What Went Wrong With Wang

As a fan of the Yankees in general and of Chien-Ming Wang in particular, it was extremely difficult to watch the demise of the former staff ace play out over the course of the past two years.

Wang started out 2008 strong, winning 6 of his first seven starts. Then he hit a rough patch, working up an ERA of 6.45 over his next six outings before briefly getting back on track just as the second round of interleague play was beginning. Of course, he injured the arch of his foot running the bases after 5 innings of shutout ball in Houston and it was all downhill from there.

When he came back in 2009, he had one of the worst three game stretches possible to begin the season. In just six innings, he gave up 23 runs. Wang had transformed from a dominant sinkerballer to a batting practice pitcher.

What caused this seismic shift?

According to pitch f/x data from FanGraphs (which only dates back to 2007), 73% of the pitches Wang threw in '07 and '08 were sinkers. However, in 2009, only were 57% sinkers. Is that possible? I know it's a small sample size, but it's hard to believe that he would have changed his repertoire that dramatically.

From my read of the data, it seems as though Wang was throwing the same amount of sinkers, but some were so flat that they were being miscategorized as two-seam fastballs. Two-seamers move similarly to sinkers but less downward and more to the right. Lets take a look at the velocity and movement of Wang's versions of those pitches:

In 2009, it appears that Wang's sinker was actually straighter and sunk more than in previous years. However, that can be explained.

Wang has always thrown sinkers that were miscategorized as two seamers, but there was a sharp increase in 2009:

So the movement on his sinker looked better in pitch f/x because all of the ones that were so flat that they were identified as two-seamers were taken out of the sample. So it's not that Wang's pitches sank less, instead they started running more side to side. So much so that they basically became a different pitch.

As Pat Androila pointed out at the the Hardball Times yesterday, Wang's numbers against lefties have always been bad, but were especially terrible in 2009. Why? I have a bit of a theory about this. I think Wang's increased side to side movement in '09 caused him to have difficulty throwing strikes (highest BB/9 of his career at 4.1), in addition to making the pitches that did travel through the zone much more hittable, particularly to lefties (gave up a 1.146 OPS against southpaws).

In general baseball terms, some pitches travel through the strikezone on planes that are more difficult to square up with than others. My contention is that those elite pitches find slots - angles of movement - that run counter to the barrel of the bat and minimize the time that they can be struck squarely. From the batter's perspective, this is similar to a golf swing. The longer your clubface is square through the impact zone, the better chance you have of hitting the ball straight. If your club is turning on the way through, you need to get very lucky to hit it flush.

Randy Johnson's slider was death to lefties because it crossed the zone from an extremely wide angle, diving down and to the right. Mariano Rivera's cutter is even tougher than lefties than it is on righties because it veers in on their hands and away from the thick part of the bat.

Though it seems odd to say now, Wang's sinker was one of those elite pitches over the course of almost three full seasons. Batters knew it was coming 3/4 of the time and still had trouble making solid contact. I remember Brandon Inge saying during an interview played on a broadcast that he used to literally try to swing under the pitch and would still sometimes drive it into the ground.

Take a look at these two graphics I made from Wang's at bat against Nick Markakis in the first inning of the game on April 8th, 2009. But keep in mind that this is far from exact; I'm trying to provide a 2-D visualization for a 3-D problem. The yellow lines represent some potential slots that Markakis' bat could fall into while the red represents the trajectory of Wang's pitch. The graphic on the left is meant to resemble a sinker and the one on the right shows what pitch f/x would classify as a two-seamer.

An effective sinker by Wang is running nearly perpendicular to the bat once it reaches the strikezone, while his drifting 2-seamer is much closer to parallel. They often say baseball is a game of inches and the break on Chien-Ming Wang's sinker is a perfect example of that.

Of course, this doesn't get to the part of the scenario that any team looking to sign Wang actually cares about: Will he ever be able to command the sinker that made him so effective before his injury in Houston again?

