Archive for Teams

Just a little more than a week ago, the Indians had a reportedly healthy Danny Salazar, a totally healthy Carlos Carrasco, and their odds of winning the World Series, according to our projections, sat at 13.4%. Aside from a 24-hour window back on July 5 during which Cleveland’s odds jumped up to 14.2%, last week’s figure was the highest of the year for the soon-to-be American League Central Division champions.

Of course, Salazar is no longer healthy, having finally given in to the right elbow that’s been barking at him for much of the season. He seems unlikely to contribute again until 2017. And of course, Carrasco is no longer healthy, having been knocked out just two pitches into his most recent start after being struck by an Ian Kinsler line drive and fracturing his throwing hand. He won’t contribute again until 2017.

Understandably, this has provided a huge blow to Cleveland’s odds, which our own Corinne Landrey touched upon this morning. While the Indians will still have a better shot at winning it all than all but seven teams come October, their odds have been cut from 13.4% to 9.3% in the blink of an eye, a 30% decrease that couldn’t occur so quickly without a devastating injury or two. Our projections have long viewed Cleveland as either the strongest contender for the American League pennant, or at least the team most likely to stand in someone else’s way. No longer is that the case.

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Hi! You read FanGraphs, so you probably like Joey Votto. As such, you’re probably aware that, two seasons in a row, now, Votto has gone crazy in the second half. Last year, he boosted his game by increasing his hits, his power, and his walks. He ran a second-half wRC+ in the neighborhood of 200. This year, Votto is again running a second-half wRC+ in the neighborhood of 200. Once again, he’s increased his power. Once again, he’s increased his hits. Yet this time, the walks have stayed where they were. Votto isn’t earning free pass after free pass. Rather, somewhere around the middle of this season, Joey Votto just decided that he didn’t like striking out anymore.

So he stopped. Votto, earlier, was more strikeout-prone than ever in his life. More recently, Votto has been less strikeout-prone than ever in his life. That graph seems like it should be impossible — where first-half Votto struck out a quarter of the time, second-half Votto has struck out a tenth of the time. To put it another way, while second-half Votto again has one of the highest walk rates in the league, he’s also managed a lower strikeout rate than Jose Altuve. You just can’t get the ball by Joey Votto anymore. He doesn’t allow pitchers to do it.

Perhaps just as amazing — second-half Votto hasn’t done any better in terms of avoiding two-strike counts. In the first half, Votto saw 29% of his pitches while in a two-strike count. In the second half, that’s risen, ever so slightly, to 30%. Votto is still disciplined, and, clearly, Votto is still letting counts run deep. And even when swinging in two-strike counts, Votto hasn’t necessarily gotten more aggressive or better at hitting the ball fair. His swing rate has risen just a couple points, and the same could be said of his in-play rate. That’s not where you can find an explanation for the whole drop-off.

The answer involves foul balls. When Votto swung with two strikes in the first half, he hit 38% fouls. That ranked him in the 39th percentile. When Votto has swung with two strikes in the second half, he’s hit 49% fouls. That ranks him in the 98th percentile, or, put differently, it puts him in second place. Votto has replaced two-strike whiffs with two-strike fouls, and there’s no penalty for a two-strike foul for a hitter. If you foul off a tough pitch, you earn the opportunity to see another pitch. Votto has fought pitches off and earned himself additional looks, and that’s how he’s maintained his sky-high walk rate while also keeping the defense on its collective toes. He’s refused to strike out, and he’s remained really good at everything else.

I don’t know why it would just click like this, and I don’t know why Votto wouldn’t have done this before, given how well it’s worked. I’m sure there’s a little bit of a hot-streak factor involved. But it’s not like there’s ever been any question that Votto is outstanding, and while there’s limited evidence that hitters overall are able to fight pitches off consistently when they need to, it makes sense that Votto could be an exception, given his almost unparalleled bat-to-ball skills and knowledge of the strike zone. At some point this year, Joey Votto didn’t want to strike out so much anymore. So he quit striking out so much. Everything else, he’s mostly maintained. You can’t say it’s mattered very much for the Reds, in the bigger picture, but at least Votto’s been able to have himself some fun.

I’ve spent more than 10 years as an online baseball writer with mild opinions. Now I’m about to have my first chance to act on those mild opinions, as I’ve been selected as a voter for the 2016 American League Rookie of the Year Award. If I had my druthers, I would’ve been selected as a voter for the 2015 American League Rookie of the Year Award, but I’ll take what I can get. Thinking about the awards feels different when you have an actual say, and so while I haven’t yet made up my mind, I figured it would make sense to put together a few FanGraphs posts so I can lay out how I’m thinking.

