Archive for Teams

I first heard of Chaz Roe in December of 2010, when he was traded straight-up for Jose Lopez. It wasn’t a promising thing; it was more like, hey, in 2009 Lopez hit 25 home runs, and in 2010 the best he could get in a trade was Chaz Roe. Roe, since then, has bounced around without quite establishing himself. He is, at this point, a 30-year-old man, who is now with his tenth organization, one of which having been an independent outfit named the Lemurs. Roe has traveled all over the place. He’s been sufficiently intriguing to get a number of looks, yet insufficiently effective to stick. Such is the career of an eighth or ninth reliever.

By now, I’m sure Roe doesn’t feel too secure. He’s probably hesitant to ever unpack any bags, and his current employer — the Braves — remains in the midst of a rebuild anyway. If Roe’s bad, he could go. If Roe’s good, he could go. The future’s uncertain, but at least Roe is now giving it his best shot. He’s running out of time to build a more stable career, so late last season, he started using his best pitch a lot more. It sounds so simple to us. It seems almost obvious. You can now count Chaz Roe among the slider machines.

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The Scott Boras influence on the Nationals’ roster is “inescapable” wrote Washington Post scribe Barry Svrluga on Monday.

Svrluga calculates that, after the Matt Wieters signing, nine players on the Nationals’ projected Opening Day roster will almost certainly be Boras clients, their contracts totaling $551.4 million.

When Dave Cameron examined the curious signing of Wieters by the Nationals earlier this month the FanGraphs editor wrote:

The lesson, as always; if you’re not sure where a Scott Boras client is going to sign, Washington is always a safe guess.

At the plate, Wieters isn’t clearly better than Norris, even with the latter’s miserable 2016 as our most recent data point. …. Statcorner has Norris at +22.5 runs from framing in his career, while Wieters is at -20.9. Prorated to 10,000 pitches, that’s roughly +6.5 per season for Norris and -3.2 for Wieters, so about a 10 run swing between them per year.

The Nationals needed help. They needed to bolster their bench, they required bullpen help, and reportedly added Joe Blanton Tuesday. What they didn’t need was Wieters, a poor receiver with a middling bat. With Wieters, Boras appears to have sold ice to an arctic village. It was a surprising fit, only it wasn’t, as Boras and Nationals owner Ted Lerner have developed something of a deal-making relationship.

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This morning, Eric Longenhagen released his list of the Top 20 Mets prospects, giving kudos to an underrated system led Amed Rosario, who Eric noted could be the #1 prospect in the game when next year’s Top 100 rolls around. Right behind him, Eric went with Robert Gsellman, the Jacob Degrom lookalike who ended last year in Queens, helping pitch the Mets to a Wild Card berth. This was a bit of a deviation from where Gsellman has ranked on other lists, as Baseball America had him as the #7 prospect in the Mets system, while MLB.com had him at #5. Eric, though, put a 55 FV grade on him, the same rating as many of the best-known pitching prospects in the game, such as Michael Kopech, Tyler Glasnow, and Jose De Leon.

Given Gsellman’s track record, it’s not surprising that he would engender some pretty different points of view. A 13th round pick, he was a run-of-the-mill pitch-to-contact guy for most of his minor league career, running strikeout rates as low as 13% in Double-A as recently as 2015. As Eric noted, he mostly sat in the low-90s and pitched primarily off his fastball, so between not being much of a prospect when drafted to not having an out-pitch against low-level hitters, there weren’t a lot of reasons to get too excited about Gsellman’s future.

But then last year, the velocity began to tick up a bit, and he got his strikeout rates up closer to league average in both Double-A and Triple-A, which earned him enough notice to get a big league callup when the injury plague hit Queens and the team needed another starter to help down the stretch. And then, once he got to the big leagues, he was nothing short of spectacular, running a 2.42 ERA/2.63 FIP/3.38 xFIP in 45 innings of work. As a Major Leaguer, his fastball sat at 94, generated a bunch of groundballs, and his secondary stuff was good enough for him to post an above-average strikeout rate. Besides the fact that five of his seven starts came against the Braves and Phillies, there was basically nothing to argue with in his big league performances.

