The Orioles, to put it bluntly, haven’t had the best of luck at developing pitching. (They haven’t been particularly successful with acquiring it, either, but that’s another matter for the moment.) Starting pitchers who both (a) have been signed and developed by Baltimore and (b) have also thrown at least 50 innings since 2011 have combined for an underwhelming 10.7 WAR.

Dylan Bundy was supposed to be the crown jewel of Baltimore’s renaissance. He was, at one point, considered to be the best pitching prospect in all of baseball. The idea was, he supposed to arrive in Baltimore and serve as the club’s ace. It hasn’t happened yet. Bundy missed time with Tommy John surgery and other injuries. He made his return last year, making the Opening Day roster, in part, because he’d exhausted his option years after signing a big league deal when he was drafted. He pitched out of the bullpen and then moved to the rotation.

His first full season wasn’t a smashing success. Though he showed flashes of brilliance, his 4.70 FIP left a lot to be desired. When he was on, though, he was on.

 

Bundy can strike guys out, but his 8.53 K/9 doesn’t scream ace. We know that strikeouts aren’t the only means to effectiveness, though. Consider, for example, the work of Danny Duffy before Duffy morphed into a frontline starter last year. Let’s compare some of Bundy’s numbers from last season to the 2015 version of Duffy. The numbers aren’t exactly the same but possess many underlying signs of life.

This isn’t an exact science, of course, and shouldn’t be taken as gospel. As Tony Blengino recently noted in a piece about contact management, though, Bundy is exceptional at generating pop ups, which are high-probability outs, and an effective way to suppress BABIP. Bundy has also displayed a knack for limiting exit velocity on his batted balls. Duffy featured a similar profile and converted that success into a breakout in 2016. Bundy’s already striking batters out at a higher rate than the 2015 iteration of Duffy. If Bundy can keep inducing pop ups at his current rate, all while limiting damage in other ways, he could be a special pitcher this year.

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So you want to win the MVP award, huh? I hope you play in the National League. There’s a bit more of an open field over there, at least. Sure, the NL feaures Kris Bryant and the only starting pitcher in the game who can seriously demand consideration for the award. But if you play in the American League, you have to deal with one Michael Nelson Trout, who is far and away the best player in the game. And, given the conditioning and training of today’s athletes relative to those from previous generations, Trout may just be the best to ever play. If you want to win the MVP in the AL, you’ll probably have to go through him.

It’s been done before. In fact, it’s happened more often than not. Trout has played five full seasons, and he’s won the MVP twice. Of course, the times he didn’t win, he finished second. It would be a surprise if he didn’t finish among the top two again this year. History dictates that Mike Trout’s default state is “MVP Contender.” The times he’s lost the award, twice to Miguel Cabrera and once to Josh Donaldson, have been close. Miggy and Donaldson never blew him away. They were tight margins. He theoretically deserves to have won the award five times.

What would it take for someone to be the absolute clear favorite over Trout? What could a player possibly do to overtake Trout and emerge as the consensus favorite? In the same vein, what would Trout have to not do?

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Before today, the last post containing information about Joe Blanton on the baseball news aggregator MLB Trade Rumors went up on February 2nd. He was one of the seven remaining players in the right-handed reliever section of the site’s list of free agents, alongside players like Jerome Williams and Jonathan Papelbon who have fallen victim to the passage of time. Blanton is 36 years old, with 1723.1 regular-season innings’ worth of mileage on his right arm. Our Depth Charts projection system looked into its cybernetic crystal ball and foresaw just 0.7 WAR for him this year. In a way, it’s not surprising that Blanton didn’t have an employer until today, when he signed with the Nationals.

But it’s also quite strange that he couldn’t find a deal until now, and that he didn’t find more than $4 million for a year (and, in typical Washington fashion, $3 million of that sum is deferred). He’s been just as valuable as Shawn Kelley these last two years, ever since he was reborn from the pitching ashes as a reliever. Blanton’s career was through, collapsed under the groaning weight of home runs surrendered. He didn’t appear in a big-league game in 2014, and then reappeared as a member of the Royals’ bullpen the following year. He’s been a valuable relief workhorse ever since.

