By actual games played, we’re coming up on the halfway point of the season. By now, statisticians might continue to insist that certain data samples remain small, but they generally don’t feel small. We’ve had three months of baseball, everyday baseball, and three more months of everyday baseball remain. This is the middle of the summer routine, the routine where baseball stretches as far as the eye can see in every direction. It’s a comfortable time of year; games are becoming increasingly important, but there’s still ample time to correct mistakes.

We’re always trying to take stabs at the future. We know that baseball will play out however it likes, but we still attempt to guess what’s going to happen. This kind of thinking is what informs a lot of trade-deadline activity. So I’ve been thinking lately about second-half predictions. How can we know what’s going to happen in the standings? First things first: In a sense, we can’t. Baseball has an endless capacity to make the analysts look stupid. But it’s not like we don’t know anything. So I’m returning to a project similar to something I’ve done before.

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The Yankees for so long had seemingly been the favorite to win the Bryce Harper sweepstakes. After all, the Yankees have the largest war chest to pursue one of the most coveted free agents in major-league history. The Yankees were determined to stay under the luxury threshold last winter for the first time in the tax era to restart their tax-paying status, and they were motivated to do so with an eye on this historic forthcoming class of free agents. While Harper has had some struggles this year, he is still going to be a 26-year-old free agent who has a nine-win season under his belt and is regarded as an elite talent. His left-handed swing is a natural fit for the right-field porch of Yankee Stadium II.

But now the Harper-to-Yankees match hardly seems like a sure thing. It is at least less of an obvious fit for reasons beyond just the $400-plus million. The Yankees saw an opportunity and pounced to add Giancarlo Stanton and his MLB-record contract this offseason. He’s bookended in the outfield by Aaron Judge. And for the purposes of this post, in center field, they have another asset in Aaron Hicks, who is proving his 2017 breakout is anything but a fluke.

The only major knock against Hicks last year was his inability to stick on the field, as he dealt with injury. He is also better from the right side of the plate, though he’s been above average as a left-handed hitter (119 wRC+ in 2017, 106 this season) the past two years. While Hicks is certainly not the talent that Harper is, and while he’s a couple years his senior, he’s solidifying himself as a solid regular, a three-win-type player with perhaps further upside to be extracted. Hicks, who is under club control through 2019, gives the Yankees the ability to throw $300-plus million at a free agent other than Harper this winter, a player such as Manny Machado, who is perhaps a better fit. While the Yankees infield is crowded, there’s a way to fit an elite left-side infielder on any MLB club. While Hicks remains a short- to mid-term center-field option, Estevan Florial and Clint Frazier give the Yankees longer-term, non-Harper outfield options.

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This post begins with a very crude and also lame test of the reader’s observational powers. What’s necessary to know before beginning the test is that FanGraphs’ player linker features an option that allows one to link players just once. If a player’s full name appears on multiple occasions in a document, only the first of those appearances will feature a link to the relevant player’s profile. Subsequent instances of the player’s full name are presented just in plain text.

These finer points of the player linker’s functionality having been reviewed, I will now move on and present a set of three tables. Each table features the top-10 hitters by BABIP over the last three seasons — in the first two cases, among the batters with 350 or more plate appearances and, in the third case, among this year’s qualified hitters (because a relatively small population has hit the 350 mark).

Here they follow with little comment. First, for 2016:

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Colin Moran was at a crossroads. The 2016 season was over, and the left-handed-hitting third baseman had just slashed .259/.329/.378, with 10 home runs and 124 strikeouts, in Triple-A. His pair of big-league cameos had been every bit as abysmal — in 25 plate appearances for the Houston Astros, he logged three base hits and one free pass. Truth be told, the sixth-overall pick in the 2013 draft had essentially gone from prospect to suspect due to his lack of production.

Moran recognized that fact. Moreso, he did something about it. As Tony Kemp, his former teammate, related to me last fall, Moran came to the conclusion that his “swing doesn’t play in the big leagues,” and told his hitting coordinator, “I need to switch something.”

