One of the most difficult aspects in the world of analyzing baseball players involves separating our perception of a player from his actual true talent level. Early last season, Cliff Lee’s previously established talent level prevented many from believing that he could produce such an incredible season. After the small sample of dominance in April fans questioned if Lee was “for real.” As May came to its close fans began to hop aboard his bandwagon. Following several more starts in June people became convinced that the lanky lefty had in fact broken through a plateau and become a different pitcher. Lee’s is an extreme example but Kyle Lohse had a very similar season.

After essentially posting league average numbers since 2002, Lohse put up 2.4 wins in 2007, splitting time with the Reds and Phillies, in two very homer-happy stadiums. He signed a 1-yr/$4 mil contract with the Cardinals in the off-season and became the low-risk bargain of the year by putting up 3.1 wins. Following the success, the Cardinals must have been convinced that Lohse, too, was “for real” and inked him a much-ridiculed four-year extension.

Just like Lee, fans struggled to believe that a pitcher previously considered to be average at best could somehow become so effective. Entering this season most anticipated a regression from Lohse towards the production levels of 2002-06, numbers that certainly merited his spot on a roster but did not necessarily call for an average annual value of $10+ mil per season.

Entering today’s action, Lohse had made three starts and amassed 21 innings, scattering 13 hits, just one of which left the yard. Never a dominant strikeout pitcher, his raw total of 12 and rate of 5.14 were hardly earth-shattering but he had only issued three free passes to the tune of a Maddux-esque 1.29 BB/9. All told, Lohse boasted a 2.57 ERA and 3.14 FIP, good enough for 0.6 wins after a mere three weeks.

In a 12-8 win against the Mets earlier today, Lohse surrendered just one earned run over five innings of work, another quality outing in which he lowered the earned run rate to just 2.42. Lohse likely would have continued to pitch past the fifth however he sustained an injury covering first base and is going to undergo an MRI to see where he stands. Granted, he has only made four starts this season, but this is beginning to have a familiar feel, namely in that there are probably plenty of fans wondering if last season plus this April is enough to prove that Lohse has become a different and much more effective pitcher.

One way to find out is to check out his pre-season projections as they are derived primarily from weighting data from the previous seasons. Before his stellar 2008 campaign, Lohse’s previous three FIPs were 5.06, 4.55, 4.34. He clearly displayed signs of improvement in the controllable skills department but a crude projection for 2008 would call for a mark somewhere in the 4.40-4.50 range.

After 33 starts and 200 innings at a 3.89 FIP, Lohse projected to right around 4.14 entering this season. His season was not incredible enough to prove to the systems that he had become a true talent +3.1 win pitcher but rather somewhere in the +2.5 to +2.8 wins vicinity. I’d like to toss this out there to anyone interested in throwing in their opinions, but at what point will you consider Lohse to legitimately be a very good pitcher if he continues to keep up his current performance level?

Before Matt Stairs connected in the 8th inning for a solo home run to end Dave Bush’s no-hitter, I was trying to figure out how on earth Bush was getting hitters out. He wasn’t exactly dominating with raw stuff.

Take a look at some of the graphs from Dan Brooks Pitch F/x tool.

His fastest pitch of the day was 90.4 MPH. He threw a variety of fastballs, ranging from 86 to 90, averaging around 88 MPH. The algorithm identified another 21 pitches as change-ups, ranging from 81 to 86 MPH. Some of them were probably just fastballs with a little bit taken off, though. He also mixed in some cut fastball/slider type in the low to mid-80s, and topped it off with a big slow curve that averaged 68 MPH.

If I went to a high school game and saw a right-handed pitcher topping out at 90 without much sink and featuring a curve that hit 70 with some wind behind it, I’d assume that he had a pretty good chance of not getting drafted this summer. It’s just not the kind of stuff you expect to encounter in a major league starting pitcher, especially a righty.

To have that kind of stuff throwing a no-hitter at the defending World Champs is enough to make you fall out of your chair.

