Perhaps the biggest problem with sports analysis is believing too strongly in one’s ability to understand the future. Perhaps the biggest problem with sports commentary is believing too strongly in one’s ability to understand the present. We’re always more than happy to play psychiatrist when it comes to discussing people we know and talk to every week, but then we allow this to carry over into sporting events, with completely unfamiliar people trying to navigate completely unfamiliar circumstances. We pretty much never know who a player is, and what he’s going through. That doesn’t stop people from analyzing the activity waves in his brain.

You know what I’m referring to, and it happens with every sport, in particular down the stretch and in the playoffs. Choking. Stepping up. Wilting. Clutch. So many people offer so many psychological explanations, yet, we never know whether there’s actually any truth. They’re just explanations after the fact, even though, in every competition, somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. So rarely can we actually speak to the psychology of sport. We don’t know when we’re observing a certain mental state, so we can’t analyze what that means.

Which brings us to Thursday night and Mike Fiers. Let’s say that professional athletes are mentally strong — mentally stronger than most. So let’s say it would take a lot for one to be rattled. What kind of event might rattle more than anything else? I’d volunteer a high hit-by-pitch. When you throw a ball that hits someone around the head, that goes beyond competitive adversity. So given what transpired, perhaps Fiers is an actual, observable example of a player playing while rattled. These examples are exceedingly rare things.

Yet, maybe it still didn’t matter. Turns out this stuff is complicated.

Read the rest of this entry »

Who is the best reliever in baseball over the last two years? If we made a list, the usual suspects would shoot straight to the top. Craig Kimbrel is a given, Koji Uehara was essentially unhittable for one calendar year, Kenley Jansen skews “untouchable” and Aroldis Chapman is in his own world. Greg Holland and Wade Davis surely jump to mind without much searching, Sean Doolittle and David Robertson deserve attention for their high-leverage work.

There is one reliever that is conspicuously absent from that list (because I excluded him!) but since the start of the 2013 season, this closer boasts some unbelievable numbers. Pitching to 41 ERA- (fifth best among qualified relievers) and a 51 FIP- (third) while posting roughly 5 RA9-WAR and 4 fWAR, both of which place him among the elite stoppers in baseball.

The reliever in question is Mark Melancon, the setup guy-come-closer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Melancon went from being well-traveled to a brief sting in AAA to become the very best of a stout group of relievers holding the Pirates in the playoff race for the second straight season.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like forever ago now, but earlier — in this very season! — Yasiel Puig was probably the hottest hitter in baseball. A blistering month of May lifted his OPS into four-digit territory, and articles like, say, this one were getting written:

We’re talking about a guy who, through this point in his career, has been a better hitter than almost all of the greatest hitters of all-time. And he seems to be getting better. The story of Puig’s rookie year focused heavily on the parts of his game that reminded everyone of Manny Ramirez. Perhaps we shouldn’t miss out on the fact that he’s hitting like an in-his-prime Manny Ramirez as well.

Nothing about that block quote was wrong. Nothing about that article was wrong. Puig was an absolute terror, and he was showing signs of getting even better. Earlier — in this very season! — Puig looked like one of the very most valuable players. But the minute you try to predict baseball, it shapeshifts into something unrecognizable and mean, and now articles like, say, this one are getting written:

OK, enough. Enough waiting for the Golden Boy to become an overnight sensation or last year’s overnight sensation to get going again.
[…]
It’s time to start Andre Ethier in center again.

You probably don’t need to get caught up, but I’ll catch you up. Puig at the end of July: .958 OPS. Puig since the start of August: .523 OPS. That .523 OPS comes with zero homers and three doubles, each of them separated by more than a week. Puig drove in a run the other day. It was the first time he’d done that since August 15. There are luck-slumps and there are performance-slumps, and right now, Yasiel Puig is stuck in a performance-slump that everyone’s noticed.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades. There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. -Kiley

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like top up-the-middle prospects like Francisco Lindor don’t come around very often. It seems like you can’t get enough shortstop prospects, especially if you run the Cubs. It seems like a building team like the Indians shouldn’t trade their top prospect. It seems like a team like that should hold on to their prospects like they were precious baubles to be hoarded in dark places.

Maybe all of that is wrong. Maybe the Indians should trade Francisco Lindor.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rusney Castillo is set to make his Major League debut in mere days after signing a record contract for a Cuban defector. Cuban players are the most interesting to project, since the public tends to have about as much information as teams do to process and make a decision on their futures. I started writing this article before Rusney Castillo signed with the Red Sox, with the goal of figuring out how his bat will play in the big leagues. Going forward I will also be contributing in a modest fashion to the robust scouting team that Kiley McDaniel has assembled, with my motivation and experience still focusing on hitters.

