Archive for Daily Graphings

Dear reader, please allow this internet article to serve as the official announcement of the fourth annual FanGraphs Boston Meetup on Saber Seminar Eve. As the title makes clear, this year that day is Friday, August 12th. We’ll kick off around 7 pm, and the televisions will display the baseball match between the Boston Red Sox and Arizona Diamondbacks. We’ll talk about it, and baseball, and beer, and maybe how ridiculous it is that the other TVs in the bar are showing preseason football because who watches those?
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Earlier this week, the Cardinals called up a promising young arm in Alex Reyes, who’s already enjoyed some success out of St. Louis’ bullpen. Another promising young arm is set to debut for the Cardinals tomorrow, as 22-year-old Luke Weaver will get the start against Cubs. What should we expect from him?

One thing we know for certain is that Weaver was undeniably excellent in the minors this year. In 13 starts this year — most of them at Double-A — he pitched to a sparkling 1.30 ERA and 2.11 FIP. He struck out an impressive 28% of opposing batters, while walking fewer than 4%, which is equally impressive. It wasn’t the first time he tasted success either, as he pitched well last season in High-A, albeit with a more underwhelming 21% strikeout rate.
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When I click over to the leaderboards, I see that, right now, Jose Altuve is the major-league leader in wOBA. Which means that, by that measure, Altuve has been baseball’s best hitter, which is absolutely nuts. Not that we didn’t know Altuve was good, but he’s having a Mike Troutian season. Altuve is simultaneously breaking down pitchers and breaking down barriers, and it’s just so much more fun to have him leading the stat than some ordinary muscle-bound giant. It makes us second-guess what’s possible. Lots of things are possible.

Like this. When I click over to the leaderboards, and then significantly drop the minimum number of plate appearances, I see that, right now, the major-league leader in wOBA is Sandy Leon. Unlike Altuve, Leon’s offensive season isn’t “qualified.” So we can’t take it close to so seriously. But you might not understand how ridiculous this is, and you might not understand how critical it’s been for a Red Sox club trying to hang in the race.

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Ben Heller was called up to the big leagues for the first time yesterday. He arrived as a member of the Yankees, having been acquired by New York from Cleveland at the trade deadline as part of the Andrew Miller deal. As luck would have it, the 25-year-old right-hander’s first MLB venue was Fenway Park.

His debut will come elsewhere — the Bombers left Boston without him appearing in the game — and when it does, you can expect to see heat. Heller throws hard. Baseball America rated his fastball tops in the Indians system, and opposing hitters have certainly taken notice. In 45 relief innings this season, Heller has allowed 24 hits and fanned 52 in 45 innings at the Double-A and Triple-A levels.

Heller talked about his game, and the excitement of putting on a big-league uniform for the first time, shortly before taking the field at Fenway. Read the rest of this entry »

In the second half of the double-header between the Twins and Astros today, Chris Devenski will take the mound for the Astros. He owns an 80 mph changeup and a 92 mph fastball, give or take some ticks, and that differential is the fourth-biggest one among starting pitchers since 2014. That fact alone should make his changeup a great one when it comes to whiffs.

We’ve known for a while that movement and velocity differential are important to a changeup, but seeing as how the relatively ineffective John Lamb possesses the league’s second-best differential — and because the changeup works, in no small part, because of its relationship with the fastball — it seems fair to wonder, as someone in my chat did today, if a changeup which features too great a velocity differential might also suffer from ineffectiveness. In theory, an 80 mph changeup might look the nothing like a fastball. And if that’s the case, how could it fool the batter?

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You might not know very much about Travis Jankowski, but he’s just about tied with Bryce Harper in WAR, in half the plate appearances. The bat has been fine, but the defense has been exceptional, and the work on the basepaths has been daring. Just Wednesday, Jankowski pulled off a successful steal of home. As a rule, players don’t really try to steal home. Jankowski has now done it twice. His teammates in San Diego have done it another two times.

That’s four successful steals of home. Here they all are, in one clip:

The last team to record even three steals of home in one season was the 2008 Giants. The last team to reach four was the 1999 Padres, who actually got to five. Jankowski already has two such steals to his name. Wil Myers has also done it, and so did Melvin Upton Jr., before he was dealt. You can see that the Padres have been willing to take some chances.

But really, it’s more than that. It’s not easy to notice, because the Padres as a club this year haven’t been easy to notice. They’re bad, and their own team officials acknowledged after the Drew Pomeranz trade that a return to contention is probably many seasons away. Yet, okay — every team in spring training says one of the goals is to get more aggressive on the basepaths. Typically, nothing comes of it. The Padres have been remarkably aggressive, and they’ve been even more remarkably effective. The Padres have been the best baserunning team in baseball, and it’s not even all that close.

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Without rehashing the baseball-is-dying trope, it should be noted that the television ratings for this year’s All-Star Game took a pretty steep dive. Over the past half-decade, the ratings had held pretty steady, which is actually a positive trend relative to the general decline in television viewership as a whole — as well as the lack of interest in the other major sports’ All-Star contests. While the All-Star game still managed to draw nearly 9 million viewers, that figure also represent a 20% drop from last year’s contest — and seems to indicate that the exhibition lacks some of the draw that the event possessed when major-league broadcasts were few and far between. 

