We’re almost done with April, which means we’re closer than we were before to being able to stop with the standard “it’s early” caveat we heartily employ during this time of year. For better or for worse, however, it’s still early. The good news (besides the obvious fact of it being April and baseball is being played) is that most starting pitchers have made enough starts to provide us with some sample of data to comb through for patterns and changes compared to last year. There’s still a lot of noise in that data, but there’s some signal, and we’re going to see what we can get out of a fun data set today.

It’s interesting news when a pitcher starts throwing a new pitch effectively, mostly because it happens pretty rarely. What’s also interesting news is when a pitcher starts throwing a pitch he already had in his arsenal more often, especially when he does so to an extreme level. With that in mind, let’s look at a table of starting pitchers, sorted by the percentage of sliders that they’ve thrown so far in 2015:
Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays finished their first home stand of the season at the Rogers Centre yesterday, and the discussion surrounding the games has been a little strange so far. The talk has been about the performance of the team, who have started well, but it’s also been about the artificial turf that was installed this past offseason. Is it bouncy? Is it not bouncy enough? Are the balls always rolling foul off of the first and third base lines? These are questions we end up asking when baseball is played on a surface other than grass.

That’s not to say that playing on turf is an inherently terrible thing, it’s just different, and if the choice is between playing baseball or not playing baseball in a climate that might not support grass, the choice is obvious. Still, with the news that Toronto hopes to move to an all-grass field by 2018, and with the continuing talk that seems to arise every year from playing in stadiums with artificial turf, we should look into it further.

First, the fuel for the fire. This was the play that started everyone talking about the new surface, a swinging bunt in a game from Monday of last week that took a very strange bounce in front of the plate:

Here’s a closer angle:

Read the rest of this entry »

While I was on my daily ambulation through the equivalent of the basement archives at Baseball Reference (the manager pages), I came across a strange fact: Kevin Cash, rookie manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, has challenged nine times this season and has not won a single time. That seems very strange, given the fact that managers generally have a good idea of when they’re going to win challenges nowadays: it’s why they stand at the top of the dugout steps while someone looks at video before they actually challenge.

We’ve had just over a year of the challenge system in major league baseball, and already we have a good idea of the types of challenges managers are most likely to win, the ones they’re likely to lose, and the ones that still seem to go either way for reasons that haven’t been and might never be fully established. That understanding is engrained in managers to varying degrees, and we now have enough data on the subject to identify the ones that seem to get it and the ones that don’t.

So, how and why exactly has Cash gone 0-9 so far this year? Does it matter that he seems bad at winning challenges? It also got me thinking: how have other managers fared, and are we thinking about this in the wrong way?

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past couple weeks, you might have noticed some of our advanced fielding data filtering into the system, as the scouts grading and categorizing each play go through their expert machinations. With two weeks of play in the books, and enough time for much of the data to come in (there is normally a slight delay), we can now look back on some of the highlights of the defensive portion of the game. Though the stats run a few days behind, we still have a lot to look at.

I’ve gone through each defensive position and pulled one or two of the best “remote” plays for each, giving us a veritable super cut of defensive gems from the early going. These are only the plays categorized as being converted into outs between 1-10% of the time. Though there could be some disagreement with elements of the classification for each play, there’s no doubt that these plays are among the best made since the start of the season. Let’s get to it!

Pitcher

A preface: obviously the pitcher position doesn’t have to make a lot of incredible defensive plays. Routine and sometimes awkward, yes, but not spectacular. That being said, there was one that made the cut:

Anthony DeSclafani, April 14th

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there sports fans! Congratulations on making it through the first two weeks of the regular season. I’m sure some of you are ecstatic, like you fans of select AL Central teams or the Mets that have won most of your games; the rest of you (with a few exceptions) are listless in a hovering mediocrity around .500. At least we’re all in this together. It will get better, I promise, unless it gets worse.

Today we’re going to look back at some of the batted ball highlights of the first two weeks of the season, utilizing our friends HitTrackerOnline and Baseball Savant. There’s going to be a little bit of everything in here — hardest-hit ball, lowest-apex home run, weakest-hit ball, etc. — in the hope that this might become a semi-regular post, provided there are enough interesting results. August did a few of these last year, and they’re fun for everyone involved, so let’s keep it rolling.

