The start of the KBO season this week has been a joyous occasion for me. The opening night broadcast reminded me of what I’d lost: the crack of the bat, the delightful feeling of not knowing what will happen next, and the thrill of a sudden defensive gem in an otherwise stately-paced game.

But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I’ve been vocal about my desire to see Dixon Machado play; shortstop defense is my favorite flavor of baseball, and he’s a wizard with the glove. The Lotte Giants weren’t scheduled for any English language games all week. Something had to give.

Luckily, if you’re willing to hunt around a bit, the English programming schedule is no barrier. The KBO broadcasts all of their games in Korean on Twitch, and so I set out to watch the Giants take on the KT Wiz and enjoy a game that was both very like what I know and utterly foreign.

My initial impression, after fast-forwarding through the pregame show, was one of emptiness:

But of course, that’s simply baseball’s new reality. I’d encountered it already in the opening broadcast, and in the time of COVID-19, it isn’t strange to see empty spaces designed to seat thousands. It was comforting, almost, a reminder that I wasn’t watching to see what was different. It’s all different. Life’s all different. I was watching to see what was the same, to see the central thread of baseball with different trappings. Read the rest of this entry »

If we didn’t know it was real, Joe Mauer’s career with the Minnesota Twins might strike us as being more like a fairy tale than an actual story. That is, until August 19, 2013. That was when Mets first baseman Ike Davis hit a foul tip that hit Mauer square in his helmet.

The moribund Twins, coming off a 69-93 season, had the first overall draft pick in 2001 for the second time in franchise history. The first time the Twins had the No. 1 pick, they drafted Tim Belcher, who didn’t sign when the team wouldn’t pay the going rate for a top selection. Minnesota also failed to sign their second round pick, Bill Swift; none of the players they actually did sign ever played a game in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many proposals floating around concerning when and how the major league season will begin. Several such plans include divisional alignments that go beyond the standard American and National Leagues that have been present for more than a century. The main point of difference still in play between the leagues is the presence of the designated hitter in the American League and the absence of the same in the National League. I think most fans would be in favor of tweaks to the division rules if those changes prove necessary for baseball to return this summer. While sticking to the interleague rule where the home ballpark dictates whether the designated hitter is in use might be feasible, given that the standard divisions don’t exist, going to a universal designated hitter might be an easier solution. It also might be slightly safer, helping to prevent pitcher injuries in a shortened season. But should a universal DH be adopted, NL teams will be at a significant disadvantage at the plate this season.

Our Depth Charts currently project National league teams for 291.5 WAR on the position player side, while the American League comes in at 314.3 WAR, a difference of 22.8 WAR. The main source of that difference is the designated hitter, where AL teams are projected for 27.1 WAR and 700 PA per team while NL teams are projected for 8.8 WAR and 300 PA per team. While those 300 PA are deemed part of the designated hitter category, in reality, it is mostly pinch hitting opportunities, which come without the positional adjustment associated with the designated hitter. With the positional adjustment, the NL WAR would actually be below replacement level. Of course, if NL teams were actually using the designated hitter, they would apportion playing time differently and also receive the same 700 plate appearances as the American League (for the purposes of this exercise and to ease understanding, we’ll just go with a normal 162-game season). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m wading into the gaming and streaming space with Yeoman’s Work, a lo-fi, multimedia presentation that follows my pursuit of a championship in the baseball simulator, Diamond Mind Baseball, paired with single-camera footage from my baseball video archives. Below is its maiden voyage, which features a rematch of my league’s 2019 championship series paired with video from a few 2019 fall instructional league games between the San Diego Padres and Texas Rangers.

My initial plan was to stream Diamond Mind (henceforth DMB) on the FanGraphs’ Twitch account the same way my colleagues have been streaming Out of the Park Baseball and MLB The Show. But my home upload speeds are insufficient for streaming, and it was only after several failed attempts that I diverted to the format below, which enables some cool post-production elements that I’ll continue to explore. My goal with the archived game footage is to feature video that is either relevant to my recent prospect work or to the current discourse surrounding baseball culture. In the pilot that means focusing on prospects in the Rangers and Padres systems, as I’ve recently written about both.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I took a look at the best 10-year periods in baseball history by position player WAR. As it relates to the modern game, Mike Trout is on one of the greatest 10-year runs in history, and he’s only been at it for eight seasons. Currently, there isn’t a Mike Trout equivalent on the pitching side, but that shouldn’t be surprising – the only player with a more impressive record than Trout over the last 50 years is Barry Bonds. There just isn’t going to be a Trout-like pitcher in every generation because Trout’s talent and production are so rare. But that doesn’t mean that the last decade of Clayton Kershaw isn’t one of the more impressive performances in baseball history.

