The headline isn’t the way the Marlins would put it. It’s not the only way to interpret Wednesday’s trade — it’s just one way to do so. The Dodgers, who’ve been in the market for rotation help, convinced the Marlins to sell them Mat Latos. The price for Los Angeles: accepting, along with Latos, Michael Morse. To soften that blow, the Marlins have thrown in a competitive-balance draft pick, to be made after the end of the first round. Now, technically, the Dodgers are sending the Marlins three minor-league pitchers. So it’s not a pure sale, and we don’t know who those players are, so maybe a conclusion shouldn’t be jumped to, but this one feels pretty safe. Those pitchers are presumably the equivalent of nothing. They won’t be as valuable as the player that draft pick turns into. The Marlins sold an asset at the deadline, and they’re the ones effectively losing the best prospect.

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Let’s accept that, after four starts this season, there are few conclusions that can be reached about Jose Fernandez. After all, we need bigger samples of data, and even then, conclusions mostly have to be pretty soft. After four starts, we know very little. But we’re always allowed to make observations. We can identify hints of things, things that might be true, and so I ask, has Fernandez become more dangerous on the other side of his elbow surgery?

You probably haven’t missed it, but just in case you did, Fernandez rejoined the Miami Marlins not long ago, and one of the Internet’s most favorite pitchers has 32 strikeouts in 26 innings. He’s also issued just three walks, throwing almost three-quarters of his pitches for strikes. And it doesn’t seem like he’s lost any movement or zip. Set a low enough minimum, and Fernandez leads all starting pitchers in out-of-zone swing rate. It’s here that I want to linger. I want to talk about that number, and I want to talk about Fernandez’s best pitch.

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Carter Capps allowed a three-run single on Tuesday. That’s both pretty bad and pretty weird. Three-run singles might be a post topic of their own, but the most interesting thing didn’t have anything to do with the play result. Before Xander Bogaerts ever swung the bat, Capps threw a fastball, and I’ll excerpt conveniently from an MLB.com entry by Ian Browne:

Bogaerts hung in on a pitch that had a perceived velocity of 105.55 mph, the highest number of any pitch in the Major Leagues this season, according to Statcast™. The pitch looked that fast to Bogaerts, thanks to an extension of 9.5 feet by Capps.

This sounds complicated, but it’s simple to understand. Not a whole lot of time passed between Capps releasing the ball and the ball arriving around home plate. That’s all perceived velocity is — a kind of measure of flight time. According to Statcast, this year, no pitch has had a smaller flight time than the one Bogaerts drilled for a hit. That’s remarkable, on Bogaerts’ part, and that’s remarkable, on Capps’ part. Capps’ part, we’re becoming more familiar with.

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The Miami Marlins are about to get a lot better as a baseball team. Jose Fernandez, one of the most exciting and superlative pitchers in major-league baseball, is set to return next week. Martin Prado and Michael Morse should be back shortly. Henderson Alvarez, who has made just four starts all year, is progressing in his rehab. Mat Latos, who struggled mightily to begin the season, is beginning to show signs of life as the velocity on his fastball continues to creep forward. The Marlins should soon have the team they expected to enter the year with — the team that some, this author included, thought would make the playoffs as a wild card. The problem for the Marlins is that it is already too late this season, and the team needs to start thinking about next year.

The Marlins began the season as a .500 team and the Fangraphs Playoff Odds gave them a 27% chance of making the playoffs. As they were missing their best starter at the time, but his return was factored into those odds, it is fair to assume that the team was not going to be very good to start the season and that they would actually be a below .500 team for the early part of the season. They started the season poorly enough that they fired their manager and replaced him with the general manager. Often times, a team that fires its manager makes that move because the team is underperforming, and the managerial change appears to work as the team tends to play up to its talent level. For the Marlins, the team’s record has not improved with the managerial change. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last calendar year, there are 139 qualified major-league hitters. Prorating their plate appearances to 600 per person, one finds that Mike Trout has the highest WAR at 7.2, followed by Russell Martin, Buster Posey, and Anthony Rizzo. None of that should come as much of a surprise, but the hitter right behind that group and just ahead of Josh Donaldson, Andrew McCutchen and Bryce Harper could provide a bit of shock. Over the last calendar year, Kevin Kiermaier has been worth six wins per 600 plate appearances.

Kiermaier, who has worked to improve his offense, is incredibly reliant on his fantastic defense for his great WAR numbers. While Kiermaier is a valuable player, it is possible that his WAR total is inflated by defensive numbers that are likely to come down over time. Kiermaier has logged roughly 1200 innings in the outfield and has a UZR/150 of 42.1, but only six active outfielders with at least 2,500 innings have a UZR/150 greater than 15, with Lorenzo Cain, Ben Zobrist, Peter Bourjos, Brett Gardner, Josh Reddick, and Jason Heyward falling between 16 and 22 — that is, roughly half Kiermaier’s current rate. Although he’s been good, Kiermaier is probably not the fifth-best player in baseball over the last year, and his defensive numbers should serve as a reminder that defensive statistics take some time before they become reliable.

Yesterday, I covered some players whose current WAR was potentially undervalued due to lower than normal defensive numbers in an article titled Heyward, Pedroia, and Your Annual Reminder About Defense. The present article renders yesterday’s title false as the articles together are now daily reminders, but this post should be the final one in this series with few, if any, more reminders coming in the near future. The caveat regarding small sample size from Mitchel Lichtman and our FanGraphs library is quoted more fully in yesterday’s piece, but to summarize: use three seasons of UZR when being conclusory about the defensive talent of any given player.

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The Miami Marlins have been in the news this week, because they did something that’s at worst kind of stupid, and at best pretty confusing. But the Marlins only did something newsworthy in the first place because the team, overall, has been an early disappointment, and disappointing baseball teams tend to leave a few people jobless. But there’s something else true about even the most disappointing teams: not everything is going wrong. It’s kind of the key to keeping yourself interested — even bad teams have bright spots, promising spots. With this in mind, let’s watch Dee Gordon make a throwing error.

This is from Tuesday’s game. It’s a weird play, but it’s ultimately a play that didn’t go in the Marlins’ favor.

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Mat Latos throws a pitch that nobody in the big leagues throws. For good reason, too. He has no idea where it’s going.

“I was told in high school that it would never be a realistic pitch in the big leagues,” Latos said when I asked him about the pitch that he gripped like a knuckle curve but released like a changeup and was neither his breaking ball nor his changeup. Yeah, I said, sure, but what is this pitch?

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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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