One could argue that, during the 2015-16 offseason, Jason Heyward was my hill. If that’s the case, I am now mostly dead. After producing almost six wins in his final campaign with the Cardinals, the outfielder recorded just a lone win in each of his first two seasons with Chicago.

I say mostly dead, though, because Heyward’s bat is showing some signs of life: since coming off the disabled list a month ago, he’s hitting .307/.347/.489 with a 124 wRC+. While that represents a hot streak for the Cubs version of Heyward, it pretty closely approximates what the team probably expected from Heyward when they signed him. Whatever the case, it is the best run he has produced since the joining the team.

Heyward’s swing changes have been frequent over the past few years. He has altered his mechanics nearly every season of his career. The Cubs hoped to unlock more power out of Heyward after he posted a 121 wRC+ for the Cardinals in a 2015 campaign during which he took a bunch of walks, limited his strikeouts, ran the bases well, and exhibited slightly below-average power. The Cubs weren’t wrong to try and unearth that version of Heyward. With his defense, baserunning, batting eye, and contact skills, the addition of a bit more power might have made Heyward an MVP candidate.

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For the past week or so, I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing about Justin Miller. Miller is a 31-year-old reliever, and, by the way, he’s pitching for the Nationals. Though he’s allowed runs in each of his last two appearances, he’s faced 43 batters so far, and he’s struck out 22 of them, without one single walk. Miller, last year, was bad in Triple-A for the Angels. Now he looks like he could be one of the more dominant relievers around. It’s too early to go quite that far, but, well, you know how relievers are. They can emerge or decline in the blink of an eye.

It’s possible that, in Miller, the Nationals have found something. He might turn out to be one of the keys to their season. But Mike Rizzo is also no stranger to making midseason bullpen upgrades, and you don’t want to end up counting on Miller to keep up the miracle. And so, Monday, Rizzo has moved to beef up the depth in front of Sean Doolittle. In the current era of baseball, it’s almost impossible to have too many good relievers. The Nationals got a new one from the Royals.

Nationals get:

• Kelvin Herrera

Royals get:

• Kelvin Gutierrez
• Blake Perkins
• Yohanse Morel

I’m not sure there’s anything stunning here. Herrera was very obviously going to be available, as a contract-year closer on a terrible team. The Nationals are in the hunt, and the bullpen in front of Doolittle has sometimes been shaky. The prospect package seems to be light, but rentals generally don’t fetch a blockbuster. Herrera’s strikeout rate is only 23%. What surprises me more than anything is that this happened on June 18. It doesn’t surprise me that the Nationals would want Herrera for five or six extra weeks. It surprises me that, on so early a date, the Royals would settle.

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Been a long time since I ran a polling post. So, this is going to be one of those, where I ask you, the smart audience, to tell me what you think about certain questions. Typically, these polling posts focus on teams. This time around, the focus is on ten specific hitters. These are ten hitters whose performances to this point don’t look very much like their preseason Steamer and ZiPS projections. I’ve selected five significant overachievers, and five significant underachievers. Their names!

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

We spend a lot of time writing about players who are in some way defying expectations. Players who might have reached or sunk to a new level. For example, I’ve written about Muncy a couple times lately, and Jay Jaffe recently wrote about Davis. It’s interesting when players don’t do what we think they’re going to do. Rarely, though, do we open things up to audience opinion. You all watch a lot of baseball, and you all are familiar with contemporary analysis. That’s why you’re here. But most of the time, all you get is a comment section. Consider this something like a midseason fan-projection project. How much do you believe in the success of the players above? Are you expecting positive or negative regression, or do you believe some of them have new true talents?

Everything that follows is simple. I’m not going to offer any analysis, beyond each player’s current wRC+, and projected rest-of-season wRC+. All I’m asking for each guy is what you think his wRC+ will be over the remainder of the season. When the results are in, we can see what the community thinks of each of the players. Doesn’t mean anything is conclusive or correct! It’s just nice to get other data points for a change. Thank you in advance for your participation. You don’t have to vote in every poll if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything here if you don’t want to. You wouldn’t believe how completely voluntary this is!

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A little more than two months ago, I noted that the Mariners’ bullpen had been — through that point in the season — among the most improved in the game, relative to preseason expectations. Before the 2018 season began, we projected Seattle relievers to strike out 9.1 batters per nine innings and walk 3.5.

A couple weeks into the season, they weren’t doing that. They were performing much better than that, actually. At the time I wrote that first article, Mariners relievers had struck out 10.7 batters per nine innings and walked just 1.5, both of which were tremendously good numbers and perhaps merited further investigation at the time. But it was still early, so I kept the article general and cautioned that we shouldn’t necessarily expect the men in teal to keep up their early-season performance too much longer.

Well, we’re now more than a third of the way through the major-league schedule, and the Seattle bullpen has stayed improved. In fact, the Seattle bullpen has been among the top three or four in the game, no matter which way you slice it, but this piece is about improvement against expectations. Here’s an updated version of a chart I included in my original article, which plots each teams’ actual relief K/9 and BB/9 (adjusted so that positive figures are good in both cases), through games played on Friday, against our preseason expectations of the same:

Observant readers will note that there is another happy story to tell here about the Astros’ pen — featuring Héctor Rondón and Chris Devenski — and a sad one about the Orioles, featuring almost every Oriole. But, again, this article is about the Mariners, whose improvement relative to projections in both K/9 and BB/9 has been outstanding — and key to the club’s outrageous performance in one-run games, which was detailed here by my colleague Jay Jaffe. Maybe it’s finally time to dive a little bit deeper into what they’ve been doing and why it’s been successful.

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As a part of their sudden organizational push, the Brewers almost simultaneously acquired both Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain. Yelich is only 26, but Cain is 32, yet when the Brewers gave Cain a five-year free-agent contract, they justified the investment by saying they believed his aging curve would be graceful. The Brewers were believers in Cain’s athleticism and track record, and they didn’t see him as a player likely to fall off a cliff. Every team that signs a free agent is optimistic, of course. But Cain was one of relatively few free agents whose market didn’t crater. In an otherwise challenging winter, he got what he was worth.

To this point, Cain’s been even better than the Brewers might’ve imagined. He’s 11th among position players in WAR. He’s more than halfway to his career high in stolen bases. He leads all major-league center fielders in Defensive Runs Saved, and he leads all major-league center fielders in Ultimate Zone Rating. And Cain is also showing off a new and disciplined approach at the plate. I know it’s early, and there’s plenty of contract to go. But Cain isn’t just avoiding decline — he’s taken steps to improve.

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

We’re entering a time on the scouting calendar when a great shift in resources occurs. Short-season leagues get underway this week (if they haven’t already), which means some amateur scouts will pick up regional pro coverage now that the draft is done, while others stay on the amateur showcase circuit to prep for 2019. It also means teams that know if they’re buying or selling at the trade deadline can target scouting resources more efficiently by identifying likely trade partners and focusing on those systems. For example, the Padres have probably considered what teams are in need of lefty relief help at the deadline and have made it an organizational priority to know about those teams’ systems more than the systems of other rebuilding clubs. Daily Prospect Notes returns as a space to explain and discuss concepts like this, individual performers, my in-person notes, and whatever else I see fit to talk about.

Yordan Alvarez, 1B/OF, Houston Astros (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 3  FV: 55
Line: 2-for-5, HR

Notes
Sunday was Alvarez’s first game back from a hand injury that cost him about a month and a half. Injuries have limited him to 134 games combined in parts of three pro seasons. Between those extended periods of inactivity, however, Alvarez has dominated. This is a giant 20-year-old who is remarkably athletic and twitchy for his size and crushing Double-A in a modest sample. This was the relatively unknown guy that the Dodgers signed for $2 million just before the clock struck midnight on the 2015 July 2 period. He hadn’t suited up for the Dodgers before they sent him to Houston for Josh Fields, and now he’s the best prospect from that 2015 Dodgers July 2 class by a sizable margin. He’s a potential middle-of-the-order force and quickly closing in on an increasingly expendable A.J. Reed.

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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 thirteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Dennis Eckersley, Michael Fulmer, Miguel Gonzalez — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

———

Dennis Eckersley (Hall of Famer) on His Slider

“I couldn’t throw a curveball because of my angle. I couldn’t get on top of it. That’s all they’d ever tell me. Every time somebody would whistle at me, it would be, ‘Get your arm up! Get your elbow up!’ But a slider came pretty easy. It was just, ‘Turn your wrist a little bit.’

“I went straight from high school to pro ball [in 1972], and all of a sudden my fastball didn’t play. I was in the California League when I was 17, and they could hit. The next thing you know, I’m throwing a lot more breaking balls than I ever did in my life. I didn’t have any choice.

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June is Pride Month in the United States. By way of explanation:

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month (LGBT Pride Month) is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. The Stonewall riots were a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as “Gay Pride Day,” but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the “day” soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBT Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.

You can read more about the Stonewall riots here for greater context. Essentially, though, Pride Month is a time not just to celebrate gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the United States, but also to highlight the current state of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. For our purposes, it also represents an opportune moment to examine the current state of LGBTQ+ issues in baseball.

A couple of years ago, Gallup found that 4.1% of Americans overall, and 7.3% of millennials, identify as LGBT, although the demographer who published that data suspects that, after accounting for those respondents who are unwilling to disclose details regarding their sexuality, the overall figure is probably closer to 10%.

