Archive for Teams

As we creep up on the beginning of May, the Milwaukee Brewers have the best record in baseball. At 19-7, they’ve thrust themselves squarely into playoff contention, even if the pre-season projections mostly saw them as a third wheel in a difficult division; their early success combined with the struggles of their direct competition have opened the door for the Brewers to make a real run at the postseason. As Jeff noted two weeks ago, it doesn’t even matter all that much that our projections still aren’t that bullish on their future performance, because the cushion they’ve created with a strong first month of the season gives them plenty of room to regress and still be in contention.

Which is a good thing, because there’s almost certainly some pretty harsh regression coming the Brewers direction; one of the core foundations of their strong start has been a remarkable performance from their bullpen.

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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.

Raul Mondesi, SS, Kansas City Royals (Profile)
Level: High-A   Age: 18   Top-15: 3rd   Top-100: 46th
Line: 89 PA, .304/.382/.430, 1 HR, 9 BB, 23 K

Summary
One of the game’s top shortstop prospect is holding his own against much older players.

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During their time together, much was written about Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, and the idea of lineup protection. In theory, by having Fielder right behind him, Cabrera would get more hittable pitches and hittable fastballs. Certainly, Cabrera’s offensive game didn’t suffer, and when Fielder went away, much more was written about the idea of losing lineup protection. Would Cabrera be pitched around, with an inferior threat behind him? In the very early going in 2014, there were half-humorous observations that Cabrera’s rate of pitches in the strike zone actually went up. That is, by losing his protection, Cabrera wound up in a better spot, and therefore the idea of protection is nonsense.

But there’s something interesting there. Pitch patterns, given a good-enough sample, can reveal something about opposing scouting reports. If Cabrera had seen more strikes with Fielder on deck, perhaps that would suggest that Fielder was serving as protection. Josh Hamilton doesn’t get a lot of pitches in the strike zone, because teams know to make him chase. Marco Scutaro gets a lot of pitches in the strike zone, because teams know not to be too afraid. What if — what if — teams pitched to Miguel Cabrera as if they weren’t that afraid of him? That would be crazy, right? Wouldn’t that be crazy?

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The Royals, as you most likely know, are something far from a powerful team. It took them until April 9 to hit their first homer of the year, an Alex Gordon shot that likely wouldn’t have made it out of any ballpark in the big leagues had it not been wind-aided. It took them until April 15 to hit their second. Even now, 24 games into the season, they have only 10, four coming in the span of a week from Mike Moustakas, who has just 13 total hits — and a .159/.213/.354 line — all year. They have as many homers as a team as Jose Abreu does on his own. Their isolated power is .001 better than that of the Mets, and is in shouting distance of the worst mark we’ve seen in decades. They’re on pace for 67 homers. No one has hit fewer than 70 since the 1991 St. Louis Cardinals, who had only Todd Zeile break into double-digits with 11.

This isn’t a surprise. The Royals hit the fewest homers in the American League last year, and they tied with Minnesota for the fewest in 2012. This wasn’t built to be a powerful team, and it’s not.

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Last year, the St. Louis Cardinals scored nearly five runs per game and bashed their way to the World Series. Okay, the pitching helped too, but the 2013 Cardinals were far better at scoring runs than any other NL team — the Rockies were #2 in the NL in runs scored, but were still 77 runs back — and that was their competitive advantage. And then, over the off-season, they replaced Pete Kozma with Jhonny Peralta, which is about as large of an offensive upgrade at a position as any team made over the winter. Sure, they lost Carlos Beltran, but he was replaced by Matt Adams, and swapping out David Freese for Kolten Wong didn’t appear to be a significant offensive downgrade.

The 2014 Cardinals aren’t exactly the same team as the 2013 Cardinals, but this is more of a tweaked line-up than an overhauled one, and the general core remains the same. And yet, after finishing third in the majors in run scoring last year, St. Louis currently finds themselves 28th in the majors this year, and has hit so poorly that the team has already made a few adjustments to their roster. So, what’s going on in the Gateway City?

