The Cincinnati Reds are young and rebuilding, so it’s not too much of a surprise that, this year, they’ve had more players make their major-league debuts than any other team. Yesterday, a pitcher named Ariel Hernandez showed up for the first time. He was tasked with some early innings in relief of an unsuccessful starter. Although it’s never easy to make one’s first-ever big-league pitches, some of the pressure is off when your team’s already losing 10-4.

Hernandez entered in the bottom of the fourth. In this post, I’d like to try something. He entered with one out. It took him six pitches to get out of the inning. Hernandez completed two more innings afterward, but I want to look at those six pitches alone. And here’s the idea: I want to estimate Hernandez’s projected ERA at each instant. That is, I want to take a stab at his rest-of-season ERA given only the information provided to me. I knew nothing about Hernandez before, and the same presumably goes for many of you. He’s working now to fill up a blank slate.

Here goes nothing! Six Ariel Hernandez pitches. His first six meaningful pitches, against major-league hitters.

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Over the last few years, we’ve been called TroutGraphs more than a few times, because we write about Mike Trout a lot. Well, TroutGraphs might officially be taking a year off, because 2017 appears to be the year of ThamesGraphs. Yes, after we put his name in the headline of three posts and a podcast last week, I’m writing about him again today. Sorry, rest of baseball. We’ll get back to you all eventually.

Yesterday, Thames did Thames things, launching two more home runs and drawing two more walks, reaching base four of the five times he came to the plate. His season line is now at .373/.481/.910, and he’s now one home run away from having as many long balls this year as the Red Sox. At +1.8 WAR, Thames has already produced the entire season’s worth of value for which we projected him before the season started, and the consensus was that our projections were wildly optimistic. Apparently they weren’t optimistic enough.

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Previously
Changeup: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveball: AL Starters / NL Starters.

Our series focusing on the evaluation of 2016 ERA-qualifying starters’ pitches grinds on. Today, we kill a couple of birds with one stone, with a look at the best cutters and splitters from both leagues.

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To start, we might as well revisit the difference between command and control, or at least the accepted version of that difference: control is the ability to throw the ball into the strike zone, while command is the ability to throw the ball to a particular location. While we can easily measure the first by looking at strike-zone percentage, it’s also immediately apparent that the second skill is more interesting. A pitcher often wants to throw the ball outside of the zone, after all.

We’ve tried to put a number on command many different ways. I’m not sure we’ve succeeded, despite significant and interesting advances.

You could consider strikeout minus walk rate (K-BB%) an attempt, but it also captures way too much “stuff” to be a reliable command metric — a dominant pitch, thrown into the strike zone with no command, could still earn a lot of strikeouts and limit walks.

COMMANDf/x represented a valiant attempt towards solving this problem by tracking how far the catcher’s glove moved from the original target to the actual location at which it acquired the ball. But there were problems with that method of analysis. For one, the stat was never made public. Even if it were, however, catchers don’t all show the target the same way. Chris Iannetta, for example, told me once that his relaxation moment, between showing a target and then trying to frame the ball, was something he had to monitor to become a better framer. Watch him receive this low pitch: does it seem like we could reliably affix the word “target” to one of these moments, and then judge the pitch by how far the glove traveled after that moment?

How about all those times when the catcher is basically just indicating inside vs. outside, and it’s up to the pitcher to determine degree? What happens when the catcher pats the ground to tell him to throw it low, or exaggerates his high target? There are more than a few questions about an approach affixed to a piece of equipment, sometimes haphazardly used.

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There’s something odd about the Cubs’ starting rotation, and I wrote about it last week. All five pitchers have been working with reduced velocity, relative to where they were last season. When it happens to one guy, it’s a potential problem. When it happens to five guys…I suppose it’s a potential *huge* problem, but it’s also a potentially deliberate pattern. I speculated as much, offering that the Cubs might be trying to back off their main arms since they’re coming off an extended season, and preparing for another.

Jake Arrieta has been okay, reduced velocity or not. The same goes for Jon Lester, who looks like the same pitcher. However, it’s a different story when it comes to Kyle Hendricks. Like the other starters, Hendricks isn’t throwing as hard as he used to. But then, Hendricks is sitting on a 6+ ERA. He specialized in command and soft contact. Now he has worse command, and he’s allowing hard contact. As far as Hendricks is concerned, something seems awry, although it looks to me to be mechanical.

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Episode 734
The prolific Travis Sawchik is a former beat reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and author of the book Big Data Baseball. He’s also the guest on this edition of the program, during which he identifies which Marriotts in this country are located nearest to and furthest from major-league ballparks; recalls where he’s gone drinking in Covington, Kentucky; and relays a brief, dark fact about how his ancestors have fared in the mines of Western Pennsylvania.

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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 1 hr 19 min play time.)

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk to Grant Brisbee of SB Nation about acceptable ballpark behavior, Madison Bumgarner, the Giants, and baseball’s latest tests of unwritten (and written) rules involving beanball wars between the Tigers and Twins and the Orioles and Red Sox.

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Slowly but surely, we’re getting into the fun part of the season. I mean, it’s all fun, even parts of spring training, but now that we’re approaching the end of April, elements are starting to shake out. Certain teams have had legitimately great starts, and certain other teams are in significant trouble. Sample sizes everywhere remain small, but they’re growing large enough that we can begin to seriously wonder about changed performances. What’s more fun than a player who’s changed his own true talent? After the first few games, we can throw any number of names against the wall. By now, there’s just a little more clarity.

In this post, I call for your help. It’s a poll post! Below, you will find the names of five hitters who have gotten off to extraordinary starts. They’re five of the more interesting hitters in the game today. Every player gets a short description, and a poll. I want to know how good you think they actually are. Just for the few of you who might like to complain: Obviously, I’ve not included every interesting hitter off to a promising start. There’s no Freddie Freeman or Ryan Zimmerman or Aaron Hicks. I’ve chosen these five because these are the five I have chosen. Participate or don’t. (Please participate.)

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Last Thursday, Madison Bumgarner wrecked his dirt bike, and in the process, also wrecked his throwing shoulder. The team publicly announced that he’d be out 6-8 weeks while rehabbing the injury, but reports suggest that might be an optimistic belief.

SF will get more info on Bumgarner in days ahead, but there is concern within organization the injury will sideline him longer than 2 months

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) April 22, 2017

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