Archive for Teams

You probably enjoyed your holiday weekend. I watched a good deal of Colorado Rockies baseball, so you tell me which of us had a more productive few days. It’s difficult to remember a time where I’ve seen more incompetent baseball in such a short span. It’s not that Colorado lost three of four, because the Dodgers are a more talented team on a hot streak and it’s not fair to have to face Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke back-to-back. Rather, it’s how the Rockies looked while losing.

Three days in a row, Colorado allowed the Dodgers innings in which they batted around. In the seventh inning on Saturday, the Rockies went through three relievers and seven Dodger hitters before finally getting an out — and turning an 8-2 lead into an 8-7 squeaker. On Sunday, Brooks Brown, who is apparently a real person, entered in relief of Yohan Flande, who is also apparently a real person. Brown faced Miguel Rojas — a .238/.305/.297 hitter in parts of nine minor league seasons and a .230/.288/.246 hitter in his first big league season — with the bases loaded. He hit Rojas to force in a run.

Or, if you prefer pictures, here’s Franklin Morales throwing a slider while Wilin Rosario was expecting a pitchout: Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees just pulled a rare feat by trading Vidal Nuno to the Diamondbacks for Brandon McCarthy. Only once in the last five years has a team traded for a pitcher whose results were so out of whack with their process and peripherals. Of course, that was when the Dodgers traded a player to be named later to the Phillies for Joe Blanton in 2012, but the Yankees have a few reasons to believe that this will turn out better for them than that trade did for the Dodgers.

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We all knew Jeff Samardzija was going to get traded. We all knew Jason Hammel was going to get traded. We all knew the Oakland A’s were in the market for a starting pitcher. Perhaps, in retrospect, we should have expected some convergence of these things we knew. But I don’t think anyone expected that any team would kick start the July trading season by picking up both Cubs starters. Perhaps even fewer figured that a prospect like Addison Russell would be on the move, and I’m assuming that just about nobody could have seen a scenario in which the A’s traded Russell for a starting pitcher who wasn’t David Price.

It’s a shocking trade, one that changes the landscape in a few ways, but there’s a lot happening here, so let’s not gloss over the specifics:
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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
The SAL leader in wOBA also happens to be a catcher who should stick behind the plate.

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I’ve recently started taking golf lessons again. It’s the first time I’ve taken them in almost a decade, and in that 10 years I’ve developed a lot of bad habits. My shoulders over-rotate, my left knee collapses on the backswing, I release my wrists too early. I’m a mess, really. And working with a professional has shown me just how I got from being pretty good at something to fairly poor at it over 10 years.

It’s about creating a repeatable motion, really. Consistency is key. I can hit some dandy shots, but those are occurring less frequently. Inconsistency between rounds turn into inconsistency between holes turns into inconsistency between swings. Success comes from not only creating a good motion, but a dependable one. And getting there involves a long road of minor adjustments.

This didn’t start out as an Astros post. Technically, this started as a post about golf, but you know what I mean. I didn’t sit down to research the Astros at the outset. I was fiddling with PitchF/X numbers looking to see how pitchers were changing their positions on the rubber compared to last year. With some help from Jeff Zimmerman, I found the difference between x0 positions — essentially the horizontal position in feet where the PitchF/X cameras first pick up the ball. I sorted by the absolute difference, so that righties and lefties could be compared equally. Here’s how the top 30 shook out:
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Major League Baseball’s signing period for international prospects kicked off on Wednesday and will continue until June 15, 2015. Teams may sign players residing outside the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico who have or will turn 16 by September 1 of this year. Just a few years ago, teams were allowed to spend as much as they wanted to develop and sign international prospects. That all changed with the current collective bargaining agreement, which went into effect in 2012.

The CBA imposes bonus pool limits on international signings. The team with the worst winning percentage in the prior year receives the largest bonus pool for the next year. The team with the best winning percentage receives the smallest. The remaining 28 teams fall in between, again according to their winning percentage from the prior season. International players who are 23 years of age or older, and have played professional baseball for five or more years, are exempt from the bonus pool limits. Click here for the list of bonus pools by team, with the Houston Astros on top with $5,015,400 and the St. Louis Cardinals at the bottom with $1,866,300.

