Archive for Daily Graphings

Last year’s Royals caused us to fall in love with stolen bases all over again. The AL Wild Card Game put their utility on display, and it was around that game the whole nation turned its attention to Jon Lester’s refusal to attempt any pickoffs. I probably don’t need to review this for you, so I’ll skip ahead. When Lester began this year with the Cubs, plenty of people were wondering whether he’d attempt more pickoffs than the zero he tried in 2014. He seemed like a pitcher who could be taken advantage of.

Flash back to the first month of the season. Lester threw over, all right. Twice. Sort of.

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Before anybody snarks about the quality of Trevor Bauer’s pitching, and whether or not he’s good enough for us to value his thoughts on pitching, know that he’s fully aware of his limits, and was even before conceding six runs to the Yankees last night.

“I don’t throw hard enough. My pitches aren’t strikes often enough. My pitches aren’t consistent enough. I’d almost rather not be a pitcher than be a mediocre pitcher,” he admitted to me. (I had to tell him he was decidedly above-average when it came to whiffs and strikeouts, at least.)

But this is exactly what makes him well qualified to study the art of pitching. He isn’t blessed with a Felix Hernandez changeup, or Clayton Kershaw‘s command, or even teammate Corey Kluber’s breaking ball. He knows that.

And so what brings him satisfaction? Studying pitching. Working hard to figure things out. Getting better, with the help of our best tools.

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Nelson Cruz leads both leagues in home runs, and he ranks second behind Bryce Harper in SLG. Neither is a surprise. The Seattle slugger left the yard 40 times with Baltimore last season, and moving to Safeco Field wasn’t going to squelch his production. Per ESPN Home Run Tracker, 22 of the 34 bombs he’s hit this year have traveled more than 400 feet. Nine of them have gone at least 440 feet.

One thing has come as a surprise: Going into last night, the career .274 hitter had a .324 batting average, and he was tied with Prince Fielder for the most base hits (140) in either league. Once one-dimensional, the former Texas Ranger has morphed into more than just a basher.

It’s been a long process. In many respects, Cruz has been a late bloomer. Read the rest of this entry »

I watched Hisashi Iwakuma’s no-hitter, and I wrote about it, and in writing about it, I included the following screenshot:

That’s Jesus Sucre, setting up for a high fastball to Manny Machado. The pitch was executed well, and Iwakuma got his out. Now, writing about the no-hitter didn’t leave me much space to analyze individual matchups, but something I noticed was that Sucre set up high against Machado pretty often. Really, he just set up high pretty often, more often than in the average Iwakuma start, but it was the pitches to Machado that caught my eye, and it made me curious. Does Machado have a vulnerability upstairs, like last year’s version of Mike Trout? After finishing the no-hitter post, I turned my attention to Machado’s breakout year. Allow me to spoil the rest of this post: no. There is no high-pitch vulnerability. In fact, quite the opposite!

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One week before the trading deadline, the Baltimore Orioles looked like a team that might sell, coming off a three-game sweep at the hands of the New York Yankees and dropping the opening game of the series against the Tampa Bay Rays. Their record stood at 46-49 and, with 5.5 games and four teams standing in between them and the second wild-Card spot, moving pending free agents Chris Davis or Wei-Yin Chen for prospects looked like a real possibility. Perhaps lost in the frenzy of the Toronto Blue Jays’ moves, the Orioles won seven of eight games, attempted to shore up some of their outfield issues with a trade for Gerardo Parra, and continue (now) to hang around the playoff race even as they continue to fly under the radar.

Free-agent-to-be Chris Davis has had a well-timed run both for himself and his team in the second half, hitting 12 of his 31 home runs in the last 25 games. Davis’ .281 isolated slugging percentage ranks fifth in all of Major League Baseball behind only Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, Nelson Cruz, and Mark Teixeira. He has improved as the season has gone on, and has done better at handling high-octane fastballs, per Mike Petriello at mlb.com. Davis has not been alone, either, as Manny Machado moves toward stardom with the fifth-highest WAR in MLB built on an excellent season at the plate that has risen to the level of his incredible defense. Adam Jones has also put up another very good season in center field. With those three players anchored within the first four slots of the lineup, the Orioles have scored a respectable 4.4 runs per game.

