Griffin Jax, the unluckiest man in baseball

[Trov]

Overall I like Jax, but watching him last night it was crazy to see so many foul balls with 2 strikes until a weak contact hit to the right spot got the job done.  Yes, he got hosed on the Otani walk, should have been strike 3, as it was a better pitch than a strike 3 on Twins just inning before.  Is it bad luck when you cannot strike a guy out and he keeps fouling off pitches until he gets a soft hit over the infield head?  I would say that is not bad luck, but not good pitching to finish a guy off when you have 2 strikes.  The triple was not hard hit, but hit in right spot and guy was ready for the pitch.  The 0-2 single was just a guy wanting to not strike out and get ball in play.  Twins lack people that are willing to have a soft hit to avoid a strike out, so when we see it happen we think it is just luck that a soft hit fell.  I wish our offense would learn how to not try to crush pitches on 2 strike counts but try to get ball in play more often. 

[killebrewlover]

On 5/11/2023 at 10:26 AM, Brock Beauchamp said:

So last night, someone in the game thread was concerned that Jax was coming into the game. Jax has been really good this year but unlucky... but I didn't realize just how unlucky he has been in BABIP and hit sequencing.

The one thing he hasn't been good about is walks, giving up seven unintentional walks in 15.2 innings. Let's get that out of the way first.

But over those 15.2 innings, he has allowed only 12 hits with zero home runs.

He has given up six earned runs and the defense has gifted him three additional unearned runs. He has a very respectable 2.80 FIP that would be much better if not for the walks.

This is where the numbers really get crazy. As I said, Jax has 15.2 innings pitched with 12 hits allowed... 11 of those were singles. He has given up all of one extra base hit, a double against the Nationals.

While I can't find a link to the MLB video of that double - probably because it's so embarrassing - it was a 49.9mph ground ball rocket ship that scooted by the third baseman. Oh, and it was raining that evening. If you have MLB.tv and don't remember it specifically, go back and watch the "double". It's so emblematic of Jax's season thus far. April 21st, eighth inning.

The only XBH Griffin Jax has allowed in 2023 was a grounder that didn't even have a 50mph exit velocity. The expected batting average on the ball was .150.

Which explains his Baseball Savant page. Look at those top six numbers. This is not a man who should have an ERA that starts with a three.

Someone once told me, you make your own luck.  I understand that baseball is a team sport.  And GJ's numbers certainly belie his real potential and capabilities.  But in Trumanesque style, IMHO, the attitude of any player should be that "the buck stops here."  In other words, take responsibility of your actions (even if it's questionable that it's yours to take).  Learn from your mistakes.  And constantly improve on your results.  So, let's stop making excuses for players play, and let's start expecting production that's worthy of their level of (proposed) talent.  I'm sure Mr. Jax agrees.  So how about we follow his lead.

[Hosken Bombo Disco]

11 minutes ago, Trov said:

The triple was not hard hit, but hit in right spot and guy was ready for the pitch.  

It was a line drive pulled into the right field corner.

One of the big disservices to fans is that saying infield hits or hits ‘off the end of the bat’ (Dick’s favorite last night) are somehow cheap or unlucky hits when the opposition gets them, but when the Twins get them, it’s “a good piece of hitting” or some such. 

sure, Jax had some bad luck early, but it shouldn’t have disguised the fact that he was not a top bullpen piece to begin with. 

[ashbury]

Every now and then I post something to the effect that I don't like the word "luck" when applied to human beings doing their respective best against other human beings, although statistically I'll quickly say that some particular result doesn't look "sustainable".  This thread is a prime example of what I mean, and others (I'll point out Jocko's post a bit above that talks about tipping pitches) have brought out good ideas that reinforce my opinion.

Many here on TD are analytically inclined.  So I will toss out for whatever it's worth a bit of wisdom I picked up long ago during a talk given by very smart mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, who said that down through the history of mankind, progress occurs when someone figures out how to understand processes that were previously thought to be "random".  Solar and lunar eclipses were an example I remember but he had others.  He said this in the context of explaining fractals, which are very interesting geometric shapes that look random from a distance but actually contain repeatable mathematical patterns.

