Mitch Harris is known for his back story. The 30-year-old righthander was drafted by the Cardinals in 2008, but he didn’t throw his first professional pitch until 2013. The interim years were spent protecting Uncle Sam. Harris did two tours of duty in the Persian Gulf and another off the coast of Colombia, where his ship helped curtail drug-smuggling operations.

Last year, Harris became the second graduate of the Naval Academy to reach the big leagues. (Nemo Gaines pitched in four games for the Washington Senators in 1921.) Harris came out of the St. Louis bullpen 26 times and put up a 3.67 ERA over 27 innings.

A 6-foot-4, 235 lb. power pitcher, Harris relies heavily on a mid-90s fastball and a cutter. He began throwing the latter during his sophomore season with the Midshipmen, on the recommendation of his pitching coach.

Keeping your deliveries sharp isn’t easy when you’re on a boat halfway across the world, although Harris did occasionally throw to a cook on the flight deck. Following the MLB hitters he hoped to one day face was also a challenge. As Harris put it, “It’s not as though I could turn on the TV and get any channel; it was more of whether the ship was in the right direction to get a satellite.”

Now that he’s in the big leagues, the righty has access to all the video he could possibly want. Initially, he used ignorance to his advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I read an article on Philly.com about Jason Groome, a left-handed high school pitching prospect thought to be in the mix for the first overall pick in this upcoming draft. In addition to being the local-ish prospect, Groome got a stamp of approval from Cole Hamels, who saw him do a workout for the Phillies last year before Hamels was traded to Texas.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben talks to former Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Steven Goldman and Banished to the Pen’s Darius Austin about how Warren Spahn avoided the 1950s Dodgers and what we can learn from the way managers used their pitchers when rotations weren’t rigid.

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

Subscribe: RSS

Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati .

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds. In this companion piece, I look at that same Cincinnati farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies aren’t projected to be a very good team this season. If you’re familiar with our internet pages, that certainly doesn’t come as breaking news. The Phillies rebuild has been a long time coming, and it’s good that they are finally committed to that process. And when I say committed, I mean committed. In a good way. The process is working, and working faster than many have anticipated. But while the process can be ghastly to the point where it isn’t really fun to watch, the Phillies don’t figure to be that kind of team. In fact, they should be fun.

Among the projected starting rotation and starting lineup, there will only be three players over 30 — Ryan Howard, Carlos Ruiz and Charlie Morton. Ruiz is a fan favorite, and Morton is a still interesting pitcher who doesn’t have the mileage on him a 32-year-old normally would. Watching Howard might not be pretty, but we’re suddenly in the last year of his contract (assuming Philly isn’t going to pick up his 2017 club option). Hopefully, the season can be spent celebrating all the good things he did in a Phillies uniform — like how he’s still just one of 24 players who has ever hit 40 or more home runs off of right-handed pitching in a single season. Or perhaps the three home runs he hit in the 2008 World Series, or his MVP performance in the 2009 NLCS. There were good times to be had. And hey, at least he got back to hitting righties at an above-average clip last year. That was nice.

Aside from those players, this is not a team that is going to be populated by retreads like last year’s version of the club. In addition to Howard and Ruiz, last year’s Phillies also gave run to 30s-aged players Jonathan Papelbon, Cole Hamels, Jeff Francoeur, Grady Sizemore, Chase Utley, Aaron Harang, Kevin Correia, Jerome Williams and Andres Blanco. Blanco — who oddly produced a 136 wRC+ campaign — is back, but the rest have been excised. The only other potentially prominent 30-something is Matt Harrison, if he can get healthy again. And if he does, his comeback will be a heartwarming story.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before I wrote for FanGraphs – in what might be considered the dark ages – I was in a small grocery store in my Oakland neighborhood. I was in line to pay, A’s hat perched forlornly on my head, when I struck up a conversation with a guy in line who looked to be in his 60s. We talked about baseball for five to ten minutes, and, toward the end of the conversation, he introduced himself as Mike Norris: a former screwballer who pitched for the A’s during the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was a fluke meeting — a simple coincidence, if there ever was one — but looking back on it, the meeting was somewhat of a turning point for me in respect to writing about baseball.

