The Bill James Handbook 2017

Acknowledgments

Introduction

David Ortiz may be the iconic figure of 2000s baseball. He was a traditional middle-of-the-order hitter. He was not a fast runner. He was not a fielder at all. But he was patient, and he could hit for power. When he came to the plate, there was no mystery. He was going to work the count, and when he saw his pitch, he was going to swing hard. Opposing pitchers had to hope that he would swing and miss or that his invariably hard-hit balls would be hit at one of their fielders who could make a play on it.

Ortiz is interesting for many different reasons, but the thing I find so fascinating about his career is that it reached into this new era of baseball. Ortiz had one of the best seasons in MLB history as a 40-year-old, but the nostalgic image of him at bat did not perfectly match our memories of him from his prime because defensive shifts poached would-be hits from Ortiz every few games and because teams became much more aggressive in deploying left-handed relievers against him to try to gain an extra edge.

In part because of the Handbook and other new data-driven analytical work in recent seasons, teams have gotten more sophisticated. That sophistication has led to more nuanced strategies, like defensive shifts, that have chipped away at the strengths of opposing players. Ortiz had the talent to overcome those new challenges, but many one-dimensional players do not. As the number of stars in Ortiz’s image has declined, a new generation of diversely talented stars has made the game more exciting than it’s ever been.

If the cover is meant to represent Ortiz passing the torch to that next generation, then it’s perfect that Jose Altuve is the player he is passing it to. Physically, Altuve will never measure up to Ortiz, but his play justifies his inclusion at Ortiz’s side. Despite his height of 5’7, Altuve hit 24 home runs in 2016, the same number as 6’2 Bryce Harper and 6’4" Paul Goldschmidt. And don’t think that Altuve padded his total with a bunch of cheap shots. As is fully explained in the new Long Outs and Home Run Distances section, 15 of Altuve’s home runs flew at least 380 feet. Even more impressive, Altuve had another 19 flyball outs that traveled at least 380 feet in the air. That was four more than any other player. If anything, Altuve should have had even more home runs.

But really, Altuve’s power numbers are beside the point. What makes Altuve such a great representation of the new generation of star players is his diverse skill set. Altuve stole 30 bases this season and averaged 3.54 seconds running from first to second on his stolen base attempts, tied for eighth fastest in baseball (from the Stolen Base Times section). Altuve was a major part of the Astros’ league-leading 1,869 defensive shifts (from the Shifts section). Altuve hit safely 216 times and leads baseball with a three percent projected chance to set the all-time hit record of 4,257 hits (from The Favorite Toy section).

The Cubs were the best team in baseball this season and quite possibly the best team in more than a decade, and, like Altuve, their diversity led to their success. As you can find in the Team Statistics section, the Cubs were just 13th in baseball with 199 home runs, but they still had an elite offense because they led baseball with 656 walks, they manufactured runs with an MLB-best 96 hit-by-pitches, and, despite a modest 66 stolen bases, they were excellent on the basepaths. To that point, Kris Bryant and Ben Zobrist combined to steal just 14 bases, but they were both top 10 in baserunning gain, which captures extra bases taken and outs avoided on the basepaths (from the Baserunning section). Cubs starters led baseball with a 2.96 ERA and did so even though none of their starters struck out a batter per inning. Instead, they avoided walks and let their defense—that saved 107 runs, the most in baseball this season and the most by any team in the Defensive Runs Saved era (since 2003)—make plays behind them.

You’ll find interesting statistics related to every star player you can think of. For example, Madison Bumgarner had the highest Game Score in a start in his complete-game one-hitter against the Diamondbacks on July 10. He won that start, but Bumgarner also had six tough losses, or losses with a Game Score over 50 (from the Leader Boards section). Altuve, Mike Trout, and Joey Votto finished in the top three in Win Shares even though none of their teams made the playoffs (from the Win Shares section).

But I think the real reason I love the Handbook is that you can also find interesting statistics on players you might not have realized were so interesting otherwise. Take Tyler Flowers, who started 2016 as the backup catcher on an Atlanta Braves team that was clearly in a rebuild—they finished in last place in the NL East with 93 losses. Despite his typical modest offensive performance, Flowers was a major contributor to the team thanks to his 14 Strike Zone Runs Saved, or runs saved due to his pitch-framing, which was tied for the most in baseball. That one elite skill made him an above-average defensive catcher overall even though he allowed 60 stolen bases and caught just 2 runners stealing all season (from the Fielding section).

All of that information and much more is at your fingertips in this Handbook. In the pages that follow, you’ll find a variety of sections and statistics that aim to capture the amazing diversity of today’s game and its players. We hope that you enjoy all of our hard work.

