Casey Fien has found his niche. Primarily fastball-curveball when he broke in with the Tigers, in 2009, the Twins reliever has since added a cutter and learned how to pitch. As he told me a few weeks ago, “Now I know what I can get away with and what I can’t.”

Last summer, Fien didn’t get away with a pair of misplaced pitches at Fenway Park. Protecting a 1-0 lead on a scorching afternoon, he surrendered back-to-back tenth-inning home runs. The gophers left a scar.

“It hurt a lot,” said Fien. “I think it still hurt at the end of the season. As a reliever, you never focus on your good games. Ever. You always look back at the negative ones, and I didn’t get a pitch far enough inside to David (Ortiz) and he wrapped it around the pole. Against (Mike) Napoli, I thought I made a pitch, but he popped it to dead center.”

Fien didn’t watch it go out. Knowing it was gone, he simply put his head down and walked to the dugout.

His big-league debut is a more pleasant memory. Facing the White Sox at Comerica Park, he pitched two-and-a-third scoreless innings, allowing a lone walk. The first out he recorded was an inning-ending pop-up, immediately proceeded by a startling revelation. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Performances are magnified in October and April. Everyone watches the playoffs with greater focus, and in April everyone is starved for baseball leading to massive consumption and potential over-analysis. Carlos Beltran has had little difficulty delivering in October, with 16 home runs and a .333/.445/.683 line in 219 postseason plate appearances, but this April, coming off his worst season in 15 years, increased scrutiny is coming for the soon-to-be 38-year-old. In the second year of his three-year, $45 million contract, whether Carlos Beltran will be able to produce is a question without an easy answer.

In each of the last two games, Carlos Beltran has come to the plate for the New York Yankees late in the game, trailing by one or two runs with runners in scoring position. On Wednesday, with the Yankees down 3-1, Beltran came to the plate with the bases loaded against Brett Cecil with nobody out. A wild pitch advanced all the runners a base leaving men on second and third. He could not check his swing on a 2-2 offspeed offering.
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The Houston Astros just finished a three-game series at home against the Cleveland Indians, and a few things presented themselves in respect to our discussions during this past offseason. The discussions in question pertained to two subjects: the quiet strength of the Cleveland pitching staff, and the strikeout propensity of the Houston lineup.

It was hard to know exactly where the line between the two started and ended. We can say this about the Cleveland rotation: it looked good. Corey Kluber was Corey Kluber. Carlos Carrasco looked like he did at the end of 2014, looking unhittable with his high-90’s fastball and great changeup. Finally, Trevor Bauer put the icing on the cake in the third game, showcasing his combination of wildness and raw stuff to exit with a no-hitter intact after 6 innings. Cleveland fans are obviously encouraged by what they saw in the front end of their rotation this series. It’s not a surprise two of them just signed lengthy contract extensions.

On the other side, the results were clear in another way for the Houston offense:

• .208 OBP
• .048 ISO
• 37.5 K%

Those stats were informed in large part by performances like this, from Evan Gattis:

Gattis is also the only player since at least 1914 with 2 4-K games within his team’s 1st 3 games of a season

— Baseball Reference (@baseball_ref) April 9, 2015

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You almost couldn’t dream of a better matchup. Thursday in the capital, Stephen Strasburg went up against Matt Harvey. It would technically be possible to improve on that. Some would suggest Corey Kluber and Clayton Kershaw. Others would suggest Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw. But, on pure stuff alone, Strasburg’s a delight to watch, and Harvey’s every bit his equal. At least, that’s what we recalled. We also hadn’t seen Harvey pitch a major-league game in a while.

Harvey began and ended on a pitch count. He still managed to go longer than Strasburg did, spinning six shutout frames on 91 pitches. I don’t know if there was a single representative at-bat, but I will volunteer this first-inning showdown against Bryce Harper:

1. low curveball, 83, whiff
2. high fastball, 97, whiff
3. high fastball, 97, ball
4. high fastball, 97, whiff

In case that one doesn’t do it for you, you might prefer the third-inning at-bat, where Harvey whiffed Harper with a high fastball at 97. Or you could skip ahead to the sixth, where Harvey whiffed Harper with a high fastball at 96. Between Strasburg and Harper, the Nationals have two young stars who’ve generated near-unparalleled hype. Thursday, Harvey out-played them both. It was a rather emphatic way for the phenom to kick off what promises to be an electric campaign.

And the Mets themselves are thinking big things. Bigger things, at least, than they’ve been thinking about the last few years. This year, they want to be a year of transition from finding and developing talent to winning. Like a smaller-scale Cubs, if you will, and, like the Cubs, the Mets think they have the ability to get to the playoffs, even without the injured Zack Wheeler. It stands to reason that, if things go well this year for New York, it’ll be in large part because of what Harvey can do, now that he’s back.

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If someone asked you to guess which right fielder provided the most value on the defensive side of the ball last year, the only logical answer is Jason Heyward. Heyward was so far above his compatriots that you almost wonder if he was simply not supposed to be a right fielder and that Fredi Gonzalez’s lineup card handwriting was somehow confusing the players and sending them to the wrong positions.

Heyward posted 32 defensive runs saved and a 24.1 ultimate zone rating in 1317 innings in right field. No one else was even in the ballgame, but if you had to guess who was second, it might be a little more difficult. Enter Kevin Kiermaier. Kiermaier’s 14 DRS and 16 UZR in right field landed him at second on a list of right fielders sorted by DEF, which is UZR and the positional adjustment.

DEF is a cumulative statistic, meaning more opportunities can lead to higher numbers. Heyward’s DEF was 17.3 and Kiermaier’s was 13.3, but Kiermaier played just 526.1 innings in right field last year. If you convert those marks to a rate statistic, say UZR/150, then Kiermaier rockets up to an insane 56.6 UZR/150 while Heyward settles just above 20. By the numbers, Kiermaier was the most dazzling defender we saw in right field last year.

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In Monday’s “Opening Day Staff Survey,” Dave said the storyline he was most looking forward to this season was, “Breaking in young pitching prospects as relievers.” This was a little bit vague, but he elucidated on it further later that day when he recorded his weekly podcast with Carson. If you skip to the 30-minute mark, we get to the heart of the issue:

“Earl Weaver used to do this all the time with his relievers back in the 70s, but he broke them in as long relievers; we didn’t really have these one-inning specialists that they have today. So you’d break in these young pitchers, but they’d go two, three, four innings. They’d have to face hitters multiple times, they’d have to work on multiple pitches, they’d have to pace themselves a little bit. To me, that’s a little bit different than breaking in a guy as a ninth-inning guy or as an eighth-inning guy and telling him to throw as hard as possible for 15 pitches.”

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When you look at the player pages for a prospect, you’ll see present and future grades. When it comes to the grades per pitch, the difference between the two is mostly consistency. As Kiley McDaniel puts it, the future grade is “usually the best version of the pitch currently.”

If you watched Michael Pineda pitch yesterday, you know exactly what this means. By Gameday, he threw nine changeups, but by PITCHf/x he threw 12, and the number might be even larger. Only twice before in his 42 starts has he thrown that many. They weren’t all good. But when they were good…

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Ben and Sam talk about how we should talk about baseball’s latest decline in scoring.

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