Archive for Daily Graphings

Hitting a home run in Major League Baseball requires a considerable amount strength. It’s probably fair to presume, however that, having previously hit 53 of them in a single season, Chris Davis is in the upper reaches of physical strength among MLB players. Of Davis’ 190 career home runs, likely none has displayed that strength more clearly than the one he hit this weekend to beat Oakland — even though that homer failed to travel even 400 feet. 

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth on Saturday, Chris Davis came to the plate with no runners on against switch-pitching Pat Venditte. A 69 mph slider headed to the plate low and away out of the strike zone. Chris Davis did not appear to get a good swing on the ball:

Yet, somehow, the ball ended up here:

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Major League Baseball’s arcane – and many would say horribly outdated – television blackout policy has long been a source of frustration for baseball fans. As most readers are by now well aware, under MLB’s existing rules, fans residing within each team’s designated “local” broadcasting territory are currently unable to view that team’s games over the Internet via the MLB.tv streaming service. Instead, fans must subscribe to whichever regional sports network (RSN) owns the rights to the team’s games in order to watch their local team play.

These restrictions impact fans in a variety of ways. For starters, the existing rules prevent fans from watching their local team play on mobile devices, instead only allowing fans to view their local team’s games on a traditional television set. So anyone hoping to watch their local team’s broadcast via cell phone, for instance, is out of luck under the league’s existing rules.

Perhaps more frustrating, though, is the impact that MLB’s blackout policy has on fans who are either currently unable – or simply unwilling – to subscribe to whichever RSN owns the rights to their designated local team’s games. Under MLB’s policy, even if these fans shell out $110-130 per year to subscribe to MLB.tv, they will still be blacked out from watching any game involving their local team, even if they cannot watch the game on their local cable system.

So when news broke on Monday that MLB and Fox are nearing a deal to allow in-market streaming for 15 teams’ games, some fans were undoubtedly excited to learn that baseball was apparently, at long last, fully embracing the new digital age.

Unfortunately, in reality, the MLB-Fox agreement will do little to solve the most frequent criticisms of MLB’s blackout policy, as the scope of the new deal appears to be much more modest than some initial headlines suggested.

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Milwaukee Brewers prospect David Denson made history yesterday when he revealed he is gay. With his announcement, Denson became the first active, openly gay player in the history of affiliated baseball.

Given his significance to the game, there’s unlikely to be any shortage of coverage regarding Denson in either the near- or long-term. As some of the authors of that coverage have already noted, attempting to become a major leaguer is difficult enough without having to contend with questions of personal identity and concerns about acceptance at the same time. Denson himself has stated that he’s relieved that he can divert more of his energy now to baseball itself.

What I’d like to do here is set aside for a moment the implications of David Denson, gay ballplayer, and to utilize my KATOH projection system to consider briefly Denson’s prospects for reaching the majors.

Just 19 now, Denson was drafted by the Brewers in the 15th round in 2013, and has split the 2015 season between Low-A Wisconsin and Rookie League Helena, where he currently plays. In 268 trips to the plate this year, the first baseman has hit just .229/.313/.360, due in no small part to his elevated 26% strikeout rate. Denson opened the year in Low-A, where he also spent the second half of the 2014 season. But the Brewers reassigned him to extended spring training in May when he was hitting .195/.264/.305. He’s put up a more respectable .247/.339/.390 line since joining the Brewers Rookie League affiliate in June. Based on his 2015 numbers,  forecasts Denson for just 0.2 WAR through age 28, with a meager 6% chance of cracking the big leagues.

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It’s difficult to figure out where to start with Jackie Bradley Jr. You could start with his incredible defense, and actually that’s probably the right place to begin. You could look at this play, or this play, or this play, or if you have four minutes and 31 seconds you can watch some defensive highlights from 2014. Or just use Google. I’m sure you’ll come up with something good. That’s because Bradley is an exceptional outfielder. Someone with his defensive skills shouldn’t have to hit much to play regularly. “Not much” is still more than “none,” though, and it’s the difference between these two that has held Bradley back.