So, Gsellman is a great test case for how evaluators weight different types of information. On the one hand, we have four years of minor league data suggesting that he doesn’t get enough strikeouts to be a high-end big league pitcher, and you almost always want to go with four years of history over a month’s worth of data. On the other hand, not only is Gsellman’s performance in the majors the most recent data, but it also provides some pretty clear evidence that he’s not throwing the same stuff he was as a minor leaguer who didn’t miss bats. What you think of Gsellman’s future likely depends on how much importance you put on long-term track record versus how willing you are to believe that a small sample performance that doesn’t match the history suggests a change in skillsets.

Before PITCHF/x and Statcast, I’d probably be in the “small sample size” camp, pointing out that even including 2016’s improved minor league numbers, KATOH is still comparing him to guys like Aaron Cook, and suggesting we don’t get too excited about a small handful of starts against poor competition. But thankfully, with better data, I think we now better understand of the limits of yelling “small sample size” about everyone, and we have tools that allow us to more regularly identify guys whose track records lose relevance after a significant shift in skills. And when you read Eric’s write-up and look at what Gsellman threw in the big leagues, I think there’s enough evidence to suggest that not only is the optimism warranted, but that it’s possible that we’re still undervaluing him even now.

Let’s put the minor league numbers aside for a minute. Let’s just talk about raw stuff. In the big leagues, Gsellman primarily threw a sinker that averaged 94, ran his four-seam fastball up to the high-90s on occasion, and threw a couple of breaking balls and a change-up ranging from 82-89. Using the always-nifty pitch descriptions from Brooks Baseball, which turn the data into scouting-report style write-ups, this is what Gselllman’s stuff looked like in the majors last year.

His sinker generates an extremely high number of swings & misses compared to other pitchers’ sinkers, generates a very high amount of groundballs compared to other pitchers’ sinkers and has well above average velo. His fourseam fastball has slightly above average velo. His cutter generates an extremely high number of swings & misses compared to other pitchers’ cutters, has heavy sink and is a real worm killer that generates an extreme number of groundballs compared to other pitchers’ cutters. His curve is slightly harder than usual. His change is basically never swung at and missed compared to other pitchers’ changeups, is much firmer than usual and results in somewhat more flyballs compared to other pitchers’ changeups. His slider (take this with a grain of salt because he’s only thrown 18 of them in 2016) is thrown extremely hard, is an extreme flyball pitch compared to other pitchers’ sliders and has primarily 12-6 movement.

Despite the difference between calling his primary hard breaking ball a slider or a cutter, this matches up well with what Eric wrote, and the first sentence really emphasizes why Gsellman destroyed big league hitters last year. A 94 mph sinker that generates both an “extreme” number of swinging strikes and generates a “very high” number of groundballs is a huge weapon. For instance, here’s the leaderboard of swinging strike rate on sinkers from 2016.

Probably not a coincidence that there are three Mets on that list. Also not a coincidence; most of these guys are really good. Darvish, Arrieta, and Syndergaard are three of the game’s most elite pitchers, and Carrasco isn’t far behind. Guys who throw swing-and-miss sinkers have a great foundation, and Gsellman’s sinker put him in the top tier of bat-missing with the pitch.

But Gsellman might also be different from most of those guys, because his sinker also generated the 12th highest GB% of any sinker in MLB last year. In general, the guys who get high whiff rates on their sinker don’t also get high grounder rates. For instance, Velasquez had the highest whiff rate but the fourth-lowest grounder rate. Out of the 119 pitchers who threw at least 200 sinkers last year, Darvish ranked 79th in groundball rate, Arrieta ranked 65th, and Ray ranked 87th. Brandon Finnegan, the least encouraging comparison on the whiff rate list, ranked 110th.

The only other pitcher who ranked in the top 20 in grounder rate on his sinker and top 10 in whiff rate with the pitch was Carlos Carrasco, who ranked 19th in GB% with his sinker; Ventura was 22nd and Syndergaard was 24th, for the record.

So, yeah, Gsellman’s sinker. This looks like it might be a pretty special pitch. If all we knew about him was that he threw that, then there would be plenty of reason for optimism. But the good news doesn’t end there.

