With nearly two months of games in the books, I’m taking another look at the hitting prospects who have most improved their KATOH+ projections since the preseason. To ensure I am writing up actual prospects rather than fringey ones, I’ve set a minimum KATOH+ projection of 3.0 WAR and listed the five most-improved lesser prospects at the bottom. I did not include guys who are injured or who have graduated to the big leagues. A reminder: a player’s KATOH forecast denotes his projected WAR total over the first six seasons of his major-league career.

Jesus Sanchez, OF, Tampa (Profile)
Preseason KATOH+ Projection: 0.5
Current KATOH+ Projection: 5.8

Sanchez appeared on the two previous iterations of this exercise and continues to perform as a teenager in Low-A. He’s hit for an impressive amount of power and has also been making more contact of late. As of this writing, he’s struck out just four times over his last 10 games. The combination of contact, power, and youth will win over KATOH in a hurry.

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As one of the flag bearers of the fly-ball revolution — or the air-ball revolution as Daniel Murphy has suggested rebranding it — I thought it would be appropriate to check in on the status of the batted-ball trends after we’ve reached a stabilization point for air balls. And for many regular position players, we have reached a stabilization points for line-drive, fly-ball, and ground-ball rates.

I provided an update midway through April after a barrage of posts about the subject this spring.

Across the majors, fly balls (35.7%) are up 1.1 percentage points from last season and 1.9 points from 2015*. Ground-ball rate (44.3%) is down slightly and at its lowest level since 2011. Ground balls are down from 0.4 points from last season and 1.0 point from 2015. In an industry always looking for an extra 2%, the emergence of even slightly a slightly higher air-ball rate might be indicative of something — particularly since pitches in the bottom part of the strike zone have increased by more than three points this season. Those are pitches that should be even more difficult to lift.

*Numbers entering play Monday.

Moreover, average launch angle is up a tick (to 10.9 degrees) this season, compared to 10.8 degrees last season and 10.0 degrees in 2015, launch angle on pitches in the lower third of the strike zone has increased from 5.1 degrees in 2015, to 5.8 degrees in 2016, to 6.0 degrees this season, according to Statcast data.

While the slight increase in air balls league wide is perhaps explained by something else — or perhaps by many other things — or is perhaps just the product of random variance, there are definitely individual batters who’ve made a concerted effort to changing their swing planes. Which players, specifically, have meaningful altered their batted-ball distributions?

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Triston McKenzie has a big arm. He’s also charismatic with a big heart, which helps make him a natural fit for the team that drafted him 42nd overall in 2015. As much as any organization in baseball, the pitching-rich Cleveland Indians value character and makeup.

McKenzie has all the makings of a role model, but at 19 years old, he is hesitant to set it as a goal. He would nonetheless embrace that sort of reputation.

“I wouldn’t try to put myself in that position, but if that’s what happens, that’s what happens,” said McKenzie, who has a 2.84 ERA this year with high-A Lynchburg. “I always try to set a good example for my younger (16 year old) brother, and I guess it would stem from there.”

McKenzie pays attention to players he can look up to, and model his game after. He feels that athletes who set good examples are not only “good for the culture of baseball,” they also “open eyes for a lot of people outside the game.”

His father isn’t a pitching professional — McKenzie’s parents are both physical therapist assistants — but he does have insights on the craft. Pitchability is considered one of the youngster’s strengths, and paternal advice is part of the reason. Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, I remember thinking that Billy Beane must be feeling pretty good about having Sonny Gray, perhaps one of baseball’s best trade chips. Stephen Strasburg had just signed a contract extension, leaving few, if any, pending free agents around the league and little else available on the trade market at the deadline. With a cost-controlled pitcher, the A’s could sell to any team without being limited to major markets. If Drew Pomeranz was capable of fetching a top prospect in Anderson Espinoza, Sonny Gray was going to merit a haul.

It didn’t quite work out that way. A combination of ineffectiveness and arm injuries, perhaps one causing the other, left Gray with a poor season. A year later, Gray is pitching well, and he might still be that valuable trade chip I considered him to be a year ago.

I have some recollection of Sonny Gray being a top-of-the-rotation starter, an ace-type player. Then I look at some of his stats, and I can’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed. There’s his 21% strikeout rate from 2013 to 2015, which ranks an okay 31st out of 89 pitchers with at least 400 innings. His 7.7% walk rate was 60th among those 89 pitchers — not that good at all, in other words. Then you look a little further and find the one thing that Gray did very well — namely, keep the ball on the ground. His ground-ball rate of 54% was seventh in the majors during that timeframe. It’s hard for opposing batters to collect extra-base hits when they can’t get off the ground. It’s impossible to hit it out of the park. Unsurprisingly, Gray’s 0.66 HR/9 was 12th best in baseball during that period. Opponent ISO was under .100, second only to Clayton Kershaw.