Bush is the kind of guy who thrives on throwing strikes, but he didn’t even really do that today. Check out this chart:

That’s not painting the corners and peppering the strike zone to get ahead of hitters. 45 of his 111 pitches were outside of the Pitch F/x strikezone (which isn’t perfectly accurate, of course). Most of the stuff in the strike zone is on the higher side, which helps explain the 10 flyouts. There’s just nothing there that indicates “tough to hit”.

Help me out, Brewers fans. How on earth was Dave Bush able to hold down a line-up with some pretty good left-handed bats while throwing high school velocity and locating it up in the strike zone?

Here’s a question – who is the worst team in the American League this year?

The Indians currently have the worst record at 5-10, but they have the highest wOBA of any team in baseball and a significant amount of talent. With a -5 run differential, they’re not even struggling that much out of the gates. I think we can safely disqualify them.

Both Oakland and Los Angeles are off to 5-9 starts, but they entered the seasons as the two teams picked to contend for the AL West division title. The Angels have been playing at less than full strength, while the A’s are waiting for their newly imported offense to start hitting. They might not be great teams, but they have plenty of reasons to think they won’t be among the league’s worst.

Tampa Bay is 6-9. They were in the World Series last year. They’re out.

Texas is 6-8 so far, and most people had them finishing last in the AL West. As always, the offense is good and the pitching is bad. But with an offense this good and a ton of young talent on the way (Derek Holland just arrived in the majors to lead the wave), it’s hard to see them finishing with less than 70 wins.

Minnesota? They’re 7-9 without Joe Mauer, and while they have the worst run differential in the league so far, adding an MVP-calilber catcher will help significantly.

Baltimore? 7-9 to start off, and like Texas, they can score but not pitch. However, like Texas, there’s just too many good players on the O’s to see them as truly awful, and Matt Wieters will eventually join the club.

Every other team in the AL is currently above .500. Kansas City and Seattle are good candidates to regress from unsustainable hot starts, but they each have wins in the bank that aren’t going to be taken away. Even if we expect them to play at their projected preseason levels, they’ve won enough games early on to add a couple of wins to our end-of-season expectations.

If there’s a truly bad team in the American League, I can’t find them. There are teams that are better than others, but it’s the National League that features all the turkeys this year. Right now, it looks like every team in the junior circuit will finish with 70+ wins.

It’s amazing to consider, but some major league regulars are yet to take ball four and their free base. Okay, I lied, it’s not “some” as much as “a pair”. Mariners shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt and Giants backstop Bengie Molina have appeared at the plate a collective 100 times entering Wednesday’s games, and combined had zero walks. Zero intentional walks, zero hit by pitches, etc.

Neither of them are all too fond of OBP boosting. Molina’s career BB% is 4.1% and Betancourt’s is 3%.

In fact, Betancourt’s career high in walks in a single season is 17, the same number that current walk champion Adam Dunn had entering Wednesday’s games. Yeah, he really is that impatient.

Given Betancourt’s distaste for the walk, it’s no surprise that he’s only seen four counts go to three balls, with only one of those being a non-full count. Heck, this isn’t even Betancourt’s longest dry spell in the past calendar year. Last season, from April 29th until May 28th Betancourt went 103 plate appearances in between walks.
Remember, this is a hitter with a career batting average of .283, slugging percentage of .401, and .301 batting average on balls in play. This is not Ichiro Suzuki or Vladimir Guerrero, this is a below average hitter refusing to take a free base. When combined with poor defense, it’s easy to see why most Mariner fans would enjoy seeing Ronny Cedeno starting at shortstop.

Players can be offensive contributors without walking like Dunn or Pat Burrell, but not walking at all makes it nearly impossible. Of the 33 players with 5% or less walks this season, 24 have negative wrAA. Here’s a look at how the two are correlating thus far:

And there you see our pals Molina and Betancourt, both spared too much ridicule, thanks to decent slugging percentages thus far.

