Weird things about baseball fascinate me. One of those things is the concept of discarded players. Every once in awhile, you’ll see a player doing well and think to yourself, “Hey, wasn’t he on our team at one point?” David Carpenter is one such player. Watching him face the Red Sox this week, I couldn’t help but think that it would be sure nice if the Sox had him right now instead of Craig Breslow. Sure, the world will keep on spinning, and Carpenter wouldn’t make or break the 2014 Red Sox, but every little bit counts, and the Red Sox gave him away for free after just five weeks on the roster. In situations like these, we often jokingly say (or at least I do), “Hey, I wish we could get guys like that!”

I don’t mean to pick on the Red Sox, because every team does this. If you scan rosters, you’ll find one such player on just about every roster. And originally, my intention was to run down that list and look at them all individually. But then I got a look at this trade. On July 31, 2010, the Atlanta Braves traded Gregor Blanco, Jesse Chavez and Tim Collins to the Kansas City Royals for Rick Ankiel and Kyle Farnsworth. Take a look:

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A lot of people think Pablo Sandoval is back. I don’t know if I agree.

In a lot of minds, baseball players are constantly coming and going, and it seems like that shouldn’t be true. Results waver; ability doesn’t — at least not so much. I don’t think Pablo Sandoval was ever gone, but what we can say with certainty is that early 2014 Sandoval didn’t look right. Recent 2014 Sandoval has looked a lot better. He’s looked a lot more familiar. He seems to be back on track to be one of the Giants’ positional leaders.

And there’s an interesting thing about that. In April, Sandoval drew 10 unintentional walks. In May, he’s drawn zero. In April, Sandoval swung at an above-average rate of pitches. In May, he’s swung at more pitches. This is what writers call an “understatement.” It’s what non-writers also would call an understatement, because that’s a everyday word.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
O’Brien’s hanging in with the legendary Joey Gallo in the minor league home run chase, and he plays the most important position on the defensive spectrum, yet he falls behind the first tier of slugging prospects due to a variety of weaknesses.

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Twitter user and probably good person Cory Little brought something to my attention the other day. The San Francisco Giants were playing a game in Colorado, and, following a somewhat ordinary looking sequence of events, from the top of the fifth inning:

• Brandon Hicks flies out
• Brandon Crawford singles
• Tyler Colvin doubles
• Madison Bumgarner strikes out
• Gregor Blanco triples
• Hunter Pence singles
• Pablo Sandoval strikes out

Three-run inning for San Francisco. Three two-out runs. The Giants took the lead, though they’d ultimately lose on a walk-off. What’s interesting isn’t the sequence, as it’s presented. What’s interesting is the sub-sequence. Let’s zoom in on the Bumgarner strikeout. The six pitches:

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
Black might have the most velocity of any minor leaguer.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
A small Venezuelan southpaw, Lopez has command of three solid pitches at a young age.

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Circumstances were different when Paul Goldschmidt faced Tim Lincecum the first time. In early August of 2011, Goldschmidt was playing in his second-ever major-league game, a young first baseman who’d never been a Baseball America top-100 prospect, and who’d never been a Baseball America top-10 Diamondbacks prospect. Lincecum was a staff ace having a Cy Young-caliber season, his fourth in a row, and he was one of the major pieces around which the Giants were built. Against Lincecum, Goldschmidt popped out on the seventh pitch of the first plate appearance. On the fourth pitch of the second plate appearance, Goldschmidt went yard.

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One of the unsung heroes of the 2012 San Francisco Giants team was Angel Pagan, who had come to San Francisco in trade in December, 2011. In fact, Pagan was so unsung that towards the end of the 2012 regular season, our very own Dave Cameron touted him for the tag of “most underrated player in baseball.” After the World Series trophy came back to the Bay, Pagan got a nice little contract, but unfortunately 2013 didn’t really go as planned. As such, he has gone back to being underrated. At least, for now.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to tear a hamstring muscle. I bet it hurts. It sure sounds like it hurts. Like, a lot. Unfortunately for him, Angel Pagan knows this feeling intimately, as he tore his right hamstring last season. Reading back through the Rotoworld injury news briefs, it may have been on this play:

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It would be hard to call Livan Hernandez’s retirement surprising, but some people such as myself were probably a bit taken aback because we assumed he had already retired. That is not meant as a slight. Hernandez is in his late thirties (some would say he is even older), did not pitch at all in 2013, and was dreadful when he last pitched in the majors in 2012. Our own Paul Swydan ranked Hernandez’s 2012 as one of the worst final seasons among pitchers having similar careers.

Beat writers and fans of Hernandez’s numerous teams will have all the best stories and reflections on his career. It would be hard to top Grant Brisbee’s (understandably) Giants-centric farewell to Hernandez, so I am not even going to try. But Hernandez drew attention, even late in his career, for other, non-fan-centric reasons. In 2011, Jeff Sullivan (who today [Livan Day at FanGraphs!] also posted about Hernandez and the strike zone) mentioned that Hernandez had a pretty bad slider in 2011. Yet after that same 2011 season, Swydan noted gave Hernandez an honorable mention for his incredibly slow, but amazingly curvy curve in 2011. Robert Baumann also got in on The Joy of Livan.

Rather than getting into every little statistical detail of Hernandez’ career, let’s look at three different moments from the roughly the beginning, end, and middle of his career.

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There’s bad days, and then there’s what Sergio Romo had against the Mariners in the midst of an 18-3 thrashing on Saturday. Romo faced five batters in the eighth inning, and you can imagine the type of opposition you face in the eighth inning of a Cactus League game on March 8:

1. Leon Landry singles to right. Most people don’t know who Leon Landry is. I only do because I remember the Dodgers trading him for Brandon League. Landry hit .216/.262/.303 as a 23-year-old in Double-A last year. Somehow, Seattle still won that trade.
2. Ketel Marte singles to right. I have absolutely no idea who Ketel Marte is, though he appears to not be related to Starling, Alfredo, Damaso, Andy or vodka.
3. Ty Kelly walks. Ty, or Tyler, Kelly, was apparently traded to Seattle last year for Eric Thames. Thames hit .252/.315/.356 in Triple-A for Baltimore, was picked up on waivers by Houston in September, and was released in December to sign in Korea. That is what Ty Kelly was traded for.
4. Tyler Smith walks. As I’ve moved into my 30s, I’ve become resigned to the fact that every male younger than me is named “Tyler” or “Austin.” And wouldn’t you know it, there were three different Tyler Smiths in pro ball last year alone. This one was drafted out of Oregon State in June, and played for Pulaski. Bonus points if you can identify the state “Pulaski” is in.
5. Ji-Man Choi singles. Now there’s a name you know, if only because “Ji-Man” is an 80 name. Despite a .411 minor league OBP, Choi didn’t rank on our top 15 Mariners prospects, and didn’t rank on the same list of most other sites.

I could do the same for his first outing of the spring, when he allowed six runs in an inning to Oakland, but the point here isn’t really to go on a tour of the lower levels of the American League West. The point is that there’s a sizable portion of you, I imagine, who have heard of zero of those five names. And yet Sergio Romo, World Series closer, All-Star, among the best relievers in the game for the last five years, managed to retire exactly none of them. After four games, Romo has faced 23 batters, allowed 14 of them to reach, and 12 to score (11 earned).

So… panic, right? Even within the context of “spring numbers don’t matter”, because no quality big leaguer should have such trouble with a collection of names like that without hiding some kind of serious injury.  Read the rest of this entry »