When Wang is finally able to pitch this year, it will have been almost two years since he could throw enough effective sinkers to be a solid Major League starter. It seems as though the Yankees messed up his rehabilitation by telling him not to exercise his legs when recovering from his lisfranc sprain, which probably contributed to his inability to find his old sinker. It took an intricate combination of forces and no small amount of touch to toss that pitch and his failed rehab might have thrown him irreparably off course. To continue with the nautical analogy, he might have already run ashore and there's no telling if he will be able to rebuild his ship.

The troubling part is that the line between being awesome and awful for Wang is so thin. It only takes one bad pitch to ruin an at bat, and just a 17% drop in good sinkers made him one of the worst pitchers in the history of the game over his first three starts. He's never thrown good enough offspeed pitches to get guys out so any team who gives him a deal is betting on whether or not he recoups the magic sinker. Personally, I hope Wang finds it. Objectively, I don't think he will.

Baseball Braces For Bloomberg

For about four hours yesterday, a good portion of the baseball blogoshpere gathered at the Bloomberg headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. Many went through the painful process of putting on pants, emerging from their mother's basements and commuting to New York City in exchange for an up close and personal tour of Bloomberg's new baseball software, along with lunch, beverages, some especially delicious frosted peanut butter brownies and an awesome shirt.

Even those of us who don't work in finance were familiar with Bloomberg's capabilities in data gathering, organization and visualization and were anxious to see how they had applied it to baseball. The company is offering two separate products, one aimed towards fantasy baseball players and the other designed specifically for and in partnership with the teams in the MLB. The demonstration of the fantasy version came first.

Within the fantasy product, there are two main incarnations of the program, available for purchase separately. The first is the draft kit, in which you can enter the specifications of your league regardless of where it is hosted (CBS, ESPN, Yahoo, etc).

Bloomberg's system revolves around a proprietary B-Rank based on a 5x5 league, which the presenters disclosed next to nothing about. I understand reasons for the secrecy, but I think users might find this off-putting in contrast to the availability of data throughout the rest of the software. It's tough to get a someone with a sabermetric slat to put their faith behind a metric whose methodology is purposely concealed.

Beyond the B-Rank though, you can search for and prioritize players by any statistical category (and by multiple categories at once) to ensure you have a balanced roster. Conveiently, Bloomberg has already computed player's eligibility by position to save you that headache. With your subscription, you have access to a player's average draft position in relation to their projected production, providing a simple visual representation of their value among many, many, many other intuitive features and comparisons. If you take your fantasy draft preparation seriously, the biggest limitation of the utility of the software is the amount of time you want to put into it.

Similar to the draft tracker, the in-season version of the Bloomberg software offers an impressive depth of information and is very customizable. They don't have historical or minor league stats available yet, but those are included in the professional suite and could be added in the future. The in-season version will be the most useful to this site and you will likely see some of the Bloomberg visualizations in our posts once the software debuts on February 18th.

The draft kit is being offered for $19.95, the in-season tools for $24.95 and both of them together will set you back $31.95.

The professional level software was what was most tantalizing to most of us bloggers in attendance. With a less colorful and more data-heavy layout, I could imagine spending days on end poking through the spray charts, pitch predictors and countless other tools that were offered. The teams are being given a free trial which started at the Winter Meetings and extends through the All-Star break, during which time Bloomberg has been and will be making every effort to customize the software and give the teams exactly what they want.

One of the underlying themes Bloomberg bent over backwards to convey was that what we were looking at on the 7th floor of 731 Lexington Ave. yesterday was just the beginning. They welcomed and encouraged - and might have even demanded - our input and suggestions were that socially acceptable.

To a company like Bloomberg, the market for baseball information is pretty limited. The financial firm employs over 10,000 people and has 126 offices around the world, so their entrée into the world of sports statistics and information isn't likely to significantly affect their bottom line, even if their software becomes ubiquitous among teams, fantasy baseball players and bloggers alike. But they seem committed to constant improvement of the technology nonetheless.

