The Houston Astros just finished a three-game series at home against the Cleveland Indians, and a few things presented themselves in respect to our discussions during this past offseason. The discussions in question pertained to two subjects: the quiet strength of the Cleveland pitching staff, and the strikeout propensity of the Houston lineup.

It was hard to know exactly where the line between the two started and ended. We can say this about the Cleveland rotation: it looked good. Corey Kluber was Corey Kluber. Carlos Carrasco looked like he did at the end of 2014, looking unhittable with his high-90’s fastball and great changeup. Finally, Trevor Bauer put the icing on the cake in the third game, showcasing his combination of wildness and raw stuff to exit with a no-hitter intact after 6 innings. Cleveland fans are obviously encouraged by what they saw in the front end of their rotation this series. It’s not a surprise two of them just signed lengthy contract extensions.

On the other side, the results were clear in another way for the Houston offense:

• .208 OBP
• .048 ISO
• 37.5 K%

Those stats were informed in large part by performances like this, from Evan Gattis:

Gattis is also the only player since at least 1914 with 2 4-K games within his team’s 1st 3 games of a season

— Baseball Reference (@baseball_ref) April 9, 2015

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You almost couldn’t dream of a better matchup. Thursday in the capital, Stephen Strasburg went up against Matt Harvey. It would technically be possible to improve on that. Some would suggest Corey Kluber and Clayton Kershaw. Others would suggest Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw. But, on pure stuff alone, Strasburg’s a delight to watch, and Harvey’s every bit his equal. At least, that’s what we recalled. We also hadn’t seen Harvey pitch a major-league game in a while.

Harvey began and ended on a pitch count. He still managed to go longer than Strasburg did, spinning six shutout frames on 91 pitches. I don’t know if there was a single representative at-bat, but I will volunteer this first-inning showdown against Bryce Harper:

1. low curveball, 83, whiff
2. high fastball, 97, whiff
3. high fastball, 97, ball
4. high fastball, 97, whiff

In case that one doesn’t do it for you, you might prefer the third-inning at-bat, where Harvey whiffed Harper with a high fastball at 97. Or you could skip ahead to the sixth, where Harvey whiffed Harper with a high fastball at 96. Between Strasburg and Harper, the Nationals have two young stars who’ve generated near-unparalleled hype. Thursday, Harvey out-played them both. It was a rather emphatic way for the phenom to kick off what promises to be an electric campaign.

And the Mets themselves are thinking big things. Bigger things, at least, than they’ve been thinking about the last few years. This year, they want to be a year of transition from finding and developing talent to winning. Like a smaller-scale Cubs, if you will, and, like the Cubs, the Mets think they have the ability to get to the playoffs, even without the injured Zack Wheeler. It stands to reason that, if things go well this year for New York, it’ll be in large part because of what Harvey can do, now that he’s back.

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In Monday’s “Opening Day Staff Survey,” Dave said the storyline he was most looking forward to this season was, “Breaking in young pitching prospects as relievers.” This was a little bit vague, but he elucidated on it further later that day when he recorded his weekly podcast with Carson. If you skip to the 30-minute mark, we get to the heart of the issue:

“Earl Weaver used to do this all the time with his relievers back in the 70s, but he broke them in as long relievers; we didn’t really have these one-inning specialists that they have today. So you’d break in these young pitchers, but they’d go two, three, four innings. They’d have to face hitters multiple times, they’d have to work on multiple pitches, they’d have to pace themselves a little bit. To me, that’s a little bit different than breaking in a guy as a ninth-inning guy or as an eighth-inning guy and telling him to throw as hard as possible for 15 pitches.”

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When you look at the player pages for a prospect, you’ll see present and future grades. When it comes to the grades per pitch, the difference between the two is mostly consistency. As Kiley McDaniel puts it, the future grade is “usually the best version of the pitch currently.”

If you watched Michael Pineda pitch yesterday, you know exactly what this means. By Gameday, he threw nine changeups, but by PITCHf/x he threw 12, and the number might be even larger. Only twice before in his 42 starts has he thrown that many. They weren’t all good. But when they were good…

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You’ve already read about the stuff being tried in an effort to improve baseball’s pace of play. You’ve already read so much of it you’re probably already tired of reading it. Sorry. Pace of play is a relatively boring subject, when compared to everything that happens in between the various delays and stoppages (i.e. baseball). But, hey, here’s something: last year, the median game duration was 3:07. So far this year, 2:58. Maybe that means something. Maybe all that means is it’s been just a few days. Don’t know, but, forget the macro. This is about the micro.

Among the new rules implemented: batters must keep one foot in the box. A candid Bud Selig:

“A guy gets in the batter’s box, ball one, and now he’s adjusting all this crap he has on,” Selig said. “And I’m thinking to myself watching the game, ‘What is he adjusting? He hasn’t swung the bat.’ ”

Bud Selig is very old, but that’s something I myself would’ve said, with the same terminology. Baseball has been littered with hitters who have to meditate between every pitch, and perhaps the worst offender has been Troy Tulowitzki. Back in 2008, Tulowitzki averaged 20.5 seconds between pitches. That subsequently rose every year, to last season’s 27.9. Tulo, like other hitters, would explain it as a habit. Part superstition, part taking a breather, part thinking things through. But Tulo wasn’t always like this. He grew into it. When he worked faster, he was an excellent player. He’s always been an excellent player, but his is a frustrating trend.

