Archive for Daily Graphings

The Orioles have turned some heads with their excellent start to the year. Although they’ve lost their last two games, they’re still 7-2 and have one of the best records in baseball. Naturally, a team projected to finish last in their division doesn’t open the year with seven straight wins without help from some unlikely contributors. Perhaps none of those contributors has been more unlikely than their new outfielder, Joey Rickard. Rickard’s started all nine of Baltimore’s games thus far, and has gotten on base in every one of them. He’s slashing a smooth .306/.325/.472. With a strong spring, Rickard pried playing time away from Korean import Hyun-soo Kim, and he doesn’t appear to be looking back.

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Mark Trumbo is all about distance. The middle-of-the-order Oriole (and erstwhile Angel, D-Back and Mariner) has averaged 29 home runs in his four uninterrupted seasons. Many have been bombs. He has a 475-footer to his credit and 17 of last year’s 22 blasts carried 400 feet or more. His three this year have gone 412, 415 and 428, respectively.

One thing he’s not is a high-on-base guy. A notorious free-swinger, Trumbo has a career 6.5% walk rate and a .302 OBP to go with his .258 batting average and .460 slugging percentage. It’s not that he wouldn’t like to reach base at a healthier clip. His skill set is simply that of a slugger.

Trumbo — hitting .389/.421/.667 on the young season— talked about his game when Baltimore visited Fenway Park earlier this week.

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Trumbo on maturing as a hitter: “I’d like to think I’ve gotten better in a lot of areas. I’ve had one injury-plagued year (2014) — I played half a season — but I was still on pace to drive in over 100 runs. But as far as managing the count and picking spots — being an overall smarter hitter — I’m more advanced than I was my first two or three years in Anaheim.

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There’s no point in lying about what the Phillies are. The fans know the Phillies aren’t going to be very good. The front office knows they aren’t going to be very good. I’m sure even the players understand on some level this team isn’t going to be very good. It’s not about competing in 2016. That’s abundantly clear, and that’s OK, because it’s kind of liberating. Some of the pressure comes off, and you play or watch baseball with development in mind. It’s all about the future, and it’s all about imagining which current players could be a part of a future Phillies contender.

Hello, Vincent Velasquez. It’s not like Velasquez has come out of nowhere or anything, since he was the key to the Ken Giles trade, but he’s been something of a wild card. Velasquez arrived with a lot of uncertainty, just another powerful arm with question marks. Then, Thursday, Velasquez delivered one of the better starts the Phillies organization has seen. By the numbers, that’s not even exaggerating. He was, granted, pitching against the Padres — a Padres lineup without its best hitter — but Velasquez was completely untouchable. Something is becoming clear here in the early going: Velasquez has almost everything working for him.

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Against an admittedly terrible Padres lineup, Vincent Velasquez just pitched the game of his life. No matter how high you are on Velasquez’s potential, you should agree he’ll probably never again finish with such a sparkling line: nine innings, no runs, three singles, no walks, 16 strikeouts. Velasquez was constantly around the zone, but the Padres couldn’t do a thing, and the Phillies allowed Velasquez to get the final out because he hadn’t yet thrown a single pitch under stress. Velasquez didn’t just pitch to that final line; he cruised to it.

It was an incredible, overpowering effort, and I’m going to write more about Velasquez tomorrow. I’ll write more about the game, and more about Velasquez in general. But my favorite part wasn’t how Velasquez worked, or finished. Rather, my favorite part was how he treated Cory Spangenberg. Now, I don’t know if it was by design. But Velasquez wound up facing Spangenberg four times, and he was awfully cruel.

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For some time now, Major League Baseball teams have depended on major revenues from local regional sports networks (RSNs), entities which themselves have depended on cable providers paying high per-subscriber fees to put those networks on the standard-cable tier. This relationship has long prevented fans from watching their local team without paying for a bulky and often expensive cable subscription. MLB.TV blacks out local games to accommodate the relationship and the revenue that comes with it. While it is not full-scale a la carte, Sling TV’s recent announcement that they will carry FOX Sports RSNs on their new offering for $20 per month is a major win for consumers and a way for MLB to keep their product relevant to those who do not subscribe to traditional cable — frequently a younger demographic that MLB desires.

MLB.TV is a very good product that streams out-of-market games. The announcement last fall that in-market streaming would be available to cable subscribers represented a small step for fans who increasingly consume the game digitally. What was missing, however — and has been missing for years — is a digital option to watch local games without also having to subscribe to a local cable provider. We’re certainly not all the way there, but the newest offering from Sling TV is a big step in the right direction, and a very good compromise for those who do not want to pay for traditional cable.

