Archive for Teams

Baseball fans’ brains are littered with obscure names and trivia. We all know names like Wally Pipp, Fred Merkle, and Johnny Vander Meer for their rather absurd places in baseball history. Five of those baseball names that may or may not be stuck in your brain for trivial reasons are: Freddy Garcia, Jamie Moyer, Gil Meche, Joel Pineiro, and Ryan Franklin. If that quintet is meaningful to you, it’s because every single game of the 2003 Mariners season was started by one of those pitchers.

In the modern era of five-man rotations, that team was the only one ever to get through an entire season without once turning to a sixth starter. It’s a trivial feat, but one that I find myself wondering year after year whether it will ever be repeated. Now that we’re halfway through the 2016 season, it’s time to assess the situation and determine whether or not this will be year of the second immaculate five-man rotation.

One-in-five teams have already used 10 or more starters this season and only two teams are left standing in my personal race to a perfect five-starter season: the Cubs and the Cardinals. Can either team match the 2003 Mariners?

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Yesterday, Baseball America’s Ben Badler reported that Major League Baseball was going to levy penalties against the Boston Red Sox due to improprieties perpetrated during last year’s International Signing Period. Today, Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports elaborated on that report. I’ve spoken with several international scouts about this news in an attempt to gauge the implications not only for the Red Sox but for the international market in general. The results of those inquiries appear below.

Some background on the issue

Boston was in the J2 penalty box last year as a result of the Yoan Moncada signing the year before. They signed two Venezuelan prospects from the same training program last year, both for $300,000, and a third from that program for $200,000. MLB has found that the best of those three prospects, a catcher/outfielder named Albert Guaimaro, received most of that money. This allowed Boston to acquire a player whom they wouldn’t have been able to sign (since being in the J2 penalty box means you can’t sign players for more than $300K), the agent makes more money and two prospects who otherwise may not have had an opportunity to play in a Major League organization now have that chance. As a result of MLB’s findings, five players signed by the Red Sox during last year’s period will be declared free agents and the club is now banned from signing any international prospects during the Int’l Signing Period that begins tomorrow.

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At the end of May, Carlos Correa possessed a .253/.348/.414 line that didn’t much resemble the numbers from his Rookie of the Year debut. The walks were there, the strikeout rate was about the same, but the defense was down and the power was out. Hey look at him now! He’s got a .268/.366/.477 and is approaching last year’s weighted-offense mark. Let’s look at what happened in June.

The easy answer is that Correa has been hitting the ball harder. He’s hitting for more power, duh. But if you split the season into two halves, each featuring roughly significant samples of balls in play — 100 balls in play is a good number, and most everyday players are at around 200 right now — you’ll see that Correa has improved more than almost everyone in baseball.

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The Miami Marlins have traded white-hot RHP Chris Paddack to San Diego in exchange for Fernando Rodney. Paddack was an eighth-round draftee in 2015 and was signed for a $400,000 bonus. He dominated prep competition at Cedar Park High School in Texas, striking out 134 hitters in 75 innings during his senior year. He fell to the eighth round, in part, because he was 19-and-a-half on draft day. He was also a fastball/changeup guy without great breaking-ball feel. Arms like that tend to slot after fastball/breaking-ball pitchers because orgs think it’s easier to develop a changeup over time than it is to learn how to break off a curveball.

Paddack was solid during Gulf Coast League play after he signed last summer but looked so good this spring that Miami let him bypass the New York-Penn League and sent him straight to Low-A. He had made some physical strides, strengthening his lower half and repeating a delivery that was often inconsistent and stiff in high school. The results this season have been staggering: 48 strikeouts and just 2 walks — plus only nine hits allowed — in 28.1 innings over six starts. Paddack hasn’t allowed a hit in his last three starts and two of those came in consecutive appearances against a Rome lineup that failed to make adjustments to his stuff or sequencing.

A broad-shouldered 6-foot-4 and 195 pounds, Paddack has a well-paced, easy delivery. He commands a low-90s fastball – with terrific plane and run, which help the pitch play as plus – to both sides of the plate and has been up to 95. The meal-ticket secondary pitch here is the changeup. It’s already plus and Paddack will use it against both lefties and righties. It’s difficult to identify out of his hand, dies as it reaches the plate.

