There are currently four managerial openings in Major League Baseball. The Cubs, Reds, Nationals and Mariners are all in need of a new skipper. Torey Lovullo is likely to receive serious consideration from one or more of those teams.

Currently John Farrell’s bench coach in Boston, the 48-year-old Lovullo has managed in the minor leagues with the Indians and Red Sox. He interviewed for the Dodgers job in 2006, only to see it go to Grady Little. Boston interviewed him prior to the 2012 season, but hired Bobby Valentine. He was Toronto’s first base coach in 2011 and 2012.

In the second of a series of interviews with up-and-coming managerial candidates, Lovullo discussed the approach and philosophies he would bring to the job. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the weird things you just get used to when you’re a hockey fan is the vague, non-informative reportage of injuries, especially around playoff time. If a guy has a broken foot, it’s a lower-body injury. If a guy sustained a concussion, it’s an upper-body injury. No one ever goes into specifics until a playoff run is over, nominally so as not to give the other team some kind of advantage. If a guy’s playing through pain, you don’t want the other team targeting his sore spots, after all. Once a team is eliminated, or wins the Stanley Cup, everything comes out, and everyone admits what they’ve been dealing with. By the end, nobody’s healthy.

Tony Paul’s suspicion is that, whenever the Tigers are done playing baseball, everyone will come clean about what’s going on with Miguel Cabrera. It’s no secret that Cabrera’s playing hurt, and we’ve all heard about his litany of aches and pains, but we might not have a true understanding of how bad things have gotten. I don’t know, that’s speculation, but Cabrera most certainly doesn’t look like himself. He most certainly didn’t look like himself — or perform like himself — in September, as nagging pains mounted. The Tigers, like everyone, are more than just one player, and they’ve still got a shot at a title, but they’d have a better shot with a healthy Cabrera, a Cabrera who doesn’t presently exist.

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Midnight struck for baseball’s Cinderella last night, as Adam Wainwright’s curveball played the part of the wicked stepmother. Actually, I don’t know the Cinderella story well enough to know if that sentence makes sense, so let’s move on from this tortured analogy after just one sentence. The Pirates lost last night, and the season that put the city back on the map as a baseball town is now over. So now, there’s one question hanging over the franchise: was this was a one year aberration or was this was the emergence a new force to be reckoned with in the NL Central?

From one perspective, it’s impossible to answer this question right now. We have no idea what the 2014 Pirates will actually look like after an off-season of roster shuffling. They could pony up their entire farm system to land both David Price and Giancarlo Stanton, and then, yeah, they’re obviously a contender next year. Or they might decide to play it safe, wait for the next wave of prospects to hit Pittsburgh, and take a step backwards in a consolidation year. There’s no way to know what the 2014 Pirates are going to do without knowing who is going to be playing for them.

But, we know some of the players that are almost certainly going to be on the team, and we know some things about how the 2013 Pirates won 94 games, so we can look at how much of what they did this year could reasonably be expected to carry over to 2014. So let’s do that.

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Ahead of game five, Oakland manager Bob Melvin had a tough choice to make. Both Bartolo Colon and Sonny Gray were available on full rest. And though he has indicated that Sonny Gray is his starter, what this post presupposes is: what if he hadn’t told us who was starting. Who would we choose to be his starter?

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Cliff Lee pitched for the Phillies in the World Series in 2009, and though Lee and the Phillies didn’t win, the ace impressed armchair psychiatrists and industry officials alike with his apparent countenance and composure under stress. One of my favorite baseball anecdotes is that, the next spring, in a team meeting, a coach pointed to Lee and held him up as an example of how to stay balanced and perform when the pressure’s really on. It was then that Lee spoke up and said, paraphrased, “actually I damn near s*** my pants.”

In a postgame interview Wednesday night, Adam Wainwright admitted to having been nervous, given that he was tasked to start a do-or-die Division Series Game 5. Wainwright’s pitched in a World Series before, and he already had 14 games of playoff experience, but you could hardly blame him for being human. Experience doesn’t make you immune to feelings. It maybe gives you a better idea of how to handle them. Wainwright was chosen for the postgame interview because he threw a complete game to allow the Cardinals to advance to the NLCS. For the second time in two starts, Wainwright was dominant, and though there’s no such thing as an unwinnable game, Wainwright is the reason why you talk about avoiding aces in October. The Pirates technically had two chances to win this series, but this is why it felt like they only had one.

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Something I like to look at after every season is a chart of the locations of all the season’s intentional balls. Intentional balls, of course, are supposed to be super far away from the strike zone, but out of any such group there has to be a pitch that’s closest to being a strike, and for some reason those pitches fascinate me. This project would by no means be timely right now, in the middle of the playoffs, but something that is timely is something very similar. Along a similar vein to intentional balls, we have hit-by-pitches.

