Archive for Teams

Despite his below-average walk rate and high strikeout numbers, Ian Desmond’s power and speed have made up for his contact inadequacies during the past three years. He is, at once, an exciting and frustrating player to watch: a hitter prone to incredible dry spells followed by gluttonous power explosions. The Nationals have accepted his droughts — even going so far as to offer him a seven-year, $107 million dollar contract extension before the 2014 season — because the hot streaks were worth it.

Desmond has relied on that full combination of speed, low contact, and high power during the years since his breakout in 2012, and because of that, his skill set is a relatively tenuous one. We’ve seen players excel at a high level with those same type of skills, but the difference between productive and unproductive is closer when you rely on the ball going over the fence a certain number of times.

If we navigate to the batter leaderboards and sort by wRC+, Desmond has been the seventh-worst qualified offensive player in the majors this season. He’s been the very worst defensive shortstop. The nightmare scenario has come to fruition in Desmond’s walk year: a cratered home-run rate per fly ball (HR/FB), a walk rate dive, an almost total absence of speed, and really poor defense. The 2015 edition of Ian Desmond is now 2010 Desmond, except with more strikeouts and less on the base paths. Take a look:

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The Blue Jays are a pretty good team. Sometimes they look like a very good team, and with an upgrade or two, they might get to that level consistently. There’s a decent shot this is the team that busts the extended franchise playoff slump, and with the trade deadline around the corner, you know the front office is active. They’ve been open about the activity, and you can see where upgrades would be wanted. Because of the Blue Jays’ situation, I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of a Johnny Cueto/Aroldis Chapman addition for a package built around Jeff Hoffman and Daniel Norris. And then more, presumably. Extreme seller’s market and everything.

From an outsider’s perspective, it would be a blockbuster. It would change the landscape of the American League now, and it could shift the Reds’ future fortunes. That said, there are a few hurdles. For the Jays, Norris could conceivably help in 2015. It’s also not impossible to imagine Hoffman making a difference in the bullpen down the stretch. And for the Reds, if you deal Chapman, that subtracts from 2016, and then that takes you to a slippery slope. The Reds might not want to go that far. If they had their druthers, they’d move rentals and try to get back at it a year from now.

So maybe that’s not so realistic. Maybe the Reds don’t want to tear down. And maybe the Jays don’t want to take anything at all away from 2015. The idea could use some restructuring. Which brings us to something I’m going to hate: I absolutely love the guy, but, imagine if the Jays were to dangle Marcus Stroman.

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When you write up the worst called ball of the first half, you’re set up for a two-part series. You have to write up the worst called strike of the first half, as well, or else it feels like something is missing. Usually, I make my own editorial decisions. Technically, this was my decision. But really, this decision was out of my hands. Once the first post went, the second was guaranteed to follow.

Bad called strikes, I think, are less upsetting than bad called balls. Oh, they’re both annoying, but the worst called balls are on pitches down the middle, and it seems inconceivable that an umpire could miss a pitch down the pipe. It’s easier to see why an umpire might grant a strike on a pitch out of the zone. There’s no such thing as the middle of the out-of-the-zone. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing strikes off the plate, so, what’s another inch or two? When you see a strike out of the zone, you think, ugh, whatever. When you see a ball on a pitch down the middle, you think, how did that happen? This is the long way of saying this post might be less interesting than the first one.

But here we are anyway, and your own curiosity will prevent you from leaving this post until you see the result. What’s been the worst called strike of the first half? I don’t mean the strike with the lowest called-strike probability, adjusting for count and handedness and everything. I mean just relative to the rule-book zone, which is directly over home plate. This pitch was 10.7 inches away from the border of the rule-book zone, as it crossed the front plane:

Pretty bad! Lefty strike, but, pretty bad. Clearly outside. One pitch was worse than this.

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I tend to follow the minor leagues pretty closely. As a result, I would say I’m at least generally familiar with nearly all prospects who have a chance of making a big league impact in the foreseeable future. However, when Balbino Fuenmayor came to the plate as Team World’s cleanup hitter in Sunday’s Futures Game, I hadn’t a clue who he was. I was even more confused when I saw his stats show up on my screen: .360/.388/.612 between Double-A and Triple-A this year. Sure, the World team sometimes needs to scrape the bottom of the barrel for its first basemen, but how could I not know about this guy? Who could forget a name like that?

After pulling up Fuenmayor’s FanGraphs page, I somewhat forgave myself for letting him fly under my radar. Simply put, he wasn’t someone worth monitoring prior to this season. In fact, he didn’t even play affiliated baseball last year.

Fuenmayor originally signed with the Blue Jays as 16-year-old out of Venezuela way back in 2006, and spent seven forgettable years in the Blue Jays organization. Over nearly 2,000 plate appearances, none of them above Low-A Ball, he hit a pedestrian .251/.296/.390. With a strikeout rate of 28%, Fuenmayor simply struck out too frequently to turn any heads, especially for a corner infielder with few walks and middling power. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t allow the recent slump to throw you off. If the Astros were to keep winning games at their season pace, then by next Wednesday they’d have more wins than they did in all of 2013. By Thursday, a week later, they’d have more wins than they did in 2012, and by that Saturday, they’d have more wins than they did in 2011. By the penultimate day of August, they’d have more wins than they did a season ago. And then there would be 31 games left. The speed with which we adjust our expectations means there are people who are disappointed by how the Astros closed out the first half, but this has been a great season, a blessing of a season, a season of competitive baseball that even recently would’ve been almost impossible to imagine. For the Houston Astros, 2015 has been wonderful.