His minor league track record shows a guy who is able to pound the strike zone, and he did the same thing in the big leagues. This isn’t a Daniel Cabrera situation, where a guy with a great fastball is unable to throw strikes and puts himself in hitter’s counts where guys can sit on it and crush a predictable offering. As Eric notes, Gsellman’s entire thing as a minor leaguer was fastball command, only now he’s apparently commanding a sinker that might be among the best in the game.

The primary knock against Gsellman now is that the breaking balls still aren’t great, and as Eric notes, the change-up is kind of terrible. As, as a sinker-heavy right-hander who is probably going to move towards the slider as his primary breaking ball — he’s a Met, after all — there seems to be some risk that he might be vulnerable to left-handers. But then, there’s this.

Platoon splits are one of the things that can show up pretty quickly, especially if a guy has a limited repertoire that only works against one type of hitter; it’s almost impossible for a sinker/slider right-hander to accidentally strike out a bunch of lefties if he’s throwing from a low-arm slot. But that wasn’t Gsellman’s story, as he struck out a higher percentage of lefties than righties, and still got a bunch of grounders from them as well. His breaking stuff might not scare left-handers much, but it seems like the fastball is good enough to pitch off of against hitters from either side, and while we shouldn’t put any stock in the reverse-platoon aspect of things, it’s at least encouraging that lefties didn’t torch him in the big leagues.

So, based on what he threw in the majors last year, it seems difficult to cling to comparisons to guys like Aaron Cook or Mike Leake. Gsellman looks like he has one of the best sinkers in the game, sitting at 94 with movement and command. The secondary stuff isn’t great, but realistically, there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference between what Gsellman was throwing in the big leagues last year and what Aaron Sanchez rode to an All-Star appearance in Toronto. Sanchez throws a tick harder, but he’s an example of what a heavy sinking fastball that also misses bats can do, even for a pitcher that doesn’t do a lot of other stuff at a high level.

Without a true knockout breaking ball, he probably won’t run elite strikeout rates, but the reality is that a guy who throws strikes and gets groundballs doesn’t also need an elite strikeout rate to be a good pitcher. Even if he settles in as more of a Marcus Stroman or Sonny Gray, guys with roughly average strikeout rates, that’s still a high-end arm, and the profile doesn’t look too different from what Garrett Richards was earlier in his career, showing that these guys do add strikeouts as they develop sometimes.

Of course, not every velocity spike is long-lasting, and the story changes a bit if Gsellman goes back to throwing 92 instead of 94. Health certainly is no guarantee. But I think this might be one of the times where what a player was previously might be having too much of an impact on what we think he is now. Eric certainly wasn’t conservative in giving Gsellman a 55 FV grade and putting him in the upper tier of pitching prospects around the game, but I wonder if even that might be underselling the value of a big league ready arm who throws what Gsellman throws.

There just aren’t that many guys commanding 94 sinkers that miss bats and get ground balls. It’s easy to look at the rest of the stuff and say that it’s not special, but if he had another special pitch, he’d be the best pitching prospect alive. As is, he looks pretty good to me, even without a knockout breaking ball. And if he develops one, well, good luck National League.

Before today, the last post containing information about Joe Blanton on the baseball news aggregator MLB Trade Rumors went up on February 2nd. He was one of the seven remaining players in the right-handed reliever section of the site’s list of free agents, alongside players like Jerome Williams and Jonathan Papelbon who have fallen victim to the passage of time. Blanton is 36 years old, with 1723.1 regular-season innings’ worth of mileage on his right arm. Our Depth Charts projection system looked into its cybernetic crystal ball and foresaw just 0.7 WAR for him this year. In a way, it’s not surprising that Blanton didn’t have an employer until today, when he signed with the Nationals.

But it’s also quite strange that he couldn’t find a deal until now, and that he didn’t find more than $4 million for a year (and, in typical Washington fashion, $3 million of that sum is deferred). He’s been just as valuable as Shawn Kelley these last two years, ever since he was reborn from the pitching ashes as a reliever. Blanton’s career was through, collapsed under the groaning weight of home runs surrendered. He didn’t appear in a big-league game in 2014, and then reappeared as a member of the Royals’ bullpen the following year. He’s been a valuable relief workhorse ever since.