What was most encouraging about yesterday's presentation was that Bloomberg seemed to embrace the sabermetric ideal, even though they had arrived there from a financial background. They aren't attempting to give people the answers they are looking for, they just want to give them the information to come to their own conclusions. Through it all, there was a notion of humility and the desire to improve the product in every way possible and that bodes well for the future of the software.

The Divergent Paths Of Matsui & Wang

The Yankees signed two bona fide stars from Asian countries in the 2000's. After the disasters that were Katsuhiro Maeda and Hideki Irabu and before the debacle of Kei Igawa, Chien-Ming Wang and Hideki Matsui played vital roles on the team this decade.

Wang was acquired all the way back in 2000, starting at the one of the lowest levels of professional ball the Yankees could place him in (the short season NYPL) and didn't make his Major League Debut until 2005. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hideki Matsui arrived via much fanfare after winning both the Central League MVP and Japan Series title in 2002 and joined the Yankees out of Spring Training in '03.

The graphic below follows the careers of the two men, both of whom are athletic heros in their respective countries. In many ways, left the Yankees the same way they came to them; Matsui a champion and a hero and Wang an unwanted minor leaguer. It shows in their salaries as well. Matsui has already made $73M in the United States and is due $6.5 more while Wang netted about $10M between the Majors and Minors and will have to take when he is given from his next team.

1. The Taiwanese right hander was signed as an amateur free agent in 2000 and made his debut pitching in the short season New York Penn League for the Staten Island Yankees. He had a fantastic first season, throwing 87 innings at a 2.45 ERA.
   
   
2. Wang injured his shoulder and missed the entire 2001 season. However, he rebounded nicely in 2002, compiling a 1.72 ERA over 78 1/3 innings.
   
   
3. Amidst much hype, Hideki Matsui was signed as a free agent from the Yomiuri Giants of Japan and given a Major League contract. Expectations varied but many expected his prodigious power to carry over from Japan. He hit only 16 home runs his first year but did rack up 42 doubles.
   
   
4. During 2003 and 2004, Chien-Ming made most of his ascent through the Yankees' minor league system. He began at Rookie ball in Tampa, and jumped to AA by the end of '03. Despite an ERA in the 4.00's during his time in Trenton, he made it to AAA by the end of 2004.
   
   
5. Hideki Matsui's ostensible prime as a Yankee came in 2004 and 2005. He played in every game in both years, hit .302/.378/.509, averaged 27 home runs and 112 RBIs while striking out scarcely more than he walked.
   
   
6. 2005 was the year that Wang made the jump to the Big Leagues. He wasn't pitching spectacularly in Scranton but when Jaret Wright got injured the Yankees were forced to call him up. He pitched 7 innings of two run ball in his first start and ended up sticking with the team for the rest of the season, going 8-5 with a 4.02 ERA in 17 starts.
   
   
7. In May of 2006, Matsui broke his wrist attempting to make a catch in the outfield, ending his season and his consecutive games streak of 1768 which he had carried over from Japan. He was in the middle of a solid offensive season, hovering at a 128 OPS+ through 51 games.
   
   
8. Wang's peak as a Yankee was high but it was also steep, lasting only two complete seasons. In 2006 and 2007, just as Matsui was relegated to the background, Wang burst onto the scene. He won 38 games in those two years (the most in the Majors during that time) and pitched 417 1/3 innings of 3.67 ERA ball.
   
   
9. Matsui re-emerged in 2007 but injuries to his knees and hamstrings limited his defensive ability and he appeared in 143 games, 112 in left field. In 2008 he was injured again, appearing in only 93 games and putting up a 108 OPS+, the lowest of his career.
   
