 KBO Pitcher WAR Leaderboard

With KBO free agency (aside from the fates of Yoon Suk-Min and Oh Seung-hwan being decided) already over, it is a good time to look back at the 2013 season in the Korea Baseball Organization. I will start with pitchers, the subject of this post. All 194 pitchers that threw in the KBO this year have complete WAR numbers for the 2013 season in the spreadsheet below.

For replacement level (the R in WAR) I used the traditional .320 winning percentage (18 % worse than KBO 2013 league average), instead of the current ~.29 rate used by Fangraphs or Baseball Reference. This is for no particular reason. I have no idea what a random veteran player in the Futures League is worth in the KBO. As you will see, I used three different versions of WAR for comparison, one based on runs per nine innings allowed (replacement rate was .69 per inning), one based on earned run average (.62 was replacement level), and one based on fielding independent pitching (.58). Then, using runs per 9 innings (which I labelled RPG), I created two different measurements instead of replacement level. The first is average, or WAA. The second is what I labelled as WAFP, meaning Wins over Foreign Pitcher. Foreign Pitchers gave up .5 runs per inning in 2013 in the KBO on a whole, and I thought it would be interesting to compare each pitcher to how you expect an average foreign pitcher to perform in the KBO.

The below spreadsheet are the WAR results for each pitcher in 2013. The sheet is sorted by RPG WAR, but you should be able to copy and paste the data in a spreadsheet, and sort it by whichever metric you want. The basic data (including the foreign pitcher data) and names are taken from MyKBO.net, while the league average rates (adjusted to replacement level by me) were taken from Naver.


 If you have any questions or concerns about methodology (or even the results), please feel free to leave a comment below. 

International NPB Free Agents

Free Agency in Japan works differently than free agency in the Major Leagues. Players earn domestic free agency after eight seasons of service time in the NPB, meaning they can exercise the option (assuming they haven't signed a new deal) to become a free agent and sign with another NPB team. However, unless a team agrees to post a player, they have to wait until 9 years of service time to become (or have the option of being) an international free agent, meaning they can sign with teams overseas (read: the Major Leagues).

So I compiled a list of the players that have international free agency eligibility* and are still active. Some of the players are backups or are no longer very good, but that is okay for this list. I also put their NPB salaries converted to U.S. dollars (using 1 Yen=.010 dollars), because all other things equal, you would expect an American team to have to pay them more to get them from Japan. Of course, this isn't always the case, as some players may decide that no amount of money is worth leaving their home country and some players may decide that taking less money for a shot at making the Majors is worth it. It is just to be used as a measuring stick. I also put what the expected MLB WAR, using the 5 million dollars equals one WAR measuring stick used by FanGraphs and others to evaluate free agent contracts, next to the salary. In a world where the player would take the same amount or more money than his current NPB salary to play in the Majors, they would need to exceed that WAR to be "worth it".
As you may notice, NPB salaries are pretty low when compared to MLB free agent contracts, so nearly every player on the list just needs to play as an effective part time player to be worth their current salary in the Majors (obviously some of them are playing for less than 500,000 dollars, which is below MLB minimum). Below, I will take short looks (by no means comprehensive scouting reports) on three players that are at least interesting to me as international free agents. I have no idea whether or not any of them would consider coming to the States, so this is purely a talent, not a conjecture of their career desires, perspective.

Shinnosuke Abe has been perhaps the most prolific and well known hitters in Japan over the last several years. Despite turning 34 before the 2013 season started and really struggling to move in the WBC thanks to a previous knee injury, Abe still catches nearly every day and is enjoying a great offensive season. In fact, by OPS, he is enjoying the best season of his career, even better than his prime years before the first ball change (he hit 44 homers in 2010, the last year of the "old" ball). Only Wladimir Balentien (who is chasing the single season HR record in the NPB) and Tony Blanco have a higher OPS in the Central League (with a minimum of 50 games) than Abe, meaning he has been the best Japanese native in the league. Here is a GIF of an Abe homer to get an idea of his swing:

Catching defense is hard to evaluate, especially considering we have no metrics at all for NPB catchers, and the body type is going to turn off a lot of scouts because he doesn't look like a catcher, with more of a DH body type. That is probably fair, and he has never been a doubles/triples/stolen base guy, so interested teams would be interested in his bat. Considering the poor job MLB teams have done at evaluating NPB hitters, hesitance over guaranteeing 6 million dollars to a guy just for his bat would be understandable. With that said, his plate discipline looks like it has improved over the past couple of years, as he is now walking more than he strikes out, and by a considerable margin. An interested team wouldn't be just counting on his power to play, but he has shown the ability to hit for consistently high averages with good plate discipline, giving the power more of a chance to play up at a higher level.

As far as I know, Abe hasn't expressed interest at coming over to the Majors, but he is probably the best bet to be a successful hitter as a free agent (considering 2013 brought another disappointing class of middle infielders from the NPB, expectations and interests on Takashi Toritani is most likely low). 

Two other somewhat interesting (but considerably less interesting) possible free agents in my opinion are pitchers. The first is a NPB starter, but someone who would pitch out of relief in the Majors. 

Masanori Ishikawa is a 33 year old left-handed starter for the Yakult Swallows. His greatest claim to fame is most likely his ability to avoid walking hitters, with just a 4.2 % rate in his career, and 5.7 % rate over the last two years. As you would expect, that doesn't come with a lot of strikeouts either, with just 13.3 % for his career, and 13.9 % and 14.2 % over the last two seasons. He is also listed at 5-6 161, which despite a consistent run of 170-190 IP seasons, isn't going to interest MLB teams as a starter. However, he could be a lefty specialist, shown by his ability to limit lefty hitters to the Mendoza line this season. His release point also looks like one of a lefty specialist, as shown by the GIFs below, showing three of his pitches.

Fastball/Sinker

Slider

Changeup

He also throws a notably slow curve and has been known to let go of an occasional screwball. He is a guy with a decent pedigree of success in the NPB, can throw strikes, and provide some deception. The big problem is that MLB teams will probably not want to pay 2 million dollars for a left-handed specialist that hasn't proven himself in the big leagues yet.

Shinichiro Koyama is a 35 year old right-handed reliever for the Rakuten Golden Eagles. Despite a decline in his peripherals in 2013, he has been able to keep his earned run average near where it was in 2012, where it dipped below two. There isn't really anything flashy about Koyama other than he has finished some games in the past and throws a pretty good changeup.

Fastball:

Changeup

Slider

*Thanks to Jason Coskrey of the Japan Times for double checking my list, which mostly came from yakyubaka.com's research.

Evaluating Mark Buerhle, Past and Future

Mark Buerhle has been the 19th most valuable pitcher in baseball since the start of the Pitch F/X era (2007) according to FanGraphs' WAR. He has done this despite having one of the worst fastballs in baseball (the worst qualified fastball in 2012). In a previous post, I tried to see why some soft-tossing lefties were successful in the Majors. Here, I will take a look at Mark Buerhle, and consider it a case study, as we try to unlock the puzzle and contradiction of Buerhle. He is not a high strikeout guy, relying on groundballs instead, and his own fielding abilities to help him "outperform" his DIPs. I am not so much as interested in why he has a 3.88 ERA since 2007, but why he has a 4.18 FIP (96 FIP -) since this time.

