I’m sitting here, reading complaints on Twitter. Not long ago, a starting lineup was revealed for a Tuesday baseball game, and almost immediately some people took issue. They don’t like that a certain bench player is getting a start, and they don’t like that a certain regular starter is sitting out. Why, they wonder, would you ever make your lineup worse, especially when you’re playing against a team in the same division?

To be perfectly honest, yeah, this is inspired by the Seattle Mariners. But this isn’t just a post about the Mariners, because this can apply to every team and to every team’s fan base. There’s not a single fan base immune to lineup complaints, and as much as more people are beginning to understand that lineup order doesn’t make much of a difference, a bench player filling in for a starter always generates a negative response. After all, the bench player, presumably, is worse than the starter, which is why the starter is the starter. So what does it mean to take out a starter?

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Just like any reasonable person would’ve expected, the Los Angeles Dodgers currently have sole possession of first place in the National League West. And just like any reasonable person would’ve expected, right now the Dodgers’ team leader in wRC+ among regulars and semi-regulars is Dee Gordon, at 174. As a neat bit of ephemeral trivia, Gordon’s wRC+ is 43 points higher than his 2012 wRC+ and his 2013 wRC+ combined. And by combined, I don’t mean averaged out. I mean added together. Through two weeks, the Dodgers’ biggest weakness has been one of their biggest strengths, and this is an example of why the playoffs don’t crown the best team in baseball. Sometimes, over little samples, Dee Gordon out-hits Hanley Ramirez.

Some more neat ephemeral trivia: Before the season started, Steamer projected Gordon for 0.3 WAR. Meanwhile, ZiPS projected Gordon for 0.7 WAR. Already, Gordon’s been worth 0.6 WAR, so he can be replacement-level from this point forward and the Dodgers won’t be worse off than they were expected to be. Following about a season’s worth of games of being terrible, Gordon’s gone from busted prospect to contributor, and he even went so far as to hit a legitimate home run off Max Scherzer. Sunday, he did something more his own speed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe the most annoying thing you could say is that the Brewers are going to regress. They’re not going to keep winning 83% of their baseball games. They’re not going to end the season with a +378 run differential. They’re not as good as a 1.80 team ERA, and they’re not going to keep running a .250 BABIP against. They’re on a nine-game winning streak, but they’re going to lose, and they’re going to lose, inarguably, dozens of times. The Brewers, in truth, aren’t close to this good. No kidding. This year’s Brewers aren’t literally the best team in the history of baseball.

But every hot streak is unsustainable, just as every cold streak is unsustainable. Any team that wins nine in a row and any team that wins 10 of 12 will have contributing factors you can’t expect to keep up in the long run. What’s important isn’t determining whether or not the Brewers will keep winning at this clip. They won’t. What’s important is determining where the Brewers stand now, relative to where they stood a couple weeks ago before the season was underway.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a hell of a stretch for Jose Dariel Abreu. Coming out of Cuba, he signed with the White Sox for life-changing money. He put together a decent spring training under completely unfamiliar circumstances, and then in his major-league debut, he went 2-for-4 with a double. He was intentionally walked twice in his second-ever game, and at this writing Abreu owns a .300 average, and eight extra-base hits and four home runs, those dingers all in the span of three games. Few players in baseball are flying higher than Abreu at the moment, so I don’t feel guilty about pointing something out.

Right now, Abreu has four home runs. A few days ago, Abreu had zero home runs, when he stepped in against Chad Bettis in Colorado. Abreu worked a 12-pitch at-bat, and on the final pitch — low and in — he unloaded. Abreu blew the game open, and for the first time, he’d gone deep in the bigs. It is, presumably, a memory he’ll keep and cherish forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe the most fun you can have with the Danny Salazar start is by just going over the fun facts. Salazar faced the White Sox Thursday, and he’d go up against 18 batters. Six of them hit the ball fair, and six of them ended up with hits. Two batters walked, meaning ten batters struck out, in just 3.2 innings. The following facts are also true: Salazar recorded zero non-strikeout outs, and the White Sox hit to a 1.000 BABIP. So how do you explain the one extra out? Adam Eaton was gunned down at second trying to turn a single into a double. In that way, Eaton was the spoiler.

