The highest career triple rates in baseball history, minimum 1000 plate appearances, with one exception:

• Paulo Orlando, 17.2%
• Tom Long, 3.0%
• Joe Jackson, 3.0%
• Sam Crawford, 2.9%
• Buck Freeman, 2.7%

Orlando, obviously, doesn’t qualify, being well short of 1000 career trips to the plate. But let’s just pretend he got all the way up to 1000, and over that span he never hit another triple. He’d still have a higher rate than Darin Erstad, and Jeff Francoeur, and whichever one of the Alex Gonzalezes this is, and Rickey Henderson. Across baseball, triples have been in decline. Orlando is trying to reverse the trend by himself.

Until a short while ago, you’d probably never heard of him. He’s a 29-year-old rookie who joined affiliated baseball in 2006. That tells you plenty about his career path, and upon Orlando’s initial promotion, by far the neatest fun fact was that he became the third-ever Brazilian major-leaguer. Now there’s a neater fun fact, a fact all Orlando’s own: he’s the first player anyone can find whose first three big-league hits were triples. And since then, he’s hit two more triples.

He isn’t just the current major-league leader, among players. He’s also tied for the major-league lead, among teams. Orlando has all five of the Royals’ triples. Four other teams have five triples, but none have more than that, and most have fewer. Two teams have yet to hit a single triple. Orlando hasn’t hit a ball out of the park. From a post by Jeffrey Flanagan:

“The first time the guy who scouted me for the White Sox saw me [in Brazil] he said to me, ‘All you do is hit triples. You never hit home runs,'” Orlando said, smiling.

See? Scouting is easy! Orlando was scouted as a triples machine. He’s blossomed into something of a triples machine. No matter how much longer this goes on, Orlando’s already made history. Few 29-year-old rookies can say that, but now that we know Orlando’s already cemented his place, how much more might’ve been possible to do? It’s time for this article to get stupid.

Read the rest of this entry »

For better or worse, the Kansas City Royals have garnered a fair amount of attention to start the season. On the better side of the ledger, the team now sits at 10-3, with the second best record in the American League behind only the 11-2 Detroit Tigers. Even finishing a game over .500 the rest of the way would give the team a solid 85-win season, and the Playoff Odds here at Fangraphs give the Royals a better than one in three chance at making the playoffs. While those might not seem like great chances, they are sixth in a league where five teams make the playoffs and they are already ahead of preseason darling Cleveland Indians.

The ugliness that consumed the weekend for Kansas City certainly is not drawing the type of attention a team should hope to receive, but perhaps lost amid the beanings and the yelling and the pointing, there was a significant and rare day for the Royals as Salvador Perez did not start on Sunday. Erik Kratz took his place, although Perez did not receive the day off as he entered the game in the seventh inning and caught the final two innings behind the plate.

This early in the season, a catcher making most if not all a team’s starts is not overly unusual. Perez started the first 11 games, but off days early on meant that he received two days of rest during that time. While his games and plate appearances are near the top of the catcher Leaderboard and his 107 innings behind the plate are second in baseball to Derek Norris’ 111 thus far, it is too early to get alarmed about his workload thus far. It is the upcoming workload that should be concerning.
Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the Chicago Cubs promoted Kris Bryant to the big leagues. With the service time shenanigans out of the way, it was abundantly clear that Bryant that he was their best third baseman, so they summoned him from Iowa to help their team win. Today, the Cubs have also pulled shortstop Addison Russell up from Triple-A, where he’ll join Bryant, Starlin Castro, and Anthony Rizzo to form something close to the infield of their dreams.

Unlike with Bryant’s promotion, however, this one didn’t appear imminent, nor has Russell necessarily forced his way into the big leagues. While everyone agrees that he’s one of the best prospects in baseball, it’s less clear that he’s finished developing in the minor leagues, and is ready to step in and produce from day one the way Bryant is. In total, Russell has just under 1,100 minor league plate appearances, and only 321 of those have come above A-ball.

He was excellent in Double-A last year, hitting for power and making contact, but his walk rate eroded, a perfectly natural thing to expect from a 20-year-old facing advanced pitching for the first time. That trend has continued in the first few weeks in Triple-A this year, as he’s drawn just one walk in his first 47 plate appearances. Of course, a middle infielder who can hit for some power and avoid striking out already does enough to justify his spot in the line-up, so even if Russell is still in the overly-aggressive phase of his development, that doesn’t immediately preclude him from being a productive player in 2015.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past couple weeks, you might have noticed some of our advanced fielding data filtering into the system, as the scouts grading and categorizing each play go through their expert machinations. With two weeks of play in the books, and enough time for much of the data to come in (there is normally a slight delay), we can now look back on some of the highlights of the defensive portion of the game. Though the stats run a few days behind, we still have a lot to look at.

I’ve gone through each defensive position and pulled one or two of the best “remote” plays for each, giving us a veritable super cut of defensive gems from the early going. These are only the plays categorized as being converted into outs between 1-10% of the time. Though there could be some disagreement with elements of the classification for each play, there’s no doubt that these plays are among the best made since the start of the season. Let’s get to it!