Let's start by looking at his Speed and spin chart

The speed and spin doesn't provide a lot of differences, but the movement data does suggest there are 3 different fastballs. The MLBAM tags are horrible and unhelpful, especially since they changed the way they classified fastballs in 2010. The Brooks Baseball tags are better (as they always are), but I am doing it my own simple way, but putting the high horizontal movement pitches as sinkers/moving fastballs, the low horizontal movement as regular fastballs, and negative movement pitches as cutters.

There also seems to be a separate slider as well, something that the Brooks/Pavidilis tags seem to ignore, or just call cutters. There is a big difference in both velocity and movement, along with spin, so I am saying he has a separate slider. You can't really classify sliders based on spin, so I used horizontal movement, the higher negative horizontal movement (that were clearly not curveballs) I labelled sliders, and the lower ones, the ones closer to 0, I labelled cutters.

So according to my classifications (I know a few pitches were cutoff, but this is almost all of the pitches that Mark Buerhle has thrown in games in the Pitch F/X era):

4947 4-seam fastballs (29.56 %): 86.37 MPH, 2.35 horizontal movement, 8.05 vertical movement, 163.18 degrees of spin

4324 "Moving fastballs" (25.84 %): 84.47 MPH, 7.64 horizontal movement, 6.88 vertical movement, 132.08 degrees of spin

1948 cutters (11.64 %): 83.3 MPH, -.88 horizontal movement, 4.75 vertical movement, 196.36 degrees of spin

1327 sliders (7.93 %): 81.94 MPH, -3.21 horizontal movement, 3.14 Vertical movement, 228.74 degrees of spin

1623 Curves (9.7 %): 72.35 MPH, -4.51 horizontal movement, -4.91 Vertical Movement,  310.27 degrees of spin

2564 changeups (15.32 %): 79.3 MPH, 7.61 horizontal movement, 3.53 vertical movement, 118.16 degrees of spin

The fastball movement is pretty good horizontally, but it doesn't get a lot of vertical depth comparatively. The slider has really nice movement, and the curve is sort of average.

Here is what Buerhle's Release Point looks like in graph form:

His averages are 6.11 vertically and 1.72 horizontal. So compared to the average soft-tossing lefty, he is a little more low, but not quite as far out when he delivers the ball. Buerhle's closest comparison is probably either Everett Teaford or Odalis Perez. Neither very attractive comparisons.

In 2013, Buehrle has been the second worse starting pitcher according to fWAR. Many believe that his style of pitching won't work in the AL East and cite his career numbers against the Yankees and Red Sox to back this up.

First, we should look at his 2013 outings, and see how his pitches have regressed overall.

219 4-seamers (33.8 %): 84.97 MPH, 2.36 horizontal movement, 7.21 vertical movement, 161.41 degrees of spin

105 changeups (16.2 %): 79.61 MPH, 7.38 horizontal movement, 3.61 vertical movement, 118.43 degrees of spin

58 curves (8.95 %): 74.15 MPH, -3.73 horizontal movement, -3.36 vertical movement, 311.55 degrees of spin

62 cutters (9.6 %): 82.59 MPH, -.81 horizontal movement, 4.02 vertical movement, 198.73 degrees of spin

157 "moving fastballs" (24.2 %): 83.96 MPH, 7.34 horizontal movement, 6.25 vertical movement, 130.99 degrees of spin

47 Sliders (7.3 %): 81.47 MPH,  -2.94 horizontal movement, 2.35 vertical movement, 234.5 degrees of spin

So the differences, according to my tags, in Buerhle in 2013 and previous Buerhle seasons, is that his fastball has lost a couple more ticks, his moving fastball, slider, and cutter a half MPH, but that his changeup and curve have actually gained velocity, but lost some movement. This could be just classification errors, but the spin is the same for the two pitches, so maybe not. Eric Nehs of BIS points out that the gun at Toronto this year has been "hot", so perhaps this explains some of it.

Buerhle seems to be going to his 4-seam fastball a little more, and his cutter less. This doesn't even make sense in the context of this season, as he has given up contact 14 times with the pitch, 13 times for outs, and just one for not an out (though it was a run scoring play). It still seems to be an effective pitch, yet, he is throwing it less now. Compare this to his 4-seamer, which he has gotten 24 outs with on contact, and 10 hits/run scoring plays with.

Let's also play with average pitch location:

4-seam: Orange
Changeup:Black
Curve: Red
Cutter: Purple
Moving FB: Blue
Slider: Green

He is working glove side with everything except the moving fastball and the changeup. The 4-seam is the only pitch above the middle of the plate, with the slider moving closest away. Here are the average pitch locations for his career (starting in 2007 of course, also including 2013):

As you can see, his 4-seam fastball is actually higher for his career than in 2013 so far. So he isn't throwing more fastballs in the middle of the plate in 2013. The same 4 pitches are staying arm side or glove side, none of them have changed dramatically. Really everything is actually lower in 2013. I don't think this helps us any when it comes to why he is struggling in 2013, though perhaps it gives us some insight into how he is so successful. He keeps the ball low for the most part and uses 6 distinct looking pitches (I think the spin shows that there is a difference between a cutter and a slider) into three quadrants of the strike zone. He obviously has the ability to throw them all for strikes as well.

It also doesn't appear that his release point has anything to do with his struggles either, as his vertical release point this year is exactly at his career average, and his horizontal release point (near 1.5) is actually a little closer to the center of the plate.

So I really think we have three choices for Mark Buerhle's struggles so far in the American League East. The first is that it is mainly just small sample size. Even though he has had some really bad starts, and his BABIP doesn't work traditionally, we are in mid-May. It is still technically a small sample size. Secondly, maybe the stuff has finally regressed to where he can no longer have consistent success in the big leagues. Perhaps he could live at 86 MPH, but not 84 MPH. Or finally, maybe Buerhle could have success in other divisions in baseball, or in the NL, but pitching in the doubles friendly park at Fenway, or the homer friendly park in New York, or just facing those good lineups on a consistent basis just doesn't work for his stuff. Picking between the three would just be an educated guess, but the other indicators (there is no release point change, etc.) show that it is probably one (or a mixture) of these three.

A Jair Jurrjens Update

Jair Jurrjens had a two year run, in 2008-2009, where he was a very good starter in the big leagues (worth over three wins above a replacement pitcher according to FanGraphs' WAR). However, things unravelled in 2012 and he threw more AAA innings than MLB innings. In 2013, Jurrjens signed a deal with the Orioles, which was changed to a minor league deal when it was revealed he had a knee injury (he then suffered another injury in spring training). Jurrjens just made his 2nd AAA start of the season, both against the Durham Bulls.

In his first start, Jurrjens threw 56 strikes out of 95 pitches, with just as many groundouts as flyouts (just like his second start). He had 7 strikeouts, 2 walks, only 1 hit allowed, a single to Wil Myers on a groundball.

