For the last week or so, the Angels have been pretty vague about what’s going on with Garrett Richards. He missed a start due to “fatigue” and “dehydration”, but they hadn’t given any real indicators that his arm was bothering him. Apparently it was, however, as Jeff Passan dropped this bomb this morning.

Source: Angels ace Garrett Richards has torn ulnar collateral ligament and is expected to need Tommy John surgery. https://t.co/wkbiUpTCl0

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) May 6, 2016

This is a huge blow to the Angels, not only because Richards is really good, but because the Angels pitching staff without him is atrocious. Here’s what our current depth chart forecast for Anaheim’s starting rotation looks like, with Richards included.

#25 Angels

Name	IP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BABIP	LOB%	ERA	FIP	WAR
Garrett Richards	159.0	8.4	3.2	0.7	.298	72.7 %	3.39	3.41	2.8
Hector Santiago	140.0	8.1	3.5	1.1	.292	74.2 %	3.89	4.29	1.3
Jered Weaver	137.0	5.6	2.5	1.4	.288	70.0 %	4.54	4.84	0.5
Nicholas Tropeano	114.0	8.5	3.3	1.1	.303	71.6 %	4.09	4.03	1.1
Matt Shoemaker	84.0	7.6	2.3	1.2	.298	71.5 %	4.04	4.07	0.9
Andrew Heaney	62.0	7.5	2.6	1.0	.301	72.0 %	3.83	3.91	0.7
C.J. Wilson	40.0	7.6	3.7	0.9	.295	70.8 %	4.06	4.14	0.4
Tyler Skaggs	39.0	8.7	3.2	0.8	.294	73.7 %	3.42	3.60	0.6
Kyle Kendrick	16.0	5.3	2.3	1.2	.292	71.5 %	4.23	4.59	0.1
Total	790.0	7.6	3.0	1.1	.296	72.1 %	3.93	4.08	8.4

Hector Santiago is a FIP-beater, so he’s better than that projected WAR makes him look, but after him, it’s a dumpster fire. And in Passan’s story, he notes that Andrew Heaney may also need Tommy John surgery, so we might be crossing his ~60 innings off that list as well, if his rehab-to-avoid-surgery plan isn’t successful. And Tyler Skaggs just went for an MRI after getting scratched from a Triple-A start last week; the current diagnosis is biceps tendonitis, but it’s an arm problem for a guy with a history of arm problems.

At some point in the not too distant future, the Angels rotation could be Santiago-Weaver-Tropeano-Shoemaker-Kendrick, which wouldn’t be good enough to contend even if supported by the offense of the 1927 Yankees. And the 2016 Angels aren’t exactly an offensive behemoth.

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Is it still cool to talk about contact hitting, or are we past that? I don’t think we should be past that. Not yet, not as long as the Royals remain the defending champions. So, you remember all this stuff. It was a big part of the Royals conversation during last year’s playoffs. Yeah, the Royals had a really strong bullpen, and an incredible team defense, but they wound up mostly defined by their insistence on putting the ball in play. For better or worse, that’s the association. The Royals were the contact team. As a matter of fact, they were arguably the best contact-hitting team since at least 1950. I personally don’t care too much about what happened before 1950, not when I’m talking about statistics.

The Royals are a loyal organization, so they brought back a lot of their players. There’s been a little mixing up, but for the most part they’re still the familiar Royals, so it shouldn’t surprise you they’re again running a low strikeout rate. It’s a pretty sticky metric, strikeouts. As much as the Royals have put the ball in play, though, they’ve so far been surpassed in that regard. Filter out pitchers, and the Royals have baseball’s seventh-lowest rate of strikeouts. They’re a little higher than the A’s. They’re a little higher than the Marlins. And so on, and then there are the two standouts. To this point, at least as far as not striking out goes, the Angels and Giants have been on another level.

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Jeremy Sowers doesn’t turn 33 until later this month. He’s young enough that he could still be pitching. Having succumbed to shoulder woes and ineffectiveness, he’s instead embarking on a new career with the Tampa Bay Rays.

Drafted sixth overall in 2004 out of Vanderbilt, Sowers never did fulfill expectations on the mound. In four seasons with the Cleveland Indians, the left-hander logged a 5.18 ERA while winning just 18 of 48 decisions. Known more for moxie than velocity, he fanned 10% of the batters he faced across 400 innings of work.

