When Willson Contreras began to shoot up prospects lists last year, it wasn’t because of his defense. The now-24-year-old third baseman-turned-catcher was a fringe prospect who had never cracked a top-100 list until he came out of nowhere to slash .333/.413/.478 in Double-A last season — his fourth year spent behind the dish. Contreras’ breakout at the plate began earning him recognition from scouts, as Baseball America, ESPN, Baseball Prospectus and MLB.com all ranked Contreras as a top-75 prospect coming into this season. Regarding his work behind the dish, however, questions remained.

BP’s Christopher Crawford called Contreras a “work in progress” behind the plate in this year’s preseason scouting report, adding that “receiving is the big focus point right now, as he’s still learning how to frame pitches and call games.” Baseball America made note of Contreras’ “inconsistent receiving and blocking skills that need more development.” Most every scouting report on Contreras echoed a similar sentiment: great athleticism for a catcher, cannon for an arm, but the receiving and blocking needed work. Receiving is far and away the most important defensive skill for a catcher to possess, and so Contreras’ development (or lack thereof) in this area would go a long way toward determining his long-term value, or even future, behind the plate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the good news: the Texas Rangers have the best record in the American League and a seven-game division lead. Here’s the less-good news: our playoff projections give them roughly one-in-10 odds of relinquishing their division lead before the end of the season due, in part, to the worst rest-of-season winning percentage projection of any current first-place team. One of the primary reasons projection systems are down on the Rangers relative to other first-place teams is that they’ve struggled with run prevention this season and a key cause of that struggle has been their difficulty filling out a five-man rotation with healthy, reliable starting pitching. However, the top of their rotation features a stealth Cy Young candidate in a weak field, Cole Hamels, and an ace who is increasingly looking like another Tommy John success story: Yu Darvish.

Since rejoining the rotation for good after the All-Star break, Darvish has been among the best pitchers in the American League on the strength of a 2.70 ERA, 3.32 RA9 and a major-league-leading 28.0-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%). But one of the most encouraging things to see with Darvish is that he’s been able to go deep into games. It wasn’t until his most recent two starts that he crossed the 95-pitch threshold this year, and yet he’s currently riding an active six-game streak of going six innings or more in his starts. Things have been going extraordinarily well of late for Darvish and it’s worth taking a look at what has and hasn’t changed for Darvish and whether or not he’s truly “back.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Kris Bryant did what he’s best known for; hit the crap out of the baseball. In the Cubs 9-6 victory over the Brewers, Bryant went 5 for 5 with a double and a pair of home runs, giving him 30 homers for the season. The big day raised his season line to .296/.392/.564 and pushed him up to a 152 wRC+, second in the NL, behind only Daniel Murphy. This isn’t exactly breaking news, but Kris Bryant can really hit.

But Kris Bryant is also really good at a bunch of other things that don’t get as much attention, and given his monstrous production yesterday, I thought it would be a good time to talk about all the other reasons why Kris Bryant might be the best all-around player in the National League.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eight hitters with enough plate appearances to qualify in 2016 have recorded an isolated-power figure (ISO) between .255 and .264. These eleven players populate the leaderboard from #20 up to #13, which for the most part is populated by a proverbial who’s who of power hitters. Daniel Murphy might surprise you, but the other seven are very much the players you would expect to see.

You might not have expected to find that Evan Longoria has found his power again or that Yoenis Cespedes is following up on his 2015 breakout, but this is a list of power hitters. Now, of course, it’s clear I’m setting a trap. That’s how this works. I’m going to show you a bit of data that looks right and then I’m going to show you adjacent data that is supposed to be shocking. That bit of data concerns the player with the 12th-highest ISO in 2016, who’s delivered more extra bases per at-bat than Cespedes, Cruz, Davis, et al. That player is Rays shortstop Brad Miller.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t remember hearing much about controlling the running game until the whole Jon Lester episode. I mean, it’s always been important, but it was one of those baseball subtleties until it became public knowledge that Lester went a whole season without attempting a single pickoff. That opened up the gates, and, last year, Lester allowed more stolen bases than anybody else. He yielded 44 out of 55 attempts, and the next-worst steal total was seven behind. Lester knew it was something he had to work on. The Cubs knew it, too. To Lester’s credit, this year he’s allowed just 19 steals. That’s still a lot, relatively speaking, but it’s not astronomical.

