Prospects are babies. They’re eagerly anticipated, they’re evaluated by their ceilings, their arrivals are memorable and frequently painful, and these days they’re traded for goods less than ever. They continue to be interesting for a handful of months, but then they start to develop into more fully-formed people, and the magic of limitless possibility disintegrates. Sometimes they turn into remarkable things, more often they turn into unremarkable things, and regardless, it doesn’t take long before they’re taken for granted. Toward the beginning, everything is celebrated. Later on, mistakes aren’t so novel, they aren’t so easy to explain away.

Javier Baez still counts as a prospect, even though his big-league career is weeks underway. He’s among the most exciting prospects we’ve seen in baseball in some years, and though it’s a certainty that he’ll be less compelling a year or two from now, at the moment everything he’s involved in can be turned into a highlight. If he were a real baby, all his activity would be posted on Facebook. Some people might already be getting Baez fatigue, but I’m not one of them, and even if I were, I’d probably make an exception for a showdown between Baez and a similarly extreme sort of pitcher. A pitcher like, I don’t know, Aroldis Chapman. Who Baez faced for the first time on Wednesday night in the top of the ninth of a close game.

Earlier this season, people paid a lot of attention to an at-bat between Kenley Jansen and Miguel Cabrera. It was compelling, because both Jansen and Cabrera are extremely talented. Chapman vs. Baez is compelling because both players are extremely powerful. There’s no one who throws harder than Aroldis Chapman. There might be no one who swings harder than Javier Baez.Who wouldn’t want to watch them go head-to-head over and over? They haven’t yet gone head-to-head over and over, but they have gone head-to-head once. Let’s put that at-bat under the microscope.

Read the rest of this entry »

Numbers are the easy part, so let’s start with some numbers. David Price got thrashed by the Yankees, ending with twice as many hits allowed as outs recorded. He was charged with eight runs, all of them scoring in the top of the third, which Price began, but which Price was removed from without getting an out. That third inning saw Price allow nine consecutive hits, the first time that’s happened to a pitcher since 1989. The all-time record for consecutive hits in an inning by a team is 11, and that was in Colorado. Never before had Price allowed nine hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed eight hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed seven hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed six hits in an inning. In Price’s previous game, he one-hit the Rays.

Price on Wednesday got one swinging strike. His previous season low was six. In his regular-season career before Wednesday, he’d allowed at least nine hits just 20 times. He’d allowed at least eight runs just four times. Price set a new career Game Score low, of 2. In Price’s own words: “That was probably the worst game I’ve ever had in my life.” It was an awful game, but really, it was an awful inning. And, technically, it was an awful fraction of an inning. David Price is one of the best known pitchers in the universe.

Maybe it’s enough to just say what’s happened. A nine-hit disaster happened, to an excellent pitcher. Maybe now we ought to just move on. But it seems like we should reflect at least a little deeper. It isn’t often a terrific pitcher gets lit up like this. It isn’t often a team manages to string a bunch of hits together, and nine is extreme. We should go past just the numbers. What in the hell was that top of the third? Can the video show us anything?

Read the rest of this entry »

So, this stuff doesn’t really need to be reviewed, because you’re baseball fans, and you’re baseball fans who read FanGraphs, but recently, of course, the Angels lost Garrett Richards for the year. Meanwhile, Anibal Sanchez experienced a setback in his injury rehab, and now it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to return in the regular season. Not coincidentally, trade rumors have popped up, as the Angels are fighting for the AL West, and the Tigers are fighting for the AL Central or a wild-card slot. Losing guys like Richards and Sanchez aren’t easy injuries to overcome.

A disadvantage for both teams is that the injuries have taken place after the non-waiver trade deadline, so moves now are limited and difficult. Really good players just aren’t available, so the guys who are are mediocre or expensive. But, you’ll notice the calendar’s almost turned to September. That presents an advantage. That greatly reduces the need to go out and get a new pitcher for the short-term.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Angels’ starting rotation has been worth 10.8 WAR. Tyler Skaggs is responsible for 15% of that, and he’s been hurt for a while, and he’s done for this season. Garrett Richards is responsible for another 41% of that, and as of last week he’s out for the season as well, and perhaps a part of next season. The Angels still have the intention of competing for the World Series, but it would appear their pitching hopes might be down to a declining Jered Weaver and a struggling C.J. Wilson. Those guys, and an unknown rookie who turns 28 in a month. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know much about Matt Shoemaker. For a long time there wasn’t a reason to, but it might be Shoemaker who’s now the best starter on the staff.

It’s easy to want to write the guy off. Almost all quality big-leaguers show up and establish themselves sooner than Shoemaker has. He went entirely undrafted out of Eastern Michigan, and he owns a Triple-A ERA of 5.38. Never before was Shoemaker considered much of a prospect, if any kind of prospect, and when people would talk about the Angels’ rotation depth, Shoemaker was among the reasons they’d be nervous. Prior to 2014, Shoemaker wasn’t a meaningful part of the Angels conversation. So: why should that be something we care about now?

Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Wainwright would tell you himself: he’s currently in a funk, and he’s been in a funk for about a month and a half. It’s not like you have to dig very deep to find out why he feels that way. After blanking the Pirates on July 7, Wainwright’s ERA stood at 1.79. Since then, it’s been in the mid-4s. Through July 7, he threw 67% of his pitches for strikes. Since then, he’s come in at 62%. The walks are up, the hits are up, the strikeouts are down, and Wainwright’s frustrated, looking for clue after clue so he can get back to what he was. They say no one in baseball’s better at making adjustments than Adam Wainwright. He’s still looking to make the right one for this most current slump.

It feels like this could be easy to explain. Wainwright’s almost 33, and he’s had Tommy John surgery before. Last year he threw just about 300 innings, which is an extraordinary total, and earlier this season he missed a start with non-UCL discomfort in his elbow. He’s also pitched through illness and a sore back without alerting the media, so it could be he’s still feeling something and not owning up to it. Injury, fatigue, fatigue leading to injury — we don’t know. It could be anything. But what if the answer’s a different sort of simple? What if Adam Wainwright just misses pitching to Yadier Molina?

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

You know where this is going already, but, right before July’s non-waiver trade deadline, the A’s made a splash in adding Jon Lester, and the Tigers made a splash in adding David Price. The intentions were obvious: Oakland and Detroit were loading up for an extended playoff run. The two teams had the appearance of being the two best teams in the league, and so they shuffled some parts around to focus more on the short-term. It wasn’t a question of whether the teams would make the playoffs; it was a question of how far they would go.

And, yeah. So, not too long ago, we finally rolled out historical playoff odds. That is, all season long we’ve had playoff odds as of the moment, but now you can go back to any date you like to see where things stood then. I think it’s worth a look now at how things have changed since the last day of July. The month of August isn’t over, but it’s almost there, and already we’ve seen some significant shifts. How has the baseball landscape changed since the passing of the non-deadline deadline?

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a regular shortstop in the National League you probably don’t think about very often. The Marlins, though, think about Adeiny Hechavarria very often, and they happen to think very much of him. Which, of course, is implied by his still being a regular shortstop, but Hechavarria’s coming off a weekend in which he made some more dynamite defensive plays, and Jarred Cosart went and took himself to Twitter late Saturday:

Hechavarria shows me everyday why WAR and all these #s are garbage. Best defensive shortstop I’ve seen period. Fish fight on 2morrow

— Jarred Cosart (@JarredCosart) August 24, 2014

Cosart isn’t just in it to build himself and his teammates up. And this is a sentiment we’ve heard before from the organization. From November 2013:

[Michael] Hill was befuddled as to how Hechavarria wasn’t among the three finalists for the Gold Glove award, a prize that went to Braves’ counterpart Andrelton Simmons over Ian Desmond and Troy Tulowitzki.

From just the other day:

“They’ve got all these fancy numbers you measure stuff by and I guess I’m just a dinosaur,” [Perry] Hill said. “I go by what I see. I know what my eyes see and my eyes tell me he’s an elite shortstop.”

The Marlins are big believers in Hechavarria, from the front office on down to the players on the field. Those are opinions that can’t just be ignored, because the Marlins have repeated the point time and time again. To them, defensively speaking, Hechavarria’s nothing short of elite. So why don’t we talk about Hechavarria like he’s defensively elite?

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re talking about pace-of-game again, in light of the recent vote to identify the next commissioner. Baseball games are taking longer and longer, with replay and constant shifting only adding to the length, and while certain fans believe it’s no issue because that’s just the beauty of baseball, this is one of those areas where you need to look at the big picture, and most people would prefer that games take less time. Baseball games now have a greater duration with the same amount of action, and that’s not the stuff of anyone’s dreams.

Cutting down on game length isn’t as easy as identifying that baseball should want to cut down on game length. The commercial breaks are always going to be there, because they need to be. Teams aren’t going to be real receptive to ideas that limit bullpen usage and flexibility. Every so often someone brings up the idea of a pitch clock, and maybe that’s the sort of step that needs to be taken. The best target for time reduction are all the seconds that pass between pitches. At least, that’s how people frequently feel. They don’t feel like that so much when Mark Buehrle’s on the mound.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s watch some baseball! Rewind to Thursday night, in Boston, where the Angels were playing the Red Sox. The story of most of the night was Matt Shoemaker, but for our specific purposes, the story didn’t really involve Shoemaker at all.

We’ll pick things up in the top of the sixth. Ahead in the count 2-and-1, Albert Pujols took a high slider, but it got called a strike, much to Pujols’ displeasure. The pitch was received by Christian Vazquez, who seems to be an elite-level pitch-framer.

Read the rest of this entry »