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Eno took some time on Wednesday to talk about last season’s unluckiest changeup. Today, we’re going to talk about a changeup that wasn’t unlucky so much as it was woefully misplaced. It was a first-pitch changeup that was as middle-middle as one can be.

That’s where the title comes in. Let’s roll the film.

You may remember this dinger from a recent article here about Giancarlo Stanton. Statcast says it was the longest blast of the year, at a staggering 504.35 feet. It’s pretty easy to understand how this happened.

Three variables are at work:

1. Giancarlo Stanton is more machine than man, a T-800 who warped back in time and stole a baseball bat from an innocent bystander instead of boots and a leather jacket.
2. Coors Field is the Cape Canaveral of baseball.
3. Chad Bettis missed his spot with a changeup pretty badly.

I don’t need explain the first point very much. You know all about Giancarlo Stanton and what he’s capable of doing. You’ve seen him lay waste to baseballs. His muscles are made of steel rebar. He’s been doing this for years, and if we’re lucky, he’ll do it for a while longer.

I also don’t need to explain point No. 2 very much. Coors is in Denver, and the 20th row of seats in the upper deck at Coors is exactly a mile above sea level. That means the air is thin, which means the ball flies further. This is good for guys like Stanton and bad for anybody who stands on the pitcher’s mound. Unfortunately, that includes Bettis.

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The Yankees were trying last year, as silly as that may have been. They lacked the rotation muscle or offensive firepower to truly compete, but damn if they didn’t have a bullpen. That bullpen, combined with a largely mediocre roster, kept them just within spitting distance of relevancy until the very end. Even after trading Carlos Beltran, Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Ivan Nova, the Yankees still managed to hang around and win 84 games.

They didn’t make the playoffs, of course. They did make Gary Sanchez into a national sensation, and they did bring Tyler Clippard and Adam Warren back into the fold for this year’s bullpen. Chapman came back, and then they signed two sluggers (Chris Carter and Matt Holliday) to extremely tradable one-year deals. The Yankees are the Yankees, so they brought back their well-known closer and his 100 mph fastball. They need to have star power at all times and must, at least, give the appearance of trying to compete. Those are the expectations that come with being the Yankees and having an owner named Steinbrenner. According to reports, they came very close to buying instead of selling last year.

An inspection of the team’s roster tells a different story. Last year’s team was brimming with veterans. It was a poor man’s win-now team built around the bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, and hope. This year, it’s built around a weaker bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, whatever’s left in Holliday’s bat, and hope that Sanchez can continue to terrorize opposing pitchers while Greg Bird immediately rebounds to 2015 form. That’s all while having an even weaker rotation than last year.

It’s probably not going to happen. Our projections have the Yankees finishing at .500 and tied for last place, and PECOTA foresees an ever-so-slightly better 82-80 finish. Basically, the Yankees appear to be the very definition of mediocre right now. They can try to sell fans on the idea that they’re going to be competitive, and in a way that’s sort of true. The team probably won’t be a total pushover, and if a few things here and there fall the right way, maybe they’re once again on the precipice of being interesting at midsummer’s time. New York would need their many young and relatively untested players all to hit the ground running if they really want to make the playoffs, and they’ll likely need a firecracker of a debut from Clint Frazier, too.

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Here are some undeniable facts.

1. Dellin Betances was the third-best reliever in baseball by WAR last year.
2. He has the third-best strikeout rate, all-time, among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.
3. He has 22 career saves, with 12 of them coming last year.

Betances, eligible for arbitration for the first time, filed for a $5 million salary this winter; the Yankees countered at $3 million. This was the second largest gap for any player that got to the filing stage this year, only $100,000 behind the $2.1 million difference that Drew Pomeranz ($5.7M request) had with the Red Sox ($3.6M offer), and unlike the Red Sox, the Yankees decided to not split the difference and instead head to a hearing.

