Big Data Baseball Page 16
To put it in monetary terms, consider the cost of 1 win above replacement on the open market. Wins above replacement (WAR) is an advanced statistic designed to boil a player’s total value down into one number. On the free agent market in 2012–13, purchasing 1 WAR was estimated to cost clubs $5 million. For instance, a 3 WAR player is an above-average performer, and on the free agent market such a player would cost a club roughly $15 million per season. So to add 9.3 wins in free agent players would cost a club roughly $50 million per season. The Pirates had added 9.3 wins by shifting their defense and getting their pitchers to throw more ground balls, all this without adding a dollar to payroll. The Pirates were spinning gold.
For the first time in decades, the short-on-talent, short-on-dollars Pirates were in the midst of a pennant race as the season reached its halfway point.
The Pirates entered July having won 9 straight games, climbing to first place in the division. Halfway through the season they were 51-30, 2 games ahead of the Cardinals and 5 games ahead of the Reds. The two-seam fastball had improved questionable pitchers’ productivity and had allowed the club to weather the rash of pitching injuries that threatened their season, while the shifting had saved runs.
However, because most of the changes the Pirates were making were invisible, the city was not buying it. Yes, the shifts were visible and working, but how much impact could they really have? No statistics tracking their value appeared on the nightly telecasts of games or in the newspapers. Not until the 2014 postseason did the MLB Network and Fox Sports begin using real-time graphics to show defensive positioning. The ground-ball philosophy was being played out completely under the radar. This was not like adding a free agent slugger whose home runs were dramatic and their impact obvious.
Pittsburgh had a trust issue. The city had seen the Pirates start off strong only to fall apart in the second half of each of the last two seasons, and since the roster had not dramatically changed, why should this season be any different? Pittsburghers were hesitant to emotionally invest in a team that had fooled them twice, and they weren’t going to be fooled again. Despite having the best record in baseball at the end of June, through 38 home dates the Pirates were averaging just 23,203 fans, a decline of 1,652 fans per game from the same point the last season, and ranking twenty-third in baseball. Even their division rival the Brewers, mired in an awful season, were averaging 31,500 at Miller Park.
The city was still skeptical. In order to reach 94 wins, to get to the postseason, and ensure that Hurdle and Huntington would return for 2014, the club needed to find even more hidden value to produce even more wins.
9
THE MISSING ALL-STARS
On July 15, 2013, in the Jackie Robinson Rotunda at Citi Field in New York, a remarkable delegation of Pirates represented the team during the All-Star Game’s media day. The Pirates sent five players to the midsummer classic—center fielder Andrew McCutchen, closer Jason Grilli, setup man Mark Melancon, third baseman Pedro Alvarez, and starting pitcher Jeff Locke. The last time the Pirates had sent that many players to the All-Star Game was 1972. All five had enjoyed productive first-half campaigns and helped the Pirates to be within a game of St. Louis.
The five All-Stars were given their own nameplates and podiums as hundreds of media members swarmed them in the vast rotunda of Citi Field, its brick edifice and open arches a nod to the legendary façade of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The five were asked to make sense of what was going on in Pittsburgh. How could they explain being 1 game behind St. Louis at the All-Star break with the league’s fourth-smallest payroll?
While Grilli, Melancon, Alvarez, and Locke were all first-time All-Stars, the situation was most surreal for Locke, who had posted a 5.50 ERA in a limited season in 2012 and had to fight for a rotation job in spring training.
“We were getting on the plane [to New York], I look around, and we had the whole first-class section taken up. Just us,” Locke told reporters. “I mean, people had their families with them, but I’d say that’s still a pretty good sign.”
But who wasn’t among them on the plane was also notable. Where was Russell Martin? Locke knew Martin was deserving of All-Star consideration. He knew how much Martin had meant to his season. Martin was critical to the Pirates’ first-half success, but his value remained largely hidden and underappreciated. Locke’s dependence upon Martin’s glove had shown up in the weeks preceding this surreal moment.
