Ty Buttrey had an up-and-down first full big-league season last year. The downs tended to come in clumps. In a pair of early-September outings, the Los Angeles Angels reliever was charged with seven earned runs in just two-thirds of an inning. Prior to that there was a three-game stretch in late July where he allowed seven earned runs in two-and-a-third innings. Take those stink bombs out of the equation and Buttrey would have finished 2019 with a 2.34 ERA, rather than the rocky-by-comparison 3.98 that went into the annals.

Not that he wants, or deserves, a pity party. Unlike duffers, hurlers don’t get mulligans. Once it becomes an official game, everything you do ends up on the ledger.

I caught up to Buttrey at Fenway Park a handful of weeks after his July speed bump. When I asked him for a synopsis of his season as a whole, he pointed to occasional overuse of a 97 mph heater that, velocity-wise, ranked in the 96th percentile among his big-league brethren.

“Early in the year, I was doing pretty well mixing my pitches,” Buttrey told me. “I was feeling comfortable and having a lot of success. Then I had a couple games about three months in where I start getting really fastball heavy. I was throwing way too many and ended up needing to go back to the drawing board.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, conflicting reports regarding the state of Major League Baseball’s ongoing effort to contract and realign the minor leagues surfaced. While Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper and the Associated Press both reported that MLB is nearing an agreement with Minor League Baseball that would result in the loss of 42 affiliated teams, MiLB countered with a statement disputing the accuracy of the reports. Regardless of exactly where things stand in the negotiations, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic endangering the entirety of the 2020 minor league season, some thinning of the herd appears likely.

While I’ve lived in New York City for 25 years and attended hundreds of Yankees games and dozens of Mets games in both recreational and professional capacities, I grew up on minor league baseball, primarily in Salt Lake City, where I lived from 1973-88 (and where my parents still reside), and Walla Walla, Washington, where my paternal grandparents lived and where I visited for several summers in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Thus I’m all too familiar with the pain that comes from a city losing its minor league affiliate — and two of the 42 teams reportedly on the chopping block hit close to home, both my current one and the one of my youth.

When I began attending games circa 1977-78, the Salt Lake Gulls were the Triple-A affiliate of the California Angels, and part of the storied, high-scoring Pacific Coast League. They featured future big leaguers like Willie Aikens, Rance Mulliniks, and Dickie Thon, all of whom Angels general manager Buzzie Bavasi made sure to trade away for aging veterans (not without some success), a pattern that continued through the remainder of the two teams’ relationship. While I had no affinity for the big club, I enjoyed following the careers of the aforementioned players and their successors, like Tom Brunansky and Brian Harper, as they fanned out across the majors.

My father would take my brother and me to a few Gulls games each year — often against the Albuquerque Dukes, the Dodgers’ Triple-A team and therefore of considerable interest in our household — and highlights from those games still stick out, particularly from 1979, the year they won the PCL championship. In one game we attended, Ike Hampton, a catcher-turned-designated hitter who clubbed 30 home runs for the Gulls that year, bookended a 17-inning epic with a pair of homers, though I was safely tucked in bed by the time the latter landed. In another game, Floyd Rayford, a third baseman whom Earl Weaver later used as a backup catcher, mashed a dramatic eighth-inning three-run homer that turned a 4-2 deficit into a 5-4 lead, creating pandemonium; we could have turned cartwheels all the way home. Once my fascination with baseball statistics had begun, I’d pore over the Gulls’ daily box scores and update a hand-kept stat sheet, annexing my mother’s pocket calculator to figure out batting averages and ERAs. A few years later, I’d even apply rudimentary Bill James formulas to calculate runs created, though this involved some guesstimation when it came to counting walks via a standard four-numbered box score (AB R H BI). Read the rest of this entry »

If someone asked you what Mike Trout’s signature skill is, what would your answer be? You might say it’s his power, even though he’s never led his league in homers, or his elite approach, even though he still strikes out a little more often than he walks. If you watched him in person when he was much younger, you might say it isn’t even his steady hitting that defines him, but the way the 6-foot-2, 235-pound mammoth of a man moves, sprinting with top-line speed to steal bases and gliding to field balls hit to center field. The correct answer, of course, isn’t any of those things. What separates Mike Trout from the pack is that he is one of the best, if not the best, at virtually everything. He is the sum of several staggeringly impressive parts.

Still, it feels a bit odd that the player we think of as the best in the game wouldn’t have any specific skill that stands far above the rest of the competition. But while it’s true that Trout has never cruised to a batting title, or demolished the field in homers or walks, the baseball community is constantly coming up with new statistics and methods through which we can evaluate players. Trends, trials, and technology help those new tools grow and improve, and with each one that sticks, we have a new chance to discover a player’s distinctive traits.