Scott Spratt

October 14, 2016

Starting Pitcher Rankings

Joe Rosales

It is interesting to think about the trajectory of a player’s career. There is the natural rise and fall that comes with age that would exist for any projectile in motion, like a ball struck by a baseball bat. However, certain external factors—injuries, for instance—can cause some localized peaks and valleys resulting in a less smooth path. And then, of course, the player himself can sometimes affect his own path to some degree through a combination of desire, hard work, good choices, and intelligence—qualities that a baseball does not have. We can try to create projection systems to predict a player’s trajectory—something that we even do later on in this book—but projections are often wrong. Not that that makes projection systems bad. Newton’s laws of physics would also fail to accurately predict the ultimate landing spot of a batted ball if a bird happened to fly in front of it. But that’s why it is fun to look back at how things actually played themselves out—because sometimes some feathers get ruffled.

Of the players that began the 2016 season ranked among the top 10 pitchers in baseball, eight of them finished the season that way. The two that fell out of the top 10 were Dallas Keuchel, who began the season ranked ninth, and Zack Greinke, who began the season ranked second. Of the two, Keuchel fell further. He dropped 17 spots down to 26th, whereas Greinke dropped 12 spots down to 14th. Still, it is difficult not to think of Greinke’s decline as more consequential given the lofty heights that he started from and the earnest ambitions of the Diamondbacks going into the season.

Replacing those two in the top 10 were Johnny Cueto and Justin Verlander. Cueto began the season ranked at No. 13 and finished it at No. 10. The fact that he was outside the top 10 at all, though, is almost entirely due to his second half swoon in 2015. He was a top 10 pitcher for most of that year, and if he had continued to pitch the way he had up to that point in his career or if he had pitched the way that he pitched in 2016, he probably would not have dropped out. At the time of his struggles in late 2015, there was certainly some question as to whether this was the start of a larger decline, but ultimately his reinstatement in the top 10 is not a surprising one. Verlander, on the other hand, made some substantial strides. He finished the season ranked 6th, moving up 27 spots from his 33rd position at the start of the season.

Talking about who the No. 1 pitcher is on the list is boring. This is the third year that we have included this section in the Handbook, and Clayton Kershaw’s name has never not been at the top, nor has there ever been any number other than 1 in any of the ranking columns next to his name. Except for very brief stints in 2014 and 2015 in which Kershaw relinquished his top spot to Max Scherzer, he has dominated the No. 1 ranking since first reaching it on May 16, 2013.

However, what makes the No. 1 ranking, and that date specifically, worth talking about now is the pitcher that Kershaw took the top spot away from … Justin Verlander. Since that day in May of 2013, after Verlander had reached his career peak and started his trip down, he fell as far as 98th place in the rankings, which happened on July 22, 2015. The last time he was ranked as high as sixth was May 26, 2014. But, amazingly, Verlander has pulled himself back up to a considerable height. And it has been a sustained effort. This past season, it actually took him until the very last day of the season, October 2, 2016, to reach sixth place again after a well-pitched but hard luck 1-0 loss to the Braves officially eliminated the Tigers from the playoffs. Now that is an interesting career trajectory!

The system that produces these Starting Pitcher Rankings is one devised by Bill James. The tables in this section of the book show a snapshot of the rankings on the first day of every month during the season, as well as the last day of the season. However, the rankings are recalculated every day, even during the offseason. For full details on how the system works, see Bill’s article on www.billjamesonline.com from September 18, 2011 called The World’s #1 Starting Pitcher. And if you are interested in exploring these rankings more thoroughly, you can also find those updated and stored daily at www.billjamesonline.com.

Starting Pitcher Rankings

Run Impact of Events

Bill James

Not all singles are created equal. When a batter hits a single, that could be a bases-loaded, two-out single which plates two runs, or it could be a two-out, bases-empty single which will have no impact on the scoreboard 85% of the time. A leadoff single is much more likely to lead to runs being scored than is a single with one out. A single with a runner on third is virtually certain to lead to a run being scored; a single with a runner on first may or may not.

Every play in baseball has a before and an after state, and every base/out state has a value based on the number of runs the team can expect to score from that state. If a team has the bases loaded and nobody out, they have an expectation of scoring 2.09 (more) runs in that inning. If the batter strikes out, freezing the runners, the run expectation for the inning drops to 1.54 runs. The negative impact of the strikeout is .55 runs. If the next hitter grounds into an inning-ending double play, the expected runs in the inning drop to zero, so the double play has cost the team about 1.54 runs.

