Archive for Teams

Ryan Zimmerman is off to a great start. We’re only 26 games into the season covering 104 PA, but anytime you’re running a .427/.462/.875 line, it’s worth celebrating. Among qualified hitters entering play on Thursday, Zimmerman led the league with a 241 wRC+. This is particularly noteworthy because, measured by outcomes, Zimmerman had a terrible season in 2016. Zimmerman posted a 67 wRC+ in 467 PA last year after many years as an above-average hitter.

During the offseason, Jeff Sullivan noted that Zimmerman’s 2016 probably didn’t portend doom. Jeff pointed out that Zimmerman was hitting the ball pretty hard in the air, but he simply wasn’t collecting extra-base hits at a rate consistent with that contact quality. Erstwhile FanGrapher Mike Petriello made a related argument, recognizing that Zimmerman was making hard contact, but that he simply wasn’t hitting the ball at a steep enough angle to turn that hard contact into productive contact.

I probably don’t have to tell you where this is going. This season, Zimmerman is hitting the ball a bit harder than last year, 93.6 mph on average vs, 92.5 mph in 2016, but his average launch angle has increased from 9.0 to 11.7 degrees in 2017.

But you don’t need fancy Statcast numbers to notice this difference. His fly-ball and ground-ball rates are plenty clear. Zimmerman has joined the ranks of so many players who are trying to hit more fly balls. And at least so far this season, it’s working quite well for him.

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Before the start of the year, the Padres’ starting rotation was the butt of so many jokes. They essentially had to build it out through free agency, but not even through the appealing parts of free agency. More like the Jered Weaver parts. Here and there, there was occasional speculation the Padres could go on to have one of the worse rotations in recent memory. At the same time, people held the Cubs in the conversation for having maybe the best rotation around. It was certainly one of the best a season ago. Why would anything change? Cubs good. Padres bad. These statements were inarguable.

We’ve completed just a sixth or so of the season. You should be sticking to many of your preseason thoughts. But let me just show six numbers. Here’s how the Cubs’ rotation has done:

• ERA-: 109
• FIP-: 109
• xFIP-: 94

And here’s how the Padres’ rotation has done:

• ERA-: 106
• FIP-: 106
• xFIP-: 95

The Padres are basically right in the middle in WAR. It’s been a mixed bag of results, but overall it’s been fine, even slightly more effective than the Cubs. It’s a strange place for us to be, and surprising group effectiveness is driven by surprising individuals. Trevor Cahill has earned a front-page post.

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The Mets, of course, were dealt a significant setback with the news on Noah Syndergaard earlier this week. Steven Matz is on the DL and has a long injury history. Robert Gsellman has some ominous velocity and spin-rate trends. That represents the majority of the starting-rotation arms upon which the Mets were counting this season.

Then there’s Matt Harvey.

The Mets — along with the entirety of baseball — had no idea what to expect from Harvey entering this season. There were plenty of concerns this spring, certainly, when Harvey was sitting at 92 mph with his fastball. The concerns have continued into the regular season.

Harvey struggled again on Tuesday in Atlanta. A month into the season, the right-hander now owns a 5.14 ERA and even worse 5.75 FIP. He’s striking out a paltry 13.5% of batters while walking 8.8% — not even a five-point difference. Here, the sake of context, are Harvey’s K-BB% marks over the last four seasons: 23.2% (2013), 20% (2015), 12.7% (2016) and 4.7% (2017).

The 2013 and 2015 versions of Harvey seem less and less likely to reappear.

Said Mets manager Terry Collins to reporters present:

“You’re talking about a guy that did not pitch very much last year. He’s coming back from a surgery that not a lot of guys have really come back to be 100 percent again. Especially when you’ve lost the feeling in your fingers and you’ve got to regain the feel of the seams.”

That’s not encouraging. That sounds like the description of a pitcher who has a long way back if he’s ever going to return to something near to what he was, which was a legit ace. Harvey had surgery in July for thoracic outlet syndrome. (Some PITCHf/x forensics on the issue were conducted here by Mike Sonne.)

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April didn’t go very well for the Texas Rangers. Their closer imploded, their offense sputtered, Adrian Beltre couldn’t get healthy, and the Astros started off red hot, opening a sizable early lead in the AL West race. Well, today, things got even worse, as Cole Hamels was found to have a strained oblique that is going to put him on the shelf until at least July.

Cole Hamels has been placed on 10 day DL with right oblique strain that will sideline him about 8 weeks.

— Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) May 3, 2017

Before this news came down, our forecasts already weren’t that optimistic about Texas’ chances this year. Their 11-16 start meant we had them finishing 78-84, so they’d need to win roughly 10 more games than projected over the rest of the season to put themselves in legitimate Wild Card contention. Our playoff odds calculation put the chances of that happening at about 10%, with another 3% chance they’d get hot enough to catch the Astros and win the division. Their 13% playoff odds put them ahead of only the A’s, Twins, Royals, and White Sox in the AL.

Take Hamels out of the picture for a couple of months, with the team already lacking rotation depth, and those odds probably sink under 10%. It’s not definitively time to throw in the towel, but this certainly hurts the Rangers chances of turning things around before they’ll have to make a decision on Yu Darvish in July. An impending free agent, if the Rangers aren’t sure they can re-sign him, they’d probably have to trade him, given the return he’d command. To avoid having to make a decision on Darvish, Texas was going to have to get hot in May and June, but now they’ll have to do that without their other good starting pitcher.

One of the main stories of 2017 is how many expected contenders might end up as sellers this summer. The Royals, Blue Jays, and Giants are all staring at significant hills to overcome to get back in the race, and now they might be joined by the Rangers in putting some impact talent in play at the trade deadline.

The Yankees have gotten off to a surprising start, sitting in a first-place tie in the AL East even despite having mostly played without Gary Sanchez. These being the Yankees, there’s not much that happens under the radar, and I’ve already fielded a number of chat questions about a reasonably young outfielder with a high walk rate and a 191 wRC+. He’s helped to power the Yankees to where they are today, far exceeding expectations with a slugging percentage of .640. Aaron Judge, also, has been terrific.

Judge, in fact, has been the club’s best player. For one month, he’s played at his ceiling, and he’s become a household name just as a function of his highlight home runs. Yet Aaron Hicks, too, has also been playing at his ceiling. Where Judge is a 25-year-old prospect, Hicks is a 27-year-old post-prospect, if you will. Until now, he felt a little like a bust. It might still end up a bummer of a season. But maybe, just maybe, for Aaron Hicks, it’s clicking.

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It was inevitable. Jon Duplantier was eventually going to allow an earned run, and it happened last night. After 21.2 professional innings with a 0.00 ERA, the Arizona Diamondbacks pitching prospect surrendered a pair of markers in the first inning of a game against the South Bend Cubs.

It’s worth noting that he’s not superstitious. That was the first thing about which I asked him when we spoke on Monday. Given that he was about to make his fourth start of the season for the Low-A Kane County Cougars, the last thing I wanted to do was jinx him.

Deplantier told me he used to be somewhat superstitious. Having found it mentally draining, though, he’s “pretty much scratched that” from his psyche. Addressing his run of perfection was thus perfectly acceptable. “Giving up runs is going to happen,” he told me. “If I never gave up a run… I don’t know how I’d be doing it, but I do know there’d be a lot of money to be made.”

He has a chance to make a lot of money. Arizona drafted Duplantier in the third round last year, and were it not for health concerns, he likely would have gone higher. The 22-year-old Rice University product has a classic pitcher’s frame — he’s listed at 6-foot-4, 225 pounds — and his fastball has touched 97. He’s currently commanding the pitch well, and he’s doing so with a delivery he trusts. Despite his injury history, the D-backs haven’t tinkered with his mechanics.

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Time to sound the New Pitch siren because Robbie Ray is throwing a curveball! And, at least early in the season, it looks like it matters: after a year spent wondering why his balls in play kept finding grass and suffering while his run-prevention marks failed to match his fielding-independent ones, the Arizona lefty finally has the numbers you might expect for a guy who’s been among the top 15 in strikeout rate among starters since he entered the league.

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Let’s say you’re in an argument with one of your colleagues. If you work in an office, maybe that comes in the form of a heated disagreement during a meeting. Maybe you work construction and you’re unhappy with the way the foreman is running things at your site. Maybe you just think the head chef at your restaurant is an ass. Regardless of what the circumstances are, your workplace disagreements — whatever form they take — likely don’t include flinging projectiles at each other at speeds in excess of 90 mph.

Baseball is far from a typical workplace, of course. For most people, work generally doesn’t require one to compete against another “team” for the amusement of the masses. Most job descriptions don’t mandate that the applicant possess elite athleticism, expertise with balls of cork and twine, or extensive experience with wooden clubs. There are rarely endorsement deals for a particularly capable account manager. Statistically speaking, you’re unlikely to be making in excess of a million dollars. Professional sports are a strange realm, and baseball may be the strangest of them all.

The politics of the beanball are as intricate as they are confusing. To hear some people discuss it, there’s a right way and a wrong way to heave a projectile at another human being. There’s a time and place for that sort of behavior. You’ve got to protect your guys.

