Last month, the Indians selected Brady Aiken with the 17th overall pick of the amateur draft. There’s a distinct possibility that several of the sixteen teams that passed on the southpaw will someday regret doing so. They all might regret it. Aiken arguably has the best raw talent of any player taken.

When he’s healthy.

Aiken is, of course, recovering from Tommy John surgery. What’s curious – at least to me – is that so many teams were seemingly scared away by that fact. This year’s draft was viewed as sub par, and Aiken went first-overall in 2014. The Astros not signing him made sense at the time – and their medicals were proven right – but the elbow fears are now in the rear-view. He’s already gone under the knife.

A full recovery from Tommy John surgery isn’t guaranteed, but chances are good that the 18-year-old will come back strong. Indians scouting director Brad Grant expects exactly that, based on precedent. Read the rest of this entry »

The first thing you learn about following sports is that there’s nothing more important than the standings. Wins and losses are everything. They control how you feel about a team, and they control how you feel about the individual players. They determine whether a team will be in contention for a championship, and as far as people believe, when they first get into this, it’s all about titles. It’s not, but that realization comes down the road.

Something you learn later on is that, yeah, the standings are important, but they might not be predictive. It’s fun when your team has a bunch of wins, but that doesn’t guarantee a bunch of future wins to follow. Sports fans are always doing what they can to try to tell the future. No one can ever do well, but you can do better or worse.

Future-telling is the goal of projection systems. You could argue, maybe, the goal is to estimate a player or team’s true talent at a moment in time, but true talent is virtually indistinguishable from expected future performance. Projections are everywhere in baseball analysis. Even when the word itself isn’t used, observers are always making educated guesses about what’s going to happen, which is a form of projecting. Official projection systems formalize it.

People have some trust issues with projections. Humans always want to believe they’re smarter than human-designed machines or systems, and they especially distrust projections when they show something different from what’s already happened. When projections are at odds with evidence, projections are given funny looks. It’s perfectly natural, yet it leaves projections always needing to be validated. In this article, let’s consider projections. And let’s consider wins and losses. And let’s consider what matters more, if we’re trying to look ahead.

A little over a month ago, I tried a project. I had, in my possession, 10 years of preseason team projections. The season was also about two months old, so I reviewed the previous 10 years of baseball, around the two-month mark. I was curious what was a better predictor of the next four months: team performance over the first two months, or preseason team projection. As it turned out, the projections fared quite a bit better. After two months, you’re better off keeping the same opinion of a team you had in March.

Here, I want to do something similar. But there are two twists.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

On Wednesday night, Alex Gordon strained a groin muscle chasing a fly ball. If you just adjusted in your seat, I don’t blame you — it sounds painful. He’ll be out for eight weeks, which is better news than the team could have received. If the Royals can hold the fort down until then, they just may have him back in time for the stretch run. Of course, injuries don’t always follow a defined timetable, so we’ll see. Still, there’s hope Gordon can come back. That’s better than nothing. The question is, though: how will they absorb his loss?

For now, they are going to roll with Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando. This isn’t a bad plan! As I’ve discussed in the past, Dyson is worthy of a starting position. His defense is still top notch. Here’s a reminder:

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Miguel Sano is off to quite the start to his big-league career. The hulking 22-year-old is hitting .385/.500/.577 through his first eight games with Minnesota, and has reached base in all but one of those contests. His 205 wRC+ is the 11th highest in baseball in the month of July, and he’s provided a significant boost to the middle of the Twins lineup.

Sano’s major-league career may be only a week old, but he’s been in the limelight for years now. He was seen as a generational talent when the Twins signed him as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican back in 2009. And the controversy surrounding his signing inspired Peletero — one of baseball’s best and most well-known documentaries.

Once his signing was finally completed and documented, Sano proceeded to punish minor-league pitching. Between 2010 and 2013, he mashed .279/.372/.567 as an infielder, with most of his reps coming at third base. Sano had some trouble making contact, as evidenced by his 26% strikeout rate, but he more than made up for it with his mammoth power. On the strength of his 80-grade raw power, his isolated-power figures (ISOs) were consistently near or above .300, which frankly doesn’t happen all that often. All in all, Sano was always among the very best hitters in his league, despite being much younger than his competition.

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The funny thing about being a phenom is you don’t really have to be phenomenal. Last season Mookie Betts was both exceptional and therefore the exception to that when he put up a 130 wRC+ in 52 games for the Boston Red Sox. He stole bases, he hit home runs, and he played center field after a life spent in the middle infield. He was your basic run-of-the-mill young star. But even young stars often struggle eventually, so this season figured to be somewhat of a learning process for the 22-year-old center fielder.

Betts didn’t disappoint at being disappointing. After a solid opening week that featured him almost single-handedly beating the expected best team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, in the home opener, Betts faltered. On June 10 — exactly one month ago for those of you without calendars — he was hitting .237/.298/.368. An 0-for-3 the next day made the numbers look worse. In this run environment that could play with exceptional defense, but for Betts that type of production was a disappointment. There was reason to believe he wasn’t playing quite that badly based on batted-ball velocity and a mid-.250s BABIP, and hey, fast forward* one month and Betts has brought his OPS up 131 points to .789.

*That’s a thing old people used to have to do when watching movies on videotape.**
**Videotape is what they used to have back before DVDs.***
***DVDs were what they used to… Actually, you know what? Forget it. I’m old.