Since he has now started against the Bulls' twice, here are the Steamer Projections (if they played in the Majors) of the batters he faced (2 in parenthesis means he faced them in both games):

Rich Thompson (2): .657 OPS

Hak-Ju Lee (2): .625

Jason Bourgeois (2): .677

Wil Myers (2): .754

Leslie Anderson (2): .684

Chris Gimenez (2): .659

Vince Belnome (2): .695

Cole Figueroa (2): .682

Tim Beckham: .627

Mike Fontenot: .686

These batters have an average OPS of .677, so Jurrgens should be dominating them. Unfortunately, he hasn't. He has struck out just 9 of the 45 hitters he has faced and walked 6 of them with a below average groundball rate.

First, before we look at his 2nd outing in detail,let's take a look at his delivery:

For comparison, here is Jurrjens in 2012:

2009 was when Jurrjens was really dominating (at least according to some of the more basic metrics). When you look at his 2009 highlights, two straight starts have highlights called "Jurrjens' Strong Start", and then the next one is named "Jurrjens Impressive start". Here is what he looked like then:

It is hard to see much of a difference if any in his final release point. His right leg is at the same angle, the back is twisted in the same way, and his head is pretty similar as well. I wanted to look at Pitch F/X data, to see if their was a change in his release, so I picked his start with the most pitches from 2009 versus his outing with the most pitches in 2012.

In graph form, here is Jurrjens in 2009:

Here is Jurrjens in 2012:

Jurrjens has clearly never been extremely consistent in his delivery. With that said it also looks like it was better in 2012 than in 2009. The numbers bear this out as well. In his 2012 start, his horizontal and vertical standard deviations were .135 and .081 respectably, solid numbers actually. In his 2009 start, it was .145 and .113 respectably, which isn't a bad number, but not as good as his 2012 start. Other than slight drop in 2012, his release point is basically the same, meaning that the release point doesn't seem to be why Jurrjens had so many problems in 2012 and regressed so badly.

So finally let's look at the pitch data that I collected from his AAA outing:


The first thing you notice is that his fastball averaged just 88.55 MPH. Out of the 215 right-handed starters that have thrown at least 500 pitches as a starter in the Majors, only 27 of them have fastballs under 89 MPH on average. It is not exactly a real successful group. His fastball acts as a sinker most of the time, and he threw it 52.7 percent of the time.

He threw a curveball 18 times in the game that didn't get a lot of vertical tilt at an average 74.67 percent of the time, but he relied on his off-speed pitch, the changeup, more often (25 times), as the curveball made its appearance late in the game, in the 2nd and 3rd time through the order. The change moved a lot like his fastball, and was thrown at an average of 81.96 MPH, again well below league average.

Jurrjens got 7 groundballs and 11 flyballs, again weird because he was a decent groundball pitcher in the big leagues, especially when he was going well. He also got just 6 whiffs (6.45 % of the time), and while missing bats was never his speciality, we see that he isn't missing bats, getting grounders, or even throwing a lot of strikes.

He clearly knows that he has below average stuff now, and is focusing on locating the ball low in the zone:

 While we are always taught that pitchers should "keep the ball low", we know that pitchers in the Majors that throw low in the zone constantly are not very good pitchers.

At this point, Jurrjens looks like a AAA pitcher. The stuff has really regressed, and he isn't throwing a lot of strikes. Without an uptick in velocity on the pitches, I can't really see him being a successful MLB starter again.

Complete Hitter KBO WAR for 2012

In December, I broke out my formula for measuring WAR in Korea Baseball Organization (the KBO). For hitters, it didn't contain any kind of defensive metric or positional adjustment, and I didn't have a complete list of players, only looking at a few of them. Thanks to Dan of Mykbo.net, this is the day I fix this flaw. I looked at the top 9 players for each team in hits (I was planning on doing plate appearances, but My KBO's statistics sorts by hits, and I didn't notice that until I was nearly half way done) for this post).

It is called KBO WAR, but we are only actually looking at KBO WAA (wins above average instead of wins above replacement). One of the reasons for this is that, while we created a replacement baserunning method, creating a replacement defensive method just seems a little pointless. Also, when looking at KBO players, at least from an international perspective, we don't really care what a replacement KBO player looks like. While understanding what a MLB replacement player looks like can be helpful (though I have never liked that MLB players' defensive and baserunning components are compared to average while their batting component is compared to replacement), understanding what a KBO replacement player looks like just doesn't have much value if you are trying to see if any are prospects (at least statistically prospects) to move into bigger leagues such as the MLB or NPB. With that said, we may not even care about the average KBO player looks like. A little more on that later.

For positional adjustments, I used the traditional positional adjustments created by Tom Tango.There are some variates out there, such as Baseball Reference uses -10.5 runs for a first baseman instead of -12.5. I just used the -12.5 run value because that is what I have usually used, but I am always open to other arguments I guess. I tweaked the positional values slightly, giving RF a run more than LF. This is because it usually takes a better arm to play RF. I was supported in it being a better position by them having more put outs, but they actually had less assists than left field.

Calculating actual positional value will be a little difficult. I just used percentage of innings, because that makes the most sense to me. Such as, say a theoretical player plays 500 innings, 400 of them at 1st, and 100 in left field. 20 percent of -8 is -1.6, and 80 percent of -12.5 is -10, thus, the player's positional value is -11.6. I think this works because it doesn't artificially award utility, but does take it into account (a problem arises when say a player can play 2nd well, but has to play left field because 2nd is already taken. I can't think of how to get rid of such team biases).

Defensively, I used range factor and a percentage factor instead of a run factor (but will calculate it as runs). I used: Player Range Factor - League Average Range Factor for position, divided by league average range factor times 100. This obviously needs some kind of minimum basis, and that is why we are only looking at starters. It doesn't need to be said that this is a pretty terrible defensive component, especially compared to what we have to work with when it comes to MLB players (and those metrics are pretty flawed as well), but it gives us something to work with.

For catchers, I subtracted the averaged passed ball ratio by the player's passed ball ratio and multiplied it by 100 to move the decimal up 2 and add it to the difference in caught stealing average times 100. For example, if a catcher has a 32.6 CS % and .007 PB ratio, the catcher has a .9 defensive value. Yes, this weighs stolen bases higher than passed balls. This is for several reasons, one being the difference between wild pitches (data we don't have for catchers) and passed balls is somewhat subjective.

I didn't look at pitchers, because I am only doing the positional players here, but adding the defensive component to pitchers would be interesting.

As you will see in the spreadsheet, I put something called WAE, Wins Above Excellence. Because we don't even even care about average players from a international perspective, there should be some kind of cutoff for when we should start caring about them from an international perspective.
Any way we do this will probably be arbitrary (Especially since we don't have a ton data on position players that have played in both American and Korean leagues, and I usually distrust translations). A couple of years ago, using an even more crude method, it seemed that there weren't any internationally interesting Korean position players. Because I didn't know where to set the baseline (I am open to suggestions!), I just left it blank for now.

