Alright Hamilton!

O - Outside of strike zone --- swing percentage and whiff percentage

The batter earns this letter by swinging at pitches outside the strike zone at an elevated rate. League average was 30% last year, so we’ll set our threshold at 40%. There are bad-ball hitters who can succeed with a high outside zone percentage, like Adam Jones and Salvador Perez, so that’s why we’ll also stipulate that the hitter must miss a majority of those balls. League average last year was 36% whiffs on balls out of the zone; we’re setting our threshold at 50%.

S - Strikeout percentage is high

The batter earns this letter by striking out a whole bunch. League average last year was 21% but guys like Sano K’d up to 37% of the time. We will generously set our threshold at 40%. 

T - Timing - whiffing at pitches in the strike zone

The batter earns this letter by swinging and missing at balls in the zone at an elevated rate. The league whiffed at about 14% of balls in the zone last year, so we’ll set our threshold at 25%. 

This shows that even when a pitch is a strike, the batter has trouble making contact. 

The Results

After combing through the numbers, Brandon Moss and Jace Peterson almost made it but fell short in outside zone percentage. And Chris Merrero got LOS but not the T. 

The one and only qualifier of the inaugural LOST is...

Byron Buxton!

L - Line drives less that 19%

Buxton checks in at 0.00%

O - Outside of zone swinging percentage over 40% and missing them over 50%

Buxton swings at pitches out of the zone 45.6% of the time and when he does so, he misses them at a 65.4% clip. 

S - Strikeout percentage is over 40%

Byron has struck out 51.9% of his plate appearances*

T - Timing - whiffing at more than 25% of strikes at which were swung. 

Buxton has missed on 28.2 percent of his swings at a strike.

*These stats do not incorporate Buxton’s latest game in which he had three plate appearances and three strikeouts. 

2. “If I’m able to keep my hard contact rate low, ground balls are almost automatic outs for me."

Gibson is correct that ground balls turn into outs at a good clip (76% or so). That fact shouldn’t be used as an argument against strikeouts, though, since strikeouts result in an out at a much better clip - about 99.9%..

And so even though he has an above average career ground ball rate (52%), some of those balls sneak through. Even more sneak through with the Twins’ defense behind the pitcher. Gibson seems to understand this.

3.  “When hitters put balls in play, they’re going to get a hit sooner or later. But if I get five ground balls in a row, I’m more than likely going to get out of the inning. Offensive numbers will tell you that. If they only get a hit three out of every ten times they put the ball in play, that’s less than two out of five, so I like my chances.”

I guess Gibson is cool with not converting batted balls into outs at an above average rate. He knows balls will drop for hits 30% of the time. And it’s comforting to him! He uses this as evidence that he has the advantage and doesn’t need to strike anyone out. Just look at Kyle’s imaginary inning - he got three outs but gave up two hits and he likes it.

Imagine a carnival game where kids shoot a basketball and win a stuffed animal if they make a basket. It’s the carnie’s job to prevent this from happening, and because this is the worst carnival game ever, he’s allowed to very easily block the shot if he so chooses. Like Mutombo against Danny DeVito or something. If it were Kyle Gibson, he’d he sit back and say, “they only make it about 30% of the time, so I like my chances. No need to block the shot.”

Front offices have reached the opposite conclusion as Gibson: why even give them a shot? Give them fewer opportunities to get lucky. In other words, try to allow fewer balls in play.

And they’ve succeeded dramatically. Balls in play are way down and strikeouts are way up and it’s become a big point in the “games are too long” debate. But from a strategic standpoint, it’s rock solid.

Putting the strategy into place involves measuring what a pitcher does apart from balls in play - homers, walks and strikeouts. But since Gibson doesn’t understand the strategy (remember, he thinks the odds are in his favor even when running a .400 BABIP), he doesn’t understand a primary measurement for putting the strategy into practice:

On succeeding with a low K-Rate: “Maybe someday someone can explain FIP and xFIP to me, and I’ll get it."

Kyle understands pitchers don’t have much control over what happens after the ball leaves the bat. And that’s the fact that was the genesis of the stat Fielding Independent Pitching, so Kyle has a great foundation for understanding it. But because he uses the same fact to arrive at a different conclusion, he can’t wrap his mind around FIP.

