We haven’t spoken about Xander Bogaerts at length in these digital pages for some time, so let’s remedy that situation. It seems like a good time to check in on the young shortstop’s development as a major-league hitter: Bogaerts is posting a wRC+ north of 100 in the first two months of the season, and he’s also almost cut his strikeout rate in half compared to last year. There’s also this group, which is an interesting subset of players, of which Boston’s shortstop is the leader — hitters with the highest increase in batted balls to the opposite field this season over last season:

Though it’s still perhaps a little early to be putting a ton of confidence in these numbers, changes as large as these in a hitter’s opposite-field tendencies merit attention. Opposite-field approach is often a good place to look when searching for a reason behind a change in type of production, and, given the drop in Bogaert’s ISO numbers from last year — .123 in 2014 vs. .106 this year — plus the fact that we’re over the ISO stabilization point, it’s one of the spots we’re going to focus on.

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Throwing a no-hitter can seem like a random occurrence. Edwin Jackson has a no-hitter. Dallas Braden has a no-hitter. One of Bud Smith’s 24 starts in the majors was a no hitter. Philip Humber has a perfect game. Tim Lincecum threw zero no-hitters in his incredible prime, and has thrown two since entering his decline. Pedro Martinez never threw one. Steve Carlton never did, either. No-hitters in major-league baseball require incredible skill, opportunity, and some luck. Thousands upon thousands of pitchers have had all three of those things, but fewer than 300 pitchers in MLB history have thrown a no-hitter. Chris Heston is now among that rare group.

Tidbits using the Baseball Reference Play Index:

• Chris Heston is only the 13th pitcher in MLB history to throw a no-hitter within his first 15 games in the majors. The last pitcher to match that feat was Clay Buchholz in 2007.
• Heston’s no-hitter was only the third in history in which the only hitters to reach base did so by means of a hit-by-pitch (HBP). The other two were Kevin Brown in 1997 and Lew Burdette in 1960.
• Heston’s three HBPs are the most in any no-hitter.
• Only ten pitchers have thrown a nine-inning no-hitter with a higher Game Score than Heston’s 98. Clayton Kershaw’s 102 mark from last season remains the top score.
• Of the 24 pitchers to throw a no-hitter within their first 30 games, Heston is the fifth-oldest at 27 years and 60 days. Bobo Holloman was the oldest at 30 years and 60 days when he threw his no-hitter in 1953 for the St. Louis Browns. Read the rest of this entry »

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On Tuesday night, in just his second game since being promoted to the big leagues, Astros shortstop Carlos Correa launched the first home run of his Major League career. Houston fans certainly hope that it won’t be the last, as the first overall pick from the 2012 draft is now being looked at as a potential franchise cornerstone; an offensive middle infielder who impacts the ball on both sides of the game.

It is not too difficult to look at the 6-foot-4 Correa and envision the heir to Troy Tulowitzki’s throne. At the time of his call-up, Correa was the consensus best prospect in baseball, thanks mostly to his destruction of Double-A and a solid performance in Triple-A despite the fact that he won’t turn 21 until September. While Correa had certainly performed well climbing the minor league ladder the last few years, he really broke out at the beginning of this season by developing additional power.

In Double-A, 24 of his 45 hits went for extra bases, which is the kind of mark you expect from aging players who can’t hit singles because they pull all their ground balls right into the shift. When you see that kind of power from a middle infielder, especially one who isn’t yet of drinking age, the sky really seems to be the limit.

But as we discussed in this space a week ago, projecting future power output is a tricky business. While a player’s power production is perhaps the most important variable in determining offensive production, it’s also the most difficult to forecast. Especially for taller, skinny athletes, power can develop later on into a player’s career, well after his other tools have gotten him to the big leagues.