The Los Angeles Angels have experienced a slew of unfortunate injuries on top of the devastating death of young Nick Adenhart. If starting the season without Kelvim Escobar in the rotation wasn’t bad enough, John Lackey and Ervin Santana were both lost to ailments with the jury still out as to when they will return. Though the Scioscia-led Halos always seem to find a way to win, as Dave recently noted, all of this hardship might be too much.

According to Ken Rosenthal, the Angels are currently showing interest in Paul Byrd, Pedro Martinez, and Mark Mulder. Tony Reagins isn’t going to sign all three of these unemployed hurlers but Robo’s report suggested that there is a better than good chance that one of them ends up in California by summer’s end. All three have issues, however, ranging from Byrd’s desire to play to the shaky health histories of both Martinez and Mulder.

Mark Mulder has not pitched a full season since 2005 when a +2.2 win value deemed him a league average pitcher. He had experienced great success in Oakland for several years before going to St. Louis in the Dan Haren deal, but his time in St. Louis worked out about as well as Carl Pavano’s with the Yankees. In 2006, he made 17 starts and posted an ugly 6.01 FIP in 93.1 innings of work, and had made just six total appearances over the last two seasons. At 31 years old, Mulder is not exactly a decrepit southpaw trying to hang on, but while his previous success will garner at least one more opportunity to pitch in the big leagues, why would the Angels, a team ridden with pitching injuries, sign someone with his history?

The same goes for Pedro Martinez, who might be a league average pitcher when healthy but who spends more time on the disabled list than on the roster. With Pedro, some think that signing him for just half of a season will eliminate the wear and tear that leads to his issues, but again, why take that risk?

Byrd publicly stated he was going to sit out the first half of the season, an odd move given that he has not exactly been at the top of everyone’s wishlist. Though durable, Byrd has not been truly effective since the 2005 season with the very same Angels. Strangely enough, Byrd’s strikeout rates experienced a sharp dropoff between the 2004 and 2005 seasons and have never looked back. He no longer fans hitters at a rate in the vicinity of the league average but is still tremendous with limiting free passes.

If the Angels were going to sign any of these three pitchers, given their injury troubles, Byrd makes the most sense given his durability. The bigger question is why would these three cover substantial ground on the Reagins Radar? A guy like Odalis Perez is available, likely for a fraction of the price of Pedro, and with much more of a track record for staying healthy than Mulder. I’m not necessarily advocating that the Angels sign Perez but rather questioning why their search would be somewhat limited to Martinez, Byrd and Mulder. A team suffering from pitching ailments should in no way, shape or form, bring in equally risky players to fill the void.

Earlier in the week we took a look at the starting rotation of the Houston Astros and how some of its members managed to string together 22.1 consecutive scoreless innings. With Wandy Rodriguez, Russ Ortiz and Felipe Paulino in the mix, the non-Oswalt shutting out of opponents was rather surprising. Another NL Central team boasted solid starting pitching in the same span: the Pittsburgh Pirates. No, pitchers like Ian Snell, Jeff Karstens, and Ross Ohlendorf are not going to rack up award votes this season but the entire Pirates rotation has been more than adequate to date.

Sitting at 8-6 after 14 games, Snell, Karstens, Ohlendorf, Zach Duke and Paul Maholm have combined for 10 outings featuring 6+ innings and a maximum of two earned runs. Additionally, on the heels of solid performances from several of these pitchers, the Pirates shut out their opponents four times in the seven game span from April 13-April 20.

Their scoreless innings streak did not match the Astros in large part due to the throttling of Zach Duke in an 11-1 loss to the Braves, but they have still pitched well. The news isn’t entirely sunny for the Pirates rotation, however, given their abysmal strikeout and walk rates. Ian Snell has the only above average K/9 of the quintet at 6.35 but control has continued to elude the once-heralded hurler. With a BB/9 of 4.76 his K/BB clocks in at a quite low 1.33.

Ohlendorf has fanned 4.0 batters per nine with Duke at 4.64. Maholm may have that sexy 0.87 ERA but his identical 2.61 walk and strikeout rates leave little to be desired. Karstens actually has a much higher walk rate at 6.3 per nine as compared to just a 3.6 K/9.

