The group of young shortstops emerging in major-league baseball has gotten a lot of deserved attention, with Xander Bogaerts, Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager — all 23 or under — potentially ushering in a renaissance at the position. Third base gets a lot of attention, too, offering a combination both of young stars (like Nolan Arenado, Kris Bryant, and Manny Machado) and the American League’s most recent MVP (in Josh Donaldson). Historically, second basemen tend to generate less attention — perhaps because players often end up at second only when they appear unable to adequately handle shortstop or lack the size to play third. This season, however, second basemen have turned the tables and are having quite possibly the best collective season ever at that position

Second basemen have not typically been responsible for great offensive seasons as a group. Last year, Wendy Thurm looked at offense by position throughout history. Second basemen, Thurm found, have generally hovered around the low-90s when it comes to wRC+, easily below average. The graph below shows the league-average wRC+ for second basemen over the past 50 years, including this one.

Second base has rarely reached (or crossed) the 95-wRC+ threshold. This season, however, they’ve produced a 101 wRC+ on the season. We can go back further and the trend continues. In the last 100 years, the only time second basemen have recorded a collective mark above 100 wRC+ is 1924, the year Rogers Hornsby hit .424/.507/.696 and accounted for more than 5% of second-base plate appearances. With Hornsby, second basemen produced a collective 103 wRC+; without him, it would have been 96 on the season. This year’s top second baseman, Jose Altuve, has recorded an impressive 167 wRC+ is impressive, but that figure doesn’t have nearly the same impact as Hornsby’s did in the 1920s.

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In 2010, 20-year-old Giancarlo Stanton slugged 22 homers in 396 plate appearances. Only 11 20-year-olds had ever hit more home runs in a season, and only Bob Horner in 1978 hit more homers in fewer plate appearances. At 21, he hit 34 homers, fourth among 21-year olds, and nobody hit more in fewer than Stanton’s 601 plate appearances. His 37 homers the next year were eighth among all 22-year-olds, and nobody had more in fewer than Stanton’s 501 plate appearances.

At 23, Stanton had “only” 24 homers in 504 plate appearances, and at 24, he hit 37 without playing a full season. Last year, he hit 27 homers in 317 plate appearances and nobody at any age has ever hit as many home runs with fewer opportunities. If there is a theme, it’s that Stanton hits a ton of home runs. If there is a secondary theme, it is that he doesn’t play full seasons. The first one is great. The second one could be cause for concern.

This is cherry-picking the data a bit, but there have been 89 player seasons where a player hit at least 22 home runs and had 505 plate appearances or fewer before or during a player’s age-26 season, per Baseball-Reference Play Index. Of those 89 seasons, 74 happened once, including 11 in strike years. Five players have two such seasons, although Mike Piazza’s happened during the strike and lockout. The only player with more than two is Giancarlo Stanton, and with him out for the season, 2016 will make the fifth time it has happened in his career. Extend the age requirement up to 30, and still nobody has more than three such seasons. Get rid of the age requirement all together and the only other player with five such seasons is Jose Canseco, and two of those seasons were shortened by a strike.

Stanton’s injuries have generally varied enough that there does not appear to be anything chronic in nature. In review:

• 2012: missed less than a month due to arthroscopic knee surgery on his right knee.
• 2013: missed a little over a month with a strained right hamstring.
• 2014: missed last few weeks of season after getting hit in the face with a pitch. No DL stint due to expanded rosters.
• 2015: missed the rest of the season beginning in late June after a fractured bone in his hand due to a hard swing.
• 2016: missed the rest of the season beginning in mid-August due to a left groin strain.

We have four separate injuries, none overly serious, and after the first three, he came back at or near the same performance level that he exhibited previously. Despite all those injuries and missed time, his 26.7 WAR is still in the top-100 of all time through age-26, and his 206 homers are 16th through the same age. Read the rest of this entry »

I cannot venture to say that Alex Rodriguez is a complicated individual any more than any other person, but I can fairly easily say that Alex Rodriguez the baseball player is full of complications. He’s an all-time great who has twice signed two of the most expensive contracts in baseball history, been suspended for PED use, and is currently being shoved out of the organization he has played for the past 13 seasons despite putting up colossal numbers and leading the team to a World Series championship during the 2009 season. This post is not meant to analyze Rodriguez’s career, celebrate his accomplishments or discuss his flaws. The question here is should Alex Rodriguez retire, and like most Rodriguez-related issues, it is complicated.
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Without rehashing the baseball-is-dying trope, it should be noted that the television ratings for this year’s All-Star Game took a pretty steep dive. Over the past half-decade, the ratings had held pretty steady, which is actually a positive trend relative to the general decline in television viewership as a whole — as well as the lack of interest in the other major sports’ All-Star contests. While the All-Star game still managed to draw nearly 9 million viewers, that figure also represent a 20% drop from last year’s contest — and seems to indicate that the exhibition lacks some of the draw that the event possessed when major-league broadcasts were few and far between. 