Bradley was called up four times in 2013, including at the beginning of the season to serve as the club’s starting left fielder. He hit .097/.263/.129 and was sent down as soon as the team got healthy enough to do so. He was called up three other times with varying degrees of failure, but the end result was a .617 OPS on the season. Even so, Bradley had hit at every level of the minors, including posting an .842 OPS for Triple-A Pawtucket in 2013 in between trips to Boston. The team decided he would be their starting center fielder in 2014. And he was. And his defense was close to perfect. His hitting was also perfect — though only on opposite day. Now, though, he’s hitting on all the regular kinds of days, too.

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With their offense sputtering, the Yankees called up first baseman Greg Bird from Triple-A last week in an attempt to potentially help matters. Bird is strictly a first baseman, meaning he’s unlikely to see regular playing time with Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez holding down first base and DH, respectively. However, with 16 games without an off-day on their schedule, the Yankees will surely want to spell both Teixeria and A-Rod, especially since both have been slumping of late.

If his 2015 numbers are any indication, Bird has little left to prove in the minor leagues. He hit .277/.356/.469 between Double-A and Triple-A this season, including a .319/.372/.534 performance over his last month in the minors. Bird’s combination of power, walks and manageable strikeout numbers have made him a potent hitter in the high minors this year, as evidenced by his 139 wRC+.

Those manageable strikeout numbers are a new feature for Bird. Prior to this season, the 6-foot-3 slugger had some trouble putting the ball in play on a regular basis. His strikeout rates were consistently higher than his league’s average (roughly 20%) since the Yankees drafted him in the fifth round back in 2011, but he’s managed to hack a few percentage points off of his strikeout rate this year.

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Dating back to at least 1999, Major League Baseball has made it a stated goal to increase the level of diversity in the highest levels of its teams’ front office operations. Under the so-called “Selig Rule,” MLB teams are required to consider female or minority candidates “for all general manager, assistant general manager, field manager, director of player development and director of scouting positions.”

Notably, the Selig Rule does not require that teams actually interview any female or minority candidates for these positions. Instead, teams must merely consider candidates belonging to an underrepresented group before hiring someone else to fill one of the five aforementioned positions. Along these lines, teams are required to provide the Commissioner’s office with a list of everyone that they internally considered for an applicable job.

Sixteen years later, the extent to which the Selig Rule has succeeded in increasing the level of diversity within MLB teams’ front office operations depends on one’s point of view. On the one hand, the number of female and minority employees in MLB teams’ front offices reportedly increased from around three percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2013. On the other hand, today only two MLB teams employ a manager belonging to an underrepresented minority group – Seattle’s Lloyd McClendon and Atlanta’s Fredi Gonzalez – while 26 of the 30 MLB general managers are white males (the only exceptions being the Diamondbacks’ Dave Stewart, the Dodgers’ Farhan Zaidi, the Phillies’ Ruben Amaro Jr., and the Tigers’ recently hired Al Avila).

Despite this mixed success, the league is committed to continuing to increase the levels of diversity in its teams’ front office ranks. In a new initiative announced last week, MLB has hired the Korn Ferry consulting firm to help prepare minority and female candidates to interview this off-season for any of the five categories of jobs covered by the Selig Rule.

While this new initiative will undoubtedly help those candidates who are eligible to work with the consulting firm, it nevertheless seems unlikely to have a significant impact on the representation of female and minority candidates within MLB.

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It’s not entirely surprising that Adam Eaton has nine home runs. The White Sox outfielder used to be a three-hole hitter with passable power. He homered 24 times in 434 at bats over his final two seasons at Miami University, and 13 times in his first 470 professional at bats.

Then the team that drafted him took away his bite.

The Arizona Diamondbacks moved Eaton to the top of the order – and sometimes near the bottom – when they promoted him to Double-A, in 2011. It was at that point they asked him to start developing a lead-off hitter type of approach.

“They wanted me to work my hands inside the ball consistently and drive the ball the other way,” explained Eaton. “Being a smaller guy on the left side of the plate, you definitely get tailored to your speed, and Arizona wanted me to ‘get on base, get on base.’ I’ve always been a guy who likes to hit the ball the other way, but that was still a completely different mentality.”

