Rehabbing a partially torn UCL with rest was an unconventional route for the Yankees and Masahiro Tanaka since the discovery of his injury last July, and there was always the possibility that it simply wouldn’t work, with the right-hander having to go under the knife at some point. While that exact situation has yet to be realized, here we are in early May with Tanaka on the indefinite-day DL due to forearm and wrist issues. As we know, forearm injuries are a big red flag, especially when your elbow is already a little balky.

Still, the Yankees have managed to cope without Tanaka so far, putting the 25-year-old Chase Whitley into the rotation: Whitley has a 0.75 ERA/1.53 FIP, 20.4 K-BB%, and 1.08 WHIP in two starts. That’s a tiny sample, and we would be remiss if we didn’t cast a lot of doubt on his ability to keep up anything near that sort of performance, but it now bears some looking into, as do the Yankees’ plans should they hit any other bumps in the road regarding their rotation (spoiler: they almost surely will).

How good has the Yankees rotation been so far this season? Great, actually. Here’s the ERA / FIP of the starters for all 30 clubs so far this season (mouse over the chart for interactivity):

The Yankees are fifth in FIP, showing how great a surprise they’ve been this year, driven mainly by Michael Pineda. As we’ll see, that level of success in the future is dependent on a lot of things lining up.

First, let’s take a look at Whitley. He couldn’t stick in the rotation last year, eventually moving to a relief role, but he has the arsenal of a starter: fastball, slider, and changeup. I’ll say this: more people would know Chase Whitley’s name if he had a fastball that matched his secondary stuff. His slider, always an average offering, is a little different this year (he’s taken almost four MPH off of it compared to 2014, and it has an inch more vertical drop), though it’s still a fly ball pitch with not a ton of depth. It’s been good this year, but the jury is still out on whether that can be sustained. His changeup is the real prize: last year, it would’ve placed in the top-10 of swinging strike rates among starters had he qualified. At its best, it looks like this:

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Commissioner Manfred’s ballpark tour took him to Texas yesterday, where he got to witness one potential solution to baseball’s run scoring problem: clone Samuel Deduno. I’m guessing that probably won’t be on the table when the next CBA negotiations come around, but it would bring offense roaring back to life, probably.

My mediocre attempt at humor aside, Manfred did talk about another issue that might become a discussion point in the next CBA, however; the length of the Major League season.

Manfred said reducing the number of games in a season would have economic and competitive ramifications, but the idea of giving players more off days is receiving more attention than ever.

“One hundred and sixty-two games in 183 days, and a lot of those 21 days consumed by travel, is a pretty demanding schedule,” he said. “By reputation I work pretty hard, and I don’t think I work 162 days out of 183. It’s a tough schedule.”

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Player salaries keep increasing, but at a pace much slower than total Major League Baseball revenue. There is little the players can do about the gap right now, but when the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in 2016, the Major League Baseball Players’ Association will have the opportunity to gain a greater share of revenues in the future. The players have a lot of options: increased minimum salaries, earlier free agency, earlier arbitration, and removal of the luxury tax are all monetary changes that would transfer more money from owners to players and have little to no effect on the play on the field. Two other options, a universal designated hitter and a 26th roster spot, would affect the play on the field, but would not provide the players with significant gains off the field.

As Nathaniel Grow wrote recently, the MLBPA has a problem. In his piece, Grow discussed the growing chasm between player salaries and MLB revenues.

After peaking at a little more than 56% in 2002, today MLB player salaries account for less than 40% of league revenues, a decline of nearly 33% in just 12 years. As a result, player payroll today accounts for just over 38% of MLB’s total revenues, a figure that just ten years ago would have been unimaginably low.

Grow’s piece included the following chart (Payroll data from Cot’s Contracts and USA Today; MLB league revenue data from The Biz of Baseball):

Owners are pocketing more and more money from revenues and have thus far refused to share their increased wealth. The owners and players last shared a roughly fifty-fifty split of revenues in 2005. Since that time, players have received less than one-third of all additional revenue.
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This is the second in a series of pieces on the emergence of batted-ball data into the mainstream. Earlier this week, we covered the basics in a fair amount of detail. Today, we’re going to drill down a bit into arguably the most important piece of information discussed in that article; the fine line between the most and least productive fly balls, where we will quickly discover that not all hard fly balls are created equal. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper went and had himself a game Wednesday afternoon, and now, we can say these things, and not be lying: Harper is sitting on a career-high wRC+. He’s sitting on a career-high isolated power, and a career-high walk rate. Harper, by the way, is still 22 years old. It’s always mandatory to put that in somewhere. It’s a pretty big part of the picture.

It makes sense, then, to talk about what’s going on with Harper’s development. The world’s been waiting to see if he can ever try to catch up to Mike Trout. Ben Lindbergh has written about what seems to be a gain regarding Harper’s eye. Harper, also, has worked to calm down his swing a little bit, at the suggestion of his hitting coach and his manager. Back in April, Matt Williams said this:

Williams said the single to left was a particularly important example of what Harper needs to do to be successful and hit for a high average.