In the grand scheme of baseball viewership, however, the All-Star game appears to represent an anomaly rather than a building trend. Because even as fewer people tuned into the midsummer class than almost ever before, local television ratings, which are up again over last season, indicate that more and more viewers are watching baseball on a regular basis.

Two years ago, the Royals came out of nowhere to make the World Series. Last year, that momentum carried over to viewers as Kansas City led MLB teams in local ratings. After winning the World Series last year, Kansas City is still watching a ton of baseball. Ratings-wise the two teams from Missouri boast the top two spots in baseball, per Forbes.

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St. Louis has added two of their top pitching prospects, Alex Reyes and Luke Weaver, to the big-league club over the last few days. Below are my brief thoughts on both of them as they try to buoy the Cardinals’ shot at a wild-card berth.

The most famous of the two prospects is RHP Alex Reyes. Reyes grew up in New Jersey but moved to the Dominican in December of 2011 in order to reclassify as an international amateur free agent. He signed a year later at the age of 18 for $950,000. In four pro seasons Reyes has dominated every level, from the Appalachian League and above, earning a big-league call-up despite having made just 69 career minor-league starts. He missed the end of last year’s Arizona Fall League and the start of this season due to a suspension for marijuana use.

Reyes sits 94-97 mph during starts but has been up to 101 with movement in short bursts, as he was both during his debut on Tuesday and in the Futures Game. It’ll be a no-doubt 80 fastball as long as he’s pitching in relief which, he told reporters, would be his initial role, and I think it will be an 80 fastball at maturity. Despite his size (Reyes is listed at a laughable 6-foot-3, 175 but is probably closer to 220 and lacks much positive physical projection), we are talking about a player still just shy of his 22nd birthday and short of his physical prime.

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By now, we’re used to seeing once-starters transition to the bullpen and have successful careers. We’re used to the mold. It’s a hard-throwing righty who’s got a fastball and a slider but just can’t master a consistent changeup. He gets moved to the bullpen, he ditches the changeup entirely, he ramps the velocity up a few ticks, and the fastball/slider combo dominates in one-inning bursts. It’s become a rather common career arc. And it’s almost the precise opposite of Jeff Samardzija’s career arc.

After playing football for four years at the University of Notre Dame, Samardzija cracked the big leagues two years after being selected in the fifth round of the 2006 MLB draft, and after four years pitching out of the Chicago Cubs’ bullpen, made the rare reliever-to-starter conversion. Not only that, but he actually reduced his arsenal when he became a starter. Usually, it’s the other way around. So much about Samardzija’s career seems backwards.

From an ESPN article from 2012:

Samardzija was tough against the Atlanta Braves on Monday as he got some much needed distance from a terrible June. Last month he added a curveball into the mix and might have leaned on it a bit too much.

“These last few starts we have been feeling things out, seeing what works and what doesn’t,” said Samardzija, whose next outing will be Saturday at New York. “But I was kind of fed up with walking guys and stuff so I really wanted to get into the zone, and I knew I could get into the zone with my slider.”

Starters-turned-relievers have no qualms with abandoning their problem pitches, because they don’t have to worry about giving batters multiple looks in order to turn over a lineup several times. Every batter a reliever faces, he’s only going to face once, so he trusts his best stuff and lets the hitter have it. Starters do have to worry about multiple looks, and so theoretically, the wider the arsenal, the better, as long as the pitches are effective. Jeff Samardzija used to throw a curveball, but once he transitioned into his starter role, he began to struggle. He identified the curve as being no longer effective, so he ditched it. From August 8, 2012 to July 23, 2016, Jeff Samardzija threw zero curveballs.

In the second inning of Samardzija’s July 24 start in New York against the Yankees, Starlin Castro saw something he couldn’t have possibly expected:

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It seems as though every year we ask the question “Is Player X having the greatest season by a relief pitcher in history?” Craig Kimbrel’s 2012 performance raised the question, as did Wade Davis’ performances both in 2014 and 2015. This year, the guy putting up a season which threatens the record books is Orioles closer Zach Britton.

On April 30th against the White Sox, Britton took the mound in the ninth inning of a tie game. He struck out the first two batters he faced and then twisted his ankle trying to field what ended up being a bunt single for Adam Eaton. Britton had to leave the game due to the injury and the Orioles brought in Vance Worley to replace him. Worley promptly walked a batter before giving up a single which scored Eaton and ultimately lost the game for the Orioles. That was the last earned run Zach Britton allowed. Go ahead and read the first three words of this paragraph again… that’s right, the last earned run Zach Britton allowed was on April 30th.

Three days before that outing against Chicago, Britton yielded a two-out run on an RBI single which was only made possible when the runner on first was able to advance to second via defensive indifference — which itself was only made possible by the Orioles’ three-run lead. To find an earned run that’s clearly attributable to Britton and not injury or strategic circumstances beyond his control, you have to go all the way back to April 11th, his fourth game of the season, when he allowed a home run to Mookie Betts to lead off the ninth.

And there, in two paragraphs, we have relived every single earned run Zach Britton has allowed during the 2016 season — all three of them. Last night, he made his 38th appearance since allowing his last earned run, which moved him into a tie with Brett Cecil and Craig Kimbrel for the longest streak in the Baseball-Reference Play Index era (since 1913). One more outing without allowing an earned run and the record will be all Britton’s.

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