Did you see Giancarlo Stanton’s homer that went out of Dodger Stadium? Stanton hit and the Dodger fans went “OOOOHHH!” and then 467 feet later, when they saw it go out, they went “OOOOHHH!” again. The Marlins color guy punctuated the moment by saying, “You don’t see that every night!” which indeed is true but maybe undersells it a bit. I mean I’d go so far as to say you don’t see that even every other night! In 4,000 lifetimes you and I could never do that, but Stanton did it in this one. Amazing.

Less amazing but more pertinent to this article is what kind of effect that has on the pitcher. As a former high-school pitcher (second-team all district, baby!) I’ve given up a homer or two and, in my very limited experience, when you face that guy again one of two things happens. The first is you challenge him again because he can’t hit your best stuff and also you’re an idiot. The second is you stay the heck away from throwing him the pitch he crushed in the first at-bat and probably stay the heck away from throwing him anything hittable in general. But that’s me in high school. Are major-league pitchers like that? At least one is!

Mike Bolsinger was the starting pitcher for the Dodgers last Tuesday. It was his 86 mph cutter at the top of the strike zone that Stanton hit so hard it briefly turned the fans of Dodger Stadium from Dodger fans into Marlins fans. An inspection of the relevant at-bat reveals that Bolsinger missed his location on both pitches he threw Stanton. The first cutter was supposed to be low and away but was up at the top of the strike zone. He was lucky Stanton missed it. The next one was supposed to be belt-high inside (there was nobody on base so I’m going by where the catcher set up). Bolsinger got the height right but left the pitch just a bit further over the plate than he probably wanted, a few inches which wound up endangering the well-being of anyone walking outside the left field area of Dodger Stadium.

So how did Bolsinger react to facing Stanton a second time? So this is interesting! Bolsinger threw Stanton six straight curveballs! Common perception is that you don’t want to throw too many of the same kind of pitch consecutively for fear the batter will hone in on the specific movement of the pitch. Mike Bolsinger may have many fears — groundhogs and people who don’t use coasters potentially among them — but what he definitely isn’t afraid of is throwing the same pitch twice.

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Aroldis Chapman was a major-league rookie in 2010, but it took no time at all for him to make a name for himself. Joel Zumaya had re-introduced the population to consistent triple digits, but Chapman pushed the limits to the extreme. In his 11th-ever outing, Chapman took the mound in San Diego, and the first pitch he threw came in at 101.5 miles per hour. Then he broke 100 again, then he broke 100 again. Then he did it again, then he did it again. Chapman threw 25 pitches on the night, and the slowest of them was an even 100. That fact was one highlight. The other highlight was one individual pitch he threw to Tony Gwynn Jr. With the count 1-and-2, Chapman missed just inside at 105.1. The enemy crowd came to life as soon as the scoreboard flashed the reading.

Last week, the Marlins took on the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Giancarlo Stanton was granted the opportunity to face Mike Bolsinger, and in an 0-and-1 count in the top of the first, Bolsinger left a fastball over the middle of the plate. Stanton swung, and connected, and the next thing the baseball knew, it was somewhere in one of the parking lots. Stanton hit a ball literally out of the stadium, and as he rounded the bases and approached home plate, he was given something of a standing ovation by the fans who just watched their team fall behind.

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As you know, we’ve got some new data on the site. It isn’t data that’s going to completely change the way we think about baseball, but new stuff is new stuff, and new stuff always takes a while before it becomes old stuff. It’s fun to play around with new stuff, and as I was doing that Tuesday, I found something I tweeted out. I’ll blockquote my own words, I guess:

hard-hit rate

Chase Utley: 16%
Dee Gordon: 15%

BABIP

Chase Utley: .082
Dee Gordon: .489

All it is, really, is a fun fact. Maybe two fun facts, or maybe four fun facts. A fun fact is its own thing, and it certainly isn’t an argument. Fun facts don’t try to prove anything; they just are, as curious statistical moments in time. But while we’re here, I’ll throw you another fun fact: as I write this, Dee Gordon leads the National League in Wins Above Replacement. Through the season’s first month, Gordon’s been one of the best players in baseball, and this after he was picked up by the Marlins in a trade that we criticized.

It’s pretty obvious that Gordon’s value has been given a tremendous boost by the laughable hit rate. Counting errors, Gordon has reached on more than half the balls he’s put in play. You don’t need me to tell you that’s going to stop. The question, really, is what Gordon will do when the silliness ends. To this point, he’s resembled a prime Ichiro Suzuki.

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When the Marlins reorganized their front office not too long ago, one of the hopes was that Jeffrey Loria would no longer so frequently meddle in the team’s operation. In 2015, however, the team has stumbled right out of the gate, and there’s chatter that Loria is getting involved. From a recent report about manager Mike Redmond being on the hot seat:

According to sources who have heard rumblings, Redmond is on the hot seat and the the organization is already bouncing around possible replacements. One possibility: Wally Backman, the Mets’ Triple A manager.

You can take this for whatever it’s worth:

#Marlins official just assured me there is “no truth” to rumor Mike Redmond could be fired after 3-10 start.

