Archive for Daily Graphings

There’s a maddening midseason tradition of realizing April performances have subconsciously impacted our perceptions of players in foolish ways. No matter how many times we tell ourselves that the baseball season is long and small sample sizes are fickle tricksters, we inevitably look up in July to find out that a player written off for dead in April is actually doing quite well, thank you very much. It’s an unavoidable reality that first impressions matter and affect the way we view those around us. The perils of first impressions may have had no bigger victim this season than Ken Giles.

When a team gives up five players to acquire you (and a rookie-ball lottery-ticket-type prospect), expectations are inescapably large. Of course, this is the situation Giles found himself in when the Astros dealt a package of players highlighted by Vincent Velasquez and former #1 overall pick Mark Appel to Philadelphia in order to acquire the flame-throwing relief pitcher. The reason for the steep price Houston paid is that Giles was under team control for another five seasons. Intellectually, the first month of his Astros tenure shouldn’t matter any more or less than the ensuing five years but, realistically, it was inevitable that he’d be under a microscope for that first month.

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Every spring, hopeful starters talk of new pitches with a gleam in their eyes. This changeup will change everything, they think. Then it comes to competitive games, and they don’t want to get beat on their fourth-best pitch, and everything goes back to where it was.

Detroit rookie Michael Fulmer had a similar story. He was flashing a plus changeup in bullpens, but not throwing it much in games. Then something changed, but he’s not sure what. From Anthony Fenech at the Detroit Free Press:

Michael Fulmer doesn’t know what happened.

He threw about 30 change-ups in one of his bullpen sessions before his start against the Rays on May 21 and something clicked.

Now, his catchers keep calling for that change-up.

“Sometimes, I’m shaking away from the change-up and they’re giving it to me again,” Fulmer said. “So, I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll throw it right here,’ and it usually works out, so by them calling it more, it’s giving me more options.”

I published a ranking last week at ESPN of the best pitches thrown by starters. Fulmer’s change doesn’t appear among the top ten. But it does appear 11th overall — and, for him, it’s impressive to see his third pitch turn up as one of the league’s best among starters (judged by z-scores for grounders and whiffs with a double weighting on whiffs).

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Congratulations on your brand-new time machine! Don’t press any buttons just yet. There’s a reason you’ve been given this time machine.

See, A.J. Preller’s done some things, and they’ve been fascinating. Fascinating because, since he took over as general manager of the San Diego Padres nearly two years ago to the day, he’s been like the Two-Face of GMs, just the handsome and less-deformed and evil version. OK, maybe it wasn’t a great analogy.

But there have seemingly been two Prellers! And they’ve each been fascinating in their own right. Preller 1.0 wanted to put a stamp on his new club, wanted to contend right away, and made a flurry of trades in an attempt to do so that now seems ill-advised. Plenty of young, intriguing, cheap talent went out, and plenty of once-enticing-but-not-so-much-anymore, ill-fitting, expensive veteran talent came in. Things didn’t go well, the Padres were bad, and Preller soon reversed course. That first season looked like a disaster, and if the egg wasn’t already directly on Preller’s face, it was at least cooking in the pan.

Since then, Preller’s done a 180. Plenty of that older talent that meant nothing to the Padres’ future has gone back out, and plenty of new, again-intriguing young faces have been brought in. Just as the majority of Preller’s first-wave moves were seen at the time as questionable, the majority of his recent moves have been regarded well. The Craig Kimbrel return was seen as a positive for San Diego. Folks were surprised at what Preller received for Fernando Rodney. Anderson Espinoza is now a Padre. Which brings us to the present. The Padres farm system is starting to look real interesting again. However far back Preller set the Padres with the first year’s moves, he’s been doing his damnedest to make it up.

And so here’s what’s got me interested: you’ve got a time machine, and your goal is long-term success with the Padres. You can erase all of Preller’s moves, pretend he was never even hired, and start over again with the 2014-15 future core players and build from there. Or, alternatively, you can take the ones they’ve got now.

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After having been permanently suspended from baseball for performance-enhancing-drug use, relief pitcher Jenrry Mejia announced this past March that he would be challenging his suspension in court, insisting that he’d been wrongfully accused of using PEDs. Mejia even went so far as to hire an attorney, Vincent White, who levied some pretty serious accusations against Major League Baseball. In particular, White contended that he had discovered evidence that the league had illegally hacked into MLB players’ social-media accounts in order to obtain evidence of their PED usage.

Despite the salacious nature of these allegations, Mejia has, to date, not yet elected to make good on his threat of filing suit against MLB. Mejia’s apparent unwillingness to sue hasn’t stopped his attorney from pursuing a case against the league, however.

This past Monday, White sent out a press release announcing that he would file a new lawsuit against MLB on Thursday, a case that he claimed was based on a “multi year investigation” that would bring to light “corrupt mob-like activity” by the league. Rather than filing the suit on behalf of Mejia, however, it turns out that White is instead representing Neiman Nix, a former 29th-round draft pick of the Cincinnati Reds, who went on to establish both his own baseball training academy, as well as an anti-aging clinic, in Florida.

