There are always so many spring-training home runs. Generally speaking, there’s no reason for you to care about spring-training home runs. You might consider caring about this spring-training home run.

The stakes almost couldn’t be lower. The bases were empty in the bottom of the fifth of a game in the last week of February. Had the exhibition not been televised, that home run would live only in Twitter descriptions. But that’s a video of Aaron Judge going really, spectacularly deep, and that video immediately made the usual rounds. As spring training goes, that was headline news.

Judge, right now, is a 24-year-old with 95 big-league plate appearances, and a .608 big-league OPS. When he did come to bat for the Yankees, he struck out close to half of the time, so in that sense he is completely unproven. Yet there’s this one thing he doesn’t have to prove anymore. Aaron Judge doesn’t just make regular contact. When he makes contact — if he makes contact — it’s easy to see why the comparisons to Giancarlo Stanton are no exaggeration.

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As of this moment, the writers at FanGraphs responsible for curating this site’s depth charts have allocated some type of playing time to 586 position players across the league’s 30 teams, from Freddie Freeman, Miguel Sano, and Carlos Santana at 665 plate appearances each down to Victor Caratini and Pedro Severino at just six a piece.

Of the 586 players who appear on those depth charts, 264 have received a sufficient quantity of fan ballots to earn a published projection. The fan assessments tend almost uniformly to skew optimistic. In the case of the 264 aforementioned players, for instance, the depth-chart projections (a combination of Steamer and ZiPS) call for an average of 2.1 WAR per every 600 plate appearances. The fans, meanwhile, call for 2.7 WAR per 600 plate appearances. That’s roughly a half-win difference for every player prorated to a full season.

Even though optimism is generally the rule in these matters, it comes in degrees. Nearly 20 players, for instance, receive a prorated fan projection that’s precisely a half-win better than the corresponding depth-chart projection. Over 170 players — i.e. about 65% of the entire sample — earn a fan-based projection that’s between 0.0 to 1.0 wins better than the figure produced by the the combination of Steamer and ZiPS.

The purpose of this brief post, however, is to consider briefly the players about whom the crowd is most optimistic. To identify that group, I prorated both the fan and depth-chart projections to 600 plate appearances and subtracted the latter result from the former. Here are the players who receive the top fan projections relative to their depth-chart numbers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one finds that most of the players here — all of them, really, with the exception of Luis Valbuena — have little major-league experience. That makes sense on two accounts. First, it’s logical that the projection systems would be conservative with this population. All things being equal, a player who lacks past success in the majors is unlikely to produce future success in the majors. On the other hand, if there’s a type of player about whom the public might possess information for which the numbers don’t account, it’s a prospect.

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Brett Anderson knows the numbers. Currently in camp with the Cubs, the 29-year-old southpaw was indoctrinated into the data game when he reached the big leagues with the Oakland A’s, in 2009.

“I came up in an organization that was at the forefront of it,” explained Anderson. “Then Brandon McCarthy came over [in 2011] and he was even more into it than most players. So I’ve been using it, although not to the extent I do now, since my rookie year.”

A player’s enthusiasm for analytics is relative. In Anderson’s case, practicality is the overriding factor. He’s data savvy, but wary of paralysis by analysis. He’s careful not to delve too deep.

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Last year, we joined up with the Pitch Talks crew for a three-city U.S. tour, and had a blast in Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. The response was clear, so instead of just hitting up a few cities this year, the tour is expanding to 16 dates, and we’re covering a good chunk of the country from April through August. Here’s the current tour schedule.

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The very real psychological condition known as the “yips” was on display in the brightest of spotlights: Game Seven of the World Series last fall. The Indians tried to fluster Jon Lester, whose troubles throwing in any direction other than toward home plate had become well known.

After making 98 pick-off attempts in 2010 and 70 in 2011, Lester made just five in 2012, seven in 2013, and none in 2014, according to SportingCharts data. He didn’t make a single pick-off attempt over the course of 66 consecutive starts until this one on April 13, 2015:

The issue isn’t only tied to pick-off attempts. Lester has also struggled when fielding his position, as seen on this throw from April 17, 2016:

Lester’s issue is the most well known and publicized in recent years, but it’s not the only case. This spring, Blake Swihart has struggled throwing the ball back to the mound, though Swihart is reportedly making some progress on that front.

Blake Swihart getting better with throwing back to the pitcher, but still has occasional issue. #redsox #wbz pic.twitter.com/5tJZr5X4Wj

— Dan Roche (@RochieWBZ) February 19, 2017

I personally watched and reported on Pedro Alvarez’s 24 throwing errors in 99 games at third base in 2014, a development that necessitated a move down the defensive spectrum from third to first base.

