The American League Cy Young race is pretty messed up this season. The current WAR leader, while apparently healthy, might throw so few innings in September that he fails to qualify for the ERA title as a result. The pitcher currently ranked second by WAR in the league hasn’t pitched in a month. A third pitcher who, as of July 1, had authored a sub-2.00 ERA and fantastic peripherals — and was probably the favorite for the award — is now an afterthought.

Overall, there are probably eight candidates who deserve to appear on a ballot — and that’s without even considering the credentials of dominant relievers like Edwin Diaz and Blake Treinen. Voters, however, can only choose five names — and, as a result, it is possible that totally defensible ballots will omit the eventual winner (or that a pitcher who would have otherwise won will be omitted from a totally defensible ballot).

As I noted yesterday with regard to the NL’s Cy Young field, this award invites multiple questions about how best to evaluate pitching performance. Unavoidably, one’s choice for Cy Young will depend on how one weighs what a pitcher can and cannot control — and how best to quantify those effects. In this post, I’ll look at various metrics and consider the implications of each regarding luck, defense, and pitcher skill.

Before we get to how contact and defense might be playing a role in voters’ minds, though, let’s look at some fairly standard statistics at FanGraphs.

Jay Jaffe made the case for Chris Sale’s candidacy last week, and that case certainly looks quite strong — or would, if the season ended today. Problem is, Sale might not get too many more opportunities to build said case. The left-hander is scheduled to throw two innings for Boston today and then another three innings on the 16th. If he records those five innings and then, say, another 10 over his final two starters, he won’t qualify for the ERA title and will potentially allow other pitchers the opportunity to catch up in value.

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Mike Clevinger has been channeling Trevor Bauer. Not just in terms of effectiveness — the long-maned righty has a 3.11 ERA and a 9.3 strikeout rate — but also with competitiveness and ingenuity. While the Cleveland Indians teammates aren’t exactly two peas in a pod, Clevinger is certainly being influenced by his mad scientist of a rotation mate.

“He’s a wealth of knowledge, and a really good resource, especially with our new cameras and stuff like that,” Clevinger said of Bauer, who uses 2,000-frames-per-second video to parse the movement and spin of pitches. “We have the same mindsets and goals on the mound. It’s never going to be a completed process. For us, it’s always going to be ‘What’s the next step? What’s the next move to get better? What’s the next level to take it to?’ Throw harder. Make it nastier.”

An 80-MPH slider is one of Clevinger’s nastiest pitches, and while Bauer didn’t play a role in its development, he has broken down its nuts and bolts. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in April, I wrote about the lawsuit former Indians uberprospect and current Padres backstop Francisco Mejia had filed against Big League Advance. As I wrote earlier this week, that case is now over. Michael Schwimer, the CEO of Big League Advance, who was good enough to talk to me after my initial post on the case, spent some time this week answering my questions about how the case ended. Once again, Schwimer was forthcoming about his company, the Mejia suit, and the future for himself and his business.

I first asked Schwimer what happened at the end of the case. Schwimer told me that Mejia dismissed his case voluntarily, without providing a specific reason. That said, Schwimer suspects “peer pressure [on Mejia] from players” might have had something to do with it. “[We got] overwhelming support from minor-league players,” Schwimer said regarding the suit, adding that BLA clients were largely supportive of the company through the litigation. Schwimer also corrected one assumption I’d made in my previous article — that no discovery had been performed. BLA, at least, had responded to document requests propounded by Mejia’s attorneys. Schwimer thought that response had something to do with Mejia’s decision to dismiss his case, as well. “We had proof to back up literally everything,” Schwimer told me.

Among Mejia’s allegations was that BLA purportedly hired a lawyer for him — and paid that attorney to advise him — solely with a view to including language in the contract that he’d had the benefit of counsel. But Schwimer told me that BLA had correspondence with Mejia’s private attorneys refuting the claim. “We had the emails with Francisco’s lawyer, where [the lawyer] redlined the contract for Francisco’s benefit,” Schwimer said. “He reduced the endorsement from 6% to 2.5%, and made other changes that helped Mejia.”

As I noted in my postmortem on the case following its dismissal, apologies in lawsuits are incredibly rare, and I was curious to know how this one came about. “We did ask him to apologize, no doubt,” Schwimer said. In this case, the apology was part of a settlement, but not of Mejia’s claim. Instead, Schwimer explained that Mejia voluntarily dismissed his claim and settled BLA’s counterclaim. The apology was part of that settlement.