Yet, in a vacuum, this all makes very little sense. When Matt Barnes threw a fastball at Manny Machado’s head, he got a four-game suspension. If Barnes had done the same thing anywhere but on a baseball field, the justice system would have likely gotten involved. Construction workers can’t hurl wrenches at each other without facing some form of repercussion.

Ever since Machado slid too hard into Dustin Pedroia, though — an act that players on both sides acknowledge was unintentional — the Orioles and Red Sox have been throwing at each other. As you may have seen last night, Manny’s had about enough of it. He launched into a profanity-filled tirade against the Red Sox after yesterday’s game, in the first inning of which Chris Sale threw behind him. It’s worth a listen. (Although, if you’re at work, I advise using headphones.)

Sale’s decision to throw at Machado came after Dylan Bundy hit Mookie Betts on Monday night, and was therefore likely retaliation for that. The Red Sox (or at least Sale) felt that Betts being hit was actually in retaliation for Machado being thrown at in Baltimore, and so on and so forth. It’s like a Taylor Swift song come to life. There’s nothing but bad blood here.

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Many are skeptical that Yankee Stadium II’s dimensions represent an exact replica of the original stadium’s — or, at least, a replica of the post-1976 version of old Yankee Stadium. The club contends on its official site that the distances from home plate to the outfields walls are identical to the previous park’s.

Because of the volume of home runs hit there since it opened, however, and because the outfield depths sure seem different, many have wondered if the club’s claims are true. The New York Times, for example, was compelled to explore the issue back in 2009.

When I asked if he still believed the dimensions were the same as before, as some folks have disputed with visual evidence, [Yankees general Brian] Cashman said, “I’ve been told they’re the same. I know they’re supposed to be the same.”

Still, without access or permission to survey the field, it’s never been possible to know exactly how honest any team is being with regard to its outfield dimensions depths. There are many who believed Fenway’s left-field wall was closer than the listed dimensions, and to anyone who has hit, pitched, or watched a game in New Yankee, the right-field wall seems awfully close. I would suggest that it’s unreasonably close to home plate.

We’ve never known which dimensions we could trust, though. Until now. It’s my understanding that the Doppler radar of Statcast is quite accurate. With that as backdrop, it’s my goal in this post to employ that radar technology to measure home runs that have passed just over the wall of Yankee Stadium to get a better sense of the park’s dimensions — especially those areas of the field that are left unmarked. Only five outfield depths are listed on the Yankee’s official website and posted on the outfield-wall locations. I was especially curious with regard to the unmarked territory in right.

Let’s begin. First in left field.

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Just after sunrise on August 6, 1974, Philippe Petit began his walk across a 200-foot stretch of wire spanning New York’s Twin Towers. He and his assistants had prepared the wire overnight, using a crossbow to connect the one-inch-wide walk way from rooftop to rooftop, 1,350 feet above Lower Manhattan. Petit completed eight walks that morning before being ordered down, and arrested, by New York City police. The Telegraph (U.K.) recounted the daring feat.

[Petit] felt so confident that he took to showboating… The Frenchman is shown [via photograph] lying down on the wire while balancing his bar across his chest with his arms well away. At one point the 24-year-old hung by his heels….

He later said: “To me, it’s really so simple: life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion, to refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope.”

Petit’s chosen line of work is not for everyone. That said, there might be some wisdom in his view on how to live regardless of your profession.

Nearer ground level this year — in fact, on a pitching mound for the Astros — Dallas Keuchel is conducting his own tightrope walk. A former seventh-round draft pick with just an 89-mph fastball, Keuchel has always been compelled to find ways to adapt and push boundaries. Last month, FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan noted Keuchel’s latest makeover — namely, that the left-hander is going “Full Ziegler” on us.

Wrote Sullivan:

Nearly everything has been at the knees or below, just like how Ziegler works, and at least to this point, it’s been working. As usual, I’ve made some use of Baseball Savant. Using the filter options, I selected the five lowest pitch-zone areas. There are 220 pitchers who’ve thrown at least 100 pitches in both 2016 and 2017. Among them, last year, Keuchel had the No. 31 low-pitch rate. This year, he has the No. 2 low-pitch rate, slightly behind only teammate Luke Gregerson. Keuchel’s low-pitch-rate increase of 17 percentage points is the fourth-greatest, and he already worked mostly down. Now it’s like he doesn’t even pay attention to the other spots.

Keuchel is off to an excellent start this season with the Ziegler approach, producing a 5-0 record and 1.21 ERA. But I wonder how much longer this success can last.

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