Archive for Teams

Jalen Beeks is quietly emerging as one of the top pitching prospects in the Red Sox organization. The 23-year-old lefty has made seven starts for the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs, and he’s kept the opposition off the scoreboard in five of them. His ERA is a frugal 1.60, and he’s fanned 48 batters over 39.1 frames.

On the surface, Beeks is more about craftiness than power. The University of Arkansas product stands an unimposing 5-foot-11, and his repertoire doesn’t include a plus-plus offering. His biggest asset has been an ability to mix and match, and keep hitters off balance.

Which isn’t to say he’s all about finesse. A scout to whom I spoke during his most recent outing opined that Beeks has good stuff, and that consistency and command are the keys to his future success. Having options should help. The former Razorback had a crisp curveball on the day I saw him, which helped make up for a cutter that wasn’t sharp. Beeks had pointed to the latter when I asked about his breakout.

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My wife is a school psychologist here in the Pittsburgh area, so naturally I learn about the profession and the field. One test of interest, and some amusement, that she’s discussed involves children and the concept of delayed gratification. Testers use all sorts of sugar-laden incentives for the evaluation. The tester presents a child with a cookie or chocolate or something else and informs the four-year-old that, after a short period of time, if the child can avoid the temptation to indulge in the first snack, that said child will receive a second. (I’m not sure such a test of will power would be all that easy for adults, either.)

The study, I believe, traces its origins to the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment conduced in the late 1960s by psychologist Walter Mischel. The kids tested were given one marshmallow, and then a second if they were able to endure about a 15-minute wait. Follow-up studies found that the children who were able to wait generally had better life-outcomes, though the experiment is not without their critics. The Atlantic revisited the study in 2014:

Studies showed that a child’s ability to delay eating the first treat predicted higher SAT scores and a lower body mass index (BMI) 30 years after their initial Marshmallow Test. Researchers discovered that parents of “high delayers” even reported that they were more competent than “instant gratifiers”—without ever knowing whether their child had gobbled the first marshmallow.

While such a study and its small sample is, of course, imperfect, I think reasonable people can agree there are many merits to delayed gratification for children and adults.

So that brings me to the New York Yankees. The club is somewhat surprisingly resides in first place in the AL East more than a quarter of the way through the season, and boasts of the second-best run-differential in the American League (+53), trailing only the Astros (+58). BaseRuns suggests the Yankees actually deserve to be a game better than their actual standing (27-16).

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It’s that time again, when we provide your somewhat regularly scheduled update on the exploits of Mike Trout. When we last saw our protagonist, he was rocking a 210 wRC+ on April 24th. That was good enough for sixth best in baseball, but given that it was April 24th, we were sure to see some regression. Right?

Now it’s May 24th, and Mike Trout has a 220 wRC+. That’s the best in baseball. It means he’s been 120% better on offense than the league average. He’s twice the average offensive player and then some. Since he’s often considered to be a reincarnation of Mickey Mantle, it should be noted that Mantle never had a single season wRC+ that high, his best mark being a 217 in 1957. He was worth 11.4 WAR in 144 games.

Speaking of WAR, Trout’s accumulated a 3.3 mark so far this year. That naturally also leads the league by a fair margin and has taken Trout over the 50-win mark for his career. In doing so, he’s passed a number of all-time greats in total career value. Those players include Luis Aparicio, Orlando Cepeda, Fred Lynn, David Ortiz, and Jimmy Rollins. He’s very close to passing George Sisler and Enos Slaughter. He’s still got a few months until he turns 26.

Of course, it’s not surprising to see Trout playing this well. It’s not surprising that this past Monday’s game was only the seventh 0-for he’s taken over the first 42 games he’s played this year. (He still managed to walk twice.) It’s not shocking to see Trout playing out of his mind like this, or to know that the above homer from yesterday tied him for the big league lead in homers with Aaron Judge.

