Cleveland’s bullpen has been very good this season, but it could still be improved upon. Some of the members at the back end — or the front end, depending on your perspective — could be upgraded. Enter Joe Smith, who was acquired from Toronto as we entered the final hour before the trade deadline this afternoon.
Here’s the deal, with details from Cleveland.com’s Paul Hoynes:
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve known for some time that Bradley Zimmer is unusually tall. We’ve also known for some time that Zimmer can move, and more recently we’ve found out that he’s one of the fastest sprinters in the game. When Zimmer gets himself to full speed, he’s practically the same as Billy Hamilton, and while that doesn’t say anything about the time required to get to full speed, it’s still a little surprising. Zimmer can rightfully be considered extreme, in terms of his running skill.
He’s got another one of those! Another extreme skill, I mean. Perhaps it’s not *as* extreme, but it’s close enough. We here at FanGraphs have measures of outfielder arm value. There’s arm value according to Defensive Runs Saved, and there’s arm value according to Ultimate Zone Rating. I don’t know which is better or worse, so I went ahead and combined the two. After adding and dividing, here are this year’s top 10 most valuable outfield arms:
| Player | OF Innings | Arm Value |
|---|---|---|
| Jarrod Dyson | 723.1 | 6.0 |
| Bradley Zimmer | 410.2 | 5.1 |
| Billy Hamilton | 780.0 | 4.9 |
| Marcell Ozuna | 810.2 | 4.6 |
| Jason Heyward | 562.0 | 3.6 |
| Alex Gordon | 769.1 | 3.6 |
| Mookie Betts | 876.2 | 3.6 |
| Odubel Herrera | 782.0 | 3.5 |
| Adam Duvall | 797.2 | 3.5 |
| Guillermo Heredia | 548.2 | 3.5 |
Zimmer is in second place. What’s more, look at the innings column. Zimmer has played a good deal less than all these guys. Still, his value is where it is. As you probably understand, arm value can be a noisy statistic, and things like assists can sometimes be fluky. So it goes. To paint a more detailed picture, here’s a selection of this year’s center fielders, plotted by assists — as a rate metric — and the rate with which they’ve held would-be advancing baserunners. The held% statistic comes from Baseball Reference, and Zimmer is the point in yellow.
Zimmer has held an above-average rate of runners. More importantly, he already has seven assists. He’s one off the league lead in that department, despite the playing-time deficiency. The other extreme point here, for what it’s worth, belongs to Leury Garcia. He also has seven assists. He’s done well, but this is a Bradley Zimmer post.
By the results, Zimmer looks good. He also looks good if you dig in a little deeper. Eric Longenhagen put a 60 on Zimmer’s arm, and there’s also this relatively recent highlight clip:
Now, last season, according to Statcast, Aaron Hicks uncorked a throw four miles per hour faster than that one. Aaron Hicks has a crazy arm. Zimmer presumably doesn’t have the strongest arm in the league, but now we know it’s at least among them. As you can see in the highlight, that was 2017’s fastest throw for an assist. Zimmer has a strong arm, and so far it’s been sufficiently accurate. That leads to both held baserunners, and dead ones.
Incidentally, in the same game in which Zimmer made the above assist, he made another assist, with another strong throw. Previously, Bryce Harper had recorded the fastest outfield assist in 2017. Zimmer knocked that down to third place in one day. The arm is for real, is the point, fluky statistic or no. In the long run, Zimmer’s arm is likely to be an asset.
Brandon Guyer recently gave Zimmer a Kevin Kiermaier comp. Guyer has played with them both. Comparisons don’t get much more flattering. Zimmer will continue to work on his offense, and he’s going to have his bad games and his better ones. As a defender, Zimmer has near-league-leading speed, with near-league-leading arm strength. That takes care of two of the five tools.
I don’t know if the Cubs are actually coming out of their funk, but it sure looks like they are. It feels like a matter of days before they re-claim first place in the NL Central, which is the outcome we’ve all long expected. There’s still work to do yet, but as the Cubs improve, it sends more eyes over to the Indians. The Indians have been in a funk of their own, and while they’re already sitting in first, they’ve been unable to shake the Twins and the Royals. Even the Tigers remain within conceivable striking distance, and they’ve begun to sell. The Indians were supposed to be better than this, and the clock, as a clock does, is ticking.
Struggling team? Check. Trade deadline approaching? Check. Observers are wondering how the Indians might look to get better in the week and a half ahead. One thought has been that the club could look to add another starting pitcher. With Danny Salazar about to return from injury, perhaps that wouldn’t be necessary. But for me, the key isn’t the return of Salazar. Rather, it’s the emergence of Mike Clevinger. Clevinger has stepped up in a big way, giving the Indians more than they thought they might have.
I’m not a particularly fast person. I was born in Jamaica, though, and Usain Bolt has practically been the country’s patron saint for the last decade, so particularly fast people amaze me. And what’s most amazing about Bolt isn’t even his raw foot speed, but rather that foot speed relative to his height. At 6-foot-5, he stands out among the crowd, from the blocks to the finish line, taking up to 15% fewer strides while breaking records.
We sort of have our own Usain Bolt in the major leagues. His name is Brad Zimmer and he patrols center field for the Cleveland Indians.
“[Jose Ramirez] is an All-Star baseman. If I were to have told you that four years ago, you’d have been scratching your head, ‘Wait. The guy who is playing second base and is known for his defense? He’s an All-Star third baseman?’”
Those words were spoken by Cleveland Indians team president Chris Antonetti, who went on to say that “development isn’t always a linear process; it’s difficult to predict where guys are going to end up.”
