The Chicago Cubs won 97 games last season, went to the National League Championship Series, and had one of the top prospects in baseball debut with outstanding success. Many teams might look at such a season, nod their heads with approval, and try to simply maintain a semblance of that high level of achievement when planning and making moves for the following season. The current version of the Cubs, however, are in win-everything mode, and they seem desperate to improve upon a 97-win season. With an aggressive Theo Epstein, deep-pocketed owners, and a clear window to make a run at a long-absent title, the Cubs have already made some of the biggest acquisitions of the 2015 offseason.

The biggest, of course, is Jason Heyward, a top 15 player by Wins Above Replacement during the 2015 season. With his eight-year, $184 million contract, he joins Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant as the young core of a team that could challenge for World Series titles for the foreseeable future. It’s easy to proclaim the Cubs as favorites to win one of the strongest divisions in baseball after this move – they did, in essence, turn one of their rivals’ best players into one of their own – but that idea is cemented by the fact that they now have three of the best 20 position players from last season by WAR. Take a look at the top 20 position players by WAR, with each player’s 2016 team:

The Cubs head into next season with three out of 20 of this past season’s best players, and that’s the kind of statement that forces everyone to sit up and take serious notice. Having two position players of this caliber is rare enough for a team in a given year; having three is a foundation on which dynasties are sometimes built.

If we assume that all three players will stay healthy and produce at around the same level next year, each will be in the top 20 or better for position players (per Steamer projections on FanGraphs, Rizzo, Bryant, and Heyward are all projected to be top 10 players, in fact). This got me thinking: what is the track record of teams that have this level of talent in their lineup? Have they accounted for a disproportionate number of World Series victories, even if we don’t take into account the strength of their respective pitching staffs?

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When the top 100 prospects in the game were ranked by Baseball America during the summer of 2010, Brett Lawrie was 26 spots ahead of Mike Trout. Both received a large cup of coffee in the majors during 2011 – Lawrie produced 2.6 WAR in just 46 games, while Trout put up 0.7 WAR in 40 – and there was a lot of optimism that we were witnessing two stars in the making: these were the athletic, ultra-talented position players of the future for two franchises.

Four years have passed since those brief debuts, and we know the history of both players has been quite different: Trout has produced a stunning 37.8 WAR, establishing himself as a perennial candidate for best player in baseball, while Lawrie has produced 6.2 WAR in a series of injury-interrupted, slightly above average seasons.

Being compared to Trout is unfair for basically every player in the game, but the point is this: early success doesn’t always mean continued success, mostly because baseball is about how well you adjust, not necessarily how much raw talent you have. A lot can change in the course of four seasons, especially when we’re trying to evaluate young players.

Because of the content of the four years since his debut, we view Lawrie through a certain lens: he was a top prospect, but he’s not a top major-leaguer. He’s had his chance, the thinking goes, and this is what he’s done with it. Major-league baseball is a boiling hot cauldron into which young men are thrown, and they either develop sufficiently thick skin to handle the heat or they don’t. It’s been over four seasons, and this is who he is.

Something complicates that viewpoint, however, and it’s that Lawrie will have just turned 26 when Opening Day rolls around in 2016. It might seem like he’s been around a long time, but he’s still young, and youthful players who were once top prospects are given a longer leash to figure things out. Now, after two separate opportunities to put everything together, Lawrie is headed from Oakland to the south side of Chicago in return for two relief pitchers, Zack Erwin and J.B. Wendelken.

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2015 was an unquestionably special year in baseball: we witnessed teams that hadn’t made the postseason in 20 years break through the barrier, saw latent fanbases reborn, and finally, after falling just short in 2014, a magic-fueled, unconventional team won the World Series. Because of a mixture of player development trends and incredible fortune, we also saw something exceedingly rare: the best positional rookie class in the past century. The likes of Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa, Matt Duffy, and many others announced their arrival with exceptional first-year performances, taking the league by storm and bringing about a new golden age for young, ultra-talented position players.

We’ve stated many times how much better the 2015 rookie positional class was than any other in the past hundred years. The fact bears repeating again because of its magnitude. Below you’ll find a chart showing the average Wins Above Replacement for positional rookies for a full season of plate appearances (600 PAs) from 1920 to 2015:

As we can see, no other season is close to 2015. There are a few reasons for that, reasons that are complex and outside the particular scope of this article. For now, this should serve as background for what we’re discussing today: how sophomore/follow-up seasons compare to great rookie campaigns. We’ll be focusing specifically on the years that followed Rookie of the Year campaigns to try to discern whether a “sophomore slump” occurred among the league’s best first-year players, and we’ll also bring in the 2016 projections for our exceptional crop of 2015 rookies to look at next year’s expected performance.

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The Red Sox just paid an enormous amount of money for the baseball-throwing services of David Price. The deal makes sense, as Boston struggled last year in that department, and now they’ve basically ensured, barring injury or anomalous performance, that they’ll struggle less in that department next season. Price is a an exceptional pitcher. That was a well-established fact before he was handed $30 million a year — dating back to his breakout 2010 campaign with the Rays, in fact. However, this past season provided glimpses at a repertoire that might facilitate the next stage of David Price, Pitcher, and it was centered around the use of his cutter and the improvement of his changeup.

