Point Blank – May 8

Some handicapping love, for the MLB glove(s)…You probably didn’t see a Corey Kluber “buy” sign yesterday (but it may have been there)…

The MLB diamonds will be a bigger focus on these pages in the days ahead, with the NBA playoffs eliminating four more teams over the next week, and also because the numbers from the 2015 baseball season begin to take shape in some key areas. One of those is defense, which may be among the most important for the serious handicapper, because it is something that the markets can be slow to react to. It does not show up much in the daily box scores, unless you do a lot of reading between the lines, and is also an area that the emerging analytics are literally not fielding well yet.

But before you get too excited, take a deep breath. While there are some team defensive statistics that can be trusted, it is still early days at the individual positions. There are some good statistical groups putting forth strong efforts, but the fact that their numbers end up pretty far off of each other on too many players shows the difficulty – the team defensive charts that will be detailed today use straight math, but the attempts at individual players require a lot of human judgment, and that brings all sorts of issues into play.

So where to start? As old-fashioned as it can appear to be, given the growing sophistication of the metrics for pitchers and hitters, PADE (Park Adjusted Defensive Efficiency) is a good basic foundation to build from. And this is the time when those numbers begin to earn trust, all teams having at last 10 games both home and away.

PADE is measuring the ability of a defense to turn balls in play into outs, which brings both the gloves and the legs into the equation, the latter in terms of range. By also performing the necessary adjustments of taking the ballparks out of play, a key area of confusion is removed. The irony these days is that while Coors Field is indeed a difficult place to play defense, the Rockies simply stink anywhere with their gloves.

Here are the top five teams so far this season, with their 2014 finish attached to bring some direction into play -

1. Cincinnati (#3)

2. Tampa Bay (#8)

3. Baltimore (#4)

4. Kansas City (#12)

5. Miami (#26)

Note the major surprise here – the Marlins. The additions of Martin Prado and Dee Gordon are making a big difference in the infield, and a couple of guys that the individual defensive metrics have had disagreements with, SS Adeiny Hechavarria and CF Marcell Ozuna, are playing to the plus side of their debates so far. Difficult to put into numbers are the impacts the arms of Giancarlo Stanton in RF and Christian Yelich in LF (he will return from the DL today), the kind of thing that is invisible in a box score, and PADE can also not account for. Assists from an outfielder can be misleading, because weaker arms get more opportunities for them, while developing a metric for the “bases not taken” by a runner, out of respect to an arm, is still in its infancy. Alas, it is also one that requires specific human judgment, so will likely always be fragile.

Then there is the other side of the coin…

26. Boston (#23)

27. Chicago White Sox (#24)

28. Washington (#19)

29. Colorado (#30)

30. Cleveland (#25)

Note the consistency here – the bottom feeders were also quite bad in 2014. Even away from Coors Field the Rockies are allowing a .318 BABIP. The Indians are wasting a starting rotation with a lot of potential by not getting to nearly enough balls, with a horrific team BABIP of .340. Not only do the Nationals score low here, but they also lead that Major’s by already allowing an alarming 25 unearned runs to cross the plate (for perspective, no other team has allowed more than 17). In other words, the bottom of the league may be setting itself in stone pretty early – these teams may not get any better.

OK, so now you are getting ready to ask, “How can I use this each day?” There is no magic here. Unlike basketball and football, where defense forces action, on the baseball diamonds it is almost entirely a reaction, and there are some nights in which a good defensive team will not gain an edge on the scoreboard because there are no difficult plays to be made. Instead make this a part of your overall process in terms of evaluating teams, and in particular starting pitchers. How much do you attribute the slow starts of Stephen Strasburg (.394 BABIP), Chris Sale (.378) and Corey Kluber (.364, more on him in a moment) to the fact that the defenses behind them are playing so poorly? It is more of a tool for general ratings, than to take advantage of specific matchups.

Here is what does stand out. Heading into Thursday, the top five defensive teams would have returned a +6.71 in net units on a per-game basis, while the bottom five failed have failed to a stunning -28.07 tune. Yes, there is absolutely some back-fit involved in the logic of those accountings, but it does show that it is a part of the game that the markets do not value properly. If you do, it is a big step on the way to long-term profits.

Now about Kluber…

Kluber was a featured part of yesterday’s column (full archive at the bottom of the page), noting that while his W/L and ERA had fallen dramatically off of those Cy Young numbers of 2014, he was actually throwing the ball just about as well. Now he is sitting at 0-5/5.04, with the Indians 0-7 across his starts, and it may appear to be a train wreck to the markets. Which, as is so often the case, means time to begin looking for the “buy” signal, and yesterday in Kansas City it may have appeared.

Part of the Wednesday take concerning Kluber was one of confidence – he simply did not show it in his last outing, a home loss to Toronto when the pitching conditions were extremely favorable, and for a guy that still only has 77 Major League starts, that can indeed be an issue. So it was also not a surprise when he struggled early against the Royals. Just four batters into the bottom of the first inning, it was 4-0 KC, capped by an Eric Hosmer home run.

There is almost no way for a pitcher to statistically turn around a game in which the first four batters he faces score. Kluber’s single-game ERA will get pegged at 7.94, and there is rarely something good to see from that tag. But there was. Kluber faced 24 batters the rest of the way, and had more K’s (seven) than Hits + BB combined (four) through that stretch. Over the course of the day, nearly two-thirds of his pitches (69 of 104) were in the strike zone, and that cold splash in the face in the first inning may have been just what he needed to reach back for some of that 2014 form. Use this, from manager Terry Francona, as part of the takeaway – “To his credit, man, he battled and started working ahead. When he worked ahead he was very good. That's a rough start to a game. I think he knew if they got much more, we're in trouble. He gave us a chance. He just kept fighting and fighting."

Note again the key from the Thursday column – Kluber is not all that far from where he was in 2014. His command rates of K/9 and BB/9 are off a bit, though still elite, but his GB% and SwS% are actually better than last year. Contrast his 5.04 ERA to an FIP of 3.20 and much of that is in evidence. He will be getting a lot of negative takes from the Sports Mediaverse before his next start (ESPN Stats & Info had a tweet of “Indians have lost all 7 of Corey Kluber's starts, tied for most consecutive losses to begin a season in starts by reigning Cy Young winner” out shortly following the Kansas City win becoming final), and that could make him an attractive value proposition at the betting windows.

The complete Point Blank Archive

@PregamePhd (a work in progress, feedback appreciated)