Bud Black has made a lot of tactical decisions at Coors Field. He’s done so from the visiting dugout, having previously served as the skipper of the San Diego Padres. His perspective will be different going forward. Following a year-long stint as a special assistant in Anaheim, Black is now at the helm in Colorado. The Rockies named the 59-year-old former big-league lefty as their new manager earlier this month.

Black was a pitching coach before becoming a manager, and run-prevention remains his area of expertise. He’ll have his hands full in his new position. The offensive environment at Coors is well known, and the Rockies pitchers allowed the second-most runs in the National League this past season. Their 4.92 ERA was also second from the bottom.

Black has ideas of what will work in Colorado. He’s receptive to analytics — a trait surely not lost on GM Jeff Bridich — so while he has no intentions of trying to reinvent the wheel, he’s by no means old school. His moves will sometimes qualify as conventional, but that’s a matter of pragmatism, not a cookie-cutter mentality.

Black, who was featured in this past Sunday’s Notes column, talked about the approach he’ll bring to his new job — the focus was on pitching — late last week.

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Black on managing in Colorado: “I have a little bit of perspective, because I’ve managed close to a season [at Coors Field]. I’m not sure of the exact number, but it’s probably 80-90 games. Even though they were three- and four-game series over the course of a nine-year period, I’ve experienced all types of ballgames there.

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After Jeremy Hellickson‘s decision to accept his qualifying offer, Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey’s respective agreements with the Atlanta Braves, and the Houston Astros’ acquisition of Charlie Morton last week, the starting-pitching market in free agency is pretty well depleted. If two 40-plus-year-old pitchers and two other pitchers who’ve produced a single above-average season between them can deplete a class, it’s probably safe to assume that the class in question is pretty dreadful. Last year, eight pitchers signed contracts guaranteeing at least $70 million; this year, we might not see any.

We can get a decent idea of how little there is out there by looking at the projections. Our Depth Chart projections call for 247 pitchers to record at least five starts next season. Of the top 150 — equivalent to five per team — only seven are free agents currently.

For those clubs in need of a starter, there’s 38-year-old Rich Hill, a half-season of optimism courtesy Ivan Nova, and… zero other pitchers forecast to record an average, two-win season. Generally, free agents will not have youth on their side, as it takes six full years of service time to get to free agency, but this group is particularly long in the tooth. Nova is the only one under 30, while five of seven will play next season at age 33 or older — and that doesn’t even include the aforementioned Colon and Dickey.

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Andrew Cashner just signed a one-year deal with the Rangers, the kind of deal you might call a pillow contract, an opportunity for Cashner to bounce back and get on the market with better numbers behind him. That’s the benefit for Cashner. As for the Rangers, they’re happy to get a relatively cheap veteran with some upside for the back end of their rotation.

The only problem with this scenario is that Cashner has spent two years trying to bounce back, and has met with poor results, even on the back of high-velocity stuff that looks like it should do better. There’s got to be a way to get more from 94 and a mullet.

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Baseball is a “What have you done for me lately?” sort of affair. The most notable and most discussed exploits tend to be those which differ most greatly from the status quo. A player who produces an unexpectedly excellent season is likely to receive more attention than one who’s quietly great. We don’t notice the everyday effectiveness of a player unless that effectiveness occurs in incredible volume, as in the case of someone like Mike Trout. Trout makes the historic an everyday, mundane occurrence, and it’s because of that stupefying feat that he’s finished either first or second in the MVP voting every full season he’s spent in the big leagues.

Kyle Seager has never finished first or second in MVP voting. He received one MVP vote in 2014. He came in 12th this year. He’s not an historic talent like Trout, and he may not even be the best player on his team, given the fact that he shares an infield with future first-ballot Hall of Famer Robinson Cano. He may not even be the best player in his own family. Perhaps you’ve heard of his brother, Corey. He just won the Rookie of the Year award in the National League and finished third in MVP voting. He hasn’t had the slow buildup in production that Kyle has. Corey appeared, looked around, planted his feat, and started mashing. Because of that, it’s easy to forget that there have only been six more valuable position players in the AL than Kyle Seager since 2012.

The first six names are a who’s-who of MVP candidates and possible future figurative residents of Cooperstown, New York. The next three names on the list are also almost uniformly lauded: Dustin Pedroia, Ian Kinsler and Evan Longoria. It’s probably fair to say that Seager isn’t customarily evoked among these other players, yet there he is.

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Earlier today, I published an article about the season’s worst home run. The criteria was very simple: I just selected the home run with the lowest recorded exit velocity, courtesy of Statcast. I think that position is fairly defensible, even if there might be other ways to identify other bad home runs. It’s subjective. Sorry!

