Gregory Polanco has been an absolutely fantastic baseball player, having started to turn potential into results at the plate.
Polanco has committed himself to various swing adjustments, as expertly documented by expert Travis Sawchik.
Below!
If the season ended today, it would be chaos. There would be significant protestation from players, owners, and fans alike, all parties confused by the suddenly truncated schedule. But if matters were allowed to proceed from there, the National League would have the Mets grab one wild-card slot. The other entry would be determined through a different one-game playoff — that one played between the Pirates and the Phillies.
The Phillies! It’s understood that anything can happen on any given day. What that means is that anything can also happen during any given month. And here the Phillies sit, tied for baseball’s fifth-best record. The Phillies came in as a clear contender for baseball’s worst record, but they have a better record than the defending champs. They have a better record than everyone in the AL West, and also the NL West. The Phillies have won six games in a row — baseball’s longest active streak — and they’ve completed series sweeps against the Nationals and Indians. A handful of teams in the league are rebuilding. The Phillies have had the best start of any.
| 9:10 |
: Well dammit friends
|
| 9:10 |
: Let’s just baseball chat
|
| 9:10 |
: Hello
|
| 9:10 |
: Jeff, OMG did you fix Chris Archer???
|
| 9:11 |
: Chris Archer didn’t need very much fixing, which helps
|
| 9:11 |
: It’s like trying to fix David Price
|
You’ve read articles like this before. That’s because Taijuan Walker has been a somebody for years, and we’ve all been waiting for him to kick it up. When you know a player is already hyped, you’re predisposed to think the most of any encouraging performances. It’s a bias, is what it is, leading observers to get ahead of themselves. I think, in the past, it’s been easy to get too excited about Walker. He needed to show more. But that’s why this is a post now. He’s showing more. Taijuan Walker is showing signs that he might be almost complete.
You remember that something seemed to click for Walker toward the end of last May. Through nine starts, he had 23 walks and 39 strikeouts. Through the remaining 20 starts, he had 17 walks and 118 strikeouts. That got people excited, and rightfully so, because those are tremendous indicators of improvement. But something was missing. Something was just a little bit off — over those 20 starts, Walker ran a near-average ERA. He had the strikes, and he had the whiffs, but he didn’t have the contact management. He was tantalizing, but unfinished.
I’m not declaring that Walker now is finished. That’ll take more proof. But Walker, this year, has carried over the walks and the strikeouts. In that sense, he looks exactly the same. Yet he’s allowed just one home run. He’s giving up far less solid contact, having dramatically increased his rate of grounders. Coming in, Walker was missing one thing. It seems he could be finding it.
I feel like I just wrote this recently somewhere, but I guess I’ll write it again. In baseball, people don’t pay too much attention to strength of schedule. In part this is because numbers aren’t easy to come by. In probably larger part, this is because strengths tend to mostly even out. That’s true over full seasons, for sure, but there’s no reason it should be true over smaller samples. Like, here’s a stat for you. Pitchers Aledmys Diaz has faced so far have allowed a combined .877 OPS. Pitchers Brad Miller has faced so far have allowed a combined .653 OPS. Is it any wonder why Diaz is presently out-hitting Miller? That’s an enormous gap, and it isn’t going to remain so enormous.
Let’s turn our attention to the overall standings. By wins and losses, no one has been better than the Cubs. That’s no surprise. They’re even with the White Sox, which is a bigger surprise. Then you find the Nationals. Though they’ve lost a couple in a row, they’re still 14-6, and while we expected the Nationals to be pretty good, we didn’t expect them to be this good. Of course, we’re kind of still waiting for the Nationals to play a major-league opponent.
On a few occasions over the winter, I theorized that we might be seeing the beginning of the end of pitch-framing value. It has nothing to do with the idea of an automated strike zone. Rather, I think there are two factors. One, umpires have an increasing awareness of framing reputation, and that can have effects, even if they’re not intended. And two, as teams develop and acquire better framers, that raises the floor, and in turn it raises the average, making it more difficult to stand out. You know — if everyone has a good framer, no one has a good framer. That sort of thing. I do genuinely think that we’re in a transition period.
