My Sunday afternoon was spent covering the Cleveland Indians and the Baltimore Orioles game at Progressive Field. In the fifth inning, something caught my eye from the press box:

Quite the double play turned by the #Orioles to kill a potential rally with two on in the fifth. Nice snag by Gausman, quick turn by Hardy.

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_ABJ) August 17, 2014

Double plays happen all the time. This one was a bit unique in that it was started by the pitcher, but it still appeared to be a pretty standard double play. Most exciting double plays are the result of a glove flip, a diving stop or a barehanded catch-and-throw. Here’s what this one looked like:

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It’s cliche to say that an event keeps getting better, but when it comes to Saber Seminar, it’s true. This year’s event, which is hosted and organized by Chuck Korb and Dr. Dan Brooks and raised more than $30,000 for The Jimmy Fund, ratcheted up both the enlightenment and the lightness for which the event has come to be known. They, along with emcee Mike Ferrin, kept the talks flowing and on point the whole weekend. I don’t want to get into everything here today, but I do want to highlight some of the presentations.
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Ryan O’Hearn is making it look easy. Forty-six games into his professional career, the 21-year-old Idaho Falls Chukar first baseman is crushing the Pioneer League. Swinging from the left side, O’Hearn is hitting .380/.455/.604 with nine home runs.

The Kansas City Royals drafted the Sam Houston State Bearkat in the eighth round, and he didn’t waste time showing he was ready for pro ball. O’Hearn homered in his first plate appearance and went 5 for 5 on the day. A little over a month later he was involved in a 16-inning game that featured a bench-clearing brawl.

He’s had more than a fighting chance against opposing pitchers. O’Hearn isn’t cocky, but he is confident.

“I finished my college year pretty good and got off to a good start in pro ball,” O’Hearn told me earlier this week. “My confidence has really built. You end up telling yourself, ‘I can do this, this is no big deal.’ Sometimes guys just click with their hitting, and I’ve been doing that lately, which is awesome.”

O’Hearn’s power potential is a big reason he was drafted. He left the yard eight times in his junior year, and he’s already surpassed that total in Idaho Falls. The 6-foot-3 slugger isn’t surprised. He describes his college ballpark as “what players call a graveyard – a big field where the ball doesn’t carry well because of heavy air.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last February, Michael Brantley and the Indians agreed to a four-year contract extension worth $25 million. The Indians figured it was a safe bet for an average player with upside. Some of the Indians’ players, meanwhile, had a different take. For example, let’s consider the words of Nick Swisher:

“We all said when that deal came out that that was a bargain for us,” said first baseman Nick Swisher.

Point: Swisher. Not that the Indians mind. Used to be, in terms of performance, Brantley was consistently, exactly average. Now, take a trip through the Wins Above Replacement leaderboard. You see Mike Trout at the top, naturally. Then there’s Alex Gordon, and Josh Donaldson, a previous breakthrough. Hanging out with the likes of Giancarlo Stanton is Brantley, who this year has become a fringe MVP candidate. Not that Brantley really stands any chance of winning, but at least statistically, there’s an argument, which tells you most of what you need to know.

Brantley’s offensive game is driving all this, and while he’s been developing for a while, his results have changed overnight. We have a measure of offensive performance called wRC+, which compares a player’s productivity to the league average. A figure of 100 is exactly average; a figure north of that is better than average. Between last year and this year, Devin Mesoraco leads baseball with an 87-point wRC+ improvement. That currently stands as one of the very biggest season-to-season improvements ever. Brantley’s in second place, with an improvement of 52 points. If it weren’t for Mesoraco being an anomalous freak, Brantley’s improvement would look more absurd.

Part of this is that Brantley’s reduced his strikeouts. Not that he was ever particularly strikeout-prone, but now he’s whiffing just once per 12 trips to the plate. A year ago, he whiffed once per nine. A bigger deal, though, is that Brantley’s hitting for power. It’s power people always suspected would come from his frame, and right now Brantley has more home runs in 2014 than he had the two previous years combined. Isolated power is simply slugging percentage minus batting average, and Brantley used to hang out around .110. This season he’s pushing .200. He’s kept most of everything the same while adding power and cutting down strikeouts, and that’s a pretty effective recipe for achieving a breakout.

