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In his spartan hitting facility in a San Fernando Valley industrial park near Los Angeles, private hitting instructor Doug Latta said something of a hitting “think tank” developed.

There in a windowless, warehouse-like structure that encased two batting cages and a gym, Latta, a former high-school coach — along with other hitting instructors from the private to amateur and professional ranks — gathered on the Astro-turf carpet on fold-out chairs to discuss their craft. Latta kept about 30 chairs on hand for larger crowds. Don Slaught, a former major leaguer turned instructor, was a frequent visitor and in one meeting debuted his swing analysis computer system, Right View Pro. Greg Walker, who had served as a hitting coach with the White Sox and Braves, was another regular contributor. During one meeting, he told a story about how a new player had asked him a question. His response: “I don’t know, let’s go to the cage and find out.” That story resonated with Latta. He saw it was not about knowing all and having an answer for everything. Rather, coaching was about searching for an answer that works for a hitter.

In conversation with FanGraphs last week, Latta said there was “flow” during the talks. The meetings exposed what Latta describes as a “big hole” in how hitting is taught at all levels of the game. Those conversations, combined with thousands of hours of working with hitters and poring over video, led Latta to a hitting philosophy.

In simplistic terms, the philosophy is this: the optimum swing plane is an uppercut, which is often at odds with much of conventional wisdom. The principles are basic: stay square, stay balanced, stay relaxed, and get the ball in the air.

The philosophy helped two of Latta’s clients, Justin Turner and Marlon Byrd – for Byrd it was between PED suspensions – reach new levels of performance.

Others, like J.D. Martinez and Josh Donaldson have found success, through a similar philosophy – based largely on getting balls in the air – by working with private instructors. Donaldson credited so much of his success to his swing change that he chose his private instructor – Bobby Tewksbary – to pitch to him in the 2015 Home Run Derby.

The 2013 Oakland A’s won 96 games in part via a fly-ball approach, posting the top ratio on record since GB/FB metrics have been tracked. A fly-ball swing plane is especially effective against two-seam, sinking fastballs, as noted in The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. Despite these successes, Latta’s philosophy, and those similar to it, haven’t been widely adopted in professional baseball.

“You would be surprised at how much resistance [exists],” Latta said. “We talk about swing planes, how we initiate the swing, getting the ball in the air. That stuff is antithetical to most people out there doing training.”

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Sixty-three plate appearances into his big-league career, Colin Walsh is two percentage points above batting average oblivion. A Rule 5 pick by the Milwaukee Brewers a year ago, the switch-hitting utility man logged just four hits in 47 official at bats. That computes to .085, which is as bad as it looks. Over the last 100 years, 5,842 non-pitchers have come to the plate at least 60 times, and only Enrique Cruz (.083) has a lower mark.

Walsh is a bit sheepish about his BA — he has an ego like the rest of us — but don’t expect him to lose any sleep over it. He intends to get back to The Show, and even if he doesn’t, he’s proud of where he’s been.

“No one can take away the fact that I played in the major leagues,” said Walsh, who inked a minor league deal with the Atlanta Braves over the offseason. “In and of itself, that is a great accomplishment. If it ends up being my only major league experience, it’s still something that 99.99999 percent of people who ever played baseball haven’t done. I don’t think struggling in the major leagues is something I’ll go through life being looked down upon for.”

His career was on the upswing a year ago. Blessed with impeccable plate discipline, he’d earned the Rule 5 opportunity by slashing .302/.447/.470 for Oakland’s Double-A affiliate in 2015. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cincinnati Reds. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Cincinnati produced the worst BaseRuns record in the majors last year, tied with a very rebuilding Philadelphia team. The club’s field players weren’t really the problem, however, recording just a few wins less than a league-average unit.

The projections here reflect the general competence of the club’s position players. After Joey Votto (592 PA, 4.6 zWAR), who unsuprisingly receives the top wins forecast in the organization, there exists a collection of reasonably useful pieces. The front office probably deserves credit, in fact, for some of its discoveries. Adam Duvall (549, 1.9), Scott Schebler (564, 1.7), and Eugenio Suarez (608, 2.3) all profile as roughly league-average types, for example, despite having appeared on zero top-100 lists collectively as prospects.

