Rick Porcello was really good in 2016 when he won the Cy Young award. He had a very strong 3.40 FIP, an even better 3.15 ERA, and was worth 5.1 WAR. The race was close that year, with Porcello narrowly edging out Justin Verlander. Corey Kluber, Chris Sale, and even Zach Britton all also had decent arguments for the award. Any one of the starters could have won, but Porcello got the nod in what was presumably his career year.

It’s early, but so far Porcello is putting those presumptions to the test. Through four games, Porcello has 23 strikeouts against just one walk with a fantastic 1.74 FIP and 1.40 ERA. He’s never pitched quite this well before.

Even during his 2016 campaign, Porcello never put together a stretch as good as the one of which he’s in the midst. The graph below shows rolling four-game stretches since Porcello came to Boston.

We are currently at the low mark for both ERA and FIP during Porcello’s tenure in Boston. As to why Porcello is on such a great run, we can start with the lack of home runs. Since joining the Red Sox, Porcello has never produced a four-game stretch without allowing a homer until now. He had a couple per year back in his extreme pitch-to-contact ground-balling days in Detroit, where the park suppressed homers, but he had no such streaks during his first three seasons with the Red Sox. Some of that can be chalked up to good fortune, of course: he is obviously going to give up a dinger at some point this season. In addition to keeping the ball in the yard, though, there’s also that 23:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

So what’s the difference? Is there even one?

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Many people had probably heard of Sean Manaea before Saturday. He was a consensus top-100 prospect before the 2015 and 2016 seasons. He was involved in a trade-deadline deal for Ben Zobrist as the Royals went on to win the World Series back in 2015. That sort of stuff is going to make him well known among those who follow baseball closely; however, even relatively committed fans might not have been paying attention to Manaea’s last two seasons in Oakland. A lot more people are likely to have heard of Manaea now that he’s pitched a no-hitter, the first one by an American League pitcher in nearly three seasons.

Manaea has made good on his pedigree — and Oakland’s decision to trade for him — with two successful seasons. He’s one of just 40 pitchers with at least 300 innings and an above average ERA and FIP across 2016 and 2017. The only pitchers as young or younger than Manaea on that list are and Zach Davies, Michael Fulmer, Carlos Martinez, and Robbie Ray. Manaea isn’t yet anybody’s version of an ace, but his 4.3 WAR from 2016 to 2017 represents the most of any Athletics pitcher. The A’s have averaged 90 losses over the past two seasons, and a roughly average pitcher on a bad team isn’t going to garner a lot off attention. There have been some signs, though — even before the no-hitter against the Red Sox this past weekend — that Manaea had taken a step forward this season.

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On Wednesday, Yoan Moncada hit a grand slam and stole a base. Those were the notable accomplishments for the White Sox’ 22-year-old second baseman in Chicago’s game at Oakland. In a less remarkable but still relevant development, Moncada recorded his 300th plate appearances for the White Sox since his debut with the club last June.

Three years ago today, Moncada had yet to play a professional game in the United States, and while he came with considerable hype and pedigree, his play thus far has mostly lived up to the lofty expectations. Here’s his line with the White Sox since his promotion last season.

A combination of good patience, decent power, and solid speed have allowed Moncada to mitigate the effects of his one real weakness (swinging and missing) and permitted him to produce solid numbers. And while we can’t simply double the numbers here to arrive at a full-season forecast for Moncada, our Depth Chart projections nevertheless call for an average offensive performance and roughly three-win season in 2018.

If there’s a number that jumps out, however, it’s the one caused by his aforementioned weakness: Moncada has struck out more than a third of the time with the White Sox overall and in just under 40% of his plate appearances this season. That number is scary high. While Moncada has incredible tools, it could be difficult for him to capitalize on his immense talent if he fails to discern strikes from balls.

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Jose Bautista hit 23 homers last season but still had trouble finding a job over the winter. This wasn’t a conspiracy against Bautista, though, or a case of the slow free-agent market at work. Those 23 homers put the former star in a tie for just 84th overall in the majors in 2017, a season during which 117 players hit 20 homers and three-fourths of qualified batters hit at least 15.

