Left field at AT&T Park in San Francisco is spacious — but compared to center field and right field, it’s not terribly complicated. No unusually high brick walls; no tricky angles. After Barry Bonds left the team, the Giants rotated some pretty mediocre defenders through left (and towards the end, Bonds was pretty mediocre himself). If the left fielder could hit, he’d probably be an overall plus, despite subpar range or weak arm. Think Pat Burrell in 2010.

The Washington Nationals’ four-game series in San Francisco this week, then, couldn’t have worked out better for new left fielder Ryan Zimmerman. The former Gold Glove third baseman made his first start in left on June 3 after returning from a 51-day stint on the disabled list for a broken right thumb. Zimmerman’s in left because Bryce Harper went down with his own thumb injury that is expected to keep him off the field until July. The Nationals moved Anthony Rendon to third — his natural position — and Danny Espinosa came off the bench to retake his old job at second. Before Zimmerman, Tyler Moore and Nate McLouth rotated in left and posted an 88 wRC+ and 58 wRC+, respectively.

But there’s much more to it. Zimmerman has been battling an arthritic condition in his right shoulder since 2012 and the injury has significantly affected his throwing motion. From 2007 through the 2011 season, Zimmerman had two of the top 10 defensive seasons for third baseman in the league, as measured by Defensive Runs Saved. Cumulatively, the only third baseman better than Zimmerman in those five seasons were Evan Longoria, Adrian Beltre and Scott Rolen, again using DRS.

That all changed with the shoulder injury in 2012. A cortisone shot allowed him to play through pain — and he delivered at the plate to the tune of a .352 wOBA and 121 wRC+ — but his defense suffered. He and the Nationals hoped off-season surgery would alleviate the pain and the effects of the injury on his throwing motion, but 2013 wasn’t much better from the hot corner. Zimmerman’s cumulative DRS from 2007 through 2011 was +55; in 2012 and 2013, it dropped to -2.

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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.

In this installment of the Prospect Watch, I examine three players who have improved markedly from my viewings in 2013 to 2014.

Summary
Leyer brings easy heat and knows where it’s going, and his game has taken a quantum leap forward in the past year.

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Whenever a player or team perform exceptionally well, a common question we get in our chats is, “is this the real player/team?” Usually, the answer is no — a hot streak is a hot streak, a fluke level of performance above the norm. Every so often, though, the outlook’s a little fuzzier, especially when it comes to individual players who might be having a breakout. Yet in the case of the Nationals’ rotation, we can declare unequivocally that no, this is not the real them. The Nationals’ starting rotation is good. Over 51.2 innings, between June 3 and June 10, Nationals starters didn’t walk a single batter.

And they struck out 51 batters. According to Adam Kilgore, that hadn’t happened in at least a century. We can say with certainty that the Nationals’ starters aren’t this good because, over that span, they posted a 1.66 FIP, putting them somewhere between Craig Kimbrel and peak Pedro Martinez. They achieved a strikeout-to-walk ratio of #UNDEFINED, and a K% – BB% of their K%. The Nationals’ rotation, without question, overachieved, but everyone who’s ever thrown a perfect game has overachieved, and those perfect games have drawn an awful lot of words. So the Nationals deserve some words of their own, before this streak is forgotten.

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If you were to conduct a casual survey among baseball fans about the greatest pitching season of all time, there’s no doubt that there’s a few years that would pop up regularly among the responses. Bob Gibson‘s 1968, certainly. Dwight Gooden‘s 1985 would probably appear, or Roger Clemens‘ 1986, or Steve Carlton’s 1972. Randy Johnson has a few years you could point to. So does Sandy Koufax. So does Greg Maddux. There’s not really a wrong answer there, because it’s not a question that can be answered. Run environment and park effects have to be measured, and we can do that to some extent, but we can’t really account for the fact that some people prefer the quiet mastery of Maddux to the flame-throwing mastery of Johnson, or the fact that whether you were 15 in 1968 or still decades away from being born will absolutely color your memories of particular eras.

For me, the answer is a tie. It’s either Pedro Martinez‘ 1999 or Pedro Martinez‘ 2000, and it’s not hard to explain why. They were legitimately great seasons no matter how you looked at them, and they occurred right in the face of some of the highest offensive environments we’ve ever seen. It’s why Martinez’ ERA+ in 2000 was 291 while Gibson’s 1968 was 258, despite Gibson’s raw ERA of 1.12 being considerably lower than Martinez’ 1.74. And for me, I lived in Boston at the time. I was in college. I lived within walking distance of Fenway Park. I can’t say I specifically remember any starts of Martinez’ I saw in person in those two years, but I’m sure I saw at least a few.

Martinez, in those two years, did something no other qualified pitcher since 1900 has ever done before or since. He struck out more than 11 per nine, and he paired that with a walk rate below 2.00. That’s a bit biased towards recent pitchers, since the game as a whole simply didn’t strike out decades ago like they do now, but that doesn’t really change how fantastically impressive it was.

Now, realize this: This isn’t a post about Pedro Martinez. It’s a post about Stephen Strasburg, who, through his first 14 starts of the season, is on pace to do exactly that… not that anyone seems to be noticing. If it’s possible to be both a superstar and feel like a disappointment, considering how hyped Strasburg was as the No. 1 pick in the 2009 draft, he’s managed to accomplish it.

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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.

Summary
Payano has two interesting pitches from the left side, but he’s been derailed by inconsistency his whole career.

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Weird things about baseball fascinate me. One of those things is the concept of discarded players. Every once in awhile, you’ll see a player doing well and think to yourself, “Hey, wasn’t he on our team at one point?” David Carpenter is one such player. Watching him face the Red Sox this week, I couldn’t help but think that it would be sure nice if the Sox had him right now instead of Craig Breslow. Sure, the world will keep on spinning, and Carpenter wouldn’t make or break the 2014 Red Sox, but every little bit counts, and the Red Sox gave him away for free after just five weeks on the roster. In situations like these, we often jokingly say (or at least I do), “Hey, I wish we could get guys like that!”

I don’t mean to pick on the Red Sox, because every team does this. If you scan rosters, you’ll find one such player on just about every roster. And originally, my intention was to run down that list and look at them all individually. But then I got a look at this trade. On July 31, 2010, the Atlanta Braves traded Gregor Blanco, Jesse Chavez and Tim Collins to the Kansas City Royals for Rick Ankiel and Kyle Farnsworth. Take a look:

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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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