In the summer of 2005, the author of this post contracted at a Chicago area restaurant some manner of foodborne illness. The symptoms produced by same needn’t be explored in any depth here; to say, however, that I experienced roughly all the forms of “gastric distress” is sufficient. Nor is it the deepest throes of my illness that are relevant here, but rather the recovery process. Indeed, after about a week or so of turmoil, I returned to something like normal health. The only qualification: that I’d be compelled, for the better part of the next month, to survive on diet consisting strictly of starches, mashed and non-fibrous fruits, and (were I feeling particularly strong) baked, skinless chicken. These were foods which represented the least possible challenge to my sensitive digestive system.

What follows is the analytical equivalent of the aforementioned diet. It is designed not to examine in any depth — but rather to provide deserving coverage of — certain players who’ve made their major-league debuts this season. To say that it is both incomplete and haphazard is probably correct. To say, however, that it might be of some use to those readers who have exhausted themselves mentally by means of their other daily pursuits — this is also reasonable.

Below are five players whose debuts have been notable for one reason or another — where notable has been entirely at the discretion of the author. Accompanying each player are his season stats to date (denoted by Season), his Steamer rest-of-season projection (Steamer ROS), and his ZiPS rest-of-season projection (ZiPS ROS).

Archie Bradley, RHP, Arizona (Profile)

Who he is: Right-hander in D-backs rotation.

Notable because: He was the seventh pick in the 2011 draft. Has exhibited excellent fastball and curveball as amateur and minor leaguer.

Earliest returns: Positive. In an unexpected way, though.

Bradley has never demonstrated particularly strong command, nor would his walk rate after two starts (12.8%) suggest that he’s changed in any substantial way so far as that’s concerned. Still, he’s produced better-than-average fielding-independent and run-prevention numbers — largely, those, on the strength of unexpected strong ground-ball tendencies. Jeff Sullivan examined those tendencies yesterday. One takeaway: he’s been throwing a riding fastball low in the zone. More than most every pitcher.

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Coming into the season, you might have had a three-part checklist for Mariners’ lefty James Paxton. Can he throw more high fastballs, can he improve his changeup, and can he hold his velocity and command? We know his curve is good, and most years, he has the big velocity that has turned our attention to him. But these three items sum up the healthy skepticism that still remains, and the pitcher knows all about them.

Jeff Sullivan recommended high fastballs for Paxton because his fastball has rise but he throws it low. Currently the Seattle lefty is showing almost exactly the same whiff and strikeout rates as he showed last year, so maybe he wasn’t listening.

Except that he was! “I do utilize the high fastball, to work off of it, and have the curveball drop off it,” Paxton said of the fact that high fastball release points can help mask a high curveball release point.

But the pitcher also admitted that the high fastball was “probably something I could work into my game a little more effectively.” He’s been trying, as you can see from the fastball heat maps below from Baseball Savant (2014 on the left, 2015 on the right). If you prefer numbers, Paxton has thrown 29% of his fastballs in the top third of the zone this year, up from 25% last year. And his rank with respect to his peers has changed, as he used to be in the 41st percentile for high fastballs, and so far this year, he’s in the 31st percentile.

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I’ll start this one like I think I’ve started another, probably also about Shane Greene. Who remembers? Last summer, while working on an article for The Hardball Times Annual, I talked to Brandon McCarthy about the significance and implementation of contemporary data. It was a long interview and a lot went into the article, so I’m not going to sit here and spoil everything, but McCarthy noted something he learned immediately upon joining the Yankees. Right away, they told him about the value of an elevated fastball. Even though McCarthy was more traditionally a sinker-baller, he found that he could get easy outs sometimes going hard and up, with hitters geared for pitches down. Adding one new level made hitting exponentially more difficult.

As the conversation went on, it turned to then-Yankees sensation Shane Greene. Maybe “sensation” is over-selling him, but he came out of nowhere, and he was throwing gas. Greene was whiffing a batter an inning, powered by a mid-90s sinker that he kept down by the knees, and as we neared the end, McCarthy made one more point. The Yankees had given Greene very simple offseason instructions: he was to improve his ability to throw a fastball up.

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Avert your eyes, Milwaukee Brewers fans. I apologize in advance for how painful this may be.

