We have a Madison Bumgarner, right now. He just put a whole team on his shoulders and blew our minds last October, even. And with that Paul Bunyanesque workmanlike yet fiery demeanor, he seems a snowflake. Unique and alone. But maybe we have we seen pitchers like him before?
Rehabbing a partially torn UCL with rest was an unconventional route for the Yankees and Masahiro Tanaka since the discovery of his injury last July, and there was always the possibility that it simply wouldn’t work, with the right-hander having to go under the knife at some point. While that exact situation has yet to be realized, here we are in early May with Tanaka on the indefinite-day DL due to forearm and wrist issues. As we know, forearm injuries are a big red flag, especially when your elbow is already a little balky.
Still, the Yankees have managed to cope without Tanaka so far, putting the 25-year-old Chase Whitley into the rotation: Whitley has a 0.75 ERA/1.53 FIP, 20.4 K-BB%, and 1.08 WHIP in two starts. That’s a tiny sample, and we would be remiss if we didn’t cast a lot of doubt on his ability to keep up anything near that sort of performance, but it now bears some looking into, as do the Yankees’ plans should they hit any other bumps in the road regarding their rotation (spoiler: they almost surely will).
How good has the Yankees rotation been so far this season? Great, actually. Here’s the ERA / FIP of the starters for all 30 clubs so far this season (mouse over the chart for interactivity):
The Yankees are fifth in FIP, showing how great a surprise they’ve been this year, driven mainly by Michael Pineda. As we’ll see, that level of success in the future is dependent on a lot of things lining up.
First, let’s take a look at Whitley. He couldn’t stick in the rotation last year, eventually moving to a relief role, but he has the arsenal of a starter: fastball, slider, and changeup. I’ll say this: more people would know Chase Whitley’s name if he had a fastball that matched his secondary stuff. His slider, always an average offering, is a little different this year (he’s taken almost four MPH off of it compared to 2014, and it has an inch more vertical drop), though it’s still a fly ball pitch with not a ton of depth. It’s been good this year, but the jury is still out on whether that can be sustained. His changeup is the real prize: last year, it would’ve placed in the top-10 of swinging strike rates among starters had he qualified. At its best, it looks like this:
I’ve written many times in the past eight months that this draft class is pretty weak and that, combined with the bonus pools that limit each team’s draft spending, will make for an unpredictable draft day filled with below-slot deals. That talk has continued here and in other places but, in the last few weeks, teams’ plans have come into better focus and the question marks now start at the very top.
I called Orlando-area prep SS Brendan Rodgers the best prep player in the 2015 class a full two years ago and he’s held serve since then, standing today as the consensus top player in the whole draft for the industry and in my recent rankings. The assumption for most of the spring was that the Diamondbacks would take Rodgers #1 as the consensus top player in a down class. Another reason this made sense is the embattled first seven months of the Dave Stewart/Tony La Russa regime in Arizona, which have gone about as bad as possible so far, so they don’t need another off-the-board, bucking-industry-consensus decision that could draw more bad PR.
I had heard in the last few weeks that Rodgers was out of the mix for the D’Backs at #1, but until I had heard who the target was, I didn’t feel comfortable reporting that, since it could just be misdirection for negotiating purposes. I had also heard the D’Backs weren’t at many of Rodgers’ games this spring, so that put more momentum behind that buzz being real. hen, in the last few weeks, D’Backs GM Dave Stewart and VP of Baseball Ops DeJon Watson have been seen all over the country scouting amateur players, but not Rodgers.
Commissioner Manfred’s ballpark tour took him to Texas yesterday, where he got to witness one potential solution to baseball’s run scoring problem: clone Samuel Deduno. I’m guessing that probably won’t be on the table when the next CBA negotiations come around, but it would bring offense roaring back to life, probably.
My mediocre attempt at humor aside, Manfred did talk about another issue that might become a discussion point in the next CBA, however; the length of the Major League season.
Manfred said reducing the number of games in a season would have economic and competitive ramifications, but the idea of giving players more off days is receiving more attention than ever.
“One hundred and sixty-two games in 183 days, and a lot of those 21 days consumed by travel, is a pretty demanding schedule,” he said. “By reputation I work pretty hard, and I don’t think I work 162 days out of 183. It’s a tough schedule.”
Player salaries keep increasing, but at a pace much slower than total Major League Baseball revenue. There is little the players can do about the gap right now, but when the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in 2016, the Major League Baseball Players’ Association will have the opportunity to gain a greater share of revenues in the future. The players have a lot of options: increased minimum salaries, earlier free agency, earlier arbitration, and removal of the luxury tax are all monetary changes that would transfer more money from owners to players and have little to no effect on the play on the field. Two other options, a universal designated hitter and a 26th roster spot, would affect the play on the field, but would not provide the players with significant gains off the field.
