Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the surprising home run streak of Kendrys Morales, Lucas Giolito, Michael Kopech, and the fluctuating state of the White Sox rebuild, an unusual Yankees save streak and the changing distribution of saves across the majors, and the Rays-Pirates Chris Archer trade in retrospect. Then (25:41) they bring on Rockies starter Kyle Freeland to discuss growing up rooting for the Rockies, the perils of pitching development and recovery at altitude, how he’s conquered Coors Field and put together one of the strongest seasons in franchise history, the adjustments he’s made this season, the secret to inducing weak contact, pitching in pennant races from the beginning of his career, whether Rockies pitchers are perceived unfairly, the benefits of being managed by former pitcher (and pitching coach) Bud Black, and more. Finally, Ben and Jeff review the interview, weigh the merits of strikeout guys vs. groundball guys, and forecast Freeland’s career, and Ben provides some updates and weighs in on the latest debate about Daniel Murphy’s homophobic comments from 2015.

Audio intro: Bob Dylan, "Seven Days"
Audio interstitial 1: Spooky Tooth, "Kyle"
Audio interstitial 2: The Alan Parsons Project, "Standing on Higher Ground"
Audio outro: The Smiths, "Accept Yourself"

Link to Jay Jaffe’s post about Morales
Link to list of pitchers who’ve induced the weakest contact
Link to Freeland’s pitch selection by season
Link to Whitney McIntosh article about Murphy’s comments

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Although FanGraphs is very much a baseball site, we’ve occasionally paid homage to arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, Lebron James. (My favorite was this piece by the inimitable Jeff Sullivan trying to design a 23-WAR baseball player.) Every so often, LeBron does something which forces us to ask questions — questions that might also be relevant to baseball — and then we have to cover it. Something like that is happening now, in a lawsuit about tattoos and video games.

LeBron has some awesome ink. It’s a part of his brand, and so back in 2015, those tattoos were included in the computerized depiction of LeBron created for the NBA2K video game. The game also included tattoos on the bodies of Eric Bledsoe, Kobe Bryant, DeAndre Jordan, and Kenyon Martin (among others). Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that it led to a lawsuit being filed by Solid Oak Sketches, LLC, against the video-game makers, for copyright infringement. Solid Oak Sketches has an exclusive licensing agreement with the tattoo artists, which means that Solid Oak owns the exclusive right to market, sell, and otherwise control the copyrights to the tattoos in question. In the summary judgment briefing in Solid Oak’s case, LeBron provided an affidavit which said, inter alia, this:

In the fifteen years since I’ve been playing professional basketball, this case is the first time that anyone has suggested to me that I can’t license my likeness without getting the permission of the tattooists who inked my tattoos. No tattooist has ever told me I needed their permission to be shown with my tattoos, even when it was clear I was a public basketball player.

You can already recognize how this might have some relevance to major leaguers. Javier Baez, Matt Kemp, Jose Ramirez, Ryan Roberts, and Gary Sanchez (among many others) have all been known, at one time or another, for their tattoos. If a baseball video game includes them in its depictions of the players, is that copyright infringement? Is showing them on a nationally televised baseball game copyright infringement?

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Last week, I wrote about the Dodgers. Not too long before that, I wrote about the Mariners. Both teams were and are still out of the playoff picture, but they’ve gotten to where they are in opposite ways. The Mariners are 74-57, but they have a BaseRuns estimated record of 64-67. The Dodgers are 70-61, but they have a BaseRuns estimated record of 78-53. The Mariners are four games better than the Dodgers in the actual standings. In the alternate standings, the gap is 14 games in the other direction. What on Earth must have happened over these five or so months? The Mariners have been clutch. The Dodgers have not.

We have our own clutch metric, as you know, that’s rooted in win probability. It’s called Clutch, and you can read a little about it here. In the interest of moving this post forward, here is an up-to-the-minute Clutch score landscape for all of MLB:

The Mariners are in first by a mile. The Dodgers are bringing up the rear. They’re not the only clutch and unclutch teams, but they’re the most *extreme* clutch and unclutch teams. The difference here is about 20 wins, based on timing alone. Timing has allowed the Mariners to look pretty strong. Timing has also caused the Dodgers to look surprisingly vulnerable.

Whenever I write about clutch performance, some of the same questions come up. The big one: Is clutch performance real? Now, for those of you who have been around for a while, nothing to follow is going to surprise you. I’ve written about this in the past, and my results today don’t look any different. But I thought this would be a good time to display all the data again. Clutch performances do happen. Obviously, clutch performances do happen, and they can add up over time. But, historically, it all just seems so random. You should never count on a team to be clutch.

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No matter what else is happening in your life — no matter how dire your circumstances seem, or how far away salvation might appear — you can at least take consolation in the fact that you are, almost certainly, not a New York Met. And yet despite yet another season nearly entirely unsullied by success or inspiration of any kind, 25 blessed souls still labor on in Flushing, and one of those souls is housed in a body named Brandon Tate Nimmo.

According to a profile of the young man published in the New York Times shortly after Nimmo was selected 13th overall in the 2011 first-year player draft, young Brandon grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, dreaming of one day becoming a bull-rider. Instead, he became a Met. In the years that followed, Brandon Nimmo turned out to be quite good at playing baseball, as was possible but not overwhelmingly probable back in 2011, and by early this spring writers at this site were calling for him to be given quite a bit more playing time this year, in 2018, than the 215 plate appearances he was allowed in 2017.