And that’s because he’s Mike Trout, the guy who’s already punched his ticket as one of the best players to ever play the game. He’s the guy who’s finished first or second in MVP voting in every full season he’s played, and arguably should have won every time. He’s been the most consistently great player in the game since the second he was called up in 2012. He’s among that extremely small percentage of players who shouldn’t be discounted from being able to carry a 200 (or larger) wRC+ for a whole season, because he’s simply that talented. And by typical player aging curves, Trout hasn’t even hit his prime yet.

Trout, as good as he’s been, has never finished a season having outpaced the league by this much. It’s important to note that it is, indeed, just May 24th, but Trout’s hitting profile looks pretty similar to what he’s produced in the past. He’s just simply hitting the ball with even more power. His walk and strikeout rates are generally the same as last year, and he’s basically taken just two percentage points of ground-ball rate and put them into fly-ball rate. The only marked difference is that his soft contact rate is somehow up to 20% from 12%.

Ben Lindbergh recently noted in an excellent piece of work at The Ringer that Trout is swinging more than ever, and that he’s swinging more often at meatballs in the middle. Swinging more often can sometimes be dangerous, but Trout is pulling it off with aplomb, as Ben noted.

In his first, brief exposure to the big leagues, Trout’s selective aggression ranked in the first percentile compared with qualifying hitters. He swung at fewer than half of the pitches he saw in the strike zone and almost a third of likely balls, showing relatively little ability to differentiate between pitches he could punish and pitches even he would have a hard time driving. His ratio improved in 2012 and again in 2013 and 2014 before regressing in 2015, when he was probably playing through a wrist issue. Last year and this year, his strike zone judgment has made further strides, to the point that he’s now in the 94th percentile — one of the game’s smartest swingers

Having a strong feel for the strike zone isn’t the only ingredient of offensive success: Plenty of hitters have the ability to distinguish balls from strikes but lack the coordination and power to make the most of that skill. But when a hitter with Trout’s physical gifts adds elite discipline to the mix, pitchers can’t counter. Thus far, they’ve thrown fewer pitches in the strike zone to Trout than ever before, but he’s not biting on bad pitches. Over the course of his career, Trout has produced a .465 weighted on-base average when swinging at pitches inside the strike zone and a .250 wOBA when swinging at pitches outside the strike zone. It makes perfect sense that he’d be even more potent now that he’s swinging at the former pitches more often and the latter less often.

Ben also pointed out that Trout is pouncing on first-pitch curves more than ever, which counters a previously popular method of attack against him. Trout is plugging the few tiny holes in his game, and it’s resulting in some dazzling production.

There’s probably going to be a bit of regression from the phenomenal offensive high he’s currently riding, but there isn’t reason to expect a ton of it. We’ve always wondered about the hypothetical of whether or not Trout has peaked yet, of whether or not there’s still room between his current state and the upper limit of his possible performance. That may be what we’re looking at right now. If Trout is reaching his physical peak, maybe that explains his .411 ISO, which is well above that even of the behemoth Judge.

Nothing should be surprising with Trout, except if perhaps if he took the mound and started striking people out. As I noted over the winter, he’s basically already a Hall of Famer. He’s just gotten even better now. Trout could very well come back down to his heightened version of reality at some point in the near or distant future, because it’s extremely hard to hit this well for an entire season. There have only been 32 instances of a qualified batter carrying a wRC+ of 200 or greater for a season. Many of those campaigns were had by men named Ruth, Bonds, and Williams. That’s how good Trout has been, and what kind of company he would have to keep to do this from now until October.

We shouldn’t put it past him. We shouldn’t expect him to do it, either, but we shouldn’t immediately discount it. Trout is a special player, and possibly the greatest to ever play the game. He’s the one thing keeping the Angels from being basement-dwellers.

He’s absolutely, incredibly, ridiculously great. We’re lucky to be able to watch him perform.

So much is going well for the Yankees. Aaron Judge has exceeded everyone’s expectations. Aaron Hicks has found another level. Top prospect Gleyber Torres has been promoted to Triple-A. Luis Severino has a 21.1-point K-BB% mark. Michael Pineda owns an even better 24.5-point K-BB% mark — and finally has some better BABIP luck to go with his elite swing-and-miss stuff. Many believe, including this author, that it’s better than even odds that we will see Bryce Harper somewhere in the Yankee outfield in 2019. If feels like the next Yankee dynasty is taking shape.

