Everything You Could Have Learned This Week: Week of July 6th

“All-Star Game” is a bit of a misnomer, isn’t it? I mean, it either implies that all of the players playing in the game are stars, or that all of the stars in the particular sport are playing in that game. Like, I don’t really think Alcides Escobar or Carlos Martinez are stars (yet), but they’re playing. And Clayton Kershaw is DEFINITELY a star, but he isn’t playing. Therefore, I petition we rename it the “Some-Stars Game.”

No, I’m not currently employed, why do you ask?

Tuesday
If your lifelong dream has been to start more than 35 games in one season in the major leagues, first of all, that’s a very specific lifelong dream, and second, that’s probably not gonna happen. Sorry: The Present and Future of the Starting Rotation, by Matthew Trueblood, Baseball Prospectus

The Rays, with their wily ideas for beating much richer teams, have taken to a full-fledged shuttle system for the fringes of their pitching staff, optioning everyone who can be optioned, it seems, to allow them to cram usable, fresh relief arms onto the roster at times and in places where other teams couldn’t. That’s how they’ve managed to call upon an MLB-high 27 pitchers already this season, a number only 20 teams since 2010 have surpassed in an entire season. Only, the Yankees—the very behemoth the Rays are hoping to outfox by doing this—have also used 27 arms. Every team is flush with options, guys they know (or hope) they can call upon to get a few outs in middle relief, enough to ensure that if the rest of the roster does its job, they’ll get the win.

Pitching staffs can’t grow any more, not really, without an attendant expansion of the roster to accommodate them. That’s probably coming, so it won’t be long before Matt Harvey‘s comments sound strange in hindsight. The 26th man on an MLB roster won’t be a much-needed bench bat or even a ninth situational reliever, but rather, the sixth starter for every team’s rotation. Japanese pitchers and college pitchers will have their adjustment curve to MLB routines considerably flattened. Everyone will go right on asking pitchers to pitch on different rest intervals; it’ll just be a question of whether one gets five days of rest or six. Or seven, I suppose. Julio Urias will one day complain about that.

Some scouts are apparently paid less than peanuts and are also victimized by shady personnel strategies: Scout Hiring and Pay Practices Challenged in New Lawsuit

Wyckoff’s suit alleges that these different agreements violate antitrust law. Specifically, by allegedly agreeing not to fully compete with each other for scouts, teams have artificially depressed the market for their services. Wyckoff contends that but for these allegedly illegal agreements between MLB franchises, teams would frequently hire scouts away from one another, competition that would result in higher wages and better benefits for the employees.

Wyckoff’s lawsuit asserts that the lack of competition has instead allowed teams to pay many of their scouts less than the minimum wage. For example, Wyckoff states that when he was hired as a part-time scout by the Royals in 2013, he received a salary of $15,000 per year. Despite his “part-time” status, he says he was nevertheless frequently expected to work 50-60 hours per week traveling to games, evaluating prospects, and drafting reports. Consequently, he claims that he often effectively received only around $5 per hour for his services, and never received overtime when working more than 40 hours in a week. Both practices, he asserts, violated the FLSA.

Wednesday
Ya still gotta spend to win: Don’t Be Fooled By Baseball’s Small-Budget Success Stories, by Noah Davis and Michael Lopez, FiveThirtyEight

J.C. Bradbury, an economics professor at Kennesaw State University, found that winning more increases revenue exponentially. “Going from 85 wins to 90 is worth more than 80 wins to 85,” he says. As a result, while it might cost more per win for a team that wins 90 games than 85, it makes financial sense because the revenue reward will be higher as well. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle. Additionally, fans of teams that win frequently expect them to continue winning, and management pays more to do so. For a team like the New York Yankees, paying 10 percent more than anyone else for a second baseman who is only 5 percent better than his closest peer is worth the money (and they can afford it).

But though the current narrative revolves around small-budget success stories as an argument against the importance of salaries, baseball has always had small-budget overachievers. “Just because you don’t spend money doesn’t mean you can’t win,” Bradbury says. As long as there has been baseball, there have been teams with low payrolls that have exceeded expectations in the win column.

Friday
Attacking pitchers early in the count is more important for hitters to do these days, but there’s also a stronger correlation now between unintentional walk rate (i.e. not attacking early in the count) and offensive success. How paradoxical!: Be Aggressive! B E Aggressive!, by Matthew Trueblood, Baseball Prospectus

Right now, this remains a unique run environment (as much in its shape as in the volume of cleats crossing home plate), and the myriad changes we’re observing in so many aspects of the game make it hard to succinctly break it all down. Part of that is that we’re getting better at measuring and identifying changes faster than we’re getting better at valuing and weighing them, one against the others. In time, we’ll catch up on that second front, because there’s really only so much more data we can gather in order to improve our understanding of certain elements of the game. For now, I guess the takeaway is: The apparent rising value of aggressiveness at the plate is purely relative. The reason the league is leaking absolute offensive value is that there aren’t enough hitters capable of getting deep into counts and still making good things happen.

Scalping (if you want to call it that) is a bit more complex and cooperative than previously thought, at least in Phoenix: Arizona State study: Ticket scalping might not be as bad as you think, by Shawn Brody, Beyond the Box Score

That means that ticket scalpers in Arizona are working together, but how are they able to do so? Well, as Bozeman outlined for me in a phone interview, it works like this. There are two types of scalpers: vendors and hawkers. In Arizona, if you are going to sell tickets on the public streets, you have to be a licensed vendor. Because of this, hawkers can buy tickets but must rely on vendors to sell tickets. Hawkers, like it might sound, were the people you would typically think to be ticket scalpers—younger, lower income, not well dressed, on bicycles, and lacking a license. They are the people who drum up business and clientele.

As for vendors, they are the people with licenses who actually sell the tickets and run the operation. Because they are licensed—which requires finger-printing, photographs, and a background check—vendors are less likely to be criminals. The interaction between these two groups also leads to a wider area of ticket scalping but a relatively small area where the actual transactions take place.

This is the point of the season during when the current standings are more reliable than the preseason projected standings, right? Ehhhhh: How much should you believe in the standings?, by Jeff Sullivan, Just A Bit Outside

Ever so slightly, there’s a tighter relationship. And there’s a considerably steeper slope. The simplest interpretation: even at this point, you should put more stock in the projections than in what the standings say. A betterinterpretation would be that the jury’s out for now, since we don’t have enough of a sample built up, and there’s lots of potential error in here. But we can at least say the projections aren’t worse than the standings, in terms of seeing the future. We aren’t at the point where the projections can be dismissed. That point probably never comes. Even over 80 or 90 games, a team’s record can deceive.