Archive for Teams

The 2014 version of Anthony Rizzo would be great enough for just about any team out there: lots of walks, power, and contact. If you were trying to build him into the model of a superstar, the only knock against him would be that he basically didn’t run, but he’s promptly taken care of that this season. Through the first two months of 2015, he’s also shown another remarkable improvement: he’s cut his strikeout rate by a third while slightly increasing his power output. Take a look at his ISO and K% since he was called up in 2011:

Rizzo’s 2015 is the equivalent of making a Ferrari go a little faster while using less gas; it’s rare we see that sort of development. Recently, strikeouts have become something of a necessary evil with power hitting, so Rizzo’s current strikeout level is a bit of an exception to that relationship. Over the past 15 years, qualified hitters around his ISO (.250) and K% (12.4) make for some pretty great company: Rafael Palmeiro (2003), Albert Pujols (2002), and Bernie Williams (2000) are just a few of the names that come up.

The early 2000’s was a different era for strikeouts, however, so if we just look at the past five years, we see only four qualified hitters who have posted ISOs higher than .250 with strikeout rates below 13%: Adrian Beltre (2011), Edwin Encarnacion (2013), and Pujols twice (2009 & 2010). Quickly, let’s take a look at where Rizzo fits into that ISO vs. K% connection among qualified hitters in the past five years (2009-2014), with those other four players mapped. Rizzo is the red dot, the other four players the blue dots:

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Carlos Gonzalez is showing the worst power he’s shown since he was a rookie. He’s healthy, maybe, but he’s not producing, not yet. He’s still only 29, and there are signs of life — mostly centered around the velocity on the balls leaving his bat. Maybe he’s not done.

Batted Ball velocity is probably close to stabilization. Jeff Zimmerman found that the correlation between April and May’s batted ball velocities was already reasonably high (r^2 of .34, stabilization point is around .5) at the very least. So, in small samples like these, it does look meaningful to look at CarGo’s speedometer.

It’s healthy. By Baseball Savant, he has the fifth-highest maximum exit velocity this year. His average exit velocity is 58th of 273, or in he top fifth. On fly balls and line drives, he’s up to 45th.

If it seems like these aren’t elite numbers, maybe they aren’t. But Gonzalez hasn’t been an elite slugger, maybe? He’s 21st in isolated slugging since 2011, and 11th in home runs per fly ball. That’s fairly elite. But the bar was lowered in 2014, when he would have been 28th in ISO and 24th in HR/FB, had he qualified. That sort of bar seems reachable with his current velocity.

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Believe it or not, the Minnesota Twins kind of look like a playoff contender. Their 34-29 record is tied for 4th best in the American, and puts them just 2.5 games behind the Royals in the AL Central. They also hold a slim lead over the Rangers and the Tigers in the Wild Card chase. The Twins have recorded one of the better records in baseball over the season’s first two and a half months. This is a fact. They have those wins in the bank. But it’s not at all clear they have the talent on their roster to keep winning going forward. Several Twins have outperformed their projections to date, and it remains to be seen if first-half contributors, like Brian Dozier and Mike Pelfrey, will be able to keep up the pace down the stretch.

But the Twins will have some additional help in the form of Byron Buxton — their new centerfielder. The Twins summoned the 21-year-old from Double-A Chattanooga before Sunday night’s game. Buxton’s gone one for seven in the big leagues so far, but that one was a stand-up triple. Typical Buxton. Prior to his call up, he had twice as many three-baggers as any other player in Double-A.

Prospect evaluators have been drooling over Buxton’s tools since he was in high school. The Twins selected the Georgia native second overall in the 2012 amateur draft, and his name immediately started showing up at the tops of prospect lists. Here at FanGraphs, we’ve ranked him 16th, 1st and 2nd the last three pre-seasons. Other outlets have given him similar praise, with some — MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus — ranking him as the top prospect in baseball this year, ahead of Kris Bryant.

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With two down in the ninth inning Monday night, Alex Rodriguez came up for the New York Yankees with a chance to be the hero. It didn’t work out that way, and the Yankees lost, but there was reason for hope. More reason, perhaps, than there would’ve been with nearly any other Yankee hitter. That’s saying something, considering where Rodriguez has been, considering where his relationship with the team has been and considering the team is pretty good.

Technically, a great story shouldn’t require anything more than interesting characters and a captivating plot. That’s not the way it’s used in conversation, though. The connotation is that a great story revolves around a character you want to root for, and the character earns a deserved payoff. For the average person, a great story should be uplifting. I’m not sure Alex Rodriguez is capable of broadly stirring such sentiment. His personal tale will forever be tainted, and that’s an obstacle for many even if you’re not among them. But the story Rodriguez is presently authoring is almost great. With just about everyone prepared to give up on him, a seemingly cleaned-up Rodriguez is soaring, allowing observers to ever so fleetingly forget about that other stuff.

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The Padres fired their manager Monday, saying goodbye to Bud Black, who’d been around since 2007. It’s not that the Padres blamed Black for what they’ve considered to be a disappointing start. That’s always the idea whenever any coach gets the axe, but that’s a gross oversimplification. It’s not that Black was the whole problem. It’s that the Padres thought Black was *a* problem, the kind of problem they might be able to fix midseason. Easier to do that than to find a whole new front office, or a whole new group of players.

As we all observed, the Padres put together a roster they thought could win in 2015. It hasn’t happened yet, not consistently, and with the trade deadline a month and a half away, A.J. Preller might be thinking about the pieces he has to sell off. There’s still plenty of time for the group to turn it around and mount a charge toward the playoffs, but if the Padres do end up a midseason seller, this would be the first step toward admitting the plan didn’t work out. The first step, that is, if you don’t count losing as often as you win.

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I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: while most of us understand that the gambler’s fallacy is a fallacy, sometimes it’s easy to see why so many people believe in it. In the case of this post, take the Blue Jays. Through the season’s first two months, they had the third-worst record in the American League, and a contender-worthy run differential. It seemed, at that point, like better times were ahead. But instead of things playing evenly from there, the Jays have simply ripped off 11 straight wins, rocketing back into the playoff picture. Barely any time ago, the Jays and Red Sox were battling for possession of not-last place in the AL East. This quickly, the Jays are back on their feet, and the Red Sox are a disaster.

I don’t have a hot take. My hottest take might be this: the Jays aren’t a true-talent 162-0 team. Winning streaks are easy for analysts because we always get to know for a fact the given team is overachieving. But there’s no better time than now to review what the Jays have done, and to evaluate where they now stand. The situation has changed in a jiffy. Even their own front office is probably trying to catch up.

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The thing about Max Scherzer is he’s really good. We knew that. You knew that. This Sunday the Milwaukee Brewers learned about it firsthand when Scherzer threw a complete game one-hit shutout against them. Well, okay, they probably knew it already thanks to scouting reports and whatnot. On the off chance the Brewers don’t use scouting reports or whatnot — and considering their record this is possible — they know it now. Scherzer is really good.

The lone Brewer hit was a broken-bat muscle job over the outstretched glove of second baseman Anthony Rendon. A few innings later Scherzer issued a walk. It was okay. His 16 strikeouts and nine shutout innings overshadowed it. Great as he was, the start was an outlier, of course. Nobody strikes out 16 guys against one walk and one hit every time out. But Max Scherzer is, as we know, quite good, and this start was emblematic of his season.

Against the Brewers, Scherzer threw all four of his pitches for strikes more than 60 percent of the time. He got swings and misses on each of them, including 12 on his fastball, nine on his slider, four on a curveball he threw only 16 times (according to MLB Gameday’s data, at least), and two on his changeup. When a pitcher can throw as hard as Scherzer and throw three other good pitches, well gosh. That’s about the definition of an ace.

Most importantly, that kind of pitch mix allows him to get both right-handers and left-handers out. Against right-handers Scherzer, throws fastballs and sliders with the occasional changeup when he gets ahead in the count. Against left-handers he abandons the slider and becomes a fastball, changeup, curveball pitcher. He also throws a cut fastball (rarely) against lefties but never against righties. Sunday, Scherzer struck out 12 right-handed batters. Those came on six sliders, three curveballs, and three fastballs. He also struck out four left-handed batters on two fastballs and two changeups. It’s a varied enough repertoire of pitches that he effectively becomes two different pitchers against different-sided batters, Pat Venditte style, though with much better pitches than Venditte throws.

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Almost three weeks ago, Pablo Sandoval did something extraordinary at the plate. To be fair, Sandoval often does interesting and unique things — mostly involving swinging at and hitting impossible pitches — so this might not come as a surprise. However, this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill sort of Sandoval madness. I’ll allow a short looping film to begin to tell the story:

A few things happened here: he swung at the first pitch, it was high and inside, and he got jammed but still managed to hit a line drive. These are all things Sandoval routinely does, so you can’t be blamed if you think one of them is what we’re highlighting. The true answer? Sandoval faced a left-handed pitcher as a left-handed batter.

If that doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider this: Kung Fu Panda hadn’t batted from the left side against a left-handed pitcher before this at bat since 2011. For what it’s worth, both Sandoval and his manager John Farrell claimed he only batted as a lefty in this pinch-hit appearance because of a knee injury sustained by a hit by pitch a few days before. Still, the fact remains: Sandoval’s struggles as a switch hitter from the right side are well documented, and they’ve gotten remarkably worse this season. It says at least say something that he batted from the left side here, given his struggles.

So just how bad has it gotten when he’s in the right batter’s box? Sandoval has a .160 OPS mark as a right-handed hitter facing a left-handed pitcher this year. He owns a 2.1% walk rate and a 27.1% strikeout rate from that side. In other terms, he’s hit three singles in 46 at-bats with one walk. That’s about the equivalent offensive output of Kyle Kendrick in 2014, except that Kendrick is a pitcher, and he doesn’t bat near the middle of the order for the Red Sox.

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The Boston Red Sox 2015 season is starting to look like an abject failure. A week ago, they were not too far from pulling back up to .500 and were only five and a half games back of first place in a weak division, and they had an upcoming six game stretch against the Orioles and Blue Jays that presented a real opportunity to gain some ground on two of their competitors. Instead, the Red Sox lost all six games, are now 10 games under .500, and are eight games behind both the Yankees and Rays, and seven games behind the Blue Jays. In one week’s time, they’ve moved from being within spitting distance of first place to being equally far back of fourth place.

Nearly every move the organization made last winter is currently looking like a disaster. The big acquisitions of Hanley Ramirez (-0.4 WAR), Pablo Sandoval (+0.1 WAR), and Rick Porcello (+0.5 WAR) have resulted in a trio of highly paid replacement level performers, and the more minor acquisitions like Wade Miley (+0.5 WAR) and Justin Masterson (-0.2 WAR) have been just as ineffective. While the history of these deals won’t be written based on their first few months in Boston, it’s fair to say that things aren’t exactly working out according to the team’s plans.

And now the Red Sox are heading towards a crossroads. This experiment hasn’t worked, and with just six weeks to go before the trade deadline, the Red Sox have to start considering the fact that they may be sellers at the deadline. The upside of being terrible is that it’s a good year to be selling talent, but the Red Sox are struggling in large part because their big expensive acquisitions have been lousy, and it’s not so easy to dump $100 million contracts a few months after they were signed. The path forward for the Red Sox isn’t so obvious, but let’s try to figure out some priorities for this team’s short-term and longer-term future.

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Pitching is an enigmatic thing. There are so many aspects to it that it can be difficult to get them straight in one’s head. A thing we all know about it, though, is the faster you throw the better you are. This is what makes Nathan Eovaldi so fascinating and yet so curious. Eovaldi has the fastest average fastball velocity of any starting pitcher in baseball at 95.8 mph. He started against the Nationals on Wednesday and hit 99 mph with his fastball in the third inning. Dude throws hard. And yet, outside of that, he’s not really anything special as a pitcher. In total value Eovaldi is Wade Miley. Miley has an impressive beard, but to paraphrase a great person, an impressive beard does not an impressive season make. The most valuable pitcher in baseball so far is Corey Kluber at 3.0 WAR. Kluber’s average fastball is 93.5 mph, 2.3 mph slower than Eovaldi’s. So clearly fastball velocity isn’t everything.

But why not? The quicker a pitch, the shorter the batter’s reaction time, and we’re talking about removing hundredths of a second. A 95 mph fastball will reach home plate in 0.4 seconds so removing those small fractions of a second you’d think would be problematic for the hitter. And they are problematic. The thing is, they’re not the whole story.

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