Ohlendorf and Maholm each have nonexistent home run rates and Duke has a 0.42 HR/9 that in no way will stay that low. On the flipside, Snell may actually see his home run rate come down over the course of the season but it will take improved control in conjunction with the regressed gopher rate in order for him to remain effective. Looking at their xFIP, which normalizes the home run rate, we get the following numbers:

Zach Duke:      4.79
Paul Maholm:    5.42
Ian Snell:      5.17
Ross Ohlendorf: 4.77
Jeff Karstens:  7.46

While I hate to rain on the parade in Pittsburgh, fans of these guys should not expect results similar to what has been seen so far unless each of these pitchers improves in a few different areas. Pitching to contact while missing a somewhat limited amount of bats and getting bailed out by the defense is nice but usually translates into extended success when the pitchers have solid control on the forefront of their resumes. The Pirates starting staff has either walked too many hitters relative to their strikeouts or failed to strikeout a decent number of hitters, all the while posting unsustainable home run rates.

This does not mean that the members of their rotation cannot be successful so please avoid reactions proclaiming that Karstens or Ohlendorf CAN keep their performance up. I’m not arguing that they can’t but rather that they won’t if the current peripherals hold true. A lot needs to happen for this rotation to be successful in 2009 and while it might be a longshot it certainly falls into the realm of possibility.

Yesterday, we took a look at the hottest team in Minor League Baseball: The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. So let’s flip things around and take a peak at the team with the worst record in the minors: The Stockton Ports. The club is an affiliate of the Oakland Athletics and plays in the High-A California League. It’s a little surprising that a minor league club of the A’s would be struggling so much given the emphasis that the organization puts on developing minor league talent. Let’s see what’s going wrong for The Ports club, which is 1-12 (.077) on the season.

The Pitching
Collectively, the Stockton pitchers have a 4.58 ERA, which is tied for the third highest in the 10-team league. The staff has also allowed the third most hits and walks. The team is middle-of-the-road with 105 strikeouts in 112 innings pitched.

Likely the most recognizable name on the pitching staff is Craig Italiano. The right-hander entered the season with some promise, but he has not pitched well in the California League. Last season, Italiano, 22, had a 2.94 FIP in 70 low A-ball innings before moving up to Stockton where his FIP jumped to 6.73 in 30 innings. This season, through three starts, Italiano has a FIP right around the same level, mainly due to poor control (11 walks in 12.1 innings). On the positive side, he has not allowed a home run.

Tyson Ross was the club’s second round draft pick in 2008 out of the University of California. He’s finding the early going a little bit easier than Italiano – at least on the surface. Ross, who turns 22 today, has been helped by his defense a bit and has a 4.40 ERA… but the FIP is 6.48. He’s allowed 18 hits in 14.1 innings of work, along with six walks and eight strikeouts. Ross has also been touched up for three home runs in as many games.

The top starting pitcher right now is Carlos Hernandez, who has a 3.45 FIP in three starts. The 22-year-old southpaw has allowed 16 hits in 16 innings, but he’s commanding the ball well. Another left-hander, Derrick Gordon, 25, is having the most success out of the bullpen. He has not allowed an earned run or walk in nine innings. He has given up just three hits with 11 strikeouts.

The Hitting
The California League has some pretty good hitter’s parks, but the club in Stockton is collectively hitting a horrible .185/.241/.257. The team is last in all three categories. The next lowest batting average by club is Modesto (a former A’s affiliate) at .228. Stockton is second last in homers with just five and tied for last in stolen bases. It’s no wonder the club has scored just 28 runs in 13 games. On the plus side, the club has the second fewest strikeouts with 88.

Truth be told, there are no big names amongst the hitters in Stockton. The biggest “prospect” would be outfielder Jermaine Mitchell, who is third on the club with a .244 average and has yet to collect an extra base hit. The 24-year-old outfielder has a lot of tools, but he has never been able to translate those consistently to the diamond. It’s Mitchell’s second season in Stockton and he hit .244/.338/.377 in 422 at-bats in 2008.

