The New York Mets’ young trio of Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, and Noah Syndergaard have garnered quite a bit of attention of late. Our own Dave Cameron put all three pitchers in the first 30 names in his Trade Value series. The Mets were the only team with three pitchers on the list, and all three are 27 years old or younger. The Mets staff has carried a woeful offense and kept them in contention for a playoff spot. John Smoltz recently called the Mets’ young collection of talent “way better” than the 90s Braves teams that included Hall of Famers Smoltz, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine. While the young group is no doubt talented, how do they compare with other young groups around the league?

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Johnny Cueto has been invoked frequently of late as a likely trade target for contending teams. The combination of his pending free agency and the Reds’ own disappointments makes the probability quite high that he’ll change clubs before the end of the month. Whichever team trades for the Cincinnati Reds’ ace is going to get a pitcher on his way to having the best year of an already very good career. What factors, specifically, have led to his performance?

After above-average seasons from 2009 to 2011, Cueto broke out in 2012 with a 2.78 ERA, 3.27 FIP and 4.7 WAR in 217.0 innings. Injuries cut short his 2013 season, but Cueto came back last season and paced the National League with 243.1 innings pitched. He finished the season with a 2.33 ERA and 3.30 FIP, and he has continued to pitch well this season, producing a 2.73 ERA and 3.06 FIP which would be the lowest of his career.

Cueto has been aggressive in the strike zone, leading to a career-low 4.7% walk rate, but this approach has not cost him strikeouts: he’s produced a 24.3% strikeout rate, representing nearly the best figure of his career by that measure. Cueto is one of ten qualified pitchers this season with a strikeout rate exceeding 20% and a walk rate lower than 5%. Only Max Scherzer, Michael Pineda, and Jason Hammel better Cueto in both categories. Cueto’s percentage of pitches thrown in the strike zone is above 50% for the first time in his career. The charts below of the strike-zone maps for 2012-2014 and 2015 show Cueto’s evolution as a strike-thrower.

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Over the next month, rumors will shape baseball coverage, and a small portion of those rumors will actually develop into real trades. Every team with a shot at the playoffs wants to get better, and adding a starting pitcher is often the mode for many organizations. Even teams that have pitching could probably use a little more. To be willing to part with organizational resources, teams need to have an appropriate nexus between the impact of the new pitcher and a spot on the marginal win curve that makes the upgrade worthwhile.

Eliminating buyers is harder than finding them at present. Every team in the American League except for the Chicago White Sox, Texas Rangers, and Oakland Athletics have at least a 15% chance of making the playoffs and even those three teams might not have thrown in the towel yet this season. Only the Kansas City Royals, New York Yankees, and Los Angeles Angels have greater than a 55% chance of making the playoffs and even those teams do not have commanding leads in their respective divisions. The National League looks slightly more clear with seven teams likely fighting for five playoff spots. In a tight race, a pitching addition can have a considerable impact, but how much difference a trade makes depends on the hole the new player is filling.

A quick look at the rest-of-season depth-chart projections reveals how rotations are expected to perform in the second half. The graph below shows the projected WAR for all Major League Baseball rotations. Read the rest of this entry »

If last night’s Home Run Derby was any indication of the interest and excitement that will be on display tonight, there should be a lot of electricity in Cincinnati for the All-Star Game. The disparity of talent between the American League and National League has been an ongoing debate for some tonight, and the result of a single-game exhibition is not going to tell us a lot about the superiority of any league. Looking at the entire talent level of a league is a much better indicator of the league’s as a whole, but tonight we have a snippet of that talent, and for the most part, we have a large portion of the talent at the top.

The All-Star Game never has all of the best players in each league matched up face-to-face. Layers of fan voting, peer selections along with injuries and pitchers starting on Sunday tend to thin the rosters a little. That being said, most of the best players in Major League Baseball are represented on the roster and taking a look at their performance this season, their preseason projections, as well as rest of the season projections can provide a decent indicator of the talent level at the top of the respective leagues.

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Television ratings for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, like most sporting events and television shows generally, have seen a viewership decline over the last few decades. This decline is not new. After an embarrassing All-Star Game in 2002 that saw Bud Selig call the game a tie, the powers that be wanted to help prevent a further decline in ratings and interest so they came up with a plan to make the game matter. Beginning in 2003, the league that won the All-Star Game would receive home field advantage in the World Series. The move has done little to prevent ratings from a slow decline over the next few years, but over the past five seasons, the ratings have remained steady despite an increasingly fractured television landscape.

Thirty years ago, the All-Star Game was the crown jewel of MLB’s regular season. Only around 50 baseball games were broadcast nationally, ESPN had not begun to broadcast games, and the All-Star Game was a rare opportunity to see the game’s best players. That rarity, combined with limited options for television viewing in general, came through in the ratings. The graph below shows the ratings for the MLB All-Star Game from 1967 through last season.

Source: Baseball Almanac and LA Times

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Yovani Gallardo was supposed to slot into the Texas Rangers rotation as the number-three starter behind ace Yu Darvish and Derek Holland. Those plans quickly disintegrated after Darvish underwent Tommy John surgery and Holland pitched just one inning before suffering shoulder problems that will keep him out until at least August. Gallardo, once an ace for the Milwaukee Brewers, was traded in the offseason for a package of prospects that contained more quantity than quality. Gallardo has provided a solid return for the Rangers, just finishing a 33.1-inning scoreless streak and serving as the team’s best pitcher as the Rangers hover around .500 with perhaps an outside shot at a playoff spot. A more realistic look at the team suggests Gallardo’s value is as high as it will be and the Rangers should begin shopping him as the trade deadline approaches.

