Archive for Daily Graphings

Let’s take a little stroll through the big-league leaders in strikeout rate. Jose Fernandez. All right. Clayton Kershaw! Of course. Drew Pomeranz. Naturally. Danny Salazar. Predictable. Max Scherzer. Duh. Stephe-wait, rewind. Well I’ll be damned, there he is. Pomeranz, indeed.

Most recently, Pomeranz went into Chicago and struck out 10 Cubs, and eight of them weren’t even John Lackey. And if you think this might just be a case of strikeout fetishizing, Pomeranz owns a 1.80 ERA, and he’s given up just two unearned runs. The peripherals are good, even if the walks are a little bit up. Seven starts in, and Pomeranz looks fantastic. Not bad for a guy who came to camp as a probable reliever. While relatively little has gone right for the Padres, Pomeranz looks like he could be gathering and assembling all of his pieces. It’s either taken a while, or it’s taken no time at all. That’s up to your own perspective.

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Over the course of big-league history, there have been a few hundred no-hitters. There have been 66 occasions of a pitcher hitting multiple homers in one game. Scarcity doesn’t automatically mean a superior accomplishment, but what Noah Syndergaard just did against the Dodgers was extraordinary. His first time up, he hit a home run. His second time up, he hit a home run. The last pitcher to pull this off was Micah Owings in 2007, and Owings was more of a hitter, anyway. Here are the MLB.com highlights. This would be no fun without the highlights.

Not that there’s any such thing as a bad home run, but those were big-boy dingers. Syndergaard jumped on a first pitch, and then he jumped on a two-strike pitch. He gets points for diversity, and he also gets points for dumb luck, since the second homer followed four consecutive shown bunts. Instead of moving the runners a little bit over, he moved them all the way over. Syndergaard drove home all the Mets’ runs. He genuinely pitched and hit them to victory. It was one of the better all-around single-game performances in history, I’m sure.

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Among the many surprises of the 2016 season, the fact that the Blue Jays struggling offense is being carried by good performances from their starting rotation has to rank near the top of the list. Toronto bashed their way to the postseason last year, but with Russell Martin (.185 wOBA) and Ryan Goins (.198 wOBA) giving the team absolutely nothing at the plate this year, the bottom of the Blue Jays order has been a rally-killing black hole. And the lack of offense from those two have put pressure on the rest of the line-up, which means that the continuing struggles of Troy Tulowitzki have been a bit more obvious this year.

Tulo didn’t hit that well after coming over from Colorado in the mid-summer trade last year, but his defense at shortstop allowed him to remain a valuable contributor, and because the team was scoring six runs per night, his lack of offense didn’t seem like a big problem. Now, with the team scoring four runs per game, Tulo’s .172/.275/.336 line is a bit more problematic, and the offensive issues magnify his own struggles. Thankfully for the Blue Jays, there’s one easy sign to point to as reason for hope; Tulo has a .190 BABIP, which ranks 190th out of 194 qualified hitters so far this year. That isn’t going to last, and Tulo’s ability to still hit for some power and draw walks means that he should be a productive hitter once again after that number corrects itself with more time.

But it isn’t true that Tulowitzki’s problems are just bad luck. There are some legitimate reasons to think that age might just be slowing his bat in an irreversible way.

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Major League Baseball’s new slide rule has not been without controversy, both in its creation and in its implementation. Some might feel hard slides are just a part of baseball and need no legislation at all. Those parties have already lost this particular battle. There are those who might like some sort of rule, but feel the new rules are a bit too onerous. Still others might feel the new rule is a good one and should be implemented uniformly (I am in this camp). Those who want the rules tweaked appear to be winning now, though, as MLB seems to be backing off full implementation of the slide rule, perhaps to avoid more controversial plays like those which occurred in April.

In the sixth inning of a tied game on Tuesday between the Detroit Tigers and Washington Nationals, James McCann came to bat with the bases loaded and one out. McCann hit a ground ball that appeared as though it could start a double play, thus ending the Tigers’ threat. Anthony Gose, running from first to second, did this:

This play clearly violates the new slide rule. Gose is not close to the bag at all, never even attempts to touch it or be near to it, and is clearly attempting to break up a possible double play. McCann got down the line quickly enough that he likely would have beat the throw even without the slide, but that fact is immaterial to the new slide rule as it was introduced this offseason.

In the end, the play was reviewed, the replay official deciding it was not a violation. Here’s MLB’s explanation as relayed to MLive (H/T Hardball Talk):

Even though the judgment was that runner failed to engage in a bona fide slide, the Replay Official must still find that the runner’s actions hindered and impeded the fielder’s ability to complete a double play. In the absence of the hindering/impeding element — which is a judgment call — the runner cannot be found to have violated 6.01 (j). The judgment on this one was that there was no hindering or impeding of the fielder.

What we find here is a distortion of the rule and a direct contradiction of the clearly written language in which it was authored. Nowhere in the rule does one find the words hindering or impeding or anything similar. When the Jose Bautista slide ended a game earlier this season season, we went over the rule in great detail. Reading the explanation above, however, it would seem that there are actually two requirements for interference in this situation: first, a failure to execute a bonafide slide and, second, that the runner’s actions actually hindered or impeded the fielder. This is not the rule as written.

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The Red Sox were a fairly popular pick to win the AL East entering this season. The continued maturation of their young position players combined with an improved starting rotation — fronted by big-ticket free-agent acquisition David Price — was the recipe for success.