But it doesn’t always develop quickly, and sometimes it doesn’t develop at all. In talking with some people in the game about Correa, I was struck by how similar the descriptions sounded to conversations we had a few years back about another can’t-miss slugging shortstop: Xander Bogaerts. Like Correa, Bogaerts rocketed through the minors, getting to the big leagues as a 20 year old, and was considered the cream of the prospect crop at the time. And while he’s showing real improvement this year on both sides of the ball, we’re coming up on 1,000 at-bats in the big league career of Xander Bogaerts and he still has a grand total of just 15 home runs.

To this point, just 29% of his career hits have gone for extra bases. While he’s raised his average this season to .297, he’s slugging just .401, and his improvements have come entirely from reducing his strikeout totals. Rather than morphing into more of the slugging shortstop he was projected as, Bogaerts’ offensive profile now looks more like that of a traditional middle infielder. At just 22, it’s still far too early to declare that he’s a finished product, and Bogearts still has plenty of career left ahead of him, but he is a reminder that we can’t just assume every player is going to add power in a nice linear fashion as they get older.

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J.D. Martinez is a thoughtful baseball player who has made major changes to his swing mechanics. As much as writing is what gets me out of bed on Monday mornings, it seems a shame to sully this one with too much of my own clumsy verbiage. So what follows is just J.D. Martinez, running us through the myriad realizations and swing changes he’s made since he was once a struggling Astro. Of course, there are a few edits and moving pictures.

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We tend to take the greatest players for granted, so it ought to tell you something when even one of the established elites is raising eyebrows. Chris Sale’s one of the very best starting pitchers in the world, of that there’s no question, and still he’s recently been generating all kinds of positive attention. Just Monday, he struck out 14 against the Astros in eight innings. It was his fourth consecutive start with double-digit strikeouts, and his fourth consecutive start with at least 20 missed bats. I won’t go through the specifics, but in terms of unhittability, Sale just tied one record with Sandy Koufax. He set a couple new all-time White Sox records, and he became the first pitcher to do a particular something since Randy Johnson. This is Chris Sale at the top of his game, and no one’s allowed a lower contact rate over the season’s last month.

Sale has established a few new personal bests, which, again, is a difficult thing to do, when you’ve been as excellent as he has. It seems like forever ago that he owned a near-6 ERA and people were wondering whether something was wrong. He’s yielded eight runs in six starts, he’s on a career-low FIP, and he’s on a career-low xFIP. When you look at the overall picture, at this point Sale looks more or less like himself. But underneath, you can see him evolving, and now Sale’s turned into one of the rarest sorts of pitchers.

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At first glance, Cleveland’s starting rotation could be considered one of the league’s poorest in terms of performance: their 4.40 ERA has them 9th-worst in the majors, and the fact that the Indians are 27-29 (though seemingly improving) probably doesn’t help them shed that label. Those surface-level numbers hide a lot, however. In fact, they obscure what is on pace to be one of the most strikeout-heavy rotations in the history of baseball, one whose on-field performance is being negatively impacted by factors largely outside of their control. Where does the 2015 Cleveland starting staff rank so far in a historical context of some of the great rotations throughout history? Let’s find out.

We’ve talked about Cleveland’s woeful defense in this space before. There’s a reason for that: it’s both historically terrible (since 1950, only the 2007 Rays converted fewer balls in play into outs than the 2015 Indians), and it impacts the pitching staff to a great extent. The Cleveland defense has become something of a hot topic: by all accounts, it’s basically turning the pitching staff into a bunch of pumpkins.

What the Indians rotation should be is a markedly different story from what it currently is: if we boil down the numbers only to what pitchers can control (i.e. if we take the terrible defense out of the picture), Cleveland’s rotation is at the very top of the league: by one measure, Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), they’re the fourth-best starting staff in baseball. By another (xFIP), they’re number one.

This means that Cleveland’s defense has probably let them down to a serious extent, and also that they’ve been unlucky — though the elevated batting average on balls in play (BABIP) the Indians rotation has shown might be due in some part to the types of pitchers that Cleveland likes to bring through their system (hard throwers who are prone to giving up hard contact). Taken together, however, all of these factors should give us some optimism that there might be better times ahead for the rotation, even if the defense doesn’t improve very much.