I’m not going to tell you how I’m going to vote. Not only is that explicitly prohibited — I don’t even know which way I’m leaning. I’m hoping to make a decision this week. But the race probably isn’t that much of a mystery. NL Cy Young voters can’t talk about their first-place pick, but they’re free to acknowledge that Noah Syndergaard has a stronger case than Alfredo Simon. And with the AL rookies, Michael Fulmer was the presumptive favorite before Gary Sanchez went insane. Fulmer is going to finish somewhere around the top. So, let’s talk about him, shall we?

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We don’t talk much about Matt Holliday these days. It’s been awhile since he was one of the best players in baseball. Probably the last time you could have honestly made that claim was in 2014, when his 132 wRC+ was 28th-best in the game. However, with the news that Holliday has probably succumbed to his thumb injury for the rest of the season, I thought we would take a minute to talk about Holliday. Holliday can’t do most of the things he used to, but even after all this time can still hit.

Holliday has always had a special place in my heart because he got to Coors Field at the same time as I did. I started working for the Rockies in March of 2004, about a month before Holliday would make an unexpected major-league debut. He got the call when both Preston Wilson and Larry Walker came up lame in the first couple weeks of what would become (at the time) the bleakest moment in Rockies history. Technically, the team’s winning percentage had been worse in 1993, but in 1993 no one in the Rocky Mountain region had cared, because they had a major-league team for the first time.

That 2004 season was bad not just because of the team on the field, but because it was the year the team traded Larry Walker away — twice — getting far less in return the second time. The first time, when they tried to trade him to the Texas Rangers for Ian Kinsler, Walker had vetoed the deal. He was then sent to the Cardinals, which, in retrospect, was absolutely the right move for Walker, who would finally get to play in the World Series that fall. I’m pretty sure the Rockies would have rather had Kinsler than Chris Narveson, though. In any case, trading away Walker meant that any scant hopes the team would contend had totally and completely died. The “Todd (Helton) and the Toddlers” era had begun.

The most prominent “toddler” was Holliday. He would come along slowly, but he could always hit. As fate would have it, the season he put it all together coincided with Troy Tulowitzki‘s arrival and Todd Helton’s final good season, and the three helped lead the Rockies to their first and still only World Series berth. Holliday slugged .607 that season, and if that seems like a ridiculous number, it is. Coors Field might still be a hitting haven, but no Rockies player has slugged .600 since.

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On August 19th, the Mets lost 8-1 to the Giants, dropping to 60-62 on the season. The loss, coupled with a depleted roster — that was just about to get more depleted, as they would place Steven Matz back on the disabled list three days later — pushed their playoff odds to a season-low 6.6%. Here’s what has happened over the last month, in graph form.

That is simply a remarkable image; the visualization of a team saving a nearly-lost season in very short order. Since that loss to the Giants, the Mets have gone 20-7, and have now taken the lead for the top spot in the NL Wild Card race. The defending NL Champs are now very likely to be back in the postseason, 30 days after they were just about to write their own eulogy. Let’s take a look at how they got here.

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I don’t mean to stress out anybody whose teams are still fighting for a playoff spot, but the postseason is almost here. In less than two weeks fans of either the Mets, Giants, or Cardinals will be crushed as will fans of the majority of the (approximately) 82 teams vying for an American League Wild Card spot. When that time comes, the disappointed will be able to dry their tears while engaging in one of the great annual postseason traditions: overanalysis. For six months, we’ve been watching up to 15 games every night — a pace which lends itself nicely to broad, big-picture analysis more than football-esque gameday breakdowns. In the playoffs, however, that all changes and suddenly every game and series will be diced up and analyzed in every possible way, for better or worse.

One of the biggest ways this overanalysis creeps into our baseball consciousness is through an obsession over starting pitching. If you check a newspaper — I see you and I respect you, old-school newspaper folks — or open a game preview on the MLB.com At Bat app, the first thing you’ll find is that day’s starting-pitcher matchup. Is your team going to win on a given day? Better know who’s toeing the rubber to set your expectations correctly. Intellectually, we know that baseball is too unpredictable and complex to be effectively parsed down to a look at the day’s starters, but that won’t stop us. With that in mind, it’s been a rough stretch for a few playoff-bound teams who figure to see their starting rotations scrutinized under a high-power microscope over the next few weeks. I’m talking, of course, about Cleveland losing Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar to injury, the Mets losing Jacob deGrom, and the Nationals losing Stephen Strasburg.