This isn’t to suggest that there’s no room for improvement among the batting types here, but rather that “average” is probably not an unreasonable outcome for this group.

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One of the most interesting aspects of the Rich Hill story was his decision to break from convention and make his curveball – one of the game’s most effective pitches – his primary offering, a decision about which I wrote earlier this week.

That decision was one of a number of factors that has led to Hill’s late-career resurgence. As you’re probably aware, Hill led all major-league pitchers in curveball usage (49.7%) last season, throwing it more often than his fastball (47.2%). By this standard, Hill is an outlier. Conventional wisdom in baseball stipulates that the fastball should be the primary pitch for just about every arm. Rejecting that wisdom allowed Hill to become one of the most productive per-inning pitchers last season — and to receive a three-year, $48-million contract this offseason despite a limited track record of success.

The only regret Hill might have is that he didn’t change things earlier. What would Hill wish he had told a younger version of himself?

It’s that question which brings me to talented young Phillies starting pitcher Aaron Nola. Nola isn’t left-handed like Hill. His curveball doesn’t have quite the same shape. It is, perhaps, the next best thing to Hill’s curveball among major-league starters, however, depending upon how you judge performance and aesthetic beauty. It’s certainly part of a small group and a candidate in the discussion.

The curve tracks so well horizontally it made Jose Bautista flinch:

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The St. Louis Cardinals’ former director of amateur scouting, Chris Correa, is serving 46 months in jail for gaining unauthorized access to the Astros’ player information/evaluation database, codenamed Ground Control. A few days ago, MLB announced St. Louis’s penalty: they’d have to send $2 million and their top two draft picks to Houston.

From a network-security perspective, the case is interesting. It illustrates how difficult true network security really is, which raises the strong possibility that another team will attempt this in the future (if indeed one isn’t doing it right now).

Here’s a timeline of the incident up until it was made public:

• March 2013 – April 2014: Correa accesses Ground Control using passwords of various Astros staff. (Source: David Barron and Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle.)
• June 2014: Deadspin posts leaked documents that were retrieved from Ground Control, mostly regarding trades or potential trades during the 2013 season. This action causes the Astros to contact MLB, who contacts the FBI to begin an investigation into the breach. (Source: Derrick Goold and Robert Partrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)
• June 2015: Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times reports that the Cardinals are the prime suspects in this investigation.

Why didn’t the Astros detect the unauthorized access themselves? I don’t know anything about how they ran their security team, so I can only speculate. But I do have several years of experience in the network-security industry. I’ll use those to provide a perspective.

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The St. Louis Cardinals lack stars. Sure, Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright are well known and remain solid even as they age. Sure, Matt Carpenter has developed into an important member of the club. In terms of big-time production, though, the Cardinals have few options upon which they can reasonably rely.

Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for the Cardinals support this observation: per ZiPS, no position player on the St. Louis roster is likely to produce more than 3.1 WAR in 2017; only one pitcher is projected for more than 2.1 wins. That pitcher — and, incidentally, the only player on the Cardinals whom one might reasonably classify as a “star” — is Carlos Martinez.

Yesterday, the Cardinals very wisely locked that star up. Martinez and the club agreed to a five-year extension worth a guaranteed $51 million. The deal includes two options that could keep Martinez in St. Louis through 2023 and buy out four years of free agency, leading to a possible total value of $85.5 million.

A week ago, I suggested that the Wil Myers deal — for six years, $83 million guaranteed — indicated that extensions for players who possessed more than three and less than four years of service time might become a lot more expensive. This contract appears to provide evidence to the contrary.

In that post I noted that, among such position players, only five had recently reached contract extensions — and that those were either upside bets on riskier players like Michael Brantley and Josh Harrison or big-money contracts for big-time players like Freddie Freeman. The one contract in the middle involved Dee Gordon and his five-year deal for $50 million, an agreement that also includes an option. Martinez’s contract is like Gordon’s, except with an additional free-agent year surrendered by the player.

On the pitching side, meanwhile, there’s virtually no precedent for this type of deal.

