Since the start of the 2015 season, the Diamondbacks have been easily baseball’s best baserunning team. They’ve been baseball’s best baserunning team in terms of stolen bases, and they’ve been baseball’s best baserunning team in terms of other kinds of advances. Baserunning isn’t one of those components that makes or breaks a roster, given that it’s more peripheral or secondary than anything else, but the longer something like this goes on, the easier it is to recognize.

In this very season, the Diamondbacks are at it again. That’s the second-place Diamondbacks, the wild-card-spot-occupying Diamondbacks. A few years ago, by our numbers, as a team they were 13 runs better than average on the bases. Last season, they were 18 runs better than average. This season, they’ve already been about 12 runs better than average. They didn’t do anything noteworthy on this particular afternoon, but that’s what a team gets for facing Max Scherzer. The team’s still been elite, and they’ve played only 30 games.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few minutes ago, I turned on a game between the A’s and the Twins, which is a sentence no one has ever written before. I turned the game on just in time to see Jharel Cotton pitching to Danny Santana. You might not know very much about Danny Santana. In fact, you probably don’t know very much about Danny Santana. That’s okay. Context clues. Relatively speaking, he’s a little dude. Hits a bunch of grounders. Utility player; reserve; Minnesota Twin. Here’s what Santana did:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Ring of Power could only be destroyed by returning it to whence it came, in the fiery Cracks of Doom of the great volcano Orodruin in the land of Mordor. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee had to travel all across Middle-Earth to accomplish this, traveling a great distance and encountering many perilous places and foes. Yet as is often the case, traveling a great distance resulted in accomplishing a great thing. Frodo and Sam rid the world of the Dark Lord Sauron. Luke Skywalker traveled to what was left of Alderaan and became a galactic hero. I am a massive dweeb.

Marcell Ozuna sent a baseball on a grand and glorious journey last night. He did not destroy it to eliminate a great evil, depending on how you feel about the Rays, but he did launch the ball into a far-flung flight. He sent a baseball into a part of Tropicana Field that was hitherto unexplored, and exploration of decrepit ruins like the Trop often yields important archeological information. The ball was like a sports version of the Cassini probe, a lonely adventurer into parts unknown.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Rangers announced that they’d be without Cole Hamels for the next couple of months, as he recovers from an oblique strain that was probably why he was pitching so poorly. A few hours later, they played the Astros in the third game of their four game series, and just like the previous two nights, they lost.

And they didn’t just lose; they got pounded 10-1, pushing them eight full games behind Houston in the AL West race. Now 11-17, the Rangers have the fourth-worst record in baseball, and their playoff odds have taken a nosedive; we currently are giving them just a 10% chance to reach the postseason.

And while it’s early enough to turn their season around, the disastrous first month of the season, paired with significant injuries to Hamels and Adrian Beltre, make it more likely that the Rangers are going to enter July in a precarious position. With some improvements from some key players, it’s not that hard to see this team making a late-season comeback, as they did a couple of years ago, to dig out of this big early hole and still put themselves in Wild Card position. But before they get there, the team will have to convince the front office to keep the roster together, and in particular, to ignore the numerous calls they’ll certainly be receiving on Yu Darvish.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alex Stumpf’s second piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

For the last six years, Tom Gillespie has been scouring the world looking for future Pirates. He says it’s the same as normal scouting: getting a name from beating a bush or a word from a trusted coach. It just happens over in Europe and Africa.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about infield-alignment terminology and walking Bryce Harper, then answer listener emails about proper pitch usage, winning minor league championships, the minimum acceptable velocity given perfect command, improving equipment, taking batting practice seriously, Eric Thames vs. Ivan Nova, making positions be dictated by batting order, the Royals’ awful offensive month, a message from the baseball god, a WWE-style MLB team, pace of play and the playoffs, voiding contracts, and more.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Subscribe: RSS

Last night, the Rockies slept in San Diego. For the most part, they slept well. They’ll head to Colorado after today’s game, and they won’t sleep as well when they get home. This is important, and backed by the players and science, so stick with me.

I did not sleep with them, or ask each one, but the ones I did talk to all mentioned the difference between sleeping at home and sleeping in San Diego and San Francisco. “The first night we were here, everyone was talking about how well they slept,” Rockies’ starter Tyler Chatwood told me in San Francisco. “Sometimes you feel it the first night, you have a crappy night’s sleep and feel tight,” said setup man Adam Ottavino of Colorado.

Plus, science says sleeping at high altitude is hard, and that rest and recovery generally is a difficult thing up high. In 2013 a meta-study in Turkey summed up the research:

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that we’re nearly one month into the minor-league season, 2017 performances are starting to mean something. The 2017 sample size is still small, but it’s large enough at least to merit a look at those prospects who may be in the midst of a breakout. This article aims to do just that by calling attention to the 10 pitchers who have most improved their KATOH+ projections over the season’s first few weeks. (The most-improved hitters were examined yesterday.) A reminder: a player’s KATOH forecast denotes his projected WAR total over the first six seasons of his major-league career.

Wilmer Font, RHP, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
Preseason KATOH+ Projection: 0.6
Current KATOH+ Projection: 1.9

Over the winter, KATOH tabbed Font as one of the most compelling minor-league free agents due to his serviceable performance as a starter in Triple-A last year. Through five Triple-A starts in 2017, Font possesses a 31% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate, giving him one of the best FIPs in Triple-A. As a 26-year-old journeyman, Font isn’t much of a prospect, but he’s currently pitching like one as a starter in Triple-A.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Zimmerman is off to a great start. We’re only 26 games into the season covering 104 PA, but anytime you’re running a .427/.462/.875 line, it’s worth celebrating. Among qualified hitters entering play on Thursday, Zimmerman led the league with a 241 wRC+. This is particularly noteworthy because, measured by outcomes, Zimmerman had a terrible season in 2016. Zimmerman posted a 67 wRC+ in 467 PA last year after many years as an above-average hitter.

During the offseason, Jeff Sullivan noted that Zimmerman’s 2016 probably didn’t portend doom. Jeff pointed out that Zimmerman was hitting the ball pretty hard in the air, but he simply wasn’t collecting extra-base hits at a rate consistent with that contact quality. Erstwhile FanGrapher Mike Petriello made a related argument, recognizing that Zimmerman was making hard contact, but that he simply wasn’t hitting the ball at a steep enough angle to turn that hard contact into productive contact.

I probably don’t have to tell you where this is going. This season, Zimmerman is hitting the ball a bit harder than last year, 93.6 mph on average vs, 92.5 mph in 2016, but his average launch angle has increased from 9.0 to 11.7 degrees in 2017.

But you don’t need fancy Statcast numbers to notice this difference. His fly-ball and ground-ball rates are plenty clear. Zimmerman has joined the ranks of so many players who are trying to hit more fly balls. And at least so far this season, it’s working quite well for him.

Read the rest of this entry »