Brantley swears he hasn’t made any dramatic changes. Terry Francona thinks he’s just developed a stronger base, and that he’s finding a little extra power as he enters his prime. Michael Bourn, for what it’s worth, thinks he sees something:

“I had to convince him a little bit,” Bourn said. “It’s all about believing that you can do it. When you come up here first, you might just want to stick with what you’ve been doing the whole time. You might not want to take a chance of swinging the bat with a little authority. He’s done that now.”

Let’s stick with that “authority” idea. The evidence suggests Brantley is looking for more opportunities to drive the ball. Below, a chart from Brooks Baseball. This is showing the average angle of Brantley’s balls in play, where more negative means more to right field, which is Brantley’s pull area. I’ll explain more after the image.

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Last week, Dave wrote a little ditty about how we will probably be crowning some Los Angeles players with the Most Valuable Player Awards this season. For the National League, that means Yasiel Puig or Clayton Kershaw. And, Dave is right. Dave is usually right. Right now, Kershaw is probably the best choice. But he’s a pitcher, and he missed a month, and yada yada yada people will invent reasons to not vote for him. And Puig? Well, we know he isn’t the most popular player among the voting bloc. But Giancarlo Stanton, on the other hand, is pretty popular with just about everyone. And he is having a heck of a season too. Could he sneak in and yank the award away from the boys in blue?

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We have a pretty good idea of baseball’s best pitches. You’ve got the Aroldis Chapman fastball. You’ve got the Kenley Jansen cutter. The Adam Wainwright curveball. The Stephen Strasburg changeup. The Cole Hamels changeup. The Felix Hernandez changeup. The Corey Kluber whatever it is. The Clayton Kershaw curveball. The Kershaw slider. The Kershaw hypothetical splitter that, in my imagination, he doesn’t throw because he doesn’t need to because of his curveball and his slider. There’s no clear winner, but there are plenty of candidates, and all of them are amazing.

We don’t have as good an idea of baseball’s worst pitches. The truth is baseball’s worst pitches don’t get thrown often outside the bullpen. They’re projects in which pitchers don’t have confidence, so you don’t see them in games. But we can skip over to something related, something that might stand as a decent proxy: We have the data to identify baseball’s least-effective pitches. At least among pitches that are thrown more than once or twice a month. This is one of the uses of the FanGraphs pitch-value data, and if you set a 50-pitch minimum, the second-least effective pitch this year has been Wei-Chung Wang’s changeup. And the first-least effective pitch this year? That honor belongs to Drew Smyly.

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Sometimes you hear something, an anecdote or an observation, that sounds very obvious but, upon reflection, you realize you never pieced it together in such a succinct manner. All the ingredients might have been there but until somebody experienced or smart laid it out just so, it never really clicked.

A big league pitcher once explained to me that his catcher insists that when his pitchers miss, they miss on the “right” side of the target. The correct side, if you will. If the target it is inside, miss inside. Set up away, missing off the plate is preferable to a pitch leaking back over the heart. Same applies up and down, high and low.

In golf, they call it a “good miss.” Not quite on the target but a shot that avoids disaster and gives you a chance to salvage a decent score. In baseball, it seems simple and isn’t an earth-shattering revelation but, if you watch for it, it often reveals a lot about the pitcher. It is a window into the value of stuff and velocity, as brute force papers over a lack of finesse.

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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 change-up, 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. Often, those will be the same grades. 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

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Maybe you find Tim Lincecum frustrating. He’s still throwing no-hitters, still in the top 25 for swinging strikes, still has an above-average strikeout rate, and still has a an above-average ground-ball rate. His walk rate has improved the last couple of years! Those home runs are coming at a rate that you’d figure would regress to the league average at some point. But they aren’t, and so you have his last few years.

Well, you are not alone with your emotions. Tim Lincecum is also frustrated. “The last few years have kind of eluded me in a sense, so I’m always trying to figure something out,” the pitcher admitted before a game with the White Sox.

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Much of modern sabermetric thought regarding pitcher evaluation has been based upon the theory that most types of contact are created somewhat equally. High and low BABIPs allowed are usually attributed to good and bad luck, and FIP, which is directly based upon BABIP, is oft cited as the go-to individual pitching statistic. Well, not all contact is created equal. This week, we’re using a fairly basic method of evaluating contact management ability, and looking at the leading contact managers in both leagues. As it turns out, there’s a head-to-head battle for supremacy in both the AL and NL. Read the rest of this entry »