Breaking balls sometimes get short shrift these days. Perhaps because of their strong platoon splits and weak (but probably real) correlation with injury, it’s the change up that teams are insisting their pitchers learn. Brett Anderson is a product of a baseball family and one such organization, and yet he continues to ply his trade mostly by throwing a strong breaking ball or two, when he’s healthy.

Is it one pitch, is it two pitches, does it lead to platoon splits, does it lead to injury? His slurve knows all. Or at least a bit.

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* Update: kind of. Though Morales will surely take opportunities from Hart, they may coexist on the active roster. It’s complicated, but it shouldn’t change too much about the analysis.

There was never any question that the Mariners liked Kendrys Morales. They traded for him in the first place, and he hit. They offered him a three-year contract. They kept in touch with him during the offseason. If the Mariners had had their druthers, they would’ve locked Morales up to return as the team’s DH. But Morales, see, didn’t really want to go back to Seattle:

“He knew it was going to be tough to look for another offer, or another job, but in his heart he just didn’t really want to come back here and be in the same spot … he was taking his chances to see if something was better.”

When a player is a free agent, he gets to decide where he ends up. When a player belongs to a team, however, he can’t control where he gets traded, barring a full or partial no-trade clause. The Mariners couldn’t sign Morales, so he waited and waited and signed with the Twins. The Twins fell quickly out of the race, and now they’ve traded Morales to the Mariners, for Stephen Pryor and salary relief. The Mariners got Morales the only way they knew how to, and now he’ll serve as the rusty DH, in replacement of a rusty DH.

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Over the All Star break, Miguel Cabrera admitted he wasn’t feeling great. He also mentioned his teammate while he complained of aches and pains to Jorge Ortiz:

“There are times when I feel good, but there are always muscles that are tightening, muscles that are not functioning properly,” Cabrera said in Spanish. “It’s part of the process. The same thing is happening to Justin Verlander, but the difference is he pitches every five days, so you don’t see it as frequently.”

The line between the little everyday joys of growing older and actually being injured may be fine. As the famous line from The Program goes, “If you’re hurt, you can still play. If you’re injured you can’t.”

So is Justin Verlander hurt, or is he injured?

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Another piece in this year’s trade deadline mosaic fell into place on Monday, as Chase Headley was dealt from the Padres to the Yankees in exchange for 3B Yangervis Solarte and High-A RHP Rafael De Paula. Headley promptly jumped on a plane, was inserted into what became a 14-inning marathon with the Rangers, and delivered the game-winning hit. Moments like this have been hard to come by for the switch-hitting third baseman since 2012, when he unfurled a .286-.376-.498 line with 31 HR and an NL-leading 115 RBI, while playing his home games in a pitchers’ park.

He basically became the poster child for an underachieving, and dare I say boring Padres club. It’s clearly unfair to heap all of the 2013-14 Padres’ problems on the back of Headley, but it goes with the territory when you bat in the middle of the order daily and haul down a large salary by San Diego standards. What on earth has happened to Headley since 2012, and what can the Yankees expect to get from their new third sacker for the rest of the 2014 season? Read the rest of this entry »

I learned of the Jeff Samardzija trade at an Independence Day house party. That’s how long ago that deal took place, and most people have moved on. They’ve turned their attention to potential trades. We analyzed the Oakland-Chicago deal rather thoroughly, first with Mike Petriello, then with Tony Blengino. It seems like there shouldn’t be a whole lot left to say — the A’s paid steeply to try to win a World Series; the Cubs bolstered a position-player stockpile that’s not so easy to bolster. Classic, fascinating midseason blockbuster.

And I agree there’s not a lot left to say. But I do have one thought I want to throw on top of the others. It concerns a potential side benefit for the A’s — a side benefit they might not have even considered to be a benefit at the time. This is about the nature of how the deadline works, and how this particular deadline could be shaping up.

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The Tigers, as they seemingly always do, have a bullpen problem. They rank 26th in the majors in bullpen ERA (4.37) and 25th in FIP (3.92), as Joe Nathan has been a disaster in the ninth inning, and Al Albuquerque, Phil Coke, and Ian Krol haven’t been very good at protecting leads before Nathan takes the hill either. When your most reliable reliever is Joba Chamberlain, you know there’s some issues.