Unable to sufficiently school hitters, Sowers stepped away from the game and returned to the classroom, earning an MBA from the University of North Carolina. Now he’s back in baseball. After a summer spent interning with the Orioles, Sowers is currently a major-league operations assistant with the Rays, a position he sees as a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

Sowers talked about his path from first-round pick to entry-level baseball ops on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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Sowers on working for the Rays: “Just because I played does not qualify me as an absolute source of information about this game. I think I offer a unique perspective, but my value is only increased by hearing out and understanding everybody else’s perspective. To use a really crappy movie analogy, in Sling Blade, everybody is trying to figure out how to make a lawnmower work. All of a sudden, the one character is like, ‘I reckon there’s no gas in it.’

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I recognize that this is a sensitive subject at a lousy time. I mean, the Mariners are winning, winning on a fairly sustained basis, and Felix Hernandez owns a lower ERA than Stephen Strasburg and Noah Syndergaard. According to our playoff odds page, the Mariners have a better than 50% chance of getting to the postseason, which for Felix would be his first-ever taste of those stakes. Mariners fans aren’t looking to be worried. Not now, not when they have circumstances to appreciate.

So I know this post might be interpreted as a bit of a bummer. It’s not meant that way; these are just observations. And no part of me presently thinks that Felix is toast. It’s just, there are things to talk about. What Felix has been doing, he’s never before done quite like this. It’s looking like he could be beginning a new chapter.

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Heading into the season, there were a lot of question marks about the Dodgers rotation, but so far, the team’s struggling offense and bullpen have received a big boost from a pitching staff led by Clayton Kershaw and Kenta Maeda; their starters currently rank fifth in WAR. Ross Stripling has been a nice early surprise for the team, and while Alex Wood’s ERA remains too high, his underlying metrics suggest that he still can help the team. Scott Kazmir’s struggles are perhaps most worrisome, but if he can stop giving up home runs, he should be serviceable as well.

And if any of the big leaguers falter, there is help on the way. In the minors, Jose De Leon made his first start of the 2016 season on Tuesday, the delay being partly due to a minor ankle injury and also the product of an effort to keep his innings low in the early going. When de Leon’s debut came the day before Julio Urias’ most recent start, I decided to watch both via MILB.tv.

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Just a couple weeks back, Dave Cameron examined the things that should worry us about Dallas Keuchel. He was more nuanced, but we could break it down into three components: lower velocity, fewer calls on the black, and fewer swings. For a guy that had the third-lowest zone percentage in baseball last year, the latter two seem hugely important for his success. So I asked the Astros’ lefty what he’s doing about those things.

Lower Velocity

Asking a pitcher about velocity is a delicate thing. Big increases mean whispers, and big declines mean… whispers of another sort. And then there’s the brutal march of time that fritters away our athleticism, day by day. You walk on egg shells.

But they know their radar-gun readings. And though age should have stolen about a tick from Keuchel, it looks like he’s down more than a tick and a half on the radar gun, from 89.6 mph last year to 88.0 this year. But that’s comparing all of last year to this year’s April, and also ignoring a slight uptick in recent games. If you compare last week’s velocity to last year’s April velocity, Keuchel is only down 0.8 mph, well in the normal range for a 28-year-old pitcher.

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The case has been made for Carlos Correa. It was even made on this very site last year. He was the number one overall draft pick. He was last year’s American League Rookie of the Year. He’s been called Alex Rodriguez, with better makeup. He’s even been called the best player in the major leagues (maybe). When we ran our preseason staff predictions a couple months back, 11 of 55 FanGraphs employees chose Correa to win the American League MVP. Beside he and Mike Trout, no other player received more than four votes. The public opinion on the matter seems almost unanimous: Carlos Correa is viewed as baseball’s best shortstop, just 126 games into the 21-year-old’s major league career.

But there’s a 22-year-old, just 123 games into his major league career, who wasn’t Rookie of the Year and received zero preseason MVP picks, whose case for baseball’s best shortstop might be just as strong as Correa’s. It’s time we consider whether it’s actually Francisco Lindor who is baseball’s best shortstop.

The argument might not have to be complicated. Correa gained his status so quickly due to the hype and the performance. Both need to be present for a player to be accepted as a bonafide superstar in less than a calendar year. It’s when the two collide that lofty claims like “baseball’s best shortstop” or “MVP candidate” start to seem reasonable. So let’s start with the hype.

