There was a time last season that Zack Greinke was batting over .400. At that time, no other pitcher in baseball was batting over .300. So people had some fun with that, because it’s fun when a pitcher is helping himself. It pretty much never lasts. Greinke didn’t keep batting over .400. This year he’s down near .200. He’s a pitcher, and pitchers are bad hitters, and single-season pitcher hitting statistics are limited by miniature sample sizes. No longer do we think of Greinke as a guy who’s going to break records. But all the while, as Greinke’s numbers have bounced around, he’s genuinely improved. And he’s improved to the point where, now, Greinke might be a half-decent hitter, and I don’t mean relative to pitchers this time.

Since the start of the 2012 season, Greinke’s come up 173 times. There are 107 pitchers who have come up at least 50 times during that window. Greinke leads the sample in wRC+, by 27 points. He’s the only pitcher in there with an OBP over .300. He’s one of four pitchers with an ISO over .100, and the next-best OBP in that group is .243. Some people thought of Carlos Zambrano as a good-hitting pitcher, and he had a 57 wRC+, with 24 times as many strikeouts as walks. Yovani Gallardo gets similar treatment, and he has a 41 wRC+, with 12 times as many strikeouts as walks. Travis Wood? 47 wRC+, 22 times as many strikeouts as walks. Mike Leake? 57 wRC+, 12 times as many strikeouts as walks. Those considered “good-hitting pitchers” tend to be pitchers capable of hitting home runs. Greinke adds unlikely elements of discipline and bat control.

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Ken Rosenthal has an NL MVP vote this year, and the other day, he wrote about his thought process in regards to pitchers winning the award. He’d prefer to vote for a position player, but isn’t entirely against pitchers-as-MVPs, and he noted that a dominant starter who works deep into games doesn’t just affect the team on the day they pitch, as is commonly cited. Quoting from his column:

The one pro-Kershaw argument I do like – the one I recall making for Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000 – is that a dominant starting pitcher affects three games out of five. Kershaw averages more than 7 1/3 innings per start. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly can empty his bullpen the day before Kershaw pitches and manage a fully rested group the day after.

This does seem to be a potentially real benefit created by Kershaw that is not being accounted for anywhere in his own stat-line. While there is a lot of talk about players “making their teammates better”, this would be one actual place where it could exist, with a starting pitcher allowing his manager to reallocate his bullpen usage to the days around Kershaw, increasing their chances of winning on those days as well. This is the kind of thing that we wouldn’t capture by just looking at Kershaw’s performance.

But is it true? Rob Neyer was smart enough to realize that we should be able to find some data to test this theory, and so I bugged Jeff Zimmerman about it, and he was nice enough to query out the Dodgers’ bullpen usage on days before and after Kershaw pitched this season. Here are the results.

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades. There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. -Kiley

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Clayton Kershaw’s good! Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about him. In the first half of this season, he struck out more than a third of all the hitters he faced. In the second half, his strikeout rate is actually down 17%. Now, that’s percent, not percentage points, but it means one of six strikeout victims hasn’t been a strikeout victim. That seems like the kind of thing that should raise eyebrows. But you haven’t noticed because in the first half Kershaw allowed 19 runs, and in the second half he’s allowed 19 runs. One is less inclined to notice when great players are slightly differently great.

Also, his second-half strikeout rate is still extraordinary. Also, he’s still not really walking anybody, even though just yesterday he did put Yusmeiro Petit on base. The regular numbers love second-half Kershaw, but if you dig just a little bit deeper, you can gain a better understanding of how Kershaw has remained so dominant despite giving away a handful of whiffs.

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It seems like forever ago now, but earlier — in this very season! — Yasiel Puig was probably the hottest hitter in baseball. A blistering month of May lifted his OPS into four-digit territory, and articles like, say, this one were getting written:

We’re talking about a guy who, through this point in his career, has been a better hitter than almost all of the greatest hitters of all-time. And he seems to be getting better. The story of Puig’s rookie year focused heavily on the parts of his game that reminded everyone of Manny Ramirez. Perhaps we shouldn’t miss out on the fact that he’s hitting like an in-his-prime Manny Ramirez as well.

