Archive for Featured

O.co Coliseum prepares for the Athletics’ LGBT Pride Night.

The Athletics had an LGBT Pride event Wednesday night, and the night was peppered with love for many people that haven’t always felt comfortable at the ballpark.

Opera Singer Breanna Sinclaire, the first trans singer accepted into the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s master’s program according to the San Francisco Chronicle, sang the anthem. According to Major League Baseball, she was also the first trans singer to perform the anthem.

MLB ambassador of inclusion Billy Bean was in the building, and was part of the impetus for the event, as the news of this event came out after he addressed the Athletics in Spring Training.

Sean Doolittle’s partner Eireann Dolan helped improve the event, as she not only offered to buy back tickets from disgruntled ticketholders with a heartfelt and funny letter, but also started a GoFundMe to help pay for even more donated tickets to members of Our Space, AIDS Project East Bay and Frameline, a nonprofit LGBTQ cinema foundation.

It seemed like a good time to ask the ballplayers willing to comment about the issue at hand: is baseball ready for an openly gay player, and what obstacles might they face when it happens? Even with a few “no comments,” the opinions given all had their own unique angle, and showed that even a ready country and sport will not make the first openly gay player’s professional life easy.

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It’s possible Andrew McCutchen hasn’t been the hottest hitter in baseball, but at the very least, there haven’t been many much hotter. What makes the year notable, though, is that — as late as early May — McCutchen’s OPS was rattling around in the .500s. McCutchen didn’t go from good to red-hot. He went from bad to red-hot, and it’s worth examining the turnaround. Especially since I went to the trouble of examining his slump several weeks back. There was a time when people were legitimately worried about the Pirates’ best player. Now it’s all peaches.

It was on May 8 that I published an article titled “The Matter With Andrew McCutchen,” for JABO. Part of this article will now have to review that article, but understanding what was happening is critical for understanding what’s changed.

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In the aftermath of yesterday’s shocking news that the FBI is investigating the St. Louis Cardinals for allegedly illegally accessing the Houston Astros’ computer network without authorization, many fans have begun to speculate as to what sort of penalty the Cardinals might face from Major League Baseball. MLB has already suggested that some form of punishment is forthcoming, issuing the following statement yesterday in response to the New York Times’ initial report:

Major League Baseball has been aware of and has fully cooperated with the federal investigation into the illegal breach of the Astros’ baseball operations database. Once the investigative process has been completed by federal law enforcement officials, we will evaluate the next steps and will make decisions promptly.

In particular, as others have noted, MLB’s reference to the incident as an “illegal breach” – as opposed to an “alleged” illegal breach – is especially noteworthy. MLB isn’t denying that employees of one of its teams may have illegally accessed the Astros’ computer network, nor is the league holding off judgment on the veracity of the reports until the federal investigation is complete. Instead, the league office is explicitly acknowledging that an illegal breach has occurred.

So the Cardinals are almost certainly facing some form of MLB-imposed punishment on top of any potential criminal charges the government may pursue. The question now is just what type of punishment MLB and Commissioner Manfred will seek to impose.

Given the unprecedented nature of the incident, initial speculation has ranged anywhere from a steep fine or the loss of draft picks to a potential postseason ban for the Cardinals. However, while Commissioner Manfred certainly has broad authority to govern the sport under his “best interests of baseball” powers, his authority – as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has learned in recent years – is not absolute. Instead, MLB’s league constitution and collective bargaining agreement both impose some real constraints on the commissioner’s ability to punish the Cardinals. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times dropped a bombshell of a story Tuesday morning, reporting that the FBI is investigating whether front-office officials from the St. Louis Cardinals may have illegally hacked into the Houston Astros’ proprietary computer network. According to the Times, government officials believe that unnamed Cardinals employees may have accessed the Astros’ computers in order to retrieve the team’s internal trade discussions, proprietary statistics and scouting reports. The FBI has apparently traced the source of the hacking to a house shared by some Cardinals employees.

While some are understandably comparing Tuesday’s news to the NFL’s recent “SpyGate” scandal – in which the New England Patriots were accused of impermissibly videotaping the New York Jets coaches’ hand signals during a 2007 game – if true, the Cardinals’ alleged hacking would, of course, be much more serious. Beyond just league-imposed penalties, the hacking allegations carry the possibility of criminal prosecution, not just for the Cardinals employees involved in the breach, but potentially for the organization as a whole.

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Believe it or not, the Minnesota Twins kind of look like a playoff contender. Their 34-29 record is tied for 4th best in the American, and puts them just 2.5 games behind the Royals in the AL Central. They also hold a slim lead over the Rangers and the Tigers in the Wild Card chase. The Twins have recorded one of the better records in baseball over the season’s first two and a half months. This is a fact. They have those wins in the bank. But it’s not at all clear they have the talent on their roster to keep winning going forward. Several Twins have outperformed their projections to date, and it remains to be seen if first-half contributors, like Brian Dozier and Mike Pelfrey, will be able to keep up the pace down the stretch.

But the Twins will have some additional help in the form of Byron Buxton — their new centerfielder. The Twins summoned the 21-year-old from Double-A Chattanooga before Sunday night’s game. Buxton’s gone one for seven in the big leagues so far, but that one was a stand-up triple. Typical Buxton. Prior to his call up, he had twice as many three-baggers as any other player in Double-A.

Prospect evaluators have been drooling over Buxton’s tools since he was in high school. The Twins selected the Georgia native second overall in the 2012 amateur draft, and his name immediately started showing up at the tops of prospect lists. Here at FanGraphs, we’ve ranked him 16th, 1st and 2nd the last three pre-seasons. Other outlets have given him similar praise, with some — MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus — ranking him as the top prospect in baseball this year, ahead of Kris Bryant.

