Archive for Teams

Last night, Dansby Swanson, 2015’s first overall pick, debuted for the Atlanta Braves. After destroying High-A pitching to the tune of .333/.441/.562 in April, Swanson spent 84 games at the Double-A level. He hit a less exciting, but still respectable .261/.342/.411 at the latter stop.

During his brief stay in the minors, Swanson didn’t stand out in any particular area offensively, but was better than average across the board. He posted a healthy 11% walk rate this season, a .151 ISO, and made enough contact (recording an 18% strikeout rate) for it not to be a concern. Even his 13 steals indicate a guy who’s fast, if not exceptionally fast.

Swanson is a good hitter, but his bat alone doesn’t make him a particularly exciting prospect. What really sets him apart is that he’s a good hitter who also happens to play a mean shortstop. Eric Longenhagen noted yesterday that he thinks Swanson will be a plus defender at short. The data support that observation. In just 105 minor-league games at short this year, he’s been a +19 defender according to Clay Davenport’s model.

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Kevin Kiermaier missed a good chunk of the season after breaking his glove hand in late May, and that’s a shame, because when Kiermaier is in the field, he’s among the most exciting players in baseball. Kiermaier is must-see television with a glove in his hand. Decidedly less so at the plate. He’s been roughly a league-average hitter through 1,100 career plate appearances, and so it’s understandable that when we’re paying attention to Kiermaier, it’s usually for his defense.

But I want to flip the script for a minute. The Rays are bad, and Kiermaier missed time, and we’re usually paying attention to the defense, so this may have been easy to miss, but Kiermaier’s undergone some rather radical changes at the plate, relative to last season. Cutting to the chase:

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It’s been a big season for Michael Saunders, and for his career. He’s long been dogged by injury questions, and a season ago he was limited to just nine games played. For 2016 he’s been able to stay on the field, and his bat has done the talking. He’s been part of a loaded Blue Jays lineup, but he’s still third on the team in wRC+, below Edwin Encarnacion but ahead of Jose Bautista. The Jays now have sole possession of first place in the AL East, and given some of what they’ve gone through, it makes sense that they might owe Saunders a great deal of gratitude, his recent slump aside. He’s mostly been stable, and he’s become rather strong.

Numbers are funny, though. There are different ways to spin them, even if you don’t want to spin them. It would be completely legitimate to say Saunders has been one of the best hitters on the team. You could also very legitimately say Saunders has been arguably the least-valuable hitter on the team. It’s true that he’s third in wRC+. It’s true that he’s last in WPA. In a few ways, then, Michael Saunders is having a season to remember.

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From 2008-11, Tim Lincecum and Justin Verlander were two of the five best pitchers in the world. The only three pitchers with a higher WAR than those two over that time period were into their 30’s. Verlander was coming off a Cy Young Award victory in 2011; Lincecum already had a pair under his belt from 2008-09. They were both under the age of 28, and were seen as perhaps the two most likely pitchers of that time to go down as all-time greats.

We know what happened with Lincecum. The following year, he lost his fastball. Without the fastball, he struggled to ever adapt. Essentially overnight, he became ineffective, and now five years later, it looks like his career might be over.

Verlander began to lose his fastball in 2013, and by 2014, he, too, was beginning to look ineffective. The strikeouts plummeted, and just two years removed from Lincecum’s swift decline, we began to ask questions wondering if Verlander was hurt or if he could ever be a front-line starter again. All signs pointed to no. As recent as midseason 2015, Verlander looked like one of the least valuable players in the game. It seemed as if we’d lost another one of the greats to the dreaded fastball decline.

Except, something’s happened. Over the last calendar year, here are the five most valuable starting pitchers in baseball, according to our measure of WAR:
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Just fourteen months after having been selected first overall in the draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Dansby Swanson is making his Major League debut for the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday. While Swanson doesn’t have a robust collection of plus tools and won’t be setting the National League ablaze with top-of-the scale speed or monster raw power, his skillset is air tight with nothing but the smallest of nits to pick. Combined with his ability to play most valuable of position in baseball, Swanson should provide All Star-level value for the Braves. Read the rest of this entry »

In retrospect, it was inevitable. Monday night, Bartolo Colon did what once looked to be impossible and drew the first walk of his major league career. The all-time leader in plate appearances without drawing a single free pass stepped to the plate in the fourth inning against Diamondbacks pitcher Robbie Ray and seven pitches later the history books were rewritten.