There's nothing particularly applicable about fractals to this discussion (the above image is just a pretty picture I found).  But I took to heart Mandelbrot's general observation about chipping away at the unknown, those things we chalk up to "random luck".  Even when you successfully apply statistical methods to predict something, it doesn't mean you understand it yet.  Figuring out why Griffin Jax doesn't have results that match up to his "stuff" is a worthwhile effort.  Guys like Emilio Pagan, and Ricky Nolasco (to go back a decade now), are similar cases.

It's not luck.  It's not that Jax is a bad pitcher, either.  It's just something we don't understand yet.

 

[Twodogs]

1 hour ago, Trov said:

Overall I like Jax, but watching him last night it was crazy to see so many foul balls with 2 strikes until a weak contact hit to the right spot got the job done.  Yes, he got hosed on the Otani walk, should have been strike 3, as it was a better pitch than a strike 3 on Twins just inning before.  Is it bad luck when you cannot strike a guy out and he keeps fouling off pitches until he gets a soft hit over the infield head?  I would say that is not bad luck, but not good pitching to finish a guy off when you have 2 strikes.  The triple was not hard hit, but hit in right spot and guy was ready for the pitch.  The 0-2 single was just a guy wanting to not strike out and get ball in play.  Twins lack people that are willing to have a soft hit to avoid a strike out, so when we see it happen we think it is just luck that a soft hit fell.  I wish our offense would learn how to not try to crush pitches on 2 strike counts but try to get ball in play more often. 

I mean Right? I guess I'm all for going crazy and swinging for the fences with no strikes or one strike but why not change the approach with 2 strikes, and in the situation of course also.  I mean 1st and 3rd 1 out you kind of need a fly ball somewhere, you don't want a ground ball double play, so in the right situations they need to change their approach once in awhile.  I feel as though the players themselves are always swinging for the fences because that's what gets them paid.  So career moneywise a bunch of K's don't mean anything if they have 30+ homers.  But a bunch of K's can negatively impact a winning season, but the agents out there get the guys paid to hit dingers.  It seems to them the the winning and losing is secondary? 

[KirbyDome89]

1 hour ago, ashbury said:

Every now and then I post something to the effect that I don't like the word "luck" when applied to human beings doing their respective best against other human beings, although statistically I'll quickly say that some particular result doesn't look "sustainable".  This thread is a prime example of what I mean, and others (I'll point out Jocko's post a bit above that talks about tipping pitches) have brought out good ideas that reinforce my opinion.

Many here on TD are analytically inclined.  So I will toss out for whatever it's worth a bit of wisdom I picked up long ago during a talk given by very smart mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, who said that down through the history of mankind, progress occurs when someone figures out how to understand processes that were previously thought to be "random".  He said this in the context of explaining fractals, which are very interesting geometric shapes that look random from a distance but actually contain repeatable mathematical patterns.

There's nothing particularly applicable about fractals to this discussion (the above image is just a pretty picture I found).  But I took to heart Mandelbrot's general observation about chipping away at the unknown, those things we chalk up to "random luck".  Even when you successfully apply statistical methods to predict something, it doesn't mean you understand it yet.  Figuring out why Griffin Jax doesn't have results that match up to his "stuff" is a worthwhile effort.  Guys like Emilio Pagan, and Ricky Nolasco (to go back a decade now), are similar cases.

It's not luck.  It's not that Jax is a bad pitcher, either.  It's just something we don't understand yet.

 

Luck, at least as it pertains to the baseball world, has always had a sort of "God of the gaps," feel to me. Being "lucky," for 6-7 weeks seems, ahhhh, unlikely. 

