Chris Heisey made his big-league debut with the Cincinnati Reds in 2010. A year earlier he put up a .900 OPS with 22 home runs and 21 stolen bases between Double-A and Triple-A. Following his break-out season on the farm he played in the Arizona Fall League.

Heisey has yet to break out in the big leagues. He’s had his moments – he went deep 18 times in 2011 — but for the most part he’s been a spare part. Seeing time at all three outfield positions, he’s averaged fewer than 300 plate appearances per season. His career slash line is a nondescript .252/.307/.425.

The 29-year-old hasn’t changed much since he broke in. His skill set is the same, as is his quest to improve certain facets of his game. That became clear when we revisited an interview I did with him during his Arizona Fall League stint.

The first thing we addressed was mechanical adjustments. In 2009, Heisey told me he had “almost a no-stride swing.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Fernandez. Patrick Corbin. Jarrod Parker. A.J. Griffin. Luke Hochevar. Matt Moore. Brandon Beachy. Cory Luebke. Bruce Rondon. Bobby Parnell. Kris Medlen. Ivan Nova. And now Martin Perez. Top and mid-tier pitchers in the early stages of their professional careers who have had Tommy John surgery this season, or in the case of Perez, are about to have it. Then there’s Matt Harvey, Jonny Venters, Dylan Bundy, Alex White and Eric O’Flaherty, who went under the Tommy John knife last season. For these pitchers, the surgery and rehabilitation will consume critical service time in their careers when they would otherwise be building up value for their arbitration-eligible seasons or free agency.

So while we lament the loss of these talents to our favorite team and to the game, the players face a troubling question: how will Tommy John surgery and the typical 12-18 month recovery time affect their short-term earning power?

Let’s start with the “lucky ones”: Matt Moore, Martin Perez, Cory Luebke and Dylan Bundy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the year started, an easy prediction for National League Cy Young Award winner would’ve been the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw. Then Kershaw, last year’s winner, went and got himself hurt, and though he’s presently back in action, the voters have historically been big on full seasons.

When Kershaw went down, an easy substitute NL Cy Young prediction would’ve been the Marlins’ Jose Fernandez. Then last year’s NL Rookie of the Year who, finished third in the Cy voting, got hurt and is having Tommy John surgery on Friday.

So, the field’s open.

Philadelphia’s Cliff Lee, certainly, is a contender, if he doesn’t get traded to the other league. Washington’s Stephen Strasburg now has his ERA under control, and of course there’s no forgetting St. Louis’ Adam Wainwright, last year’s runner-up in the Cy voting.

However, if the voting were to be conducted today, the certain winner would be Cincinnati’s Johnny Cueto … even if Kershaw and Fernandez hadn’t suffered their injuries, because Cueto has been that dominant.

Read the rest on FoxSports.com.

If one were to review the data for pitchers with the highest strikeout rates in baseball (at start of play Thursday), they would rightly expect to see names like Kenley Jansen, Jose Fernandez, and Max Scherzer near the top. All three are in the top 15, but a surprising name owns the top spot on that leaderboard – Wade Davis.

Read the rest of this entry »

As of this writing, the Detroit Tigers are the only team in the AL Central with a record above .500. They rank sixth in all of baseball in both runs scored per game and runs allowed per game. While their offense ranks in the top 10 in WAR, their pitching is what is really shining — ranking second in all baseball just behind the Red Sox. The claim that the Tigers have good pitching is not an original one, certainly. They have a pair of Cy Young award winners in Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, as well as Anibal Sanchez, who would be the ace of a lot of teams.

Other members of the rotation pique certain interests as well. Drew Smyly is getting another shot at starting, and Robbie Ray has been more than adequate while filling in for an injured Sanchez. Applying a sort of family dynamic to the team — Verlander, Scherzer, and Sanchez are the older kids that are just kind of doing their own thing while Smyly and Ray are the little ones that garner all the attention. This leaves Rick Porcello, the Jan Brady of the Detroit Tigers.

Porcello isn’t a dominant strikeout artist. He doesn’t have amazing “stuff” that gets featured via GIFs. Though he’s only 25 years old, he isn’t seen as part of an exciting new crop of pitchers. He isn’t flamboyant, he doesn’t say crazy things to the press. On the surface, Rick Porcello is boring.

But do you know what else Rick Porcello is? A top-25 starting pitcher. Since 2012, he’s been the 24th best pitcher by WAR and ranks 25th so far this season. He doesn’t walk many, he keeps the ball on the ground and in the ballpark. He may not have the dazzle of a Jose Fernandez (RIP), but he’s a vey effective pitcher in his own right. And he may be getting more effective. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners and Rays played a Wednesday matinee that featured extraordinarily little in the way of offense. Following the conclusion, there was this simple throwaway tweet:

#Mariners fall to Rays 2-0. Tampa had 3 hits, Mariners 2. No idea why this one took 3 hours, 21 minutes.

