Over at NBC, Joe Posnanski raises this provocative question: Would Major League Baseball be better off if it eliminated the postseason, and just crowned its champion based on regular-season record, the way that England’s Premier League does?
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Last year, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper had two of the best seasons for age-19/age-20 players in baseball history. We might not ever see anything like Trout’s 2012 season from a 20-year-old again. Those two ruined our expectations for what underaged position players are supposed to do in the big leagues. Everyone else pales in comparison to what we just saw.
That shouldn’t cause us to overlook the fact that there’s another 20-year-old putting his mark on Major League Baseball right now. In Baltimore, Manny Machado is showing the early signs of being a superstar.
Although Clay Buchholz had enjoyed his share of success heading into 2013, from a no-hitter to a 17-win season, one assumes the Red Sox were hoping for more. Buchholz was Baseball America’s fourth-best prospect entering 2008 and appeared to be a top-of-the-rotation power arm capable of ace-level dominance. Instead, Buchholz has had one very good season — a 2010 with a 2.33 ERA and a still-solid 3.61 FIP. He has otherwise pitched like a back-end rotation-filler, with a 4.26 ERA and a 4.38 FIP over 500.1 innings.
Wednesday night, Buchholz’s fifth start of his age-28 season, is the latest signal of the step forward the Red Sox have been waiting for. Buchholz held the Blue Jays to just two hits and three walks over seven shutout innings as he struck out eight to lower his ERA to 1.01. And fret not, the peripherals are fantastic as well: he owns a 2.28 FIP and 3.00 xFIP.
The strikeout total he put up Wednesday night has been there all season, and it’s the main difference between the new Buchholz and the old Buchholz. Despite his blazing fastball and breaking pitches lauded as grade 70 pitches in Baseball America reports, Buchholz was posted remarkably consistent and mediocre strikeout rates from 2009-2012, always between 6.1 and 6.7 K/9. He now has 47 strikeouts in 44.2 innings in 2013.
Additionally, Buchholz kept a Blue Jays lineup loaded with power hitters without a home run, and he has allowed just one this season. His HR/FB was a horrible 13 percent last year and he had four seasons above 10 percent in his last five.
So what’s new? Via last night’s Blue Jays broadcast, Red Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia said Buchholz’s biggest difference is improved fastball command. And indeed, the numbers (via BrooksBaseball.net) bear this out: Buchholz has thrown his four-seam fastball for a called strike 27.5 percent of the time this year after just 22.8 percent in 2012. Conversely, the pitch has seen a similar drop in in-play rate. Considering Buchholz has allowed a .537 slugging on contact on the pitch for his career — the worst by over 100 points for any pitch he still throws — the fewer four-seam fastballs put in play the better.
By keeping the fastballs on the corners, something he did proficiently Wednesday night, he’ll turn what used to be balls in play into called strikes or foul balls. He has thrown the fastball for a strike but not in play 51.8 percent of the time this year, six points higher than last season. And, with 160 four-seam fastballs thrown already this season, this difference is already statistically significant (in a 90 percent confidence interval, to be specific).
His HR/FB won’t stay grounded at 3.7 percent, but keeping fastballs out of play will keep it from escalating too quickly. It’s especially key because he needs to be able to throw the fastball to get into favorable counts — it’s his best-controlled pitch at about 68 percent strikes the last two seasons, slightly better than the two-seamer and much better than his off-speed options.
And thanks to those fastball strikes, Buchholz has been in plenty of two-strike counts. The next question, then, is which pitch will be the out pitch. His curveball has been shockingly bad at drawing whiffs — under 10 percent since 2007, close to the major league fastball average — and that hasn’t changed this year. But his changeup, at least in 2013, has been an elite swing-and-miss pitch. Of the 74 Buchholz has tossed, hitters have waved at 20, a massive 27 percent.
As mentioned above, Buchholz’s changeup has been heralded in the past; a 70 grade is frontline material. But he was struggling mightily with the pitch last season, so much so that he scrapped it for a splitter Josh Beckett taught him after he threw the pitch for a ball nearly 50 percent of the time in April last season.
That arsenal change didn’t take as the calendar flipped to 2013. Buchholz had little trouble drawing swings and misses when he used the changeup in 2012 — 18.9 percent is still an excellent mark for a changeup — and his control issues have disappeared. Buchholz threw 13 changeups Wednesday night with nine (69 percent) going for strikes, and his 63 percent overall strike rate works fine for a pitch designed to fool hitters. The pitch has been devastating to left-handers and right-handers alike, with whiff rates over 20 percent to both sides. It’s been so good, he’s put the splitter back in the toolbox, leaving it as a side project for bullpen sessions.
Things will come back to earth. Buchholz’s changeup probably won’t finish with a higher whiff rate than Aroldis Chapman’s slider (currently at 24.4 percent). Teams will tag his fastball for a few home runs. But Buchholz has already thrown enough fastballs to suggest his control and command of the pitch have improved this year, and his changeup has been a highly regarded pitch dating back to his time in Double-A. If he can maintain even a fraction of the improvements he’s shown over his first five starts with these two pitches, the Red Sox can expect Buchholz to finally step into his frontline potential.