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You might have heard that Clayton Kershaw is good at pitching. He’s Hercules and Sandy Koufax merged together at the molecular level. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to throw over tall buildings with a single curve. He’s SuperPitcher. Much like Mike Trout, Kershaw is the sort of athlete who could easily serve as the genesis of a daily newsletter with interesting factoids about said athlete. The more you dig around on statistical leaderboards and in his ledger, the more ridiculous little nuggets of gold you can dig up.

Take, for instance, this:

One of these things is not like the other. WHIP isn’t a perfect indicator of pitcher success, because the number of hits allowed by a pitcher is impacted by the defense playing behind him, and walks are affected by the framing quality of a pitcher’s catcher. It is, however, a generally fun statistic and is usually useful when one is in pursuit of a general picture of a pitcher’s ability to limit baserunners. The full leaderboard is here, and as you can see, it generally consists of pitchers who kicked ass in 2016.

Let’s talk about the top portion of that leaderboard, though, which has been reproduced in the table above. Of the 10 pitchers included here, Kershaw is the only one who’s a full-time starting pitcher. (Devenski started five games but had the bulk of his success in relief.) You have to go down to the 16th spot on the leaderboard to find the next starter, Max Scherzer (who’s followed by Kyle Hendricks and Rich Hill). Scherzer’s WHIP was 25 points higher than Kershaw’s. This is largely due to the fact that Kershaw walked just 11 men all year, and would have set the modern record for strikeout-to-walk ratio had he been a qualified starter.

One of the great injustices of baseball is that Kershaw hurt his back last year, because we’ll never know if he would have been able to keep up that sheer lunacy over the course of a full season. His 1.69 ERA in 149 regular-season innings was lower than Pedro Martinez’s 1.74 in his ridiculous 2000 campaign. Kershaw also bested Pedro’s 2000 in FIP and WHIP, with Pedro taking the edge in DRA. If you look at all starting-pitcher seasons since 2000, set the minimum innings requirement at 140, and sort by WHIP, Kershaw’s 2016 and Pedro’s 2000 represent the top two figures. Four of the top 10 seasons over that timeframe belong to Kershaw. The fact that we’re even conducting a flawed (Pedro threw 217 innings that year, and in a different offensive era) comparison of these two men and not totally throwing the stats out with the bathwater is remarkable.

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Pitchers and catchers have been in camp for all of a day and a half, and the baseball gods may have already claimed the first pitcher to feed their insatiable hunger for elbow ligaments and heartbreak. Alex Reyes of the Cardinals, a top-five prospect in all of baseball — if not the best (keep an eye out for Eric Longenhagen’s final rankings) — is headed for an MRI after experiencing the dreaded elbow discomfort. According to Jeff Passan, there’s significant worry within the organization that Reyes will need Tommy John surgery.

That’s a massive blow to the Cardinals, who were almost surely counting on Reyes for major contributions in their rotation. The rest of the pitching staff is largely a patchwork of the old (Adam Wainwright), the ineffective (Mike Leake) and the recently repaired (Lance Lynn). Only Carlos Martinez stands out as a real candidate to turn in 190 or so genuinely good innings. Knowing the Cardinals, they’ll probably still get a few prospects to emerge out of thin air and provide value at the big-league level, but Reyes is Reyes.

His fastball is the sort of pitch that’s spoken of in hushed and reverent tones. The curveball isn’t far behind. He’s the prototypical über-prospect in the age of Noah Syndergaard. He’s what they look like. For a Cards team that’s projected to win just 84 games, he was going to be a vital cog. He may be gone for the whole season.

There are two major implications here: one for the status of the club this year and one for the status of Reyes and his career. The second is largely an unknown. Every elbow reacts differently. Reyes may not need Tommy John. He may need it, and then another one. The Cards are almost surely praying that he’ll just need rest and rehabilitation, and that the ligament is still somewhat intact. Ervin Santana and Masahiro Tanaka have been pitching with partial tears of their ulnar collateral ligaments. It can be done, but it would likely eat into Reyes’ titanic velocity. We don’t yet know what the damage is.

