Travis Hafner is hitting like it’s 2005. The 35-year-old has raced to a .318/.438/.667 line, replete with six home runs, three doubles and a triple in April. He has helped breathe life into a lineup missing its usual stars. With Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson, and Alex Rodriguez all shelved, the Yankees have still managed 4.6 runs per game, good for ninth in the league.

The Yankees’ lineup has been 14 runs above average this year by wRAA. Hafner is at plus-9 himself, powering the Yankees lineup like he powered those mid-2000s Cleveland teams.

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“I’m not a tremendously gifted athlete,” Mark Trumbo said. “I have to work at it, and be smart out there.” That might be surprising given how country strong the six-foot-four, 225-pound outfielder looks, but if you consider his game at as a whole, it’s obvious that there are aspects that could use refinement. Statistics have helped shape some of his baseball values as he’s worked to improve himself, even if he doesn’t incorporate them daily.

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Monday night and Tuesday morning, the A’s and Angels played a game for the ages, a 19-inning affair that saw the hosts rally in the ninth and the 15th before walking off in the game’s seventh hour. The game featured 18 runs and nearly 600 pitches, and in the end, the A’s improved to 15-12, while the Angels fell to something much worse than that. Generally, such games are immediately thought of as turning points, and generally, such games don’t go on to work that way. But this was a game that few will forget, regardless, simply because the duration grew to be so extreme.

FanGraphs isn’t in the business of issuing game recaps, particularly several hours after the fact. But still, some attention to the game should be paid, and I’m electing to focus on a particular intentional ball. With two out in the top of the 11th inning, Grant Balfour intentionally walked Albert Pujols. We consider the 3-and-0 pitch.

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While it goes without saying that the present site is required reading for all of baseball’s most progressive front offices, it’s also the case that no post at the site today will be read more hungrily or with such hunger as this one — which post is a very urgent scouting report on Skip Schumaker, who both (a) is a middle infielder for the Dodgers and (b) threw a scoreless inning for that same team on Monday night (box).

Fastball
Schumaker’s fastball — in relief, at least — bears striking resemblance to an average major-league one, sitting at about 88-90 mph and with similar rise and arm-side run.

Irrefutable proof of same is contained within this animated GIF:

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Josh Hamilton is the most aggressive hack in baseball. This isn’t news, of course, but to put his hacktastic ways in context, here is where Hamilton’s swing rates rank among batters with 500+ PAs in the last year.

O-Swing%: 42.7% (150th of 151)
Z-Swing: 82.0% (151st of 151)
Swing%: 57.9% (150th of 151)
Zone%: 38.8% (151st of 151)
Contact%: 64.9% (151st of 151)

The only guy who has swung the bat more often than Hamilton is Delmon Young, but 46.1% of the pitches Young has been thrown have been in the strike zone. Hamilton is pitched around more than any other hitter in the game, and yet he swings more often than anyone, with the exception of one replacement level scrub.

Josh Hamilton has always been an aggressive hitter. Josh Hamilton has a career major league batting line of .301/.360/.542. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Well, it is broke(n), but most importantly, this isn’t the approach that made Josh Hamilton an elite Major League player. This approach is new, and if he doesn’t make some changes in a hurry, he’s on his way to becoming the new Ryan Howard.

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Stetson Allie sat, staring at the ground as Rockies farmhand Drew Beuerlein verbally tore into him. Moments before, the 240-pound Allie delivered a glancing blow on a home plate collision, unable to jar the ball loose from the 24-year-old catcher. As teammates took the field, Allie continued to sit as if he’d been shaken up during impact. The pitcher-turned-first-baseman eventually rose to his feet and gingerly took two steps towards the third base dugout before he quickened his pace.

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Major League Baseball Advanced Media and YouTube announced an expanded partnership on Monday that will result in thousands more hours of baseball highlights that will be available for free on the video site. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the content of the highlights and the timing of their availability on YouTube will continue to be strictly controlled by MLBAM. In other words, fans with dusty VHS collections will continue to receive take-down notices from MLBAM and YouTube if they upload their favorite games or highlights.

Still, the expanded MLB-YouTube agreement is a step in the right direction for baseball fans hungry for free content.

