Parker Hageman

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4211[/ATTACH]With the advancement of statistical analysis playing a prominent role in major league front offices, some teams have begun to gear their broadcast teams towards being able to move the dialogue forward with their fan base over the airwaves. The Houston Astros hired Robert Ford and former major league knuckler Steve Sparks to push the needle for the revamped front office, which includes plenty of brain power making decisions based on sciences rather than guts, instincts and chew spit. Yet, for every progressive pair like Ford and Sparks, there’s the standard Hawk Harrelson in the White Sox booth who denounced the intellects at every turn. In fact, when asked if advanced stats would be something viewers would like in broadcasts during an MLB Network show, Harrelson scoffed. “It’s not ready yet,” the White Sox broadcaster said. “Down the road, 40 or 50 years, when you can put some of those categories, you get your OBPS and all that, your VORPs, when you put in TWTW [“The Will To Win”], and interface those numbers with TWTW, that category, then you might have something cooking.” Beefing up the numbers in a broadcast is a hard pill to swallow for some teams. After all, the concepts, stats and acronyms are still foreign to a significant portion of the fans. There is likely a percentage of listeners who fully believe The Will To Win trumps any number alive. Advanced statistics and sabermetrics are often thought of as a niche. Locally, the Twins hired Chicago-area native Cory Provus away from the Milwaukee Brewers before the 2012 season. Provus was kind enough to offer his insights about the broadcast industry and the challenges it presents in discussing and promoting some of those concepts on the radio: How do you feel about advanced stats and their role in the game today – particularly in your broadcasts? The more baseball I am around now, I think it is imperative to at least pay attention to the metrics that are in the game today. They are a prominent part of the game and they’re becoming vital to the way rosters are being assembled – and I’m not just talking about the 25-man, but I think throughout your system. At the same time you have to remember the medium, particularly the medium I work in, how often you use numbers – in the medium of radio – where you just don’t have the capability through numbers on the screen and let people digest that. For example, this is just me, but I process things visually so if you are trying to explain to me – or anybody – if I had a question about balls in play…I had a question for [Glen] Perkins about that in Detroit last week about the average that players and pitchers try to shoot for. Only he was explaining it to me and I was trying to process it and then I remembered the visual of it and it starts to sink in. So maybe I take that selfish approach to the broadcast and I am always conscious of the medium we work that we don’t have the ability to throw a graphic on the screen and let people visualize it and then digest it. Do you think you can convey the concepts of advanced metrics doing the broadcasts? I think that you can, not so much metrics, but for example, I went on Fangraphs.com for a while this morning and I wanted to compare John Lackey in 2007 – that great year he had and won 19 games and finished like third in the Cy Young balloting that year – and looking at Fangraphs and what he was throwing, the average speeds he was throwing, to what he was throwing. Now, the sample is a lot smaller now because of the injury aspect, but I was somewhat surprised that the fastball velocity is pretty constant, pretty consistent with what he did in ’07 compared to what he’s throwing now, he’s average is about 91 with his fastball which is exactly what he was throwing in ’07. However what I find interesting is the differences between ’07 and today is he is throwing more sliders now and less curveballs. And that’s I think probably because of the injury. I remember [Milwaukee Brewers’ radio broadcaster] Bob Uecker told me one time…I thought the slider was the most dangerous pitch on your shoulder on your arm on your elbow, and he always told me the curveball puts more strain, even though you throw it with less velocity, the tighter grip and the more torque you’re putting on it. So that makes sense when you look at the injuries [Lackey] is coming back and what he is throwing now and what he was throwing in the past. I found that very interesting. Do you use any other sites in preparation for