Andrew McCutchen has been bad. I think I’m allowed to say that. Used to be, it was just a bad start. It’s still a bad start, but we’re a week into May, so that “just” is disappearing by the second. Attention to this thing is warranted.

Now, at any given time, lots of baseball players are in the midst of being bad. What’s weird about McCutchen being bad, in particular, is that he’s usually not. He goes beyond just being an All-Star; he’s one of the five best players in the game today. The spotlight shines a little brighter, and so when things are going awry, people notice.

How much do I need to go over, here? I know McCutchen’s numbers are bad. You know McCutchen’s numbers are bad. I don’t need to review a ton of information proving as much. Here, let’s just look at one graph. As I write this, McCutchen has played 26 games in 2015. Below, his whole career, in rolling 26-game stretches of OPS. Pretty simple measure of hot streaks and cold spells:

Two things to take from that. One, McCutchen has had bad 26-game stretches before. They’ve just been tucked into the middle of seasons, rather than being right at the start, all conspicuous-like. Two, McCutchen has been quite bad this season. As far as the graph above is concerned, McCutchen has achieved a career minimum. It’s not proof that something’s wrong, but it’s enough to make you wonder.

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We have a Madison Bumgarner, right now. He just put a whole team on his shoulders and blew our minds last October, even. And with that Paul Bunyanesque workmanlike yet fiery demeanor, he seems a snowflake. Unique and alone. But maybe we have we seen pitchers like him before?

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The Houston Astros are well known for swinging, missing, and striking out at an extremely high rate. It should come as no surprise the Astros are currently leading the American League in strikeout rate, even in the early going, striking out 26.2% of the time. However, the Astros are not first in Major League Baseball in strikeout rate. That honor goes to the Pittsburgh Pirates who have struck out 26.8% of the time so far this season. Excluding pitchers, the Astros still hold the lead (26.2% to 26.0%), but the Pirates have swung and missed a lot to start the year.

The Pirates have struggled a little out of the gate, getting swept by the Cincinnati Reds to begin the season on their way to winning three out of their first eight games. The pitching has been mostly solid, with a 3.55 ERA and 3.21 FIP, although the bullpen has been credited with the loss in three of the five Pirates losses. In the early-going the Pirates have hit just .221/.270/.366 with a wRC+ of 80. Those numbers are not all that concerning this early, but the Pirates lack of patience is surprising even as strikeout rates across MLB continue to move upwards.

A deviation in the Pirates strikeout numbers in April is not unusual for the team. While the Pirates have switched out Russell Martin for Francisco Cervelli and given Gregory Polanco a full-time role, most of the team is similar to last season. The Pirates struck out more last April than any other month in 2014. As the chart below shows, the same was true throughout MLB last year, although the effect was not as pronounced for MLB as a whole.
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You had, probably, heard of Arquimedes Caminero before. This is because his full name is Arquimedes Euclides Caminero, and that speaks for itself. His existence as a baseballer was something of a curiosity, but that was more or less the extent of it. However much you knew about Caminero, you probably knew next to nothing about his actual talent. In January, he was designated for assignment by the Marlins. Some days later, he was acquired by the Pirates for cash considerations. He was added to the spring-training pile of guys competing for a major-league bullpen spot. These are the transactions you ignore, and you’re usually justified in doing so. Most of the time, the Camineros of the world remain the Camineros, only a little bit older every year.

And to be fair, it’s April 14. It’s been two and a half months since the Marlins gave Caminero up, so it’s not like we can know the rest of his career. But, in February, I polled the audience about pitching coaches, and Pirates fans liked theirs the most. Big fans of Ray Searage, those Pirates people. Searage has developed a reputation for getting the most out of troubled live arms, and based on early indications, with Caminero, Searage can count for himself another unlikely win.

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When discussing contract extensions like the four-year $27 million deal with two team options the Pirates signed with Josh Harrison, especially for those players three years or more away from free agency much of the focus is on how many free agent seasons a team has purchased by offering a substantial guarantee. The Miami Marlins and Chicago White Sox each received three free agent years from Christian Yelich and Adam Eaton, respectively. The New York Mets received one free agent season from Juan Lagares, and the Minnesota Twins did not receive any free agent years from Brian Dozier when they signed his extension. The Pirates have bought potentially three years of free agency with a relatively small guarantee, but given Harrison’s age and track record prior to 2014, those years will not likely be as valuable as those for teammates Andrew McCutchen and Starling Marte.

The recent contract extensions for players with between three and four years and in their first year of arbitration have incredibly wide variance.
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Before you understand Jeff Locke, you should know that you probably won’t understand Jeff Locke. This will be a post without a real conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be interesting!

