Joe Nathan has had Tommy John surgery before. Joe Nathan will need to have Tommy John surgery again. He has proclaimed that he intends to come try to return, but the odds are against that — 41-year-old major league pitchers are in short supply (there are just two this season). Whether he does or doesn’t make it all the way back, any subsequent seasons are unlikely to add much to his statistical ledger. And an impressive ledger it is.

A sixth-round pick in the 1995 draft, Nathan has been one of the few players left in the game who saw action back in the 90s, as he debuted for the Giants back in April of 1999. He was a starter back then, though he wasn’t particularly good. He only struck out three more batters than he walked in those 14 debut season starts. He would get another crack at starting the next season, but in his 15 starts in 2000 he struck out four fewer batters than he walked, and that was the end of that chapter.

Well, sort of. He would be a starter for the bulk of the next two seasons, at age 26 and 27, but he would do so in the minor leagues. His 2001 was an unmitigated disaster — he struck out 54 against 70 walks in Double-A and Triple-A — he walked more guys than he struck out at both levels. He was better in 2002 — 117 Ks against 74 walks, all at Triple-A Fresno — but he allowed 20 homers, had a 1.647 WHIP and 5.60 ERA. Better, but not good. He would come back up to San Fran in September for four scoreless relief appearances, and never looked back.

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This post is part of an ongoing arbitration research project and is coauthored by Alex Chamberlain and Sean Dolinar.

Feb. 25: 2015 MLB Arbitration Visualized

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Sean and I share a mutual passion for knowledge and understanding how things work. Said mutual passion is magnified when regarding baseball-related matters. With that said, the mysterious arbitration process intrigues us. We joined forces to try to crack the code, so to speak, and we would like to share the fruits of our labor with you.

Players with anywhere from three to six years of service time are eligible for salary increases based on performance. Teams and players typically reach settlements outside of arbitration, but if they can’t agree on a salary figure, both sides enter the formal arbitration process, as described here by FOX Sports.

Therein resides the questions intrinsic to the process: How do teams and players decide what is an appropriate dollar-value raise in salary? How does an arbitration panel decide in favor of one side or the other?

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From the standpoint of physics, muscle begets bat speed, which begets power.

That part is simple, as physicist Alan Nathan has shown. “A 10% increase in muscle mass can lead to about a 3.8% increase in bat speed,” Nathan found, and that sort of bat speed increase can lead to an increase of 4.3% in batted ball distance.

And so this year, Mariners shortstop Brad Miller decided to put on more weight. Was it about the power? “Oh yeah. I want to get as physical as I can,” Miller admitted before a game with the Athletics this year. So he put on 15 pounds in the offseason and came into the season weighing 220, instead of the 205 he weighed to finish the season in 2014.

We don’t have yearly heights and weights for players, but we do have *a* listed height and weight for each player. Despite being of dubious quality, let’s see how Body Mass Index is related to power factors. Turns out, it is significantly related to many power stats, with Home Runs per Fly Ball providing the cleanest look:

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I’m going to let you in on a little blogger secret: as I’m writing this post about the Royals, the Royals are actively playing the White Sox, on Thursday night. I usually try to shy away from writing about someone or something as they’re playing, because something might conceivably change, and then I could have to re-work my thesis if not abandon the article entirely. But I’m going to stick with this and cross my fingers. In fact, I can even use this to my advantage.

So, here’s a neat thing. Thursday, the Royals are facing Chris Sale! Which means for you, the reader, on Thursday, the Royals faced Chris Sale. At this writing, Sale has two strikeouts through three innings, having faced 14 batters. For Sale, it’s not his greatest outing, especially given the two runs he’s allowed. But about the whiffs: through these three innings, the Royals’ team strikeout rate has gone up.

That’s a little perspective. The Royals have been red-hot, and the Royals’ offense has been red-hot. This is a rather distinct change from the editions of the Royals we’ve seen over the past few years. We knew the team would be able to defend, and we knew the team would have a lockdown bullpen; we didn’t know the offense could do something like this. At FanGraphs, we track a stat called wRC+, which is like OPS+, but better. As I look at the team leaderboard, the Royals are second in baseball, between the Dodgers and Padres. As always, plenty of factors go into making an offense good. You can never discount the variable of good luck. But something that’s driven the Royals to this point: they simply haven’t been striking out. Their contact has been absurd.

It’s not only that the Royals have the lowest team strikeout rate in baseball. A year ago, they had the lowest team strikeout rate in baseball. The year before, they had the second-lowest. The Royals have been a contact-oriented team. What’s most notable is the magnitude of the Royals’ advantage over everyone else. Here are the lowest team rates, through some of Thursday, but not all of Thursday:

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

At some point this year, the samples will be large enough that every post doesn’t have to come with a massive disclaimer. Of course we’re dealing with minuscule samples, but interesting things can happen in minuscule samples even if they don’t provide a lot of externally useful information. In particular, the first month of a baseball season can bring some extremely unusual and compelling stat lines, especially when dealing with metrics that are designed to be useful over larger samples. Enter Nick Martinez.

Martinez was the 564th pick in the 2011 draft and likely only has a safe spot in an MLB rotation this year because he is a member of a Rangers organization that has been decimated by injuries. While we saw Martinez toss 140 innings in his age 23 season in 2014, they were bad innings. He posted a 113 ERA- and 128 FIP-, both of which are still using park factors that treat Globe Life Park as if it’s more hitter friendly than it’s played since the renovations. If we’re being generous, he pitched like a replacement level starter and you might argue he was worse.

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This interview was conducted in September 2012, but that doesn’t matter. The topic was his career, and Andruw Jones was weeks away from his final game. Contextually, nothing has changed in the two-plus years that these words went unpublished.

The longtime Atlanta Brave hit 434 home runs, but his legacy is defense. He won 10 straight Gold Gloves, and few center fielders have played the position with as much style and grace. Jones didn’t age particularly well, but in his prime, he was an outstanding player and an absolute joy to watch. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben, Sam, and Will Woods talk about the Royals’ latest dust-up, the Mets’ 11-game winning streak, and Giancarlo Stanton’s almost physics-defying home runs.

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You might be getting kind of sick of me writing about fastballs, and elevating them. That’s totally fine, and I don’t intend to keep on writing about them forever and ever. There are two contributing factors. One, I need to write a lot, so I can’t throw away very many ideas. And two, when I get something I’m interested in, I stay interested in it for a while, performing all the analysis I can think of to see if there’s anything new to be said. I don’t want to keep writing about high fastballs, but this post is kind of about high fastballs, and if it helps at all, you can think of it as being a post about Clayton Kershaw. Or, inspired by Clayton Kershaw.

Kershaw’s fresh off a nine-strikeout start in San Francisco. For the most part he looked like himself. For the most part he’s looked like himself. While his ERA’s over 4, his xFIP’s under 2, and his strikeout rate is higher than ever. His repertoire is fine. Kershaw looks like Kershaw, which is good if expected news for the Dodgers, but I can at least point out this one little thing about him. Check out where his fastballs have gone.

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Since the middle of March, the author has published each week a statistical report designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have enthusiasm for collegiate baseball, if not actually expert knowledge of it. These posts have served as a means by which one might broadly detect which players have produced the most excellent performances of the college season.

What follows is another edition of that same thing, updated through Thursday.

As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done is utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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