Between Bautista’s pedestrian home-run figure, his batting line of .203/.308/.366, and his 80 wRC+, few if any teams pursued him. His poor range in the outfield and similarly poor speed on the basepaths rendered him something worse than replacement-level last year, and at 37 years old, it’s reasonable to believe Bautista’s days as a productive player are behind him. Just in case he’s not done, however, the Atlanta Braves are going to give him a shot.

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If you were to examine the relationship between the matters about which fans most complain and the relevance of those matters to actual wins and losses, you’d likely find that lineup construction produces the weakest correlation. Who starts and who sits matters a lot. Bullpen management can make a real difference on a club’s record. Generally, though, the precise location of a hitter in the batting order doesn’t amount to much.

Take the Cubs as an example. Chicago’s leadoff hitters batted .246/.324/.422 with a 94 wRC+ last year, which isn’t ideal production from one of the most important spots in the lineup. The team still managed to average more than five runs per game, though — and even if they completely optimized their lineup, it likely wouldn’t have netted the team much more than 10 extra runs over the entire course of the season.

Now, 10 runs isn’t nothing: over the course of the year, a close playoff race might turn on that margin. And while the Cubs might have left runs on the table, this actually probably isn’t a case where the manager — in this case, Joe Maddon — is actually to blame. Finding a leadoff hitter for the Cubs has proven to be a difficult proposition. Consider how the team performed last season by batting-order spot.

Kris Bryant mostly batted second, Anthony Rizzo mostly batted third, followed by a mix of cleanup hitters including Willson Contreras, Rizzo, Ben Zobrist, and a few others. Everywhere else, the Cubs were mostly average, especially if one regards the eighth and ninth spots as one given Maddon’s habit of sometimes batting the pitcher eighth.

Such a disparity between the leadoff spot and hitters two through four is actually pretty common. MLB teams recorded a collective 99 wRC+ out of the leadoff spot last year while producing a 112 wRC+ in the next three spots. If suboptimal, it’s also not unusual. A year ago, we were discussing a new type of leadoff hitter in the Kyle Schwarber mold, but it didn’t really hold. It especially didn’t hold for Schwarber, who started slowly.

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Before the season began, I noted some possible concerns regarding the Cardinals rotation — namely, that the team might have better, more talented starting pitchers in Triple-A than those on their major-league roster. At the time, the issue was only a potential problem: the season had yet to start. The potential became a reality even sooner than I expected, however.

A brief timeline:

• On March 28, the Cardinals place Adam Wainwright on the 10-Day DL retroactive to March 26. Wainwright had injured his hamstring running sprints.
• On April 3, Jack Flaherty, taking Wainwright’s place in the rotation, pitches five innings, giving up one run while recording nine strikeouts and just one walk.
• On April 5, the Cardinals rush back Wainwright for the Cardinals’ home opener even though the latter hasn’t pitched in a competitive game since March 14, when he went five innings. Wainwright struggles in his debut, recording more walks than strikeouts, failing to finish the fourth inning, and losing more than 5 mph on his fastball during the game.
• On April 11, Jack Flaherty strikes out 11 batters with no walks in seven innings, giving up just one run.

Wainwright alleviated some fears in his second start, pitching seven innings and maintaining decent velocity throughout his appearance. That’s a positive development, but that doesn’t really address the entirety of the problem. Jack Flaherty is sitting down in Triple-A right now despite having a possessing a better projection than Miles Mikolas, Michael Wacha, or Wainwright himself. It seems wasteful to let Flaherty keep pitching in the minors; at the same time, none of the Cardinals’ five starters is an obvious candidate for demotion. It’s an issue in need of a creative solution — namely, a six-man rotation.

On The Bernie Miklasz Show last week, Miklasz and co-host Michelle Smallmon discussed this very topic. (Go to 34:45 of the 7 am hour to listen to their conversation.) Smallmon noted Flaherty’s success, as well as Mike Matheny’s penchant for demanding eight relievers despite never having much use for the eighth reliever. The pair discussed the Cardinals’ bullpen depth which would help with a six-man rotation and Miklasz stated that, “Every pitcher has some sort of vulnerability or reason to be careful with their innings.” He then went down the list of Cardinals starters providing reasons why a six-man rotation might be beneficial.