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Max Fried is a dude again.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that it is so. Being a dude in baseball is much preferable to being just a guy.

After a lengthy rehab from Tommy John surgery and a shaky return, Fried finished the 2016 minor-league season by striking out 44 against seven walks in 25 innings over his final four starts. He touched 97 mph and the knee-melting curveball was back. According to the reviews out of Braves camp, he has picked up this spring where he left off in the fall:

You might recall that Fried was once the second-best pitcher on his high-school team, behind staff ace Lucas Giolito, but was talented enough to go seventh overall in the 2012 draft.

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Michael Kopech’s fastball sits in the upper 90s and has reportedly been clocked at 105 mph. With that kind of electricity, he has one of the highest upsides of any pitching prospect in the game. Part of the package Chicago received from Boston in the Chris Sale deal, he’s a big part of the White Sox’ future.

He obviously needs to stay healthy, and continue to grow his game, for that to come to fruition. There’s risk in both areas. Kopech is just 20 years old, and thanks in part to a pair of off-the-field snafus, he’s thrown only 134.2 innings since being drafted 33rd overall out of Mount Pleasant (Texas) High School in 2014. He’s been a dynamo in that smallish sample, fanning 11.5 batters and allowing 6.2 hits per nine innings of work.

Kopech talked about his ongoing development, including his burgeoning velocity, late last week.

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Kopech on his delivery and glove-side fastballs: “[Pitching coach Don Cooper] said he likes what I do mechanically, and a lot of that is from what I worked on with the Red Sox, but a few things have been tweaked. I’m trying to stay back over my back leg longer, and stay tall. Something that’s been really important for me is… not necessarily trying to stay in line toward the plate, but to have my momentum carried in the right direction. I’ve been a guy who throws across his body my whole career, but as long as I can keep my momentum going the right way, I feel like that’s more important than making a line.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the New York Mets farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .324/.374/.459 between High-A and Double-A in 2016.

Scouting Report
When Rosario was a teenager, he was a messy amalgam of limbs, athleticism and clearly present baseball instincts that were all wholly unsupported by a lack of physical strength. As he has started to fill out (it was easy to see, even back in 2012, that he was going to) and gotten stronger, he has become more explosive, his actions more refined, and he’s begun to hit. And indeed, at just 21 years old with more room for mass on the body, Amed Rosario has just begun.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the Padres’ bullpen. More specifically, it was a post about how the Padres could dismantle their bullpen around the trade deadline. I tucked something in near the bottom, but I don’t know how many of you read that post, so here I want it to stand alone. Sorry for repeating myself, if you knew I was repeating myself.

First, to establish what we’re doing: Andrew Miller’s slider is one of the best pitches in baseball, yes? Miller is one of the best pitchers in baseball, and he just threw his slider more than half of the time. Miller’s secondary pitch, in 2016, was his primary pitch. Whenever one player does something extraordinary, people wonder who’s going to be next. So, who else, if anyone, throws something like the Andrew Miller slider? There is one name that stands out.

A few years ago, I introduced pitch comps. It’s just a simple method of comparing individual pitches based on velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. Long story short, I looked at all 2016 lefties who threw at least 25 sliders. I ran the math, and just one other slider earns a comp score below 1.0. Granted, that threshold is arbitrary, but it’s what we’re working with. By a good margin, the slider most similar to Andrew Miller’s belongs to Brad Hand.

Miller has a little more zip, and an inch and a half more sink (on average), but the pitches are siblings, if not quite twins. Here, you can see the pitches in action, courtesy of a perfect Tampa Bay camera angle. Thank you, Tampa Bay! Here’s Miller:

And here’s Hand:

Miller threw his slider 61% of the time. It was a strike 72% of the time, and 48% of all swing attempts missed. Hand threw his slider 31% of the time. It was a strike 61% of the time, and 53% of all swing attempts missed. But it’s worth noting that Hand threw 44% sliders over the season’s final month. His command of it improved. And why wouldn’t it have? The pitch was relatively new. Hand hardly threw sliders until 2015’s second half.