During that time he’s put up a 189 wRC+ which, as Mike Petriello notes, puts him in the company of Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Manny Machado. Here are 10 ways Mookie Betts has turned his season around.

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When Alex Gordon got injured on Wednesday night, it was a big blow to the Royals, who have lost their best player for the next two months of the season. But with Detroit struggling — and having lost Miguel Cabrera themselves just a week earlier — and the Twins probably unable to keep playing as well as they have in the first half, the Royals will probably still be able to hold on to their division lead, even with Gordon on the shelf for the next few months.

However, Gordon’s injury does create a pretty significant hole on the American League All-Star roster. No, it’s not that Gordon is really that much better than Adam Jones, who will replace Gordon in the starting line-up, but that Gordon brought one unique skill to the American League’s offense: he bats left-handed.

With Jones replacing Gordon, all nine American League starters will bat from the right side of the plate. Let’s take a guess at what Ned Yost’s starting line-up might look like.

1. Lorenzo Cain, LF
2. Jose Altuve, 2B
3. Mike Trout, CF
4. Albert Pujols, 1B
5. Josh Donaldson, 3B
6. Nelson Cruz, DH
7. Adam Jones, RF
8. Salvador Perez, C
9. Alcides Escobar, SS

There are some pretty great hitters in the middle of that line-up, and guys like Trout have historically hit right-handed pitching just fine. But at both the top and bottom of the order, you have some guys on the team primarily due to their defensive abilities, and hitting right-handed pitching isn’t really their strong suit.

And the National League has loaded up on right-handed pitching. Of the 13 pitchers already on the NL roster, 11 of them are right-handed; only Madison Bumgarner and Aroldis Chapman are lefty hurlers on the NL’s squad. Johnny Cueto is likely to join that group via the Final Vote, which would push the NL up to 12 RHPs, many of whom are death to right-handed hitting.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

The Oakland A’s lost by four runs on Thursday. Granted, it was a two-run game in the bottom of the eighth. But, still. Four runs. The A’s currently have the worst record in the American League. They’ve lost by at least four runs 11 times. The Royals easily have the best record in the AL. Kansas City has lost by at least four runs 15 times. Four runs is an arbitrary cutoff, but this helps to demonstrate something you’ve probably already heard: The A’s are badly underperforming, and in the weirdest way. By the standings, in the AL, no team has been worse. By other metrics, in the AL, arguably nobody has better.

For a more rich and representative 2015 A’s experience, consider Wednesday. Sure enough, the A’s lost to the New York Yankees — but they lost by one. The game ended with the tying run in scoring position. The Oakland bullpen coughed up four runs; the Oakland defense coughed up the other one. It’s not that the Yankees didn’t do enough to win. It’s that the A’s did, too. Yet they came up short. The market is just waiting for Billy Beane to sell.

It isn’t new that the A’s are underperforming the numbers. It’s already been written about here, there and everywhere. Just in April, the team went 9-14 while outscoring its opponents. Lately, the team has been more successful, despite its recent setbacks. But while you’re probably tired of hearing about Oakland’s misfortune, you might not be aware of the magnitude of what’s happened. This isn’t the kind of thing that happens to someone every year.

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Let’s go ahead and get this out of our systems: Wednesday night, some Cardinals got ejected for complaining in a game the team won. Some people might call that the very most Cardinals thing. Those same people are just people who don’t like the Cardinals, but, whatever, everyone’s entitled to his or her own feelings, and we should get this out of the way before proceeding. All right, it’s out of the way! So let’s unpack a picture:

What you see is a play in progress. It’s a bases-clearing double, that put the Cubs ahead. As the Cubs were in the process of rounding the bases, and as the Cardinals were in the process of retrieving the baseball from the outfield, Yadier Molina argued with home-plate umpire Pat Hoberg. We see Molina with his back turned to the plate, even though there might soon be a play right there. (There wasn’t.) Arguments are common; arguments during plays are less common. Molina was shortly ejected. The same went for his manager. The game had been leading up to this moment.

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Longtime Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan loves the sinker. The Braves’ Leo Mazzone was all about establishing the pitch low and away. Rick Peterson may hate the cutter.

The Mets’ Dan Warthen may not have the name value of legendary pitching coaches that have come before him, but he does have his own pitch. If you want to see what it looks like, you just have to notice how the Mets, as a team, are outliers when it comes to slider velocity and movement.

The Mets are throwing a different kind of slider.

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A couple weeks ago, we took a look at the most and least authoritative hitters of all time, utilizing raw contact scores, or production relative to the league on all plate appearances not resulting in a strikeout or walk. One of the reader comments suggested to take a look at the most productive low-authority hitters, and the least productive high-authority hitters. Earlier this week, we looked at the former, and today we discuss the latter.

First of all, a review of the methodology, and some parameters. We calculate raw contact scores by stripping away the strikeouts (Ks) and walks (BBs), and applying run values to all balls in play based on the norms for that era. The results are then scaled to 100. Raw contact scores were calculated for all regulars going back to 1901. Since we don’t have access to granular batted-ball data going that far backward, we’re not going to be able to adjust for context. That context includes the effects of ballparks, individual player’s speed, and of course, luck. In a given year, that those factors might affect an individual player significantly. Over the long haul, however, raw ball-striking ability, or lack thereof, as well as contact quality, the respective frequency of line drives and popups, of weak and hard contact in general, tends to carry the day.

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