Archive for Teams

For most of the last few years, if you clicked on the Leaderboards tab here on FanGraphs, you’d find Mike Trout’s name at the very top. Today, that is not the case, as Trout has been surpassed in 2014-to-date WAR, slipping to #2 for the first time since late April. That isn’t necessarily controversial in and of itself, as it’s not that unusual for the best overall player in the game to not rate at the top of the WAR leaderboards every season, but what is somewhat controversial is the name of the player who has usurped Trout at the top of the list at this moment.

Alex Gordon, you see, is not exactly what most people think of as a superstar. He’s a corner outfielder who is hitting .286 with 13 home runs. Among 153 qualified Major League hitters this season, he’s ranked 36th in batting average, 32nd in on-base percentage, and 53rd in slugging percentage. Even using wOBA as a better evaluator of overall offensive performance, his .357 wOBA puts him in a tie for 33rd with Neil Walker and Jayson Werth. Add in park effects, and his wRC+ of 128 falls to 39th. As a hitter, he’s basically having the same season as Matt Kemp. This is the batting profile of the guy who currently leads all position players in WAR, and for many, that simply highlights the limitations of the model.

Even sabermetrically-inclined writers who live in Kanas City think this is weird.

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Somewhere along the line in their development, pitchers are instructed to try to control the running game. At younger ages, pitchers are more able to stop runners than catchers are, since the catchers aren’t very good and the runners aren’t very good. At upper levels, catchers tend to get most of the credit, and indeed catchers bear a lot of responsibility, but for the most part it’s still pitchers on whom the fate of a running game depends the most. Controlling the running game is one of the ways in which Mark Buehrle excels. It’s one of the ways in which Johnny Cueto excels. For Tim Lincecum, it’s a weakness. Nothing’s more critical for pitchers than pitching, but how you manage baserunners can grant an extra advantage or disadvantage, depending. Every little run’s important, if any run is important.

It’s a weird thing, trying to control runners on base. You don’t want to allow steals, but you do want to allow steal attempts, so that you might be able to get baserunners erased. Better for a pitcher to have one stolen base and one caught steal on his record than zero of both, because the value of a caught steal is considerably higher than the value of a successful steal. If you’re too good at controlling runners, you won’t really throw runners out. Now take a glance at this year’s leaderboard. Leading the majors in caught steals is Madison Bumgarner, with nine. Just six steals against him have been successful. Three pitchers are tied at eight caught steals. Against Drew Smyly, runners are 14-for-22. Against Max Scherzer, they’re 11-for-19. Against Hisashi Iwakuma, they’re 0-for-8.

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Javier Baez is a player who transcends ordinary prospect-dom. Not just because he possesses extraordinary skills — also because he’s a prospect in whom fans of every team might be interested. Usually, a guy on the farm or a guy just on the roster will captivate locally, but Baez is able to captivate nationally, in a way that few young players are able. He’s not quite on the level of rookie Stephen Strasburg, for whose debut the whole country turned on TV, but people want to know what Baez is going to become. And they want to know how quickly he’s going to become it. His big swings are the hitter equivalent of Strasburg’s big fastballs.

People who are interested in baseball are interested in Javier Baez. They know more about him than they know about the average young prospect. Keeping with the theme, other teams, too, seem to know more about Baez than they know about the average young prospect. Other teams have prepared for Javier Baez, just as we have as fans, and in the early going it turns out Javier Baez has been pitched pretty much exactly as you’d expect that Javier Baez would be pitched.

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Every pitcher in baseball has a primary pitch, and for almost every pitcher in baseball, that’s going to be some variety of a fastball. After the primary pitch, there will be an assortment of secondary pitches, numbering from one to a lot more than one. But not all secondary stuff is created or treated the same; there can be a trusted secondary pitch, or a decent secondary pitch, or a rare occasional secondary pitch. Clayton Kershaw‘s slider is a trusted secondary pitch. Tony Cingrani’s slider is a decent secondary pitch. You have to keep your eyes peeled for the occasionals.

Plenty of guys throw them. Let’s look at some examples! Here’s Danny Salazar throwing a terrible curveball:

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Several unusual things happened in Sunday afternoon’s game in Arlington between the Rangers and Angels. Firstly, Huston Street blew a save, his first as an Angel. Second, Mike Trout got a hit, his first in 18 at bats as he suffers through the second prolonged slump of his otherwise Troutishly MVP-calibre season. Thirdly, Trout was caught stealing for the first time in 2014.

Given Trout’s recent inexperience in reaching base safely, one might understand his urgency to make something happen for the first time in a week. Which also explains why Rangers starter Nick Tepesch had an eye on the Angels’ centerfielder, promptly picking him off first base.