   
10. On June 15th, 2008, Wang's career entered a downward spiral from which he has not recovered. He missed the rest of the '08 season and when he returned in 2009, he couldn't have been much worse, surrendering 23 runs in 6 innings in his first three starts. The Yanks jerked Wang around (/obligatory) calling him up after only two minor league starts after Joba Chamberlain got hit with a line drive. He alternated between the bullpen and the rotation for 9 more appearances before being placed on the disabled list July 15th and undergoing shoulder surgery.
    
    
11. Hideki Matsui rebounded in 2009, having one of his better offensive seasons strictly at the Yankee DH. He hit 28 homers and drove in 90 runs despite playing in only 142 games. Of course, his career as a Yankee was capped over with a resplendent World Series recognized by the MVP award. He just signed a $6.5M contract with the Angels.
    
    
12. In the process of rehabbing his shoulder injury, Chien Ming Wang waits in limbo. The Yankees declined to tender him a contract and he doesn't figure to be ready to pitch until May at the earliest. As such, he may wait until then to sign his contract.

TBS PitchTRAX: Informative or Infuriating?

Those of you watching the game in HD last night were exposed to a new feature on the TBS broadcast. On the right hand side of the screen, for the view in from center field only, the displayed a sort of pitch tracker like you see on ESPN and FOX, except it was on the screen at all times.

As the pitches come in, they show up as little numbered balls corresponding to the location they are thrown. It's the type of thing I hate in principle - a flashy graphic imposed on us by a network that doesn't really know much about broadcasting baseball - but I don't totally despise it (yet, anyway). Anything that makes you pay less attention to Chip Caray, you know?

The one thing I wonder about is whether this is computerized like MLB Gameday and PitchFX or they have someone on the production team manually assigning locations. If it's the latter, then we might as well be judging balls and strikes from the couch, but if it's the former, I can see some utility in it. Regardless of the accuracy, it does show you the approach being taken by the pitcher and displays it a lot more clearly that your mental record could.

Aesthetically, it looks kind of terrible, even though the portion of the screen that it's blocking is never really going to show anything, save for a flash of a grounder to third. It's certainly no yellow first down line in terms of value add, but it does give you some interesting context. For instance, when Phil Hughes faced Orlando Cabrera, you could see that every pitch he threw was either high or outside, nothing close to down or in:

It tells you that A) Cabrera is a low/inside, pull type of hitter and B) Hughes was consistently hitting his spots. I watch the games pretty closely but I've gotta admit that some of the pitch sequencing gets lost to me.

I wouldn't want to see this on every YES game, but for the postseason, I guess I don't really mind it. Ideally you'd like to be able to turn it and off via remote, but we're obviously a little ways down the road from that kind of functionality. I'm trying to look at the bright side here, but I'm sure there are a bunch of you who are going to vehemently hate it. I'd be willing the bet the umps do.

Haters? Appreciators? Agnostics?

Watch Every Yankees Game! (Unless Of Course You Can't)

I got an email from the Yankees yesterday, informing me that I could "Watch every Yankees game on MLB.tv Premium":

You don't say!

They use lots of fonts and fades and flashy graphics, but tucked away in the fine print just underneath the bright green buttons where you can buy the service, it says "Blackout and other Restrictions Apply".

Hey Yankees, guess where probably 90% of the people on this email list live? In your fucking broadcast territory! It's not that the headline is misleading, it's the exact opposite of the truth for the vast majority of the recipients of this blast. Is that not a little disingenuous?

The people out of the market have probably looked into how they would be able to watch the games, don't you think? I'm not breaking new ground here, nor is this going to make a difference, but they should just stream the commercials through the feeds and dump the ridiculous blackout restrictions. It's bullshit. They have customers who are willing to pay for the service and I'm sure any of those cable networks would be open to having their viewing audiences increased if the viewers were shown the ads. Work it out. I blame Bud Selig.

And in the interest of full disclosure, they should probably be more up front with what the blackout restrictions entail. The price is high enough where the customer deserves to be made aware that if they are in their home market, they are going to be dropping $110 for everyone else's games and their team's radio feed.