Archive for Teams

Just a couple of weeks ago, the Cardinals were just behind the Brewers in the National League Central. Just over a week ago, the Cardinals pulled just barely ahead of the Brewers. Today, after taking three of four against Milwaukee, including yesterday’s 9-1 crushing, the Cardinals are five games up on the Brewers, who are actually now in third next to the Pirates. Over the last week the Brewers’ rotation has not exactly made its defenders look good.

While one could go on about the Brewers’ fall, the Cardinals are the main story. They have never really been out of it. At the beginning of the season, St. Louis was a solid favorite to win their division. Two months ago, when they were four games behind the Brewers, the Cardinals’ chances of winning the division were roughly the same as the Brewers. Today, they are overwhelming favorites.

The 2014 Cardinals are not clearly dominant in either pitching or hitting. In particular, on the offensive side they have not hit nearly as well as the 2013 team. Yet they again are poised to win the division. In many ways, the regression was predictable. But does that mean the Cardinals made mistakes when preparing for 2014?

Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody could ever accuse Kevin Towers of being anything less than bold. Few teams have been as interesting as the Arizona Diamondbacks over the last few years. Setting aside the quality of his moves, the sheer volume and often puzzling circumstances surrounding them garnered Arizona more headlines than such a middling team typically deserves.

His moves cut against the grain of prizing young, cheap talent and instead focused on a loose set of criteria, most of which was derived from the ability to play above one’s tools. It didn’t make the team better but it sure spilled a lot of ink. The problem is a simple one: a general manager’s job is to win and make money for the club, not generate think-pieces and schadenfreude. The Diamondbacks didn’t win and now Towers is out as the general manager, with the search for his replacement beginning in earnest (the list of candidates is as long as your arm.)

The Diamondbacks team  Towers inherited wasn’t a world beater, though it did claim the 2011 National League West crown. One could convincingly argue that the franchise is actually in worse shape now compared to Towers’ first day on the job. What exactly has the outgoing general manager left the next person to fill his chair? More than you might think.

Read the rest of this entry »

We can’t ever be sure exactly who a player is. Some guys are easier to project than others. Some guys have many years of data and consistent results. Guys like Hunter Pence or Ben Zobrist. Other guys have minimal data and inconsistent results. Danny Salazar is a guy like that.

Nevertheless, a large portion of what we do is try to figure out exactly who players are. We can’t have a definitive answer as to what a player’s true talent level is, but we do have data. We do have video, and we do have people inside the game with whom to converse. Let’s combine these three things and try to figure out what to make of Danny Salazar.

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Kemp has had a terrible season.

He’s been worth only 0.9 WAR — close enough within the margin of error to refer to him as a “replacement-level player” — and he’s being paid $21 million to do it. He was so awful in center field that the Dodgers removed him from the spot in late May despite not having a reasonable alternative. No, really, they first turned to Andre Ethier, then to Scott Van Slyke, then to Yasiel Puig — then pushed Kemp to left field before eventually finding him a home in right field. His reaction to the move was so poor that he didn’t start for five consecutive games, around which he had an 0-18 streak. His agent, former pitcher Dave Stewart, couldn’t stop talking about how much he’d like to see a trade. That didn’t happen, obviously, in part because no one would reasonably want any part of his large contract.

Matt Kemp has had a great season.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a sign of the times that, when you think about Mike Zunino, you might well first think of his defense. He’s proven himself to be a tremendous receiver of pitches, and when you fold in the rest of his defensive skillset, Zunino has a lot of value, even independent of his bat. There’s evidence to suggest that Zunino is one of the people behind Felix Hernandez’s Cy Young-caliber campaign, and Zunino’s been trusted as a staff leader in his first full year in the bigs. Behind the plate, and off the field, Zunino scores high marks. At the plate, he’s also been interesting, but in more of a peculiar way.

It’s easy enough to look at the normal numbers. An 84 wRC+? He’s young, and, good thing he plays a premium defensive position. A .199 average, a .254 OBP, and a .404 slugging? This provides more insight on the sort of hitter Zunino is — he’s the picture of an over-aggressive power hitter, and you can see why his offensive profile has drawn comparisons to J.P. Arencibia. We’re familiar with this kind of hitter, and most teams probably have at least one or two of this kind of hitter. But it’s in the more minute details that Zunino’s season really stands out.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals lead the American League Central by one game over the Tigers after Detroit defeated the Indians Thursday night, 11-4 in 11 innings. The teams are even in wins with 77; the Tigers have two additional losses. The Royals are 19-19 in blowout games and 20-22 in one run games. For the Tigers, those numbers are 23-18 (blowouts) and 20-18 (one run games). Both teams have a higher winning percentage on the road and both have dominated in interleague games.

