You ever notice how “improved” doesn’t have a good selection of antonyms? That’s what I’m going for. “The pitch-framer who’s gotten a heck of a lot worse somehow” gets the idea across, but it makes for a pretty lousy headline. Anyway, now you know the question being answered.

Dave has noted a few times in the past that at this point, the market doesn’t seem to pay very much for quality pitch-framing. There could be any number of reasons for this, but one could be that teams simply think they can teach their catchers to receive the ball better. Why pay for what you can instruct? Jason Castro would be an example of a guy who’s gotten way better at receiving with proper, targeted instruction. I think it makes sense to us how a guy could learn to receive pitches better. It makes less sense how a guy could just flat-out do worse. It seems like a fundamental skill once it’s learned, but every stat has its players who get better and its players who get worse, and the catcher who’s had the biggest performance decline between 2013 and 2014 is a catcher who last winter inked a three-year contract after winning a World Series.

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The Baltimore Orioles are about to win the American League East and Buck Showalter, in all likelihood, will be named Manager of the Year. The latter is quite an accomplishment for someone who refers to himself as a slapdick with a limited shelf life.

Showalter’s track record isn’t that of a slapdick. As for the self-deprecation, the 58-year-old skipper’s way with words matches his ingenuity, which lies somewhere between fox and far-sighted facilitator. In an interview four years ago – three months before he was hired to manage the Orioles – he told me, “You always have to keep your eye on the end game.” To the surprise of most prognosticators, Showalter may be on his way to leading his team to its first World Series title in over 30 years.

——

Showalter on the Orioles’ identity: “As an organization, one of the most important things you can do is know who you are, and who you’re not. When I first came here, we talked about that a lot: ‘Who are we and how are we going to do this?’ You can’t confuse your fans. We look within first and spend a lot of time – like every other club does – preffing [sic] six-year free agents. We look like we have a 75-man roster, because it’s going to come out of Norfolk, Bowie and here. When you have a game like [September 7], where 20-something guys make a contribution, there’s a great morale that comes out of that.

“We’re not paupers. Our ownership has been very supportive financially. We’ve got more than enough payroll. There are a lot of things you may not be able to do, but we can out-opportunity some teams for guys like Steve Pearce. We can give them an opportunity to be more than how the industry may perceive them.

“This thing is so fleeting, and this time of year, things snowball. They snowball good and they snowball bad. September is an eternity. When you’re trying to close out a good season, it’s tough. It tests your mettle. That’s why you challenge your players to stay together, stay together. There are so few people who live in the reality of what they do, and what the challenge is. People try to get into that, but they can’t. Until you’ve been through this and understand what the day-to-day stuff is really like… seasons are really about shortening the bad times and elongating the good times. Everybody is going to have them – as a pitcher individually, as a hitter individually, as a team. You’re going to have that, so you try to shorten the curves.”

On a life lesson and learning to adjust: “My dad, years ago… we’d get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and drive to Tuscaloosa in his school truck – he was a principal – and we’d go in the faculty section of Alabama. He’d have me watch the sidelines and coach [Bear] Bryant. I used to love how Alabama would go out in the first series against podunk – a team they were supposed to beat – and go three and out. I’d ask, ‘Dad, what’s wrong?’ He’d go, ‘Watch the sideline.’ Coach Bryant would walk over to the linemen to talk about this new defense this other team had put on the field, a 5-3 stack or something crazy. My dad would say, ‘OK, watch the next series’ and it would be like a knife going through butter. Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Kershaw’s good! Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about him. In the first half of this season, he struck out more than a third of all the hitters he faced. In the second half, his strikeout rate is actually down 17%. Now, that’s percent, not percentage points, but it means one of six strikeout victims hasn’t been a strikeout victim. That seems like the kind of thing that should raise eyebrows. But you haven’t noticed because in the first half Kershaw allowed 19 runs, and in the second half he’s allowed 19 runs. One is less inclined to notice when great players are slightly differently great.

Also, his second-half strikeout rate is still extraordinary. Also, he’s still not really walking anybody, even though just yesterday he did put Yusmeiro Petit on base. The regular numbers love second-half Kershaw, but if you dig just a little bit deeper, you can gain a better understanding of how Kershaw has remained so dominant despite giving away a handful of whiffs.

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There are a few things that most people reading this know about 3-0 counts, or at least there some things we think we know about what happens when the count runs 3-0. We know the strike zone gets very big and we know batters take the vast, vast majority of the time. We also know only the best hitters get the green light in this count.

While bat still stay largely on shoulders with the count 3-0, more and more hitters do offer at these pitches – the 3-0 swing rate increased every year since 2009. If you’re going to get a good pitch to hit, why not swing? Since only the best hitters get to unload, the ones understood to be the best judges of the strike zone, the chances of a positive outcome increases. As a rough measure, consider the drop off in slugging from 3-0 to 3-1 is slight compared to the drop from 3-1 to a full count.

