It’s an easy-enough list to sort. You go to the leaderboard for pitch types and you select the fastball column. There, at the very top, is Bartolo Colon, the only starter in baseball throwing heaters more than 80% of the time. From there, you get to build the narrative, that Colon is extraordinarily weird. He doesn’t look the part of an athlete. He’s 41 years old, and 42 later this month. His average fastball has dropped into the 80s, approaching his rate of contact allowed. And he throws as many pitches as he has walks issued (one). The overall profile doesn’t make a lot of sense — it doesn’t feel like this kind of pitcher ought to be able to succeed.

And, yeah, Colon is weird. It looked like his career was over until it wasn’t, and other pitchers don’t share his current approach. It’s an unusual strategy with which Colon so routinely manages to get hitters out, but the reality isn’t as simple as him getting by with weak fastball after weak fastball. Reality is — guess what! — more complicated than that. Reality is always more complicated. Maybe especially with the freaks.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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“The biggest thing is that I’m finally healthy,” said Wil Myers before a game with the Giants. After breaking his wrist in the fourth game of the year in 2014, and then following that up with another broken wrist (the other one) about six weeks later, Myers is happy to have his health. Those broken wrists did a number on his game.

After the first wrist broke, Myers played through it. “I still have a bone that sticks out,” Myers said as he points to a protrusion. “And any time I turned this wrist over, this tendon right here was very painful.” Even that first half of last year, before the second injury, Myers had below-average power (.126 Isolated Slugging, .145 is average).

It was worse when he came back from the second broken wrist after 81 days away. “I just didn’t have it,” Myers said as he shook his head. “This forearm looked like a baby’s forearm, I had no muscle.” That’s when his performance really tanked, as his .055 ISO and overall offense that was 50% worse than league average can attest.

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In the offseason after winning the 2014 award for American League Comeback Player of the year, Chris Young — that’s the exceptionally lanky pitcher Chris Young, not the merely lanky hitter Chris Young — received zero attention on the free agent market. It took until about mid-way through Spring Training until a team signed Young — on March 7, the Royals signed him to a very interesting one-year contract with a $0.675M base salary and a whopping $5.325M in incentives. That’s very little guaranteed money, though, especially compared to the 2014 National League Comeback Player of the Year, Casey McGehee, who is guaranteed to earn $4.8M from the San Francisco Giants this season despite performing below replacement level thus far.

Jeff explored Young’s lack of a market in late February, pointing out that Young is riskier than most pitchers because of both his frighteningly extensive injury history and perhaps also because of the uniquely large gulf between Young’s ERA and his FIP. Even though Young’s BABIP of .238 in 2014 was actually in line with his through-2013 career rate of .258, it also makes sense that no teams were eager to snap up a pitcher who compiled a 5+ FIP the previous season after missing the entire season prior to that. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout’s exploits are well known, but no matter how well Mike Trout plays, his team will not succeed without productive play from others in the lineup. Mike Trout is not the first great player with a less than stellar supporting cast. It is something he has gone through already in his brief career. In 2012 and 2014, the Angels had solid teams surrounding Trout that won nearly 90 games in 2012 and won the division in 2014, but in 2013, the rest of the Angels provided poor production and the team wasted a 10-win season. The Angels have gotten off to a slow start at 12-15 and they are certainly far from out of the race at this point, but based on the start of the season and the projections from here on out, the Angels could have trouble providing Trout with support and staying in the playoff hunt as the year goes on.

On offense this season, Mike Trout has been 11.6 runs above average, good for sixth in all of baseball while the rest of the position players have been 26.6 runs below average. Even with Mike Trout, the team has an 85 wRC+ in the early going, ranking 25th in Major League Baseball. Mike Trout is hitting .302/.404/.552. while the rest of the team is .218/.275/.323. Garrett Richards, C.J. Wilson, and Matt Shoemaker should perform well in the rotation, but the team projects to finish the season around .500. No matter how hard he tries, Mike Trout cannot end every game like this:
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Yesterday, we looked at the biggest changes in fastball movement (rise and sink) in starters and relievers from their offerings in 2014 vs. this season. Today, we’re going to do the same thing with breaking balls (pitches known for their movement), which should hopefully yield some interesting takeaways as we move forward with this young season.

As I said in the previous article, more movement doesn’t always mean better results: it can be a catalyst for some changes in peripheral numbers, however, and can point toward raw improvement in a pitch. We’ll go into some information related to whiff rates and batted ball profiles with these breaking pitches, looking for any change in production that goes along with change in movement.

The standard preface: all stats are farmed from Baseball Prospectus’ PITCHf/x leaderboards. It’s obviously still very early, so take these results with a grain of salt, and mostly as something interesting to watch as the season progresses. Today we’ll divide these pitches by curveball and slider, looking at starters and relievers together. We’ll also divide sliders by lefties and righties, as the movement data is obviously quite different for each of them. As a baseline, I’ve used a 50 pitch minimum for both starters and relievers in 2014.