As Nathaniel Grow wrote recently, the MLBPA has a problem. In his piece, Grow discussed the growing chasm between player salaries and MLB revenues.
After peaking at a little more than 56% in 2002, today MLB player salaries account for less than 40% of league revenues, a decline of nearly 33% in just 12 years. As a result, player payroll today accounts for just over 38% of MLB’s total revenues, a figure that just ten years ago would have been unimaginably low.
Grow’s piece included the following chart (Payroll data from Cot’s Contracts and USA Today; MLB league revenue data from The Biz of Baseball):
Owners are pocketing more and more money from revenues and have thus far refused to share their increased wealth. The owners and players last shared a roughly fifty-fifty split of revenues in 2005. Since that time, players have received less than one-third of all additional revenue.
Read the rest of this entry »
| 11:30 |
: welcome to my college hip hop collection
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: Shoot… YouTube embed might be broken.
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according to the probables leaderboard, the a’s starter for today is… ike davis. should i start him? |
| 12:01 |
: eh. okay two-seamer but lacks repeatability and a great second offering.
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Who would you prefer as a bench player in an AL only league: Saunders or Bourn? |
It seems like it should matter how hard you hit the baseball. That statement probably seems self-evident, but until this year we haven’t really had a whole lot of evidence to demonstrate whether that’s true. We have an old month of HITf/x data from 2009 and there’s non-public data about exit velocity, but until StatCast data arrived this year, we didn’t really have the tools to determine how much quality of contact matters.
Last week, FanGraphs launched quality of contact statistics courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions to add to this effort. The methodology isn’t based solely on a raw exit velocity, but the data stretches back to 2002 and it’s publicly available now and easy to manage. As soon as people realized the data was available, the sabermetric masses went to work to run preliminary tests on the data. One of the interesting things that showed up right away was that the data didn’t do a great job predicting itself in the future and things like Hard% didn’t correlate with stats like BABIP or LD% as well as we might have otherwise thought.
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. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Los Angeles NL at Milwaukee | 13:40 ET
Frias (7.2 IP, 87 xFIP-) vs. Fiers (24.2 IP, 82 xFIP-)
Three years ago, following the completion of that season in which Michael Pineda had produced three-plus wins with Seattle despite almost the complete absence of a third pitch, the author endeavored to identify the next Michael Pineda. The idea: to find a pitcher in the high minors who threw roughly 95 mph (like Pineda) and also featured above-average control (like Pineda). The result: Garrett Richards. Richards’ success wasn’t immediate — he didn’t record his first signature season until last year — but he’s retained that pairing of skills and they continue to benefit him. This most recent offseason, the author endeavored to find the next next Michael Pineda (or simply the next Garrett Richards, perhaps). The result of that second effort: Carlos Frias. Frias exhibited both of the relevant skills in his first start of the season last Friday, sitting at just under 96 mph while recording just a single walk over 5.1 innings (box).
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Milwaukee Radio.
This is the second in a series of pieces on the emergence of batted-ball data into the mainstream. Earlier this week, we covered the basics in a fair amount of detail. Today, we’re going to drill down a bit into arguably the most important piece of information discussed in that article; the fine line between the most and least productive fly balls, where we will quickly discover that not all hard fly balls are created equal. Read the rest of this entry »
Bryce Harper went and had himself a game Wednesday afternoon, and now, we can say these things, and not be lying: Harper is sitting on a career-high wRC+. He’s sitting on a career-high isolated power, and a career-high walk rate. Harper, by the way, is still 22 years old. It’s always mandatory to put that in somewhere. It’s a pretty big part of the picture.
It makes sense, then, to talk about what’s going on with Harper’s development. The world’s been waiting to see if he can ever try to catch up to Mike Trout. Ben Lindbergh has written about what seems to be a gain regarding Harper’s eye. Harper, also, has worked to calm down his swing a little bit, at the suggestion of his hitting coach and his manager. Back in April, Matt Williams said this:
Williams said the single to left was a particularly important example of what Harper needs to do to be successful and hit for a high average.
Williams liked to see Harper shooting balls the other way. Harper has long been personally obsessed with shooting balls the other way. Wednesday, the first of Harper’s three homers was slugged the other way. What you’d think is, maybe, Harper’s getting even better at using all fields. Truth be told, at least to this point, Harper’s gotten better at using just one of the fields.