Archive for Teams

How do you build a bullpen? How do you turn a bad one around? Fans in Detroit and other inquiring minds might like to know. The Dodgers might have a bit of a blueprint for us.

The bullpen in Chavez Ravine last year… it wasn’t good? Only four National League teams were worse by Wins Above Replacement, and it doesn’t get any better if you use ERA. “You can say it was bad,” said A.J. Ellis with a smile before a game with the Giants.

Things are a little different this year. Of course, it’s a small sample, but 41 innings in, the Dodgers bullpen is the best in ball. The components look good, too, with the best strikeout rate in baseball and good velocity. “It’s a nice arsenal of arms that keep coming out as the game progresses, guys that can fill multiple roles, guys that can go long, guys that can come in and face just one hitter,” Ellis said of the new look pen.

But is there a road map here? Dave Cameron talked about the way many of these relievers were acquired, but is there a way you use the relievers they acquired as a road map for future bullpen turnarounds?

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Guess what! It’s time for my first pitch-framing post of the season. There will probably be dozens more of these. I don’t know what those ones will be about, but the purpose of this one is to highlight the early performance of Angels catcher Chris Iannetta. I know, of course, it’s super early! I know, of course, current statistical arrangements will change over the coming five and a half months. But so far, Iannetta rates as one of the top pitch-receivers in the game. He ranks very high according to Matthew Carruth’s method. He ranks very high according to the Baseball Prospectus method. And that one adjusts for a whole lot of stuff. Through these weeks, Iannetta has been getting strikes and avoiding balls.

Which some catchers do commonly. You know the guys who’re considered good at this. What makes Iannetta interesting is, this is a first for him. Not that the season is over and we’ve confirmed that he’s a good framer now, but he’s played like a good framer, and, previously, that hasn’t been him. Let’s go back four years. In all four years, by Carruth, Iannetta has rated as below-average. In all four years, by Baseball Prospectus, Iannetta has rated as below-average. As recently as 2013, Iannetta looked like one of the worst receivers in baseball, by the numbers. So you wouldn’t expect him to be where he is today.

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One year ago today, I wrote an article right here called  “The Indians Are Missing The Easy Ones,” which looked into just how awful the Cleveland defense had looked to that point. Though it included all the usual “it’s still early in the season” caveats, the simple fact was that the Indians had done little to help what had been (and would be) a fantastic young pitching staff with repeated miscues in the field, flaws that seemed obvious even in mid-April. (It was also a great excuse to have an article full of blooper GIFs. This is going to come up again.)

As it turned out, it wasn’t just a small sample size problem. The Indians went on to have the worst DRS in baseball at a shocking -75, and as Jeff Sullivan ably noted in August, the defensive gap alone was a huge component of what set the Indians apart from the Royals. If you buy into the idea that 10 runs equal a win, then DRS saw a difference of 11 wins between the two clubs on defense alone. Even if you don’t completely accept that full value as an accurate accounting, it’s pretty clear that poor fielding was a huge detriment to the 2014 Indians, and that’s a big deal considering that they missed the wild card by just three games.

So! Now it’s 2015. With somewhat of an inflexible roster, management was limited in the moves they could make, so while things look similar, they aren’t identical. The Carlos Santana third base experiment is long over. Asdrubal Cabrera‘s adventures at shortstop are now Tampa Bay’s problem, with Jose Ramirez presenting a far superior defensive option. Yan Gomes‘ second half looked a lot better than his first half. Nick Swisher’s achy knees haven’t yet appeared in a game. Tyler Holt showed defensive value as a backup outfielder late in the year. Jason Kipnis swore he was healthier after oblique and hamstring issues helped to tornado his 2014 season.

