The early part of the Major League Baseball season presents an interesting paradox when it comes to interest and attendance. Fans have waited all winter for real live baseball, and Opening Day comes with big crowds and pageantry. After Opening Day, crowds tend to thin out a bit as people come to terms with the long season, and in many places, weather that is still less than hospitable to baseball. Comparing attendance this season to attendance at this time last season shows a still-healthy game with a few teams having made major jumps after successful seasons a year ago.

When looking at per-game attendance so far this season, it should come as no surprise that the usual names remain atop the board, per Baseball Reference.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees were the top four in attendance last season — in that order — and those same four teams continue their grip on the attendance lead this year. The Chicago Cubs have swapped spots with the Los Angeles Angels while the Toronto Blue Jays have taken an edge over the Boston Red Sox. The bottom five teams are the same as the end-of-the-season numbers last year, although in a different order, as Tampa Bay Rays finished the end of the season last while Oakland A’s were ahead of the Chicago White Sox and the Miami Marlins.

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Cuban righty Yadier Alvarez was the $16 million crown jewel of the Dodgers’ 2015/2016 international free-agent class. It was the second-highest bonus ever given to an international amateur and reports on Alvarez prior to last July were so good that I ranked him #1 on my J2 board at the time. Alvarez ventured stateside this spring and has consistently pitched every fifth day, only missing one start to attend the birth of his child. Reports coming out of Camelback Ranch have been superlative. On Monday, I got to see it for myself along with a number of other interesting prospects.

Yadier Alvarez, RHP, Los Angeles Dodgers

Current Level: Extended Spring Training, Age: 20.2, Height/Weight: 6’3/180
Signed: IFA at age 19 on July 2, 2015 out of Cuba by LA for $16.0 million bonus

Alvarez was electric. After opening his start with a few fringe fastballs, he began to loosen up and was sitting 92-97 before long. He has been up to 100 this spring, which is especially notable given that there were rumors over the offseason that his velocity had been down. Mixed in along with the fastball was an 82-86 mph slider with late, two-plane bite. It flashed plus, but the line between that pitch and his 76-82 mph curveball was sometimes blurry. The curveball is a bit more vertically oriented than the slider and Alvarez decelerates his arm a bit to throw it, but it flashed average and it should solidify there once he becomes more comfortable with its release.

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Yesterday, we tackled the best final seasons for pitchers. Today, let’s tackle the position players, so we can get to the heart of the question of just how good David Ortiz needs to be to crack one of these lists. The rules and breakdowns are the same as before, so I would encourage you to read yesterday’s post to peep those. Once again, big ups to Jeff Zimmerman for data help.

30-39 WAR

Best Final Season, Position Players with 30-39 WAR

Player	Final Season	Age	WAR	Career WAR
Roy Cullenbine	1947	33	4.4	33.8
Chick Stahl	1906	33	3.7	33.1
Tony Cuccinello	1945	37	3.0	32.2
Gil McDougald	1960	32	2.8	39.7
Joe Adcock	1966	38	2.5	34.2
Elbie Fletcher	1949	33	2.4	30.7

The guys on this list are definitely not household names, but there are some interesting, if also tragic, stories here. Let’s deal with the tragic first. There are six players here because one of them, Chick Stahl, committed suicide during spring training of the 1907 season. He had been named the Americans’ (Red Sox) player/manager over the winter, and something drove him to take his own life. This was surely a big loss for the team, as they had been counting on him to help lead them. He was the fifth-best hitter in the game just a couple years earlier in 1904.

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A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

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Here’s a thing: last year, Clayton Kershaw was tied for baseball’s fifth-lowest walk rate by a starting pitcher, out of 78 pitchers. Then, this year, only one guy (Mike Fiers) has dropped his walk rate more substantially than Kershaw. That’s the nerdy and complicated way of saying that Clayton Kershaw has walked four batters this season. He’s made eight starts, he’s completed 62 innings, he’s faced 225 (!) batters, and he’s walked four of them. Four. He’s also struck out 77. And you know how many he’s walked? He’s walked four. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Is Clayton Kershaw actually getting better? It’s a scary thought. It’s one that’s hard to fathom. I also wouldn’t put it past him. For what it’s worth, Kershaw’s past the point in the season in which walk rate becomes a reliable indicator of past performance, and these eight games are a level of walk stinginess that we’ve never seen from him before:

Following every valley, of course, comes a peak, and Kershaw probably isn’t going to run a 1.8% walk rate the entire season. But given the relatively acceptable sample, the career-high zone rate, and the extent to which Kershaw has avoided the free pass, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that he may be (somehow) demonstrating an even more improved control of the strike zone.

Anyway. Four walks, yeah? That’s not too many. That’s enough to take a good look at them all in a blog post and see if there’s anything going on. This was a pretty poor segue. It’s Friday.

Walk No. 1

• Date: 4/4/16
• Batter: Yangervis Solarte
• Projected BB%: 7.1
• Sequence:

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Over the course of big-league history, there have been a few hundred no-hitters. There have been 66 occasions of a pitcher hitting multiple homers in one game. Scarcity doesn’t automatically mean a superior accomplishment, but what Noah Syndergaard just did against the Dodgers was extraordinary. His first time up, he hit a home run. His second time up, he hit a home run. The last pitcher to pull this off was Micah Owings in 2007, and Owings was more of a hitter, anyway. Here are the MLB.com highlights. This would be no fun without the highlights.

