Ben and Jason talk to Jesse Katz about his reporting on Yasiel Puig’s harrowing escape from Cuba.
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Episode 441
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he considers la règle du jeu, as it were.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 43 min play time.)
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Maybe the most annoying thing you could say is that the Brewers are going to regress. They’re not going to keep winning 83% of their baseball games. They’re not going to end the season with a +378 run differential. They’re not as good as a 1.80 team ERA, and they’re not going to keep running a .250 BABIP against. They’re on a nine-game winning streak, but they’re going to lose, and they’re going to lose, inarguably, dozens of times. The Brewers, in truth, aren’t close to this good. No kidding. This year’s Brewers aren’t literally the best team in the history of baseball.
But every hot streak is unsustainable, just as every cold streak is unsustainable. Any team that wins nine in a row and any team that wins 10 of 12 will have contributing factors you can’t expect to keep up in the long run. What’s important isn’t determining whether or not the Brewers will keep winning at this clip. They won’t. What’s important is determining where the Brewers stand now, relative to where they stood a couple weeks ago before the season was underway.
The Brewers have two Baseball Systems Openings:
The Milwaukee Brewers are currently seeking a full-time Architect, Baseball Systems. This individual will collaborate with the Baseball Research & Development team and will assist in the development and maintenance of an aggregated player information and evaluation system. This position requires strong statistical, database management skills and experience as well as a demonstrated ability for independent thought while working within a team framework.
Right-hander Ubaldo Jimenez produced his third consecutive poor start for the Baltimore Orioles on Sunday, recording just three strikeouts against 27 opposing batters while posting a single-game xFIP of 5.23 (box). It was also the third consecutive start for his new club in which Jimenez produced an average fastball velocity below his 2013 average of 92.1 mph (or 91.9 mph average when accounting for all pitches classified as either a four- or two-seam fastball).
It’s both (a) largely unimaginative and also (b) not entirely inappropriate to begin any investigation into a pitcher’s poor performances with an investigation into velocity trends. A hastily performed study by the present author, for example, demonstrates that — amongst a large pool of starting pitchers from 2002 to -11 — that every mile-per-hour was worth about a tenth of a run of xFIP. Such a study, of course, accounts mostly for pitchers who have already adapted to their own particular velocity limits. One assumes that any one individual pitcher, when compelled to work with reduced velocity, would demonstrate an even greater increase in xFIP.
The Dodgers are off to a 9-4 start, despite plenty of roadblocks on the way. Clayton Kershaw has pitched just once and likely won’t be back until well into May. A.J. Ellis is out with knee surgery. Brian Wilson has had elbow trouble. The Yasiel Puig saga never seems to end, on or off the field. Matt Kemp has three homers, but only one hit otherwise. Maybe the success is because five of those wins have come against Arizona, who seem to be worse than anyone expected, but it’s also because Zack Greinke & Hyun-Jin Ryu & Dan Haren have been great, the bullpen has been effective, Dee Gordon has been shockingly useful so far… and because Adrian Gonzalez has been surprisingly powerful.
Gonzalez is currently riding a nine-game hitting streak. He’s had at least one extra base hit in each of the last eight games and homered four games in a row, both one shy of tying team records. He’s tied for second in the bigs in homers with five — and hit at least one additional ball, arguably two, that might have made it out of most parks that aren’t Petco — and he’s tied for first in ISO with Jose Bautista at .400. (His .427 wOBA is nice as well, and No. 16 in baseball, but hard to get too excited about when Chase Utley is still rolling along at .607.) He’s raising hopes that at 31 (he’ll be 32 in May), it’s not too late for the Dodgers to get the elite hitter that San Diego and Boston saw between 2006-11, rather than the merely above-average second-level first baseman that the Red Sox and Dodgers saw in 2012-13. Read the rest of this entry »
There are now splits options on the FanGraphs leaderboards that allow you to see exactly how a player performed at an individual position. These positional splits also include a Value tab, so you can see a player’s WAR totals and components at a specific position.
Please note that these are different from the existing positional filters, which filter on qualified players (25% of games played) at a particular position. The new splits will only show the stats for a player while he was playing a specific position.
This is particularly useful at the team and league level where you don’t want full season stats from players who play multiple positions in your leaderboard.
If you’re going to have one great pitch, it’s probably good to have a great fastball. It’s thrown more than all the other pitches combined, at least. But in today’s baseball, the benders and breakers get the oohs and aahs — and the appreciation of your coaching staff. Tony Cingrani has heard all about it on his way up to the big leagues.
As he progressed through the Reds’ system, the former college closer always heard from the coaching staff that he needed to work on his slider. They told him he needed the pitch to “get to the next level,” Cingrani told me this spring, but he disagreed. “I’m not going to lose the game on that one pitch.” So he worked on it in bullpens and on the side. And he led the minor leagues in ERA in 2013.
He made it to the big leagues on the back of that fastball, so it’s hard to disagree with his approach. What a fastball it is: according to PITCHf/x, only one pitcher threw more than 750 four-seam fastballs and got a better whiff rate on the pitch last year — Madison Bumgarner. The Reds’ lefty even got more whiffs with his four-seamer than gasaholics Matt Harvey and Max Scherzer. And by percentages, only Bartolo Colon threw the pitch more often last year. Of course he’s throwing it a ton, it’s working.
How has Cingrani thrived when everyone knows what is coming?
| 12:01 |
: After 2 weeks of no FanGraphs chats (ESPN Chat and then away), Dan Szymborski returns, just as terrible as ever.
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| 12:01 |
So… should i be starting Bailey against pitt today?? |
| 12:02 |
: Obviously depends on what your choices are, but Bailey’s generally a safe play even with his poor start.
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| 12:03 |
Where the hell have you been? I’ve needed someone to tell me if Emilio Bonifacio and Michael Morse can be the best players in the league!!!! |
| 12:03 |
: The answer to 60% of questions this month is “Because April.”
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| 12:03 |
My monday mornings have sucked for two weeks because of you. |
Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.
Rafael Montero, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Triple-A Age: 23 Top-15: 5th Top-100: 94th
Line: 11.0 IP, 11.45 K/9, 0.82 BB/9, 0.0 HR/9, 0.93 FIP
Summary
The Mets’ diminutive right-hander has torched the Pacific Coast League (PCL) thus far, but the organization may need to get creative if its to best utilize his services.