Archive for Daily Graphings

It’s been a frustrating offseason for Baltimore fans, he says to people who already know just how little the Orioles have done. Nelson Cruz, Nick Markakis, Andrew Miller, and Nick Hundley have all left town. The entirety of the work the team has done to replace them was to bring back Delmon Young and import reliever Wesley Wright. While you can’t draw a straight line between the team’s inactivity and the ongoing “is Dan Duquette leaving for Toronto” saga, it’s easy to see how some may look to see a relationship there.

Trading for Travis Snider, as the O’s did on Tuesday night, won’t change that. But that we’re talking about him says a little bit about what the Baltimore offseason has come to, a lot about the state of baseball news on January 28th, and something about a player that the Orioles clearly hope can become their next scrapheap pickup to yield results on a team that’s making something of a habit out of confounding the expectations.

There’s no way to sugarcoat this, really: Snider’s major league career has been a bust, at least so far as the expectations go for being the 14th overall pick in the 2006 draft. It’s fair to wonder what might have been had the Blue Jays let him get more than 18 Triple-A games before promoting him to the big leagues as a 20-year-old in 2008, despite the fact that he’d struck out 27.4% of the time in 423 Double-A plate appearances prior to that. Still, he was rated as a top-6 overall prospect by both BA and BP headed into 2009… and never quite stuck. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Cishek learned to throw a slider in 2009. Three years later, the side-winding Miami Marlins righty learned how to throw it more effectively against left-handed hitters. He has since emerged as one of the best closers in baseball.

Cishek – as Eno Sarris wrote in December – has a reverse platoon split, despite an arm angle that suggests otherwise. Eno’s article addressed the reasons why, but didn’t cover Cishek’s thought process and back story. In order to find out how the 28-year-old turned into into what he is today – a pitcher with a 13.25 K/9 and .209 BAA vs LHH in 2014 — I went directly to the source.

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Steve Cishek on his evolution as a pitcher: “What’s changed since I got called up is I throw my slider to two different locations. That’s kind of my big thing. I can backdoor a slider, whereas before I was just one side of the plate. Prior to 2012, I was in to lefties and away to righties with my slider.

“For me, it’s a different feel throwing a slider from arm side to glove side. I knew what my slider did, I just couldn’t understand how to command it to that side of the plate. Once I started figuring it out, it became a matter of muscle memory. Now it’s just a spot thing. If I start it here, it will end up here. Read the rest of this entry »

I lived through the 2008 Seattle Mariners. I’m not sure quite how I did it, but I paid attention to that damn team on a daily basis, and I wrote about that damn team on a daily basis, and while I’m sure there were lots of things I cared about and thought were significant in the moment, one of the only things I truly remember about the year, and especially the second half of the year, is Roy Corcoran. Corcoran was a nobody, a journeyman reliever, but he became one of the rare positive stories on a team that went right down the crapper. One of the few upsides of following a team through a disaster year is you uncover these little surprises who otherwise never would’ve gotten a chance. You get to stop caring about a team and start caring about individual players and individual stories, and 2008 put Roy Corcoran on my radar.

And then he fell off my radar the next year, but, anyway. Last year’s Rangers had their own disaster season. It was a disastrous season for different reasons from why the 2008 Mariners had a disastrous season, but it was a catastrophe almost from the start. And as a result, in time, unfamiliar players started to show up in the bigs. I never knew anything about Jake Smolinski. The same goes for Dan Robertson and Tomas Telis and Spencer Patton and Lisalverto Bonilla. And the Rangers also introduced one Ben Rowen. Now, the Rangers are no longer in possession of said Ben Rowen:

In addition to veteran LHPs Erik Bedard & David Huff, #Dodgers also sign 3B Jarek Cunningham and RHP Ben Rowen to minor league deals.

