Ben and Sam discuss whether it would make sense for a team to sign a recent Tommy John surgery sufferer to a long-term contract extension.
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One of the most confounding things in baseball is an obviously talented starting pitcher who doesn’t generate many strikeouts. Generally speaking, we expect to see strikeouts match the stuff, and while sometimes we just confuse a good fastball for a good repertoire, there are guys who just pitch below their ceilings. Garrett Richards, in the past, was such a guy. It wasn’t just that he possessed one of the fastest fastballs in the majors — he’s also thrown a sharp slider, yet through his first three years he posted the same strikeout rate as Jeff Karstens and Kevin Millwood. Because of the incongruity, Richards has been considered a sleeper, but sometimes all a sleeper is is an early-stage disappointment.
Right now it doesn’t look like Richards is going to be a disappointment. It looks like Richards is going to fulfill that sleeper potential people have long figured he had. Wednesday, Richards was dominant against the Phillies, whiffing eight over seven shutout innings. Now, through a quarter of the year, Richards has struck out one of every four batters he’s faced. One out of four is bigger than one out of six.
David Price had one of the best starts of his career on Tuesday. With any start, you always have to consider the opponent, since it’s the opponent who’s responsible for doing anything with the pitches that get thrown, but at least by the numbers, Price was absolutely outstanding in Seattle, turning in a walk-free complete game with a dozen strikeouts. He was sufficiently dominant that he was allowed to handle the ninth inning of a one-run game, and he closed the deal with a 96 mile-per-hour swinging strikeout. Not that it was the swinging strikeouts for which people will remember the effort.
Closing the bottom of the first, Price froze Corey Hart with an inside running fastball. That was the first of eight called strikeouts Price would record, giving him twice as many called strikeouts as whiffs. It was tied for the highest called-strikeout start of the 2014 season, and while most called third strikes are the result of a hitter being caught off guard, in the end Price’s called strikeouts were pretty similar.
The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced last April by the present author, wherein that same ridiculous author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.
Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists* and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on the midseason prospect lists produced by those same notable sources or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.
We’ve updated our WAR Graphs tool to include pitcher comparisons:
Source: FanGraphs — Pedro Martinez, Clayton Kershaw, Sandy Koufax
It’s also now possible to compare batters and pitchers on the same graph:
Source: FanGraphs — Clayton Kershaw, Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander
| 11:43 |
: Happy Wednesday. No one has blown out their elbows yet, so get your questions in now before the Tommy John scourge hits you.
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| 12:01 |
: And because I see that the queue is full of fantasy questions, here’s your weekly reminder that I’m not a fantasy guy, and I’m the wrong person to ask. Eno will be here tomorrow, and Collette chats on Fridays. Ask them.
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| 12:02 |
Which stat do you like better, OBPA or WHIP? |
| 12:02 |
: I don’t know what OBPA, but I don’t like WHIP, so probably OBPA, assuming it doesn’t have something to do with number of orphanages pillaged.
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| 12:02 |
Is Shelby Miller going to be ok? It sounds like it’s a mechanical issue, but he seems so far off from the beginning of last year. |
| 12:03 |
: He had a rough stretch in Triple-A a few years ago that he worked through, so I wouldn’t say there’s no chance for a recovery. That said, this isn’t a minor problem. He’s terrible right now.
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“Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.” — Crash Davis, in 1988’s classic baseball flick “Bull Durham”
This piece of advice from Kevin Costner’s character has been translated into nearly every ballpark in America, as fans and commentators alike lament a struggling pitcher’s inability to just throw the ball over the plate. Even if they hit the ball, it’s not another boring walk, and besides, you have seven guys standing behind you who are covering most of the field; as long you keep the ball in the ballpark, odds are that the hitter is going to make an out. Trust your defense, pitch to contact and, most importantly, work deep in the game.
But is putting trust into your defense actually a good strategy? After all, while most balls in play become outs, almost every strikeout becomes an out — there are rare times when a batter does reach on a strikeout due to a wild pitch or passed ball — and a pitcher’s job is to rack up as many outs as he can, while allowing as few runs as he can in the process. Are strikeouts an inefficient way of collecting outs, and would a pitcher be better off trading them in for those democratic ground balls if he wants to get as many outs as possible while staying within his pitch count? Let’s dive into the numbers.
Overall, there are 105 starting pitchers who have thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title. The average pitcher in this group has thrown 3.8 pitches for every batter faced, so given today’s rough guideline of 100 pitches per game for a starter, a pitcher can be expected to face about 26 batters per game, or get through the entire batting order nearly three times. However, because some batters reach base, the average qualified starter has required 5.3 pitches for each out he has recorded, meaning that he records about 19 outs per start, or 6 1/3 innings pitched.
Do groundball pitchers get more bang for their buck, as is often suggested? Let’s take a look at those 105 starters broken into quartiles based on ground ball percentage this year.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
New York AL at New York NL | 19:10 ET
Masahiro Tanaka (49.0 IP, 58 xFIP-, 1.2 WAR) faces Rafael Montero (41.2 IP, 24.1% K, 10.6% BB at Triple-A). The latter, who has typically produced more excellent numbers than one might otherwise expect from his armspeed and build, makes his major-league debut. The former has recorded both the second-best xFIP- and best overall swinging-strike rate among qualified starters.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.
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.
The New York Mets have a talented group of young arms in the minor league system. That’s great news in terms of the pitching talent pipeline but it might make roster management difficult.
The club has eight arms that would be at risk of being lost in the annual Rule 5 draft if they were to be left unprotected: Noah Syndergaard, Cory Mazzoni, Logan Verrett, Jack Leathersich, Gabriel Ynoa, Luis Mateo, Domingo Tapia, and Akeel Morris.
Just over a month ago, Dave Cameron made an astute observation: Kenley Jansen was suddenly throwing harder in the earliest part of the season. Or as he put it, “PITCHF/x has already classified more 97+ mph pitches from Kenley Jansen this year than it did all of last year.” And since Jansen was already a hard-throwing and dominant closer with an unhittable pitch even before the velocity jump, it made for an interesting proposition. Namely, what would hitters do against a Jansen who was actually throwing harder? What happens if you take someone who is one of the three or four best in the world at what he does, and then give him something more to work with? What then?
Six weeks into the season, Jansen now has one more 97-plus mph pitch (21) logged than in his entire career through 2013. He’s also already allowed more than half as many earned runs as he allowed in any of the last three years, and he has four meltdowns as compared to eight in all of 2013. Hitters have a .276/.349/.408 line against in 2014, as opposed to .158/.245/.249 previously. He’s throwing harder, finding less success despite it, and, well, baseball is just the worst sometimes. (This may be residual Jose Fernandez anger.)
This has led to a pretty predictable narrative: Jansen is throwing harder…
…and it’s because of that that he’s had problems. Causation! It implies correlation, except when it doesn’t.
