Yes. What is wrong with Matt Harvey? Because if you watch him pitch, it seems like everything is wrong, and yet nothing at all. At least, it’s hard to put your finger on it. You run down the list of things that could explain why he has an ERA near five and the worst ERA estimators of his career, and you find little things here or there. But do you find a smoking gun?
Over the course of big-league history, there have been a few hundred no-hitters. There have been 66 occasions of a pitcher hitting multiple homers in one game. Scarcity doesn’t automatically mean a superior accomplishment, but what Noah Syndergaard just did against the Dodgers was extraordinary. His first time up, he hit a home run. His second time up, he hit a home run. The last pitcher to pull this off was Micah Owings in 2007, and Owings was more of a hitter, anyway. Here are the MLB.com highlights. This would be no fun without the highlights.
Not that there’s any such thing as a bad home run, but those were big-boy dingers. Syndergaard jumped on a first pitch, and then he jumped on a two-strike pitch. He gets points for diversity, and he also gets points for dumb luck, since the second homer followed four consecutive shown bunts. Instead of moving the runners a little bit over, he moved them all the way over. Syndergaard drove home all the Mets’ runs. He genuinely pitched and hit them to victory. It was one of the better all-around single-game performances in history, I’m sure.
You don’t need to know what spinal stenosis is to know you don’t want it, and to know it’s bad that David Wright has it. No major-league baseball player would choose the condition for himself, and for Wright, the diagnosis raised innumerable questions about the state of his career. When this very regular season opened, there was chatter in the first series that Wright looked stiff, that he looked exploitable and weak. Early on, it looked like Wright could and would be a liability. It would be a most unfortunate turn for a beloved former superstar.
Let’s be clear: David Wright still has spinal stenosis. That isn’t going to change. He is very much limited, but at the same time, as I write this, Wright is sitting on a 136 wRC+, about dead even with his lifetime mark of 134. Wright might be compromised, but Wright has also made things work, and he’s done that by focusing on maximization. David Wright has turned himself into an all-or-nothing hitter.
Yesterday, Daniel Murphy went 4-5, hitting his fourth home run of the season in the process, and driving his batting line for 2016 up to .398/.449/.663. His 192 wRC+ ranks third best in the big leagues, and he’s behind only Manny Machado, Dexter Fowler, and Mike Trout on the WAR leaderboards. In the aftermath of yesterday’s hit barrage, I sent out the following tweet.
Daniel Murphy for 3/$38M now looking like the free agent steal of the winter.
— David Cameron (@DCameronFG) May 4, 2016
Many of the responses argued that Fowler is ahead in that race, which is certainly a reasonable argument given what he’s done for the Cubs thus far. A bunch of other responses were essentially along the “small sample size” lines, though. Like this one, for instance.
@DCameronFG Is there any reason to expect the 25 game sample to trump the 900 game sample that preceded it? We know who Daniel Murphy is.
— Rational Sports (@Rational_Sports) May 4, 2016
In general, the premise of this tweet is mostly correct. When you have a large sample of a player’s career performance, you shouldn’t overreact to a 25 game hot streak, and believe that the most recent performance cancels out the longer history the player has provided for evidence of what he’s capable of doing going forward. In Murphy’s case, though, we’re well past the point of this being a 25 game hot streak. For most of the last year, Daniel Murphy has been one of the best hitters in baseball.
There’s a vestigial anchor from my baseball past that I drag around — it’s called Red Sox fandom, and it’s attached to a barely seaworthy vessel whose form is an email group of mainly older Boston fans. Most of the debates that happen on the email chain are really just individual manifestations of the argument surrounding process vs. outcome. Like a lot of traditionally-minded baseball fans, most of the members of the group are outcomes people, as baseball fans have been taught to be for the past 100-plus years — focusing on ERA, batting average, etc. I tend to find myself more on the process end of the spectrum, and lately I’ve been thinking about this debate as it relates to pitching — and especially as it relates to Noah Syndergaard.
You could argue that no one’s process is better than Syndergaard’s right now — and, most recently, Jeff Sullivan actually has argued that. If the goal of pitching is to limit base-runners — and thus limit runs — the right-hander is about as good as it gets. I like quick ERA estimators like strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) partly because I’m lazy and partly because I think they’re nifty, and currently Syndergaard is second in K-BB%, which is the best quick ERA estimator we have. Strikeouts? Elite. Walks? Elite. Velocity? Arsenal? Unparalleled. The processes he’s taking to influence positive outcomes are second really only to Clayton Kershaw this season, and for the most part, he’s been rewarded for them. But there is one glaring issue he still has — laid bare in his past two starts — which we’ll get a lot of chances to see below.
All of that said, the main question we’re going to be answering today is: how does a team score runs off of Syndergaard? Every pitcher has to give up runs at some point, no matter how impressive their talent. Today, we engage in a fun exercise to examine those runs. So let’s go through a month’s worth of starts!
A primer for what we’re about to discuss: looking at Statcast data through Baseball Savant, Syndergaard has the lowest average exit velocity among pitchers with a minimum of 60 batted-ball events. Those events include both hits and outs, and it’s testament to the type of contact against him — and the frame for a lot of what we’ll be looking at today. Here’s a reminder of what exit velocity generally means for outcomes. Now let’s jump in, with the understanding that we’re going to skip over his first start of the season, as he didn’t give up any runs. Onward!
