Baseball is enjoyable this time of year. It’s like catching up with a friend we haven’t seen in a while. We spend April trying to figure out what the game is — not as it is right now, I mean, but as it will be all season. We parse through small bits of over- and underperformance, endeavoring to sift signal from the noise. Shohei Ohtani has been great. That probably means something! Ryan Flaherty has also been good. We might expect that means less. The Dodgers will likely recover; the Padres likely won’t.

With any friend, part of learning the who of them is knowing what matters and what is mere flotsam; alma maters and disappointments, cities lived in. Sayings only our mothers use. It’s why it is so hard to make new friends as an adult: grown-ups have all these stories from way back, full of people we don’t know, doing all sorts of things. It’s a lot to learn.

And while baseball’s who shifts around and grows, changing with new players and seasons, there are bits that endure, memories of childhood and cut grass that constitute a more fixed personality. I thought I might look beyond April to other artifacts, stories from way back full of people. So, inspired by how little they change year to year, I made perhaps an odd choice — namely, of reading The Official Professional Rules of Baseball and The Official Baseball Rules (2018 Edition), to see what baseball tells us about itself.

Here are a few of the things I found.

Baseball allows for small moments of grace…
Sports inspire intense competition. It’s sort of the whole thing. Once play begins, teams are generally expected to press their advantage, however minute. It’s why managers challenge when an opposing runner comes of the bag for the briefest of instants. It’s annoying, and a bit fussy, but there might be an out hiding in there. Can’t just give up an out! Baseball knows this about itself, this impulse to be fastidious in the service of winning, but it also knows that we humans are prone to make mistakes. Managers have to wear those mistakes when they come in the fourth inning, but earlier, before the stakes are set, baseball allows its generals a bit of grace.

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For a really long time, there was little doubt about the best pitcher on the planet. Clayton Kershaw has been on an epic run that will land him in the Hall of Fame. Over the past two seasons, Kershaw has still been brilliant, but he’s averaged 24 starts and 162 innings instead of 32 starts and 222 innings. That slight downturn in health has allowed arguments to pop up debating whether Kershaw is still the best pitcher in baseball. Last season, Max Scherzer was the takeover candidate of choice. The 2016 National League Cy Young winner followed up one great performance with another by claiming the award again. Ignored in those debates was a pitcher who has been better than both over the past two seasons and projects to be better this year: Corey Kluber.

On Monday, Kluber pitched eight scoreless innings, striking out 13 batters against one walk and just two hits. After three starts, Kluber’s ERA is 1.57, his FIP is 2.33, and he’s been worth 0.7 WAR. That’s great, but it doesn’t really separate him from a bunch of good pitchers off to great starts, including Scherzer, Dylan Bundy, and Gerrit Cole. Let’s extend to the past just a little bit more to get a sense of how Kluber has done lately. The table below shows the top pitchers by WAR since the All-Star Break last season.

Kluber is so far out ahead of the pack, the 1.3 WAR difference between him and Severino is nearly double the difference between Severino and 11th-place Scherzer. Combining his great second half with his strong start to this season, Kluber has struck out 169 batters and walked only 15. Since the All-Star Break last season, Kluber has been the best pitcher in baseball, and it isn’t particularly close. To really take a look at the best pitcher in baseball, it probably helps to take a bit of a longer view. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month in a piece for ESPN Insider, I was tasked with predicting what players might benefit from a change of scenery.

In that piece, this author cited a 2016 paper titled “Turning up by Turning Over” published in the Journal of Business Psychology, which studied 712 players who changed teams in the major leagues from 2004 to -15. The study concluded there are benefits for certain players in changing teams, particularly players that had been in decline. The study asserted there is a real change-of-scenery effect.

Maybe this effect is really just regression to the mean, teams acquiring players after down years. But there is perhaps something to be said for the energy and clean slate of a new environment. There’s also something to be said for being exposed to new ideas and colleagues. While Craig Edwards noted earlier today that the Pirates may have a new emerging ace, their former No. 1, Gerrit Cole, was one of the players I included in my piece about changes of scenery. I wasn’t alone in the belief, as many suspected, that he could benefit by moving to Houston.

And through two starts, the Astros, a team with an overwhelming collection of talent and a 100-win projection, look like they might be developing the last thing the rest of the American League wanted to see: another front-line pitcher.

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I imagine we’ll be accused of writing clickbait. I imagine many websites will face the same accusation. And, sure, there’s probably plenty of bad Shohei Ohtani coverage out there. But, already, this is something special. Readers have possessed a voracious enthusiasm for consuming Ohtani articles. Writers have possessed a voracious enthusiasm for composing Ohtani articles. This is something that none of us have ever seen, and, if anything, Shohei Ohtani has exceeded the hype. Of course it’s still embarrassingly early. But, this is the best thing going. There is so much for us to see, and so much for us to learn.