4. "I’d benefit from increasing my strikeout rate, but the same time, you have to know what your strengths are. Going after strikeouts for 27 out of 27 guys isn’t my strength right now. Sure, there are times where I’d like to get more strikeouts, but 27 outs are 27 outs. Whether it’s 27 strikeouts or 27 ground balls doesn’t matter to me.”

After cutting through the hyperbole, it seems that Gibson simultaneously believes the following things:

a. I can’t get more outs via strikeout (Going after strikeouts for 27 out of 27 guys isn’t my strength right now)

b. I would benefit by getting more outs via strikeout (I’d benefit from increasing my strikeout rate)

c. It doesn’t matter to me if I get more outs via strikeout (27 outs are 27 outs. Whether it’s 27 strikeouts or 27 ground balls doesn’t matter to me)

______

a. I can’t get more outs via strikeout

Let’s tackle the first one first: Is it within the realm of possibility for Kyle Gibson to increase his strikeout rate?

People who know baseball certainly seem to think so. Last year at this time, even strikeout under-rater Terry Ryan saw the K skills:

"There's a lot of talk about his strikeouts. If you evaluate that guy pitch by pitch, he's got three plus pitches in his approach, but you wouldn't know it with his strikeout ratio," Ryan said. "He's just gotta attack the strike zone more and not nitpick. He shouldn't be a finesse guy. He's got stuff with a power slider, a fastball that can sit around 92-93 [miles per hour] and a good touch and feel for a change. So there's a good chance Kyle Gibson is a guy who can take a step or two forward."

And there have been articles written by really smart people examining his strikeout upside and saying, “he’s proven himself as a quality arm. Take a quality arm and add some extra strikeouts, and you’ve got a dominant arm. And it seems like he should be getting those extra strikeouts.”

It’s not all just potential. He has the results, too.

This excel sheet sorts every career start into one of three categories: high k%, medium k% and low k%.

Take a look at the top third by K% of his career starts - every start in which he K’d more than 17.8% of the batters he faced. In those 32 starts, he struck out an average of 24.96% batters. League average since Gibson broke in is about 20.4%.

In other words, he’s had a lot of games in which he had a high k percentage. So yes, he can do it.

I suppose the quote, “going after strikeouts for 27 out of 27 guys isn’t my strength right now.” might not mean, “I literally can’t strike out more guys”, but could be read as “If I tried something that isn’t a strength, even if I succeeded in raising my K rate, it would not benefit me overall because any gains would be negated by going away from my signature strength - inducing grounders.” If that’s what he meant, he’d obviously be contradicting himself when he said that raising his K rate would be beneficial. But furthermore, he’d be presenting an either/or type situation. As in, there’s a choice between being a groundball pitcher or a strikeout pitcher, because it’s impossible to increase one rate without decreasing the other.

Being a ground ball pitcher is part of Kyle Gibson’s identity. No one wants to lose part of their identity. Especially if they also think it will hurt their performance.

The line of thinking is this - adjusting approach to go after more swings-and-misses (whiffs) and not pitching to contact means he’d be throwing his sinker less often, meaning the success in missing bats would be offset by giving up fewer grounders when they do make contact.

Luckily, we have fangraphs correlation calculator tool so we can see if ground ball rate goes down when swinging strike rate goes up.

Not so much. 

For Gibson himself, it’s a little different. Looking at the top third of starts by swinging strike rate, we see that his groundball rate doesn’t change much when he gets more whiffs, but his BABIP does.

Swinging Strike Rate - Upper Third of starts - 53.08 GB% and .312 BABIP 

Swinging Strike Rate - Lower Third of starts - 51.80 GB% and .294 BABIP

On the other hand, these thirds are only composed of about 35 starts, a little more than a season’s worth of games.

Inducing grounders and suppressing BABIP isn’t the only thing to worry about. Pitchers also need to avoid giving up extra base hits. Maybe Gibson is freaked out about giving up harder hit baseballs if he tries to miss bats as opposed to throwing his sinker and going for contact, which means that even if the guy gets a hit on it, at least it won't be for extra bases.

First, is this true generally? We’ve seen bright guys like Zack Greinke trade in swinging strikes for pitching to contact, so there must be something to it. Let’s go back to the correlation calculator and check if Isolated Slugging Percentage goes up when swinging strike rate goes up.