That’s certainly true for Ramirez, who will start at the hot corner for the American League in tonight’s midsummer classic. As Antonetti alluded to, the expectations for the Dominican native were quite different just a handful of years ago. The 2013 Baseball America Prospect Handbook opined that Ramirez has “little power and limited physical projection,” and that he “lacks a high ceiling.”
Feel free to put that scouting report in the shredder, because the 5-foot-9 Ramirez’s ceiling currently resembles that of the Sistine Chapel. The 24-year-old infielder heads into the break with a .332/.388/.601 slash line, and — drum roll, please — an eye-opening 17 home runs. Ramirez has, quite simply, developed into a star.
He isn’t exactly verbose when it comes to talking about his emergence as an offensive force. At least that was the case when I spoke to him — with the assistance of Indians translator extraordinaire Anna Bolton — prior to a recent game. But while Ramirez wasn’t particularly forthcoming, he did share a few a noteworthy nuggets.
Logically, all of the following is true. We accept that human beings are in charge of calling the strike zone. They try their best to tell the difference between strikes and balls, but you can usually understand if they call a strike on a pitch that missed by an inch. How much is an inch? When’s the last time you tried to do what they do a few hundred times every game? The ball moves incredibly fast, and as an umpire, you never know where it’s going to go, or how it’s going to spin. Anyway, we can be forgiving with an inch. And if we can accept a miss of one inch, it follows that we should accept a miss of two inches. All that is is one more inch, and we already gave them the first inch.
If we can accept a miss of two inches, we can accept a miss of three inches. If three inches, then four inches. If four inches, then five, and if five, then six. On and on it goes, in single-inch increments, and it does all make a certain amount of sense. Humans are great, but humans are flawed, and any human-called strike zone is going to have a gray area.
But, nine inches? Imagine nine inches. You don’t even have to be precisely correct. Your imagination is enough. We know that pitches miss the zone by nine inches. But how does a pitch like that get called a strike? I mean, ever? I don’t want to act like some kind of umpiring authority, because I *haven’t* ever been an ump, and I know sometimes people make mistakes. It’s just — nine inches. Technically, 9.1 inches, in this case. The worst called strike of the 2017 regular season’s first half missed the outer edge of the zone by 9.1 inches. You might’ve seen that Angel Hernandez has been in the news lately.
Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Adbert Alzolay, RHP, Chicago NL (Profile)
Level: Hi-A Age: 22 Org Rank: NR Top 100: NR
Line: 5.2 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 2 R, 7 K
Notes
His delivery is a bit rough (though it’s more efficient than it used to be), but Alzolay has good stuff, sitting in the mid-90s and topping out at 97 with arm-side run. He’ll flash an average changeup and can vary his breaking ball’s shape, at times exhibiting 12-6 movement and showing two-plane wipe at others. He has a chance for a plus-plus fastball an two solid-average secondaries, perhaps a tick above, to go with fringe command.
On Opening Day, Edwin Encarnacion made his presence immediately felt with his new team. With Cleveland down a run, one out in the eighth, and Matt Bush on the mound, Encarnacion homered to tie the game in Arlington. It was his second hit — in just his fourth plate appearance — for his new team. By WPA, it was the biggest play of the game to that point (it would end the day as the second-biggest). By the time he came up for his fifth plate appearance, Cleveland had pulled ahead by three runs, and they would go away winners. Unfortunately, Encarnacion wouldn’t hit another homer for 13 games. In the 12 games between those homers, he would hit just .182/.308/.205 (48 wRC+) in a 53-PA stretch that had some Cleveland fans feeling a whole lot of buyer’s remorse.
Fortunately, Encarnacion hasn’t maintained that horrid performance all season. In fact, as the calendar has flipped to June, he’s been on fire. His 228 wRC+ for the month is tops in the majors, and his 132 wRC+ for the season is now 32nd among qualified hitters. In case you hadn’t noticed that he was heating up, he punctuated the hot streak yesterday with two homers off of Twins starter Kyle Gibson, accounting for the only three runs Cleveland would require to secure both the win and also four-game road sweep of the Twins. He then tacked on an RBI single and a sac fly just for fun, which made him responsible for driving in all five Cleveland runs on the day. Not bad. And the home runs were pretty, to boot, both landing in Target Field’s second deck.
Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Breiling Eusebio, LHP, Colorado (Profile)
Level: Short Season Age: 20 Org Rank: NR Top 100: NR
Line: 5 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 7 K
Notes
It’s been a strong 2017 affiliate debut for Eusebio, who looked quite good throughout extended spring training, his fastball often sitting 90-94 with some tail. His low-70s curveball improved as we inched closer to the summer and it, too, was missing bats as June arrived and is currently average, flashing above. Eusebio has trouble timing his delivery, which can negatively impact his command, but he’s deceptive, throws hard for a lefty starting-pitching prospect, and has breaking-ball feel. Very much a prospect.
Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Yordan Alvarez, DH/1B, Houston (Profile)
Level: Low-A Age: 19 Org Rank: HM Top 100: NR
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR
Notes
Alvarez is hitting a preposterous .413/.500/.693 as a 19-year-old in full-season ball. Even once you acknowledge that better hitters at lower levels are going to have especially high BABIPs because they’re hitting balls harder than the baseline player at that level, Alvarez’s current .553 mark is unsustainable. Nevertheless, reports on the ease of his power and picturesque swing are very strong. There’s some swing-and-miss risk here but also a potential middle-of-the-order bat.