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There’s a vestigial anchor from my baseball past that I drag around — it’s called Red Sox fandom, and it’s attached to a barely seaworthy vessel whose form is an email group of mainly older Boston fans. Most of the debates that happen on the email chain are really just individual manifestations of the argument surrounding process vs. outcome. Like a lot of traditionally-minded baseball fans, most of the members of the group are outcomes people, as baseball fans have been taught to be for the past 100-plus years — focusing on ERA, batting average, etc. I tend to find myself more on the process end of the spectrum, and lately I’ve been thinking about this debate as it relates to pitching — and especially as it relates to Noah Syndergaard. 

You could argue that no one’s process is better than Syndergaard’s right now — and, most recently, Jeff Sullivan actually has argued that. If the goal of pitching is to limit base-runners — and thus limit runs — the right-hander is about as good as it gets. I like quick ERA estimators like strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) partly because I’m lazy and partly because I think they’re nifty, and currently Syndergaard is second in K-BB%, which is the best quick ERA estimator we have. Strikeouts? Elite. Walks? Elite. Velocity? Arsenal? Unparalleled. The processes he’s taking to influence positive outcomes are second really only to Clayton Kershaw this season, and for the most part, he’s been rewarded for them. But there is one glaring issue he still has — laid bare in his past two starts — which we’ll get a lot of chances to see below.

All of that said, the main question we’re going to be answering today is: how does a team score runs off of Syndergaard? Every pitcher has to give up runs at some point, no matter how impressive their talent. Today, we engage in a fun exercise to examine those runs. So let’s go through a month’s worth of starts!

A primer for what we’re about to discuss: looking at Statcast data through Baseball Savant, Syndergaard has the lowest average exit velocity among pitchers with a minimum of 60 batted-ball events. Those events include both hits and outs, and it’s testament to the type of contact against him — and the frame for a lot of what we’ll be looking at today. Here’s a reminder of what exit velocity generally means for outcomes. Now let’s jump in, with the understanding that we’re going to skip over his first start of the season, as he didn’t give up any runs. Onward!

Start #2, 4/12/16, 1 ER: Derek Dietrich single. Exit velocity: 74 mph.

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Bryce Harper was in a slump! You might not have noticed. Right around the middle of April, it seemed people decided Harper had somehow taken another step forward. And maybe he has, I don’t know, but if he has, he hasn’t done it since the middle of April. As a matter of fact — I’m writing this late Wednesday, and when I look at the leaderboards over the past seven days, Harper is tied for dead last in WAR. I don’t recommend you make a habit of looking at WAR over seven-day periods, but Harper is Harper, and last is last. There was a real and legitimate slump. Could be there still is.

Let me make it clear right now that I’m not concerned. Not about Harper, not at present. I thought he was great at the beginning of April, I thought he was great in the middle of April, and I think he’s great now at the beginning of May. Everyone is entitled to the occasional off-week. I just do think there’s something we could learn from examining how what’s happened has happened. Bryce Harper slumped! Why?

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How do you identify the very best pitches? It’s actually not easy, since every pitch in someone’s repertoire has an effect on every other pitch. So let’s say this: I don’t know if Aaron Nola’s “true-talent” curveball is the best in the game. What I know is, to this point, it’s been the most effective curveball in the game. By lots! Here’s the top of the run-value leaderboard for curves in 2016:

1. Aaron Nola, +9.5 runs
2. Jerad Eickhoff, +3.6
3. Carlos Carrasco, +3.2
4. Justin Grimm, +3.1
5. Aaron Sanchez, +3.0

Nola’s value is nearly the sum of the next three values combined. How great is +9.5 runs? Only one pitch so far has a higher value, and that’s Jose Quintana’s fastball, at +10.0. Quintana has thrown almost 400 fastballs. Nola has thrown fewer than 200 curves.

We’ve written plenty about the Phillies so far. Countless people have, because the Phillies have surprised, and it’s no secret the key to that has been unbelievable pitching. This has become the core of the Phillies’ whole rebuild, and they love what they’re getting from Eickhoff. They love what they’re getting from Vincent Velasquez. But you can’t forget about Nola. Nola was always thought of as the safe, polished one, but now he’s flashing upside, such that he might be the best of them all. He might be turning into one of the best, period, and the curveball is fueling his ascent.

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