For a really long time, there was little doubt about the best pitcher on the planet. Clayton Kershaw has been on an epic run that will land him in the Hall of Fame. Over the past two seasons, Kershaw has still been brilliant, but he’s averaged 24 starts and 162 innings instead of 32 starts and 222 innings. That slight downturn in health has allowed arguments to pop up debating whether Kershaw is still the best pitcher in baseball. Last season, Max Scherzer was the takeover candidate of choice. The 2016 National League Cy Young winner followed up one great performance with another by claiming the award again. Ignored in those debates was a pitcher who has been better than both over the past two seasons and projects to be better this year: Corey Kluber.

On Monday, Kluber pitched eight scoreless innings, striking out 13 batters against one walk and just two hits. After three starts, Kluber’s ERA is 1.57, his FIP is 2.33, and he’s been worth 0.7 WAR. That’s great, but it doesn’t really separate him from a bunch of good pitchers off to great starts, including Scherzer, Dylan Bundy, and Gerrit Cole. Let’s extend to the past just a little bit more to get a sense of how Kluber has done lately. The table below shows the top pitchers by WAR since the All-Star Break last season.

Kluber is so far out ahead of the pack, the 1.3 WAR difference between him and Severino is nearly double the difference between Severino and 11th-place Scherzer. Combining his great second half with his strong start to this season, Kluber has struck out 169 batters and walked only 15. Since the All-Star Break last season, Kluber has been the best pitcher in baseball, and it isn’t particularly close. To really take a look at the best pitcher in baseball, it probably helps to take a bit of a longer view. Read the rest of this entry »

Adjectives like “impossible” and “improbable” and “unbelievable” are used quite liberally in sports broadcasting and writing — perhaps misused, even.

A walk-off win is not unbelievable; it happens semi-regularly. Likewise, winning a championship is not technically impossible for most teams (even if 11 clubs have a 0% chance of winning the World Series according to FanGraphs’ playoff odds). Nevertheless, people respond to narratives, and the overcoming-all-odds story is a popular one.

While we should employ such descriptors more sparingly, what Edwin Encarnacion did Monday night truly bordered on the improbable and impossible without sliding into hyperbole.

You’re probably aware that he hit an inside-the-park home run. While three 34-year-olds have hit inside-the-park homers since 2012 — David DeJesus, Jimmy Rollins, and Jason Bourgeois — Encarnacion is the oldest to do so in at least the past six seasons.

Here’s the video evidence:

https://gfycat.com/IdenticalBrownKookaburra

Encarnacion is not exactly fleet of foot. He’s a DH who was born in 1983. Encarnacion (25.6 feet per second) ranked 420th out of 465 MLB players in Sprint Speed last season, according to Baseball Savant’s leaderboard.

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Two people walked into a bar. They settled every debate in the universe. Then they discussed baseball.

“Who is Mr. October?”

“Reggie Jackson. What my elders taught me anyhow. Read it was sarcastic at first, then Reggie grew into the role.”

“Mr. November?”

“Ain’t Jeets that’s for sure? Can’t take a crown because you were first in line when a calendar flips.”

A swig.

“Randy Johnson won Games Six and Seven of the World flippin’ Series. That boy never needed to grow, of course. Just found the right circumstance. We should all be so lucky and talented.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Peace in our time.

“What about Mr. March?”

Oh no.

“All the databases have ‘Mar/Apr’ in their splits. There have been 70 regular-season games played in March. What are we saying here? Beginnings don’t matter? Without a beginning there is no end. An ouroboros. With no March there is no October. There is no November. There’s no Christmas. I like Christmas.”

“Chanukkah is also…”

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GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Right before the start of spring training, Cincinnati prospect Nick Senzel received a phone call at his home in Knoxville, Tenn. It was from Reds headquarters. The club had a question for its top rookie-eligible player: could he handle shortstop?

“I said, ‘Yeah,’” Senzel told FanGraphs recently in Arizona. “And they got me there now.”

Even before taking the call, the No. 2 pick of the 2016 June draft was taking ground balls at third, second, and shortstop — and even fly balls in the outfield — on the playing surface of Lindsey Nelson Stadium, the baseball home of his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. A third baseman in college, Senzel wanted to make himself as versatile as possible entering this season.

It was prescient planning, as the Reds have since begun one of the great experiments of the spring.

As players advance through professional baseball, as they age at the major-league level, they typically move down the defensive spectrum. What is so interesting about Senzel playing shortstop, even if it’s short-lived, is that it represntns a case of a player moving up the spectrum.

There is an argument to be made that more teams should be identifying players who can move to more challenging positions. Why? Because over the last decade, about 20% of defensive opportunities — as in batted balls in play — have evaporated. In this three-true-outcomes environment, it’s easier to hide a bat, to trade some glove for bat, when the ball is less of a threat to reach the field of play.