If he does require surgery, the prognosis isn’t excellent. Research by Jon Roegele suggests that, for pitchers who undergo a Tommy John procedure between ages 16 and 23 (Reyes is 22), the median figure for innings pitched after the surgery is just 221. Only 40% of pitchers in that age group reach the 500-inning threshold. That 221-inning mark is worrisome for someone of Reyes’ age. But again, we’re not yet certain if he’ll need surgery.

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The Braves aren’t going to go very far this year: that’s an assertion that’s unlikely to bite me six months from now. Both our Depth Charts projections and Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA forecast Atlanta failing to clear the 80-win threshold. The acquisition of Brandon Phillips over the weekend did little, if anything, to change that. Phillips is roundly projected to be just a touch over replacement level this season. The man he’s supplanting, Jace Peterson, is who you see a picture of when you look up “replacement level” in the baseball dictionary. Peterson has taken more than a thousand trips to the plate and played more than 2,000 innings in the field. He’s put up a career WAR of 0.4. Phillips needn’t do much to represent an upgrade.

That’s good, because (as just stated) Phillips probably isn’t going to represent much of an upgrade — a sentiment that basically other every club appears to share. Nor do new additions Bartolo Colon or R.A. Dickey, or Jaime Garcia appear set to turn the club around. The Braves have spent their winter loading up on veterans on one-year deals like these players, using them to round out a roster that has some desirable elements and other pieces that are less helpful. There’s unquestionably value in replacing bad players with somewhat competent ones.

Doing that isn’t enough to make the Braves contenders. They seem to understand this, of course. The Braves don’t appear to be banking on a postseason spot this year. They’re unlikely to compete with the Mets and Nationals in the NL East, and their projected high-70s win total puts them in position to have another nice draft. Even with all the Freddie Freeman in the world, the Braves are no match for the forces of superior baseball and sweet, sweet prospects.

What they do seem to have done is field a team that’s palatable enough to draw people into their new taxpayer-funded stadium. Because of that new stadium, the organization will attempt to pull of a difficult balancing act this year. Fans will need to be sold on the product currently on the field, and on what’s to come.

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We just had a conversation on Monday about the league’s ideas for changing up the game, and about tilting at windmills. Intentional walks aren’t that big a deal. Now extra innings are killing baseball, apparently.

Jeff Passan has reported that baseball is going to start testing out a new policy at Rookie-level ball. Every extra inning will start with a runner automatically standing on second base, with the idea of ending the game quicker. I can see the argument. Extra innings drag, especially if they go on for extended periods of time. This rule would theoretically protect against 19-inning wars of attrition in which position players get to try out their fastballs. Nobody wants to sit around into the wee hours of the morning until someone finally pushes a run across the plate. That’s the rationale behind this, right?

“What really initiated it is sitting in the dugout in the 15th inning and realizing everybody is going to the plate trying to hit a home run and everyone is trying to end the game themselves,” Joe Torre told Passan. And the same is likely true of the fan still sitting out in the bleachers in the 15th inning, no? Is anybody still watching at home in the 15th inning? The sooner a baseball game can end, the better. That seems to be the message here.

Yet this proposed cure may not be any better than the supposed disease.

The Australian Baseball League has this rule, and some other international formats of play employ it. It hasn’t garnered glowing reviews.

Rules putting runners on in extra innings lead to sac bunts and IBBs. Slows the game and feels exactly like the artificial gimmick it is.

— Ben Badler (@BenBadler) February 8, 2017

As we know, bunts stink. They’re a waste of an out. They work less often than you’d think. It’s not totally uncommon for a runner being bunted over from second to be thrown out at third. Plus, the league just publicly stated its vendetta against old-fashioned intentional walks this week. If MLB is concerned with pace of play, making extra innings even more of a slog through the mud feels quite counterintuitive.

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