— Mike Berardino (@MikeBerardino) April 20, 2015

If you want to play semantics, now the Marlins are off to a 3-11 start. So Redmond could be fired right now and the official wouldn’t technically have been a liar. The thing about votes of confidence is that you can never really know what they mean. They’re either one thing or the exact opposite, and we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do off the field, because we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do on the field.

But we can step back from manager speculation. The Marlins will make whatever decisions they make, and as easy as it is to pin these things on Loria, maybe there’s more of a consensus. Maybe Redmond deserves to be fired; I have no idea. Analysts can seldom add value to the subject of managerial job security. I have one point, though, that I feel like ought to matter: these Marlins probably weren’t going to be very good. While the start has been disappointing, it needs to be compared against what would’ve been a reasonable expectation.

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You already know what I’m going to say — this early in the year, we don’t really care about results so much as we care about what goes into those results. Maybe that’s a new pitch, or a new batting stance, or our first look at a guy trying to come back from an injury. Sometimes, though, you can’t help but start with the results. In Mat Latos‘ Miami debut, there were certainly results:

So that’s pretty bad, and generally you’d let it go by as just one of those things, in the same way that no one really thinks that Cole Hamels‘ lousy first start means anything more than a very good pitcher having a very bad day. But like with the interest in seeing what kind of pitcher Masahiro Tanaka would be, there’s interest in Latos. After several good seasons, his 2014 was ruined by left knee surgery and right elbow soreness, after which the Reds flipped him to to a Miami team that plans on contending for a decent enough pitching prospect in Anthony DeSclafani and minor league catcher Chad Wallach’s intriguing offensive profile. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve moved our from the west — both NL and the AL — and covered both the NL and AL Wests the last two days. Today, we’ll do both eastern divisions, starting with the National League.

The Projected Standings

The easiest division in baseball to handicap. The favorites just have to avoid implosion to punch their ticket to the postseason, with only two teams even pretending to put up a fight, and neither one looking quite ready for the postseason yet. The fight for second place could be a Wild Card battle, but more likely, there is only one playoff team here, and it’s probably going to be the one we’d all expect.

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Yesterday, the Marlins agreed to sign outfielder Christian Yelich to a deal that guarantees him at least $51 million over seven years, locking up one of the game’s best young players. This morning, Rob Bradford of WEEI.com reported that the Red Sox are considering approaching Mookie Betts about signing a long-term deal of his own, which might both serve to lock in some future cost savings as well as temper the speculation about if they’ll use Betts as a trade chip to relieve their outfield logjam. The timing of Yelich’s deal and the rumored possible offer for Betts serves as an opportunity to look at them side by side, and note that while they’re physically quite different, they might be pretty similar players going forward.

Certainly, Yelich and Betts don’t look similar. Yelich is six inches taller, standing at 6-foot-3 compared to the 5-foot-9 Betts. Besides just the size difference, Yelich hits from the left side while Betts is a right-handed batter. If you watched them both swing, you wouldn’t necessarily draw a connection between them.

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Not every contract extension is a winner for both sides. Sometimes teams guarantee too much money without getting many prime seasons. Sometimes players give away too many free agent years. In Christian Yelich’s 7-year, $49.6 million contract (corrected from $51 million) — with a team option for an eighth year — the Marlins have secured Yelich’s services through his 20s and bought out three potential free agent seasons, which could bring significant savings down the line. However, $50 million is also a significant guarantee for Yelich, and this deal looks like a winner for both sides.

Signed out of high school five years ago for $1.7 million, Yelich made the minimum for part of a year in 2013 and all of 2014. He would have made the minimum again this season and next, meaning he was faced with earning under $2 million total for his first four seasons, and if he stayed healthy and productive over the next two seasons, his reward would have been an arbitration salary of around $5 million. If he played well and avoided major injury, he could earn $7 million for his first five seasons, with the bulk of that money still three years away. Yelich faced considerable risk with an eight-figure reward not anywhere in his short-term future.
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The situation for Cuban free agent infielder Hector Olivera is still a bit muddled, even though he’s now a free agent that may sign any day now. Here’s a more complete background with a full scouting report, recap of his workout that I scouted last month and a breakdown of which teams fits him best. Here’s the video from that workout:

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You’re 11 years old. You toss your flattened “Piña Mango” Capri Sun pouch to the floor of your mother’s dog hair riddled Honda Odyssey and pull the door handle that activates the painfully slow automatic sliding door. As the door creeps along and the heat of the mid-July sun begins to fill the smelly minivan, you grab your sweet airbrushed helmet and -7 Easton Stealth aluminum bat from the backseat and race towards the dusty fields.

As you begin warming up with your teammates by playing a bit of catch (see: chase balls thrown over your head and down that stupid hill into the woods), you can’t help but begin scouting the other team. “Those kids are huge,” you think to your prepubescent self. Your attention is drawn to one child in particular, due in part to his hulking stature but also to the audible POP! of his partner’s glove. With each subsequent throw and POP! of the glove, you and your entire team begin to quiver in your size-7 Mizuno youth baseball cleats, questioning your own talent, self-worth, and ultimate place in this world. POP! Without doing anything, he’s already gotten in your head.

That child is Giancarlo Stanton.
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