After comparing Jeff Keppinger to Tony Gwynn this morning, I figure I should write something that everyone can agree with for the afternoon post. So, here’s a non-newsflash; the Arizona Diamondbacks are good.

Anyone following baseball right now has probably come to that conclusion. They are second in baseball in offensive production at 6.25 runs per game and second in run prevention, allowing only 3.55 runs per game. When you score a lot and don’t give up many runs, you win. It’s a pretty good combination. Most of the platitudes so far have gone to offensive heroes Mark Reynolds and Conor Jackson, along with the duel aces of Dan Haren and Brandon Webb. All four are off to terrific starts to their 2008 seasons and are among the main reasons the team is performing so well.

However, I’d like to suggest that there’s another reason Arizona is finding success, and one that won’t get as much mention – their work with the gloves, and particularly, their outfield defense. Eric Byrnes, Chris Young, and Justin Upton are all legitimate major league center fielders, and having three rangy athletes covering that much ground has made life quite easy on the pitching staff. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Diamondbacks are turning 73% of all balls in play against them into outs, which is the main reason the D’Backs are running a 2.98 ERA despite a FIP of 3.81 – the largest difference between FIP and ERA in baseball. In particular, The Hardball Times Revised Zone Rating believes that the D’Backs outfielders have been among the best in the league so far at making plays.

The D’Backs pitching is good, but it’s not solely responsible for the team’s run prevention. Let’s make sure that the trio of outfielders gets their fair share of credit. It’s been a while since we’ve seen an outfield defense that has the potential to be this good. Oh, and they can hit too.

I know, this is something of a cliche subject. There’s always a good player who never seems to get a lot of national press, and then everyone starts writing about how good he is, and pretty soon, everyone agrees that Mr. Underrated is so awesome that he becomes overrated. Bobby Abreu has to be the poster boy for this syndrome. But, that doesn’t change the fact that there are some valuable players who just don’t get any notice at all. More than anyone else, though, there’s one guy who is quietly having a terrific start to 2008 after a sensational 2007 and I can’t remember reading five words about him.

So, Jeff Keppinger, here are your five words (and then some). Did you realize that last year, Keppinger hit .332/.400/.477 while spending most of his time at shortstop (but also playing every other position on the diamond besides C and CF). The only SS with a higher OPS in 2007 was Hanley Ramirez. NL MVP Jimmy Rollins was just a tick behind Keppinger at .875. Yes, it was only 276 plate appearances, but he’s followed it up with a .325/.368/.488 line in his first 88 PA of 2008, and the sample is getting bigger every day. Pretty soon, people are going to have to conclude that Jeff Keppinger is a pretty good little hitter. In fact, using the awesomely addictive comparison charts available here on fangraphs, here’s Keppinger’s basic skill set matched up against someone with a slightly better reputation.

I fully expect to get tarred and feathered for comparing Jeff Keppinger to Tony Gwynn, and please don’t read this as an endorsement of Keppinger as a future hall of famer. I’m just showing you a guy who had a very similar set of skills – extreme contact hitter, gap power, not fast, but sustained value through repeatedly hitting the ball on the ground and having it find holes. Keppinger’s one of the hardest guys on the planet to strike out, and since he makes such a large volume of contact without sacrificing his power, he’s able to get a lot of singles and keep his batting average north of .300. Kinda like Tony Gwynn. Toss in the occasional extra base hit and some walks, and Keppinger becomes one of the better offensive middle infielders in baseball.

With Alex Gonzalez still injured and Juan Castro released, it looks like Keppinger is going to be given a chance to handle shortstop full time for the Reds. That’s a stretch for him defensively, and he’s probably better off at second base, but his combination of offense and defense up the middle makes him a real asset at either spot. If he can maintain even 90% of his current performance level, he’s a borderline all-star. Not bad for a guy who has been traded three times and been thought of as a utility player at best.

On April 14th, I wrote the following in a piece entitled “Busting Out: Corey Patterson”:

Patterson’s early season performance isn’t going to be sustained at this level (a 7% swinging strike rate is impossible to keep up), but there are legitimate reasons to believe that he’s adopted a new approach at the plate, and his continued contact ability could be just the ticket to stardom that people have been projecting on Patterson for most of this decade.

Since those words were written, Corey Patterson is pulling an o-fer. Eight days and 21 plate appearances later, and my fearless call that Patterson might be on the verge of a breakout year looks pretty foolish – he’s now hitting .183 and appears to be losing his grip on the Reds center field job. It’s hard to have a career year while sitting on the bench.