Hardest-hit home run — Yoenis Cespedes, 4/19

A-Rod was poised to claim this spot with his 477-foot dinger highlighted below, but Cespedes went a little wild in the first inning of yesterday’s game against the White Sox, hitting a grand slam off of Jose Quintana with a batted ball speed of 116 MPH. That bested A-Rod’s blast by .7 MPH, though it will likely fall as the season goes on: last year saw a hardest-hit home run of 122 MPH.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember Alex Rodriguez? He’s playing baseball again. He’s also just six home runs from passing Willie Mays for fourth on the all-time home run list. Now that we’ve left the frenzied Bonds record-breaking era behind, not many people are paying attention to who’s climbing the leaderboard, or even generally what’s going on with A-Rod. It feels like a saga that has run its course, and we’re left in the post-scandal haze when everyone is bored and has moved onto something else. The people that are talking about him either do so ostensibly to bash him, or love him in an ironically redemptive, friend of the anti-hero sort of way.

That’s understandable given the circumstances surrounding him, but he’s popped up a few times in this young season, like when he did this on Wednesday night:

Read the rest of this entry »

The projections on Shane Greene have been pessimistic since he was in high school. The story goes like this, courtesy of our own Kiley McDaniel: leading up to the 2009 MLB draft, Greene was rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, on the roster at Daytona State Junior College, and was virtually unknown.

Greene’s father talked a Yankees area scout in Florida into watching Shane pitch, and the scout was so impressed that Greene was added to pre-draft workouts, and subsequently taken in the 15th round. To say that his road to the majors is unique is an understatement; arms like Greene’s rarely go unnoticed nowadays.

After a five-year minor league stay and a trade from the Yankees to the Tigers, here we are. By now, you’ve probably heard of Greene’s first two starts of the season, the second happening just last night, in which he has pitched a combined 16 innings while giving up zilch. Yes, it’s immensely early, and Greene only has a short track record of any success at the major league level. However, he appears to have made some tweaks to his repertoire that merit our attention.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve spoken about Mookie Betts a few times recently in these digital pages, highlighting what we might expect out of him given his age and tools, and looking at the validity of some of the comparisons to a young Andrew McCutchen. And why not: despite a batting line in the opening week that might not wow us at first glance, he’s been a walking highlight reel since spring training with his sneaky power, base running, and defense in centerfield.

Monday only added to the hype, as he did this in the top of the first inning on a Bryce Harper would-be home run:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Houston Astros just finished a three-game series at home against the Cleveland Indians, and a few things presented themselves in respect to our discussions during this past offseason. The discussions in question pertained to two subjects: the quiet strength of the Cleveland pitching staff, and the strikeout propensity of the Houston lineup.

It was hard to know exactly where the line between the two started and ended. We can say this about the Cleveland rotation: it looked good. Corey Kluber was Corey Kluber. Carlos Carrasco looked like he did at the end of 2014, looking unhittable with his high-90’s fastball and great changeup. Finally, Trevor Bauer put the icing on the cake in the third game, showcasing his combination of wildness and raw stuff to exit with a no-hitter intact after 6 innings. Cleveland fans are obviously encouraged by what they saw in the front end of their rotation this series. It’s not a surprise two of them just signed lengthy contract extensions.

On the other side, the results were clear in another way for the Houston offense:

• .208 OBP
• .048 ISO
• 37.5 K%

Those stats were informed in large part by performances like this, from Evan Gattis:

Gattis is also the only player since at least 1914 with 2 4-K games within his team’s 1st 3 games of a season

— Baseball Reference (@baseball_ref) April 9, 2015

Read the rest of this entry »

Ian Desmond turns 30 this coming September. “Hey, let me run out and get him a funny card about how he’s over the hill!” you might say, not realizing that’s actually not funny for baseball players. This is noteworthy because Desmond is in the last year of a contract with the Washington Nationals, and is a player who provides power at a position that has very little. That’s likely the main reason he reportedly turned down a seven-year, $107 million contract extension from the Nationals in the offseason before 2014, a piece of news that was only fully revealed this past November. I’m ashamed to say it slipped under my radar of analysis, dear readers, and I’m out to remedy that today.

It’s fair to say that Ian Desmond is an important part of this Nationals team. He is a rarity: a middle infielder who can bat fifth or sixth and provide the gawking sort of power normally reserved for positions played by large, slow men. According to Baseball Heat Maps, his average fly ball and home run distance of 297.5 feet was good for 24th-best in baseball in 2014, sandwiched between Pedro Alvarez and Devin Mesoraco. That mark is also a few ticks better than Troy Tulowitzki (295 feet), and gives us a good idea of just how much raw power he has.

Read the rest of this entry »