In an unexpected turn of events, the Royals are fighting with the Tigers to try to win the AL Central, which hasn’t escaped your attention. The Tigers have been hurt by Justin Verlander being replaced by Chris Volstad, and by Joe Nathan being also replaced by Chris Volstad. The Royals, meanwhile, have been helped by an overall clutch team performance and an amazing defensive outfield. At this point, the division is almost a toss-up, where as recently as a few weeks ago it looked like the Tigers would advance without breaking a sweat.

Looking up at both of those teams, not quite out of the race but not quite in the middle of it, are the Indians. Though the Indians haven’t been markedly worse than the Royals, they have, in several ways, been the anti-Royals. The Royals have been clutch, and the Indians haven’t. The Royals have outplayed their BaseRuns, and the Indians haven’t. The Royals haven’t hit well, and the Indians have. The Royals haven’t had a strong rotation, and the Indians have. And then you get to the fielding. There is no greater difference between the two teams than there is in the field, where the Royals have been great and where the Indians have been less than that.

Read the rest of this entry »

So we know by now that Garrett Richards has blossomed into an ace. He always had it in him, at least based on his fastball velocity and movement, and in this particular season he’s helped to pick up a lot of the slack within an Angels rotation that carried a bunch of question marks. Richards is the premier arm on the staff, and a part of his breakout has had to do with his dramatic increase in strikeout rate. From last year to this year, Richards has increased his strikeouts by half, which, well, think about that.

The other part of his breakout has had to do with his limiting quality contact. Tony just wrote about this Wednesday, linking Richards with Felix Hernandez, and that’s saying something considering Felix is having one of the better seasons ever. Richards has started 24 baseball games, and he’s allowed just five home runs. He’s yielded a .256 slugging percentage that is actually lower than his opponents’ on-base percentage. You don’t need to dig too deep to understand that batters haven’t been hitting the ball hard against Garrett Richards through four and a half months. But, what’s going on here? How does a pitcher allow just a .063 ISO?

Read the rest of this entry »

You’re familiar with win/loss standings. I’m pretty comfortable with this assumption. You’re likely also growing familiar with BaseRuns win/loss standings. It’s something we’ve cited pretty often since we began to offer the data, and the idea behind BaseRuns is that it strips away sequencing. Actual standings show you performance plus variation. BaseRuns standings show you performance. It’s not quite that simple, but that’s the outline, so it’s interesting to compare how teams have done to how BaseRuns thinks teams have done.

Take the American League Central, right now. The Royals are leading! The Royals are leading the Tigers, by half of a game! Yet, BaseRuns preserves the Tigers’ winning percentage, but drops the Royals’ winning percentage from .542 to .480. BaseRuns doesn’t think the Royals are as good as the Tigers at all. So why are the Royals presently where they are? They’ve been clutch. Sequencing has been a strength of the Royals, and of course, sequencing can make an enormous difference if you under- or over-perform in high-leverage situations. The Royals have earned their current record by doing well when it’s mattered the most.

Read the rest of this entry »

The player with baseball’s third-best wOBA started on Tuesday, and the first time he came up, he drilled a low-away curveball into center for a single. The next time, behind 0-and-2, he fought off an inside fastball and lifted another single into center. The third time, he yanked a low slider down the left-field line for extra bases. I’m taking a risk by writing this post before the game is fully over, so perhaps there’ll be a fourth time, and maybe that’ll go well and maybe it won’t. No matter the outcome, it’s hardly the most important data point.

The most important data point is this: Right now, the best hitter in baseball has been either Mike Trout or Troy Tulowitzki. To round out the top five, you’ve got a selection, including names like Andrew McCutchen, Edwin Encarnacion, and Devin Mesoraco. Four of these players named are known to be amazing. Mesoraco’s been amazing; he’s just not known for it yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On the one hand, I don’t know how much this matters anymore. Each team has just over 40 games remaining, which is basically a quarter of the season, and over a quarter of a season, things go crazy. The numbers get enormous error bars as you expect a ton of variation around calculated averages. On the other hand, these are the highest-leverage games yet, for almost every team still in the race. Little things now look like big things, as the stretch run essentially puts a magnifying glass over otherwise ordinary baseball. So that’s my justification for this latest and last look at rest-of-season-schedule strength.