There were 60,249 “plays” by defenders in 2007, according to FanGraphs data. Last season, there were just 49,809 — or roughly 10,000 fewer.

Consider opportunity trends by position:

It’s not just Senzel. Paul DeJong, who appeared at a variety of positions during his junior campaign at Illinois State, received over half the Cardinals’ starts at shortstop last season. Lonnie Chisenhall and Jason Kipnis were deployed in center at times in 2017, aided by a staff that recorded the highest strikeout rate of all time. Dee Gordon is transitioning to center field in Seattle.

Could it work? Could teams benefit from more aggressive defensive assignments? Could it be the next big thing? Or at least a little thing at no cost to clubs ever in search of efficiency and hidden value?

***

Senzel believes he can stick at short and has ambitions to make the team as the club’s starter out of spring training, although the realities of how clubs manipulate service time make that all but impossible. Still, Senzel reported early to camp. He’s worked with Barry Larkin. He’s participated every day in a particular drill where rubber balls are thrown off a wall, forcing Senzel to quickly reset his feet and transfer the ball into throwing positions.

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In my weekly chats or in the comments section of certain posts, readers often ask a question like, “Does Pitcher X have ace potential?” or some variant of it. While it makes sense that people would be curious about such a thing, the answer is (by definition) almost always “No.” Because there are so few aces in the majors, the probability that any prospect would develop into one is necessarily low.

When I’m at games — and especially when I’m at spring-training games — I’ll occasionally run into someone like Corey Kluber, though. And while I realize nobody’s wondering if Kluber has a chance of succeeding in the majors, there’s some value in writing up guys like this as an exercise, to illustrate what an ace looks like on paper. So that’s what I’ve done here. (Note, as well: context is important when reading the following, as it’s the product of an abbreviated spring look.)

Kluber was 90-92 in my viewing, with enough movement on his fastball to merit a half-grade bump. That’s about 1.5 ticks slower than his average fastball velocity from last year, but this is typical of early-spring Kluber. I put a 55 on his fastball while observing im and imagine it’s plus during the season when he’s throwing harder.

He mixed in a cutter, slider, changeup, and a curveball. The cutter was 86-88 with tight, late movement. It was consistently plus, flashing plus-plus, and Kluber put it where he wanted to when he wanted to. It’s likely that the slider and curveball are the same pitch and that Kluber can just manipulate the shape and depth of the pitch, but the ball acts differently enough when Kluber does this that he functionally has both, even if the catcher puts down the same sign for both. When his breaking ball behaved more like a curveball, it was a 50, a deep, but blunt, 80-82 mph curveball. The slider was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and Kluber threw a few 80-grade sliders in the outing, while most were 70s in the 83-85 mph range. These had more horizontal movement and, like everything else Kluber does, located with precision. I saw a few changeups that I thought were average.

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Spring training is here. It’s a new beginning! Every team has optimism for the coming season. (Well, almost every team. Sorry, Marlins fans.) But in this time of beginnings, we also have an ending. Specifically, this will be the last spring training — and the last season — with Chief Wahoo. Beginning in 2019, the Indians will no longer use the symbol on their uniforms.

In one sense, the move has seemed inevitable for a while now. Cleveland has been phasing out Chief Wahoo for years in the face of increasing public pressure from people who believe the logo is racist. I don’t intend to comment on that matter in this piece. You’re all intelligent people and can draw your own conclusions.* Instead, I’m going to focus on whether the Indians legally had to remove Wahoo and what the symbol’s removal means for other teams (like the Braves) who use Native American imagery.

*For what it’s worth, research suggests that mascots and logos such as Chief Wahoo are psychologically harmful to Native American youth.

As an initial matter, the traditional use of Chief Wahoo as a logo is generally fully protected by the First Amendment, even if certain individuals regard it as offensive. The Supreme Court has held in cases like R. A. V. v. St. Paul that it’s illegal to ban speech (which includes symbols) simply because it’s offensive. But the Indians are a business, and that makes things a little more complicated.

To take a look at this, we’re going to have to enter into an area of law known as “intellectual property”: trademarks, trade dress, copyrights, and patents. Each protects different things: trademarks protect trade names and logos; trade dress protects a certain product’s label and appearance; copyrights protect creative works; and patents protect ideas like inventions. (There’s a pretty decent overview of the differences here.) For our purposes, let’s oversimplify things and discuss the trademark that applies to both the team name and Chief Wahoo.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Esteban Loaiza’s drug bust and the Cubs’ Yu Darvish signing, then preview the 2018 Indians (15:31) with writer/editor Pete Beatty, and the 2018 Royals (44:16) with Kansas City Star Royals beat writer Rustin Dodd.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cleveland Indians. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Among those clubs one might reasonably designate as a “super team” — which, for sake of ease, we might simply define as any team projected for 90 or more wins at the moment — Cleveland possesses the lowest current payroll.

