Archive for Daily Graphings

This week, we’re running a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. These posts are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Other cases: Jose Altuve for AL MVP / Mookie Betts for AL MVP / Mike Trout for AL MVP / Manny Machado for AL MVP.

Josh Donaldson was the American League’s Most Valuable Player last season, edging out Mike Trout by receiving 23 of 30 first-place votes and earning 385 vote points, compared to Trout’s 304. Donaldson was the best player on a division-winning team and, by routinely delivering in key moments, led the league in Win Probability Added for his 93-win club.

Donaldson was great, and clutch, and a winner. And this year, he’s arguably gotten better. The wRC+ has gone up. He’s again been one of baseball’s most productive hitters in high-leverage situations. He remains one of the game’s top defensive third basemen. The reigning MVP has, in many ways, built on his award-winning season. But that’s not why he should win it again.

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Last night, the Nationals and Braves played an 11-inning game, and because it happened in September, 17 different pitchers were used between the two clubs. Ninety-nine batters, 17 pitchers: that’s a new pitcher every six batters, essentially. Yes, it went extra innings, and Stephen Strasburg had to leave the start with an injury, forcing the Nationals into an unplanned bullpen game, but 15 pitching changes is still just far too many for a Major League game. It’s a problem the league faces every September, when teams are able to carry everyone on their 40-man roster as active players if they so choose; the Nationals currently have 37 active players.

Of course, neither the individual teams nor the players are all that incentivized to change the system. Since the minor-league season ends around Labor Day, the roster expansion gives teams a chance to give their best prospects something to do in September, and gets them some valuable experience in the big leagues. Players like it, of course, because the promotion to the active roster comes with a big improvement in salary, and so guys who have been making minor-league wages are essentially rewarded with a significant end-of-season bonus. It’s hard to imagine either side is going to push hard to limit September roster sizes in the current CBA negotiations, as they both benefit from the current system, and the burden of longer, less enjoyable games are mostly carried by the fans, who don’t have a seat at the bargaining table.

But as the Braves and Nationals showed last night, there has to be a better way than this. Let’s run through a few options.

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In June, I talked to Jesse Winker following a 2-for-3 game that included a double and a walk. At the time, a big-league call-up seemed almost imminent. The top outfield prospect in the Cincinnati system was performing well for Triple-A Louisville, and with the Reds in rebuild mode, Great American Ballpark loomed right around the corner.

I wrote up the interview, then decided to hold it until the call-up came. Days later, Winker hurt his wrist and missed the next three-and-a-half weeks. Upon his return, he went 20-for-50 — albeit with limited power — while, 100 miles north, the big-league club continued to swim against the tide.

August came and went, and Winker went nowhere. As Reds fans scratched their heads, he remained in Louisville where he celebrated his 23rd birthday and finished the season with a .303/.397/.394 slash line. Winker went deep just three times in 448 plate appearances — he had 13 long balls last year in Double-A — and walked and struck out an equal number of times (59).

As of today, Winker is still awaiting his first big-league call-up. Three months after it was conducted, the interview won’t wait any longer. Here is what Winker had to say following the June game.

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Winker on his game against the Syracuse Chiefs: “I didn’t know too much about their starter [Paolo Espino]. We did have a scouting report, and I was talking to Hernan Iribarren about how he likes to attack left-handed hitters, but the game kind of dictates itself. With a certain amount of outs and a certain number of guys on base, pitchers are going to attack you a certain way.

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His season is over and Kyle Garlick is headed home. Like most minor leaguers, the 24-year-old Los Angeles Dodgers outfield prospect will spend his offseason working. He has a pair of part-time jobs lined up, which will help him make ends meet until spring training rolls around. He’ll then resume his underdog quest to make it to the big leagues.

He’s already exceeded expectations. A 28th-round senior sign in 2015 out of Cal Poly Pomona, Garlick dominated A-ball last year, putting up a .987 OPS between multiple stops. This season he slashed .293/.348/.508, with 42 doubles and 19 home runs, between Rancho Cucamonga and Double-A Tulsa.

As recently as two years ago the one-time Oregon Duck was uncertain about his baseball future. An injury, followed by a family health issue, preceded a season in which he put up mediocre numbers and was subsequently bypassed in the 2014 amateur draft.

Garlick talked about the challenges he’s overcome — and the ones still in front of him — prior to suiting up for the final game of his 2016 season.

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Garlick on what it’s like to have the minor-league season end: “A couple of weeks ago I would have told you I was really excited. This being my first full season, my body wasn’t feeling too great. I was drained, both physically and mentally. But now that the last game of the year is here, I’m actually feeling kind of sad. I don’t really want it to end. I love playing this game and I’m going to miss is it over the next five months or so.

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Last season, a 23-year-old Randal Grichuk put together a tremendous rookie campaign. He posted a 137 wRC+ on the strength of a terrific .272 isolated-power mark. Add into the mix that he could handle all three outfield positions and, on the surface, it looked like the Cardinals had themselves a solid young contributor to build around. However, his performance was not without red flags, the most prominent among them being a 6.3% walk rate, 31.4% strikeout rate, and .365 BABIP. If Grichuk wanted to sustain his success into the 2016 season, it was reasonable to expect he’d need to improve his plate discipline to balance the likely BABIP regression.

The good news is that Grichuk was up for the challenge. He practiced his pitch identification using methods outlined by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch back in April. The early results showed that adjustments had, in fact, been made. Jeff Sullivan wrote at the time about the impressive decline in Grichuk’s swing rate on pitches out of the zone. A promising young player with a glaring weakness addressed and improved on that weakness! Fantastic! What could possibly go wrong?

