Greinke: someone talk me off the ledge

[Hate those Rodents]

Though he has the phenomenal k/bb ratio, it could be a blessing he hasn't been Cy Young when we maybe look to offer him an extension in the offseason.

[Oxy]

Though he has the phenomenal k/bb ratio, it could be a blessing he hasn't been Cy Young when we maybe look to offer him an extension in the offseason.

Unless we pay him like Cy Young, and this is really who he is. Then it is quite unfortunate.

[Ayt]

This can't be who he is. He has some key numbers that are absurd outliers that simply can't continue.

[Ennder]

I think a homerun translates to either a poor pitch or good hit

 

I completely disagree. I'd say less than 50% of HR hit in baseball are this easily classified.

[strawbossisevil]

That´s 86...thousand. Not million. Unless I´m reading it incorrectly.

[jeffy]

Dang, you were too quick...noticed that and deleted post before seeing someone had already caught my error.

[xisxisxis]

I completely disagree. I'd say less than 50% of HR hit in baseball are this easily classified.

 

 

 

 

More than 50% are not a "good hit"? Maybe they're bloop singles out of control, or popups that the wind took, or maybe strikeouts that go very bad......

[Thurston Fluff]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought saying less than 50% of HR's can be classified as a good hit or poor pitch. They may not be easy to classify but that doesn't mean they aren't one or the other.

 

AS far as Greinke goes it should mean something when the manager says he still doesn't have his best stuff. Even more when it's after a pretty good outing stats wise. His slider in particular seems to be something less than it has been. AS far as his outliers looking good they very well may and he could still be something other than bad luck. Pitchers with filthy stuff like Greinke can have good ks and such but still miss their spots more than usually do thus give up more runs. That isn't bad luck as much as it is being off more than they have in the past. It may be a sign that his stuff is still great but his location isn't as spot on as it needs to be.

[umphrey]

Greinke has good numbers against the Rays. Maybe we'll finally see a dominant start out of him. It's possible that he does better when he has experience with the hitters a little bit.

[JohnBriggs12]

Adding a little more pressure on Greinke is the torrid stretch that Alcides Escobar is on. In his last 12 games, Escobar is 22 for 43 (.511), with 5 doubles, a triple, a HR, 7 RBI, 11 Runs scored, and 6 stolen bases. He's raised his BA from .203 to .255, his slugging from .237 to .322 and his OBP from .237 to .289.

 

As someone that believed Escobar could be a real good offensive player, it's taken him longer than I expected, but he seems to have turned a corner. Guess not having Macha there to bench him every time he went two games without a hit seems to have paid off for the Royals. Defensively he's been near Gold Glove caliber. He could be just a year or two away from being an All Star. Toss in Odorizzi, who's got 93 K's in 66 innings as a 21 year old in high A and now appears to be one of the top pitching prospects in all of baseball and Cain, who has an .876 OPS in AAA, with 8 HR, this deal (even with Jeffress regressing) could turn out to be historically one sided and not in the Brewer favor.

[brewerfan82]

this deal could turn out to be historically one sided and not in the Brewer favor.

Possibly, from a player for player standpoint, but if the Brewers win the World Series this year or next year, in hindsight, I take that deal 100% of the time, no questions asked.

[cwolf2012]

"but he seems to have turned a corner."

 

45 plate appearances are enough to convince you that he's turned a corner? His overall line from the season is still pretty abysmal.

[And That]

Adding a little more pressure on Greinke is the torrid stretch that Alcides Escobar is on.

It's a good thing he's not pitching against the Royals, then.

[rluzinski]

Adding a little more pressure on Greinke is the torrid stretch that Alcides Escobar is on.

 

I can just picture Greinke looking up Escobar's hitting stats every night on the net, shivering with dread. "His OPS is six-TEN now!? I need to step it up!"

 

I think there is a better chance that Greinke can't spell Escobar's full name than he knows how well Escobar is hitting in June.

[PrinceEatMeat]

Escobar will be hitting .220 again by the end of July. Not that worried about him becoming some star player or anything.

