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The All-Star Game isn’t for another 28 days, but with the voting in full swing and enough of the season under our belts, I figure it’s time to weigh in on how I’d fill out the roster if I were Grand Poobah and had the final say on all 34 players. I will note up front that I believe the All-Star Game is an annual affair, and we shouldn’t simply have the same collection of players every year just because those are the “true stars”.

The All-Star Game is best when it serves as both a platform for the game’s greatest players and recognition for those who have earned their way in. I will not be putting players on the roster who have not performed well in 2014, even if they are bonafide stars, with just one exception: people want the chance to honor Derek Jeter on a national stage, and an exhibition game is as good a place to do that as any.

We’ll start with the American League, with the NL to follow tomorrow. As a reminder, the rosters now comprise 34 players, which I’ll be splitting as 21 position players and 13 pitchers, as that has been the final tally for the game most of the last few years. And, yes, we’re honoring the rule requiring every team to be represented. I’ll list each player by the tier of how they got selected, then put the final roster down below. On to the picks.

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For all of the natural ebbs and flows of individual player performance from year to year, the game’s ruling class – the elite among the elite, the upper crust – is a fairly closed society that remains fairly static from year to year. Any given year might have its Yasiel Puig joining that group, or its Albert Pujols conceding his seat, but the core membership is fairly predictable. What might happen in any given season, however, is one of these elite players taking a temporary step up in class, reaching an even more rarified air than ever before. This week, let’s take a deeper look at the 2014 performance of some of the game’s elite, and determine whether they in fact have taken things to the next level. Today, Felix Hernandez. Read the rest of this entry »

Player projections, because of what they are, are always going to be pretty accurate at the group level, or else they’d be really lousy player projections in dire need of improvement. So when thinking about the future, a projection should always be the starting point. One truth is that there will be few exceptions to the rule that players follow their projections. Another truth is that there will always be exceptions. A third truth is that baseball fans will over-identify presumed exceptions, because we’re not very good at weighing recent events. As such, if this counts as a debate, it’s going to be a long-running, unwinnable debate, with new possible exceptions submitted every year. There’s always going to be some reason to believe in a given player who hasn’t performed like his projection over a couple weeks or months.

Dave wrote about some pretty important research last Friday, finding that in-season projections work well and there’s not much sense in isolating season-to-date statistics. Monday I put up ten polls and then another ten polls, focusing on position players and pitchers who haven’t met their projections so far. On each player, I wanted to gauge audience opinion, to see who people think might be exceptions, and who people think are just players on a streak or a slump. There’s not a ton we’ll be able to do with the results, when it comes to furthering our understanding of the game, but I thought it could be fun to quickly review some stuff we can already see. While more voting has taken place since the writing of this post, the numbers shouldn’t have changed very much.

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Oscar Taveras is like a sad birthday gift.

He’s the big one. The first gift you asked your parents for, like, seven months before your birthday. You knew it was coming. You were even pretty sure it was that giant box in the back of your parents closet that you stumbled upon while you totally weren’t snooping around for presents. But you couldn’t open it yet. No, no. It just toiled there, right in front of your eyes. Big and beautiful. But you couldn’t play with it. No, you had to wait, damnit.

Then, finally, your birthday came.
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Watch a Seattle Mariners game when Mike Zunino’s behind the plate and, eventually, there’ll probably be a runner on third. At that point, a wild pitch or a passed ball brings in a run, but you might still see something breaking, thrown in the dirt. Then you’ll hear about how much trust the pitcher must have in the catcher, to keep the ball in front of him. After all, with a shaky receiver, a pitcher might think twice about burying something offspeed. I could continue with this pseudo-example, or I could copy and paste an actual example. From Phil Miller, a month ago:

Both Kyle Gibson and Glen Perkins had plenty of praise after the game for Kurt Suzuki, who has clearly earned the trust of the pitching staff for his ability to block pitches in the dirt. “I think I threw four sliders tonight with a guy on third base,” Perkins said of his typically diving-in-the-dirt pitch. “I threw [Corey] Hart two and I threw Justin Smoak two, and yeah, he’s going to block them.” Manager Ron Gardenhire said that trust in Suzuki allows Twins pitchers to throw their best pitches in any situation — something that they would be more hesitant to do with a catcher who lets too many balls get past.

It all makes sense. With a good blocker, a pitcher won’t be afraid to throw anything. With a worse blocker, a pitcher might be reluctant to throw certain pitches. And then the pitcher’s limited, and perhaps that renders him less successful. But why not look at the numbers? It’s not like it’s really that difficult to look at the numbers. Here come some numbers, with research conducted using Baseball Savant, of course.

