The St. Louis Cardinals took two of the three games from the Milwaukee Brewers over the weekend, but the wins cannot wash over the losses the team suffered. Over three games, Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, and Jason Heyward all left games early due to injury. Molina did not play on Saturday or Sunday, but has avoided the disabled list so far. Heyward apparently hurt his groin, and after lobbying to stay in the game, he is day-to-day. The biggest blow came on Saturday when Wainwright could not get out of the batter’s box, probably injuring his achilles. The Cardinals will likely be forced to play the season without their ace, leaving the team with options both internally and outside the organization, but no realistic option will make up for Wainwright’s absence.

There were injury concerns with Adam Wainwright heading into the season. After struggling in the summer months of 2014 and gutting through the playoffs with less than his best, an offseason surgery on his right elbow, the same part of his body that needed Tommy John surgery four seasons ago, raised questions about whether Wainwright would be able to carry the load for the Cardinals in 2015. His velocity and strikeouts were down to start the season, but so were his walks, and he’d been brilliant to start the season. Those injury concerns did not come forward as expected when he injured his ankle attempting to get out of the batter’s box, but with Wainwright likely gone for the season the Cardinals face a difficult task replacing one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Despite missing all of 2011 recovering from Tommy John surgery, Adam Wainwright’s 27 WAR since 2009 ranks sixth among Major League Baseball pitchers and is in the top 20 among all MLB players. His 16 wins since returning from surgery in 2012 sit even with Max Scherzer and David Price and trail only Clayton Kershaw and Felix Hernandez among MLB pitchers. Wainwright was incredibly effective when he pitched, but just as important for the Cardinals, he provided massive amounts of innings, preventing wear on a bullpen and a rotation trying to break in young starters.

From 2012-2014, including the playoffs, he pitched over 700 innings, with over 500 of those innings coming in the last two years. Over the last two seasons’ Wainwright’s +11 WAR have accounted for more than 40% of the Cardinals starting pitching total during the time. With Wainwright, the Cardinals’ rotation has pitched very well so far this season, with a 2.39 ERA that is the best in baseball and a 3.06 FIP that ranks fifth. Lance Lynn, Michael Wacha, John Lackey, and Carlos Martinez look to still make up a solid front four to the Cardinals’ rotation, but finding a fifth starter could leave the Cardinals’ scrambling for innings as they attempt to replace their ace. The Cardinals were already looking to manage starter innings this season, per Derrick Goold, and the loss of Wainwright only serves to amplify the difficulty of balancing starter innings with trying to preserve their rotation arms.
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Back at the beginning of Spring Training, I wrote a piece here called Trying to Solve the Alex Guerrero Problem. In that piece, I noted that the Dodgers were in a bit of a difficult position with Guerrero, as they didn’t really have a spot for him on their Major League roster, and his contract made it very difficult to trade him and impossible to send him to the minor leagues. So, after a pretty strong spring, the Dodgers just decided to carry him as a bench piece; there weren’t a lot of alternatives, and having him pinch-hit and draw the occasional start would give them a chance to get a better idea of what he was.

I’m pretty sure they weren’t expecting this. After 24 plate appearances — seven of them coming as a pinch-hitter, a difficult job that most people struggle with — Guerrero is hitting .500 and slugging 1.273, which is the kind of offensive performance you need to rack up +1 WAR (which he already has) in roughly six games worth of at-bats. Guerrero has already been worth +8 offensive runs above an average hitter, placing him 8th on the leaderboard, in between a bunch of guys who have 50 or 60 more trips to the plate. And so now, the Dodgers have a different kind of Alex Guerrero problem.

He’s not going to keep this up, obviously, but the ability to launch seven extra base hits and strike out once in any random 24 plate appearance sample should be enough to earn you more playing time. That power/contact combination is pretty rare, and even over a tiny sample, this kind of performance already forces us to re-evaluate the pre-season forecasts: ZIPS has moved from a projected .316 wOBA to a .327, while Steamer has jumped from .297 to .318; the average of the two has Guerrero posting a 110 wRC+ going forward, making him a pretty solid hitter even after he stops with the Barry Bonds impression.

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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. What follows represents the first edition of NERD scores for 2015.

