Archive for Teams

In one way, CC Sabathia is having the best season we’ve seen him have in years. In another, much more real way, he’s having the worst season of his long and valuable career. Baseball is a weird game sometimes.

When you look at the current ERA standings, from worst to first, a few things jump out at you. (Yes, besides, “ERA is dumb,” because for the moment this is more about what has happened than what might have happened.) You see Kevin Correia and Ricky Nolasco showing absurdly low strikeout numbers (along with Kyle Gibson, the Twins have the three lowest K% pitchers, because Twins) and you understand that pitching to contact in front of a lousy defense might not result in runs being prevented. You see a lot of high BABIP (I see you, Homer Bailey’s .385), and guys who have had a disaster start or two that inflate the number (Bartolo Colon), and guys who either can’t miss bats (John Danks) or throw strikes (John Danks) and find that the end result is poor (John Danks). As it turns out, there’s a lot of different ways to allow runs to score in Major League Baseball.

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In the early going, much of the coverage on the Rockies has centered around Charlie Blackmon’s leap from irrelevance. Overshadowed during that time has been the even better start by Troy Tulowitzki. While generally regarded as one of the best players in the game, Tulowitzki frequently goes overlooked. But his hot start has put him in position to squarely insert himself in the Most Valuable Player Award discussion.

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Twice this offseason, Joey Votto has uttered a comment that goes against the baseball orthodoxy that lineup protection is best done behind the hitter. Votto believes it is done in front of him, and is best done by Billy Hamilton.

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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
This 2013 2nd-rounder is a unique mix of skills and drawbacks.

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Pitch-pattern data can be interesting when you’re trying to spot trends or adjustments for scouting reports. Changes in pitch patterns can sometimes be revealing. Just the other day, we looked at Miguel Cabrera, and beginning in last year’s playoffs, pitchers started to challenge him with more fastballs over the plate. That trend continued into this April, as opposing teams picked up on the fact Cabrera wasn’t 100% after offseason surgery. With Cabrera not swinging like himself, pitchers often tried to blow him away. Now Cabrera’s getting back to normal, so pitchers, one figures, should soon return to their normal. Not that it’ll do them much good.

Pitch-pattern data can also be interesting and revealing when it doesn’t change. Wilin Rosario doesn’t see many fastballs, or strikes, or fastballs for strikes. What’s revealed is how people think of Wilin Rosario and his eye. The way Rosario gets pitched is perfectly justifiable, and this is an example of baseball finding its equilibrium. Yet there’s something curious I’ve noticed about Anthony Rendon. His name has come up when I’ve been researching other things.

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A common question in our chats has asked how much longer the Reds can put up with Billy Hamilton and his lousy numbers out of the leadoff slot. Hamilton was known to be a question mark coming into the year, and he got off to a putrid beginning, and all the speed in the world can’t do you any good if you can never even get down to first. Some entertained the idea of Hamilton becoming a full-time pinch-runner, figuring that was the way for him to maximize value. The questions have been coming in less frequently lately. Hamilton, since April 15, has hit .340.

That isn’t intended as evidence that Billy Hamilton is a good hitter. Before he started hitting .340, Hamilton was hitting .140, and that data’s every bit as valid. What’s becoming more clear, though, is that Hamilton’s a real player, and not just an assortment of exaggerations. Before a player arrives in the majors, it’s tempting to view them as caricatures of their strengths and weaknesses. Then big-league performance pulls everything back closer to the ordinary. Billy Hamilton played a game Tuesday that said as much as words could: he’s probably not the worst hitter in baseball. And while he’s gifted on the bases, he’s far from un-throw-out-able.

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In the grand scheme of things, raising a child that ends up being a band nerd isn’t such a terrible fate. There are a lot of worse things a kid could do with their time, and band nerds generally stay out of trouble. They are just as weird and filled with hormones as the next kid, but band kids tend to be involved in a lot of activities which keeps them under fairly-constant supervision. Band parents may have to buy a few more fundraiser candy bars or sign off on a few more field trips, but at least they are not bailing their kids out of jail.

