Archive for Daily Graphings

If the New York Mets finish the 2016 season as world champions, they’ll have done it with a drastically different approach than the one with which they began the year. See, the Mets are something like a bat-first team now. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, and now Steven Matz won’t pitch again until 2017, and while they’ve still got Noah Syndergaard and a suddenly impressive bullpen, it’s the offense that’s really carried their second-half resurgence. Since the All-Star break, the Mets have baseball’s seventh-best wRC+, among non-pitchers. Over the last month, they’ve had baseball’s third-best offense by that same measure.

And so, barring some unforeseen heroics from the likes of Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo, it seems that the World Series aspirations in New York that began with the starting rotation now fall heavily on the starting lineup. If the Mets want to win this thing, they might have to slug their way there, the way Daniel Murphy nearly did for them last postseason. The Mets probably don’t love the fact that they opted not to go the extra year on Murphy in free agency and saw him not only go to a division rival in Washington, but go on to build off last postseason’s success and become potentially the best hitter in the National League. But even though the super-charged Murphy will now play for the Nationals in the postseason, the Mets suddenly have a super-charged middle infielder of their own in Asdrubal Cabrera.

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Don’t ask Justin Verlander if his new harder slider is a cutter, apparently. “Verlander is steadfast on this — he’s not throwing a cutter. It’s a slider,” is how Chris McCosky characterized the ace’s opinion on the changing pitch.

The difference between a cutter and a slider is difficult to really nail down — and is most easily represented as existing on a spectrum. First, there’s the cut fastball, thrown with a slightly offset grip but still a fastball release. That pitch usually goes about a mile or two slower than the four-seam with only a couple inches of drop beyond the four-seam. Mariano Rivera threw that thing better than anyone, but Adam Ottavino modeled it for us.

Then there’s the baby slider, a cutter grip thrown with a little more supination before release, and those go 4-plus mph slower and have a few inches more drop. Those are the pitches you see from Madison Bumgarner, Cole Hamels, Jon Lester, James Shields, and Adam Wainwright. Most of those pitchers refer to that pitch as a cutter, but most of those pitches also drop more than the overall average for the cutter.

To make matters worse, there’s a brand of slider thrown by the Mets which might fit between the “baby slider” cutter and the slider-slider. We’ve dubbed that pitch the Warthen Slider. And it might be the answer to why Verlander is throwing a harder slider that looks like a cutter, but one to which he still refers as a slider. And it might be part of the answer to why tonight’s starter Daniel Norris has seen such an improvement in his walk rate.

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Yesterday, with the help of a much smarter friend, I dug a little bit into the home-run surge that we’ve all observed. There was room for some more examination, though, so this is to be considered a brief follow-up. Toward the end of that post, I engaged in some speculation. Based on evidence below, I believe I was wrong!

To re-cover some territory real quick, we do have this fact, established in the original post: Home runs are being bunched unusually tightly. The distribution of home-run rates around the game is closer to being even than ever before in at least the game’s modern version. That’s interesting! More and more hitters are getting into the dinger spirit, such that the landscape isn’t so dominated by a handful of elites. That now being given, let’s move on.

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The first weird thing about the home-run surge is that there’s been a home-run surge. No one expected this, yes? It’s worked out conveniently, given how many conversations were taking place about the diminished levels of offense. At the very least, those have been put on pause.

Now, since we’re given the reality of a home-run surge, we can poke around within it. I’ll show you what Dave showed me yesterday:

Jean Segura (@Dbacks): 104th player to hit 20 HR this season, setting all-time record (breaking tie at 103 with 1999)

— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) September 27, 2016

Last year, Jean Segura slugged .336. The year before, he slugged .326. This year, he’s slugging .496. His is one of the many faces of the homer explosion. Yet just where has this been taking place? Are homers up across the board, or has there been a change in distribution? I’ll give you a hint: There’s been a change in distribution. We’re seeing more home runs from what you might label as the lower classes.

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For the last few years, as the season comes to a close, I’ve basically written a version of the same article, advocating for the extreme use of relief pitchers in the Wild Card games. I think the first one I wrote was back in 2012, when I titled the piece “Play-In Game Strategy: Skip the Starter”. And while teams have started to move more towards aggressive reliever usage, teams haven’t really adopted the full-on bullpen game as a planned outing as of yet.

I think this year, that changes.

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“Different day, different arm,” is one of those things you’ll hear a pitcher say. You get up on the mound on a given day, and you try to figure out which pitches are working, what parts of your body are barking, where you can actually intentionally throw your pitches. It’s understandable, given the complicated mechanics required to throw the ball so hard, with so much movement — but it has implications for those who would attempt to place a number on their true-talent ability.

We know about this difficulty when it comes to pitching. Projections try to put a number on the true ability of a player, but pitching projections lag behind hitting projections. Even when a stat — like exit velocity — becomes meaningful in similar samples for hitters and pitchers, it behaves strangely for pitchers. It becomes meaningful quickly but isn’t quite predictive, either — maybe because pitchers add pitches, change the script, and become different more quickly than hitters. Maybe because their true talent shifts often.

Maybe true talent for hitters shifts more than we think, though. At least when it comes to their actual ability to express that true talent due to health reasons.

