Most of the time when we talk about Mike Trout, we ask if anybody has ever done what he’s doing. Sometimes the answer is Mickey Mantle or Ty Cobb or Albert Pujols, but a lot of the time the answer is no and what Trout is doing is unprecedented. Today, we are asking two related questions:

1. Could Mike Trout deserve the American League Most Valuable Player Award despite missing 39 games earlier this season?
2. Does Mike Trout have a realistic chance to win MVP despite missing 39 games earlier this season?

While answering the second question might help prove the first through precedent, let’s restrict ourselves in the first part to the value Mike Trout provides. On Friday, I talked about Jose Altuve’s candidacy for MVP and showed this chart:

Things have already changed considerably. This is what the top of that chart looks like now.

So Trout is currently projected to be the AL position player WAR leader at the end of the season. If he keeps up his current pace and gets close to the the 200 more plate appearances he is projected for, he is going to get above 8 WAR. Trout is currently above a 200 wRC+, a number that hasn’t been reached since Barry Bonds and done by only nine players in non-strike seasons in history. He will actually have to exceed his projections in PAs to qualify for the batting title, as he is currently set to fall eight short. Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Votto hasn’t made a West Coast swing recently so we don’t have original words to annotate here, but he did say some interesting things to Zach Buchanan at The Cincinnati Enquirer this week, interesting particularly because he said that “This has been documented, so this is not anecdotal here,” and that sort of statement is like catnip around here. Let’s provide the documentation.

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Over the last few years, the A’s have had a high-end player problem, in that they haven’t had any. Jed Lowrie currently leads the team with +2.3 WAR; by comparison, the Astros have seven players who have already reached that mark, and that does not include their best pitcher, Dallas Keuchel, who spent two months on the DL. The team has developed some decent role players and decent enough everyday players, but they haven’t really had a franchise player since they traded Josh Donaldson to Toronto.

Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, I am starting to wonder if they’ve finally found a guy who at least has the potential to get to that level in the not too distant future. His name is Matt Chapman.

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CLEVELAND — When I asked Josh Donaldson about being a founding father of the fly-ball revolution recently in the visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field, he re-directed the credit. The creator of the air-ball, upper-cut philosophy was Ted Williams, he noted.

Donaldson knows his history.

Williams, of course, co-authored the book The Science of Hitting. He talked about impacting the lower half of the ball. It seems like that should be required reading for all professional hitters, but I wonder what is the actual percentage of pro hitters who have read the book?

What is interesting to this author is how Donaldson arrived at his philosophy. It wasn’t from watching grainy black-and-white video of Williams. In my conversation with the right-handed slugger, he did not reference having read Williams’ thoughts as being the impetus for his belief changes. No, Donaldson arrived and adopted the #GroundballsSuck concept through what he describes as his “first love”: golf. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t a big surprise when Justin Verlander stayed in Detroit at the July 31st trade deadline, because for Verlander, the 31st wasn’t really a deadline. With $28 million salaries for each of the next two years, he wasn’t in much danger of being claimed on waivers; sure enough, he reportedly went unclaimed last week, and is again free to be traded to any team in baseball. And now that prospective buyers don’t have the distraction of other possible options, it might actually be easier for the Tigers to trade Verlander this month than it was in July.

Of course, easier doesn’t mean easy. As Jeff noted a month ago, there appears to be something of a gap between how the Tigers see Verlander and how the rest of the league sees him. Detroit seemingly is shopping him as if he’s still the ace he pitched like last season, not the average-ish starter he’s pitched like this season. And Jeff’s piece laid out why that isn’t a totally unreasonable position.

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Kaz Matsui’s big-league career was fairly unremarkable. From 2004-2010, he logged a .701 OPS, and compiled 5.4 WAR, playing second base and shortstop for the New York Mets, Colorado Rockies, and Houston Astros. His best season came in 2007, when he was the starting second baseman on the “Rocktober” Rockies.

That season, he was worth 2.7 WAR, and formed an incredible double-play combination with a rookie across the second-base bag by the name of Troy Tulowitzki. While Matsui was never much of a hitter in MLB — NPB was another story — no self-respecting Rockies fan will ever forget his Game 2 performance in the 2007 NLDS, when he came a single shy of the cycle; his fourth-inning home run was the biggest play of that game, and kept the Rockies’ famous run chugging along.

Matsui’s seven American seasons were bookended by stints in his homeland, where he’s starred for the Seibu Lions (1995-2003) and Rakuten Golden Eagles (2011-2017). Yes, Matsui — now 41 years old — is still active.

Darrin Jackson knew him when he was just breaking into NPB. The Chicago White Sox broadcaster — at the time a veteran of nine MLB seasons — spent 1995 and 1996 in Japan, as Matsui’s teammate. To say he was impressed with the switch-hitting infielder’s raw talent would be an understatement.

I recently asked Jackson if he could share his memories of Matsui. Here is what he had to say.

…

Darrin Jackson: “I can tell you a couple of things about a young Kaz Matsui. First of all, he was 19 years old when I got there. He had an unbelievable arm. He was also just learning how to switch-hit. He’d only batted right-handed, and they were teaching him how to bat left-handed.

“Every day, for his training, the coaches would be out there by the mound with a basket of balls. They put padding on his right side — his legs, his hips, his shoulder. They would wrap him up, and he’d stand there in the left-hander’s batter’s box. They’d throw balls at him, literally at him, and have him turn into them, turn into them, turn into them. They were getting him used to having balls come at him — seeing the balls that way, and not flying open. They put padding on him to teach him how to stay on the ball, hitting left-handed. I thought that was amazing. And there was more. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday and Sunday I attended my first Saber Seminar, along with a number of other members of the FanGraphs team. It was a great weekend and Dan Brooks and Chuck Korb were excellent hosts and organizers. In a department of chemistry lecture hall on the campus of Boston University, a space where periodic tables flanked the stage, we saw a number of interesting research presentations.

One of the lectures I was most interested in attending was one of dealing with the physical sciences, a presentation by Dr. Alan Nathan, who has of course become a superstar in the field of baseball analysis and research. It is Nathan who, along with others, has helped writers like Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur investigate whether the ball is juiced.
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The main subplots of this 2017 season have been pretty obvious; the Dodgers are unstoppable, Aaron Judge is a power-hitting monster, and Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer, Chris Sale and Corey Kluber are really good at what they do.

Flying a bit under the radar, however, are some shortstops previously best known for their glovework (or not known at all) who have begun to hit. Is the offensive production being generated by the likes of Elvis Andrus, Andrelton Simmons and Johan Camargo for real? Let’s use batted-ball data to answer some questions.

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Carlos Gonzalez has been a very good hitter for quite a while now. Since 2009 (his first season in Colorado) through 2016, he was one of just 74 position players to accrue 4,000 plate appearances. Among those players, his 122 wRC+ ranked 26th.

As recently as last season, he was hitting the ball with authority, relative to his peers. In a February piece, Tony Blengino stated that his batted ball profile was one that “projects as a safely above average offensive ballplayer in any ballpark,” despite no longer being elite. That hasn’t been how Gonzalez’s season has played out, as he has looked like a shell of himself all season. Even in June, I was still hopeful. I said that I didn’t think Gonzalez had gone from “a .366 wOBA player to a .287 wOBA player overnight.”
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Last week, we ran Part 1 and Part 2 of what was planned to be a three-part series chronicling Lars Anderson’s experiences playing baseball in Japan. This is Part 3, and thanks to popular demand — and Anderson’s willingness to contribute more stories — it won’t be the final installment. We will hear more from the former big-league first baseman in the coming weeks.

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