Archive for Daily Graphings

Jason Coats has had an unremarkable career thus far. In eight games with the White Sox, the rookie outfielder has one hit in 15 at-bats. He’s basically a spare part. An unheralded former 29th-round pick, he’s ridden the pine since getting his lone base knock a week ago today.

Of course, everything in life is relative. What qualifies as unremarkable to some could be unforgettable to another. Coats has had a pair of those moments in his short time with Chicago. The more recent of them came at Fenway Park.

Hitless in his first 12 big-league at-bats, Coats stepped up to the plate against Boston southpaw Eduardo Rodriguez and smoked a pitch to deep right field. Soaring beyond the reach of Mookie Betts, the ball one-hopped the short fence into the bleachers, not far from the visiting bullpen.

As the ball was caroming, Coats was motoring.

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Who is the best hitter in the National League? The easy and “right” answer, insomuch as one exists, is Bryce Harper, as we’re mere months removed from watching him put up the best season at the plate by a 22-year-old since Ted Williams. But with Harper currently producing at the plate at a rate more comparable to guys like Odubel Herrera and Stephen Piscotty, it’s natural to ponder the question: “If not Harper, then whom?”

There are a few viable candidates but two who stick out are the only two National League players other than Harper to post a wRC+ above 150 since 2014: Paul Goldschmidt, who has been consistently elite with the bat for four seasons now and, the subject at hand, 26-year-old superstar, Anthony Rizzo.

In the previous sentence, you could argue I threw around the word “superstar” a bit cavalierly. It’s a word from which I tend to shy away because it’s so incredibly subjective as to be functionally meaningless. I don’t know that there are more than two players in the game right now – Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw – who are labeled “superstars” with anything resembling universal agreement. Anthony Rizzo certainly wouldn’t receive universal billing as a “superstar.” I don’t know if he’s a superstar by your definition – shoot, I just paired him with that term and I’m not completely convinced he’s a superstar by my own subjective definition – but I do know this: Anthony Rizzo is an extraordinarily talented baseball player and, so far this year, he’s putting up what looks like the best season of his major-league career.

He has set or matched his career high in most key offensive rate stats from on-base percentage to wOBA to strikeout and walk rates. But not only is he putting together a strong season by his own standards, his stats stand out in comparison to his competition in the National League:

There are a variety of different ways to go about building a prototype for an ideal hitter, but a great starting point would be a guy doing exactly what Rizzo is doing right now: exhibiting plate discipline, getting on base, and hitting for power. That’s an impressive trifecta — and, at the core of that offensive profile, lies the key improvements Rizzo has made.

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The Indians have won 10 games in a row! That’s really good, and it’s allowed them to storm out in front in the American League Central. Sure, things can change in a hurry — 10 games ago, the Indians and the Royals were tied. But there’s no sense in just dismissing whole hot streaks, and the Indians now have one of the better records in baseball. For a few years, they’ve gotten some preseason stat hype, and now they resemble an actual contender. A contender that, mind you, has been doing almost all of this without Michael Brantley. Not bad.

I wrote last week about how the Indians’ patchwork outfield has overachieved. That’s been a part of this success. Of course, the rotation has also been critical, and now it looks like even Trevor Bauer might be figuring something out. On the bases, the Indians have been remarkably good, so that’s a quiet strength of theirs. I want to take this opportunity to call attention to another. For a while, the Indians were known for being horrible in the field. Last season, they turned that around. This season, they’ve been up to something special.

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Mike Trout is, once again, the league leader in position-player WAR, and league leaders in position-player WAR tend to do some incredible things. Trout just did an incredible thing on Monday, and we should talk about it. With two strikes, against Collin McHugh:

No, you didn’t see that wrong. Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, because memories are notoriously unreliable, but the thing about eyewitnesses is that they witness things once. You can witness this as many times as you want. Loop it over and over and over again. This pitch. It went for a dinger.

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When Cole Hamels arrived in the major leagues, he had a 90 mph fastball, decent command, and what would prove to be baseball’s best changeup. That’s a few bucks short of an ace, and so, in two of his first four seasons, he produced an ERA over four and maybe was looking for something.

Now, instead of having one elite pitch, the Rangers’ ace is the only starting pitcher in baseball to possess four pitches in the top ten by whiff rates (minimum 200 thrown). That’s a long way from a pitch and a half. The fixes were simple, though, and he ran me through them before a recent game with the Athletics.

The Fastball
Here’s a graph that doesn’t follow normal aging curves: Hamels’ fastball velocity. Note that he was 26 years old in 2010.

Instead of going down steadily, the curve has gone up. We could wonder why, but we don’t have to — Hamels can tell us himself. Turns out, Hamels had back problems when he came up — a herniated disc — and he finally was able to do something about it once he got a major-league contract. “I hired a chiropractor, and for the past few years, I have one that travels with me and works on me the day before the game and right after the game,” Hamels told me.

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Saturday is July 2, which marks the start of the 2016-2017 International Free Agent Signing Period. Most people in the industry are now simply referring to it as “J2” because “International Free Agent Signing Period” is a bit of a mouthful and because, as one Scouting Director put it, “that’s what all the kids are calling it now.”

Much has been written here at FanGraphs and in other spaces about J2, its rules and the ways teams try to circumvent them. If you’re unfamiliar with the process and its nooks and crannies — or if you just want a refresher before diving into this week’s content — here is a summary of the basic rules and regulations:

International players who are already 16 years old, or will be by Sept. 1 of 2016 (or the applicable year), are now eligible to sign with teams unless they’re old enough (23) and have the requisite experience (five years) in a foreign professional league to be declared an open-market free agent, the way Yoenis Cespedes was and Yulieski Gourriel will be.

