Author Archive
Charlie Morton’s Dilemma
Last year, Charlie Morton had an ERA of 7.57, had a stint on the disabled list, and was bounced from the Pirates rotation and ended up back in Triple-A. This year, he has a 1.64 ERA, is averaging better than seven innings pitched per start, and is one of the main reasons the Pirates are a .500 team, only a game out of first place in the NL Central. He’s an early season success story, and credit is being given to his new Roy Halladay-esque delivery and the decision to lower his arm slot.
But at the risk of being a wet blanket, I’m going to suggest that Morton’s success so far is actually problematic long term, and it might just be in his best interests to get torched by the Marlins tomorrow.
Maybe It Is Time to Panic in Minnesota
Last week, we asked whether the Red Sox slow start was cause for concern, and concluded that while their struggles had taken away a presumed talent advantage in the race for the AL East, they were still likely a playoff team and could stay the course until the ship righted itself. But I’m not sure things are so rosy in Minnesota, where it might be time to sound the alarm.
It’s not just the Twins 4-8 start and early three game deficit to the White Sox that’s the problem – it’s all the issues associated with their roster that have arisen since opening day. As Joe wrote yesterday, Francisco Liriano’s struggles are a legitimate concern, as his velocity is down and he’s looked nothing like the pitcher who led the American League in xFIP a year ago. Tsuyoshi Nishioka is on the DL with a broken fibula, and the Twins weren’t exactly deep up the middle to begin with. And now news comes that Joe Mauer is going on the disabled list with “bilateral leg weakness”, an unusual diagnosis and one that leaves an open-ended time frame for his return.
The Twins already looked to have some flaws heading into the season; the lineup was still too left-handed, nearly the entire infield offered uncertain productivity, and they were essentially trying to replace the entirety of their bullpen from last year. The Twins didn’t enter the season with much of a margin for error, but a disastrous first two weeks of the season have left them with a hole to climb out of and a smaller shovel than they expected. Mauer is the guy who makes this whole thing work, and if he’s going to be sidelined for more than a couple of weeks, the Twins are legitimately in trouble. Minnesota’s 2011 season could be slipping away before it ever really gets started, and unfortunately, that might be the least of their worries right now.
Why Have Power Hitters Stopped Striking Out?
In any small sample of data, you’ll always be able to find things that stand out. Nick Hundley is now apparently Ted Williams, which is kind of a neat trick for a catcher who plays half his games in Petco. Of course, we’ve all had “small sample size” engrained into our thoughts, so we can look at these statistical abnormalities and realize that, given time, they’ll straighten themselves out. By and large, they don’t actually mean anything, but they’re still kind of interesting.
To me, perhaps the most interesting of the early season statistical flukes is the large group of sluggers who have essentially stopped striking out this year. We talked about Joey Votto on Tuesday, but at least his reduction in strikeouts is somewhat understandable — pitchers have just stopped throwing him strikes. However, Votto is far from the only slugger whose K% has taken a drastic nosedive to begin the season.
Stop Worrying About Jason Heyward’s Spot
There’s a mini-outrage going on down in Atlanta right now, as the Braves offense isn’t performing as well as expected, and the natives are getting restless with Fredi Gonzalez’s designated batting order. The main complaint revolves around the fact that Nate McLouth, he of the .228/.328/.373 mark as a Brave, is batting second, while Jason Heyward (.275/.393/.464 career) hits sixth. Heyward is unquestionably a better hitter than McLouth, and by having him lower in the order, Gonzalez is intentionally choosing to have McLouth receive more plate appearances. Generally, you want your worst hitters to get fewer chances – not more.
That said, the amount of virtual ink being spilled over this issue doesn’t commensurate to the outcome it’s having on the Braves chances of winning baseball games. Yes, hitting McLouth second and Heyward sixth is an inefficiency, but in reality, it just doesn’t matter all that much.
