Archive for Teams

A cursory examination of the WAR leaderboards for shortstops in 2015 shows a few surprising developments. At the very top, we have the nice blend of defensive and offensive aptitude in Zack Cozart, and the mainly defensive-minded duo of Brandon Crawford (who has surprised at the plate this year) and Andrelton Simmons. Then, where we might expect a name like Ian Desmond or Troy Tulowitzki, we instead have Marcus Semien.

It’s only May, so we’re still dealing with the usual parts of the game that suffer from small sample size issues when it comes to player comparison and valuation, like BABIP and defensive metrics. Still, there’s something about Semien being toward the top of the boards that warrants our attention: not only is the A’s shortstop there because of his offense, he’s there despite his defense.

On Sunday, we saw both the best and worst of him. Let’s start with defense. During the bottom of the second, Logan Morrison hit a routine one-hopper up the middle to Semien, who was shifted along with the rest of the infield. The outcome was one Athletics fans have wearily gotten used to:

That was the 24-year-old’s 9th error of the season, briefly tying him with Ian Desmond and Danny Santana for the league lead, that is until he moved into sole possession of first by making another on Monday (he made one last night too). If you don’t like errors, Semien sits at -1 runs by DRS, good for 20th in the majors.

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A little over a year ago, the Cleveland Indians locked up much of their future core, signing Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley, and Yan Gomes to contract extensions. Kipnis received double the guarantees of his teammates after a great, five-win 2013 season, but last year the fortunes reversed, as Brantley and Gomes both had breakout years and Kipnis struggled. Kipnis got out of the gate slowly in 2015, as the hits were not falling, but a solid approach taking the ball the other way has the new Cleveland leadoff hitter’s production on the rise.

Last April, Kipnis performed well in the first month after signing his $52 million extension, posting a .234/.354/.394 line with a 120 wRC+ that could have been much higher if not for a .250 BABIP. At the end of that same month, though, Kipnis strained his oblique on a swing, forcing him to miss a month. He never got going in his return, hitting just .241/.299/.315 with a 77 wRC+ in 442 plate appearances over the rest of the season despite an acceptable .297 BABIP. Kipnis finished his lost season having produced roughly a win.

Determining the effect of Kipnis’s oblique injury on his production the rest of the season is a tricky proposition. The injury does not require surgery, varies in severity and does not have a set recovery time. Chris Davis and Ryan Braun suffered oblique injuries last season and neither player had a good season, but Joe Mauer played well, albeit without power, after hitting the disabled list for the same injury. Jason Kipnis played through his struggles last year, but he did admit in the spring that the injury gave him trouble.
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Justin Turner isn’t Babe Ruth — mostly because only Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth. Of late, however, Turner’s numbers have been Ruthian in nature. Consider: since the beginning of 2014, only two hitters in all of baseball have been better than Turner, pound for pound. Two hitters! All this after the Mets released him. Turns out, he met someone on the 2013 Mets that changed his life.

Someone else’s life changed in 2013. This 35-year-old veteran outfielder with a little bit of power and a little bit of speed and a little bit of defense was coming off a down year and a suspension — circumstances which might otherwise be known as “the end of a career.” But he’d heard something about hitting he’d never heard before, and he’d spent the winter in Mexico putting his new philosophy to work. That year in New York, he was hitting for more power than he’d ever had before, and he was relevant once again. He thought he’d tell a red-headed backup infielder a little of what he’d learned.

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We’ve had fun, but this might be the last post I ever write about opposing pitchers trying to work Mike Trout upstairs with good heat. It’s not that I’m tired of it. I didn’t think I could ever grow tired of it. For me, it might’ve been the most interesting single thing in baseball, the game’s greatest player having such an obvious vulnerability. How often do we really get to talk about that kind of stuff? No, I’m not saying this because I’m tired of the subject. I’m saying this because it might not be a subject anymore.

I can’t imagine you need background. Everyone knows what was going on. Everyone saw what the Royals did to Mike Trout in last year’s ALDS. Trout’s strikeouts went up because teams realized they could throw him fastballs upstairs. OK, this, we’re all familiar with. It was probably unrealistic to expect Trout to make an adjustment last year on the fly. He’d need an offseason to work out how he wanted to respond. I think we’ve now seen his response. That glaring, obvious weakness? It’s completely disappeared.

