Archive for Daily Graphings

Last night, Dansby Swanson, 2015’s first overall pick, debuted for the Atlanta Braves. After destroying High-A pitching to the tune of .333/.441/.562 in April, Swanson spent 84 games at the Double-A level. He hit a less exciting, but still respectable .261/.342/.411 at the latter stop.

During his brief stay in the minors, Swanson didn’t stand out in any particular area offensively, but was better than average across the board. He posted a healthy 11% walk rate this season, a .151 ISO, and made enough contact (recording an 18% strikeout rate) for it not to be a concern. Even his 13 steals indicate a guy who’s fast, if not exceptionally fast.

Swanson is a good hitter, but his bat alone doesn’t make him a particularly exciting prospect. What really sets him apart is that he’s a good hitter who also happens to play a mean shortstop. Eric Longenhagen noted yesterday that he thinks Swanson will be a plus defender at short. The data support that observation. In just 105 minor-league games at short this year, he’s been a +19 defender according to Clay Davenport’s model.

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When I started researching a post about the American League Cy Young Award, I was prepared to make a case in favor of Chris Sale. I know you’re not always supposed to go into these things with an outcome in mind, but, look! The rest of this post proves I wasn’t too biased. When I got a little into the work, I started imagining a somewhat contrarian argument in favor of Danny Duffy. That turned into my pursuit, until I became more convinced to support Corey Kluber. I was just about ready to begin a draft. Then I told myself, no, look at the numbers. The favorite should be Aaron Sanchez. I’ve assembled cases for all these guys. A few more, too. Start to finish, this wasn’t supposed to take more than a couple hours.

I wish I could give you something better. I wish I could give you a reason to lean toward one name. Truth be told, there are plenty of those reasons, but many of them point toward different names. It’s the middle of August right now, and there’s roughly a quarter of the season left. That’s going to settle the Cy Young race, because at least as far as I can see it, right now there’s just a multi-way tie.

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Kevin Kiermaier missed a good chunk of the season after breaking his glove hand in late May, and that’s a shame, because when Kiermaier is in the field, he’s among the most exciting players in baseball. Kiermaier is must-see television with a glove in his hand. Decidedly less so at the plate. He’s been roughly a league-average hitter through 1,100 career plate appearances, and so it’s understandable that when we’re paying attention to Kiermaier, it’s usually for his defense.

But I want to flip the script for a minute. The Rays are bad, and Kiermaier missed time, and we’re usually paying attention to the defense, so this may have been easy to miss, but Kiermaier’s undergone some rather radical changes at the plate, relative to last season. Cutting to the chase:

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Back in May, we told you guys that we were teaming up with the Pitch Talks crew for a summer tour. We had our first event in Boston back in July, and it went really well, with a few hundred Red Sox fans packing the house for a fun evening with GM Mike Hazen, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, and a bunch of local writers mixed in.

In the next few weeks, the tour really picks up steam, however, with three events happening over the upcoming month.

First up, we’re heading to San Francisco in 12 days.

The Giants GM and play-by-play announcer will both be joining us at The Independent, and Eno Sarris and I will represent FanGraphs among a couple of panels of terrific writers. It’s going to be a good time, and is a steal at just $25. Buy your tickets now.

A week after that, Eno will be traveling to Toronto to take part in the next event up there, joining Jeff Passan and the local Blue Jays writers who have made the events up there so successful.

Then, finally, I’ll be heading to Chicago in September to meet up with Craig Edwards and a bunch of smart baseball folks from the windy city for an event at The Metro right around the corner from Wrigley Field.

Jonah Keri will be joining us for that one as well, and you’ll want to get your tickets before they’re gone, as that promises to be a fun show.

If you’re in SF on August 29th, Toronto on September 8th, or Chicago on September 22nd, make sure you come out and spend an evening talking baseball with a bunch of other die-hard fans. We’re looking forward to seeing you all there.

It’s been a big season for Michael Saunders, and for his career. He’s long been dogged by injury questions, and a season ago he was limited to just nine games played. For 2016 he’s been able to stay on the field, and his bat has done the talking. He’s been part of a loaded Blue Jays lineup, but he’s still third on the team in wRC+, below Edwin Encarnacion but ahead of Jose Bautista. The Jays now have sole possession of first place in the AL East, and given some of what they’ve gone through, it makes sense that they might owe Saunders a great deal of gratitude, his recent slump aside. He’s mostly been stable, and he’s become rather strong.

