Archive for Teams

I’m sorry to have to tell you that you’re never going to hit in the major leagues. As far as how well you’d do if you got the opportunity — it’s fun to think about the lowest possible limits, but random fans never get the chance. It’s an experiment that will never be run, but the closest we can get to an understanding is by examining American League pitchers. Every last one of them is a professional athlete worth millions of dollars, but they’re not supposed to have to hit. The fact that they do hit sometimes is more or less an accident of scheduling. They practice hitting just about never, and that’s reflected in their results. In this table, there are two lines. One shows how American League pitchers have hit so far in 2017. The other shows how all the regular players have hit so far against Craig Kimbrel.

I kept it a mystery because it’s a popular writer technique. Look, they’re almost indistinguishably bad! Point made! But just for the hell of it, I’ll tell you now, the AL pitcher line is the first one. The Kimbrel line is the second one. The second one is the worse one.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s fifth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

On the whole, the Phillies’ offense appears to be taking a big step forward in 2017. Entering play Sunday, their combined wRC+ was 14 points higher than it was the previous year and the highest it’s been since 2011. The team’s batting average, slugging, and on-base percentages are all up, putting them on pace to score 113 more runs than last season.

But they’ve been doing it without much help from Maikel Franco.

After a strong rookie campaign and then slump in his sophomore season, Franco has taken another step back in 2017. His wRC+ has dropped from 129 two years ago to 74 today — the second lowest out of Philadelphia’s regulars and 25th out of 27 qualified third basemen.

The results he’s had don’t reflect the positive steps he’s taken this season, however. He vowed at the end of last year to be more patient at the plate. So far he says he’s done that, which is why his walk rate has crept up and his strikeout rate is going down. He is able to get those better numbers because is he is chasing out of the zone a lot less, dropping his chase percentage 7.2 points from a year ago. According to PITCHf/x, he was swinging at 26.5% out of the zone entering play Sunday. And while his output is down, his average exit velocity is holding steady with last year, which is still up from 2015.

Getting a couple breaks to raise his .222 BABIP average would help, too, but he isn’t worried about that at the moment. “I have to not think about that stuff,” Franco said. “…I have to do everything that I can control.”

But the good has been outweighed by one major problem. If you’ve seen the title of this post, you probably know what that problem is: he’s struggling against the slider.

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When the Tigers signed Alex Avila over the winter, it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster. They paid him $2 million to re-join the organization and serve as the backup catcher to James McCann, and since his dad is the GM of the team, there was an easy narrative for those who wanted to criticize the organization for not doing more to upgrade a team reaching the end of its window to contend.

what a joke. Nepotism all the way. The guy cannot hit. Only way he stays in MLB is daddy ball

— Hard Truth (@zerofilter2021) December 23, 2016

https://twitter.com/Sesso2345/status/812401342664810497

https://twitter.com/MrJonez1/status/812401315343167492

I would imagine that if we polled Roo2481, Sesso2345, and MrJonez1 today, we might find that they have a slightly different view of the Avila acquisition. Because, to this point in the season, he’s basically carried the Tigers’ offense.

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The Brewers’ Jared Hughes is the type of pitcher who’s endangered.

When Hughes was one of the more effective relievers in baseball for the Pirates from 2013 to -15, he relied on one pitch — a sinker — that he threw time after time in the lower part of the strike zone. Over the last year-plus, however, two important trends in the game have conspired against Hughes. For starters, the strike zone shrunk for the first time in the PITCHf/x era last season, according to Jon Rogele’s research. Worse, it shrunk in one particular area, down, where Hughes likes to pitch. Jeff Sullivan found that the zone continued to contract in spring training. The other trend is that more and more hitters have gone in search of fly balls, adjusting their swing planes to become more effective at lifting pitches down in the zone.

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In something of a surprise move, the Blue Jays summoned top prospect Anthony Alford to the big leagues on Friday. The move is a surprise not because Alford lacks talent, but because he’s played a mere 33 games above A-ball, all of which came this season with the Jays’ Double-A affiliate. Alford has performed exceptionally well this season, slashing .325/.411/.455. But he was overmatched by low-minors pitching as recently as last season, when he struck out 29% of the time and could only muster a .236/.344/.378 batting line at High-A.

Alford cut his strikeout rate by over 12 percentage points (from 29% to 17%) this year while maintaining his robust walk totals and modest power. The result has been substantially better offensive numbers. This is an encouraging development, especially since Alford’s so much more than his offense. He’s a 70 runner per Eric Longenhagen, which makes him a no-doubt center fielder and a threat on the bases.