Over the last 10 seasons, Clayton Kershaw’s 59.1 WAR is the best in baseball among pitchers, four wins clear of Max Scherzer, who is a win ahead of Justin Verlander. Kershaw was actually slightly better from 2009-2018, with 59.8 WAR, which also led baseball. He’s also first in the 10-year periods beginning in 2008 and 2007 despite not playing in the majors in 2007 and not making his debut until late-May of the 2008 season. Kershaw has ended a season as the 10-year WAR leader four times, and is very likely to do so for a fifth time in 2020, but would need to be a couple wins better than Scherzer over the next two seasons to extend that streak to 2021.

Since 1909, only 30 pitchers have ended a season as the game’s 10-year WAR leader. Only eight have more than Kershaw’s four seasons as 10-year WAR leader and only Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens have more than Kershaw over the last 60 years:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I went over the foreign-born players who ply their trade for five KBO teams. Today, as we continue to ramp up for Opening Day, let’s hit on the other five teams. As before, this is a mix of former 26th men and talented-but-flawed players, some of whom have unlocked new levels of their game in the KBO.

LG Twins

Casey Kelly: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Kelly was a fringy major leaguer who debuted in the majors in 2012 for the Padres and then bounced around the minors for years, sometimes making spot appearances when a team needed an extra starter or bullpen arm. A low-90s fastball and no obvious plus secondary — his closest is probably his two-plane, low-80s curve — simply don’t combine to stop major league hitters.

With the Twins, everything clicked. Kelly put up a stellar 2.55 ERA, which led to a $1.2 million contract with another $300,000 in incentives — Mel Rojas Jr. money. Under the hood, it wasn’t quite as pretty — his RA9 was 3.49 and his FIP was in the threes as well — but that’s still spectacular in a league where 4.6 runs are scored per game.

Like most pitchers in the KBO, Kelly forces opponents to beat him — he struck out 17% of the batters he faced and walked 5.5%. Between that glorious walk rate and a penchant for keeping the ball on the ground, he forced opposing hitters to play his game, and it paid off. This is what KBO teams are hoping for when they bring in a foreign-born pitcher: steady competence that adds up to ace-level numbers.

Tyler Wilson: Before Kelly, there was Wilson. After toiling in the Orioles system for six years with only 145.1 major league innings to show for it, he signed with the Twins before the 2018 season. In juiced-up 2018, he was awesome: a 3.07 ERA, a KBO-Haderesque 21.7% strikeout rate, and only 4.9% walks. He followed it up with a solid 2019, though a little worse after adjusting for the overall run-scoring environment: 18% strikeout rate, 5.6% walks, and tremendous home run suppression. Read the rest of this entry »

It happens so fast, sometimes. A moment ago, two runs behind, the game seemed almost over, the stadium lethargic; too much of the same thing has already happened this season. The Mariners have trailed almost the entire game after the Twins got to Doug Fister early. Only two months in, and they’ve already seen eight walk-off losses, 14 losses that came down to the game’s final plate appearance. They’ve had an eight-game losing streak. And who’s up this inning? No one to inspire. Jose Lopez, Josh Wilson, Rob Johnson. Edge-of-your-seat kinds of baseball guys.

But Jose Lopez hits a double into the right field corner, and Josh Wilson slaps a single up the middle, and all of a sudden, there is hope. It’s 5-4, nobody out, and the go-ahead run is coming to the plate.

***

Today is Monday. On Saturday, the Mariners played the Angels in Anaheim; Félix Hernández pitched eight innings, allowing only a single run, but the Mariners batters failed to back him up with anything more than a single run of their own. After walking Hideki Matsui, the first batter of the Angels ninth, Hernández gave way to Brandon League — who, after a scoreless ninth and top of the 10th, ended the game by allowing a grand slam to Kendrys Morales. On Sunday, still playing the Angels, the Mariners led 7-2 in the fifth. But a gradual crumble led to a final death-blow — a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. Another walk-off loss for Seattle. They returned home defeated and demoralized. Here, now, the tables are turned. One win can’t erase the memory of all the losses. But it can, for a moment, give everyone something to celebrate — give everyone something meaningful to hold on to. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, conflicting reports regarding the state of Major League Baseball’s ongoing effort to contract and realign the minor leagues surfaced. While Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper and the Associated Press both reported that MLB is nearing an agreement with Minor League Baseball that would result in the loss of 42 affiliated teams, MiLB countered with a statement disputing the accuracy of the reports. Regardless of exactly where things stand in the negotiations, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic endangering the entirety of the 2020 minor league season, some thinning of the herd appears likely.

While I’ve lived in New York City for 25 years and attended hundreds of Yankees games and dozens of Mets games in both recreational and professional capacities, I grew up on minor league baseball, primarily in Salt Lake City, where I lived from 1973-88 (and where my parents still reside), and Walla Walla, Washington, where my paternal grandparents lived and where I visited for several summers in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Thus I’m all too familiar with the pain that comes from a city losing its minor league affiliate — and two of the 42 teams reportedly on the chopping block hit close to home, both my current one and the one of my youth.

