Archive for Teams

There are two big stories with Jeff Samardzija right now. One is that he’s almost certain to get traded by the Cubs somewhere around the deadline, as a contender looks for a major rotation boost. The other is that Samardzija is currently 0-4 in ten starts with a 1.46 ERA. Of course, we pretty much never talk about win/loss record, and of course a pitcher on the Cubs is going to have a worse record than he deserves, but for as silly as this bit of trivia is, it really is astonishing. In Samardzija’s ten games, the Cubs have scored 20 runs.

Because of those two things going on, relatively few people might have noticed a third thing going on. Samardzija remains a quality starter, but ever so quietly, he’s changed his profile. The starter version of Jeff Samardzija in 2014 isn’t the starter version of Jeff Samardzija from the two previous years, and in particular, this version of Samardzija doesn’t get as many strikeouts, even though he still has all his stuff. Last year, he was tied in strikeout rate with Shelby Miller and Gio Gonzalez. This year he’s even with Kyle Lohse. At the moment, Samardzija is one of the most talked-about pitchers in baseball, and so we might as well talk about why he isn’t quite what he was. It’s not that he’s a worse pitcher. It’s that he’s a different pitcher.

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We’re coming up on Memorial Day, and Mike Moustakas is hitting .152/.223/.320. That’s going to be his line for a while, because the Royals just optioned him out to Triple-A, and are going to hope he remembers how to hit against minor league pitching.

On the one hand, a case could be made that Moustakas’ performance was unsustainable, and a little positive regression would get him back to prior levels. After all, his walk and strikeout rates are right in line with career norms, and his .168 ISO is actually close to a career high. His overall line has been sabotaged by a .155 BABIP, the lowest in baseball for any player with 130 or more plate appearances. While BABIP for hitters has a wider range of true talent levels than BABIP for pitchers, no Major League player is going to run a sub-.200 BABIP for any real length of time. Given a longer leash, Moustakas’ numbers would have improved.

But let’s not kid ourselves; this isn’t just a small-sample BABIP problem. Over the last calendar year, Moustakas has hit just .227/.279/.368, putting up a 75 wRC+ that is only acceptable for an Andrelton Simmons-level defender. For his career, spanning over 1,600 plate appearances, Moustakas has an 80 wRC+. Even regressing Moustakas back to his career norms doesn’t make him good, and it’s not like Moustakas holds no responsibility for that .155 BABIP to begin with. In fact, his career is basically a case study in how to run a really low BABIP.

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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.

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Twitter user and probably good person Cory Little brought something to my attention the other day. The San Francisco Giants were playing a game in Colorado, and, following a somewhat ordinary looking sequence of events, from the top of the fifth inning:

• Brandon Hicks flies out
• Brandon Crawford singles
• Tyler Colvin doubles
• Madison Bumgarner strikes out
• Gregor Blanco triples
• Hunter Pence singles
• Pablo Sandoval strikes out

Three-run inning for San Francisco. Three two-out runs. The Giants took the lead, though they’d ultimately lose on a walk-off. What’s interesting isn’t the sequence, as it’s presented. What’s interesting is the sub-sequence. Let’s zoom in on the Bumgarner strikeout. The six pitches:

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Justin Verlander has a 3.55 ERA. Seems a little strange to be worried about a pitcher with a 3.55 ERA. But, a few things, about that ERA:

1. it is worse than some of his old ERAs
2. a league-average ERA is lower than it used to be
3. ERA, really?

There’s concern, and the concern is legitimate. Okay, so you go a step beyond ERA. You look at FIP. Verlander’s FIP is even lower than his ERA! ERA takes a long time to stabilize, but FIP can take a while, too, on account of how much it depends on dingers. Verlander, so far, hasn’t given up too many dingers, but let’s use a stat we just introduced on Tuesday to show why Verlander is at the root of much angst.

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Baseball is a presentation. It’s a thing that is part of our lives, but isn’t our lives. It lies in the world of the else. It’s theater, it’s drama, it’s entertainment. Because of this, we tend to romanticize it some. This is a totally normal response. We pull for teams, we root for certain guys, we sometimes wish others would fail. Just like any drama, there are heroes and villains and fools and underdogs. Every story has characters and every character has an archetype.

I’ve written about labels in baseball in the past. It’s a subject that interests me. Labels are just like any other word really, they only have meaning because we say they do. The thing you are looking at isn’t really a computer screen; it’s a thing we call a computer screen because we needed to call it something, so we picked that. We couldn’t call it a dog because we already named something else a dog. Words are placeholders, they are helpers. There’s nothing intrinsic about the words computer or screen beyond the value and definitions we place on them. I’d go deeper into this, but it would probably end with me telling you that you’re just a battery fueling the system of our robot overlords. Plus, I need to start talking about baseball.

The idea of a workhorse pitcher has been around the game for some time. You perhaps have read an article or a hundred articles about the death of the workhorse pitcher — how the days of Seaver and Carlton and Feller are over, how our pitchers are now babies and/or being babied. The reasons for this phenomenon are fairly clear and aren’t something I’m terribly interested in discussing at the moment, but the basic facts are true. Pitchers are pitching less innings than they used to. Because of this shift, certain pitchers who do perform at a greater frequency are still revered.

And this isn’t without good reason. We know that the ability to pitch a good deal of innings is a valuable skill. It keeps the pressure off the bullpen, and helps teams keep the amount of pitchers they need to use during a season low. High-volume pitchers are usually good performers as well, as even a pitcher with the rubberiest arm wouldn’t go that many innings if he was always getting lit up by the fifth. There are a lot of useful skills a pitcher can have, durability is one of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Last off-season, the Red Sox made Stephen Drew a qualifying offer, giving him a chance to return for 2014 with a $14.1 million salary. He turned it down, and sought a multi-year offer in free agency instead. No offers came, and the Red Sox moved on. They brought Xander Bogaerts to camp as their regular shortstop, and gave Will Middlebrooks a chance to reclaim the starting third base job. While Boras made noise about the problems with the qualifying offer system, he continued to suggest that Drew’s market would emerge once the draft occurred and the attached compensation pick went away. The draft will be held in two weeks, and so Drew could have signed with any club as a “true free agent” 16 days from now.

Instead, today, he essentially accepted the qualifying offer from the Red Sox, taking a pro-rated version of the $14 million salary he turned down seven months ago. Once he’s ready to resume facing live pitching, Drew will presumably once again take over as the Red Sox shortstop, with Bogaerts shifting back to third base, and Middlebrooks serving as depth or a trade chip once he returns from the DL.

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On Monday night, I sat down to watch a presumed pitchers duel featuring successful AL West starters Garrett Richards and Dallas Keuchel, which I suppose says something about both the 2014 baseball season to this point and me as a person. Richards, who’d entered the game with a top-10 FIP in baseball, disappointed, needing 27 pitches to get through a three-run first inning. He managed to avoid a disaster and actually stuck around through seven innings, but allowed 12 base runners, five runs and a mere lone strikeout, if whiffing Chris Carter even counts. I’m sure there’s a good starter in there, but being as this was the first time I’d had the opportunity to really watch him this year, I haven’t seen it yet.

And Keuchel? Well, I’m fairly certain this is the first time we’ve ever written about Keuchel on the main page of FanGraphs. He shut down the Angels on two runs over 8.2 innings for what was very nearly his second career shutout, five days after shutting out the Rangers for his first career shutout. After entering the season with a 5.20 career ERA in 239 innings, he’s now got a 2.92 ERA over the first 61.2 innings of his 2014 — numbers emphatically backed up by a 2.81 FIP and 2.68 xFIP. That xFIP is No. 5 in baseball, tied with Zack Greinke, just ahead of Johnny Cueto and Jon Lester; his swinging-strike percentage is No. 13, right in between Madison Bumgarner and Corey Kluber.

You know what? I think we’re finally going to have to talk about Dallas Keuchel. Read the rest of this entry »

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
This independent league find has always been old for his levels, but he has legitimate stuff and deception.

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The best player in baseball so far has been Troy Tulowitzki. He made it to 4 WAR before any other player made it to 3 WAR. Tulowitzki isn’t the entire reason why the Rockies have been a pleasant surprise, but he’s more responsible for their success than any other player is responsible for his own team’s success, and as long as Tulowitzki is able to stay on the field, he ought to resemble an MVP candidate. Healthy Tulowitzki is always an MVP candidate.

Let’s break that WAR down a little bit. As the best player in baseball, Tulowitzki has been the best hitter in baseball. It’s true that he spends half his time in a hitter’s paradise, but we have numbers that adjust for that, and the adjustment is built into the fact. The most conspicuous part of Tulowitzki’s hot streak has been his offensive productivity. You don’t just overlook a .764 slugging percentage. But another thing that’s true is that Tulowitzki has been among the best defenders in baseball. He’s on track for a career-best UZR. He’s already at a dozen Defensive Runs Saved, after finishing last year at +6. We’ve long known that Tulowitzki is a good defensive shortstop, but thus far he’s been out of his mind, just as he’s been at the plate. So one wonders: just what has he been doing?

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