In the first half, Grichuk’s strikeout rate fell all the way to 22.7% and his walk rate was up to 7.3%. Unfortunately, these improvements coincided with a massive drop off in his ability to crush baseballs. He hit just .226 in the first half thanks to a BABIP that cratered to .255 — and he posted a notably diminished .199 ISO — all of which left him with a terrifically disappointing 89 wRC+. In response, Grichuk has been demoted to Triple-A twice, once June and once at the start of August. Since his most recent return to the majors on August 11th, however, something has changed.

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This week, we’re running a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. These posts are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Other cases: Jose Altuve for AL MVP / Mookie Betts for AL MVP / Mike Trout for AL MVP.

It’s fair to say that, at places like FanGraphs, we spend a lot of time trying to remove teammates from the equation, strip everything down to its basic parts and determine a player’s individual value without context. We ignore things like RBI and runs — metrics that are often based not on a player’s own talent level, but how good a player’s teammates are around him. While there are differing viewpoints on the BBWAA’s suggestion that “actual value” ought to be considered in MVP voting — and how that term should be defined — if we choose to look at the standings, at the playoff races, and the individual teams and players on those teams, Manny Machado has been the most important player in the American League and has provided more actual value to his team this season than any other player. That is his case for Most Valuable Player.

Machado currently has 34 home runs and .306/.358/.565 overall line, good for a 140 wRC+. The 24-year-old has played to his usual incredible standard on defense, and his 28 runs above average on offense — coupled with his 13 runs above average on defense — has led to a WAR above six on the season. While there are other players who provide more offensive or defensive value, literally no one in baseball provides that combination of the two: no single player currently stands within 15 runs on offense of Machado and five runs on defense. There is not a player who has provided double-digit defensive numbers with even half of the offensive runs above average as Machado. There are few concerns that Machado’s defensive numbers are the product of a small-sample mirage, either: he’s averaged about 18 runs above average per 150 games in his career. On offense, Machado is chasing history. The only players to play at least 25% of their games at shortstop and hit more than 40 home runs are Alex Rodriguez and Ernie Banks. Machado has a chance to join them. Read the rest of this entry »

September call-ups are upon us. Now that the minor-league regular season has come to an end, players are getting called up left and right. Some of those players are organizational catchers and journeyman relievers*, but a few of the recent call-ups are prospects who appear to have promising futures in the Show.

*Editor’s note.

With the long weekend, I’ve fallen a bit behind on projecting the prospects who were called up over the past few days. In what follows, I attempt to make up for lost time by projecting several of the players who have recently gotten the call. In case you missed it, I projected Yoan Moncada last week. As usual, KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

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This week, we’re going to run a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. These posts are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Other cases: Jose Altuve for AL MVP / Mike Trout for AL MVP.

Mookie Betts has been pretty amazing this season. As we move closer to that time when writers have to submit their MVP ballots, he is going to garner attention. While he may lose some votes to his teammate David Ortiz, and faces stiff competition from the likes of Jose Altuve, Josh Donaldson, Manny Machado, Mike Trout and others, Betts has a great case of his own.

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The consistency of Christian Yelich throughout his first three major-league seasons, each with identical wRC+ figures of 118, was both promising and, in some ways, perhaps maddening. On the one hand, a hitter with a 118 wRC+ is a good hitter. Especially at such a young age. On the other hand, Yelich has been a ground-ball machine, and with his 6-foot-4 frame, the adjustment to bump up the production a few ticks has seemed so obvious. He doesn’t have to be a slap hitter, and yet he largely has been. And, as with Kansas City’s Eric Hosmer, that inability to adjust — to hit the ball in the air with even slightly greater frequency — has been somewhat confounding.

Unlike Hosmer, Yelich has taken a step forward this year. Our own Jeff Sullivan took early notice of some changes back in May. Yelich was laying off low fastballs, getting himself more good pitches to hit. He was doing a better job of turning on the inside pitch, and a better job of using those offerings to create loft. For the year, Yelich has dropped his ground-ball rate by six points, and while that’s one of the larger decreases across the game, Yelich’s still putting the ball on the ground more than almost anyone.

But then this past week, Yelich showed something else new. You’ll be able to see it rather clearly in this image. Yelich’s already doubled his career-high in home runs, with 18. Here’s the first 15, from before last week, and then you’ll see three new ones pop up in the week since:

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Danny Duffy has had his ups and downs since being drafted by Kansas City in 2007. Many of the former have come in the past 12 months. The 27-year-old southpaw made three relief appearances for the Royals in last year’s World Series and has a ring to show for his efforts. This season, he has emerged as a dominant starter. Duffy is 11-2 with a 3.13 ERA, and his game log includes a 16-strikeout gem.

His resume includes rocky moments, as well. He’s undergone Tommy John surgery, shoulder woes, and more than a little inconsistency. The issues have been mental as well as physical. Duffy admits to having gotten inside his own head at times. He’s put too much pressure on himself, and an early-career soul-searching session even resulted in him walking away from the game for a few months.

Duffy talked about the road he’s traveled, and where he is today, when the Royals visited Fenway Park in late August.

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Duffy on why he’s been able to take a step forward: “That’s an interesting question. I’m just trying to keep it simple, man. It’s that battle I’ve tried to conquer for a while. When you don’t make the game so difficult… it’s hard enough already. I’m kind of just trying to use my stuff for what it is and not trying to be better than I am.

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