Few things get baseball fans more excited than the opportunity to begin taking an extraordinary young talent for granted, so baseball circles are abuzz right now with talk of the Orioles’ promotion of top prospect Dylan Bundy. It didn’t at any point appear as if Bundy would see the majors in 2012, so this news comes as a surprise, but few were also counting on the Orioles to remain in the race for this long, and now the circumstances are what the circumstances are. Suddenly, Bundy makes some good sense.

To hear the Orioles tell it, they weren’t going to call Bundy up, then Tuesday night they played the Mariners for seventy innings, so they decided to call Bundy up. It might seem short-sighted to you for the Orioles to change their plans for a top prospect because a September game went longer than expected, but for one thing, the Orioles kind of need to be short-sighted at the moment, and for another, how likely is this to stunt Bundy’s development, really? It doesn’t matter so much that the Orioles changed their plans if the difference for Dylan Bundy is small or inconsequential.

Read the rest of this entry »

There exists the perception that the Detroit Tigers are just this total disappointment. The Tigers, you’ll recall, came into the year looking like the favorites in the AL Central, and now it’s the middle of September and they’re three back of first. They’re about as far out of the wild card as the Padres are, which means for the Tigers it’s probably division title or bust. They won’t play the leading White Sox again down the stretch. Many thought the Tigers would be able to coast to the playoffs, and now the Tigers are fighting for their very playoff lives.

Truthfully, I’d say it’s less about the Tigers being surprising, and more about the White Sox being surprising. Major media types liked the Tigers because of their stars, but check out those linked projections above. Statistically, the Tigers didn’t look like an elite team, and they’re on pace to win 85 games. People just didn’t expect for the White Sox to give them such a push.

Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres didn’t play on Monday, which means the San Diego Padres didn’t win on Monday. We currently live in a world in which this is an infrequent occurrence. We currently live in a world in which the Padres, Orioles, and A’s keep on winning, and the Red Sox have one of their worst rosters people can remember. In some ways this was a gradual shift and in other ways this was rather sudden. Anyhow, the Padres have been amazing, and one of the players allowing them to be amazing has been Cameron Maybin.

Last offseason, it wouldn’t have seemed weird to know that Maybin would help the Padres down the stretch in 2012. Two offseasons ago, sure, for two reasons, but last offseason, Maybin was coming off a year in which he seemed to put his skills together. Maybin was 24 years old in 2011, and for three years in a row he had been a Baseball America top-10 prospect. Last year was a career year and the Padres rewarded Maybin for his development with a five-year contract. It seemed like he was becoming the player he was supposed to be.

But after Maybin figured it out in 2011, he lost it again to begin 2012. Maybin was left in the position of having to figure it out again.

Read the rest of this entry »

People care about home-run distance, because people like impressive home runs, and impressive home runs tend to have considerable distances. One is impressed when a batter drives a baseball 480 feet and out of the yard. As far as quality of contact is concerned, though, what might be more significant is the baseball’s speed off the bat. All a hitter ever wants to do is hit the baseball hard, so looking at the speed off the bat tells us who hit the baseball the hardest. The ESPN Home Run Tracker provides this data for dingers, and unsurprisingly, the hardest-hit homer of the year so far was hit by Giancarlo Stanton. It was a homer that damaged a scoreboard.

You can sort the data in the other direction to see the weakest-hit home runs. On average, home runs have left the bat at 103.5 miles per hour. The weakest homer was hit by Jayson Nix, to right field in Yankee Stadium. It left the bat at 89.8 miles per hour. The next-weakest was hit by Chris Iannetta, also in Yankee Stadium. Then the next two weakest after that were hit in Fenway Park. These aren’t astonishing results — people are familiar with the idea of Yankee Stadium and Fenway conceding some cheap dingers. People love dingers, but some of those cheap ones can make them roll their eyes.