In recent years, many of those new revelations have come along because of Statcast, which has introduced an increasing number of statistics into even the casual fan’s lexicon, a technology that gives us a peek into data and visuals we didn’t previously have access to. One of the more recent additions to Statcast’s suite of tools is Swing/Take value, which sorts each pitch into four attack zones based on where it crosses the plate — the heart of the plate, the shadow of the plate, chase pitches, and waste pitches — as well as whether the hitter swung or took the pitch, and uses Tom Tango’s RE288 table to assign the result of each pitch a run value. The result is sort of a hybrid set of data, a glimpse at the particulars of a hitter’s plate approach, as well as his impact when he does decide to swing. Read the rest of this entry »

Who was better, Jim Edmonds or Andruw Jones?

I asked that question in a Twitter poll earlier this week, expecting that it would be a close call. Centerfielders both, they played 17 seasons each and finished with similar WAR totals (Jones 67, Edmonds 64.5). Making the comparison especially intriguing was the fact that one was clearly the better defender, while the other was clearly the better hitter.

Instead of a nail-biter, I got a landslide. A total of 4,017 people voted, and a resounding 71.4% opted for Jones. Edmonds, despite having a huge edge in wRC+, garnered a meager 28.6%.

My eyebrows raised a full inch when I unearthed these statistical comps:

Edmonds had a career 132 wRC+. So did Wade Boggs, George Brett, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, Todd Helton, and Billy Williams (among others).

Jones had a 111 wRC+. So did Russell Branyan, Bernard Gilkey, Geoff Jenkins, Adam Lind, Hal Morris, and Neil Walker (among others). Read the rest of this entry »

Rick Miller had a solid, albeit unremarkable, big league career. A left-handed hitting center fielder known mostly for his speed and defense — he was awarded a Gold Glove in 1978 — Miller slashed .269/346/.350 in 4,440 plate appearances from 1971-1985. He spent his first seven seasons with the Red Sox, the next three with the California Angels, then returned to Boston for five more.

Miller entered pro ball on the heels of a Big Ten batting title. In his junior season with the Michigan State Spartans, the Grand Rapid native hit .429, prompting the Red Sox to take him in the second round of the 1969 draft. Little more than two years later — this despite a swing adjustment that may have been ill-advised — he was in the big leagues to stay.

Miller discussed the early and late portions of his career when the Red Sox held an alumni game at Fenway Park two summers ago.

———

David Laurila: What do you remember about the start of your career?

Rick Miller: “I was drafted in 1969 out of Michigan State. There were a lot of contact hitters at the time, and I got some bad advice when I first came up. This was from one of the people in the Red Sox organization. I’m not going to name him, but when I signed, I went to Pittsfield [Massachusetts], which was Double-A. They watched me take batting practice. I was told, ‘You’ll never be able to hit that way in the big leagues” — the way I was hitting.”

Laurila: What were you doing that they didn’t like?

Miller: “Well, I don’t know. But wherever it was, they didn’t like the way I was swinging. And I was hitting pretty well at the time. But I listened. I was young, naive, and stupid. I didn’t know any better. I’d hit that way on my life, and in my opinion you don’t tell somebody, ‘You can’t hit that way,’ until they get a chance to show if they can do it.

“So I changed. And I never hit that well in the minor leagues. I played two-plus years in the minors, and never did a lot with the bat. My defense is pretty much what got me to the big leagues. Once I was there, I did improve my hitting. It was a longer process, because I used to hit a certain way. I think I would have been successful had I… of course, I wasn’t a big guy. I didn’t hit a lot of home runs.”

Laurila: I recall you having success when you first came up [in September 1971]. Read the rest of this entry »

Time is the ultimate badass. No matter how great you are, no matter how amazing you are at planning, time always wins in the end. And so it is in baseball as in other things. Mike Trout is, in many ways, the reigning king of baseball, that rare player who enters every season as the nearly-undisputed best in the game. Trout is no longer the young phenom and will turn 30 in just under 18 months, the threshold past which your baseball youth is symbolically gone. Young talent debuts every year while Trout inches closer and closer to retirement, and the day will come when he’s no longer baseball’s clear best.

Just being the best player projected coming into the season is practically enough to ensure your baseball immortality. I went back to the start of the modern era (1901) and collected the top WAR projection for every season, instructing ZiPS to calculate a Marcel-like method for the seasons prior to 2003, when the ZiPS projections did not exist. This is a quick way to demonstrate Trout’s dominance compared to other elite players in baseball history:

There are a couple of oddities in there, mostly caused by the difficulty of projecting a player who missed seasons due to war service, but otherwise it’s a Who’s Who of the Hall’s inner circle. I’d wager that in 50 years, all but two of these players will be in the Hall of Fame, with Charlie Keller likely on the outside, and Snuffy Stirnweiss certainly so. (If I’m still around in 50 years to test this prediction, I also wager I’ll be a very shouty, curmudgeonly 91-year-old.)

