In what is quickly becoming a disappointing season for the Colorado Rockies, I'm somewhat surprised by the insistence in the (rather limited) Rockies blogosphere that the team's problem is an inability to hit on the road. Granted, that much seems obvious, given the .301/.373/.492 line the offense puts up at Coors Field and the .232/.306/.364 line on the road. There's no question, looking at those numbers, that the Rockies can't can't can't hit on the road. A .306 OBP anywhere from your worst hitter is atrociously bad, let alone from your entire roster.
Consider the other teams road slashes in the NL West, for comparison:
Arizona Diamondbacks - .255/.339/.419
San Francisco Giants - .256/.325/.397
Los Angeles Dodgers - .256/.325/.382
San Diego Padres - .244/.304/.377
Amazingly, the Padres, despite playing in Petco Park, are hitting significantly better at home (.258/.339/.380) this year than on the road. The unlikely success of San Diego this season has a great many sources, not the least of which is the magical transformation of Petco into a hitter's paradise for Padres players, whilst remaining one of the stingiest pitcher's parks for opposing hitters.
Anyway, it's clear from this list that the Rockies are quite poor on the road, but it is true that all of those teams have the benefit of playing a substantial number of their away games at Coors Field, so lets look at the NL East, too.
Philadelphia Phillies - .257/.328/.394
Atlanta Braves - .248/.334/.380
Florida Marlins - .256/.314/.410
Washington Nationals - .239/.307/.375
New York Mets - .240/.295/.366
The Phillies have been much better than you would think, given all the doom-and-gloom talk about their offense this season. Other than that, what stands out most here is that the Mets and Nationals, who no one picked to win the World Series this offseason, are the only teams with road splits as woefully bad (or, in the Mets case, worse) than the Rockies.
We might as well do the NL Central, too.
Milwaukee Brewers - .271/.339/.436
Cincinnati Reds - .264/.322/.414
St. Louis Cardinals - .260/.315/.405
Chicago Cubs - .252/.314/.396
Houston Astros - .244/.304/.344
Pittsburgh Pirates - .232/.289/.351
The Brewers offense jumps out at you, but their woeful pitching is the other side of the story, and the reason for their disappointing season so far. The Pirates are truly awful, even though they certainly played the Rockies tough recently.
All told, Colorado clocks in with a tie for last in road batting average (with Pittsburgh), at 12th out of 16 in road OBP, and at 14th out of 16 in road SLG. So the Rockies problem is definitely that they can't hit on the road. I buy it.
But I also think this is a case where the hypothesis - that the Rockies can't hit on the road - is only a part of the whole story. "Can't hit on the road" is a subset of the broader statement, "can't hit." The Rockies, I would argue, can't hit on the road because they can't hit, period. This is one of the very worst offensive teams in baseball. Only a spectacularly good pitching staff and a set of mediocre talents particularly well adapted to playing at Coors Field keep the team slightly above .500.
Coors Field. That's the real issue here. I was one of the first people on the "Coors Field is no longer an absurd bandbox" train back when the humidor was put in place in 2002. I fear, however, that the pendulum has swung too far back in the other direction. Many Rockies fans (and announcers, I'm unhappy to report) seem convinced that Coors plays like any other park. It doesn't. It's still the best hitters park in baseball by a longshot, and that continues to make a mediocre-to-poor offense, like the Rockies have always had, seem good.
Coming into today, the Rockies are fourth in the NL in runs scored at 543. Fourth, even though they are one of the worst road hitting teams in the National League. Now the question is, are the Rockies inordinately unlucky on the road, or is Coors Field just that good of a hitter's park?
Unfortunately, "Park Factors" are calculated, primarily, by comparing home and road splits, so to say that Coors Field has a high park factor is to say that the Rockies hit better at home. Park factor does account for visiting teams as well, but we might simply write off that influence as insignificant, certainly over the course of a single season, compared to the influence of the Rockies roster construction.
Nevertheless, we might begin to suspect that Coors Field really is a good hitter's park if it is consistently the best or one of the best hitter's parks in baseball. Over time, sure, there still might be some luck involved, but the influence of visiting teams in the calculation feels more substantial, and over multiple seasons the sample size gets large enough that something systematic is going on.
So what has the Coors Field park factor looked like since the first year of the humidor? It's higher than you might think.*
* I'm using the standard, ESPN "runs" Park Factor here. Basically, a number of, say, 1.5, means that 1.5 times as many runs are scored at Coors compared to an average ballpark.