your broadcasts? I look at BrooksBaseball.net just for my own knowledge. I’ll take a look at that from time to time. I am aware that there is a demographic of the audience that loves that stuff and thrives on that stuff and it is important. But also remember that I think my primary job is to tell a story. And I would rather tell stories based on person to person contact, based on what I found out that day from talking to the players and coaches. While I think stats are important, I also think stats are a crutch. I think that it goes back to the way I was brought up in baseball broadcasting where dead air isn’t the worst thing in the world. In baseball it is good to let game breathe; Let people hear the sounds, let people hear the emotions of the crowd, the vendors hawking programs and hot dogs, hearing the PA guy, hearing the crack of the bat. I would rather do that then get into stat after stat after stat. Are there any stats you prefer over others? I think on-base percentage is a stat I do rely on. I think too many times I go back and listen to my own stuff and I think, man I keep bringing up batting average. Danny [Dan Gladden] and I both think on-base percentage should trump batting average. We are of that belief that, maybe we should be better at a team to hammer that stat across more than batting average. Stats are important, they’re a vital part of the game but I think that often times, they are used as a crutch. And I would always rather tell a story than give a stat. Do you feel it to be part of your job to educate the listeners on understanding these stats and their context? Part of our job is to education as well. Educate about strategy, Educate about rules, and this day and age now, educate about metrics and the way they are applied to a current game and to the ways teams are being built. You worked with the legendary Bob Uecker in Milwaukee prior to working with the Twins. Is there anything different about the way that broadcast was approached? Was there any advanced stats discussions? Bob and I were telling stories and having fun. Trying to inform and education but keeping people entertained. That’s what we tried to do every night. I don’t think we got into sabermetrics in any way, shape or form. If it does not fit well in the broadcast, where do you see the conversation being had about statistical analysis on the air? I think it’s a good conversation during a rain delay. I think if we have time to kill during a rain delay, it’s not a bad thing to approach but I go back to how many people are really going to understand it with the medium of radio? Are we going to be throwing so many names and so many numbers across without the benefit of the visual, is everybody really going to get it? I don’t know. I would think that some people would be confused by it, because I would be confused by it. Summarize your approach to the broadcast. It’s fun. It’s a game. It’s baseball. It’s not rocket science; it’s not trying to solve the financial crisis around the world here. We’re trying to give people a break from their lives for three-and-a-half hours. Let them kind of laugh, let them learn, let them have fun, let them hear something that maybe brings them back to their childhood. That’s what I try to do each and every day.

Did somebody say it was?

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]4160[/ATTACH]Figuring hitters out, a baseball lifer told me recently, is like trying to untangle a giant knot. At first you just try to attack it in the easiest manner possible. If that does not work, you pick another course. And then another and another. You keep trying different things until something gives and you attack that spot until the knot becomes and unraveled mess of string with a sub-.200 batting average and a ticket back to Triple-A. That, in short, is how teams approach players who are new to the league. Pitchers go right after hitters until the method proves fruitless. Then they start pitching away. Or they pitch up. They change speeds. Or they feed them breaking balls until they go cross-eyed. Meanwhile, the good hitters – the Joe Mauers’ of the world – adjust with the pitcher. They take that pitch on the outer-half to the opposite field. They lay off the high ones. They wait on the breaking ball. Those less experienced may fall right into the game plan of the other team. Take Danny Valencia and Brian Dozier, for instance. Both of those players enjoyed immediate success but fell apart as teams began to exploit their tendencies to pull everything. Valencia has hit .234/.274/.365 