Britni de la Cretaz, who’s written a number of fascinating stories on the intersection of sport, gender, and sexuality, wrote an article last month exploring queer women in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a facet ignored by A League of Their Own. And two major leaguers have come out as gay: Glenn Burke and Billy Bean.

But in another sense, baseball generally, and MLB specifically, has a lot of work to do when it comes to LGBT inclusion. Both Burke and Bean came out after their playing days were over. David Denson, the first openly gay player in affiliated ball to come out while still playing, has since retired. And while Denson said his retirement wasn’t related to his coming-out – and that his teammates were largely supportive – he nevertheless related to Bleacher Report some cringeworthy tales from his time in baseball clubhouses.

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Jeimer Candelario is establishing himself as one of the best young players on a young Detroit Tigers team. Playing in his first full big-league season, the 24-year-old third baseman is slashing a solid .251/.346/.476 with 10 home runs. His 2.0 WAR leads all Tigers.

Acquired along with Isaac Paredes in the deal that sent Alex Avila and Justin Wilson to the Cubs at last summer’s trade deadline, “Candy” is a switch-hitter with pop. His M.O. is gap-to-gap, and the orientation of his top hand is a focal point of his swing.

“I want to hit the ball with palm up,” explained Candelario. “If you’re palm up and you hit the ball, you finish up. I try to be connected. My back side, my hands, my hips, and my legs come in the same moment. That way, when I hit the ball I hit the ball with power, with palm up.”

Candelario credits Cubs assistant hitting coach Andy Haines — at the time the club’s hitting coordinator — for helping him develop his stroke. Now that he’s in Motown, he’s heeding the advice of Lloyd McClendon, who is emphasizing “How to load and then follow through, which helps me have some doubles and homers. If I just concentrate on hitting line drives, the ball will carry.”

McClendon is bullish on the young infielder’s future. Ditto his here and now. Read the rest of this entry »

We spend a lot of time fretting about baseball. Baseball games take too long; teams use too many pitchers and make too many visits to the mound. There are too many strikeouts; there aren’t enough balls put in play. These complaints are dressed up in anxiety over the game’s future, but I think the real worry is closer to home. It’s about us. I think what’s really at the center of it is a gnawing concern that these slowdowns will make us want to watch something else entirely, that we might come to find baseball boring.

But there are worse things than being bored. Wednesday night, in the fourth inning of the Dodgers-Rangers game, Adrian Beltre scored on a close play. It appeared that Austin Barnes had tagged him out, but home-plate umpire Sean Barber disagreed. A man in the crowd was inspired to make a face.

Dave Roberts challenged and it went to a replay, which began at 2:02:25. The home broadcast showed some slo-mo.

https://gfycat.com/GloriousDearestClam

The broadcast was confident the replay would go the Dodgers’ way. Enrique Hernandez, whose throw looked like it had nabbed Beltre, seemed confident. Beltre looks pretty out.

But at 2:05:00, the call on the field was upheld. The crowd booed. They’d spent more than two-and-a-half minutes waiting around — only to lose out. It didn’t end up mattering: the Dodgers won in the 11th inning after Hernandez evaded a tag of his own. But for those few minutes in the fourth, Dodger fans were something worse than bored. They were bored and angry. It’s a terrible combination of things to feel, and one that replay seems to inspire often, which is understandable, though I’ll admit it makes me worry about how passionate we are for justice. And so, in all our fretting about the game, I thought I’d check in on replay and see how it is going so far this season.

Baseball Savant maintains a handy replay database, but it doesn’t include 2018 replays yet, so it’s Retrosheet to the rescue. Retrosheet’s data also includes the duration of each replay — an indispensable data point for those concerned with the dull and enraging. They update their data every two weeks; the replays I’m analyzing are through May 31.

Two quick notes. First, the time listed for each replay is from the beginning of the review until New York’s decision is announced. That might seem like an obvious point, but it may, in some cases, undersell the length of the delay on the field. Last year, I wrote about an 18-minute long replay at Dodger Stadium. It was a rules check and the longest replay of 2017. Retrosheet has it taking 8:34. So there’s a bit of squishiness here.

Second, in case you’ve forgotten (and honestly, why would you remember?), before the 2017 season, MLB released new guidance that, with a few exceptions, the Replay Operations Center in New York has two minutes to render a decision on a play. That’s what they’re driving toward. It’s part of keeping us from feeling bored and angry.

Now, some observations.

You might ask, “When is replay most likely to occur?” Maybe you’re naturally curious about things. As you might imagine, challenges become more common the later into a game a team gets.