The top hitter on the Stockton club is outfielder Todd Johnson, who’s hitting .271. The best slugging percentage goes to catcher Matt Smith at .423. Both Smith and Johnson are tied for the highest on-base percentage at .321. Outfielder Matt Spencer, obtained last year from the Phillies with Adrian Cardenas in the Joe Blanton deal, is leading the team in homers (3) and RBI (9). Unfortunately, that comes with a .163 average.

The best news for Stockton at this point is that it’s not even the end of April. The club – as well as the individual players – has plenty of time to turn things around.

2008 was a roller coaster ride of a rookie season for Kosuke Fukudome. He started off strong, hitting a game tying home run in the bottom of the 9th in his major league debut that endeared him to Cubs fans from the start. He hit .327/.436/.480 in April and rode that hot start to an All-Star game appearance.

The second half was not as kind, however. He hit just .217/.314/.326 after the All-Star game, pounding the ball into the ground and showing little power. He lost playing time after the team acquired Jim Edmonds, and was basically a reserve in September. His ability to hit for enough power to play regularly became a regular topic of discussion, and the team went out and signed Milton Bradley over the winter, pushing Fukodome into a center field platoon with Reed Johnson.

He didn’t exactly inspire hope and confidence that a rebound was coming with a poor performance in the World Baseball Classic, either. For a lot of Cubs fans, his second half collapse and struggles in the WBC were part of a trend that showed Fukodome simply wasn’t a very good hitter.

So much for that. Fukodome is hitting .357/.491/.714 in his first 55 plate appearances of the season. He has nine extra base hits in 12 games. To put that in perspective, he had 11 extra base hits after the all-star break last year. He’s almost matched that in two weeks of the 2009 season. Fukodome has excellent plate discipline, so when he’s hitting for power as well, he’s a very good player.

Sometimes, a slump is just a slump. Pitchers didn’t figure out Fukodome last year – he just had a bad couple of months. It happens. The Cubs still look like the best team in teh National League to me, and their center fielder is one of the reasons why.

One of the talking points buried in last weekend’s Rays/White Sox series is the difference in organizational philosophies. More specifically, pitching philosophies.

Over the years, the White Sox have established the cut-fastball as their “add-on” pitch of choice. John Danks , Mark Buerhle, and D.J. Carrasco amongst others throw the cutter thanks to the help of pitching coach Don Cooper. The Rays on the other hand are an organizational that preaches the way of the change-up. James Shields is notorious for helping teammates like Scott Kazmir, David Price, and even Troy Percival refine their grips on perhaps baseball’s most practical pitch.

Going beyond that “add-on” pitch, the two teams have a similar outlook on what makes for a good relief staff.

Dave covered the Rays bullpen a few days ago. Describing them as a unit that “throws feathers” due to the lack of hard throwers. The White Sox are perhaps the antithesis of that philosophy. This year, the Rays’ bullpen throws an average fastball of 87 miles per hour, easily the lowest group total in the league. The White Sox’ pen is closer to 92 miles per hour. Last year the Rays finished second to last in combined fastball velocity while the Sox lead the league.

With the exception of Grant Balfour, the rest of the Rays pen throws sub-90 heaters. On the flip side, the White Sox have three relievers who routinely hit 92-94, three who sit 89-91, and one who sits around 87-89. If Brian Shouse and Matt Thornton ever get into a paper ball throwing match, I know who I want on my side.

It’s pretty fascinating that two teams can entirely different approaches to assembling and teaching pitchers while experiencing success in such techniques.

In an attempt to make the site a little easier to use for newcomers or really just anyone, I’ve implemented a quick glossary in the player pages.

Just click on the quick glossary button in any section on the player pages and you’ll get a quick overview of all the stats in that section. This will probably make its way into the leaderboards too.

Someday we’ll get around to updating the actual glossary….