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.

Joey Gallo, 3B, Texas Rangers (Profile)
Level: High-A   Age: 20   Top-15: 6th   Top-100: N/A
Line: 185 PA, .342/.459/.795, .452 ISO, 17.8% BB, 23.8% K

Summary
Joey Gallo used to throw pitches. Now he just abuses them.

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Hey, everybody, I’m the guy here who talks about pitch-framing, and I’m here to talk about pitch-framing — sort of. You might think there’s too much written about pitch-framing, but it’s a real thing that we can measure, so that’s kind of like saying you think there’s too much written about on-base percentage. Baseball stats are baseball stats, and that’s what we talk about here. But I’ll say this much: Usually, when people talk about framing, they’re talking about the catchers who do it. But I want to focus on the pitchers.

That is, the pitchers who benefit, and the pitchers who do the opposite of benefit. It’s important to remember good and bad framers don’t simply do what they do in isolation. That performance has an effect on pitcher statistics — statistics we’ve long thought to be fielding-independent. It’s an aspect not often discussed, in part because it gets incredibly complicated, but I figured I’d take this chance to provide a 2014 season update on pitchers and their zones. I’ve written these posts before, but not yet this season.

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Ben and Sam banter about ejections and the Diamondbacks, then answer listener emails about pitch count histories, career strikeout records, a baseball version of the XFL, and more.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

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By popular demand, we’ve added K% – BB% (K-BB% on all pages) to all pitchers stats sections, including leaderboards, player pages, splits, etc….

Enjoy!

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Last off-season, the Red Sox made Stephen Drew a qualifying offer, giving him a chance to return for 2014 with a $14.1 million salary. He turned it down, and sought a multi-year offer in free agency instead. No offers came, and the Red Sox moved on. They brought Xander Bogaerts to camp as their regular shortstop, and gave Will Middlebrooks a chance to reclaim the starting third base job. While Boras made noise about the problems with the qualifying offer system, he continued to suggest that Drew’s market would emerge once the draft occurred and the attached compensation pick went away. The draft will be held in two weeks, and so Drew could have signed with any club as a “true free agent” 16 days from now.

Instead, today, he essentially accepted the qualifying offer from the Red Sox, taking a pro-rated version of the $14 million salary he turned down seven months ago. Once he’s ready to resume facing live pitching, Drew will presumably once again take over as the Red Sox shortstop, with Bogaerts shifting back to third base, and Middlebrooks serving as depth or a trade chip once he returns from the DL.

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What follows represents an attempt by the author to utilize the projections available at the site to identify the five starting pitchers whose per-inning WAR projections have most improved since the beginning of the season.

For every pitcher, what I’ve done is first to calculate his preseason (PRE) WAR projection prorated to 150 innings, averaging together Steamer and ZiPS forecasts where both are available. What I’ve done next is to calculate the prorated WAR for every pitcher’s rest-of-season (ROS) WAR projection (again, using both Steamer and ZiPS when available). I’ve then found the difference in prorated WAR between the preseason and rest-of-season projection.

When I attempted a similar exercise last month, I used updated end-of-season projections instead of prorated rest-of-season ones. The advantage of the latter (and why I’m using it here) is that it provides the closest available thing to an estimate of any given player’s current true-talent level — which, reason dictates, is what one requires to best identify those players who have most improved.

Only those pitchers have been considered who (a) are currently on a major-league roster and (b) have recorded at least 20 innings at the major-league level and (c) are expected to work predominantly as a starter for the duration of the season. Note that Projection denotes a composite Steamer and ZiPS projection. PRE denotes the player’s preseason projection; ROS, the rest-of-season projection. Inning estimates for both PRE and ROS projections are taken from relevant pitcher’s depth-chart innings projection. Data is current as of some time in the middle of the night between Monday and Tuesday.

5. Drew Hutchison, RHP, Toronto (Profile)
Projection (PRE): 115 IP, 7.5 K/9, 3.4 BB/9, 1.2 HR/9, 4.38 FIP, 1.1 WAR
Projection (ROS): 132 IP, 8.3 K/9, 3.2 BB/9, 1.1 HR/9, 3.93 FIP, 1.7 WAR

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This afternoon, Mike Petriello put up a really good post on Dallas Keuchel’s breakout season. Included in that post was a graph plotting every 2014 qualified starter based on two variables: their groundball rate, and their strikeout rate minus their walk rate. Basically, the point of the graph was to show not just how extreme Keuchel’s groundball tendencies have been, but how rare it is for a pitcher to get that many groundballs while also getting strikeouts and limiting walks.

I gave Mike the graph after seeing that he had beaten me to writing a post about Keuchel’s emergence, but that’s not the only interesting data point on the chart, so I’m giving that chart its own post, highlighting some of the more interesting pieces of information that we can gain from plotting pitchers based on those variables.

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On Monday night, I sat down to watch a presumed pitchers duel featuring successful AL West starters Garrett Richards and Dallas Keuchel, which I suppose says something about both the 2014 baseball season to this point and me as a person. Richards, who’d entered the game with a top-10 FIP in baseball, disappointed, needing 27 pitches to get through a three-run first inning. He managed to avoid a disaster and actually stuck around through seven innings, but allowed 12 base runners, five runs and a mere lone strikeout, if whiffing Chris Carter even counts. I’m sure there’s a good starter in there, but being as this was the first time I’d had the opportunity to really watch him this year, I haven’t seen it yet.

And Keuchel? Well, I’m fairly certain this is the first time we’ve ever written about Keuchel on the main page of FanGraphs. He shut down the Angels on two runs over 8.2 innings for what was very nearly his second career shutout, five days after shutting out the Rangers for his first career shutout. After entering the season with a 5.20 career ERA in 239 innings, he’s now got a 2.92 ERA over the first 61.2 innings of his 2014 — numbers emphatically backed up by a 2.81 FIP and 2.68 xFIP. That xFIP is No. 5 in baseball, tied with Zack Greinke, just ahead of Johnny Cueto and Jon Lester; his swinging-strike percentage is No. 13, right in between Madison Bumgarner and Corey Kluber.

You know what? I think we’re finally going to have to talk about Dallas Keuchel. Read the rest of this entry »

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