Archive for 2017

Because we’ve been here for every moment of his career, we may have somehow lost track of just how good Mike Trout is. Obviously we know he’s the best player in the show right now, but it’s a not as easy to wrap your head around his historic greatness. Trout’s excellence isn’t the kind that lends itself to flashy highlight-reel plays, except for his trademark leaping home-run robberies. He isn’t a high-intensity player. His home runs aren’t moonshots, and he’s not a disciple of the Bryce Harper–Jose Bautista school of flare. He plays for a bad team, so we don’t often get to watch him on national television. Looking at WAR leaderboards and seeing his name at the top of the chart has become a mundane fact of baseball since 2012.

Let’s look at it another way, though. Consider Moises Alou. Had a pretty good career, no? He played his first big-league game in 1990 and his final in 2008. During that time he appeared in 1942 games and accumulated 47.7 WAR. He made the All-Star team six times. A fine career.

Mike Trout has played in 811 games. During that time he has also been worth 47.7 WAR, or roughly the value of Alou’s entire career. Take that with a grain of salt, of course, as the defensive metrics for Alou only go back so far, but yeah. We can somewhat confidently say that Trout has provided a similar amount of value in the span of 811 games that Alou, a pretty darn good player in his own right, provided in nearly 2000.

Trout is the sort of player who generates fun facts like this. You could easily do a recurring series of Mike Trout Fun Facts and not run out of material for a good while. Generational talent leads to statistical madness, and Trout is nothing if not a generational talent, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime talent. He’s 25, and has already put together almost 50 wins. Only two players in history have compiled greater WAR totals through age 25, and they’re both inner-circle Hall of Famers. One of them is Mickey Mantle, to whom Trout is so often compared. The other is Ty Cobb.

Trout has yet to play his age-25 season.

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For a few decades now, the easiest way to get paid in MLB was to hit a bunch of home runs. Given the way bat-first outfielders and first baseman got compensated in free agency, the catchphrase actually should have been “General Mangers Dig The Longball.” The trend in free agency for quite a while has been that offense is expensive and defense is cheap.

Except, that seems to be changing.

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Justin Wilson is all about getting outs, and he’s done a laudable job of getting them. Over four full seasons, and a fraction of a fifth — two-plus with the Pirates and one each with the Yankees and Tigers — the 29-year-old southpaw has a 3.28 ERA and a 3.21 FIP. Armed with a 95-mph heater and a cutter/slider, he’s allowed 7.6 hits per nine over 258 innings of work.

Detroit acquired the Fresno State product prior to last season — Luis Cessa and Chad Green went to Gotham in the swap — and it remains to be seen how long he remains in Motown. Despite the solid relief work on his resume, Wilson has been the subject of trade speculation since the completion of the 2016 campaign. While the rumors have died down, there remains a chance he will be toeing the rubber in a new city come Opening Day.

If he does change addresses — and even if doesn’t — Wilson could find himself in a new role. His 276 big-league appearances have all been out of the bullpen, but some think he’s better suited to starting. Reverse splits are a reason. Last year, the lefty logged a .667 OPS-against versus righties, while same-sided hitters put up a .772 OPS. Over his career, lefties have been .043 better against his deliveries than have right-handers.

Wilson talked about his game when the Tigers visited Fenway Park last summer.

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Wilson on aggression and location: “All I care about is outs. I don’t try to ever get ground balls — even if I have a runner on first. I don’t feel I have enough conviction behind the pitch if I’m trying to throw a ground-ball pitch. I’m trying to be aggressive. In a sense, I’m trying to strike everybody out. If he hits it on the ground, great. If he swings and misses, great. My thought process is more about making a good pitch than getting a specific result.

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When the Rays acquired Nate Karns from the Nationals back in 2014, the story was that he had fastball velocity and a power curve, and we’ll see about the changeup. We saw the changeup, and it was good enough, and the curve was as advertised. Unfortunately, something happened to the fastball along the way.

The Rays sent Jose Lobaton and Felipe Rivero to the Nationals for that curveball and hoped on the change. The change looked good in 147 innings for the Rays in 2015, so the Mariners took a leap that offseason, sending Brad Miller, Logan Morrison and Danny Farquhar to the Rays for Karns, right-hander C.J. Riefenhauser, and center fielder Boog Powell. Now, after a poor year, Karns has been traded again — to the Royals, this time — for outfielder Jarrod Dyson.