— Matt Eddy (@MattEddyBA) January 23, 2015

…and maybe that’s meaningful. They had him, and didn’t think enough of him to keep him. But I’d like to show you why you should be rooting for Ben Rowen. Daniel Brim already did, having beaten me in a race, but Rowen came up in my morning chat, and had it not been for the Rangers’ 2014 nightmare, Rowen wouldn’t have won me over with his unconventional…ness. They don’t make many like this guy.

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Multiple influences led to the composition of this brief post — and I fully anticipate that the end result will appeal to approximately X readers, where X is an integer less than 1. That said, as my fourth-grade teacher at Broken Ground School in Concord, NH, once told me during an actual student-teacher conference, “Carson, you’re not that special.” Which is to say: there’s a possibility that at least one other person will derive some pleasure from what follows and perhaps, not unlike that same bright star upon which Fievel Mousekewitz and his sister Tanya both wished in 1986 animated musical An American Tail, the current dispatch will allow us to feel less alone in a world populated by talking felines who extort small immigrant mice in return for quote-unquote protection.

Earlier today, my colleague Jeff Zimmerman — a person who, I sense, very much anticipates the return of domestic baseball — asked if I had plans to do any scouting this spring/summer in the the northeast. The short answer is “No” — not because I don’t intend to transport my dumb body to actual games (I do), but rather because, even were I to acquire both a radar gun and a lifetime supply of moisture-wicking polos, I am a mere impostor in this regard.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers traded a mainstay of their rotation in Yovani Gallardo to the Texas Rangers last week, as you by now are well aware. When a team trades a mainstay of its rotation, it’s natural to look to the rest of the rotation in an attempt to find who will pick up the slack. Literally, that person will be Jimmy Nelson, who is likely to fill the now-open spot in the rotation. But Nelson’s a fifth starter who is 26 has thrown just 79 innings in the MLB, so the expectations of him are somewhat tempered.

You look to the rest of the rotation and you see Kyle Lohse and Matt Garza, two guys whose career trajectories appear to be going down rather than up. Mike Fiers is an interesting case, but believe it or not he’s only a year younger than Garza and since he hasn’t been a big part of the rotation the last two years, the bar isn’t set too high for him, either.

This brings us to Wily Peralta. Peralta is young — he’s just 25. Peralta has been a fixture of the rotation the last two seasons — he’s made 32 starts in each year and racked up 382 innings in the process. Peralta legitimately improved last season — he dropped his ERA-, FIP- and xFIP- while throwing more innings per start. And Peralta is exciting, because he throws really, really hard. But that’s the part I want to talk about.
Read the rest of this entry »

The legal controversy surrounding Alex Rodriguez seemingly knows no end. Fresh off a season-long suspension – and a year filled with litigation – Rodriguez is currently preparing to return to the New York Yankees for the 2015 season. In addition to the $61 million the Yankees still owe A-Rod under the 10-year contract he signed back in 2007, Rodriguez can potentially earn another $24 million in bonuses by reaching four different home run milestones in the next three years.

Under the terms of his 2007 contract, the Yankees will pay A-Rod $6 million every time he moves up the all-time home run leaderboard. Rodriguez’s 654 career home runs currently rank fifth all-time, trailing only Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds. If Rodriguez hits six home runs in 2015, he would earn the first $6 million bonus by tying Mays’ career 660 home runs.

According to a recent report in the New York Daily News, however, the Yankees are preparing to contest the bonus provisions in A-Rod’s contract. When the team agreed to the milestone bonus structure back in 2007, it assumed Rodriguez’s march to the all-time home run crown would prove to be quite lucrative. In light of Rodriguez’s subsequent fall from grace, though, the team now understandably thinks A-Rod’s home run milestones will not be nearly as valuable as it initially hoped. As a result, the team is exploring its legal options.

So do the Yankees have any realistic chance of voiding Rodriguez’s bonuses? As is so often the case with the law, the answer is: It depends.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Reds have officially given four years and at least $28 million to Devin Mesoraco. The contract buys out what would’ve been Mesoraco’s first year of free agency, and this is a contract that would’ve looked a little weird to an observer a year ago. Through 2013, in the majors, Mesoraco owned a 70 wRC+, and against same-handed pitchers, it was a lowly 53. Before last season, Mesoraco was pretty much all potential. And then he tapped into that potential.