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The sample size is small — just 24 plate appearances — but the numbers still jump off the page. Four weeks into the season, Mike Carp is hitting a stratospheric.455/.500/.864. Seven of his 10 hits have gone for extra bases.

The 26-year-old outfielder will obviously come back to earth, but he still might be one of the best under-the-radar acquisitions of the off-season. The Red Sox acquired him from the Mariners in February for a PTBNL.

Carp was an enigma in Seattle. In parts of four seasons, he hit .255/.327/.413 and occasionally drove baseballs long distances. What he didn’t do is prove that he could stay healthy and provide consistent production. Jettisoned to Boston, he is intent on proving he is capable of both. Only time will tell, but Carp is swinging a hot bat.

——

Carp on his hot start: “Being healthy is a big part of it. I missed a lot of time last year with the shoulder injury, so it’s about finding my rhythm. The more reps I get, the better I see the ball and better rhythm I have.

“I wasn’t getting at bats the first couple weeks of the season, but I’ve gotten a few lately and that’s helped me lock in a little more. I feel great at the plate. I’m just trying to stay short and use the whole field. I’m going up there with a good plan and sticking to it. I kind of got away from it [Saturday] and had a rough night, but I rebounded [Sunday] and got back to what’s working for me.

“I’m itching for as many at bats as I can possibly get, but I also understand the concept of a team. We have a very deep bench and it’s nice to be able to keep guys fresh.”

On hitting at Fenway Park: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the best things about really getting into the regular season is that we’re starting to get some meaningful data. One of the best things about getting meaningful data is that it’s accompanied by a lot of meaningless data. True insight can be gleaned from the former, but fun? You can have fun with both. Let’s talk about pitchers stealing bases.

A year ago, pitchers combined for seven stolen-base attempts. The year before that, they also combined for seven, and the year before that, they combined for three. Then six, then ten, then 12, then seven, then nine…it isn’t often that pitchers get on base, but it also isn’t often that, once on base, pitchers attempt to steal. Pick your favorite reason, or combine them. They want to avoid injury. They want to conserve their energy. They aren’t properly trained for aggressive base-running. They don’t want to distract their hitters. They don’t want to give up a rare opportunity to not watch from the dugout. They want to actually exchange words with the first-base coach. Nobody thinks about pitchers stealing because pitchers don’t steal. On April 25, Cliff Lee tried to steal. On April 26, Andrew Cashner tried to steal.

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This morning, Jon Heyman noted an odd thing on Twitter:

i am not a hater of WAR stat, but if someone can explain to me how starling marte & bryce harper are both 1.7, please do

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) April 29, 2013

He was quoting Baseball-Reference’s WAR calculation, and the two are indeed tied at +1.7 WAR on B-R. Here, we have Bryce Harper (+1.5 WAR) ahead of Starling Marte (+1.2 WAR), but the point still basically stands; WAR thinks Harper (1.200 OPS) and Marte (.835 OPS) have both been pretty great this year, with just a small (or no) difference between them. What Harper has done with the bat, WAR believes that Marte has mostly made up with his legs in baserunning (+3 run advantage) and defense (+3 run advantage), as well a slight bump from getting 12 extra plate appearances.

There’s no question that Harper has been a better offensive player, but there are questions about the defensive valuations, because defensive metrics aren’t as refined at this point as offensive metrics are. It is much easier to prove that Harper has been +10 runs better with the bat this year than it is to prove that Marte has been +3 runs better defensively by UZR, or +7 runs better defensively by DRS. There are more sources for error in the defensive metrics, and Heyman’s tweet led to a discussion on Twitter about the usefulness of including small sample defensive metrics in WAR.

I’ve written before about the strong correlation between team WAR and team winning percentage, and others have followed up with similar analysis more recently. However, all those articles have focused on full season or multi-season data samples, and since the question was raised and I hadn’t yet seen it answered, I became curious about whether WAR would actually correlate better at this point in the year if we just assumed every player in baseball was an average defender.

Essentially, if we just removed defensive metrics from the equation, and evaluated teams solely on their hitting and pitching, how would our WAR calculation compare to team winning percentage? And how does WAR correlate to team winning percentage based on just April 2013 data, when we’re dealing with much smaller sample sizes?

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