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Kevin Gregg didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps. Eric Gregg — one of the first African-American umpires to work in the major leagues — called balls and strikes in the National League from 1975-1999. Kevin graduated from James Madison University with a degree in Sports Management, and is now the Senior Director of Media Relations for the Boston Red Sox.

While his late father plays a big role, he wasn’t the initial impetus when I approached Gregg for this story. Rather, I’d been thinking about how different people follow baseball in different ways. Not everyone has the same relationship with the game, nor the same perspectives on it.

When you’re in Gregg’s position, you watch a lot of baseball, and you do so studiously, through a unique lens.

“I’m at about 130 of the regular-season games, and I’m watching every single pitch,” explained Gregg. “I’m scoring the game, literally writing everything down. Being into every pitch is part of my job. I need to know what issues may come up for the players, or for the manager, who meets with the media on a daily basis. What were the strategies that worked and didn’t work? There’s also the baseball information side — getting game notes ready.” Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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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From the case of Rich Hill, I’m not sure one could learn any lessons. For one thing, he still has more time to pitch, so his final chapters are unwritten. But even if Hill is already underwater, so what? No one needs to be told that there are risks inherent in committing to a free agent 37-year-old. And it’s not like anyone else is following the Rich Hill career path. His case is unique. What matters for him might not apply to anyone else. Everything about what he is is atypical, and so we stand to learn about Hill and Hill only.

It is fair to say, though, there are things to be learned. The Dodgers are probably anxious to learn them, because they’re counting on Hill, and he’s not pulling his weight. Now, no one thought Hill would throw 200 innings. I don’t think anyone expected 140. But here’s Hill now, at 35 innings after eight starts, eight starts in which he’s run up a 5+ ERA. Hill’s strikeouts have fallen and his walks have exploded, and Thursday in Cleveland saw him cough up seven runs. Rich Hill isn’t right, and although the Dodgers aren’t so worried about his June, they’d like to know if he’ll be fine by October. Something right now is borked up.

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“Grips are meaningless,” Oakland A’s starting pitcher Sonny Gray once told me. Maybe that’s why we haven’t yet had a good talk, despite calling the same clubhouse home half the time. He didn’t quite mean “meaningless,” it occurred to me, when we finally discussed his repertoire. But there’s another reason he’s found it difficult to talk the way pitchers often talk to me: He’s changing things from pitch to pitch, according to what he sees. That includes grips, finger pressure and pitching mix. It’s hard to say he’s been doing something different when he’s always doing something different.

It’s difficult to figure out the righty. His breaking balls, for example: One classifying system says he’s currently throwing more sliders than ever. One says he’s in a three-year high for curveballs. A third says he’s right about where he’s always been, but that his recent good stretch may have coincided with an increased use of his slider.

Is he throwing more sliders now that he’s healthy? Gray shrugs. “Even before I got hurt, I was throwing sliders, and I was throwing them at 88, 89 mph,” he says. No system has him throwing a breaking ball that hard. “Whatever people call the pitch is what they are going to call it. It’s a hard curveball, I guess. The grip is a little bit different, but it does have a curveball action.”

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Prior to covering professional baseball, I covered household expenses and built a meager savings by reporting on Clemson athletics for the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier. Clemson has typically been a fixture in the NCAA Tournament and in early June of 2010 I covered a bizarre scene at the regional in Auburn, Alabama.

One of Clemson’s star players was Kyle Parker, who was also the starting quarterback for the school’s football team. While playing quarterback at Clemson was the higher-profile amateur position, he was expected to choose baseball professionally, as he’d shot up draft boards that spring and was regarded as a potential first-round pick. On the opening night of the draft, Parker found himself also playing an NCAA Tournament regional elimination game against Auburn in Auburn.