Lester is no longer the obvious guy to run against. It does help that he’s left-handed. Steven Matz has allowed 20 stolen bases. That’s third-most. Jimmy Nelson has allowed 22 stolen bases. That’s second-most. Noah Syndergaard has allowed 40 stolen bases. That’s first-most. That’s more than the Indians. That’s more than the Royals. Runners have been unsuccessful just four times in 44 attempts. Noah Syndergaard does a lot of things right, but when it comes to controlling his baserunners, he’s got a real problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

A poor base-runner and fielder who strikes out a lot and also doesn’t walk much needs to have a batting average like Tony Gwynn — or otherwise hit for a ton of power — to be a worthwhile player. This is the plight of Yasmany Tomas. He doesn’t run well and plays poor defense at one of the less challenging positions. He strikes out in a quarter of his plate appearances while walking just once every 20 times up. Expecting a Tony Gwynn batting average is impossible, and, up until a few weeks ago, Tomas wasn’t bringing much power either. The entire package rendered him a replacement-level player at best.

With eight home runs in the last ten games, however — and 12 in the last 19 games — Tomas is providing a glimmer of hope that he will not be a $68.5-million bust since signing with Arizona Diamondbacks before last season.

In 2015, Tomas parlayed an elevated .354 BABIP into just a .273 average, due largely to the strikeouts. The lack of walks led to an on-base percentage of only .305 on the season. He didn’t bring much power either, recording only nine home runs and a .128 ISO. The final product: an 88 wRC+ and -1.3 (that’s negative 1.3) WAR. Tomas got off to a good early start last season by taking the ball the other way. Of course, doing so muted his best tool, which was — and remains — his raw power. Out of the 211 hitters last season who recorded at least 400 plate appearances, Tomas’ 31.7% pull rate was 192nd, just ahead of Alcides Escobar. Outside of great all-around hitters like Ryan Braun and Paul Goldschmidt, the hitters around that range consist mostly of speedy, slap-happy type hitters. Not the type of company Tomas would want to keep, in other words.

Compounding Tomas’ pull problems last season was his inability to get the ball in the air. Tomas’ 54.9% ground-ball rate was 12th highest in MLB last season, and his 23.2% fly-ball rate was 15th lowest. Again, those numbers are more common among slap hitters who lack Tomas’ raw power. His problems last season were evident in his spray chart, seen below.

Note, on the pull side, how there’s roughly one black dot (home run) for every two blue dots (fly balls in the outfield). If he could pull the ball in the air, there was a decent chance — again, with his raw power — that Tomas would be able to hit it out. But the changes were few and far between. Tomas recorded a total of 297 batted balls last season but pulled just 94 of them (31.6%). Of those, only 17 (18.1%) were fly balls. Twenty-four percent of his pulled fly balls left the park, but because he gave himself so few opportunities, his power numbers were weak.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our series of divisional team BIP analyses rolls on. Most recently, we examined the NL East. Today, the AL Central. We’ll use granular data such as plate-appearance frequencies and BIP exit speed/angle as of the All-Star break to project “true-talent” club records.

About 90 games’ worth of balls in play is a fairly substantial sample size, one that enables us to make fairly educated guesses about the true-talent level of each team. We’ll compare our projections to club’s actual records at the break, examining the reasons for material variation along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been pretty much impossible to ignore what Mookie Betts has been up to. I know that FanGraphs has been rather pro-Betts from the beginning, but even we didn’t think he was likely to hit for this much power. So, he’s exceeding everyone’s expectations, on the way to becoming a legitimate candidate for the league MVP. Dave has written about Betts plenty. He just wrote about him the other day, in fact. And there’s one thing Dave has pointed to a few times: Pitchers should probably change the way they’re pitching. They look at Betts and see a little guy, so they’ve peppered the zone. Results would suggest they should attack with greater caution.