On a sun-soaked Sunday afternoon on June 9 on the north side of Chicago at Wrigley Field, Locke started the game with Martin behind the plate, his butt nearly scraping the dirt as he settled into his low squat. For a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, several taller, offensive-oriented catchers had come into the game, suggesting a new prototype build for the position. Shorter catchers such as the five-foot-ten Martin believed that was just a fad, that being low to the ground was an advantage when receiving pitches.
Martin was important to Locke because the young lefty lacked elite velocity. He had to live on the edge of the strike zone to be successful in the major leagues. He had lived there to this point in the season, but to do so he was dependent on Martin’s mastery of pitch framing. In fact, all the Pirates pitchers had degrees of dependence on Martin.
In the first inning, Locke got to a two-strike count on the Cub’s right-handed Cody Ransom. Martin called for a two-seam fastball to be thrown toward the inner part of the plate, as the Pirates pitchers so often did in 2013. Locke went into his delivery, which included a brief turn of his back to the batter to add torque, then hurled a two-seam fastball. The pitch hissed near Ransom and just missed the inside part of the plate. Rather than reach out to his left to catch the ball and bring it back over home plate in a back-and-forth, herky-jerky motion, Martin demonstrated the art of pitch framing. He began with his glove inside near the batter and moved his hand to the pitch in one quick, subtle motion toward the strike zone. He caught the ball with his glove moving slightly back over the inside portion of the plate, getting the strike-three call on a pitch that was several inches off the plate. Ransom disagreed with the call. He muttered something and momentarily resisted leaving the batter’s box, his small protest. As he finally walked back to the home dugout, he gave a long glare back at home-plate umpire Paul Nauert.
At the beginning of the bottom of the second inning, with a two-strike count on the Cubs’ right-handed hitting Scott Hairston, Martin again called for a Locke fastball to be thrown inside. Locke fired a fastball that was slightly in off the plate. Martin made another slight but lightning-quick movement of his glove, moving from nearer the batter to over the plate, catching the ball in one subtle motion, making it appear that the pitch had grazed the strike zone. Hairston had jumped back from the pitch, hoping his dramatic body language would sway the umpire. Nauert turned and emphatically punched his left hand forward and drew his right fist back in unison, another strike-three call. Hairston dropped his head in disbelief and looked directly down at the pitch’s invisible trajectory, as if it had left a vapor trail. He saw dirt and clay below the invisible flight path of the pitch, not a sliver of home plate.
Locke struck out the first two batters of the second inning with fastballs, then Cubs lefty Ryan Sweeney came to the plate. With a lefty up, and a 1–2 count, Martin called for Locke’s knuckle-curve, a pitch that broke sharply away and down from a left-handed batter. Locke twisted and threw. The pitch began over the middle of the plate, then dropped sharply toward the outside corner, sweeping away from Sweeney. Sweeney could do little with the pitch so he didn’t swing. The pitch grazed the outside corner of the plate, barely registering as a strike according to PITCHf/x location tracking. A less adept pitch-framing catcher might have allowed his glove hand to drift away from home plate with the ball, giving the appearance that the pitch was a ball. But not only were Martin’s hands quick, they were strong. He reached forward and grabbed the pitch just as it crossed the plate. It was like nailing a landing in gymnastics, with no east or west movement of his frozen glo
ve. Martin had gone straight out to meet the pitch before it could dive farther away from the batter. Had Martin let the pitch travel, even though it had caught the strike zone, the final inches of its path might have made it look like a ball. Again, Nauert turned and pumped his first—another called strikeout.
Locke—with a lot of help from Martin—had struck out the side. In the first two innings, Martin had helped frame three third-strike calls, and Locke took a no-hitter into the sixth before Dioner Navarro lined a single into left field.
It was the beginning of a remarkable monthlong push for an All-Star selection for Locke as he allowed just 6 earned runs in 32 innings in June, posting a 1.67 ERA. Martin had helped Locke to his remarkable first half of the season, when the lefty went 7-1 with a 2.06 ERA, and Martin was quietly making every pitcher on the staff look better through a completely obscured ability. Martin was worth nearly 3 wins above replacement in the first half of the season, giving the Pirates incredible value on his two-year, $17 million contract. And the WAR calculation did not include pitch-framing value. He was arguably the team’s first-half MVP, but he was nowhere to be found on the All-Star flight.
