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I don’t mean to stress out anybody whose teams are still fighting for a playoff spot, but the postseason is almost here. In less than two weeks fans of either the Mets, Giants, or Cardinals will be crushed as will fans of the majority of the (approximately) 82 teams vying for an American League Wild Card spot. When that time comes, the disappointed will be able to dry their tears while engaging in one of the great annual postseason traditions: overanalysis. For six months, we’ve been watching up to 15 games every night — a pace which lends itself nicely to broad, big-picture analysis more than football-esque gameday breakdowns. In the playoffs, however, that all changes and suddenly every game and series will be diced up and analyzed in every possible way, for better or worse.

One of the biggest ways this overanalysis creeps into our baseball consciousness is through an obsession over starting pitching. If you check a newspaper — I see you and I respect you, old-school newspaper folks — or open a game preview on the MLB.com At Bat app, the first thing you’ll find is that day’s starting-pitcher matchup. Is your team going to win on a given day? Better know who’s toeing the rubber to set your expectations correctly. Intellectually, we know that baseball is too unpredictable and complex to be effectively parsed down to a look at the day’s starters, but that won’t stop us. With that in mind, it’s been a rough stretch for a few playoff-bound teams who figure to see their starting rotations scrutinized under a high-power microscope over the next few weeks. I’m talking, of course, about Cleveland losing Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar to injury, the Mets losing Jacob deGrom, and the Nationals losing Stephen Strasburg.

The good news for each of those teams is that they all have at least one healthy ace-level pitcher remaining, but will that be enough when matching up against other ace-laden playoff rotations? Are any of them particularly well-suited to handle the loss? In preparation for overanalysis season, let’s take stock of what each of these injuries means to these teams and what their October rotations look like as things stand today.

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Over the last calendar year, Andrew Miller has a 1.81 ERA and a 2.22 FIP. Those dominant numbers, combined with the compelling nature of Miller’s complete transformation, have rightfully earned him the reputation as perhaps baseball’s best active relief pitcher.

Over the last calendar year, Addison Reed has a 1.87 ERA and a 2.14 FIP. You might not have heard about it, but dating back 365 days, Reed’s been every bit as dominant as the guy who’s rightfully earned the reputation as perhaps baseball’s best active relief pitcher. And you might not have realized it, but Reed’s undergone a similarly compelling transformation that’s left him looking more and more like Miller than one might expect.

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Rob Refsnyder has gone deep just 37 times since the Yankees drafted him out of the University of Arizona in 2012. He’s homered twice this year in 397 plate appearances between Triple-A and the big leagues. Power hasn’t been a forte.

He wants that to change.

“I’m going to try to hit home runs next year,” Refsnyder told me on Friday. “I’ve had a lot of good conversations with people and I’m going to try to completely change my game. I think it will help my career.”

The change may be necessary. Refsnyder has good bat-to-ball skills, but he’s neither a speed-burner nor a plus defender. He came up through the Yankees system as a second baseman, but with Starlin Castro manning that position, he’s been seeing action at first base and in right field. Without added pop, he’s unlikely to be an everyday player going forward.

He has role models for his goal. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2013, Hanley Ramirez tore the cover off of many a baseball. He was the Dodgers’ best position player, and their second-best player overall after Clayton Kershaw. During that season, which was abbreviated due both to thumb and hamstring injuries, he put up a .293 ISO in 336 plate appearances. The Dodgers offense had a hard time producing without him, particularly in the National League Championship Series. After Ramirez had two ribs fractured by a Joe Kelly fastball that had lost its way in its journey to the strike zone, the Dodgers would score just 13 runs in six NLCS games, with six of those runs clustered in Game 5.

Now, Kelly and Ramirez are teammates (I wonder if Kelly ever apologized for that hit by pitch) and Ramirez really hadn’t hit like that for an extended period of time since. He showed signs of it in April of 2015 but then ran into a wall down the left-field line at Fenway, and wasn’t the same afterward. He had been a good hitter in 2014, but not a power hitter. The same seemed true at the start of this season. He was getting on base at a decent clip — .367 was his on-base percentage — but the power wasn’t there.