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As I write this, it’s still early in the 2014 regular season. But, as I write this, Ervin Santana has one of baseball’s better adjusted ERAs. He has a top-five adjusted FIP and a top-10 adjusted xFIP. He has a top-10 strikeout rate, an upper-level strikeout/walk ratio and a top-five contact rate allowed. He’s been absolutely dominant against right-handed hitters, and he’s been only slightly less dominant against left-handed hitters. Santana was late to sign — and it took some injuries to get him to Atlanta — but through a handful of starts, Santana has demonstrated a new level of ability.

And, looking back, perhaps we were tipped off. Think about how you used to think about Ervin Santana. He was homer-prone — in your head and in the numbers — and he was an example of a fastball/slider starting pitcher. He never mastered a third pitch, so he never frequently threw a third pitch. And while his slider was good enough for him to get by, the limited repertoire set him a lower ceiling. Santana, we assumed, was a known entity. Then we heard something at the end of December.

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Don’t look now, but the Minnesota Twins lead the major leagues in runs scored per game. The Minnesota Twins — with a line-up featuring the likes of Chris Colabello, Pedro Florimon, Kurt Suzuki, Aaron Hicks, Josmil Pinto, and Trevor Plouffe — are scoring 5.52 runs per game in a month where Joe Mauer has been kind of terrible. On the list of amazing things to happen this April, this has to rank near the very top. And the way they’re scoring runs is perhaps just as surprising.

When you think of organizations that have committed to a patient approach at the plate, you probably think of the Red Sox, Yankees, A’s, and Indians; clubs with long track records of emphasizing on-base percentage and working counts. You probably don’t think of the Twins; over the last three years, Minnesota’s hitters rank just 24th in OBP and are tied for 16th in walk rate. Even with a franchise player like Joe Mauer, taking pitches and getting on base hasn’t really been a point of emphasis for the Twins, and Mauer found himself surrounded by the likes of Ben Revere, Ryan Doumit, Alexi Casilla, and Danny Valencia.

Those four are all gone now, however, and the new Twins don’t look much like the old Twins. Their 12.9% walk rate leads the majors, and their .354 OBP ranks second only to the Colorado Rockies. The Twins are basically walking their way into wins, and it looks like it might very well be be design.

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Just when you think he’s finally going to fade into oblivion, Daisuke Matsuzaka just saunters back into the picture. Once again, he’s with the New York Mets, but this time it’s in the brand new role of closer. Just one day after being mentioned by Mets manager Terry Collins as a potential closer candidate, Matsuzaka saved the first game of his career. Given his mix of pitches, it’s not a role that one would expect him to have.
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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
Formerly an all-or-nothing power hitter, the early returns on Gallo’s 2014 show him to be combining his once-in-a-generation power with an increasingly sound approach at the plate.

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From Michael Wacha’s start Wednesday night in New York, there might be something to learn about the notion of a pitcher either having it or not having it on a particular day. Conventional wisdom is that pitchers have good days and bad days, and sometimes a guy just doesn’t feel it from the start. Through three innings against the Mets, Wacha had nine strikeouts out of a possible 12. In the fourth inning, Wacha had one strikeout out of a possible eight. In other words, Wacha went from doing something historically great to struggling to find the zone, in a matter of minutes. Reality is that a pitcher can find or lose his feel between pitches. How a guy looks at one minute might not mean very much with regard to how he’ll look a few minutes later on.

But while I went into this thinking I’d write about Wacha’s strikeouts, what I stumbled upon is something even more remarkable. There are more high-strikeout games now than ever before, and while Wacha’s feat was certainly unusual, it no longer feels so insane. But how Wacha actually pitched against the Mets — he didn’t really pitch like himself. Pitch mixes vary to some degree all the time, yet Wacha all but abandoned his signature.

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