In the grand scheme of baseball viewership, however, the All-Star game appears to represent an anomaly rather than a building trend. Because even as fewer people tuned into the midsummer class than almost ever before, local television ratings, which are up again over last season, indicate that more and more viewers are watching baseball on a regular basis.

Two years ago, the Royals came out of nowhere to make the World Series. Last year, that momentum carried over to viewers as Kansas City led MLB teams in local ratings. After winning the World Series last year, Kansas City is still watching a ton of baseball. Ratings-wise the two teams from Missouri boast the top two spots in baseball, per Forbes.

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The New York Yankees are in the middle stages of an overhaul, both in terms of player turnover and also philosophy. Over the past few weeks, the team has traded Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Carlos Beltran for a bevy of prospects that includes four players near the top of Eric Longenhagen’s rankings of prospects traded at the deadline. Mark Teixeira wasn’t going to be back next year, so his retirement announcement is more a symbol of — rather than actual contribution to — a changing Yankees’ future. The news that Alex Rodriguez would be stepping aside as well, though, further adds to the changing of the guard in the Bronx. They were in a similar spot in 2013 and abandoned plans to build for the future so they could contend in the near term. Will they abandon those plans again or will they exercise a little more discipline?

The Chicago Cubs spent years both (a) getting rid of old contracts and (b) trading, drafting, and signing prospects. Last season, they began to see the fruits of their labor. The Yankees shouldn’t need to head down that path. The team’s farm system was strong before the team sold at the trade deadline, and it’s possible that some of the international signings from 2014 will start to make their way up the ranks in the near future, as well. The Yankees also have less of a financial need to get rid of bad contracts before contending. The Yankees have the financial power to spend to succeed. These are the larger long-term contracts they do currently possess:

• Jacoby Ellsbury (four years, $90 million)
• Masahiro Tanaka (four years, $89 million with an opt out after 2017)
• Brian McCann (two years, $34 million)
• Starlin Castro (three years, $31 million)
• Chase Headley (two years, $26 million)
• Brett Gardner (two years, $25 million)
• CC Sabathia (one more year at $25 M seems likely with his vested option)

Of those contracts, Sabathia is likely an overpay — but for just one season — and the Yankees might need his innings next year, even if they’re just of the average variety. Gardner, Headley, and McCann are all reasonable contracts which compensate each player at a rate pretty close to his actual value. If the team believes prospect Gary Sanchez is ready to take over full-time catching duties, then giving away McCann is an option to free up salary, but he’s not likely to bring decent prospects back. The same is true for Gardner. Castro remains an enigma, providing generally below-average production, but his salaries are hardly burdensome. Ellsbury has a contract from which the team might like to free itself, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense to pick up some of his contract for someone else when he’s still likely to provide average production from center field. Tanaka has pitched very well this season and should be the Yankees ace in 2017 before he opting out of his contract after that.

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Perhaps lost a bit in the trade-deadline shuffle, Kansas City left-hander Danny Duffy pitched one of the very best games of the year this past Monday. On the road against Tampa Bay, he had a no-hitter going until the eighth inning. By the time that inning had ended, Duffy had recorded 16 strikeouts against just one hit and one walk. After a fairly mediocre 2015 season spent mostly in the rotation, Duffy looked to be the next in line to become a very good reliever on a Royals team that has had its fair share. For the first month of the season Duffy pitched quite well out of the pen, but since the middle of May, he’s been a part of the rotation. Jeff Sullivan chronicled Duffy’s rise in the middle of June, noting in particular the lefty’s ability to throw for strikes, and hitters’ general inability to hit those strikes.