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Let’s take a little stroll down the walk leaderboard, shall we? It’s not the most exciting leaderboard on the site, but every board can tell you something. In first we’ve got Joc Pederson. Hell of a rookie season underway. After that we’ve got Bryce Harper. Looks like he’s finally turning that corner. Carlos Santana, Kris Bryant, Matt Holliday — disciplined hitters, all of them. Alex Avila and Jose Bautista are no strangers to the free pass. And then there’s Carlos Peguero. Yes, that Carlos Peguero. If you don’t know him, you’re interested. If you do know him, you’re speechless.

For reference, before this year, Peguero had been in the majors for parts of four seasons. Spent the bulk of that time with the Mariners. He drew eight unintentional walks, in more than 200 trips to the plate. In this year’s early going, he’s batted about a third as much. Still a very small slice of playing time. He’s drawn a dozen unintentional walks. When seen before, Peguero gave off the impression he was clueless. Now he’s having excellent at-bats against Felix Hernandez and Sonny Gray. Also, he is impossibly strong.

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The number of innings a team’s bullpen throws over the course of the season has less to do with the performance of the bullpen than the performance of the starters. Teams with starters pitching deep into games rely less on relievers, leaving the bullpen well-rested and allowing the manager to leverage a team’s best relievers in more important situations. A great bullpen might cause a manager to pull his starter at the first sign of trouble, creating more innings for the bullpen, but for the most part, the starter will pitch as many innings as possible and the rest is left for the bullpen. Once the relievers are called upon, it is the manager’s job to divvy out appearances and prevent overuse. So far this season, the Boston and Tampa Bay rotations have put their bullpens in trouble and St. Louis also appear to be in danger of wearing out their core arms — points which I’ll address momentarily.

First, let’s consider performance. In unsurprising fashion, the Kansas City Royals’ bullpen has produced the lowest ERA among all major-league bullpens in 2015. Their relief corps was a featured strength as the team made it to the World Series last year. From 2012 to 2014, the Royals bullpen WAR of 17.7 is more than two wins greater than the second-place Atlanta Braves, and the bullpen is off to a great start in 2015 (even if their 3.35 FIP does not quite match their sterling 1.56 ERA). The graph below shows every bullpen’s ERA and FIP, sorted by the former.

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Things are not going particular well in Colorado, and I’m not just talking about the fact that it snowed in May. The state’s baseball team has lost nine straight games, and new GM Jeff Bridich isn’t particularly pleased with the results he’s seen as of late.

“We have a good collection of players,” said Bridich, the first-year GM whose team is 11-17 and last in the National League West. “And at this point, meaning the last two weeks of the season, they’ve added up to a bad team. I don’t think there’s any other way you can look at it. That’s not saying anything shocking. The players know that.

“There are bad stretches that befall every team in a season, or most every team in a season. This is where we see what type of resolve our players have — if they take a look around that clubhouse and deal with reality as adults and say, ‘We’re going to make some changes and do things necessary to start winning games.

…

“I continue to believe in our guys, but when you have to make changes like we did with Tyler Matzek [who was sent down to Triple-A Albuquerque over the weekend], when it’s in the best interest of the team and the player, you go ahead and give somebody else an opportunity,” Bridich said.

Unfortunately for Bridich and the Rockies, swapping out every underperforming player is logistically impossible. They’re not going to bench Carlos Gonzalez, but he’s been their worst player this season, putting up -0.6 WAR in his first 101 plate appearances. They could start taking some playing time from Justin Morneau and give it to Wilin Rosario, but that doesn’t seem like an obvious upgrade, and Morneau was pretty good for the Rockies last year, so that would seem like an overreaction to a slow start. And if the team had better pitchers than Jorge de la Rosa or Kyle Kendrick hanging around, they wouldn’t have spent some of their free agent money to sign those guys in the first place; this is not an organization overflowing with quality arms.

So yes, the Rockies can do things like demote Tyler Matzek or swap out Daniel Descalso for a different utility infielder, but moving the deck chairs around isn’t going to stop the ship from sinking. While Bridich is right that the team does have some good players, they just don’t have enough of them, and when the team’s two highest profile players aren’t performing like superstars, the rest of the roster gets exposed. And that’s what has happened early on; Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez have been mediocre and terrible respectively, and there just isn’t enough around them to pick up the slack.