Through May 31, managers initiated 436 challenges, a full half of which have came between the sixth and ninth innings; indeed, since replay expanded in 2014, close to 49% of the replays in nine inning games have come between the sixth and ninth innings. The eighth inning saw the greatest number of challenges, but also the lowest success rate, among non-extra innings frames. That makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. Late in games, I would imagine, managers are more inclined to challenge borderline calls, both because the stakes are higher and because why the heck not? You can’t take those challenges with you. More borderline calls also means more calls on the field that stand or are confirmed, but why not try? Maybe that runner in scoring position is actually out on the tag!

And speaking of tags, you might also wonder, “What is getting reviewed, and for how long?” The below table shows all 2018 replays by type, along with the average and median duration of the replay in minutes, and the success rate for challenges of each type.

Fans have, for the most part, stayed out of the way. Despite recent dustups, the slide rule that caused so much controversy in years past hasn’t been much of an issue, or at least has merited little investigation. Umpires mostly know what a catch is. Force plays seem a bit trickier, though they didn’t take long on average to sort out. Stadium boundary replays took the longest, both by average and median length in minutes, though there weren’t many of them. With the exception of the boundary plays, replay officials are, on average, adhering to their two-minute guidance. Of the 490 total calls, 377 have been two minutes or under in length.

But I think the most common category of replay underscores the enterprise’s greatest challenge (no pun intended). Now, I haven’t watched all 197 tag replays, but I would hazard a guess that some portion of them — perhaps a significant portion — involve runners coming off a base ever so slightly for just a teeny tiny touch of time. We’ve seen this sort of replay play out, sometimes in big moments of important games, resulting in a guy who would have been safe for the 100 years prior suddenly being out. We can’t exactly blame managers for asking that tags be reviewed; we’ve told them there might be an out hiding in there. And some portion of these allow us to examine swim moves and close plays, and that isn’t a terrible use of time. But we’ve spent some part of 288 minutes peaking under guys’ fingers and toes. Avengers: Infinity Wars, for sake of comparison, was only 160 minutes and involved a bunch more people. I submit that this is when we are at our most bored, and certainly our most angry.

And of course, fans of some teams should be angrier and perhaps more bored than others.

None of these samples are large enough to tell anything definitive, but as an indication of efficacy so far, we can learn a few things. The Royals, Phillies, and Yankees have fared the best in their challenges. The Braves have challenged more times than any other team, but have a middling success rate. They are still doing better than the Padres, who (in admittedly fewer attempts) have a league-worst success rate. The Orioles fare only marginally better.

Baltimore did initiate the longest challenge of the year, a review of a fair/foul call that lasted 4:32 they ultimately won.

Everyone looked thrilled as they waited.

Just a great day at the office.

We can also see something interesting when we look at the distributions of how long reviews take, grouped by their result.

The graph isolating 2018 is a bit rougher, but retains the same general shape.

From 2014 to -18, a “stands” call took about 40 seconds longer than “confirmed” or “overruled” calls did, which I think shows that replay is generally working how you would want it to when you consider that the standard for overturning calls made on the field is having “clear and convincing evidence” that the call was incorrect. One would hope that if a call were obviously right or obviously wrong, it wouldn’t take very long to reach that conclusion. Absent some bit of striking evidence, best to leave it be.

I think it is worth adding a small bit of perspective to this analysis. We’ve all had the experience of seeing a replay go the “wrong” way. We’ve all felt like our boys have gotten jobbed. We’ve been Wednesday night’s Dodgers’ fans. We begin to question the whole endeavor.

But we might benefit from recalling how frustrating it was, in the era of slo-mo and hi-def, to know that a call on the field was wrong, to be able to see it right there, and then have to watch as a baserunner trudged back to the dugout when he should have been on base, or as a pitcher was left to contend with a runner who should have been erased by a tag. It felt unfair. It felt silly. It felt like an injustice. We’re sometimes bored and angry now, but we were also bored and angry then! And it isn’t costing us that much. The season isn’t done, but so far, 2018 is following a trend of replay times decreasing as the years go on.

These aren’t huge numbers to begin with; I doubt even a close observers could perceive the difference between 2015’s average replay time of 1.85 minutes and 2017’s 1.46. But it isn’t ballooning out the other way, either. Through May 31, MLB was on pace for 1,285 replays, which would be the lowest number since replay was expanded in 2014. That could change, of course, but it hasn’t been so bad so far. It’s an attempt to get things more right more often.

I calculated how much time each team had spent under replay review, including both those reviews they had initiated and those initiated by their opponents or by umpires, and compared that time to their total game minutes in 2018. I’ll spare you another long table, but the team that has spent the most time in replay as a percentage of their total playing time is the Blue Jays at… 0.57%. That’s a little more than 58 minutes across all their games, and theirs is the worst of it.

That isn’t so bad. Replay gets things wrong from time to time; we all have bad days at work, after all, and humans remain fallible, even with slo-mo. But I’m not sure the game is well served by putting too strict a clock on justice. Not even when we’re bored and angry.