Interestingly, while Arizona is getting the prospects and selling the main piece, they’re currently closer to a playoff spot than Seattle. But that’s kind of Seattle’s whole reason, and Arizona doesn’t fancy itself a real contender just yet. From the Diamondbacks’ perspective, this relieves a roster crunch, with Jake Lamb coming back and forcing Yasmany Tomas somewhere else. And from the Mariners’ perspective, Mark Trumbo feels like one of the most obvious acquisitions in years. He fits the mold, partially based in truth, of being a dinger machine who doesn’t really do anything else. But as easy and fun as it is to snark, that doesn’t make this a bad trade. And as much thump as Trumbo has, that doesn’t make this a big trade. It’s not actually of great significance, nor is it wildly lopsided.
Hitting and pitching may seem equally complicated, but consider this: when it comes to hitting, you have to use both of your hands in one place. By necessity, that adds a wrinkle, and can make hitting analysis difficult. In order to focus on something we can bite off and digest, let’s just ask Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Joc Pederson what they think about the top hand.
The Sortable Draft Board features draft-prospect ranks, tool ratings, and likely selection range — and costs zero dollars.
In my continuing quest to increase transparency and reduce the amount of information that I know and do not communicate, today FanGraphs has rolled out a thing that I think is most appropriately described as the Sortable Draft Board. There is lots of information I wanted to include, so we made three tabs to include all the stuff I think you want to see while also separating the information by type. The general idea behind this is to:
1. Give you the tools to re-rank these players to your preferences, as you now have all the information necessary to have some reasonable amount of confidence about doing such.
For the better part of the last decade, Gerrit Cole has intrigued with potential. Twice a first round selection — after being drafted out of high school in 2008, he spurned the Yankees and went to UCLA instead — and the first overall selection in the 2011 draft, Cole’s velocity and frame have had scouts dreaming about what he could eventually turn into. But while the stuff has always been top-shelf, the performance haven’t always lined up with expectations.
In his final season at UCLA, in fact, he wasn’t even his own team’s best pitcher, as Trevor Bauer ran circles around him from a performance standpoint. Their lines, side by side:
Player
G
IP
H
HR
BB
SO
H/9
HR/9
BB/9
K/9
ERA
Trevor Bauer
16
136
73
6
36
203
4.8
0.4
2.4
13.3
1.25
Gerrit Cole
16
114
103
8
24
119
8.1
0.6
1.9
9.4
3.32
Cole looked like an ace, but Bauer was the guy who pitched like one, striking everybody out in a way that you’d expect Cole to do, given his velocity and breaking ball. But the Pirates bet on his stuff and their ability to develop him into more than what he had been, choosing Cole with the top pick while Bauer went to the Diamondbacks three selections later.
In the minors, it was a bit more of the same, as he was good-but-not-great, and certainly wasn’t blowing away minor league hitters like you might expect for a top overall selection who throws 100 miles per hour. And when he got to Triple-A, the strikeouts mostly disappeared, as he managed just 63 strikeouts in 90 innings at the highest rung of the minor league level. He was still throwing hard, and still had a good breaking ball, but for whatever reason, batters were still making plenty of contact against him, and he’s never profiled as an elite command guy, so missing bats was always going to be his path to star status.
Things got a bit better after the Pirates promoted him to the big leagues, as his strikeout rate jumped to 21% in 2013 and up to 24% last year, but given that the league average strikeout rate in the majors is now 20%, these are still not dominating performances. And while Cole’s FIP-inputs suggested he was pitching fairly well, he posted an ERA just a bit below league average, as he allowed a .310 BABIP despite pitching for a team that shifted very aggressively and held opponents to a .287 BABIP overall. Heading into 2015, Cole remained more potential than performance, and at some point, he was going to have to do something to justify the belief that he could become an ace.
