Addison Russell already had one of the twenty-best debuts by a shortstop we’ve seen in the free agency era. But two adjustments — one made last year, and one made this spring — could end up driving the 22-year-old beyond his projections this year. Particularly because both adjustments spoke to his biggest flaws.
| 12:46 |
: No idea where this floated to me from. I gather they were popular around when I was born.
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| 12:01 |
: Your pitcher rankings suggest you’re lower on Verlander than most. I know Sporer is a believer. What are you seeing that he isn’t?
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| 12:02 |
: I think I’ll revise that up. Apparently he’s got the best fastball spin rate, and when seen in tandem with the fact that he found his rise again last year, I think a lot of his struggles were release point related. If that’s true, and he’s healthy, it all seems fixable. I’ll move him up above Shields, maybe into the low 30s. I should update those.
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| 12:02 |
: Can you get a free agent to get an Eno clause in his contract in which you get to be around a team 24/7 like Laroche had?
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| 12:03 |
: Judging how Greinke gave me an hour last week after he told the beats that they had to pool their questions, I might have a chance.
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| 12:03 |
: Who’s leading the way for the Astros’ 1B job as of today?
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It’s Bold Prediction season over on the fantasy side, and since it’s in the water, it’s starting to spread. And though this bold prediction will be a silly enterprise, it’s not an insane one. It’s a prediction like any other, a dart thrown at a board with some intention and thought behind it.
The projections on our site that say that the Chicago White Sox are a .500 team poised to finish tied for second, five or six games back of the Indians in the American League central? Those represent the meat of possible outcomes, the median result of throwing thousands of player projections into a battle with each other.
But the error inherent in projecting one player adds up with each additional player added, and the error bars on those projections are relatively large. One standard deviation is around five wins, meaning that a result that is ten wins above or below the projection is not out of the norm.
We were talking about something unrelated, so when Joey Votto slipped this quote in, I laughed out loud. You?! Joey Votto? You did what? Listening back to it even made me giggle again.
“I tried to do a lot of pull hitting early in the season and it was an error,” he said, but my mind could barely comprehend in real time. “It was a mistake,” he admitted before I could point out that it was completely out of character.
So why did he try it? “It was me trying to hit more homers. I thought I’d get easy homers.” After the laughter came a sort of stunned silence. The idea that Votto, who has preached going up the middle to himself and the games’ biggest stars for as long as he’s been great, tried to pull a few cheapies into the seats last year was a bit stunning.
| 11:30 |
: I’ll be here shortly so just chill
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| 12:00 |
: I have no pants on.
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| 12:01 |
: Who wins the Indians’ CF job out of Spring Training? Is this individual worthy of a spot in mixed leagues? AL-only? Nothing?
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| 12:01 |
: You know who I think is going to win the job? Tyler Naquin, that’s who.
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| 12:02 |
: As for his value… I think he could maybe .260/.320/.380 with some steals, which is AL-only type value.
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| 12:02 |
: Should I take Scherzer over Betts and Abreu in the second round of my fantasy draft? Also, would you take Arenado over Correa and Rizzo?
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Indians’ starter Trevor Bauer prepares to collect data at Driveline Baseball.
Kyle Boddy spent years getting it wrong. “There were years of inconclusive results that led to more questions,” Boddy told me about his past work at his Driveline Baseball facility in Kent, Washington.
He had the best intentions. After years of day jobs, and coaching youth baseball with some competitive weightlifting sprinkled in, he started writing at The Hardball Times and studying injuries with Josh Kalk, now a member of the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office. They had some success using neural networks on PITCHf/x data in order to spot injuries earlier than usual.
In the end, though, the Seattle-based mechanics analyst wanted to take a look at pitcher development under the same data-based lens that he and Kalk had used to spot existing injury.
So he built a biomechanics lab, complete with high-speed cameras and objects of known size. (That object, known as the Cube, is a square box built of tubing that helps calibrate the cameras so that the video created is all comparable.) It was a lot of work with an uncertain reward. “We got a lot of great kinetic data,” said Boddy of that time. “Then we realized that there was a huge amount of noise.”
Helping Boddy with the realization was Dr. Murray Maitland in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. When approached with analysis based on limb movement and pitchers’ physical tendencies and the link to injury, Dr. Maitland smiled and dropped what might have been a bombshell to Boddy that day. “Just because the joint or limb moves in this direction doesn’t mean the underlying muscle is doing that,” said Maitland in Boddy’s recollection. “The movement could be due to inertia, it could be due to whatever. You can’t infer muscle activity.”
Last year seems so long ago, but if you remember back to September, you probably remember Kyle Hendricks at his best. That month, he struck out nearly seven batters for every walk. He ended the season with 12 straight shutout innings and 17 strikeouts against two walks. Against the Royals and in Milwaukee.
What was the magic all about that month? Because, if Hendricks is that guy again, there’s no competition for his spot in the rotation. With regard to his pitching mix, though, nothing stands out as obviously different.
Baseball has started, sort of, and it’s time to have a meetup. Don’t worry about the team projections, all of our teams are still in it, at least until April. Please come drink, rosterbate, and theorize with the following writers at OHSO Brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday, March 11th, at 6pm. Free appetizers for attendees!
| 1:20 |
: be here shortly. If you’ve seen the ads on MLBN, you’ve heard this song, but it’s great, and the video even better:
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| 1:20 |
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| 12:00 |
: Please rank for 2016: Eovaldi, R. Hill, Berrios, Snell
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| 12:00 |
: You got it, but I could see moving Berrios ahead of Hill. Hill only has two pitches…
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| 12:00 |
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| 12:01 |
: Would you be so kind as to name three prospects you would love to roster at this weekend’s AL-LABR?
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Maybe you remember, but a couple of years ago, Bill James went on a rant about ground-ball pitchers. It started with a bang:
Make a list of the best pitchers in baseball. Make a list of the best pitchers in baseball, in any era, and what you will find is that 80% of them are not ground ball pitchers. They’re fly ball pitchers.
And it got louder. James felt that they got injured often, and flamed out. “They’re great for two years, and then they blow up,” he wrote. “Always.”
The response was swift.