Brad Hand’s slider is not as good as Andrew Miller’s slider. Not yet. But it is a very good pitch, and a very similar pitch, and considering how new it was to Hand last season, who’s to say it couldn’t get better? There are different ways for players to succeed. Andrew Miller blazed his own trail. Brad Hand could now be following in his footsteps.

The Reds had the worst bullpen in baseball last year, right? They finished last in WAR, coming in at an unfathomable -3.6. And they finished last in RA9-WAR, coming in at a similarly unfathomable -3.1. By those measurements, last year’s Reds bullpen was historically awful. And yet! And yet, according to WPA, the Reds bullpen was only second-worst. I know that WPA is not the best evaluative tool, but in terms of what actually happened, given all the context and everything, the Reds bullpen had a WPA of -4.2. The Rockies bullpen had a WPA of -5.8.

Last year’s Rockies bullpen was one of the components that sunk the team. It hardly gave the Rockies a chance to contend, and it’s no coincidence the front office went out and signed Greg Holland. Holland, if he’s healthy, should make the situation an awful lot better. But he won’t be tasked with trying to do it alone. Adam Ottavino is also a part of the group, and while he missed most of 2015 and half of 2016 due to Tommy John surgery, he’s pitched some, and he’s probably been overlooked.

Because of his recent numbers, I can’t wait to see what Carter Capps does this year, post-surgery. Ottavino belongs in a similar boat. He’s already pitched a little bit post-surgery, but I doubt many were paying attention. You think this year’s Rockies will be more competitive. Ottavino could be a big part of that. Look what happens when you combine his 2015 and 2016 samples, and then compare that to his previous record.

Very clearly, we’re not dealing with much. In 2015, Ottavino pitched in 10 games before he had surgery. Last year he came back and made 34 appearances after the calendar flipped to July. Combined, it’s a sample of just 142 plate appearances. But relative to what Ottavino used to be, this newer version has been far better in terms of strikeouts and grounders. He’s ranked in the top 3% of all pitchers in adjusted ERA, FIP, and xFIP, and it probably has something to do with a two-seamer he’s more aggressively folded in.

Since every such post needs a visual:

Ottavino’s putaway pitch remains his slider. It’s still a good slider! But more recently, he’s used two fastballs instead of one, and he’s worked different sides of the plate. Although he’s spent less time within the strike zone, he’s also generated fewer swings within the strike zone, which is a good outcome. Ottavino has been more difficult to read and predict, and the small-sample results have been outstanding.

We could still probably stand to see more, and strong lefty bats remain a vulnerability. Because of the way that he throws, Ottavino is forever likely to run a substantial platoon split. Yet when he’s been able to pitch of late, he’s done almost everything right. Strikeouts and grounders while limiting walks. As with any team, the Rockies could be in for some bad luck. With some good luck, however, their bullpen could present a dominant top two. From there, who’s to say what they could achieve?

Here’s the thing about bunting: it can be a good idea if the third baseman is playing too far back. The chance of a hit goes up in that case, and a successful bunt often causes the third baseman to play more shallow in future plate appearances, so future balls in play receive a benefit. That’s one of those games within a game we see all the time in baseball: once the positioning deviates from “normal” by a certain degree, the batter receives a benefit. Then the defender has to change his approach.

This tension created by the bunt illustrates how offenses and defenses react to each other’s tendencies. That same sort of balance between fielder and hitter might be playing out on an even broader scale, however, when it comes to the shift in general.

Too many shifts in the game, and the players begin to adjust. They develop more of a two-strike approach, they find a way to put the ball in play on the ground the other way, or they make sure that they lift the ball if they’re going to pull it. There’s evidence that players are already working on lifting the ball more as a group, pulling the ball in the air more often than they have in five years, and have improved on hitting opposite-field ground balls. So maybe this next table is no surprise.

The league has improved against the shift! The shift is dead! Or, wait: the league has actually improved as a whole over this timeframe, and the difference between the two is still about the same. And every team would take a .292 wOBA against over a .297 number. Long live the shift.

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