But, at the risk of cramming my foot even further into my mouth, I’m actually even more convinced than ever that Patterson has made significant strides in improving as a player. Despite his 0 for 18 run since the post went up, he’s walked three times while only striking out twice, and his season long K% still sits at a remarkably low 6.7%. That doesn’t happen by accident. If we take the 19% true talent strikeout rate that pretty much every projection system on earth forecasted for Patterson in 2008, the odds of him striking out four times or less in his first 68 trips to the plate was a whopping .0019%. That’s 1 in 500, basically.

Given his current strikeout rate in 2008, it’s remarkably unlikely that Patterson’s true talent strikeout rate is currently 19%. Given that we need to adjust our expectations of how often he’s going to make contact, and that it hasn’t affected his power output, I’m sticking with the theory that increased contact + sustained power = improvement. Call me crazy, but I still think we could look back at year’s end and say that Patterson had the breakout year we’ve been waiting for. Even if it got off to a bit of a rough start.

During the last few days, I’ve been asked the “Is Frank Thomas done?” question several times, as Mariner fans wonder if he is the right fit to take Jose Vidro’s spot at DH. During these conversations, I’ve mentioned that the main indicator of whether a player has really fallen off The Cliff is his power level. If he has lost his ability to drive the ball, then yes, he’s probably done. Mariners fans have seen a lot of players fall of The Cliff (Bret Boone, Edgar Martinez, John Olerud, and Carl Everett to name a few), and in all of their collapses, you can see that their Isolated Slugging % and Home Run Per Fly Ball % take precipitous nosedives. If a player is actually finished as a major league hitter, those two numbers are the first place to look.

With regards to Thomas, that is part of why my conclusion is that he still has more to contribute as a major league hitter. However, the situation got me thinking – is there a major league hitter right now that is a current example of a player just falling off a cliff? I think there is. Take a look at these graphs.

The first graph shows a huge decline in power – you can see a line almost straight down from the ’06 season to now. What used to be well above average power has deteriorated to an ISO of below .100. The second chart shows that the batting average on balls in play is actually not that different than the career average. In other words, it doesn’t appear that this hitter is hitting the ball hard and just having it find a fielders glove. We can’t build much regression to the mean back into his batting average, which means that since he’s not hitting for power, if he’s also not hitting for average, he’s probably done.

Who is this guy who is currently plunging off The Cilff? Mets fans could probably already guess, but it’s Carlos Delgado. Once a powerful slugger, injuries and age have caught up with him, and he just doesn’t look to be much of a productive major league player anymore.

The Cleveland Indians entered the season with a a rotation that they felt could be the strength of their ball club. With a dominating lefty and emerging sinkerball right hander, they felt they had found the elusive 1-2 punch that so many teams were looking for. The back of the rotation was less stable as no one really knew what to expect from the guys who didn’t have the same power stuff as the frontline guys.

Well, through the first several weeks, the Indians find themselves being carried by a dominating lefty and an emerging sinkerball right hander, trying to pick up the slack for the rest of the rotation. Interestingly, however, the script has flipped – Cliff Lee and Jake Westbrook are ones that are pitching like Cy Young candidates while C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona struggle to find their groove.

Lee, in particular, is having a pretty remarkable beginning to the season. A southpaw with a fastball that sits around 89 and a decent curveball, he’s always been able to get an average amount of swings and misses, but has struggled with inconsistent command. As a flyball pitcher, he’s been prone to giving up the longball as well, and the combination of allowing walks and home runs isn’t really one that leads to consistent success.

So, after a disastrous 2007 season where he lost his rotation spot and found himself in Triple-A, Lee has apparently decided to just stop walking people.

Through 23 innings of work, he’s issued just two free passes. In looking at his Baseball Reference pitch summary data, his strike percentages are essentially unchanged from last year, however. From the raw data, it’s hard to see that Lee is doing anything differently, even though the results are vastly superior. If this early season performance represented a sustainable leap forward, we’d be able to see it in the types of pitches he was throwing. Right now, it looks like Lee’s pretty much throwing like he’s always thrown, but just getting better results from it.

While the Indians have to be happy with how he’s performed, they’d also be wise to not count on the belief that Lee has taken a real step forward, and instead expect his results to begin to more closely match up with his skillset.

The Toronto Blue Jays released disgruntled designated hitter Frank Thomas this afternoon, several days after deciding that he wouldn’t be a regular in their line-up anymore. Thomas was unhappy with that decision and made sure the team knew about it, so they made the decision to part ways.

