Archive for Featured

Sometimes it’s the things you don’t write that make you look smarter. A few weeks ago, I nearly wrote something celebrating Michael Saunders‘ improved plate discipline. I wasn’t quite feeling it, though, so I went and did something else, and then Saunders embarked on a miserable slump. That’s not the first time something like that has happened. Additionally, there were a few times I wanted to re-visit the Rick Porcello narrative, pointing out that his spring-training strikeouts didn’t lead to regular-season strikeouts. I never wrote anything to that effect, and now Porcello is striking guys out. Again, I look smarter by not looking like an idiot. Over the last 30 days, Porcello’s posted baseball’s third-lowest xFIP. Here’s a selection of strikeout rates over the same span:

• Stephen Strasburg, 27.0%
• Matt Harvey, 26.6%
• Shelby Miller, 26.2%
• Rick Porcello, 26.0%
• Tim Lincecum, 23.9%
• James Shields, 23.7%
• Clayton Kershaw, 20.4%

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article titled “The Myth of the Passive Hitter“, which examined the change in the rate of swings in Major League Baseball over the last 25 years. While a host of writers have written about the rise of Moneyball philosophies as a reason for why strikeout numbers are on the rise, I noted that the data shows that hitters are actually swinging at basically the same rate now as they did two decades ago. The evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that hitters have become significantly more passive at the plate.

However, as several readers pointed out, the point being posed most repeatedly by Tom Verducci isn’t that hitters are not swinging often enough, it’s that they’re not swinging often enough in the right situations. As a follow-up to his original post, he wrote this last week:

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One of the most interesting fields of study in baseball over the last few years has been that of pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving, or pitch-stealing, or whatever you want to call it. This is the stuff that’s made Jose Molina nerd-famous, and it’s drawing more attention with every passing month. Framing has been discussed on ESPN. It’s been discussed on MLB Network. It’s been the subject of countless player interviews, and what’s been revealed is that a great amount of thought and technique goes into how a catcher catches a pitch. Catchers don’t just catch the baseball. They catch the baseball with a purpose.

Research has uncovered a few outliers, like Molina and Jonathan Lucroy and, say, Jesus Montero and Ryan Doumit in the other direction. It’s interesting these guys can be given such different strike zones, since the strike zone is supposed to be consistent for everybody. And it’s interesting that, as much as people come up with run values in the dozens, it’s hard to identify the actual effect. For example, Rays pitchers this year have allowed a higher OPS throwing to Molina than when throwing to Jose Lobaton, the other guy. Last year, Molina again had the worst numbers. It reminds me too much of Catcher ERA for my tastes, but you’d think you’d see something. Instead, you see little. Where is the value going?

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Last week, Mike Trout hit for the cycle. When asked for a comment, coach Mike Scioscia said, “If I’m a betting man, I’ve got to believe there’s another cycle in his career somewhere.” That got me wondering.

Whenever I was in a math class where probability was being discussed, the question often in the back of my mind was, “How can this be applied to baseball?” One of the things I love the most about baseball is how well it lends itself to situations of probability, compared to most sports. I’m not sure what that says about me. Anyway, I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to refresh my memory (and hopefully some of yours) on how to crunch the numbers on situations like this. Don’t worry — the principles work on useful things other than just calculating the odds of that gimmicky achievement we call the cycle. Read the rest of this entry »

­Coming off the first batting Triple Crown in 45 years, Miguel Cabrera ­is making a bid to  be the first hitter to do so in consecutive seasons.  He currently leads the American League in batting average (.391), RBI (55) and is one home run off the pace at 14.  In a recent piece here at FanGraphs, Jeff Sullivan commented on Cabrera’s impressive all fields hitting and ability to cover the full strike zone with power.  I have put together some imagery to highlight this ability and show a bit of why Cabrera is such a threat.

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“I’m probably leading the league in bad contact, too.” — Marco Scutaro

We talked for a few minutes, Marco Scutaro and I, about hitting and contact before a game a few weeks back. When I told him he’s leading the league in contact rate since 2010, he offered the response above with a slight frown and a flick of the bat. He swung a bat the whole time we talked, even. But his voice never really wavered — it never betrayed either the physical effort he was putting into choosing his bat for the day or the matter-of-fact humor that accompanied his answers.

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Even when I’m not trying to pay attention to Bryce Harper, he finds a way to capture my focus. Last night, I was seeing off a friend on the east side of Portland, and if I’d been thinking about any sport, it was hockey, since these are the days of the NHL playoffs. A TV was being projected onto one of the walls of the bar, and at first it was showing a minor-league hockey game. Eventually it switched to baseball highlights, which eventually turned to a game between the Nationals and the Giants. The Nationals won 2-1 in ten innings, but what stuck with me wasn’t the result, but rather a Bryce Harper double.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harper rip a Jeremy Affeldt delivery into right field. The ball skidded all the way to the fence, where it was recovered by Hunter Pence, but Harper pulled up at second with ease. He’d score minutes later. I’ve seen Bryce Harper double before, but this one was different. This one was an in-between grounder/line drive, and it was hit between the first and second basemen, and it made it all the way to the wall. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw something like that.

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The Mariners stuck with it for 735 innings. Despite the fact that nearly everyone in baseball agreed that Jesus Montero could not catch at an acceptable level in the Major Leagues, the Mariners let him try for the equivalent of a half season spread out over eight painful months. Now, it seems like the organization is accepting the reality that Jesus Montero is not, and will never be, a Major League catcher. As of today, he isn’t even a Major League player.

The Mariners are swapping out Jesuses in their backup catcher role — Montero had already lost the starting gig to vaunted superstar Kelly Shoppach — by replacing Montero with Jesus Sucre, the polar opposite of Montero as a player. Sucre is a no-bat defensive specialist, but given Montero’s struggles on both sides of the plate, a non-prospect catch-and-throw backup is probably an upgrade at this point.

So, with Montero back in Triple-A for the foreseeable future, I figured it would be a good time to re-do an exercise we did with Montero 17 months ago, when he was first traded from New York to Seattle. At that point, we walked through a list of comparable bat-first prospects who reached the Majors at an early age, noting that players of this type have turned into superstars, but that the median forecast based on similar prospects called for Montero to turn into a good hitter, not a great one. I ended that piece with the following paragraphs:

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Featured Game: Baltimore at Toronto, 19:07pm ET
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Featured Game: Baltimore at Toronto, 19:07pm ET
Regarding This Game, Who’s Starting It for Baltimore
Starting this game for Baltimore, in terms of a pitcher, is Compelling Baseball Prospect Kevin Gausman. The appearance will mark Gausman’s first in the majors.

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Vance Worley just got clobbered again, this time by the Braves. There’s no set and certain point at which a start turns into an official clobbering, but looking through Worley’s 2013 game log, I’d say this was the fifth or sixth time he’s been clobbered, in ten games. That’s an ugly ratio, and to make matters worse, recall that Worley was Minnesota’s opening-day starter. The Twins’ de facto ace owns an ERA over 7, with 82 hits allowed in just under 49 innings. His strikeouts are way down and on Wednesday he was chased by a double that followed an Evan Gattis grand slam. Two seasons ago, Worley finished third in the voting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

On May 17, Worley allowed one run in a start against the Red Sox, and he credited his improvement to mechanical tweaks he’d made in recent side sessions. He finished that start with three walks and a strikeout. At the end of April, following a rough appearance, Worley said he was throwing the way he wanted to be throwing. His pitches were fine, and his movement was normal. The results just weren’t present, for him. They still aren’t, and the only consolation for Minnesota is that Ben Revere has been bad, too.

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