The Dodgers announced today that teenage LHP Julio Urias will be called up to make his major-league debut on Friday in New York against the defending National League champion Mets. His statistics in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League this year have been cartoonish. In eight appearances, Urias has thrown 41 innings, allowed 24 hits, 8 walks, and accrued 44 strikeouts. He sports a 1.10 ERA and a 0.78 WHIP — versus the PCL averages of 4.36 and 1.40, respectively. All of it at the age of 19, a full eight years younger than the average Pacific Coast Leaguer.

When he debuts on Friday, Urias will be the youngest player in Major League Baseball and the first pitcher to debut as a teenager since Madison Bumgarner in 2009. Not bad for a kid whom the Dodgers discovered in the Mexican League (and later signed for $450,000) on the back end of a scouting trip that also netted them Yasiel Puig.

Urias’ repertoire and usage thereof is advanced. His fastball is plus and will sit 91-95 while touching 97. However, it can be fairly straight, and even features some natural cut at times, but Urias generally commands it down or below the zone and to both sides of the plate. He generates lots of ground balls when he’s not catching hitters looking on the corners or blowing away the ones who struggle with velocity. The heater is complemented by a plus low-80s curveball and an 82-85 mph changeup that is consistently above average. Urias’ usage of his repertoire is just as (if not more) impressive than his pure stuff. You’ll see him back door and back foot the curveball to right-handed hitters, pitch backwards with it to lefties and rarely leave a secondary pitch hanging in a place where it can be punished.

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Over the last 365 days, Clayton Kershaw has been baseball’s best pitcher. That isn’t a particularly enlightening sentence given that he’s almost certainly been the league’s best pitcher over the last several years, as well. At this point, the question isn’t really if Kershaw is the best pitcher, but rather if he is the best overall player, Mike Trout included. Kershaw has truly been that phenomenal.

To put some numbers behind it, consider: since May 26, 2015, Kershaw has thrown 253.1 regular-season innings (34 starts) and produced a 39 ERA- and 42 FIP-, thanks in part to a 34.8 K% and 3.3 BB%. By our WAR model, that’s equivalent to an 11-WAR season. It’s closer to 12 WAR if you use runs allowed as the primary input instead of FIP.

We all have our own favorite Kershaw fun fact, but here’s one that’s been bubbling to the surface lately. Full disclosure: I’ve been partially responsible for said bubbling.

Some context: since 1961, there have been just a handful of qualified starters to record less than a 40 ERA- in a single season and the only two qualified seasons under 40 FIP- belong to Pedro in 1999 and Kershaw in 2016. Those Pedro years are often considered the modern gold standard of starting-pitcher dominance. He was 60% better than league average for two full seasons.

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The early part of the Major League Baseball season presents an interesting paradox when it comes to interest and attendance. Fans have waited all winter for real live baseball, and Opening Day comes with big crowds and pageantry. After Opening Day, crowds tend to thin out a bit as people come to terms with the long season, and in many places, weather that is still less than hospitable to baseball. Comparing attendance this season to attendance at this time last season shows a still-healthy game with a few teams having made major jumps after successful seasons a year ago.

When looking at per-game attendance so far this season, it should come as no surprise that the usual names remain atop the board, per Baseball Reference.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees were the top four in attendance last season — in that order — and those same four teams continue their grip on the attendance lead this year. The Chicago Cubs have swapped spots with the Los Angeles Angels while the Toronto Blue Jays have taken an edge over the Boston Red Sox. The bottom five teams are the same as the end-of-the-season numbers last year, although in a different order, as Tampa Bay Rays finished the end of the season last while Oakland A’s were ahead of the Chicago White Sox and the Miami Marlins.

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Cuban righty Yadier Alvarez was the $16 million crown jewel of the Dodgers’ 2015/2016 international free-agent class. It was the second-highest bonus ever given to an international amateur and reports on Alvarez prior to last July were so good that I ranked him #1 on my J2 board at the time. Alvarez ventured stateside this spring and has consistently pitched every fifth day, only missing one start to attend the birth of his child. Reports coming out of Camelback Ranch have been superlative. On Monday, I got to see it for myself along with a number of other interesting prospects.

Yadier Alvarez, RHP, Los Angeles Dodgers

Current Level: Extended Spring Training, Age: 20.2, Height/Weight: 6’3/180
Signed: IFA at age 19 on July 2, 2015 out of Cuba by LA for $16.0 million bonus

Alvarez was electric. After opening his start with a few fringe fastballs, he began to loosen up and was sitting 92-97 before long. He has been up to 100 this spring, which is especially notable given that there were rumors over the offseason that his velocity had been down. Mixed in along with the fastball was an 82-86 mph slider with late, two-plane bite. It flashed plus, but the line between that pitch and his 76-82 mph curveball was sometimes blurry. The curveball is a bit more vertically oriented than the slider and Alvarez decelerates his arm a bit to throw it, but it flashed average and it should solidify there once he becomes more comfortable with its release.

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Yesterday, we tackled the best final seasons for pitchers. Today, let’s tackle the position players, so we can get to the heart of the question of just how good David Ortiz needs to be to crack one of these lists. The rules and breakdowns are the same as before, so I would encourage you to read yesterday’s post to peep those. Once again, big ups to Jeff Zimmerman for data help.