The opposite! This shows that improving whiff rate actually makes ISO go down, even though it’s an extremely weak correlation and we shouldn’t actually say that. 

I don’t have Gibson’s ISO-against, but we can look at hard%. The top and bottom third of swinging strike rate games produced almost the same exact Hard% and GB%. So, it doesn't seem like he has to choose between getting swings and misses or getting grounders OR avoiding hard contact. 

Swinging Strike Rate - Upper Third of starts - 29.13 Hard% and 16.50 HR/FB%

Swinging Strike Rate - Lower Third of starts - 26.66 Hard% and 11.50 HR/FB%

According to our spreadsheet, Gibson’s home run per flyball does rise slightly in games where he gets more whiffs, though. Gibson’s fears that we just invented are maybe valid. Maybe he’s right to be scared that his GB% will go down and his hard% will go up resulting in both a higher BABIP and ISO against.

That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t increase his strikeout rate though. It’s pretty clear that any losses in those departments will be more than made up for by the increase in strikeouts. And he knows this. 

b. I would benefit by getting more outs via strikeout

Damn right. And the proof is right there in the results. His ERA is significantly lower in games that he strikes out a higher rate of batters, which is probably mostly because he lets fewer people on base. And when they do get on, they’re stranded more often.

c. It doesn’t matter to me if I get more outs via strikeout

If this interpretation is correct and Gibson believes both B and C, then he’s admitting that he doesn’t care about getting better.

However, the actual quote is “..27 outs are 27 outs. Whether it’s 27 strikeouts or 27 ground balls doesn’t matter to me.” Maybe he’s referencing Tom Tango’s work that shows the value of a strikeout is only marginally better than a groundout. If so, he’s correct that the way he gets the outs doesn’t matter, as long as he gets them.

However, getting outs isn’t the only goal of a baseball pitcher. It’s getting outs while not giving up runs.

It’s hard to overstate how proud Twins fans were back then. The overcoming of obstacles and their style of play and the gushing of the national media made their success feel not just exciting and unique, but righteous. They were the model organization. The Twins Way was the light shining in the dark era of the Yankees and steroids and huge payroll disparities. 

As the Twins were bounced from the playoffs year after year, the feel good-story began to get tired, and all those cute but vague aspects of the team, like "doing the little things," started to feel like they would not be enough to reach the top of the mountain. They felt more like things broadcasters would say to explain overachieving teams.

By 2010 the team’s circumstances had really changed. The youthful energy of the band of ‘02 was gone. There was less talk of grit and guts. There was a fancy new stadium with expensive seats and a larger payroll. There was an unlikable GM and a general off-putting smugness. And finally another early October exit provided by the Yankees.  

The remarkable inversion from righteous David to bloated underachiever was complete with a 99-loss season in 2011. Terry Ryan had to return to the GM chair to bring back the righteous old days of The Twins Way, but instead, he closed the book by admitting, “There is no Twins Way,” 

(Note -- The address of the Twins’ front office at Target Field is literally 1 Twins Way.)

And now the Kansas City Royals have won the World Series seemingly using the old Twins book. It’s like someone you grew up with who became, I don’t know, David Lee Roth’s wardrobe consultant, assuming that was your dream. It’s painful. Why did the Twins style work for KC but not for Minnesota? Because baseball is cruel, yes, but people have done more digging. Fans want to figure out exactly how the Royals did it and how it can be copied it so that the Twins can actually maybe win the whole thing.

The incredible thing is that pretty much everyone else is on the same mission. The Royals are influencing fans and media across baseball to eagerly explore their success, usually titled, “what the _____ can learn from the Royals.” Look at this:

Twins

Diamondbacks

Pirates

Indians

Red Sox

Mets (2014)

Yankees (2014)

Phillies

Rockies

America (2014) *

Cardinals (could you imagine this two years ago?)

Nationals

Mariners

Tigers

Kansas City’s local government

Baseball generally

Baseball generally again, from the same website even

*This article, about a formerly great nation and how it can become great again, features perhaps the greatest line ever written: “We don’t have another Ronald Reagan, but we do have the Kansas City Royals.”

Okay, obviously everyone wants to dissect success and learn from it, whether it’s baseball or business-ing or doing math with hot dogs. But the Royals seem to have struck a chord. 