Here we are, over a month into the campaign, and the Sox are battling the Orioles for the top spot in the division. The offense has been even more potent than expected, with David Ortiz fighting off father time and Xander Bogaerts taking the next step toward stardom. The pitching staff, however — with the exception of knuckleballing savior Steven Wright — haven’t gotten the memo. Price, in particular.

Price enters his start this evening with an AL-worst 6.75 ERA. It’s not like his stuff has evaporated: he still possesses a strong 53/12 strikeout-to-walk ratio, and his swinging-strike rate stands at a career best 14.1%. Today, let’s dig into some granular ball-in-play (BIP) data and draw some conclusions as to whether it’s OK to start worrying about Price.

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The man who threw two no-hitters in a single season just one-upped himself. Max Scherzer was overwhelming on Wednesday night, striking out 20 Detroit Tigers batters without a single walk. It may not have matched the overall brilliance of his 17-strikeout, no-walk, no-hitter against the Mets a little over seven months ago, but this one was every bit as memorable. Although strikeouts have been on the rise for a decade, so too have the limitations on starting pitchers’ workloads, and in an era where aces get shut down in time for the playoffs and others get removed while chasing history, Scherzer went where it was difficult to imagine a man could go again, becoming the fifth pitcher to strike out 20 batters in a nine-inning game.

Scherzer did so by descending upon the strike zone with a reckless abandon. He threw an almost unfathomable 96 strikes in 119 pitches, becoming the first pitcher in recorded history to throw as many strikes in fewer than 125 pitches. His 80.7% strike rate ranks fifth since the beginning of the expansion era in games where the starting pitcher threw at least 100 pitches.

You’re in one of two camps with regard to Scherzer’s performance. You’ve read about it, and you wish you’d seen it, or you saw it, and you want to see it again. I was in the former camp, before I joined the latter. Let’s relive the five most dominant sequences from Max Scherzer’s most dominant game.

No. 5

Miguel Cabrera, first inning, strikeout No. 2

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There’s always a risk that comes with pre-writing. I’m writing this Wednesday afternoon, about Yasiel Puig, even though Puig hasn’t yet begun his game Wednesday night. I can’t know what’s going to happen. Puig might have the game of his life! Or he might hijack a blimp. Life’s a mystery. But what I know is that I’m writing about the Puig who’s batting .235. The Puig with a 78 wRC+ that would very easily stand as a career low. Maybe Puig snaps out of this in between writing and publishing, but what’s happened has most definitely happened, so now, a discussion of that.

You might’ve noticed by now that I take a lot of interest in the way that good hitters get pitched. Puig’s been pitched in a certain way, and it’s remarkably uncomplicated. A couple weeks ago, Dave Roberts said Puig’s been hurt on fastballs in and soft stuff away. Pretty much. And that’s also kind of a traditional blueprint, but it’s been aces against Puig to this point. We have the overall numbers, and we have the idea from the manager. Let’s now get into some deeper evidence.

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This isn’t my own subjective interpretation. When you throw around a word like “favorites,” that opens the door to opinion-based writing, but I have numbers on my side. Sweet, sweet, precious numbers. Look at the following table. You have our preseason projected win totals, and our current projected win totals, which take into account everything that’s happened.

We liked the Astros a lot. Still do, but they’ve done themselves considerable harm. After the Astros, there was a group of four teams, all vying for second or last. The Mariners have emerged through the early going, and now they’re well out in front. Sure, that’s just us, but if it makes you feel any more trusting, PECOTA agrees. Projections still like the Astros, but the Astros are way behind the Mariners, just because of the games in the books. So the Mariners find themselves in a great divisional position. Getting to the point faster: This.

A lot has gone into that picture. Let’s talk.

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Marlon Byrd has been around. Drafted by the Phillies out of Georgia Tech in 1999, the 38-year-old outfielder is in his 15th big-league season. The Indians, who inked him to a contract in March, are his 10th team.

Byrd has never been a star, but he’s had a solid career. His slash line over 6,066 plate appearances is .275/.329/.429 and he’s recorded 504 extra-base hits, including 156 home runs.

Eno Sarris wrote about Byrd a year ago this month, largely through the lens of former teammate Justin Turner. Last week, I caught up to Bryd to get his own perspective on the notable adjustment he made in 2013, and the overall arc of his career.

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Byrd on playing at age 38: “What’s different is that I have more confidence and a higher baseball IQ. It’s knowing instead of trying to figure out. It’s the same process as far as the way I go about my work. I’m just better at it now, because I have more experience.

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A a writer, you typically have an agenda when you approach a major-league hitter in the clubhouse. Literally. Even me! I try to keep it open-ended — and avoid the old “can you talk about how important player X is so that I can finish up my piece on him”-type questions — but I still have a (loose!) narrative sketched around some key stats when I step to a player. It’s called research.

Sometimes, the player has an agenda, too. Maybe that’s wording it too strongly. Sometimes, the player doesn’t want to answer your questions and has something else on his mind. That’s better.

That describes what happened when I talked to Josh Donaldson last night before a game against the Giants. He was obviously thinking about the night before, and when I brought up an old conversation about his two-strike approach, and the deception between Zack Greinke and Paul Konerko, he started talking about pitchers not following the rule book.

I let him run with it.

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