That point is here, and through the first two months of 2015, Cole has now become what people have been projecting him to be. A comparison of his 2013-2014 and 2015 lines, to highlight the changes:
Recently, one of the hot topics in baseball statistics has been the appearance of a measurement for hard-hit balls: here at FanGraphs, we added hard-hit rate to our leaderboards before this season, adding along with it a wealth of opportunities for analysis. An issue with any new statistic is that it can be cited without fully knowing its true use or impacts, and so hard-hit rate has been making the rounds in player analysis, generally cited in respect to how well or how poorly they have been performing.
For hitters, it might go without saying that hitting the ball harder is generally a good thing: the aim of hitting, in a certain sense, would seem to be to hit the ball as hard as possible as often as you can (except in the cases of bunting or other situational circumstances). However, it hasn’t been clear yet how hitting the ball hard impacts other rate and counting statistics, and that seems to be a hole in our understanding of a statistic that is undergoing a moment in the spotlight.
The aim today is, at the very least, to explore how hard-hit rate impacts a few of those stats, as well as to begin a conversation that more astute statistical minds may be able to take to deeper and exciting places. There are a couple levels to this piece today, but there are surely many more that I have not reached: I don’t intend to make hard conclusions, but rather to explore and provide a well-intentioned foray into the data. With that said, onward.
Sometimes, I feel like I have to set these things up. This isn’t one of those times. The other day, Bryce Harper batted against Aroldis Chapman. Who wouldn’t want to examine that plate appearance in detail? We’re talking about the game’s premier one-inning pitcher, a guy who does something that might never have been done before, and then you’ve got the hottest hitter on the planet, a guy whose at-bats are worth setting alerts for if you’re not already tuned the hell in. Yeah, they’ve matched up before. Yeah, Chapman struck Harper out all three times, on a combined 10 pitches. That was that Bryce Harper. This is this Bryce Harper. Or, as you might know him, Bryce Harper.
The evening: Friday, May 29. The setting: nobody cares. This is about the individuals, not the circumstance, and while the leverage could’ve been higher, the game was close enough everyone was trying their hardest. This was about something other than deciding the score. This was arguably the game’s most watchable hitter and arguably the game’s most watchable pitcher. So you know they had to combine for a watchable matchup.
The All-Star Game ballot is no longer available in paper form. This comes to the chagrin of many, but probably didn’t really bother the vast majority of the baseball watching population. The paper ballot certainly had its limitations, and space was chief among them. There simply isn’t much room on the paper ballot, and often you had to squint to read the names, which is all the more difficult on a sunny day when you’re consuming some frosty beverages. Now that baseball has done away with the paper ballot though, it raises the following question:
Hey, since All-Star voting is no longer constrained by the size of a paper ballot, isn't it time fans were able to vote for pitchers, too?
Joe often comes up with good questions around MLB’s big events, and this was no exception. Given that there is no limit to how long the ballot can be online, and given how slick MLB’s online ballot actually is, there really doesn’t seem like much reason to keep pitchers off the ballot. For one thing, you’d be doing the managers a big favor, as the fans would be doing a lot of the work for them. There will still inevitably be pitchers who start on the Sunday before the game and are thus removed from the proceedings (side note: this bugs me when teams do this, though there really isn’t a good fix for it), not to mention normal injuires, so the managers won’t have their voting power completely stripped away. Still, this would alleviate some of their burden. There’s a chance that it could simply focus their pain on one or two decisions when crappy teams are involved and you need to pick an All-Star, any All-Star from said crappy team, but that seems like a risk worth taking to give fans more of a say.
Now that enough information has accumulated in the last 20 days, it’s time to do another mock draft. I’ll do one more right before the draft, but the variations likely from what I have below hinge on (1) who Houston takes with the second pick, so I outlined the two paths and (2) players shuffling and deals being cut in the back half of the first round (with regard to which decisions teams are starting to meet now), so I gave a word bank of sorts at the end of this, of other players in the mix.
As I mention below, the #1 pick has gone from toss-up to well over 50% chance that it’ll be Dansby Swanson, but it appears that picks 2-9 will have the same players I have below, jumbled in some order. Since certain teams are only on a few of those players, the possible selections after that aren’t just random, but rather variations of the two scenarios centering around which player Houston takes. Roughly picks 10 to 20 are the same names jumbled, with less certainty about which teams prefer whom, then roughly 21 to 40 is about 30 players for 20 picks, with those left out either getting a little less money at later picks, or striking an overslot deal in a later round.