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The transition from the minors to the majors is a difficult one for all players, but sometimes pitchers can make it look easier than it really is. Noah Syndergaard comes to mind from last year. Michael Fulmer put on a really good run at the start of the season this year. However, pitchers generally experience some rough patches as they transition to the majors, and that has been more true this season than in any year in the past decade. Despite contributions from players like Fulmer, Jon Gray and Steven Matz — and debuts by more high-end talent than we have seen in two decades, including players like Lucas Giolito, Alex Reyes, Blake Snell, and Julio Urias — this year’s class of rookie starters looks to be the worst-performing class of the last decade, and this year’s increase in offense might be behind those struggles.

Back in 2012, in a class led by Yu Darvish and featuring Mike Fiers, Lance Lynn, Wade Miley, Matt Moore, and Jarrod Parker, rookie starting pitchers produced a collection 53.7 WAR, the most in major-league history. The class wasn’t just about quantity, either: the group averaged 2.2 WAR per 200 innings pitched, itself one of the higher figures in history. The 2013 class produced just 35.3 WAR, averaging 1.8 WAR/200 IP, while the 2014 class — headed by Jacob deGrom, Collin McHugh, Marcus Stroman, and Masahiro Tanaka matched the 2012 group with 2.2 WAR/200 IP, and produced 44.4 WAR in fewer innings. Last year’s group was solid in quantity, recording 40.4 WAR as a group, but only a 1.7 WAR/200 IP. This year’s class has produced just 27.4 WAR in total and 1.5 WAR per 200 innings. The graph below documents total WAR by rookie pitching classes since the 1986 season.

The 2004 season, which marked the first year of penalties for steroid testing, wasn’t a great year for rookie pitchers, and it was actually pretty poor year for rookie hitters, as well. Why? Perhaps teams wanted to see what their current players would do under the new testing rules. Perhaps mere randomness is the cause. Elsewhere on the graph, we find a low point during the 1994 strike, which is unsurprising given the relative lack of games that season. Even with 10% of the season left, 2016 isn’t going to shape up as a banner one for rookie starting pitchers. After the introduction of steroid testing, there looks to be a not-so-steady, but evident incline in the contributions of rookies.

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Yesterday, following a league investigation into claims that the Padres withheld pertinent medical information from other teams with whom they were discussing trades, MLB suspended Padres GM A.J. Preller for 30 days. The Padres admit that they screwed up and vow to change their “medical administration and record keeping,” but in their statement about the suspension, claim to have done so unintentionally.

Obviously, as outsiders without knowledge of what the league found in their investigation, we can’t make any definitive claims about what is true and what isn’t, but the idea that the Padres accidentally kept two sets of medical records — one for their internal use and one to be fed into the centralized league database — is absurd. You don’t unintentionally create more work for your medical staff without knowing exactly why you’re doing so, and it’s not like everyone in the Padres organization hasn’t previously worked with other organizations; they all knew the standard protocol for reporting health information in trade discussions, and they knew this wasn’t how everyone else does things. The idea that this was an accident, and that no one in the organization realized what the team was doing, is laughably unbelievable absent a compelling explanation, which the Padres did not provide.

As best as we can tell, the Padres lied (by omitting pertinent information) to other teams about the health of their players in order to try and complete trades and secure returns that they might not be able to otherwise if the full scale of medical information was disclosed. And it worked. They made the Andrew Cashner deal with the Marlins by also including Colin Rea, a young starter the Marlins thought they were getting to bolster their rotation; when it turned out that Rea got to Miami and admitted that his elbow hurt and had been hurting for some time, the Marlins went nuts and the Padres had to agree to rework the deal, taking Rea back and sending one of the prospects they got in the deal back to Miami.