Eaton is 5-foot-8, so it makes sense that a team would want him to eschew swinging for the fences. To their credit, the White Sox realize it also makes sense to let him take advantage of his sneaky pop. Read the rest of this entry »

I live in Portland, Oregon which is a beautiful city of rivers and mountains and beer and pine trees and beer. About the only thing it doesn’t have that I wish it had is professional baseball. The closest pro team is the Hillsboro Hops, the short-season Single-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and they’re about a half hour away by car. In case you are not familiar, here is a hop.

That’s not a problem because a half hour isn’t a reasonable distance to drive for baseball. It is. It’s a problem in the general sense because a city like Portland should probably have more than a low Single-A baseball team. Then again, we’re all about to be swallowed up by the ground anyway so whatever.

But back to baseball! The lack of the sport here means there aren’t many opportunities to see a noteworthy game or related event. Wednesday night represented a departure from that norm. Dansby Swanson, the very first player selected in the most recent 2015 baseball draft, was going to make his professional debut and it was going to be with the Hops in Hillsboro. Yay Portland!

It was at this point that I thought, hey, I can watch Swanson in a scouty way and help inform not only myself but the readers of FanGraphs dot com as well. I get beer and a baseball game while, you, dear reader, get scouty-ish information on the top player drafted. That’s what we in the business call “a win-win.”

By way of catching you up on Swanson, here is what Kiley McDaniel had to say about him back in April.

Swanson was an advanced defender with a light bat in high school, then played second base his first two years at Vanderbilt and over the summers. Scouts got their first recent look at him playing short this spring and it still works. Swanson is a plus runner with fringy raw power and a strong 6’1/190 frame. He’s a contact hitter with more 10-13 homer power that wears out the gaps and would be a nice 6th-10th overall pick most years, but a high probability shortstop with some ceiling is hard to ignore in this draft.

Now back to me. I arrived, family in tow, at Ron Tonkin Field, home of the Hops, as the National Anthem was playing and had no trouble locating our seats. This is because the park contains not very many of them. When you’re used to a major-league stadium, finding six seats among 3,500 is like finding your bed in your bedroom.

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You’ve probably heard about the Troy Tulowitzki trade. The one that turned the Toronto Blue Jays’ already mighty offense into a juggernaut incapable of losing. The trade for David Price made some news, too. A team with a few mid-rotation starters but lacking an ace at the top and depth at the bottom was reinvigorated with the acquisition of one of the best pitchers in Major League Baseball, simultaneously providing that much-needed ace and allowing the rest of the rotation to fill out the remaining spots nicely. Those were the major moves — the earth-shattering, capture-the-attention-of-two-nations moves. The Blue Jays made other moves, too, though, and getting LaTroy Hawkins in the Tulowitzki trade, adding Mark Lowe, moving Aaron Sanchez to the bullpen, and officially naming Roberto Osuna as closer has strengthened what was once a weakness. For months, the Blue Jays struggled to close out games, but the bullpen has been lights out in the second half and looks ready to compete in October.

The last time I looked at the Blue Jays’ pitching issues, it was late June, the team was fourth in the division but had a solid 50/50 shot at making the playoffs. In the six intervening weeks, the Blue Jays have moved from wild-card hopeful to near playoff lock with more than a 90% chance of making the playoffs and 57% chance of winning the division. In late June, the rotation had at least one hole, and the bullpen was still struggling. Brett Cecil was experiencing difficulties as a closer, and the team had recorded just one more Shutdown (40) than Meltdown (39) on the year. As the first half drew to a close, the team had as many saves (14) as blown saves (14). Beginning with the change in closer six weeks ago, however, the Blue Jays have transformed their bullpen.

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There are a lot of rookies getting attention this season. And with good reason — it’s been a pretty good year for rookie position players. But while Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber, Joc Pederson, Jung-Ho Kang, Randal Grichuk are Carlos Correa getting lots of pub, it seems as though Miguel Sano has not generated the same volume of coverage nationally as have his peers. And that’s a shame, because he’s just as deserving of praise.

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