Which comes with the upside: unexpected success. Everybody loves unexpected success. It’s good for the players, it’s good for the coaches, it’s good for the fans, and it’s good for the organization. But this also comes with a challenge: figure out how to navigate the rest of the month. The Astros might’ve expected 2015 to be another year of building. Now they’re in position to trade from the long-term to try to improve the short-term. The Astros will be perhaps the most interesting team to watch in the days and weeks ahead, because if they wanted, they could be awful aggressive.

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Just because of the sheer number of taken pitches in a season, hitters will frequently disagree on a call with the judge standing behind them. A certain number of disagreements are to be expected, but from the sounds of things, Dexter Fowler feels like he’s been disagreeing more than usual. Fowler doesn’t think his approach is worse, but his numbers are worse, so he identifies some iffy calls as a factor. This is what Fowler looks like after an iffy strike call:

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A lesson you learn as you grow older is that everything is somewhere on a spectrum. Though we yearn for blacks and whites, for certainties and absolutes, the world is more complicated than that, littered with partials and mitigations. Seldom does everything point in one direction. Seldom do we even know about everything pointing. There is always much we can’t or don’t figure out. There is a neat thing, though, about spectra — each one has two extremes. So when we know enough, we might be able to identify points near an extreme. The least-talented running back. The most challenging summit. The worst called ball by an umpire.

Strikes and balls are most definitely on a spectrum. The strike zone might be precisely defined, but it’s impossible for humans to call it that way, given our own limitations, which means any given pitch has a certain likelihood of being called a strike, and a certain likelihood of being called a ball. Most controversial calls take place around the boundaries. That area where taken pitches end up as coin flips. But sometimes there are bad calls beyond the boundaries, within or without. These head toward our extremes. Armed with PITCHf/x, it’s possible to find the worst called ball, by looking for balls on pitches down the middle. They’re uncommon, but they happen. What’s been the worst called ball of the 2015 first half? The following pitch was called a ball, though it was 3.0 inches from the center of the strike zone:

The worst called ball is worse than this.

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The Yankees boasted one of the best offenses in baseball in the season’s first half. Heading into the All-Star break, the team ranks third in the American League wRC+ and second in runs scored. But very little of this run scoring has come from the second base position, where the team has mustered only a 64 wRC+. Stephen Drew, with his 229 plate appearances of 69 wRC+, has been the primary culprit.

The Yankees second base situation just got a bit better, however. Or at least it did on the offensive side of things. The team called up rookie second baseman Rob Refsnyder on Saturday. The Bombers faced off against two left-handed pitchers over the weekend, making it an ideal time to break in their right-handed rookie second baseman. Refsnyder accumulated two hits in his first two games, including a towering home run off of Alexi Ogando yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

Given all the controversies they’ve been through this year, you’d almost want to think the Angels were having a bad season. Only a few months ago, ownership ran Josh Hamilton out of town, and while it did so figuratively, you get the sense it would’ve done it literally. Not very long after that, a team executive was dismissed after using words like “segregation” in an interview about ticket policies and attendance. And of course, the other week, the general manager packed up his office and left, his relationship with Mike Scioscia finally reaching the breaking point. From a PR perspective, for the Angels, it’s been a year to forget. Except for this recent stretch of winning, that’s moved the Angels into first place.

The baseball season will suck you in. It’s 162 games long, and it wants you to feel every single one of them. It wants you to celebrate every runner left stranded; it wants you to curse every failed call to the bullpen. The baseball season pitches itself as an election — every game matters. And it’s true, that every game does matter. But it’s terribly easy to get too wrapped up in the day-to-day trivialities. Ultimately, every team will win a bunch of games, and every team will lose a bunch of games. Baseball is best consumed every day, but it might be best understood every week or two. An ordinary standings page will include an “L10” column. You can learn a lot from one glance. Forget, for a moment, about all of the details; over their past 10 games, the Angels are 7-3. The Astros and Rangers are both 2-8. The A’s and the Mariners are a harmless 5-5. Divide a season into 10-game blocks, and over the most recent block, the Angels have made their move.

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On Wednesday night, Alex Gordon strained a groin muscle chasing a fly ball. If you just adjusted in your seat, I don’t blame you — it sounds painful. He’ll be out for eight weeks, which is better news than the team could have received. If the Royals can hold the fort down until then, they just may have him back in time for the stretch run. Of course, injuries don’t always follow a defined timetable, so we’ll see. Still, there’s hope Gordon can come back. That’s better than nothing. The question is, though: how will they absorb his loss?

For now, they are going to roll with Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando. This isn’t a bad plan! As I’ve discussed in the past, Dyson is worthy of a starting position. His defense is still top notch. Here’s a reminder:

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