Last week, on Twitter, Mike Petriello reminded me that, in January of 2016, I wrote a post entitled The Most Volatile Hitter in Baseball History. The headline was sexy and interesting, because I didn’t know any other way to convince you to read a post about Ryan Raburn. The gist: I looked at all four-year season stretches dating back to 1900, with at least 200 plate appearances in each season. Raburn, over his four-year span beginning in 2012, had seen his wRC+ bounce around the most. He went from being one of the worst hitters to being one of the best hitters to being one of the worst hitters to being one of the best hitters. I don’t know what it meant. It just instantly became the most interesting thing about Ryan Raburn.

Okay! So, since 1900, there have been more than 8,300 cases where a player was a “qualified” hitter in consecutive years. Who had the biggest year-to-year drop in wRC+? You might be able to guess this one — it’s Bryce Harper, who just saw his wRC+ drop by 85 points. Though he wasn’t bad by any means in the most recent year, he wasn’t the destroyer of worlds he’d been the summer before. Rumors continue to swirl that Harper was playing through significant pain.

Bryce Harper’s wRC+ just lost 85 points. A massive, historic drop. If you look at the last two years and reduce the playing-time minimum, the guy with the second-biggest drop, at 81 points, is Ryan Raburn.

The pattern, therefore, continues.

The first time around, I looked at four-year stretches, with a minimum of 200 plate appearances in each. Raburn has batted at least that many times every year since 2009, but since he’s often been close to 200, I opted to lower the minimum to 150 plate appearances. Now to look at five-year stretches. I had a pool of 12,044 five-year stretches to consider. Here are the stretches with the biggest wRC+ standard deviations:

It’s Ryan Raburn! In second place, overlapping Ryan Raburn. In third place, overlapping Ryan Raburn. And then a somewhat distant Dusty Rhodes. But one thing about standard deviations is that they don’t really consider sequencing. Going 100 – 100 – 50 would look the same as going 100 – 50 – 100. The second example looks more volatile, so to capture that, I’ve looked at the total wRC+ change. I took the absolute values of the changes between each year and then added them together. The leaders:

It’s not even close. Over the last five years, Raburn’s wRC+ has changed by an average of about 101 points a season. The nearest non-Raburn name is 2011 – 2015 Danny Valencia, at an average of about 69 points a season. Raburn established a historic pattern, and then continued it. I wasn’t expecting that, even though, you know.

Basic pattern recognition would suggest Raburn is now due for another offensive breakout. He happens to be a free agent, and the last time he was linked on MLB Trade Rumors was last March 29. Every team in baseball would tell you, no, that conclusion is stupid, that’s not how this works. But I think we can all agree that baseball probably doesn’t quite understand how Ryan Raburn works. How could it?

On Super Bowl Sunday, the Pirates announced they were moving their Face of the Franchise, Andrew McCutchen, to right field.

Since his major-league debut in 2009, the Pirates’ most valuable and exciting player since Barry Bonds has played 10,317.1 innings in the field. All have come in center field. But due to McCutchen’s decline in the field, and the Gold Glove-caliber skill of of Starling Marte, the Pirates are re-arranging their outfield. Gregory Polanco will play left field.

One could argue the move should have happened much earlier.

McCutchen’s uncharacteristically poor age-29 season was largely fueled by a defensive decline, though McCutchen also posted career-low speed measures across the board. McCutchen, who was very much available in this offseason’s trade market, posted a mark of -28 Defensive Runs Saved last season, the worst in baseball. Flanking him in the outfield was Marte, who won his second straight Gold Glove and produced +19 DRS. While the Pirates’ shallower outfield alignment strategy did not help McCutchen, that positioning combined with poor execution off the mound, McCutchen is still in he midst of a multi-year decline defensively.

McCutchen was worth +5 DRS in 2013, -13 in 2014, -8 in 2015 and -28 last season.

Here’s McCutchen’s defensive work in 2016 via data visualization from BaseballSavant.com:

Pirates general manager Neal Huntington and manager Clint Hurdle acknowledged they were considering moving McCutchen at the end of the season. Huntington noted that McCutchen’s DRS number “grabs your attention.” On Sunday they made it official.

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Jason Hammel isn’t yet officially a member of the Royals. He still has to pass a physical, and we’ve been burned before when we’ve jumped the gun. Yet the odds are that Hammel will soon officially join the Royals, and he’ll do so on a two-year guarantee worth $16 million. I’ve personally never signed a two-year guarantee worth $16 million, and I can’t imagine I’m going to, unless FanGraphs gets incredibly popular. Hammel is coming out of this with a nice chunk of change.