Jeff went over the changes in Price’s cutter usage in late September, but the main premise is this: Price started throwing more cutters, throwing them harder, and locating them further inside to right-handed hitters toward the end of last season. As we’ll see, that impacted how successful his changeup was in different parts of the zone.

Now, the changeup: we often hear about how difficult they’re to learn. They’re a “feel” pitch, and we’re told that, because of that, they need a lot of work — work that usually comes from experience. It takes confidence to throw any type of pitch well, and when confidence is lacking in a particular offering, the pitcher is reluctant to throw it very often. This is a little different for left-handed pitchers: as Eno pointed out in this piece, left-handed starters throw changeups 65% more often than right-handers do. Lefties inherently have a difficult job because the majority of hitters are right-handed; to combat this, they throw more changeups, the pitch with the best reverse platoon split.

Price has always thrown a changeup, going back to his debut in the league. And, fitting the narrative that changeups are found with more experience, he’s thrown them with increased usage every season of his career. Take a look at his pitch usage every season since 2010:

In 2015, he cracked the 20% mark with his changeup usage, and he’s now transitioned firmly away from using his curveball as his main secondary pitch. In truth, he had already transitioned away from that approach beginning in 2013, but this year marked not only another increase in usage, but a few other adjustments that merit attention from us.

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Usually, the retirement of a 37-year-old journeyman who spent the vast majority of his 20-year career in the minor leagues is not a cause for reflection by most fans of major league baseball. A cause of wonderment, perhaps, at the drive of a player who would, year after year, continue to play past the point at which a full-time major league dream seemed out of reach. That assumes, however, that the player wasn’t incredibly accomplished, and just this past season set the minor league record for home runs. All of it assumes the player isn’t Mike Hessman, the modern-day embodiment of Crash Davis.

Hessman’s is a true baseball life – not that of a storied major league slugger, or a fire-balling ace who won 300 games – but a player who epitomizes the never-say-die attitude at the heart of many a great sports story. That perseverance deserves recognition, and today, we’re going to highlight Hessman’s career through a few key facts and graphics to try to capture just how special and zany it was.

First, the easy one: the home runs. Hessman hit a lot of them. Out of a total of 454 professional dingers, he hit 433 in the minors, 14 in the majors, six in Japan, and one while playing in Venezuela. Take a look at his career home runs by level:

It took Hessman almost six years to make it to Triple-A after being drafted by Atlanta out of high school, but when he arrived, he stuck around. While he would compile 109 games in the major leagues with the Braves, Tigers, and Mets, his most permanent team was the Toledo Mud Hens, the Triple-A affiliate for the Detroit Tigers. He spent five years bashing a combined 140 homers for them between 2005 and 2009; in 2015, he reunited with them to add on another 16, including his record-breaking 433rd, a fitting go-ahead grand slam to left:

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In some seasons, the Most Valuable Player award is a close race between a few worthy position players with a pitcher thrown into the mix if the circumstances align. This year, in the National League, the voting was unanimous for the MVP, and for good reason. In the American League, there were only really two serious candidates for the award, with one fact underlining that point: in MVP voting, each voter ranks players from one to ten, and this year in the AL, every ballot except for one had either Mike Trout or Josh Donaldson in first or second place.

Given that there were only two serious candidates in the AL, there was a fair amount of discussion about who was the worthier of the two players. We could say this was a battle of statistics versus context: a better statistical season (Trout) versus the offensive lifeblood of a playoff-bound Toronto team (Donaldson). Defensively, Donaldson had a better season, but Trout was clearly superior on the offensive side of the ball. Take a look at their full stats side-by-side (wRC+ uses 100 as league average, while UZR is how many runs better the player was than a league average defender):

In the end, the context that is often added to the MVP award won out: Donaldson led his Toronto team to the playoffs after the city had endured a 21-year postseason drought, compiling an incredible offensive and defensive campaign in the process. As is so often the case, there was no true right or wrong answer on who should have won the award; it was close enough to where both players could have deserved it, and it was a matter of opinion that separated them. When all is said and done, baseball is about winning games, however, and Donaldson benefitted from being a key piece of a team that won more games than Trout’s Anaheim Angels.

Discussing the worthiness of each player winning the AL MVP has already been covered at length. If you’ve paid attention to this award season, you probably know the arguments for and against both Trout and Donaldson: we’ve even recapped a few of them here. What is well-known is who Donaldson currently is. What is less-known is who he Donaldson was, and where he now stands among historical MVPs. In context, who he was is a huge part of the story, and we’ll see that it’s pretty rare that he turned into who he is.

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Luck. We know it’s a large part of baseball. It’s also the foundation for the central questions we ask when trying to analyze the game: what was a certain player or team’s actual performance? How much control did they have over their production? Can they recreate it next year? We never stop debating these points. We create new statistics to try to answer them a little better than we did last season. And, despite there being certain influences we can’t measure when looking at individual and team production, we do have a few tools at our disposal to tell us who might have been underperformed, and who might have overperformed.

