Look at the list of two-pitch starters these days, and you won’t find any left-handers. That’s probably because lefty starters have to think about opposite-handed hitters more than anyone. That’s probably also why more lefties use changeups than righties — the pitch is more effective against opposite-handed batters.

Well, Derek Holland’s changeup has seen better days, he’ll admit it. And he doesn’t throw his semi-consistent curve all that much. So how does the Ranger’s mustachioed lefty make it work?

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In some ways, this Reds season has turned out exactly like we expected. Way back in February, I worried that Cincinnati wouldn’t have enough offense to compete in 2014, and that the season would be a disappointment. It wasn’t hard to see why, really. Take a team that was 15th in wRC+ in 2013, replace Shin-Soo Choo’s elite on-base skills with the huge question mark of Billy Hamilton, do absolutely nothing else other than add the mediocre Skip Schumaker and Brayan Pena to the bench, have Brandon Phillips and Ryan Ludwick get another year older, and watch the offense collapse.

That’s what happened! Sort of. The Reds are 29th in wRC+, saved from last only by the Padres, and are probably going to lose more games than they have since 2008, but it hasn’t happened in exactly in the way we might have thought. Hamilton has been good enough. Joey Votto and Jay Bruce, the only two Reds hitters you could have counted on entering the season, have had disaster years. Devin Mesoraco and Todd Frazier have had breakout campaigns. The end result is still bad, just a different kind of bad.

You can see the same thing on the pitching side, too, just in the other direction. A good, deep rotation was expected to be a strength, and it has. Homer Bailey had finally put it all together in 2013, earning himself a rich contract extension, and a full year of Tony Cingrani seemed fascinating. But Bailey, dealing with a bulging disk in his neck, made only 23 decent starts before undergoing flexor tendon surgery. Cingrani was a huge disappointment, dealt with shoulder issues and hasn’t been seen in the bigs since June. Mat Latos didn’t make his first start until June thanks to elbow trouble, then made only 16 before being shut down earlier this month with — wait for it — elbow trouble.

This shouldn’t be a good rotation. By one measure, it’s arguably been the best rotation. We should talk about that.

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Who is the best team in baseball right now? There are a handful of ways one could attempt to answer this question.

The Angels currently have the best record at 94-57, so they’re a natural pick, and maybe the best selection, as they also lead the majors in both run differential and expected record by BaseRuns, both measures which attempt to strip some luck out of a team’s results. But on the other hand, the Angels were excellent for most of the year in part due to the excellent pitching of Garrett Richards, who is now injured and won’t pitch again this year.

Rob did a nice job of showing that one player does not make or break a team, but good players do matter to some degree, and the Angels are a worse team without Richards than they were with him. His loss doesn’t cut out their legs, but it does make them less likely to keep winning at this same pace going forward, and this question asks us to care more about the future than the past.

So maybe this isn’t such an open-and-shut case. Let’s evaluate a few of the top contenders, and look at their claim to the Best Team in Baseball title.

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I’d like to believe that Jacob deGrom started out as hair. Just hair. Over time, that hair grew into much more than just hair, eventually sprouting a full human figure and developing world-class athletic ability. The hair would go on to play middle infield in college before transitioning into a pitcher and getting drafted by the New York Mets. The hair would then have Tommy John Surgery and never crack a top-1oo prospect list, but nevertheless the hair would reach the majors by age 25. And the hair would dominate.

On Monday night, deGrom made the 21st start of his rookie season, this one against the Miami Marlins. Here’s how he started:
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This is about Clayton Kershaw, but this isn’t about Clayton Kershaw. This is about all great pitchers and the Most Valuable Player award. We know that, in the voting, pitchers face a severe penalty. That’s the long-established track record of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and it’s not about to dramatically change. There are writers who think pitchers need to be insanely good to be worth a high vote. There are voters who refuse to vote for pitchers entirely. We know the habits. Why are these the habits?

It’s not just a writer thing, either. Consider this recent Internet poll: Should pitchers should be eligible for the MVP? Here are the responses of a learned audience:

• 59%: Yes
• 30%: Yes, if the pitcher’s way better than the position players
• 11%: No

Even among FanGraphs readers, one-in-nine voters doesn’t think pitchers should be eligible — and another big fraction puts an asterisk on the eligibility. This is a question people argue almost every year, and the more I think about it, the more I don’t get it.

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The footage embedded above comes from an August 22nd game between the Mets and the Dodgers and depicts Wilmer Flores acting out what is essentially the baseball equivalent of a first-day-of-school anxiety dream. With two outs and runners at first and second, Yasiel Puig batted a mostly harmless ground ball to Flores. Instead of converting said grounder into a routine out, however, what Flores did was first to (a) misplay the ball and then, after picking it up, (b) stumble forward unprovoked and fall to the ground in front of everyone.

That no one scored on the play (or the inning) is perhaps some consolation so far as this particular instance is concerned. Still, to the degree that just any one play can, this particular one doesn’t recommend Flores’ hands and agility.

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Innovation Enterprise conducted a two-day Sports Analytics Innovation Summit in San Francisco last week. This is Innovation Enterprise’s speciality — conferences and online learning focused on “big data” across business, finance, media and sports. Last week’s summit featured presentations focused on two general areas of sports analytics — (1) analytics that enhance training, development and performance; and (2) analytics that enhance marketing, ticket sales and fan engagement.

