Archive for Featured

I was reading through Jon Heyman’s latest Inside Baseball, and then I got to the White Sox section. Within, Heyman said something about Chris Sale, and though it wasn’t specifically about everything that’s going to follow in here, it at least works well enough for me to embed:

Chris Sale’s pitches come from such an unusual angle, it seems to fool umpires. It looked like he had an 0-and-5 count on Nick Castellanos in one at-bat (the actual count was 3-and-2)

Nothing important, really. Just a fleeting thought about one at-bat in particular. OK! Well, as you know, balls and strikes have to do with multiple factors. The pitcher plays a part. The hitter plays a part. The umpire plays a part. Dumb luck plays a part. And the catcher plays a part. In some previous posts, I’ve quickly touched on the White Sox’s catchers. It seems time for something in greater depth, because this has been an awfully big problem for a team that’s badly slipped.

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There’s another disagreement regarding the Kansas City Royals and advanced metrics. If you’re still standing, you may take another drink.

This time, it’s Eric Hosmer and the defensive metrics. The Kansas City Star’s Rustin Dodd penned a column over the weekend regarding the disconnect between the perception of Hosmer’s defense and the evaluation of Hosmer’s defense. It’s a well-written and well-researched piece that’s worth your time, but I wanted to dive a bit deeper. And it’s probably about time we had the talk anyway — it’s been an elephant in the room each of the last three seasons, while Hosmer’s won a trio of Gold Glove Awards despite grading as nothing more than an average defender.

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Atlanta’s ace, Julio Teheran, has a career 3.34 ERA, a good mark even for this pitching-friendly era. This year’s numbers, at least in some ways, are the best of his career. He’s a 25-year-old with less than $30 million in guaranteed money remaining on his contract, which runs through 2020 if you count the low-cost team option for that season. If the Braves make him available before the deadline, he’d instantly become one of the most valuable assets on the market.

But is Teheran an ace, like the Braves are likely to price him? Or is he more of a good pitcher on a nice run? Since assuming regular major-league duties in 2013, he’s 44th in pitching Wins Above Replacement despite being 11th in innings pitched, as he’s accrued value by staying healthy and racking up innings, but not dominating in the traditional walk, strikeout, and home run categories.

But this year, once again, Teheran is dealing, and he’s doing so without strikeout, walk, or home-run rates that would appear on the first page of each leaderboard. For teams hoping to acquire the Braves ace, they’ve got to be wondering who he will be on their team; the guy who looks great by ERA or the guy who looks like an innings-eater by FIP?

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Before homering last night in the first inning of a 3-2 loss to the Dodgers, Bryce Harper’s OPS had briefly fallen all the way below .900. And while that might seem like occasion to sound the alarms, let’s get one thing straight: Bryce Harper’s season numbers are still great. His OBP is still above .400, his power’s still been immense, and by wRC+, he’s still had as good a year as Nolan Arenado and the Seager boys.

But lately, things haven’t been right for the reigning MVP. A couple months ago, we had a post here on the site about how Harper was catching up to Mike Trout, and it was totally reasonable. And it still probably is, but over the last 30 days, Harper’s wRC+ is 80, his OBP the same as what Andrelton Simmons did last year, and he’s hit for as much power during that stretch as 2015 Kevin Pillar. It’s the most underwhelming Harper’s looked since the middle of 2014:

Y’know what’s not an ideal way to break out of a slump? Face Clayton Kershaw. Harper did that on Monday night, and he did not break out of the slump. No, he faced Kershaw three times, and he fanned three times.

Even with the recent slide, Harper’s still viewed as the best hitter in world, and the best hitter in the world facing the best pitcher in the world is always worth an examination. But there’s something about this particular matchup at this particular time that makes it all the more fascinating. See, something’s been happening to Harper lately. Rather, something’s been happening to the way Harper’s being pitched lately.

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Last week, I wrote about the dearth of production at the first-base position this season. In the piece, I highlighted Wil Myers as one of the few, young beacons of hope at the position and mentioned a few other young stars, but there was one notable guy I failed to mention: the Braves’ sole star-caliber position player, 26-year-old first baseman Freddie Freeman. It wasn’t a slight on my part, but instead was a side effect of my awareness that Freeman was worthy of an entire post of his own. Well, the time has come. Let’s take a look at Freddie Freeman.

Freeman’s 2016 season started unbearably slowly. After homering in his first at-bat of the season, he went on to accumulate just two more extra-base hits – both doubles – over his next 81 plate appearances. After play on April 26th, he’d recorded a miserable 65 wRC+ and had been bumped down in the batting order from his typical spot in the three-hole. Fortunately for the Braves — who have Freeman under contract for $106.5 million from 2017 to 2021 — Freeman’s season quickly began to turn around. Entering play on Tuesday night, he had posted a .307/.379/.571 slash line — good for a 151 wRC+ — ever since his statistical nadir on April 26th.

His offensive production during the month of June has been among the best in the majors and has led to Freeman currently sporting the highest ISO figure (.211) of his career. On the strength of his power surge, it might appear that Freeman is well on his way to another predictably strong season, but it must be noted that not all indicators are trending in the right direction for Freeman.

