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Last week, Ben Lindbergh wrote a piece titled “Baseball Has a ‘RedZone’ Channel” over at The Ringer. It was all about a script that Dan Hirsch wrote at The Baseball Gauge called MLB.TV Game Changer. Basically, if you’re watching MLB.TV in a web browser, this script will allow you to program your MLB.TV experience to skip to the action that you most want to see, and you can customize it in many different ways. Put succinctly, this blew my mind. So I spent the better part of a night playing with the script’s priority list.

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Richie Martin grew up in Tampa and plays in the Oakland A’s organization, but he has a lot of Detroit in him. The 21-year-old shortstop prospect was born in the Motor City and still has family there. There are baseball connections. Martin’s 74-year-old father was a high school teammate of Tigers legend Willie Horton — the two remain friends — and the youngster considers Chet Lemon a huge influence and “almost a second dad.”

Martin — the 20th-overall pick in the 2015 draft —played youth baseball for Lemon beginning when he was 12 years old. Not surprisingly, he’s friendly with the former centerfielder’s son, Marcus Lemon, who plays in the White Sox system. The two share more in common that athletic talent. Both are creative. Read the rest of this entry »

For the second straight year, I have been given the right to cast a vote for the National League Cy Young Award. Last year, the task of picking between three deserving winners was practically impossible, and I ended up going with Jake Arrieta over Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke by the thinnest of margins. After last year’s embarrassment of riches, however, it looks like this year, the choice will come down to picking between some candidates with some more obvious flaws.

Just going by runs allowed, there’s a big pile of guys who have all been roughly similar in value.

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I hadn’t planned on talking to Zack Greinke about the game he’d started the night before, but then, for the second time in his career and the first time since his rookie year, he went six innings and recorded only one strikeout. It was a win for the team, but maybe not his finest game, that one against the Giants on Tuesday night. So I had to say something. “They make a lot of contact,” he grumbled, “but it wasn’t ideal.”

When I asked him if anything was different, he shrugged. “Against guys like Denard Span, Ben Revere, Buster Posey, I’m not going to spend a lot of pitches going for the strikeout. They make too much contact.”

We’ve heard this sort of thing before, of course. Pitching to contact is even espoused as a general philosophy by some organizations. But it’s a little surprising to hear from this pitcher, who regularly strikes out 200 batters a year, even if he’s told us before that pitching to FIP — pitching to limit the walks and increase the strikeouts — just led to hard contact in the zone.

He also gave us a name! Denard Span, he of the 3.7% career swinging strike rate, good for 11th-best overall since he’s been in the league. Span, because of his contact-oriented skill st, has forced Greinke to approach him differently.

So let’s look at Greinke’s plan against Span this past Tuesday and see what he was trying to do.

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If you follow baseball at any level, pitch counts are a part of your life. Some people hate them, some people think they need to be more heavily enforced for amateurs. They impact our thinking about pitcher health, durability, and effectiveness. Every broadcast tracks them.

The interest in pitch counts isn’t simply a media/outsider-driven affair, either. Teams have significant financial and competitive incentives to keep pitchers healthy and effective, and it certainly seems like they’ve stopped pushing their pitchers as much within individual games over the last decade.

But even amid this general trend, something significant happened over the last two seasons. Instead of following the long-term trends, pitch counts fell sharply starting last year and have fallen again in 2016. While we can’t offer a definitive explanation without spending time inside the heads of MLB’s managers, the evidence seems to suggest that the culprit is something other than a newfound appreciation for protecting arms.

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As things stand today, September 2nd, there is a two-way tie between the Orioles and Tigers for the second Wild Card spot in the American League. The Orioles, whether due to the phenomenal exploits of their closer or their inability to convince projection systems of their success, have been the focus of much discussion. It strikes me, though, that the Tigers are flying a bit under the radar. Their best players are guys we’ve talked about for years like Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler, and Victor Martinez. Even J.D. Martinez’s success is starting to become yesterday’s news. Outside of the success of Michael Fulmer and Justin Verlander’s resurgence, the Tigers have suffered from being a bit boring, whether that’s fair or not.

They haven’t needed to go on a massive run to get themselves this close to playoff position, as their playoff odds have hovered around 25% for the majority of the second half and topped out at 60% in the start of August. Their current position on the very edge of playoff contention, however, is thanks in part to an 8-2 run over the last week and a half. Some of their key offensive forces — such as Cabrera and the Martinez not-brothers — have been thoroughly predictable over this stretch, but one player who stands out as being somewhat surprisingly good and productive of late is the man in the midst of a disappointing first year of a nine-figure contract: Justin Upton.

Over the past three weeks or so, Upton has been the epitome of a streaky player. From August 9th to August 18th, he took 32 plate appearances and recorded just one hit, giving him a -87 wRC+ — which is evidently a real number a hitter can post over an extended stretch. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn Upton got a day off on August 19th — a -87 wRC+ tends to inspire managers to give a guy some rest — but since his return on August 20th, he’s been an absolute monster at the plate for the Tigers. In those 46 plate appearances, he’s hit three home runs and posted a tremendous 225 wRC+. Yeah, that’ll do. If the Tigers can get the most recent version of Upton to sustain this late-season breakout, it would be a massive boost to their playoff aspirations. Is there any evidence that this mini-breakout is part of a larger trend toward a more productive Upton?

