We’ve seen a lot of premium free agents negotiate opt-outs into their contracts in recent years. Teams like the fact that they can use opt-outs to decrease the total amount they have to guarantee the player in order to sign him, and players like the flexibility of hitting the market again if they play well and increase their value. But by and large, most of these end up not getting used, as free agents are almost always older players by design, and older players usually don’t get better as they age.

Johnny Cueto has an opt-out for this winter that he almost certainly won’t use, as his poor 2017 season — and now an extended DL stint — would force him to take a pay cut this winter. Masahiro Tanaka probably won’t use his opt-out this winter either, since he’s developed a home run problem this year. Wei-Yin Chen definitely isn’t opting out. Neither is Ian Kennedy. Looking ahead to the future, it’s hard to imagine either Jason Heyward or David Price walking away from the remainder of their guaranteed years at this point.

A year ago, Justin Upton fit into that category. In the first year of his six year, $132 million contract, he hit .246/.310/.465, posting a career-low (as an everyday player) +1.4 WAR. He joined a host of other albatross contracts in Detroit, and all the money owed to aging, unproductive players was part of the reason the Tigers decided to start rebuilding this year, moving veterans for younger, cheaper talents when they could.

But this year, Upton has gone right back to being the Justin Upton the Tigers hoped they were signing. He’s currently at .282/.366/.546 and +4.1 WAR; his 140 wRC+ would be the second-best of his career, behind just the 141 mark he put up in 2011. He won’t match the +6.3 WAR he put up that year, but if he finishes strong over the next six weeks, he’ll crack +5 WAR for just the second time in his career. Regardless of how he finishes, this will likely go down as one of Upton’s best seasons.

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For some time, it seemed like the battle between analytics and scouts had died out.

The divide first surfaced in the public consciousness following the publication of Moneyball 14 years ago. Michael Lewis recounts in his book how some in the A’s front office contemplated a future in which scouts were redundant and no longer necessary — at least not in such numbers. It was an extreme view.

In the meantime, however, a sort of peace appeared to have been brokered. It was generally accepted that the best clubs, the model organizations — like the St. Louis Cardinals for much of the 2000s — successfully integrated both camps.

And then in 2015 something happened: Statcast was installed in every major-league stadium.

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It’s almost always a cliche when a player says he’s out there to help his team win. When Whit Merrifield utters the phrase, the meaning is more nuanced. The 28-year-old Kansas City Royals outfielder attributes much of his late-bloomer success to an approach that didn’t seem plausible when he was a prospect.

After six-plus seasons in the minors, Merrifield is flowering in the big leagues because… he’s in the big leagues.

“Honestly, it’s just being up here and playing to win,” Merrifield told me when I asked about his breakout campaign. “Every day there’s a motivation to come to the field. There’s an excitement that you don’t really have in the minor leagues. Down there, you’re not playing to win every game so much as you’re playing to move up. Here, it’s a different attitude, and I’m at my best when I don’t focus on my numbers.”

His numbers have been a pleasant surprise. Playing in his first full MLB season — he split last year between Kansas City and Triple-A Omaha — Merrifield is slashing (despite his current 0 for 19 skid) a solid .281/.319/.461. Not only that, he’s left the yard 14 times, and his career home-run high on the farm was 11.

“I’m just in a little groove this year,” Merrifield responded when asked about his uptick in the power department. “I’ve always been more of a gap-to-gap, doubles hitter, but I can drive the ball. When I catch it right and get it a little more elevated, it will go out.”

The University of South Carolina product went into the 2015 offseason with a revitalized work ethic that arguably has as much to do with his success as his team-first attitude. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Stroman is one of the very best pitchers in baseball. Since the beginning of last season, his 6.7 WAR is 13th in the league, right behind Jon Lester, Stephen Strasburg, and Jose Quintana — and just ahead of Jacob deGrom, Madison Bumgarner, and Zack Greinke. If you’re a believer in ERA, you probably didn’t think much of his 4.37 mark last year but are much more impressed by this season’s 2.99 figure. His FIP has remained steady, right around 3.70.

Despite a listed height of 5-foot-8, Stroman has recorded one of the league’s higher average fastball velocities. While there’s typically a relationship between velocity and strikeouts, that’s never been integral to Stroman’s success. His game is about inducing ground balls. It works well for him, but it does also leave room for some to regard him as something less than an ace.

As far as the ground-balling goes, Stroman’s elite. His 60.1% ground-ball rate topped all pitchers last season. He’s actually improved upon that figure this year, recording a 62.6% rate so far. The right-hander’s 61.2% ground-ball rate in 2016 and 2017 is the second-highest over a two-year period (min. 300 innings pitched) this decade behind Dallas Keuchel’s 62.6% mark in 2014 and 2015. Tim Hudson is the only other pitcher to exceed 60% grounders over a two-year period since 2010.

Inducing a lot of ground balls is a good thing, largely because ground balls can’t become homers. Stroman’s 0.87 HR/9 over the last two years is indicative of that; it places second among qualified starters only to Michael Fulmer’s 0.80 mark. Even after dropping the inning requirement to 250, Stroman sits behind only Fulmer, Clayton Kershaw and Kyle Hendricks. Stroman’s ability to limit homers helps make him one of the league’s better pitchers, even without an abundance of swings and misses.

