When the Marlins reorganized their front office not too long ago, one of the hopes was that Jeffrey Loria would no longer so frequently meddle in the team’s operation. In 2015, however, the team has stumbled right out of the gate, and there’s chatter that Loria is getting involved. From a recent report about manager Mike Redmond being on the hot seat:

According to sources who have heard rumblings, Redmond is on the hot seat and the the organization is already bouncing around possible replacements. One possibility: Wally Backman, the Mets’ Triple A manager.

You can take this for whatever it’s worth:

#Marlins official just assured me there is “no truth” to rumor Mike Redmond could be fired after 3-10 start.

— Mike Berardino (@MikeBerardino) April 20, 2015

If you want to play semantics, now the Marlins are off to a 3-11 start. So Redmond could be fired right now and the official wouldn’t technically have been a liar. The thing about votes of confidence is that you can never really know what they mean. They’re either one thing or the exact opposite, and we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do off the field, because we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do on the field.

But we can step back from manager speculation. The Marlins will make whatever decisions they make, and as easy as it is to pin these things on Loria, maybe there’s more of a consensus. Maybe Redmond deserves to be fired; I have no idea. Analysts can seldom add value to the subject of managerial job security. I have one point, though, that I feel like ought to matter: these Marlins probably weren’t going to be very good. While the start has been disappointing, it needs to be compared against what would’ve been a reasonable expectation.

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During Ned Colletti’s tenure as the General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a hallmark of the franchise was lavish spending on relief pitchers. A year ago, their Opening Day bullpen combined to make $33 million, by far the most of any team in baseball. To pitch in front of All-Star closer Kenley Jansen, Colletti shelled out big money to sign former All-Star closers Brian Wilson and Brandon League; even his idea of a bargain signing was signing injured former All-Star closer Chris Perez and hoping he returned to his prior form.

Colletti valued experience and track record, going after guys who were on the downsides of their careers, but had been effective ninth inning guys in the past. Unfortunately for him and the Dodgers, he routinely overestimated the shelf life of a relief pitcher, and ended up with expensive, ineffective setup guys incapable of getting the ball to Kenley Jansen with a lead. Last year, those three combined to give the Dodgers 158 mediocre innings, posting a 3.71 ERA and a miserable 4.17 FIP; they also combined to make $20 million between them, a total higher than 25 other MLB teams spent on their relief corps.

Last winter, the Dodgers replaced Colletti with Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi, poaching two analytically-inclined executives from the Rays and A’s respectively. Those two franchises have spent years building bullpens on the cheap, and not surprisingly, the Dodgers 2015 bullpen looks a lot different than their 2014 bullpen.

Gone is Brian Wilson, released despite the fact that he exercised his $9 million player option for the 2015 season; the new-look Dodgers decided they’d rather pay him that money to sit at home rather than let him take the mound. League is on the disabled list with a shoulder problem and won’t be joining the team any time soon. Perez signed a minor league deal with the Brewers this winter, and currently has a 9.00 ERA in Triple-A. Even Kenley Jansen, the team’s one actual good reliever from a year ago, has yet to throw an inning for the team in the regular season, as he had surgery to remove a growth from his foot during spring training.

From four closers to no closers in a year’s time, the Dodgers bullpen couldn’t possibly be any different than it was a year ago. And despite their lack of anything resembling a proven ninth-inning workhorse, LA’s bullpen has been nothing short of amazing so far.

The current group, listed with their 2015 walk, strikeout, and groundball rates, are included in the table below.

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Just as we were all finally getting over our Kris Bryant Day hangovers, the Cubs gave us something else to celebrate. As you’ve likely heard by now, the Cubs summoned Addison Russell to the major leagues yesterday. He started at second base last night, and went 0-5 in his big league debut.