[Warning Track Power]

As someone that believed Escobar could be a real good offensive player, it's taken him longer than I expected, but he seems to have turned a corner. Guess not having Macha there to bench him every time he went two games without a hit seems to have paid off for the Royals. Defensively he's been near Gold Glove caliber. He could be just a year or two away from being an All Star. Toss in Odorizzi, who's got 93 K's in 66 innings as a 21 year old in high A and now appears to be one of the top pitching prospects in all of baseball and Cain, who has an .876 OPS in AAA, with 8 HR, this deal (even with Jeffress regressing) could turn out to be historically one sided and not in the Brewer favor.

The only way I think this trade is a historically one sided deal for the Royals is if:

 

1.THIS is the ZG we see for the rest of his career.

OR

2. ZG pitches to his potential, then leaves after next season and we don't make the playoffs in 2011 or 2012.

 

Even then, this trade is one that always has to be made. With Jeffress and Cain, the Brewers arguably had coverage at those postions for the forseeable future with Axford, Komatsu and Schafer. So I don't regret moving those guys. Escobar, eh...I've never been a big fan. I was in the don't trade JJ crowd and so far, Escobar is YuBet with a better glove. Odorizzi will hurt. He is a legit prospect that is a potential all star. But he is the only one worth fretting over in my opinion. And with Prince, Rickie, Hart and Braun in their prime, the Brewers had to put present Greinke in the rotation and risk that Odorizzi turns into future Greinke.

[Oxy]

"but he seems to have turned a corner."

 

45 plate appearances are enough to convince you that he's turned a corner? His overall line from the season is still pretty abysmal.

He has turned the corner, yes. How long he continues to head in the direction he is facing is yet to be seen. There is plenty of time for his numbers to head south again.

[Ayt]

This discussion made me think of Gwynn hitting .455/.538/.545 over 39 plate appearances in 2007.

[RockCoCougars]

Escobar is pretty much a garbage hitter. Good glove, no hit. I'm glad that Melvin flipped him when he still had value. Let the Royals keep giving him at bats based on his 'potential'.

[TheCrew07]

I've intentionally avoided rehashing 4-5 years worth of debates regarding certain metrics with the usual suspects in this thread but I do have a couple of comments.

 

I like stuff as much as anyone, and who has better raw stuff in MLB than Edwin Jackson? The problem is he's never been able to locate consistently, there are plenty of pitchers who never reach their full potential. We have a LHP on our DL that can hit 95 MPH... you can count those guys on one hand, and he didn't have success. There's much more to baseball than pure statistical analysis.

 

I love to talk about peripherals, in fact on the minor league forum you'll see me posting about raw stuff and peripherals all the time, but at some point the actual results have to count for something.

 

If you look at Greinke's career as a whole, what year is the outlier?

 

Greinke's fantastic K rate this season has relatively little to do with his FB location, he's getting those Ks off his secondary pitches. The poorly located FBs and the occasional hanging slider are the pitches that are getting rocked.

 

You will find an occassional pitcher's pitch that is hit for a HR, or some lucky garbage like golfing one out off of one knee, but those are events that happen a couple of times a season, they are extremely rare. How many hitters do the Brewer's have that can hit a pitcher's pitch consistently? I'll submit there's 1... Braun. Morgan has slapped a couple of hit of hits on them as well, but I haven't seen enough to make a judgement about him yet. Everyone else on the team is a mistake/fastball hitter.

 

If people refuse to believe that pitching is all about location (which includes pitch selection), then there really isn't anything to discuss ever. The game isn't played in metrics, there is no "cause" in any metric, they only measure results. In baseball the power lies with the pitchers and by extension the cause mostly rests in their ability to execute a given pitch.

 

If less than 50% of HRs can be classified, then GB, LD, and FB% are all pretty meaningless aren't they? If we can't classify what happens on the best possible outcome for a hitter, how can we classify the rest? Wait that's right, we don't care about HRs because BABIP doesn't include them in the calculation.

 

We've reached a stagnant place where a poster can't say a player has done X over Y number of games without the same tired stastical analysis regarding sample size, sometimes being horrible or good over a small stretch is the point of the discussion. Something causes those stretches other than luck, I'd love to see many of you coach... don't worry about it son, your BABIP is just low, you'll be fine, the hitch in your switch has nothing to do with it.