Martinez’s deal breaks the record for biggest guarantee to a starting pitcher entering arbitration, a distinction which previously belonged to Corey Kluber after he was guaranteed $38.5 million heading into the 2015 season. That deal might also potentially last seven seasons. At the time, however, Kluber was a super-2 player. He was entering arbitration for the first time, but he was still four years from free agency, unlike Martinez’s three. He was also coming off a Cy Young Award and heading into his age-29 season, meaning he was four years older than Martinez is now. Kluber’s deal provided some guaranteed income, but also gave away all of his prime years: he won’t be a free agent until after his age-35 season.

That isn’t the case for Martinez, who enters just his age-25 season. Even if all of the options are exercised, Martinez will still head to free agency after his age-31 season, the same age as Zack Greinke when he signed his $206 million deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

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The Angels, Mariners, and Rangers are all situated within a game of each other in FanGraphs’ projected standings.

The Blue Jays, Orioles, Royals, Tigers, and Yankees are also all bunched together with the those AL West clubs, all situated within in just three games of each other, suggesting there could be a crowded and parity-laden AL Wild Card race.

Any added value could be significant. For the Texas Rangers, there might be good news on that front. A full season of Jonathan Lucroy – who was acquired last summer – could offer additional benefits for Texas beyond the 3.7 WAR projected for him in the ZiPS forecasts.

Earlier this week, Texas Rangers manager Jeff Banister was asked by the Dallas Morning News about the benefits of Lucroy having a full season to work with the Rangers pitching staff.

“I think that it’s definitely going to be a benefit. He’s going to be able to learn the core guys that were here last year a little better. Obviously there’s some new guys coming in, but just to put his stamp and his brand on what he likes to do behind the plate and how he likes to call a guy. But we had a guy in Robinson Chirinos behind the plate that was a quality catcher too that helped these guys out. But I think the addition of Lucroy and what he’ll be able to do, just him as a hitter but also his game planning and our overall philosophy all year long will be a plus.”

To quantify all the ways Lucroy and the Rangers might benefit from Lucroy’s ability to work with his pitchers in February rather than on the fly in August is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Last season, was a different kind of year for Lucroy.

Consider: from 2011 to 2015, Lucroy never caught more than 22 different pitchers in any given season. In 2016, meanwhile, Lucroy caught 40 different pitchers, including 18 new Rangers teammates after coming over from the deadline.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / Oakland / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

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Only four Mets field players recorded a WAR figure of 2.0 or greater in 2016. According to Dan Szymborski’s computer, six different Mets might be expected to reach that mark in 2017. Yoenis Cespedes (596 PA, 4.1 zWAR) receives the club’s top projection by a full win — and three of the club’s top-four forecasts overall belong to outfielders. One of those additional outfielders is Curtis Granderson (538, 2.3). The other isn’t presumptive right-field starter Jay Bruce (583, 1.2) but rather Michael Conforto (558, 3.0). Conforto, in other words, appears to be a markedly superior option.

ZiPS doesn’t account for the nature of David Wright’s (331, 1.1) injury over the past couple seasons, only that he’s missed time because of it. Following two abbreviated seasons, Wright unsurprisingly earns a muted playing-time projection for 2017. The rate numbers are predictably modest relative to Wright’s best seasons. He still appears to profile as an average player, though, when he’s on the field.

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The easiest yes you’ll get in sports is by asking anyone on the field if spring training should be shorter. They agree almost unanimously. The players especially think so, since they’ve been working all offseason, too. The days of coming into town 15 pounds overweight and stepping on the mound or to the plate for the first time in months — those are long gone. Players have been working since after Thanksgiving, and maybe even earlier in some cases.

Players like Jason Heyward, who just came off the worst year of his career with the bat, might have been working even harder. There’s so much to prove. At least in Heyward’s case, the problem might be obvious and the solution seems to be in hand. At least theoretically.

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“I’m a completely different hitter from each side of the plate,” Hank Conger told me one time. He went on to describe how he had more loft in his swing from one side. Switch-hitter Billy Burns said about the same thing, speculating that his relative lack of experience hitting from the left side was the cause for his lack of power on contact from that side. “My muscles aren’t as strong there,” he told me in July of 2015. Even if a player is capable of hitting — even hitting well — from both sides of the plate, that doesn’t mean he’s the same type of hitter from both sides. Subtle differences are bound to be present.

All of this may explain a strange thing that happened to Jonathan Villar last year.

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