The conversation about the rotation’s hypothetical vs. real-world results is just the introduction to why we’re really here, though. Now that we know Cleveland’s rotation has been subject to some unfortunate outside influences for the first two months of the season, let’s compare this rotation to other rotations throughout history, especially in terms of strikeout rates.

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In recent articles, we’ve discussed many of the various aspects of the emerging granular batted-ball velocity/exit angle data that is becoming more pervasive in the game today. We’ve already covered both the overall hitting and pitching contact-quality leaders and laggards in both leagues, and have now begun to dig deeper into some of the nuances that make it less than advisable to simply accept raw contact authority at face value. Let’s investigate the impact of pulling the ball on the ground at an excessive rate. Last time, we looked at the 2014 AL extreme ground-ball pullers. Today, it’s the NL’s turn.

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Over the last calendar year, there are 139 qualified major-league hitters. Prorating their plate appearances to 600 per person, one finds that Mike Trout has the highest WAR at 7.2, followed by Russell Martin, Buster Posey, and Anthony Rizzo. None of that should come as much of a surprise, but the hitter right behind that group and just ahead of Josh Donaldson, Andrew McCutchen and Bryce Harper could provide a bit of shock. Over the last calendar year, Kevin Kiermaier has been worth six wins per 600 plate appearances.

Kiermaier, who has worked to improve his offense, is incredibly reliant on his fantastic defense for his great WAR numbers. While Kiermaier is a valuable player, it is possible that his WAR total is inflated by defensive numbers that are likely to come down over time. Kiermaier has logged roughly 1200 innings in the outfield and has a UZR/150 of 42.1, but only six active outfielders with at least 2,500 innings have a UZR/150 greater than 15, with Lorenzo Cain, Ben Zobrist, Peter Bourjos, Brett Gardner, Josh Reddick, and Jason Heyward falling between 16 and 22 — that is, roughly half Kiermaier’s current rate. Although he’s been good, Kiermaier is probably not the fifth-best player in baseball over the last year, and his defensive numbers should serve as a reminder that defensive statistics take some time before they become reliable.

Yesterday, I covered some players whose current WAR was potentially undervalued due to lower than normal defensive numbers in an article titled Heyward, Pedroia, and Your Annual Reminder About Defense. The present article renders yesterday’s title false as the articles together are now daily reminders, but this post should be the final one in this series with few, if any, more reminders coming in the near future. The caveat regarding small sample size from Mitchel Lichtman and our FanGraphs library is quoted more fully in yesterday’s piece, but to summarize: use three seasons of UZR when being conclusory about the defensive talent of any given player.

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Now that we have to take the Astros seriously, we also have to take the Astros’ players seriously, and among the first you must consider seriously is Dallas Keuchel. Keuchel is no one’s idea of a traditional ace, but the Astros are no one’s idea of a traditional competitive team, and you can’t get around Keuchel’s results. Down the stretch in 2013, he was a sleeper. At this point, he’s established, proven, reliable. Keuchel’s a big reason why the Astros are where they are, and if they do ultimately make it to the playoffs, Keuchel ought to be a weapon.

You know enough of the biography, I bet. Keuchel wasn’t a highly-regarded draft pick, and when he was coming through the system, he never ranked in Baseball America’s top-10 Astros prospects. When Keuchel was a big-league rookie, he wound up with more walks than strikeouts. Then, in what geologists would consider a “flash,” Keuchel figured it out and started getting results to match the big boys. He continues to drop his xFIP, as he’s more than adequate in all three components. His most visible strength, of course, being keeping the ball on the ground. But Keuchel does even more to maximize his skillset. We always look at walks, strikeouts, and homers. Those won’t tell you the whole Keuchel story.

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