On the other hand, we’re a week into February, meaning spring training is right around the corner. Hammel got two years where he really wanted three, and this offer might not have even existed were it not for a horrible accident claiming the life of Yordano Ventura. The Royals were more or less forced into this position, and the offseason for Hammel wasn’t what he thought it would be. Looking back, I suppose there’s not much mystery. Hammel’s representatives were fighting something of an uphill battle.

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In his spartan hitting facility in a San Fernando Valley industrial park near Los Angeles, private hitting instructor Doug Latta said something of a hitting “think tank” developed.

There in a windowless, warehouse-like structure that encased two batting cages and a gym, Latta, a former high-school coach — along with other hitting instructors from the private to amateur and professional ranks — gathered on the Astro-turf carpet on fold-out chairs to discuss their craft. Latta kept about 30 chairs on hand for larger crowds. Don Slaught, a former major leaguer turned instructor, was a frequent visitor and in one meeting debuted his swing analysis computer system, Right View Pro. Greg Walker, who had served as a hitting coach with the White Sox and Braves, was another regular contributor. During one meeting, he told a story about how a new player had asked him a question. His response: “I don’t know, let’s go to the cage and find out.” That story resonated with Latta. He saw it was not about knowing all and having an answer for everything. Rather, coaching was about searching for an answer that works for a hitter.

In conversation with FanGraphs last week, Latta said there was “flow” during the talks. The meetings exposed what Latta describes as a “big hole” in how hitting is taught at all levels of the game. Those conversations, combined with thousands of hours of working with hitters and poring over video, led Latta to a hitting philosophy.

In simplistic terms, the philosophy is this: the optimum swing plane is an uppercut, which is often at odds with much of conventional wisdom. The principles are basic: stay square, stay balanced, stay relaxed, and get the ball in the air.

The philosophy helped two of Latta’s clients, Justin Turner and Marlon Byrd – for Byrd it was between PED suspensions – reach new levels of performance.

Others, like J.D. Martinez and Josh Donaldson have found success, through a similar philosophy – based largely on getting balls in the air – by working with private instructors. Donaldson credited so much of his success to his swing change that he chose his private instructor – Bobby Tewksbary – to pitch to him in the 2015 Home Run Derby.

The 2013 Oakland A’s won 96 games in part via a fly-ball approach, posting the top ratio on record since GB/FB metrics have been tracked. A fly-ball swing plane is especially effective against two-seam, sinking fastballs, as noted in The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. Despite these successes, Latta’s philosophy, and those similar to it, haven’t been widely adopted in professional baseball.

“You would be surprised at how much resistance [exists],” Latta said. “We talk about swing planes, how we initiate the swing, getting the ball in the air. That stuff is antithetical to most people out there doing training.”

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Sixty-three plate appearances into his big-league career, Colin Walsh is two percentage points above batting average oblivion. A Rule 5 pick by the Milwaukee Brewers a year ago, the switch-hitting utility man logged just four hits in 47 official at bats. That computes to .085, which is as bad as it looks. Over the last 100 years, 5,842 non-pitchers have come to the plate at least 60 times, and only Enrique Cruz (.083) has a lower mark.

Walsh is a bit sheepish about his BA — he has an ego like the rest of us — but don’t expect him to lose any sleep over it. He intends to get back to The Show, and even if he doesn’t, he’s proud of where he’s been.

“No one can take away the fact that I played in the major leagues,” said Walsh, who inked a minor league deal with the Atlanta Braves over the offseason. “In and of itself, that is a great accomplishment. If it ends up being my only major league experience, it’s still something that 99.99999 percent of people who ever played baseball haven’t done. I don’t think struggling in the major leagues is something I’ll go through life being looked down upon for.”

His career was on the upswing a year ago. Blessed with impeccable plate discipline, he’d earned the Rule 5 opportunity by slashing .302/.447/.470 for Oakland’s Double-A affiliate in 2015. Read the rest of this entry »

Look, over the horizon. You can just barely make it out with the naked eye. Can you see? It’s baseball, just coming ’round the bend. Sunday marks the end of football, and then we’ll have pitchers and catchers reporting to Florida and Arizona. We even get a treat in the form of the World Baseball Classic this year. Real, competitive baseball, and then Opening Day. It’s so close that you can taste the sunflower seeds and Big League Chew.

That doesn’t mean that everyone has a job yet, though. There are still some fairly notable players on the free-agent market. Not all of them are that great, but there are always a few February stragglers. So, like any self-respecting baseball fans, we’re going to arbitrarily put the best of them (based on MLB Trade Rumors’ list of remaining free agents) into a lineup, and then we’re going to see how they stack up against the Padres, using our Depth Chart projections. Why the Padres? Because we’ve currently got them projected for 66 wins, fewest in the league as of today. I’m not going to put together a whole 25-man roster out of these guys, because I value my sanity and, to a slightly lesser degree, yours as well. At least, though, we’re going to find out how a lineup of misfit toys looks against that of the San Diego Dads. Why the hell not? Buckle up.