The fifth-weakest dinger of the year so far was hit in Petco Park.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rays reliever Jake McGee has, at this writing, struck out seven consecutive batters. McGee has not, as I was led to believe by a certain other distinguished FanGraphs author, struck out nine consecutive batters. This fact was uncovered embarrassingly late in the research and article-development process. A streak of seven is less impressive and less unlikely than a streak of nine. But a streak of seven is still impressive, and still unlikely, and of course, McGee’s streak of seven is still alive, pending the next plate appearance. So McGee’s streak is still worth writing about. Consider for reference that Aaron Cook registered seven strikeouts through his first ten starts, spanning 237 batters. McGee has done that against 230 fewer batters.

Tampa Bay has a critical series coming up against New York, but they’re coming off a critical series against Baltimore, a critical series in which they got swept. Their Cool Standings playoff odds dropped from about 61 percent to about 27 percent, as the Rays went from looking like favorites to looking like underdogs. They’re left now to lick their wounds and try to bounce back against the Yankees, but one Ray who has nothing to feel bad about is McGee, who did the best against the Orioles that he possibly could have.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday night, Kevin Millwood was laboring through shoulder discomfort in a start in Toronto. Still, he’d kept the Blue Jays hitless through three and a third. That’s when he let an 0-and-2 fastball to Edwin Encarnacion catch a little too much of the plate. Encarnacion blasted the pitch way out to left field, and the Jays got on the board. It was the 22nd home home run of Encarnacion’s 2012 season. That ties him for the second-most in baseball. A glimpse at the current leaderboard:

1. Miguel Cabrera, 24
2. Edwin Encarnacion, 22
3. Ryan Braun, 22
4. Giants, 22

Whoa, wait, hold on a second. What?

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t intend to mean-spiritedly pick on the fine folks over at Baseball Prospectus, but in this instance I can’t not make a little fun. A couple excerpts from paragraphs found on Chase Headley’s player page:

I don’t think Headley is going to have more than .150 Isolated Power. Partially due to Petco, partially because he’s not that kind of hitter. (5/5/2010)

That was on Chase Headley’s power potential, not on Headley just in 2010. Another:

Yes, PETCO suppresses some of his power, but even in Citizen’s Bank Park, Headley wouldn’t hit more than 24 HR. (12/20/2010)

Read the rest of this entry »

You’re going into the bottom of the ninth inning, and your favorite baseball team is trailing 7-0. The game’s being played in a roughly neutral run environment, and so your team’s odds of winning are about 0.2 percent. That’s one-fifth of one percent. Maybe you’ve stopped paying close attention, and maybe you’ve stopped watching entirely, because the game is basically hopeless. It’s clearly not impossible to score at least seven runs in one inning, but it is exceedingly rare.

The first batter draws a walk. The next batter draws another walk. Now maybe the guy after that strikes out, but then a single loads the bases, and another single scores two. A walk loads the bases once more. You’re paying close attention again, if you didn’t turn the game off, because suddenly things are interesting, and your team has tons of momentum. Your team’s odds of winning with one out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth of a 7-2 game are about four percent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Odds are, as FanGraphs readers, you aren’t Oakland A’s fans, but you are at least somewhat familiar with Jerry Blevins. You know something about who he is and what he does for a living. You might have an idea of how good he is at it. To you, this isn’t weird; Blevins is a baseball player, and you know a lot about a lot of baseball players. To other people outside the baseball-fandom bubble, you know a lot about a lot of guys you’ve never met. Speaking generally, it is profoundly unusual to be familiar with Jerry Blevins. Tuesday night, though, Blevins got himself in headlines, so it’s very slightly less unusual to be familiar with him than it was before.

As you might’ve seen or read about already, Blevins came through with a clutch ninth-inning relief appearance that allowed the A’s to beat the Angels, 6-5. According to Cool Standings, the win boosted Oakland’s playoff odds from 85 percent to 90 percent, and the loss dropped LA’s playoff odds from 32 percent to 26 percent. Recall that the Angels were supposed to be one of the best teams in recent baseball history. There is now a three-in-four chance they don’t even reach the one-game playoff. I don’t know how these odds would’ve swung had the Angels rallied and won, but suffice to say things would look very different indeed.

Read the rest of this entry »