What happened last year, when Karns had an ERA over five? The curve and the change were fine in Seattle! But in the meantime, something may have happened to Karns’ fastball. And it could have to do with useful spin. Kansas City has to hope that what broke is fixable.

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I was in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park last May as the Chicago Cubs began to arrive for their game later that evening. Before games, at least for the period when media is present, major-league clubhouses are typically serene spaces. Players are often seated before their lockers, scrolling through their smart phones or listening to music on the device. There’s conversation, of course, there are players and coaches quietly examining video in the center visiting clubhouses, but there is typically not a frat-house atmosphere.

Then Anthony Rizzo walked in.

Rizzo appeared at the threshold of the locker room itself and boomed “What’s up [expletive]s!” beaming with a smile as he strutted to his corner locker.

The coaches and teammates present smiled and laughed. When I later departed, I walked past the visiting manager’s office, where Joe Maddon sat alone, rock music blaring.

It was not my first encounter with the Cubs’ clubhouse culture. I had briefly inhabited the old, cramped home clubhouse in Wrigley Field at the end of the 2015 season after the Cubs clinched a Wild Card berth. The narrow clubhouse was about the size of a batting cage. There I saw David Ross hand Maddon a bottle of spirits as a gift, and then embrace him. I asked then-rookie Addison Russell about his first conversation with Maddon. He said it was not baseball-related. They discussed some Stephen King novels, as Maddon had learned Russell was a fan of the genre. When Kris Bryant arrived to much fanfare early that season, Maddon didn’t talk to him about handling pressure and expectations, rather Maddon shared his favorite restaurants and places to bicycle in Chicago.

In my limited experience around the Cubs, I thought, This is a different kind of atmosphere: fun, loose, stress-free. This is a team that doesn’t feel overwhelmed by expectations. Sure, it helped that I was witnessing a club when in the midst of a historically good start. And sure, I was making an assumption off a small sample of behavior. But Malcolm Gladwell argued in Blink that human beings are adept at making accurate assessments very quickly.

So these anecdotes bring us to that time Maddon met Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney.

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Episode 708
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. On this edition of the program, he discusses an innovation (care of Baseball Savant) in the measurement of outfield defense; examines Milwaukee’s rebuilding strategy through the lens of the club’s 2017 projections; and considers the optimal balance between fastballs and secondary pitches.

This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

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 40 min play time.)

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Ben talks to Joe Sheehan and Rany Jazayerli about unsigned free agents, baseball economics, trends to watch in 2017, and the perplexing Royals.

Whenever conventional wisdom and the numbers — or whatever conclusion I have drawn from the numbers — differ, I’m left wondering why such a difference exists. Many times there’s a good reason; other times, the reasons make less sense. One situation where my conclusions appear to differ from conventional wisdom comes in the form of Vladimir Guerrero and his case for the Hall of Fame. When recently considering Guerrero’s statistical credentials for the Hall, he seemed to fall short of the voting standards for most recent candidates who gained induction. At the same time, his name currently appears on 75% of this year’s ballots according to Ryan Thibodaux’s tracker. So what gives?

The easy answer is that voters — due to Guerrero’s brilliance and flair at the plate — are willing either to minimize or forgive entirely Guerrero’s defense and baserunning, as well as the fact that his last above-average season occurred at age-33. They aren’t necessarily wrong, as he certainly has a case by virtue of his peak and career WAR numbers. He also recorded a very good .318 career batting average and an MVP award. Plus, from 1997 to 2006, his 114 assists topped all outfielders, with his great arm obscuring his lack of range and errors, in which category (errors) he also topped MLB during that time. That’s probably the most reasonable explanation for why I concluded he was just below the cusp for the Hall of Fame — certainly worthy of consideration, but not a certain Hall of Famer like the voters appear close to making him.

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On Friday morning, the Mariners made what looked like a weird trade, shipping useful outfielder Seth Smith to the Orioles for less useful starting pitcher Yovani Gallardo, who is both not as good as Smith but also more expensive. Sure, the Mariners needed some more pitching depth, but they weren’t really rolling around in extra good outfielders, so subtracting Smith seemed weird.

Then, though, they made a second trade, this time swapping a starting pitcher for an outfielder, that made the pair of moves make a bit more sense. In the second deal, they shipped Nate Karns to Kansas City in exchange for Jarrod Dyson, who is a better player than Smith, so the series of moves actually resulted in an OF upgrade, with the impact to the pitching staff depending on what you think of Karns, who has both obvious strengths and minuses.

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