Parker was the starting right fielder for Clemson, and Auburn had something of a party deck just beyond and above the right-field wall, where a rowdy collection of loyal Auburn partisans gathered. As a sort of preemptive measure, Parker approached the section of fans before the game and suggested they heckle him in any manner they chose, but he made one request: he ask they avoid one subject matter in their taunts and that was anything related to the draft.

Parker envisioned a scenario in which the fans out there distracted him while his team was on the field. “Hey, Kyle, you just went fifth overall!” “Hey, Kyle you’re really sliding!” Imagine the NFL draft taking place the night of the national title game. This was nearly the baseball equivalent.

In the middle of the seventh inning, a cheer went up during a rather innocuous, low-energy point in the game. It was audible throughout Plainsman Park. It had been produced by the Parker family, seated in the grandstands on the first-base side. The yelps indicated that Parker had been selected 26th overall by the Rockies, who at the time had a thing for college quarterbacks (See: Helton, Todd and Smith, Seth.) Earlier in the game, Parker had smashed a three-run homer, so maybe the whole life-changing-moment, life-changing-money thing hadn’t been so much of a distraction. Or maybe Parker was smart to make a personal appeal to the Auburn’s rowdiest contingent of fans. A similar situation played out this past Monday night, as University of Florida Friday night starter Alex Faedo was selected 18th overall by the Tigers while his Gators were in the midst of an NCAA Tournament game.

I will hardly be the first or last person to question the awkward timing of the amateur baseball draft. Baseball faces a number of challenges related to the draft given that it has its own feeder system (the minor leagues) to consider, while the NFL and NBA largely use colleges to develop much of their future talent. Major League Baseball probably has little interest in pushing back the draft and losing weeks of potential development time with minor-league seasons underway and short-season ball on the verge of beginning. College baseball, for its part, has shown little interest in changing its schedule. While the sport might benefit from holding its postseason when school is still in session and students are on campus, cool early-spring weather already puts Northern schools at a disadvantage.

While the timing of the draft isn’t the most pressing issue facing college or professional baseball, it is the most obvious portal through which to view the imperfect relationship between MLB and college.

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Last year, Brian Dozier hit 42 home runs for the Twins. He’d never hit 30 before that, so it was fair to wonder if the power was repeatable. Earlier this year, he was on pace for a total much more similar to his career norms… and yet some of the factors we used to look at last year’s home runs suggest that he should have recorded more homers this year already. Notably, Andrew Perpetua’s xStats metric indicated last week that Dozier had an expected home-run tally that was four homers higher than his actual number.

I was curious about it, so I decided to go directly to the source. Before a recent Twins-Giants game in San Francisco, I made a trip to the visitor’s clubhouse with video of the longest fly balls that Dozier has hit this year. “Where are those missing home runs?” I asked him.

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What follows is my last attempt to mock out the first round of the 2017 amateur draft. It’s mostly names with teams and nothing more, but I’ve included exposition where I think it’s merited. I’ll update it as information flows throughout the day, perhaps several times. Players have been assigned to teams based on multiple factors: rumors I’ve heard from various industry sources, the presence of front-office members at certain games (especially lately), each club’s own particular modus operandi, etc. Be sure to check out our draft rankings here. Chris Mitchell and I will be covering the draft live here.

1. Minnesota – Brendan McKay, 1B/LHP, Lousiville
I’ve heard JSerra SS Royce Lewis was being considered above where I had him on my last mock (which was as a potential option at No. 3, mocked at No. 5) and MLB.com has reported that it’s at No. 1. Presumably, Lewis would be an underslot target. That said, he’s a Boras advisee and an option at third overall, whereas McKay’s next home is at pick No. 4, so I’m not sure how Minnesota has more negotiating leverage over Lewis than McKay. If they take Lewis, I think it’s just because they like him most and the savings will be marginal.

2. Cincinnati – Hunter Greene, RHP, Notre Dame HS (CA)

3. San Diego – MacKenzie Gore, LHP, Whiteville HS (NC)
Greene is the other option, if he’s still available, with Lewis as a dark horse.