He wound up with a 147 wRC+. Against righties, 145. It’s not exactly new news that Mesoraco enjoyed a breakout season, and I’ve even written about this before, back in August. Everything from then remains valid, but I wanted to revisit Mesoraco’s season, to show in greater detail where he made adjustments, and where those adjustments paid off. Though Mesoraco’s remains far from a household name, he just completed one of the great breakout seasons of our time.

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You can tell a lot about a hitter by how many fastballs pitchers are willing to throw him. The bigger the bat, the more likely it is to see junk. Turns out, small changes in the number of fastballs a hitter sees can help us project that hitter better.

Sort the leaderboard for lowest fastball percentage, and you’ll see it immediately. It’s full of sluggers at the top. Reverse the filter and it’s mostly slappy speedsters. Rob Arthur took a more scientific approach and showed that isolated slugging and fastball percentage are indeed correlated negatively — sluggers see fewer fastballs.

Rookies see more fastballs when they come into the league. Over the last five years, the league saw 57.5% fastballs, and rookies saw 58% fastballs. That’s not a large difference, but it comes in a large sample. Then again, it’s not a large difference, period. Over the course of a season, a rookie with 600 plate appearances would be expected to see 12 or so extra fastballs.

In any case, even if this effect is small when you zoom out, it seems that individual differences in fastball percentage are predictive of future strong work. As Arthur said when he did the gory math behind this statement, “Fastball frequency normally varies according to the pop of the batter, so that when it changes, it may be indicating a change in the underlying skill level of the same batter.”

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Yesterday was Rob Manfred’s first official day on the job, and he didn’t waste any take making headlines. In addition to penning an open letter to the fans, he also sat down with Karl Ravech for an ESPN Sunday Conversation, offering some thoughts on what he saw as priorities to tackle early in his tenure. Some of the points of emphasis are things people have been talking about for a long time — there can be entirely too much time between pitches, and when certain teams get together, the length of the game is a real problem as well — but it was his comments about potentially restricting defensive shifts that got the most attention.

In the context of the conversation about how the game can be improved, Manfred mentioned that the league was looking at ways to “inject additional offense into the game.” And it’s fairly natural that people would draw a connection between the rise in shifting and the decrease in offense around the game. After all, the trend towards non-traditional defensive alignment has picked up a lot of steam in the last five years, the same time period in which offensive output has returned to levels not seen since the early-1990s. Shifts are also highly visible changes to the game, as we have all seen line drives end up as easy outs when a frustrated slugger shakes his head and walks back to the dugout.

But while I appreciate Manfred’s willingness to think about tweaking the game to improve the overall experience, this probably isn’t the best path to pursue. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure that we talk about how great Chris Sale is often enough. That’s relatively easily explained, I suppose; after all, with offense down across baseball, there’s more great-looking starting pitchers than ever, and even just within Sale’s division last year we found Corey Kluber, James Shields, Yordano Ventura, Max Scherzer, David Price, Anibal Sanchez, Justin Verlander, and Phil Hughes. You don’t have to go too far to find an interesting starter to talk about these days.

Sale finished third in the AL Cy Young balloting, but a distant third, not picking up a single first-place vote. That was primarily due to an early-season trip to the disabled list that left him unable to match Kluber and Felix Hernandez in innings pitched; otherwise, on a rate basis, he was every bit the equal of the AL’s two best starters. But we know that Sale is incredible, and we know that in 2014 he began to be a different kind of incredible, as Jeff Sullivan noted in June. Sale began to diminish usage of his fearsome slider, the one that he’d collected more than half of his strikeouts in 2012-13 with, in hopes that fewer sliders would help maintain the health of his arm.

That was in June. Now it’s January. We have a full season of data to look back upon, and three things should be pretty immediately clear. One, Sale really did use the slider less over the course of the year as compared to 2013: Read the rest of this entry »