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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The Padres have continued to load up their farm system with interesting pieces, this time netting power-hitting first-base prospect Josh Naylor and low-level fireballer Luis Castillo in exchange for Andrew Cashner and others.

Naylor, a native of Ontario, stood out during his showcase summer because of his big raw power but wasn’t seen as a potential first rounder until he began to rake against advanced international competition with the Canadian Junior National Team late the next spring. By draft day, there was buzz that Philadelphia was interested in him at 10, but he fell to 12 where the Marlins made him their second big-bodied first-round selection in as many years. I was not a fan of the pick at the time and remain skeptical of Naylor, but he does have some impressive tools that might allow him to clear the high offensive bar required of a first-base-only prospect.

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Here are the prospects changing hands in today’s deal between Miami and San Diego as evaluated by my newly updated KATOH system. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

Josh Naylor, 1B, San Diego (Profile)

KATOH: 4.4 WAR (80th overall)
KATOH+: 4.6 WAR (77th overall)

Though he turned 19 just last month, Naylor’s held his own in Low-A this year. Nothing in Naylor’s batting line is particularly great, but he also lacks a major weakness. He makes a decent amount of contact and draws an acceptable number of walks. His home-run total is a bit underwhelming for a first baseman, but’s made up for it by hitting a bunch of doubles this year. He’s also swiped 10 bases and played good defense, so KATOH gives him something of a pass for his underwhelming offensive numbers.

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One need only glance at the Marlins’ projected starters over the next few days to determine where the team could use an upgrade. Jose Urena, a hard-throwing right-hander whose stuff hasn’t translated to strikeouts out of the bullpen or in the rotation, will pitch tonight’s game. Tomorrow, Jarred Cosart is scheduled to pitch — and he has a 15% strikeout rate and 11% walk rate over his career. The Marlins apparently didn’t like the look of that situation going forward, especially if Jose Fernandez’s innings need to be managed and/or if Wei-Yin Chen is unable to return from the disabled list soon.

So, they’ve conducted a trade, which reportedly includes the following pieces (arranged in approximate order of name-recognition):

The Marlins get:

• Andrew Cashner
• Colin Rea
• Tayron Guerrero

The Padres get:

• Jarred Cosart
• Carter Capps
• Josh Naylor
• Luis Castillo

As for the Marlins, they receive an immediate boost from adding Cashner to the rotation. While his season numbers (which include a 4.76 ERA and 4.94 FIP) look pretty ugly, Cashner seemed to have boosted his trade value over the last few weeks. As August Fagerstrom noted recently, he’s been much better since coming off the disabled list:

Cashner’s picked up a half-tick on his average fastball. Pre-disabled list, 15% of his fastballs went 96 or harder. These last four starts, he’s reached that upper-tier of velocity on 21% of fastballs. The walks are down from a bit over 9% to a bit under 6%. The strikeouts are way up, from 15% to 28%, because Cashner is missing plenty more bats. He’s missing more bats inside the zone, perhaps due in part to the added life on the heater, and he’s missing more bats outside the zone, and that’s because of the slider. The slider is really what this is all about.

Cashner’s slider has been more effective of late, and if he can maintain his current run, he should be able to hit his roughly league-average projections and represent an improvement over where the team stands right now. If the playoffs started today, the Marlins would be in, playing in a one-game playoff with the Cardinals for the right to play the Dodgers in another one-game playoff to qualify for the divisional series.

However, the projections see the Cardinals as the better team going forward. They actually see the same for the Mets, who are a game and a half behind the Marlins and Cardinals. The chart below shows the playoff odds before the trade for the teams that look to be in the hunt for the second wild card. The Marlins are in orange, essentially in a dead heat with the Mets and behind the Cardinals.

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Know this — Dave Dombrowski likes to make trades. He was first named a general manager back on July 5, 1988, assuming the title of “youngest GM in the game” back before it was cool with the Montreal Expos. He made his first trade on July 13. His aggressive nature was sometimes just off center stage, as the teams he had previously helmed — the Expos, Marlins and Tigers — have rarely been media darlings. But now he is running the Red Sox, and they get plenty of coverage. While that level of coverage might not be fair or warranted, his deals are being scrutinized hard these days. Is he gutting the farm system? Or does Dombrowski know how to pick ’em? I thought I’d take an objective stab at his trade record.
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This is stupid. I mean, honestly, I think it’s kind of smart, but the subject is stupid. This is arguing semantics on account of a single pitch thrown in an exhibition baseball game that, no matter what they say, doesn’t really matter. Just — I want you to understand, up front, there isn’t a real good point for this. This post needn’t exist, but I’m a pitching dork, and a pitch in Tuesday’s All-Star Game captured the attention of my dorkiness. It was the most talked-about pitch of the contest. This is how Jose Fernandez started David Ortiz in the third inning:

The thing to notice is that “80” down there. Sometimes, Jose Fernandez throws 80 mile-per-hour breaking balls. This wasn’t one of them. Ortiz said Fernandez threw a changeup. Fernandez smiled and said he threw a fastball. Obviously, it wasn’t a normal fastball. The normal fastball buzzes 96. So, did Fernandez actually throw a changeup, or a slow fastball? I believe the evidence points to the latter. I warned you this would be stupid.

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