This post will highlight the presentation on analytics for training, development and performance. Later this week, I’ll focus on innovations in analytics for the business side of sports.

Before getting into the details, a few preliminary thoughts.

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Chase Anderson started out with a curveball, back when he was barely a teen. But the young Diamondback starter was told to shelve it, found a changeup, and the rest is history. Except that it looks like he has two changeups, which is even more fun than one.

“My curve ball when I was younger was a better pitch than my changeup,” said Anderson before a game with the Giants in early September. “But I learned my changeup when I was 13 and threw it more because it was easier on my arm as a kid,” Anderson continued before admitting that, yeah, his dad told him to stop throwing the curve.

The curve has been a great pitch for Anderson this year (“my equalizer”), mostly because it gives him another option when his fastball command is gone. “My fastball command has been spotty in certain starts, but the curveball I’ve been able to throw for strikes to get ahead,” said Anderson.

He’s been just as likely to throw his curve as his sinker on the first pitch this year. “It’s a really good 0-0 pitch to get you over and get strike one and get ahead,” he admitted. The change is a better swing and miss pitch because “They can see the curveball, but the changeup is hard to see, looks like a fastball and then it’s slower, messes with your depth perception,” the pitcher pointed out. “Curveballs they can see out of your hand unless it’s Clayton Kershaw’s and you can’t see it at all.”

And so Anderson works to get ahead so he can use the change and curve to put batters away. Sometimes, he uses the changeup to get ahead, but he wants to be careful about how often he does so. “You have to learn to have confidence to spot a 2-0 or 3-1 heater — if you throw a 3-1 changeup in the first inning, they’ll know you go to your changeup when you’re behind in the count,” Anderson said. “You don’t want to get into patterns.” It’s either fastball or change in 2-0 counts, but Anderson has only thrown two 3-0 changes all year. (Maybe he could consider throwing a few more. Maybe even a lot more.)

About those 2-0 changeups. They look a bit different than his 0-2 changeups. Anderson changes his change depending on the count. “I almost throw two changeups — a strike changeup and a strikeout changeup,” Anderson said, adding that the two-strike pitch comes with “more pronation.”

If that seems surprising, maybe it shouldn’t be. Pronation is key to great changeups, and he’s been throwing the change forever. If there are ‘inside of the ball’ and ‘outside of the ball’ pitchers as Gavin Floyd suggested, Anderson knows which group is his: “I’m an inside of the ball guy.”

What does that extra pronation do to the pitch? Here are his changeups in buckets depending on how many strikes the count started with:

Looks like pronating more led to more drop on the pitch, and slightly more horizontal movement. Here are two changeups at the extremes of those ranges — the get-me-over on the left, and a two-strike diver and darter on the right. The two-striker moved six and half inches more horizontally, and dropped three and a half inches more vertically.

Almost — but not quite — two different pitches, no?

Chase Anderson still has to work on fastball command, though he thinks it could be about confidence. “I think it’s a mental thing, you try to make the perfect pitch instead of letting the pitch do what it’s going to do,” he said about occasional bouts of homeritis brought on by getting into hitter’s counts.

But even when his fastball isn’t quite there, he has good command of a big breaker, and two changeups. That’s usually enough. “If you have a three pitch mix, and you can locate one or two — somedays three — you can do well,” said Anderson.

We keep trying to explain the Baltimore Orioles. After all, they’re destroying the American League East, up by 12.5 games at the moment over the Blue Jays. They’re likely to clinch it in the next 24-48 hours, and when the playoffs roll around, they’ll be the No. 2 seed, kicking off an ALDS at home against either Detroit or Kansas City, depending on which of the two win the AL Central. They’re doing this despite a list of things that have gone wrong this year, most of which I laid out here in July, and that was before Manny Machado injured his knee and Chris Davis got suspended. Dave Cameron made a very thorough case for the simplicity of accepting randomness, and August Fagerstrom looked into how much power the lineup has had, largely thanks to Nelson Cruz.

It’s all of those things, and it’s none of them. It’s the managerial genius of Buck Showalter, if you want it to be, and it’s also the unquantifiable magic of balls bouncing the right way. It’s Dan Duquette playing with never-ending roster moves, or it’s outstanding (and generally random) performance in clutch situations, or it’s defense that hasn’t had a single weak spot. We can argue about whether the Orioles are a good team that has had enough things go their way in the right spots to look like a great one, or if they are actually that great team and we’ve just been so wrong about them, but in the end it doesn’t matter so much. The wins are banked, and they’re headed to the playoffs, and if that sounds insane knowing that they won’t have Davis, Machado or Matt Wieters, you’re not alone.

Sometimes, though, it’s not so complicated. Sometimes there’s a Steve Pearce.

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Unless the Baltimore Orioles advance to the World Series, the 2014 book is closed on their slugging first baseman, Chris Davis. After breaking out in a big way with a 53-home-run tour de force in 2013, Davis crashed to earth this season, hitting half as many homers while losing 90 points off of his batting average before a 25-game suspension for Adderall usage brought his campaign to a premature halt. Just by watching him for even a couple of days, it’s easy to see that Davis is a high variance, all-or-nothing hitter, but even then such a sudden decline at age 28 is beyond the pale. Which Davis — the 2013 MVP candidate or the 2014 Mendoza Line flirter — is closer to the real thing? Read the rest of this entry »