The good news for each of those teams is that they all have at least one healthy ace-level pitcher remaining, but will that be enough when matching up against other ace-laden playoff rotations? Are any of them particularly well-suited to handle the loss? In preparation for overanalysis season, let’s take stock of what each of these injuries means to these teams and what their October rotations look like as things stand today.

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Over the last calendar year, Andrew Miller has a 1.81 ERA and a 2.22 FIP. Those dominant numbers, combined with the compelling nature of Miller’s complete transformation, have rightfully earned him the reputation as perhaps baseball’s best active relief pitcher.

Over the last calendar year, Addison Reed has a 1.87 ERA and a 2.14 FIP. You might not have heard about it, but dating back 365 days, Reed’s been every bit as dominant as the guy who’s rightfully earned the reputation as perhaps baseball’s best active relief pitcher. And you might not have realized it, but Reed’s undergone a similarly compelling transformation that’s left him looking more and more like Miller than one might expect.

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In 2013, Hanley Ramirez tore the cover off of many a baseball. He was the Dodgers’ best position player, and their second-best player overall after Clayton Kershaw. During that season, which was abbreviated due both to thumb and hamstring injuries, he put up a .293 ISO in 336 plate appearances. The Dodgers offense had a hard time producing without him, particularly in the National League Championship Series. After Ramirez had two ribs fractured by a Joe Kelly fastball that had lost its way in its journey to the strike zone, the Dodgers would score just 13 runs in six NLCS games, with six of those runs clustered in Game 5.

Now, Kelly and Ramirez are teammates (I wonder if Kelly ever apologized for that hit by pitch) and Ramirez really hadn’t hit like that for an extended period of time since. He showed signs of it in April of 2015 but then ran into a wall down the left-field line at Fenway, and wasn’t the same afterward. He had been a good hitter in 2014, but not a power hitter. The same seemed true at the start of this season. He was getting on base at a decent clip — .367 was his on-base percentage — but the power wasn’t there.

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Yesterday, following a league investigation into claims that the Padres withheld pertinent medical information from other teams with whom they were discussing trades, MLB suspended Padres GM A.J. Preller for 30 days. The Padres admit that they screwed up and vow to change their “medical administration and record keeping,” but in their statement about the suspension, claim to have done so unintentionally.

Obviously, as outsiders without knowledge of what the league found in their investigation, we can’t make any definitive claims about what is true and what isn’t, but the idea that the Padres accidentally kept two sets of medical records — one for their internal use and one to be fed into the centralized league database — is absurd. You don’t unintentionally create more work for your medical staff without knowing exactly why you’re doing so, and it’s not like everyone in the Padres organization hasn’t previously worked with other organizations; they all knew the standard protocol for reporting health information in trade discussions, and they knew this wasn’t how everyone else does things. The idea that this was an accident, and that no one in the organization realized what the team was doing, is laughably unbelievable absent a compelling explanation, which the Padres did not provide.

As best as we can tell, the Padres lied (by omitting pertinent information) to other teams about the health of their players in order to try and complete trades and secure returns that they might not be able to otherwise if the full scale of medical information was disclosed. And it worked. They made the Andrew Cashner deal with the Marlins by also including Colin Rea, a young starter the Marlins thought they were getting to bolster their rotation; when it turned out that Rea got to Miami and admitted that his elbow hurt and had been hurting for some time, the Marlins went nuts and the Padres had to agree to rework the deal, taking Rea back and sending one of the prospects they got in the deal back to Miami.

Unlike the Rodney/Rea deal, the Red Sox didn’t force the Padres to rework the Drew Pomeranz/Anderson Espinoza swap, but it is fair to wonder if they would have surrendered their top pitching prospect had they known that Pomeranz had been taking anti-inflammatory medications at the time of the deal. We’ll never know, of course, but it’s at least reasonable to think that the Padres believed there was some benefit to their trade discussions by withholding that information from the Red Sox, or else they wouldn’t have bothered to omit that information in the first place.

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Hopefully there aren’t too many of you out there suffering from Zach Britton fatigue. Last month, our own Corinne Landrey wrote about his potential for an all-time great season, and then shortly thereafter the baseball-writing community collectively began taking turns crafting the individual arguments for his Cy Young — and even MVP — candidacy, before the pushback began. We had our Zach Britton week, and all was good and fun. In reality, however, the chances of him winning — or even making a serious run at — the Cy Young Award seems highly unlikely.

But the first inaugural Zach Britton Cy Young Discussion Week still provided the framework for a few days of thought-provoking arguments and gave us something interesting to ponder. Now, here’s something else to think about: what if, in Zach Britton’s already potentially all-time great season, he’s actually been unlucky?

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