Not that there’s any such thing as a bad home run, but those were big-boy dingers. Syndergaard jumped on a first pitch, and then he jumped on a two-strike pitch. He gets points for diversity, and he also gets points for dumb luck, since the second homer followed four consecutive shown bunts. Instead of moving the runners a little bit over, he moved them all the way over. Syndergaard drove home all the Mets’ runs. He genuinely pitched and hit them to victory. It was one of the better all-around single-game performances in history, I’m sure.

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There’s always a risk that comes with pre-writing. I’m writing this Wednesday afternoon, about Yasiel Puig, even though Puig hasn’t yet begun his game Wednesday night. I can’t know what’s going to happen. Puig might have the game of his life! Or he might hijack a blimp. Life’s a mystery. But what I know is that I’m writing about the Puig who’s batting .235. The Puig with a 78 wRC+ that would very easily stand as a career low. Maybe Puig snaps out of this in between writing and publishing, but what’s happened has most definitely happened, so now, a discussion of that.

You might’ve noticed by now that I take a lot of interest in the way that good hitters get pitched. Puig’s been pitched in a certain way, and it’s remarkably uncomplicated. A couple weeks ago, Dave Roberts said Puig’s been hurt on fastballs in and soft stuff away. Pretty much. And that’s also kind of a traditional blueprint, but it’s been aces against Puig to this point. We have the overall numbers, and we have the idea from the manager. Let’s now get into some deeper evidence.

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Major League Baseball has taken steps toward becoming a truly global game in recent years. Cuban players have joined their Venezuelan, Dominican and other Latin American counterparts in making a significant impact on today’s game, and talent from the Far East, particularly from the Japanese and Korean Leagues, has made its presence felt as well.

This year’s most heralded Japanese rookie is Kenta Maeda, who signed a long-term deal with the Dodgers this past offseason. After concerns were raised following a medical examination, he signed a deal that was heavily discounted from the originally negotiated terms, paying him $25 million over an eight-year period. This put the Dodgers in a fantastic position: a low-risk, potentially high-reward scenario. One month in, the Dodgers simply have to be thrilled as Maeda’s posted a 3-1, 1.41 mark with a 28/6 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 32 innings.

Sure, the season remains young, and the sample sizes are small, but it’s not too early to form some early hypotheses regarding whether Maeda is for real. Today, let’s use granular batted-ball data, examining his plate-appearance frequency and production by BIP type data, to see how Maeda is getting it done, and whether we can expect his success to continue moving forward. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the season, there were a lot of question marks about the Dodgers rotation, but so far, the team’s struggling offense and bullpen have received a big boost from a pitching staff led by Clayton Kershaw and Kenta Maeda; their starters currently rank fifth in WAR. Ross Stripling has been a nice early surprise for the team, and while Alex Wood’s ERA remains too high, his underlying metrics suggest that he still can help the team. Scott Kazmir’s struggles are perhaps most worrisome, but if he can stop giving up home runs, he should be serviceable as well.

And if any of the big leaguers falter, there is help on the way. In the minors, Jose De Leon made his first start of the 2016 season on Tuesday, the delay being partly due to a minor ankle injury and also the product of an effort to keep his innings low in the early going. When de Leon’s debut came the day before Julio Urias’ most recent start, I decided to watch both via MILB.tv.

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We’re left to wonder how players who have established careers in international leagues will fare when they first reach the major leagues: some never find the same level of production they had overseas, others endure a tough adjustment period, and a precious few immediately take to their new surroundings. From what we’ve seen of Kenta Maeda so far, he appears as if he could be a member of that final group: with only one earned run conceded in 19.0 innings over his first three starts of 2016, Maeda has been every bit of the solid #2/#3 starter the Dodgers envisioned slotting behind Clayton Kershaw. Maeda is also quietly echoing the success of another rookie Dodger starter who came before him, one whose consecutive string of successes to start the season led to the receipt both of the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards in the same season — and caused a sea change in Dodgers’ fandom while doing it.

There are a few interesting trends that have been driving Maeda’s success in this young season. While he’s posting a slightly depressed BABIP (.250) compared to league average, his batted-ball profile so far suggests that might not be a fluke: his line-drive rate is in the top 25 of starters with at least 10 innings pitched, and he’s posted above-average ground-ball and infield-fly rates. The 100% strand rate won’t stick, and the 5.9% HR/FB rate likely won’t either, but there’s at least some encouraging signal in this noise. We already had an idea that Maeda’s walk rate was going to be better than average, and he hasn’t disappointed in that respect, issuing free passes to just 5.5% of batters faced.

It’s Maeda’s unique approach that warrants the most attention, however. Last December, our own Eno Sarris tried to find a comp for Maeda, and he included this snippet in his breakdown:

Maeda’s best secondary is a slider, and his next-best is probably also his slider (he varies the velocity and shape). Against righties this year [2015], Maeda was almost 95% fastball/slider according to some observers.

In 2016, Maeda has lived up to that billing. He’s thrown his slider almost 30% of the time overall, and against righties, the mark is 41.2%. He can alternate between a 79 mph offering with increased vertical movement, like this:

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