José Fernández died in a boating accident early this morning. He was a lot of things to a lot of people. First and foremost, he was Cuban. Cuban baseball players turn up frequently enough in the United States that we sort of discount how hard it must be for them to get here, from the island. We should not do that, as it is extraordinarily difficult. It is a journey that most people born in this country likely have no way of comprehending, and so we don’t try to. But Fernandez’s journey started there.

José Fernández was a prisoner. After his stepfather succeeded on his 14th try to defect from Cuba, he would eventually earn enough money for Fernández and his mother to try. Caught, Fernández would spend time in a Cuban jail among murderers, his only crime trying to leave Cuba, to pursue a better life. As a 14-year-old. From a 2013 profile by Grantland’s Jordan Ritter Conn:

He doesn’t ever want to think about the food again — “I have no idea how I would even describe it in English,” he says, “but believe me, you don’t want to know.” He tries not to remember all those bodies cramped into so little space. And he doesn’t let his mind dwell on the inmate killings. “To them, their lives were already over,” Fernández says. “What did it matter to them if they killed you? That’s just one more murder.”

José Fernández was a son. When he finally successfully did escape the undercover Cuban agents and police whose job it is to turn back defectors, his journey was just beginning. Again, from Ritter Conn:

And then he remembers the splash. He heard it one night while he was making small talk with the captain. After the splash, he heard the screams. A wave had crashed over the boat’s deck and swept Fernández’s mother out to sea. He saw her body and before he had time to think, he jumped in. A spotlight shone on the water, and Fernández could make out his mother thrashing in the waves about 60 feet from the boat. She could swim, but just barely, and as Fernández pushed his way toward her, he spat out salty water with almost every stroke. Waves — “stupid big,” he says — lifted him to the sky, then dropped him back down. When he reached his mother he told her, “Grab my back, but don’t push me down. Let’s go slow, and we’ll make it.” She held his left shoulder. With his right arm — his pitching arm — he paddled. Fifteen minutes later, they reached the boat. A rope dropped, and they climbed aboard. For now, at least, they were going to be OK.

José Fernández was going to be a father. As Emma Baccellieri noted over at Deadspin this morning, Fernández had announced to the world not even a week ago that his girlfriend was expecting. Now, that child will grow up without his or her biological father.

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The National League Cy Young race is an incredibly competitive one, and as Dave Cameron (who has a vote this year) broke down a few weeks ago, much of the differences between the candidates deals with run prevention in a team sense (RA/9-WAR and ERA) versus run prevention in a component sense (FIP, WAR). As a result, there has been considerable discussion on the concept of weak contact, and last week I looked at the role of the Cubs defense in the Chicago pitchers’ low BABIPs. Taking a small step further, let’s use the Statcast to look at weak and strong contact to determine if the Cy Young candidates in the National League have been helping out their defenses.

To whittle down the candidates, I found the pitchers who are among the National League’s top 10 both by WAR and RA/9-WAR — and then added Jose Fernandez, who just missed the second list. This is a list of those pitchers and their respective ERA, FIP and WAR marks.

As you can see, the NL pitchers ranked first and second in ERA only rank sixth and seventh in FIP, which has led to discussions, particularly with regard to Kyle Hendricks, about how to evaluate such discrepancies when discussing a pitcher’s Cy Young candidacy. To examine the type of contact a pitcher is generating, ee can start with a simple look at average exit velocity. Here are the pitchers’ average exit-velocity numbers and MLB ranks, per Baseball Savant.

While the evidence isn’t overwhelming, there is some reason to think that a pitcher has some, if not a lot, of influence over exit velocity, with the bulk of the influence coming from the batter. Those arguing for Kyle Hendricks for the Cy Young would likely say there is a considerable effect and point to the very good exit-velocity numbers and very low BABIP he’s conceded as evidence. That said, Clayton Kershaw has an even better average exit velocity and his BABIP isn’t quite as low as Hendricks’. Which pitcher gets more credit?

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Baseball has a thing for archetypes. Leadoff hitters are supposed to be fast. Right fielders have good arms. Closers need either to be Mariano Rivera or slightly bizarre. These archetypes exist, in theory, because they are consistent with what you need from certain players. The rise of the analytics movement in baseball has fought against some of the ill-conceived archetypes, like the bat-handling No. 2 hitter, but many of these ideas remain because they align with success.