A given J2 period runs from July 2 through June 15 of the following year, at which point there’s a two-week moratorium on any deals before the next signing period begins. Per the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, each team receives its own bonus pool, a cap on how much money the organization can spend on players during each signing period. Pool amounts are distributed much in the same way as they are for the domestic amateur draft in June and teams’ pools are based largely on their records from the previous season, with worse teams receiving more money to spend. Teams can acquire more bonus money — up to 50% of their original pool amount — via trade.

Here is a rundown of this year’s pool amounts.

If a team spends more than their pool amount, they are taxed at 100% of the overage and, if the overage exceeds 15% of their cap, are barred from signing a player to a bonus exceeding $300,000 during the next two signing periods. If a club goes over, but not by more than 15%, they must take a one-year hiatus.

Teams that are in that “penalty box” include:

2016-2017
Dodgers, Giants, Cubs, Royals, Diamondbacks, Angels, Rays, Yankees, Red Sox and Blue Jays

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Lucas Giolito was once the 2012 draft’s odds-on first-overall selection. As he began his senior season at Harvard-Westlake, Giolito was seen as the most talented player in a draft class that included Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa. It would have made him the first and only high-school righty to be selected at 1.1 in the draft’s history. But then Giolito felt discomfort in his elbow during the first inning of an early-March start (he was up to 100 mph and had thrown a one-hitter the start before) and removed himself from the game in the second.

An MRI revealed damage to Giolito’s UCL but not so much that he would require immediate ligament reconstruction. Despite that, Giolito’s season was over and so, too, were his chances of going first overall. As the draft approached and the Astros, who possessed the first pick, shifted their focus toward Correa and other prospects (including Giolito’s teammate Max Fried), the industry wondered when and where Giolito would be selected. There wasn’t much precedent at the time for pre-draft UCL injuries and Giolito’s stock remained volatile until very late in the process. He was still being mocked within the top-five picks into late May.

The Nationals drafted Giolito 16th overall and signed him, at the deadline, for $2.925 million, exactly $800,000 over the pick’s slot value at that time and about $300,000 more than the slot’s value in 2016. Giolito threw two innings for the Nationals’ GCL team on August 14th of that year. On August 31st, Dr. Lewis Yocum fixed his elbow.

Giolito returned 10 months later, especially notable considering that effective Tommy John rehabilitations generally require 12-18 months. It has been almost exactly three years since Giolito made his first post-TJ start and his stuff has returned to pre-surgery levels.

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Ben Smith has a 21.21 ERA in three appearances for the Tri-City Valley Cats. All told, the 23-year-old southpaw has allowed 19 base-runners and 15 runs in 4.2 innings for Houston’s short-season affiliate.

There’s a lot more to his story than numbers.

Smith will be watching this week’s College World Series with interest. The school out of which he was drafted in 2014, Coastal Carolina, is a surprise participant in the championship round. Several of the Chanticleers are former teammates, and he expects to be “sneaking into the locker room a couple of times” each night to follow their fairy-tale quest for a title.

The fact that the lanky left-hander is playing baseball is a real-life success story of its own.

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In 1990, Rickey Henderson came to the plate in the leadoff spot 588 times (out of 594 total plate appearances). He hit 28 homers out of that slot, walking 95 times and striking out just 60, en route to a .326/.439/.579 line as Oakland’s No. 1 hitter. He also stole 65 bases and was caught on just 10 attempts. All told, he produced a 10.2-WAR season that has since been eclipsed by only three position players: Barry Bonds, Cal Ripken, and Mike Trout.

Henderson’s 190 wRC+ mark in 1990 has been topped by a small handful of batters in the meantime, too: Bonds a bunch of times, Jeff Bagwell Mark McGwire. Bryce Harper did it last year, and Frank Thomas did, too, in the strike-shortened 1994 season. None of them provided such production out of the leadoff spot, however. By most criteria, it’s the greatest hitting season by a leadoff batter in history.

It will likely remain the greatest season by a leadoff batter after the 2016 campaign, as well. That said, Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter is making a strong case for second-best.

In terms of pure value at the plate, Matt Carpenter is off to a great start. Carpenter’s .300/.419/.585 line has led to a .419 wOBA and a 167 wRC+ that leads the National League and is behind only David Ortiz in all of major-league baseball*. Over the last 365 days, Carpenter’s 154 wRC+ mark sits behind only Ortiz, Trout, Josh Donaldson, Harper, and Joey Votto, and his .277 ISO is the seventh best in baseball. Continued production at that level would give him one of the greatest-hitting leadoff seasons of all time.

*Numbers current as of Monday afternoon.

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It’s raining prospects. The prospect gods gave us Brandon Nimmo and A.J. Reed over the weekend, and today we’re treated with another prospect debut: hard-throwing righty Lucas Giolito. The former first-rounder will take the hill for the Nationals in tonight’s game against the New York Mets.

Giolito pitched exclusively at the Double-A level this year, where he posted a 3.22 FIP and a 23% strikeout rate. That performance is nothing to sneeze at, especially coming from a 21-year-old, but it’s a tad underwhelming when held against his numbers from prior seasons. Giolito showed an exceptional penchant for missing bats at the low minors, but he hasn’t been quite as prolific since he was promoted to Double-A last July. He posted a 29% strikeout rate in 168 innings in A-Ball between 2014 and 2015, but saw that figure dip below 23% in his 118 Double-A innings. His walk rate also ticked up upon reaching the Double-A level.

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