The numbers Sullivan cited in his post six weeks ago have remained good since then. Danny Duffy is generally a strike-thrower, keeping the ball in the zone 53% of the time this season, a figure which ranks sixth out of 95 qualified pitchers. Nor is he necessarily pitching to contact, however: his 78% Z-Contact rate is third in baseball behind only knuckleballer Steven Wright and Max Scherzer. Hitters haven’t fared too much better outside of the zone: his 56.6% O-Contact rate is 13th among qualifiers. His overall contact percentage (72%) and swinging-strike percentage (14.3%) sit behind only the figures produced by Jose Fernandez, Clayton Kershaw, Michael Pineda, Max Scherzer, and Noah Syndergaard. His 62% first-strike rate is good, but closer to the middle of the pack.

In Duffy’s brilliant game against he Rays, his first-strike percentage was actually a tad lower than normal at 53.9%, and his zone percentage was just a bit under 50%. Where Duffy excelled was getting the Rays to chase the ball outside the strike zone. Of the pitches outside of the strike zone, Rays batters swung at 44% of them and made contact on just 20% of swings.

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When a player puts up a great first half that departs considerably from his established levels, it’s generally expected that the player will come back to earth in the second half. This is regression in its simplest form, and it’s baked into the sort of projections which appear at this site. This isn’t to say the player won’t continue to be good, just that he might not be as good as he showed in the first half. The same is true for players with uncharacteristically poor first halves. We expect them to figure things out and get back closer to their prior performance level. We can look at many indicators of the poor performance — BABIP is usually prominent — and tie some of the performance to bad luck. Sometimes it’s injuries. Another avenue we can travel down is to look at exit velocity.

Over the winter, I looked at players who under- or overperformed their average exit velocities in the first half of 2015 and then compared it to their second-half production. Standard caveats about the importance of launch angle and somewhat incomplete data apply, but those players who most outperformed their exit velocity in the first half last season saw massive drops in production in the second half. Here’s the methodology I applied in February (and repeated a few weeks ago in looking at players who underperformed last season):

I created IQ-type scores for exit velocity and wOBA from the first half of last season based on the averages of the 130 players in the sample. In each case, I assigned a figure of 100 to the sample’s average and then, for each standard deviation (SD) up or down, added or subtracted 15 points.

Once the IQ scores for both stats were calculated, I subtracted the IQ score for exit velocity from the IQ score for wOBA to find the players with the biggest disparities.

Here are the overperformers from the first half of last season — i.e. the players whose production most exceeded their exit velocity:

As you can see, players who outperformed their exit-velocity numbers in the first half of 2015 produced a collective wOBA that was 50 points lower in the second half of that season.

With that in mind, here are the overperformers from the first half of this season:

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Two years ago, Steve Pearce was a revelation for the Orioles, hitting 21 home runs and recording a 161 wRC+ in just under 400 plate appearances. Last year, Pearce failed not only to duplicate that season, but even to maintain a league-average line, producing a .289 on-base percentage and 91 wRC+ whille playing first, outfield, and a little second base. As a result, the 33-year-old was left unsigned by the Orioles and had to settle for a one-year deal for under $5 million with the Tampa Bay Rays. Just a few months later, Pearce has returned to the Orioles, who traded young catcher Jonah Heim to bring him back.

From 2007 to 2013, Steve Pearce recorded at least 15 games played per season, but never received a chance at extended playing time, failing to accumulate 200 plate appearances in any one year. In 847 total plate appearances during that time, Pearce hit 17 homers, posting a 9% walk rate and 20% strikeout rate with a disappointing .283/.318/.377 line — good for an 87 wRC+ and 0.4 WAR. The Orioles were one of three teams for which Pearce played in 2013, and the team saw enough to bring him back for 2014, setting the table for his big season.

After that disappointing 2015 campaign, Pearce struggled to find a market for his services. The FanGraphs crowd estimated a two-year, $12 million contract, while Dave Cameron guessed a one-year, $8 million contract and labeled him one of the offseason’s biggest bargains before the signings began. Cameron justified his choice, thusly:

But for a team looking for a right-handed hitter who can play first base or the outfield, signing Pearce at a bench player price and giving him a shot at a regular job might be a risk worth taking. The underlying skills suggest that he’s better than a lot of other guys who have picked up the everyday player label, and unlike a lot of sluggers, he’s not just a one trick pony. He makes contact at league average rates, draws enough walks to be a decent on-base guy, is an above average runner on the bases, and defensive metrics have graded him out as an asset at first base and average in the outfield. When you combine those skills with a guy that has hit 36 homers in his last 682 plate appearances, that’s a player who is worth putting in the line-up most days.