He did just that, and the results speak for themselves. Moran returned to Triple-A in 2017 and slashed an eye-opening .301/.369/542, with 18 home runs in only 350 at-bats. (A facial fracture, courtesy of a foul ball, knocked him out of action for six weeks.) His turnaround season included seven games with the eventual World Series champs, for whom he went 4-for-11 and hit first MLB long ball.

The 25-year-old University of North Carolina product is now a Pittsburgh Pirate, having been traded from Houston to the Steel City this past January in the five-player Gerrit Cole deal. In 248 plate appearances for his new club, Moran is hitting .265/.347/.419 with seven home runs. He shared the story of his career-altering adjustments prior to a recent game at PNC Park.

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Colin Moran: “In a perfect world, I would have made the changes earlier. That’s something I think about a lot. It often takes a bad year to get to, ‘Alright, let’s change some stuff, let’s figure out what works,’ and unfortunately that’s what happened with me. It’s preferable to think forward rather than wait for that bad year.

“My swing was off when I got called up in 2016. Things didn’t feel all that great with it — I didn’t know why — and I got exposed, especially at the top of the zone. I remember my first at-bat. You kind of know in the batter’s box when guys are attacking a weakness, and the first few pitches were up and in. It was like, ‘Man.’ Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, for the second time inside of a week, two of the NL’s top starting pitchers in terms of ERA — the Cubs’ Jon Lester (2.10, third in the league) and the Dodgers’ Ross Stripling (1.99, which would rank second if he weren’t 4.2 innings short of qualifying) — will square off, this time in Los Angeles. On June 20, Lester got the upper hand, throwing seven shutout innings in a 4-0 win, the latest strong outing for the 34-year-old southpaw, who’s been on quite a roll lately.

Indeed, Lester has surrendered a mere two runs and 13 hits in his last four starts (27 innings), both via solo homers by Cardinals in a June 15 game that the Cubs won, 13-5. Only once in his past 10 starts has he allowed more than two runs (four in six innings versus the Pirates in a May 29 win), good for a 1.58 ERA over 62.2 innings. Depending upon the schedules of Max Scherzer (10-3, 2.09 ERA) and Jacob deGrom (5-3, 1.69 ERA) as well as the preferences of their respective teams, it’s not completely farfetched that NL All-Star manager Dave Roberts could give Lester (who’s a gaudy 9-2 to go with that ERA) the start on July 17 at Nationals Park, though you can imagine the pressure will be on the Nationals to make Scherzer available, health permitting.

Despite those superficially glossy stats, Lester is nowhere near the top of the NL pitching WAR leaderboard. His 0.9 WAR ranks just 26th in the NL, somehow behind the WARs of the likes of the Marlins’ Jose Urena (2-9, 4.40 ERA, 1.4 WAR), the Phillies’ Vince Velasquez (5-8, 4.69 ERA, 1.4 WAR), and the Mets’ Zack Wheeler (2-6, 4.85 ERA, 1.2 WAR), none of whom are likely to make the NL All-Star team, let alone get consideration for the start.

The disconnect for Lester is that his FIP (4.19) is almost exactly double his ERA, ranking 28th among the 43 pitchers with enough innings to qualify and 37th out of 59 with at least 60 innings; his 104 FIP- tells us that he’s actually 4% worse than league average on that front. The 2.09 runs per nine differential between his ERA and FIP isn’t just the majors’ largest this season, it’s the largest from an ERA qualifier since 1901. Even if you drop the innings threshold to 90 (Lester’s total), he’s just a whisker away from the lead:

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Joe Palumbo, LHP, Texas Rangers (Profile)
Level: Rehabbing   Age: 23   Org Rank: 18  FV: 40
Line: 2 IP, 2 H, 0 BB, 3 K, 0 R

Notes
Sunday was Palumbo’s first start back from Tommy John surgery. He was into the mid-90s with a plus curveball before the injury, which caused him to miss all of 2017. Yerry Rodriguez (more detail here) had a second strong outing in relief of Palumbo, striking out seven in six innings of four-hit, one-run ball. Video of Rodriguez appears below.

