The designated hitter rule has been in place in the American League since 1973. Some like it. Others would prefer that pitchers swing the bat. They do in the National League, and that’s part of the debate. Does it make sense for the league to play with different rules, or should there be uniformity?

I asked five pitchers, five position players, and five coaches/managers – many of whom have experience in both leagues – for their opinion of the DH rule. Here is what they had to say.

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Steve Buechele, Rangers bench coach: “I think the DH is good for baseball. The pitcher hitting is the purest form of the game, but having a DH adds to the excitement. Some of the DHs out there are players people pay a lot to watch.

“We’ve done it for so long now, and I’m OK with that, but I wouldn’t mind seeing both leagues go with it at some point. It’s not a priority for me, but I’d like to see it be consistent.”

Clay Buchholz, Red Sox pitcher: “I think it will eventually happen in both leagues. A lot of money is paid for starting pitchers, and many of us aren’t comfortable hitting. Everybody is a competitor, so when you hit a ground ball, you want to run it out. Guys get injuries running the bases.

“I’d be in favor of having the DH in both leagues. It would make baseball better. I think there should be uniformity, but only if the DH was in both leagues.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres fired their manager Monday, saying goodbye to Bud Black, who’d been around since 2007. It’s not that the Padres blamed Black for what they’ve considered to be a disappointing start. That’s always the idea whenever any coach gets the axe, but that’s a gross oversimplification. It’s not that Black was the whole problem. It’s that the Padres thought Black was *a* problem, the kind of problem they might be able to fix midseason. Easier to do that than to find a whole new front office, or a whole new group of players.

As we all observed, the Padres put together a roster they thought could win in 2015. It hasn’t happened yet, not consistently, and with the trade deadline a month and a half away, A.J. Preller might be thinking about the pieces he has to sell off. There’s still plenty of time for the group to turn it around and mount a charge toward the playoffs, but if the Padres do end up a midseason seller, this would be the first step toward admitting the plan didn’t work out. The first step, that is, if you don’t count losing as often as you win.

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I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: while most of us understand that the gambler’s fallacy is a fallacy, sometimes it’s easy to see why so many people believe in it. In the case of this post, take the Blue Jays. Through the season’s first two months, they had the third-worst record in the American League, and a contender-worthy run differential. It seemed, at that point, like better times were ahead. But instead of things playing evenly from there, the Jays have simply ripped off 11 straight wins, rocketing back into the playoff picture. Barely any time ago, the Jays and Red Sox were battling for possession of not-last place in the AL East. This quickly, the Jays are back on their feet, and the Red Sox are a disaster.

I don’t have a hot take. My hottest take might be this: the Jays aren’t a true-talent 162-0 team. Winning streaks are easy for analysts because we always get to know for a fact the given team is overachieving. But there’s no better time than now to review what the Jays have done, and to evaluate where they now stand. The situation has changed in a jiffy. Even their own front office is probably trying to catch up.

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The thing about Max Scherzer is he’s really good. We knew that. You knew that. This Sunday the Milwaukee Brewers learned about it firsthand when Scherzer threw a complete game one-hit shutout against them. Well, okay, they probably knew it already thanks to scouting reports and whatnot. On the off chance the Brewers don’t use scouting reports or whatnot — and considering their record this is possible — they know it now. Scherzer is really good.

The lone Brewer hit was a broken-bat muscle job over the outstretched glove of second baseman Anthony Rendon. A few innings later Scherzer issued a walk. It was okay. His 16 strikeouts and nine shutout innings overshadowed it. Great as he was, the start was an outlier, of course. Nobody strikes out 16 guys against one walk and one hit every time out. But Max Scherzer is, as we know, quite good, and this start was emblematic of his season.

Against the Brewers, Scherzer threw all four of his pitches for strikes more than 60 percent of the time. He got swings and misses on each of them, including 12 on his fastball, nine on his slider, four on a curveball he threw only 16 times (according to MLB Gameday’s data, at least), and two on his changeup. When a pitcher can throw as hard as Scherzer and throw three other good pitches, well gosh. That’s about the definition of an ace.

