With the 35th pick in the 2012 draft, the New York Mets selected Kevin Plawecki out of Purdue University. In a draft where the organization was questioned for drafting low ceiling talents, the now 22-year old catcher was assumed to be an overdraft — Fueled by his ranking as the 68th best prospect pre-draft per Baseball America.
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A.J. Burnett made some history Wednesday night when he recorded his 2,000th career regular-season strikeout. Of course, he also has 31 career postseason strikeouts, and I don’t know why those don’t matter — but they don’t matter, and this isn’t even the main point of this piece. Burnett nearly made some more impressive history Wednesday when he carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Cardinals. Carlos Beltran knocked a two-out double, and Burnett was removed before the eighth. But even without the history and the complete game, Burnett turned in a hell of an effort and the Pirates improved to .500. Now all the team needs to do is hold this for another five-and-a-half months.
But this post isn’t about Burnett. It’s about is Russell Martin. While that’s a bit of a stretch, Martin was at least catching Burnett on Wednesday, and I needed some sort of topical introduction. When the Pirates signed Martin as a free agent, they presumably considered both his defensive and his offensive skills. In the early going, his offense has been entirely absent, but at least a part of his skillset shows up in the numbers.
The ranking might change day-by-day, Jarrod Parker said, but he agreed: “Overall I would say the fastball and changeup are my two better pitches.” And that changeup is special — he threw it more than any secondary pitch last year, it was his best-rated pitch, and a big part of why he had the 21st-best swinging strike rate among qualified starters. It wasn’t always that way, though. Coming out of high school, Parker was a fastball/curve guy. So what happened?
“I got hurt and didn’t want to throw as many breaking pitches, so I started working on a changeup.”
Used to be one of the principal complaints — nay, the principal complaint — about Austin Jackson was that he struck out too much. He had all the tools, but the strikeouts were limiting his upside. Similarly, used to be one of the principal complaints about Torii Hunter was that he struck out too much. It was the same conversation, years and years earlier, and now both Jackson and Hunter are teammates. Funny thing about that.
Paul Swydan just posted about Austin Jackson’s dramatic strikeout reduction. Jackson’s strikeouts are down this season more than you would believe, and that’s given even more life to the top of the Tigers’ order. But I became independently interested in Jackson while conducting my FanGraphs chat on Tuesday, wherein I was asked plenty of times whether or not I’m buying Jackson’s early success and change. We’re always looking to make something of the early numbers, because they’re the only numbers we have and we want for them to be meaningful. Most of the early numbers are bad and stupid, but we know that certain stats stabilize faster than others, and Jackson’s stable stats are eye-popping, if you’re familiar with the previous versions of Austin Jackson.
Austin Jackson has a fairly well-documented history of frequent strikeouts. But every day, Jackson seems to be creating a new history. That’s because he’s decided to stop striking out.
Chris Getz hit his first home run in 1,144 plate appearances against Atlanta last night. It was rather overshadowed when the Braves smacked three home runs off of Kelvin Herrera in the eighth inning as if they had a whole lineup full of Chris Getzes. Getz does not have much power, but he does make up for it with other skills. Yeah, right. Getz is off to a pretty hot start (for him, certainly) this year, but he is a pretty terrible hitter. Over 1351 career plate appearances, he has a .258/.314/.323 (.286 wOBA) line. His utter lack of power is only part of the problem.
There have been hitters who have excelled without much power, of course. Even before Getz’s shot off of Kris Medlen, I had been thinking about looking at hitters who managed big numbers without much power. Baseball fans like benchmarks: 500 home runs, .300 batting average, 100 runs batted in, 20 wins. Some of them may be more telling regarding a player’s actual value than others, but we understandably like those standard numbers. So I decided to look at .400 hitters — well, .400 wOBA hitters. I think of a .400 on-base percentage as an “awesomeness benchmark,” and since wOBA is scaled on on-base percentage, it works well enough.
For the sake of historical curiosity, here are some of the .400 wOBA seasons with the fewest home runs.
The title of this piece is too obvious. Brandon Nimmo, a 2011 first round draft pick taken ahead of Marlins phenom Jose Fernandez should stand out. No? But the outfielder from Wyoming’s development path has been slow. At a development stage when most top prospects are assigned to full season squads, Nimmo was returned to extended spring training and assigned to Brooklyn of the New York-Penn League in 2012. At 19, he produced 35% better than league average in 2012. However, it’s difficult to avoid focusing on a triple slash line of .248/.372/.406.
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Before we get started, I find appropriate two words of warning. One, this post contains .gifs, like many of my posts on FanGraphs. If your browser locks up from too many .gifs, I think the bigger story is that you’re visiting the present-day Internet from 1997, but it’s at least right of me to give you a notice. Two, this is maybe the dumbest and most pointless thing I’ve ever put together. And it wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a post about bunt doubles. In terms of determining wins and losses, you aren’t about to learn anything the least bit meaningful. On the standards of significance, this post sucks.
All right. This is a post about intentional walks, and, more specifically, intentional balls. People don’t really notice intentional balls because they don’t matter. The outcome is pre-determined, and throwing and receiving intentional balls isn’t a skill. Nobody is thought to be “good” at it or “bad” at it because it’s just a simple game of catch that maybe shouldn’t even be necessary in order to advance a hitter to first base. Once every several years or so, a hitter will swing at an intentional ball, just to take the other side by surprise. Once every year or month or something, an intentional ball will be thrown too wildly, and bad things will happen. This is when intentional balls are noticed, but those events are infrequent.
So the Legends had to play someone, right? Of course they did. While I was there, I caught two other teams, and the first I’ll talk about is the Asheville Tourists. On to the prospecty goodness.
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Kyle Farnsworth is intimidating. The Tampa Bay Rays right-hander throws hard and isn’t afraid to come inside. He is also a sculpted 6-foot-4, 240 pounds with a background in martial arts. Charging the mound against him has never been a good idea.
That tough-guy image has overshadowed a long and mostly successful career. Farnsworth has never been a star, but he has appeared in 814 regular season games and 15 post-season games. In 941 innings he has fanned 934 batters. He has backed down to none of them.
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David Laurila: How different a pitcher are you now compared to when you broke into the big leagues?
Kyle Farnsworth: Not too much different. I obviously don’t throw as hard as I did back then. That’s going to happen over the years and this is my 15th season. You just have to continue to make adjustments as hitters make adjustments to you.
DL: How hard did you throw in those early years?
KF: I think I topped out at 103, but I was mostly high-90s. You can get away with a lot more mistakes when you’re throwing that hard, as opposed to being 90 or something like that. It’s a good luxury to have.
DL: Did you reach a point in your career where velocity wasn’t as important?
KF: Not really, although I realized that maybe movement was a little more important than velocity. Eventually hitters are going to catch up to straight 98, as opposed to movement and 94. That’s a lot harder to hit and the type of thing you figure out the longer you are into your career. You’d like to figure them out a whole earlier, but you figure them out when you figure them out.
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