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Last night, Derek Jeter played his final game at Yankee Stadium, and his career will come to a close this Sunday in Boston, putting an official end to the era of the Yankees Core Four: Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada have already sailed off into the metaphorical sunset. And certainly, this particular Yankee dynasty will go down as the premier team of their time.

Over the last 20 years, since those four debuted together in 1995, the Yankees have won 1,897 games, and have a chance to push that to 1,900 total wins with a strong finish this weekend. This mark is easily the best of any team during the Core Four’s reign, 63 wins ahead of the second place Braves and more than 100 wins. This is the group that returned the Yankees to their historical place atop baseball’s landscape, and re-established the franchise’s legacy for a new generation.

And what a legacy it is. This isn’t the Yankees first 20 year stretch of dominance, of course, and the end of the Core Four era allows us to look back at some of the other dominant runs the Yankees have had throughout their history.

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Derek Jeter’s final game at Yankee Stadium ended like a Disney movie. That’s not an insult; moments like this are one of the reasons why we love baseball.

You don’t have to like Jeter or the Yankees to enjoy that moment. There is perhaps no better way for Jeter to leave Yankee Stadium than with a game-winning, opposite-field single.

As his career comes to a close, nearly everyone who covers baseball has weighed in on Jeter’s legacy, and unfortunately, part of that legacy is his status as a poster boy for disagreements between the traditional media and the statistically inclined crowd, especially regarding his defensive value. Jeter’s poor ratings at shortstop have made him the subject of numerous articles on defensive performance, and that has created the perception that Jeter has been a poor defender; a notion which Jeff did a nice job of debunking earlier this year.

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Maybe, when you were younger, you observed a pitcher triple in the wild. These days they’re mostly found in captivity, and they spend a lot of time sleeping and they don’t like to breed.

Looking over the history of baseball, two trends emerge, related to one another. Pitcher triples are going away. Relative to a century ago, a pitcher triple now is almost ten times less likely. It’s half as likely as it was in the 70s and 80s. Pitchers, overall, are getting worse at hitting, relative to the rest of the league, because pitchers are more specialized than ever. They’re also taking fewer chances on the basepaths, as measured by the ratio of doubles to triples. Some of that last bit could additionally be explained by recent emphasis on defense and differently-aligned ballparks, but it’s clear that pitchers are getting worse, and they’re getting more conservative. So it’s not like anyone should expect a pitcher-triple rebound.

Let’s bring this back to current events. Through last season, the lowest pitcher-triple total in a year was three, first achieved in 1991, and achieved again in 2010. Last year, there were ten pitcher triples, the highest total since 2005. And this year? As of Friday, September 19, there had been zero pitcher triples. As of dinner time on the west coast on Saturday, September 20, there had been zero pitcher triples. There have since been three pitcher triples. All of the year’s pitcher triples have come in the last five days, off the bats of Andrew Cashner, Jake Arrieta, and Clayton Kershaw. Arrieta and Kershaw both delivered on Wednesday. Let us reflect, as humans do.

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Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball, and I’m not even going to waste your time backing that up with evidence. It’s true. You know this to be true. We’ll accept that and move on. There’s no shortage of reasons why Kershaw is so good, but a pretty good shorthand is that there are four things a pitcher can do that are of the utmost importance, and he’s great at all of them. He gets strikeouts (first in K%), limits walks (seventh in BB%), avoids the longball (third in HR/9), and keeps the ball on the ground (14th in GB%). If you can do all that, the rest of it doesn’t really matter.

It helps, of course, that has three dominant pitches. His fastball ranks second in baseball in our pitch values. His slider is the best. His curveball is fifth-best. This is completely unfair, and that’s part of the reason his walk rates are so low. Since he’s got three pitches that are basically unhittable, he has little reason to nibble around the corners. Only three pitchers have a higher Zone%; only three pitchers have a higher first-pitch strike percentage. (Unsurprisingly, Phil Hughes leads both lists.)

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With the sixth-overall pick of this year’s amateur draft, the Seattle Mariners selected 18-year-old Alex Jackson out of Rancho Bernardo [CA] High School. Their second selection, which came 74th-overall, was 18-year-old Gareth Morgan out of North Toronto Collegiate [high school] in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Tom McNamara, as one would expect, is bullish on both. The Mariners’ director of amateur scouting went the collegiate route with the club’s top pick in four of his first five drafts – Taijuan Walker, in 2010, was the exception – but he couldn’t pass up Jackson’s potential. Ditto Morgan’s, despite McNamara’s admission that the Canadian outfielder is a relatively unpolished project.

Jackson was also drafted as an outfielder, but it wasn’t his primary position in high school. The 6-foot-2, 215-lb. slugger was a catcher, but Seattle appears to be set behind the plate for a good long while with 2012 first-round pick Mike Zunino. And while McNamara didn’t say it so many words, he seemingly suggested Jackson could be in the big leagues sooner than some might think.

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McNamara on scouting Alex Jackson: “We saw him for three years. It’s not like we just stumbled across him this spring. He played for the Area Code team in California — Long Beach. We saw him at the Under Armour All-Star, at Wrigley. We saw him at the Perfect Game All-Star at Petco Park. We were tracking him for a few years.