Nix contends that MLB intentionally interfered with both of these business endeavors, perhaps most notably by subjecting his anti-aging clinic to many of the same, allegedly unsavory investigation techniques that the league used during the midst of the Biogenesis scandal. Nix’s lawsuit thus seeks to hold the league legally responsible for his resulting financial losses.

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The Padres continue to capitalize on the short-term success of their big leaguers by parlaying what might just be small-sample mirages into good prospects. For those of you missed my report on RHP Chris Paddack, who San Diego got from Miami in exchange for Fernando Rodney, that write up is here. The Padres arm du jour is Anderson Espinoza, one of baseball most electric young arms and, in my opinion, a great return for the likes of Drew Pomeranz. Read the rest of this entry »

The All-Star break is often just that — a much-needed break, for players and executives alike. You might’ve heard this before, but the regular season is something of a grind. Yet the break also comes just in advance of the trade deadline, so one can never get too comfortable. And as trades go, today there’s been a big one: Drew Pomeranz is going from the Padres to the Red Sox, and Anderson Espinoza is reportedly going from the Red Sox to the Padres.

Let’s get this out of the way now: The A’s look really silly. They looked silly even before this — Pomeranz was an All-Star! — but Espinoza is a major return, and quite preferable to Yonder Alonso and Marc Rzepczynski. This is a move I’m sure Oakland regrets. There’s another move I’m sure they regret more.

The Oakland part of this is funny. But the Boston and San Diego parts are also interesting, and obviously more relevant. For the Padres, this moves the rebuild forward, getting another boost from the Red Sox farm system. Perhaps the team learned a lesson from last summer’s inactivity. And for the Red Sox, they’ve now picked up one of the only quality starters known to be out there. Pomeranz’s sudden breakout appears to be legitimate. In question is how much he has left in the tank.

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One fact for you: After Tuesday, the American League has won 16 of the past 20 All-Star Games. The National League has won a lousy three, and then there was the silly one. That’s a pretty striking set of results.

Another fact for you: The fact above doesn’t really mean much. Leaving aside all the countless other considerations — we’re talking about 20 games. The Cubs have lost 14 of their past 20 games. The Phillies have won 12 of their past 20 games. The Cubs are a lot better than the Phillies. No one would ever argue that.

A third fact for you: Fans don’t really have league allegiances. It doesn’t really matter to fans which league is better. You just want your team to be good in its league, and then you want to win the last series. There aren’t rival AL and NL street gangs. Differences can exist, and so what.

But, a fourth fact: It’s often said the AL is better than the NL. It long has been. Is it still? It’s an easy thing to check up on, and we are now more than halfway through the season. We can look at things. These have been introductory facts. Let us now consider even more facts.

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The All-Star Game is behind us, the unofficial second half of the season is set to kick off and, today, we present the last installment in our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality. Last time, it was right fielders; this time, catchers. Granular ball-in-play data such as BIP frequencies, exit speed and launch angle are the key inputs in this analysis.

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Over the past few weeks I’ve seen Cleveland Indians prospects in several different places: at the club’s Spring Training complex in Goodyear, Arizona; at the Cal/Carolina League All-Star Game in Lake Elsinore, California; in Wilmington, Delaware; and at the Futures Game in San Diego. Below are my notes on some of Cleveland’s most relevant prospects scouted during this brief window.

Justus Sheffield, LHP, Lynchburg (High-A)

Once primarily a fastball/curveball pitcher, Sheffield’s most used secondary offering now appears to be a slider. His fastball sat 93-95 mph at the Cal/Carolina League All-Star Game in one inning of work and then was 92-94 in his first post-ASG start in Wilmington. Frequently, Sheffield, who is listed at 5-foot-10, fails to get on top of his fastball and the pitch comes in flat and hittable. The slider isn’t totally new — I wrote up Sheffield back in 2014 when it was his fourth option — but, considering how promising the curveball once looked, it’s a bit of surprise that that the slider has become his go-to secondary weapon. It was 84-86, some featured tight, two-plane movement while others were shorter and more cutter-like. It flashed above-average, and I think there’s a chance it could one day be a 55 offering, but was generally fringe-average to average. Sheffield is already trying to run his slider inside on right-handed hitters.

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One of Dino Ebel’s responsibilities as Mike Scioscia’s bench coach is positioning the outfielders. It’s a data-driven task. Ebel — now in his 12th season with the Angels — relies heavily on information provided by the front office and scouting staff. When you see Kole Calhoun move in several steps or Mike Trout shifting into the opposite-field gap, you can be sure it was done with probability in mind.

Ebel explained what goes into positioning the Anaheim outfield prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

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Ebel on positioning the outfield: “We look at spray charts and who is pitching. We look at the last 150 at-bats to the last 1,000 at-bats, or whatever it is they give us. Our front office provides us with a lot of data and we put it all together. We have an in-house guy who does the dots.

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