Innovation doesn’t always come on the field. Innovation can invade any part of the sport, really. And innovation doesn’t always mean you are first in your field, even if that sounds wrong. If you define innovation as the introduction of something new, the Giants are constantly innovating upon their own processes.
“You always have to assess your best practices,” admitted Giants Vice President Bobby Evans this week. That includes everything from the training room to the rest room, apparently. Over the last three years, the Giants have spent time improving their facilities so that the fans and players had the best experiences possible. You might not see it easily on the field, and it’s hard to quantify how much these things help — but these changes are probably meaningful.
Matt Carpenter never swings. People with dictionaries might take objection to the use of the word “never” in that context, but relative to his peers, Carpenter essentially doesn’t remove the bat from his shoulder. In 2014, he swung at just 32.8% of the pitches that came his way, which was the lowest mark among qualified hitters by quite a bit. Brett Gardner and Jayson Werth tied for second, swinging at 36.8% of the pitches they saw last year.
Since his debut in 2011, Carpenter’s swing percentage is the lowest in baseball among batters with 1000 PA. Joe Mauer is second and nearly a full percentage point behind. No one has mastered the art of the take like the Cardinals infielder, and that passivity hasn’t hurt his ability to make contact either. Among the same group, he’s 30th in contact rate since 2011.
In fact, last year, Pablo Sandoval nearly swung at a higher percentage of pitches outside the zone than Carpenter did against pitches inside the zone. When it comes to pitches outside the zone, Carpenter’s 17.4% was two percent lower than any other hitter. At a glance, you have to assume that Carpenter almost never chases bad pitches and if he does chase one, there has to be a pretty good reason.
The other night on Twitter, I put out one of those early-February thoughts that can’t really be properly explained in a mere 140 characters: Rick Porcello is going to make more than $100 million next year, and people are going to freak out about that.
Needless to say, I received some interesting replies to that, because the second part’s pretty easy to understand. Porcello’s generally seen as a decent enough pitcher, but one who doesn’t miss bats or prevent runs like his peripherals say that he should, and he’s usually not been among the top three pitchers on his own team. (That he’s been teammates with Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, David Price, Anibal Sanchez, and Doug Fister generally gets left out of that last point.)
James Shields, who has had something like seven seasons better than Porcello’s best, just very recently couldn’t get to $80 million. Porcello’s going to top that? Well, okay then. I guess I need to back this up. Let’s run through this and see if it’s crazy. Spoiler alert: It might be crazy.
Felix Hernandez’s changeup is one of the best pitches in baseball. How can we actually know this? You could, if you wanted, look at the assigned run values. Those’ll tell you what happened on Felix’s changeups, specifically. But, those run values get complicated, since all pitches are inter-related. One pitch has an effect on another pitch, even if it’s of a different type. Yet there’s a very simple solution to this. How do we know Felix’s changeup is amazing? Felix is amazing, and he uses his changeup a third of the time. So it stands to reason the latter has a lot to do with the former.
A year ago, I was talking to a major leaguer, and when we somehow got to the topic of Henderson Alvarez, the player remarked that Alvarez seemed like he was one little tweak away from becoming a superstar. That much is easy to understand — Alvarez is still very young and he still throws very hard, and all of his pitches have life. It’s easy to see the upside in Alvarez’s repertoire. Maybe he’ll never reach his ceiling, but because of his ability, his ceiling is higher than almost all others.
I was reminded in my chat earlier today that Alvarez has something in common with Felix. Actually, he has a lot of things in common with Felix. That would be another indication of Alvarez’s upside. If you’ve watched Alvarez, and thought to yourself he has an ace’s arsenal of pitches, you haven’t been wrong. He just hasn’t yet made the most of it.
The Giants were left at the altar by a couple of high profile free agents this offseason and did their best to improve the roster in different ways. Listen to Brian Sabean talk before the FanFest this weekend, and what they ended up doing was look at ways to “deepen the roster.”
That collection of names may not lead the Giants into the next decade, but the veterans are mostly capable of league-average (or so) work. That’s impressive depth, actually. Given that there’s a 65% likelihood that two starters are on the disabled list at the same time on the average team — and this team may be more likely than most to have starters get injured, given their collective age — it’s good that the Giants score well on our depth charts in different ‘depth’ metrics.