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Here on FanGraphs, a lot of the data we present is built around future projections. We host both pre-season and in-season forecasts from multiple systems, and these forecasts form the basis for many of our tools, including our Playoff Odds model. It’s safe to say that we like forecasts.

But I know not everyone reading this post trusts the projection systems, especially when they are forecasting things that we don’t want to be true. It’s natural to want to discard prior information when it doesn’t align with what we want to believe, and often, the forecasts serve as a wet blanket alternative to enthusiasm and excitement. What’s to like about a system that takes the fun out of breakout performances, or tells us that we need to be more patient with the guy who just looks terrible every time we watch him?

And it’s not like projection systems are infallible. Those forecasts never saw Cliff Lee coming, and they certainly didn’t anticipate Jose Bautista was going to go from career scrub to superstar at the age of 29. There are plenty of examples where players made dramatic, unexpected turns in their career arc, and using their track record to project their future would have been wrong. The fact that there are players who have radically changed their performance base allows us to extrapolate that possibility to every player who is performing in a way inconsistent with their projection.

But we just shouldn’t do it. Projections might be fun-sucking, soulless algorithms that are incapable of picking up on adjustments that players can and do make, but the reality is that these forecasts do a pretty good job of predicting the future, even for players whose current performances and projections don’t line up at all.

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Yoenis Cespedes‘ defense currently ranks third in the MLB, according to UZR/150. Here’s how the third-most valuable fielder in baseball sometimes likes to play routine outfield grounders:

How in the world is this guy third-best defensively in anything? Because this is how he makes up for those gaffes:
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Earlier this week, we took a look at the thought process of a club that opened the season with thoughts of contention might go through when deciding whether to shift gears and sell off assets. Today, let’s take a look some of the organizational processes that lead up to the final product – a significant deal that helps set such a club up for the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout has been baseball’s best and most dominant player since 2012, so a little earlier this year, when he encountered something of a slump, it was a newsworthy event. Trout seemed almost perfect in all things, so it raised more than a few eyebrows when he started striking out fairly often. Before Trout, there was no Trout, but between 2009 – 2011, no one accumulated more WAR than Evan Longoria. He was perhaps baseball’s best young player, and it’s not like he fell off a cliff after that; Trout was just better. But Longoria was an awesome young superstar, and he, too, seemed impervious to trouble. It would’ve been hard to imagine Longoria going through hard times.

Yet here we are now, and Longoria’s hit some hard times. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, it’s been partially masked by the whole Rays team dropping out of the race, and it’s not like Longoria’s been bad, but something’s been missing, something of great importance. He’s still just 28, so it’s probably too soon to talk about a decline, but to this point Longoria’s been without his greatest strength. And it’s a mystery as to why that is.

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If you were to conduct a casual survey among baseball fans about the greatest pitching season of all time, there’s no doubt that there’s a few years that would pop up regularly among the responses. Bob Gibson‘s 1968, certainly. Dwight Gooden‘s 1985 would probably appear, or Roger Clemens‘ 1986, or Steve Carlton’s 1972. Randy Johnson has a few years you could point to. So does Sandy Koufax. So does Greg Maddux. There’s not really a wrong answer there, because it’s not a question that can be answered. Run environment and park effects have to be measured, and we can do that to some extent, but we can’t really account for the fact that some people prefer the quiet mastery of Maddux to the flame-throwing mastery of Johnson, or the fact that whether you were 15 in 1968 or still decades away from being born will absolutely color your memories of particular eras.

For me, the answer is a tie. It’s either Pedro Martinez‘ 1999 or Pedro Martinez‘ 2000, and it’s not hard to explain why. They were legitimately great seasons no matter how you looked at them, and they occurred right in the face of some of the highest offensive environments we’ve ever seen. It’s why Martinez’ ERA+ in 2000 was 291 while Gibson’s 1968 was 258, despite Gibson’s raw ERA of 1.12 being considerably lower than Martinez’ 1.74. And for me, I lived in Boston at the time. I was in college. I lived within walking distance of Fenway Park. I can’t say I specifically remember any starts of Martinez’ I saw in person in those two years, but I’m sure I saw at least a few.

Martinez, in those two years, did something no other qualified pitcher since 1900 has ever done before or since. He struck out more than 11 per nine, and he paired that with a walk rate below 2.00. That’s a bit biased towards recent pitchers, since the game as a whole simply didn’t strike out decades ago like they do now, but that doesn’t really change how fantastically impressive it was.

Now, realize this: This isn’t a post about Pedro Martinez. It’s a post about Stephen Strasburg, who, through his first 14 starts of the season, is on pace to do exactly that… not that anyone seems to be noticing. If it’s possible to be both a superstar and feel like a disappointment, considering how hyped Strasburg was as the No. 1 pick in the 2009 draft, he’s managed to accomplish it.

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