It was a bittersweet moment for me. Seeing a 43-year-old player achieve something on the baseball diamond for the first time is always thrilling, but this achievement also brought an end to one of my favorite streaks. In June, I wrote about Bartolo Colon’s record-setting game in celebration of an accomplishment I’d actively watched develop for months. The problem with records like these, however, is that it takes just one plate appearance to undo everything. Ben Revere had an incredible stretch with zero career home runs… until he didn’t. Bartolo Colon had an incredible stretch with zero career walks… until Monday. One of these days, Matt Albers and Ryan Webb may even draw a save and put an end to their remarkable streaks.

During Colon’s record-setting game — his record-setting plate appearance, to be even more precise – he provided a hint that this record would not be long-lived. The previous (and now current) record holder was Tracy Stallard whose career ended with zero walks in 258 plate appearances. When Colon tied Stallard’s record, not only had he never drawn a walk, he’d worked just six three-ball counts over those 258 plate appearances. So, naturally, in the record-breaking 259th PA, Colon worked a full count.

As it turns out, the impeccably timed three-ball count wasn’t a mere fluke, but instead was indicative of a significant shift in Colon’s approach at the plate. In his first two seasons with the Mets, Colon posted a 51.6 Swing% which was the 95th highest among 546 batters with 130+ plate appearances. This season, his Swing% has plummeted to 41.2% which ranks 446th among 517 batters with 40+ plate appearances. Although his Contact% has also dropped from a bad 63.5% in his first two seasons to an atrocious 48.5% this year, going from a guy who swung too much and rarely made contact to a guy who swung rarely and hardly ever made contact was enough to set up the inevitability of a base on balls.

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It’s been observed before we don’t write that much about the Rockies. Now, this is one of those things that works both ways — we could probably stand to write about them more, but there also hasn’t been much in the way of demand. Mostly, I’d say it’s the Rockies’ fault, since people want to read about and write about winners. The Rockies haven’t won. When we have written about them, many of the posts have been examining that.

But I can say this much: For the first time in years, I like where the Rockies are headed. The sense I get is they’re close to a return to being competitive. Over the past month or two, I’ve been paying the Rockies extra attention out of curiosity, and that’s given me reason to write now about Charlie Blackmon. I know this year’s Rockies aren’t going to the playoffs. I know Blackmon’s will never be a household name. But the guy just won the National League player of the week award. He also leads all players in WAR in the half-month of August. So far this month, Blackmon has out-homered the Astros, and his surge has come from zeroing in on a hot spot.

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In 2010, 20-year-old Giancarlo Stanton slugged 22 homers in 396 plate appearances. Only 11 20-year-olds had ever hit more home runs in a season, and only Bob Horner in 1978 hit more homers in fewer plate appearances. At 21, he hit 34 homers, fourth among 21-year olds, and nobody hit more in fewer than Stanton’s 601 plate appearances. His 37 homers the next year were eighth among all 22-year-olds, and nobody had more in fewer than Stanton’s 501 plate appearances.

At 23, Stanton had “only” 24 homers in 504 plate appearances, and at 24, he hit 37 without playing a full season. Last year, he hit 27 homers in 317 plate appearances and nobody at any age has ever hit as many home runs with fewer opportunities. If there is a theme, it’s that Stanton hits a ton of home runs. If there is a secondary theme, it is that he doesn’t play full seasons. The first one is great. The second one could be cause for concern.

This is cherry-picking the data a bit, but there have been 89 player seasons where a player hit at least 22 home runs and had 505 plate appearances or fewer before or during a player’s age-26 season, per Baseball-Reference Play Index. Of those 89 seasons, 74 happened once, including 11 in strike years. Five players have two such seasons, although Mike Piazza’s happened during the strike and lockout. The only player with more than two is Giancarlo Stanton, and with him out for the season, 2016 will make the fifth time it has happened in his career. Extend the age requirement up to 30, and still nobody has more than three such seasons. Get rid of the age requirement all together and the only other player with five such seasons is Jose Canseco, and two of those seasons were shortened by a strike.