In additional to the bonus pools, MLB also assigns slot values for international prospects, even though there is no international draft. But the slot values are tradeable, and are therefore valuable for teams looking to spend more on international prospects than their assigned bonus pool would allow. A team can trade for up to 50% of its bonus pool, but it must trade for a specific slot value. For example, a team with a $4 million bonus pool can trade for up to $2 million in pool space, but it must receive in return specific slot values that add up to $2 million, or less. Click here for the list of 120 slot values assigned to each team. The Astros have the top slot value of $3,300,900 and the Cardinals have the lowest at $137,600.

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Over the last couple of years, the Padres have done some weird things. Despite being a lower revenue club, they spent a decent amount of money to have Huston Street close games, and then spent a decent amount more money to have Joaquin Benoit pitch in front of Huston Street. Instead of either extending or trading Chase Headley, they’ve done neither, and are now primed to either sell when his value is lowest or just let him leave as a free agent. They acquired and then extended Carlos Quentin, despite his health problems and their inability to offer him a designated hitter role.

All the way through, it has appeared as if the team couldn’t decide whether they were building for the future or trying to win now. They planted one foot firmly in both camps and ended up going nowhere, which is why they just fired Josh Byrnes and are looking for a new GM to provide direction to a franchise that has been swimming upstream for a while now.

Generally, firing your GM mid-season is a pretty good sign that you’re not a contender. And the Padres certainly are not. Despite having acting-GMs in place, they have a large for sale sign in the yard, and will likely be one of the more active sellers in July. But despite all this, the Padres are apparently not done being weird.

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Before a game against the Padres, I sat down with Reds outfielder Jay Bruce to talk about his frustrating season so far, divorcing process from results, the value of routine, and his hitting approach in general. The player was so eloquent that it seemed best to leave his words alone.

Eno Sarris: I read a great piece you did with Trent Rosecrans recently. I thought it was very heartfelt and honest. When you said that in the past you felt what it feels like to be lost, and that you don’t really feel that this year, and about divorcing results from process. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the lost feeling — how did you feel that was so different then?

Jay Bruce: My whole life, I had not really had a fall back on routine. I just kinda played baseball and was really good at it, but everyone here is really good at baseball. Up until I got to the major leagues in 2009, I had never struggled anywhere. I mean I hit .270 in the GCL…

And you still hit for power. [.230 ISO]

Yeah. There was never really any reason to question what I was doing or why I was doing it or why I wasn’t doing it. I just always played. Just played baseball and the results came to what I thought they should have been and what the standard I had set for myself based on performances in the past. 2009 was the first time I wasn’t performing to the level I had expected and I didn’t have something to fall back on. What now? What do I do now?

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Is that an inflammatory headline? It feels like it might be. It’s not like Jose Altuve was bad before, of course. But this is the Internet, where it’s important to entice people to click on stories, and if you’re reading this, then I’ve already won. Success! Anyway, maybe this is more of a “me” thing than anything else, but had you asked me prior to the season who the most overrated player in baseball was, Altuve’s name likely would have been mentioned. Not that Altuve was a poor player; far from it. It’s just that when you think about the reasons he was notable, the list would go something like this:

• Because he is a big league player despite his remarkably small stature
• Because he was one of the few decent players on atrocious Houston teams
• Because he made an All-Star team in his first full season
• Because he could steal bases (33 and 35 in his two full seasons) and hit around .290, which are shiny stats

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Taijuan Walker is back. It’s an unusual thing to say of a guy who was barely here in the first place, but Walker finally made his big-league 2014 debut Monday night, turning in six decent frames against the Astros. The hope is he’ll stabilize a back of the rotation left in the unstable hands of Brandon Maurer and Erasmo Ramirez. More than anything, the Seattle Mariners are just happy to have Walker seemingly past his shoulder issue. If all goes well, Walker will be starting the rest of the way, and though he’s short on major-league experience, it’s interesting to note some adjustments he flashed. Walker started for the Mariners three times in 2013; his 2014 start doesn’t fit the same patterns.

Much more will be learned, of course, over the following weeks. One start against one opponent can’t be easily compared to other starts against other opponents, and so Walker will take some time to even out. But Monday, Walker showed some differences in his pitch mix. He showed a difference in his setup. And he showed a difference in his delivery. What looks like it’s changed, for one of baseball’s very best young pitching prospects? Let’s get into a little bit of detail.

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