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It’s still May. The Cubs are barely over .500. The Brewers are in first place. Needless to say, it’s still somewhat early in the season. Things aren’t going to end up the way they are now.

That said, we’re coming up on Memorial Day weekend, and the Arizona Diamondbacks have the fifth-best record in baseball. And if you look at our BaseRuns standings, which attempt to strip out sequencing from more-reliable performance data, the 27-19 Diamondbacks should actually be 29-17, putting them third overall in MLB, just barely behind the Dodgers for the #2 spot. They are sixth in the game in position player WAR and third in pitcher WAR.

So, yeah, it’s at least time to ask if the Arizona Diamondbacks actually good now.

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Previously
Changeups: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveballs: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Cutters and Splitters: MLB Starters.
Four-Seamers: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Two-Seamers: MLB Starters.

With May running out of days, it’s about time we laid to rest our series evaluating the individual pitches of 2016 ERA-qualifying starting pitchers. By the end of the week, we’ll be done. I’m splitting up the final two articles in a slightly unorthodox manner in order to make them run about the same length. There were so many good sliders in the NL last season that they deserve their own article later this week. Today, it’s the sinkers in both leagues, plus the AL sliders.

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What makes Andrew Miller so good? There’s a variety of contributing reasons — there’s the velocity, the fastball, the slider, the delivery, the body, the mentality, and so on and so on. Every part of Miller comes together to make him nearly perfect. But, what’s the mechanism? What’s the statistical explanation for Miller’s dominance? In essence, he warps the hitter’s idea of the strike zone. Hitters don’t swing at many strikes, and they swing at too many balls. They have the statistical discipline of bad-hitting pitchers.

So far this season, Miller has gotten opponents to swing at pitches out of the zone 43% of the time. Once again, that’s super high — by O-Swing%, Miller ranks second in baseball. There’s one guy in front of him. That one guy is Anthony Swarzak?

Sure, why not. It’s 31-year-old journeyman and minor-league-contract acquisition Anthony Swarzak, pitching out of the White Sox bullpen. I’ve already written about how Tommy Kahnle is overachieving. Now here’s Swarzak, too, basically out of nowhere. I’ve got a plot for you.

That’s Swarzak in red. Compared to last year, his O-Swing% against has improved by 14 percentage points, and his Contact% against has improved by 15 percentage points. So Swarzak is way, way out there, having now adjusted well to full-time relief. Let me take that back; Swarzak has mostly relieved for a while. First he was a starter. Then he was a swingman. Last year, with the Yankees, Swarzak for the first time dramatically increased his slider rate, overtaking his number of fastballs. Swarzak has kept that up in 2017. The difference this time around is in location. The Yankees got Swarzak to change his pitch mix rather aggressively. The White Sox have gotten Swarzak to focus on one specific area around the plate.

From Baseball Savant:

Last season, Swarzak threw 63% of his pitches to the glove-side half, which was one of the higher rates around. This season, Swarzak has thrown 85% of his pitches to the glove-side half, which ties him for the highest rate in the league. The next-closest pitcher trails by more than 10 percentage points. Swarzak works righties away, all the time. He works lefties inside, all the time. He throws his fastball to the glove-side, and he throws his slider to the glove-side. His locations have gotten precise, and consistent, and hitters haven’t really known what to do.

In January, Anthony Swarzak was basically nothing. I’m going to guess he signed with the White Sox because he figured there he stood a better chance of getting a big-league opportunity. He was right! And for a month and a half he’s been one of baseball’s more effective relievers. I don’t know what to tell you. This is our shared reality. How about Anthony Swarzak?

The first time I met Dodgers slugger Cody Bellinger, we didn’t have a lot of time, so I just shook his hand and said that I’d seen him enough to think “you swing really hard, every time, don’t you?” He smiled. “Always been this way.” And that part remained true when we reconnected. But he also opened my eyes to the parts of his game that were molded along the way.