This morning, FanGraphs’ playoff odds gave the Tigers a 54.5% chance of taking the division. The Royals’ odds are at 44.4%. No other division race features such closely-divided odds. Even in the National League West race between the Dodgers and Giants — which the Dodgers lead by two games with 22 to play — FanGraphs gives LA an 83.3% chance of winning the division.

If you believe the projections, the AL Central race is as close as it can get between the Royals and the Tigers. And yet the teams have reached this point in completely different ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Kershaw is having one of those all-time seasons, the kind of season that causes you to reflect on Pedro Martinez and some of his own all-time seasons. Kershaw is running a 1.70 ERA, and a big chunk of that is due to one brief start in the middle of May. The last time Kershaw left a game with an ERA more than 2 was June 29, and while we all recognize that ERA leaves out unearned runs, including Kershaw’s unearned runs lifts his runs-allowed average all the way up to 1.75, because his unearned-runs total is 1. Kershaw’s been a human sort of perfect. Even though he missed the whole month of April, he’s almost a shoo-in for the NL Cy Young, and he’ll get a lot of attention for the league most valuable player. Clayton Kershaw has stepped it up a level, from already having been Clayton Kershaw before.

Let’s think about what makes a great starting pitcher. I mean, in the most general terms. You want a guy to have at least reasonable stuff. Unless the stuff is extremely overpowering, then it’s important to mix up speeds and it’s important to hit locations. One thinks of a lot of ace pitchers as being able to spot the baseball where they want, and absolutely, great pitchers know how to pitch around edges. Kershaw’s no exception. His command this year has been better than ever. What you don’t think of ace pitchers as doing is hurling the ball down the middle very often. That’s the danger zone, the area where you find the bulk of the meatballs. Turns out Kershaw’s not afraid of going down the pipe. Turns out Kershaw doesn’t really get hurt there very much.

Read the rest of this entry »

For much of the past two seasons, “enigma” has been an optimal word to describe Rangers pitching prospect Cody Buckel. Formerly a performance prospect extraordinaire who dominated the A-ball levels as a teenager, he suddenly lost all sense of the strike zone in 2013, walking 35 batters in 10 2/3 innings. It’s one thing to see a pitcher totally “lose it” in this fashion, but it’s another for that pitcher to be one who originally was lauded for his exceptional polish.

With Buckel entering the 2014 season still at just 21 years of age, a second-round pedigree, and a past history of dominance, the Rangers weren’t ready to cut bait just yet. A look at his statistics this past year reveal a pitcher who wobbled through a slightly less disgraceful year than his 2013—a 5.73 ERA in 59 2/3 High-A innings, mostly in relief, a disgusting (if much improved) 19.9% walk rate, and a solid 26% strikeout rate. Instead of being essentially unplayable, Buckel is now just bad.

Or is he?

Read the rest of this entry »

Most pitchers are bad hitters, as we all know. Most pitchers look so out of place at the plate that it is a great source of both comedy and debate. Why should we continue this charade? Why should this paean to a by-gone era, propped up under a pretense of “strategy,” continue to degrade the quality of the game we all love?

That debate is better left until another day in another setting with well-established ground rules and adult supervision. Today, we can just look at the impact of pitchers hitting, specifically on their impact on the Wild Card chase.

On Tuesday night, Clayton Kershaw made more than his typical contribution to the Dodgers’ cause. Sure, he pitched brilliantly and shut down an otherwise powerful offense. But Kershaw worked his way on base against Doug Fister in the fifth inning and then “helped his own cause” by dashing from first to third on a bounding single to center field. Read the rest of this entry »

By at least one stat, Giants rookie second baseman Joe Panik is top-two at his position in the National League. Look at his numbers coming up, and this seems about what you might expect. It turns out that, while he’s had to adjust to the big leagues, much of his current success can be attributed to not changing.

Read the rest of this entry »