Archive for Featured

The Oakland A’s lost by four runs on Thursday. Granted, it was a two-run game in the bottom of the eighth. But, still. Four runs. The A’s currently have the worst record in the American League. They’ve lost by at least four runs 11 times. The Royals easily have the best record in the AL. Kansas City has lost by at least four runs 15 times. Four runs is an arbitrary cutoff, but this helps to demonstrate something you’ve probably already heard: The A’s are badly underperforming, and in the weirdest way. By the standings, in the AL, no team has been worse. By other metrics, in the AL, arguably nobody has better.

For a more rich and representative 2015 A’s experience, consider Wednesday. Sure enough, the A’s lost to the New York Yankees — but they lost by one. The game ended with the tying run in scoring position. The Oakland bullpen coughed up four runs; the Oakland defense coughed up the other one. It’s not that the Yankees didn’t do enough to win. It’s that the A’s did, too. Yet they came up short. The market is just waiting for Billy Beane to sell.

It isn’t new that the A’s are underperforming the numbers. It’s already been written about here, there and everywhere. Just in April, the team went 9-14 while outscoring its opponents. Lately, the team has been more successful, despite its recent setbacks. But while you’re probably tired of hearing about Oakland’s misfortune, you might not be aware of the magnitude of what’s happened. This isn’t the kind of thing that happens to someone every year.

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Longtime Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan loves the sinker. The Braves’ Leo Mazzone was all about establishing the pitch low and away. Rick Peterson may hate the cutter.

The Mets’ Dan Warthen may not have the name value of legendary pitching coaches that have come before him, but he does have his own pitch. If you want to see what it looks like, you just have to notice how the Mets, as a team, are outliers when it comes to slider velocity and movement.

The Mets are throwing a different kind of slider.

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With the trade deadline 22 days away, we’re starting to reach the point where deals could come together pretty quickly. The standings are beginning to sort out the contenders from the pretenders, and teams have mostly completed their internal evaluations of what they need for the stretch run. Over the next few weeks, the focus will turn to getting deals done, and for every team looking for a big deadline upgrade, two names will be at the front and center of those discussions: Johnny Cueto and Cole Hamels.

They’re not just the two best pitchers on the market; they’re probably the two best overall players as well. Both are high quality starters with long track records of success, and each could upgrade an acquiring team by something like a couple of wins over the remainder of the season, plus the upgrade of adding a frontline starter to their postseason rotation. Both players are going to be in high demand, and will likely return a significant haul for their organizations.

But which one should a team prefer? Let’s compare the pros and cons of each, and look at whether contenders should be willing to pay more for either pitcher.

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There is no good known method for rating all the front offices. Every team has a front office, consisting of a general manager and a bunch of other guys, and fans talk about those front offices, but critical evaluation is hard. One could, I suppose, just think about wins and losses, but that seems an over-simplification. So this is the second part of a project, a project that depended upon your participation. Just the other day, I posted polls for every team in baseball, and I asked for front-office ratings. It’s crowdsourced evaluation, and while there’s a difference between crowd evaluation and the actual truth, I’m no less interested in perception of the front offices. Presented below is how people think. Who isn’t interested in how people think?

How good is a front office? It’s a very simple question, that’s also an extremely complicated question. I tried to untangle the front office from ownership. I tried to untangle the front office from the player-development people. The question is, basically: if a front office were given average resources, how many championships would it win over a million season repetitions? More than average, fewer than average, or exactly average? That’s not a possible thing to know, but that doesn’t mean the community didn’t have opinions. Some of them were very strong.

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If you’ve been paying attention to baseball during the past month, you probably know that J.D. Martinez has been on a pretty good run. That might be an understatement: he’s hit 15 home runs in the past 31 days, four more than the next-best mark (Albert Pujols). If home runs aren’t your thing, he’s also first in wRC+, wOBA, and ISO over that span. Martinez has been out of his mind recently, and he’s been out of his mind in an even more extreme way than we’re used to seeing from him.

Let’s start with a few names. Below is the complete list of right-handed hitters who have hit a home run to either center field or right field at Comerica Park this season:

• J.D. Martinez
• Miguel Cabrera
• Nick Castellanos
• Ryan Braun
• Avisail Garcia
• Tyler Flowers

It’s not an extensive list, because hitting home runs to those areas of Comerica Park is difficult if you’re right handed: the right-field fence is 11 feet tall once you get toward right center, and center field is, quite simply, where fly balls go to die. The names on this list have to possess a lot of raw power, obviously. Exhibit A, Martinez’ first hit of the season:

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As hard as it might be to believe right now, Oakland front office asked center fielder Billy Burns to consider ending the switch-hitter experiment and bat solely from the right side when they acquired him. “It was presented as an idea, and it wasn’t something they wanted to do during the season,” Burns admitted, but they did mention it. And it makes a little sense, since Burns came to switch-hitting in professional ball, and he slugged about 20% worse from the left side in the minors.

