Archive for Teams

As of March 16th of this year, everything was decidedly not sweetness and light for Boston right-hander Joe Kelly. On that day, he recorded his third (and ultimately final) start of spring training, over the course of which he conceded three runs in just 2.2 innings, bringing his spring ERA to 11.05. Worse yet, he was compelled to leave that start due to biceps tightness in his biceps (i.e. the place where that kind of tightness is most commonly found). The outlook was sufficiently grim that managing editor Dave Cameron was forced to publish a post here considering other starting possibilities for the Boston Red Sox.

Following a retroactively dated trip to the disabled list and a pair of minor-league spring-training appearances, Kelly made his season debut on Saturday. It’s hard to know what Kelly’s expectations were or what the organization’s were, but “low-ish” is an objectively reasonable assumption. If nothing else, there had to be concerns regarding Kelly’s endurance. Of the two appearances he’d made since leaving his spring start with an injury, his highest pitch count was 78. “Ideally he’d have another outing to build arm strength before an MLB game,” John Farrell said in the presence of Providence Journal reporter Tim Britton. That ideal scenario did not become a reality. Instead, Kelly’s next appearance was Saturday’s.

There were reasons, in other words, to expect the worst for Joe Kelly’s start on Saturday at Yankees Stadium. In reality, however, Kelly’s results from that start were actually the best. Not the best in every sense of the word, but certainly among the best so far as Kelly’s major-league career is concerned. He allowed just one run over 7.0 innings. He posted the lowest single-game FIP (41 FIP-) of all his starts ever. And another thing he did was to surpass his previous single-game strikeout mark. Previous to Saturday, he’d recorded six strikeouts in a single game on seven different occasions. On Saturday, however, he produced eight strikeouts (i.e. two more than ever before).

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote a piece looking at minor league players who saw stark decreases in the number of pitches they saw inside the strike zone. My analysis was inspired by recent research by Rob Arthur that suggested drops in Zone% can be early predictors of a breakout. Essentially, Arthur found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. By his theory, a pitcher knows a good hitter when he sees one, and chooses to approach him with caution. So when pitchers change their approach, it’s often because the hitter’s gotten more talented.

One of the hitters who jumped to the top of my list was Richard Shaffer, a third baseman in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. Shaffer spent the entire 2014 season in Double-A Montgomery, where he hit an uninspiring .222/.318/.440. Although he hit for a good amount of power last year, the rest of his game left a lot to be desires. KATOH wasn’t thrilled with this lack-luster season — especially his elevated strikeout rate– and gave him just a 50% chance of even reaching the major leagues. Here’s a look at my system’s full break-down of Shaffer’s odds.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’d think that here in 2015, alongside our flying hoverboards and pill-based meals, we’d have finally eradicated the myth of “lineup protection.” The idea that having a dangerous hitter on deck would give the pitcher incentive to challenge the current batter with hittable pitches lest he walk him and put a man on for the better hitter may make sense in theory, but in practice it’s been proven wrong in an endless stream of studies, dating back to at least 1985.

But as I’ve watched the first week of games, it keeps coming up on broadcasts, seemingly endlessly. It’s not worth worrying about whether a great hitter has someone dangerous behind him — that hasn’t stopped Andrew McCutchen or Giancarlo Stanton or Robinson Cano in recent years — and it’s not worth worrying about whether the hitters in front of those great hitters get more hittable pitches. It’s been definitively proven that either there’s no effect at all or, if there is one, it’s so imperceptibly small and clouded by other variables that there’s no meaningful gain to be had from it.

It’s certainly not my intention today to give you yet another study on why lineup protection is terribly overrated in the traditional sense. What’s more interesting today is that we’re seeing, at least in one case in the early going, a different kind of lineup protection. Read the rest of this entry »

After an arbitrator ruled ten days ago that Josh Hamilton had not violated his drug treatment program following an alleged drug relapse, it looked like the Angels would be forced to pay him the rest of the roughly $83 million he is owed over the last three years of his contract. Now, however, it appears that the Angels are determined to do whatever they can to try to escape from the rest of Hamilton’s contract.

Before the Angels’ home opener on Friday evening, the team’s owner, Arte Moreno, spoke with the media. As one might expect, the discussion eventually turned to Hamilton, with a reporter asking Moreno whether the Angels would welcome Hamilton back to the team when he had recovered from his shoulder injury. Somewhat surprisingly, Moreno responded, “I will not say that.”

Instead, Moreno suggested that the team was exploring the possibility of cancelling the rest of Hamilton’s contract. As Moreno explained to reporters, “We have a contract with Hamilton and that contract has specific language, that he signed and that was approved, that said he could not drink or use drugs.”

The Major League Baseball Players Association quickly responded to Moreno’s comments on Friday evening:

“The MLBPA emphatically denies Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno’s assertions from earlier today that the Angels had requested and received the approval of the Union to insert language into Josh Hamilton’s contract that would supersede the provisions of the Joint Drug Agreement and/or the Basic Agreement. To the contrary, the collectively bargained provisions of the JDA and the Basic Agreement supersede all other player contract provisions and explicitly prevent Clubs from exactly the type of action Mr. Moreno alluded to in his press comments today.”

So who is right? And what are the odds that the Angels could terminate the rest of Hamilton’s contract?

Read the rest of this entry »

Performances are magnified in October and April. Everyone watches the playoffs with greater focus, and in April everyone is starved for baseball leading to massive consumption and potential over-analysis. Carlos Beltran has had little difficulty delivering in October, with 16 home runs and a .333/.445/.683 line in 219 postseason plate appearances, but this April, coming off his worst season in 15 years, increased scrutiny is coming for the soon-to-be 38-year-old. In the second year of his three-year, $45 million contract, whether Carlos Beltran will be able to produce is a question without an easy answer.