First, I’ve identified the top free agent at each position. Below that, I’ve included a table featuring a head-to-head comparison between the top free agent and Padres likely starter at each position.

Catcher: Matt Wieters

Wieters is the clear option here, which isn’t saying much. The former future “Mauer with power” has seen his career degrade and his bat erode. Baseball Prospectus’ framing metric wasn’t fond of his work last year, or the year before that either, so his 1.9 WAR projection is probably a bit generous. That being said, it’s him and a bunch of aging career backups, so Matt Wieters it is. He’s projected for an 89 wRC+, though, so let’s not get too excited just yet.

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Our extremely early 2017 standings projections have the Diamondbacks located a clear step behind the Giants and a couple of notches behind the Dodgers in the NL West, but with a 77-win projection, they’re firmly planted within striking distance. Even if the projections were on the money regarding the club’s true talent, a few wins of random overperformance and a couple of deadline deals could easily vault them into the Wild Card race. The Diamondbacks’ roster is respectable. No one expects them to produce a 95-win season, but you could imagine exciting games in September.

One thing about the club that’s particularly interesting going into the season is their starting rotation. The projections put them somewhere in the middle of the pack for 2017, and while you can definitely argue about precise rankings, you probably couldn’t find anyone willing to put them higher than eighth or lower than about 20th. Even if you don’t put much stock into the exact calculations, that generally passes the sniff test.

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I can confirm I have brought at least three new readers to FanGraphs: my mom, my dad and my neighborhood crossing guard, Damon.

I live seven miles south of downtown Pittsburgh in the suburb of Mt. Lebanon, which counts Mark Cuban (let’s get him an MLB team) as one of its more successful high-school graduates. For western Pennsylvania, it’s a dense community, 33,000 living in six square miles. The suburb grew along a trolley line that took commuters into the city. It’s a walking community. You can travel by foot to coffee shops, the post office, boutiques, restaurants, bars, and every school in the district. There are no school buses, but there are crossing guards.

For nearly the last two years, since my routine began of taking – or rather, pushing – my two-year-old on a daily stroll to our Main St., I have spoken nearly daily with Damon, a retired gentleman who is perhaps the top crossing guard on the planet. He has been kind to my two-year-old, and he is also an enthusiastic baseball fan. When I was covering the Pirates, we spoke often of the team. He’s has been kind enough to follow me on my new adventure here, and our baseball discussions have broadened beyond the local Pittsburgh club. Damon cordially disagreed with my my post Monday asserting this is the Golden Age of shortstops.

Damon saw Clemente throw. He attended games at Forbes Field. He knew a local scout who signed Ken Griffey, who saw Josh Gibson hit. His father took him via train to see the Yankees play in Cleveland. He saw shortstops contending with a Forbes Field infield that was much poorer than the Augusta National-like playing surfaces today’s players enjoy. Damon has watched much more baseball than I have, and he believes previous generations produced superior defensive players.

There is no argument I have to refute those observations. We can only imagine how efficient Dick Groat would have been on a modern playing surface. Our defensive metrics today are imperfect. It’s difficult to compare different generations of players. And using WAR to compare is also imperfect as it’s comparing contemporaries against contemporaries. While it seems like there is rare amount of talent congregated at shortstop in today’s game, that does not necessarily tell us how Francisco Lindor compares to Honus Wagner. How do you compare past generations that did not have the benefit of modern strength training and conditioning practices?

But I think what is true is that the type of athlete playing the position is changing.

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On Wednesday, Travis Sawchik wrote about why there are still reasons for optimism surrounding Byung-ho Park, despite a rough first year in the major leagues. The piece was titled “Don’t Quit on Byung-ho Park”, but two days later, the Twins have done exactly that, designating him for assignment in order to clear a roster spot for Matt Belisle.

This is a bit of a surprising decision because, a year ago, the Twins paid a $13 million posting fee to acquire Park’s rights. But that was a different front office with different evaluators, and the new management team in Minnesota apparently decided that Park wasn’t worth keeping on the 40-man roster, so they’ll either trade him or expose him to waivers, where any team who wants to take a shot on the bounce back would be on the hook for the roughly $9 million in guaranteed money he has coming over the next three years.

Given they minimal salary commitment, I can’t imagine Park is actually going to clear waivers. $3 million per year is nothing in this day and age, and with a multi-year deal, there’s some upside with Park that doesn’t exist if you sign, say, Chris Carter, to a one year contract. And as Sawchik noted in his piece, anyone who was thinking about signing Carter to a cut-rate deal should probably be interested in Park too.