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The season opened with a curious experiment that saw the Cardinals playing Matt Adams in left field. Adams is a large human being who, till this year, had been a first baseman — and, well, the whole left-field experiment didn’t go particularly well. Due to Matt Carpenter’s presence at first, Adams entered the weekend with just 53 plate appearances to his name — plate appearances in which he’d hit fairly well, but without his usual power.

It’s possible that some regular playing time could get Adams back to his old ways. The Atlanta Braves will be the ones to find out, as they traded for him on Saturday to fill in for the injured Freddie Freeman. Freeman had been playing like a superstar before being hit by a pitch and fracturing his wrist.

It’s a devastating blow to a Braves team that already wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, but you can do a lot worse for a replacement than Adams.

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PITTSBURGH – Daniel Murphy spends much of his offseason in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, where he hits in the batting cages of his alma mater, Jacksonville University. He works out there alongside his brother, who is also an alumnus of the program and who is also a local high-school coach. At the university, with his brother’s high-school team, Murphy will often talk about the craft of hitting with amateur players.

Murphy is, of course, one of a number of hitters who has changed his swing, improved his launch angle, and enjoyed significant success and improvement. He was an early adopter along with the usual names mentioned like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez. But as Murphy talks to players at the grassroots level about swing concepts, he notices there are often curious looks when he discusses the idea of hitting fly-balls.

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The Toronto Blue Jays have reportedly called up 22-year-old outfielder Anthony Alford from Double-A. It’s an aggressive promotion, albeit likely a temporary one. The organization’s No. 2-rated prospect would be filling a void created by Kevin Pillar’s suspension and an injury to Darrell Ceciliani.

Regardless of the duration of his stay, Alford has a bright future with Canada’s team. The former Ole Miss football player augments his athleticism with outstanding baseball instincts. In 141 plate appearances for the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, Alford was slashing .325/.411/.455, with three home runs and nine stolen bases in 10 attempts.

Gil Kim, Toronto’s director of player development, gave a snapshot rundown on the newest Blue Jay.

“Alford has made huge strides,” Kim told me earlier today.” He was a two-sport athlete, and I believe 2015 is the first year he fully committed to baseball. When you combine his character, makeup, and natural ability, and factor in the inexperience, I’m comfortable saying he’ll make quicker advances than most. He’s coming into his own, just focusing on baseball. He had a 2016 season that saw him progressively improve. He carried that into the AFL, and he’s obviously doing a very good job now in Double-A.”

Kim proceeded to double down on his opinion of Alford’s character.

“I can’t speak more highly of character and makeup in our organization than Anthony Alford. He’s an impressive human being. He’s going to be a very successful major-league baseball player, and he’s already a successful human being. If you talk to our field coordinator, Eric Wedge, or Angus Mugford, our high-performance director, Ben Cherington, Ross Atkins, Mark Shapiro — as we strive to create the culture, and environment, of what a Toronto Blue Jays player is, Anthony Alford is off the charts. He’s impressive, man.”

These days, we’re blessed with a number of amazing young shortstops. Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager, for example, are already among baseball’s top players. Manny Machado is a shortstop who just accidentally plays third base. All of them are younger than 25.

Second base isn’t as notable for its youth. Last year, however, second basemen recorded one of the top collective offensive lines at the position in the history of the game. Good job, second basemen.

So both positions are experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. This led me to wonder which teams might be benefiting most from that renaissance. It’s rare that teams can keep a second baseman and shortstop together long enough to form a lasting and effective double-play combo. Right now, MLB has some pretty great ones. But which is the greatest — particularly, on the defensive side of thing? Let’s explore.

First, we want to know who has played together for awhile. Since the start of the 2015 season, 21 players have played at least 200 games as a shortstop, and 23 have done the same at second base. Cross-referencing them and weeding out the players who have played for multiple teams, we get the following list:

That’s a pretty good list. There are some tough omissions here. The most notable is the Angels, as Andrelton Simmons hasn’t been with them long enough to meet our bar here. Given Johnny Giavotella’s defensive contributions, however, we can guess that the combo here would be quite one-sided. Also excluded are teams with new double-play combos, like the Dodgers and Mariners. Not only are the Logan Forsythe-Corey Seager and Robinson Cano–Jean Segura combos new this season, but thanks to injuries they haven’t even played together much this season. Cano-Segura has only happened 22 times this season, and Forsythe-Seager only 10 times.

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On Wednesday, Aaron Loup threw this up-and-in fastball.

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