But things are still transitioning. This is something that would play out over several seasons, not one or two. Framing is very much still alive, meaning the idea of differing strike zones is very much still alive. Fair? Unfair? Don’t know! But we’ve got numbers. Here come some early-season numbers.
Let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with, here. This is a simple plot of AL West division playoff odds over time, beginning with the start of the season, through, I don’t know, right now? About an hour ago, I guess.
The calendar on my wall tells me it’s still April, and the much smaller calendar on my computer agrees, so this early you don’t expect many big huge shifts in playoff probabilities. Long ways to go, and all that. Looking at the image above, you see teams kind of holding steady. The Rangers are close to where they started. The Angels are down a little bit. The A’s are up a little bit. The Mariners are up even more. All of those teams are bunched together — they’re separated by just 1.5 games. But then you have the Astros. Based on our own math, the Astros opened as overwhelming division favorites. They’ve already coughed that up, and then some. Odds are based on projections, and projections are imperfect. I get that. So here’s a fact: At 6-15, the Astros presently have the worst record in the American League. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad team, but it does mean they’re a team in real trouble.
They say you can’t predict baseball, but that’s nonsense. You can’t predict all of baseball, but you can definitely predict some of baseball. One of those predictions that any one of us could’ve made: There was no way Trevor Story was going to keep that up. It was so obvious that even saying it would’ve been empty. Pointless. The prediction was essentially implied by the statistics, because the statistics were so absurd everybody recognized it.
Let’s talk about this. Hot starts like Story’s regress. We know that to be true, and regression takes place for a few reasons. Luck just evening out is one of them. Hot streaks are typically accompanied by good luck, and cold slumps are typically accompanied by bad luck. And then there are the adjustments. Adjustments! Our favorite genre. When you’re a hot hitter, you don’t keep getting the same at-bats over and over and over again. Opponents learn about you, and they put that information to use. Strengths are apparent, and so are anti-strengths, and that gets folded in to how a guy gets pitched. It’s a tale as old as baseball, even if it’s told a little differently these days.
Hot starts regress. Opponents adjust. Trevor Story had a hot start. Opponents adjusted. Welcome to the big leagues.
Going all the way back to the turn of the previous century, the worst team wRC+ was posted by the 1920 Philadelphia Athletics, who finished at 67. The worst mark in more modern baseball came from the 1963 Mets, who finished at 69, and then if you look at the more recent era, the 2013 Marlins finished at 73. Terrifically bad offenses, all. This year’s Braves are sitting at 57.
They won’t finish at 57, because the franchise would fold itself before it would let that happen. But the situation to this point has been absolutely dreadful, and it’s made a bit worse by the fact that the front office spent the offseason assuring people the team, and especially the lineup, would be better. This is from a mid-January Twitter takeover, in response to a fan asking why someone should bother even showing up at the park:
Better offense at every position, chance to see many impact prospects make MLB debut, last year of Turner Field https://t.co/CaJh0UXIdL
— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) January 14, 2016
You’ve probably seen some of what’s been going on. It’s been almost impossible to ignore. But let’s review anyway. Sometimes a few images can pack a bigger wallop than a table of statistics.
This year, Odubel Herrera is an everyday player, and only two players in baseball have drawn more walks. On its own, maybe that doesn’t convey its real significance, so consider that, last year, Odubel Herrera was an everyday player, and 193 players in baseball drew more walks. Herrera today has more than twice as many walks drawn as Joey Votto. Votto last year out-walked Herrera by literally 115. In the first 29 games after the All-Star break, Votto drew more walks than Herrera did in the entire season. This point actually captures two things — Herrera has been surprisingly good, and Votto has been surprisingly bad. Separate the last one, though, and you’re left with the fact that Herrera has been surprisingly good.
The Phillies presumably expected Herrera to be useful. He was just rather astonishingly a four-win player, and though there was plenty of room for him to come down, the talent was obvious and Herrera can defend his premium position. Yet I’m sure the Phillies weren’t looking for Herrera to boost his OBP damn near a hundred points. Herrera isn’t going to stay at .432 all season long, but this has been a glorious start. And Herrera is showing something he didn’t show as a rookie.