Archive for Teams

Marlon Byrd has been around. Drafted by the Phillies out of Georgia Tech in 1999, the 38-year-old outfielder is in his 15th big-league season. The Indians, who inked him to a contract in March, are his 10th team.

Byrd has never been a star, but he’s had a solid career. His slash line over 6,066 plate appearances is .275/.329/.429 and he’s recorded 504 extra-base hits, including 156 home runs.

Eno Sarris wrote about Byrd a year ago this month, largely through the lens of former teammate Justin Turner. Last week, I caught up to Bryd to get his own perspective on the notable adjustment he made in 2013, and the overall arc of his career.

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Byrd on playing at age 38: “What’s different is that I have more confidence and a higher baseball IQ. It’s knowing instead of trying to figure out. It’s the same process as far as the way I go about my work. I’m just better at it now, because I have more experience.

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A a writer, you typically have an agenda when you approach a major-league hitter in the clubhouse. Literally. Even me! I try to keep it open-ended — and avoid the old “can you talk about how important player X is so that I can finish up my piece on him”-type questions — but I still have a (loose!) narrative sketched around some key stats when I step to a player. It’s called research.

Sometimes, the player has an agenda, too. Maybe that’s wording it too strongly. Sometimes, the player doesn’t want to answer your questions and has something else on his mind. That’s better.

That describes what happened when I talked to Josh Donaldson last night before a game against the Giants. He was obviously thinking about the night before, and when I brought up an old conversation about his two-strike approach, and the deception between Zack Greinke and Paul Konerko, he started talking about pitchers not following the rule book.

I let him run with it.

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Nothing about Josh Donaldson being great is surprising anymore. There was the late-career breakout in 2012, and then confirmation that the breakout was real in 2013-14. And then, of course, he won the Most Valuable Player award in 2015. We love stories about unexpected rises to prominence more than anything else, and that’s true within baseball and outside of it. Once a player reaches the elite and stays there, the story of the rise fades away, and consistent excellence has a strange way of becoming almost routine — whether it deserves it or not. (Note: it does not.) The really fun part comes, however, when great players do things to try and make themselves more great, pushing themselves past the already absurdly high plateau. From what we’ve seen so far this season, Donaldson appears to be embarking on that hallowed and honorable mission.

First, a little background to what we’re talking about. Donaldson based his breakout on better patience, all-fields power, and a few aggressive mechanical changes. Those mechanical changes were based on the leg kick and bat tipping of Jose Bautista, so it was a nice coincidence when the two were united on the Blue Jays last season. Here’s a couple GIFs that visually explain some of those changes, from a 2014 interview with Jerry Brewer:

2013 swing — smaller leg kick, controlled bat tipping:

2014 swing — bigger leg kick, aggressive bat tipping:

The latter swing is more of the hitter we know today — the guy who consistently murderizes baseballs — and we can see the quite obvious visual similarities to Bautista’s swing. It’s also the swing that, along with his great defense, vaulted him into the top of the WAR leaderboards over the past few years. Since he joined the Jays, however, Donaldson’s batted-ball tendencies have trended more toward his other power-laden teammate, Edwin Encarnacion. There’s certainly potentially something to gain from him moving more toward Encarnacion’s approach, as it has mimicked the sort of trajectory a number of players follow during single-season power surges. Here, allow us to consider how.

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When you’ve got a problem with command, your options seem obvious. You can clean up your mechanics, which is easier said then done. You can focus on throwing strike one. You can move on the rubber in order to move your heat map to a better spot. You can tinker with your fastball selection in case you have better command or outcomes with one of them. You can limit throwing a secondary pitch you don’t command that well. You can throw in the zone more and risk home runs if you miss more middle-middle.

It looks like Seattle’s Taijuan Walker is fighting poor command with a new weapon: throwing a secondary pitch in the zone more often. The best part is that, if it’s the right secondary pitch, command of that pitch is not super important. Tai’s fighting with a new approach to his curveball.

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The nice thing about being a baseball writer — specifically, one who analyzes the sport — in the year 2016 is that sometimes players just come right out and start talking about their launch angle. Free topic! A player coming out and talking about his launch angle is the same thing as a player calling my direct line and telling me to please write a post about him. Kris Bryant called my direct line the other day and told me to please write a post about him. Not really. But he did come out and start talking about his launch angle, and I took the hint.