Below, see how the Giants rank when it comes to innings expected from their sixth and seventh starters, projected Wins Above Replacement from those slots, and WAR per 200 innings pitched from their sixth and seventh starters. Generally, the Giants look like a top-five team when it comes to starting rotation depth.
After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Philadelphia Phillies. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Batters
Were one to construct a Venn diagram depicting (in one set) those individuals who derive pleasure from baseball analytics and (in another set) those who employ the phrase “hot mess” with some frequency, one would likely find that the circles occupied by those sets don’t overlap. Largely, that, because the former demographic is composed mostly of 18- to 34-year-old males; the latter, Southern women who’ve been dead for half a century.
Were they to overlap, however, every one of those individuals who occupied both sets would feel compelled to describe the present iteration of the Phillies as a “hot mess” — for reasons that are illustrated by the ZiPS projections below. There are multiple examples of why, although the presence of Ryan Howard remains the most illustrative: with no fewer than two years and $60 million remaining on his contract, the 35-year-old Howard is projected to record a -0.1 WAR in 449 plate appearances.
Seems we’ve been talking about the Cubs more than usual this offseason. Which makes sense — the Cubs are really interesting right now. They’re really interesting right now, and it’s been a while since they’ve been interesting at all. It’s finally their turn. Of course we’re going to talk about them more than, say, the Mets or the Rangers. Sorry, Mets and Rangers.
Bullpens are all the rage in today’s MLB. Starting pitchers are being asked less and less to work deep into games, and so the importance of having multiple bullpen weapons to work the final few innings is at an all-time high. Used to be you’d hear about a team that “played eight inning games.” A team like the Yankees could let out a sigh of relief when they entered the ninth with a lead, because they had Mariano Rivera. Last year, we saw the emergence of the team that played six innings games, as the Royals let out their collective sigh of relief with a lead in the seventh inning as they watched Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland toy with hitters for three innings to close out games.
Everyone would like to have their own version of the Royals’ three-headed monster in the back of their bullpen, which brings us to the back end of the Cubs bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s safe to say that Dustin Pedroia has never been lacking for confidence. And remember, Pedroia’s confidence stands out among other major-league baseball players, who are already some of the most confident individuals around, by necessity. So it’s not just that Pedroia has 80-grade self-confidence; it’s that he has 80-grade self-confidence even out of the population pool limited to people with 80-grade self-confidence relative to the general populace. Pedroia is three standard deviations above the mean of those who are three standard deviations above the mean. Related: Pedroia’s 2014 ended with wrist surgery, and these days he’s feeling really good about things.
Let’s ignore, for a moment, James Shields‘ actual major-league track record in what one might consider to be big games. We’ve all had fun at his expense, and the playoff ERA over 5 makes the nickname seem ironic. What’s interesting is that Shields has pitched a lot of big games in the first place. He debuted for a team that had never won more than 70 games, and the (Devil) Rays shortly blossomed into something of a second-tier powerhouse. And when Shields got dealt, he got dealt to a team that hadn’t been good since 1994.
The idea was to return the Royals to glory, and after a promising first year, in the second Shields got to start twice in the World Series. Now Shields has joined the Padres, signing for a four-year term, and the Padres’ hope is similar to what the Royals were looking to do: the organization wants to graduate from irrelevance. The Padres haven’t even been sufficiently relevant to be a laughingstock, but a whirlwind offseason has put the team on everyone’s radar, and in that way signing Shields is in large part symbolic. You don’t sign Big Game James unless you figure he’s going to start some. These Padres ain’t the Padres no more. Not the way you knew them.
While college baseball is slated to begin in earnest this week, the Junior College circuit already has, which means 2015 draft season has arrived. Near or at the top of everyone’s JUCO agenda is College of Southern Nevada righty, Phil Bickford. The 6’4” sophomore righty is already famous after spurning the Toronto Blue Jays’ multi-million dollar advances when he opted not to sign with the club after they made him the 10th overall pick in the 2013 draft.
