A little over a month ago, Owen Watson wrote a piece here entitled “Chris Archer and His Elite Slider, and in the piece, he noted that Archer had ramped up the usage of his off-speed stuff this year, throwing it 40% of the time in the first month of the season. In that piece, Watson also noted that Archer was throwing his slider harder than he had in previous years. A few paragraphs from his piece:
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On July 4th, you’re likely going to be pressured into exuding every bit of patriotism you can muster, and perhaps you’ll spend the evening watching things explode in the sky. On July 5th, we’d like to offer those of you in the Washington D.C. area a chance to celebrate America in a different way; talking baseball and drinking beer.

On that Sunday evening, from 6 pm to 9 pm, we’re hosting a gathering at The RFD Bar. The event will be a mix of hanging out, along with a couple of formal Q&As, including:

General baseball discussion with SiriusXM’s Mike Ferrin, BrooksBaseball founder Dan Brooks, and myself.

Washington Nationals discussion with members of their front office.

The cost of the event is just $10, and that includes a ticket for one free drink at the bar. The private room we’ve reserved can comfortably hold roughly 100 people, so I’d strongly suggest buying your tickets sooner than later, as the odds of a sellout are pretty high. We’ve always enjoyed doing these events, and look forward to hanging out with all of you guys in a month’s time.

Yesterday, the Mariners traded for Mark Trumbo. Of course they did. More than any other franchise in baseball, the Mariners have a history of seeing value in bat-only sluggers, often surrendering defensive value to try and build a line-up that can conquer Safeco Field. I’ve been predicting the Mariners would trade for Trumbo all year, and with the Diamondbacks finally admitting that they needed to clear up their roster logjam, this was one of the easiest deals to see coming.

Of course, the fact that the Mariners have been acquiring players exactly like Trumbo for years, and never really having much success in doing so — even though the the acquisition of Nelson Cruz has gone as well as could possibly be imagined so far, the team’s position players are still 22nd in wRC+ and 28th in runs scored — makes it easy to point out that Trumbo is more of what the Mariners already have, but not at all what they lack. The Mariners have a .298 on-base percentage as a team, and they just acquired a guy who has a .299 OBP this year (while playing in hitter-friendly Arizona) and a .298 OBP for his career. This factoid was pointed out by a litany of people on Twitter in the aftermath of the trade.

Would feel better about Mariners if they got AJ Pollock, not Trumbo. Their problem is being 14th in AL in OBP, not 9th in slugging

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) June 4, 2015

The team with the second-worst OBP (.298) in the American League just acquired a hitter with a .298 career OBP/.299 OBP this season.

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) June 4, 2015

Hey, another low OBP guy! Problem solved! https://t.co/m8fNiJX4pV

— David Schoenfield (@dschoenfield) June 3, 2015

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Baseball’s Rule 4 Draft commences next Monday, and this year, the Arizona Diamondbacks will have the pick of the litter. While this particular crop might not be as exciting as some others, there are a handful of interesting prospects, including the usual assortment of hard-throwing pitchers and toolsy high school kids who might be useful in five years. These are the guys who are going to draw the most attention and likely go at the top of the draft, as most of the focus remains on identifying and developing potential franchise players.

However, not every draft pick is going to be oozing with upside, especially once you get out of the top half of the first round. After the top handful of players are off the board, teams have to start picking and choosing between guys with pretty notable flaws; maybe the hard-throwing guy only has a fastball at this point, or that impressive athlete hasn’t yet figured out how to hit. Or, as is the case for a large handful of draftees every summer, a lack of size and an inability to hit for power create the sense that a player is “low upside”, profiling as a future utility player or bench guy. A lot of college middle infielders fit this profile, especially the ones who get picked after the first round.

Only there’s something interesting going on in MLB right now; if you look at the majority of the best second baseman in baseball, they almost all were tagged with this “low upside” label in the draft. For example, here are a few of the draft profiles of some of the best middle infielders in baseball right now, courtesy of Baseball America.

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For the better part of the last decade, Gerrit Cole has intrigued with potential. Twice a first round selection — after being drafted out of high school in 2008, he spurned the Yankees and went to UCLA instead — and the first overall selection in the 2011 draft, Cole’s velocity and frame have had scouts dreaming about what he could eventually turn into. But while the stuff has always been top-shelf, the performance haven’t always lined up with expectations.

In his final season at UCLA, in fact, he wasn’t even his own team’s best pitcher, as Trevor Bauer ran circles around him from a performance standpoint. Their lines, side by side:

Cole looked like an ace, but Bauer was the guy who pitched like one, striking everybody out in a way that you’d expect Cole to do, given his velocity and breaking ball. But the Pirates bet on his stuff and their ability to develop him into more than what he had been, choosing Cole with the top pick while Bauer went to the Diamondbacks three selections later.

In the minors, it was a bit more of the same, as he was good-but-not-great, and certainly wasn’t blowing away minor league hitters like you might expect for a top overall selection who throws 100 miles per hour. And when he got to Triple-A, the strikeouts mostly disappeared, as he managed just 63 strikeouts in 90 innings at the highest rung of the minor league level. He was still throwing hard, and still had a good breaking ball, but for whatever reason, batters were still making plenty of contact against him, and he’s never profiled as an elite command guy, so missing bats was always going to be his path to star status.

