Everyone is good at something. We may not be great or elite, but we all have something we can do better than anyone we know. Whether it’s whistling, whittling, or wrestling — you can do something better than your friends and family. It could have to do with genetics or just hours of practice, but there’s something. This is not to say that being good at something is actually a good thing. Most talents are pointless at best.

I used to work in a sheet music store/warehouse. Part of my job was pulling sheet music for customers who called the store or came in looking for something. I would look up the thing on my computer, then take to the stacks. Every piece of stock had a nine digit stock number. I started off writing these things down, but eventually just committed everything to memory. Doing this dozens of times a day allowed me to become very proficient at memorizing and then immediately forgetting nine digit numbers. I can still do it pretty well. This is a pretty dumb talent.

On April 9^th, Phil Hughes started a game for the Twins. He gave up four runs, striking out three and walking three. This isn’t entirely atypical of Phil Hughes, but he’s certainly done better. He pitched only five innings, however. This, we are learning, is probably more of the norm for him. Read the rest of this entry »

Circumstances were different when Paul Goldschmidt faced Tim Lincecum the first time. In early August of 2011, Goldschmidt was playing in his second-ever major-league game, a young first baseman who’d never been a Baseball America top-100 prospect, and who’d never been a Baseball America top-10 Diamondbacks prospect. Lincecum was a staff ace having a Cy Young-caliber season, his fourth in a row, and he was one of the major pieces around which the Giants were built. Against Lincecum, Goldschmidt popped out on the seventh pitch of the first plate appearance. On the fourth pitch of the second plate appearance, Goldschmidt went yard.

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Masahiro Tanaka has now made two starts for the Yankees, and outside of a couple of home runs, he’s been ridiculous. He’s rung up 18 strikeouts while issuing just one walk, and he’s posted a 51% ground ball rate in the process, leaving him with a nifty 1.81 xFIP. His splitter is as good as advertised, and while it’s just two starts, it’s two starts that suggest that the hype was probably correct; Tanaka likely is one of the best starting pitchers in baseball.

But, a little more quietly, there is a pitcher in the National League that has put up a very similar line, and you probably won’t believe who it is.

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We’re just over a week into the regular season, and many baseball memories – positive and negative – have been inserted into the history books. Ryan Braun‘s three-homer game, Emilio Bonifacio‘s rapid-fire succession of BABIP singles, Tim Hudson’s sensational Giants’ debut, a bunch of aces being aces, and the Mets/Phillies/Angels, etc.., bullpen implosions – just another week in paradise. While individual player statistical sample sizes are still way too small to draw meaningful conclusions, team totals are already ramping up, allowing us to make some somewhat informed judgments regarding what may be in store for some clubs the rest of the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps due to schedule shenanigans, Arizona’s Chase Field has only been home to one Mark Trumbo home run this season. That’s fine. The park has already helped Trumbo become a better hitter.

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One of the big conversations taking place in baseball right now concerns whether or not Billy Hamilton is going to hit enough to stick as an actual long-term regular. It’s a justifiable worry, because Hamilton didn’t exactly tear up the minors, and he hasn’t looked fantastic in his limited exposure to the majors. We won’t know for a while whether Hamilton can do enough at the plate, but it’s good to have the occasional reminder of why he’s being held to a lower baseline than others. Wednesday’s fifth inning of a game between the Reds and Cardinals provided such a reminder.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Hamilton made a run happen entirely on his own. He required assistance from the pitcher, his teammates, and the rest of the opposition. But with no other player in baseball would a run have been scored, given the sequence you’re about to observe, in .gif form.

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All we want are numbers that matter, beyond the numbers that matter. Wins and losses are already in the books, and in certain cases teams have already significantly changed their own playoff odds, but we’re all waiting for the point at which we can do some meaningful analysis. The sample sizes thus far are incredibly small, and this is a big reason why people are paying so much attention to pitcher fastball velocities — that’s one of the only things that stabilizes almost immediately. Velocity is entirely up to the one guy. The numbers that stabilize fastest tend to be the numbers relying on the fewest players.