Bickford attended Cal State Fullerton last year, then went to the Cape Cod League over the summer where his stock skyrocketed thanks to an uptick in stuff as Kiley McDaniel pointed out in his rankings. Bickford defected to the Junior College ranks at the College of Southern Nevada to take advantage of this ascent, as it meant he would be draft eligible in 2015. Bickford pitched at South Mountain Community College in Tempe on Saturday.
Phil Bickford, RHP, College of Southern Nevada
Delivery/Command/Feel to Pitch
Bickford’s body tapers down from his broad shoulders to his narrow but muscular lower half. His long arms always seem to be a bit bent at the elbows. He is a tightly wound, muscular kid, not the sinewy, smooth, projectable type of arm that is most associated with draft eligible high schoolers. Bickford uses his lower half fairly well during the delivery, driving hard off of the mound in a way that is more power than grace. His unwinds up through the hips and generates a good amount of torque before uncorking his pitches. The arm action is short as Bickford loads his arm with a bent elbow, similar to what you might see from quarterback, before unfurling out to about a 3/4 angle at release.
There is effort to the delivery but not so much that I would label it as violent. Despite that effort, Bickford repeated his delivery fairly well, especially early on in the outing, other than a few instances in which he varied his arm angle to alter the depth of his slider. Whether that was done consciously or not I don’t know, but it always made the pitch less effective. Bickford’s fastball command was a pleasant surprise as he worked in, out, up and down at will for the first few innings.
Stuff/Projection
The stuff was down a bit from Cape League ball which makes this a good time to remind everyone that it’s not even Valentine’s Day yet and there’s four months between now and the draft for players to grow and change. Bickford’s fastball sat 90-92 and touched 94 mph for his first few innings before throttling down to 88-90 as he finished up. The four seamers lacked movement, but the two seamers had appetizing sink and run to them. Both were vicious when Bickford was spotting them on the corners at the knees, which occurred half a dozen times or so in this outing. Projecting the fastball here is tricky, as Bickford has had some pretty vast fluctuation in velocity over the past few years. It’s hard to know where it’ll be when the cement dries.
At 6’4”, 210, there’s some room for him to thicken up and get stronger but not so much that it’s going to make a world of difference. The best case scenario in my summation is for Bickford to shake off what could simply be early season rust, get back to being the mid-90s chucking howitzer scouts saw on the Cape and add enough strength to maintain that sort of velocity throughout a season as he matures. Of course as he does that, he’ll have to also maintain enough flexibility and athleticism, two things he already appears a tad short on. His physical development and the way his stuff is impacted by it will be an interesting thing to follow over the next few years.
Bickford’s slider flashed plus twice and sat between 78-81 mph with a good bit of horizontal movement but not much depth. It was a consistently average pitch until he began to fatigue in the fifth inning. His slider utilization was about what you’d expect from a 19 year-old (Bickford doesn’t turn 20 until July 10th) with pretty uniform location in the zone. He’ll have to learn to use it in various ways, first and foremost to run it away from righties in the dirt as he matures. He did try to throw one backdoor slider to South Mountain’s only lefty in the lineup but missed off the plate away. Bickford’s changeup was miles behind today, but it’s still early in every sense of the word.
Based on what I saw Saturday (hedging a bit based on past performance) my projected long term outcome for Bickford is that of a hard sinker, slider, cutter (purely an educated guess based on the way Bickford’s hand naturally interacts with the baseball) mid-rotation starter. He looked good enough for me to put a mid-to-late first round grade on him which, in what looks like a bit of a down draft, could slot him in the 12-15 range. If the velo ticks up as the spring chugs along then we could be having a different discussion. Beauty is very much going to be in the eye of the beholder come June.
CSN RHP/DH Kayden Porter sat upper 80s with the fastball and had a loopy, below average curveball. He’s just a redshirt sophomore, so there’s time for the breaking ball to tighten up. At 6’7”, 275 lbs there’s not much projecting to do on the fastball. He might be someone’s late round flier if they want to take a chance on something developing on the mound or in the batter’s box as Porter has some pop.
CSN sophomore lefty Anthony Martine touched 91 and flashed a fringe average breaking ball but, while his arm was loose, he had trouble repeating any aspect of his delivery.