Of course, WAR, other than FIP WARs for pitchers, doesn't take in account what we might call luck, randomness, or BABIP luck. There have been several attempts to try to neutralize the BABIP out of hitter statistics, and I have tried several of my own. Here, I am using Hitter FIP, which turns into a runs created per 9. Instead of using innings as the baseline, I am using games played. You still add the 3.2. This has obviously problems, such as ignoring doubles and triples, discounting speed, but may be useful in a basic predictive sense. It is unrelated to WAA or WAE, but I am including it for fun.


Remember, most of this stuff only works on full time players, and again, that is fine, because we don't really care about part time KBO players or above replacement but below average bench KBO players.Without further words or explanations (I am sure many of you skipped the method and went straight to the results, which is fine), here is my list of the 72 (9 from all 8 2012 teams) players,sorted by WAA:
Let me know if you find any errors, etc. I have noticed that the speed score is well below 0 combined, which is a problem and skewed the WAA to a negative. I have left it, but just note that players are probably better runners than the metric is giving them credit for and they are probably worth a little more on a whole than the WAA gives them credit for. If anyone wants to fix this component, be my guest. Defensive and offensive value is positive, which it should be since these players are starters, or at least play a lot. You would expect starters to be, on average, better than league average. The positional adjustment, as a whole, is negative, which it should be. In case you were wondering, the average hFIP for the 72 players was 3.93.

This approach is somewhat crude and has plenty of flaws, but hopefully it will help us quantify and rank the talent in the KBO. You will notice that there is a 2nd sheet called "defensive guts", which is just the defensive averages for each position. If you would just like the spreadsheet, feel free to look at it or download it here.

Choi Jung Scouting Report

I was putting together a scouting report on Choi Jung for a podcast I was going to be on, but we ended up only talking about Yoon Suk Min, so I decided to turn my notes into an article.

Jung is a KBO 3rd baseman for the SK Wyrens who should be granted free agency after the season and rumors have it that he is interested in coming to the United States to play in the Majors. I've written before than I don't believe their are any positional player from the KBO are MLB prospects, (and I still haven't found a real exception) but let's rate Jung anyway.

Offensively, I do have Kang Jung-Ho and Park Byung-Ho that played for Nexen as better offensive players (both baserunning and hitting combined) as better than Jung in 2012, but Jung does seem to be a pretty balanced player, with above average baserunning and defensive skills to go with his offense. Without the defense, he was slightly over a 6 win (over replacement player) player in 2012, so he really is one of the elite players in the KBO. Last year, I wrote about that there aren't any MLB offensive or position player prospects in the KBO. Jung's K/BB wasn't that impressive in 2012, about 2 to 1, but he does walk a reasonable amount and hit a lot of fly-balls.

He seems to use the whole field pretty well, at least that is what his spray charts suggest. He is considered to have good bat speed, and I have to agree, you can't really get in on him because his wrists are so quick. He uses an uppercut swing to get under the ball, which is one of the reasons he hits for power and hits so many fly-balls.

I'm not going to compare his assist data to MLB players because there is a bias in just pure batted balls between the two leagues, but he seems to be the 2nd best defensive 3rd baseman in the KBO according to the 2012 data. His throwing motion isn't exactly ideal, as he comes down a little more arm slot wise than you would normally want, but the arm strength seems to be there. His footwork also seems to be a little messy and his body doesn't go with his arm, which may lead to a lot of inaccurate throws. As far as size, athleticism, and range goes, I don't really see any reason why he couldn't be at least a decent defensive 3rd baseman in the big leagues, and it doesn't look like he will have to move off the position anytime soon.

 I don't see a MLB starter in Choi, and backup infielders don't have great value if they can't play shortstop. This is why he wouldn't have as much value as say Kensuke Tanaka, the former Fighter shortstop that is now with the Giants. I think Choi likely has more power, but Tanaka has the positional value, and he had to take a minor league contract. Obviously we will see how he plays in 2013, but it is hard to see him getting a guaranteed contract in the Majors. He may actually fit on a NPB roster better.

KBO, WAR, and Velocity (Again)

MLB Park did a KBO WAR ranking (if you just want to see the image look here) by year, based on their own methods. This seems to be a ranking of the best foreign KBO players by WAR. Dan K. of MyKBO translated the names and teams here. I wanted to see how this ranking fit in with my theory about velocity and success between leagues.

We will use average/median velocity along with their MLB numbers. A lot, perhaps most, of the MLB numbers are small sample sizes, but that is the data we have to deal with. I decided to just use MLB FIP (I wanted to use ballpark adjusted FIP, but I couldn't do it for many of the older pitchers). I used Fangraphs velocity when I could. As far as order, I left the original order of the WAR ranking alone, and took out duplicates.