To their credit, the Mets have mostly given Nimmo a starting outfield spot this season. To Nimmo’s credit, he’s made the most of it. On the year, for example, Nimmo is slugging .503, with an ISO of .238 and 15 home runs in 413 plate appearances. All four figures are career highs, besting both the marks Nimmo set last year and, in perfect order, also the standards he set in the year before, when he made his debut in Queens as a 23-year-old. This power is especially surprising for Nimmo because, with the exception of a stint at Triple-A that forced his original call-up back in 2016, his power numbers were never anywhere close to this good at any stop in the past. My former colleague Travis Sawchick covered this subject back in June.

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Baseballs have continued to fly out of the park in 2018, if not at a record pace — the current per-team, per-game rate of 1.15 is the fourth-highest of all time, after 2017 (1.26), 2000 (1.17), and 2016 (1.16) — then nearly so. Nonetheless, over the past week-and-change, the game has produced something previously unseen amid this recent surge: a player challenging the major-league record of homers in eight consecutive games, a feat last completed by Ken Griffey Jr. in 1993. Blue Jays designated hitter and occasional first baseman Kendrys Morales has homered in seven straight, something unseen in 12 years. Tonight in Baltimore, he’ll have a chance to put himself in the record books.

Here’s Morales’s entry from Sunday, a towering two-run blast off the Phillies’ Vince Velasquez:

Alas, the homer, Morales’s 21st of the season, wasn’t enough to help the Blue Jays continue their season-high five-game winning streak, which has been fueled by the 35-year-old switch-hitting slugger’s power burst.

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This is Nate Freiman’s third post as part of his August residency. Nate is a former MLB first baseman. He also played for Team Israel in the 2017 World Baseball Classic and spent time in the Atlantic and Mexican Leagues. He can be found on Twitter @natefreiman. His wife Amanda routinely beats him at golf. To read work by earlier residents, click here.

One of my favorite people in baseball is Tom Tornincasa. He was my hitting coach in the Double-A Texas League in 2012. Apart from being a great coach, he kept the clubhouse loose. Ask anyone who played for him; they’ll know what I mean.

At about 6:50, we’d be stretching on the foul line, and he’d walk out with his notebook.

“Straily.”

That was the start of our advance scouting meeting.

“Ninety to ninety-four, slider, changeup. Sixty percent fastball, thirty percent slider.”

Dan Straily led the minor leagues in strikeouts that year, spotting his fastball to both sides of the plate and mixing in an almost unhittable slider — unhittable in that it was un-layoff-able — that he’d throw in any count. He was in the big leagues that September.

“One more thing. He sucks.”

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The Baltimore Orioles now have some friends on the other side: the Kansas City Royals recently shuffled off the mortal coil of contention and have now joined the Orioles among those clubs mathematically eliminated from the postseason. While the competition for the No. 1 pick rolls on, Kansas City’s season is otherwise dead. Today, they’re the topic in our series of post-mortems on 2018 clubs.

The Setup

The 2018 season was always going to be a dreadful one for the Kansas City Royals, no matter the objections lodged by the franchise to the contrary. The 2017 campaign was the final one before free agency for most of Kansas City’s core contributors, with Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Minor, Mike Moustakas, and Jason Vargas all departing — a group, incidentally, that combined for 14.2 WAR in their final season together. That’s not to say the Royals should have attempted to retain most of those players — after pitching like Greg “Mad Dog” Maddux in the first half, for example, Jason Vargas more resembled Chris “Mad Dog” Russo” in the second — but the departure of 14 wins was a real loss for a team that only won 80 total (72 in terms of Pythagoras).

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It’s safe to say that the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t following a paint-by-numbers script. Casting convention to the wind, they employ “an opener,” they station their relievers on corners, they… do just about anything to gain a potential edge. As a small-market team in the A.L. East, they need to be creative in order to compete. It makes sense.

But not to everybody, and that includes a fair share of their fanbase. And even if it does make sense to the fanbase — sorta, kinda, at least — that wasn’t always the case. They had to be brought up to speed on the methods behind the madness, and that job fell squarely on the shoulders of the people who report on, and broadcast, the games.

Andy Freed and Dave Wills — the radio voices of Rays baseball — were front and center. According to the latter, they at least had a head start.

“We were trained a little bit by Joe Maddon,” said Wills, who along with Freed has called games in Tampa since 2005. “Joe was kind of the leader with doing different things, such as shifts and putting four men in the outfield. He’d set lineups differently than other people. So when it comes to what they’re doing now, we’re already in grad school. We’ve seen it, we’ve been there, we’ve done that.”

Which doesn’t mean advance warning from Kevin Cash wasn’t appreciated when the team introduced the “opener” concept. Wills may have an advanced degree in understanding-out-of-the-box, but what the Rays manager told him and his broadcast partner was straight out of left field. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the returns of Mike Trout and Willians Astudillo, Astudillo’s new hobby, Jose Ramirez‘s power/speed combo, the NL Rookie of the Year race between Ronald Acuna, Juan Soto, Harrison Bader, and Brian Anderson, the decreasing incidence of stolen bases and sacrifice bunts, the Angels’ active offseason in retrospect, the Angels’ lack of playoff appearances with Trout vs. the Mariners’ lack of playoff appearances with Felix Hernandez, David Wright’s painful latest comeback attempt, and a Rich Hill (AKA Dick Mountain) anniversary, in addition to a deeper discussion about the role of randomness in baseball, what the standings “should” look like, and how luck, timing, and clutch hits are saving the season from the boring stretch run that some fans feared before the season.

Audio intro: The Byrds, "Welcome Back Home"
Audio outro: Dandy Livingstone, "There is a Mountain"

Link to picture of Astudillo drawing his bow
Link to Ben’s preseason piece about hope and faith
Link to Jeff’s post about the Dodgers and Mariners
Link to Marc Carig’s David Wright rehab article

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 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

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