While I ran through my thoughts on all 30 teams in the division previews, I had a few stray things that didn’t fit into the capsule format, so I’m tackling them here. A year ago, I wrote this same post, including gems like this one:
2. I believe the Royals are being overrated.
Let’s see if I can do better this year. On to the five things I believe about the 2015 season. Read the rest of this entry »
| 12:39 |
: Sorry for the delay, I was doing important and exciting things I can’t tell you about
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| 12:40 |
Good afternoon, sir. |
| 12:40 |
: And to you!
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| 12:41 |
So now that you’ve written approximately 55 million words on prospects, what’s left to ask you? |
| 12:41 |
: I’ve had a lot of suggestions, most of them include getting really drunk and/or wandering through some sort of wilderness
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| 12:41 |
Hey Kiley, got a Matt Wisler comp? |
A player can become a poster child of sorts for his club’s offense. Edwin Encarnacion notwithstanding, I think of Jose Bautista and his pull power when I think of the Blue Jays. Mark Trumbo’s free-swinging ways embody the Diamondbacks, at least for me. Ben Zobrist hasn’t even played a game for the A’s yet, and his multipositional nature and OBP-centric skill set already makes him my go-to guy. The closest correlation between club and player, though, is an easy one for me. The Cardinals’ team-wide hit-it-hard-to-all-fields philosophy is most completely embodied by Matt Holliday. Read the rest of this entry »
This time of year, we’re always asked, what should fans believe in? For five or six weeks, we issue constant reminders not to pay much attention to spring-training statistics. And when there are finally real, new, meaningful statistics, it’s still important to bear in mind that small sample sizes make noise of almost everything. It’ll be weeks before some numbers stabilize. For others, months. For still others, even longer than that. You think taking things away from baseball is easy? Conclusions are actually difficult to reach! Unless your conclusion is “this team won the game”, or “this team lost the game”, or “this number might mean this one thing but then again it might not.”
You want to know what’s really interesting, from a statistical perspective? Evidence of real change. For a pitcher, maybe it’s a new pitch, or a change in velocity. For a hitter, maybe you’re talking about a new swing. Some years ago, I remember getting excited about Michael Saunders in spring training. It wasn’t that his numbers were good — it was that he was showing in-game power to the opposite field, which he’d never really done before. That seemed like a real thing, and sure enough, Saunders became an actual decent big-leaguer.
You follow? Yeah, you follow. And, while you’re following: Monday, in Kansas City, Mike Moustakas hit an opposite-field home run. It’s considered to be his first-ever opposite-field home run. This is the kind of thing that draws my attention. If you want to know what I’m willing to care about in the early going, an easy answer is firsts.
It’s far too early to put serious weight on just about anything (save for injuries, or growing concern about those injuries) you see in the first 36 hours of a baseball season. It’s far too early to do much of anything other than say, “hey, baseball’s back, isn’t that great?” I mean, Buddy Carlyle and Chris Hatcher are on pace for 162 saves. The Red Sox are on pace for 810 homers. Probably not going to happen. Could happen. Won’t happen.
So we know not to look at the in-season numbers for at least a few weeks, lest we forget what Charlie Blackmon and Dee Gordon did last April as compared to the rest of the season. But it’s not like we’re simply not going to talk about baseball until then, and it’s not like there aren’t takeaways we can make from what we’re seeing right now. Like this one, for example: Seemingly years after most smart baseball team gave up on the save rule, why are we still seeing managers risk victories in service of it? Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 547
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 discusses Mookie Betts versus Cole Hamels, the Craig Kimbrel trade, and other relevant matters.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 41 min play time.)
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A few years ago, Brandon McCarthy threw out a question that baseball Twitter scrambled to research: how often do Opening Day starting pitchers throw a first-pitch non-fastball? Suggested is that first-pitch fastballs, here, are extremely common and extremely predictable, and the results fell in line. It wasn’t clear there had been any first-pitch non-fastballs, and if there had been, there hadn’t been more than one or two, excepting, of course, the occasional knuckler. Baseball season has started. How does baseball season usually start for every team? With a fastball. It’s almost like a ceremonial first pitch, after the ceremonial first pitch, and before the actual baseball stuff.
Monday afternoon, baseball season started for the Yankees and the Blue Jays. In the top of the first, Masahiro Tanaka opened things by pitching to Jose Reyes. That season-opening pitch of 2015: a low slider, for a called strike, at 81 miles per hour. No mystery — it was a certain first-pitch breaking ball. The next pitch was a splitter. The following pitch was also a splitter. Reyes went down on three strikes, and Tanaka was off to the best of all starts.
Episode 546
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses three of his nearly final organizational lists, in addition to other pressing matters.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 2 min play time.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Because there’s a lot of noise, we tend to look past spring training stats. But recent work suggests that using spring training stats can improve projections, and our own Mike Podhorzer worked with Matt Swartz to show that a pitcher’s strikeouts and walks in the spring are meaningful results.
In other words, if we use our small-sample tools, maybe Spring Training really is a little bit like September: expanded rosters, some meaningless games, but still baseball, being played at a high level. The veterans usually play veterans early in the game, and the minor leaguers don’t get the same number of innings or plate appearances to be grouped with the veterans in any statistical mining we might do.
So, that said, let’s look at the starting pitchers, and their strikeouts. These strikeout rates are basically half-way to the stabilization point — the point at which they represent more signal than noise — and they’ve been (mostly) facing the veterans before they leave early, along the right field line.
Over the weekend, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Kansas City Royals. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Kansas City’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Royals system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.
Below are the top-five prospects in the Kansas City system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.
Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.
5. Brian Flynn, LHP (Profile)
| IP | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | FIP | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 7.4 | 2.6 | 0.9 | 3.74 | 0.2 |
At points during the 2013 season, the left-handed Flynn appeared to be developing into a legitimate candidate for a major-league starting role. He produced strikeout and walk rates of 28.7% and 3.5%, respectively, over his first four starts at Double-A before earning a promotion to Triple-A, where he proceeded more or less in the same fashion, if with some of the decline in his rates that one might expect from facing more difficult competition. He hasn’t exhibited that same sort of ability in the majors yet, however. Traded to Kansas City this offseason in exchange for Aaron Crow, he has the potential to become one of the Royals’ large collection of former starters who’ve found considerable success in the bullpen.