In terms of the number of years at the top of the heap, Trout’s eight seasons already puts him in third place in modern baseball, behind only Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds. In terms of uninterrupted reigns, Trout’s eight consecutive seasons ties Bonds’ 1992-1999 stretch, meaning that if he has the top projection entering 2021, he’ll have earned his spot as the giocatore di tutti giocatori in baseball.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, we saw footage of Mike Trout being unkind to a golf ball. He sent it into near-earth orbit with ease as a crowd of cackling onlookers has the only reasonable reaction. If he were a superstar with superstar exposure, this would have been quite the branding opportunity for Topgolf. Instead, it became an opportunity for the baseball world to debate the greatness of his feat.

Mike Trout hitting rockets isn’t exclusive to the baseball field. pic.twitter.com/tuEyIzxqQ5

— Los Angeles Angels (@Angels) March 2, 2020

What did he really do, some asked. Anything more than what a skilled golfer could have done? And shouldn’t Mike Trout be able to do that? Why would we be surprised that he could? Enjoying something, even an 18-second clip of a dude whacking a ball, is passé, and on a more vibrant, upbeat planet, we would have absorbed the footage, whistled quietly, and moved onto the various other 18-second segments that would make up our day. Maybe it’s the well-earned cynicism of today’s baseball fan or the sea of writers looking for topics [waves aggressively at you], but that’s not how we do things anymore. Read the rest of this entry »

When you think of Anthony Rendon, you probably think of consistency. He’s good every year, in roughly similar ways: he doesn’t strike out much, walks a good deal, hits his fair share of homers and doubles, and plays good defense. He’s been worth more than 4 WAR in every one of his full seasons. He’s a line drive hitter, a batting average machine. If anything, he’s become more consistent over time: in each of the last three years, he’s been worth between 6 and 7 WAR and struck out between 13% and 14% of the time.

I don’t buy it, though. Rendon might seem consistent on the surface, but under the hood, he’s completely revamped his game to unlock progressively more offensive potential. In fact, I can retell the Anthony Rendon story as a progressive improvement over time. Let’s try that now.

In 2015, the first year for which we have Statcast data, Rendon was hurt. He sprained his MCL in spring training, sprained his oblique while rehabbing the MCL, and somehow got forced off of third base — a year after a 6 WAR season — by Yunel Escobar. He played the majority of the season at second and scuffled.

That’s a low baseline, which makes any tale of improvement easier to tell. But let’s start there anyway. Rendon didn’t hit the ball with much authority that year — oblique strains aren’t good for power. When he put the ball in play, he generated a .343 wOBA, significantly below the league average of .361. Those numbers don’t really mean much out of context, so think of it this way: in 2019, Luis Arraez and Kolten Wong were below league average by roughly that amount. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Major League Baseball made official a handful of rule changes that had been in the works for nearly a year. In case you missed it while following the latest twists and turns of the Astros’ sign-stealing saga or the excitement of pitchers and catchers reporting, here’s the full press release, which spares us from having to retype it:

Rule changes for the 2020 season were announced today by @MLB. pic.twitter.com/cXZrFzHv3F

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) February 12, 2020

The three-batter minimum rule — and the existential threat it poses to lefty specialists — has been the most discussed of these changes. Our own Ben Clemens illustrated that it won’t matter all that much, a conclusion supported by Sam Miller’s examination, while other analysis such as this article by Tom Verducci and this one by Cliff Corcoran suggest it could have a negative impact.

The changes to the injured list and the service time tradeoffs that come with the permanent 26th man and the limited September roster size can bear closer analysis, but the rules that have my attention today — and this should be no surprise if you’ve been reading my work here — are the ones concerning position players and two-way players. By themselves, they won’t amount to much, and while they do close the loopholes that come with the 13-pitcher limitations on the new 26-man rosters, those are some pretty narrow loopholes to begin with. What they really do is stamp out a bit of novelty, not that the sport needs further encroachment by the Fun Police. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about why the Astros sign-stealing scandal won’t go away, and the reception to the team’s first attempts to apologize. Then they preview the 2020 Angels (28:13) with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, and the 2020 Cardinals (1:03:49) with MLB.com’s Will Leitch. Lastly (1:37:15), Ben talks to FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards about Boston’s Mookie Betts Competitive Balance Tax myth, MLB’s reported 14-team playoff format idea, and the new three-batter-minimum rule (plus a postscript about the Mets’ new big-leaguers-only clubhouse).

Audio intro: Queen, "Scandal"
Audio interstitial 1: Teenage Fanclub, "Ain’t That Enough"
Audio interstitial 2: The Association, "Standing Still"
Audio interstitial 3: The Delgados, "Ballad of Accounting"
Audio outro: Isotopes, "Poison in the Clubhouse"

Link to story on Astros apologies
Link to The Athletic story on 2017 Astros clubhouse
Link to latest WSJ story on the Astros’ sign stealing
Link to Washington Post story on sign-stealing suspicions
Link to Bauer’s story on sign stealing
Link to Craig on Boston’s savings
Link to Zach Kram on Boston’s savings
Link to Rob Arthur on payroll flexibility
Link to story about MLB’s proposed playoff format
Link to Ben Clemens on the playoff format
Link to Cliff Corcoran on the three-batter minimum
Link to order The MVP Machine

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