The Cubs are a running team, now. Wasn’t always that way. Wasn’t that way even one season ago. One season ago, the Cubs finished with just 65 stolen bases, seventh-fewest in the majors. This year, they already have 25, second-most in the majors. If you fold unsuccessful steals into the mix, last year the Cubs were the worst stealing team in baseball. So far this year, fourth-best. No one ever wins the World Series because of the running game, but improvements are improvements, and this is a legitimate change.

And, well, this year’s Cubs have a bunch of new players. They also have a new manager, so maybe it’s not the most surprising thing in the world that they’ve become more aggressive with their legs. Joe Maddon liked to put the game in motion in Tampa Bay, and in spring training with Chicago he made baserunning a priority. On the other hand, here’s Anthony Rizzo, also from spring training:

“We don’t steal much on this team anyway.”

Rizzo, perhaps, wasn’t yet used to playing with Dexter Fowler. Fowler’s already stolen six bags. That’s good enough to tie him for eighth in the majors. But let’s keep that figure in mind. As of this writing, 15 players have stolen at least six bases. That’s a somewhat arbitrary line, but I chose it for a reason. Here are the 15:

Over the winter, the Padres, Nationals, and Rays agreed on a big three-way trade that shipped Wil Myers to San Diego, Steven Souza and a bunch of other stuff to Tampa Bay, and a couple of prospects to Washington. Joe Ross was the only named prospect at the time of the deal, but the Nationals also received a PTBNL, who was quickly reported to be Trea Turner, the Padres first round selection from last June’s draft.

Because draft picks are not eligible to be traded for 12 months from their signing date, the Padres and Nationals are not allowed to confirm that Turner has indeed already been traded, and he remains in the Padres organization at this time. However, it’s public knowledge that Turner will be changing organizations mid-summer, creating an awkward situation where the Padres are stewarding another team’s asset. As I wrote after the trade was made and Turner was unofficially revealed as the PTBNL, this was a bad situation for all to be involved in, and likely required a rule change.

Well, as of today, that rule has officially been changed. An email has been sent to all 30 MLB teams regarding this adjustment, and reads as follows, as told to me by a source who got the email:

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Chase Utley just finished the worst month of his major league career. The 36-year-old second baseman with knee problems in his past played well last season, hitting .270/.339/.407, with his 4.5 WAR leading National League second basemen. Last year was his his tenth straight season with more than three wins and the eighth time in his career he has had at least four wins in his career. An offseason ankle problem slowed his Spring Training regimen, and the results in April have not gone Utley’s way. Much of the underlying statistics are similar for Utley and pitchers do not appear to be pitching him differently, but the results have been lacking. For a player of Utley’s caliber, chalking up a bad month to a rough run of luck is simple for a player in his prime, but at Utley’s age, questions will linger whether he might be done as an effective everyday player.

Chase Utley hit a meager .114/.198/.200 in 81 plate appearances, and his wRC+ of 1 was second worst among the 186 qualified hitters, besting only Matt Joyce. Utley has played at an incredibly high level for a long time, and there are sure to be lengthy discussions about his possible induction to the Hall of Fame, but April’s production was far below the standards Utley has set over the course of his career. Utley had the worst month of any in his 13-year career.

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A few weeks ago I took a look at Major League Baseball players’ declining share of overall league revenues, noting that the players have gone from receiving just over 56% of MLB’s revenues in 2002 to around 38% today. That post went on to identify a variety of factors that have converged to reduce the percentage of league revenues going to the players, including increased revenue sharing, MLB’s growing television revenues, and more efficient front office decision-making.

One factor that I touched upon briefly in my prior post, but that probably merited a more extended discussion, is MLB’s luxury tax. As I explained the last time around, the luxury tax has helped dampen many of the larger market franchises’ willingness to spend on payroll, as teams will now incur a fine ranging from 17.5% to 50% – depending on how many years in a row the club has exceeded the luxury tax threshold – for every dollar they spend on player salaries over $189 million per year.