Unlike the Rodney/Rea deal, the Red Sox didn’t force the Padres to rework the Drew Pomeranz/Anderson Espinoza swap, but it is fair to wonder if they would have surrendered their top pitching prospect had they known that Pomeranz had been taking anti-inflammatory medications at the time of the deal. We’ll never know, of course, but it’s at least reasonable to think that the Padres believed there was some benefit to their trade discussions by withholding that information from the Red Sox, or else they wouldn’t have bothered to omit that information in the first place.

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Hopefully there aren’t too many of you out there suffering from Zach Britton fatigue. Last month, our own Corinne Landrey wrote about his potential for an all-time great season, and then shortly thereafter the baseball-writing community collectively began taking turns crafting the individual arguments for his Cy Young — and even MVP — candidacy, before the pushback began. We had our Zach Britton week, and all was good and fun. In reality, however, the chances of him winning — or even making a serious run at — the Cy Young Award seems highly unlikely.

But the first inaugural Zach Britton Cy Young Discussion Week still provided the framework for a few days of thought-provoking arguments and gave us something interesting to ponder. Now, here’s something else to think about: what if, in Zach Britton’s already potentially all-time great season, he’s actually been unlucky?

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With three home runs in his past five games, Freddy Galvis is in the midst of a power surge that has made him the most prolific home-run-hitting shortstop in the league over the past 30 days. Go back just a tiny bit further and you’ll find that Galvis has 10 home runs and a corresponding .899 OPS since August 9th. Freddy Galvis. You know, the glove-first shortstop with a career 73wRC+. He entered the 2016 season with 20 career home runs in 1,153 plate appearances and has now nearly doubled that career total thanks to 19 homers this year in just 568 trips to the plate. It’s a mind-boggling surge on its own, but Galvis’ story is just one of many strikingly similar tales.

Across the league, there are established major-league shortstops with unimpressive career power totals soaring beyond their prior home-run paces.

These newfound sluggers have all joined a plethora of other shortstops across the league in the 15-plus home-run club. All total there have been 15 shortstops to hit 15 or more homers this season.

According to Baseball-Reference, prior to this year there had never been more than 10 shortstops to hit 10 or more homers in a season — a record set in 2003 and tied in 2007. (As an aside, the only shortstops to make the list in both of those seasons were Miguel Tejada and Alex Gonzalez… not that Alex Gonzalez, the other one.) This year’s crop of 15-plus-homer shortstops is already half again as large as the previous record holder and it’s conceivable that the size of this year’s group could further extend its new record as Francisco Lindor is currently just one homer away at 14 on the season and Brandon Crawford, with a slightly larger mountain to climb, currently has 12 round-trippers on the year. In summary, shortstops be hittin’ lotsa long balls this year.

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As the battle for a handful of playoff spots intensifies in both leagues, we today complete our late-season look at MLB park factors. Earlier this week, it was the American League; today, the senior circuit. These park factors, as explained in previous installments, are based on granular batted-ball data, such as exit speed and launch angle.

As a reminder, here’s the quick-and-dirty on the method used to calculate these park factors. Through August 21, 106,962 balls were put into play during MLB regular-season contests. They resulted in an overall batting average of .328 and slugging percentage of .537, while fly balls generated a .328 AVG and .895 SLG. Line drives generated a .661 AVG and .872 SLG, and ground balls a .237 AVG and .258 SLG. (Oh, and pop ups have generated a .018 AVG and .028 SLG.) Each BIP type was split into “buckets” separated by 5-mph increments. The top fly-ball bucket begins at 105 mph, and the top liner and grounder buckets begin at 110 mph.

For each ballpark, the actual production derived from that park’s actual BIP mix was compared to the projected production, assuming that each BIP bucket generated MLB average production for that BIP type/exit-speed combination. Convert everything to run values, and voila, park factors, both overall and by BIP type.

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