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Last week, I asked you about ten surprising hitters. These are their names!

• Max Muncy
• Brandon Nimmo
• Mookie Betts
• Matt Davidson
• Eddie Rosario
• Bryce Harper
• Jackie Bradley Jr.
• Giancarlo Stanton
• Dexter Fowler
• Chris Davis

It had been a while since I ran a polling project, so that was the exercise. Five of those players had greatly overachieved, relative to their projections, and five of those players had done the opposite. So what I was looking for was for the FanGraphs audience to collectively project their rest-of-season wRC+ marks. For each player, I provided their current wRC+, their projected rest-of-season wRC+ based on Steamer and ZiPS, and a poll with a bunch of options. In this post, I’ll analyze the results of the polls. Polling projects are nothing without the analysis.

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Cleveland set a number of records last year by means of a dominant collective pitching effort. This contributor noted last summer how the Indians’ rotation was distancing itself from the rest of baseball, and on Oct. 2, Jeff Sullivan argued that the Indians might have had the best overall staff of all time. They were the best of all time by some measures, including total WAR.

Then earlier this season, remarkably, the Houston Astros appeared set to better that Cleveland staff, recording an ERA that was almost 50% better than average over the season’s first two months.

But guess what? The Indians are making another run. And while the club’s overall staff (relievers included) might not ultimately rival Houston’s, the Indians’ rotation just might be able to chase down the Astros’. Read the rest of this entry »

We’d all like to believe we might have superpowers — if not X-ray vision, otherworldly strength or the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, then at least the capacity to turn the fortunes of our favorite athletes for the better. Via the miracles of selective memory, small sample sizes, arbitrary endpoints and confirmation bias, I’m here to tell you that I have the latter. Allow me to explain.

In the few months since I joined FanGraphs — and particularly since the start of the 2018 regular season — multiple readers have noted, both here and on Twitter, that several of the subjects I’ve covered, particularly (but not exclusively) slumping or underachieving ones, have experienced improved fortunes — or continued good fortunes — almost immediately after I covered them. It’s apparently the flip side of the infamous Jonah Keri Curse; over the years, my friend and occasional colleague has caused many a fan base to tremble in fear after he touts a player or team.

Let us consider the “evidence” of my powers, organized by the order of my coverage:

Paul Goldschmidt, Diamondbacks (Profile)

I swear I’m not obsessed with Goldschmidt, but I’ve already checked in on the Arizona first baseman three times thus far this season, twice in depth and once in passing as part of the Diamondbacks’ offensive struggles as a whole. When I began writing about the five-time All-Star’s slow start for my April 11 piece, he had hit just .118/.333/.206 for a 70 wRC+, but the mere motion of my clickety-clacking fingers coincided with his first home run and multi-hit game of the 2018 season, lifting him all to 101 wRC+ overnight. By the end of April, his line was up to .273/.395/.505 (144 wRC+), and it appeared that the slugger had his mojo back.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the fourteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Yoshihisa Hirano, Joe Musgrove, and James Paxton — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Yoshihisa Hirano (Diamondbacks) on His Splitter

“I started throwing it when I turned pro in Japan. The truth is, when I was in college, I was able to get hitters out without having a splitty. A fastball and a slider was enough. When I got to the pros, there was a lot of talk of needing a pitch that comes down and about how there’s more success with that pitch. I started toying with it a little bit my last year of college, and when I got to the pros I started using it.

“Kazuhiro Sasaki was a big splitty-forkball thrower. There are some books about him, and I studied those. No one really taught me anything. I just went out and started playing with it, checking the books on how he grips it. I found a grip that was comfortable for me. There are some guys who throw it the same way, but there are other pitchers in Japan who grip it differently, too. They have a different placement within the seams.

Hirano’s splitter-forkball.

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