The initial reaction to this may be something of a surprise, since there are several MLB teams who Thomas would represent an upgrade at DH for. However, once you begin to look at his contract, the picture becomes a bit clearer. Thomas has a $10 million option for 2009 that vests if he receives 376 plate appearances this season (based on a 1,000 PA threshold over the ’07-’08 seasons combined). The Blue Jays, obviously, had no interest in paying him $10 million next year (no other club wants to either), so their options essentially included turning him into a part time player or releasing him. They tried the former and Thomas threw a fit, putting two and two together to realize that his benching was more about money and less about performance.

By releasing Thomas, they save themselves from having him on the hook next year, but also cost themselves a major league hitter in a season where they are trying to contend in the A.L. East. While Thomas got off to a slow slart, his overall skillset is essentially the same; his BB% and K%, and HR/FB% are all essentially the same, and four of his ten hits have gone for extra bases. Here are his patience, contact, and batted ball charts:

He’s still a flyball, power hitting, right-hander with a good eye at the plate and good enough contact rates – the early results are based on a ridiculously low rate of getting balls in play to find holes.

Thomas’ speed makes him unlikely to post a BABIP of league average or higher, but his current rate is unsustainable. The ball will start finding holes, and Thomas’ production will rebound much closer to last year’s performance. The first several weeks of his season don’t give us any real reason to expect Thomas to continue to struggle like this.

It will be interesting to see who bids on his services as a free agent. Since he was released, the Blue Jays contract does not carry over to the new team that signs him, and the vesting option is no longer an issue. Teams like the Mariners, A’s, and Yankees should all be interested in his services, and it wouldn’t be that surprising to see a small bidding war break out for The Big Hurt. While the contract the Jays gave Thomas nullified his trade value, there will still be teams interested in adding that bat to their line-up.

On Saturday, April 12th, the Rays promoted highly touted prospect Evan Longoria to the major leagues and handed him their third base job after placing Willy Aybar on the disabled list. Six days later, the Rays have announced that they’ve signed Longoria to a six year, $17.5 million contract with team options that could make the deal worth as much as 9 years and $44.5 million. Longoria now has more guaranteed years of pay than hits in the big leagues.

Following on the heels of extensions for Troy Tulowitzki and Chris Young, more and more teams are showing willingness to offer their young talent long term security in exchange for significant cost savings in the future. It used to be that organizations wanted to see players establish themselves as proven major league talent before they rewarded them with long term contracts, but as these clubs become more confidant in their ability to project future performance before a player even reaches the major leagues, they’re parlaying that information into a competitive cost savings.

That isn’t to say there is no risk involved in signing a player like Longoria while we still have incomplete information about his abilities. The Rays used a similar tactic in 2006 when they locked up Rocco Baldelli, and that hasn’t worked out as well as they would have liked. However, decisions to extend a young player aren’t made on a micro level, but instead, organizations tend to focus on securing a group of players to hedge their risk. By signing both Baldelli and Crawford to long term deals, they were able to secure a highly valuable outfielder at a below market rate without having to know in advance which of the two was the one that was going to develop as hoped. Likewise, by signing Carlos Pena, James Shields, and now Longoria to multi-year contracts at the same time, the team is securing a minimum level of future performance while hedging against inflation.

In several years, these deals are going to reap big rewards for the franchises willing to take on some risk today. The current market values of these long term contracts for pre-arbitration players is skewed heavily in favor of the franchises, and as more teams understand the economic payoff that comes with making these kinds of deals, this strategy will continue to rise in popularity.

It will be interesting to see how happy these players are in four to five years, however, when they’re drastically underpaid relative to the salaries of the times. MLB generally hasn’t had to deal with contract holdouts due to their guaranteed contracts, but with a wave of potential all-stars signing away the primes of their careers at below market rates, these teams could have an interesting dilemma in the future.

Last night in Cleveland, two struggling young All-Stars took the hill to try to get their 2008 campaigns back on the right foot. As the graph below shows, only one succeeded.

Fausto Carmona was able to throw strikes for the first time all year, finding positive results by getting his “turbo sinker” over the plate and inducing ground ball outs. This was the Carmona that Indians fans got used to last year and were counting on for the upcoming season.

However, Justin Verlander wasn’t as lucky. As we documented the other day, he’s lost quite a bit of velocity on his fastball this year, which has hurt him quite a bit. The trend continued tonight, as he sat between 89-93 with his now hittable fastball and even added a new wrinkle – an inability to throw strikes. His line for the night: 5 innings, 7 hits, 5 runs, 4 walks, 2 hit batters, and 1 strikeout.