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This time last year, Jeff Sullivan posited that the Indians might have assembled the best pitching staff in baseball history, a distinction that unsurprisingly included one of the best collections of starting pitchers ever. Even though the club wasn’t able to translate their success into October glory, it would be hard to pin whatever shortcomings the team exhibited on the rotation, the worst regular member of which, Josh Tomlin, recorded “only” a league-average FIP. It was an impressive season.

Perhaps surprisingly, the 2018 campaign has seen the Indians repeat that success. The rotation as a whole leads baseball with 19.9 WAR, with its four best starters — Trevor Bauer (6.0 WAR, fourth in baseball), Corey Kluber (4.9 WAR, ninth), Carlos Carrasco (4.1 WAR, 11th), and Mike Clevinger (3.9 WAR, 12th) — ranked among the top 12 of the league by that metric. That quartet has already exceeded their combined WAR from 2017 by half a win with a month to go. Notably, that isn’t even the only way in which the rotation has improved.

Instead of Tomlin, the Indians have turned to rookie starter Shane Bieber since the end of May. In 15 starts, Bieber’s has produced a 4.66 ERA but has also posted an incredible 3.23 FIP and 2.0 WAR in a mere 85 innings. He strikes out over a batter an inning (9.21 K/9) and has excellent control of his pitches, as evidenced by a top-10 walk rate (4.2%). Putting those figures two together, Bieber’s 5.8 K/BB is exceeded by only six pitchers with at least 80 innings pitched. Some impressive names are counted among those six, including Clayton Kershaw, Chris Sale, Justin Verlander, and Bieber’s teammate, Kluber.

The Indians seem to have struck gold with Bieber. While the team doesn’t seem to need it this year — thanks to the remarkably weak AL Central — Bieber is a key piece for the Indians in the future. His repertoire, ability to deploy his pitches, and command make him an especially valuable (and foundational) starter.

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The Blue Jays made the long-awaited trade of Josh Donaldson on Friday night, sending their former MVP third baseman to the Cleveland Indians and cash considerations for a player to be named later.

With the Blue Jays out of contention quickly in both 2017 and 2018, a trade of Donaldson was always likely at some point. Without an agreement on a long-term contract for Donaldson, it would have been very risky to hang onto him. The Jays’ had some concern, in fact, that, due to his recent struggles with injury, Donaldson would actually accept a one-year qualifying offer — a factor which changed the calculus somewhat as the non-waiver deadline approached. At the start of the season, retaining Donaldson would have seemed like a possible option even if the club didn’t remain competitive, because a characterstically productive Donaldson would have almost certain fetched a $50-plus million deal this offseason and commanded a compensation pick for Toronto.

At one point, with the Oakland A’s, Donaldson was in danger of becoming a minor-league journeyman, hitting .156/.206/.281 in a little cup of espresso in 2010 during his age-24 season. His .238/.336/.476 and .261/.344/.439 lines over his age-24 and -25 seasons for the Sacramento River Cats in the Pacific Coast League were extremely marginal for that league, not even at the level at which you’d call him a Ken Phelps All-Star, Bill James’ terms for minor-league sluggers who never received a real chance in the majors.

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On the most superficial level, this has something of the absurd about it:

Josh Donaldson, when healthy, is one of the best third baseman in the majors. He’s talented both offensively and also defensively, which is almost all the ways a ballplayer can be talented. He’d represent an upgrade on basically any of baseball’s contending clubs.

That’s basically any of baseball’s contending clubs. Not all of them, though. A brief examination of this site’s WAR leaderboard for position players reveals why.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Note from Eric: Hey you, this is the last one of these for the year, as the minor-league regular season comes to a close. Thanks for reading. I’ll be taking some time off next week, charging the batteries for the offseason duties that lie ahead for Kiley and me.

D.J. Peters, CF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 4-for-7, 2 HR, 2B (double header)

Notes
A comparison of DJ Peters‘ 2017 season in the Cal League and his 2018 season at Double-A gives us a good idea of what happens to on-paper production when a hitter is facing better pitching and defenses in a more stable offensive environment.

