Archive for Teams

Projection systems tend to look at reality a whole lot more soberly than us humans, who can fall madly in love with a player on the basis of aesthetic appeal alone. That’s why most offseason columns here at FanGraphs reviewing free-agent acquisitions tend to damper down instead of ramp up excitement.

So it is a meaningful testament to Russell Martin’s skills that, upon being signed by the Toronto Blue Jays to a five-year, $82M contract as a 31-year-old catcher — i.e. after Martin has already sustained several lifetimes of knee-shredding, cup-checking abuse in baseball’s most brutal position — the deal was graded positively in these pages by Mr. Sullivan.

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Thursday afternoon, the Indians lost another close game, which is the sort of thing I have to presume they find awful maddening. Among the few bright spots was Michael Brantley, who batted four times and wound up with a homer and a walk. Said homer was all of the Indians’ offense, and it did come close to holding up. Brantley’s been outstanding on a team that’s underachieved.

Let’s stick with the same baseball game for a moment. In the game, Matt Adams struck out swinging three times. Nick Swisher struck out swinging two times, and so did Roberto Perez. I don’t bring this up to say anything about Adams, Swisher, or Perez. Rather, it just seems like an appropriate lead-in to this astonishing fact: Brantley has struck out swinging two times all season.

What’s taking place for Brantley isn’t a breakthrough. Brantley’s breakthrough happened last year, following seasons of gradual development. He wound up a participant in the All-Star Game, and he finished third in the voting for the American League MVP. What’s taking place is a continuation, a demonstration that Brantley doesn’t intend to return to what he was before as an almost impossibly average ballplayer. Brantley doesn’t have a single flashy skill. His team is threatening to drop out of the race before the season’s half over. The ingredients are there for Brantley to become a forgotten star. Consider yourself urged to not forget him.

So far this season, Brantley has been a top-15 hitter, a hair behind Mike Trout and Joc Pederson. If you expand the window to the start of last season, Brantley’s been the fifth-best hitter in the game, between Jose Abreu and Andrew McCutchen. There’s nothing about his results that seems particularly unsustainable. His improved power is almost all to the same area, but in that way, Brantley is sort of an outfield equivalent of Kyle Seager. More than anything else, Brantley’s been able to combine a quick and smooth swing with a smart approach. He hasn’t meaningfully altered his swing. It just seems like he’s always getting smarter.

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The Houston Astros grabbed all of our attentions a couple of weeks ago, when they rattled off 10 wins in a row and vaulted to the top of the American League West. They’ve cooled off quite a bit since, going 3-6 since that streak. Yet, despite their recent struggles, they had built up enough of a cushion to maintain a .618 winning percentage and a four-game lead over the second place Angels. Not bad for a team that lost 111 games just two seasons ago.

The Astros have a very good record, and a decent shot at making the playoffs (45% by our calculator), but their roster isn’t without holes. And perhaps none of these holes is bigger than the one at shortstop. Currently, the Astros are employing Marwin Gonzalez as their primary shortstop, with a little bit of Jonathan Villar on the side. To date, these two have wRC+s of 68 and 30, respectively, and have contributed a total of -0.5 WAR.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Astros signed Jed Lowrie to a three-year contract back in December to play shortstop, but he lasted all of three weeks before landing on the shelf with a thumb injury. As of this writing, Lowrie’s on the 60-day DL and isn’t expected to return until sometime after the All-Star break.

Gonzalez and Vilar are unlikely to contribute much value for the Astros going forward. And, given the nature of Lowrie’s injury, it’s anyone’s guess whether he’ll be of much use in the season’s second half. The immediate future looks pretty bleak for the Astros at short, but help is on the way. The Astros promoted top prospect Carlos Correa to Triple-A on Tuesday, putting him just a step away from the big leagues.

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Ever since the Diamondbacks selected Max Scherzer in the first round of the 2006 draft, his potential has been readily apparent to everyone who has watched him pitch. Anytime you have a pitcher with significant fastball velocity and movement, and at least one very strong secondary pitch, the sky is the limit. Stuff is pretty easy to identify early on, but becoming an elite pitcher requires more than raw ability.

For the first few years of his professional career, Scherzer had a classic case of “he should be better.” He was a solid contributor in Arizona and in his early years in Detroit, but if you watched his stuff on any given night, you were left wondering why he was above average rather than great. The biggest hurdle for Scherzer was repeating his rather chaotic delivery to the point where he could utilize his stuff effectively day in and day out. Adding a curveball certainly helped, but the turning point came in mid-2012 when Scherzer figured out how to find a consistent release point. He never looked back.

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A while back, after one of those occasions where someone accused us of writing about the same teams too much, I checked to see which teams had been written about here most and least often. I had to depend on accurate author tagging, which hasn’t always been consistent, but based on the tags, we’ve written the most about the predictable teams — Boston, New York, Oakland, and so on. The other end was interesting, if also predictable. Not as much about the Astros, although more lately. Not as much about the Padres, although more lately. There’s been comparatively little about the Rockies. And, there’s been comparatively little about the Twins. One thing we can say is that, right now, the Rockies suck. But the Twins? The Twins are demanding devoted and focused content.

Not that we thought things were going to be this way. This year’s Twins were projected to be bad, and that was before Ervin Santana got suspended. Seven games into the season, the Twins found themselves six games out of first place, with a run differential almost twice as bad as the next-worst in the American League. But, since then, it’s been a month. Over that month, the Twins have tied for the league’s best record, with twice as many wins as losses. As things stand, the Twins have the eighth-best record in baseball. They have a better record than the Nationals. They’ve closed the gap on the Tigers and Royals.

There’s competitive baseball in Minnesota. It’s the damnedest thing. But now I have to write the kind of post I don’t like to write. The Twins aren’t good. This isn’t keeping up. I want there to be reasons to believe, but the indicators are what the indicators are. I apologize for the statistics. They’re in charge of me, not the other way around.

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Lance Lynn first received a rotation spot in 2012 when St. Louis’s then-ace Chris Carpenter went down in Spring Training. Lynn inherited the rotation spot vacated by Carpenter, but did not inherit his role as staff ace, into which Adam Wainwright stepped after missing 2011 while recovering from Tommy John surgery. The Cardinals have once again lost their ace, with Adam Wainwright out for the season because of an Achilles injury. This time, Lance Lynn, secure in his spot in the rotation and current de facto ace, appears poised to drop the de facto qualifier and be one of the top ten pitchers in all of baseball.

As Jonah Keri wrote yesterday, not much was expected of Lynn when he was drafted, but over the last year he has been one of the better pitchers in the National League. The Cardinals tweaked Lynn’s delivery in the minors, instructing him to move his hips more to gain greater leverage towards the plate. The moves helped Lynn throw in the mid-90s out of the bullpen in 2011, and kept his fourseam fastball in the 92-93 mph range as a starter. Lynn has been solid and durable, but not spectacular, as a starter over the past three seasons slotting behind Adam Wainwright. In the early part of this season, he has taken a step forward, mirroring the career of Max Scherzer.

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Corey Kluber just regressed very quickly. After a high-profile winless start to his post-Cy Young-winning campaign that had many wondering what was wrong with him, the Cleveland right-hander struck out 18 Cardinals yesterday over eight innings, allowing only one hit and no walks along the way. In reality, there was nothing wrong with Kluber; his 5.04 ERA was mostly a mirage overlaying a 3.20 FIP, and given the fact that his peripherals were almost in line with last year’s stellar figures, better times were always ahead.

The better times came all at once, however, and they came in a package that almost made (and did make) history: Kluber finished the eighth inning just three strikeouts shy of the single game record for most in a game, 21. He didn’t get the chance to go out for the ninth, something that is being hotly debated, but the facts speak for themselves: Kluber had the most strikeouts in a game since 2004, he was only the second pitcher ever to have 18 Ks in eight innings (Randy Johnson, 1992), and his game score of 98 was the highest in an eight inning outing since 1914.

I won’t list all of the records because there are a lot of them, but the bottom line is that he had an almost impossibly great day. August summed up the impact on Kluber’s season stats well in this tweet:

Corey Kluber today: ERA from 5.04 to 4.27 FIP from 3.20 to 2.57 K% from 23.8 to 29.2 BB% from 5.7 to 5.0 Record from 0-5 to 1-5

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_MLB) May 14, 2015

That’s quite a turnaround, as you might expect, so let’s dive a little deeper into the start. We’re going to kick this off with a GIF. It’s a good GIF, and it illustrates a few points we’re going to talk about. The camera angle changes slightly as the innings progress, but it still gives us a pretty good idea of where Kluber was operating yesterday. Green circles are swinging strikeouts, red circles are looking strikeouts:

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Coming into the season, the Red Sox rotation looked to be around league average. Instead, watching Red Sox starters this season has been like sticking 30 sporks in your eye: difficult, time consuming, and quite painful. So they’ve been worse than we thought.

The results from the starting staff have been bad and that badness has been unexpected but not nearly as unexpected as the Red Sox’ inability to score runs. While the rotation had a low upside, Boston’s hitters were expected to crush the ball. Indeed, the Red Sox were projected to score the most runs in baseball, but instead they’re seventh in the American League and closer to the last place White Sox than the first place Blue Jays.

To date, the offense has been mediocre instead of outstanding and, more importantly, hasn’t been good enough to cover for the starting rotation’s early season difficulties. But as you know if you read FanGraphs regularly, just citing runs scored isn’t enough. Though if it were I’d be finished right now and, I won’t lie, that has some appeal! Still, we want to know why, so let’s find out why.

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Stephen Strasburg has an ERA over 6. We don’t talk about ERA very often. OK, then, Stephen Strasburg has an overall RA over 7. I don’t bring these numbers up because they conclusively demonstrate that Strasburg has a problem. I bring them up because an ERA over 6 is just embarrassing, and a pitcher like Strasburg can’t pull that off unless something’s awry. This isn’t something that’s hidden deep in the statistics — it’s readily apparent to everyone that Strasburg’s been giving up way too many runs.

You have an understanding of how these things go. When you see someone who’s been really good, odds are that player has been both good and lucky. When you see someone who’s been really bad, odds are that player has been both bad and unlucky. For some of you, the first thing that stands out on Strasburg’s page is the near-.400 BABIP. It’s the highest BABIP in baseball, and we know Strasburg has pitched in front of a porous defense. His peripherals indicate he’s been all right. You can’t just stop there, though. This isn’t random BABIP noise. There’s no reason why a pitcher like Strasburg should be running a higher contact rate against than Bartolo Colon. No reason, at least, that isn’t problematic.

Strasburg has issues. Or, Strasburg has one issue. But he very definitely has not been himself.

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It’s funny now to reflect on some of the things that were said over the offseason, when the Dodgers went through an almost complete roster overhaul. Granted, people have to say something, because that’s how this business works, but think of the concern expressed in some corners regarding the immediate future of the Dodgers’ offense. How were they going to make up for losing Matt Kemp? How were they going to make up for losing Hanley Ramirez? How were they going to make up for losing Dee Gordon? Two of those players, as it happens, have hit quite well this year. Hasn’t mattered to the Dodgers. After swapping so many different pieces around, the Dodgers became an early-season offensive juggernaut.

It is, of course, a big reason why the Dodgers have the second-best record in baseball, and the highest run differential. They’ve dealt with significant injuries on the pitching side, that have left them weakened, but the lineup has picked up the slack, despite some injuries of its own. The point isn’t just to say, hey, the Dodgers have hit pretty well. No, that wouldn’t be worthy of a post. The point of this is to explain to you the magnitude by which the Dodgers have out-performed everybody else. The state of things is ridiculous.

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