Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Jake Johansen, RHP, Washington Nationals (Profile)
Level: Low-A  Age: 23   Top-15: N/A   Top-100: N/A
Line: 26 IP, 28 H, 20 R, 23/16 K/BB, 5.88 ERA, 3.80 FIP

Summary
Johansen has premium size and arm strength, with enough supplemental skills to make him very interesting.

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Pitch-pattern data can be interesting when you’re trying to spot trends or adjustments for scouting reports. Changes in pitch patterns can sometimes be revealing. Just the other day, we looked at Miguel Cabrera, and beginning in last year’s playoffs, pitchers started to challenge him with more fastballs over the plate. That trend continued into this April, as opposing teams picked up on the fact Cabrera wasn’t 100% after offseason surgery. With Cabrera not swinging like himself, pitchers often tried to blow him away. Now Cabrera’s getting back to normal, so pitchers, one figures, should soon return to their normal. Not that it’ll do them much good.

Pitch-pattern data can also be interesting and revealing when it doesn’t change. Wilin Rosario doesn’t see many fastballs, or strikes, or fastballs for strikes. What’s revealed is how people think of Wilin Rosario and his eye. The way Rosario gets pitched is perfectly justifiable, and this is an example of baseball finding its equilibrium. Yet there’s something curious I’ve noticed about Anthony Rendon. His name has come up when I’ve been researching other things.

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Perhaps we should be used to this by now. Just four years ago, Craig Kimbrel was just some guy who walked more than 18 percent of the batters he faced. Now, he’s Craig Kimbrel. In the same timeframe, Drew Storen went from talented rookie set-up man to closer on a suddenly not terrible Nationals team. In their wake, young relievers like Kenley Jansen, Kelvin Herrera, Trevor Rosenthal, Addison Reed and others have taken the baseball world by various degrees of storm. And there was this Aroldis Chapman guy, too.

This season has been no different. Seemingly anonymous relievers have been springing from the figurative woodwork to capture spots on the top of various reliever leaderboards, most notably K% and velocity. Let’s meet some of them, shall we?

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With the real Opening Day behind us — sorry Astros and Yankees, you’re just late — we now have real 2014 data from almost every team on the leaderboards. Of course, besides answering trivia questions, we all know that there’s really nothing insightful to be learned from one day’s performance, and we’re not going to find useful information to be analyzed there until the samples get a lot bigger.

But there are some numbers that became useful in very short order. Strikeout rate, for instance, only has to be regressed 50% to the mean at a much lower number of batters faced than most other pitching metrics, and big changes in K% over even a few starts can prove somewhat meaningful. It’s hard to fluke your way into getting a bunch of Major League hitters to swing through your pitches, and if you’re consistently throwing pitches by people, it’s a pretty good sign for the future.

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FanGraphs recently added the ability to view Inside Edge fielding data breakdowns to player pages, and it’s a fun way to look at defense. Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez converted the highest percentage of “Remote” (defined as being 1%-10% likely) plays, not unexpected given his stellar defensive reputation, while Brandon Crawford and Pedro Florimon tied for the largest raw number of such plays, at 24, also not unexpected since they are shortstops who are mostly in the big leagues for their defensive value. You can view this data in any number of different ways, really. By definition, no major leaguer converted a single “Impossible” play, but the two players who had the most such plays head their way were Cincinnati outfielders Jay Bruce and Shin-Soo Choo, who had a combined 250 “Impossible” plays. That the top two players both played on the same team tells us… something, probably.

But we’ve already looked at Crawford’s greatness, and Florimon just really isn’t that interesting. What I’m thinking about today are the 90%-100% plays, defined as “Almost Certain / Certain” for our purposes. Those are the plays that are so routine that most every major leaguer should be converting nearly every such opportunity into an out, and for the most part, they do. Nine qualified big leaguers made 100% of those plays last year, including the defensively-maligned Choo, which tells you a little something that his issues were more with his routes and speed in center than they were with making plays on the balls he got to. (Which sort of makes him sound like the Derek Jeter of center fielders, doesn’t it?) 44 players converted at least 99% of those plays. 60 got to at least 98%. Every team made at least 97.2%; as a whole, the sport converted 98% of such plays.

