On Monday, I looked at how different spin rates for different pitches affect the way those pitches move through the air towards a batter. That post was useful for understanding the relationship between spin and velocity and movement. What it didn’t tell us, however, is too much about what the spin actually does for the pitcher: does more spin make pitches harder or easier to make contact with? Does more spin induce weaker contact? To answer those questions (as well as others), we can look at the actual production from hitters on these pitches. That’s the goal of this post.

The first such stat we’ll consider is contact rate (Contact%), or times made contact (balls in play or foul balls) per swing.

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Do you like pornography? You don’t have to answer that. Just, here’s some pornography, only of the type that…well, you’re still not supposed to watch at work, but you could at least get away with watching it with your parents:

That’s Joc Pederson, either befriending Coors Field or trying to assault it. According to the ESPN Home Run Tracker, it’s the longest home run of the year, although there is that Coors-related asterisk. Also yesterday, Pederson hit a different mammoth dinger. The day before, he hit a different mammoth dinger. Among those with at least six homers, Pederson has the greatest average distance. Strong hitter. Good rookie.

These are indicators of strength. And there are some other familiar ones. For example, Pederson is tied for second in isolated power, behind only Bryce Harper. He’s barely a percentage point off the lead in home runs per fly ball. The comparisons to Adam Dunn are being made for a reason — lots of walks, lots of strikeouts, lots of power. We know that Pederson has pop. But how else might we be able to think about this? Enter Statcast. Glorious Statcast!

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The New York Yankees haven’t been to the playoffs since 2012. In itself that’s not all that noteworthy: a two-year playoff drought when the team won 84 and 85 games over the previous two years seems more like bad luck than fundamental organizational error. Over the last two seasons, however, more teams have made the playoffs than haven’t, and the Yankees are in the minority despite their $200 million payrolls. After first planning to cut salaries and then abandoning that plan following a disappointing 2013 season, the Yankees’ spending spree couldn’t quite push them to the playoffs last year. Surprisingly, though, it’s the same collection of injury-prone, aging players from last year who have led to the club’s success over the first two months of the 2015 season.

In 2014, newcomer Jacoby Ellsbury played well, but Brian McCann disappointed on offense, and Carlos Beltran never got things going. Injuries to Michael Pineda, CC Sabathia and Masahiro Tanaka — plus the complete absence of Alex Rodriguez, a compromised Mark Teixeira, and a disappointing farewell for Derek Jeter — meant a second straight season without the playoffs. Hiroki Kuroda played well, but he didn’t return for 2015. During the offseason, the Yankees did more tinkering than make wholesale changes. They brought in Didi Gregorius to play shortstop, retained trade-acquisition Chase Headley, and signed Andrew Miller to replace the departed David Robertson. The Yankees current record of 28-25 is only one game better than their expected winning percentage at the start of the season, but their playoff odds have increased immensely, as the following graph illustrates.

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With Adrian Beltre set to miss the next few weeks with a thumb injury, the Texas Rangers did something a little unexpected. To fill Beltre’s void, they called up top prospect Joey Gallo from Double-A, who ranked 16th on our top-200 list heading into the season. Gallo made his big-league debut last night, and went 3-for-4 with a home run, a double and a walk. The one out he made came via the strikeout.

Gallo’s first big-league homer was a majestic one… Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s Rule 4 Draft commences next Monday, and this year, the Arizona Diamondbacks will have the pick of the litter. While this particular crop might not be as exciting as some others, there are a handful of interesting prospects, including the usual assortment of hard-throwing pitchers and toolsy high school kids who might be useful in five years. These are the guys who are going to draw the most attention and likely go at the top of the draft, as most of the focus remains on identifying and developing potential franchise players.

However, not every draft pick is going to be oozing with upside, especially once you get out of the top half of the first round. After the top handful of players are off the board, teams have to start picking and choosing between guys with pretty notable flaws; maybe the hard-throwing guy only has a fastball at this point, or that impressive athlete hasn’t yet figured out how to hit. Or, as is the case for a large handful of draftees every summer, a lack of size and an inability to hit for power create the sense that a player is “low upside”, profiling as a future utility player or bench guy. A lot of college middle infielders fit this profile, especially the ones who get picked after the first round.

Only there’s something interesting going on in MLB right now; if you look at the majority of the best second baseman in baseball, they almost all were tagged with this “low upside” label in the draft. For example, here are a few of the draft profiles of some of the best middle infielders in baseball right now, courtesy of Baseball America.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Hitting and pitching may seem equally complicated, but consider this: when it comes to hitting, you have to use both of your hands in one place. By necessity, that adds a wrinkle, and can make hitting analysis difficult. In order to focus on something we can bite off and digest, let’s just ask Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Joc Pederson what they think about the top hand.

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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
Minnesota at Boston | 13:35 ET
Hughes (64.2 IP, 106 xFIP-) vs. Rodriguez (7.2 IP, 75 xFIP-)
A combination of faux science and the author’s own discretion suggest that this afternoon’s Twins-Red Sox game is the most likely, objectively speaking, to facilitate baseball pleasure. Largely that’s because it’s also the most likely — among all today’s various contests — to feature Boston rookie Eduardo Rodriguez, which left-handed pitcher recorded a 7:2 strikeout-to-walk ratio in his debut last week at Texas while also sitting in the mid-90s. Eno Sarris provided some brief comments on Rodriguez’s impressive velocity after the latter’s impressive debut. Chris Mitchell, meanwhile, utilized his KATOH machine to examine some of Rodriguez’s historic comparables. As for the present author, he merely wrote a paragraph of limited utility, which the reader has just now completed.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Boston Radio.

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The Sortable Draft Board features draft-prospect ranks, tool ratings, and likely selection range — and costs zero dollars.

In my continuing quest to increase transparency and reduce the amount of information that I know and do not communicate, today FanGraphs has rolled out a thing that I think is most appropriately described as the Sortable Draft Board. There is lots of information I wanted to include, so we made three tabs to include all the stuff I think you want to see while also separating the information by type. The general idea behind this is to:

1. Give you the tools to re-rank these players to your preferences, as you now have all the information necessary to have some reasonable amount of confidence about doing such.

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Episode 567
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he discusses the Twins and the defensive spectrum among other disparate, but not uninteresting, baseball topics.

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 42 min play time.)

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