Most importantly, that kind of pitch mix allows him to get both right-handers and left-handers out. Against right-handers Scherzer, throws fastballs and sliders with the occasional changeup when he gets ahead in the count. Against left-handers he abandons the slider and becomes a fastball, changeup, curveball pitcher. He also throws a cut fastball (rarely) against lefties but never against righties. Sunday, Scherzer struck out 12 right-handed batters. Those came on six sliders, three curveballs, and three fastballs. He also struck out four left-handed batters on two fastballs and two changeups. It’s a varied enough repertoire of pitches that he effectively becomes two different pitchers against different-sided batters, Pat Venditte style, though with much better pitches than Venditte throws.

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Almost three weeks ago, Pablo Sandoval did something extraordinary at the plate. To be fair, Sandoval often does interesting and unique things — mostly involving swinging at and hitting impossible pitches — so this might not come as a surprise. However, this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill sort of Sandoval madness. I’ll allow a short looping film to begin to tell the story:

A few things happened here: he swung at the first pitch, it was high and inside, and he got jammed but still managed to hit a line drive. These are all things Sandoval routinely does, so you can’t be blamed if you think one of them is what we’re highlighting. The true answer? Sandoval faced a left-handed pitcher as a left-handed batter.

If that doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider this: Kung Fu Panda hadn’t batted from the left side against a left-handed pitcher before this at bat since 2011. For what it’s worth, both Sandoval and his manager John Farrell claimed he only batted as a lefty in this pinch-hit appearance because of a knee injury sustained by a hit by pitch a few days before. Still, the fact remains: Sandoval’s struggles as a switch hitter from the right side are well documented, and they’ve gotten remarkably worse this season. It says at least say something that he batted from the left side here, given his struggles.

So just how bad has it gotten when he’s in the right batter’s box? Sandoval has a .160 OPS mark as a right-handed hitter facing a left-handed pitcher this year. He owns a 2.1% walk rate and a 27.1% strikeout rate from that side. In other terms, he’s hit three singles in 46 at-bats with one walk. That’s about the equivalent offensive output of Kyle Kendrick in 2014, except that Kendrick is a pitcher, and he doesn’t bat near the middle of the order for the Red Sox.

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Last week, I walked through the KATOH projections for each of the college players taken in the first round of this year’s amateur draft. The first round is obviously the most important one, as it produces the largest share of the game’s productive players. Nonetheless, the proceeding rounds also generate their fair share of quality major leaguers. So, today, I’m going to take a look at some of the hitters selected in rounds two through eight who rated favorably according to my KATOH system.

David Thompson, 3B, New York Mets
Draft Round: 4th
KATOH Projection: 5.7 WAR

After mediocre freshman and sophomore seasons at Miami, David Thompson broke out in a big way in 2015. The third baseman smashed 19 homers and 18 doubles in 64 games on his way to a .333/.445/.658 showing in the ACC. Thompson’s breakout likely had something to do with his finally being healthy. Originally a two-sport star at Miami, Thompson opted to give up on his football career following a litany of injuries. Between undergoing four surgeries, while also trying to play both baseball and football, it’s easy to see why he only managed an .800 OPS as an underclassman. It’s pretty rare for a player to run an ISO north of .300 while striking out in fewer than 10% of his trips to the plate, especially in the ACC, which happens to be one of the best college conferences in the country.

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We’re all moving forward on the baseball calendar. Pitchers and catchers? Way back there. Spring training games? Opening Day? Well behind us. And we’ve just recently seen the completion of the amateur draft, so now we look ahead again. The next specific date is that of the All-Star Game, followed by the non-waiver trade deadline. However, while the trade deadline comes after the exhibition, we’ve just entered trading season. Unofficially, it kicked off with the Mark Trumbo deal. More officially, it always lurks on this side of the draft.