* * *
The hidden value of Russell Martin began, fittingly, in obscurity. He was the son of a Montreal street musician and construction worker who cobbled together enough money to send his son to baseball camps and clinics so he could pursue his dream. In between rush-hour subway performances he took his son to practice his gift. Though Martin played Quebec’s first sport, hockey, he loved baseball and first started playing in the tree-lined, brick-duplex neighborhood of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. After graduating from his Montreal high school, hardly a bastion for baseball, Martin sought a warm climate where he could play baseball year-round and secure the extra reps he had missed growing up in Quebec. He signed with one of the better junior-college programs in the United States at Chipola College in Marianna, Florida, where he played primarily on the left side of the infield, though he did appear in a few games as catcher in his final season.
Martin was a star at Chipola and was drafted as an infielder by the Dodgers in 2002. A natural athlete, he possessed a rare desire to work. In rookie ball with the Dodgers that summer, he played third base well, but there was a problem: Martin was blocked at the major league level by one of the game’s best young third basemen, Adrian Beltre. The Dodgers also wondered if the squatty five-foot-ten Martin would hit enough and with enough power to play a corner position. The Dodgers also needed catching depth. A Dodgers scout suggested Martin had the abilities—the arm, the smarts, and the athleticism—to convert to catcher.
So in spring training in 2003, Martin began his catching education. The Dodgers’ minor league catching coordinator, Jon Debus, began with an unusual drill that had nothing to do with crouching behind the plate and playing. During intrasquad games on the back fields of the club’s Vero Beach, Florida, spring training home, Debus placed a batting-practice screen behind the catcher, behind which he placed two chairs, and there Martin was first exposed to the subtle technique of manipulating ball-strike calls.
A catcher must possess certain natural gifts to frame pitches. He must have naturally soft, strong, and sudden hands that eliminate excessive movement, actions that would catch an umpire’s eye. As an exceptional athlete and former infielder, Martin possessed soft, calm hands, but most of the skill is acquired through thousands upon thousands of reps. A catcher must understand the angles of pitch flight and be able to execute a quick and fluid motion to create one of baseball’s most important illusions. Martin explained to the Tribune-Review one of the first, critical concepts he learned from Debus: “I’m trying to go completely against what the ball is trying to do. If it’s a slider going down and away, I’m going to try and catch it before it goes further down and away. If it’s a two-seamer coming back, I try to catch it deeper in the strike zone so the natural two-seam action makes it look like a strike.”
The education Martin gained on the back fields of the Dodgers spring training complex formed an important foundation, but to excel, Martin would have to build upon that foundation himself. He benefited by being innately curious. He gleaned important details from observation and learned through experience. He learned that lefties with heavy breaking balls force your glove away from the zone and cost you strikes. He learned that to catch these balls he would have to get down on one knee to allow his glove more room to operate horizontally in the strike zone.
In the Pirate City locker room in the spring of 2014, Martin knelt on one knee on the carpet to demonstrate to a reporter how much more freedom he had with his glove hand with one knee dropped to the ground. Getting the low strike is particularly important for Martin with the Pirates, as their pitchers often relied on sinking, two-seam fastballs. Moreover, PITCHf/x data proved that umpires were more willing to give a borderline low strike than a borderline high strike.
“Guys who are really good at getting low strikes are able to give a low target; and if they are catching the ball on the way up, it will look like a strike,” Martin explained. “As opposed to if you give a high target and catch it on the way down, it looks like a ball.”
Locke witnessed Martin’s dedication to the craft early on, struck by his attention to detail. During some of Locke’s first practices that February on the back-field bull pens in Bradenton, he was surprised when Martin cursed at himself for not catching a pitch in a certain manner, with the ball falling from his mitt. There was no audience besides Locke and pitching coach Ray Searage; they were surrounded by nothing else but chain-link fencing and windscreens. “No one is watching, but it didn’t matter. He’s competitive with himself,” said Locke.