There’s an argument that early analysis misses the point. That Ohtani is easy to appreciate, and perhaps best appreciated, with the eyes. He hits harder than almost anyone. He pitches harder than almost anyone. He’s playing his first-ever meaningful MLB games, and he’s arguably the greatest baseball talent Japan has ever had to offer. To this point, he’s been absolutely dominant on both sides, which is something long considered impossible. Ohtani shouldn’t be able to be this good. Players aren’t supposed to actually meet the runaway hype. Was Ohtani hyped…too…little? If you want to just let his beginning wash over you, I completely understand. In many ways this is bigger than regular baseball.

But I have a job to do. My job is to generate written baseball content, which can hopefully teach you something. If you’re interested, let me teach you something about Shohei Ohtani, the hitter. Everyone in baseball ends up with a scouting report. Ohtani, I guess, will have two of them. But, hitter Ohtani? Pitchers have already tipped their plan.

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How were your last seven days at work? Did you meet demanding, perhaps even impossible, expectations? While performing in unfamiliar surroundings? In front of literally millions of expectant eyes?

If not, then you probably failed to match Shohei Ohtani’s first full week as an employee in the United States.

To recap:

• Tuesday (as DH): 3 for 4, first MLB home run (off Josh Tomlin).
• Wednesday (as DH): 2 for 5, home run (off Corey Kluber).
• Friday (as DH): 1 for 4, BB, home run (off Daniel Gossett).
• Sunday (as pitcher): six perfect innings, a total of 12 strikeouts and just one walk over seven innings, 25 whiffs (including 15 whiffs via the splitter).

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A little less than two weeks ago, Travis Sawchik and Craig Edwards wrapped up our positional power rankings series by taking a look at each team’s bullpen as composed at the start of the season. In Craig’s introduction, he noted that this was, in one sense, a bit of a fruitless exercise. Bullpen performance is very poorly correlated year to year. A combination of midseason acquisitions, injuries, and just plain bad luck can have an outsize impact on end-of-year results.

But the unpredictability of a bullpen’s performance in the future is another matter altogether from the performance of that bullpen in the past. Relievers threw a little over 38% of all innings pitched last year, and that figure is up to 42.3% through games played this past Saturday. Having a good — or at least not a terribly bad — bullpen is increasingly critical to a team’s chances of making and thereafter succeeding in the postseason, and so even if we should retain a measure of humility about our ability to predict what will happen before the season, we should nonetheless keep a close eye on how bullpens actually do once the season starts.

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Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Among the reasons for optimism in Toronto is that Aaron Sanchez is back. Sure, you never really know when any pitcher will stay good and healthy, but Sanchez was able to start just eight games in 2017, due to significant blister problems. So far this year, the problem hasn’t recurred. As far as the Blue Jays go, the problem isn’t upper-tier talent. The problem is keeping all that talent on the field. If Sanchez can throw another 30-odd times, that’ll answer at least one major question.

Now that Sanchez is two starts into 2018, we can say that there’s been good and bad. He’s still throwing hard, and he’s getting ground balls. That’s good. Less good are the early problems with control, although maybe Sanchez deserves a break for struggling against the Yankees. Plenty of pitchers are going to struggle against the Yankees. Sanchez just looked fine against the White Sox, and, even more important than that, we’re seeing an adjusted Aaron Sanchez. Sanchez has unveiled a new weapon of his, something he’s never been able to consistently possess. From the looks of things, 2018 Aaron Sanchez has a far better changeup. It’s also one of the hardest changeups in the game.

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After a shaky spring, Shohei Ohtani was basically as advertised in his first start on the mound — which is remarkable, since he was essentially advertised as the best pitching prospect in nearly a decade.

In his debut, Ohtani maxed out at 99 mph on the fastball and averaged 97.8 mph on the same pitch while also showcasing a darting, 90 mph splitter and breaking ball. If Ohtani can approximate anything like the 19.6% swinging-strike rate of his debut and continue to exhibit solid command, he will be an ace in short order.

Ohtani’s fastball averaged 96.6 mph and 96.1 mph, respectively, his last two years in Japan. He posted 15.8% and 15.0% swinging-strike rates in his last two seasons in the NPB (his 2017 season was injury shortened). Our old friend Eno Sarris found that plate-discipline and batted-ball trends in the NPB and MLB are remarkably similar. While it’s often folly to draw too much upon small sample sizes in April, it would appear as though Ohtani has verified that his power stuff is real.

Ohtani did more verifying Tuesday.

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One could argue that the first great, widespread data-based departure from tradition this century was the infield defensive shift. Based upon opponents’ batted-ball tendencies, teams more and more began to align their infielders where opposing hitters directed baseballs.

And while one defensive alignment trend, infield shifts, might have peaked, another radical alignment phenomenon seems poised to be adopted more widely.

During the opening week, we saw the Astros give us this alignment versus Joey Gallo:

Over the last decade, we’ve seen four-man outfields on a rare occasion. But I’m not sure there has ever been a defensive alignment where only one non-pitcher or non-catcher was standing on the infield dirt. Only Astros first baseman Marwin Gonzalez had his cleats in the Arlington, Texas infield skin. Now that’s extreme.

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