Nothing about that block quote was wrong. Nothing about that article was wrong. Puig was an absolute terror, and he was showing signs of getting even better. Earlier — in this very season! — Puig looked like one of the very most valuable players. But the minute you try to predict baseball, it shapeshifts into something unrecognizable and mean, and now articles like, say, this one are getting written:

OK, enough. Enough waiting for the Golden Boy to become an overnight sensation or last year’s overnight sensation to get going again.
[…]
It’s time to start Andre Ethier in center again.

You probably don’t need to get caught up, but I’ll catch you up. Puig at the end of July: .958 OPS. Puig since the start of August: .523 OPS. That .523 OPS comes with zero homers and three doubles, each of them separated by more than a week. Puig drove in a run the other day. It was the first time he’d done that since August 15. There are luck-slumps and there are performance-slumps, and right now, Yasiel Puig is stuck in a performance-slump that everyone’s noticed.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

Matt Kemp has had a terrible season.

He’s been worth only 0.9 WAR — close enough within the margin of error to refer to him as a “replacement-level player” — and he’s being paid $21 million to do it. He was so awful in center field that the Dodgers removed him from the spot in late May despite not having a reasonable alternative. No, really, they first turned to Andre Ethier, then to Scott Van Slyke, then to Yasiel Puig — then pushed Kemp to left field before eventually finding him a home in right field. His reaction to the move was so poor that he didn’t start for five consecutive games, around which he had an 0-18 streak. His agent, former pitcher Dave Stewart, couldn’t stop talking about how much he’d like to see a trade. That didn’t happen, obviously, in part because no one would reasonably want any part of his large contract.

Matt Kemp has had a great season.

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Clayton Kershaw is having one of those all-time seasons, the kind of season that causes you to reflect on Pedro Martinez and some of his own all-time seasons. Kershaw is running a 1.70 ERA, and a big chunk of that is due to one brief start in the middle of May. The last time Kershaw left a game with an ERA more than 2 was June 29, and while we all recognize that ERA leaves out unearned runs, including Kershaw’s unearned runs lifts his runs-allowed average all the way up to 1.75, because his unearned-runs total is 1. Kershaw’s been a human sort of perfect. Even though he missed the whole month of April, he’s almost a shoo-in for the NL Cy Young, and he’ll get a lot of attention for the league most valuable player. Clayton Kershaw has stepped it up a level, from already having been Clayton Kershaw before.

Let’s think about what makes a great starting pitcher. I mean, in the most general terms. You want a guy to have at least reasonable stuff. Unless the stuff is extremely overpowering, then it’s important to mix up speeds and it’s important to hit locations. One thinks of a lot of ace pitchers as being able to spot the baseball where they want, and absolutely, great pitchers know how to pitch around edges. Kershaw’s no exception. His command this year has been better than ever. What you don’t think of ace pitchers as doing is hurling the ball down the middle very often. That’s the danger zone, the area where you find the bulk of the meatballs. Turns out Kershaw’s not afraid of going down the pipe. Turns out Kershaw doesn’t really get hurt there very much.

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Most pitchers are bad hitters, as we all know. Most pitchers look so out of place at the plate that it is a great source of both comedy and debate. Why should we continue this charade? Why should this paean to a by-gone era, propped up under a pretense of “strategy,” continue to degrade the quality of the game we all love?

That debate is better left until another day in another setting with well-established ground rules and adult supervision. Today, we can just look at the impact of pitchers hitting, specifically on their impact on the Wild Card chase.

On Tuesday night, Clayton Kershaw made more than his typical contribution to the Dodgers’ cause. Sure, he pitched brilliantly and shut down an otherwise powerful offense. But Kershaw worked his way on base against Doug Fister in the fifth inning and then “helped his own cause” by dashing from first to third on a bounding single to center field. Read the rest of this entry »

Check out some recent versions of this series with Dilson Herrera, Jorge Soler and Rusney Castillo (though he’s still in the minors). I made the cutoff for a write-up a 50 Future Value, meaning a projected peak role of 8th/9th inning reliever, #4 starter or low-end everyday player. Take a look at recent prospect lists for the Rangers or Rockies to get a better idea of the distinction between 45 and 50 FV. The last of the 50 FV prospects is generally around the 150th best prospect in the game.

Joc Pederson, OF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Hit: 45/55, Game Power: 45/55, Raw Power: 60/60, Run: 55/50, Field: 50/50+, Throw: 50/50+

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   -Kiley

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