And the chord is hope. 

Why do the Royals offer hope for baseball fans (and Reagan-ites)? It was informed by specific assumptions and a rational thought process. Let’s go through it. 

People have a hard time believing the Royals are actually a good baseball team Why do people feel this way even though they won the whole shebang?

a) Maybe it’s subconscious. The team was associated with badness for almost 30 years. People still can’t wrap their head around the fact that the Kansas City goddamn Royals are a genuinely good team. They were the laughing stock of baseball for an entire generation. It was a universal truth for so long that it became embedded, and it’s not easy to deprogram our brains from associating the word “Royals” with “Awful.”  

b) They've achieved success in seemingly unorthodox ways. For fans who watched baseball circa 1995 to 2005, there seemed to be two things required to win: great starting pitching and home runs. The Royals finished second to last in the league in homers, and third to last in strikeouts by starting pitchers. It’s tough to imagine that combination working in like 2002, when there were larger gaps between payroll and talent and chemical enhancements. Even the normally reliable projection system PECOTA (formulated in 2002 with 2002 assumptions of how to win) said the Royals would be bad. 

c) The team has no probable Hall of Famers and began the season with no superstars. They should be bad.

d) Again, they’re the Royals. It’s really the only way to explain 85 of 88 baseball experts predicting before the season that the Royals should be bad.

And but so to resolve these competing concepts (Royals are bad, Royals just won World Series) the solution is to conclude either: THEORY 1 - The Royals are bad and LUCKY    THEORY 2 - The Royals are actually good, but since they’re winning in a different way, and THERE MUST BE AN EXPLANATION

Even after accounting for confirmation bias, theory 1 believers didn’t have to look very hard to see the Royals benefit from some seemingly good (postseason) luck. Coming back from late inning deficits regularly and the opponent making stupid errors seems like things that great teams don’t rely on. Maybe no one said it out loud, but the general atmosphere of the Royals being lucky was hard to ignore. Many blogs and articles and tweets blew back, sometimes citing the italicized maxims mentioned above, but more often including quotes about luck being the residue of design, and the ingenious scouting of Bautisa’s and Duda’s respective throwing tendencies. 

*A note on the word ‘luck.’ When used in a baseball context, I think it means different things to different people in different situations. I suspect that’s part of the reason people are always arguing about it w/r/t/ the Royals. We usually don’t think of a seeing-eye-single as lucky, even though 75% of ground balls are turned into outs. Maybe the threshold for the using the word is more like 99%, I don’t know. And sometimes the same bloop is lucky in April but purposeful and clutch in October. Anyway, sometimes it’s fun to imagine how the perceptions would shift if we used terms like “happen-stance” or “fortunate” or “good break” or “unlikely” or “fluke” or “unsustainable success.”

This luck theory also jibes with the modern baseball idea that the entire postseason completely revolves around luck/fortune/unsustainable performances/breaks. Anything can happen over a handful of games. Light-hitting Daniel Murphy can blast homer after homer, carrying a team, then go totally cold. This is why A’s GM Billy Beane calls the playoffs a “gauntlet of randomness,” and, more famously, a crapshoot. But what’s Plinko for Beane, seems like a cakewalk for the Royals.* 

*(and a brick wall for the Twins) Even though the Royals have done well in the postseason for two straight years, it’s the regular season that really hurts the ‘Royals are bad and lucky’ theory. Maybe they were lucky in the playoffs - that argument is wide open. But they were very good over a long period of time, consistently, from April to October. A mediocre team can fake it for a month, because anything can happen in a short amount of time. But It’s really hard to fake it over the course of a full season, ala the 2012 Orioles.  Here’s where theory two comes in. The only conclusion after seeing the sustained regular season success is that the Royals are good. And it’s unexpected because, as noted, they seem bad. And the way they win is unorthodox because, as noted, they’re objectively not good in ways we used to associate with winning. When success is unexpected and unorthodox, people feel feelings. Like when that one guy went from bum to golden voiced radio man. 

People go through this process, they feel, and then each person follows their own path. The Royals are now whatever the observer wants them to be, affirming any philosophies or beliefs or feelings. 