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When reports emerged in January that the Yankees were intending to contest the home run milestone bonus agreement the team entered with Alex Rodriguez back in 2007, it was unclear whether or not the matter would ever actually come to a head. Following a season-long suspension for performance enhancing drug use, no one knew for sure whether Rodriguez would even make the Yankees’ opening day roster, let alone be given enough playing time to hit the six home runs necessary to tie Willie Mays at 660 (triggering the first of five potential $6 million milestone bonuses under the 2007 agreement).

Rodriguez, of course, did make the team and ended up hitting his 660th career home run on Friday evening in Boston. As a result, attention has once again focused on whether the Yankees have any realistic hope of escaping the milestone bonus agreement.

As I noted back in January, because the bonus agreement has never been released publicly, it is difficult to fully assess the Yankees’ chances of escaping the $6 million payment. However, while there is still much that we don’t know about the contract, recent developments have shed some additional light on the legal arguments the Yankees will likely rely on when attempting to avoiding paying Rodriguez under the agreement.

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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. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Cleveland at Kansas City | 20:10 ET
Carrasco (21.2 IP, 58 xFIP-) vs. Duffy (28.2 IP, 90 xFIP-)
All indications indicated that Cleveland right-hander Carlos Carrasco would sustain — given adequate health — would largely sustain in 2015 his success from 2014. FanGraphs’ Eno Sarris found, for example, that no other pitcher generated a better combination of swinging strikes and ground balls with each pitch in his arsenal. That sort of performance in combination with the plus-plus velocity he exhibited on his fastball last year suggested that he possessed both the physical tools and pitching-specific skills to produce an excellent campaign. While he’s had some difficulty in preventing actual runs over his first five starts, Carrasco has continued to record among the very best defense-independent numbers in the league, having recorded, for example, the third-best expected FIP among all pitchers with 20-plus innings — behind only Clayton Kershaw and teammate Danny Salazar. Nor is the run-scoring likely all his fault: the Cleveland defense currently sits comfortably in the bottom third among all clubs both by Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) and Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR).

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

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If you sort the Major League leaderboards by runs scored for each team, you’ll find the Toronto Blue Jays at the top of the list. That’s probably no big surprise, given that they feature prodigious sluggers like Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, and Josh Donaldson; the Blue Jays have some serious thump in the middle of their order.

But you might be surprised to see that the Oakland A’s are not too terribly far behind the Blue Jays, with their 140 runs scored putting them in second place among all big league clubs. The A’s had a pretty good offense last year, but that was a very different line-up, including a half-season of production from Yoenis Cespedes, plus full years from the aforementioned Donaldson, the also-traded Brandon Moss and Derek Norris, and some good hitting from free agent departee Jed Lowrie. After the A’s second half fade and Wild Card loss to Kansas City, Billy Beane spent the off-season shipping out most of his good hitters, putting together a younger roster that leaned more towards contact hitters than the homers-or-strikeout types that they featured a year ago.

But it isn’t really the new guys leading the offensive charge for the A’s so far this year. Ben Zobrist is on the DL, and wasn’t great even before he had to start sitting out a good chunk of the season. After a hot start, Billy Butler has remembered that he’s Billy Butler and come back down to earth. Ike Davis has one home run, only one fewer than Lawrie. Instead, the line-up has been led by a couple of holdovers: Stephen Vogt and Josh Reddick.

Vogt has been a monster for the A’s, and has been perhaps the best player in baseball so far; his +1.8 WAR leads all big leaguers. Eno Sarris tackled Vogt’s improvement, noting that while he won’t keep this up, there are reasons for optimism, who might be the latest in a long list of guys that just needed a chance to play before finding their first opportunity in Oakland.

But that’s not Reddick’s story at all. He came up through the Red Sox system with plenty of hype, as Baseball America had him among the team’s top five prospects in 2008, 2009, and 2010. On their 2010 Top 100 prospect list, Reddick ranked 75th overall, 10 spots ahead of some guy named Mike Trout. Reddick made it to the big leagues in Boston, and was only traded to Oakland when the Red Sox wanted to acquire All-Star closer Andrew Bailey from the A’s.

Reddick took over as the A’s everyday right fielder immediately after joining the organization, and had a breakout year in 2012, finishing 16th in the MVP voting thanks to a strong performance both on offense (32 home runs) and on defense (+17 UZR and a Gold Glove). But the injury problems that caused the Red Sox to trade Reddick sidelined him for significant parts of the last two seasons, and his power regressed even when he was healthy enough to play. He was still a solid enough player, but mostly contributed with average-ish offense and plus defense, and he appeared to be settling in as as a solid role player rather than any kind of star.

But to start 2015, Reddick has not only looked like the star of his 2012 season, but actually something even better than he’s ever shown before. With the big caveat that it’s only 86 plate appearances, Reddick is flashing the combination of skills that could allow him to develop into an elite right fielder. Those skills? Simultaneous power and contact. Most players in baseball — the ones who aren’t just backup catchers or utility infielders, anyway — can call one of those two things something of a strength. Guys either major in hitting the ball hard or hitting the ball often, but very few can do both at the same time.

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