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The Boston Red Sox 2015 season is starting to look like an abject failure. A week ago, they were not too far from pulling back up to .500 and were only five and a half games back of first place in a weak division, and they had an upcoming six game stretch against the Orioles and Blue Jays that presented a real opportunity to gain some ground on two of their competitors. Instead, the Red Sox lost all six games, are now 10 games under .500, and are eight games behind both the Yankees and Rays, and seven games behind the Blue Jays. In one week’s time, they’ve moved from being within spitting distance of first place to being equally far back of fourth place.

Nearly every move the organization made last winter is currently looking like a disaster. The big acquisitions of Hanley Ramirez (-0.4 WAR), Pablo Sandoval (+0.1 WAR), and Rick Porcello (+0.5 WAR) have resulted in a trio of highly paid replacement level performers, and the more minor acquisitions like Wade Miley (+0.5 WAR) and Justin Masterson (-0.2 WAR) have been just as ineffective. While the history of these deals won’t be written based on their first few months in Boston, it’s fair to say that things aren’t exactly working out according to the team’s plans.

And now the Red Sox are heading towards a crossroads. This experiment hasn’t worked, and with just six weeks to go before the trade deadline, the Red Sox have to start considering the fact that they may be sellers at the deadline. The upside of being terrible is that it’s a good year to be selling talent, but the Red Sox are struggling in large part because their big expensive acquisitions have been lousy, and it’s not so easy to dump $100 million contracts a few months after they were signed. The path forward for the Red Sox isn’t so obvious, but let’s try to figure out some priorities for this team’s short-term and longer-term future.

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MLB’s 86th All-Star Game is just over a month away, and if you’ve been paying attention to the early voting, you know you can actually skip the event and just watch any random Kansas City Royals game instead; it will basically be the same thing. The Royals have turned out their voting bloc in droves, and unless the other franchises make a late move, the American League is going to try and bunt, steal, and defend their way to a 1-0 win in Cincinnati next month.

Just as the game itself is an annual tradition, so too are summer columns suggesting ways to “fix” or “improve” the Midsummer Classic. Even Jonah Keri, an absurd optimist who probably has Everything Is Awesome as the only song in his Spotify playlist, hates the current All-Star format:

Jonah Keri: I’m the most positive guy you’ll ever meet. Also, I love baseball. Adore it. Bathe myself in it.

But All-Star week — the Home Run Derby, the actual All-Star Game, and especially the four days with no real baseball — are freaking terrible. Uh-oh. Here comes Angry Jonah.

Why the hell does this game “count”? It’s a total farce. AL All-Star manager John Farrell has already said he won’t use any pitcher for more than one inning under any circumstances. How is that managing to win? Why should that count?

I’m with Jonah. All-Star Week sucks. The Futures Game is fun and worth doing, but the rest of it doesn’t interest me at all. And MLB’s attempt to make the game “count” is silly, and has done nothing to change the fact that this is still an exhibition game designed solely to make a lot of money for the league. But I also recognize that it’s good for MLB to market itself on a large stage, giving people a mid-season event to turn into, especially where the game’s best players are all assembled together. But the All-Star Game isn’t really a baseball game, and it doesn’t show off what is good about the sport.

So I’d like to make a proposal to overhaul the All-Star Week. This idea still allows MLB to gather its best players in one location — in fact, even expands the number of players who get to participate — while also giving us three actual baseball games, with actual baseball rosters, played under normal baseball conditions. The concept? Battle of the Ages.

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Major League Baseball has seen its fair share of television-related litigation over the last few years. On Thursday, there were significant developments in two of these lawsuits.

First, the legal proceedings surrounding the failed CSN-Houston regional sports network took a new turn when the bankrupt station filed suit against Comcast, accusing the cable provider of a variety of misdeeds. If successful, the case could potentially allow the Houston Astros and the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets – the two primary owners of the defunct station – to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

Meanwhile, the long-running Garber lawsuit challenging MLB’s television blackout and pay-per-view package policies took an interesting turn as well, when the parties in a companion case challenging the National Hockey League’s analogous TV policies reached a tentative settlement. Although this settlement does not directly affect the suit against MLB, the deal nevertheless has potential implications for the Garber case.

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It’s only been 35 major-league plate appearances, but Joey Gallo has already made quite the impression. The ball doesn’t fly off the bat any faster than it does off his, and he’s also second in the big leagues in three-true-outcome percentage (K%+BB%+HR%) — he’s a slugger’s slugger.

He’s also second in the big leagues in strikeout rate. “I’ve tried to cut down on them,” Gallo sighed when I asked. “I’ve tried. I promise.”

So we talked about the strikeouts, and what he can do about them, and why they have happened, and why they will continue to happen.

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We haven’t spoken about Xander Bogaerts at length in these digital pages for some time, so let’s remedy that situation. It seems like a good time to check in on the young shortstop’s development as a major-league hitter: Bogaerts is posting a wRC+ north of 100 in the first two months of the season, and he’s also almost cut his strikeout rate in half compared to last year. There’s also this group, which is an interesting subset of players, of which Boston’s shortstop is the leader — hitters with the highest increase in batted balls to the opposite field this season over last season:

Though it’s still perhaps a little early to be putting a ton of confidence in these numbers, changes as large as these in a hitter’s opposite-field tendencies merit attention. Opposite-field approach is often a good place to look when searching for a reason behind a change in type of production, and, given the drop in Bogaert’s ISO numbers from last year — .123 in 2014 vs. .106 this year — plus the fact that we’re over the ISO stabilization point, it’s one of the spots we’re going to focus on.

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