The Evolution of Joey Votto
Last year, Joey Votto put up the kind of year that is hard to live up to, winning the NL MVP with a monster +7.4 win season and carrying the Reds to the NL Central title. He hit .324/.424/.600 and was essentially Pujolsian throughout the summer. He hit for average, hit for power, took his walks, and stole 16 bases to boot. If you wanted to find a flaw in his game, you’d have to nitpick at things, and maybe you’d start with his slightly elevated strikeout rate, which suggested that he probably couldn’t keep hitting .320+ while racking up 100 whiffs per year.
So, rather than watch his average regress, Votto has apparently decided to just do away with the strikeouts instead. Through the first ten games of the season, Votto has come to the plate 46 times, but struck out on only four occasions. While the sample is obviously too small to draw any firm conclusions, the zone data suggests that pitchers are being far more careful with Votto this year, and he’s adjusted quickly to being pitched around.
The Trend Toward Team Options
In the last week, we’ve seen three young American League starters sign long term contracts with their teams despite minimal Major League experience. Clay Buchholz has thrown 374 innings, Trevor Cahill has thrown 388 innings, and Wade Davis has thrown just 217 innings in the big leagues, and yet all three now have long term financial security. In order to get the cash so early in their careers, however, they each had to give their organizations multiple club options on their free agent years. These three are continuing a trend that is gaining momentum, and could have some interesting ramifications for the future of salary inflation on the free agent market.
Contract extensions used to be mainly aimed toward retaining players who weren’t too far off from free agency, and it was extremely rare to see a player rewarded with a long term deal until he had established himself as a premier player. That has shifted significantly over the last few years, as teams have used the carrot of quicker paths to significant money in order to get their best young talents to sign away free agent years at an early age.
Is It Time to Panic in Boston?
With today’s 1-0 loss to the Indians, the Boston Red Sox are now 0-6. This is the same Red Sox team that many people, myself included, tabbed as the favorites to win the World Series. So far, they haven’t hit (only Minnesota has been worse offensively after today’s shutout) and they really haven’t pitched (entering the day with a ridiculous 8.25 FIP), and the total team meltdown has led to a miserable start to the season and a 4 1/2 game deficit behind the East-leading Orioles.
Those last three words should be all you need to know about whether the current standings are predictive of where we’ll be at year’s end, but that hasn’t stopped a number of people from pointing out that no team that has ever begun the season 0-6 has gone on to play in the World Series, and only two out of the 85 teams to ever start 0-5 (or worse) had even made the playoffs. Those sound like seriously scary numbers until you realize that there’s a huge sampling bias problem – most teams that start a season with a long losing streak kind of suck. By virtue of filtering only teams that have lost a bunch of games to start the season, we’re left looking at the records of teams who inherently lacked talent in most cases, and holding those teams up as examples of how the 2011 Red Sox (who don’t suck, despite their poor start) will play going forward doesn’t work.
Michael Pineda’s Debut
Yesterday, Tommy Rancel wrote about Alexi Ogando’s impressive start to the season, but while Ogando pitched well and his team won, he wasn’t the big story in that game. His counterpart on Tuesday was Michael Pineda, a highly touted prospect who was making his Major League debut for the Mariners. At 6’7 and 250 pounds, Pineda looks the part of a dominating frontline starter, and after he showed off his mid-90s velocity and dispatched the Rangers on 10 pitches (despite racking up two strikeouts) in his first inning of work, it was easy to see why his arrival was so highly anticipated.
The Rangers were able to get to Pineda a couple of times later in the game, notching four extra base hits that led to three runs off the young hurler in his six innings of work, but it was certainly a successful debut overall; there’s no shame in giving up a few hits to the Texas Rangers, after all. However, while Pineda dominating the right-handed bats in the Texas line-up – they combined to go 2 for 16 with a walk and a sac bunt in their 18 attempts against him – his one big flaw was on display on Tuesday, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m not quite sure that he’ll be able to live up to the hype this year.