Though it wasn’t a straight steal of second base, it counts as just his 13th stolen base attempt and first unsuccessful try – that’s ten fewer than noted speedster and fellow New Jersey native Todd Frazier. A number difficult to believe for a player who gets on base 40% of the time and also successfully swiped 82 bases over the two previous seasons.

The lack of stolen bases highlights a soft spot in Trout’s game this year – he hasn’t been a particularly valuable base runner. One of the fastest players (and hardest runners) in the league, Trout’s work with his feet rates as a single run above average this season, a far cry from the two Wins he added on the base paths between 2012 and 2013. In each of those years, Trout added five runs by advancing extra bases when the ball was in play while the weighted stolen base metric values and reflects his efficient theft accordingly. This season, his UBR is essentially zero.

Given his speed, reputation, and the sheer volume of his opportunities (only four players reached base safely more than Trout this season), this result is somewhat shocking. Why is Trout suddenly less effective on the bases? Or, is Trout actually less effective on the bases, or is this just expected and normal variance?

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The August waiver period can be an interesting time, because it gives you a little bit of insight into how teams around the bigs value certain players. For example, it came as absolutely no surprise that the overpriced and under-performing Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier made it through waivers, or that Cole Hamels, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg did not. It came as a bit of a surprise that Jon Niese did get through, which maybe tells you something about how other teams view his shoulder and that he’s perhaps not as valuable as Mets fans seemed to think; if the worst-case scenario is that the Mets stick you with the $16 million he has left after this year and still nobody was interested, that’s not a great sign.

For guys like Crawford, Ethier and others, their contracts were signed years ago, and obviously much has changed since then, so it’s most interesting to see how the industry reacts to players who were popular free agents just last winter, a mere eight months or so ago. While obviously not every roster move or claim is public, we know of at least one: Curtis Granderson, who signed for four years and $60 million with the Mets. Even with the desperate need for offense around the majors, Granderson, on pace for only a two-win season despite a rebound from a slow start, went unclaimed. At 33, two years off his last good season and three years away from his last great one, the risk wasn’t worth it.

This isn’t about Granderson, though; it’s about one of the other major New York signings from last winter who is off to an atrocious start in his new home and has a considerable amount of money still coming: Brian McCann, who returned from a stay on the concussion list yesterday. We don’t know if McCann has been put on waivers or if anyone would put in a claim — you imagine a rich team with catching issues like the Dodgers would at least think about it, though not necessarily do it — but isn’t it fascinating to think that if someone did claim him, the Yankees might be best off just letting him go?

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My Sunday afternoon was spent covering the Cleveland Indians and the Baltimore Orioles game at Progressive Field. In the fifth inning, something caught my eye from the press box:

Quite the double play turned by the #Orioles to kill a potential rally with two on in the fifth. Nice snag by Gausman, quick turn by Hardy.

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_ABJ) August 17, 2014

Double plays happen all the time. This one was a bit unique in that it was started by the pitcher, but it still appeared to be a pretty standard double play. Most exciting double plays are the result of a glove flip, a diving stop or a barehanded catch-and-throw. Here’s what this one looked like:

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his change-up, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. Often, those will be the same grades. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. – Kiley

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Last week, Dave wrote a little ditty about how we will probably be crowning some Los Angeles players with the Most Valuable Player Awards this season. For the National League, that means Yasiel Puig or Clayton Kershaw. And, Dave is right. Dave is usually right. Right now, Kershaw is probably the best choice. But he’s a pitcher, and he missed a month, and yada yada yada people will invent reasons to not vote for him. And Puig? Well, we know he isn’t the most popular player among the voting bloc. But Giancarlo Stanton, on the other hand, is pretty popular with just about everyone. And he is having a heck of a season too. Could he sneak in and yank the award away from the boys in blue?

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We have a pretty good idea of baseball’s best pitches. You’ve got the Aroldis Chapman fastball. You’ve got the Kenley Jansen cutter. The Adam Wainwright curveball. The Stephen Strasburg changeup. The Cole Hamels changeup. The Felix Hernandez changeup. The Corey Kluber whatever it is. The Clayton Kershaw curveball. The Kershaw slider. The Kershaw hypothetical splitter that, in my imagination, he doesn’t throw because he doesn’t need to because of his curveball and his slider. There’s no clear winner, but there are plenty of candidates, and all of them are amazing.

We don’t have as good an idea of baseball’s worst pitches. The truth is baseball’s worst pitches don’t get thrown often outside the bullpen. They’re projects in which pitchers don’t have confidence, so you don’t see them in games. But we can skip over to something related, something that might stand as a decent proxy: We have the data to identify baseball’s least-effective pitches. At least among pitches that are thrown more than once or twice a month. This is one of the uses of the FanGraphs pitch-value data, and if you set a 50-pitch minimum, the second-least effective pitch this year has been Wei-Chung Wang’s changeup. And the first-least effective pitch this year? That honor belongs to Drew Smyly.

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