So on Wednesday night, the Tigers did what contending teams with bullpen issues do; they paid through the nose — giving up Double-A starter Jake Thomspon and rookie reliever Corey Knebel — to get an experienced, high-quality closer, acquiring Joakim Soria from the Rangers. Soria has been fantastic this year, posting a ridiculous 1.07 FIP, thanks to the lowest walk and highest strikeout rate in his career. Oh, and the fact that he hasn’t allowed a home run yet. That helps too.

Of course, not allowing home runs in Texas is a neat trick that Joe Nathan pulled off last year, and that hasn’t really carried over to his pitching this year in Detroit, but even when the home runs return, Soria should still be pretty big upgrade for the Tigers relief corps. However, even very good relievers only pitch about 10 innings per month, and with just a little over two months left in the season, there just aren’t that many innings left for Soria to make a significant difference in the standings. Besides, the Tigers were extremely likely to win their division even without Soria, as they currently hold a 6 1/2 game lead over the Indians and a 7 game lead over the Royals.

In terms of moving the playoff odds needle, perhaps no significant trade made this month will have less of an effect that the Tigers acquiring Soria. But this trade isn’t about the regular season. This trade is about the postseason, and the potential impact Soria could have in October.

We’re all pretty familiar with the fact that relievers just don’t pitch enough innings to be highly valuable in the regular season, but the game is played differently in the postseason. The increased frequency of off days makes it easier to lean on your best relievers more often, and the importance of each game provides an incentive to make sure that the best pitchers are on the mound the most often. And this shows up in their usage patterns.

For illustration, the most frequently used relievers throw about 5% of a team’s total innings over the course of the regular season; that’s ~75 innings out of around 1,450. Most are a bit under that, but if you’re really aggressive with your closer usage or have a relief ace working in a setup role, you can give him 5% of the total innings pie from April through September.

Now, let’s take a look at the percentage of innings pitched by elite relievers in last year’s postseason. Eight of the top 20 relievers in 2013 WAR made it to at least the division series and pitched in multiple games. Here are their percentages of innings pitched for last postseason:

After throwing 5.1% of the Red Sox innings in the regular season, Uehara threw nearly double that amount in the playoffs. For reference, 9.6% of a team’s total regular season innings would equal out to about 140 innings per year. Based on the fact that the average leverage index when Uehara entered the game was 1.76, you could equate the impact of the innings he threw in the postseason to a starting pitcher that threw 246 innings in the regular season.

Yeah, elite relievers can matter an awful lot in October, which is why teams continually trade legitimate prospects to acquire them in July. Of course, Uehara carried the heaviest workload of the elite relievers, so this is basically the absolute best case usage scenario for a relief ace in October. The A’s managed to use Doolittle similarly, but only through one round, and every other team who advanced beyond the division series gave a lighter workload to their best bullpen arms. The average percentage of innings pitched for these eight relievers was 6.5%, which still translates a regular season workload of about 95 innings, but doesn’t match what Boston got out of their closer.

But, again, we have to factor in that while these pitchers are throwing fewer innings, they are pitching in innings that have a greater impact on wins and losses than a starting pitcher does, and we can’t simply equate one reliever inning with one starting pitcher inning. The way this is handled in reliever WAR is through chaining, which gives the reliever credit for pitching in higher leverage situations but doesn’t incorrectly assume that those innings would have gone to a replacement level reliever instead.

So, yes, Soria might only throw a handful of postseason innings, and reliever performance is volatile enough that perhaps he won’t end up making a significant difference for the Tigers. In that case, they’ll have just punted one of their best pitching prospects and a power arm who might have been a useful reliever himself. Certainly, this is the kind of deal that could easily backfire, and the Tigers may very well regret this deal in the long run.

But they made this because of the potential for an Uehara-style impact. Uehara’s dominance over a very large workload was one of the primary reasons the Red Sox won the World Series last year, and despite their diminished importance in the regular season, relievers can matter an awful lot in the postseason. We shouldn’t diminish Soria’s potential impact on the Tigers playoff run just because individual relievers don’t matter as much in the regular season.

If Brad Ausmus learns from the mistakes Jim Leyland made last postseason — note the very low percentage numbers for Benoit and Smyly on that list above — and aggressively uses Soria this October, this trade could end up being a significant difference maker for the Tigers. The idea that relievers don’t really matter that much holds up to scrutiny in the regular season, but the postseason is a different game, and it’s one where guys like Joakim Soria can matter a lot more.

