Bill James - The Bill James Handbook 2019

www.baseballinfosolutions.com

A Division of ACTA Publications

Cover Design by Tom A. Wright

Front Cover Photo by David Richard, USA TODAY Sports

Back Cover Photo by Jake Roth, USA TODAY Sports

Copyright 2018 by Baseball Info Solutions and Bill James

All rights reserved. No information contained in this book nor any part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form for commercial use without permission from the publisher.

First Edition: November 2018

Published by:

ACTA Sports, a division of ACTA Publications

4848 North Clark Street

Chicago, IL 60640

(800) 397-2282

www.actasports.com www.actapublications.com

ISBN: 978-0-87946-025-9

ISSN: 1940-8668

Printed in the United States of America by McNaughton & Gunn

I would like to dedicate this book to the following people: my fianc Annalise and my family: my mom, dad, and brother, Mike. Your unwavering love and support means so much to me and gives me the confidence to pursue my professional and personal passions. You have all shaped me in so many positive ways and without you I would not be the person I am today.

Also, I would like to thank all the BISers past and present who have contributed to the growth of our company. I am thankful that I got the chance to cross paths with so many of you. Specifically, I want to thank our Ops staff and our Video Scouts. You do a great job handling an incredible volume of work year in and year out and I cannot say enough how much I appreciate your hard work and dedication. It has been a pleasure working with all of you.

Go Garnet!

Tim Kwilos

This is our 30th annual edition. We thank you, our readers, for having a near-limitless thirst for baseball.

The way the game is played and how fans follow it has changed significantly since the first Handbook arrived in bookstores in the fall of 1989. For example, lets look at the role of the starting pitcher. The Los Angeles Dodgers Tim Belcher led the majors with eight shutouts in 1989. Since then, that number has steadily declined. This past season, there was a nineteen-way tie for the league lead of one shutout. No one has matched Belcher for three decades, and the 2018 season total is the lowest since 1874. The emerging prominence of the bullpen over the past several decades has led to the more-defined roles of closer, set-up, and now, most recently, the opener. Teams, such as the Tampa Bay Rays and the Minnesota Twins, experimented this season with using a reliever to open the game. These changes are in stark contrast to the prior mentality of handing the ball to your best pitcher and anticipating that he will pitch the entire game.

We also got to experience something this season that fans in Japan had already witnessed, the return of the two-way player, specifically 23-year-old Shohei Ohtani. He became the first player to pitch 50 innings and hit 15 home runs since Babe Ruth in 1919. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim utilized him on the mound and as a designated hitter, and when you review his stats later in the Handbook, you can draw your own conclusion on the successfulness of the venture.

Overall, the game is evolving offensively, particularly from the power-perspective where striking out as a batter is no longer considered embarrassing and swinging for the fences, ideally without using banned substances, is at an all-time high. As a team, the New York Yankees set the record for most home runs in a season at 267, breaking the 1997 Seattle Mariners previous mark by three. In the process, they also set the record for most players with double-digit home runs in a season with 12.

You may have noticed that we included the catcher and umpire along with Jose Ramirez on the front cover. As youll read later in the book, we wanted to convey their significance in the evolving dynamic unfolding in the current game.

Over the years, improvements in computers and technology, such as PITCHf/x and Statcast, have helped to efficiently gather data, which has facilitated more research insight from new metrics and visualizations allowing us to peer deeper into the game. Weve dedicated more pages to original research and data, such as our Strike Zone Runs Saved section later in the Handbook, so that youll have more to ponder during the grueling months of the off-season.

Bill James, along with John Dewan and an unending string of accomplished analysts, have spent considerable time each fall over the past three decades planning and producing this book so that you, our dear reader, have the best possible information in front of you by November 1. We hope you enjoy reading and debating the topics in the Handbook as much as we have enjoyed creating it.

Rob Dougherty

Coplay, PA

October 5, 2018

Bill James

OK, that stupid Launch Angle thing didnt work; what do we do now?

Two years ago, a great many hitters in baseball were convinced that they could get better by hitting the ball in the air more often. There were four elements of this, essentially:

1) Creating a swing path, an uppercut, which tends to cause the bat to collide with the lower half of the pitched ball more often than the upper half, thus launching the ball into the air,

2) Swinging more often at pitches up in the strike zone than down,

3) Changing the strike point or target in the hitters mind from the center of the baseball to below the center, and

4) Crowding the plate so that you can pull more balls.

It is certainly true that balls hit in the air are preferable, from the hitters standpoint, to balls hit on the ground. Balls hit in the air often become extra base hits, including home runs, and very rarely become double plays. Balls hit on the ground become double plays.

There is not a big difference in the batting average on ground balls vs. fly balls. The big difference in batting average is in line drives. If a ball is hit on the ground, it decelerates rapidly due to its contact with the ground. If a ball is hit in the air it does not decelerate as rapidly. Makes a big difference.

The idea, a couple of years ago, was to get hitters to do more of the good stuffhitting fly ballsand less of the bad stuff. Of course I am jumping the gun in declaring this attempt to have been a failure, but it is my opinion that this was just a fad, really. It didnt work, and it didnt really have a chance to work.

Why?

Well, first of all, the notion that there are ground ball hitters, fly ball hitters and line drive hitters is not exactly true. It is sort-of true. All hitters hit ground balls, fly balls and line drives, and all pitchers give up ground balls, fly balls and line drives. There is just a little difference in the mix for each pitcher and each hitter. Statisticians sometimes exaggerate these differences in the way that they state them, but you cant really become a fly ball hitter, because there isnt really any such thing; you can just become more of a fly ball hitter than you were before. You can change the mix a little bit.