When the Brewers woke up on Monday morning, they were merely a bad baseball team, off to a 2-10 start, the worst in 47 years of Pilots/Brewers baseball. When they went to bed on Monday night, they were still a bad baseball team, off to a 2-11 start, one of just two teams with fewer than four wins. In between, second baseman Scooter Gennett joined the “stupidly weird injury” club, slicing his hand open in the shower. In between, star catcher Jonathan Lucroy left Monday’s 6-1 loss to Cincinnati early with what was revealed to be a fractured toe, one that manager Ron Roenicke could apparently hear happening.

So there’s terrible baseball, and then there’s this, in which a team that had just about no margin for error has gotten off to what’s basically the worst possible start imaginable. You can’t make the playoffs in April, but you sure can miss them. That’s a saying that exists or it’s one I’m either making up or poorly paraphrasing, but now it’s on the Internet, and therefore it’s true. Welcome to the 2015 Milwaukee Brewers, a team that just saw its season implode before it really began. Read the rest of this entry »

Just as I was beginning to work this up, I got an email saying Nelson Cruz had been named the American League Player of the Week, which provides for a very convenient introductory sentence. Over the past seven days, Cruz has posted the highest wRC+ in baseball, by 85 points. Over the past seven days, Cruz has driven in 10 runs, while the Indians have driven in 11. Eight days ago, Cruz slugged a home run. Nine days ago, Cruz slugged a home run, and a couple of singles. All he’s hit have been singles and dingers, and he has almost as many dingers as singles. It’s been a good start for Nelson Cruz.

Which means analysis is obligatory. What’s gotten into Nelson Cruz? The answer is pretty much always “nothing sustainable,” but that’s never stopped us before. Nor does that mean there’s nothing to analyze. Cruz has been almost the entirety of the Mariners’ offense, and lately he’s been hotter than everyone else. Yet, how true is that? And is there anything else going on?

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Hey there sports fans! Congratulations on making it through the first two weeks of the regular season. I’m sure some of you are ecstatic, like you fans of select AL Central teams or the Mets that have won most of your games; the rest of you (with a few exceptions) are listless in a hovering mediocrity around .500. At least we’re all in this together. It will get better, I promise, unless it gets worse.

Today we’re going to look back at some of the batted ball highlights of the first two weeks of the season, utilizing our friends HitTrackerOnline and Baseball Savant. There’s going to be a little bit of everything in here — hardest-hit ball, lowest-apex home run, weakest-hit ball, etc. — in the hope that this might become a semi-regular post, provided there are enough interesting results. August did a few of these last year, and they’re fun for everyone involved, so let’s keep it rolling.

Hardest-hit home run — Yoenis Cespedes, 4/19

A-Rod was poised to claim this spot with his 477-foot dinger highlighted below, but Cespedes went a little wild in the first inning of yesterday’s game against the White Sox, hitting a grand slam off of Jose Quintana with a batted ball speed of 116 MPH. That bested A-Rod’s blast by .7 MPH, though it will likely fall as the season goes on: last year saw a hardest-hit home run of 122 MPH.

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Four weeks after he hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy at MetLife Staduim in February of 2014, Russell Wilson reported to Surprise Arizona to participate in spring training with the Texas Rangers. Although the Rangers technically hold the rights to Wilson as a baseball player, he didn’t actually appear in any spring training games, and returned home after taking a few grounders and batting practice swings. Wilson made an appearance at the Rangers spring training complex this year as well.

Wilson’s spring training attendance was little more than a publicity stunt, but there was a time when he was a fairly well-regarded baseball player. After his junior season at North Carolina State, the Colorado Rockies drafted him as a second basemen in the 4th round of the 2010 amateur draft. Before he joined the Seattle Seahawks in 2012, he spent parts of two seasons in the Rockies organization, where he recorded 379 plate appearances between two levels of A-ball.