Trading season is relevant to everyone. If your favorite team is sitting pretty, maybe this is where it makes the move that puts it over the top. If your favorite team is stuck in the middle, maybe this is where it makes the move that makes all the difference. And if your favorite team blows, maybe this is where it makes the move that sheds salary or directly benefits the future. For everyone, trade talk fills the time between games. For some, trade talk is also a welcome distraction.

This time of year, there’s always chatter about who’s most in need of what. I thought, for purposes of this post, I might try to make it mathematical. I looked at every certain and fringe contender, position by position, and tried to identify the positions of greatest need as trade season heats up. I wound up selecting five positions, because I think five is a good number, and a better number than four or six. Why do I think that? That would be a different article.

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I was at Progressive Field earlier this week to see the Indians host the Mariners. A stone’s throw away, the Cavaliers were playing Golden State in the NBA finals. The latter series has the city captivated and on the precipice of euphoria. When the basketball game got out on Tuesday night, hordes of fans below my hotel window chanted “Let’s go Cavs!” and blew air horns to celebrate a win. A brass band played somewhere down on the street. It sounded like Mardi Gras, and it was only Game 3.

“They’re going to blow the roof off this place if they win,” Indians outfielder Nick Swisher told me. “People love their sports around here, and it’s been a long, long time since there’s been a championship.”

Fifty-one years, to be exact. The Browns won the NFL title in 1964, and since that time it’s been a multi-sport combination of heartbreak and non-contenders. According to Swisher, who grew up in Ohio, “That’s why you see so many people coming out to support the Cavs.”

Meanwhile, with no basketball game as competition, the official attendance at Progressive Field on Wednesday night was 12,305. The number of fans who actually showed up was probably closer to seven or eight thousand. On the season, the Indians have drawn an average of 16,836, with only the cloudy-future Rays spinning fewer turnstiles. Cleveland was also second from the bottom last year, and in 2013 they ranked just one spot higher despite 92 wins and a Wild Card berth. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitching is an enigmatic thing. There are so many aspects to it that it can be difficult to get them straight in one’s head. A thing we all know about it, though, is the faster you throw the better you are. This is what makes Nathan Eovaldi so fascinating and yet so curious. Eovaldi has the fastest average fastball velocity of any starting pitcher in baseball at 95.8 mph. He started against the Nationals on Wednesday and hit 99 mph with his fastball in the third inning. Dude throws hard. And yet, outside of that, he’s not really anything special as a pitcher. In total value Eovaldi is Wade Miley. Miley has an impressive beard, but to paraphrase a great person, an impressive beard does not an impressive season make. The most valuable pitcher in baseball so far is Corey Kluber at 3.0 WAR. Kluber’s average fastball is 93.5 mph, 2.3 mph slower than Eovaldi’s. So clearly fastball velocity isn’t everything.

But why not? The quicker a pitch, the shorter the batter’s reaction time, and we’re talking about removing hundredths of a second. A 95 mph fastball will reach home plate in 0.4 seconds so removing those small fractions of a second you’d think would be problematic for the hitter. And they are problematic. The thing is, they’re not the whole story.

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Every year around this time, Major League Baseball starts their periodic All-Star Game voting updates. This year’s process has been flawed, to say the least. And like we always do about this time, we go through and pick the updates apart and see who still hasn’t got their due, to try to find the right recipe for the game. In doing so this year, the most glaring omission appears to be A.J. Pollock.

As of Thursday, A.J. Pollock was 11th in the majors in position player WAR. Let’s start there. If we look at the top 10, we can note that as of our last ballot update — which was Monday for the American League and Tuesday for the National League — that every one in the top 10 had at least 900,000 votes, and all but Joc Pederson had at least one million. Pollock, however, didn’t rate. He wasn’t one of the top-15 vote getters among NL outfielders, and 15th place Starling Marte had totaled 635,125 votes thus far. So Pollock is pretty far behind his fellow WAR leaders.

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