There’s absolutely no denying that pitch-framing is a thing. Different people call it different things, but it’s real and it matters and it’s going to continue to matter until or unless everyone’s the same or there’s an automated strike zone. Pitch-framing is normally associated with catchers, because it’s the catchers who’re doing the framing. Borderline pitchers are in large part up to them, and given that we have pretty good data, a lot of people ask us here at FanGraphs when we’ll incorporate pitch-framing into catcher WAR. It’s something we’d like to do, but it’s also something that’s a lot more complicated than you might think.

Framing data affects pitchers. Those are the next people to be considered when the subject comes up. Catchers receive pitches, but catchers receive pitches thrown by pitchers, and good or bad framing value already shows up in the data. It just doesn’t show up next to the catchers’ names, being instead woven into the pitching statistics. So if we’re going to give catchers WAR credit for framing, we have to figure out a way to strip the same amount of credit from pitchers. Framing affects, among other things, walks and strikeouts, and right now those are pitcher-only.

So when people talk about framing, they talk primarily about catchers. Sometimes, they’ll talk about pitchers, often talking about specific batteries. Barely ever do people talk about the hitters. You know, the other people dealing with balls and strikes. The victims, as it were, in the case of good receiving. Or the non-victims, in the other case.

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As we head into play on Wednesday, 12 of the 15 teams in the American League are within six games of a playoff spot. This is great news if you were a member of Bud Selig’s Blue Ribbon Committee, tasked with bringing parity — competitive balance is the preferred MLB jargon, I believe — to a sport that has seen its fair share of dominant dynasties. The addition of a second wild card, along with rising television revenues that have shrunk the gap between the haves and the have-nots, means that more teams are fancying themselves as contenders now than ever before.

The Royals, a game below .500, are reportedly more interested in acquiring a hitter to bolster their offense than in selling off the final few months of James Shields‘ contract. The Rays are five games below .500, but have won six straight and might just be talking themselves out of trading David Price, given their recent surge. Even the Red Sox, who looked dead and buried a few weeks ago, have now won eight of their last 10, and can probably make a case for keeping their team together to make a last ditch run at defending their championship.

However, I’d like to make a suggestion to American League teams chasing the second Wild Card spot: proceed with caution.

The reward for even winning the Wild Card used to be a best-of-five series that would likely result in at least two home playoff games, a nifty little reward for a team’s fan base. Under the new system, however, the carrot at the end of the Wild Card stick is just a single game winner-take-all affair, with the loser only extending their season by one additional day, and maybe not even playing that game in front of their home crowd.

And the news gets worse for the second Wild Card entry in the American League this year; not only are you going on the road for an elimination game, but you’re almost guaranteed to be going up against one of the very best teams in baseball.

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Kevin Kiermaier debuted for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2013. Here were his end-of-season numbers:

The Rays added Kiermaier to their 40-man roster on September 30 last season for their Game 163 tiebreaker against the Texas Rangers. Kiermaier debuted in the ninth inning when Joe Maddon subbed him in as a defensive replacement in center field, and as a result Kiermaier earned a spot on the Rays postseason roster for their Wild Card game against the Indians. An unusual debut, to say the least, but not surprising given what was thought of Kiermaier at the time.

Rays General Manager Andrew Friedman called Kiermaier the best defensive player in their organization at any level at the time of his callup last season. MLB.com’s Bernie Pleskoff, a former professional scout, called Kiermaier an “outstanding defender” and went on to say that Kiermaier could win multiple Gold Gloves.

It was always thought that Kiermaier had a future as an MLB player, probably as a fourth or fifth outfielder who mostly served as a late-inning defensive replacement or pinch runner. Now, Kiermaier has the highest WAR on the team projected to be best in the AL East, and he’s done it in less than half as much playing time as anyone else.

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I remember… some of the details about the clearest time regression to the mean was ever explained to me. It wasn’t explained to me personally; it was a blog post somewhere, or maybe a print-published article, and it simply showed league-leading batting averages, and then the batting averages for the same players the next season. If you’re familiar with the concept of regression, of course you know that, the next season, the batting averages were pretty much all down. It couldn’t have been more simple, and it couldn’t have been more helpful, and regression is so common a term now within baseball analysis that we all get to feel like part-time mathematicians. Especially around here, most people are smart enough to factor regression into almost everything.

It applies between seasons, and it applies within seasons. It’s a little like gravity — it’s always a factor, whether you like it or not, and it’s built into good player projections. It’s built into good standings projections. If a player has been really good for a time, odds are, going forward, he’s going to be less good. If a team has been really good for a time, odds are, the same thing. Regression is among the more powerful forces, but there is some evidence of teams being able to fight it off. Let’s talk about midseason trades.

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