Kris Bryant was fantastic last year. He was fantastic for any type of player, but he was especially fantastic for a rookie. For that, he won an award. He can’t win that same award anymore, on account of no longer being a rookie, but he presumably wants to win more awards and so he’d like to get even better. Bryant was great, but he was great in this weird way, in that he succeeded while making contact on barely two-thirds of his swings. He wasn’t the first to do it, but the company he kept wasn’t particularly inspiring. Look for qualified seasons and sort by contact rate and you’ll find Bryant’s name around the likes of Jack Cust, Pedro Alvarez, Russell Branyan, Dan Uggla, and Ryan Howard. Bryant figured he could succeed and keep better company, so he entered this season with a new plan in mind.

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Believe it or not, I actually agonized over how to title this post. Ultimately, I couldn’t come up with anything better, not if I didn’t want to outright deceive. Because this is a post about Hector Neris, and about Brad Brach, and there’s no way around that. You should be aware of that from the start. Now the only people in here are people who might give a damn, and that’s better than me feeling like I tricked you.

Neris is someone who’s been on my radar for a few weeks. Before that, he was absolutely not on my radar, even though he pitched in the majors in each of the previous two years. I became aware of him after a Phillies person told me to become aware of him, and Neris is in the early stages of a breakthrough major-league campaign. It’s been quiet, because he’s not a closer, and because he’s not a starter. Non-closing relievers take a while to command attention. But Neris has allowed four runs in 20 innings. More impressively, he’s increased his strikeout rate by more than fifty percent.

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You don’t need to know what spinal stenosis is to know you don’t want it, and to know it’s bad that David Wright has it. No major-league baseball player would choose the condition for himself, and for Wright, the diagnosis raised innumerable questions about the state of his career. When this very regular season opened, there was chatter in the first series that Wright looked stiff, that he looked exploitable and weak. Early on, it looked like Wright could and would be a liability. It would be a most unfortunate turn for a beloved former superstar.

Let’s be clear: David Wright still has spinal stenosis. That isn’t going to change. He is very much limited, but at the same time, as I write this, Wright is sitting on a 136 wRC+, about dead even with his lifetime mark of 134. Wright might be compromised, but Wright has also made things work, and he’s done that by focusing on maximization. David Wright has turned himself into an all-or-nothing hitter.

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Yesterday’s big news was that the Nationals agreed to a long-term extension with Stephen Strasburg. So that’s exciting for him, and for them, but you always have to think about the side-effects of these things. Several people pointed out that, without Strasburg, the upcoming pitching market sucks. And several people also pointed out that, with Strasburg locked up, this puts Billy Beane in a better position with regard to Sonny Gray. There’s just the one problem right now: Sonny Gray hasn’t been very good.

He’s far from the only ace who’s had his struggles. If you look at all the qualified starters and sort by ERA, you see David Price at an unbelievable 6.75. There’s Adam Wainwright, with an uncharacteristic 6.30. Gray is hanging out at an even 6.00, after getting tattooed by the Red Sox. Every slump is accompanied by a search for explanations. Seems to me the explanation for Gray is that he’s been pitching without his best weapon.

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The historic start of the club residing on Chicago’s north side has obscured some pretty amazing things going on at US Cellular Field, as the White Sox have raced out to the best record in the American League. Hopes weren’t all that high entering the season, with the club’s only spring-training noise emanating from the aftershocks of Drake LaRoche-Gate.

A month-plus in, however, the poor-fielding and weak-hitting Chisox of 2015 are a distant memory. A fine starting staff, led by perennial Cy Young candidate Chris Sale and his wingmen Jose Quintana, Carlos Rodon and Mat Latos, are thrilled to find that most of the batted balls they allow are finding leather this time around.

About those batted balls: much is being made of the fact that Chris Sale is posting the best, small-sample traditional numbers of his career while pitching to much more contact than in the recent past. Today, let’s dig inside the numbers a little bit to see whether Sale is, in fact, new and improved.

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J.B. Wendelken had an inauspicious MLB debut. Called up by Oakland from Triple-A Nashville on Sunday, the 23-year-old right-hander retired just four of the nine batters he faced. Following a mound visit, he gave up a grand slam.

The native of Savannah, Ga., was originally Red Sox property. Drafted in 2012, he was subsequently swapped to the White Sox, and later to the A’s. Finding out he was going to the big leagues was every bit as surprising as being told he’d been traded. He was so stunned by the news that he sat down.

Wendelken didn’t have to wait long to get into a game. Hours after joining the team in Baltimore, he was standing on the mound with his eyes wide and his heart beating fast. Needless to say, it was an experience he’ll never forget.

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Wendelken on learning he was being called up: “We were in Nashville and coming up on a closing situation. I’d been told by my pitching coach, Rick Ro [Rick Rodriguez], that I’d either be the late-inning setup guy or our closer. That time came along, and I was left sitting there. I was a little confused, but there was nothing to it. I didn’t think too much about another guy being up.

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