Yet another negative consequence of years of mismanagement. This mess will take a couple of years to clean up.

It’s getting REALLY old to keep hearing this, because it’s simply not true. The Mariners were able to adequately patch CF and 1B (as well as the entire OF defense) from last year’s team in the space of ONE offseason, and it didn’t take exorbitant contracts to do it, either. It is not going to take Fort Knox and every prospect in the minor league system to add a LHB middle infielder or LHB OF, and replacing the SS and C with simply decent 2 WAR players will help move the team strongly forward, plus there’s something close to 40-45 million in salary moving off the books next year in the form of Beltre, Bedard, Washburn, Batista and Griffey, so it’s really not like Zdurencik won’t have resources to make intelligent FA signings OR take on salary in a trade.
This team is not that far away from being able to contend, and the doom and gloom needs to stop.

And, less than a year later, the votes are in: eponymous coward wins.

Also, Felix in 2009 didn’t throw appreciably more changeups (13.6% in ‘09; 13.3% in ‘08) or significantly fewer fastballs (63.2% in ‘09; 65.9% in ‘08)… he just threw better ones. And was rewarded. Don’t spend the $78M all in one place, kid.

What does this mean? Are these the fastball locations for every fastball to both righties and lefties that Felix has thrown this year?

Sorry I was not 100% clear. The black dots show the movement of Felix’s fastballs. The heat map shows the run value based on movement of ALL RHPs fastballs to LHBs. Just because Felix’s fastballs are in the blue region doesn’t necessarily mean his will be unsuccessful. Since I am averaging over all RHPs it does not take into account speed or location. All it shows is that based solely on movement you would expect him to be unsuccessful versus LHBs.

Also, if Felix’s fastball stayed mainly in the happy red area instead of the sad blue area, would that make his fastball dominating to both lefties and righties, or one of the two? Or are the red areas red because they’re out of the strike zone and you hitters can’t reach them?

That figure is not the location of the ball but its movement. The movement of a pitch is the difference (broken up into vertical and horizontal components) from where the ball ends up and where you would expect a spinless ball to end up. So it measures how much rise or sink and break in or out a pitch has.

In black below I indicate the movement of his fastballs. I plotted that over the run value for all fastballs from RHPs to LHBs based on movement.

What does this mean? Are these the fastball locations for every fastball to both righties and lefties that Felix has thrown this year?

Also, if Felix’s fastball stayed mainly in the happy red area instead of the sad blue area, would that make his fastball dominating to both lefties and righties, or one of the two? Or are the red areas red because they’re out of the strike zone and you hitters can’t reach them?

They proved with Silva and Morrow they’ll demote players who aren’t performing… Beltre would be the next one if they had a suitable replacement.

Did it hurt your fingers to write something that dumb? Beltre could get a day or two off at the most, but he’ll get demoted if and only if he falls off the planet defensively, or the trade market for him completely evaporates.

Could someone please define “run value”.

I don’t know specifically which they’re using but I would presume some form of Linear Wights system such as Batting Runs.

The run value for Felix’s changeup is even better against righthanders than lefties, which is counterintuitive, but he hardly ever throws it to them, which is a fairly normal pitching pattern. Should he be using it much more often against righties as well, or will it lose effectiveness if used more that way? Also, to what extent is this data point, or for that matter the reliever evaluations, subject to small sample size caveats?

I think that there are too few pitches to reach any conclusion about his changeup to RHBs. I think there were only about sixty in the past three years. There might also be a selection bias of the types of hitters he throws them to.

How are the run values calculated?

I am going to do a post at fangraphs in the next week explaining how to calculate run values.

Run value is calculated with respect to what? If a pitch has -0.021 run value on average, what exactly does that mean?

The run value is the change in run expectancy. For each out and base runner state (e.g. one out runners on the corners) we know the average runs scored for the rest of the inning. Let’s say it is x. Now say a RHP throws a two-seam fastball to Johjima, on average after that pitch the number of runs score in rest of the inning will be x-0.021.

On the other hand, is that chart on his FB movement 4-seamers, 2-seamers, or both?

The fastball movement chart for Felix is all four-seam fastballs. He does throw both, but at least by my and the pitchf/x classification algorithm most of them are four-seamers. For his run value chart I grouped all the fastballs.