The Rays took that minor chance on Pearce and were rewarded for it. This season, Pearce has played first and second base for Tampa Bay and appeared in 60 games so far. In his 232 plate appearances, he’s hit 10 homers, with a 147 wRC+ and a .309/.388/.520 line. While his .342 BABIP is likely to regress, his projections are still very positive. ZiPS forecasts Pearce for a rest-of-season 119 wRC+, while Steamer is a bit more pessimistic at 111. In either case, though, both numbers are solidly above average. Where Pearce can really help the Orioles is against left-handed pitchers, as the Orioles have recorded just an 85 wRC+ against southpaws, among the very worst in the game.

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While deals for Zach Duke and Mark Melancon might have made it appear as though the price for relief pitching was coming down, the San Francisco Giants, in need of some help at the back end of the bullpen, have just paid a pretty high price to get the left-handed Brewers’ reliever Will Smith.

Here are the full terms.

Giants get:

• Will Smith (RHP)

Brewers get:

• Phil Bickford (RHP)
• Andrew Susac (C)

For the Giants, pursuing a reliever made a lot of sense. They have some useful pieces there, surely: Santiago Casilla has been generally reliable at the the end of the bullpen, Derek Law has pitched well with more exposure, and Hunter Strickland has been solid at time. As a whole, however, the group hasn’t done a lot to add to the Giants’ chances of reaching the postseason this year.

The Giants’ 19.8% strikeout rate is barely ahead of the Colorado Rockies’ (19.7%). By ERA (3.76) and FIP (3.92), the Giants pen sits in the middle of the National League pack. By WAR, however, the team places ahead only of the Arizona Diamondbacks and the abomination the Cincinnati Reds have put together. By Win Probability Added (WPA) among NL relievers, Casilla (0.63, 37th), Strickland (0.53, 39th) and Law (0.52, 40) — who, again, represent the back-end of San Francisco’s bullpen — are well behind the game’s better pitchers. The rest of the relief corps is hovering around zero or worse. They’ve landed someone who should be able to bolster the bullpen significantly this year, and perhaps into future seasons.

In 2015, mostly in the capacity of setting up Francisco Rodriguez, Will Smith was one of the best relievers in baseball, . He made 76 appearances, strinking out 35% of the batters he faced — and no NL reliever without a save had a higher WAR than Smith’s 1.4 mark. He moved into 2016 with the closer role his to lose, but lose it he did when he lost his balance while removing a shoe and twisting his right knee during spring training, an injury which required surgery. Smith hasn’t been as lights out this season, striking out 24% of batters against a 10% walk rate in 22 innings. Although his ERA and FIP have not stabilized due to a couple home runs, his strikeout rate in July has crossed the 30% threshold, providing some encouragement that Smith is on his way back.

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Josh Reddick is the near-ideal trade candidate. He’ll be a free agent at the end of the season, he’s continued to hit ever since rebounding from a disappointing 2013 campaign, and he’s playing for a team in the Oakland Athletics that’s eight games under .500 and has virtually no chance at the playoffs. Reddick is headed to free agency in market populated by few decent players, suggesting there’s little expectation of a return to the A’s, a small-market club relying on young players to compete. All that said, there’s a case to be made that the A’s need not move Reddick at the deadline if they fail to receive a solid offer.

The market for corner outfielders hasn’t been great for sellers or free agents over the past year. A year ago, minor deals were made for Shane Victorino, David DeJesus, David Murphy, and Gerardo Parra. Yoenis Cespedes netted a good package for the Detroit Tigers headlined by Michael Fulmer, and even Cespedes was brought in to play center field. Jay Bruce, on a selling Reds team, stayed put. Carlos Gonzalez, on the selling Colorado Rockies, stayed put. Justin Upton, despite pending free agency, stayed put with the Padres. The latter three players were all producing offensively, but the Padres opted to take a draft pick for Upton, while the Rockies and Reds decided to hold on to their outfielders to try and get better value later.

Then, last offseason, the Rockies and Reds still couldn’t find any offers to their liking. As a result, the Rockies opted to trade the younger, cheaper Corey Dickerson to the Tampa Bay Rays for reliever Jake McGee. Jason Heyward got paid as did Justin Upton, but Cespedes ended up with an unusual three-year deal despite an MVP-type season. Alex Gordon did fine to get four years and $72 million — and Gerardo Parra was fortunate to get a three-year deal from the Rockies — but Dexter Fowler and Austin Jackson both had to sign one-year deals, while Colby Rasmus avoided the market altogether by accepting the qualifying offer. The FanGraphs crowdsourced guesses overshot it on almost all of the outfielders.

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