Regard:

The constraints both of the market and ownership’s willingness to spend might ultimately render it difficult for Cleveland to sustain their current run of excellence. For 2018, however, the Indians are well positioned not only to compete but contend.

Francisco Lindor (696 PA, 5.8 zWAR), of course, remains the centerpiece of the club’s field-playing corps. He’s forecast not only for a batting line nearly 20% better than league average but also +10 fielding runs at shortstop. Jose Ramirez (643, 4.7) is nearly Lindor’s equal, supplying the same type of value, if not necessarily the same degree of it.

After that pair, the roster is composed largely of players in the average range. ZiPS calls for Edwin Encarnacion (577, 2.9) to continue hitting sufficiently well to compensate for his defensive shortcomings. The greatest weakness, meanwhile, appears to be right field, where even a platoon of Lonnie Chisenhall (421, 0.3) and Brandon Guyer (294, 1.0) fails to eclipse the one-win mark by much.

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I noticed an underlying theme in both pieces I’ve written since coming back, along with many others written this offseason at FanGraphs. If you are a fan of a small- or medium-market team that will never spend to the luxury-tax line and thus always be at a disadvantage, do you want your team to try to always be .500 or better, or do you want them push all the chips in the middle for a smaller competitive window? In my stats vs. scouting article I referenced a progressive vs. traditional divide, which was broadly defined by design, but there are often noticeable differences in team-building strategies from the two overarching philosophies, which I will again illustrate broadly to show the two contrasting viewpoints.

The traditional clubs tend favor prospects with pedigree (bonus or draft position, mostly), with big tools/upside and the process of team-building is often to not push the chips into the middle (spending in free agency, trading prospects) until the core talents (best prospects and young MLB assets) have arrived in the big leagues and have established themselves. When that window opens, you do whatever you can afford to do within reason to make those 3-5 years the best you can and, in practice, it’s usually 2-3 years of a peak, often followed directly by a tear-down rebuild. The Royals appear to have just passed the peak stage of this plan, the Braves hope their core is established in 2019 and the Padres may be just behind the Braves (you could also argue the old-school Marlins have done this multiple times and are about to try again now).

On the progressive side, you have a more conservative, corporate approach where the club’s goal is to almost always have a 78-92 win team entering Spring Training, with a chance to make the playoffs every year, never with a bottom-ten ranked farm system, so they are flexible and can go where the breaks lead them. The valuation techniques emphasize the analytic more often, which can sometimes seem superior and sometimes seem foolish, depending on the execution. When a rare group of talent and a potential World Series contender emerges, the progressive team will push some chips in depending on how big the payroll is. The Rays have a bottom-five payroll and can only cash in some chips without mortgaging multiple future years, whereas the Indians and Astros are higher up the food chain and can do a little more when the time comes, and have done just that.

What we just saw in Pittsburgh (and may see soon in Tampa Bay) is what happens when a very low-payroll team sees a dip coming (controllable talent becoming uncontrolled soon) and doesn’t think there’s a World Series contender core, so they slide down toward the bottom end of that win range so that in a couple years they can have a sustainable core with a chance to slide near the top of it, rather than just tread water. Ideally, you can slash payroll in the down years, then reinvest it in the competing years (the Rays has done this in the past) to match the competitive cycle and not waste free-agent money on veterans in years when they are less needed. You could argue many teams are in this bucket, with varying payroll/margin for error: the D’Backs, Brewers, Phillies, A’s and Twins, along with the aforementioned Rays, Pirates, Indians and Astros.

Eleven clubs were over $175 million in payroll for the 2017 season (Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Tigers, Giants, Nationals, Rangers, Orioles, Cubs, Angels), so let’s toss those teams out and ask fans of the other 19 clubs: if forced to pick one or the other, which of these overarching philosophies would you prefer to root for?

I have an early, hazy memory of Benito Santiago explaining to a reporter the approach that had led to his game-winning hit moments earlier. “I see the ball, I hit it hard,” said Santiago in his deep accent. From which game, in what year, I can’t remember. Also, it isn’t really important: it’s a line we’ve heard before. Nevertheless, it contains multitudes.

We know, for example, that major-league hitters have to see well to hit well. Recent research at Duke University has once again made explicit the link between eye sight, motor control, and baseball outcomes. This time, though, they’ve split out some of the skills involved, and it turns out that Santiago’s deceptively simple description involves nuanced levels of neuromotor activity, each predictive of different aspects of a hitter’s abilities. Will our developing knowledge about those different skills help us better sort young athletes, or better develop them? That part’s to be determined.

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