A couple things we know to be true about Locke: Over the last two seasons, he’s made 51 starts, and has logged 292 innings. In that time, he’s posted a very respectable ERA of 3.69, which puts him in the same company as guys like Jeff Samardzija and Dallas Keuchel. Over that same time period, however, he’s also posted a less-respectable FIP of 4.18, which puts him in the same company as guys like Travis Wood and Edinson Volquez. Put another way: Locke has outperformed his peripherals like few others in baseball.

Now, some things we know to be true about the Pirates: They have, arguably, baseball’s most distinct organizational pitching philosophies, which include both pitching inside and pitching low at extreme rates. As a team, they’ve outperformed their peripherals like few others in baseball, and that’s likely at least partially a result of their organizational pitching philosophies. The last thing we know is that they recently chose Locke over Vance Worley for the final spot in the rotation, which came as a bit of a surprise considering Worley’s dominant comeback last season.

Worley still made the rotation, on account of Charlie Morton’s injury, but that’s beside the point. The Pirates chose Locke over Worley, and, to an extent, that’s telling. For these facts alone, we have reason to be interested in Locke. It’s not often one finds oneself saying that, so the time is now. Let’s investigate Jeff Locke.
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Yesterday, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Pittsburgh Pirates. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Pittsburgh’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Pirates system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Pittsburgh system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

t5. Elias Diaz, C (Profile)

As McDaniel notes, Diaz was signed as an 18-year-old out of Venezuela for just $20 thousand. Age and bonus amount are pretty strong indicators of a Latin American player’s prospect status — and Diaz’s indicators suggest that his status as a prospect wasn’t “very highly sought after.” Statistically, though — with the exception of a couple low-BABIP seasons — he’s demonstrated a promising and constantly improving offensive profile, never striking out in more than 20% of his plate appearances and always exhibiting something better than negligible power. Moreover, his defensive skills at catcher appear to be his actual strength. Considered altogether, that’s a promising collection of qualities — one that renders him probably somewhere above replacement level.

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This week’s nuttiest pitches might even have a point. But let’s just start with the GIFs. Because it’s fun to watch crazy pitches do crazy things.

Let’s do the uncle charlies, the yakkers, the yellow hammers — curveballs are on the menu today. As usual, we’re looking at the last three years because that’s what MLB.tv allows us, and we’re sorting PITCHF/x to find the pitches with the most extreme horizontal and vertical movement, as well as velocities.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves, Athletics, Angels, Dodgers, Blue Jays, Tigers, Cardinals, Brewers, Indians, Mariners & Pirates

Top 200 Prospects Content Index

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects

With 31 players listed, the Pirates system is one of the deeper ones in the game, though a number of the guys listed below already have or will get big league looks next year. That’s obviously better than having the depth be at the low levels since the point of a system is to produce big league players, it just means the list may be less deep a year or two from now.

The Pirates do a nice job in Latin America, with the current regime led by Rene Gayo signing Starling Marte, Gregory Polanco, Dilson Herrera, Alen Hanson and Harold Ramirez, of the 45 FV or better types.  The Pirates spent big in the draft in the years leading up to the bonus pools, but have a lower bar to clear on draft expectations with the big league team’s recent success and the bonus pool system limiting the outlay for domestic prospects.

The last five 1st rounders Pittsburgh has signed (Cole Tucker, Austin Meadows, Reese McGuire, Gerrit Cole and Jameson Taillon) all have returned positively so far and the big league team’s success is proving to block some MLB-ready prospects, so the organization is in a healthy place after decades in the wilderness.

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Everything you know to be true in your heart but hasn’t been proven by stats is worth hanging on to, even if just a little bit, and privately. The stats may catch up some day. This isn’t to say that all conventional wisdom is correct. This is to say that all “statistically-proven” wisdom is not always going to continue to be true.

Take swinging strikes, called strikes, and Vance Worley.

Vance Worley blew up in 2011. He struck out more batters on a rate basis than he ever had in the minor leagues. He did it with one of the worst swinging strike rates among starters that year. He did it with called strikes — he was fifth among starters with at least 2000 pitches that year. He did it with style, as you can see thanks to Zoo With Roy:

As 2012 approached, I was tasked with figuring out his fantasy value for the upcoming season. I had a personal preference for the swinging strike. To me, there’s no cleaner statistical happening in baseball — that the batter swung and missed is irrefutable. And the swinging strike as a moment is both triumphant and despondent, all in at once. It renders a one-nothing August game watchable. It’s beautiful.

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