12:06

Dan Szymborski: OK, I’m here!

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I’d like to say something out of my control happened, but I tend to start Twitter rants two minutes before I have to be somewhere

12:08

Dan Szymborski: Should be fixed now.

12:08

Dan Szymborski: He’s certainly looked better. There’s still hope.

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79 years ago Friday, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, triggering a new phase of World War II and leading to France’s surrender six weeks later. Contrary to popular belief, the French army was not weak, and fought well. In the end, their failure was one of planning and imagination. While the Maginot Line actually held until everything else collapsed — again, contrary to what many people today think — the French leadership widely assumed they could easily take the offensive in Belgium, keeping the fighting on their left out of France, and that the Ardennes were unsuitable for any kind of invasion. Neither of those things turned out to be true and what with most of the reserve the French had in Northern Belgium or the Netherlands, they were unable to counterattack; the German crossing of the Meuse in the first week doomed them.

The Cleveland Indians, while obviously finding themselves in a considerably sunnier position than being in a life-or-death struggle with an invader trying to wipe them off the map, have struggled in 2019 and are currently looking up at the Minnesota Twins by a four-game margin; their scuffling is largely the result of same failures of planning and imagination the French exhibited. The team had a viable plan for winning this season, but it involved believing in a number of very specific things being true. Now that some of those things have turned out not to be true, the team finds itself backed into a corner, with many weaknesses that can’t be easily painted over. The fight for the AL Central is very real.

Cleveland’s argument for winning the Central relied on the team’s strengths, the things that no other team in the division could match. There was a very good case to be made for the projected five-man rotation to be the best in baseball; ZiPS pegged them to go 71-41 with a 3.47 ERA in 911 innings, combining for 20.5 WAR. The other four teams in the division combined only possessed a single starting pitcher who projected at a level high enough to even make Cleveland’s rotation — Jose Berrios of the Twins. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Baltimore Orioles are not very good at baseball. This should be no shock to anyone who has watched the Orioles play baseball during the last two seasons. Finally starting into a long-overdue rebuilding phase, this is a state of affairs that will likely last for several years. If you’re going to be terrible at something, however, I’m an advocate of being the best at being terrible at that thing. The 1962 Mets, with the most losses in modern major-league history, were lousy enough to become beloved in a way the 2003 Tigers or 1935 Braves weren’t. And there’s one lousy thing the 2019 Orioles are great at: allowing home runs.

Now, every team allows home runs these days, so standing out from the pack is even harder than it usually is. The Orioles have allowed 75 home runs in just 35 games, a frightening pace; it’s always a Home Run Derby when the orange-and-black are in town. Notice I said pace, Giants fans; your staff isn’t exactly amazing at keeping the ball in the park.

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12:04

Dan Szymborski: The hatches are battened, the sails are trimmed, the splines have been reticulated, and the hedgehog has been hidden, so let’s do this!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Trucky McTruckface.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I still suspect that he does.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Though I still don’t quite get why he’s so BABIP anemic.

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Earlier this week, I made my on-the-record guesses for what would happen with some of April’s underachieving hitters. Now we’ll turn to look at the disappointing pitchers and the potential for more helpings of crow for me to eat come October.

Chris Sale, Boston Red Sox

Last year, through the late-season shoulder problems, I counseled people not to panic so soon on Sale. He’s Chris Freaking Sale after all. When the White Sox put him in the rotation in 2012, there was a lot of doom-and-gloom about how his pitching motion and his frame meant he wouldn’t survive long as a starting pitcher. But from 2012-17, Sale was one of the most durable starters in baseball and now he drinks overflowing pints out of the skulls of those pundits.

But now, I am quite worried, especially in the short-term. He’s shown he can occasionally dial it up as he did in the Yankees matchup, hitting 96-97 through most of the game. But his velocity is generally down, severely so in most games. He went three months without a start below an average of 95 mph last year. This year he’s only had individual pitches passing this mark in a single game (the Yankees one).

If this is the Sale that we have now, I do expect him to adjust in the long-term. But the Sale of 2018 had a highly edited repertoire. He’s essentially a fastball-changeup-slider pitcher who is amazing at changing the look of these pitches. He could throw his fastball anywhere between 88-98 and have it look like five different pitches depending where it was. In 2019, he’s Pavarotti with an octave taken away. His fastball is more one-note and hitters have realized it; of every 10 fastballs that batters swing at, one in 10 of those swings-and-misses from previous years are now being hit.

“But Dan, he’s just being cautious because of his shoulder!” That makes me even more worried if 10 months later, he’s still having to pitch in a way that makes him a less effective pitcher because of a shoulder issue. Elbow problems are bad, but shoulder problems are a whole new level of scary, like going from a haunted house at an elementary school carnival to a Saw movie. I’m hopeful in the long-term, but it’s a problem for Boston getting back into the race. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first month of every baseball season, I’m a bit notorious for simply answering “April” as the convenient, one-stop-shop for questions relating to why someone’s favorite player is hitting .150. Once we start heading into May, telling people to be patient when 1/6th of the season is already over becomes an increasingly unujustifiable task. While rebuilding teams are in a place at which they can be patient, avoiding judgment is tricky for contenders, especially when every division leader is in first place by fewer than three games.

So let’s get out the guillotine and guess who can be saved and who is a lost cause.

