Giancarlo Stanton still looks like Giancarlo Stanton. He’s a gigantic human being who possesses a fierce swing that inflicts damage upon baseballs when his bat makes contact. The problem in the early part of this season is that his huge swing is making slightly less contact than it did a year ago when he was the National League MVP.

Stanton has swung at 116 pitches this year and has whiffed 48 times, per Baseball Savant. Based on his fantastic 2017 season, we would expect to see about 34 whiffs. While a difference of 14 whiffs over 250 pitches doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s the difference between normal, awesome Stanton and this abnormal version of Stanton that has struck out in 40% of his plate appearances.

To better understand just what’s going on with Stanton, let’s try to take the early-season numbers we have and separate normal Stanton from abnormal Stanton. To start, here is a table showing some statistics from his career, from last season, and from this season to spot the problems.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Shohei Ohtani’s platoon splits and pitchers’ league-wide avoidance of the strike zone this season, then answer listener emails about the power and prestige of managers compared to coaches, when to trust in-season results over projections, choosing between Ohtani and Mike Trout, whether Albert Pujols or Adrian Beltre will end up with the higher career WAR, the staying power of the phrase “Andrew Miller-type role,” the Marlins’ current shortstops vs. a 43-year-old Derek Jeter, a hypothetical involving consecutive walk-off wins, the Mario Mendoza of wRC+, Ohtani’s ceiling and odds of winning awards, the value of being a big leaguer, and an MLB equivalent of Scott Foster, the NHL’s accountant emergency goalie, plus a Stat Blast about reliever use, game length/pace, and the most homers without a walk-off shot.

Audio intro: Common (Feat. John Legend and Kanye West), "They Say"
Audio outro: Sparks, "This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us"

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I know that, just yesterday, the Yankees allowed 14 runs. They allowed eight runs the game before that. They allowed seven runs two games before that. By park-adjusted ERA, the Yankees presently rank 20th in baseball, which is not very good. This is hardly the time to celebrate the pitching staff.

On the other hand, by park-adjusted FIP, the Yankees presently rank fifth in baseball. By park-adjusted xFIP, the Yankees presently rank second in baseball. By strikeout rate, they’re first. The Yankees have been great! They just haven’t gotten the results. Perhaps this *is* a good time to celebrate the pitching staff.

Yet this isn’t really a celebration at all. Rather, it’s an observation. It might be an observation of a good thing, or it might be an observation of a bad thing. Could even be an observation of an ultimately insignificant thing. But, the Yankees’ pitching staff? Collectively, they’re out there on an island. There’s no other pitching staff like it.

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On Thursday, a company called Sports Media Technology (“SMT”) sued MLB Advanced Media (“MLBAM”) over Statcast. The complaint in the lawsuit is 92 pages long, and I read it so you don’t have to. But if you did want to, here it is.

According to the lawsuit, in 2006, MLB and MLBAM entered into a contract with SMT to develop PITCHf/x. However, according to SMT’s lawsuit, MLBAM then breached that contract, poached at least one key engineer from SMT, then used SMT’s PITCHf/x technology to create Statcast.

According to SMT, Sportvision and MLBAM signed a contract before SMT purchased the company that gave Sportvision exclusive rights to provide use of their PITCHf/xpitch-tracking system for three full MLB seasons. However, SMT now alleges that MLBAM has not only failed to live up to that agreement but they’ve also been working with third parties to emulate that technology. Per SMT, that not only fails to fulfill the contractual obligations of their agreement but also is a misuse of their patented technology.

Now let’s make one thing clear at the outset: the Complaint represents only one side of the story. We don’t know if it’s true or not, and SMT’s case has real problems. We’ll get to those in a second.

Some reports have pegged this as a simple breach-of-contract suit, framing it as SMT suing MLBAM for prematurely terminating the deal in 2016 so as to proceed with developing Statcast. But that’s not really accurate.

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Although the Diamondbacks lost to the Giants on Tuesday night, Paul Goldschmidt finally got on the board with his first home run and first multi-hit game of the season. Normally, that would barely be worth mention, but the 30-year-old five-time All-Star first baseman is off to the worst start of his eight-year career, producing a batting line that teammate Zack Greinke wouldn’t sign for — that, at a time when the Diamondbacks have been busy banking wins while the heavily favored Dodgers scuffle. And even then, amid the small samples that reign at this time of year, one typically Goldschmidt-esque night made his start look far less dire.

The Diamondbacks, who a year ago won 93 games as well as the NL Wild Card game, are now 8-3, leading the NL West by 2.5 games. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out, through Monday night, the Snakes, who were projected to finish 80-82 had improved their playoff odds more than any team besides the Mets.