Up to this point, Wilson’s stint as a professional baseball player has been just an interesting footnote. But in a recent interview with Bryant Gumbel, Wilson hinted that he’d be open to playing both sports simultaneously — a la Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders or Brian Jordan. Regardless of what he said in the interview, I find it hard to believe that Wilson will actually try to pull this off. He’s one of the better quarterbacks in the NFL, and has played in two consecutive Super Bowls. Would he really compromise his football career just to see if he might be able to succeed at baseball too? Read the rest of this entry »

Making wholesale role changes two weeks into the season is not likely a sound strategy, as the decisions leading up to Opening Day take in much more reliable information with considerably more history than a few appearances in April. Likewise, taking promising starters who have yet to prove they cannot start and sending them to the bullpen where they will pitch considerably fewer innings is not ideal either. Yet that is where the Toronto Blue Jays sit heading into the third week of the season. The Blue Jays were dealt a blow in Spring Training when Marcus Stroman was lost for the year after a knee injury that required surgery, and they are still reeling from that loss.

A battle for the fifth spot in the rotation between Daniel Norris, Aaron Sanchez, and Marco Estrada shifted as the Blue Jays anointed two of their top three prospects as starters to begin the season. With Aaron Sanchez struggling, Daniel Norris beginning the season with a dead arm, and a young bullpen that has already switched closers, the Blue Jays pitching staff has provided more questions than answers.

In five starts this season, Norris and Sanchez have combined for 22 innings and 15 strikeouts while giving up 12 walks and five home runs. The poor performance and low innings totals thus far have put a strain on an inexperienced bullpen. The Blue Jays 47 2/3 innings pitched out of the bullpen are tied for fourth Major League Baseball, but they’re not getting worked so much because they’re dominating when called upon; those innings have come with a 4.16 FIP, ranking 26th in MLB. The Blue Jays bullpen is both performing poorly and getting overworked, never a good combination for mid-April.
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Let’s follow a tried-and-true format, unimaginative as it is. I’ll throw in a twist. There’s the imaginative part.

The good! Archie Bradley, so far, has made two starts in the major leagues. He’s faced maybe the best team in baseball, and last year’s World Series champion. He’s allowed a total of five hits and two runs, leaving his first start with his team ahead of Clayton Kershaw, and leaving his second start with his team ahead of Madison Bumgarner. His team also isn’t very good, so there are some bonus points.

The bad! Bradley’s come up just a hair shy of 60% strikes. He’s paired 10 strikeouts with six walks, so the command issues that’ve always been there haven’t disappeared. To this point, he’s lived almost exclusively fastball-curveball.

The ugly interesting! Bradley’s basically tied for the league lead in groundball rate. Of the 31 pitches batters have hit somewhere fair, they’ve put 23 of them on the ground. He hasn’t faced extreme groundball-hitting opponents, and he doesn’t have a ground-balling track record, and this is one of those things that’s supposed to sort itself out in a hurry. Groundball pitchers generally get grounders every time out. Fly ball pitchers generally put the ball in the air every time out. There are exceptions, odd reversals, but the probability gets lower when you consider back-to-back starts. Already, we might start to think of Archie Bradley as a groundball pitcher. With the weird thing being, he hasn’t been one, and he probably shouldn’t be one.

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When I first met Drew Storen, his train had yet to reach Big League Station. The Stanford product was 22 years old and pitching in the Arizona Fall League, his Nationals debut still six months away. Since that time he’s ridden a roller coaster.

The 27-year-old right-hander has a 43-save season on his resume, but also an elbow injury and a crushing post-season loss. Briefly demoted to the minors in 2013, he bounced back to the tune of a 1.12 ERA in 65 games last year. With everything that’s transpired since our initial conversation, a glimpse in the mirror was in order.

“You try not to reflect when you play,” said Storen. “It’s human nature to do so, but you try to go day-to-day – every cliché possible – in baseball. You have to go forward, because the train is moving.

“But it’s been a good journey. There have been challenges, and good times as well. I feel I’ve grown as a pitcher. Trying harder is not always trying better, and I’m not as pedal-to-the-metal as I used to be, When I came up, I was more of a bar-fighter than a boxer. I’ve learned that you need to be a tactician; you can’t just go out there and out-stuff people.”

Analogy aside, Storen has never possessed a troglodyte mentality. He was already familiar with PITCHf/x when I interviewed him five-and-a-half years ago. He still utilizes the tool, typically to review his release point, and relies heavily on video to “make sure everything is in tune.”

Monitoring his mechanics and the depth he’s getting on his deliveries is an off-the-field endeavor. His mind’s eye is equally attentive on the mound. Read the rest of this entry »