With Darvish and Holland, the Rangers might have had a playoff-caliber team, one deserving to be buyers instead of sellers. Given the replacement-level pitching at the end of the rotation an extra three wins up to this point and another three wins going forward would put Texas in the mid-80s in terms of wins and a major trade for a player like Cole Hamels might make them the favorite to catch Houston in the American League West. The Rangers have not had their best pitchers healthy and missed time for Adrian Beltre has left them below .500 and quickly falling out of the playoff race. With Gallardo under contract only through the rest of the season, he is an ideal candidate to be moved, and while Gallardo might like it in Texas, he also might welcome a trade that would put him in a pennant race and prevent a qualifying offer at the end of the season making him more valuable on the free-agent market.

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The Tampa Bay Rays are taking a relatively novel approach to divvying up innings between starters and relievers. Injuries have robbed the team of Alex Cobb for the season, Matt Moore and Drew Smyly for much of the year, and Jake Odorizzi for a time as well. Despite those problems, the team climbed to a 41-32 record a few weeks ago thanks to a splendid season from Chris Archer, good seasons from Odorizzi, Nate Karns — and even Erasmo Ramirez has pitched in to help the team form a solid rotation. The team has slid back to the pack in the difficult-to-decipher American League East, but still finds itself just two games back of the Yankees after losing nine of their past 12 games. Rays’ starters have been effective, but have not pitched deep into games, leaving the outcome of many games to a set of inexperienced relievers who have been shuffled between the big-league club and the minors all season long.

The Rays’ strategy appeared to be related to to two potential issues. First, the rotation was so depleted at the beginning of the year, they twice pitched bullpen games, letting Steve Geltz pitch a couple innings until his spot in the batting order. The other problem is that the deeper pitchers tend to pitch into games, the worse they tend to do. Getting a pitcher out of the game after two times through the lineup can limit damage to the starters and it can work so long as the team has a deep and effective bullpen. The Rays’ starters have averaged just 89 pitches per start, the fewest in MLB. Ted Berg noted a few weeks ago that the Rays were on pace for the second-lowest total of plate appearances (to the 2012 Colorado Rockies, who experimented with a four-man rotation) three times through the lineup in the last decade.

The graph below shows innings pitched by every bullpen this season.

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By striking out 12 St. Louis Cardinals hitters on Tuesday night, Chris Sale of the Chicago White Sox tied Pedro Martinez’s record for striking out at least ten hitters in eight games in a row. The feat is an impressive one, requiring a consistent level of performance for more than a month. Only four pitchers have had such a streak last more than five games, per Baseball Reference’s Play Index (Much of the data throughout this piece comes the Play Index).

During the streak, Sale has an ERA of 1.80 and a 1.27 FIP while striking out 42.5% of hitters. Counting only strikeouts during the streak, Sale’s 97 Ks would be tied for ninth with Sonny Gray for strikeouts for the entire season in the American League. WIthin Sale’s current streak is a five-game span where Sale struck out at least 12 hitters every game which is also tied with Pedro Martinez (as well as Randy Johnson) for the longest streak in history. As it stands, Sale’s 141 strikeouts and 35% K-rate are number one in baseball. Although unlikely, Sale has an outside shot at becoming the first pitcher to achieve 300 strikeouts since 2002 when both Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling achieved that mark for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants began the season with what appeared to be an adequate, but perhaps underwhelming, infield. Buster Posey was the star at catcher and Brandon Belt seemed like a solid young first baseman. Brandon Crawford looked to be a decent glove-first shortstop while not much was expected from Joe Panik at second — and even less than that was expected from Casey McGehee at third base. McGehee could not quite catch fire the way he had done in Miami the previous season and has since been replaced by the previously unknown Matt Duffy. Nearly halfway through the first half of the Major League Baseball season, however, the Giants’ quintet of infielders has been the best in all of baseball.

Buster Posey has been right in line with his very high expectations, and Brandon Belt has been solidly aboveaverage as expected, but Panik, Crawford, and Duffy have vastly exceeded expectations in 2015. The group as a whole was projected for 12.4 wins before the season according to the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections. Those players have already accumulated nearly 13 wins and have more than half of the season to go. That number is the best in MLB this season.

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Heading into this season, not unlike most seasons over the past few years, not much was expected out of the Baltimore Orioles from the statistics-based community at FanGraphs. Despite winning at least 85 games in each of the past three seasons with two playoff berths and the division title in 2014, just seven of the 38 FanGraphs writers surveyed before the season expected the Orioles to make the playoffs. The projections pegged the Orioles for 79 wins and gave them just a 16% chance of making the playoffs. The offense figured to be led by Adam Jones, Chris Davis, and emerging star Manny Machado providing great production at the plate and in the field, but the pitching had some question marks with no starter projected to record an ERA or FIP below four. While Jones, Davis, and Machado pacing the offense, there are still questions about the pitching staff, but Ubaldo Jimenez has returned from a terrible 2014 to provide stability for an Orioles team once again in first place in the American League East.

Jimenez was once one of the best pitchers in major-league baseball. From 2008 to 2010 with the Colorado Rockies, Jimenez accumulated 15.3 WAR, ninth in MLB just behind Felix Hernandez and right ahead of Jon Lester, Adam Wainwright, and Jered Weaver. Inconsistency plagued Jimenez over the next three seasons with the Cleveland Indians, but a great second half in 2013 — when he posted a 1.82 ERA, 2.17 FIP and 3.0 WAR — earned him a four-year deal with the Orioles worth $50 million.

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