since that exciting rookie season while Dozier is a career .226/.265/.319 hitting in almost 500 plate appearances. Chris Parmelee enjoyed his month of September back in 2011 but has been a pile of yarn in the batters’ box ever since, hitting just .218/.284/.351. This brings me to the latest hot-hitting young Twin, Oswaldo Arcia. Arcia began the month of May with an 8-game hitting streak. Within that stretch, he hit .438 with four doubles, a triple and a home run. That performance, spread out across three series, undoubtedly had advanced scouts saying “uh-oh, we’ve got to deal with this.” In a USA Today article, Bob Johnson, an advanced scout for the Braves who the Twins just finished burning them hardcore on Twitter getting swept out of the south, explained a bit about his technique: "I'm looking for tendencies," he explains. "If a guy sets his hands at a different position on different counts. I want to know his stance. Does he close up? Is he an open-style hitter? Does he dive into the pitch? … I first check his hands, then his feet. Then I check where his head goes on certain pitches." {snip} Back at the hotel, he writes up reports on the game and then emails them to the team's video coordinator, who compiles the various streams of research. The team's manager and staff will ultimately share the information with the players to help them prepare for future match-ups. What advanced scouts saw with Arcia, is a hitter who has a great ability to keep his hands inside his swing and plenty of his power is generated that way. He is a hitter who has no trouble going to all fields, in fact he has hit the ball the opposite way (37% of balls in play) more than he has pulled it (31%). Teams realize that they need to get him to move his hands away from his body which requires avoiding pitching him middle-in. The assumption may be that he is seeing fewer fastballs but the reality is he is seeing roughly the same number of fastballs, just fewer of those for strikes. Take a look at this animation of his swing on fastballs from the beginning of his season to when his hitting streak ended compared to his past 10 games. http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/theeight_1369375354_Arcia_Fastballs.gif Notice the cluster of fastballs near the heart of the plate in the first series and the lack of anything there in the second series. The amount of in-zone pitches Arcia has seen has shrank significantly (his in-zone pitch percentage is 46%, well below the near 50% mark and has been at 39% the past two weeks). Arcia, so far, has not been the type of hitter in his professional career who takes walks. He is a power hitter who is ready to swing (his 54% swing rate is also well above the MLB average of 46%). During the Atlanta series, Ron Gardenhire held Arcia out of the lineup, saying that the rookie was “misfiring” at the plate. True, the above numbers indicate that he is pressing hard at the plate with little to show in the past few weeks. Plus, his ninth inning pinch hitting appearance which resulted in a foul out to end the game was a prime example of why he was mired in this offensive quagmire. On a 1-0 pitch, Arcia was sitting dead-red on a fastball. While the Braves gave him one, it was on the outer-half, running away and the contact resulted in an easy third out for Justin Upton in foul territory. http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Arcia3.PNG In that situation, under those conditions, you can expect that the manager wants his player to be teeing up on a better pitcher - particularly when ahead in the count. Prior to Thursday’s game against the Tigers, Gardenhire informed the media that his starting lineup would not include Arcia for a fourth consecutive game. When pressed for an explanation, the manager said that he wanted to play the matchups and that Ryan Doumit was 4-for-10 off the Tigers’ starting pitcher, Rick Porcello. This reasoning, based on absurdly small sample size, is likely the cover for the manager and coaches wanting Arcia to slow down and recognize how pitchers are approaching him. He had fallen into a pattern of trying to force everything. Don’t swing so much, don’t expand the zone and let the game come to him. Based on his tools, Arcia has a bright future. In order to realize this potential, Arcia will need to refrain from chasing after everything that moves. His mechanics are solid and his strength will ensure that he will blister pitches that come into his swing path. As major league pitchers continue to pick at his weakness, he needs to adjust with them.

