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Jim Sankey: Extra Innings: If everything goes right, Bucs place third

jim sankey, allied news, grove city, pa.
·4 min read

Mar. 28—Let me say this right up front: I am not a fan of analytics, a process of looking beyond traditional stats (home runs, batting average and RBIs for batters and wins, innings pitched and strikeouts for pitchers).

In many instances, these complicated tools have overtaken a manager's "hunch" for in-game decisions, as managers instead pore over information that supposedly helps them select strategies to determine best use of the team's roster.

We oldtimers remember when an person sat behind home plate lifting a radar gun to determine a pitch's speed, perhaps an early form of analytics, which have gone through changes suggested by Bill James, the Oakland A's and others to arrive now at Statcast, which MLB.com defines as "a state-of-the-art tracking technology that allows for the collection and analysis of a massive amount of baseball data, in ways that were never possible in the past."

In 2015, all 30 teams began using a combination of camera and radar systems. But 2020 saw the arrival of Hawk-Eye, which increased tracking ability.

Each major-league club now has a dozen Hawk-Eye cameras around its ballpark. Five of those, which have higher frames-per-second rates, focus on pitch tracking. The other seven are dedicated to tracking players and batted balls.

Hawk-Eye has led us to be bombarded by facts about velocity, movement and spin rate and direction for pitching; exit velocity, launch angle, hard-hit rate and batted ball distance for hitting; sprint speed and base-to-base times for running; and arm strength, catch probability and catcher pop time for defense.

The problem with this updated "sabermetrics" is that we often don't hear or read about the traditional, long-time ways of evaluating. Ignoring tools many fans grew up with, announcers employed by the teams they describe give us an arbitrary, pick-and-choose way of evaluation that parallels the same process of using statistics to "prove" a point.

All of these new ways to measure athletes' performances cannot replace the use of wins or saves for a pitcher and RBIs for a batter. No one can provide an example where a hitter's launch angle or hard-hit rate resulted in a multi-year, nine figure contract or a catcher's pitch framing or pop time or a pitcher's active spin rate propelled a player onto the top-10 highest paid athletes.

For Pirates fans, we have been bombarded with all kinds of weird combinations of letters as proof that Mitch Keller and, before his elbow/arm injury, JT Brubaker form one of baseball's best starting pitcher duos. You hear about their coming into their own last year based on xFIP, FIP, BABIP, wRC, ERA+, tERA, PV and VELO, but seldom do you hear that Keller was 5-12 and Brubaker 3-12. For those keeping a calculator at home, you can figure that's a combed 8-24 — hardly what most of us would call a strong top of the rotation.

It's true the 2023 Pirates spent $30 million on free agents, but let's be real: The team had no other competition for those players (possible exception: Andrew McCutchen), and all got only one-year contracts. Wouldn't you be happier if they had used that $30 million to bridge the gap between what Bryan Reynolds asked and the Pirates offered?

While the team won't lose 100 games again, they seem destined for fourth place ... unless if absolutely everything goes right, they could finish third ahead of the Cubs.

I'm pretty sure teams make the playoffs based on wins, not spin rates, and end-of-season awards are based on homers, RBIs and batting average, not launch angles. So based on wins, not Statcast, here's where you can expect teams to finish after Game 162 on Oct. 1.

—AL East: Toronto, New York Yankees (WC), Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Boston

—AL Central: Cleveland, Minnesota (WC), Chicago White Sox, Detroit, Kansas City

—AL West: Seattle, Houston (WC), Texas, Los Angeles Angels, Oakland

—NL East: Atlanta, New York Mets (WC), Philadelphia (WC), Miami, Washington

—NL Central: St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago Cubs, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati

—NL West: San Diego, Los Angeles Dodgers (WC), San Francisco, Arizona, Colorado

Keep in mind that the probability that these predictions will be accurate is minuscule. Try to predict something in your life that's going to be true in six months and see how that works out.

It's fun to try, but hard to achieve.

JIM SANKEY writes his Pittsburgh Pirates and Major League Baseball columns for Allied News. His "Extra Innings" pieces run every week during the MLB season.

JIM SANKEY writes his Pittsburgh Pirates and Major League Baseball columns for Allied News. His "Extra Innings" pieces run every week during the MLB season.