2002: 1.440, 1st in MLB
2003: 1.243, 5th in MLB
2004: 1.412, 1st in MLB
2005: 1.276, 2nd in MLB
2006: 1.149, 2nd in MLB
2007: 1.160, 3rd in MLB
2008: 1.126, 3rd in MLB
2009: 1.247, 1st in MLB
2010: 1.275, 1st in MLB
There are a few things to notice here. First of all, Coors Field has always been in the top 5, and usually in the top 2 hitter's parks in baseball in any given season. Even as league-wide scoring has gone down, and scoring at Coors with it, the home of the Rockies continues to rank near the top in MLB. Coors Field, regardless of how much it has calmed down with the addition of the humidor, is still a hitter's paradise.
Also worth note here is that a park factor around 1.2 can seriously muddle simple metrics like "runs scored." The Rockies, as mentioned above, are fourth in the NL with 543 runs this season. If, however, we factor in that the Rockies have played 55 home games, and that those games inflate scoring by 1.275, we can roughly scale the Rockies actual production down to 485 runs or so if they played at a neutral park. Lo and behold, that would put the Rockies 12th in the National League.
A final statistic worth looking at here - and we've done it before on this blog - is WAR. Fangraphs has the Rockies offense (and defense) at 13.8 Wins this season, good for 16th in baseball (they adjust for DHs, so comparing across leagues is fair). The Rockies pitching has been worth 17.4 Wins, good for 2nd in the entirety of MLB. The problem is, hitting and defense together account for more of a team's success than pitching, so that 16th outweighs, unfortunately, the 2nd. That's why you see a 59-55 record.
It's easy to think that the Rockies have the pieces in place to compete offensively, especially because of how lauded the lineup is in the local media. But we forget that players who look good at Coors are merely average elsewhere, that near-MVPs like Matt Holliday turn into marginal All-Stars on other teams, that Neifi Perez looked like a passable Major Leaguer playing in Colorado. That is still true for today's Rockies.
Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez are the Rockies best offensive players, but neither is a world beater. The CarGo for MVP talk is nonsense. Even with his recent surge, he is 21st in WAR in the National League, almost 2 full wins worse than the NL's best position player this season, Joey Votto. In fact, "Little Pony" has been only the third best outfielder in the NL West, according to WAR, so far this season (behind the incredibly underrated Andres Torres and Chris Young). Gonzalez is a good player, but Coors makes him look better than he is.
The same can be said of Tulo, who is incredibly valuable by default as a slick fielding shortshop. That he hits a little is just a bonus, but just because he rakes on the Rockies doesn't mean he hits more than a little. He's no Chase Utley. One can only imagine what a player like that could do at Coors for 81 games a season.
It is true that, with the exception of Tod Helton, who has had an atrocious season, no one hitter on the Rockies right now is particularly bad. But no one is particularly good either. When your best offensive player doesn't know how to draw a walk and is 21st in WAR in the league, you're not likely to score a lot of runs unless you play at an extreme hitter's park. The same could be said for when four of your regulars are producing at approximately replacement level (Helton, Spilborghs, Hawpe, and Mora). Without offense, even a team with great pitching like the Rockies is doomed to mediocrity.
The point of this post, though, is not to write a post-mortem of the Rockies season. We all know that anything is possible, and while it's unlikely that Colorado will catch all of the teams in front of them, stranger things have happened. No, the point here is to remind fans of the Rockies - and really any team - that the raw numbers you see don't tell the whole story. The Rockies score a lot of runs, but not because they have a good offense. Rather, Coors Field is the culprit.
Showing posts with label hitting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hitting. Show all posts
Friday, August 13, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Best Team in the National League?
Fangraphs is in the second year of their annual "organizational rankings," which combine current talent, future talent, and general front-office well-being to come up with a highly subjective list of the haves and have-nots in the current baseball landscape. Not surprisingly, the top six teams on this list are all American League teams (as of this writing, not yet unveiled). The American League has been quite a bit better than the National League for most of the last decade now, which is reflected not just in World Series victories (somewhat subject to chance), but the much more reliable interleague play records of both leagues. The last five years look like this (h/t to Wikipedia):
There's some variability, of course, but the trend is clear, and even with Roy Halladay moving from the Blue Jays to the Phillies this offseason, there's little reason to believe 2010 will tell a different story come interleague time.
What may surprise you, however, is which organization topped the Fangraphs list for the National League. That's right, the Colorado Rockies weigh in at #7 in baseball and #1 in the NL. That does not mean that the Rockies are Fangraphs pick to make the World Series, mind you, but it does mean that the organization as a whole is healthy, complete with both a solid and contending Major League roster as well as a generous collection of prospects waiting in the wings. Even a cursory fan of the team would realize that 2010 should be an exciting year in Rockietown, but a slightly longer look nets the conclusion that 2011, 2012, and on for the foreseeable future might also be exciting years.