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Here at FanGraphs, we spend a decent amount of time talking about ways to think about valuing players and their performance. These kinds of discussions naturally lead themselves to conversations about various postseason awards, and with the rise of prominence of WAR, the role of newer metrics in determining things like the Most Valuable Player or Cy Young Award in each league. And so we end up writing a lot of words about player value in the context of trying to define awards that were created by other entities, and sometimes, arguing about the meaning of the name of the award rather than the performances of the players on the field.

So this year, we’ve decided that perhaps it is time that we just have our own award, so we can define the award in a way that makes sense to us, and to give us a chance to honor the the single player that we felt deserved to be recognized in a given year, regardless of which position he plays or which league he is in. To that end, we’ve decided to create the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, which we will give out for the first time this season.

The criteria for the award will be rather simple: which player, through his on-the-field performance, most deserves to be recognized for his outstanding play within the given season? It is an attempt to honor outstanding performances, and to consider the relative merit of all players who contributed within that season, regardless of position or quality of his teammates.

Certainly, we recognize that we are not the first organization to create their own Player of the Year Award, as the Sporting News, Baseball America, and the MLB Player’s Association all have similar awards, and ESPN gives out an ESPY award for “Best MLB Player” every year. However, as we are a baseball-only site, and one that focuses heavily on attempting to quantify player value, we think it is likely that we may come to different conclusions than other organizations, and we would rather spend our time honoring players we think are worthy rather than trying to convince other organizations to adopt our methodology for their award. This does not mean we think our award is better or more important than other awards — including the awards voted on by members of the BBWAA, which we remain a part of and will continue to vote on when asked — but that we think there’s some value in having an award that is distinctly ours.

The FanGraphs Player of the Year Award will be voted on by members of the FanGraphs staff. This year, the 11 voting members are as follows.

Tony Blengino
Dave Cameron
Carson Cistulli
August Fagerstrom
David Laurila
Kiley McDaniel
Mike Petriello
Eno Sarris
Jeff Sullivan
Paul Swydan
Wendy Thurm

Each member will be casting a ballot with 10 names ranked in sequential order as well as a grade for that player’s season — in order to capture information about the voter’s opinion of relative performance beyond just what a simple list vote can offer — and both the ranking and the grade will be used to calculate the final order. And no, to answer the obvious question, the order and the grade will not simply be based on a player’s Wins Above Replacement. All the ballots will be made public and we will attempt to be as thorough and transparent as possible about the calculations. We will vote on the award at the conclusion of the regular season, and announce the first annual FanGraphs Player of the Year Award winner on Monday, October 20th, the day between the end of the League Championship Series and the start of the World Series.

In addition, we will run a crowdsourced ballot on the day after the regular season ends, and announce the results of the FanGraphs Readers Player of the Year selection as well.

Over the next month, our writers will be encouraged to write articles detailing the way they plan to approach their ballot, and we will attempt to make it quite clear why each voter decided on their final ballot. We also fully encourage educated lobbying, so if you would like to make a strong case for your favorite candidate, the Community Blog is a great place to make your arguments heard. If the piece is compelling, we will publish it, and we will take your points into account when deciding how to vote.

So, don’t be shy in letting us know who you think the FanGraphs Player of the Year should be. There are a number of players having excellent seasons, but only one will be honored as the most outstanding player of 2014 as evaluated by a collection of baseball nerds.

I’m going to be honest, I feel a bit dirty writing this post. We’re now on year five of Craig Kimbrel being impossibly good. For four years he’s clearly been the best reliever in baseball and, frankly, it’s one of the better stretches of relief pitching we’ve seen in recent history. Yet, this is the first post on FanGraphs this year where he is the subject, and it’s about him making a mistake. Which, really, just reinforces how good Craig Kimbrel is. He’s so good that when he makes a mistake, it becomes news. On Wednesday, Kimbrel made a new kind of mistake.
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Saturday night, Mike Trout kicked the living crap out of Scott Feldman and the Houston Astros. His first time up, Trout went deep. His second time up, Trout went deep. His third time up, Trout went less deep, but he went deep enough for a double. All of that’s to say Trout had 10 total bases through three at bats. After a performance like that, you could say Trout was locked in. After a performance like that, you could say either the Astros didn’t have a good enough game plan, or the plan was fine and they didn’t execute. We usually don’t know enough to identify which, but, anyway, let’s continue.

You’re super familiar by now with Trout’s alleged vulnerability. You might even be sick of reading about it. Let’s take a look at the pitches that Trout hit off Feldman to see what we can see. We’ll go in order: homer, other homer, double.