Pitcher

A preface: obviously the pitcher position doesn’t have to make a lot of incredible defensive plays. Routine and sometimes awkward, yes, but not spectacular. That being said, there was one that made the cut:

Anthony DeSclafani, April 14th

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

In the summer of 2005, the author of this post contracted at a Chicago area restaurant some manner of foodborne illness. The symptoms produced by same needn’t be explored in any depth here; to say, however, that I experienced roughly all the forms of “gastric distress” is sufficient. Nor is it the deepest throes of my illness that are relevant here, but rather the recovery process. Indeed, after about a week or so of turmoil, I returned to something like normal health. The only qualification: that I’d be compelled, for the better part of the next month, to survive on diet consisting strictly of starches, mashed and non-fibrous fruits, and (were I feeling particularly strong) baked, skinless chicken. These were foods which represented the least possible challenge to my sensitive digestive system.

What follows is the analytical equivalent of the aforementioned diet. It is designed not to examine in any depth — but rather to provide deserving coverage of — certain players who’ve made their major-league debuts this season. To say that it is both incomplete and haphazard is probably correct. To say, however, that it might be of some use to those readers who have exhausted themselves mentally by means of their other daily pursuits — this is also reasonable.

Below are five players whose debuts have been notable for one reason or another — where notable has been entirely at the discretion of the author. Accompanying each player are his season stats to date (denoted by Season), his Steamer rest-of-season projection (Steamer ROS), and his ZiPS rest-of-season projection (ZiPS ROS).

Archie Bradley, RHP, Arizona (Profile)

Who he is: Right-hander in D-backs rotation.

Notable because: He was the seventh pick in the 2011 draft. Has exhibited excellent fastball and curveball as amateur and minor leaguer.

Earliest returns: Positive. In an unexpected way, though.

Bradley has never demonstrated particularly strong command, nor would his walk rate after two starts (12.8%) suggest that he’s changed in any substantial way so far as that’s concerned. Still, he’s produced better-than-average fielding-independent and run-prevention numbers — largely, those, on the strength of unexpected strong ground-ball tendencies. Jeff Sullivan examined those tendencies yesterday. One takeaway: he’s been throwing a riding fastball low in the zone. More than most every pitcher.

Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into the season, you might have had a three-part checklist for Mariners’ lefty James Paxton. Can he throw more high fastballs, can he improve his changeup, and can he hold his velocity and command? We know his curve is good, and most years, he has the big velocity that has turned our attention to him. But these three items sum up the healthy skepticism that still remains, and the pitcher knows all about them.

Jeff Sullivan recommended high fastballs for Paxton because his fastball has rise but he throws it low. Currently the Seattle lefty is showing almost exactly the same whiff and strikeout rates as he showed last year, so maybe he wasn’t listening.

Except that he was! “I do utilize the high fastball, to work off of it, and have the curveball drop off it,” Paxton said of the fact that high fastball release points can help mask a high curveball release point.

But the pitcher also admitted that the high fastball was “probably something I could work into my game a little more effectively.” He’s been trying, as you can see from the fastball heat maps below from Baseball Savant (2014 on the left, 2015 on the right). If you prefer numbers, Paxton has thrown 29% of his fastballs in the top third of the zone this year, up from 25% last year. And his rank with respect to his peers has changed, as he used to be in the 41st percentile for high fastballs, and so far this year, he’s in the 31st percentile.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll start this one like I think I’ve started another, probably also about Shane Greene. Who remembers? Last summer, while working on an article for The Hardball Times Annual, I talked to Brandon McCarthy about the significance and implementation of contemporary data. It was a long interview and a lot went into the article, so I’m not going to sit here and spoil everything, but McCarthy noted something he learned immediately upon joining the Yankees. Right away, they told him about the value of an elevated fastball. Even though McCarthy was more traditionally a sinker-baller, he found that he could get easy outs sometimes going hard and up, with hitters geared for pitches down. Adding one new level made hitting exponentially more difficult.

As the conversation went on, it turned to then-Yankees sensation Shane Greene. Maybe “sensation” is over-selling him, but he came out of nowhere, and he was throwing gas. Greene was whiffing a batter an inning, powered by a mid-90s sinker that he kept down by the knees, and as we neared the end, McCarthy made one more point. The Yankees had given Greene very simple offseason instructions: he was to improve his ability to throw a fastball up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Avert your eyes, Milwaukee Brewers fans. I apologize in advance for how painful this may be.

When the Brewers woke up on Monday morning, they were merely a bad baseball team, off to a 2-10 start, the worst in 47 years of Pilots/Brewers baseball. When they went to bed on Monday night, they were still a bad baseball team, off to a 2-11 start, one of just two teams with fewer than four wins. In between, second baseman Scooter Gennett joined the “stupidly weird injury” club, slicing his hand open in the shower. In between, star catcher Jonathan Lucroy left Monday’s 6-1 loss to Cincinnati early with what was revealed to be a fractured toe, one that manager Ron Roenicke could apparently hear happening.

So there’s terrible baseball, and then there’s this, in which a team that had just about no margin for error has gotten off to what’s basically the worst possible start imaginable. You can’t make the playoffs in April, but you sure can miss them. That’s a saying that exists or it’s one I’m either making up or poorly paraphrasing, but now it’s on the Internet, and therefore it’s true. Welcome to the 2015 Milwaukee Brewers, a team that just saw its season implode before it really began. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about batting around and Bryan Price’s media meltdown, then check in on early-season statistical trends.

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

Subscribe: RSS