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With the exception of an eight-game stretch in April where he went 13-for-26, with seven extra-base hits, Jeremy Hazelbaker has had a fairly unremarkable rookie season. The St. Louis Cardinals outfielder is slashing .239/.300/.487, with a dozen home runs in 221 plate appearances. He spent parts of June and July in Triple-A.

For a time, it looked like he might be a minor-league lifer. Drafted in the fourth round out of Ball State University by the Red Sox in 2009, Hazelbaker was dealt to the Dodgers following the 2013 season. Eighteen months later he was released. St. Louis signed him last May and assigned him to Double-A Springfield. He finished the year in Triple-A.

Hazelbaker was 28 years old when he reported to spring training — he turned 29 last month — and the odds were against him earning a spot on the Cardinals roster. He beat those odds.

I’d followed Hazelbaker’s career. I’d interviewed and written about him a handful of times as he was coming up through the Red Sox system. I’d seen the tools, but I hadn’t seen those tools translate into consistent performance. I was skeptical that I ever would.

When I caught up to Hazelbaker in early August, I admitted as much. Being perhaps a little too honest, I began the interview by saying: “I didn’t think you’d make it. Why was I wrong?” Here was his response.

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Hazelbaker on proving me wrong: “Everybody has their opinion on guys coming up. There are things people don’t really get. Looking in from the outside, you don’t see how hard of a worker a guy is, or how much drive and determination he has. Do you want to call me an underdog story? You can if you want. Whatever you want to call it, I know there have been people skeptical of me — my path, my journey, my abilities along the way.

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On Sunday evening, the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the Colorado Rockies in what was legendary announcer Vin Scully’s last home game at Dodger Stadium after 67 years of calling the team. The Dodgers won, in walk-off fashion, scoring in the ninth on a Corey Seager home run that tied the score at 3-3, and again in the 10th on a home run by Charlie Culberson that clinched the National League West Division and ensured Scully’s final call in Los Angeles would come on a high note.

But Seager and Culberson only had the opportunity for their theatrics because of a home run hit in the top of the ninth inning by a Rockies player. With the Rockies down to their final strike of the ninth inning and with rookie outfielder David Dahl in a 1-2 count with two outs, this happened:

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The Nationals are far from the only team to have experienced recent playoff disappointment. Some teams don’t even make the playoffs at all! So you can’t really say the Nationals are necessarily unique. Teams run up against obstacles. A lot of those teams can’t get past. That being said, over the past number of seasons, few teams have looked better than the Nationals, and few teams have wound up more disappointing. A Nationals fan might get the sense that a championship will simply never be in the cards, and that familiar feeling is coming back with gusto, with Wilson Ramos having been diagnosed with a torn ACL.

The truest pain here belongs to Ramos. Most immediately, he is the one literally hurting. But he’s also the one who can’t play anymore, and he’s the one who was looking ahead to free agency after having a big bounceback season. Ramos’ short-term future has been blown up in the blink of an eye, and he might wonder whether he’ll even be able to catch anymore down the line. This is somebody’s life, somebody’s career. That is, and is always, the most important thing.

Secondarily, but of fan interest, is the effect on the team. And that’s the only thing we’re really equipped to write about. So, acknowledging that the real story is Ramos himself, I’d like to set that aside for a moment and talk about the postseason. The Nationals find themselves in trouble at the worst possible time.

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The Nationals have had an excellent bounce back season after last year’s struggles, and have already locked up the NL East with a 91-65 record. But all is not well in Washington.

The team was already dealing with the potential absence of Stephen Strasburg, who had to leave his first start back from the disabled list with lingering soreness. Daniel Murphy, probably the team’s MVP this year, has not played in over a week due to a glute strain, and while it doesn’t seem like a major injury, you never like to see important players dealing with issues right before the playoff start.

And now, the Nationals will need Murphy more than ever, because Dusty Baker just confirmed that starting catcher Wilson Ramos has suffered a torn ACL, ending his season a week before the team takes on the Dodgers in the NLDS.

There it is. Wilson Ramos has a torn ACL, Dusty Baker says.

— CSN Nationals (@CSNNationals) September 27, 2016

Ramos’ career year has been one of the primary reasons the Nationals have been better this year than last year, as he’s posted a 124 wRC+ and +3.5 WAR, solidifying what was a black hole in 2015. He gave the lineup depth it didn’t have last year, and provided some right-handed thump to counter team’s left-handed pitching; he had a 160 wRC+ against LHPs this year, second-best on the team.

Jose Lobaton will take over as the Nationals starting catcher, and the offense is going to suffer as a result. Lobaton has a career 77 wRC+, and is putting up a normal-for-him 82 wRC+ this year. He takes some walks and makes okay contact, but there’s not much power there, and the Dodgers pitchers will probably have no problem coming right after him and making him do damage with his swing. Facing a pitching staff as good as Los Angeles’, especially one with two frontline left-handed starters, Lobaton is going to be a huge dropoff from Ramos.

This injury doesn’t sink the Nationals chances, of course; no one player is that important in baseball, and Ramos isn’t the kind of impact player that can swing a series by himself. But no question, this is a significant loss for Washington, especially given that the Dodgers are a formidable opponent. The team has had a great season, but they’re likely going to need some Murphy and/or Strasburg to make it back for the NLDS, because without Ramos too, they’re going into the playoffs undermanned.