• Adam Wainwright: “Old… question of whether he can maintain his velocity over a full season.”
• Luke Weaver: “Good pitcher, but I know they don’t want him throwing 200 innings this year.”
• Michael Wacha: “Runs out of gas every year.”
• Miles Mikolas: “In Japan, shorter season.”
• Carlos Martinez: “He pitched 205 innings. He can do it, but again, do you really want to keep pushing him too hard?”
• Jack Flaherty: “Twenty-two years old. They aren’t going to want to ride him too hard. They definitely want to limit his innings.”
• Alex Reyes: “The plan is to have him be in the rotation, maybe not right away, but you know they are going to limit his innings.”

Smallmon pushed back on Carlos Martinez, making the argument that losing Carlos Martinez starts wouldn’t be a positive and Miklasz noted that, when the Cardinals had considered a six-man rotation three years earlier, the players strongly objected. Before getting to potential player objections, let’s first evaluate Miklasz’s — and presumably the Cardinals’ — logic for wanting to add an extra pitcher to the rotation.

We can start with Wainwright, who is — in baseball years, at least — relatively old. The 36-year-old pitched poorly and faded badly due to injuries last season. As noted, his velocity was poor in his first start of the season but better in the second. The difference between those two? The latter followed five days rest as opposed to the normal four. His start tonight will also be on extra rest. 

While in Japan, Miles Mikolas started 62 games over three years. Last year, Mikolas made 27 starts during a 26-week season, getting roughly six days off between appearances. In 2016, Luke Weaver made 21 starts and pitched 119.1 innings between the majors and minors. In 2017, he made 25 starts and pitched 138 innings between between Triple-A Memphis and the big club. He’s going to blow past that right after the All-Star Break at his current pace. Jack Flaherty made 23 starts and pitched 134 innings in High-A during the 2016 season and upped that to 30 starts and 170 innings last year between Double-A, Triple-A, and the majors. The Cardinals might not want to push too much beyond that this season. Alex Reyes is coming back from Tommy John surgery, so limiting innings and providing more rest seems self-explanatory.

As for Wacha, here’s how he has pitched the last three seasons through July compared to August and September:

Wacha did pitch well last September, but it was also after a poor August. To top it off, his velocity has been down so far this season, which raises concerns about his health.

With Carlos Martinez, I tend to side with Smallmon’s argument against giving him extra rest. As Miklasz noted, he pitched 205 innings last year. Since the beginning of the 2016 season, Carlos Martinez’s 426 innings is sixth in MLB behind only Chris Sale, Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, Rick Porcello, and Corey Kluber. His 7.1 WAR during that interval is 17th in baseball and his 9.9 RA9-WAR (which uses run allowed and not FIP as the main input) is eighth. He’s just not a guy for whom the Cardinals should be limiting starts.

I went through the St. Louis schedule and kept the Cardinals’ five pitchers on a normal schedule to see how many starts they were scheduled to receive before the All-Star Break under the present schedule. I also noted the number of days off between starts the pitchers were set to receive.

When we hear about objections to a six-man rotation, it is often related to a pitcher’s routine and normal schedule. That was Cole Hamels‘ main point of contention this spring:

“I know that’s the new analytical side of trying to reinvent the wheel, but I was brought up in the minor leagues on the five-man [rotation], and that’s what I’m designed and conditioned for.”

What is striking about the table above is that there really is no typical routine. In two-thirds of the starts above, pitchers are pitching on five or six days rest, with only one third of the starts on the supposedly normal every fifth day. Due to the rainout on Monday, the next time Michael Wacha will pitch, he will be on seven days rest because the team preferred to have the emerging Luke Weaver pitch against the Cubs rather than the struggling Wacha.