This is all as you’d expect. Those are the routine, mundane, barely thought-of plays you see a dozen times a night. They’re just short of extra points in football; they’re made all the time because they should be made all the time. You don’t notice them until they give you a reason to. The rankings tend to overweight outfielders, because there’s of course a smaller likelihood of making a throwing error from the outfield. But someone has to be pulling up the rear, and that’s what I wanted to know: which big leaguer (non-catchers, for simplicity) was the worst at making the easiest play? Read the rest of this entry »

It would be hard to call Livan Hernandez’s retirement surprising, but some people such as myself were probably a bit taken aback because we assumed he had already retired. That is not meant as a slight. Hernandez is in his late thirties (some would say he is even older), did not pitch at all in 2013, and was dreadful when he last pitched in the majors in 2012. Our own Paul Swydan ranked Hernandez’s 2012 as one of the worst final seasons among pitchers having similar careers.

Beat writers and fans of Hernandez’s numerous teams will have all the best stories and reflections on his career. It would be hard to top Grant Brisbee’s (understandably) Giants-centric farewell to Hernandez, so I am not even going to try. But Hernandez drew attention, even late in his career, for other, non-fan-centric reasons. In 2011, Jeff Sullivan (who today [Livan Day at FanGraphs!] also posted about Hernandez and the strike zone) mentioned that Hernandez had a pretty bad slider in 2011. Yet after that same 2011 season, Swydan noted gave Hernandez an honorable mention for his incredibly slow, but amazingly curvy curve in 2011. Robert Baumann also got in on The Joy of Livan.

Rather than getting into every little statistical detail of Hernandez’ career, let’s look at three different moments from the roughly the beginning, end, and middle of his career.

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If there are two somewhat separate skills when it comes to defense — getting to balls and converting the chances you can get to — we all know which one gets more attention. The leapers and divers get the oohs and ahs while those watching the ball all the way into the glove gets golf claps at best. It’s time to appreciate the guys that make the plays they are supposed to.

The All Sure-Handed Team.

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It’s a simple thing to say, but there’s an important interplay between the swing and the miss when it comes to pitching. In order to get a swinging strike, you need to get the batter to swing and you need to get them to miss. These are, in effect, two different skills, even if the best pitchers are awesome at both. And so it’s not surprising that we have two different metrics for that moment — whiffs per swing (whiff% in some places) and whiffs per pitch or swinging strike rate (swsTR% here). We probably need both. Is one better?

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Washington Nationals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
Despite recording about -5 runs on just errors alone, third baseman Ryan Zimmerman managed to produce three wins in 2013, a figure which ZiPS expects him to approximate in 2014. Here’s what ZiPS likely knows about Zimmerman: that his defensive figures have been decidedly less impressive in recent years than previously. Here’s what it can’t know: that one reason for Zimmerman’s decline is a combination of shoulder weakness and perhaps even some manner of anxiety which have conspired to affect his throwing accuracy.

Reports this offseason suggest that Zimmerman will receive a modest number of starts at first base, in place of Adam LaRoche. This idea has merit to it. Not only might it allow Zimmerman to avoid having to contend daily with the throwing obligations of third base, but one also notes that Zimmerman is expected to outhit LaRoche by ca. 30 points of wOBA.

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A year ago, pretty much everyone picked the Nationals to win the NL East. Why not? They’d won 98 games in 2012, and they’d done so without full seasons from Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Jayson Werth. They’d done so without a real center fielder, since Rick Ankiel and Roger Bernadina had started 64 games there while Harper was still in the minors or otherwise unavailable, a problem that newcomer Denard Span was intended to fix. They’d also won 98 without Rafael Soriano, a seemingly luxurious addition who had been added to a bullpen that was already solid, and without Dan Haren, who was a risk but had many years of excellent performance behind him and wasn’t being counted on to be more than the fourth starter.

No one wanted to say that the Nationals were going to top 100 wins, but plenty of us thought it. In a division with only one other serious contender, they seemed like a lock. They seemed like the safest bet in the game. Read the rest of this entry »