Recently, I was listening to one of my favorite non-baseball podcasts when baseball unexpectedly cropped up. Well, the theory of skin in the game cropped up. The idea, espoused by many people but notably by Nassim Taleb, is that actors perform better when they get rewarded for a good outcome and punished for a bad outcome. Want a better doctor? Fine them if they misdiagnose a patient, but give them a bonus for prescribing the correct treatment. Better money manager? Force them to invest all their own money alongside their client. You get the idea.
Anyway, one example of skin not being in the game is a sports team playing out the string. For most teams at most times, sports is a very skin-in-the-game-intensive field. If you hit well, you get paid more. If you don’t, you might get sent to the minors. If your team wins, they make the playoffs. If the team doesn’t win, no postseason. The incentives are straightforward.
At the end of a long season, however, it might not feel that way. If you’re 50-100 in late September, the rewards of a good game aren’t that high, and the cost of a bad game is quite low. If you’re 15 games out in the race, being 16 games out won’t suddenly bring out the detractors. You can think of these teams as having no skin in the game; the result of one game won’t change anything for them. Read the rest of this entry »
Hunter Greene started the 2022 season off with a bang. An audible one, if you were sitting near home plate: Greene topped out at 102.6 mph in his second start of the year, averaged nearly 101 mph on his fastball, and generally looked like an entirely new type of pitcher, a starter with closer velocity.
A funny thing has happened since, though. That fastball didn’t play out quite how you’d expect. After those initial two starts, Greene lost a bit of zip on the pitch, and hitters stopped missing it. He drew 21 swings and misses in his first two major league outings; it took him another six starts to match that total. After walking just two hitters in those first two starts, he walked eight in his next two. It was time for an adjustment.
Consider that adjustment made. In his last seven starts, Greene looks like a top-flight major league starter again. He’s striking out a third of the batters he faces, walking less than 10%, and pitching to a 3.20 ERA (and 3.47 FIP) beginning with his May 10 start against Milwaukee. He’s going deeper into starts. And after the Brewers tormented him for five home runs on May 5, he’s allowed only five in these last seven starts over nearly 40 innings of work. How has the starter with the fastest fastball in the game done it? Exactly how you’d expect – by de-emphasizing his fastball and leaning on his best pitch, an upper-80s slider. Read the rest of this entry »
For as much slack as Tyler Anderson and Tony Gonsolin have been picking up in the Dodgers rotation lately, the news that Walker Buehler will miss a large chunk of the remainder of the season is a gut punch. The 27-year-old righty departed Friday night’s start against the Giants with elbow discomfort — his second early exit in a row — and after undergoing an MRI on Saturday was diagnosed with a flexor tendon strain. He will be shut down completely for six to eight weeks before restarting a throwing program, all but guaranteeing that he won’t see major league activity again until September.
Buehler struck out the side in the third inning on Friday night, but via MLB.com’s Juan Toribio, he “noticed something was bothering him after throwing a breaking ball” during the frame. While he made it through that inning and the fourth, his discomfort increased. Said manager Dave Roberts afterwards, “Certain discomforts you can manage through, where this one tonight, clearly he felt that any more could potentially be damaging.”
Coming off the best season of his career, Buehler had not pitched well lately, though he said on Friday that he didn’t believe the injury was linked to his previous woes. His overall 4.02 ERA (100 ERA-) is the highest of his career excluding his cup-of-coffee 2017 stint, and a full run per nine above his career mark, while his 3.83 FIP (96 FIP-) is only his second time above 3.16; he was at 4.36 in 2020, a season during which he made just eight starts due to recurrent blisters on his right index and middle fingers. Read the rest of this entry »
Ezequiel Tovar came into the season ranked as the No. 4 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system. Despite being just 20 years old, he might finish it in the big leagues. In 229 plate appearances with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats, Tovar is slashing .317/.393/.579 with a 165 wRC+. Moreover, he has a dozen home runs and has swiped 16 bases in 17 attempts.
His calling card is his glove. Described by our own Eric Longenhagen as “a no-doubt shortstop with balletic defensive footwork and a well-calibrated internal clock.” Tovar had received similar rave reviews from MLB scouts in the Arizona Fall League. And that was before he blossomed with the bat.
I asked Yard Goats manager Chris Denorfia about the offensive strides that have elevated Tovar’s profile.