[Mike Sixel]

7 hours ago, ashbury said:

Every now and then I post something to the effect that I don't like the word "luck" when applied to human beings doing their respective best against other human beings, although statistically I'll quickly say that some particular result doesn't look "sustainable".  This thread is a prime example of what I mean, and others (I'll point out Jocko's post a bit above that talks about tipping pitches) have brought out good ideas that reinforce my opinion.

Many here on TD are analytically inclined.  So I will toss out for whatever it's worth a bit of wisdom I picked up long ago during a talk given by very smart mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, who said that down through the history of mankind, progress occurs when someone figures out how to understand processes that were previously thought to be "random".  Solar and lunar eclipses were an example I remember but he had others.  He said this in the context of explaining fractals, which are very interesting geometric shapes that look random from a distance but actually contain repeatable mathematical patterns.

There's nothing particularly applicable about fractals to this discussion (the above image is just a pretty picture I found).  But I took to heart Mandelbrot's general observation about chipping away at the unknown, those things we chalk up to "random luck".  Even when you successfully apply statistical methods to predict something, it doesn't mean you understand it yet.  Figuring out why Griffin Jax doesn't have results that match up to his "stuff" is a worthwhile effort.  Guys like Emilio Pagan, and Ricky Nolasco (to go back a decade now), are similar cases.

It's not luck.  It's not that Jax is a bad pitcher, either.  It's just something we don't understand yet.

 

So you think players control where a hit ball goes with enough precision that there isn't luck? We'll never agree on that. Life is filled with luck. Filled with it. It's why randomness is so valuable in process analysis and nearly all fields of business and sports. 

[ashbury]

1 hour ago, Mike Sixel said:

So you think players control where a hit ball goes with enough precision that there isn't luck?

Straw man.

Certainly some things in sports are luck.  Nick Gordon breaking his leg on a foul ball is pure bad luck - and you'll notice nobody is taking the opposite tack of saying he's a bad player because someone more skillful would not have let it happen.

But in terms of controlling where they hit the ball, batters go to the plate with some kind of plan.  Do you think that the Twins leading the league in pull-percentage is just luck because they have no control over what happens when they swing.

My position is pretty much smack-dab in the middle.  The batter has a plan, the opposing battery has a plan, and let the better plan win over the long haul.  Sometimes the batter gets fooled and still winds up on base.  Sometimes the pitcher makes a terrible pitch and the batter swings straight through.  The statistics smooth out after a season or so, but trends look pretty likely sooner than that.

But "great" stuff getting beat over and over is eventually more than just happenstance.

Or if you want to believe luck overrides everything (hey, I can do straw men too!), then the front office needs to work on bringing in luckier players.

[chpettit19]

7 minutes ago, ashbury said:

Straw man.

Certainly some things in sports are luck.  Nick Gordon breaking his leg on a foul ball is pure bad luck - and you'll notice nobody is taking the opposite tack of saying he's a bad player because someone more skillful would not have let it happen.

But in terms of controlling where they hit the ball, batters go to the plate with some kind of plan.  Do you think that the Twins leading the league in pull-percentage is just luck because they have no control over what happens when they swing.

My position is pretty much smack-dab in the middle.  The batter has a plan, the opposing battery has a plan, and let the better plan win over the long haul.  Sometimes the batter gets fooled and still winds up on base.  Sometimes the pitcher makes a terrible pitch and the batter swings straight through.  The statistics smooth out after a season or so, but trends look pretty likely sooner than that.

But "great" stuff getting beat over and over is eventually more than just happenstance.

Or if you want to believe luck overrides everything (hey, I can do straw men too!), then the front office needs to work on bringing in luckier players.

FYI, the Twins (40.8%) are actually closer to league average (38.5%) in pull% than they are to leading the league (43.7%). Probably not great to exaggerate stats if you're going to call people out for strawman arguments.

[ashbury]

14 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

FYI, the Twins (40.8%) are actually closer to league average (38.5%) in pull% than they are to leading the league (43.7%).