1.Danny Rios: ~90 MPH. 9.94 MLB FIP

2. Denny Harriger: ???. 5.72 MLB FIP

3.Aquilino Lopez: 90.4 MPH. 4.26 MLB FIP

4.Brandon Knight: 90.9 MPH. 6.06 MLB FIP

5.Gary Rath: ???  7.76 MLB FIP

6.Dustin Nippert: 93.3 MPH, 4.87 MLB FIP

7.Fernando Hernandez: ??? 7.75 MLB FIP

8. Seth Greisinger: 88.13 MPH, 5.13 MLB FIP

9.Shane Youman: 88 MPH, 4.75 MLB FIP

10.Ben Jukich: 87.73 MPH, No MLB FIP

11.Mickey Callaway: 89 MPH, 4.87 MLB FIP

12.Matt Randel: ???,No MLB FIP

13. Rick Guttormson: ???, No MLB FIP

14.Elvira Narciso: ???, 3.80 MLB FIP

15.Ken Kadokura: ~90 MPH, No MLB FIP

16.Mark Kiefer: ??? 5.17 MLB FIP

17.Kelvin Jimenez: 93.6 MPH, 5.20 MLB FIP

18.Mark Fyhrie: Under 90 MPH, 4.23 MLB FIP

19.Cedrick Bowers: 91.6 MPH, 6.53 MLB FIP

20.Ryan Sadowski: 89.5 MPH, 4.72 MLB FIP

21.Kenny Rayborn: ??, No MLB FIP

22.Jamie Brown: ?? 4.74 MLB FIP

23.Andy Van Hekken: 86.49 MPH, 4.10 MLB FIP

24. Radhames Liz: 93.8 MPH, 6.26 MLB FIP

25.Satoshi Iriki: ???, No MLB FIP

26.Francisco Cruceta: 93 MPH, 6.34 MLB FIP

27.Henry Sosa: 93.1 MPH, 4.77 MLB FIP

28.Victor Cole: ???, 4.13 MLB FIP

29.Chris Oxspring: ???. 4.85 MLB FIP

30.Travis Smith: ??, 5.58 MLB FIP

31.Emiliano Giron: ??, No MLB FIP

32.Mike Romano: ??, 7.26 MLB FIP

33.Kevin Hodges: ??,7.53 MLB FIP

34.Tim Harikkala: ??, 5.27 MLB FIP

35.Julio Manon: ??, 5.88 MLB FIP

36.Scott Baker: ??, 6.38 MLB FIP

37.Melqui Torres: ??, No MLB FIP

38.Efrain Valdez: ??,5.12 MLB FIP

39.Ravelo Manzanillo: ???, 5.42 MLB FIP

40.Kerry Taylor: ???,5.02 MLB FIP

41.Mike Farmer: ???, 7.14 MLB FIP

42.Jason Scobie: ???, No MLB FIP

43.Martin Vargas: ???,No MLB FIP

44.Adrian Burnsides: ???, No MLB FIP

I am making the assumption that pitchers that never pitched in the Majors are worse than pitched in the Majors, which seems to be close to what the data says. The average Rank of the No MLB numbers pitchers is 26.63, with no one ranked over 11th. Pitchers with a MLB FIP under 5 (the mean of the group was about 4.50) had an average rank of 17.5. The one pitcher with a FIP under 4 was ranked 14th.  The pitchers with a FIP between 5 and 6 had an average rank of 28.8. The rest of the pitchers, the ones that had a FIP over 6, had an average rank of 22.1. It is really hard to argue that there is a lot of correlation there, other than that the better MLB pitchers did tend to do better on average in the KBO. Let's see if the correlation for pitching velocity is any better.

Unfortunately, we only have pitch data for 17 of the 44 pitchers. The max velocity was 93.8, Liz, who is 24th overall (below average out of the 44) and 12th out of the 17th we have velocity for. In fact, there are just 5 pitchers out of the 17 with fastballs over 93 MPH on average, and 3 of those were the worst velocity pitchers (average rank of 10.6 out of 17, extremely poor). 10 of the 17 pitchers had fastballs that averaged at least 90 MPH. Their average rank was 8.8. The other 7 averaged 9.14, so the difference was negligible at best.

As mentioned above, since we don't really know the formulas for the WARs above (my guess is that they just plugged in the FanGraphs and Baseball Reference formulas. If they didn't adjust the league average/replacement levels, it would lead to screwy results, but perhaps the same order). So I decided to use my own and see what results we got from it. So I looked at the 17 pitchers with velocity data and sorted by their career KBO FIP WAAs divided by years played in the KBO (so basically FIP WAA per year). To introduce a new variable, one with a better sample size, I looked at their AAA statistics instead of their MLB statistics, to see if there was any correlation there. Because the two AAA levels are so different in offensive friendliness, I am using K%-BB%. I don't like not counting homers, but I think it helps us conflate the two leagues better.

I couldn't find Ken Kadokura's numbers (older KBO numbers are hard to find if you can't read Korean. Dan K of MyKBO was a big help as always), so I replaced him with Gary Glover. I sorted by velocity here.

Liz: 93.8 MPH, .21 FIP WAA, 13.6 AAA K%-BB%

Jimenez: 93.6 MPH, -.16 FIP WAA, 9.6 AAA K%-BB%

Dustin Nippert: 93.3 MPH, .43 FIP WAA,12.76 AAA K%-BB%

Henry Sosa: 93.1 MPH .66 FIP WAA, 93.1 MPH, 5.34 AAA K%-BB%

Gary Glover: 93 MPH, -.73 FIP WAA, 9.04 AAA K%-BB%

Francisco Cruceta: 93 MPH, -.99 FIP WAA, 13.46 AAA K%-BB %

Bowers: 91.6 MPH, -.45 FIP WAA, 9.2 AAA K%-BB %

Knight: 90.9 MPH, -.15 FIP WAA, 13 AAA K%-BB%

Aquilino Lopez: 90.4, .14 FIP WAA, 18.4 AAA K%-BB %

Danny Rios: 90 MPH, .39 FIP WAA, 4.14 AAA K%-BB %

Fyhrie: Under 90 MPH, -1.44 FIP WAA, 8.56 AAA K%-BB %

Sadowski: 89.5 MPH, -.73 FIP WAA, 8.7 AAA K%-BB%

Callaway: 89 MPH, .16 FIP WAA, 7.5 AAA K%-BB%

Seth Greisinger: 88.13 FIP WAA, 1.11 FIP WAA, 7.9 AAA K%-BB%

Youman: 88 MPH, 1.00 FIP WAA, 6.27 AAA K%-BB%

Ben Jukich: 87.73 MPH, 1.04 FIP WAA, 12.13 AAA K%-BB%

Van Hekken: 86.49 MPH, 1.01 FIP WAA, 7.55 AAA K%-BB%

When you split the 17 pitchers into three groups by AAA K%-BB%, the best group (top 5) has a -.36 FIP WAA in the KBO, the median group (7) had a -1.36 FIP WAA, while the bottom 5 had a 3.17 FIP WAA. So the worst AAA pitchers were actually the best in the KBO. Using AAA statistics do not seem helpful. How about velocity? Breaking down the pitchers into thirds again, we see that the top 5 velocity pitchers had a .41 FIP WAA, the median 7 had a -3.23 FIP WAA, while the 5 worst had a 4.32 FIP WAA. The slowest pitchers were the best, while the median pitchers were the worst. This puts a major ding in the theory that fastball velocity is a good predictor of success across leagues, but again, cross league statistics performed poorly. We saw in previous posts that the pitchers with the worst velocities performed not as good as the high velocity guys but better than pitchers with velocities closest to the mean. Perhaps this is good news for a guy like Adam Wilk, who has a well below average fastball, but some pitchability, and just signed with the Dinos (filling out an expansion roster is tough, but I have liked a lot of what they have done). Regardless, we will continue to look at evidence and data to see whether or not this theory has any support.

A Possible KBO Projection Using Velocity: Richmond, Rodriguez, Eveland

In just the past couple of days, the KBO has brought in 3 new MLB/MiLB pitchers. Dana Eveland is going to Hanwha, while Scott Richmond is going to replace Ryan Sadowski in Lotte. As I was getting ready to finish this post, it was also announced that Aneury Rodriquez is signing with Samsung. As we have tried to do in the past, some kind of conversion metric between the MLB and MiLB would become increasingly helpful and we have gotten mixed results just from statistical comparisons. I had an idea and wanted to test it out and see if it would work in the transition from the MLB to the KBO (then perhaps try to test it vise versa and even, if we are feeling extremely ambitious, see if I could come up with some kind of velocity metric from the minors to Majors). Basically it goes like this, there is a good correlation between velocity and success, at least in the Majors, perhaps one could do some sort of project based on fastball velocity alone. Of course, there are many other factors that make a pitcher good/bad, but I wanted to see if velocity was a better indicator between leagues than actual statistics.

Here, we will use FIP WAA, Maximum Velocity (MV) and Median (perhaps "mid-range" is more appropriate, as we are adding the lowest number and the highest number and divide by two as they do not have average velocity listed) Velocity (AV) according to Naver KBO Data. I will look at the top 5 in innings for each team, in order to get decent sample sizes and I am using the number 5 as it gives us some semblance of a rotation. Later, I will separate the velocities into "bins", but I'll explain that when we get there. On the original lists, I will keep it in KMH (just for ease), but I will change the averages to MPH later on.