Russell’s promotion came as something of a surprise. Although he’s a very talented player, and is one of the most highly-regarded prospects in the game, he’s had very little exposure to high-minors pitching. He’s played all of 77 games above A-Ball, and only 14 of those games came in Triple-A. Due to this relative lack experience, most anticipated that Russell wouldn’t make it to the majors until late 2015, if not sometime 2016. Yet here we are. It’s April 22nd and Russell is playing major league baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night’s broadcast of the Cardinals and Nationals game debuted live, in-game Statcast enhanced graphics and replays. Statcast is the next-generation player tracking technology that combines both optical and radar measurements promising to create new ways to quantify previously unmeasurable aspects of baseball. The hype leading up to this game was billed as historic, and here at FanGraphs, we even had a special edition of the After Dark Live chat to cover this momentous occasion.

If you were expecting something earth-shattering from Statcast, once you began to watch the game you were probably disappointed at the slow start. If you were unable to watch the broadcast, no need to worry, because all the important replays from the broadcast were posted on Major League Baseball’s site, and I’m about to review and critique the different elements of the Statcast presentation.

First, before analyzing specific images and gifs from the game, MLB Network appeared to treat this as a normal broadcast using Statcast to augment their broadcast, not define it. 90% of the broadcast contained traditional camera angles, graphics, replays, and other broadcast elements. When Statcast was used, it was to produce enhanced replays and player positioning. There weren’t graphical overlays over live-game action aside from a few pre-pitch positioning graphics. ESPN currently has more detailed graphics for live-action pitch tracking with their K-Zone graphical overlay.

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More than one organization has banned the cutter at one time or another. But it’s barely one pitch, and you probably wouldn’t want to have banned Mariano Rivera from throwing that pitch. Turns out, looking at the grip on the baseball might help us differentiate between risky and less risky cutters.

Dan Duquette has banned the cutter from the Baltimore organization. Explore his reasons, and you start to uncover that not all cutters are made alike.

The first stated reason was about outcomes. “Why don’t you take a look at the chart with the average against cutters in the big leagues, batting average against and then come back and tell me that that’s a great pitch,” Duquette said back then. Unfortunately, when stacked against fastballs, the pitch is actually decent. BACON is batting average on contact, SLGCON is slugging percentage on contact:

Sliders and changeups do better, but — theoretically at least — you can throw the cutter more often than those pitches. If it’s a fastball. More on this later.

The second stated reason was about fastball velocity and arm health. Increased cutter usage led to lower radar gun readings and lower arm strength, Duquette and Director of Pitching Development Rick Peterson felt. “What happens is you start to get off to the side of the baseball (with your grip) and then you’re no longer consistently behind the baseball,” Peterson said of the way the cutter steals velocity from a fastball.

The thing is, there are two vastly different types of cutters, and grip factors in. When Duquette was asked about pitchers that had done well with the pitch, Mariano Rivera in particular, he pointed to the difference between a ‘cutter’ and a ‘cut fastball.’ “Name me all the pitchers in the big leagues that make a living with a cut fastball? Rivera’s is a fastball. It moves,” he said.

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Out of all the reasons I enjoy baseball, I think mainly it’s about watching people do things few other people can do. Granted, that applies to the whole sport itself — every single player in the major leagues is absolutely fantastic. But I get particularly charged up by the freaks, and by the freak events. I love Felix Hernandez‘s changeup because there just isn’t another one like it. I love Aroldis Chapman’s fastball because there just isn’t another one like it. Mike Trout clobbers baseballs other guys don’t clobber. Andrelton Simmons gathers baseballs other guys don’t gather. Everybody we watch is several standard deviations above the mean. And then to see things several standard deviations above that? I watch to be amazed, and players remain amazing.

Kris Bryant was just called up, as you know. He’s without question an elite-level prospect and he might be, with some question, an elite-level player. One thing we know is he possesses an elite-level skill, in his ability to hit for consistent power. Not every player in the league is capable of doing truly extraordinary things. Bryant, though, shot up prospect lists because he is capable. And Tuesday night, we got our first major-league glimpse. In the first inning of a game against the Pirates, Kris Bryant did something amazing. Let’s watch and discuss.