The source I used is b-r.com which shows the Twins batters at the top of MLB at 34.0%.  Other sites may compute things differently, I don't know.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2023-advanced-batting.shtml

[mrtwinsfan]

On 5/13/2023 at 12:48 PM, ashbury said:

I don't use ERA for relief pitchers.  FIP may be an improvement over ERA for forecasting, for starting pitchers, but I don't pay it much mind for relievers either. 

I like two other ways better.  OPS-against tells you a certain amount, clean innings tells you more, because unlike for starters, a reliever's job is to shut down the opposition for one inning.

The one thing I like about Jax's season so far is that he's limited the extra-base hits.  Just two doubles and no HR.  That's very important, and it helps keep his OPS-against to an impressive .589 this year.

But ... he's hittable.  Opponents are batting .239, and league-wide the BA is only .247.  In the small numbers we have so far, that's basically an average pitcher. As was pointed out, he walks some batters, so his OBP of .320 is likewise around league-average.

Looking at his 2023 game log, I see 6 appearances out of 18 where he gave up neither a hit nor a walk.  I don't know what is "average" but this doesn't look like a shut down arm to me.

Why I harp on clean innings - if you throw a lot of them, then one instance of "bad luck" won't do you (or the team) in.  If men are on base when the bad luck happens, then a run may score and you can try to explain it away as not the pitcher's fault and the "defense gifted the opponents a run" but the pitcher's hands ain't clean.

He's also given up 5 stolen bases this year.  They say you steal on the pitcher, not the catcher, but I'd have to dig deeper to the individual cases to make sure these SB weren't someone else's fault than Jax's.  Nor can you say it's situational, being in tight games or whatever - Duran and JLopez each have 2 SB, by contrast.

In late innings of tight games, it's the little things that sometimes separate winning from losing.  Jax to me isn't a difference-maker, and I don't think it's fair to call it bad luck.  If we're going to focus on one seeing-eye double against the shift, it doesn't negate the other innings where he put men on base.  His BABIP is .329, so probably that one double accounts for him being any different than the league on this.

I don't dislike Jax - average pitchers are useful - but he's miscast.  If he's option #7 in an 8-man bullpen, you have a real good bullpen.  If he's counted on as #3, it spells trouble.

I want a real good bullpen, so for me, explaining away Jax's bad outcomes is merely a distraction.

Not Lately

[chpettit19]

15 minutes ago, ashbury said:

The source I used is b-r.com which shows the Twins batters at the top of MLB at 34.0%.  Other sites may compute things differently, I don't know.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2023-advanced-batting.shtml

Statcast and fangraphs disagree pretty dramatically with those numbers. 

[Squirrel]

10 minutes ago, chpettit19 said:

Statcast and fangraphs disagree pretty dramatically with those numbers. 

Maybe you and @ashbury could answer this for me ... if they are measuring roughly the same thing, why are the stats so different? (I know, making it quite a bit off topic, but ... ) Are they using different formulas to measure the same thing?

[chpettit19]

1 minute ago, Squirrel said:

Maybe you and @ashbury could answer this for me ... if they are measuring roughly the same thing, why are the stats so different? (I know, making it quite a bit off topic, but ... ) Are they using different formulas to measure the same thing?

I don't know if where they "draw the lines" for pull, center, oppo is different, but statcast is using camera generated data while baseball reference is using human entered ball data. At least they were 2 years ago, I may be unaware of a change there, but I doubt they have their own camera generated data at this point. It can also be a difference in where they mark the end of a ball's journey. I know the data BR has used in the past marks a grounder at the edge of the infield. The "pie slices" are tighter there than in the OF. If statcast is marking where a grounder ends as where it's picked up in the OF it can add some extra variance on grounders in the gaps as the pie slices grow bigger and spin on the ball can lead to some variance the farther it rolls. My guess would be it's a combination of a number of these things. I tend to trust statcast, and their camera technology, significantly more on any ball data. The camera is far more reliable than the humans trying to track a dozen data points at a time live. Although, those humans are incredibly good at their jobs. There's just far more variance with dozens of humans trying to judge things live instead of the cameras. The human variance is another reason defensive metrics should be taken with a giant helping of salt.