One of those tools is Fielding Independent Pitching, which strips away some of the influences a pitcher can’t control — namely what happens when a ball is put into play and the timing of events that unfold against them. With FIP, we can see who might have gotten unlucky with batted balls finding holes in the defense more often than expected, and conversely, who might’ve benefited from batted balls being hit straight at defenders. After a lot of groundbreaking research, it was found that pitchers don’t have a lot of control over what happens once the ball leaves their hand. Comparing FIP to actual performance — namely ERA — we can see the teams and players who might’ve gotten lucky and unlucky over the course of this past season.

Today, we’re going to look at which team’s starting rotations overachieved and underachieved, as judged by FIP. I’ve charted each starting rotation’s ERA and FIP in an interactive graph, sorted by the best ERA in 2015. If a rotation’s FIP (their expected average runs against) was lower than their ERA (their actual average runs against), they underachieved; if their ERA was lower than their FIP, they overachieved. One of the best things about FIP is that it can be used exactly like ERA, so understanding it is intuitive: treat it exactly like you would Earned Run Average. After we look at the chart, we’ll go through some individual examples, but this should give us a good primer on the subject. Again, feel free to mouse over the chart to see each team’s specific data:

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Toward the end of July, something had become apparent in the 2015 season: it was an unquestionably great year for talented positional rookies. That was easy to see by the first half introduction of All-Star caliber players in Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa, and Joc Pederson. Many others added to the top-heavy, strong class. As it turns out, that excellence was also borne out in the data: the first half of the 2015 season had the most rookies with 1.0+ WAR and the most combined rookie WAR since 2005.

Digging a little deeper, it turned out that only two seasons in the last 40 years compared to the playing-time adjusted WAR the 2015 rookies put up in the first half. Take a look at this interactive chart that compares the first half of this past season with those from the past 40 years:

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Last Wednesday, we looked at the most extreme home runs of the 2015 postseason. There was Daniel Murphy‘s off-the-shoetops homer, one of many ridiculous Kyle Schwarber blasts, and Jose Bautista’s now-infamous bat flip that caused such an uproar. And, while it was great to relive all of those home runs from the playoffs, a simple constraint to that piece was this: there were only 91 home runs hit during the postseason. We’re searching for extreme home runs, and that wasn’t the largest sample size from which to draw. Fun, absolutely, but there is more fun when more homers are involved.

And so we find ourselves here, staring at a sample of every home run hit during the regular season: all 4,907 of them. There are a lot of strange occurrences in that many separate events, and so I’ve pulled out some of the finest moments involving home runs during the entire 2015 regular season. As always, data has been mined from Baseball Savant and HitTrackerOnline. Let’s get to it!

Hardest-Hit Home Run: Josh Donaldson, 4/23/15

Josh Donaldson might win the American League MVP award this year. However, regardless of whether he wins or not, he beat out his biggest competitor in that award (Mike Trout) by almost a full mph in this category, producing an exit velocity of 120.5 mph on a belt-high changeup from Chris Tillman. Whether that fact will give Donaldson any solace if he loses the MVP award cannot be known, as we do not have an accurate knowledge of whether he reads these digital pages, or puts any stock into made-up awards related to home run compilation articles.

Also of note: the sound that emits from this particular contact of ball on bat. I’ve been trying to think of a way to describe it, and the best I can come up with is that something shattered. That something could’ve been the bat, or the ball, or might simply be the sound of a small fusion reaction. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitching in the major leagues is almost incomprehensibly difficult. It’s easy to pick up on that fact by watching the revolving door of pitchers who simply don’t have the talent, health, or stuff to make it. There is no leeway in pitching, no slack, no grace period to ease into: major league baseball is a wood chipper that pitchers are fed into with the hope that they’ll emerge on the other side with a manageable amount of damage.

This is the main reason why pitchers live and die by velocity. With increased velocity, a pitcher’s margin of error grows, and they can get away with making more mistakes. With lower velocity, a pitcher has to rely on guile, movement, and strategy to be successful. Then, of course, there is the extreme low end of the velocity spectrum, which is what we’ll be look at today: the seldom-seen outlier, heir apparent to Jamie Moyer. These are the rare pitchers who have either figured out a way to get by with diminished stuff, or are simply (and cruelly) not long for starting duties.

The particular pitcher we’re talking about is Jered Weaver, whose fastball velocity dropped five miles per hour between the 2014 and 2015 seasons. With his fastball clocking in at just above 88 mph in September of 2014, Weaver was another veteran pitcher in the midst of a lucrative five-year, $85 million contract; a year later, after a month-long stint on the disabled list for hip inflammation, he was throwing at an average of 83-84 mph and had entered the rare territory of soft-throwing starters who are still offered a full workload. Here’s a good visual from Brooks Baseball that tells the story of what happened to his fastball velocity:

The main question today is this: what does Weaver need to do to be able to survive at this unique velocity level, and what might we learn about it from those who came before him?

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.