These run-impact (or run-expectation) charts have been around at least since the 1960s, and they have to be adjusted occasionally as the run scoring levels in the majors go up and down. What we are trying to do in this section is to use those charts to ask a few basic questions. Which hitters hit the most productive singles in the majors? The least productive singles? The most productive doubles?

This is a clutch hitting article—and then again it isn’t. Certainly this issue is related to whether a player has hit well in the clutch, but it is important to note that that is not EXACTLY what we are figuring. We are trying to state facts, not judgments.

Suppose that a player hits a single with two out and a runner on second base. The runner scores; the batter goes to second on the throw home, so the run impact of the event is 1.000 runs. The base/out situation is exactly the same after the play as it was before, only there is one more run on the scoreboard.

Suppose, however, that the runner from second base is thrown out at home plate, ending the inning. Then the impact of the play is NEGATIVE, not positive.

You can point out—and correctly—that this is not the hitter’s fault, and that it may have nothing to do with the batter. Maybe the runner coming around from second didn’t hustle; who knows? But saying that it is not the batter’s fault is a JUDGMENT. Saying that the play hurt the team, rather than helped it, is a fact. We’re not making judgments; we are recording facts.

There are a million other ways that this can be done, and I’m just trying to explain what we have done. You can treat that as two separate events—the batting event of the batter hitting the single, and the base running event of the runner from second scoring or being thrown out. That has problems, but you can do it that way—or you can say that there is a batting event, a base running event, and a fielding event, or you can say that there are two base running events or two fielding events.

Also, the concept of clutch hitting has several other meanings. This study looks at the RUN impact of each event, without considering the score of the game. But the impact on the game is different if the score of the game is 2-1 than it is if the score is 12-0. We didn’t consider that. The impact of the event is different if it is in the heat of a pennant race than if both teams are out of the race. The eventual impact of the event is different if the team’s pitcher goes out the next inning and allows five runs than it is if he retires the side one-two-three.

Those are all valid ways to study the issue, and maybe we’ll study some of those things next year, but we didn’t study any of those things this year. We just looked at the RUN impact of each event, based on the state of the inning before the event and the state of the inning after the event.

So … the player who produced the most runs with his singles, in 2016, was Dustin Pedroia of the Red Sox. Pedroia hit 149 singles, which led the major leagues. On average, his singles were about as valuable as anybody else’s singles, but he led the majors in the runs added by his singles as well as the number of singles:

Players Producing the Most Runs with Singles

Pedroia’s singles produced 63.1 runs for the Red Sox, the most for any major league player. We will also note this: that the number of runs Pedroia produced with his singles is greater than the number of runs that ANY hitter produced with doubles, triples, or walks, and more than anyone produced with home runs except for two players. The most interesting name on this list, however, is the #2 man, Nick Markakis. Markakis hit 110 singles, which would rank him 36th in the major leagues—but he hit singles that MATTERED. He hit singles that changed the inning. Although he hit 39 fewer singles than Pedroia, he almost matched Pedroia—and beat every other major leaguer—in the number of runs resulting from his singles. Markakis hit .240 with the bases empty—but .306 with men on base. That made his singles more valuable. A list of the players hitting the most valuable singles (one for one) contains a couple of the same names:

Players Hitting High-Impact Singles

David Ortiz is there … one more note from his remarkable Swan Song Season. The major league average was .436. Markakis created 14 more runs than he would have created had his singles been just ordinary, garden variety singles.

On the other end of that scale was a high-visibility player:

Players Hitting Low-Impact Singles

Jose Altuve was regarded for most of the season as a leading MVP candidate. Not trying to play into that discussion; Altuve is a great player, and he has a lot of good numbers. But he did hit the most meaningless singles of any major league player, among the 150 players who hit the most singles—and by far the most meaningless singles; nobody else is close to him in this regard. The other four guys on this list are in the .360s; Altuve is 24 points behind the world.

Moving on now to doubles; same concept. A bases-empty double is worth 1.14 runs when there is no one out, 0.32 runs when there are two men out. A bases-loaded, bases-clearing double is worth 2.05 runs with no one out, 2.62 runs when there are two men out.

The player who produced the most runs with his doubles was, again, the player who hit the most doubles:

Players Producing the Most Runs with Doubles

But Ortiz isn’t at the top of this list simply because he hit the most doubles. He also hit high-impact doubles, producing .84 runs per double as opposed to a major league average of .75. That’s a good average, but nowhere near the highest in the majors:

Players Hitting High-Impact Doubles

Lucroy, traded to Texas in mid-season, hit only half as many doubles as the Big Papi, but did have a higher impact per double. A hitter was eligible for this list if he hit 22 or more doubles—this list, or the next one. 22 doubles because 150 major league players hit