Read more about the components of NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Houston at San Diego | 22:10 ET
Collin McHugh (18.2 IP, 67 xFIP-, 0.7 WAR) faces James Shields (25.0 IP, 85 xFIP-, 0.4 WAR). After producing last year a strikeout- and walk-rate differential (18.7 points) that far exceeded his previously established levels, the former has both (a) exactly matched that same differential while also (b) inducing about 25% more grounders on balls in play. Probably, if not definitely, related: McHugh has replaced about 10% of his fastballs with sliders. With regard to the Padres, the current UZR figures — published on the site for the first time last night — suggest that San Diego has had predictable difficulties in converting batted balls into outs. Despite that, the club features a 30% chance currently of qualifying for the divisional series.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Probably Houston Radio.

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Ben and Sam banter about the NL DH and then discuss A-Rod’s newfound patience and oldfound power.

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Episode 555
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 a recent pro scouting trip to Montgomery, some notable high-school prospects, and the current state of the international market.

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 12 min play time.)

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Tony Watson was an All-Star last season. If you’re a casual fan and the Pirates aren’t your team, you maybe weren’t aware of that. The 29-year-old left-hander isn’t exactly a household name.

Opposing hitters know who he is. Working as a set-up man in the City of Bridges, Watson had a 1.63 ERA in 78 appearances for the NL Central squad. A year earlier, he was almost as busy and nearly as good. Ever since he was introduced to a sinker by erstwhile Bucs’ backstop Rod Barajas, in 2012, the former University of Nebraska Cornhusker has been stellar.

Watson is a big believer in establishing your fastball to both sides of the plate.

“You have to do that,” said Watson. “Otherwise, hitters can eliminate pitches and portions of the plate. When that happens, you’re basically putting it on a tee for them. I pitch off my fastball with sliders and changeups, and try to keep hitters off balance. Pitching is all about upsetting timing.”

His changeup, which he’s using more frequently – 21% in April versus 10.7% last year – is a pitch he’s always had a good feel for. He throws it with white-on-white deception, and a grip that belies its movement.

“It’s a four-seam grip, but for some reason it comes out looking like a two-seam,” said Watson. “I kind of pronate to get a little more action, and I guess my long-ass fingers have something to do with it as well. 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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The Blue Jays finished their first home stand of the season at the Rogers Centre yesterday, and the discussion surrounding the games has been a little strange so far. The talk has been about the performance of the team, who have started well, but it’s also been about the artificial turf that was installed this past offseason. Is it bouncy? Is it not bouncy enough? Are the balls always rolling foul off of the first and third base lines? These are questions we end up asking when baseball is played on a surface other than grass.

That’s not to say that playing on turf is an inherently terrible thing, it’s just different, and if the choice is between playing baseball or not playing baseball in a climate that might not support grass, the choice is obvious. Still, with the news that Toronto hopes to move to an all-grass field by 2018, and with the continuing talk that seems to arise every year from playing in stadiums with artificial turf, we should look into it further.

First, the fuel for the fire. This was the play that started everyone talking about the new surface, a swinging bunt in a game from Monday of last week that took a very strange bounce in front of the plate:

Here’s a closer angle:

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Last season, Derek Norris and John Jaso took the bulk of the catching starts for Oakland, starting 140 of Oakland’s games at behind the plate. The duo performed well for the A’s and the 126 wRC+ by Oakland catchers ranked third in Major League Baseball behind only the Pittsburgh Pirates and Milwaukee Brewers. As the A’s tend to do, they remade their roster in the offseason sending Norris in a deal to the San Diego Padres that netted Jesse Hahn, and sent Jaso to the Tampa Bay Rays in the deal that landed Ben Zobrist. The deals cleared the way to playing time for Stephen Vogt, a 30-year old catcher with under 500 plate appearances in his career, with a decent amount of those appearances coming from first base and the outfield with the A’s in 2014.

The projections did not expect much from the Oakland catcher. The FanGraphs Depth Charts expecting a .255/.303/.398 season and producing roughly two wins. Vogt has gotten off to a great start in 2015 with a .360/.441/.700 line in 59 plate appearances including seven walks, four home runs, three doubles and one triple. The projection systems have begun to take notice. ZiPS now projects Vogt for a .259/.310/.415 line for the rest of the season while Steamer has Vogt with .265/.316/.420, already an improvement over the projections from a couple weeks ago and with his early season exploits, a two-win season has turned into one that could top three wins with the potential for more if he hits like he has over the past year. Since being called up at the beginning of June 2014, Vogt has hit .292/.341/.473 with a 130 wRC+ in 346 plate appearances.
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The Mets can’t lose, and having won 11 straight games on their way to a 13-3 record, they own the best winning percentage in baseball. On Monday, I pointed out that we have to take them seriously as contenders because of this hot start, as those wins aren’t going to be stripped away in the future even when the Mets stop playing this well. But, while the wins-in-the-bank argument is still valid, there is a pretty decent counterpoint to that argument; the Mets have essentially been borrowing from their overall expected win total by playing a collection of lousy opponents so far.