— Greg Johns (@GregJohnsMLB) May 14, 2014

Seems long. Seems like too much. An isolated instance is an isolated instance, and you shouldn’t focus too much on anything unless it repeats, but it turns out, for the Rays, this is a reflection of the norm.

Granted, there was a variety of reasons for Wednesday’s duration. Mariners starter Brandon Maurer struggled, and Mariners manager Lloyd McClendon went and got himself into an on-field argument. The day before, the Rays won 2-1, and that game took less than three hours. But a few days ago, the Rays lost a nine-inning affair 6-5, and they played for 228 minutes. Not long before that, they lost a nine-inning affair 6-3, and they played for 250minutes. In terms of footspeed, the 2014 Rays presumably are not the slowest team in baseball history. In terms of game pace, they most probably are.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers, already the most injury plagued team in baseball, got a double dose of bad news on Wednesday.

Matt Harrison’s lingering back problems have simply not abated, and now he’s looking at either trying to pitch through serious pain or face a spinal fusion surgery which could potentially threaten his Major League career. Meanwhile, Martin Perez — who lasted just 3 2/3 innings on Saturday — was diagnosed with a tear in his UCL, and is probably going to join the Tommy John parade. The Rangers were already trying to get by without Derek Holland, Jurickson Profar, and Geovany Soto, as well as a host of role players who had been pushed into larger roles due to the team’s injury epidemic.

With both Perez and Harrison potentially out for the season, the Rangers rotation is in shambles, and some national pundits are already writing the team’s obituary. And certainly, losing 40% of your rotation on one day is not going to improve your team’s chances of making the playoffs. The Rangers are worse today than they were yesterday. But let’s keep some perspective; few players are so good that their loss would dramatically the needle for a team’s playoff odds, and the Rangers replacement for Martin Perez might actually be just as good.

Read the rest of this entry »

Roughly a quarter of the 2014 season is in the books, and the sample sizes are creeping toward a representative level. Over the next couple of weeks, let’s take a somewhat deeper look at some of this season’s more noteworthy players and performances to date. “Noteworthy” doesn’t always mean “best”, though it does in most cases. Let’s kick it off today with a look at Masahiro Tanaka’s first seven starts as a Yankee. (This article was written prior to his eighth start, on Wednesday night.) His 58/7 K/BB ratio obviously speaks volumes about his ability. Is his future success based almost exclusively on this solid foundation, or is there even more to him? Read the rest of this entry »

Dave observed the other day on Twitter that, over the past calendar year, Mark Buehrle has been one of the better and more valuable starting pitchers in baseball. A lot of that has had to do with home-run suppression, and if you read FanGraphs often, you know how we generally feel about home-run suppression, but the larger point is that, after getting off to a rough start in Toronto, Buehrle turned things around and continues to get batters out to this day. His strikeouts right now are basically the same as ever, and every game batters against Buehrle return to their dugouts shaking their heads. He is what he has been, allowing him to feel ageless.

Consider everything about Buehrle and you might assume that he’s pitching like he always has. Why mess with what’s been working? Buehrle’s always been a little bit deceptive and a little bit finesse, and it’s not like you very often see a pitcher in his mid-30s make an approach adjustment. But if you dig beneath the 2014 Mark Buehrle surface, you notice something you can’t un-notice. Of his 31 strikeouts, 20 have been called. This is unusual, and this has an explanation.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most confounding things in baseball is an obviously talented starting pitcher who doesn’t generate many strikeouts. Generally speaking, we expect to see strikeouts match the stuff, and while sometimes we just confuse a good fastball for a good repertoire, there are guys who just pitch below their ceilings. Garrett Richards, in the past, was such a guy. It wasn’t just that he possessed one of the fastest fastballs in the majors — he’s also thrown a sharp slider, yet through his first three years he posted the same strikeout rate as Jeff Karstens and Kevin Millwood. Because of the incongruity, Richards has been considered a sleeper, but sometimes all a sleeper is is an early-stage disappointment.

Right now it doesn’t look like Richards is going to be a disappointment. It looks like Richards is going to fulfill that sleeper potential people have long figured he had. Wednesday, Richards was dominant against the Phillies, whiffing eight over seven shutout innings. Now, through a quarter of the year, Richards has struck out one of every four batters he’s faced. One out of four is bigger than one out of six.

Read the rest of this entry »