In each of the last two games, Carlos Beltran has come to the plate for the New York Yankees late in the game, trailing by one or two runs with runners in scoring position. On Wednesday, with the Yankees down 3-1, Beltran came to the plate with the bases loaded against Brett Cecil with nobody out. A wild pitch advanced all the runners a base leaving men on second and third. He could not check his swing on a 2-2 offspeed offering.
Read the rest of this entry »

If someone asked you to guess which right fielder provided the most value on the defensive side of the ball last year, the only logical answer is Jason Heyward. Heyward was so far above his compatriots that you almost wonder if he was simply not supposed to be a right fielder and that Fredi Gonzalez’s lineup card handwriting was somehow confusing the players and sending them to the wrong positions.

Heyward posted 32 defensive runs saved and a 24.1 ultimate zone rating in 1317 innings in right field. No one else was even in the ballgame, but if you had to guess who was second, it might be a little more difficult. Enter Kevin Kiermaier. Kiermaier’s 14 DRS and 16 UZR in right field landed him at second on a list of right fielders sorted by DEF, which is UZR and the positional adjustment.

DEF is a cumulative statistic, meaning more opportunities can lead to higher numbers. Heyward’s DEF was 17.3 and Kiermaier’s was 13.3, but Kiermaier played just 526.1 innings in right field last year. If you convert those marks to a rate statistic, say UZR/150, then Kiermaier rockets up to an insane 56.6 UZR/150 while Heyward settles just above 20. By the numbers, Kiermaier was the most dazzling defender we saw in right field last year.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Monday’s “Opening Day Staff Survey,” Dave said the storyline he was most looking forward to this season was, “Breaking in young pitching prospects as relievers.” This was a little bit vague, but he elucidated on it further later that day when he recorded his weekly podcast with Carson. If you skip to the 30-minute mark, we get to the heart of the issue:

“Earl Weaver used to do this all the time with his relievers back in the 70s, but he broke them in as long relievers; we didn’t really have these one-inning specialists that they have today. So you’d break in these young pitchers, but they’d go two, three, four innings. They’d have to face hitters multiple times, they’d have to work on multiple pitches, they’d have to pace themselves a little bit. To me, that’s a little bit different than breaking in a guy as a ninth-inning guy or as an eighth-inning guy and telling him to throw as hard as possible for 15 pitches.”

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve already read about the stuff being tried in an effort to improve baseball’s pace of play. You’ve already read so much of it you’re probably already tired of reading it. Sorry. Pace of play is a relatively boring subject, when compared to everything that happens in between the various delays and stoppages (i.e. baseball). But, hey, here’s something: last year, the median game duration was 3:07. So far this year, 2:58. Maybe that means something. Maybe all that means is it’s been just a few days. Don’t know, but, forget the macro. This is about the micro.

Among the new rules implemented: batters must keep one foot in the box. A candid Bud Selig:

“A guy gets in the batter’s box, ball one, and now he’s adjusting all this crap he has on,” Selig said. “And I’m thinking to myself watching the game, ‘What is he adjusting? He hasn’t swung the bat.’ ”

Bud Selig is very old, but that’s something I myself would’ve said, with the same terminology. Baseball has been littered with hitters who have to meditate between every pitch, and perhaps the worst offender has been Troy Tulowitzki. Back in 2008, Tulowitzki averaged 20.5 seconds between pitches. That subsequently rose every year, to last season’s 27.9. Tulo, like other hitters, would explain it as a habit. Part superstition, part taking a breather, part thinking things through. But Tulo wasn’t always like this. He grew into it. When he worked faster, he was an excellent player. He’s always been an excellent player, but his is a frustrating trend.

So how has he been changed? How has Tulowitzki responded to a new rule that addresses one of his quirks? We’ve got games, now. Games mean data.

Read the rest of this entry »

When discussing contract extensions like the four-year $27 million deal with two team options the Pirates signed with Josh Harrison, especially for those players three years or more away from free agency much of the focus is on how many free agent seasons a team has purchased by offering a substantial guarantee. The Miami Marlins and Chicago White Sox each received three free agent years from Christian Yelich and Adam Eaton, respectively. The New York Mets received one free agent season from Juan Lagares, and the Minnesota Twins did not receive any free agent years from Brian Dozier when they signed his extension. The Pirates have bought potentially three years of free agency with a relatively small guarantee, but given Harrison’s age and track record prior to 2014, those years will not likely be as valuable as those for teammates Andrew McCutchen and Starling Marte.

The recent contract extensions for players with between three and four years and in their first year of arbitration have incredibly wide variance.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the winter, the Padres changed over almost their entire roster, turning an also-ran into a contender with a flurry of moves that borrowed heavily from the team’s future. The current roster is good enough to be a legitimate Wild Card threat, but despite some big name pieces at the top of the roster, San Diego is still rolling with a tandem of Alexi Amarista and Clint Barmes at shortstop. Unsurprisingly, A.J. Preller is looking to change that.

The #Padres and aggressive A.J Preller still aren't done dealing. They are now scouring the shortstop market, teams say.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) April 7, 2015

Significant trades are pretty rare in April, but Preller already defied the odds by getting the Braves to surrender the best closer in baseball on the eve of Opening Day, so let’s put aside the fact that most teams aren’t likely going to want to move a quality shortstop right now and see if we can find a fit for the Padres. After all, we don’t need to look for an All-Star to find someone better than what San Diego has at the moment.

The Options

Read the rest of this entry »