To modify the schedule, I left Martinez’s starts as is and inserted Flaherty into the rotation just ahead of the first start currently scheduled to be on four days’ rest (in this case, Adam Wainwright’s on April 29). Here’s how many starts each pitcher would get as well as the number of rest days in between starts through the All-Star Break.

Just as with the current, more traditional arrangement, two-thirds of the starts here would be made on five or six days of rest. The starts with four days rest before — just five or six per starter before the break — are now replaced by seven-day periods. The non-Martinez starters miss just two or three starts apiece and Jack Flaherty gets to prove he belongs in the majors. We don’t know that this approach would lead to better health or performance, but given the makeup of the Cardinals rotation and the desire to limit innings, this setup makes a lot of sense. If a starter gets injured before June, the typical five-man rotation will make more sense. Once the end of May arrives, the Cardinals will have another candidate for the rotation in Alex Reyes.

The scheduling for this rotation is a little difficult to pull off due to the desire to keep Martinez on somewhat normal rest, but it is certainly not impossible. St. Louis doesn’t actually need an eighth pitcher in the bullpen, and never actually use one when they have an extra guy. They might as well do everything they can to maximize the talent they have available to them in Memphis and St. Louis. That means getting Jack Flaherty back to the majors and getting creative with a rotation that can make the most of a sixth man.

The Braves and Cubs played a game on Saturday that offered some of the best elements in baseball, including a collection of great young players and an amazing comeback. It also possessed some of the game’s worst possible qualities, including awful weather and incredibly sloppy play likely caused by that same bad weather.

In the end, we saw the Braves jump out to a 10-2 lead and feature a 99.4% chance of winning the game as late as the seventh inning. Despite adding a few runs, the Cubs’ win probability was still just 2.0% in the eighth after Efren Navarro whiffed to record the inning’s second out. Nine two-out runs later, Chicago’s probability of losing was just 2.6%.

Here’s the win probability chart from the game (from this box score):

For five full innings in the middle of the Saturday’s contest, things appeared to be over. Before we get to the craziness of the eighth, however let’s talk a little about the weather. Cubs manager Joe Maddon did not believe the game should have been played and then added his perspective.

“I thought the 2008 World Series game I participated in was the worst. It just got surpassed,” Maddon said. “This is not baseball weather. The elements were horrific to play baseball in. That is the worst elements I ever participated in in a baseball game. Ever.”

Maddon has certainly been around for a while, so his comments carry some weight. His represents merely one opinion, though. What about the players? What about Peter Moylan, for example?

“I’ve been playing since 2006 and never seen anything like that,” said veteran Peter Moylan, the last of the relievers in the inning and the one who threw the wild pitch that let in a run. “We’ve been rained out and been snowed out, but we’ve never had to play through (expletive) like that.”

So, not a big fan. How about Freddie Freeman?

“I don’t understand it one bit. It was the worst game I’ve ever been part of weather-wise.”

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The New York Mets have the best record in baseball. The Mets, whose biggest free-agent signing was a player from last year’s 70-win team, are 10-1 on the season. The Mets, whose two biggest pitching acquisitions have compiled 2.1 totals innings so far this season, are 3.5 games up in their division and have already swept presumptive favorite Washington Nationals.

As Jeff Sullivan detailed earlier this week, no team has improved its playoff odds since the season began as much as the Mets. Winning 10 out of 11 games is certainly a surprising way to start. It would be surprising for any team — even the Astros have around just a 3% chance of winning 10 out of 11 games — but it isn’t all that surprising that the Mets are good right now. They should expect life to get tougher as the season goes on.

To provide a sense of how unlikely the Mets were to start 10-1, the graph below shows the odds of each win total from zero to 11 based on the assumption of the Mets as an 85-win team.

Eighty-seven times out of 100, the Mets end up with four to eight wins — with a one-in-120 shot at winning 10 games. I should also note that their schedule has been roughly neutral thus far, with the series against the Nationals balanced out by games against the Marlins. As for this version of the Mets, it might seem improbable after last year’s difficulties, but the Mets probably weren’t as bad in 2017 as their record ultimately suggested.