What stands out most about the Diamondbacks’ start thus far is that it has had little to do with the success — or, more to the point, the lack of same — of what are generally viewed as their best players. Through Monday, the team’s 2017 leaders in position player WAR (Goldschmidt and Jake Lamb) and two of their top three in pitching WAR (Greinke and Robbie Ray) had combined to produce just 0.1 WAR. Meanwhile, the bulk of the heavy lifting… Well, let’s just pull back the curtain on Small Sample Theater:

Again, those stats are through Monday, not Tuesday, via which Goldschmidt raised his batting line to .158/.360/.316 for a 101 wRC+, still subpar but much less gawkworthy. Such substantive (positive) regression is the reason it’s dangerous to write about anything this early in the season — prior to his RBI triple on Monday, Goldschmidt’s wRC+ was an even more dismal 61 — and yet we forge ahead.

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I’ve been driving around Florida this spring, getting looks at a particularly loaded draft class. I also spent last week at the NHSI tournament run by USA baseball in Cary, NC. NHSI is always a solid event, with at least a half-dozen interesting draft prospects appearing over the four days, but this year featured the best crop in the history of the event. Of the 16 participating teams, almost every one had a potential top-five-round draftee to watch.

I already broke down the players I saw and buzz I heard after week one of the college season, and last Friday I reviewed the college players I saw last month. Now here’s all the notable prep players I saw last month, with video, notes on what I saw, and a preview of the area of the list they will rank when Eric and I release an updated draft list next week. Here are our preseason rankings.

Carter Stewart, RHP, Eau Gallie HS (FL), Mississippi State Commit

I wrote up Stewart and Denaburg’s first matchup in one of the pieces linked above, but they had another one a couple weeks later. The first matchup, which took place in front of a double-digit number of scouting directors, placed them both firmly in the middle of the first round, so it was unsurprising to find over 100 scouts and three general managers at this next game. Stewart opened it sitting 92-96 mph and was holding 92-94, hitting 95 mph in the fifth inning. His signature 80-83 mph curveball, with Seth Lugo-level spin rates, flashed the normal 65 or 70 on the 20-80 scale (go to 0:56 for the best one I got on video), and his changeup — which looks about average in warmups and may project above average with more use — wasn’t used in game. I counted 13 Ks for Stewart through 5.2 innings.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the third installment of this series, we’ll hear from four pitchers — Anthony Bass, Matt Andriese, and Bobby Poyner — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Anthony Bass (Cubs) on His Splitter

“I learned a split from my friend Matt Shoemaker, who is with the Angels. That’s his out pitch. I picked it up from him, and then when I was overseas in Japan [in 2016], I watched the way they threw their splits and started incorporating that into the way I use mine. It’s started becoming a swing-and-miss pitch for me.

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I wrote last week about how, based on the early evidence, Patrick Corbin is McCullersing. That is, of course, a reference to Lance McCullers Jr., who has taught us that, if you have a really good pitch, you should just throw it a whole bunch more. McCullers has a great curveball, so he throws a lot of his curveball. Corbin has a great slider, so he’s started to throw a lot more of his slider. It’s a strategy that’s almost stupidly obvious, but it’s taken a while to catch on. Such is the power of baseball tradition.

There’s another way to think about this. You can throw more of a good pitch, but then, all the pitch rates have to add up to 100%. So if you’re throwing more of one thing, that has to come at the expense of something else. Typically, what we see is more secondary stuff, at the expense of fastballs. And this is how we get to talking about Masahiro Tanaka. Tanaka already pitches for a team that’s opted to de-emphasize the heater. But even within that context, Tanaka is extraordinary. Tanaka is working away from his hard stuff. He’s been doing this for a while already, but he’s gotten to the point where he’s throwing hard pitches as if he were a knuckleballer without a knuckleball.

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For a really long time, there was little doubt about the best pitcher on the planet. Clayton Kershaw has been on an epic run that will land him in the Hall of Fame. Over the past two seasons, Kershaw has still been brilliant, but he’s averaged 24 starts and 162 innings instead of 32 starts and 222 innings. That slight downturn in health has allowed arguments to pop up debating whether Kershaw is still the best pitcher in baseball. Last season, Max Scherzer was the takeover candidate of choice. The 2016 National League Cy Young winner followed up one great performance with another by claiming the award again. Ignored in those debates was a pitcher who has been better than both over the past two seasons and projects to be better this year: Corey Kluber.

On Monday, Kluber pitched eight scoreless innings, striking out 13 batters against one walk and just two hits. After three starts, Kluber’s ERA is 1.57, his FIP is 2.33, and he’s been worth 0.7 WAR. That’s great, but it doesn’t really separate him from a bunch of good pitchers off to great starts, including Scherzer, Dylan Bundy, and Gerrit Cole. Let’s extend to the past just a little bit more to get a sense of how Kluber has done lately. The table below shows the top pitchers by WAR since the All-Star Break last season.

Kluber is so far out ahead of the pack, the 1.3 WAR difference between him and Severino is nearly double the difference between Severino and 11th-place Scherzer. Combining his great second half with his strong start to this season, Kluber has struck out 169 batters and walked only 15. Since the All-Star Break last season, Kluber has been the best pitcher in baseball, and it isn’t particularly close. To really take a look at the best pitcher in baseball, it probably helps to take a bit of a longer view. Read the rest of this entry »