Perhaps one of the key components of Paddack’s step forward this season has been the development of a curveball. Paddack struggled to find consistency with any sort of breaking ball in high school and public-sector reports on what he was throwing were all over the place. Dan Farnsworth’s offseason Marlins prospect list had Paddack presciently ranked as the #2 player in the system but listed the breaking ball as a slider. The curveball Paddack throws is of the 12-6 variety and rests in the 73-77 mph range. It’s a fringe-average offering right now but is flashing average and should mature there, though Paddack’s expedient breaking-ball improvement might be a sign that the pitch has more development in the tank than is typical.

When pitches get away from Paddack they do so up in the zone, and while pitch movement has been his saving grace in those situations — and while he’s still been able to miss bats — it may become more of an issue at the upper levels. He’ll also have to improve upon sequencing and pitch usage, but Paddack is just a year removed from high school and it isn’t reasonable to expect much more than he’s shown to this point.

There are also those who think sudden upticks in velocity like the one Paddack has experienced over the last several months are harbingers of ulnar-collateral doom but there’s nothing beyond anecdotal evidence to support that and Paddack’s build and delivery don’t sound any alarms.

I think, given Paddack’s relatively short track record of success and the fact that he’s just a year removed from high school, there’s still a good bit of risk associated with his prospectdom, but he has mid-rotation stuff right now and that changeup might just continue to improve.

Grades
Fastball: 60/60
Changeup: 60/65
Curveball: 45/50
Control/Command: 45/50+
FV: 50

Thursday afternoon, I wrote about the Mets’ offense, and about how it’s been remarkably unclutch. It’s not the only thing that’s been going wrong for them, but it’s been a big deal, and it’s one of the reasons why the Mets feel like they’ve lost a lot of their momentum. Consider this a companion piece, as everything came out of the same research. If things were to keep up, then by one measure, the Mets would have the least-clutch offense since at least 1974. Similarly, if things were to keep up, then by the same measure, the Rangers would have the most-clutch offense since at least 1974.

The Rangers own the best record in the American League. As the majors go, they’re hanging around with the Cubs, and the Rangers have also staked out a massive lead in the AL West. It would be a shocker if they didn’t win the division, and whenever you have a team playing this well, there’s a lot that goes into it. What’s interesting is it’s not like the Rangers have been particularly lucky with health — players have seemingly dropped left and right. But replacements have stepped in, and the Rangers are blowing away their estimated BaseRuns record. The biggest contributor has been offensive timing.

I know this verges on coming off like a bad word; no one wants to think of their team as being sort of fluke-y. That’s really not the point I want to drive home, anyway. The Rangers deserve credit for what they’ve done. What they’ve done has been almost unbelievable.

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“Keep your eye on the ball” is one of baseball’s oldest adages. According to John Russell, it doesn’t apply to managers and coaches. The Baltimore Orioles bench coach and his professional brethren have responsibilities that go beyond watching the flight of the cowhide sphere.

Russell, who skippered the Pittsburgh Pirates prior to joining Buck Showalter’s staff in 2011, expounded on the subject during a mid-June visit to Fenway Park.

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Russell on watching the game: “I think different managers do different things, but you run little checklists in your mind. First, there’s a lot of preparation involved before the game begins. Once it does, you obviously keep an eye on your pitcher. But one of the biggest things — we talk to young managers about this when they first start out — is that you don’t want to be caught following the baseball. When the ball is hit, you don’t want to just lock in on it. If you do, you’re going to miss a lot.

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Let’s face it: As the Mets go, there’s no shortage of things to worry about. The team overall remains in a decent position, but now there’s concern regarding two pitchers’ elbows. Meanwhile, Matt Harvey still doesn’t quite look like himself. David Wright is probably done for the year. And the lineup just isn’t producing runs. Injuries haven’t helped, and Michael Conforto’s collapse didn’t help, but the pitchers are getting so little margin of error. Things in New York are frequently tense. They’re tense today. It feels a little like last season, before the season turned beautiful.