Story after story after story came up about the team’s focus on it this winter. This was never going to be a good defense, not with so much of the same cast and crew, but maybe enough had changed to think, okay, maybe this won’t be so bad. So how’s that going? Read the rest of this entry »

When the Marlins reorganized their front office not too long ago, one of the hopes was that Jeffrey Loria would no longer so frequently meddle in the team’s operation. In 2015, however, the team has stumbled right out of the gate, and there’s chatter that Loria is getting involved. From a recent report about manager Mike Redmond being on the hot seat:

According to sources who have heard rumblings, Redmond is on the hot seat and the the organization is already bouncing around possible replacements. One possibility: Wally Backman, the Mets’ Triple A manager.

You can take this for whatever it’s worth:

#Marlins official just assured me there is “no truth” to rumor Mike Redmond could be fired after 3-10 start.

— Mike Berardino (@MikeBerardino) April 20, 2015

If you want to play semantics, now the Marlins are off to a 3-11 start. So Redmond could be fired right now and the official wouldn’t technically have been a liar. The thing about votes of confidence is that you can never really know what they mean. They’re either one thing or the exact opposite, and we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do off the field, because we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do on the field.

But we can step back from manager speculation. The Marlins will make whatever decisions they make, and as easy as it is to pin these things on Loria, maybe there’s more of a consensus. Maybe Redmond deserves to be fired; I have no idea. Analysts can seldom add value to the subject of managerial job security. I have one point, though, that I feel like ought to matter: these Marlins probably weren’t going to be very good. While the start has been disappointing, it needs to be compared against what would’ve been a reasonable expectation.

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Just as we were all finally getting over our Kris Bryant Day hangovers, the Cubs gave us something else to celebrate. As you’ve likely heard by now, the Cubs summoned Addison Russell to the major leagues yesterday. He started at second base last night, and went 0-5 in his big league debut.

Russell’s promotion came as something of a surprise. Although he’s a very talented player, and is one of the most highly-regarded prospects in the game, he’s had very little exposure to high-minors pitching. He’s played all of 77 games above A-Ball, and only 14 of those games came in Triple-A. Due to this relative lack experience, most anticipated that Russell wouldn’t make it to the majors until late 2015, if not sometime 2016. Yet here we are. It’s April 22nd and Russell is playing major league baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Out of all the reasons I enjoy baseball, I think mainly it’s about watching people do things few other people can do. Granted, that applies to the whole sport itself — every single player in the major leagues is absolutely fantastic. But I get particularly charged up by the freaks, and by the freak events. I love Felix Hernandez‘s changeup because there just isn’t another one like it. I love Aroldis Chapman’s fastball because there just isn’t another one like it. Mike Trout clobbers baseballs other guys don’t clobber. Andrelton Simmons gathers baseballs other guys don’t gather. Everybody we watch is several standard deviations above the mean. And then to see things several standard deviations above that? I watch to be amazed, and players remain amazing.

Kris Bryant was just called up, as you know. He’s without question an elite-level prospect and he might be, with some question, an elite-level player. One thing we know is he possesses an elite-level skill, in his ability to hit for consistent power. Not every player in the league is capable of doing truly extraordinary things. Bryant, though, shot up prospect lists because he is capable. And Tuesday night, we got our first major-league glimpse. In the first inning of a game against the Pirates, Kris Bryant did something amazing. Let’s watch and discuss.

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Episode 554
Touki Toussaint is a right-hander in the Arizona system who was selected 16th overall in the most recent draft. Brian Johnson is a left-hander in the Red Sox system, currently playing for Triple-A Pawtucket. This edition of FanGraphs Audio features both of them, in conversation with lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel. (Note: Toussaint’s interview begins at about the 12:45 mark; Johnson’s, around the 20:35 mark.)

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 35 min play time.)

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The highest career triple rates in baseball history, minimum 1000 plate appearances, with one exception:

• Paulo Orlando, 17.2%
• Tom Long, 3.0%
• Joe Jackson, 3.0%
• Sam Crawford, 2.9%
• Buck Freeman, 2.7%

Orlando, obviously, doesn’t qualify, being well short of 1000 career trips to the plate. But let’s just pretend he got all the way up to 1000, and over that span he never hit another triple. He’d still have a higher rate than Darin Erstad, and Jeff Francoeur, and whichever one of the Alex Gonzalezes this is, and Rickey Henderson. Across baseball, triples have been in decline. Orlando is trying to reverse the trend by himself.