Because most clubs will only raise their payroll when they anticipate that each additional dollar spent on player salary will generate more than that in added revenue, the luxury tax provides a natural disincentive for most teams to cross the payroll threshold. Now, rather believe that an extra dollar in payroll will generate at least $1.01 in added revenue, teams must instead anticipate that any increased salary obligations above $189 million will generate anywhere from $1.18 to as much as $1.51 per dollar in new revenue in order to justify the expenditure. As a result, the luxury tax has caused most of MLB’s largest market franchises – the teams that the Major League Baseball Players Association has historically relied on to help drive the free agent market – to become more financially prudent in recent years.

But even this basic account doesn’t fully reflect the impact that the luxury tax has had on the players’ declining share of league revenues, as changes to the luxury tax structure since 2002 have increased the penalties for teams exceeding the payroll threshold, while also significantly lowering the threshold as a share of the average MLB team’s revenues.

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We didn’t envision April going like this. The Cleveland Indians received 35 total votes for a playoff appearance in our 2015 preseason staff predictions, the most out of any team in the American League. Four weeks after those predictions were published, Cleveland finds themselves 7-14 — seven and a half games back of the Royals in the AL Central — tied for the biggest deficit in any division outside of the one containing the Brewers.

If we’re searching for a silver lining, the early going hasn’t been easy schedule-wise, with six games against Detroit that resulted in one win and a few bullpen implosions that have ended up as walk-off losses. Those one-run games on the road are the types of results that can easily swing win/loss records; however, if we look at Cleveland’s Pythagorean W/L, it gives us only an ever-so-slightly healthier 8-13. Alas, we can’t simply blame many of their losses on volatile one-run results.

Still, as we like to point out here in the early going, losses count in April just like wins do, and Cleveland has now gone from trendy sleepers in the division to having to play catch up against two fast-starting squads in Kansas City and Detroit. Before the season began, we gave Cleveland a 43% probability of winning the Central with 86 projected wins, and after yesterday’s results, that figure now stands at 13.4% and 82 projected wins.

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Brady Anderson’s title within the Baltimore Orioles’ organization is Vice President of Baseball Operations. According to the team’s media guide, the 51-year-old former all-star “collaborates with Dan Duquette and manager Buck Showalter on player development and roster management.”

Anderson, who hit .256/.362/.425 over a 15-year career, isn’t your typical ex-player. He spends a lot of time in the clubhouse – his multi-faceted role includes working with hitters — but he’s equally comfortable interacting with the analytics department. A stat geek for most of his life, Anderson is well-versed in sabermetrics.

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Brady Anderson on stats and understanding value: “I’ve always been interested in statistical analysis. From the time I was five years old I was quizzed by my dad and my uncle about members of the 500-home-run club, the 3000-hit club, and a variety of other stats. It was just part of what seemed like normal conversation to me, because that was the environment in which I lived.

“I was drafted in 1985, and remember getting the Bill James “Historical Baseball Abstract.” I used to enjoy his rankings of players and his rationale for his rankings. I also grew up reading Ted Williams‘ “The Science of Hitting.” I used to travel with it and read it frequently while in the minors. Read the rest of this entry »

It seemed like this post was practically going to be able to write itself. Hanley Ramirez has been hot at the plate, and he’s tied for the big-league lead in homers, with 10. There are hundreds of hot streaks by so many players every single season, but this year we have the treat of new data, and Ramirez’s has seemed particularly remarkable. I thought this would be simple and straightforward, but instead we have something more complicated and kind of boring to what I assume would be the majority of people. Keep reading, though! There’ll be some .gifs. You love .gifs.

If you’ve paid attention to Gameday, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve started to get some early-season batted-ball data. It hasn’t been complete, but it’s been fairly consistent, as one of the first signs of the rolling out of StatCast. It can be tricky to find and preserve that information, but thankfully for the masses, there’s Baseball Savant, which I feel like I must link in every post. There, for the first time, we can sort hitters by batted-ball velocities. The industry has had HITf/x for years, so this isn’t progress for them, but it’s progress for us, on the outside. And we all love a new toy.

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Brett Lawrie doesn’t really have a problem with breaking balls, not if you zoom out on his career. He’s whiffed on sliders (14%) and curves (8%) at about an average rate (13% and 11%, respectively), which follows his overall whiff rates (8.6% for Lawrie, 8.5% is average).