4. Tampa Bay – Royce Lewis, SS, JSerra HS (CA)
I think McKay stops here if he falls. Alabama high school OF Bubba Thompson has been mentioned as an underslot possibility here.

Royce Lewis: now to Tampa Bay? (Photo: Bill Mitchell)

5. Atlanta – Kyle Wright, RHP, Vanderbilt
Wright is the top player on my board, and I think he’d be a steal here, but there’s a chance Atlanta goes underslot with Concordia Lutheran HS (TX) Shane Baz, UC Irvine 2B? Keston Hiura and Huntington Beach HS 1B Nick Pratto. They’ve also had North Carolina prep outfielder Austin Beck in to work out, but I think there’s less money to be saved there than with the other names. If Wright doesn’t go here, he should be considered the favorite at each pick until he does.

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Hundreds of college pitchers will be selected in the MLB draft over the next three days. They’ll vary widely in talent and readiness, ranging from raw power arms to pitchability-types lacking premium stuff. Many will be tied together by one commonality: heavy usage in college. Last year, I found that deep starts and meager rest stints are all-too-frequent occurrences for collegiate pitchers. Do the same standards apply to the cream of this year’s draft crop?

Let’s focus on the most coveted collegiate pitchers: the projected 2017 first-round draftees. First rounders capture fan attention, pepper prospect lists, and generally have the best shot at becoming solid MLB contributors. Big leaguers will be found in the later rounds, of course, but it’s the first rounders who are paid the most money and carry the highest expectations. So let’s look at the ten NCAA pitchers — starters all — projected by Baseball America to be selected in the first round this evening.

I pulled game logs from the NCAA’s statistics pages for each of the pitchers, capturing all of their pitch counts and batters-faced totals from their college careers (up through yesterday’s games). Where the NCAA was missing pitch counts, I recorded the data from game logs on team websites. For the few instances in which this secondary effort bore no fruit, I estimated pitch counts by taking the pitcher’s batters faced total in that game, and multiplying it times the average pitches per batters faced for that pitcher-season.

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The 2017 MLB Draft kicks off tonight at 7 p.m. ET, and the Minnesota Twins will have the first pick from what is generally considered to be a pretty a mediocre class. And how the rest of the draft goes depends on how the Twins answer one pretty simple question: can a high-end MLB player really contribute as both a hitter and a pitcher?

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Daniel Norris has no illusions of being Clayton Kershaw, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to emulate him. Who wouldn’t? Kershaw is arguably baseball’s best pitcher, and — according to the Detroit Tigers southpaw — they share important characteristics. For those reasons, Norris watches “almost all of Kershaw’s starts,” and has for some time.

“I like watching him pitch,” Norris told me on Friday. “And because we’re similar, I can learn from him. He’s the best in the world — he’s Kershaw — but he’s a lefty, he’s typically 93-95, he’s got a slider that’s 88-90, he’s got a curveball that’s 73-76, and he’s started throwing a changeup. That’s four pitches that I throw, as well. If I can pick up something from the way he maybe throws his slider down-and-in more often than he goes backdoor… stuff like that. I like how he attacks hitters.”

Norris also likes how Kershaw, despite being elite, continues to evolve. He pointed to how the Dodgers ace has not only started throwing more changeups, he’s also “kind of dropping down from time to time, to give hitters different angles.” Norris has noticed subtle “delivery adjustments” over the years, where Kershaw appeared to be “working on mechanical rhythms and tempos.”

Norris is currently doing exactly that. Consistency and command have been issues for the 24-year-old former Toronto Blue Jay, and he feels that a work-in-progress tweak may help solve those woes. He described it as “kind of a higher leg kick, and getting a stronger front side.” One of the goals is a freer and easier delivery. Rather than being out there “trying not to walk guys,” he feels he needs to “not think about anything, just let it go and trust my stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »