Archive for 2017

The Texas Rangers are 2-5, which is not good. Consolation comes in two flavors. One, so early! Who cares! Two, the Mariners are 2-7. The Blue Jays are 1-6. The Cardinals are 2-6, and the Giants are 3-6. Baseball will find its level, and its level will have the Rangers winning at a clip higher than 29%. So, yeah. Still, it’s a fan’s place to overreact to the season’s beginning, and it’s perfectly reasonable to wonder why the Rangers have been so bad. Let’s just take a look at something:

Yeah, that’ll do it. By WPA, Sam Dyson has already been a win worse than the next-worst pitcher. As a matter of fact, according to the best research I could do, Dyson has the lowest WPA on record through a team’s first seven games. It’s a weird stat, but a telling one, and in case you don’t love WPA, let’s go old-fashioned. Dyson’s tied for first (last?) in baseball in runs allowed, while being tied for 138th in batters faced. Bad. Dyson has been a drag, and he was a drag again Tuesday night.

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How does one define stardom in baseball? How does one identify a star? Well, firstly, it probably doesn’t require knowing a guy’s WAR. It’s more intuitive than that. You can feel your lips curling into a grin when a certain player does something exceptional. When that happens again and again, that’s when you know: there’s something special about that one guy. He can do it all, and he does it more often than everyone else. What’s a star? A star is someone capable of evoking an almost childlike sense of joy and wonder.

Yoenis Cespedes has sentimental value for Mets fans beyond his capacity to do just that. It was Cespedes who strode in and muscled the Mets to the World Series a couple years ago. He may not serve as a daily one-man wrecking crew with the sort of frequency that he did during the 2015 stretch drive, but he’s still pretty damn good, and pretty damn watchable to boot. He’s a near-ideal mixture of talent and swagger, a man with monstrous power and a magnetic presence off the field. It was that monstrous power, and the Phillies, which helped him launch three home runs last night.

Homer #1

Look, I don’t know whether we’ll ever be able to say for sure if Clay Buchholz is (was?) good. His career has been a roller coaster without safety harnesses. There have been years where he’s looked brilliant, and there have been years where he’s looked disastrous. Both varieties of seasons are prone to being curtailed by injuries. And, speaking of which, Buchholz did wind up leaving last night’s game with the dreaded “right forearm tightness,” so he may not have been at his best when Cespedes did this to him.

Now, yes, the Phillies do indeed play in a bandbox. But hitting a ball out to dead center is impressive no matter where you’re playing, and Cespedes cleared the wall with room to spare. It’s easy to do that when you’re built like Cespedes and you’ve just been thrown a big-league meatball, but you’ve still got to actually hit the thing. Cespedes, true to form, did in fact hit the thing. Thus began a game that would see the Mets score 14 runs and hit seven bombs in total. It seems Mets hitters really do trust the process.

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The Angels have an interesting situation at the back end of their bullpen. It’s not unique in that it’s a timeshare — in their own division, the Athletics are adamant that Sean Doolittle and Santiago Casilla are both closers, depending on the handedness of the opposing ninth-inning lineup — but it’s still a little different. Andrew Bailey and Cam Bedrosian, the two heads of that monster, have two unique pitches that power their success.

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Over the winter, Eric Longenhagen had very nice things to say about Padres outfield prospect Manny Margot. He ranked Margot and 23rd overall in baseball. He also gave four of Margot’s five tools a grade of 60 or higher. Margot’s power was the only tool that didn’t receive a plus grade. Eric assigned Margot’s game power a present grade of 30 (or three to five homers per year) and a future grade of 40 (10-12 homers per year). In sum, he projected Margot to do everything but hit for power.

Nine games into the season, Margot has not adhered to those power grades. He already has three dingers to his name, tying him for eighth in baseball. His .343/.396/.686 batting line works out to a 182 wRC+. The guy who was supposed to do everything but hit for power is hitting for power. Eric said the following in his write-up of Margot, which is starting to look prescient.

It’s possible Margot may learn to elevate the ball more regularly as he matures, and if he does he’ll become a star-level player.

Yes, it’s only nine games. And, yes, punchless hitters sometimes bunch a few homers together by pure chance. Noted bunt machine Mallex Smith hit two in one game, for example, but few noticed because it didn’t happen in the first week of the season. But Margot is doing something very different than what he’s done in the past, and if he keeps doing it, he could be a bonafide star.

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Brad Brach broke out after reaching Baltimore. Fueled by a velocity spike and a healthy dose of confidence, the 31-year-old right-hander has excelled since being acquired by the Orioles from San Diego prior to the 2014 season. In 183 relief outings, Brach has a 2.56 ERA and has allowed just 163 hits over 224.2 innings. Working primarily as a setup man, he’s been credited with 22 wins and three saves.

Brach — an All-Star for the first time last season — was treading water before coming east. A pedestrian fastball was a big reason. The Monmouth University product was barely topping 90 mph when the Padres lost faith and shipped him out in exchange for a low-level prospect. Then came spring training in a new uniform, and sage tutelage from a pair of since-departed pitching gurus.

Brach detailed his career-altering velo jump, and the I’m-coming-after-you mindset that followed, prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

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Brach on how he turned a corner in 2014: “I made a mechanical adjustment that helped me gain some velocity. I straightened out on the rubber. I kind of throw across my body and, before, I was tilting way too much. I was throwing so far across my body that I was basically having to get over myself to throw to home.

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Often it seems that anything written in April, any attempt at analysis, any assessment of a player, must be accompanied by a disclaimer that it’s small-sample-size season. That same sense of caution applies to this report, certainly. It’s generally dangerous to read into any limited sample of work — especially at the beginning of a season, when we’re most starved for actual baseball, when we’re most apt to rush to a judgement or make an extrapolation.

Still, some things occur at this time of year that do matter.

Sometimes, of course, the adjustment and changes made in the offseason and during spring do lead to results.

And a good start for Jason Heyward was important — if for no other reason than to quell lineup controversy and ensure playing time.

Last October, the last time most of us saw Heyward, his swing was broken. There were times, as a neutral observer, that it was difficult to watch him struggle with his awkward swing, sapped both of power and confidence. Last season, Heyward’s average exit velocity of 87.4 mph ranked 282nd among hitters 379 hitters with at least 100 batted-ball events, a figure sandwiched between those produced by Delino DeShields and Kolten Wong.

While Heyward has always had a mechanical-looking swing, the production and velocity was well down from his 2015 levels, when he slashed .293/.359/.439 and produced an average exit velocity of 90.7 mph. That season, combined with his longer track record of defensive excellence and above-average offense, earned him an eight-year, $184 million contract.

That contract looked like one of the few errors made to date during the Theo Epstein Era in Chicago. Heyward was going to become a very expensive defensive specialist if he posted another 72 wRC+, if he suffered an unusual loss of offensive abilities in the midst of his prime, like Melvin Upton Jr.

So this offseason, with no monetary incentive, with pride and professionalism serving as primary motivators, Heyward went to work.

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You could be forgiven, heading into last season, for thinking that Daniel Murphy would fail to carry over the magic of his 2015 playoff performance into the 2016 campaign. Many teams seem to have had similar suspicions: a free agent, Murphy received just $37.5 million over three years to sign with Washington. The Nationals were immediately rewarded: Murphy recorded nearly six wins for the club, basically providing a full return on Washington’s investment in just the first year of the contract.

Despite the wild success of Murphy’s 2016 campaign, it’s possible you had your doubts going into the current season, as well. Murphy was entering his age-32 season. His success last season was built in part on a very high BABIP. He doesn’t walk a ton. The projections were pegging him for just short of three wins this year. There was plenty of reason to expect some regression.

Early in the 2017 season, however, Daniel Murphy’s play is dispelling whatever doubts remained about the legitimacy of last year’s breakout.

After just eight games, Murphy already has 17 hits, seven for extra bases. He’s gotten at least one hit in every game, gotten at least two hits in six of eight games — including a three-hit game and last night’s four-hit game. With two doubles and a homer yesterday, Murphy is hitting .472/.486/.778 with a wRC+ of 230. It’s easy to say that it’s only eight games, but if Murphy gets another 550 plate appearances on the season and hits “only” his projected 118 wRC+ over the course of it, he’ll still record a 125 wRC+ overall. Over his last 200 games dating back to August 1, 2015, Murphy has a 153 wRC+ and that doesn’t even include another 86 postseason plate appearances where that number was close to 200. Murphy has been a really good hitter for quite some time, and it doesn’t look like he’s slowing down.

If you recall, Murphy did this exact same thing at the beginning of last season, hitting .480/.581/.880 with a 277 wRC+ after eight games. There were still skeptics at that point, and there were still skeptics a month later when Dave Cameron asked everyone to buy into Daniel Murphy. Over the winter, Jeff Sullivan looked at Murphy’s unique skillset, which includes a whole lot of power and a whole lot of contact. Sullivan noted that, in recent history, only Victor Martinez and Nomar Garciaparra have had seasons like Murphy’s 2016. Going further back into the past we find Hall of Famers like George Brett and Tris Speaker.

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Episode 730
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the program, during which he discusses the beguiling matter of velocity and the measurement of velocity in baseball after the League recently completed their transition from the PITCHf/x to Statcast pitch-tracking systems.

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 35 min play time.)

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