The first coach that Bellinger had was his father. Clay Bellinger got some time with the Yankees earlier this century and coached his son early on. But once the son signed with the Dodgers, the father’s advice receded to “little tips and pointers.” His dad’s a firefighter now, in Gilbert, Arizona, and so he’s a little busy with his day job.

And the son had professional coaches. When he first arrived in pro ball, though, the focus was on staying afloat. “When I first signed in [2013] and Rookie ball in ’14, I wanted to learn how to hit first,” Bellinger said before a game against the Giants. “I was so young — I was 17, 18 — I didn’t worry about power at all.” You can see that there was something different about Bellinger back then.

Those professional coaches largely left him alone that first year, but going into High-A Rancho Cucamonga, they saw an opportunity. “Going into Rancho, they told me it was hitter friendly, so they made some adjustments to my swing. Damon Mashore helped me out,” Bellinger remembers. “I created a little bit more of a consistent path to the ball, just to backspin the ball. I never knew how to backspin balls before.”

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My first memory of Chris Taylor is of him serving as the third part of the illustrious Nick Franklin – Brad Miller – Taylor line in Seattle. He was the third to come up and the third to stumble. There were some who were of a mind that Franklin and Miller would turn into long-term assets for the Mariners, and that Taylor could be the sort of everyday regular who doesn’t make headlines but steadfastly contributes.

Now, a few years later, none of them play for Seattle. Franklin is struggling for the Brewers, and Miller is on the DL after an unexpected 30-homer campaign in Tampa. Taylor is a Dodger following a midseason trade last year.

He’s amassed 1.4 WAR in 29 games so far this year, and he’s slugging .583. Just as precisely nobody expected.

Some of the old reports on Taylor said that he would be a decent enough hitter, but that he’d make his money with his glove. Nobody ever looked at Taylor and saw a serious power threat, or a player who would prove to offer real value on both sides of the ball like this year. It’s just 29 games, and indeed, just 101 plate appearances. And when you go to his stats page, that .411 BABIP stands out like a sore thumb that just suffered a paper cut and was doused in lemon juice. But there’s so much more than dumb luck going on here.

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Did you know that the A’s lead the American League in home runs? Here’s one of them:

Here’s another one of them:

Those are two mammoth home runs. More, those are two mammoth home runs hit by the same guy — one Chad Pinder. Pinder is a 25-year-old infielder who’s topped out as Baseball America’s No. 7 Oakland prospect. In Pinder’s best professional season to date, he went deep 15 times. He’s gone deep four times over his last six big-league starts.

Pinder clearly has pretty good power. Keep that in the back of your mind. There are nearly 1,700 players with at least 50 batted balls in each of the last two seasons, including both the minors and the majors. Here are the 10 players with the biggest drops in ground-ball rate:

Whole bunch of minor leaguers. One Alex Avila out in front, about whom Dave just wrote. Avila has dropped his grounder rate by a stunning 30 percentage points, and that’s insane, but it’s also insane that Pinder is in ninth, having dropped his own grounder rate by 21 points. Pinder’s year-to-year track record:

• 2013: 41% grounders
• 2014: 46%
• 2015: 48%
• 2016: 42%
• 2017: 21%

One of those stands out from the others, and although it’s still early, and although things can still shift, what’s remarkable is remarkable. Suddenly, Pinder looks like he’s become an extreme fly-ball hitter. There’s power there to back it up. You know how Yonder Alonso has dramatically changed his own batting profile? His grounder rate is down by 19 points. Pinder has slightly bested that.

And oh, hey, Statcast. Out of everyone in the majors with at least 30 batted balls this season, Pinder ranks second — second! — in average exit velocity. He ranks fifth in average air-ball exit velocity. He ranks seventh in rate of batted balls hit at least 95 miles per hour. Pinder has hit nine so-called “Barrels”, which ties him with, say, Carlos Correa and Anthony Rizzo, and Pinder hasn’t played very much. He’s basically insisting that he gets noticed.

So, consider him noticed. How far this goes, I can’t tell you. Dramatic early-season shifts don’t always reflect legitimate changes in true talent. Yet Pinder is off to a promising start, and just to the eye, his swing is quite pleasing. The A’s could have something here. The A’s could have something terrific.