When I began attending games circa 1977-78, the Salt Lake Gulls were the Triple-A affiliate of the California Angels, and part of the storied, high-scoring Pacific Coast League. They featured future big leaguers like Willie Aikens, Rance Mulliniks, and Dickie Thon, all of whom Angels general manager Buzzie Bavasi made sure to trade away for aging veterans (not without some success), a pattern that continued through the remainder of the two teams’ relationship. While I had no affinity for the big club, I enjoyed following the careers of the aforementioned players and their successors, like Tom Brunansky and Brian Harper, as they fanned out across the majors.

My father would take my brother and me to a few Gulls games each year — often against the Albuquerque Dukes, the Dodgers’ Triple-A team and therefore of considerable interest in our household — and highlights from those games still stick out, particularly from 1979, the year they won the PCL championship. In one game we attended, Ike Hampton, a catcher-turned-designated hitter who clubbed 30 home runs for the Gulls that year, bookended a 17-inning epic with a pair of homers, though I was safely tucked in bed by the time the latter landed. In another game, Floyd Rayford, a third baseman whom Earl Weaver later used as a backup catcher, mashed a dramatic eighth-inning three-run homer that turned a 4-2 deficit into a 5-4 lead, creating pandemonium; we could have turned cartwheels all the way home. Once my fascination with baseball statistics had begun, I’d pore over the Gulls’ daily box scores and update a hand-kept stat sheet, annexing my mother’s pocket calculator to figure out batting averages and ERAs. A few years later, I’d even apply rudimentary Bill James formulas to calculate runs created, though this involved some guesstimation when it came to counting walks via a standard four-numbered box score (AB R H BI). Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the World Series started to look more like modern baseball. The best hitters batted more, the worst pitchers threw less, and there were fewer bunts than ever. Did that modernization continue into the 2000’s? Uh, nope!

2001

Here we are, at the World Series that led me to this article series in the first place. The Diamondbacks were an oddly constructed team; stars and scrubs to an extreme degree. They didn’t help things by batting Tony Womack and his 66 wRC+ in leadoff, and Mark Grace was overqualified in the seven spot, but this team simply didn’t have much offensive firepower outside of Luis Gonzalez and Reggie Sanders, who batted third and fourth respectively. Grace over Craig Counsell in the two hole would have helped, surely, but offense wasn’t this team’s calling card.

The Yankees had the same efficient lineup as always. Jeter held down the oft-misused second spot, Chuck Knoblauch remained an underqualified leadoff hitter, and everyone else was roughly where they should be. It’s still hard to know whether they got there on purpose or by accident — Knoblauch somehow got 600 PA as a no-bat left fielder/DH — but for the most part, they had good hitters batting where they should.

In Game 1, the 90’s came back in the most predictable way. Womack led off the third inning by getting hit. Counsell followed up with a sacrifice bunt — which Luis Gonzalez followed with a homer. Nice bunt! It had been a tie game, but still: third inning, no outs. That’s a pretty bad one.

Aside from that, the 9-1 blowout was more or less uninteresting. The Yankees indulged in a few intentional walks, but they were in spots that felt somewhat do-or-die; down three and four runs, to be precise. Bob Brenly pulled Curt Schilling after 102 pitches and 7 innings, and he used back-of-the-pen relievers to protect an eight run lead. By the book, as it were. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball players continued to get bigger and stronger throughout the 1990s — by various legal and illegal means — the game was changing rapidly. Starting pitchers began throwing with ever increasing velocity. Meanwhile, a decrease in a typical starting pitcher’s innings per game, a heavier reliance on the bullpen, and a greater likelihood of injury — all trends that continue in today’s game — were all becoming part of this new era of baseball.

While the game became more favorable towards hitters, many of the best pitching performances during this era are legendary. Here’s a look back at how the AL Cy Young winners of the 1990s were acquired.

After a successful 10 year stint with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that drafted him in the first round (20th pick overall) of the 1977 amateur draft, Bob Welch was traded to the Oakland Athletics following the 1986 season in a three-team, eight-player deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets. The A’s, believing they were a team on the rise and close to playoff contention, fulfilled an offseason goal of adding a veteran starting pitcher to pair with Dave Stewart, who had just had his first of what would end up being four consecutive 20-win seasons.

In his debut season with the A’s, Welch won a career-high 17 games, helping his team capture a division title and a World Series appearance. This was followed by another 17-win season that ended with a World Series championship in 1989. While he would spend another five seasons in the majors, 1990 would be one for the ages.

With assistance from one of the best bullpens in the game and, arguably, the best offense, the 33-year-old Welch won an astounding 27 games in 35 starts. But he also had a sub-3.00 ERA and allowed two earned runs or fewer in 60% of his starts, making it easy for his teammates to finish the game with a lead.

Sure, it was clear to most observers that Roger Clemens was the best pitcher in baseball. But that was no longer a huge story. He had already won two Cy Young awards and wasn’t slowing down a bit. As can happen, even today, voters will focus on the shiny new thing. In this case, that would be the “27 wins,” which hadn’t been achieved since Steve Carlton did it in 1972 and hasn’t been accomplished since. Read the rest of this entry »