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If you’re a regular reader, you may have come across my previous article on the limitations of the StatCast batted-ball data. It’s limited in size, not generating a velocity reading on just over 25% of batted balls. That wouldn’t be a huge deal if that substantial number of missed readings were randomly dispersed across BIP types, but they are not. Weakly hit balls are being missed at a much higher rate: over 56% of batted balls classified as popups were missed, as were over 28% of grounders, likely mostly of the weakly hit variety.

This limits the amount of detailed analysis that can be done, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Since the missed reading rate on fly balls (18%) and liners (17%) is much more manageable — and random — analysis of these two groups might yield some useful results. Today, let’s take a crack at calculating some park factors for the first half of the 2015 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Yankees prospect Jorge Mateo has some serious wheels. In 96 games with Low-A Charleston, the Dominican-born shortstop stole an eye-popping 71 bases. He leads the South Atlantic League by more than 14 steals, despite the fact he was promoted to High-A a little over a week ago. Mateo’s posted gaudy stolen-base numbers in past years too. He swiped 11 bags in just 15 games in the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League last year. The year before that, he lead the Dominican Summer League with 49. If you hadn’t guessed it by his stolen-base totals, his speed grades out as an 80 on the 20-80 scale.

Speed is clearly Mateo’s calling card, but he’s no slouch with the bat, either. The shortstop hit a respectable .268/.338/.378 in 96 games in the South Atlantic League, and has hit .464/.500/.714 in 30 plate appearances since his promotion to High-A, giving him a wRC+ of 116 on the year.

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For those casual baseball fans who might have found residence under a slab of basalt for the past two months, let’s get you up to speed: Carlos Gonzalez has been locked-in recently. Post All-Star break (that date chosen for simple convenience), CarGo is fourth in baseball in wRC+, tied for first in homers, and first in ISO. So, on Monday night, we shouldn’t have been too surprised when he did this:

Seeing the initial flight of the ball while watching this game, I thought this was a double in the gap that was going to short-hop the fence. The Rockies telecast said about the same thing. Instead, it was a frozen rope that didn’t come down, sailing into the first few rows of bleachers.

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Say what you will about the Mariners over the years, but at least they’ve thrown the American League’s last three no-hitters. And, say what you will about the significance of a no-hitter, but they’re undeniably exciting and cool, sometimes little oases of elation in a year that’s otherwise lost. You don’t need to overthink it. People like no-hitters. People like them because they’re neat. Hisashi Iwakuma just threw one, Wednesday afternoon in Seattle against the Orioles. The Orioles can hit pretty well!

It wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world, because Iwakuma has a history of being pretty good. It still qualified as a legitimate surprise, because Iwakuma had never before completed a major-league game, and this year he hasn’t entirely been himself. Much like Robinson Cano, it appears that Iwakuma has only righted himself too late to save the Mariners’ season. The best to hope for now is the occasional cool moment, and Iwakuma delivered as much as he could.

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There are three reasons to be interested in Chase Utley as a baseball player. One, there’s his whole history. Utley’s track record of being one of the best second basemen in baseball. If his career ended today, he’d be a borderline Hall-of-Famer. Two, he’s available. The Giants are reportedly in negotiations, with the Phillies looking to keep getting younger. If you want Utley, you can have him, provided you give a little something, and provided Utley is open to the chance. Three, this:

Good news on Utley: Per source, he not only is feeling better, but also has figured out a flaw in his swing that was caused by ankle injury.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 15, 2015

Utley’s numbers this year are very bad. He’s not one to typically offer excuses, but Utley injured his right ankle over the winter, and it never really got quite right. Lousy on-field performance followed, and then Utley went to the disabled list for a while. There’s no positive evaluation of what Utley’s been. The Giants are presumably thinking about what Utley might be now. They’d only be interested if they thought that Utley was better. His numbers since returning from the DL the other day are better. Small-sample numbers mean only so much, though. The numbers aren’t the encouraging thing. The swing is the encouraging thing.

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