This goes beyond theories of Detroit wanting him to throw more two seam fastballs or getting him to throw slower to make it through an entire season – there’s something wrong with him right now. He’s not pitching at 80% effort, then dialing it up to an extra gear when he needs it – he’s just throwing 92 MPH fastballs and occasionally hitting the strike zone. After tonight’s performance, he now boasts a 7.03 ERA supported by 12 walks and 14 strikeouts in 24 1/3 innings. It’s no longer early for Justin Verlander – Detroit should be legitimately worried about their ace. If they can’t get him throwing 95 with regularity again, getting trounced by Cleveland could become a regular occurrence.

The Minnesota Twins have been producing quality starting pitchers for years. From front of the rotation aces in Johan Santana and Francisco Liriano to useful innings eaters like Brad Radke, Carlos Silva, Scott Baker, and Boof Bonser, as well as a nifty trade chip in Matt Garza, there is seemingly never a shortage of quality pitchers taking the hill up in Minneapolis. It’s been a strength of the organization and the backbone on which a perennial division contender was built.

Well, it looks like they’ve done it once again. After losing Santana and Silva this winter, they handed a rotation spot to Nick Blackburn, a former 29th round selection in the 2001 draft who turned himself into a prospect through a volume of minor league success. As we can see from the pitch type data available here on FanGraphs, Blackburn’s stuff isn’t overpowering; he throws a 92 MPH fastball, an 88 MPH cut fastball (the pitches labeled as sliders are probably also cut fastballs), and a 75 MPH curveball, along with one or two change-ups per game. None of these pitches are a true knockout pitch, which is part of the reason his strikeout rates aren’t particularly high, and he wasn’t taken seriously as a prospect before 2007.

Through three starts, however, Blackburn is solidifying himself as a legitimate major league starting pitcher. Below are the two graphs that tell the story of his skillset and why it works.

Through his first 17 innings of 2008, Blackburn has shown impeccable command (less than two walks per nine innings) and pounded the zone with sinkers (60% groundball rate). While this isn’t as sexy as blowing hitters away with 96 MPH fastballs or a power curve, the combination of throwing strikes and getting ground balls is a proven winner. This is the Aaron Cook/Jake Westbrook path to success – pound the strike zone with pitches at the knees, don’t put anyone on base without making them swing, and let your infielders do the work.

Blackburn’s minor league data suggests that he probably won’t keep getting groundballs at quite this rate, and he’s unlikely to post an ERA below 4.00 this year, but he’s clearly showing that he’s got enough movement on his sinker and command of three pitches to keep hitters off balance and succeed as a pitch to contact starter. Chalk up another success story for the Twins pitching development machine.

After three terrific performances to start the year, Tim Hudson finally turned in a stinker last night, giving up four runs on six hits in just three innings of work as the Marlins topped the Braves 6-5. Things had to have looked a little off in the first inning for Hudson, even though he retired the side in order. Hudson got a line out and then a couple of fly ball outs in the first frame, but that’s just not Tim Hudson’s game. When the ball is going in the air, he’s doing something wrong. It’s not a coincidence that he allowed seven fly balls to just two ground balls in his worst start of the season. This is a theme in Atlanta. Here are the pitchers the Braves have run out this year for 10 or more innings, along with their respective GB%:

Tim Hudson: 24 IP, 62.3%
Jair Jurrjens: 18 1/3 IP, 50.0%
Jeff Bennett: 13 2/3 IP, 63.4%
Tom Glavine: 11 1/3 IP, 48.6%
John Smoltz: 11 IP, 57.1%

The league average ground ball rate is 44%. The Braves, as a team, have a ground ball rate of 53%. Not surprisingly, they’ve also allowed just nine home runs to date, which is one of the main reasons they’ve been able to keep runs off the board. Atlanta has quietly been collecting extreme ground ball pitchers for the last several years, picking up undervalued assets such as Bennett and Peter Moylan to complement a rotation of guys who pound the bottom of the strike zone.

With a staff of sinker ball strike throwers, the Braves have the makings of a pitching staff that could give the National League fits this year. While they may stand at 5-9 currently, they’ve shown enough in the first few weeks of the season that New York and Philadelphia should be getting a little nervous about their friends down south. A pitching staff that can induce this many ground balls is a pitching staff they can win with.