Borrowing a couple of tables from Sawchik’s piece.

And this one.

Like Carter, Park hits the crap out of the baseball when he makes contact. And, like Carter, he doesn’t make enough contact. But if you’re okay with the swing-for-the-fences-and-whiff-a-lot approach, well, Park actually made more contact than Carter did last year.

Of course, having a lot of similarities to a free agent who can’t find a home isn’t really an argument in favor of Park having a lot of value. Perhaps the Twins decided to DFA Park in part because of the league’s reticence to signing Carter, thinking that perhaps with Carter still willing to sign a one year contract, that maybe Park will slip through waivers. Or, more interestingly, maybe they DFA’d Park because they want to sign Carter themselves; that would be a fun twist to this story.

Of course, that’s pretty unlikely. The reality is that, while Park remains interesting on his own merits, there might not have been much playing time for him in Minnesota. With Joe Mauer and Kennys Vargas ahead of him on the 1B/DH depth chart, Park was probably ticketed for a platoon role, and maybe even a limited platoon role given that Vargas is a switch-hitter who hits lefties better than righties, so Park was only likely to play when Mauer wasn’t in the line-up. Neither Mauer nor Vargas are great players, but Mauer has some franchise icon appeal, and Vargas is both probably better and definitely younger, so giving him the bulk of the DH time is likely a better long-term investment.

Park probably fits better on a team that doesn’t already have a Kennys Vargas to DH, or a local hero making $23 million a year at first base. The power makes him worth another shot, and given the state of several teams 1B/DH positions, I’m pretty sure the Twins will find someone to take the rest of Park’s contract off their hands.

For instance, the Rangers seem to want to give Joey Gallo more time in Triple-A this year, but if they send him back to the minors, they would be penciled in to start Ryan Rua and Jurickson Profar as their 1B and DH options. Sure, everyone still expects them to sign Mike Napoli to play one of those two spots, but Park would still be an upgrade over Rua/Profar at the other position, and give them a cheap source of power while they figure out what Gallo might be.

Alternately, the A’s might also be interested, given that they were hunting for right-handed DHs earlier this winter, and currently have some combination of Yonder Alonso and Ryon Healy at their 1B/DH spots. In a year that is unlikely to result in a playoff berth, taking a shot on Park’s power is probably worth some playing time. Or, if we’re looking for a rebuilding team who needs a DH, the White Sox currently project to have Matt Davidson as their starting DH, and Steamer is forecasting him for a 73 wRC+ and -1 WAR. I would imagine the Twins would rather not trade Park to the White Sox, but if it comes down to waivers, there’s no way Chicago should let him get past them.

Park’s upside is probably something like an average player, so he’s worth the $9 million gamble to see if he can make enough contact to hold down a roster spot. For $9 million with a potential three year payout, there’s just not much risk here, and enough upside for another team to take a low-risk flyer on a guy with serious power. One could reasonably argue that the Twins should have kept him around and hoped to find enough playing time to be the team that got some value out of a potential improvement, but since they just had to have Matt Belisle pitching the seventh inning in a non-contention year, some other franchise will now get to make a bet on Park’s cheap upside.

In November 2014, we ran an interview with Mike Elias, who was then Houston’s director of amateur scouting. Two-plus years later, he has a new title and more responsibilities. The 34-year-old Yale University product now has the title of Assistant General Manager, Scouting and Player Development.

Elias addressed several subjects in the earlier interview, but very little of the conversation was about pitching. This time around, we talked exclusively about pitching. The scouting process — including injury-risk assessments and offspeed deliveries — was the primary focus, but we also delved heavily into last year’s first-round pick. With the 17th selection of the 2016 draft, the Astros took 6-foot-7 right-hander Forrest Whitley out of a San Antonio, Texas high school.

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Elias on how scouting pitchers has, and hasn’t, changed: “It has definitely evolved, but it is still, and I believe it always will be, most reliant on the opinions of the scouts who have seen the players in person, and know the players personally. Our scouts still spend much of their time getting a good seat behind home plate and evaluating the pitcher’s stuff, command, and delivery. They look for future improvement in those areas. Another big part of what they do is learn about the player off the field, through conversations with coaches and acquaintances, and getting to know the player himself.

“The thing that changed is the amount of information outside of the scouting report we receive. That extends from the player’s performance stats — that’s if he’s a college kid — to video analysis of his delivery. Every team does that, although every team does it a little differently. And a lot of radar technology has become available over the last few years. It has spread from just being in major-league parks to trickling down through the minor leagues and even into most college environments. Even high-school fields, throughout the major tournaments with Perfect Game.

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