Williams liked to see Harper shooting balls the other way. Harper has long been personally obsessed with shooting balls the other way. Wednesday, the first of Harper’s three homers was slugged the other way. What you’d think is, maybe, Harper’s getting even better at using all fields. Truth be told, at least to this point, Harper’s gotten better at using just one of the fields.

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It’s an easy-enough list to sort. You go to the leaderboard for pitch types and you select the fastball column. There, at the very top, is Bartolo Colon, the only starter in baseball throwing heaters more than 80% of the time. From there, you get to build the narrative, that Colon is extraordinarily weird. He doesn’t look the part of an athlete. He’s 41 years old, and 42 later this month. His average fastball has dropped into the 80s, approaching his rate of contact allowed. And he throws as many pitches as he has walks issued (one). The overall profile doesn’t make a lot of sense — it doesn’t feel like this kind of pitcher ought to be able to succeed.

And, yeah, Colon is weird. It looked like his career was over until it wasn’t, and other pitchers don’t share his current approach. It’s an unusual strategy with which Colon so routinely manages to get hitters out, but the reality isn’t as simple as him getting by with weak fastball after weak fastball. Reality is — guess what! — more complicated than that. Reality is always more complicated. Maybe especially with the freaks.

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“The biggest thing is that I’m finally healthy,” said Wil Myers before a game with the Giants. After breaking his wrist in the fourth game of the year in 2014, and then following that up with another broken wrist (the other one) about six weeks later, Myers is happy to have his health. Those broken wrists did a number on his game.

After the first wrist broke, Myers played through it. “I still have a bone that sticks out,” Myers said as he points to a protrusion. “And any time I turned this wrist over, this tendon right here was very painful.” Even that first half of last year, before the second injury, Myers had below-average power (.126 Isolated Slugging, .145 is average).

It was worse when he came back from the second broken wrist after 81 days away. “I just didn’t have it,” Myers said as he shook his head. “This forearm looked like a baby’s forearm, I had no muscle.” That’s when his performance really tanked, as his .055 ISO and overall offense that was 50% worse than league average can attest.

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In the offseason after winning the 2014 award for American League Comeback Player of the year, Chris Young — that’s the exceptionally lanky pitcher Chris Young, not the merely lanky hitter Chris Young — received zero attention on the free agent market. It took until about mid-way through Spring Training until a team signed Young — on March 7, the Royals signed him to a very interesting one-year contract with a $0.675M base salary and a whopping $5.325M in incentives. That’s very little guaranteed money, though, especially compared to the 2014 National League Comeback Player of the Year, Casey McGehee, who is guaranteed to earn $4.8M from the San Francisco Giants this season despite performing below replacement level thus far.

Jeff explored Young’s lack of a market in late February, pointing out that Young is riskier than most pitchers because of both his frighteningly extensive injury history and perhaps also because of the uniquely large gulf between Young’s ERA and his FIP. Even though Young’s BABIP of .238 in 2014 was actually in line with his through-2013 career rate of .258, it also makes sense that no teams were eager to snap up a pitcher who compiled a 5+ FIP the previous season after missing the entire season prior to that. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout’s exploits are well known, but no matter how well Mike Trout plays, his team will not succeed without productive play from others in the lineup. Mike Trout is not the first great player with a less than stellar supporting cast. It is something he has gone through already in his brief career. In 2012 and 2014, the Angels had solid teams surrounding Trout that won nearly 90 games in 2012 and won the division in 2014, but in 2013, the rest of the Angels provided poor production and the team wasted a 10-win season. The Angels have gotten off to a slow start at 12-15 and they are certainly far from out of the race at this point, but based on the start of the season and the projections from here on out, the Angels could have trouble providing Trout with support and staying in the playoff hunt as the year goes on.

On offense this season, Mike Trout has been 11.6 runs above average, good for sixth in all of baseball while the rest of the position players have been 26.6 runs below average. Even with Mike Trout, the team has an 85 wRC+ in the early going, ranking 25th in Major League Baseball. Mike Trout is hitting .302/.404/.552. while the rest of the team is .218/.275/.323. Garrett Richards, C.J. Wilson, and Matt Shoemaker should perform well in the rotation, but the team projects to finish the season around .500. No matter how hard he tries, Mike Trout cannot end every game like this:
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Yesterday, we looked at the biggest changes in fastball movement (rise and sink) in starters and relievers from their offerings in 2014 vs. this season. Today, we’re going to do the same thing with breaking balls (pitches known for their movement), which should hopefully yield some interesting takeaways as we move forward with this young season.

As I said in the previous article, more movement doesn’t always mean better results: it can be a catalyst for some changes in peripheral numbers, however, and can point toward raw improvement in a pitch. We’ll go into some information related to whiff rates and batted ball profiles with these breaking pitches, looking for any change in production that goes along with change in movement.

The standard preface: all stats are farmed from Baseball Prospectus’ PITCHf/x leaderboards. It’s obviously still very early, so take these results with a grain of salt, and mostly as something interesting to watch as the season progresses. Today we’ll divide these pitches by curveball and slider, looking at starters and relievers together. We’ll also divide sliders by lefties and righties, as the movement data is obviously quite different for each of them. As a baseline, I’ve used a 50 pitch minimum for both starters and relievers in 2014.

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