It was a conspicuously ridiculous start. You don’t need anybody to tell you nothing like that had ever happened before — you can tell that immediately by looking at the numbers. Salazar finished with a 12.27 ERA and a 0.51 xFIP. In fairness, a year ago, Joe Blanton had a start with a 13.50 ERA and a 1.51 xFIP. Roy Halladay had a start with a 13.50 ERA and a 1.58 xFIP. Over the long run, you care more about the xFIP. In the shorter run, though, how does something like this happen? How did Danny Salazar steal from what I can only assume was the Rich Harden personal notebook?

Read the rest of this entry »

Circumstances were different when Paul Goldschmidt faced Tim Lincecum the first time. In early August of 2011, Goldschmidt was playing in his second-ever major-league game, a young first baseman who’d never been a Baseball America top-100 prospect, and who’d never been a Baseball America top-10 Diamondbacks prospect. Lincecum was a staff ace having a Cy Young-caliber season, his fourth in a row, and he was one of the major pieces around which the Giants were built. Against Lincecum, Goldschmidt popped out on the seventh pitch of the first plate appearance. On the fourth pitch of the second plate appearance, Goldschmidt went yard.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the big conversations taking place in baseball right now concerns whether or not Billy Hamilton is going to hit enough to stick as an actual long-term regular. It’s a justifiable worry, because Hamilton didn’t exactly tear up the minors, and he hasn’t looked fantastic in his limited exposure to the majors. We won’t know for a while whether Hamilton can do enough at the plate, but it’s good to have the occasional reminder of why he’s being held to a lower baseline than others. Wednesday’s fifth inning of a game between the Reds and Cardinals provided such a reminder.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Hamilton made a run happen entirely on his own. He required assistance from the pitcher, his teammates, and the rest of the opposition. But with no other player in baseball would a run have been scored, given the sequence you’re about to observe, in .gif form.

Read the rest of this entry »

All we want are numbers that matter, beyond the numbers that matter. Wins and losses are already in the books, and in certain cases teams have already significantly changed their own playoff odds, but we’re all waiting for the point at which we can do some meaningful analysis. The sample sizes thus far are incredibly small, and this is a big reason why people are paying so much attention to pitcher fastball velocities — that’s one of the only things that stabilizes almost immediately. Velocity is entirely up to the one guy. The numbers that stabilize fastest tend to be the numbers relying on the fewest players.

But you can also look at numbers that build sample sizes quickly. Like, say, pitch-by-pitch numbers, since there are hundreds of pitches in each game. What that suggests is that it’s not entirely too early to look at 2014 pitch-framing statistics, and there’s evidence to believe this carries over well even over small samples. And in the early, early going, Yankees pitchers have worked with the most favorable strike zone, while Cubs pitchers have done the very opposite of that. I hope you like framing content, because this summer we’re probably going to beat it to death. So, actually, I hope you don’t like framing content? Whatever, here comes data.

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot went wrong for the Mets a season ago, but they did manage to come out of nowhere to be the best baserunning team in baseball. I say that because, the season before, the team overall was below average. They took it upon themselves to be much more aggressive with their feet, and it paid off — even if, in the end, it didn’t pay off. A huge reason the Mets were so good was because of Eric Young, who is fast. Another huge reason the Mets were so good was Daniel Murphy, who is not fast. A month ago I wrote about Murphy and the curious case of a base-stealing threat without base-stealing legs. Murphy was also good at the other baserunning aspects, and he stands as a clear example of how baserunning is more than pure footspeed.

The opposite of a slow runner who’s better than expected on the basepaths is a fast runner who’s worse than expected on the basepaths. That player type exists, and I remember that last year Gerardo Parra went 10-for-20 stealing bases even though he was a plus-UZR outfielder. Watching a game Tuesday afternoon, Parra was thrown out trying for second by almost a literal mile. I’ll grant that it appeared to be a busted hit-and-run, but that doesn’t fully excuse Parra for being so far away from the base when the baseball arrived.

Read the rest of this entry »