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If you looked at Twitter for even half a second on Sunday, you probably already know that Ned Yost is doing it again. Nearly six years to the day after the Brewers took the nearly unprecedented step of firing a first-place manager in September, at least in part due to some extreme bullpen mismanagement, Yost’s decisions — and bizarre defenses of them — are again being questioned, as the suddenly struggling Royals have lost six of their last nine.

This article isn’t really going to be about Yost’s one decision, but we have to at least explain what happened. On Sunday, with the Royals up 4-3 in the sixth inning and starter Jason Vargas on his way out of the game, Yost brought in Aaron Crow with a man out and two on. Crow walked Yoenis Cespedes to load the bases, struck out Allen Craig, then allowed a grand slam to Daniel Nava to blow the lead and then some. Nava is one of the more extreme platoon bats in baseball — a switch-hitter, he’s got a career 125 wRC+ against righties and merely a 60 against lefties — and he even admitted to being surprised after the game that Yost allowed him to face a righty.

Worse, Yost’s postgame comments defy logic. He chose Crow because he wanted strikeouts, but Crow doesn’t really strike people out, with a K% mark tied for 296th of the 311 pitchers with 50 innings. He found it frustrating that the game was lost before he could bring in Kelvin Herrera, but didn’t actually bring in Herrera because “the sixth inning is Crow’s inning,” whatever that means. Crow’s velocity is way down and he’s having the worst season of his career, yet he was still allowed to face a hitter who had the platoon advantage in the biggest spot of the game, apparently because Yost feared Mike Napoli would pinch hit if he made a move. Read the rest of this entry »

“He’s quietly grown from a kid who was a senior sign out of Arizona State to one of the best lead-off hitters in baseball. He doesn’t get a lot of fanfare compared to other guys on our team, but he’s been an essential component to what we’ve done this year.”

Those words were spoken by Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim manager Mike Scioscia, who I asked about Kole Calhoun. I knew right away that I had my lede. A more accurate and concise description of the overshadowed outfielder might not be possible.

Calhoun has been a catalyst. In 112 games – an early-season ankle injury cost him five weeks – he’s hitting .287/.338/.473 with 28 doubles and 16 home runs. On a team with no shortage of star power, he ranks second in wRC+ and third in WAR.

Despite his low profile, the production is par for the course. Calhoun hit .320 with a .948 OPS in the minors, and last year he logged a .282/.347/.462 slash line in 222 plate appearances as a 25-year-old rookie.

The performance has surpassed the projection. The 2010 eighth-round pick came into last season as the No. 11 prospect in an Angels system that Baseball America ranked dead last among the 30 teams. His writeup in the Prospect Handbook said “Calhoun’s tools are uninspiring.”

The skeptics weren’t wholly irrational in their reasoning. Calhoun is 5-foot-11 and his shiny stats on the farm came in the homer-friendly Pioneer, California and Pacific Coast Leagues. In the opinion of the lefty swinger, the venues were an afterthought. All he cared about was growing his game.

“Even if you’re in a good hitting environment, there are still going to be slumps,” said Calhoun. “The places I was at were definitely good places to hit, and that helps you gain confidence, but I still had my ups and downs. Plus, it didn’t really affect what I was trying to do. I’ve never been a huge power hitter. I’ve just been a hitter.”

Calhoun feels he performs better when keep things simple. The trick is figuring out how to stay consistent over the course of a long season. It’s not always easy.

“It’s a constant battle, to get to where you feel you can walk into that box and beat the guy on the mound,” said Calhoun. “There are days when you’re on top of the world and there are days when you’re not. When you’re not, you have to find a way. You need that feeling, which is why you work so hard in the cage. You want to get to a point where it’s, ‘I feel good, I feel good.’”

There have been plenty of good feelings in the Angels dugout this summer. No team in baseball has scored as many runs, and a lot of the credit goes to the player at the top of the order. When leading off an inning, Calhoun is getting on base at a .385 clip. As often as not, he’s the one jump-starting the Angels offense.

“Hitting is contagious,” opined Calhoun. “If you’re on a good team with good hitters, everybody is talking hitting and everybody is enjoying hitting. When you have that going, everybody hits. This is an awesome offense I’m part of.”

Going into Saturday night, the Angels had scored 88 runs over their last nine games, all of which went into the Win column. Not coincidentally, Calhoun was 15 for 42 over that stretch. His OPS in games won by the Angels this year is .944. In losses it is .566.

Hitting is contagious, but is the same true for slumps? If a few guys begin scuffling, is there a snowball effect?

“There can be,” admitted Calhoun. “That’s the name of the game, man. It’s baseball. There are going to be ups and downs and we all try to avoid the downs. But the fact of the matter is, everybody on this team can hit. With an offense like this, there are going to be more ups, and the ups are definitely a lot more fun.”

——

Dalton Pompey has to pinch himself when he wakes up in the morning. The 21-year-old native of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada began the year in High-A. Now he’s in Toronto, suiting up for his hometown Blue Jays.