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]4140[/ATTACH]Who IS This Guy? At six-foot-six and just 175 pounds, 18-year-old Trey Ball from New Castle High School in Indiana has an extremely projectable frame, one that experts agree will fill out nicely as he matures. The consensus, however, appears split between where he should play: Pitcher or outfield. Who Could He Be? The majors have few left-handed power arms that average mid-90s fastballs. Tampa’s David Price, Texas’ Derek Holland and Los Angeles’ Clayton Kershaw are a rare breed who can dial up that kind of velocity from the port-side. Because of that, Ball’s immediate future may be as a pitcher. In 2012, during the Area Code games, Ball was averaging 92 with his fastball but peppered in a slow curve at 74. This year he was reaching upwards of 96 at times. If he is able to maintain the arm speed and release spot with both pitches, the discrepancy could be downright criminal. Kershaw has struck out 67 batters in 64 innings this year thanks to the same variation between his fastball and huge hook. Landing a Kershaw-like arm would be a phenomenal get for the Twins. On the other hand, if things should go awry with his pitching development, Ball’s positional skills have been highly thought of as well. Because of his big arm, his future in the field would most likely be as a right fielder. At the plate, Ball’s abilities and style have reminded MiLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo of Shawn Green. Green displayed 30+ home run power at the peak of his career, something that Ball may be capable of once he adds some muscle. It should be noted that Ball has been playing his senior year using just a wood bat instead of a metal bat where he could put up ridiculous video game-type numbers. His decision to challenge himself should speak well for his overall makeup. How Soon Could He Be Playing In Target Field? It’s never easy with pitchers. The Twins have had several of their high profile selections (Kyle Gibson, Alex Wimmers, etc) require major surgery which sidetracked their path to the majors. The adage “there’s no such thing as a pitching prospect” applies. Still, Ball’s mechanics are relatively clean, his arm action is good and -- judging from the available game footage of him online -- his delivery looks fairly repeatable for a tall, lanky pitcher. One area that may take some polishing is his breaking ball. To avoid any injury to his arm in his formative years, Ball’s father would not allow him to throw a curve rather focusing on a changeup – which is a plus pitch for him and one of the more difficult pitches to develop later on (just ask Vance Worley). This edict meant Ball just recently began throwing curves last year during his junior season and reports are that while the movement is good, the consistency is not quite there. If The Twins Draft This Guy, They Messed Up Because… On the whole, drafting hard-throwing high school southpaws has not been a great return-on-investment for major league clubs. Back in 2007, the Hardball Times published a study that showed as a group, high school power-armed lefties had an extremely poor track record of making it past Double-A within six years of the draft. Between 1996 and 2000, just 25% of those drafted made it past Double-A, it said. The theory is that talent evaluators focus too much on the hard-throwing arm and overlook some of the other faults of a player. Could selecting Ball result in the same disappointment as like a high percentage of high school lefties before him? If The Twins Draft This Guy, They Nailed It Because… Ok, so hard-throwing high school lefties are a big risk. So what? They are also a big reward if you hit on one. Mid-90s chucking lefties are hard to come by. Ball’s skill set, too, presents a unique built-in safety net in the event that he does flame out as a pitcher. Previous Twins Daily Draft Profiles: Monday, May 20 - Sean Manaea, SP Tuesday, May 21 - Austin Meadows, OF

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]4076[/ATTACH]In what is thought of as one of the greatest Simpsons episodes of all-time, Nuclear Power Plant owner turned softball manager, C. Montgomery Burns gave one of his ringers, Daryl Strawberry, an invaluable hitting tip. “You there. Strawberry. Hit a home run,” advised the decrepit hitting instructor. Strawberry took the counsel and smacked a dinger onto the Springfield Expressway. In a perfect world designed by major league hitting coaches, life would be that easy. Certainly, the Minnesota Twins’ newest hitting advisor, Tom Brunansky, would likely agree with that. In reality, hitting coaches have to work with players who have different styles, personalities and needs. There is no “easy button” that fixes mechanics or gets them to recognize what they are doing wrong. Hitting coaches have to surf through a sea of information, digest it and then present it back to the players in a manner in which the players can relate to. Brunansky, much like a couple of his students, made the jump from the minors to the majors this year. In the minor leagues, you have buses and Red Roof Inns. In the majors, you have jets and the Four Seasons. Tools for hitting coaches have just as much separation between levels. In the minors, there are no extensive databases of pitch charts to turn to or PitchF/X cameras lining the walls of the single-tiered stadiums in the Eastern League capturing every bit of movement a pitching prospect has. Minor league hitting coaches work on instinct and experience. “Up here it’s a lot about the approaches and not about all the prep work you put into getting