Until a short while ago, you’d probably never heard of him. He’s a 29-year-old rookie who joined affiliated baseball in 2006. That tells you plenty about his career path, and upon Orlando’s initial promotion, by far the neatest fun fact was that he became the third-ever Brazilian major-leaguer. Now there’s a neater fun fact, a fact all Orlando’s own: he’s the first player anyone can find whose first three big-league hits were triples. And since then, he’s hit two more triples.

He isn’t just the current major-league leader, among players. He’s also tied for the major-league lead, among teams. Orlando has all five of the Royals’ triples. Four other teams have five triples, but none have more than that, and most have fewer. Two teams have yet to hit a single triple. Orlando hasn’t hit a ball out of the park. From a post by Jeffrey Flanagan:

“The first time the guy who scouted me for the White Sox saw me [in Brazil] he said to me, ‘All you do is hit triples. You never hit home runs,'” Orlando said, smiling.

See? Scouting is easy! Orlando was scouted as a triples machine. He’s blossomed into something of a triples machine. No matter how much longer this goes on, Orlando’s already made history. Few 29-year-old rookies can say that, but now that we know Orlando’s already cemented his place, how much more might’ve been possible to do? It’s time for this article to get stupid.

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For better or worse, the Kansas City Royals have garnered a fair amount of attention to start the season. On the better side of the ledger, the team now sits at 10-3, with the second best record in the American League behind only the 11-2 Detroit Tigers. Even finishing a game over .500 the rest of the way would give the team a solid 85-win season, and the Playoff Odds here at Fangraphs give the Royals a better than one in three chance at making the playoffs. While those might not seem like great chances, they are sixth in a league where five teams make the playoffs and they are already ahead of preseason darling Cleveland Indians.

The ugliness that consumed the weekend for Kansas City certainly is not drawing the type of attention a team should hope to receive, but perhaps lost amid the beanings and the yelling and the pointing, there was a significant and rare day for the Royals as Salvador Perez did not start on Sunday. Erik Kratz took his place, although Perez did not receive the day off as he entered the game in the seventh inning and caught the final two innings behind the plate.

This early in the season, a catcher making most if not all a team’s starts is not overly unusual. Perez started the first 11 games, but off days early on meant that he received two days of rest during that time. While his games and plate appearances are near the top of the catcher Leaderboard and his 107 innings behind the plate are second in baseball to Derek Norris’ 111 thus far, it is too early to get alarmed about his workload thus far. It is the upcoming workload that should be concerning.
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On Friday, to the surprise of absolutely no one, the Chicago Cubs promoted Kris Bryant to the big leagues. With the service time shenanigans out of the way, it was abundantly clear that Bryant that he was their best third baseman, so they summoned him from Iowa to help their team win. Today, the Cubs have also pulled shortstop Addison Russell up from Triple-A, where he’ll join Bryant, Starlin Castro, and Anthony Rizzo to form something close to the infield of their dreams.

Unlike with Bryant’s promotion, however, this one didn’t appear imminent, nor has Russell necessarily forced his way into the big leagues. While everyone agrees that he’s one of the best prospects in baseball, it’s less clear that he’s finished developing in the minor leagues, and is ready to step in and produce from day one the way Bryant is. In total, Russell has just under 1,100 minor league plate appearances, and only 321 of those have come above A-ball.

He was excellent in Double-A last year, hitting for power and making contact, but his walk rate eroded, a perfectly natural thing to expect from a 20-year-old facing advanced pitching for the first time. That trend has continued in the first few weeks in Triple-A this year, as he’s drawn just one walk in his first 47 plate appearances. Of course, a middle infielder who can hit for some power and avoid striking out already does enough to justify his spot in the line-up, so even if Russell is still in the overly-aggressive phase of his development, that doesn’t immediately preclude him from being a productive player in 2015.

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