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Yency Almonte is scheduled to take the mound for the Hartford Yard Goats this weekend. It will be the 22-year-old right-hander’s first appearance since May 3, when shoulder discomfort cut short his fifth start of the season.

Prior to being shelved, Almonte excelled. The No. 13 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system has a 1.37 ERA, and Eastern League opponents have hit .189 against his power mix. He was almost untouchable when I saw him live. On April 20, Almonte allowed just four baserunners, and fanned 10, over seven scoreless innings against Harrisburg.

When I caught up to him a few weeks later, the first thing I asked about was the velocity escalation I’d witnessed. Almonte had sat 91-92 in the early innings. By game’s end, he was consistently 95-96.

“I like to spot up and not overdo it early,” explained Almonte. “I know that once the game goes on, and I start getting warm — I start getting hot — I start getting it up there. This year, I’ve been anywhere from 91 to 99.”

Reigning in a tendency to overthrow has been a focus. According to Yard Goats pitching coach Dave Burba, the youngster has been guilty of trying to light up radar guns.

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Yasmani Grandal and I will be forever connected.

Despite his paltry traditional offensive numbers a year ago — including a .229 batting average, 49 runs scored, and 72 runs batted in — I placed Grandal seventh on my NL MVP ballot. I was the only writer to cast a vote for Grandal. I wrote about why I did this back in January when I was still new on the job here at FanGraphs. In summary, I gave a lot of value to Grandal’s framing, batting eye, and power from each side of the plate.

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While pace of play has been an issue discussed by the league for some time now, I’ve personally been slow to regard it as an actual problem for the sport. It’s been, for me, a matter that only casual fans would take note of — and that if they weren’t complaining about this issue, they would surely find another one about which to complain.

A couple of developments have changed my thinking, though. First, Grant Brisbee took the time to actually investigate two games held 30 years apart and came away with the conclusion that a pitch clock actually may make a substantial difference in the length of games. Second, players have continued taking longer than ever between pitches this season, despite the increasing talk about the league’s problem with pace of play.

Let’s start with a graph that illustrates the problem on a league-wide basis. Data is as of Thursday morning, but the Pace numbers won’t have changed much in a day, so that’s fine.

You can see the one time in the past decade that saw any marked shift downward was in 2015, when the league put a new rule in place mandating that batters had to keep one foot in the box (except after foul balls) during a plate appearance. From my viewing experiences, the rule doesn’t appear to have been enforced with the same vigilance over the last two seasons, and the data suggest the same thing. The effect has been a rise in the average pace of more than a second and a half since 2015, and 0.7 seconds more than the previous high in 2014.

This is a problem on a couple of levels. First, it shows that the players aren’t taking the Commissioner’s Office very seriously, unless there was a new memo or rule put in place that I have missed. Second, it shows that the players cannot be trusted to follow the honor system — and, as such, more heavy-handed methods of enforcement might be necessary.

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In the second half of last season, the Reds played just about .500 baseball, and they were driven in large part by a new version of Joey Votto — a version of Joey Votto that refused to strike out. However, while Votto drew himself a little bit of attention, it never became a major story, mostly because of the Reds’ miserable first half knocking them off of everyone’s radar. By the time August rolls around, there are teams that are already out of the hunt, and those teams don’t get very much coverage.

It’s still the first half of this season, and the Reds have played just about .500 baseball. They’ve been driven in large part by a sustained version of Joey Votto — a version that still refuses to strike out. Don’t get me wrong, Votto was never particularly whiff-prone. It’s not like this is Chris Davis learning to put everything in play. But Votto’s a guy who’s entered his mid-30s. Contact is thought of as a young-player skill. In this way, Votto’s turned back the clock, and also bucked the league-wide strikeout trend that so many others have fallen into.

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Previously
Changeups: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveballs: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Cutters and Splitters: MLB Starters.
Four-Seamers: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Sinkers: MLB Starters.
Sliders: AL Starters.
Two-Seamers: MLB Starters.

This series seemingly began eons ago, but here we are: the final installment of our pitch-specific evaluation of 2016 ERA title-qualifying MLB starters. The best may have been saved for last, as today we examine NL starters’ sliders.

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