The Detroit Tigers have a defensive coordinator this season. The role is being manned by Matt Martin, who joined the coaching staff shortly after Brad Ausmus was hired in November. Martin came to Motown with nearly two decades of experience as a minor league manager, coach and infield coordinator.

His job isn’t to reinvent the wheel. The 44-year-old was brought in to help make the Detroit defense more efficient. Metrics are part of his process, as is fine-tuning fundamentals. Much like his manager, Martin is a combination of old-school and new-school.

According to Baseball Info Solutions, the Tigers have 66 shifts on balls in play [as of Tuesday] – the seventh fewest in baseball – and two Shift Runs Saved. Nuanced positioning is far more prevalent. Even when it’s only a step or two, it’s by design – and it’s effective. Ian Kinsler has seven Defensive Runs Saved, which trails only Kolten Wong among second baseman. Miguel Cabrera, who was -18 as a third baseman last season, has two Defensive Runs Saved at first base.

Martin discussed defensive alignments – including The Big Papi shift and the importance of instincts – when the Tigers visited Boston earlier this month. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about the Royals, then catch up with the boys of Biogenesis.

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One of the coolest stories taking place right now is the emergence of George Springer in Houston. Springer is among the more interesting prospects in recent years, and after a bit of a rough introduction to the majors, Springer’s caught fire. He homered again Wednesday, and over the course of the last month, Springer’s gone deep nine times, ahead of Yasiel Puig, Giancarlo Stanton, and Troy Tulowitzki. Springer’s been one of the best power hitters in the world, and over that month, he’s also hit 40% fewer home runs than Edwin Encarnacion.

Encarnacion stands at 15 dingers in 30 days, and over those 30 days, that’s more home runs than have been hit by both the Cardinals and the Royals as whole teams. Previous to the hot streak, Encarnacion had gone deep just once, prompting people to worry that something was wrong. If something was wrong, it was resolved in a damned hurry, and now Encarnacion is among the Blue Jays who have led the team into a playoff position. It’s interesting to examine some of Encarnacion’s recent trends. It’s interesting, too, to compare those against larger ones.

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Yesterday, David Appelman unveiled our new heat maps, and I love them. As I noted yesterday, the linear weights graph is especially awesome, as it allows you to see where a particular hitter or pitcher is having success, and not just settling for incomplete answers like outcomes on balls in play, which ignores all the variable outcomes that happen on takes, or on swings that don’t put a ball in play. Being able to highlight a player’s overall performance on all pitches is a big step forward for the heat map concept in general.

But beyond even just individual players, there is some really fascinating information available. Based on his discussion with Chris Young, Eno got David Appelman to generate some great charts of league-wide averages for groundballs and home runs. And now, with the release of the heat map tool for all pitches on a league-wide basis, we can begin to say some pretty interesting things about pitching to specific parts of the strike zone.

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With the addition of the new heatmaps, we have a new tool that lets you whip up league average heatmaps.

The tool can be conveniently accessed under the “leaders” section in the site’s main navigation.

“You should go look at the research again and see what the charts say,” Chris Young, the Seattle Mariners pitcher, emphatically told me one afternoon this season. We were talking about high fastballs and he didn’t agree with something I’d said.

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We’re somewhere between 25% and 33% into the 2014 season, which means we’re about 25% to 33% into the first season of the Instant Replay Era. Stylistically, I didn’t need to capitalize that, but it makes it feel like a bigger deal. In 2024, it won’t be a big deal, but instant replay is still a shiny new toy that we’re playing and tinkering with, so it seems like a more important thing at the moment. There are a bunch of new rules, new strategies, and new things for managers to think about. So, to paraphrase Ed Koch, how we doing?

Jeff Sullivan, in his handsome wisdom, already talked about replay’s affect on the time of the game. The gist — games are a little longer than last year, but games have been getting longer for some time, so it’s hard to say definitively how much replay has affected that. At the time of this writing, there have been 773 games played. According to Baseball Savant’s replay database (point of order — this is my informational source going the rest of the way), there have been 389 challenges, 60 of which have been issued by umpires. That comes out to just about a challenge per every two games. Is that a lot? We don’t know! May isn’t quite over, but there isn’t much difference in challenges between this month and April. So far, managers have found their stride when it comes to challenging calls.

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Over a quarter of the 2014 season is in the books and the sample sizes are creeping toward a representative level. Over the past couple of weeks, we have been taking somewhat deeper looks at some of this season’s more noteworthy players and performances to date. “Noteworthy” doesn’t always mean “best”, though it does in most cases. Today, we’ll take a look at the first quarter performance of Mark Buehrle, who notched his ninth win of the season on Tuesday night. Exactly what is going on here? Has Buehrle found another gear late in his career, ascending to a new level of performance? Or is he simply Mark Buehrle, guy who takes the ball every fifth day, walks no one, pitches to contact, fields his position, and keeps his club in the ballgame, with no bells and whistles? Read the rest of this entry »

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
Pittsburgh at Los Angeles NL | 22:10 ET
Gerrit Cole (64.2 IP, 91 xFIP-, 0.3 WAR) faces Dan Haren (62.2 IP, 89 xFIP-, 0.8 WAR). The former, according to PITCHf/x, has produced the third-highest average fastball velocity this season (95.6 mph) among 101 qualified pitchers. For a moment’s worth of amusement attempt to guess the first two pitchers by that same measure. Afterwards, resume your wild search for distractions from the abyss.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Television.

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