ready to do it because there is so much information, there’s so much video, everything you can have to get prepped and ready to go. Lower level, you don’t really have a lot, you just go out and play. Here you can really get a good idea what you’re getting into and set up a pretty good approach and have an idea what a [pitcher’s] got before you face him.” At the major league level, you can have anything you want supplied for you at the ring of a bell. Justin Morneau wants to know about every slider that the Yankees’ C.C. Sabathia has thrown to lefties before a game? Brunansky could have in that in charts, numbers, graphs or videos in the snap of the finger. That said, even with all the availability, Brunansky does not overindulge his hitters in the deluge of data and video. It’s not that he is advocating flying blind - it is that it can often be overwhelming. “You can get enough stuff here to choke a cow with,” says Brunansky wryly. “You can get anything you want here. There’s some in-depth stuff. You can get any stat, any number, anything you want to look at. But how does that apply? It’s taking it and seeing the [pitcher] and seeing how he pitches out there and translating all that information and breaking it down and going ‘OK guys.’ These guys don’t want to hear all that garbage. It’s my job to go crazy and decipher all that garbage and say, OK, look, this is what he does.” What about the job duty of being the swing repair man? After the first month of the season, Brunansky, it seemed, would have his plate full getting guys comfortable at home plate. The Twins offense in April was fairly anemic. They completed the month with a .239 batting average, 23 out of the 30 team, and a .355 slugging percentage, ahead of just the hapless Marlins. Rookie Aaron Hicks was posterized by pitchers. Justin Morneau provided very little punch in the cleanup spot. Ryan Doumit as well. How does a hitting coach retool on the fly during a sport which has about two scheduled off-days a year? Like a pit stop at Daytona, it seems that major league hitting coaches have just a few moments to tinker under the hood with the mechanics, then pat them on their butt and say go get ‘em. For example, Morneau, as was pointed out numerous times by the Twins broadcasters, was pulling his front side open like a screen door in the wind. This left him vulnerable to being pitched away, which teams happily obligated. When the month concluded, Morneau held a middle infielder-esque .253/.309/.379 batting line and fewer extra base hits than he had fingers on his hands. Would Brunansky set Morneau up with a video viewing room much like the one in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, holding his eyes open and re-watching his swing until the idea of performing that act would make him violently ill? No, although that would be an interesting technique that an experimental hitting coach should try someday (perhaps in the forward-thinking Rays’ organization). Brunansky’s philosophy revolves around executing a physical feel rather than driving home the appearance. “A lot of that goes to just the feel. And that’s what hitting is anyways. Like anytime you play the game – it’s feel. You want guys to not really dwell on what they look at, it’s what they feel. And feel is easy to replicate, the look is tough. You can see something that looks like it needs a mechanical change in the swing and we’ll go try to implement it in the cage or on the field with the rest of the team, but it is feel that is easy to replicate and take that back into a game.” Likewise, the season snowballed quickly out of control for Hicks in the early going. After one month of play Hicks was staring at a .356 OPS and had struck out in over a quarter of his plate appearances. Many openly wondered if he would benefit from additional seasoning in Rochester. Would it even be possible to correct course at this level? How do you straighten a player out like that on the fly? Brunansky says it goes back to reintroducing the feel of hitting, getting hitters like Hicks and others scuffling back to the point in the batting cage and drills where they have a fundamentally sound swing. Dozens of at bats may go by without reaping the benefits of the changes but the message is that the coach would like to see the seeds of success sown during prep time. “It’s not so much that it is ‘to take effect on the field’,” says Brunansky. “It is more or less ‘to take effect in the cage’. That’s all I look for. Look for replication in the cage, the feel in the cage and take it on the field for BP. And then after that I don’t them to think, I don’t want them to do anything. I want them to set the approach for the guy that they’re facing and the situation that they are in and trust what they did. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, you have a [bad] swing. Heck with it. We go back to work.” Has Brunansky’s influence been a factor in the offensive resurgence in May? Obviously there are plenty of reasons for a significant rise in performance in a small period of time – some of that begins and ends with Joe Mauer. Yet the Twins find themselves with a .272 average in May, ninth-best in baseball, with a much improved .449 slugging percentage, fifth-best of the month so far. Individually, those struggling in the first month have rebounded nicely. Hicks has vastly reduced the amount of strike outs and put the ball in play with some power. Morneau is hitting .375. Doumit is slugging .500. It is nearly impossible to separate Brunansky’s contributions from the player’s talent, however, this month they are working well in tandem.