Having that post go up all but demands the posting of the opposite. At the very least, I figure the community is curious. The opposite of the home run hit with the lowest exit velocity is the home run hit with the highest exit velocity. And the opposite of the worst home run is the best home run. I don’t know if this position is so defensible, but, I had to use this headline, just for consistency.

This home run is less interesting than the weak one, because this is just a really good home run. Hence this being an InstaGraphs post, instead of a FanGraphs post. The home run was hit by Carlos Gonzalez, against Zack Greinke, in Arizona, on April 4. It was the season opener for both the Rockies and the Diamondbacks. Gonzalez hit his home run at 117.4 miles per hour. You may watch it now.

The healthy version of Giancarlo Stanton is a Statcast darling. Over Statcast’s brief history, Stanton leads the majors, by far, in the number of batted balls hit at least 115mph. Gonzalez, though, comes up a distant second, which still counts as second. So Gonzalez is no stranger to absolutely stinging the baseball, and this home run was better than any Stanton hit in 2016. Stanton owns the next-hardest homer, at 116.8mph. Then there’s a tie at 115.9mph, between George Springer and Avisail Garcia. It’s interesting to see Gonzalez going deep here in a full count — you might think, with two strikes, he’d somewhat cut down on his swing. He did nothing of the sort, and Greinke made a horrible location mistake.

Greinke knew pretty quickly what Gonzalez had done to him.

Now here’s where it gets extra fun: If you watch the highlight clip, the Rockies announcers joke about the ball’s exit velocity and launch angle. They didn’t know those numbers at the time. They were right that the ball had a high exit velocity — it had the highest exit velocity, among dingers. And they were right that the ball had a low launch angle — it had the lowest launch angle, among dingers. It’s a two-fer! Gonzalez hit the ball 14.2 degrees above the horizontal. The next-lowest homer was hit 15.2 degrees above the horizontal (Kevin Pillar). A shot from the side:

It wound up standing as a very extraordinary home run. It was the sort of batted ball you’d think would be a well-stung double, but it just never came down, registering a Statcast distance estimate of 420 feet. One more time, the ball was hit 117.4mph, with an angle of 14.2 degrees. The average baseball this year hit 420 feet had an exit velocity of 105.4mph, with an angle of 26.9 degrees. Gonzalez just beat the living crap out of a terrible full-count pitch, and this is one of the reasons why he’s not simply a product of Coors Field. You can’t fake his contact quality. He makes some of the very best contact around. Congratulations, Carlos Gonzalez, on your very good dinger.

Baseball players are human beings and – here’s some bad news about the human race – human beings are flawed. Perfection in human form does not exist and, consequently, neither does perfection in baseball-player form. The greatest players the world has ever known still have weaknesses on the field (and off it, for that matter). Some weaknesses are unfixable – sorry, Ben Revere, but you’re never going to be a power hitter – but some weaknesses can be addressed. Players who make improvements can elevate their projected value, which can come in handy during free agency. This year, one free agent who has answered questions about a long-standing perceived weakness and stands to benefit financially is Yoenis Cespedes.

A year ago, Cespedes underwent a power surge. He’d always been a 20-homer guy, but, for the first time, he crossed the 30-homer threshold. He also set a career high in isolated power (ISO) with a .251 mark that ranked 12th among 141 qualified hitters. The great news for Cespedes is that he’s been able to sustain his heightened level of power this year by putting up a .251 ISO for the second consecutive season.

The better news for Cespsedes, though, is that, in addition to strengthening an area in which he’d always shown some ability, he also demonstrated impressive improvement in an area of perceived weakness: walks and on-base percentage (OBP). From 2013 to 2014, Cespedes’ OBP hovered around .300; last year it increased to .328 thanks in large part to the influx of home runs (and their effect on his batting average). This year, however, Cespedes brought his OBP up to .354, a level he hasn’t reached since he posted a .356 OBP in his rookie season. The obvious cause of this impressive boost has been a dramatic reversal in his walk-rate trend.

In 2015, Cespedes’ walk rate bottomed out at 4.9%; this past year, it soared to a new career high of 9.4%. One of the key questions facing teams interested in signing Cespedes this winter, then, is whether the boost is real. It goes without saying that a player with good power and decent OBP will be worth more to a team than a player with good power and poor OBP. Which type of player should teams expect from Cespedes going forward?

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The season’s worst home run was a major-league home run. It was hit clean over a major-league fence, against a major-league pitcher, and it didn’t have to bounce off of the head of a major-league outfielder. The season’s worst home run was, objectively, more physically impressive than anything I’ve ever accomplished. I’ve climbed some tall mountains. It’s like walking up really cold and slippery stairs. Nobody would be amazed by anything I’ve done. I’m sitting here amazed that anyone can hit any major-league pitches.