Doosan:

Nippert: -3.83 FIP WAA, 152 MV, 145.5 AV

Kim Sun-Woo: -.79 FIP WAA, 148 MV, 141.5 AV

Lee, Yong-Chan: .733 FIP WAA,133 MV, 127 AV

Noh Kyung-eun: .7298 FIP WAA ,152 MV, 145.5 AV

Kim Seung-hee: -.414 FIP WAA, 146 MV, 142.5 AV

Lotte:

Youman: 1.00 FIP WAA, 150 MV, 144.5 AV

Song Seung-jun: .17 FIP WAA, 149 MV, 140 AV

Sadowski: .311 FIP WAA, 150 MV, 144.5 AV

Lee Young-hoon: .51 FIP WAA, 146 MV, 140.5 AV

Ko Won-jun: -.83 FIP WAA, 146 MV, 139 AV

LG:

Jukich: .609 FIP WAA, 146 MV, 141.5 AV

Liz:  1.04 FIP WAA, 162 MV, 152 AV

Kim Kwang-sam: -.06 FIP WAA, 145 MV, 140.5 AV

Woo Kyu-min: .81 FIP WAA, 143 MV, 139.5 AV

Lee Seung-woo: -.814 FIP WAA, 141 MV, 137 AV

SK:





Yoon Hee-sang: .2 FIP WAA, 148 MV, 142 AV


Song Eun-beom: -.1 FIP WAA, 153 MV, 144.5 AV

Santiago: -.46 FIP WAA, 153 MV, 147 AV

Park Hee-soo: 1.41 FIP WAA, 148 MV, 141 AV

Kim Kwang-hyun: -.5292 FIP WAA, 150 MV, 142 AV

KIA:

Lerew: -1.35 FIP WAA, 155 MV,  148.5 AV

Seo Jae-woong: .48 FIP WAA, 147 MV, 140 AV


Yoon Suk-Min: 1.63 FIP WAA, 153 MV, 146.5 AV

Sosa: .66 FIP WAA, 156 MV, 149 AV

Kim Jin-woo: 1.15 FIP WAA, 152 MV, 148 AV

Hanwha:

Ryu Hyun-Jin: 2.58 FIP WAA, 153 MV, 146.5 AV


Kim Hyuk-min: .41 FIP WAA, 153 MV, 147 AV

Park Chan-ho: -1.03 FIP WAA, 149 MV, 142.5 AV

Yoo Chang-sik: -1.972 FIP WAA, 150 MV, 141.5 AV

Yang Hoon: -.899 FIP WAA, 152 MV, 145 AV

Nexen:

Brandon Knight: .98 FIP WAA, 151 MV, 145 AV

Van Hekken: -.2822 FIP WAA, 146 MV, 139.5 AV

Kim Young-min: -.85 FIP WAA, 154 MV, 146 AV

Kang Yoon-gu: -.86 FIP WAA, 151 MV, 144.5 AV

Han Hyun-hee: .34 FIP WAA, 148 MV, 137.5 AV

Samsung:

Bae Young-soo: .7 FIP WAA, 148 MV, 143.5 AV

Jang Won-Sam: 1.9 FIP WAA, 146 MV, 141.5 AV

Talbot: -.55 FIP WAA, 149 MV, 144 AV

Gordon: -.11 FIP WAA, 149 MV, 143 AV

Yoon Sung-hwan: .80 FIP WAA 147 MV, 140.5 AV

League Average "Rotation" MV is 92.535 MPH (all speed measurements are now in MPH)

League Average "Rotation" AV is 88.6135 MPH

FIP WAA of 40 rotation members (this brings the survivor bias up front, as you would expect that the best pitchers would pitch the most innings): 4.8542

So the baseline is not really zero, as we are using the top 5 innings pitchers per each team. We would expect that if we added the rest of the pitchers in the KBO, they would have about a -4.8542 FIP WAA, unless the math behind the metric is off somehow (more likely, I just miscalculated a few guys numbers, as I did test this against league averages when I originally designed it).

Team Averages (the FIP WAA is the total, sorted by MV):

 KIA: 2.57 FIP WAA, 94.612 MV, 90.768 AV

Hanwha: -.911 FIP WAA, 93.868 MV, 89.59 AV

 SK: .5208 FIP WAA, 93.248 MV, 88.846 AV

Nexen: -.6722 FIP WAA, 93 MV, 88.35 AV

 Lotte: 1.161 FIP WAA, 91.884 MV, 88.102 AV

Samsung: 2.74 FIP WAA, 91.636 MV, 88.35 AV

LG: 1.585 FIP WAA, 91.388 MV  88.102 AV

Doosan: -3.5712 FIP WAA, 90.644 MV, 87.048 AV

We sort of see what we expected here. The hardest throwing team, KIA, is the 2nd best team according to FIP WAA. Doosan, the slowest throwing team, is the worst pitching team. If we sorted it by average velocity, we would change the bottom of the order a little, but there wasn't much difference in team rank between median velocity and max velocity (which I expected). However, Lotte, Samsung, and LG were towards the bottom and were all better than average teams. The bottom 4 teams+ had a 1.9148 FIP WAA, while the top 4 teams had a 2.9394 FIP WAA. So while there isn't a great correlation, and there were obvious exceptions in a small sample size, it does seem that teams that throw harder have a better chance (or are more likely) to be better.

The team averages above were mainly to see that the pattern that harder throwers are usually better held in the KBO. I was looking to see if I could do a projection based off velocity data, so now I will separate the 40 pitchers into 4 different "bins" based on velocity, an elite bin, an above average bin, a below average bin, and a "poor" bin. The Poor and Above Average bins will have 10 players each, but just so I didn't have to break up pitchers with the same MV or come up with an arbitrary tiebreaker, the Below Average Bin will have 11 and the Elite will have 9.  First we will do it for MV (Maximum Velocity) and then AV (Median Velocity):

Poor: 82.46 MPH to 90.52 MPH range. 2.1618 FIP WAA or .21618 FIP WAA per pitcher.

Below Average: 91.14 MPH to 92.38 MPH range. 1.62 FIP WAA or .14727 FIP WAA per pitcher.

Above Average: 93 MPH to 94.24 MPH range. -3.9194 FIP WAA or - .39194 FIP WAA per pitcher

Elite: 94.86 MPH to 100.44 MPH range. 3.56 FIP WAA or  .39556 FIP WAA per pitcher

Obviously the above average section is hurt by Nippert's struggles (mainly that he pitched a lot of innings, one of the league leaders, at a below average/above replacement level). However, it is still negative if you decided to take him out.
The Elite velocity pitchers proved to the be the best, while the poor velocity pitchers proved to be the 2nd best. Here is my theory: While the best fastballs usually make the best pitchers, for a below average pitcher to continue pitching (survivor bias, as we don't see the many soft tossers that are rarely used here or just failed), they must have something else, such as great movement, control, or breaking pitches. Perhaps these are the KBO's Jered Weavers, Shaun Marcums, and Ryan Dempsters (or even, to use an extreme example, R.A. Dickeys). It is not as if pitchers with below average velocity are automatically good, it is just that the ones that survive have to show something else impressive to get over velocity bias in talent evaluators. The worst velocity pitcher, Lee Yong-Chan is a perhaps a perfect example. Let's sort by average velocity and see if we see the same results. For this one, in order to avoid arbitrary tie breakers, we put 11 in the poor bin, 9 in the below average bin, 9 in the above average bin, and 11 in the elite bin.

