Archive for Daily Graphings

One year ago today, the Texas Rangers were 43-48, in third place in the American League West Division. The first-half bullpen looked terrible. Neftali Feliz started the year as the club’s closer and pitched himself right onto the disabled list and right out of town. Tanner Scheppers imploded. Anthony Bass threw more first-half relief innings than anyone, is maybe all you need to know. As a unit, the Rangers relief corps had a 4.38 ERA, a 4.48 FIP, and were in serious need of a shot in the arm if the club wanted to make a second-half run.

So, general manager Jon Daniels and the Texas front office identified a weakness and acquired right-hander Sam Dyson from Miami and left-hander Jake Diekman from Philadelphia, alongside Cole Hamels. Dyson and Diekman, paired with then-closer Shawn Tolleson and the emerging Keone Kela, formed a quartet that led a remarkable turnaround for the Texas bullpen. In the second half, Rangers relievers went from a 4.38 ERA to a 3.79. From a 4.48 FIP to a 3.98. From a bottom-five unit to a top-five unit. The team went 45-26 the rest of the way to launch themselves into the playoffs, and while the bullpen improvement wasn’t the entire reason why, it was certainly a large component.

Fast-forward to the present. The Rangers are in better standing than they were a year ago! Much better. They’re 55-40, and, according to our playoff odds, they’re looking at a better-than 50% chance to win their division with roughly a 70% chance to make the playoffs, one way or another. But lately, things haven’t been going well, and regarding the root of the struggles, the Rangers are experiencing déjà vu.

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Aroldis Chapman closed on Monday, and he threw some pitches incredibly hard. Now, on its own, that’s nothing new. That’s kind of his whole deal. Aroldis Chapman threw baseballs hard. The crow perched in the tree behind me was earlier literally flying in the sky. The world is amazing. But then, Chapman’s pitches were unusually hard, at least. Even by his own insane standards. He was buzzing 105 miles per hour, and other pitchers just don’t do that. Chapman was throwing pitches the likes of which we’ve barely ever seen.

So some attention is warranted. In response to Chapman’s outing, Dave asked how hitters have done and behaved against A++ heat. What’s happened when Chapman has thrown around his own personal maximum? I’ve done research. It’s all spit out for you below.

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Over the last few weeks in this space, we’ve been evaluating regular position players’ contact quality utilizing granular data such as plate appearance outcome frequencies, exit speed and launch angle. (Catchers represented the last installment in that series.) Over that time, players not included in our original analysis have overtaken previous incumbents in terms of total plate appearances. Today, we’ll add players who did so as of July 4 to the mix. Next time, we’ll look at newly qualified pitchers.

The data examined today runs through July 4. Players are separated by league, and are listed in Adjusted Production order. Adjusted Production expresses, on a scale where 100 equals average, what a hitter “should have” produced based on the exit speed/launch angle of each ball put in play. Each player’s Adjusted Contact Score, which weeds out the strikeouts and walks and states what each player should have produced on BIP alone, is also listed. Here goes:

Most of the column headers are self-explanatory, including average BIP speed (overall and by BIP type), BIP type frequency, K and BB rates, wRC+ and Adjusted Production, which incorporates the exit speed/angle data. Each hitter’s Adjusted Contact Score (ADJ C) is also listed. Adjusted Contact Score applies league-average production to each hitter’s individual actual BIP type and velocity mix, and compares it to league average of 100.

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Carlos Correa placed second last week on the trade-value list that Dave Cameron puts together every season. That placement seemed to surprise some, given that Correa is having a very good, but not great season. Correa’s 120 wRC+ is hardly spectacular, even if that number increases to 150 if you start with the latter part of May. He has improved over the last few months, but even with that improvement, the placement might seem high. What definitely seemed high was Correa’s ZiPS projections over the next five years, starting at 7.9 WAR next season and totaling more than 40 wins from ages 22 to 26. Cameron, too, was surprised, and in the comments, his explanation caught my eye:

I was shocked by the Correa forecast myself, and asked Dan to double check that there wasn’t an error in the code or something, given how bullish it is on Correa’s future. But Dan said the system just loves Correa, as the history of guys who can hit like this at 20/21 in the big leagues is almost universally fantastic. The age really is the key thing to keep in mind here; it’s easy to forget how big of a leap guys can make early on, and at 21, there’s still a lot of room for growth.