It’s been a whirlwind season for the switch-hitting outfielder. A 16th round pick in 2010, Pompey has catapulted himself from promising prospect to star-in-the-making faster than you can say Lloyd Moseby. Hopscotching through Dunedin, New Hampshire and Buffalo he hit a combined .317/.392/.469 and stole 43 bases. Since his call-up, he’s made four pinch-running appearances and driven in a run with a ground out in his only at bat,

Pompey is well-grounded. Humble to a fault, he admits he’s far exceeded his own expectations this summer. His goals were to reach Double-A and to be placed on the 40-man roster in order to not be subject to the Rule 5 draft.

You might expect Pompey’s head to be spinning given his rapid ascent, but it’s not. A big reason his results caught up to his talent was that he learned how to slow the game down. Steve Springer, who the Blue Jays employ as a “performance coach” deserves much of the credit.

“I call him every week and he helps me with the mental side of the game,” explained Pompey. “He’s helped me learn to focus on controlling the things I can control. We’ve been talking since I was drafted, but I feel I’ve really bought into that approach this year. The mental side of the game is huge. It can shield you from reaching your full potential. So much of this game is in your head.”

Pompey admitted he’s always been hard on himself, and in many ways still is. He feels the difference is that he’s now “picking spots when to be critical” rather than letting every bad game get him down. An 0-for-4 is no longer a trigger for self-doubt, but rather an opportunity to learn from what just transpired. He feels there are positives to take from every experience, regardless of the result.

Learning how to deal with failure is necessary for any young player, and Pompey has passed that test with flying colors. Not that he’s a fan of the word.

“I don’t think I’ve ever really failed,” said Pompey. “That’s not how I’d put it. “It’s more that I’ve never lived up to the expectations I have of myself. This year I had expectations and I exceeded those expectations. I’m proud of myself.”

——

Mauricio Dubon wants to be known as a nice guy. He also wants to be a big-league shortstop, which is a lofty goal for a skinny kid from Honduras. It may well happen down the road.

Dubon debuted in the Gulf Coast League last year after being drafted by the Red Sox in the 26h round. Two years earlier, he moved from his Central America homeland to Sacramento, California, to pursue his dream. His path to pro ball was a mission in more ways than one.

“I was blessed to come here,” explained Dubon. “Impact International Baseball Academy comes and gives baseball equipment to kids, and also talk about God. They saw me play and asked me to come back to California with them. I said, ‘Of course.’ It was a chance I’d been waiting for my whole life.”

Dubon grew up playing soccer and baseball, and the latter was his love. Youth tournaments took him to Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala and the Bronx, New York, but his future in the game loomed a long shot. Scouts said “too skinny” and were skeptical he could handle the rigors of professional baseball. After hitting over .500 in two seasons of high school ball in the States, he’s proceeding to prove them wrong.

Dubon is now 19 years old, and still just 165 pounds soaking wet, but he’s definitely handing pro ball. He was named to the New York-Penn League all-star team this summer after hitting .320/.337/.395 for the Lowell Spinners. There’s not much pop, but there’s plenty of glove. Defensively, he’s a water bug with a strong arm. One longtime Spinners observer compared his glove favorably to Deven Marrero’s at the same level.

Dubon describes his style as “kind of simple but sometimes flashy.” When I talked to him in August, he said he sometimes makes “the Jeter throw, the jump throw from the hole.” As luck would have it, I saw him make that exact play, in spectacular fashion, the same night.

The youngster doesn’t take his God-given skills for granted. His further explanation of what he brings to the table is ample proof.

“Some people say I’m talented and some people say I’m skilled,” said Dubon. “I think there’s a difference. Skill is like you practice every day to try to perfect it. Talent is what comes naturally, and when talent fails, skill can step in and kind of take over. I’m trying to be more skilled than talented. I’ve been working very hard to perfect my defense.”

He’s also striving to be a good teammate and human being, and by all accounts the personable infielder practices what he preaches.

“I want to be known as a good person,” said Dubon. “I’d rather people say, ‘He’s a nice guy,” than ‘He’s a good player but he’s kind of like a doosh.’ I try to say hi to everybody and respect everybody. Hopefully I can get respect back. That’s all I want.”

The field for the National League Most Valuable Player Award is wide open, and in a good way. There are a bevy of well qualified candidates, and even if voters may now be uncertain as to what do with Giancarlo Stanton now given his injury, there are still three no-doubt top-of-the-ballot candidates: Andrew McCutchen, Clayton Kershaw and Jonathan Lucroy. These three have been in the spotlight all season, and with Stanton, figure to be the ones who take home the hardware. But that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones for whom there is a case worth making. There as many as six other players who deserve recognition, and with white-hot finishing kicks could put themselves into the mix with the top dogs.
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