Archive for Daily Graphings

“It’s great, I love it,” said a bright-eyed Chase Anderson about the overfull rotation in Arizona this spring. Maybe he can be a little more enthusiastic about it — his arsenal is maybe more complete than the other nine young pitchers he’s competing with in camp. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t working hard to improve, along side other fellow Baby ‘Backs Rubby de la Rosa, Allen Webster, and Archie Bradley.

Anderson has two changeups, a good curve, and already showed the ability to get strikeouts and limit walks at the major league level, so he has to be in the driver’s seat. He said this spring is about work on his two-seamer in particular, as he’d like to get more ground balls.

Teammate Rubby de la Rosa has an electric mid-90’s fastball and a changeup taught to him by a legend. “Pedro Martinez taught me this grip, he told me ‘practice it every day, and if you can have it come out at the right speed, it will be a strikeout pitch for you, I’m 100% sure it’ll be a great pitch for you,'” de la Rosa said after a bullpen in camp last week.

He may not get the same legendary drop that Pedro got from the same grip — de la Rosa laughed when asked about Pedro’s fingers and their flexability, saying he couldn’t do anything like that himself — but the new D-back has a good change. It’s above-average by drop and fade, and got 16% whiffs last year (average was 13%).

It’s the breaking balls that have eluded the 26-year-old righty so far. He hasn’t thrown many curves in games, and the slider hasn’t managed an average whiff rate yet. The pitcher talked before and after a bullpen about the keys for his slider. One key was just keeping his curve and slider from morphing into one slurve by focusing on his release point.

The other key for his slider was more complicated. “I’m trying to get that pitch perfect,” he said. “I almost have it, but my arm speed is a bit fast, maybe. I’m tying to slow motion my feet so that I can catch up to my arm.” During his bullpen, you could see him trying to slow down his body compared to what he’s been in the past. Take a look at the end of his bullpen session in camp last week.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Last week, I explored the rumor of Matt Harvey’s new curveball, and what it might mean in the future given his curve’s effectiveness in 2013. Despite the lowest movement in the league — both horizontally and vertically — Harvey had the 12th-most successful curveball in baseball by pitch run value that year, pointing to the incredible strength of his other pitches (especially his fastball) in setting up his curve. Today, we’re going to focus on more curveball news, this time coming from the man who opposed Harvey on Friday in the Grapefruit League.

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Last July, Rockies owner Dick Monfort earned some well-deserved ridicule by indicating that his team wouldn’t consider trading 33-year-old free-agent-to-be Jorge De La Rosa, despite the fact that Colorado was well on its way to a 96-loss season and De La Rosa is, all things considered, pretty mediocre and not even that durable. The owner’s money quote: de la Rosa “has won our last three,” without noting that the three wins had required 21 Colorado games to attain. According to a Peter Gammons report, Monfort killed a potential deal that would have sent De La Rosa to Baltimore for Eduardo Rodriguez, who was instead swapped to Boston for Andrew Miller and has impressed so much since that he ranked No. 23 overall on Kiley McDaniel’s recent Top 200 Prospects list.

While Rockies fans cringe at that thought and pray that Gammons’ information was incorrect, the Rockies instead gave De La Rosa two more years and $25 million in September. Considering that the team’s major additions this winter were minor pieces like Daniel Descalso, Kyle Kendrick, John Axford, Nick Hundley, and David Hale, it’s looking like another season of praying that this is the year that Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez stay healthy at the same time, while hoping that young arms Jon Gray and Eddie Butler can contribute.

While it’s difficult to see a scenario where the Rockies break through this year, it’s perhaps even more difficult to see De La Rosa still being around to contribute to the next good Colorado team. But while Monfort’s direction and baseball sense may have been misguided, he’s not wrong about one thing: “he pitches great here,” and in a sport where finding any pitcher who can be anything other than awful in Coors Field has proven terribly difficult, maybe that’s not such a meaningless thing to have.

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Cla Meredith’s MLB debut was inauspicious. Actually, it was an abomination. Called up to Boston less than a year after being drafted out of Virginia Commonwealth University, Meredith came out of the Fenway Park bullpen in the seventh inning of a tie game. The Seattle Mariners had one on and two out.

He walked Randy Winn. Then he walked Adrian Beltre. The third batter he faced, Richie Sexson, hit a fly ball to right field.

“When the ball left the bat, I took a few steps toward the dugout,” remembers Meredith, who threw the fateful pitch on May 8, 2005. “I thought I was out of the jam, but the ball just kept drifting and drifting, and pushing and pushing, and doink, it went right off the foul pole.”

Grand slam. The fact that it was a wind-blown fly ball that traveled little more than 320 feet was of scant consolation to the shell-shocked rookie.

“I wanted to dig a hole and climb in, man,” Meredith told me. “I felt overwhelmed. The weird part was, on any other day, with the weather different, and in any other ballpark, it’s a can of sh__ in Trot Nixon’s glove. If that ball is caught, it probably changes my career.” Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Stephenson has tremendous stuff. The former first round pick wields a fastball that can touch triple digits at times, and compliments it with a plus curveball and a usable changeup. His outstanding arsenal of pitches has earned him universal praise in the prospect world. Kiley McDaniel deemed him the top prospect in the Reds organization, as did Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus. John Sickels and Keith Law ranked him #2 in the organization behind Jesse Winker.

Everyone agrees that Stephenson’s one of the most promising pitching prospects in the game. But for all his virtues, Stephenson wasn’t very good last year. His 4.72 ERA and 4.58 FIP were not only worse than the Southern League average, but were much worse — Both marks ranked in the bottom three among qualified Southern League pitchers. That’s not the pitching line of a top prospect, or even a fringy one. A 4.58 FIP is the stuff of a non-descript minor leaguer. Given this performance, its not hard to see why KATOH spat out a meager 2.2 WAR projection for Stephenson through age-28.