Carlos Correa is currently in the midst of his age-21 season, and he’s accumulated 820 career plate appearances. Over the last 100 years, only 59 players have received at least 800 plate appearances before the end of their age-21 season and then eventually made their way to a Hall of Fame ballot. One finds that — without regard for how they played or for how long — an astonishing 36% (21) of those players eventually made in the Hall Of Fame. If you move the bar up to 1,000 plate appearances, 21 of 44 players are in the Hall of Fame. Of more recent players, it looks like that trend might continue. Edgar Renteria, Starlin Castro, and Elvis Andrus probably will not make the Hall of Fame and Justin Upton and Jason Heyward have a ways to go, while Alex Rodriguez, Ivan Rodriguez, Miguel Cabrera, Adrian Beltre, and Andruw Jones all have at least decent statistical cases.

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Baseball schedules aren’t totally balanced. They get most of the way, but they’re well short of perfect, part by accident, and part by design. At this point, every team in baseball has something like 70 games left before the start of the playoffs. Among the remaining team schedules, it looks like the Pirates have the easiest one. The Yankees, meanwhile, would appear to have the hardest one. Good for the Pirates. Bad for the Yankees.

You can leave now if you want. You’ve already got two pieces of information, and I’m not one to mess around with you. Imagine all the time you could save! But maybe you want to see the rest of the landscape. Maybe you want a bit of an explanation. It’s your call — I’m writing this now no matter what. I’m also now moving to the next paragraph.

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Matt Shoemaker dominated the White Sox this past Saturday. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim right-hander threw a complete-game, six-hit shutout while walking no one and striking out a season high 13. Per Brooks Baseball, 58 of the 114 pitches Shoemaker threw were splitters, 49 were either two- or four-seam fastballs, and seven were sliders.

The splitter usage jumps out even more than the pitching line. Shoemaker throws his signature offering 35% of the time — the most of any starter — but Saturday’s 50%-plus ratio was akin to that of relievers like Koji Uehara, Hector Neris and Zach Putnam. A heavy diet of splitters for nine innings is highly atypical.

Just last month, Jeff Sullivan wrote about Shoemaker’s increased reliance on the pitch, and how it has helped him to elevate his game. Intrigued by the article, and having recently written about Putnam, a longtime friend of Shoemaker’s, I went directly to the source for further information. It turns out that the splitter is only part of the reason he’s been pitching as well as he has.

Shoemaker, who has a 2.37 ERA over his last 11 starts, shared his thoughts on the subject in early July.

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Shoemaker on upping his mental game: “The biggest thing for me has been a mental adjustment. There are small mechanical things I’ve worked on in bullpens, like trying to keep my weight back, but it’s more of a mental thing. Every time I go out there, I need to have good intent with every pitch. Every one needs to have a purpose. When you focus that way, you’re more aggressive and there’s more behind the ball. There’s no fussing around.

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Nearly a month ago to the day, Dave Cameron wrote an article for this very site praising the Washington Nationals for their patience regarding Trea Turner’s place as the club’s shortstop of the future, in deference to veteran Danny Espinosa. Espinosa had hit well up to that point, and has long graded not only as a plus defender at a premium position, but as a plus base-runner as well. In other words, Espinosa’s play at short was as good or better than what could’ve been reasonably expected from the rookie Turner, validating the team’s decision to hold Turner down in the minors for further development and/or for service time reasons.

Since that post was published, Espinosa’s been on fire. He’s essentially had the best 20-game offensive stretch of his career, putting up a 144 wRC+ over 79 plate appearances, and if it wasn’t clear already that Turner wouldn’t be taking over shortstop anytime soon, it is now. Espinosa is in no position to lose his job. Neither is Daniel Murphy, the club’s second baseman (the only other position at which Turner had played at the time of Cameron’s article), who’s arguably been the National League’s best hitter.

Turner couldn’t appear more blocked, which is why, even though he was recalled from the minors two weeks ago when Ryan Zimmerman hit the disabled list, manager Dusty Baker offered the following quote:

“Right now, there’s no real place for Trea to take.”

Except, something else has happened since the publication of Cameron’s article. Turner began to learn the outfield. He made his center-field debut in Triple-A on June 27, and started six games in center before his recall to the majors. He worked with minor-league outfield coordinator Gary Thurman on deep routes, playing balls off the wall and reading spin. He went errorless in his six games and recorded an outfield assist to third base following an overthrown caught stealing attempt at second.

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Less than a month ago, the Washington Nationals called up top prospect Lucas Giolito, with the hopes that he’d fill a hole in their rotation. However, as often happens with promising young pitchers, Giolito looked a bit overmatched in his first taste of the big leagues. He recorded more walks than strikeouts in his two starts with Washington, and was subsequently sent back to the minors to further refine his breaking stuff. Giolito will surely be back sooner rather than later, and still appears to have a bright future ahead of him. For now, though, the Nationals are turning to another electric young arm: hard-throwing 22-year-old Reynaldo Lopez debuts tonight against the Dodgers.