[Mike Sixel]

1 hour ago, ashbury said:

Straw man.

Certainly some things in sports are luck.  Nick Gordon breaking his leg on a foul ball is pure bad luck - and you'll notice nobody is taking the opposite tack of saying he's a bad player because someone more skillful would not have let it happen.

But in terms of controlling where they hit the ball, batters go to the plate with some kind of plan.  Do you think that the Twins leading the league in pull-percentage is just luck because they have no control over what happens when they swing.

My position is pretty much smack-dab in the middle.  The batter has a plan, the opposing battery has a plan, and let the better plan win over the long haul.  Sometimes the batter gets fooled and still winds up on base.  Sometimes the pitcher makes a terrible pitch and the batter swings straight through.  The statistics smooth out after a season or so, but trends look pretty likely sooner than that.

But "great" stuff getting beat over and over is eventually more than just happenstance.

Or if you want to believe luck overrides everything (hey, I can do straw men too!), then the front office needs to work on bringing in luckier players.

Talk about straw men.... Where did anyone say it is only luck? You said you don't like the word luck, that it's just that we don't understand everything. Or did I read that wrong?

[Squirrel]

Come on you guys … quit with the strawman accusations and have a discussion

[h2oface]

Maybe Jax just needs some Dock Ellis "luck".

[Shobae]

On 5/21/2023 at 3:08 AM, Squirrel said:

Maybe you and @ashbury could answer this for me ... if they are measuring roughly the same thing, why are the stats so different? (I know, making it quite a bit off topic, but ... ) Are they using different formulas to measure the same thing?

Well the first thing to note is that neither fangraphs nor bref measure this data themselves so folks should be looking at the sources those sites are using. Fangraphs batted ball data is sourced from sports info solutions who use human video scouts to collect their data. In contrast, baseball savant use hawkeye cameras installed at every ball park to record batted ball data. I assume there is some programmed definition as to what a pulled ball, that could be relevantly different from that used by SIS video scouts. However, I can't confirm that with sources. As for bref from what I can tell they seem to get their batted ball data from sportradar, but I couldn't find anything on the specifics of how that's calculated. But all 3 are using different sources leading to different results, though I would go with statcast data if i wanted to look at pull% in this case.

[Shobae]

Also there is certainly some level of bad luck going on with Jax's ERA, but I don't think that's the topic of contention here. The more interesting question is who is the real 2023 Jax? Is it the third best pitching+ score among all pitcher with 20 IP so far? (I don't think so) Is it the 52 FIP-? (I don't think he's that good either) I feel like his K-BB%, which according to Eno Sarris is decently predictive in smaller samples, that is down from last season at 16.2% (league average for RP is 14.2%) provides a good estimate. So he is above average but certainly not elite according to strikeout to walk rate differential. His SIERA (a defense independent pitching stat but it also uses batted ball data) provides a similar evaluation, it was also better last year, with a 3.42 (lavg for RP is 3.92). I'd say that judges him as a good but not great reliever. So I'd say Jax has been unlucky but I don't think he's been the unluckiest man in baseball.

Also I disagree with the premise that there is something going on here that we don't understand. Any small sample of a population can contain lots of noise in it and that very much holds true for baseball PAs/match ups. I think there are enough models, metrics and statistics for someone put together a decent evaluation of Jax, the question is what you listen to and what you're trying to establish.

[jkcarew]

The league has seen the sweeper, they are looking for it…especially with 2 strikes. The simplest explanation I have is they are not swinging and missing against it as frequently as last year…significantly less frequently. I think the stats reflect that. It is foiling the plan/pitch sequencing that he and the club took into 2023. Not bad luck.

The batters adjusted. Now it’s Jax’s turn to adjust. It will probably depend on a little better control of his best secondary pitch…and sequencing differently off that. We’ll see.