Opening week, in three games against the Rangers, Lawrie saw ten straight breaking balls… twice. He’d never seen ten straight breaking balls before.

“They’re not going to stop until I make an adjustment,” Lawrie admitted before a game with the Mariners. But that statement’s not enough to uncover what it’s like to see a barrage of breaking balls like Lawrie did. And what it means, and how you claw your way out of a hole like the one he found himself in.

Lawrie’s a loquacious dude: he’ll keep talking if you let him. So, at one point, I asked him about the thought process when something like this was happening, and he obliged. You can’t edit an inner monologue like this, especially when you know he’s describing what it feels like to strike out four times on 12 straight pitches:

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For all her conspicuous virtues and manifest talents, late singer Aaliyah was almost certainly mistaken in her assertion that age “ain’t nothing but a number.” It is a number, that’s true, but it’s a number that represents the number of years a thing or person or some other manner of noun has existed. Which, that’s more than nothing.

In the context of baseball prospect analysis, age is decidedly not nothing. As both anecdotal evidence and also more rigorous statistical evidence* suggest, age relative to level is predictive of future major-league performance, where younger relative to level is better. One finds, for example, that players who debut at a younger age produce higher prorated WAR figures than players who debut at an older one. It’s not because they’re younger that they’re better, of course. Rather, their respective teams have generally recognized that they’re capable of handling the highest level of competition. And it follows that, if they’re able to handle that level of competition en route to their respective peaks, then they’re also generally able to handle it in the decline phase of their careers, too.

*Such as the sort produced by Chris Mitchell.

The relationship between age and performance and level is the foundation for the considerable and deserved excitement regarding Mike Trout’s career — not only for his career up the to present day, but also the prospect of what his career will have been once it’s finished. Trout has recorded the highest WAR among all hitters ever through his age-22 season, for example. That’s not only impressive, but probably also predictive. Because consider: basically all of the next 20 guys on that particular leaderboard are now in the Hall of Fame.

Players who, like Trout, combine youth and talent are notable. And, all other things being equal, it’s reasonable to expect that the prospects who are producing the top performances at the youngest ages will develop into the best players.

This question of talented youth is relevant today largely because of the Dodgers, their rotation, and their top pitching prospect left-hander Julio Urias. The Dodgers possess the largest major-league payroll by roughly $50 million. They also possess the sort of expectations associated with that kind of payroll — and, over the first month of the season, the club has more or less met those expectations. As of today, for example, they lead the NL West by two games and feature nearly a 90% chance of winning that division according to the numbers and methodology used at this site.

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Life is funny sometimes. While working on a post about an interesting little quirk in the 2015 increase in runs per game, Neil Weinberg tweeted out the following.

Fun early season blip in MLB. R/PA is up from last year, but wOBA is the same. Probably April, but fun to think about possible reasons.

— Neil Weinberg (@NeilWeinberg44) April 30, 2015

This was the exact quirk that I noticed that led me down the particular rabbit hole I’m about to drag you into. If you go to the league leaderboard, you’ll notice that the league as a whole is hitting .249/.314/.390 this year, good for a .310 woBA. That is almost an exact match for the .251/.314/.386 line the league put up last year, and by wOBA rounded to three decimal places, it results in the same .310 mark.

The fact that April 2015 offense is equal to total 2014 offense is interesting, because it suggests that offense might be ticking up this year, ending the trend of the last few years. April is almost always the most pitcher friendly month of the season, with cold weather knocking down baseballs that will generally fly out of ballparks in warmer months; additionally, most teams haven’t yet had to rely on their pitching depth yet, as the full toll of injuries manifests itself more later in the year than it does at the beginning of the season.

But that’s not the part that got me interested; it’s the part that Neil noticed. League batting is basically the same as it was last year, but league runs per game are up a decent amount, going from 4.07 R/G last year to 4.26 this year. That’s nearly a match for the league’s run scoring levels of 2011, back when league wOBA was .316. So offense is up a bit from a runs perspective, but not up much at all from an individual outcome perspective. What’s driving that difference?

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