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[ATTACH=CONFIG]4036[/ATTACH]On Saturday, May 4, Ryan Doumit, at .203, was not even hitting his weight. With a slugging percentage of .291 to boot, the Minnesota Twins’ switch-hitting catcher/DH was a few nights of binge eating hot wings from matching that number as well. As a regular guest of manager Ron Gardenhire’s vital fifth spot in the batting order, Doumit’s woes directly impacted the team’s offense. An offense, which had concluded April with just 92 runs scored – ahead of only the Chicago White Sox at 89. Last year, while providing crucial support in the heart of the order, the vast majority of his plate appearances came from the left side of the plate. His total numbers are buoyed by whether or not he succeeds as a left-handed hitter. In 2012, he hit a respectable .288/.335/.488 and dropped 13 of his 18 home runs from the port side. That carried him through the year and earned him his contract extension. This year, however, Doumit had yielded little returns from either side of the plate. That is until the trip to Boston. Despite leaving Thursday night without a hit, Doumit did a great deal of damage in a two-day span which included six hits in nine at-bats, two home runs and a double. Heading into Fenway, he was the owner of the sad .203 average and a middle infielder-esque .554 OPS. He had not hit one jack job all year. When the Twins left the city, Doumit’s average was 30 points higher and his OPS had 100 points added to it as well. He also smacked two dingers. What changed was his ability to square up on pitches…in the zone. [Pause while audience gasps.] Doumit entered the Boston series not necessarily chasing after pitches out of the zone at a higher rate than last year but he was making contact with pitches out of the zone. Opponents – fully aware of the fact that Doumit is a pull hitter – have attempted to defuse his powers by feeding him with pitches away, hoping he tries to pull them and, thus, turn them over for weak grounders. Here’s a better visual reference to understand what was happening during the series in Cleveland: http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/theeight_1368168501_Doumit_2-0.JPG http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_3-2_1.jpg As a pull hitter, it is not a surprise to see teams attacking him with pitches away. Additionally, they had increased the usage of changeups on him (from 15% to 22%) in order to see if he will roll over on those offerings. These past few games, however, we have seen something different out of Doumit. Compare those points of contact to the ones he made while in Boston most recently: http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_HR1.JPGhttp://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_1B.JPG http://apps.startribune.com/blogs/user_images/Doumit_HR2.JPG Clearly, when a hitter makes contact with pitches in the zone, they are better able to square the ball off the barrel of the ball. Doumit’s poor pitch selection may indicate why he has had an inordinate amount of grounders put into play this year %) in comparison to his career average (43%). Without the elevation, he would suffer a power outage. Heading into the Boston showdown, Doumit was put the ball on the ground 35 times versus the 31 times he got underneath it. That changed significantly in Massachusetts when he went vertical eight times and bounced three times (save for Thursday night’s game). It is no surprise, then, that when we witness Doumit accumulate extra base hits, he is elevating the ball much better. Also a curious aspect to Doumit’s inauspicious start has been his inability to make pitcher’s pay when he has been in favorable counts. In 2012, when he had been up on pitcher’s, he absolutely raked - posting a .327 average and a 1.026 OPS ahead in the count. This year, that average is down to .154 with a OPS of .584. The results in those situations circle back to his expansion of the zone where two of the three examples above came in hitter’s counts. Is this a corner-turn moment for Ryan Doumit? It is definitely plausible that the Twins are seeing the old Doumit return with his swing decisions exercised in Boston. It would be wildly beneficial as the team has suffered with his lack of production in the heart of the order. Keep an eye on his swing location through the upcoming home stand to see if this output continues.

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