Poor: 78.74 MPH to 87.11 MPH. 1.8568 FIP WAA or .1688 FIP WAA per pitcher

Below Average: 87.42 MPH to 88.35 MPH. -.6162 FIP WAA or -.06847 FIP WAA per pitcher

Above Average: 88.66 MPH to 89.9 MPH. .472 FIP WAA or .05244 FIP WAA per pitcher

Elite: 90.21 MPH to 94.24 MPH. 1.7098 FIP WAA or .15544 FIP WAA per pitcher

So here, the poor velocity pitchers are actually the best. The average and below average pitchers are the worst again (seemingly validating the idea that the pitchers closest to the mean are the worst, while the slower and faster pitchers are the best), but at least it is in the right order this time. Nippert appeared in the elite this time, bringing down the results big time. If you remove him, and he was tied for the lowest velocity in the elite group, the elite group is the best group easily. Only 4 of the 11 elite pitchers in median velocity were below 0 FIP WAA and 4 of 10 elite pitchers in maximum velocity were below 0 FIP WAA.

So now, let's bring Dana Eveland and Scott Richmond into this. We will use both Fangraphs (fMPH) and Brooks Baseball (bbMPH) for average fastball velocity and Fangraphs for a max MPH. Using career for averages, just 2012 for Max MPH.

Scott Richmond: 91.89 bbMPH, 91.2 fMPH, 92 Max MPH

Dana Eveland: 90.64 bbMPH, 89.1 fMPH, 92.2 Max MPH

Richmond clearly will fall into the elite category in average velocity, while he actually falls into the below average category when it comes to maximum velocity.

Eveland is an elite velocity pitcher according to Brooks Baseball, while an above average velocity pitcher according to Fangraphs. Of course, this is not an insignificant difference and depends on which one you trust more. If you average the two, he falls under 90 MPH and into the "above average" category. Like Richmond, his max velocity falls into the "below average" category, which may introduce a classification/data difference problem. This makes actual projection difficult. However, just like in the Majors, it does seem there is a correlation when it comes to elite league velocity and success.

Let's see the effect when it comes to velocity in replacing Sadowski with Richmond for Lotte and Ryu and Park for Eveland (so we will just average the 4) for Hanwha.  

Lotte: 91.684 MV (From 5th to 6th in the KBO), 88.424 AV (Using FanGraphs' MPH. Improves them from 5th to 4th)

Hanwha: 93.575 MV (stay at 2nd place), 89.4675 AV (stay at 2nd, but like MV, the number drops slightly).

Hanwha obviously needs to use a different pitcher more to make up for losing Park (since he was terrible, he should be easy to replace, and an average pitcher replacing Park would also help make up for Ryu, as there isn't much from a statistical point of view to suggest that Eveland will be near as good as Ryu), and those innings could very likely go to their other foreign pitcher Denny Bautista, who threw 86 innings in 2012 (of course, another pitcher would have to take his innings).

Evidently, Samsung is not bringing Gordon back (so Rodriguez would replace him as one of their two foreign pitchers), so we can project how their rotation will look velocity wise.

Aneury Rodriguez: 91 fMPH, 92.9 Max MPH. Elite in average velocity and below average in max velocity, pretty much like Richmond and Eveland.

Samsung adjusted: 91.74 MV (Slightly goes up, but not in rank), 88.818 AV (This would jump them up to 3rd best in the KBO)

As far as I know, there is no real way to compare pitchers using Brooks Baseball or Fangraphs' Pitch F/X leaderboards by Maximum Velocity (the only way I could think of is to sort by average velocity, go to each individual's page, say the top 30 or so, to get the hardest thrown pitch, then compare which ranking worked better against FIP -. This would take quite a bit of time, but I may do it in the future), so it is really hard to see whether average velocity or max velocity has a better correlation to success. Just rationally, it seems to make more sense that it is more important what your velocity is on average than your best pitch, as obviously you are throwing your average fastball more than your best fastball. When scouting, people usually say that a pitcher sits at XX-XX and touches XX. Considering the data we have, I would trust the average velocity more. This would have Eveland, Rodriguez, and Richmond as elite velocity pitchers, with a 63.6 % (each) empirical probability of being above average KBO pitchers with a .46632 expected FIP WAA between the three of them. Unfortunately, for now, we have to sit and wait and see how they do in order to get more evidence and see whether this is predictive or not.

Ryan Sadowski Signs with Giants: Scouting Report

Ryan Sadowski has returned to the United States after 3 years in the KBO, signing a minor league deal with the San Francisco Giants. He spent the last three years with the Lotte Giants and (as noted in the KBO WAR article), he had a -.9 eWAA and .311 FIP WAA in 2012.

For his 3 year KBO career, he had a 5.16 eWAR and -1.28 eWAA. His career FIP was actually worse than his ERA in the KBO (4.21 to 4.03), which is a 4.249 FIP WAR (or about 1.4 WAR a season) and -2.19 FIP WAA. So he was a below average pitcher in the KBO according to the WAR metric. However, Lotte's ballpark is the most hitter friendly park in the KBO according to 2007-2011 park factors (for whatever reason, Google Docs doesn't really let me open that link in a new tab, if it does the same for you, I apologize). If we just use FIP (so we only really neutralize the HR part of the park. I don't really buy K/BB park factors unless there is some kind of weird batter's eye), we can subtract 8% of the homers Sadowski gave up and adjust his FIP to about 4.12, which would make his FIP WAA about -1.72 and FIP WAR about 4.72 for his 3 years in the KBO. The difference is minimal and his actual ERA in Lotte's home stadium (16 games, 85 innings) was 4.13 in 2012. He had an ERA of 6 in over 13 innings in KIA's stadium and Nexen's stadium. Combined, those parks are about neutral, so it has to do with randomness/Sadowski not pitching well/lineups. I find it hard to blame the park for Sadowski's struggles in the KBO, especially when his 2011 splits say that he was better at home as well.

In the Majors, he actually got to make 6 starts with the Giants (28.1 innings) in 2009 where he was about average according to ERA (0.0 WAA), but he walked as many batters as he struck out. He spent most of the year in AAA, where he struggled with a 5.11 FIP in 89.1 innings.

Sadowski was originally a 12th round pick of out of the University of Florida by the San Francisco Giants. Depending on which system of classification you trust (Fangraphs has him throwing less sinkers than Brooks), Sadowski was mainly a sinker/slider guy. He was a ground-ball guy in his short stint in the Majors, and had nearly 2 ground-balls per every flyball in 2012 with Lotte. The right-hander's velocity was below average in the Majors, sitting around 90 MPH on his 4-seamer. Again, depending on which system you believe, he either threw a lot of cutters or no cutters (basically, Brooks Baseball believes that his slider is a cutter). Sadowski evidently calls it a cutter, while others call it a slider (in seeing it, it does look more like a cutter to me).