Martin attempts to maximize every hour of practice and has logged thousands upon thousands of repetitions to create muscle memory, the neural circuitry where skills are refined, if not born. He believes being an adept pitch framer is largely a learned skill, and that you have to want to do it and be passionate about it.
“When I’m catching a bull pen, I’m not just catching a bull pen. I’m working on my receiving constantly,” he said. “I don’t have to think about it anymore. I’m doing it. I think everyone should do it.”
Martin also attempts to develop a relationship with umpires, making small talk between innings and pitches, something that couldn’t harm his ability to influence their calls. Martin also has a voracious appetite for video as he likes to study his catching peers. The National League Central Division has not only one of the greatest collection of catchers in the game but the top collection of pitch framers. Along with Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina, one of Martin’s favorite peers to study is Milwaukee Brewers catcher Jonathan Lucroy, who Martin feels is one of the best in the game at getting the low strike. Lucroy and Martin share an admiration for each other’s work, like master painters in an obscure art form that few appreciate.
“When I’m hitting [against Lucroy] and know it was a little low, I look back at him and I’m like, ‘You mother…,’” Martin said.
Lucroy, like Martin, notes some of the ability is physical. While modestly built for a professional athlete at five feet eleven and 195 pounds, Lucroy has Popeye-like forearms that allow him to stop cold a ball moving at 98 mph. “There is a lot of forearm [strength]. A lot of this,” says Lucroy as he quietly moves his left hand forward and mimics going out to stop and stick a ball. “For the most part what I do is, wherever the pitch is, I try to beat it to the spot. If you can do that, an umpire will give the pitch to you because he can see it.”
But while Martin’s magic impacted nearly every pitcher on the Pirates staff, the public, as they voted for All-Stars, couldn’t see how he had improved the club by nearly 40 runs—equivalent to 4 wins—over the previous Pirates catchers simply through how he received pitches. This improvement had nothing to do with his bat or his strong and accurate throwing arm and couldn’t be cited on the back of a bubble-gum trading card. It had everything to do with the hidden value of pitch framing, and it was the only wa
y the Pirates could afford the improvement.
Between the defensive shifts, the ground-ball pitching plan, and Martin’s glove, those hidden values would add up to the equivalent of 13 wins for the Pirates in 2013. At the All-Star break the Pirates had allowed 311 runs, the fewest in baseball. While Martin helped every pitcher on the staff, he perhaps helped none more than fellow free agent acquisition Francisco Liriano—who was also conspicuously absent from the All-Star Game.
* * *
Liriano had returned in May from rehabbing his broken arm in Florida and had immediately bolstered the Pirates’ depleted rotation. He was the first reinforcement to arrive. In his first start as a Pirate, against the Mets on May 11, he allowed just 1 run over 5⅓ innings. He struck out 9, walked just 2, and hit 95 mph on the Citi Field radar gun. He looked strong. His fastball velocity was back and his slider was biting. One strong start followed another in the first half of the season, and remarkably Liriano began to resemble the highly touted pitcher he was prior to his elbow injury. His improvement was credited to his work with the coaching staff, which is not to be discredited. Liriano raised his arm slot in 2013, which helped him miss less often east-west with pitches, and tabled his four-seam fastball for a sinker, but catching the majority of his outings was Martin.
Several weeks before the All-Star Game, Liriano and Martin demonstrated their important in-game relationship on a misty, cool June night at home against the Cincinnati Reds. With one out in the first, Liriano got ahead of the Reds third baseman, right-hander Todd Frazier, 2-0. Frazier was forced to protect and expand his strike zone, which made him vulnerable to the slider. Martin called for a back-foot slider, meaning the pitch would begin tracking toward the middle of the plate, then in the last six to eight feet it would dive toward a right-handed batter’s foot. Liriano perfectly executed the pitch, with Frazier swinging and missing over the top of a pitch that nearly smashed into his right foot.