Numbers are funny, though. There are different ways to spin them, even if you don’t want to spin them. It would be completely legitimate to say Saunders has been one of the best hitters on the team. You could also very legitimately say Saunders has been arguably the least-valuable hitter on the team. It’s true that he’s third in wRC+. It’s true that he’s last in WPA. In a few ways, then, Michael Saunders is having a season to remember.

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We’re now more than halfway through our division-by-division look at granular team ball-in-play data, as of the All Star break. Today, we take a macro-type view of the plate-appearance frequency and BIP exit speed/angle detail for NL East clubs.

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. Let’s use this information to project true-talent team won-lost records and compare them to their actual marks at the break, examining the reasons for material variation along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Loewen was designated for assignment by the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday. His future is thus in limbo, but that’s nothing new for the 32-year-old southpaw. Loewen has become well-acquainted with adversity and uncertainty since being drafted fourth-overall by the Orioles in 2002.

A contract squabble delayed the start of Loewen’s professional career, and he had barely 100 big-league innings under his belt when elbow woes threw a monkey wrench into his pitching aspirations. No longer able to toe the rubber, the Surrey, British Columbia product — a promising hockey player in his formative years — was converted into a position player.

Not surprisingly, ups and downs followed. Loewen had his moments as a slugging outfielder, but there was a lot of swing-and-miss to his game and he never put it all together. A strong 2011 season in hitter-friendly Las Vegas prompted an opportunity with the Blue Jays, but a 6-for-32 cameo in Toronto brought expectations back to earth. A few years later — his elbow no longer barking — he came full circle. Like no one before him had done at the big-league level, the 6-foot-6 Lefty returned to the mound after once leaving it to become a position player. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to know the most insidious part of my job, it’s deciding what to write about when. Some of the decisions aren’t that crafty — sometimes I have to sit on a Kenta Maeda interview because August just wrote him up, for example. Other times, it’s a small move, like publishing a piece about a pitcher on the day he pitches instead of the day before.

But there are times that make me feel icky. Like the time I talked to Sean Manaea in May and never wrote it up because I felt like there were topics out there that might get more interest. And because I was waiting for a good stretch of ball from him. Well, congratulations to me for being a bad person — Manaea has a 2.84 ERA with 38 strikeouts and just eight walks in 44.1 innings since July tenth. Time to transcribe, you awful, awful dude!

The good news is that we can now check in on the things that Manaea was working on back then and see how they worked out. Welp. If I’d been less honest now, I could have said I planned this all along. Oh well, now you know more about me. Time to know more about Manaea.

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From 2008-11, Tim Lincecum and Justin Verlander were two of the five best pitchers in the world. The only three pitchers with a higher WAR than those two over that time period were into their 30’s. Verlander was coming off a Cy Young Award victory in 2011; Lincecum already had a pair under his belt from 2008-09. They were both under the age of 28, and were seen as perhaps the two most likely pitchers of that time to go down as all-time greats.

We know what happened with Lincecum. The following year, he lost his fastball. Without the fastball, he struggled to ever adapt. Essentially overnight, he became ineffective, and now five years later, it looks like his career might be over.

Verlander began to lose his fastball in 2013, and by 2014, he, too, was beginning to look ineffective. The strikeouts plummeted, and just two years removed from Lincecum’s swift decline, we began to ask questions wondering if Verlander was hurt or if he could ever be a front-line starter again. All signs pointed to no. As recent as midseason 2015, Verlander looked like one of the least valuable players in the game. It seemed as if we’d lost another one of the greats to the dreaded fastball decline.

Except, something’s happened. Over the last calendar year, here are the five most valuable starting pitchers in baseball, according to our measure of WAR:
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Just fourteen months after having been selected first overall in the draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Dansby Swanson is making his Major League debut for the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday. While Swanson doesn’t have a robust collection of plus tools and won’t be setting the National League ablaze with top-of-the scale speed or monster raw power, his skillset is air tight with nothing but the smallest of nits to pick. Combined with his ability to play most valuable of position in baseball, Swanson should provide All Star-level value for the Braves. Read the rest of this entry »