A casual stroll down the stacks of the FanGraphs hitting leaderboards for outfielders yields many interesting takeaways, but perhaps none more interesting than this: among the top 10 outfielders by wRC+, there’s a 23-year-old who played only 45 games above High-A before being called up to the majors last year. He came into this season with the expectation of being a left-handed platoon bat, and now he’s leading the majors in hard-hit rate and hitting third everyday in the sixth-best offensive lineup in baseball. A year can change a lot of things, and it has changed more for Michael Conforto than for just about anyone else in baseball.
Conforto had about as successful a short stint in the majors during 2015 as one could hope for out of a young player with little experience in the high minors — he posted a 134 wRC+ in 56 games, hit a few important home runs in the playoffs, and outperformed the established historical expectations for players in his position. Conforto was good for 2.1 WAR in those 56 games, and the Mets went from a .505 team without him — 3.0 games back in their division — to a .631 team with him, comfortable winners of the National League East. The August/September 2015 Mets weren’t just Conforto, of course, but the Mets needed an offensive jolt, and he provided it. Conforto’s introduction represented a tidy dividing line between mediocrity and wild success, and we’d be fools not to at least recognize the narrative convenience of that line.
That type of introduction to the major leagues is hard to live up to — and yet! Here we are, a month into the season, and Conforto has lived up to them. More than lived up to them, in fact. He’s probably created new expectations, and they’re even loftier, almost impossible ones. We know how easy it is to be wrong about April numbers. It’s folly to think that April assures us of what’s going to happen for the rest of the season. But, while we shouldn’t necessarily expect this current level of production out of him moving forward, he’s showing us a few real improvements so far this season that merit some attention. Conforto isn’t truly this good (no one is), but there’s a reason he’s currently this good.
Let’s start with who he was in 2015. Describing Conforto as a dead-pull hitter in 2015 wouldn’t be accurate, but he was close: he ranked 35th from bottom in terms of batted balls to the opposite field (out of 361 qualifying hitters, min. 190 PAs). Interestingly, he had a hole in his swing, and it was on the inside part of the plate — not really where you’d expect to find it for such a pull-happy hitter. Take a look at his isolated power per pitch location from 2015:
Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.
It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.
But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.
It is abundantly clear which team won the R.A. Dickey trade. Acquiring Noah Syndergaard, Travis d’Arnaud, John Buck, and Wulimer Becerra from the Blue Jays for Dickey, Josh Thole, and Mike Nickeas in December 2012 has paid off for the New York Mets in a big way. This isn’t a particularly controversial opinion in need of detailed supporting evidence, but Spencer Bingol covered the particulars of the Mets’ heist several months ago, even before Noah Syndergaard turned into a starter who pitches like a lights-out closer.
Barring something unexpected, the Mets will have gotten more wins at a lower price from their part in the trade than the Blue Jays will have from their part in the trade by the time Dickey’s contract expires at the end of this season. Then the Mets will continue to reap the benefits for several more seasons while d’Arnaud, Syndergaard, and Becerra remain under team control. There’s no way, in an absolute sense, to spin this as anything but a win for Mets and a loss for the Blue Jays.
This kind of retrospective analysis is valuable, but it is a bit simplistic. The interesting question isn’t which set of players performed better; that’s obvious. The interesting question is if the Blue Jays would have been better off not making the trade.
Any half-decent statistical analysis will tell you that Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball. This is just about inarguable. Kershaw has pitched at an unbelievable level, and he’s been able to do it for an unbelievable amount of time. He has the peak and the track record, so while there have been other great pitchers, there aren’t any Kershaws, by the numbers. This is why Kershaw gets the best projections. Projections are our statistical measures of true talent, and Kershaw’s talent is alone by itself.
I know, I know, Jake Arrieta. And, yeah, I know, Chris Sale, and Jacob deGrom, and so on. I mean no disrespect to anyone else. Kershaw has just had the strongest argument, so I’m using him here as the point of comparison. Because, you see, we have a new potential contender. We’ve all noticed Noah Syndergaard, and people are starting to ask questions. I see it on Twitter. I saw it in Dave’s most recent FanGraphs chat. I heard it on the Effectively Wild podcast. The big question, which seems absurd but improbably isn’t: is Syndergaard now better than Kershaw? Is Syndergaard suddenly the best?
Let me be straight with you: I haven’t decided. Part of me thinks it’s stupid to even consider. The rest of me thinks we could be on to something. At least, Syndergaard does have a real argument. I’m going to lay it out below as I try to talk myself through the issue.
Building a rotation is a difficult task for any organization. Drafting and developing prospects takes time and patience and often yields little in the way of results. Free agency is incredibly expensive not merely for proven pitchers, but unproven and mediocre ones, as well. Trades mean giving up talent and making sacrifices for the future. There is not a best way to build a rotation, but some teams have more limitations than others financially and the most efficient way to build a rotation includes young, cost-controlled starters. Ideally, a team would want the best rotation at the least possible expense. It’s a difficult task, but the New York Mets (to name one team) appear to have accomplished it.
A few weeks ago, FanGraphs previewed the 2016 by using the Depth Chart Projections found here to rank the teams by position. While the exercise itself is most useful for creating context around the projections — and to highlight individual players and teams — the foundation for the whole endeavor is the projections themselves. While often a very small difference exists between certain teams in terms of wins, it’s also true that two equally productive starting rotations, for example, can have very different costs (in dollars). That has an effect on how the corresponding teams can distribute salary throughout the rest of their respective rosters.