I looked at this almost exactly a month ago. Since then, things have changed. Players have gotten hurt, players have gotten traded and games on the schedules have been played. Now there’s less of the year left, so this feels like a more significant factor. And with so little year left, schedules can look even less balanced than they are over the full summer. This isn’t to start a conversation about fairness; this is just what is. You’re going to see a big table.

Read the rest of this entry »

The article begins with an anecdote, like so many articles usually do. Let’s watch something that ultimately didn’t matter, from Sunday’s marathon contest between the Tigers and the Blue Jays. The game was tied 5-5 forever, but specifically, for our purposes, the game was tied 5-5 in the top of the 16th, when Ian Kinsler hit a one-out infield single. The next batter was Miguel Cabrera, and Cabrera drove the first pitch for a single to bring the Tigers that much closer to snapping the deadlock. It was a well-hit single, a line-drive single, to the left side of the outfield, but where Kinsler easily could’ve played it safe and stopped at second, he went and got himself to third, and he did so without a close play.

Read the rest of this entry »

In ways, the 2013 Royals were both a success and a failure, but I’ll probably always remember them for one particular thing. Around the All-Star break, general manager Dayton Moore said that he wasn’t going to sell, and his big reason, paraphrased, was that there was no reason the Royals couldn’t win 15 of 20 games. Everybody made fun of Moore for being irrational and getting carried away, and shortly after that, the Royals began a run during which they won 17 of 20 games. They didn’t make the playoffs, but they were playing interesting baseball well into August.

This year’s Royals kind of backed into the All-Star break, and a few days later, they were a couple games under .500. There were reasons, legitimate reasons, for them to look into trading James Shields, but Moore never really entertained the idea, electing to charge ahead with the roster he’d built. Since then the Royals have won 15 of 18, including seven in a row, and not only are they the current second wild card — the Royals trail the Tigers by no wins and one loss. When the Tigers added David Price, it seemed to be a maneuver to prepare for the postseason. It’s far from clear now the Tigers will even sniff a play-in game.

Two years in a row, then, the Royals have surged after the break, playing themselves right into the race. It’s exciting, because it’s meaningful Royals baseball within the final two months. And what’s funny, if unsurprising, is that this isn’t the only parallel. What’s the strength of the 2014 Royals? Look to the strength of the 2013 Royals.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is Mike Trout hitting an anomalous dinger:

The homer demonstrated that Mike Trout is special, because that’s not really a pitch people hit homers on. Trout hit a game-tying grand slam off one of the, I don’t know, five best starting pitchers in the world.

Here is Giancarlo Stanton hitting an anomalous dinger:

The homer demonstrated that Giancarlo Stanton is special, because people don’t really hit home runs like that. We’re all familiar with low-liner home runs, but it’s not like we ever see them hit down the line to the opposite field. That’s actually the opposite of how we see them.

So, Javier Baez is in the major leagues now.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you check out the FanGraphs leaderboard of the best pitchers so far, you’ve got a lot of awfully familiar names. Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw are obvious. Chris Sale? Jon Lester? No shock. The guy that stands out — the guy currently in third place in Wins Above Replacement — is Corey Kluber.

People are gradually coming to terms with the reality of Kluber being a rotation ace, but there’s still the question of how. It’s uncommon to have an ace come completely out of nowhere, and a few years ago Kluber was a little-thought-of trade return for Ryan Ludwick. Even the Indians couldn’t have seen all this coming.

The Corey Kluber story is complicated, as all of them are. He’s extremely dedicated and focused off the field. He’s changed the fastball that he throws. He’s made all kinds of little tweaks and adjustments, and he’s benefiting now from just having gotten an opportunity in the majors. But there is this one little signature of his that’s never been as good as it is today. Recently, Baseball America polled big-league managers on the best tools in the league. One of the prompts concerned the owner of the best curveball in the American League. Justin Verlander came in third, and, yeah, his curveball is really good. Dellin Betances came in first, and he’s really gotten comfortable in the bullpen. Corey Kluber came in second. That is, according to people who coach at the highest level, Kluber has one of baseball’s true elite curveballs.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.