Lopez was signed out of the Dominican back in 2012, and his stuff has landed him on top-100 prospect lists for a couple of years now. But up until this season, he his minor-league performance hadn’t quite matched up with his stuff for any extended period. He spent the 2015 season in the High-A Carolina League, where he posted a mediocre 4.09 ERA. His peripherals suggest he pitched much better than that, but his 23% strikeout rate still underwhelmed.

He opened 2016 at the Double-A level, and soon began missing bats at a rate commensurate with his stuff. His 30% strikeout rate is tops among qualified Double-A pitchers this year. He also managed to keep his walk rate under 8%. Though he wasn’t super sharp in his two most recent starts at the Triple-A level, the body of Lopez’s 2016 campaign bodes well for his future in the bigs.

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Every baseball player has bad days — it’s an inevitability in a sport so deeply tied to failure. For the most part, these failures are quickly dismissed and/or forgotten. A rough seven-run outing for a pitcher is a day when he just didn’t have “it” or batted balls had eyes. An 0-for-4 game at the plate is barely a hiccup in the span of a 162-game season. But, on occasion, there are days so bad that they elicit sympathy from even the most hardened baseball fans. You know the ones I’m talking about, the games that make you cringe when you check a box score. The games like the one Andrew McCutchen had on Sunday.

It wasn’t all McCutchen’s fault. Eighteen-inning games are freaks of nature which result from a convergence of a great many (un)lucky coincidences. If Mark Melancon had thrown a different pitch to Daniel Murphy in the ninth inning, McCutchen’s day may have ended up much differently. If any hitter for either the Pirates or Nationals had executed just one more quality swing earlier in the game, McCutchen could have been spared. But none of those things happened and, instead, McCutchen stepped to the plate eight times on Sunday and failed to reach base even once.

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Earlier today I wrote about how the Braves should feel motivated to trade Julio Teheran, given all of the circumstances of the market. I believe what I said in that post, and I do think that, from a rational perspective, the time now is right to sell Teheran while he’s cruising. That all being said, this is sports, and at the core of this whole endeavor, there are fans, fans driven mostly by emotions. You know who likes Julio Teheran? Braves fans. You know who likes young, home-grown, up-and-coming players? Fans of teams like the Braves. Sure, it makes sense to sell high on Teheran. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. Losing sucks, and it makes a team do sucky things.

One way to feel better about this stuff, though, is to shift focus. Teheran has been a good young pitcher on a team that hasn’t had enough good young players. That’s part of why trading him would be painful. He’s not alone, however. There’s been a little bit of concern over who would start the game to open the new park next year, if Teheran goes away. Looks like there could be a fine internal option. If you want to think about the next No. 1 of the Braves, might I interest you in Mike Foltynewicz?

Foltynewicz has been a prospect for a long time because of his big and powerful fastball. Like many pitchers known mostly for big and powerful fastballs, Foltynewicz has a history of throwing an insufficient number of strikes. He was a part of the Astros’ trade for Evan Gattis, and back then, it was unclear whether Foltynewicz would be a starter or a reliever. He’s been with the Braves now for a year and a half.

To get to the point fast, two tables. One metric I like to play around with is a pitcher’s rate of pitches thrown while ahead in the count. Sure, strike rate works fine enough, but I like thinking in these terms. Let’s look at Foltynewicz’s last few seasons.

Foltynewicz was traded in January 2015. Before that, in the upper levels with the Astros, Foltynewicz threw a below-average rate of pitches while ahead in the count. As a Brave, Foltynewicz has moved forward, and he’s done so this year in a big way. How big? Well:

This is just a snapshot in time, and between now and the end of the year, some numbers will shift around, but here you see Foltynewicz in the big-league lead. He’s thrown a greater rate of pitches while ahead in the count than anybody else, given the same role, and when you do that you give yourself a hell of an advantage. Foltynewicz keeps hitters on the defensive, and he’s doing this as a starter, a starter who the other day lasted 107 pitches. This isn’t the guy the Astros traded. This is a guy that guy could’ve become, but usually, pitchers stop short of developing this successfully.

It’s not like he’s an ace now. There’s polishing yet to be done, as Foltynewicz looks to get hitters to more often expand their zones. As has been the case for a while, he could stand to improve the secondary stuff. And! Bone chips. Foltynewicz is pitching with bone chips. But just look at where things are: Foltynewicz is a 24-year-old who can buzz triple digits, and he’s now frequently getting ahead in the count. More than ever before, Mike Foltynewicz is looking like he’s in command. The Braves have been collecting big arms with big risks. Here’s one that’s working out.