“Coming into this year, I was told that there was some chase on down-and-away sliders,” said Denorfia, who played 10 big-league seasons. “But I haven’t seen what everybody was talking about. Somewhere between the Fall League and this spring, he’s made this developmental jump. Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase. Whether you call it slowing the game down, or just having enough reps, he’s made that adjustment. It was probably the one thing that was holding him back, which is kind of weird to say, because he was only 19 last year.”
The discipline is reflected in the numbers. Despite being one the youngest players in his league, Tovar possesses a 9.6 walk-rate and a 22.3% K-rate. When you add his improved pop to the equation, it’s easy to see why speculation of a call-up — premature that it may be — has begun to grow legs. Read the rest of this entry »
I thought this week couldn’t get any better. I got to write about bunts, one of my favorite things to do, and about the Giants picking up tiny edges, another personal favorite. I got to write about Yordan Alvarez and how people underrate him; now I can cross that off my yearly to-do list. But Thursday took the cake. Have you seen this nonsense?
"When was the last time you saw somebody intentionally walked on 1-2?"
I love writing about bad intentional walks. I love writing about bad managerial decisions. But I can’t really wrap my head around this one, hard as I try. Let’s try to do the math, such as it is, while keeping in mind that no amount of math is going to make this make sense.
Let’s start at the top. Trea Turner is an excellent hitter, and Bennett Sousa is a lefty. Turner boasts average platoon splits for his career. Sousa has hardly pitched in the majors, so let’s just consider him an average lefty. With a runner on second and two outs, passing up an excellent righty hitter against your lefty pitcher is standard operating procedure. Read the rest of this entry »
Since the day he was selected with the second pick of the 2018 draft out of Georgia Tech, Joey Bart was considered the heir apparent to Buster Posey. His progress to the majors was closely tracked, and when Posey opted out of playing during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season for family reasons, Bart arrived in the majors ahead of schedule. When Posey retired suddenly last fall after a stellar age-34 season, all eyes turned to Bart as well. His major league career thus far hasn’t gone as hoped, however, and on Wednesday the Giants optioned the struggling backstop to Triple-A Sacramento.
With Posey putting together an All-Star season as he helped the Giants to a franchise record 107 wins, Bart was left with some oversized shoes to fill, but he began the season with great fanfare, homering on Opening Day off the Marlins’ Sandy Alcantara. Alas, the 25-year-old backstop has hit a meager .156/.296/.300 with four homers in 108 plate appearances overall. He started 21 of the team’s first 34 games, capped by a ninth-inning homer off Albert Pujols (!) on May 15, but after that, he started just eight of 20 games, going 2-for-25 with 15 strikeouts.
Particularly with the team going 9–11 in that span, and 3–5 in the games Bart started, the Giants felt some adjustments were in order, and that they would best be made in the minors. Via The Athletic’s Andrew Baggarly, president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi said, “Our sense was it was weighing a little more on Joey. It’s one thing to be struggling and still feel like the team is firing on all cylinders. That allows you to be in a better mindset. But when it starts weighing a little more, an intervention makes sense.”
Via the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser, Zaidi said, “We still think Joey is an everyday catcher… In the broader scheme of things, we thought it made sense to get him a little bit of a reset. We’re very open to the notion that at-bats at Triple-A out of the spotlight can help get a guy on track.”
Via MLB.com’s Maria Guardado, manager Gabe Kapler reiterated the team’s commitment to Bart but said, “The number one message is that he has some adjustments that he needs to make.” More:
Kapler said the Giants would like to see Bart even out his shoulders and hips, as well as have more of a gather on his front side to help him cut down on some of the swing-and-miss in his game and tap into more of his right-handed power. The first order of action, though, will be to give Bart a bit of a breather following one of the more challenging stretches of his young career.
As for that swing-and-miss, while Bart’s overall 81 wRC+ is nothing to write home about, it’s only three points below the major league average for all catchers. Of much greater concern is his 45.4% strikeout rate, the highest of any player with at least 100 PA:
Minimum 100 plate appearances. All statistics through June 7.
In the 74 plate appearances in which he’s reached two strikes, Bart has hit just .060/.160/.104; that’s 4-for-67 with eight walks, a homer, and a 66.1% strikeout rate. That’s not much better than what major league pitchers hit with two strikes on them in 2019 (.076/.103/.093) while striking out 67.8% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Two weeks ago, the Angels beat the Rangers to climb to 27–17 and pull within a game of the AL West-leading Astros. While they had slipped out of first place in the midst of a four-game losing streak earlier that week, they owned the league’s fourth-best record and appeared to be on track to make the playoffs for the first time since 2014. They haven’t won since, however, and with their losing streak reaching 12 games, on Tuesday they fired manager Joe Maddon and named Phil Nevin as interim manager for the remainder of the season, then dropped their 13th straight game with a 10-inning loss to the Red Sox.