So how has he been changed? How has Tulowitzki responded to a new rule that addresses one of his quirks? We’ve got games, now. Games mean data.

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When discussing contract extensions like the four-year $27 million deal with two team options the Pirates signed with Josh Harrison, especially for those players three years or more away from free agency much of the focus is on how many free agent seasons a team has purchased by offering a substantial guarantee. The Miami Marlins and Chicago White Sox each received three free agent years from Christian Yelich and Adam Eaton, respectively. The New York Mets received one free agent season from Juan Lagares, and the Minnesota Twins did not receive any free agent years from Brian Dozier when they signed his extension. The Pirates have bought potentially three years of free agency with a relatively small guarantee, but given Harrison’s age and track record prior to 2014, those years will not likely be as valuable as those for teammates Andrew McCutchen and Starling Marte.

The recent contract extensions for players with between three and four years and in their first year of arbitration have incredibly wide variance.
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Last May, Rob Arthur of Baseball of Prospectus unveiled new research implying that PITCHf/x data can be used to forecast hitter performance. Essentially, he found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. The theory behind this phenomenon is pretty straightforward. A pitcher knows a good hitter when he sees one, and chooses to approach him with caution. So when pitcher’s change their approach, it’s often an early indicator of improved talent from a hitter.

This finding gives us yet another tool to use in forecasting hitter performance. As great as statistical projections are, they can sometimes be a bit slow to recognize a breakout when it happens. Simply put, it’s not easy to identify the one breakout from the sea of small sample size flukes. However, Arthur’s research hints that incorporating pitch locations can help us get ahead of the curve.

This past January, Eno Sarris wrote a piece for JABO where he applied Arthur’s findings to 2014 data in an attempt to identify breakout candidates for 2015. Eno noted that this type of analysis is most useful for players who are relatively new to the league. For this reason, he limited his analysis to hitters with fewer than 800 big plate appearances.

I decided to dig a little deeper. To my knowledge, all applications of Arthur’s research have looked exclusively at big league hitters. However, in what follows, I make my best attempt at expanding this practice to hitters in the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

Ian Desmond turns 30 this coming September. “Hey, let me run out and get him a funny card about how he’s over the hill!” you might say, not realizing that’s actually not funny for baseball players. This is noteworthy because Desmond is in the last year of a contract with the Washington Nationals, and is a player who provides power at a position that has very little. That’s likely the main reason he reportedly turned down a seven-year, $107 million contract extension from the Nationals in the offseason before 2014, a piece of news that was only fully revealed this past November. I’m ashamed to say it slipped under my radar of analysis, dear readers, and I’m out to remedy that today.

It’s fair to say that Ian Desmond is an important part of this Nationals team. He is a rarity: a middle infielder who can bat fifth or sixth and provide the gawking sort of power normally reserved for positions played by large, slow men. According to Baseball Heat Maps, his average fly ball and home run distance of 297.5 feet was good for 24th-best in baseball in 2014, sandwiched between Pedro Alvarez and Devin Mesoraco. That mark is also a few ticks better than Troy Tulowitzki (295 feet), and gives us a good idea of just how much raw power he has.

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Last year was the worst year of Shin-Soo Choo’s career. He shrugs it off, but it was clear that he was hurt for most of the year. September brought two surgeries, one for his elbow and one for his ankle. Talk to him about those injuries, and you quickly see a central conflict in every player’s life — do you play through an injury and provide less value, or do you take the time off to get right?

In the context of the season last year, it was clear that Choo wanted to do his best to help a hurting team despite his own problems. “Everybody on the team was hurt, it was a tough season,” he admitted before a game against the Athletics. “I wanted to play, that’s all.” The Rangers last year set a new record for days lost the disabled list, with 99 more days than the 2004 Diamondbacks.

If you play through injury, your numbers suffer. That’s how Choo had his worst strikeout and second-worst power numbers since he became a regular. And then the fans tend to howl, particularly if you’re in the first year of a big new deal with a new team. “I know I was hurting, but I didn’t want to say anything, because it’s my job to stay in the lineups every day,” Choo said.

And the howling? Did it bother the player? “It’s okay, I’ll take it, it’s my job,” he said. “You’re a ball player, in any sport, people talk about your numbers, people talk bad, that’s okay, it’s our job.” Really, people are going to complain either way in this situation. “I’m okay with no numbers, I don’t want people to say he’s aways hurt,” Choo said.

But it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how the injury hurts you at the plate or in the field. “I just had to play, I didn’t think about it too much,” Choo said of how the elbow and ankle affected his play.

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Look at this nonsense:

I should probably explain this nonsense: That’s Ryan Zimmerman. He’s swinging at a pitch from Jacob deGrom. As you can tell, that’s Zimmerman making contact with a pitch from Jacob deGrom. And that contact resulted in a dinger. It put the Nats up in the first inning. Washington wouldn’t score again. They’d win anyway.

It can be hard to write about baseball early in the season. So much of what gets written tries to use stuff observed in small samples in an attempt to figure out what’s going to happen the rest of the way. I do it myself. This isn’t that. This is just, whoa, weird dinger. Forget what Zimmerman’s future holds. Let’s talk about this home run, and Zimmerman’s present and past. Because, I mean:

This means something.

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