Stanton’s injuries have generally varied enough that there does not appear to be anything chronic in nature. In review:

• 2012: missed less than a month due to arthroscopic knee surgery on his right knee.
• 2013: missed a little over a month with a strained right hamstring.
• 2014: missed last few weeks of season after getting hit in the face with a pitch. No DL stint due to expanded rosters.
• 2015: missed the rest of the season beginning in late June after a fractured bone in his hand due to a hard swing.
• 2016: missed the rest of the season beginning in mid-August due to a left groin strain.

We have four separate injuries, none overly serious, and after the first three, he came back at or near the same performance level that he exhibited previously. Despite all those injuries and missed time, his 26.7 WAR is still in the top-100 of all time through age-26, and his 206 homers are 16th through the same age. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, and for the second time this season, Mookie Betts launched three home runs in a game. He now has 26 home runs on the season; for comparison, Giancarlo Stanton has 25, Chris Davis has 24, and Mike Trout has 23. Mookie Betts has a higher isolated slugging percentage this season than Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Braun, or Carlos Gonzalez. This is not what anyone expected.

I’ve long been one of Betts biggest supporters, but it’d be dishonest to pretend that we saw this coming. Even back in 2014, when I wrote the “Don’t Trade Mookie Betts” post extolling his value, I included the following paragraph.

Due primarily to his size (5-9) and the potential limits that puts on his power, Betts has not generally been viewed as a franchise cornerstone type of prospect the way Xander Bogaerts was as he ascended the ranks. And while it might seem unfair to make generalities about Betts’ future based on his height, there is merit to the idea that he probably won’t become a big-time power hitter in the big leagues.

In that piece, I noted that Betts’ combination of a low swing rate and a high contact rate put him in the company of mostly low-power slap hitters, but noted that it looked like he had enough doubles-power to become a Matt Carpenter or Ben Zobrist type of hitter, and those guys were worth holding onto. I liked Betts a lot, but I liked him because of the overall game, not because I thought he was going to turn into a slugger.

Even the following spring, when Betts went bananas in the Grapefruit League, his teammates sought to praise him by comparing him to Andrew McCutchen. And those comparisons were met with pushback, even by myself, as I continued to not see that kind of power development as Betts’ likely path to success. But now, a year and a half later, the McCutchen comparison looks wrong not because Betts didn’t develop McCutchen-level power, but because he’s already surpassed McCutchen-level power, and has become a very different player than he looked like coming up through the minors.

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Just six months ago, Raisel Iglesias was everyone’s favorite starting pitcher breakout candidate for 2016. The 26-year-old Cuban, signed for seven years and $27 million by the Cincinnati Reds in 2014, was coming off an impressive rookie campaign in which he struck out more than a quarter of all batters faced as a starter while exhibiting above-average command and a knack for getting ground balls, and he only got better as the year went on. Iglesias, alongside Anthony DeSclafani and John Lamb, was perhaps the most enticing pick of a trio of young Reds starters who have all provided us a painful reminder of the fickle and painful nature of choosing pitching as a profession.

DeSclafani spent the first two months of the season on the disabled list with a strained oblique. Lamb’s experienced decline across the board. And Iglesias hasn’t made a start since April, and last week earned his first career save.

Iglesias’ status update informs us of two important developments. The first being: everyone’s favorite starting pitcher breakout candidate for 2016 has been a reliever for the last two months. That’s disappointing, because fans want their exciting young starting pitchers to be start. The bullpen is rightly viewed as a downgrade. The fact that Iglesias earned a save, though, at least suggests that he’s been effective out of the bullpen, and effective might be an understatement. In 28 relief innings this season, Iglesias has allowed just two earned runs — good for a Britton-like 0.64 ERA — while striking out nearly 30% of the batters he’s faced.

The Reds made the switch in an effort to keep Iglesias healthy by limiting his workload, and also to provide stability to a bullpen that’s still among the worst the expansion era has ever seen. Thus far, Iglesias has thrived. He’s thrived, and beyond that, he’s expressed satisfaction with his new role. In early July, Iglesias told Cincinnati reporters through a translator that he “thinks [he doesn’t] want to go back and be a starter again” and that he wants to “start thinking about continuing [his] career as a closer.” Now, that time is here, and so the Reds have an interesting decision to make.
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