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Yoenis Cespedes has had a roller-coaster year. Hamstring, quad, hip, and heel injuries have cut weeks off his season. On the field, his overall performance isn’t inspiring; his walk rate is down, his exit velocity is diminished, and his wRC+ has dropped by 16 points. The outfielder’s hitting has fluctuated between dominant and poor, with his worst month coming in July: in 89 plate appearances, Cespedes launched just a single home run and recorded an isolated-power figure that was 43 points below league average.

Small windows of playing time can bring big performance swings, but Cespedes’ power drought wasn’t a product just of bad luck in a limited sample. Consider the chart below, which uses the LOESS method to smooth through Cespedes’ launch angle over the course of the season. Batted balls are ordered from the first (his first BIP on Opening Day) through the most recent (his last BIP yesterday). Horizontal bars are included to show his average launch angle in each of the four calendar months that make up the slugger’s season.

Cespedes’ average launch angle of 24.6 degrees in April was among the steepest in baseball. After sitting out May to recover from injuries, Cespedes returned for the next month and averaged a similarly high angle. He ended June with a .929 OPS, so his overall production didn’t signal anything out of the ordinary. But the real story is told by the smoothing curve, which shows how Cespedes was changing as a hitter. In June, his launch angle began a drop that accelerated into a plunge. By the latter part of July, he bottomed out at 12 degrees, a mark more fitting for a line-drive hitter than a slugger. His angle has climbed a bit higher in August, but it remains far below April’s range.

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I have followed Justin Smoak’s career with interest.

Before I was covering major league baseball, I reported on college athletics in South Carolina, first covering the Chanticleers of Coastal Carolina and later Clemson. During this period, Smoak became regarded as one of the best college players in the game while at the University of South Carolina. Mark Teixeira comps were being placed on him and some felt the Texas Rangers got a steal when he fell to the 11th overall pick in the 2008 draft. He was a switch hitter with power, batting skills and plate discipline. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a difference between watching the game at home and watching at the park, that much is obvious. Personally, I’m more analytical at home, where I have the tools to identify pitch type and location with some precision, for example. At the field, I can only tell velocity and maybe spot the curveballs, so I get an adult soda, a good companion, and I talk and wait.

What am I waiting for? “People go to the game to see us put the ball in play, throw the ball away, and fall down,” Giants starter Jeff Samardzija told me the other day. “They want to see people doing things,” said Indians slugger Jay Bruce. I couldn’t disagree. The problem, if this is true, is that baseball is trending in the opposite direction. There are fewer balls in play now than at any other point in the history of the sport. There’s less of people doing things, to use Bruce’s words.

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Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto — they’re both cinch future Hall of Famers, as close approximations as any among current major leaguers to the ideal all-around hitter. They have consistently made hard contact to all fields, hit for average and power, and not conceded many free outs to opposing pitchers. And obviously, they’ve done it without any contribution from their legs; it’s been all bat.

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Because no one in the AL wild-card hunt feels much like being assertive, yesterday the Orioles and the Mariners played a game with potential playoff implications. The Mariners held a three-run lead going into the top of the ninth, but then Edwin Diaz came apart. Over the span of seven batters, Diaz walked three guys and hit two more. He benefited from a tremendous catch and from a borderline third strike call, but still Diaz couldn’t close it out. With the bases loaded in a 7-6 game, Marc Rzepczynski was called on to deal with Chris Davis. Rzepczynski was going for his second career major-league save.

The first pitch was a fastball off the plate inside, but Davis swung and missed. The second pitch was a fastball over the plate inside, and Davis swung and missed again. At 0-and-2, Davis had no reason to expect a fastball down the pipe. Rzepczynski had no reason to throw a fastball down the pipe. Rzepczynski threw one anyway, and Davis watched it sail. He watched it, and he watched it, until there was nothing left to watch.

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While there are certain events (like strikeouts, walks, and home runs) over which a pitcher exerts more or less direct control, it seems pretty clear at this point that there are some pitchers who are better at managing contact than others. It’s also also seems clear that, if a pitcher can’t manage contact at all, he’s unlikely to reach or stay in the big leagues for any length of time.

Consider: since the conclusion of World War II, about 750 pitchers have recorded at least 1,000 innings; of those 750 or so, all but nine of them have conceded a batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of .310 or less. Even that group of nine is pretty concentrated, the middle two-thirds separated by .029 BABIP. The difference between the guy ranked 125 out of 751 and the guy ranked 625 out of 751 is just three hits out of 100 balls in play. Those three hits can add up over a long period of time, of course, but it still represents a rather small difference even between players with lengthy careers. For that reason, attempting to discern batted-ball skills among pitchers with just a few seasons of data is difficult. Thanks to the emergence of Statcast, however, we have some better tools than just plain BABIP to evaluate a pitcher’s ability to manage contact. Let’s take a look at what the more granular batted-ball data reveals.

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