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Inevitably, after just a week and change’s worth of games, we find players on teams that have gotten off to slow starts saying things about how it’s just April, and win-loss records don’t matter too much. Outward optimism is sort of a prerequisite if you’re a professional athlete — whether you truly feel it or not — but there’s no doubt the majority of players who make these comments most likely believe them. It is early, and there’s plenty of time left in the season. But, as Jeff pointed out this week, the games matter! Playoff odds have changed. For the Braves, they never really had a shot to begin with, so starting 0-8 doesn’t change too much. But for the Minnesota Twins, their longshot campaign to make the playoffs this season has taken a faceplant.

Let’s talk about the Twins first, as they’re the big story here, and the American League Central is likely to be one of the most competitive divisions in baseball this season. Though our projections liked (and still like) Cleveland’s team this season, the Royals have declared war on those projections, and the Tigers and White Sox have built interesting teams with upside. That is true to some extent for the Twins as well: they’re building for the future, sure, but they also have some intriguing breakout candidates who could theoretically propel them into contention in a division that doesn’t have a clear-cut top dog. Those are the makings of a potentially great four- or five-way division battle throughout the season! Or else, that was the idea until now, eight games into the season, when the Twins find themselves 0-8. Here’s what that has done to their potential playoff odds (click on the image for a larger version):

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It’s funny — a couple months back, Jeff did a little study on the teams about which we’ve written the most and least. At the time of his study, we’d written fewer articles about the Twins than any other team, since 2008. And I’d bet a good chunk of those articles were about the Twins’ pitching staff, and their avoidance of strikeouts, or something similar along those lines. Well, here’s a new Twins article! And, guess what, it’s about strikeouts again!

Except, well:

I’m sorry it has to be this way, Minnesota.

In case it’s not clear, those aren’t just the top two names on the strikeout leaderboard of Twins batters with at least 20 plate appearances this season, those are the top two names on the strikeout leaderboard of all batters with at least 20 plate appearances this season. Miguel Sano is sixth. Eddie Rosario is 15th. Things haven’t gone particularly well for the Twins thus far. They’re 0-8.

And I suppose this post could be about Byron Buxton, or collectively all those names I named, but I don’t meant to pile on. Sano will be just fine, and his strikeout rate really isn’t that much higher than we’d expect it to be. Rosario just isn’t particularly interesting. Buxton’s struck out 13 times and walked zero in 25 plate appearances, and actually, that should probably have its own post, but I’ve already done all this research on Park, so this is what you’ve got for now. Someone will get to Buxton soon enough. Let’s talk about Byung-ho Park, who’s struck out exactly as often as he hasn’t.

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Unless you’ve been following the Yankees this year, there’s a decent chance you have no idea who Ronald Torreyes is. That’s understandable. I’ve been monitoring him for a while, but that’s only because I spend an inordinate amount of time parsing through minor-league data to identify players like him: players who are way, way off the prospect radar, but who project to be impact big leaguers.

Torreyes is off to a torrid start this year. In limited action with the Yankees, the 23-year-old infielder is hitting .667/.667/1.000. That’s a 401 wRC+. In nine trips to the plate, he has two singles, a double, a triple and only one strikeout. I know: small sample, blah, blah, BABIP, blah, blah. But Torreyes’ first nine plate appearances have been about as good as it gets.

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Over the last few years, we’ve done a random collection of events in cities around the country, usually calling them something like FanGraphs Live. We’d get a few of our staff members together to hang out with a bunch of our readers, spend a few hours talking baseball, and generally have a great time. We always meant to do more of them, but the logistics of finding places to host the events always served as something of a barrier, so they ended up being scheduled sporadically.

Well, for those who were hoping for more of these kinds of events, we have some good news. We’ve teamed up with the guys behind the Pitch Talks series, and as they roll out their baseball speaker series across the U.S., we’re going to be pretty heavily involved, with our writers as part of the show and friends of FanGraphs joining in for some fun discussions. I was up in Toronto for the two year anniversary show last week, and it was a blast, with roughly 600 Blue Jays fans packing out a music venue for a few hours of fantastic discussion and mildly-drunken banter about the game we all love. We are really looking forward to helping bring that kind of fun to more cities around the U.S.

For the first stop on the tour this summer, we’re coming to Boston.

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Based on what was happening in my Twitter feed, scouts drooled over few players in spring training quite like they drooled over Adam Conley. My memory might be exaggerating things, but I know that Conley was getting a fair bit of hype. Now, the problem was that there’s not much meaningful analysis we’re able to do with spring-training performance, especially those that take place in Florida, away from any PITCHf/x instrumentation. But, wouldn’t you know it? Conley just pitched well on Wednesday in New York, nearly beating the Mets. You want to talk a little bit about Adam Conley? Let’s talk a little bit about Adam Conley. That way we can at least get him on our collective radar.

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