One straightforward example is that center fielders should be fast. Technically speaking, you just want a center fielder who can prevent hits over a large section of the field. There’s more than one way to possess that ability, obviously, but speed certainly helps, even if you could imaging a successful center fielder who didn’t run particularly well. Yet, in general, it’s a baseball archetype that seems to have stood the test of time.

This article is not going to challenge that belief. It is better to have a fast center fielder. But what this article is going to do is study and celebrate a particularly unusual data point relating to center fielders and speed. Marcell Ozuna is just weeks away from becoming the first center fielder since 2005 and just the 22nd ever to go an entire season without a stolen base.

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The consistency of Christian Yelich throughout his first three major-league seasons, each with identical wRC+ figures of 118, was both promising and, in some ways, perhaps maddening. On the one hand, a hitter with a 118 wRC+ is a good hitter. Especially at such a young age. On the other hand, Yelich has been a ground-ball machine, and with his 6-foot-4 frame, the adjustment to bump up the production a few ticks has seemed so obvious. He doesn’t have to be a slap hitter, and yet he largely has been. And, as with Kansas City’s Eric Hosmer, that inability to adjust — to hit the ball in the air with even slightly greater frequency — has been somewhat confounding.

Unlike Hosmer, Yelich has taken a step forward this year. Our own Jeff Sullivan took early notice of some changes back in May. Yelich was laying off low fastballs, getting himself more good pitches to hit. He was doing a better job of turning on the inside pitch, and a better job of using those offerings to create loft. For the year, Yelich has dropped his ground-ball rate by six points, and while that’s one of the larger decreases across the game, Yelich’s still putting the ball on the ground more than almost anyone.

But then this past week, Yelich showed something else new. You’ll be able to see it rather clearly in this image. Yelich’s already doubled his career-high in home runs, with 18. Here’s the first 15, from before last week, and then you’ll see three new ones pop up in the week since:

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Back in March, before the season began, our own Jeff Sullivan was interested in a way to potentially improve Corey Kluber. Kluber, of course, was already one of the game’s very best pitchers, but even the best can get better. Clayton Kershaw’s gotten better seemingly every year he’s been in the league. Kluber could stand to improve as well. Sullivan’s idea for improving Kluber more or less went like this:

Kluber, at least in theory, could benefit from throwing more cutters and curves, and fewer fastballs. The fastball could still remain the primary pitch, but maybe the cutter would become a co-primary weapon. And the curve would show up in greater amounts, particularly in lesser-expected situations.

Reasoning being, Kluber possesses one of the few best cutters in baseball. Kluber possesses one of the few best curves in baseball. The fastballs Kluber throws have graded out as below-average pitches, and yet Kluber’s always led with the fastball. And so the thinking went, fewer fastballs, more cutters and curves, and you wind up with a better pitcher.

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In 2010, 20-year-old Giancarlo Stanton slugged 22 homers in 396 plate appearances. Only 11 20-year-olds had ever hit more home runs in a season, and only Bob Horner in 1978 hit more homers in fewer plate appearances. At 21, he hit 34 homers, fourth among 21-year olds, and nobody hit more in fewer than Stanton’s 601 plate appearances. His 37 homers the next year were eighth among all 22-year-olds, and nobody had more in fewer than Stanton’s 501 plate appearances.

At 23, Stanton had “only” 24 homers in 504 plate appearances, and at 24, he hit 37 without playing a full season. Last year, he hit 27 homers in 317 plate appearances and nobody at any age has ever hit as many home runs with fewer opportunities. If there is a theme, it’s that Stanton hits a ton of home runs. If there is a secondary theme, it is that he doesn’t play full seasons. The first one is great. The second one could be cause for concern.

This is cherry-picking the data a bit, but there have been 89 player seasons where a player hit at least 22 home runs and had 505 plate appearances or fewer before or during a player’s age-26 season, per Baseball-Reference Play Index. Of those 89 seasons, 74 happened once, including 11 in strike years. Five players have two such seasons, although Mike Piazza’s happened during the strike and lockout. The only player with more than two is Giancarlo Stanton, and with him out for the season, 2016 will make the fifth time it has happened in his career. Extend the age requirement up to 30, and still nobody has more than three such seasons. Get rid of the age requirement all together and the only other player with five such seasons is Jose Canseco, and two of those seasons were shortened by a strike.

Stanton’s injuries have generally varied enough that there does not appear to be anything chronic in nature. In review:

• 2012: missed less than a month due to arthroscopic knee surgery on his right knee.
• 2013: missed a little over a month with a strained right hamstring.
• 2014: missed last few weeks of season after getting hit in the face with a pitch. No DL stint due to expanded rosters.
• 2015: missed the rest of the season beginning in late June after a fractured bone in his hand due to a hard swing.
• 2016: missed the rest of the season beginning in mid-August due to a left groin strain.