[TheCrew07]

Also, the problem with the spray charts from fangraphs is that they don't allow you to filter by context. Even Suppan's spray charts really didn't vary from season to season or start to start.

 

What I would really like to see is the spray chart of balls in play by location, and by result... that's where you would find some meaning.

[PrinceEatMeat]

Well, Greinke's performance tonight should help take the naysayers off the ledge.

[ninja33]

TheCrew07 wrote:

 

If you look at Greinke's career as a whole, what year is the outlier?

2009, obviously. I don't think anyone here was expecting Greinke to pitch that well. I dont think anyone here expects ANYONE to pitch that well (it was the fourth highest WAR of the past decade, and the highest since Randy Johnson in '04). But I will gladly take the 5 WAR pitcher he was on either side of that year, with the added potential to dominate for stretches like he did for all of 2009.

He looked great tonight. I'm not going to try and use one start to say "hey, he's fixed! see, there was no problem!" He gets to bookend the next roadtrip against a ridonkulous Yankee lineup (in a bandbox of a stadium) and a suddenly hot (or at least productive, 5+ runs/game) Twins lineup. Will be fun.

[rluzinski]

If you look at Greinke's career as a whole, what year is the outlier?

 

I see two. His 2009 season and his 2011 season so far. He has a ZiPS rest-of-season ERA projection of 3.25. That sounds about right to me. I've only skimmed your posts in this thread (they tend to be very long) but have you offered up your opinion on what Greinke's 2011 performance so far suggests about what our expectations should be going forward?

 

If people refuse to believe that pitching is all about location (which includes pitch selection), then there really isn't anything to discuss ever.

 

No one will argue that location isn't a huge part of the equation but speed and movement are very important as well, obviously. Are you confusing the opinion that a pitcher's BABIP over a small sample is not generally representative of pitcher skill with the notion that pitch location isn't overly important?

 

The game isn't played in metrics, there is no "cause" in any metric, they only measure results.

 

What a peculiar stance to take. In the most general sense, there are two type of baseball metrics:

 

1. Raw Metrics

 

2. Derived Metrics

 

A raw metric is simply an (hopefully but not always) unbiased record of what happened. It could be compiled by observers watching a game or a series of cameras being fed into a computer. Anything that can be observed by a human being can be considered a raw metric. It is a record of what happened from the moment the game started to the instant it ended.

 

A derived metric takes that raw data and and attempts to manipulate it to answer certain questions. There are literally millions of questions you can ask. Some only care about results, some attempt to infer the cause of good or bad performance, so attempt to estimate future performance. Anything a person asks a derived metric can attempt to answer (with varying degrees of success). The difference between a good and bad derived metric is the quality of the methodology and if it's a predictive metric, whether its been tested. It's easy for someone to go on a message board and share their theories but the proof is in the pudding.

 

In baseball the power lies with the pitchers and by extension the cause mostly rests in their ability to execute a given pitch.

 

If I were the coach of a little league team, that's exactly what I would tell little Johnny but the reality is not so simple. The pitcher, the batter, defense, luck and the umpire all have some power in determining the outcome of a pitch. I think it is obvious that the combination of the batter, defense and luck play a larger role in determining the result of a pitch than the pitcher. For that reason, it becomes very difficult to separate the pitcher's performance from the results. No human or metric can do it perfectly. Anyone who says they are certain of anything should be ignored.

What I would really like to see is the spray chart of balls in play by location, and by result... that's where you would find some meaning.

Google it, there are a number of publicly available studies that you will find. There are some good discussions on insidethebook.com blog on the topic as well. Location is important and I hope you haven't gotten the impression that anyone is suggesting otherwise.

[Thurston Fluff]

Some only care about results, some attempt to infer the cause of good or bad performance, so attempt to estimate future performance.

 

This is where people tend to talk past each other. I think there is some confusion as to which each metric is doing. One thing I tend to see with Greinke's K rate is it gets used as a stat that tells us he was doing fine when in fact it is more of a predictive stat to tell us he will be fine in the future. K rates tend to get used as the definition of doing well. That to me is the wrong way to use it. The only reason it was ever determined to be a good indicator of performance was because players with good K rates had good results. It wasn't the k rates that was inherently good but the indicator of such.