The biggest problem the Rockies face, as an organization, is not player development, drafting, or intelligent management. While certainly they are an imperfect franchise (the insistence, for example, that Yorvit Torrealba start last season down the stretch, or the insistence that Brad Hawpe is a useful player despite being the worst fielder, hands-down, in Major League Baseball), the Rockies for the most part have things figured out. Indeed, in the mid-2000s, while they wallowed in last place, they already had things figured out, we fans just had to wait to see the payoff in the form of Ubaldo Jimenez, Troy Tulowitzki, and Matt Holliday. What has made the Rockies truly impressive, however, is that they have devised a scheme for continued success despite the loss of Holliday, and despite the collapse and subsequent exit of Garret Atkins. Indeed, there is a legitimate argument to be made for the improvement of the team after losing some of its "best" players.
Baseball fans will recall the Mariners team that lost, in the matter of a couple seasons, Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, and Ken Griffey Jr. That same Mariners team won 117 games the first season without those Hall-of-Famers. Why? Because while individual performance is important in baseball, economical team performance is more important. The Rockies do not have a real MVP or Cy Young candidate on their roster (Tulo and Jimenez are the best players, respectively, but they don't touch Pujols or Halladay). What they have, instead, is a solid producer at almost every position and at every spot in their rotation. The Rockies do not have the best ace in baseball, but they do have a couple of the best four and five starters.
Because we have become so accustomed to basketball and football, we tend to forget that baseball is a sport in which every single player is asked to contribute in one of two primary ways: hitting or pitching (all players are also asked to field, of course). There are not really "role players" in baseball in the way there are in basketball or - even more intensely - football. Positions in baseball matter only on defense; every hitter is asked to do the same thing (not get out). In the end, Albert Pujols is great, but he's only 1/9th of a lineup. Better to have 9 good players than one great one and 8 mediocre ones, it turns out.
Contrast that with basketball. Five amazing scorers would not a successful team make. A basketball team needs players who can rebound, players who can pass, players who can score inside, players who can defend, and players who can shoot. What's remarkable, however, is that there is no need for every player to do every one of those things. Indeed, it is not possible to build a team on which every player is good at all of those things. Specialization is a rule because it's the only way to win.
How much more so in football, where positions are even more discreet than in basketball. A great quarterback can make up for shoddy running backs. A solid offensive line can turn a mediocre halfback into an All-Star. A good coach can tactically out maneuver a superior opponent by using his specialists better.
There is some of this in baseball, but very toned down. When all is said and done, every significant event in baseball begins with a pitcher holding the ball, and a hitter standing in the batters' box. It does not matter if the hitter is the leadoff guy, the cleanup guy, or the opposing pitcher, the potential and desired outcomes are the same. For the offense: don't make an out. For the defense: make an out. That's oversimplifying, of course, but its largely true. In other sports, you might say, the object is to score (or prevent the other team from scoring), but there are so many more ways of making or preventing scores in basketball and football. Those sports are not the equivalent one-on-one of pitcher versus hitter.
All of that makes baseball easier to measure, statistically, and also harder, in an odd way, to manage. Putting together a good baseball team is not about finding specialists, but rather it is about finding players who give you the most production given their skills and the position they play. It's a game about value, when it comes down to it, and value is primarily manifest in the competition between hitter and pitcher.
So the Rockies, the best organization - if not the best team - in the National League, do something a little differently. It's not that they are amazing at pitching, hitting, or fielding. It's not that they have clear-cut All Stars, MVPs, or future Hall of Famers. It's that, position-by-position, they have useful players everywhere. They have good hitters, good fielders, and good pitchers in almost every slot in their lineup and rotation, and that makes all the difference. What few problems they have (Hawpe in right-field; Barmes at the plate) are minimal when you consider that most teams have players who are poor at both hitting and fielding. The Rockies are a good organization because they understand that, in baseball, 9 - or 25 - good players is what wins games, not a handful of great ones and a bunch of scrubs.
| 2004 | American | 126 | 125 |
| 2005 | American | 136 | 116 |
| 2006 | American | 154 | 98 |
| 2007 | American | 137 | 115 |
| 2008 | American | 149 | 103 |
| 2009 | American | 138 | 114 |
There's some variability, of course, but the trend is clear, and even with Roy Halladay moving from the Blue Jays to the Phillies this offseason, there's little reason to believe 2010 will tell a different story come interleague time.