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What a time to be alive. Not only is 29-year-old Tim Tebow attempting to launch a career as a baseball player, but he held a showcase in front of scouts from 28 teams — and actually managed to impress some of them. The ex-NFL quarterback put on a show in batting practice, which prompted some scouts to spew superlatives about his power tool. The rest of his game was underwhelming, however, including his performance against live pitching and his throwing arm.

When it comes to gauging Tebow’s talent, all we really have is this showcase and the scouting grades that came out of it. He hasn’t played baseball since high school, so we have exactly zero statistical data to use. The logical conclusion seems to be that he isn’t very good. Sure, Tebow was something of a prospect in high school, but a tiny fraction of high-school baseball prospects succeed in the pros, and that’s without having sat out a dozen years.

The responsible thing to do would be to recognize that this is little more than a publicity stunt and that Tebow will probably bust. But where’s the fun in that? Instead, I decided to play around with the shred of data we do have and infer what it might mean for Tebow’s future.

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In February of 2015, 19-year old Cuban infielder Yoan Moncada agreed to a contract with the Boston Red Sox that included a $31.5 million signing bonus. In the 18 months that have elapsed since then, the baseball world has anticipated his arrival to its biggest stage and, this weekend, it’s going to get what it wants.

While we’ve all understandably been following and analyzing his progress and development in anticipation of things to come, possibly lost on us has been that Yoan Moncada is already a significant historical figure in baseball’s history. His departure from Cuba with the country’s unexplained blessing came at a time when the public was just beginning to understand what his predecessors and their families endured during their defections just as relations between the island and the United States began to change. He symbolizes the end of a historic era of Cuban baseball excellence, the most remarkable talent in a wave of defectors who have left the country, at least momentarily, dry.

His delivery to America and, eventually, the major leagues was preordained. There was too much money on the table for all parties involved for Moncada to take a bow behind an isolated archipelagian curtain. Unlike several supreme Cuban baseball talents who preceded him, American baseball fans are fortunate that they don’t have to ask themselves, “What if?” as they do with players like Yulieski Gurriel, Jose Contreras and Orlando Hernandez who debuted stateside past their primes, in their 30s. They instead have been asking, “When?”

Moncada’s relevance extends beyond international baseball popular culture and deep into the business end of things. He is so talented that, at the age of just 18, he shined a very public light on a multi-billion-dollar business’s flaccid and discriminatory system designed specifically to suppress the wages of teenage Latin American ball players by single-handedly pushing it to its limit. He forced Major League executives to confront a once-in-history scenario, a stoned sports fan’s hypothetical question about loopholes and generational talents: “How much money is the best teenager on the planet worth, up front?”

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This is a guest post from our friends at NEIFI.co, who have built a projection system and systematic evaluation methodology about which you can read more at their site. They also tweet @NEIFIco and have started their own blog as well.

Back in November, we contributed a post about Japanese superstar Shohei Otani, noting that the 22-year-old hurler already projected as one of the best pitchers on the planet, and would be one of the most coveted international imports in baseball history if his NPB team, Nippon Ham, decided to make him available to MLB clubs. Since that time, Otani’s 2016 season has only expanded his legend.

On the mound, Otani has had another great year, allowing a 2.25 ERA in 16 starts and racking up 140 strikeouts in 116 innings. But his real coming out party has been at the plate, as he’s forced his way into the lineup on a regular basis, becoming a legitimate two-way player. In 301 plate appearances, he’s hitting .333/.435/.631, which means he leads the league in OPS. With all due respect to Madison Bumgarner and the #PitchersWhoRake hashtag, Otani looks like something the likes of which we don’t currently have in MLB.

That brings up the obvious question: do we have any relevant comparisons for Shohei Otani?

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Yesterday, we talked about Corey Kluber and Jose Fernandez, who have both made an effort to improve their arsenals in the second half by maximizing the usage of their best pitch — in this case, their similarly frisbee-like breaking balls. Kluber and Fernandez, in this regard, have been inching closer toward following in the footsteps of pitchers like Rich Hill, Kenta Maeda, Lance McCullers, Matt Shoemaker, and Masahiro Tanaka each of whom has thrown some version of a breaking or offspeed pitch this season more often than they’ve thrown a fastball.

A comment by Hill in May seemed to suggest that more pitchers could benefit from being told that they should simply throw their best pitch more often, regardless of whether that pitch is a fastball. Indians pitching coach Mickey Callaway told me more recently that “traditional things take some time to change,” and that the thinking with Kluber was that he could become more efficient in getting ahead in counts by throwing his best pitch, the curve, more often, rather than the more traditional choice of his two-seam fastball.

Guys like Hill, McCullers, Shoemaker, and now potentially Kluber and Fernandez have already made the adjustment to lead with a non-fastball. Because this approach interests me so much, I’m now curious who else might benefit from such a change.

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