Ryan Braun, Milwaukee Brewers

I remain quite torn about the state of doneness of the Hebrew Hammer. On one hand, he can still hit the ball with authority as seen by the fact that his average exit velocity, dipping under 90 mph, isn’t all that different from the numbers in 2016 and 2017, years in which Braun was still a contributor offensively. If you dig deeper into his pitch-by-pitch stats, Braun appears to be going dead-red for fastballs, and despite a career-low contact rate, he is actually making contact with fastballs at better-than-career-average rates (14.6% whiff/swing rate in 2019 vs. 19.8% career). But other than fastballs, he’s making much worse contact, missing almost half the changeups and sliders he’s offered at (career rate under 30%).

It makes me wonder about Braun’s bat speed. To my naked eye, it looks like he’s trying to compensate for decreased bat speed by making contact with his bread-and-butter pitch (Braun was one of the best fastball hitters in baseball in his prime). He also suggested he was changing his swing in order to hit more home runs. It’s unfortunate that swing speed isn’t one of the things you can get easily, but Alex Chamberlain identified stats that correlate with swing speed when reverse-engineering the scanty data available a few years ago. Isolated power, xwOBA, and contact rate all have a relationship, and in each of the three, Braun is at his career’s nadir.

I think there’s still hope for Braun, but if his bat is slowing down, I wonder if he’s taking the wrong approach in trying to hit for more power. A player with slower bat speed but who is also pulling the ball more (57% compared to 38% career) seems like one trying to cheat on the fastballs. I don’t think Braun’s as doomed as some on this list, but I think that he’d be better off not trying to capture his early-career power because it’s making him a one-dimensional hitter. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Happy April!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Don can go spit on a sparkplug

12:03

Dan Szymborski: (that’s a reference to the TV-version-edited line from Barry Corbin in WarGames)

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I have a zBABIP that I use for minor leaguers, as expected it doesn’t translate cleanly

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The Milwaukee Brewers signed a famous lefty starting pitcher out of free agency Wednesday, bolstering the back of the rotation. No, not that famous lefty starting pitcher, but a still quite respectable one in Gio Gonzalez, most recently biding his time with the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Rail Raiders. In MLB terms, Gonzalez’s contract with the team is barely even a wallet-opener at one-year, $2 million with performance incentives.

Milwaukee’s rotation necessitated another arm after the early season struggles of Corbin Burnes. Burnes struggled to hit locations with his hard stuff, resulting in a slugging percentage over 1.000 against his fastball and a total of 11 home runs allowed in 17 2/3 innings. That’s a 58% home run to fly ball ratio! Gonzalez was brought in as an emergency option for the Yankees, and with the team’s injury emergencies largely being hitters, they never called up Gio and he exercised his out clause.

The Brewers and Gonzalez have a recent history, one that went swimmingly after the late August trade with the Washington Nationals. In 2018, Milwaukee was generally content to let Gonzalez go through five solid innings and then go to the bullpen, something that worked out well, at least during the regular season (3-0, 2.13 ERA/3.63 FIP in five starts). ZiPS projects 1.0 WAR for Gonzalez, assuming 100 innings for the rest of the season, which is comparable to the team’s other options. There’s a catch of course, in that the other options aren’t actually available at this moment; Burnes shouldn’t be working out his problems in a pennant race and Jimmy Nelson and Freddy Peralta haven’t yet returned from injury, even though they’ve made progress. Gonzalez doesn’t really add wins to the standings directly so much as serving as inexpensive insurance for other pitchers.

Gonzalez joining the Brewers is only a bit of a surprise in that they weren’t actually the team most in need of Gonzalez’s services. The buzz has been that about a third of baseball was interested in Gio, but why didn’t a team more in need blow away a measly one-year, $2 million option. After all, if you’re in desperate straits and you’re not going after Dallas Keuchel, where else are you going to get viable a starting pitcher outside of the system in late April? It’s not as if the Giants are begging (yet) to trade Madison Bumgarner. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 20th, 1977, Billy Martin, then in his first of approximately 176 stints as the Yankees’ manager, pulled a lineup out of his hat. Literally. In order to shake up a team that started the year 2-8 and was suffering the bouts of media drama notable for the team during this era, Martin set the batting order by putting the names of the starters on paper and selecting them from a hat. The team’s usual cleanup hitter, Chris Chambliss, hit 8th, meaning that the lie we tell to little kids about how the No. 8 spot is the “second cleanup hitter” was actually true for possibly the first time in human history. Whether coincidental or not, the Yankees won six games straight with only a couple minor changes to this pseudo-random lineup before the team returned to a more traditionally configured one.

The Yankee lineup on Sunday looked quite a lot like this lineup, but taken one step farther to even make the names random. Of course, this wasn’t due to any homage to the late, great Martin, but a necessity fueled by injuries to, well, nearly everybody. You might be excused if you thought someone goofed and you were looking at one of the team’s Grapefruit League lineups from this spring.

Narrator: You were not.

Only a single player in the lineup, Luke Voit, was both present and playing the position envisioned when the Yankees put together their roster (Gleyber Torres was healthy, but was given an off-day). Four players didn’t even start the season, just over three weeks old, on the 25-man roster, and a fifth, Mike Tauchman, was only acquired a week before Opening Day.

Naturally, the lineup, which would have shocked people a month ago, scored seven runs, eventually winning in ten innings. We’ll have to wait until the Yankees next play the Royals in late May to see if they broke some unwritten rule about crushing pitchers with their B-squad that apparently requires hitting people with baseballs. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It has begun.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The chat, which should be obvious from context.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Of course not.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: They may do it by August.

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