30-39 WAR

Best Final Season, Position Players with 30-39 WAR

Player	Final Season	Age	WAR	Career WAR
Roy Cullenbine	1947	33	4.4	33.8
Chick Stahl	1906	33	3.7	33.1
Tony Cuccinello	1945	37	3.0	32.2
Gil McDougald	1960	32	2.8	39.7
Joe Adcock	1966	38	2.5	34.2
Elbie Fletcher	1949	33	2.4	30.7

The guys on this list are definitely not household names, but there are some interesting, if also tragic, stories here. Let’s deal with the tragic first. There are six players here because one of them, Chick Stahl, committed suicide during spring training of the 1907 season. He had been named the Americans’ (Red Sox) player/manager over the winter, and something drove him to take his own life. This was surely a big loss for the team, as they had been counting on him to help lead them. He was the fifth-best hitter in the game just a couple years earlier in 1904.

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A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

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Here’s a thing: last year, Clayton Kershaw was tied for baseball’s fifth-lowest walk rate by a starting pitcher, out of 78 pitchers. Then, this year, only one guy (Mike Fiers) has dropped his walk rate more substantially than Kershaw. That’s the nerdy and complicated way of saying that Clayton Kershaw has walked four batters this season. He’s made eight starts, he’s completed 62 innings, he’s faced 225 (!) batters, and he’s walked four of them. Four. He’s also struck out 77. And you know how many he’s walked? He’s walked four. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Is Clayton Kershaw actually getting better? It’s a scary thought. It’s one that’s hard to fathom. I also wouldn’t put it past him. For what it’s worth, Kershaw’s past the point in the season in which walk rate becomes a reliable indicator of past performance, and these eight games are a level of walk stinginess that we’ve never seen from him before:

Following every valley, of course, comes a peak, and Kershaw probably isn’t going to run a 1.8% walk rate the entire season. But given the relatively acceptable sample, the career-high zone rate, and the extent to which Kershaw has avoided the free pass, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that he may be (somehow) demonstrating an even more improved control of the strike zone.

Anyway. Four walks, yeah? That’s not too many. That’s enough to take a good look at them all in a blog post and see if there’s anything going on. This was a pretty poor segue. It’s Friday.

Walk No. 1

• Date: 4/4/16
• Batter: Yangervis Solarte
• Projected BB%: 7.1
• Sequence:

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Over the course of big-league history, there have been a few hundred no-hitters. There have been 66 occasions of a pitcher hitting multiple homers in one game. Scarcity doesn’t automatically mean a superior accomplishment, but what Noah Syndergaard just did against the Dodgers was extraordinary. His first time up, he hit a home run. His second time up, he hit a home run. The last pitcher to pull this off was Micah Owings in 2007, and Owings was more of a hitter, anyway. Here are the MLB.com highlights. This would be no fun without the highlights.

Not that there’s any such thing as a bad home run, but those were big-boy dingers. Syndergaard jumped on a first pitch, and then he jumped on a two-strike pitch. He gets points for diversity, and he also gets points for dumb luck, since the second homer followed four consecutive shown bunts. Instead of moving the runners a little bit over, he moved them all the way over. Syndergaard drove home all the Mets’ runs. He genuinely pitched and hit them to victory. It was one of the better all-around single-game performances in history, I’m sure.

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There’s always a risk that comes with pre-writing. I’m writing this Wednesday afternoon, about Yasiel Puig, even though Puig hasn’t yet begun his game Wednesday night. I can’t know what’s going to happen. Puig might have the game of his life! Or he might hijack a blimp. Life’s a mystery. But what I know is that I’m writing about the Puig who’s batting .235. The Puig with a 78 wRC+ that would very easily stand as a career low. Maybe Puig snaps out of this in between writing and publishing, but what’s happened has most definitely happened, so now, a discussion of that.

You might’ve noticed by now that I take a lot of interest in the way that good hitters get pitched. Puig’s been pitched in a certain way, and it’s remarkably uncomplicated. A couple weeks ago, Dave Roberts said Puig’s been hurt on fastballs in and soft stuff away. Pretty much. And that’s also kind of a traditional blueprint, but it’s been aces against Puig to this point. We have the overall numbers, and we have the idea from the manager. Let’s now get into some deeper evidence.

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Major League Baseball has taken steps toward becoming a truly global game in recent years. Cuban players have joined their Venezuelan, Dominican and other Latin American counterparts in making a significant impact on today’s game, and talent from the Far East, particularly from the Japanese and Korean Leagues, has made its presence felt as well.

This year’s most heralded Japanese rookie is Kenta Maeda, who signed a long-term deal with the Dodgers this past offseason. After concerns were raised following a medical examination, he signed a deal that was heavily discounted from the originally negotiated terms, paying him $25 million over an eight-year period. This put the Dodgers in a fantastic position: a low-risk, potentially high-reward scenario. One month in, the Dodgers simply have to be thrilled as Maeda’s posted a 3-1, 1.41 mark with a 28/6 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 32 innings.

Sure, the season remains young, and the sample sizes are small, but it’s not too early to form some early hypotheses regarding whether Maeda is for real. Today, let’s use granular batted-ball data, examining his plate-appearance frequency and production by BIP type data, to see how Maeda is getting it done, and whether we can expect his success to continue moving forward. Read the rest of this entry »