“The scout responsible for signing him was Gary Patchett. Our West Coast supervisor is Jeremy Booth. Our national crosscheckers are Butch Baccala and Mark Lummus. Other guys on our staff saw him as he traveled across the country. I saw him.

“These guys all play on a summer team, and also break off and play in showcases with the best players. We’re seeing high school hitters face the best high school pitchers for the following year, and with wood bats. Those are things you’re not going to see in the spring most of the time. We saw at Alex as an advanced high school player. I’ve had other teams tell me they had Alex No. 1 on their list.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, you talk with a guy and there isn’t a great narrative that ties it all together. That’s what happened when I talked to Jimmy Rollins before a game with the Athletics this month. Sure, the general question was how he’s been able to stay fresh and relevant and productive through the latter part of his career. How he’s known what to change and what not to change. But Rollins has enough character to leave it alone and let him speak in his own words.

Eno Sarris: I noticed that last year you had 666 plate appearances.

Jimmy Rollins: Did I? Wow.

Eno Sarris: That explains everything!

Jimmy Rollins: I thought it was me! That’s crazy.

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Tuesday on these very pages Mike Petriello wrote a piece about the Pirates’ pitching staff, discussing in part their ground ball tendencies and recent upgrades in their infield defense. I figured I’d approach similar subjective matter from a slightly different angle today, focusing on the (recent) historical significance of their ability to keep the ball on the ground, and the manner in which this aspect of the club fits into the Pirates’ overall plan to win with a small to mid-market payroll. To put it mildly, the starting rotation the Pirates have put together in 2013-14 is not getting all of these grounders by accident. Read the rest of this entry »

People love a breakout, so they’re always on the hunt. You’ll see a bunch of potential breakouts get written up in the first half, as season sample sizes start to grow. Among those potential breakouts, you will find the actual breakouts. But you’ll also find the noisy duds, because it turns out half of a season has a limit on how meaningful it can be. In the first half of this season, Lonnie Chisenhall posted a 163 wRC+. In the second half of this season, he’s posted just about the same wRC+, except without the 1 in it. Chisenhall’s gotten much much worse. Early on, J.D. Martinez was another potential breakout. As I write this his wRC+ is sandwiched between Giancarlo Stanton‘s and Paul Goldschmidt’s. Martinez, to a large extent, has kept things up, and he’s produced like one of the top hitters in baseball.

Because one half of one season can be noisy, two halves of one season can be noisy, particularly when a guy hasn’t been a full-time player from the start. Martinez hasn’t totally established his new baseline yet, but it’s not like this came without warning — Dan Farnsworth was all over it in December. I think we can see J.D. Martinez is better. So the question is: How much better is he?

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Teams are behaving more and more alike. There’s less separation between front offices by the month, and talent is fairly equally distributed, and people everywhere believe many of the same things. There are, of course, better situations and worse situations, but when it comes to team strategies, generally speaking everyone agrees: play the best baseball. Pitch the best pitches, swing the best swings. The Dodgers have a better on-field product than the Rockies, but they try to go about their business similarly. Neither really has a signature philosophy you can observe in the numbers.

Such philosophies are few and far between. People believe one of them is the Diamondbacks and pitching inside, but in reality the Diamondbacks pitch inside as a staff an average amount, and they’ve hit a roughly average amount of batters. They’ve just had a tendency to talk. The Diamondbacks don’t have a team philosophy of brushing hitters back. You don’t see a lot of philosophies that stand out, because successful ones will be copied, and unsuccessful ones will be abandoned. But some do still exist. You’ve presumably heard about each, but I feel like they should be put together in one place. I can think of three standout examples. Do let me know if I’m missing any others.

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Among the points one is compelled to make when arguing on behalf of Corey Kluber’s candidacy for this year’s Cy Young award is that the defense behind him has been of suspect quality, leading to an inflated BABIP (.316) and higher ERA (68 ERA-) than his main rival for the distinction, Felix Hernandez (63 ERA-). Indeed, the main defensive metrics available at the present site, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) and Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) rate Cleveland’s fielders as collectively the worst and… also the worst among the league’s 30 clubs.

With this as the background, then, one might naturally regard Danny Salazar’s line from Tuesday night with some measure of surprise (box score). On a night when he Salazar struck out 30% of the 26 batters he faced and recorded an xFIP and FIP of 3.75 and 1.63, respectively, that same right-hander also conceded eight hits and five runs over 4.2 innings, producing a single-game 9.64 ERA. While it’s not impossible for a pitcher to allow a .533 BABIP over the course of one start, it’s also not a common occurrence — and even more suspicious when it happens to a Cleveland pitcher.

In any event, Cleveland lost perhaps the last meaningful game they’ll play all season on a night when their starter recorded an above-average fielding-independent performance. Did Cleveland’s defense sabotage the game? Was it merely a case of batted-ball variance? A combination of the two?

Without defensive-tracking technology such as that presented by MLBAM at the beginning of the season, there’s no way to tell for sure the speed or efficiency of the routes with which each play has been executed. In the absence of a more sophisticated method, then, what I’ve done below is identify the five hits which led directly to Kansas City’s five runs and attempted to determine if the responsibility for them lay with Salazar, the defense, or some combination of both.

Fourth Inning
Batter: Alex Gordon
Outcome: Single
Sabotage? Probably Not

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