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Heading into the season, the Mets plan to repeat as National League champions seemed pretty obvious; they were going to beat their opponents with elite starting pitching and an above average offense, hoping those strengths would outweigh their defensive deficiencies and a just-okay bullpen. It was a solid enough plan, and based on their depth chart on Opening Day, we gave them a 51% chance to win the division and a 78% chance to make the postseason. And mostly, those things have played out as expected. The rotation has been fantastic, ranking second best in baseball to this point. The bullpen has been fine, with occasional lapses. The defense has been bad.

But one part of the formula hasn’t really gone according to plan yet; that productive offense hasn’t really come to fruition. To this point, the offense has been a little bit below average, ranking right in the middle of the pack in wRC+ while costing themselves some runs with relatively poor baserunning. And on top of that, the team has distributed their hits in a highly inefficient way, so despite an expected 4.2 runs per game based on their BaseRuns inputs, they are only scoring 3.7 runs per game, third-worst in the majors.

Certainly, health has been part of the problem. First, Travis d’Arnaud went on the DL at the end of April. Then in May, it was Wilmer Flores and and Lucas Duda. June brought David Wright’s DL stint, and more recently, news that he’ll require back surgery that may sideline him for the rest of the season. The infield has ended up as a patchwork group, and with Michael Conforto and Alejandro de Aza not hitting as well as expected, the outfield hasn’t been able to carry the load. And so now, the team is openly talking about making more additions, and not waiting until the trade deadline to do so.

“I think we might need to do something before,” Wilpon said Monday at the Harlem RBI fundraiser in Manhattan. “The deadline is still four, six weeks away. We’ve got to start playing better baseball now.”

Thankfully for the Mets, identifying a potential spot to upgrade is pretty easy. They’re not going to add an outfielder, most likely, given that group is already crowded, and Conforto and de Aza can both be expected to improve in the second half. Neil Walker has been good at second base, and Asdrubal Cabrera is a good enough player at shortstop to not require a replacement. So, the team is left with just the corner infield spots or behind the plate if they want to upgrade the offense.

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The scouting report on Kenta Maeda never suggested he was overpowering. He was never expected to post extreme strikeout totals, and while his above-average 24% strikeout rate is somewhat surprising, it’s only part of the reason the 28-year-old Japanese rookie has been one of the 20 or 25 best pitchers in baseball this season.

The other part is the part that makes more sense for Maeda and less sense to the rest of us. It’s still difficult to suss out what exactly goes into the skill of generating soft contact, or how much of it is a skill at all, but thus far, Maeda’s been among the best at it. Given how little we’ve seen him work, Maeda’s a relatively mysterious pitcher. Soft contact is a mysterious skill. That’s two mysteries, and playing detective is fun.

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A few days ago, I shared KATOH’s thoughts on the college players who were drafted (and not drafted) in this year’s amateur draft. There were hundreds of them. Many of the players with very good projections went in the first round, including Nick Senzel, A.J. Puk and Cody Sedlock. But the player with the very best KATOH projection fell all the way to the 10th round. The end of the 10th round. That player is Dakota Mekkes, whom the Cubs drafted with the 314th-overall pick out of Michigan State.

Mekkes was straight up filthy this past season. Pitching in the Big 10, Mekkes struck out a remarkable 96 batters in just 57 innings without surrendering a single home run. The catch is that he pitched exclusively in relief — though he wasn’t used like a typical reliever, and actually pitched more like a starter in some cases. Mekkes averaged over two innings per appearance in relief, and frequently threw many more than that. Most notably, he tossed six shutout innings in an extra-inning game against Maryland. Unlike most college relievers, he wasn’t a one-inning guy, which helps explain why KATOH likes him more than most relievers.

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We have an understanding, right? Neither the Phillies nor Braves were supposed to be good, and neither the Phillies nor Braves are actually good. Winning now was never part of the plan, so in a sense it kind of doesn’t matter what happens on the field. Not on the team level, because the teams were always going to lose. So there’s no point in being too critical, or in laughing too much. Criticism should be reserved for failures. Failing requires the intent to succeed.

I don’t want to sit around and talk about the Phillies and Braves every day. It’s not particularly interesting that they’re bad. That being said, I do at least want to take the chance to even things out. Toward the end of April, I wrote about how the Braves offense was a total disaster. And it was a total disaster, as you remember. They hit two homers on opening day, then they hit one homer over their next 19 games. They didn’t get their team slugging percentage into the .300s until the middle of May. It was inconceivable how poorly the Braves were hitting, and it’s not like they’ve since turned into an offensive juggernaut. But as you look at the numbers today, there has been a shift. The Braves offense ranks low. The Phillies offense is worse.

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Recently, within this site’s electronic pages, the author facilitated a crowdsourcing effort with a view towards reproducing the broadcaster rankings which appeared here roughly four years ago. More recently, that same author published the updated results for television broadcasts here and for radio here.

The service which the author has failed to render, however, is to present all the results from that endeavor in one easily digestible form. The purpose of this post is to right that vile wrong.

Below, the reader will find two tables. The first contains the complete rankings for the league’s 62 distinct television and radio broadcast teams. The second features only the highest-ranked broadcast for each major-league club.

As in every other case, it’s important to stress here that the results of this exercise aren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site. Note, furthermore, that the overall ratings which appear below are not mere averages of the charisma and analysis scores which accompany them, but a distinct category for which respondents submitted scores independently.

Those dozen caveats having been stated explicitly — and many more implied — here are the results of the 2016 broadcaster rankings.

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