“I’m not a tremendously gifted athlete,” Mark Trumbo said. “I have to work at it, and be smart out there.” That might be surprising given how country strong the six-foot-four, 225-pound outfielder looks, but if you consider his game at as a whole, it’s obvious that there are aspects that could use refinement. Statistics have helped shape some of his baseball values as he’s worked to improve himself, even if he doesn’t incorporate them daily.
Josh Hamilton is the most aggressive hack in baseball. This isn’t news, of course, but to put his hacktastic ways in context, here is where Hamilton’s swing rates rank among batters with 500+ PAs in the last year.
O-Swing%: 42.7% (150th of 151)
Z-Swing: 82.0% (151st of 151)
Swing%: 57.9% (150th of 151)
Zone%: 38.8% (151st of 151)
Contact%: 64.9% (151st of 151)
The only guy who has swung the bat more often than Hamilton is Delmon Young, but 46.1% of the pitches Young has been thrown have been in the strike zone. Hamilton is pitched around more than any other hitter in the game, and yet he swings more often than anyone, with the exception of one replacement level scrub.
Josh Hamilton has always been an aggressive hitter. Josh Hamilton has a career major league batting line of .301/.360/.542. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
Well, it is broke(n), but most importantly, this isn’t the approach that made Josh Hamilton an elite Major League player. This approach is new, and if he doesn’t make some changes in a hurry, he’s on his way to becoming the new Ryan Howard.
Stetson Allie sat, staring at the ground as Rockies farmhand Drew Beuerlein verbally tore into him. Moments before, the 240-pound Allie delivered a glancing blow on a home plate collision, unable to jar the ball loose from the 24-year-old catcher. As teammates took the field, Allie continued to sit as if he’d been shaken up during impact. The pitcher-turned-first-baseman eventually rose to his feet and gingerly took two steps towards the third base dugout before he quickened his pace.
This morning, Jon Heyman noted an odd thing on Twitter:
i am not a hater of WAR stat, but if someone can explain to me how starling marte & bryce harper are both 1.7, please do
— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) April 29, 2013
He was quoting Baseball-Reference’s WAR calculation, and the two are indeed tied at +1.7 WAR on B-R. Here, we have Bryce Harper (+1.5 WAR) ahead of Starling Marte (+1.2 WAR), but the point still basically stands; WAR thinks Harper (1.200 OPS) and Marte (.835 OPS) have both been pretty great this year, with just a small (or no) difference between them. What Harper has done with the bat, WAR believes that Marte has mostly made up with his legs in baserunning (+3 run advantage) and defense (+3 run advantage), as well a slight bump from getting 12 extra plate appearances.
There’s no question that Harper has been a better offensive player, but there are questions about the defensive valuations, because defensive metrics aren’t as refined at this point as offensive metrics are. It is much easier to prove that Harper has been +10 runs better with the bat this year than it is to prove that Marte has been +3 runs better defensively by UZR, or +7 runs better defensively by DRS. There are more sources for error in the defensive metrics, and Heyman’s tweet led to a discussion on Twitter about the usefulness of including small sample defensive metrics in WAR.
I’ve written before about the strong correlation between team WAR and team winning percentage, and others have followed up with similar analysis more recently. However, all those articles have focused on full season or multi-season data samples, and since the question was raised and I hadn’t yet seen it answered, I became curious about whether WAR would actually correlate better at this point in the year if we just assumed every player in baseball was an average defender.
Essentially, if we just removed defensive metrics from the equation, and evaluated teams solely on their hitting and pitching, how would our WAR calculation compare to team winning percentage? And how does WAR correlate to team winning percentage based on just April 2013 data, when we’re dealing with much smaller sample sizes?
Before the season season started, members of our staff took a shot at prognosticating the season, despite the fact that we all know You Can’t Predict Baseball. Of the 31 authors who participated, 15 of them — myself included — selected the Blue Jays as the favorites to win the AL East, and nine of the 16 who didn’t pick Toronto to win their division had them as a wild card club. The Blue Jays off-season makeover convinced most of us that they were a good team with a good shot at playing in October.
It might only be April 29th, but there’s a pretty good chance that 24 of us are going to end up being wrong, because while we’re still in the first month of the season, the Blue Jays season is in jeopardy.
Through five starts, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright has a 1.93 ERA, 1.09 FIP, and 2.13 SIERA. Of the 144 batsmen to face Wainwright, 37 struck out and just 1 walked — Bryce Harper in the 6th inning of last Tuesday’s game. Wainwright has induced a career-high 55.8% groundball-rate; he has held opponents to 8 earned runs, 9 runs total, scattered across 37 and 1/3 innings.
Wainwright is not “on fire.” He is fire. Butane lighters hang pictures of him on their bedroom walls. Local volunteer firemen warn children about Wainwright during school visits.
So how does an excellent pitcher produce results like a deity pitcher? For Wainwright, the tactic appears to be: (a) Throw a full spectrum of fastballs, (b) select from that fastball spectrum at an increasingly unpredictable rhythm, and (c) pitch against the right teams.
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A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:
