Archive for Teams

Miguel Sano is off to quite the start to his big-league career. The hulking 22-year-old is hitting .385/.500/.577 through his first eight games with Minnesota, and has reached base in all but one of those contests. His 205 wRC+ is the 11th highest in baseball in the month of July, and he’s provided a significant boost to the middle of the Twins lineup.

Sano’s major-league career may be only a week old, but he’s been in the limelight for years now. He was seen as a generational talent when the Twins signed him as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican back in 2009. And the controversy surrounding his signing inspired Peletero — one of baseball’s best and most well-known documentaries.

Once his signing was finally completed and documented, Sano proceeded to punish minor-league pitching. Between 2010 and 2013, he mashed .279/.372/.567 as an infielder, with most of his reps coming at third base. Sano had some trouble making contact, as evidenced by his 26% strikeout rate, but he more than made up for it with his mammoth power. On the strength of his 80-grade raw power, his isolated-power figures (ISOs) were consistently near or above .300, which frankly doesn’t happen all that often. All in all, Sano was always among the very best hitters in his league, despite being much younger than his competition.

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The funny thing about being a phenom is you don’t really have to be phenomenal. Last season Mookie Betts was both exceptional and therefore the exception to that when he put up a 130 wRC+ in 52 games for the Boston Red Sox. He stole bases, he hit home runs, and he played center field after a life spent in the middle infield. He was your basic run-of-the-mill young star. But even young stars often struggle eventually, so this season figured to be somewhat of a learning process for the 22-year-old center fielder.

Betts didn’t disappoint at being disappointing. After a solid opening week that featured him almost single-handedly beating the expected best team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, in the home opener, Betts faltered. On June 10 — exactly one month ago for those of you without calendars — he was hitting .237/.298/.368. An 0-for-3 the next day made the numbers look worse. In this run environment that could play with exceptional defense, but for Betts that type of production was a disappointment. There was reason to believe he wasn’t playing quite that badly based on batted-ball velocity and a mid-.250s BABIP, and hey, fast forward* one month and Betts has brought his OPS up 131 points to .789.

*That’s a thing old people used to have to do when watching movies on videotape.**
**Videotape is what they used to have back before DVDs.***
***DVDs were what they used to… Actually, you know what? Forget it. I’m old.

During that time he’s put up a 189 wRC+ which, as Mike Petriello notes, puts him in the company of Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Manny Machado. Here are 10 ways Mookie Betts has turned his season around.

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One of the things I find most interesting about baseball is how often players seem to try new things and then how often those changes seem to make little to no difference in their overall productivity. Batters alter their stances and pitchers try new grips and patterns all the time, but it’s actually pretty rare that a player makes a small change and becomes significantly different. A whole lot of effort goes into small changes, but the vast majority of these changes don’t seem to make a big difference, yet everyone is always making them. It seems like a lot of wasted energy.

Except that it’s not wasted energy as much as it’s about context. One reason all of these tweaks don’t have huge impacts is that everyone else gets a chance to respond to the adjustment very quickly and make their own. There’s so much information available to players and they’re generally a perceptive bunch. If Clayton Kershaw suddenly threw Paul Goldschmidt a 50-grade knuckeball, I would wager that Goldschmidt wouldn’t do much damage against that first one. Theoretically, Kershaw spent lots of man hours working on the pitch, but most hitters have faced knuckeballs and they would very quickly figure out that Kershaw has one and when he likes to use it. A pitcher adjusts, and then the hitters adjust to that adjustment. It goes on and on forever. If you don’t constantly tinker, you might be left behind.

At the beginning of 2014, there were a lot of questions about how well Jose Abreu would perform in the major leagues because we didn’t have any information about Abreu in the context of the American professional regime. His raw tools had our attention, but until we saw him face professionals in the American context, our information was rather limittarget=”_blank”. The question at hand was how Abreu would adjust to the major leagues.

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The Oakland A’s lost by four runs on Thursday. Granted, it was a two-run game in the bottom of the eighth. But, still. Four runs. The A’s currently have the worst record in the American League. They’ve lost by at least four runs 11 times. The Royals easily have the best record in the AL. Kansas City has lost by at least four runs 15 times. Four runs is an arbitrary cutoff, but this helps to demonstrate something you’ve probably already heard: The A’s are badly underperforming, and in the weirdest way. By the standings, in the AL, no team has been worse. By other metrics, in the AL, arguably nobody has better.

For a more rich and representative 2015 A’s experience, consider Wednesday. Sure enough, the A’s lost to the New York Yankees — but they lost by one. The game ended with the tying run in scoring position. The Oakland bullpen coughed up four runs; the Oakland defense coughed up the other one. It’s not that the Yankees didn’t do enough to win. It’s that the A’s did, too. Yet they came up short. The market is just waiting for Billy Beane to sell.

It isn’t new that the A’s are underperforming the numbers. It’s already been written about here, there and everywhere. Just in April, the team went 9-14 while outscoring its opponents. Lately, the team has been more successful, despite its recent setbacks. But while you’re probably tired of hearing about Oakland’s misfortune, you might not be aware of the magnitude of what’s happened. This isn’t the kind of thing that happens to someone every year.

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Let’s go ahead and get this out of our systems: Wednesday night, some Cardinals got ejected for complaining in a game the team won. Some people might call that the very most Cardinals thing. Those same people are just people who don’t like the Cardinals, but, whatever, everyone’s entitled to his or her own feelings, and we should get this out of the way before proceeding. All right, it’s out of the way! So let’s unpack a picture:

What you see is a play in progress. It’s a bases-clearing double, that put the Cubs ahead. As the Cubs were in the process of rounding the bases, and as the Cardinals were in the process of retrieving the baseball from the outfield, Yadier Molina argued with home-plate umpire Pat Hoberg. We see Molina with his back turned to the plate, even though there might soon be a play right there. (There wasn’t.) Arguments are common; arguments during plays are less common. Molina was shortly ejected. The same went for his manager. The game had been leading up to this moment.

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Longtime Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan loves the sinker. The Braves’ Leo Mazzone was all about establishing the pitch low and away. Rick Peterson may hate the cutter.

The Mets’ Dan Warthen may not have the name value of legendary pitching coaches that have come before him, but he does have his own pitch. If you want to see what it looks like, you just have to notice how the Mets, as a team, are outliers when it comes to slider velocity and movement.

The Mets are throwing a different kind of slider.

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Yovani Gallardo was supposed to slot into the Texas Rangers rotation as the number-three starter behind ace Yu Darvish and Derek Holland. Those plans quickly disintegrated after Darvish underwent Tommy John surgery and Holland pitched just one inning before suffering shoulder problems that will keep him out until at least August. Gallardo, once an ace for the Milwaukee Brewers, was traded in the offseason for a package of prospects that contained more quantity than quality. Gallardo has provided a solid return for the Rangers, just finishing a 33.1-inning scoreless streak and serving as the team’s best pitcher as the Rangers hover around .500 with perhaps an outside shot at a playoff spot. A more realistic look at the team suggests Gallardo’s value is as high as it will be and the Rangers should begin shopping him as the trade deadline approaches.

With Darvish and Holland, the Rangers might have had a playoff-caliber team, one deserving to be buyers instead of sellers. Given the replacement-level pitching at the end of the rotation an extra three wins up to this point and another three wins going forward would put Texas in the mid-80s in terms of wins and a major trade for a player like Cole Hamels might make them the favorite to catch Houston in the American League West. The Rangers have not had their best pitchers healthy and missed time for Adrian Beltre has left them below .500 and quickly falling out of the playoff race. With Gallardo under contract only through the rest of the season, he is an ideal candidate to be moved, and while Gallardo might like it in Texas, he also might welcome a trade that would put him in a pennant race and prevent a qualifying offer at the end of the season making him more valuable on the free-agent market.

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Carter Capps allowed a three-run single on Tuesday. That’s both pretty bad and pretty weird. Three-run singles might be a post topic of their own, but the most interesting thing didn’t have anything to do with the play result. Before Xander Bogaerts ever swung the bat, Capps threw a fastball, and I’ll excerpt conveniently from an MLB.com entry by Ian Browne:

Bogaerts hung in on a pitch that had a perceived velocity of 105.55 mph, the highest number of any pitch in the Major Leagues this season, according to Statcast™. The pitch looked that fast to Bogaerts, thanks to an extension of 9.5 feet by Capps.

This sounds complicated, but it’s simple to understand. Not a whole lot of time passed between Capps releasing the ball and the ball arriving around home plate. That’s all perceived velocity is — a kind of measure of flight time. According to Statcast, this year, no pitch has had a smaller flight time than the one Bogaerts drilled for a hit. That’s remarkable, on Bogaerts’ part, and that’s remarkable, on Capps’ part. Capps’ part, we’re becoming more familiar with.

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As Craig Calcaterra correctly points out at Hardball Talk, Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost has somewhat joylessly brought ultra-utility types aboard the American League All-Star roster instead of selecting players with bigger reputations.

But can ya blame Yost? You might recall that he got wicked close to winning a World Series just nine months ago. In a Game 7 where every last doggone base was weighted with incomprehensible leverage, playing that game at home nudged forward the Royals’ chances at winning by precious, precious percentage points. With this year’s Royals actually plausible World Series contestants — as opposed to their then-implausible candidacy at this time last year — Yost has unique motivation to play the All-Star Game to win.

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If you’ve been paying attention to baseball during the past month, you probably know that J.D. Martinez has been on a pretty good run. That might be an understatement: he’s hit 15 home runs in the past 31 days, four more than the next-best mark (Albert Pujols). If home runs aren’t your thing, he’s also first in wRC+, wOBA, and ISO over that span. Martinez has been out of his mind recently, and he’s been out of his mind in an even more extreme way than we’re used to seeing from him.

Let’s start with a few names. Below is the complete list of right-handed hitters who have hit a home run to either center field or right field at Comerica Park this season:

• J.D. Martinez
• Miguel Cabrera
• Nick Castellanos
• Ryan Braun
• Avisail Garcia
• Tyler Flowers

It’s not an extensive list, because hitting home runs to those areas of Comerica Park is difficult if you’re right handed: the right-field fence is 11 feet tall once you get toward right center, and center field is, quite simply, where fly balls go to die. The names on this list have to possess a lot of raw power, obviously. Exhibit A, Martinez’ first hit of the season:

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