Hit-by-pitches just about have to be pitches out of the zone, in order to hit a batter, since batters stand some distance away from the plate. These pitches aren’t thrown wildly intentionally, but the locations are generally way off regardless, because pitchers aren’t perfect. But out of the pool of all hit-by-pitches, there has to be a pitch closest to having been in the zone. What follows is inspired by Shane Victorino.

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The other day, in one of my chats, someone asked if I could design a dream starting pitcher, throwing any four pitches of my choosing. Of the pitches, I wanted a curveball, and of all the curveballs, I settled on Adam Wainwright‘s. There are a host of excellent curveballs out there — Clayton Kershaw‘s is famous, and Jose Fernandez’s will be — but Wainwright’s is spectacular, and I was also dealing with recency bias after Wainwright’s start against the Pirates in which his curve flat-out dominated. That curve was fresh in my mind, and the worst thing about Wainwright’s game ending was that I wouldn’t be able to watch that curveball anymore.

A funny thing happened on an earlier tour through the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards. I was looking at 2013 starting pitchers, and I was looking at curveballs, and almost by accident, I noticed that Wainwright’s curve generated a good whiff rate, but Gerrit Cole’s generated an excellent whiff rate. Cole — Wainwright’s opponent in just a couple hours in Game 5 of that series. This was originally slated to be a matchup between two great curves. Now it looks like a matchup between one of those great curves, and another, also great curve. There are a few things we can take away from this.

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Prince Fielder ranks 12th among active players in hit-by-pitches, and you can spare us all the fat jokes because Reed Johnson ranks fifth. There are guys for whom getting hit is basically a skill, and this seems to be the case for Fielder, as he’s happy to find another way to reach base. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the back. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the butt. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the elbow. Bringing us to a Prince Fielder HBP on Tuesday.

Fielder led off the bottom of the second inning against Dan Straily, and after falling behind 0-and-2, he got drilled by a fastball that ran up and in. The next guy struck out and the guy after that hit into a double play, so what happened to Fielder hardly mattered in the end, but this nevertheless seems like an excellent opportunity to gauge reader opinion on something.

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I’m just going to leave this here, sans commentary. Except I’ll note that the Diamondbacks hit opposing batters 60 times this year, and were hit by their opponents 43 times. Okay, proceed.

Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Kevin Towers has not shied away from venting frustration about his team’s lack of fight.
Towers has pointed to many instances where his pitchers did not hit a member of the other team after a perceived slight or beaning of a D-back.

Toward the end of the season, the L.A. Dodgers clubbed six home runs in an 8-1 drubbing of the D-backs, which was a game that saw the eventual NL West champs look a little too comfortable in the dugout.

“I was sitting behind home plate that game and when it showed up on the Diamondvision of stuffing bananas down their throats, I felt like we were a punching bag,” Towers told Arizona Sports 620’s Burns and Gambo Tuesday. “Literally, if I would have had a carton of baseballs I would have fired them into the dugout from where I was sitting behind home plate.

“That’s not who we are as Diamondbacks, that’s not how — I mean, it’s a reflection on Gibby, on myself, on our entire organization. They slapped us around and we took it.”

Towers said that has to stop, and following the game he had “a few choice words for the (coaching) staff.”

Nothing changed.

“You’d think the GM comes down and makes it a point to talk to the staff about it that at we need to start protecting our own and doing things differently,” he said. “Probably a week later Goldy gets dinged, and no retaliation. It’s like ‘wait a minute.’

“Not that I don’t take any of our guys from a lesser standpoint, but if Goldy’s getting hit, it’s an eye for an eye, somebody’s going down or somebody’s going to get jackknifed.”

Read the whole thing. You can bet the commissioner’s office is going to.

A week ago, Clint Hurdle chose A.J. Burnett over Gerrit Cole to start Game 1 of the NLDS. This was a perfectly reasonable choice, as Burnett has been excellent for the Pirates this year, and is a 37 year old veteran, while Cole is a 23 year old rookie who had just over 100 innings in his big league career. Cole has been very good since the Pirates called him up, but by pretty much any measure, Burnett had been as good or better, and he’s got a longer track record of pitching at this level.

Burnett, of course, imploded. He allowed as many hits (6) as he got outs, and he walked four batters as well, including the opposing pitcher. Seven runs scored and the Cardinals rolled to an easy victory. The next day, Cole shut down the very same line-up, allowing just two hits and one run over six innings, allowing the Pirates to tie the series. And now, with both Burnett and Cole on full rest for Game 5, Hurdle is going with the kid.

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