I’ve seen 23 of the 26 players in the projected first round and our prospect writers have seen the other three, so we have video of all the projected first rounders below from the FanGraphs YouTube page, with a quickly growing 2015 MLB Draft playlist of multi-year compilations of video from dozens of top couple round prospects, with many more coming.
*****
1. Diamondbacks – Dansby Swanson, SS, Vanderbilt
I wrote about the Diamondbacks casting a wide net 21 days ago, then projected them with Swanson the next day, but noting it was very unsettled. Now, estimates have the D’Backs about 80% likely to take Swanson here, as the industry consensus has pegged him as the top player in the class (he’ll overtake Rodgers in my forthcoming rankings), especially after a scorching finish to the season.
New York prep CF Garrett Whitley is seen as the most likely backup option here, and it would be for a drastically cut rate: Swanson would get a number that starts with 6, of the $8.6 million slot and Whitley would get around $3.5 million or so, as he’d likely slide into the teens if he doesn’t go here. Arizona’s northeast area scout owns a hitting facility and has instructed Whitley since he was in middle school, with some D’Backs officials comparing him to Mike Trout, which you hear more and more with big athletes in the Northeast these days.
Whitley allows the D’Backs to consider going cheap here and spread it to extra picks, but they have almost no control over who they get with those later picks (43 and 76) because, even with a verbal deal for $1 million more than any other team can offer, they can’t stop dozens of teams from taking the player they want anyway. See the notes below on who Arizona is targeting for those picks. Because of the uncertainty of where the savings would go and the belief that Arizona would prefer a college player and a hitter, Swanson looks like the pick here.
Georgia prep C Tyler Stephenson is an even less likely cut-rate prep option they’ve explored and college players RHP Dillon Tate, LHP Tyler Jay and SS Alex Bregman are all getting looks as well, but these five players add up to about a 20% chance of happening, at best.
“Lots of people say I’ve changed, and that I’ve done that or done this, but I’ve done this my whole life,” Bryce Harper said when I approached him about his breakout season so far. To some extent, he’s right. He’s just doing what he’s done, more often. Even the things he’s changed have been a return to his roots, to an extent.
“I’ve walked my whole life,” he pointed out. His walk rate in the minors was 13.3%, and before this year, he had a 10.4% walk rate in the majors. So he’s right, and as a young player — at 22, he’d still be two years younger than the average Double-A player, and he has yet to face a pitcher younger than him in the big leagues — he was destined to get better. Batters swing and reach less at the steepest rate before they turn 24, and Harper has improved in both cases by about five percentage points so far this year. Even if his current walk rate is double his career rate.
“Staying in the lineup, being healthy, being in the lineup every day no matter what”: that’s what Bryce Harper thought led to this start. “Not taking breaks. When I’m hurt, I’ll take a two month break and I’m not quite the same when I come back, it’s like going back to Spring Training. In September and October, I rake again.”
It took a little while to get here, with an unexpected obstacle or two, but we’ve got a six-player trade between the Braves and the Dodgers. The youngest player involved is 26, the average age of the players is about 31, and this year they’ve all combined to be worth -1.2 WAR. Sounds to me like something worth examining in detail.
It’s anything but a blockbuster. You could say a lot of these parts were expendable. Uribe lost playing time. Withrow’s still sidelined after surgery. Callaspo was likely to be designated for assignment. Jaime already had been designated for assignment, and cleared waivers. The Braves booted Stults from the starting rotation. Thomas has 16 big-league innings. Most likely, this isn’t a trade that’s going to make any meaningful difference, but if you look at it long enough, you can see components of certain interest. It’s kind of like a statistical Magic Eye puzzle, where the image revealed is very slightly more interesting than the immediate visual appearance of the puzzle itself. OK, good, I think I’m selling this well.