I ended up putting together a few articles about him for The Hardball Times during the past couple of years, and the hours of interviews I’ve conducted with him form the basis of a large project about social issues in baseball and the state of the game in urban America. Every couple of weeks, I sit down with him and he tells me stories, like the time he almost killed/got killed by Dave Winfield. It’s strange how things work out.

This article is peripherally about Norris. He’s the historical basis for what we’re talking about today, because he threw what can only be described as a dying (or dead) pitch: the screwball. There’s a mythological lifeblood to baseball – it courses through every home run and every outfield assist to the plate, popping up to offer its comparisons to the longest, the fastest, the hardest, the immeasurable. The screwball lives in this mythology, somewhere among its fellow defunct and rare pitches: the Spitter, the Eephus, the Gyroball.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s over. Maybe.

Mark Buehrle has told reporters this offseason that he is “not planning on playing next season but is not ready to officially announce retirement,” which is a sort of confusing follow-up to the rumors we heard in October that the 36-year-old veteran starter was planning to retire. If Buehrle does wind up pitching in 2016, it sounds like the only team that could lure him back are his hometown St. Louis Cardinals. If Buehrle winds up retiring, it will mark the end of a remarkable and fascinating career.

Buehrle’s no Hall of Famer. But he’s close. Closer than you might think. He’ll be on the ballot in five or six years, and he’ll get a handful of votes. By our WAR here on the site, which underrates Buehrle by using FIP, Buehrle ranks 40th all-time among starting pitchers in the expansion era. By RA9-WAR, the Preferred Buehrle Method of Evaluation, he jumps up to 30th, with a WAR of 61 that places him right on the verge of the generally accepted Hall of Fame consideration threshold.

And if you think of Buehrle simply as a “compiler,” you’d be mistaken. Buehrle had the peak. When Buehrle entered the league in 2000, his contemporaries included Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, who were turning in some of the most dominant single-season pitching performances baseball has ever seen. Buehrle didn’t have any of the strikeouts or any of the dominant peripherals, but believe it or not, he was right there, just a few steps behind the Pedros and Units and Schillings of his time. Buehrle put up 26 WAR between 2001-05, making him the seventh-most valuable pitcher during that half decade, just a win or so per season behind the true greats. Buehrle’s peak ranks 67th among all pitchers in the expansion era, just ahead of Fernando Valenzuela and just behind David Cone.

But to simply state the WAR figures does a disservice to Buehrle, who is truly one of a kind. In an age where pitchers are hurt more than ever, Buehrle’s never been on the disabled list. He fell five outs short of throwing at least 200 innings for what would have been an unthinkable 15th consecutive season. During that time, Buehrle logged 3,232 innings. That’s 300 more than second place, 500 more than third place, 1,000 more than 18th place.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems to me there are two ways of thinking about things. Baseball, as you know, is the one major sport where the playing dimensions between venues can be wildly different. Given that, I think you can either prefer neutrality and standardization, or you can choose to embrace the differences. There are limits to the latter — I don’t think anyone wants to see a stadium that makes a mockery of the contest, because you don’t have reasonable competition. But we haven’t gotten to the mockery point. So, personally, I like the quirks, even if they seem occasionally unfair.

Focus on that unfairness for a moment. If something were simply too unfair, it wouldn’t work. Fans wouldn’t support it. You couldn’t play a real baseball game with fences right behind the infield because the product wouldn’t be recognizable. I think there are certain features, currently, that approach the threshold without crossing it. Like, left field in Minute Maid Park approaches the line, because it yields a number of pretty weak home runs. It’s true, but without being out of control. On the opposite side of things, there’s straightaway center field in Minute Maid Park. If you want to conquer that, as a hitter, you have to hit the most difficult homer in baseball.

Read the rest of this entry »