Among the 16 games they’ve played this season, we find three against a depleted Nationals team that started the year with a Spring Training roster, six games against a Braves team that projects as one of the NL’s weakest squads, four games against a mediocre Marlins team that might be worse than expected, and three against the Phillies, everyone’s pick for the worst team in baseball. In addition, 10 of their 16 games have come at home, so while home field advantage isn’t a huge factor in baseball, they have gotten a slight bump from a disproportionately low number of road games.

So, yes, the Mets have been beneficiaries of a very easy schedule so far, but how much should we have expected them to win based on their opponents to date? This is actually something we can answer now, since we publish pre-game odds for every match-up in baseball on our scoreboard page. These odds take into account the actual line-up and starting pitcher for that day, so we’re also accounting for the fact that their games against the Nationals included match-ups with Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Jordan Zimmermann; facing those guys is not the same thing as facing the Nationals when they’re throwing Doug Fister or Gio Gonzalez, with no disrespect intended to two quality pitchers who just aren’t quite at that level.

By looking at the difference between a team’s average game odds for the year and their expected rest-of-season winning percentage from Opening Day, we can get a decent idea of a team’s quality of opponents. So, with some assistance from Sean Dolinar, that’s exactly what I did, and the results can be seen in the graph below.

Teams above the line have had an easier schedule, teams below somewhat tougher.

The numbers confirm what we’d expect; playing a steady diet of the Marlins, Phillies, and Braves has indeed given the Mets the easiest schedule of any team in the big leagues to date; their average game odds have put them at an expected .535 winning percentage, up 30 points over their pre-season .505 mark. The other team who has seen a 30 point spike in their average game odds compared to their pre-season expected winning percentage? The 12-4 Royals, who have baseball’s second best record. It is not a coincidence that the two teams who have started the strongest have also played the softest schedules of any team in baseball; quality of opponent matters.

But again, what we really care about is the magnitude of the factor, and with a .535 expected winning percentage based on average game odds, the Mets are still trouncing their expected record. Having a weak slate of opponents would have suggested that we think the Mets should be 9-7 after this stretch, not 13-3. This isn’t the kind of variable that explains the entirety of the Mets success so far, and we can’t just wave away 13 wins in 16 games as the sole product of having played a weak schedule. The weak schedule explains just one of their extra five wins.

And it’s not like a slate of weak opponents is any kind of guarantee of success. Of note, check out the Brewers in that graph; they had a pre-season expected winning percentage of .481, but have had average game odds of exactly .500. When you look at their overall opponents — six against PIT, three each against STL, CIN, and COL — you might not think it was a relatively easy ride, but they got really lucky in their starting pitching match-ups against the Pirates: two starts each from Vance Worley and Jeff Locke, plus a call-up start by Casey Sadler, and then one tough game against Gerrit Cole.

Misisng both Liriano and Burnett makes those games against the Pirates easier match-ups than you might think, and Andrew McCutchen sat out one of the contests as well. The Reds and Rockies aren’t very good, so combine those seven games with easier-than-expected match-ups against the Pirates, and the Brewers have actually had a pretty easy go of things as well. And yet, even after getting a good draw to start the year, they’re 3-13, and their season is effectively over already. The Mets have taken advantage of weak opponents; the Brewers inability to win the games they’ve played suggests that they might be even worse off than we think.

Likewise, the Marlins (.500 pre-season expected record, .527 average game odds) have also benefited from playing the Braves and Phillies, at least theoretically, but they haven’t capitalized on those games the same way the Mets have. While people like to cite record versus winning teams as some kind of true barometer of roster quality, the reality is that playoff teams usually just pound bad teams into the ground, then try and hold their own against the decent or good teams. The Mets and Royals have done exactly what they needed to do thus far; beat the pants off of lousy opponents.

So, yes, the Mets have had an easy schedule. No, they don’t get to keep playing the Braves, Marlins, and Phillies all year, and they will find the road more difficult when they travel to face some better opponents. But the Mets low quality of opponents to date doesn’t cancel out the fact that they’ve played .812 baseball against a slate of games where we expected them to play .535 ball, and the difference between their current winning percentage and their game-odds expected winning percentage is still the largest in baseball. No team has outperformed expectations more than the Mets, even after you adjust for the fact that they’ve played the Marlins, Braves, and Phillies 13 times.