One of the most confounding things in baseball is an obviously talented starting pitcher who doesn’t generate many strikeouts. Generally speaking, we expect to see strikeouts match the stuff, and while sometimes we just confuse a good fastball for a good repertoire, there are guys who just pitch below their ceilings. Garrett Richards, in the past, was such a guy. It wasn’t just that he possessed one of the fastest fastballs in the majors — he’s also thrown a sharp slider, yet through his first three years he posted the same strikeout rate as Jeff Karstens and Kevin Millwood. Because of the incongruity, Richards has been considered a sleeper, but sometimes all a sleeper is is an early-stage disappointment.

Right now it doesn’t look like Richards is going to be a disappointment. It looks like Richards is going to fulfill that sleeper potential people have long figured he had. Wednesday, Richards was dominant against the Phillies, whiffing eight over seven shutout innings. Now, through a quarter of the year, Richards has struck out one of every four batters he’s faced. One out of four is bigger than one out of six.

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We’ve all heard an announcer harp on the importance of throwing first pitch strikes. They ramble about the tone of the at bat, the aggressiveness of the hitter, and most importantly – the data. We’ve studied the importance of first pitch strikes for a long time. Nearly 10 years ago, Craig Burley found only eight percent of first pitch strikes were converted into hits during the 2003 season. Meanwhile, the difference between a 1-0 and 0-1 count is about 20 points of average, 90 points of on base percentage, and 40 points of slugging. Based on linear weights, Burley finds the value of a first pitch strike to be 0.07 runs. So, we accept the importance of first pitch strikes. Let’s put a pin in that for now.

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have received adequate pitching from their starters. Over 30 games, Angels starters have a 3.87 ERA, 4.04 FIP and 4.01 xFIP. They’re not world beaters by any means – they’re 17th in starter WAR and 11th in RA9-WAR.  Adequacy can take you far in the majors, especially when your offense features Mike Trout. The Angels have managed a 15-15 record, and they trail the Oakland Athletics by just 3.5 games.

Now you have two paragraphs – one about the importance of first pitch strikes and one about Angels starters. Can you guess where I’m going with this? Read the rest of this entry »

Understand, immediately: Mike Trout is currently first in the American League in WAR. In the majors, he’s sandwiched between two Rockies, one surprisingly healthy and one surprisingly awesome, and Trout’s current season pace puts him at 13 WAR, which would eclipse what he’s already done, and what he’s already done has been basically impossibly good. That Mike Trout doesn’t lead the majors in WAR isn’t a reflection of Trout; it’s a reflection of, hey, sample sizes, and also, don’t forget about Troy Tulowitzki, who is also amazing.

But let’s talk about something, just because it’s interesting. Trout is so good, so almost perfect, that we’re at heightened awareness when something might not be right. At the moment, he’s running an extraordinary 161 wRC+, which is an almost exact match for his career mark. But behind that summary number is another number that doesn’t look like the numbers that’ve come before it. What I’m referring to inspired an article in the LA Times.

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Even good hitters go through a cold streaks at some point. If they want to avoid fan panic, though, they need to make sure and save those week or month-long slumps for later in the season. When slumps happen at the beginning of the season, they sandbag the player’s line, and it takes a while for even a good hitter’s line to return to “normal.” Most FanGraphs readers are familiar with the notion of small sample, and thus are, at least on an intellectual level, hopefully immunized against overreaction to early season struggles of good players.

Nonetheless, at this time of the year it is often good to have some existential reassurance. Intellectually, we know that just because a cold streak happens over the first two weeks or month of a season it is not any different than happening in the middle of the year. Slumps at the beginning of the year simply stand out more because they are the whole of the player’s line. One terrible month (and we are not even at the one month point in this season) does not doom a season. Rather than repeat the same old stuff about regression and sample size, this post will offer to anecdotal help. Here are five seasons from hitters, each of which contain (at least) one terrible month at some point, but each of which turned out to be excellent overall.

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In a close game Tuesday night, the Angels faced Robinson Cano with two on, two outs, and a base open. Standing on deck, instead of actual protection, was Justin Smoak, and in the clearest demonstration of protection theory, or lack thereof, the Angels put Cano on to take their chances with the next guy. If all you knew were those sentences, this wouldn’t seem worthy of a blog post. Smoak might one day turn into a good hitter, but so far it’s been all hype and lousy results. Cano is one of the very best players in the world, still hanging out in his prime. Yeah, you’d rather face Smoak than Cano, and while doing so requires you put another runner on base, the intentional walk is a low win-expectancy swing. Nothing seems strange, except for one thing.