The life of a band parent isn’t without its pitfalls however. There’s a lot of shuttling around that needs to happen, and instruments aren’t necessarily cheap. And then there are the concerts. There are so many concerts. One in fall, one around the holidays, one in the spring — along with plenty of other parades and solo competitions and jazz concerts. It has to be excruciating. But some mixture of parental love and not wanting to be seen as monsters pushes these parents to sit through these things. They don’t want to be there. Nobody does. But they are there. And all they can do is hope it goes quickly.

The Atlanta Braves is a professional baseball team. I can’t speak directly to their stance on attending children’s band concerts, but I assume they have a fairly strict policy on not leaving games that are still ongoing. I can imagine they were cursing that policy Tuesday, as they were handed 9-0 loss at the hands of the Marlins and looked fairly punchless in the process. Luckily for them, the agony didn’t have to last too long. And for that, they can thank Jose Fernandez. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re into that sort-of in-between part of the early season, the part where it’s early enough where you can see ridiculous things like Charlie Blackmon hitting .379/.425/.621 and know that the dreaded “small sample size” caveat is absolutely in play, but also to know that it’s not that early any longer and that the things we’re seeing count. Whether it’s to further inform us about a player or a team, or just to have added value and wins now that will be important later even if the current production can’t be maintained, what we’ve seen over the first month matters. It’s just up to us to decide how much it matters.

That’s where we are with the Atlanta Braves, who have somehow managed to keep their early run of insanely good pitching alive and well through the end of April. And when I say insanely good, I mean just that. Even after Alex Wood got hit hard in Miami on Tuesday night, Atlanta’s rotation ERA- is 55. Since Jackie Robinson integrated the game in 1947, the lowest rotation ERA- we have on record for a full season is 73, by three teams, including the 1997 and ’98 Braves of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz. If it’s unfair to compare a month of play to full seasons, well, then you might like to know that since the 1968 “Year of the Pitcher,” only three other teams have had a rotation ERA below 2.00 in a month of at least 25 games, as the Braves currently do. Each of those teams — the 1976 Dodgers, 1992 Braves and 2011 Phillies — had at least one Hall of Famer in the rotation or someone with a strong case to be there in the future.

That the 2014 Cardinals sit second behind the Braves on the ERA- list further shows you how early it is, that the Braves won’t continue pitching like this, and that regression is coming. Obviously. Aaron Harang and Ervin Santana aren’t going to pitch like Maddux and Smoltz all year. I imagine it isn’t shocking, breaking news that the 2014 Braves aren’t going to end up as the pitching version of the 1927 Yankees.  Read the rest of this entry »

You remember what the concerns with Austin Jackson used to be. There weren’t many questions about his defense, there weren’t many questions about his athleticism, there weren’t many questions about his ability to hit the ball hard. There were, simply, questions about his ability to hit the ball. A fine rookie season gave way to a mediocre sophomore campaign, in which Jackson posted the fourth-highest strikeout rate for a 24-year-old ever. Before 2012, Jackson worked hard to modify his swing and, most visibly, eliminate his high leg kick. He chopped a fifth off of his strikeouts, and his lifted his wRC+ by almost 50 points. Austin Jackson had been fixed, and he turned into a legitimate everyday player.

So fans knew what to credit for Jackson’s turnaround. Mechanical changes always make good sense after the fact, if a player’s been successful. Jackson had a rougher go of it in 2013, but he did keep his strikeouts down. Yet Jackson was awful in the playoffs, and he’s off to a scorching start in 2014, and he’s looked both very familiar and very different. Funny thing about those mechanical changes.

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This spring, the Colorado Rockies made the unusual decision to break camp with six outfielders. If any roster had the right personnel to overload in the outfield, it was the Rockies. Infielders Josh Rutledge, DJ LeMahieu and Charlie Culberson have plenty of utility (Rutledge did not make the club out of spring training). Backup catcher Jordan Pacheco can also play the infield corners, as can Michael Cuddyer. With Justin Morneau an uncertainty entering the season, the club probably planned on using Cuddyer at first base with some regularity. Additionally, Cuddyer, Morneau and Carlos Gonzalez can be considered injury risks. IN FACT, Cuddyer is already on the disabled list.

So we’ve covered why the Rockies could carry six outfielders: utility. But why did they want to carry them?

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