We have four separate injuries, none overly serious, and after the first three, he came back at or near the same performance level that he exhibited previously. Despite all those injuries and missed time, his 26.7 WAR is still in the top-100 of all time through age-26, and his 206 homers are 16th through the same age. Read the rest of this entry »

With 117 games in the books, the Miami Marlins are one measly half-game out of wild card position. Considering they’re just five games over .500 and four teams are within 2 1/2 games of that final wild card spot, I wouldn’t exactly go printing Marlins playoff tickets yet, but it’s impossible to deny that the theoretical scenario in which they reach the postseason is becoming increasingly possible. As a result, they are now reasonably in a position where it’s in their best interest to make decisions over the next 45 games that best give their current team a chance to win. Yesterday’s announcement that Giancarlo Stanton’s season is over naturally raised the following question: “Who should the Marlins add to help replace that production?” The initial rumored answer is the hilariously unsatisfying solution of newly minted free agent, Alex Rodriguez. On a visceral, gut level, this is a horrendous idea, but let’s move beyond that immediate reaction and take stock of the pros and the cons of this pairing.
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Kyle Barraclough has a record of 6-2 and a 2.88 ERA n 53 games out of the Miami Marlins bullpen this season. Those are his ho-hum numbers. The 26-year-old right-hander has 82 strikeouts, 34 walks, and has allowed 31 hits in 50 innings. Those are his holy-cow numbers.

Barraclough’s 14.75 strikeouts per nine innings is tops in the National League, and third highest in MLB behind Dellin Betances (15.86) and Andrew Miller (15.38). His 6.12 walks per nine innings is the most of any pitcher, in either league.

Obtained from the St. Louis Cardinals last July in exchange for Steve Cishek, Barraclough overpowers hitters with a mid- to high-90s fastball and a slider that averages a tick over 82 mph. The latter is his signature pitch. Barraclough throws it 40% of the time, and as Jeff Sullivan wrote in June, “It’s a phenomenal slider.”

Barraclough talked about his power arsenal, and how his ability to miss bats helps ameliorate his walk rate, prior to a recent game at Marlins Park.

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Barraclough on limiting damage and missing bats: “The walks matter — you obviously want to limit them as much as you can — but my ability to get out of jams with strikeouts is what helps me the most. If you walk a guy, but don’t give up a lot of hits… I mean, if you take your walk rate, K rate and hit rate, and two of them are good, that’s going to translate to better statistics, to fewer earned runs. You want your WHIP to be close to 1.00, or under 1.00, and if you walk a guy but don’t give up any hits, it’s going to be hard for them to score.

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Yesterday afternoon, Ichiro Suzuki became just the 30th player to reach 3,000 hits in the major leagues. He did so with a triple, making him just the second player ever to get to hit number 3,000 on a triple. It was a pretty glorious hit, and it will be one of the capstones on an awesome career. To celebrate, I thought we could take a walk back down memory lane and look at some of the most impactful hits of his Hall of Fame career. Some are his best according to WPA, some are postseason hits, and a few are just round-number hits, because we all love those. We’ll go in chronological order.

April 2, 2001, Mariners vs. Athletics
Ichiro wasted little time getting going. After grounding out to the right side in his first two major-league plate appearances, and striking out in the third, Ichiro would single up the middle in his fourth plate appearance, and drop down a bunt single in his fifth and final plate appearance of his first game.

The first hit came off of T.J. Mathews, and the bunt came off of Jim Mecir. Ichiro scored following the first hit to pull the Mariners within one run, and the bunt would push go-ahead run Carlos Guillen to third. The bunt came following a walk. Generally speaking, you don’t want to give away an out with a bunt when a reliever comes into the game and walks the first batter he faces on five pitches, but Ichiro did anyway, quickly serving notice that the normal rules of engagement did not apply to him. Guillen would cross home three batters later, and the Mariners historic 2001 season started with a bang.

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As it has been the past few years, the 2016 non-waiver trade deadline brought about a flurry of activity that was hard to keep up with even if it was the only thing you were doing. Since most of us have other things that we have to or would like to occupy our time with, we figured we would save you some hassle and create an omnibus post with all of our trade deadline content so that you have it all in one place. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to articles about trades that actually took place.

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