The losing streak is the longest in the majors this year and the longest single-season skid in franchise history; it matches a wraparound streak of 13 straight that spanned from late 1988 to early ’89 (a stretch that encompassed the entirety of the Moose Stubing managerial era, such as it was). The current streak, which offsets what had been the team’s best 44-game start since 2004, has dropped the Angels to 27–30, 9.5 games behind the first-place Astros and 2.5 out of the third Wild Card spot. Their Playoff Odds, which stood at 77% before the streak began, with a 20.1% chance of winning the division and a 3.6% chance of winning the World Series, are down to 26.7%, with a 1.9% chance at the division and a 0.7% chance of winning the World Series.
The Angels were outscored 78–35 over the 12 games that preceded Maddon’s firing. Few things were going right at either end, as they allowed 6.5 runs per game and scored a hair under three per game, though four of those losses were by a single run (as was Tuesday’s post-firing defeat). A few major factors have contributed to the slide, including Mike Trout’s ill-timed slump, a couple of key injuries, and a particularly rough schedule. Read the rest of this entry »
Coming into 2022, Mike Yastrzemski was something of a cipher. Was he a late bloomer who suddenly learned how to hit? From 2019 through the 2021 All Star break, he was excellent, to the tune of a .266/.350/.514 slash line, a 128 wRC+, and 48 homers in 932 plate appearances. Or was he old news, a flash in the pan that pitchers developed a counter for? In the second half last year, he hit .212/.281/.483, struck out nearly 30% of the time, and generally looked like the career minor leaguer he’d been before 2019.
This year, he’s been back on track, and it’s largely been due to a better on-base percentage. Some of that is striking out less; he’s turned in a career-low swinging-strike rate and career low strikeout rate to go along with it. Just as importantly, though, he’s doing better on balls in play, and doing so partially by bunting — something of a San Francisco specialty this year.
In the first 300 games of his career, Yastrzemski bunted ten times. That generally tracks; he’s not particularly fast and hits for power. Why would he do anything other than clock balls over the fence — or, in spacious Oracle Park, into triples alley and off the wall? In fact, you might think that 10 bunts was 10 too many, if it weren’t for the fact that he turned six of them into hits.
This year, he’s put that plan into overdrive, with three bunt hits already after a third of a season. He’s been part of a concerted San Francisco bunting effort so far this year. The team has gone after shifts that don’t respect bunting ability by targeting them early and often, and its captain, Brandon Belt, is something of a bunting enthusiast himself. In fact, the Giants lead baseball in bunt hits, with 11, despite having exactly zero of the 75 fastest runners in baseball this year, per Statcast’s sprint speed leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »
Alex Bregman has a reputation for being a studious hitter. Moreover, he has a well-earned reputation for being a productive hitter. The 28-year-old Houston Astros third baseman boasts a .371 wOBA and a 139 wRC+ in just over 3,000 career plate appearances. At his best, he’s been a beast; in 2019, he slugged 41 home runs and slashed a robust .296/.423/.592.
Recent seasons have seen Bregman perform below his pre-pandemic standards, but even with the downturn he’s been putting up solid numbers. His wRC+ since the start of the 2020 season is equal to this year’s 117. Still in his prime from an age standpoint, he remains a feared hitter in the middle of the Houston lineup.
Bregman talked hitting when the Astros visited Fenway Park in mid-May.
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David Laurila: How would you describe your approach to hitting?
Alex Bregman: “The most important thing is knowing what kind of hitter you are [and] knowing what’s going to make you successful. I think that swinging at pitches you can do damage with is extremely important. I think that taking pitches that you can’t do damage with is extremely important. In my best years, I’ve swung the least, while in my worst years I’ve swung the most. I’ve put balls in play that I shouldn’t be putting in play, because they weren’t pitches that I can do damage on.”
Laurila: How can a hitter go about controlling that? A swing decision is something that happens in a blink of an eye.
Bregman: “Good hitters can recognize when pitches are coming into that zone. They can do that early and be able to make a decision, ‘yes or no,’ pretty quickly.”
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