Even now, Betts still sees a lot of strikes. That much, there’s no denying, and any downward trend has been gradual. Maybe that’s going to prove to be a lagging indicator — maybe we shouldn’t expect the zone rate to plummet until 2017. But an adjustment has taken place. It’s been quiet, and it hasn’t even worked out to this point, but pitchers have caught on to the fact that Betts represents a hell of a threat in the box.

Read the rest of this entry »

The group of young shortstops emerging in major-league baseball has gotten a lot of deserved attention, with Xander Bogaerts, Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager — all 23 or under — potentially ushering in a renaissance at the position. Third base gets a lot of attention, too, offering a combination both of young stars (like Nolan Arenado, Kris Bryant, and Manny Machado) and the American League’s most recent MVP (in Josh Donaldson). Historically, second basemen tend to generate less attention — perhaps because players often end up at second only when they appear unable to adequately handle shortstop or lack the size to play third. This season, however, second basemen have turned the tables and are having quite possibly the best collective season ever at that position

Second basemen have not typically been responsible for great offensive seasons as a group. Last year, Wendy Thurm looked at offense by position throughout history. Second basemen, Thurm found, have generally hovered around the low-90s when it comes to wRC+, easily below average. The graph below shows the league-average wRC+ for second basemen over the past 50 years, including this one.

Second base has rarely reached (or crossed) the 95-wRC+ threshold. This season, however, they’ve produced a 101 wRC+ on the season. We can go back further and the trend continues. In the last 100 years, the only time second basemen have recorded a collective mark above 100 wRC+ is 1924, the year Rogers Hornsby hit .424/.507/.696 and accounted for more than 5% of second-base plate appearances. With Hornsby, second basemen produced a collective 103 wRC+; without him, it would have been 96 on the season. This year’s top second baseman, Jose Altuve, has recorded an impressive 167 wRC+ is impressive, but that figure doesn’t have nearly the same impact as Hornsby’s did in the 1920s.

Read the rest of this entry »

On May 12, Max Pentecost played his first game in nearly two years. Drafted 11th overall in 2014 by the Blue Jays out of Kennesaw State, the right-handed-hitting catcher was just 25 games into his professional career when he was shelved with a shoulder problem. It took three surgeries to get him back on the field.

A lot of head-scratching was involved. Pentecost went under the knife for a second time last spring — the initial surgery having failed to alleviate the pain — and once again the results were insufficient. His throwing shoulder still ached, and no one could explain why.

The a-ha moment came when a member of Toronto’s medical staff attended a talk by Dr. Craig Morgan, an orthopedic surgeon who had operated on Curt Schilling’s shoulder. The symptoms Morgan described were markedly similar to what Pentecost had been experiencing. An MRI followed, and soon thereafter Pentecost was undergoing yet another surgical procedure, this one a subacromial decompression. Based on early results, it appears to have done the trick.

Hurdles remain. The 23-year-old former first-rounder is getting closer to full strength, but he’s yet to return behind the plate. The Blue Jays have limited him to DH duties, which means he has some catching up to do defensively. Offense hasn’t been a problem. In 267 plate appearances for the low-A Lansing Lugnuts. Pentecost has slashed a lusty .314/.375/.490 with seven home runs.

His next at-bats will come with Dunedin. Pentecost has already reported to Toronto’s High-A affiliate and will be activated once he’s fully recovered from a minor injury unrelated to his thrice-surgically-repaired shoulder.

———

Pentecost on his third shoulder surgery: “A lot has gone into it and I still don’t really know what was in there. We don’t know for certain if that was the original injury or if it was something caused by having pretty much a newly structured shoulder. But something was wrong and we got it fixed. So far it’s helped a lot, and hopefully my shoulder continues to get better.

Read the rest of this entry »