Reports of Peters’ physical abilities haven’t changed, nor is his batted-ball profile different in such a way that one would expect a downtick in production. The 2018 line is, I think, a more accurate distillation of Peters’ abilities. He belongs in a talent bucket with swing-and-miss outfielders like Franchy Cordero, Randal Grichuk, Michael A. Taylor, Bradley Zimmer, etc. These are slugging center fielders whose contact skills aren’t particularly great. Players like this are historically volatile from one season to the next but dominant if/when things click. They’re often ~1.5 WAR players who have some years in the three-win range. Sometimes they also turn into George Springer.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Kyle Barraclough, Andrew Miller, and Dan Straily — on how they learned and/or developed their sliders.

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Kyle Barraclough, Miami Marlins

“I’ve thrown it since my sophomore year of high school. One day my coach grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, you want to throw a slider?’ He showed me a grip and was like, ‘Throw it like a fastball, and at the very end kind of just focus on staying down through your middle finger.’

“I couldn’t really throw a curveball, to be honest with you. I didn’t know much about pitching at that point — I played multiple sports until my senior year — and it just never came naturally to me. The slider kind of popped up out of nowhere. It was basically, ‘Let the grip do what it’s going to do,’ and that worked for me.

“When I got to college — I don’t know if it was from trying to be too fine with it, or from not being as aggressive through the ball — but it kind of got a little loopier. Then I got to pro ball and it kind of stayed that way.

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At this point, it should surprise absolutely nobody paying even the remotest attention to the doings and transpirings of Major League Baseball that Jose Ramirez is having an MVP-type season. Ramirez may not, in fact, actually win the MVP award: Mookie Betts and Mike Trout have had similarly valuable seasons, while J.D. Martinez’s pursuit of the Triple Crown remains active. That said, one could easily make the argument that a very good defensive third baseman who’s produced a .292/.403/.607, 166 wRC+, and 8.1 WAR with another month go is clearly at least MVP-adjacent.

Perhaps the most telling tribute to Ramirez’s season is that he has somehow managed to overshadow Francisco Lindor’s own work a bit. The towering presence of Lindor’s talent and pedigree had previously — like sneaking a shot by Dikembe Mutombo — made such a thing seem unlikely.

If Ramirez is a superhero, though, Lindor’s more partner rather than sidekick. He gets to drive the Batmobile, solve the caper in 1890s London, and sing “Twist and Shout” in the Von Steuben Day Parade. Lindor ranks fourth in the American League in WAR among position players, hitting .291/.367/.533 and playing his typical interstellar defense at short. Some cities are built on rock ‘n’ roll, some on efficiency of infrastructure due to increased density, but Cleveland’s run-scoring is built on the backs of their shortstop and third-base pair.

To say that Lindor and Ramirez are a dangerous pair isn’t a flaming hot take. They’ve been so productive, however, that the time has come to ask not where the rank relative to their peers but to other shortstop/third-base combinations in major-league history. To answer this, I went through every team’s SS/3B pair — as defined by the players who received the most time at each position for their teams — since the beginning of the sport. I used their seasonal numbers because, after all, if Ramirez plays some scattered games at second base, as he did in 2016, does that really diminish how good the pair is?

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It’s safe to say that the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t following a paint-by-numbers script. Casting convention to the wind, they employ “an opener,” they station their relievers on corners, they… do just about anything to gain a potential edge. As a small-market team in the A.L. East, they need to be creative in order to compete. It makes sense.

But not to everybody, and that includes a fair share of their fanbase. And even if it does make sense to the fanbase — sorta, kinda, at least — that wasn’t always the case. They had to be brought up to speed on the methods behind the madness, and that job fell squarely on the shoulders of the people who report on, and broadcast, the games.

Andy Freed and Dave Wills — the radio voices of Rays baseball — were front and center. According to the latter, they at least had a head start.

“We were trained a little bit by Joe Maddon,” said Wills, who along with Freed has called games in Tampa since 2005. “Joe was kind of the leader with doing different things, such as shifts and putting four men in the outfield. He’d set lineups differently than other people. So when it comes to what they’re doing now, we’re already in grad school. We’ve seen it, we’ve been there, we’ve done that.”

Which doesn’t mean advance warning from Kevin Cash wasn’t appreciated when the team introduced the “opener” concept. Wills may have an advanced degree in understanding-out-of-the-box, but what the Rays manager told him and his broadcast partner was straight out of left field. Read the rest of this entry »