I can’t say anything about Steven Matz. I can’t say anything about Noah Syndergaard. I can’t say much about the various injuries, or about Conforto’s chances of getting it going. I don’t know where the Mets are going to go, and their struggles have helped open the door for the Marlins. What I can say is this: Offensively speaking, the Mets have been impossibly unclutch. It shouldn’t continue like this. Of course, what’s done is done.

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The New York Yankees aren’t completely out of the 2016 postseason race, but they’re also not trending up. The team has done little this season to make anyone think they’re playoff-bound or anything more than a .500 team. Masahiro Tanaka has been good and CC Sabathia is having a nice bounce-back season, but Michael Pineda, Nathan Eovaldi, Luis Severino and Ivan Nova haven’t been able to keep the ball in the park, giving up 52 homers in 274.1 innings. On offense, the only above-average hitter is a 39-year-old Carlos Beltran, and he’s having trouble staying on the field. The strength of the team is an historically great bullpen, and if the team is willing to give up on this season, they could get quite a return over the next month by dealing Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller and maybe even Dellin Betances.

The Yankees are currently 37-39 with a negative-34 run differential*. They’re nine games back in the division and six games out of the last wild-card spot, needing to pass six teams to get there. Our projections have them going 44-42 the rest of the way, thereby ending the year at exactly .500. BaseRuns says the Yankees have played like a team that should be 33-43. While the team’s peripheral pitching stats suggest the team has outperformed their results a little bit (4.43 ERA and 4.00 FIP), we’re still talking about a team that might be .500 if things had worked out better, not a team that looks like a contender. The team’s best playoff odds are likely behind them and the team has a roughly 6% chance at the postseason right now.

*Numbers before play on Wednesday.

So in all likelihood, the team should be sellers. That said, a team of veterans with long-term contracts doesn’t generally make for the most appealing trade partner. If he’s still healthy, Carlos Beltran should be in demand, and it’s possible that Nathan Eovaldi might bring something back, but the strength of the Yankees has been the bullpen, and if they’re going to sell, that’s where they’ll get the greatest return.

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Ever since Eric Byrnes used a computer to help umpire an independent-league baseball game last year, and then Brian Kenny took up the mantle of #RobotUmpsNow on the MLB Network, I’ve been fascinated with the idea that robot umpires will soon call strike zones in baseball. The more I talk to players about it, though, the more I doubt that it’s an eventuality. Because the players, well, the players are going to hate it.

I can’t speak for all players, obviously. I haven’t talked to all of them. But I’ve talked to plenty on both sides, even ones I can’t quote here, and the biggest endorsement I could get was a tepid version of “It’s going to happen.”

So instead of asking each player what they thought about robot umpires, I changed the question a bit. Instead, I asked pitchers, catchers, and hitters, “Who will hate robot umps the most?”

The short answer? Everyone. The long answer? Much more interesting.

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Two opposing things can be true, I believe. Superstar players are probably the last to know when they’ve come to the end of the line. Declines can be so gradual they’re tough to detect if you’re just taking things day by day. If you listen to the players, they’ll insist they remain capable, even after they’re probably not. On the other side of the coin, no one loves to bury good players too early more than writers. We’ve all probably done it at some point. I did it way too early to Raul Ibanez. Countless people did it way too early to David Ortiz. We start looking for any signs of age-related decline, and then when one or two show up, we tend to assume that’s it. Good players know how to make adjustments. That’s what allows them to be good players.

So with Alex Rodriguez, right now, we’re…somewhere. Rodriguez says he’ll be okay, and he says he loves to prove doubters wrong. Not that Alex Rodriguez has much of a history of being doubted, but, anyway. Rodriguez has his pride, and he also has terrible numbers. He’s 40 years old! But then, the Yankees’ best hitter is 39 years old. It would be very easy to conclude that Rodriguez is finished. The Yankees have started to put him on the bench. We should probably be more patient — this is still Alex Rodriguez we’re talking about. The talent is in there. It’s just, the numbers paint a picture, and it’s a picture of a changed and worse ballplayer. That much cannot be argued.

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