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The highest career triple rates in baseball history, minimum 1000 plate appearances, with one exception:

• Paulo Orlando, 17.2%
• Tom Long, 3.0%
• Joe Jackson, 3.0%
• Sam Crawford, 2.9%
• Buck Freeman, 2.7%

Orlando, obviously, doesn’t qualify, being well short of 1000 career trips to the plate. But let’s just pretend he got all the way up to 1000, and over that span he never hit another triple. He’d still have a higher rate than Darin Erstad, and Jeff Francoeur, and whichever one of the Alex Gonzalezes this is, and Rickey Henderson. Across baseball, triples have been in decline. Orlando is trying to reverse the trend by himself.

Until a short while ago, you’d probably never heard of him. He’s a 29-year-old rookie who joined affiliated baseball in 2006. That tells you plenty about his career path, and upon Orlando’s initial promotion, by far the neatest fun fact was that he became the third-ever Brazilian major-leaguer. Now there’s a neater fun fact, a fact all Orlando’s own: he’s the first player anyone can find whose first three big-league hits were triples. And since then, he’s hit two more triples.

He isn’t just the current major-league leader, among players. He’s also tied for the major-league lead, among teams. Orlando has all five of the Royals’ triples. Four other teams have five triples, but none have more than that, and most have fewer. Two teams have yet to hit a single triple. Orlando hasn’t hit a ball out of the park. From a post by Jeffrey Flanagan:

“The first time the guy who scouted me for the White Sox saw me [in Brazil] he said to me, ‘All you do is hit triples. You never hit home runs,'” Orlando said, smiling.

See? Scouting is easy! Orlando was scouted as a triples machine. He’s blossomed into something of a triples machine. No matter how much longer this goes on, Orlando’s already made history. Few 29-year-old rookies can say that, but now that we know Orlando’s already cemented his place, how much more might’ve been possible to do? It’s time for this article to get stupid.

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For better or worse, the Kansas City Royals have garnered a fair amount of attention to start the season. On the better side of the ledger, the team now sits at 10-3, with the second best record in the American League behind only the 11-2 Detroit Tigers. Even finishing a game over .500 the rest of the way would give the team a solid 85-win season, and the Playoff Odds here at Fangraphs give the Royals a better than one in three chance at making the playoffs. While those might not seem like great chances, they are sixth in a league where five teams make the playoffs and they are already ahead of preseason darling Cleveland Indians.

The ugliness that consumed the weekend for Kansas City certainly is not drawing the type of attention a team should hope to receive, but perhaps lost amid the beanings and the yelling and the pointing, there was a significant and rare day for the Royals as Salvador Perez did not start on Sunday. Erik Kratz took his place, although Perez did not receive the day off as he entered the game in the seventh inning and caught the final two innings behind the plate.

This early in the season, a catcher making most if not all a team’s starts is not overly unusual. Perez started the first 11 games, but off days early on meant that he received two days of rest during that time. While his games and plate appearances are near the top of the catcher Leaderboard and his 107 innings behind the plate are second in baseball to Derek Norris’ 111 thus far, it is too early to get alarmed about his workload thus far. It is the upcoming workload that should be concerning.
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Over the past couple weeks, you might have noticed some of our advanced fielding data filtering into the system, as the scouts grading and categorizing each play go through their expert machinations. With two weeks of play in the books, and enough time for much of the data to come in (there is normally a slight delay), we can now look back on some of the highlights of the defensive portion of the game. Though the stats run a few days behind, we still have a lot to look at.

I’ve gone through each defensive position and pulled one or two of the best “remote” plays for each, giving us a veritable super cut of defensive gems from the early going. These are only the plays categorized as being converted into outs between 1-10% of the time. Though there could be some disagreement with elements of the classification for each play, there’s no doubt that these plays are among the best made since the start of the season. Let’s get to it!

Pitcher

A preface: obviously the pitcher position doesn’t have to make a lot of incredible defensive plays. Routine and sometimes awkward, yes, but not spectacular. That being said, there was one that made the cut:

Anthony DeSclafani, April 14th

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