What may surprise you, however, is which organization topped the Fangraphs list for the National League. That's right, the Colorado Rockies weigh in at #7 in baseball and #1 in the NL. That does not mean that the Rockies are Fangraphs pick to make the World Series, mind you, but it does mean that the organization as a whole is healthy, complete with both a solid and contending Major League roster as well as a generous collection of prospects waiting in the wings. Even a cursory fan of the team would realize that 2010 should be an exciting year in Rockietown, but a slightly longer look nets the conclusion that 2011, 2012, and on for the foreseeable future might also be exciting years.
The biggest problem the Rockies face, as an organization, is not player development, drafting, or intelligent management. While certainly they are an imperfect franchise (the insistence, for example, that Yorvit Torrealba start last season down the stretch, or the insistence that Brad Hawpe is a useful player despite being the worst fielder, hands-down, in Major League Baseball), the Rockies for the most part have things figured out. Indeed, in the mid-2000s, while they wallowed in last place, they already had things figured out, we fans just had to wait to see the payoff in the form of Ubaldo Jimenez, Troy Tulowitzki, and Matt Holliday. What has made the Rockies truly impressive, however, is that they have devised a scheme for continued success despite the loss of Holliday, and despite the collapse and subsequent exit of Garret Atkins. Indeed, there is a legitimate argument to be made for the improvement of the team after losing some of its "best" players.
Baseball fans will recall the Mariners team that lost, in the matter of a couple seasons, Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, and Ken Griffey Jr. That same Mariners team won 117 games the first season without those Hall-of-Famers. Why? Because while individual performance is important in baseball, economical team performance is more important. The Rockies do not have a real MVP or Cy Young candidate on their roster (Tulo and Jimenez are the best players, respectively, but they don't touch Pujols or Halladay). What they have, instead, is a solid producer at almost every position and at every spot in their rotation. The Rockies do not have the best ace in baseball, but they do have a couple of the best four and five starters.
Because we have become so accustomed to basketball and football, we tend to forget that baseball is a sport in which every single player is asked to contribute in one of two primary ways: hitting or pitching (all players are also asked to field, of course). There are not really "role players" in baseball in the way there are in basketball or - even more intensely - football. Positions in baseball matter only on defense; every hitter is asked to do the same thing (not get out). In the end, Albert Pujols is great, but he's only 1/9th of a lineup. Better to have 9 good players than one great one and 8 mediocre ones, it turns out.
Contrast that with basketball. Five amazing scorers would not a successful team make. A basketball team needs players who can rebound, players who can pass, players who can score inside, players who can defend, and players who can shoot. What's remarkable, however, is that there is no need for every player to do every one of those things. Indeed, it is not possible to build a team on which every player is good at all of those things. Specialization is a rule because it's the only way to win.
How much more so in football, where positions are even more discreet than in basketball. A great quarterback can make up for shoddy running backs. A solid offensive line can turn a mediocre halfback into an All-Star. A good coach can tactically out maneuver a superior opponent by using his specialists better.
There is some of this in baseball, but very toned down. When all is said and done, every significant event in baseball begins with a pitcher holding the ball, and a hitter standing in the batters' box. It does not matter if the hitter is the leadoff guy, the cleanup guy, or the opposing pitcher, the potential and desired outcomes are the same. For the offense: don't make an out. For the defense: make an out. That's oversimplifying, of course, but its largely true. In other sports, you might say, the object is to score (or prevent the other team from scoring), but there are so many more ways of making or preventing scores in basketball and football. Those sports are not the equivalent one-on-one of pitcher versus hitter.
All of that makes baseball easier to measure, statistically, and also harder, in an odd way, to manage. Putting together a good baseball team is not about finding specialists, but rather it is about finding players who give you the most production given their skills and the position they play. It's a game about value, when it comes down to it, and value is primarily manifest in the competition between hitter and pitcher.
So the Rockies, the best organization - if not the best team - in the National League, do something a little differently. It's not that they are amazing at pitching, hitting, or fielding. It's not that they have clear-cut All Stars, MVPs, or future Hall of Famers. It's that, position-by-position, they have useful players everywhere. They have good hitters, good fielders, and good pitchers in almost every slot in their lineup and rotation, and that makes all the difference. What few problems they have (Hawpe in right-field; Barmes at the plate) are minimal when you consider that most teams have players who are poor at both hitting and fielding. The Rockies are a good organization because they understand that, in baseball, 9 - or 25 - good players is what wins games, not a handful of great ones and a bunch of scrubs.
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