Cano wasn’t simply intentionally walked by an Angels pitcher. Cano was intentionally walked by Angels starting pitcher C.J. Wilson. Left-handed Angels starting pitcher C.J. Wilson, who’s always run a big lefty-killing platoon split. Wilson put the lefty on to load the bases to face a switch-hitter, and as such, Mike Scioscia both played the matchups and didn’t play the matchups. It became a story because Smoak cleared the bases with a double, but even had Smoak gotten out, as was the likelihood, this decision would still be of interest. It isn’t often you see strategy that seems to run counter to the ordinary strategy. If there’s one thing a manager usually likes, it’s having his lefty pitcher get to face a lefty hitter.

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If there’s one thing I like here at FanGraphs — well, there are many things, but this is just one of those things — it’s our Depth Charts, which are fueled by manual inputs of playing time (the NL West is my beat, so you know who to yell at if you’d like to argue about, say, Marco Scutaro’s projections) and get funneled as part of the input into our projected standings. And if you look at the projected standings, they’re more or less what you’d expect. The Dodgers are expected to be the best team, the Astros the worst. The Dodgers, Nationals and Cardinals are projected to win the three NL divisions. The Red Sox and Tigers look to win the most games in the American League. This all makes sense, even if that’s all but certainly not how it will really play out. Maybe that’s not exciting, but projections aren’t supposed to be exciting. It’d be a lot more interesting if the Twins were projected to win the AL Central and then face the Marlins in the World Series. It’d also be proof of a projection system that wasn’t worth looking at.

Like with any projection system, you can quibble around the edges, but in five of the six divisions there are clear leaders, ranging from projected leads of two games (Red Sox over Rays) to seven (Nationals over Braves, because like every media site, we are biased against the Braves).

Then there’s the American League West:  Read the rest of this entry »

According to Alden Gonzalez, the Angels and Mike Trout are close to finalizing a six year contract that will pay Trout $144.5 mlilion over the 2015-2020 seasons.

Trout deal for $144.5M. Average annual value is nearly $24.1M. Makes Trout third #Angels player with AAV of at least $24M (Pujols, Trout).

— Alden Gonzalez (@Alden_Gonzalez) March 29, 2014

Those six years cover Trout’s three arbitration eligible seasons and his first three free agent seasons. Instead of hitting free agency after his age-25 season, he’ll play for the Angels through at least his age-28 season.

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Mike Trout is reportedly close to signing a long term deal with the Angels that will value the free agent years he’s giving up at around $30 to $35 million apiece. At the time he signs the deal, he’ll almost lock in the largest single season salary ever guaranteed to a Major League player, topping the $33 million that Clayton Kershaw will earn in the last year of his freshly minted extension. And even with that, he’s still going to be drastically underpaid.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a few conversations with folks where I’ve unsuccessfully tried to explain why Trout is worth something between $40 to $50 million per year for his free agent years. In a time where even the best free agents are signing for half of that, it’s a tough sell, and I’ve realized that most people just generally don’t believe that Trout is twice as valuable as other star players.

So, this post is an effort to help illustrate the dramatic gulf between Trout’s value and the kinds of players that are signing for $20 to $25 million per year. I’m going to try to make the math as non-scary as possible, and avoid using fancy acronyms or models that rely on black box data. We’re just going to deal with the basics.

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Speculating about how much money it would take to sign Mike Trout to a long term deal has become something of a sport unto itself. Ever since he broke into the big leagues and almost immediately established himself as the best player in baseball, people have wondered aloud about what kind of deal he could command. The fires were stoked even further when the Angels decided to renew his contract for just $510,000 last year, allowing him to rack up another +10 WAR season and get even closer to free agency. Now, with just four years of team control remaining, the Angels are reportedly hoping to get Trout signed to a long term deal that will keep in Anaheim for the foreseeable future.

So, let’s play the Mike Trout Extension Game again. With Freddie Freeman resetting the extension market for players with three years of service time, we have a new data point to work with anyway, and so we probably need to update our prior estimates to reflect the new reality of extension pricing. So let’s work through the numbers and see what we can come up with.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

Batters
The reader likely already knows, but the author will state for the benefit of anyone who might not, that it is generally the case with these projections that they’re more conservative than one’s own intuition might otherwise suggest. Not infrequently, partisan commenters will respond to these posts with regard to this or that player, saying “I’ll take the over on that projection.” Perhaps, in some cases, that’s a fair statement to make: the relative success of the FAN projections also hosted at this site suggests that the crowd might have some insight into these matters. Still, Szymborski’s forecasts are derived empirically — and, to that end, can’t be merely ignored.

It’s in light of that belabored caveat that the reader is thus invited to lose all of his shits so far as Mike Trout’s ZiPS projection is concerned. Miguel Cabrera, Evan Longoria, Andrew McCutchen, Joey Votto, Justin Verlander: none of them come within three wins of Trout, so far as ZiPS is concerned. He’s a superhero, basically, were it possible for superheroes to hail from New Jersey.

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