So the point here isn’t to criticize. Everything in baseball is remarkable. But, very simply, there are better home runs, and there are worse home runs. Not all home runs are equally impressive, correct? It follows, therefore, that there would be a worst home run. A least-impressive impressive thing, if you will. Below, you get to see the worst home run of 2016. It was allowed by Chris Sale, and it was hit by Troy Tulowitzki.

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Bud Black believes Mike Scioscia became more progressive this past season. According to the newly-named Colorado Rockies manager — a special assistant with the Angels in 2016 — Billy Eppler was a big reason why. Eppler replaced Jerry Dipoto as Anaheim’s general manager 13 months ago, and according to Black, he had his manager’s ear.

“His relationship with Billy, and the guys Billy brought over, especially some of the analysts — those guys really hit it off,” Black told me. “I think it was very educational for both sides. Mike and his coaches got some great insight from Billy, and from some of the ideas he brought over from the Yankees. Mike reciprocated with some great core principles of baseball. That made for a great dynamic.”

The data bears that out — to an extent. The Angels more than doubled their number of defensive shifts, although they also continued to give up outs with the sacrifice bunt. That ignominious total dropped by just one from the previous year.

At last spring’s SABR Analytics Conference, Eppler called Scioscia an ”information savant.” Based on my interactions with the long-time skipper — including this conversation about analytics — I’m inclined to concur with that claim. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals had a few problems last season, and among them was unreliable relief pitching. As a means toward addressing that, they’ve given free-agent lefty Brett Cecil a four-year contract, worth $30.5 million. It also has a full no-trade clause! Very clearly, Cecil didn’t come cheap. A number of teams expressed a willingness to guarantee Cecil three years, so the Cardinals stepped up and went one extra.

It wouldn’t be hard to spin this in a negative way. Relievers feel like they’re unpredictable, right? So investing in them long-term might be a fool’s errand. And, last year’s average reliever had a 3.93 ERA. Cecil had a 3.93 ERA. He also finished with the eighth-lowest WPA among relievers, meaning he was even less valuable than his regular statistics. On top of that stuff, Cecil missed a month and a half with a lat injury. He didn’t have a banner first half.

Yet, he did have a much better second half. The healthy Cecil was dominant. Here’s his last pitch of the regular season:

That’s just in there for a pretty visual. Cecil finished the year effective, and he was effective in seasons previous. There’s been a certain response to this contract:

Already have heard from multiple executives and agents who think Brett Cecil’s four-year, $30.5M deal with St. Louis is a market changer.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 19, 2016

But I just don’t agree with that. I don’t think this is the least bit strange or surprising. Cecil got four years and $30.5 million with a full no-trade. Last winter, the Orioles gave Darren O’Day four years and $31 million, with a partial no-trade. They’re very similar contracts, given to a pair of non-closers, and in this table, check out their numbers over the three seasons before signing:

O’Day has the edge in hit and run suppression. Cecil has the edge in peripherals, age, and velocity. While O’Day might’ve been the tougher pitcher to square up, Cecil has made it hard to just put the bat on the ball, and he also has the advantage of a few years of youth. I don’t see how Cecil’s contract, then, is a market-changer. Was O’Day’s contract a market-changer? If so, this one just falls right in line. It might come as a little startling to see a non-closer get four years guaranteed, but Cecil didn’t start this, and there was already emphasis being put on finding better non-closers before. This seems like it’s normal. Brett Cecil’s contract feels normal.

Now, it’s worth noting, perhaps, that O’Day wasn’t great in the first year of his four-year deal. Maybe that means all of this is unwise. But in reality, it’s not that relief pitchers are all that unpredictable. It’s that they just have smaller samples of playing time, and the reduced samples make them unpredictable. They still project like anyone else. And Cecil projects to be fine, and the Cardinals bullpen projects to be good. They can check that priority off the list.

It would be fair to label me a skeptic of Dexter Fowler’s defense skills. Despite recording basically average fielding numbers over his two years with the Cubs, Fowler had graded out as a distinctly below-average center fielder in every season of his career before joining Chicago ahead of the 2015 season. In each of the past two years his name has appeared in my early-season defensive-outlier posts, and before last season, I wrote an entire piece wondering if Fowler had actually improved as a defender or if he had merely benefited from better positioning.

Of course, even if the pre-Chicago version of Fowler is the real one, he actually still profiles as a decent player. He has a fantastic walk rate, has exhibited average power as a major leaguer, makes good contact — and, since leaving hitter-friendly Coors Field, has managed to produce a 121 wRC+, well above league average. Dexter Fowler the Hitter and Dexter Fowler the Fielder present two different points from which to begin an analysis of his future value. Let’s take a look at both.

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