Things weren’t all bad for Stephenson, though. On the bright side, he did manage to strike out an impressive 23% of opposing batters, but that good work was washed away by his 12% walk rate and 3% HR% (1.2 HR/9). Clearly, Stephenson’s performance lagged far behind his stuff last year. Kiley McDaniel offered up the following explanation for this disconnect in his write-up on Stephenson. Read the rest of this entry »

Strength of schedule, usually, is more of a football concern. The schedules are a lot shorter, meaning there’s a more narrow distribution of opponents, and that can make for some significant differences. It’s a worthwhile consideration in the evaluation of any given team — losses are more forgivable if you’re facing juggernaut after juggernaut. There’s not much impressive about clobbering a pushover.

You see less discussion of strength of schedule in baseball. This is easy enough to explain — the schedule sometimes feels interminable, and so people naturally assume that, over six months, differences more or less even out. On the other hand, we know that schedules are unbalanced. We know that some divisions are stronger than others. What that means is that there will be differences in schedule strengths, and then considering playoff spots can be determined by one win, that makes this important. Granted, that makes everything important. In a tight race, every run and every win are critical, so that goes for any advantage or disadvantage.

With teams essentially set, and with schedules having been laid out ages ago, I decided now would be a good time to project 2015 schedule strengths. How big are the differences between the toughest schedule and the weakest? Even though this isn’t a thing that’ll make a whole world of difference, it could very well make some difference, so now it’s time to take a look at that.

The method is simple. At FanGraphs, we feature team projections, based on author-maintained depth charts and two different projection systems blended together. Every team has a projected total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) value, so all I did was grab the 30 schedules off MLB.com and calculate, for each team, the average single-game opponent WAR. The higher the average WAR, the tougher the schedule. This is, naturally, only as good as the projections, but then our only alternative is, I don’t know, guessing? This is like very educated guessing.

No adjustments have been made for home games or road games, since those even out. In the chart below, you’ll see American League teams on the left in blue, and National League teams on the right in green. It’s immediately apparent that all the NL teams are projected to have lower opponent WARs than the AL teams. This is because the AL is still considered the stronger league of the two.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Spring Training statistics might not matter, but injuries can certainly make an impact on a team’s outlook heading into the season. After being hit by a pitch in yesterday’s game against the Chicago Cubs, Hunter Pence is expected to be out six to eight weeks with a broken forearm. Missing the first month of the season is far from a catastrophic loss for the San Francisco Giants as they defend their World Series crown, but if they want to fill Pence’s vacated role from outside the organization, there are multiple teams with too many outfielders.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, San Diego Padres, and Cleveland Indians are all teams that should be willing to move outfielders this spring, per Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated. The Dodgers currently have Yasiel Puig, Carl Crawford, Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, and Scott Van Slyke in their outfield with Andre Ethier apparently the odd man out. The Dodgers are eager to move Ethier and are reportedly willing to pay around half of the $56 million owed to Ethier over the next three years. A trade with the Dodgers is not impossible for the Giants, but as Dave Cameron recently noted, some rivals rarely trade with each other. The Giants and Dodgers have completed just one trade since 1985, when they traded Mark Sweeney to the Dodgers in August 2007 for a player to be named later that turned into Travis Denker.

Outside of the difficulty of trading with a rival, the Giants current outfield poses problems with taking on a long term deal for a player who expects to start. The Giants currently have an interesting composition of present and future. At 31, Pence is the youngest projected outfield starter for the Giants with Angel Pagan and Nori Aoki expected to start in center field and left field, respectively. Pence is also signed through 2018 and has the contract with the longest duration among the Giants outfielders. He is not the only Giant signed past 2015. Angel Pagan has one more year to go after 2015 and is scheduled to receive $10 million in 2016. The Giants have a club option on Aoki for 2016 at just $5.5 million. It is conceivable that the Giants projected outfield for 2015 will be the same for 2016. The age, term, and relatively small amounts owed to Pagan and Aoki do not preclude a long term solution for the outfield. However, even if Ethier were to cost the Giants under $10 million per year, a three year commitment through his Age-35 season to cover one month of missed time is likely more than the Giants would want to take on.
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The Dodgers are (reportedly) willing to pay half of Andre Ethier’s contract! As Dave Cameron pointed out, he seems a bit superfluous to the current state of the Dodgers. Now that he’s only going to cost a team around $28 million over the next three years, can we find him a home?

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As an MLB team, it’s awful hard to reduce your payroll. All those long-term contracts you agreed to years ago come equipped with incremental annual raises, and then the free agent market inflates every year in the meantime. Cutting payroll can’t happen by accident: it’s a shift in organizational direction across all tiers of the operation.

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When it comes to making demands about improving a team’s roster, a fan’s simplest complaint is that the team is not spending enough. Ownership is the easiest target for criticism because they sign the checks. There is a lot of information hidden from the public and even the players when it comes to a team’s finances. Many assumptions are made, but still questions persist: Are the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves cheap? Are the Detroit Tigers outspending their market for a shot at a championship?

Without delving deeply into the finances of individual teams, the answers are not easy to come by. Even if everyone got a look inside the books, there would be reasonable differences regarding subjective definitions of the word cheap. What we can do is take a look at recent spending patterns within baseball. Looking at the known financial aspects of a franchise and attendance, a comparison can be made within the ranks of ownership. The owners might very well all be cheap, and that we cannot know for sure, but we can find out which franchises are cheaper.
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