But you can also look at numbers that build sample sizes quickly. Like, say, pitch-by-pitch numbers, since there are hundreds of pitches in each game. What that suggests is that it’s not entirely too early to look at 2014 pitch-framing statistics, and there’s evidence to believe this carries over well even over small samples. And in the early, early going, Yankees pitchers have worked with the most favorable strike zone, while Cubs pitchers have done the very opposite of that. I hope you like framing content, because this summer we’re probably going to beat it to death. So, actually, I hope you don’t like framing content? Whatever, here comes data.

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We are pleased to announce that, beginning today, FanGraphs is going to be contributing regular original content to FoxSports.com. My first piece for Fox is up now:

When the Detroit Tigers announced that they had signed Miguel Cabrera to an eight-year contract extension that didn’t even begin for another two years, the deal was immediately met with skepticism. The Tigers tacked on an additional $248 million in guaranteed money to lock up Cabrera’s age-33 to age-40 seasons, and the history of aging, super-sized, bat-only players is littered with disappointments. Exhibit A: Albert Pujols, who has been a severe disappointment since joining the Angels and would be my choice as the owner of the worst contract in baseball right now. The Pujols disaster is why so many of us — myself included — believe the Tigers might end up regretting the Cabrera extension.

But, at the same time, we should also acknowledge that the Pujols disaster is one of the most inexplicable anomalies in baseball history. There have been hitters as good as Albert Pujols before, but they generally haven’t declined nearly to the same degree that Pujols has since joining the Angels.

Read the rest at FoxSports.com.

We’ll be contributing several pieces per week to the FoxSports site, with writers like Jeff Sullivan and Eno Sarris also on tap to bring their unique perspectives. The content you find there will be similar to the content we’ve provided here over the years, and we’ll be sure to make sure to point you to the pieces we do over there so you don’t miss one of Eno’s great interviews or Jeff’s array of GIFs.

We’re excited to partner with Fox, but don’t worry, FanGraphs itself isn’t going to be changing. We’re not going anywhere; this will simply put some of our content in front of a different audience. This is just an addition to what we already have been doing, and it won’t affect what we do here.

We look forward to working with Fox going forward, and hope you’ll enjoy this new partnership as much as we will. So check out our first piece over there and get ready for a bunch more.

When writing about Jonathan Papelbon in the year 2014, there’s a few things that we can stipulate as fact, if only because you all already know about them and there’s not really much point in spending time rehashing them.

We know that his velocity has been dropping steadily for years. We know that the four-year, $50 million contract he signed prior to the 2012 season looked bad at the time and looks even worse now, both hampering the Philadelphia budget and helping to usher in a world where closers don’t get big money on the market any longer. (No closer has earned as much since, and with Craig Kimbrel extended, it’s possible no one will for years.) We know that he’s not exactly considered the best teammate in the world. We know, we think, that the Phillies badly wanted to be rid of him and couldn’t, for all of these reasons.

Even still: 2014 has provided some additional information, and it’s not exactly encouraging. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot went wrong for the Mets a season ago, but they did manage to come out of nowhere to be the best baserunning team in baseball. I say that because, the season before, the team overall was below average. They took it upon themselves to be much more aggressive with their feet, and it paid off — even if, in the end, it didn’t pay off. A huge reason the Mets were so good was because of Eric Young, who is fast. Another huge reason the Mets were so good was Daniel Murphy, who is not fast. A month ago I wrote about Murphy and the curious case of a base-stealing threat without base-stealing legs. Murphy was also good at the other baserunning aspects, and he stands as a clear example of how baserunning is more than pure footspeed.

The opposite of a slow runner who’s better than expected on the basepaths is a fast runner who’s worse than expected on the basepaths. That player type exists, and I remember that last year Gerardo Parra went 10-for-20 stealing bases even though he was a plus-UZR outfielder. Watching a game Tuesday afternoon, Parra was thrown out trying for second by almost a literal mile. I’ll grant that it appeared to be a busted hit-and-run, but that doesn’t fully excuse Parra for being so far away from the base when the baseball arrived.

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