The optimists see a blueprint that’s easy to copy. Pessimists see a team at the top of their cycle, ready to swing back down. American dreamers see a team that pulled itself up by its’ bootstraps. Analytically minded folks see a Moneyball team, others see an Anti-Moneyball team. Patient people see the process, the impatient see deadline trades. 

3-2 beer, so called for its 3.2% ABW, is a holdover from the prohibition days. It helped it ease the country into and out of prohibition. Lower alcohol beverages were used as a compromise by brewers and politicians hoping to avoid an all out ban. A dozen years later, as FDR repealed the Volstead Act, he allowed only 3-2 for months until the 22nd amendment was enacted.

Minnesota and a handful of other states have inexplicably held the torch for lower alcohol beer. Our beloved Blue Laws mean we can’t buy a car or alcohol on Sundays because we’re supposed to be observing the Day of Rest. It didn’t take long for Minnesotans to say, “what’s the point of a whole day of rest (and relaxation) without beer?” Again, 3-2 was the compromise. “Maybe God wouldn’t be as pissed if we had beer that wasn’t as strong for one day a week?" 

Beer drinkers, though, aren’t supposed to compromise. Imagine all those beer commercials. We want more. And they’re giving us less. The only way we will take less is if it allows us to drink more. Which is the premise of light beer. 

Michelob Golden Draft Light is 4.1% ABV. Many Minnesotans drive for long distances and cross state lines on Sundays to purchase it. There are intense debates at the capitol about our ability to legally purchase it.  Here’s the thing, though. Michelob Golden Draft Light has only 0.1% ABV more than gas station Michelob Golden Draft Light. Note that 3-2 refers to alcohol by weight while 4.1% is the more common alcohol by volume. This blew my mind. 

The comparison, when using the same scale:

Michelob Golden Draft Light from the liquor store: 4.1% ABV

Michelob Golden Draft Light from the gas station: 4.0% ABV

The prick episode encapsulates Berardino's style in a lot of ways. He ruffles feathers in pursuit of even the most inconsequential baseball nuggets. 

 ... 

 That was the virtually unrelated prologue to what I really wanted to do here: compare LaVelle E. Neal's and Mike Berardino's blog posts about the Neal Cotts acquisition.

Here's LaVelle's description of the veteran relief pitcher: 

"Cotts, 35, is 1-0 with a 3.28 ERA in 50 games. In 49⅓ innings, he has given up 18 earned runs on 44 hits and 17 walks with 48 strikeouts. Lefthanded hitters are batting .185 against him while righthanded hitters are batting .284. He has given up 18 home runs, including two over his past three appearances." 

After reading the very relevant fact that Cotts has a record of one win and no losses, I dashed off the following email to LaVelle.

"Hi LaVelle, 

 Quick question. Is there some kind of baseball writers' stylebook or agreed upon convention when relaying information about a pitcher? I ask because in your most recent blog you wrote: 

 "Cotts, 35, is 1-0 with a 3.28 ERA in 50 games with the Brewers."

It seems like it's always pitcher name, then sometimes age, then win-loss record, then ERA. Is there a rule somewhere that says it has to be organized like that? It just seems like an odd way to order the stats. It's certainly not in order of relevance. 

I mean, if I had to rank the numbers on a reliever in order of importance, it'd go something like this: 

1. Innings pitched (to establish context/sample size for the other numbers), 2. K/9 3. Lefty/righty splits 4. ERA 5. Age 6. Walks 7. HR rate 8. Appearances [...] 649. His win-loss record Age is probably fine to be listed right after the name, since it's more of a biographical thing than a stat. But I think it's weird that the most irrelevant stat is often the first noted. I'd honestly probably rather know his family medical history than his w-L record." 

After hitting send, I realized I hadn't even investigated the theory of the baseball stylebook for myself. Dumb. So, I clicked over to the good 'ol Pioneer Press and read the following description of the same reliever, written this time by the aforementioned Mike Berardino. 

"The Twins will give up a player to be named for the 35-year-old Cotts, who is holding lefty batters to a .185 average and posting a 27-percent strikeout rate against them." 

This is night and day from LaVelle's piece. Night and goddamn day. In fact, at no point in Berardino's story does he mention Cotts' win-loss record. I encourage you to read the whole thing. It even goes on to mention OPS splits. That's great.