What’s the strangest about this revelation is that Burns has been so good from the left side in the major leagues so far. And though batting average on balls in play is complicated, and small-sample results aren’t any better when you’ve cut them in half, there might actually be some evidence that Burns is a better hitter from the left side. His approach from that side fits his tools better.

Maybe the Athletics were right. Maybe Burns should stop switch-hitting. Maybe he should only hit from the *left* side.

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A little over a month ago, I asked which player would get a major-league hit first: Jon Lester, or Kyle Schwarber. Lester had just set an all-time record for the longest hitless streak to begin a career. But, it’s not like the Cubs were about to remove Lester from their rotation. Schwarber, meanwhile, was a hell of a hitting prospect, but he was in the minors, so that was a hurdle. By nearly a 3-to-1 margin, the audience voted for Lester. By nearly a 3-to-1 margin, the audience was wrong. Schwarber was briefly promoted, and he registered a hit. Then he registered another seven. Lester continued making outs.

Until Monday! Monday, Lester recorded his first-ever knock, off John Lackey in the second inning of a game in which Lester, for a time, had more hits than his opponent. For Lester, it was career at-bat number 72, and career plate appearance number 79. The hitless-streak record still belongs to Lester, and there’s nothing about that to be done, but now he’s officially no longer an o’fer. And while Lester himself would’ve preferred a win to a single, just because he won’t dwell on it doesn’t mean we can’t. Here’s to dwelling.

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MLB’s pay practices have come under considerable scrutiny in recent years. In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor launched a series of investigations examining whether several MLB teams violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by failing to pay their clubhouse attendants, administrative workers, and interns in accordance with the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime requirements.

At the same time, MLB has also been hit with four different lawsuits over the last two years alleging that the league’s pay practices violate the FLSA and/or federal antitrust law. The most notable of these cases were two suits filed last year contending that MLB teams routinely fail to pay their minor-league players either the minimum wage or overtime. Those cases – which assert that minor leaguers often earn as little as $3,300 per year – currently remain pending against 22 MLB teams.

Now, yet another group of MLB employees is coming forward to challenge MLB’s pay practices. In a new class action lawsuit filed last week in New York federal court, former Kansas City Royals scout Jordan Wyckoff contends that MLB teams have unlawfully agreed not to compete with one another for the services of their amateur and professional scouts. As a result, the suit – Wyckoff v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball – asserts that a number of MLB scouts currently make less than the minimum wage and are not paid overtime, even when working more than 40 hours in a given week.

Wyckoff alleges that these practices not only violate the FLSA, but that they fail to comply with both federal and state antitrust law as well.

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The trade deadline is 25 days away, and with so many teams bunched up in the middle of the standings, there could be a serious shortage of talent available for teams looking to upgrade. In particular, available hitters seem to be particularly scarce, as the few sellers that exist in the market are mostly going to be selling veteran pitchers. Between Cole Hamels, Johnny Cueto, and Jeff Samardzija, some pretty good arms will likely change teams in the next few weeks, but for teams like the Pirates and Cardinals — who could use a bat far more than another arm — the pickings are beyond slim.

Right now, in fact, it appears that the best hitter likely to change teams before the deadline is Brewers first baseman Adam Lind. Yes, the same Adam Lind who was traded for Marco Estrada over the winter, because the Blue Jays didn’t really want to pay him $7.5 million to DH for them. Lind wasn’t exactly a hot commodity during the off-season, and given his track record, it’s not hard to see why teams weren’t exactly falling all over themselves to add him to their line-up. Here are Lind’s seasonal wRC+ marks by year since he broke into the big leagues.

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“Have you ever heard of a submariner throwing a riseball?”

Athletics Media Relations and Broadcasting Coordinator Zak Basch almost had a crazy look in his eye as he asked. But as soon as I understood what he was asking, there were two intense people in that Oakland dugout, contemplating insane things. Because it’s almost an impossible idea, the riseball released from a submarine angle. They physics of releasing the ball down under makes it almost impossible to get backspin on the ball, and backspin is what gives fastballs “rise” — backspin helps the ball drop less than you’d expect, given gravity.

That’s why, when you ask current submariners, they mostly just shake their head. “I’ve heard stories of this myth before,” laughed Javier Lopez of the Giants. He struggled to name any active low-slot pitchers that have ever thrown a riseball on purpose.

But it’s not impossible. Basch, a former pitcher for the University of Nevada (Reno) himself once threw one in game action, and it only took a couple dozen failed attempts to get there. Just to get an idea of how difficult it is to get backspin on the ball from that angle, Basch modeled the delivery and spin for a traditional submarine fastball and then how you might throw a rising fastball.

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