Archive for 2017

Lars Anderson likes to experience new things, and he’s currently doing so on the other side of the world. One year removed from a season in the Dodgers system, the 29-year-old former top prospect in the Red Sox organization is playing with the Kochi Fighting Dogs, an independent team in Japan’s Shikoku Island League. One of his teammates is Manny Ramirez.

Anderson — featured in this column a few years ago — had gone from shooting star to minor league role player, and riding the pine wasn’t his cup of tea. As he told me recently, “I love playing baseball. I do not love watching it.” He began daydreaming about places that interested him culturally, and also had professional baseball. Japan was at the top of his list.

Conversations with Terrmel Sledge and John Bowker — each of whom had played in both MLB and NPB — followed. The Fighting Dogs made an offer, and come the third week of March, Anderson arrived in Kochi.  

Things have gone well. The Shikoku Island League plays a split season — “there are no official games in June and July due to the rainy season” — and Anderson finished the April-May first half leading the league in home runs. Facing pitchers “with a wide range of ability” he was second in RBIs, and in the Top 10 in batting average. The second half of the Fighting Dogs schedule begins tomorrow.

Along with Anderson, Manny Being Manny will remain with the team. The two have known each other since they were teammates with the Triple-A Iowa Cubs in 2014, and not surprisingly Anderson has an appreciation for the enigmatic one-time superstar. 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 and blue for Community Research.
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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about humorless umpires and the on-deck circle, Michael Blazek and disaster starts, the MLB promotion of Aaron Bummer (and the nickname “Bummer” in baseball), the Brewers, Jaime Garcia and the Twins, the latest Mariners-Rays trade, Adrian Beltre’s book-worthy career, and David Price’s arm issues.

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This is not just about the Cardinals’ shortstop Paul DeJong. He’s the subject of the sarcastic tweet below, but the point is that this sort of sentiment — surprise at a walk from a player with poor plate discipline — is increasingly more common in today’s game.

PAUL DEJONG WALK

— Gif Weaver (@SimulacruMusial) July 28, 2017

It’s true, he walked! It’s also true he hasn’t walked much this year, and that he strikes out a lot. For the season, he has coupled a 2.6% BB% with a 31.3% K%. Yikes! But, with today’s power environment, this sort of plate discipline is more…allowable. Used to be, if you struck out four times for every walk, you just didn’t have a spot in baseball. That’s not true any more.

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Justin Wilson used to throw more than a modicum of curveballs, but that was when he was a starter. The Detroit Tigers closer largely shelved the pitch a few years ago, as it had been serving primarily as a get-me-over option. He didn’t feel it was beneficial out of the bullpen. As Wilson explained to me in June, “it was kind of loopy — the action just wasn’t there — so it definitely wasn’t a put-away pitch.”

The 29-year-old southpaw came into 2017 wanting to resurrect it — sort of. Mostly, he wanted a lower-octane offering to augment his bread-and-butter. Since becoming a reliever, Wilson has relied almost exclusively on a fastball and a cutter.

“I wanted something to slow guys down,” explained Wilson, whose days in Motown — if trade rumors are to be believed — are numbered. “When a hitter saw a scouting report on me, everything was hard. My fastball. My cutter is hard. There was nothing with a speed change. I worked on that over the winter, and kept it going into the spring.”

Over the course of the current campaign, Wilson’s breaking ball has been inconsistent and somewhat difficult to define. Pitch data suggests it’s a slider, the lefty considers it more of a curve, and depending on the day, either could be more accurate than the other. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners are a decidedly mediocre team. They are 51-52. They have averaged 4.7 runs per game and given up an average of 4.8 runs per game. Their BaseRuns record is actually one game worse than their actual record, but that’s pretty darn close. They are projected to win half of their remaining games. When you include baserunning, their offense is 15th in the majors. Their defense ranks 18th, three runs above average. Their starters rank 23rd in WAR and their relievers 21st.

In other words, nothing about this Mariners team says go for it, yet the team has dipped its toes in that water acquiring bullpen help in the form of David Phelps and a potential bottom-of-the-rotation starter in Marco Gonzales. Despite their mediocrity, there are rumors the Mariners will dive all the way in this season, attempting to acquire Sonny Gray. And, it does make a little sense.

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Earlier this week, we used granular batted ball data to calculate true-talent team records for American League clubs as of the All Star break. Today, it’s the senior circuit’s turn in the barrel.

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The Nationals just exploded offensively against the Brewers, winning 15-2. It might be hard to believe, but it could have been worse as all 15 Nationals runs were scored in the first four innings. One inning in particular stands out as the Nationals hit five home runs in the third inning on their way to a seven-run inning. It might be hard to believe, but the inning didn’t appear to be a particularly promising one from the beginning as Max Scherzer and his .185/.215/.200 slash line led off. Here’s how the inning went down, per the FanGraphs play log.

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In this series of articles, I have analyzed the changes in the free agent market since I last did public analysis on the topic over three years ago. I have found that teams no longer are overpaying by as much for “Other People’s Players” or for relievers. In my 2013 Hardball Times Annual article, I found a number of other types of players for which teams over- or underpaid relative to value, and those are the players I will be reviewing in my next two articles. In today’s article, I will focus on hitters.

Teams were already pretty smart about spending relative to value on hitters when I looked at free agent spending for hitters back in that piece. However, the main discovery about position players that I found was that defense and baserunning tended to be under-compensated by the free-agent market. I had suspected at the time that I began researching that article that teams would overpay for power hitters, but I found that this was not true once I controlled for position group (which I lump roughly into defense-first positions of catcher, second base, third base, and shortstop, and offense-first positions of first base, outfield, and designated hitter).
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