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Dillon Gee will miss at least the next couple of weeks with a torn groin, but the Mets aren’t likely to suffer too much in his absence. That’s because they have uber-prospect Noah Syndergaard in the fold, who will step in and replace Gee in the rotation. Syndergaard, 22, will make his major-league debut tonight against the Cubs and figures to hold down a spot in the Mets rotation for the foreseeable future. And if you believe the Steamer projections, Syndergaard might actually provide the Mets with a sizable upgrade over Gee.

Before his call up, Syndergaard was one of the very best pitching prospects in the minors. He placed 19th in our preseason top-200 list and was easily the highest rated prospect on the Mets. Other outlets gave him even higher praise, with Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com and Baseball America ranking him 9th, 10th and 11th, respectively.

Given his stuff, it’s not hard to see why he rated so highly. Syndergaard has a sizzling fastball that sits in the mid-to-high 90’s. He complements it with a curveball and changeup that are both average pitches right now, according to Kiley McDaniel, who anticipates both ticking up to above-average (55) in the near future.

Unsurprisingly, Syndergaard checks all of the boxes statistically, as well. My KATOH system, which considers his 2014 stats, absolutely adored the 6-foot-5 righty heading into the year. His projection of 11.5 WAR through age-28 was the 6th highest of any prospect. He ranked second among pitchers, trailing only Julio Urias.

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The other day, Craig Kimbrel blew a save for the first time in — I don’t know — awhile. He was given a two-run lead and he retired the first two batters he faced, but then he unraveled. In a pinch, the game was off to extras. Kimbrel is one of those relievers for whom any hiccup is notable. And when you notice Kimbrel’s blown save, you notice something else. Kimbrel, in a tiny sample, is sitting on a 5.68 ERA. If you add up the ERAs from his first five seasons in the majors, you get a sum of 6.37. Something’s a little wonky. Or nothing’s wonky at all, and this is just early-season randomness. Regardless, Kimbrel catches your eye with a 5-something ERA. He’d catch your eye with a 3-something ERA.

Is there anything going on we should know about? Kimbrel’s pitch velocities are fine. Kimbrel’s pitch mix is normal. His arm slot hasn’t changed. So there’s no easy conclusion, but Ken Rosenthal spoke to somebody with something to say:

The report from one uniformed observer: “His command was terrible. He threw three pitches that almost hit guys in the head. He even threw a pickoff to first with no first baseman there. And on the pitch that was hit for a double to tie the game, he missed by three feet.”

Is it that simple? Is Kimbrel just missing his command? Is that why his strikeout rate is down? The source was talking about Kimbrel’s blown save in Arizona. So I decided to investigate Kimbrel’s blown save in Arizona.

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Over the weekend, the White Sox scored 16 runs against the Reds in three games, and just Sunday they got the best of the impossible Aroldis Chapman, walking off after three consecutive hits. With that in mind, this would seem a funny time to be critical of the White Sox position players, but then, for one thing, the season’s been a lot longer than a couple days. And, you know what? So much content is published with timing in mind. People write about a player after he has a big game. It’s natural, but you can think of it as a form of bias. In this post, let’s not be swayed by recency. Most recently, White Sox position players have been good. Let’s knock ’em down a few pegs!

You already know it’s been a struggle for the Sox, and after spending the offseason trying to build a contender, already they’ve approached a decision point. It’s not time yet for the Sox to pull the plug, but it’s an increasingly likely outcome. At this moment, the White Sox sit dead last in the majors in team WAR, which means they rank even behind the Phillies. People have their differences with WAR, but history shows that WAR and team performance are very closely connected. Good teams don’t rank last. (Good teams don’t rank close to last.)

On the pitching side, things could be better and they could be worse. The team sits in the middle of the pack, which seems appropriate for such a top-heavy roster. There are clearly good pitchers, and there are clearly replaceable pitchers. But as for the position players, collectively it’s been a nightmare. By WAR, the Sox are in last place, and they’re in last by more than a full win. By WAR, the Sox have performed below replacement-level. This is a disaster, so let’s break it down.

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