Consider a brief list of the factors that contributed to the Mets’ woes last year:

• A mere 30.1 innings from ace Noah Syndergaard, who was projected for 5.6 WAR.
• A mere 81 games from Yoenis Cespedes, who was projected for around three wins.
• Combined replacement-level production from the bottom of the rotation. Chris Flexen, Robert Gsellman, Matt Harvey, Steven Matz, Tommy Milone, Tyler Pill, Zack Wheeler, and Adam Wilk made 88 starts, put up a 6.12 ERA, and recorded -0.2 WAR.
• Despite good performances from Addison Reed and Jerry Blevins, one of the worst bullpens in baseball.
• Almost no production from the third-base position, which produced a 93 wRC+ and 0.6 WAR.

There are other factors, but those appear to be the main issues that caused the Mets to lose more than 90 games. We will look at what has changed or not changed in a bit, but first let’s consider that the Mets’ 70 wins might not have been a good representation of their talent level even with the issues above. The graph below shows team WAR in 2017 along with team wins from last year.

Notice first the very clear linear relationship. The more WAR a team accumulates, the more wins they get. If someone doesn’t believe in WAR, they are ignoring a very close relationship between WAR and wins. The relationship isn’t perfect, of course. Some teams (the ones above the trend line) outperformed their WAR totals, while others (below the line) underperformed them. Looking at the distance from the line can provide a sense of how much a team over- or under-achieved. The Mets show up as one of the biggest underachievers. The five teams with the closest WAR totals to the Mets — the Angels, Mariners, Marlins, Rockies, and Twins — won an average of 81 games last year, with the Marlins’ 77 wins representing the lowest figure. Even with the poor performances in the rotation and the bullpen, the Mets should have been better last season.

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Giancarlo Stanton still looks like Giancarlo Stanton. He’s a gigantic human being who possesses a fierce swing that inflicts damage upon baseballs when his bat makes contact. The problem in the early part of this season is that his huge swing is making slightly less contact than it did a year ago when he was the National League MVP.

Stanton has swung at 116 pitches this year and has whiffed 48 times, per Baseball Savant. Based on his fantastic 2017 season, we would expect to see about 34 whiffs. While a difference of 14 whiffs over 250 pitches doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s the difference between normal, awesome Stanton and this abnormal version of Stanton that has struck out in 40% of his plate appearances.

To better understand just what’s going on with Stanton, let’s try to take the early-season numbers we have and separate normal Stanton from abnormal Stanton. To start, here is a table showing some statistics from his career, from last season, and from this season to spot the problems.

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For a really long time, there was little doubt about the best pitcher on the planet. Clayton Kershaw has been on an epic run that will land him in the Hall of Fame. Over the past two seasons, Kershaw has still been brilliant, but he’s averaged 24 starts and 162 innings instead of 32 starts and 222 innings. That slight downturn in health has allowed arguments to pop up debating whether Kershaw is still the best pitcher in baseball. Last season, Max Scherzer was the takeover candidate of choice. The 2016 National League Cy Young winner followed up one great performance with another by claiming the award again. Ignored in those debates was a pitcher who has been better than both over the past two seasons and projects to be better this year: Corey Kluber.

On Monday, Kluber pitched eight scoreless innings, striking out 13 batters against one walk and just two hits. After three starts, Kluber’s ERA is 1.57, his FIP is 2.33, and he’s been worth 0.7 WAR. That’s great, but it doesn’t really separate him from a bunch of good pitchers off to great starts, including Scherzer, Dylan Bundy, and Gerrit Cole. Let’s extend to the past just a little bit more to get a sense of how Kluber has done lately. The table below shows the top pitchers by WAR since the All-Star Break last season.

Kluber is so far out ahead of the pack, the 1.3 WAR difference between him and Severino is nearly double the difference between Severino and 11th-place Scherzer. Combining his great second half with his strong start to this season, Kluber has struck out 169 batters and walked only 15. Since the All-Star Break last season, Kluber has been the best pitcher in baseball, and it isn’t particularly close. To really take a look at the best pitcher in baseball, it probably helps to take a bit of a longer view. Read the rest of this entry »