Josh Hamilton is the most aggressive hack in baseball. This isn’t news, of course, but to put his hacktastic ways in context, here is where Hamilton’s swing rates rank among batters with 500+ PAs in the last year.

O-Swing%: 42.7% (150th of 151)
Z-Swing: 82.0% (151st of 151)
Swing%: 57.9% (150th of 151)
Zone%: 38.8% (151st of 151)
Contact%: 64.9% (151st of 151)

The only guy who has swung the bat more often than Hamilton is Delmon Young, but 46.1% of the pitches Young has been thrown have been in the strike zone. Hamilton is pitched around more than any other hitter in the game, and yet he swings more often than anyone, with the exception of one replacement level scrub.

Josh Hamilton has always been an aggressive hitter. Josh Hamilton has a career major league batting line of .301/.360/.542. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Well, it is broke(n), but most importantly, this isn’t the approach that made Josh Hamilton an elite Major League player. This approach is new, and if he doesn’t make some changes in a hurry, he’s on his way to becoming the new Ryan Howard.

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This morning, Jon Heyman noted an odd thing on Twitter:

i am not a hater of WAR stat, but if someone can explain to me how starling marte & bryce harper are both 1.7, please do

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) April 29, 2013

He was quoting Baseball-Reference’s WAR calculation, and the two are indeed tied at +1.7 WAR on B-R. Here, we have Bryce Harper (+1.5 WAR) ahead of Starling Marte (+1.2 WAR), but the point still basically stands; WAR thinks Harper (1.200 OPS) and Marte (.835 OPS) have both been pretty great this year, with just a small (or no) difference between them. What Harper has done with the bat, WAR believes that Marte has mostly made up with his legs in baserunning (+3 run advantage) and defense (+3 run advantage), as well a slight bump from getting 12 extra plate appearances.

There’s no question that Harper has been a better offensive player, but there are questions about the defensive valuations, because defensive metrics aren’t as refined at this point as offensive metrics are. It is much easier to prove that Harper has been +10 runs better with the bat this year than it is to prove that Marte has been +3 runs better defensively by UZR, or +7 runs better defensively by DRS. There are more sources for error in the defensive metrics, and Heyman’s tweet led to a discussion on Twitter about the usefulness of including small sample defensive metrics in WAR.

I’ve written before about the strong correlation between team WAR and team winning percentage, and others have followed up with similar analysis more recently. However, all those articles have focused on full season or multi-season data samples, and since the question was raised and I hadn’t yet seen it answered, I became curious about whether WAR would actually correlate better at this point in the year if we just assumed every player in baseball was an average defender.

Essentially, if we just removed defensive metrics from the equation, and evaluated teams solely on their hitting and pitching, how would our WAR calculation compare to team winning percentage? And how does WAR correlate to team winning percentage based on just April 2013 data, when we’re dealing with much smaller sample sizes?

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Before the season season started, members of our staff took a shot at prognosticating the season, despite the fact that we all know You Can’t Predict Baseball. Of the 31 authors who participated, 15 of them — myself included — selected the Blue Jays as the favorites to win the AL East, and nine of the 16 who didn’t pick Toronto to win their division had them as a wild card club. The Blue Jays off-season makeover convinced most of us that they were a good team with a good shot at playing in October.

It might only be April 29th, but there’s a pretty good chance that 24 of us are going to end up being wrong, because while we’re still in the first month of the season, the Blue Jays season is in jeopardy.

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A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:

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Giancarlo Stanton is struggling and Giancarlo Stanton’s teammates are terrible. These two things are true. These two might be related. It would make sense that these things are related, because the drop-off from Giancarlo Stanton to the guys hitting behind him is absurdly large.

Stanton has played in 16 games this season, and has hit third in all 16 of those games. The cleanup spot behind him has been a rotation of Greg Dobbs (8 games), Placido Polanco (5 games), and Joe Mahoney (3 games). If you go by the rest-of-season ZIPS projections, Mahoney is the best hitter of the bunch, forecast for a .677 OPS, with Dobbs and Polanco both coming in at .650. Weighted for the number of games played, then, you could say that Stanton has been “protected” by three players with an aggregate OPS projection of .665, a 269 point drop off from his own .934 rest-of-season ZIPS forecast.

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The St. Louis Cardinals just finished off a sweep of the Washington Nationals, and currently stand at the top of the NL Central with a 13-8 record. At 4.9 runs per game, they’re fourth in the NL in offensive production, which is one of the primary reasons they have outscored their opponents by 27 runs so far. (The other main reason is Adam Wainwright.)

Now, though, here’s a fun fact you might not expect; the St. Louis Cardinals currently have a wRC+ of 88, tied — with the Mariners! — for 24th in MLB. Even if we remove pitcher hitting from the group and only look at offense from position players, their wRC+ is 97, still below the Major League average. From just looking at their batting lines, it’d be fair to describe the Cardinals offensive performance to date as sub-par, and yet, they’re scoring nearly five runs per game.

This is the power of situational hitting. Behold, the Cardinals offense, by baserunner state:

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Carson Cistulli’s infatuation with specific pitches and Jeff Sullivan’s desire to highlight the bizarre and hilarious have led to some great GIFs on FanGraphs over the last few years. But, today, I think we all have to acknowledge that the art form of the GIF has been perfected. Or, at least, has hit a new high. Because this is simply incredible.

A commenter on Lone Star Ball created this image, showing the difference in movement on Yu Darvish’s pitches, and I can’t stop watching this. Mesmerizing is probably the best word I can use.

Thanks to Drew Sheppard — the guy has a webcomic, by the way, which deserves a plug just because of how great this GIF is for making this — for originally posting it to Lone Star Ball. I hope this inspires Drew (or others) to make more of these, though it might be that the Darvish one will never be topped. This feels like the Mona Lisa of GIFs.

Also, good luck to opposing hitters trying to hit Yu Darvish.

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Back in November, Jack Moore wrote about the return of the stolen base as a valuable offensive weapon. As offensive levels have decreased in MLB over the last few years, the value of taking an additional base has gone up, and the cost associated with giving up an out has gone down, so we’ve seen teams running more often now than they did back when runs were plentiful.

It’s a perfectly logical construct. As hitting is more frequent, running becomes less necessary. When hitting suffers, teams try to find runs other ways to score, and one of the primary ways a team can create additional runs is through efficient base stealing. Base stealing is essentially a substitute good for power, and so SB rates follow a fairly predictable pattern of rising and falling depending on the offensive environment.

Except, that predictable pattern has gone off the rails so far in 2013.

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