Things got a bit better after the Pirates promoted him to the big leagues, as his strikeout rate jumped to 21% in 2013 and up to 24% last year, but given that the league average strikeout rate in the majors is now 20%, these are still not dominating performances. And while Cole’s FIP-inputs suggested he was pitching fairly well, he posted an ERA just a bit below league average, as he allowed a .310 BABIP despite pitching for a team that shifted very aggressively and held opponents to a .287 BABIP overall. Heading into 2015, Cole remained more potential than performance, and at some point, he was going to have to do something to justify the belief that he could become an ace.

That point is here, and through the first two months of 2015, Cole has now become what people have been projecting him to be. A comparison of his 2013-2014 and 2015 lines, to highlight the changes:

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It’s June 1st, and the best record in the American League belongs to the Minnesota Twins. As winners of seven of their last eight games — all against teams who expected to contend coming into the season — the Twins now stand at 30-19, a half game ahead of the Royals in the AL Central; they’re also three and a half games ahead of Detroit and six and a half ahead of Cleveland. That’s a pretty great start for a team that we gave basically no chance of contending this year, as our pre-season forecasts had them as a 74 win team, and gave them just a 3% chance of reaching the postseason.

After two months of playing .600 baseball, our projections now expect the Twins to finish with 81 wins, and give them a 27% chance of reaching the postseason. On the one hand, that’s a huge jump, and a roughly one-in-four chance of making the playoffs in what was supposed to be a rebuilding year is quite the accomplishment. On the other hand, those 27% odds still put them behind eight other teams, and those odds are buoyed by their chances of reaching the less-valuable Wild Card game; Minnesota’s estimated 12% chance of winning their division ranks just 10th in the AL.

The Twins strong start is both a blessing and a curse. Watching winning baseball is a lot more fun than losing baseball, and surprising playoff runs can invigorate a fan base, driving significant revenue gains from increased attendance and television ratings. Even just putting a watchable product on the field can help a franchise avoid a financial death spiral, and even if the Twins cool off in the second half, their strong start should help keep people interested in baseball through most of the summer.

But there’s a potential downside here too, because while the Twins front office should absolutely be enjoying their strong start to the season, they need to be realistic about what it does and does not mean. And it does not mean that the 2015 Twins are actually a good baseball team.

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After another loss on Tuesday night, the A’s stand 14-27, the worst mark of any team in baseball. That record comes in spite of the fact that they’re 5th in the majors in runs scored (184), and have “only” allowed 190 runs to their opponents; being outscored by six runs over 41 games generally does not lead to a disastrous win-loss record, but that’s where the A’s find themselves after the first quarter of the season. And as is often the case when a team’s record doesn’t match their run differential, the blame can be laid almost entirely at the feet of the A’s relievers.

At the most basic level, you could just look at their 4.99 bullpen ERA — 29th in the majors — and conclude that they’ve struggled, but ERA is not a great tool to evaluate pitcher performances, and it’s especially poor at evaluating relief pitcher performance, because often their job is to come in and squash a rally; if they fail, the starting pitcher’s ERA is the one that goes up, so ERA won’t reflect bullpen performances in those situations.

And, of course, not all runs are created equal, especially late in the game. If you’re up 10-3 in the eighth inning and your bullpen gives up a few runs, it’s not a particularly big deal, as you’re extremely likely to win the game anyway. So when discussing a bullpen’s impact on a team’s record, we care not just about the number of runs they allow — whether ERA blames them for it or not — but also the distribution of when they allow those runs, and whether more of them happen to be coming in situations where giving up even a single run can have a dramatic outcome on the game.

Evan Scribner is a fantastic example of how different a reliever’s performance can be from their traditional numbers. If you just look at his overall line, it appears that he’s having an excellent season; 23 innings, 17 hits, 2 walks, 27 strikeouts, and a 2.38 ERA. Even newer-fangled pitching numbers like FIP (2.30) and xFIP (2.20), that are designed to better isolate a pitcher’s performance, think very highly of Scribner. From a context-free standpoint, Scribner has been terrific, but once you look at the distribution of his performances, you find a somewhat different story.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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On Sunday, the Marlins fired manager Mike Redmond. It’s what teams do when they find themselves performing worse than expected, even if expectations of contention were probably less realistic than the hype would have suggested. The manager is the fall guy when things go badly, though, and things are going badly in Miami, so Redmond was shown the door. It’s how baseball works, especially baseball in Miami, and Redmond certainly knew what he was signing up for when he took the job.

On Monday, though, things took a turn away from the norm. Instead of promoting a minor league manager, or one of the team’s remaining coaches, or even turning to a former player who was being groomed as a manager-of-the-future, the Marlins just put their General Manager in charge of the clubhouse. Dan Jennings, the guy who built this roster, is now tasked with trying to turn it into a winner on the field. After years of ranting that analytical GMs were undermining the value of the manager’s role, it turns out to be an old-school scout who is going to try to run everything all at once. The irony is delicious.

But while I’m no big fan of the Marlins organization, I’m also hesitant to cast too many aspersions against this decision. The narrative is really quite easy and lends itself to scorn and ridicule, but I remain convinced that we, as outsiders, have very little to evaluate the quality of a manager even after we’ve seen them perform at the job, so when it comes to evaluating managerial prospects, I just don’t know that we can say anything with any kind of credibility.

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