As such, this article is a bit of a hybrid between a concise scouting report and my usual shenanigans breaking down available videos. I promise to both you the readers and Kiley I will follow protocol more consistent with the rest of the team in the future. Check out his report on Castillo as well as Dave Cameron’s article for their more distinguished viewpoints. Kiley has a lot more contacts than I do in the scouting world, so treat this as only my take rather than a more informed opinion. Without further ado, let’s look at his tools before getting into the nitty gritty of his swing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rob Kaminsky had a killer curveball coming into the 2013 draft. By the completion of the current campaign he’d enhanced his arsenal by greatly improving his two-seam circle change. His next goal is to recapture command of the pitch that made him a first-round pick.

When St. Louis selected Kaminsky 28th overall, his calling card was a bender that Baseball America called “No. 1 among high schoolers.” Hard and nasty, it complemented a fastball that flirted with the mid-90s. According to scouting director Dan Kantrovitz, the Cardinals thought Kaminsky’s one-two punch wasn’t enough.

“When we were scouting Rob as an amateur, [area scout] Sean Moran told me Rob would have three pitches in the future with plus command,” Kantrovitz said. “He [also] said that because of how dominating he was at the high school level, he rarely had opportunities to work on his changeup and would need to focus on that in pro ball. Sean was spot-on. Our pitching coaches did an excellent job of bringing Rob along this year and really getting that changeup to be a legitimate weapon for him.”

The new weapon was legit. Pitching for Low-A Peoria, the 19-year-old southpaw surrendered just 71 hits in 100.2 innings. He won 8 of 10 decisions and logged a 1.88 ERA. Only two batters left the yard against him.

Much like an on-again-off-again relationship, Kaminsky’s signature pitch did leave him from time to time. Developmentally, it was part and parcel of what the marriage counselor… er, player development staff had in mind. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote something like this before, in the beginning of May of this season. During an arbitrary stretch between April 19 and May 14, Mike Trout struck out in 31% of his plate appearances, posting a .722 OPS. I identified the strikeouts as something to pay attention to, and then from May 15 through the All-Star break, Trout struck out in 20% of his plate appearances, posting a 1.111 OPS. So. Obviously, Trout adjusted to whatever needed to be adjusted to, or alternatively, the randomness swung in the other direction. For a while, it was easy to forget that Trout had ever slumped.

But now we’re back! Having learned nothing from the first go-round, I’m here to tell you to worry just a little bit about Mike Trout’s strikeouts. Since the All-Star break, Trout’s whiffed nearly 30% of the time, and he’s managed an OPS under .800. He’s still been a good player. He’s still been a terrifying player. He’s still, as of this moment, the almost certain winner of the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. But we’re obligated by social contract to write about Trout at any opportunity, and there are signs pitchers are finally trying to take advantage of his vulnerabilities. You know the ones. You’ve thought about them for hours.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Jose Fernandez blew out his elbow in May, the baseball world wept, rightfully so. It didn’t matter if you were a Marlins fan or not, it only mattered that one of the brightest young stars in baseball was gone, just one of a billion (probably) pitchers to learn that pitching is really, really unhealthy. It wasn’t fair, in the same way that it wasn’t fair when Matt Harvey went down, or when Stephen Strasburg was injured before that. Never love a pitcher. They’ll just let you down.

If it was sad for baseball, it was all but certain doom for the Marlins. They had Giancarlo Stanton, sure, and a few interesting young players, but they also had little rotation depth, an infield that was supposedly going to be duct-taped together by guys who sort of looked like they might have once been Casey McGehee, Rafael Furcal, Garrett Jones and Jeff Baker, and two tough competitors in the NL East. Even with Fernandez, it was going to be a tough run to the playoffs. Without him? Impossible.

As expected, the Marlins are not going to make the playoffs. As completely unexpected, the Marlins have not only not collapsed without Fernandez, they’ve hung in there all season long. A win last night over Milwaukee would have put them at .500, on a four-game win streak and 3.5 games out of the second wild card. You can certainly make the argument that being the second wild card is barely “making the playoffs,” and many have. Of course, the Marlins have won two championships and have yet to win a division title. Considering how they’ve stuck around, did Fernandez’ injury cost Miami the playoffs?

* * * Read the rest of this entry »

When Jake Peavy came into the league, almost 85% of his pitches were either a fastball or slider. Now? “I throw just about every pitch in the book at this point,” the 33-year-old pitcher said. It’s all part of evolution — not only due to changes in his stuff and his mechanics, but also due to changes on the league level.

Even in the last seven years, for which we have reliable PITCHf/x data, league-wide trends are apparent. The low strike is getting called more, pitchers are throwing more two-seamers down in the zone, and all pitches are moving downward (all pitches 2007 on the left, 2014 on the right).

Read the rest of this entry »