He also threw an occasional changeup, but relied on the curveball as a pitch with 2 strikes or ahead in the count, especially against lefties. In 2012, he walked nearly as many right-handed batters as he struck out and was better against lefties. In 2011, the splits were just about the opposite, as he struggled against lefties and was better against righties.

According to his KBO Data scouting report, he throws a cutter, but mainly likes to throw it, along with the 4-seamer, early in the count (which is the opposite of his MLB stay, as he mainly threw his cutter/slider late, mainly against righties). The report also says that he throws a slider and a two-seamer. It says he throws the cutter at a high frequency (so this should be the pitch he threw in the majors) and the slider in a low frequency (along with a changeup in a low frequency). He also throws the sinker and the curve at a common frequency according to the report.

In watching video of him from his time in the KBO, the tall, somewhat lanky pitcher threw a lot of sinkers that almost flutter and move arm side in the 89-91 MPH range. His delivery looks like a delivery that you often see in Korea, as there are a lot of legs are arms coming at the hitter via a high leg kick. This delivery is at least somewhat different (though he did come at hitters with a lot of legs and arms) than his MLB days, as it seems he is now coming a little less over the top and the overall motion seems much more fluid. He also begins his motion by almost rocking back and forth, something he didnt do in the Majors, and something that seems to get his delivery working more fluidly. Since he is not a hard thrower, he has to make up for it with movement, and basically everything he throws moves pretty well. However, as the walk rates suggest, he doesn't exactly have good command/control.

I fully expect to see Sadowski pitching in the PCL this year, as I don't think he will be very helpful at the Major League level. The deception and ability to mix pitches may lead to a good minor league season, but it is hard to see him overcoming the lack of stuff and consistency to pitch well in the Majors in 2012.

Jang or Knight? My take on the Golden Glove Controversy

In the KBO, Jang Won-Sam was awarded a "Golden Glove" over Brandon Knight.
Golden Gloves have nothing to do with defense in the KBO, it is more like the NPB's "best nine" or like an All-Pro team. This caused some controversy on the English speaking versions of the internet, with accusations of anything between an over reliance on pitcher wins to borderline racism. I find it hard to care about awards and the hall of fame when it comes to the Majors. I have mostly stayed out of that realm of baseball writing because I find prospects and play evaluations more interesting. However, Dan (of mykbo.net) somewhat suggested this idea and it sounded fun.

Knight had a 2.20 ERA in 208.2 innings in 2012, which is good for a stunning 3.67 ERA WAA and 10.62 ERA WAR (according to the metric I set up). Jang Won-Sam had an ERA of 3.55 in just 157 innings, good for just a .4 eWAA and 2.6 eWAR. Of course, ERA is not the best way to evaluate pitchers, and that is why I put more weight into FIP WAR:

Jang Won-Sam: 1.9 FIP WAA, 3.47 FIP WAR

Brandon Knight: .98 FIP WAA, 3.9 FIP WAR

Knight regresses to the mean in a hurry when DIPs is introduced, and FIP insists that Jang Won-sam is a better pitcher, but Knight just threw more innings (thus the higher WAR). So which is more valuable? While I usually prefer WAA when comparing everyday players or pitchers (the replacement level to me seems to me to be best when comparing marginal players such as utility players or bullpen pitchers, though leverage problems develop in the latter), there is something to be said for throwing more innings, especially when it is nearly 50 innings of difference. To use a perhaps flawed American example, Joe Blanton and Brandon McCarthy received basically the same contract this off-season. Even with home/road splits concerns, McCarthy is clearly the better pitcher. Blanton is a below average starter while McCarthy is an above average starter. However, Blanton has been healthy basically his whole career, while McCarthy has had major injury issues, especially with his shoulder. While free agent contract money does not necessarily equal true worth (sometimes teams are just wrong), it does give us a window into the two front offices and how the pitchers are basically viewed as the same. The Angels took a safer bet with Blanton while the Diamondbacks took the riskier player with the higher ceiling in McCarthy. So even though FIP says Jang Won-sam is a better pitcher than Knight, Knight's durability perhaps makes him more valuable.

One could argue that we shouldn't use things like FIP and BABIP when looking at leagues like the NPB and KBO (along with independent leagues, college baseball, and lower minor league levels) because the diverse pools of talent do not exactly create a controlled environment (or at least not as much as we are able to break down environments in the MLB). I somewhat disagree with this, as I think that dominance would show up at least as much in K/BB/HR as it would in BABIP. In other words, when I see a low BABIP in other levels, I am most likely to only conclude that it is just dominance or some kind of BABIP control if the pitcher also has dominant K/BB/HR (that is, if a pitcher keeps putting up 1.50 ERAs while his FIPs come out to be in the 2.00s, one could easily say that he is closer to the 1.50 ERA in true talent in that league). The other exception (and there are many in DIPs) would be if a pitcher had shown a track record of low BABIPs. Knight only got 31.1 innings in the Majors, but his BABIP was a high .353. In his last shot in AAA (89 innings), his BABIP was .347. So it is certainly not a skill set he had shown before going to Korea. Even in the KBO, he hasn't shown this before 2012, as his ERAs were well over 4 in both 2010 and 2011. Knight's ground-ball rate (at least GO/FO, which does lend itself to some variance as perhaps a pitcher has more ground-balls turned into outs than another one for a reason he doesn't controlled) is much better than Jang's, but it is hard to get over the fact that he struck out less than a batter every two innings and has less than 2 strikeouts per walk. One could argue that you shouldn't base awards off of advanced metrics like FIP, but since this article is more interested in which pitcher is/was better, it doesn't matter for our purposes.

I am doubting the KBO used any kind of advanced metrics when awarding the gold gloves, so we will look at the two pitchers from a scouting perspective.

The first thing I look at when scouting pitchers is obviously fastball velocity. According to KBO Data's scouting reports, Knight's fastball averages between 86.18 MPH to 93.62 MPH. Jang's is a little slower, sitting between 84.94 MPH to 90.52 MPH. Of course, Knight is right-handed, while Jang is left-handed. You usually expect slightly lower velocity from left-handers, but the 3 MPH difference is pretty big. Jang has the slower curve and goes to his changeup more often. Surprisingly, Jang's slider is a little harder than Knight's. Here is some video of Jang pitching against Ryu Hyun-Jin a couple of years ago.

To me, it looks like he does a pretty good job of cutting his fastball and showing good command of his slider. On the other hand, Knight (video below) seems to have some very good movement on all of his pitches:

For a ground-ball guy, Knight doesn't seem to keep the ball especially low, at least according to his heat map:

Jang clearly pitches more up in the zone, which makes more sense considering his higher strikeout rate and lower ground-ball rate:

I think you can make a legitimate argument that Jang is the better pitcher and perhaps even had a better year. Especially if you just look at strikeouts and walks. Jang had more strikeouts and less walks than Knight did, which is simply, but perhaps predictive.