In 2013, Alvarez hit 36 home runs and played an above-average third base, according to defensive runs above average (1.8). He recorded 3 WAR. But after his struggles with throwing in 2014, after he moved to first and struggled there in 2015, he was then viewed largely as a DH last offseason. He had to wait until March to sign a one-year deal with the Orioles last spring. This spring, he remains unsigned in a market that values bat-only players less and less. Baltimore attempted to play Alvarez at third base in spots in 2016, but he was still not over the throwing issues: he recorded two throwing errors against five assists in 53 innings at the position.

The yips have cost Alvarez millions and might play a role in prematurely ending his career. The condition did end the career of Pirates broadcaster and former Pirates pitcher Steve Blass. The yips played a role in derailing the pitching career of Rick Ankiel, who said in a recent interview he drank vodka before a start in 2000 to “tame a monster” that “didn’t fight fair.”

There’s something inherently tragic about an otherwise healthy athlete failing to fulfill one of the most basic obligations of his profession. It can be uncomfortable to watch a pitcher such as Lester become vulnerable in the center of the infield. To watch a player like Alvarez inexplicably lose the ability to make routine throws is difficult to comprehend. While I had explored the issue as a newspaper reporter, I wanted to understand more about the condition and how teams might be able to ameliorate it. So last week I spoke to one of the few players who has suffered through the condition and beat it: Steve Sax.

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On Friday, we ran an interview with Rockies outfielders Chris Denorfia and Charlie Blackmon on the subject of launch angles and bat paths. I’ve asked a few other players for their opinion — we’ll hear from them in the near future — as well as a few managers and coaches. Craig Counsell and Jeff Banister are among them.

“Telling a player to hit a pitch harder isn’t a very good coaching tool,” Counsell told me. “The same goes for hitting it at certain angles. But it is appropriate feedback to tell them something was a well-struck ball, when they’re in the cage: Those are balls that are going to go a long way. A hitter probably knows that, but it’s still good feedback.”

The former infielder went on to make an interesting observation. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon made some headlines by claiming he was considering making Kyle Schwarber his leadoff hitter this season. Mostly, that this was a big headline reflects the fact that this is one of the slowest times in the baseball calendar — players have been at camp for awhile now, yet games are just beginning, and in many cases the best players haven’t suited up yet. It’s a slow time. Still, it’s an interesting idea. The first thought that came to my mind was, would Kyle Schwarber be the heaviest leadoff hitter of all-time?
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You might have forgotten about Jesse Hahn, but I assure you he is alive and well and competing for a spot in the Oakland rotation this spring.

Hahn getting the nod in the Cactus League opener demonstrates that he truly is right in the mix for 5th starter spot.

— Susan Slusser (@susanslusser) February 21, 2017

Elbow issues cut his 2015 season short, and a shoulder strain and performance inconsistency limited him to 46 innings with the A’s last season when he posted a 5.63 FIP and an ugly 2% K-BB% mark. It was a lost year for Hahn.

But Hahn was recently one of the more intriguing arms in the sport.

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Last week, Dellin Betances lost his arbitration case after his agents attempted to argue that he should be paid like an elite reliever, which, of course, he is. But because arbitration is based on historical comparisons and mostly rely on traditional metrics, Betances wasn’t able to overcome his lack of saves, which is effectively the deciding metric for how much a reliever will get in arbitration.

This is a problem for Major League Baseball. The ideas about traditional bullpen usage are finally breaking down, and increasingly, teams are looking to deploy elite relievers in situations before the ninth inning. But if you’re a young pitcher, and you know that the system the league uses to value your performance depends almost entirely on how many saves you rack up, there isn’t a good incentive for you to agree to that kind of role. The way the system is setup, the best young relievers are financially motivated to try and move into the closer’s role as quickly as possible, because that’s the only bullpen role that arbiters put a significant value on. The arbitration system is effectively propping up 1990s-style bullpen usage, and it’s going to hinder the buy-in from players on a better way to deploy relievers during the season.

As Ken Rosenthal wrote, maybe the best answer to this problem (and the many other problems with arbitration) is to just get rid of the process entirely, which costs both teams and agencies thousands of hours of work for no real purpose. As Rosenthal notes, it wouldn’t be that difficult to design an algorithm that could determine the salaries of pre-free-agent players, and could take into account more meaningful metrics than the ones generally considered by the arbiters making the decisions now.

But at this point, that’s a pipe dream. Dumping the arbitration system might be a long-term reality, but Dellin Betances probably won’t still be pitching by the time that actually has the chance of happening. So how do we fix arbitration before one of the game’s truly great relief pitchers spends the next three years getting his pay docked simply because he’s not pitching the ninth inning? It’s probably easier than we might think.

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