Archive for Teams

An important point to remember is that defensive shifting isn’t new. As much attention as the shift gets these days from broadcasts and other media, teams have been moving their defenders around for decades. What’s changed are two things: shifts now are a little more individualized, and shifts now are a hell of a lot more common than ever before, by leaps and bounds. Used to be a few guys would get shifted against. Now it isn’t even unusual to get shifted against, since it’s not like it’s only the elite hitters worth a bit of strategizing. Pull and spray tendencies, after all, are similar across the board.

It isn’t just the greats that get shifted against, which is how you end up with situations like the Pirates shifting against Brayan Pena. It doesn’t matter that Brayan Pena isn’t a good hitter — if there are ways to make him worse, any gain is a gain. It’s strategy, on the Pirates’ part, to shift against Pena. And for every strategy, there is a counter-strategy. What you’re about to observe is Brayan Pena trying to beat the Pirates’ shift, from Tuesday night. Did I already mention that Brayan Pena isn’t a good hitter? Yes, okay, good, that’s going to come up again.

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The best and the worst thing about baseball is that, during the season, it’s almost never not going on. Every single day brings a new slate of games, and if you actually step back and think about it, it’s kind of overwhelming. The Brewers are off to a hot start, at 15-6. All they have left is another 141 baseball games. The upside is that, if there’s a lousy baseball day, there could be a better baseball day right around the corner. The downside is that, if there’s an incredible baseball day, in a short amount of time it’s yesterday’s news. Baseball allows for only so much time to reflect.

Case in point: it’s Wednesday, and at this writing, on Wednesday, the Marlins and Braves have already finished a game. Because the Marlins and Braves have already played Wednesday, there’s less will to think about what the Marlins and Braves did Tuesday. But just Tuesday night — last night — the Marlins and Braves competed in a classic. As things turned out, Jose Fernandez and Alex Wood put together at least the pitchers’ duel of the season, and perhaps the pitchers’ duel of the last many seasons.

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Earlier in the week, we talked about the evolution of Zack Greinke’s pitches. Mostly the piece was about the dalliance of his slider and his cutter over his career. Left on the cutting room floor was a mini conversation we had about his curveball. It didn’t fit the narrative because it wasn’t about an adjustment he’d made. But what he said did send me on a journey through the numbers.

Turns out, Greinke’s curve — despite being his third-best pitch and owning average peripherals — improves when compared to its true peers.

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Pitching and defense are inextricably intertwined, and that shouldn’t be a controversial statement. Any pitcher who isn’t striking out 100 percent of the batters he’s facing is relying on his defense for help. Any defense can only do so much to stop an opposing offense when their pitcher is giving up an endless amount of homers and line drives. It all comes together as run prevention, which is a team effort, and it’s why we have things like FIP & xFIP and de-emphasize or totally ignore things like ERA & wins that attempt to give the pitcher all of the credit (or blame).

That being the case, sometimes it’s fun to look at ERA-FIP, which shows you the gap between the two, and is a nice rough way to look at what pitching staffs are being helped (or not) by their defenses. Ideally, the teams with the biggest gaps, in either direction, should correspond to the teams with great or terrible defenses. If you look at starting rotations in 2014, you’ll see a few things stand out. First, you’ll notice that the Diamondbacks have an ERA 2.00 runs higher than their FIP, which is probably less about defense than it is about the fact that they’re a flaming dumpster fire that, if they keep things up like this, will give me a nice juicy “this is among the worst rotations ever” topic in a few days. But among teams functioning on some plane of reality, you’ll see that the Indians are the next-worst team, with an ERA 1.62 runs higher than their FIP, and that the Braves are the best, with an ERA 1.42 runs below their FIP.

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While there’s a chance you have your own personal anecdotes, most of us are familiar with Nathan Eovaldi for one thing: He’s a starting pitcher who throws super hard. I guess that’s two things. But so far this year, he’s got baseball’s second-fastest average fastball among starting pitchers, behind only Yordano Ventura. Eovaldi has been doing this since he first reached the majors, and he’s one of those live arms on the Marlins that leads people to think the staff has enormous upside. There’s all kinds of sex appeal in a starter who can throw 98 mph.

Most people equate good velocity with good stuff. And I think good velocity leads to one of two assumptions . Either the guy is an unhittable ace, or he’s tough to hit but wild. Basically, there’s the thought that good velocity means a low contact rate, and then it’s just a matter of how many strikes get thrown. But this year, Eovaldi’s been doing something different to the extreme — pitching like a guy with a very different profile. Nathan Eovaldi has been blending Ventura’s fastball with Bartolo Colon’s approach.

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Last night, Cliff Lee dominated the Dodgers, throwing eight shutout innings, while striking out 10 batters without walking anyone. In other words, it was just your normal Cliff Lee start. For the season, Lee now has 38 strikeouts against two walks; this is just what he does. But just because we’re used to Cliff Lee’s ridiculous command doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember to appreciate it.

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The Cleveland Indians weren’t supposed to make the playoffs in 2013. They did, briefly, thanks to a 10-game winning streak to end the season. But analysts, pundits and other words for sports bloggers were not impressed enough by the Indians come-from-behind success to predict a return engagement in 2014. Maybe they’re right. As of this writing, Cleveland resides in the basement of the American League Central, but they’re also just two-and-a-half games behind the division-leading Detroit Tigers.

One thing seems certain: Some very smart people are working for Team Cleveland. In addition to their focus on those intangible things we’ve had such a hard time measuring — like manager influence and chemistry — the club has also made some smart decisions about the roster’s composition.
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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 former fifth-overall pick continues to struggle with his swing, leading to increasingly poor output as he climbs the ladder.

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Funny thing about the WAR leaderboard is, as much as it’s still very early in the season, familiar names are starting to find their places. There’s Mike Trout. Of course there’s Mike Trout. If “WAR” didn’t sound so damned good, the stat might be called Wins Below Trout, and one would reasonably expect him to lead baseball from now through the end of the year. There’s Chase Utley, and as much as the Phillies have fallen apart around him, Utley remains one of the better all-around players in baseball, despite the injuries he’s been through. There’s Troy Tulowitzki, and of course Tulowitzki is one of the elites for as long as he can stay on the field. There’s Justin Upton, who has flashes of superstardom. There’s Freddie Freeman, who’s young enough to have this much upside. There are good players, and real good players, and some early surprises, and among the early surprises is Colorado’s Charlie Blackmon.

If you read FanGraphs, you’re more than a casual baseball fan, so you’re more likely to have heard of Charlie Blackmon. Also, if you read FanGraphs, you’ve read Carson Cistulli, so you’re more likely still to have heard of Charlie Blackmon. Blackmon has long been one of Cistulli’s crushes, but the thing about Cistulli’s crushes is that he deliberately falls in love with the fringey and unheralded. Those players aren’t supposed to blossom into stars, not anywhere outside of Cistulli’s head, but here we are and we have to acknowledge what Blackmon’s been up to since winning a job with the Rockies out of camp.

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Quick answer: whenever you feel like it. Longer answer: to follow.

You’ve already had the entire weekend to forget about last week, and over the weekend, there was an incident involving Carlos Gomez and Gerrit Cole that cleared the benches and that will lead to suspensions. So you’re forgiven if you don’t remember much from Friday, but from Friday, I’d like to present to you a sequence of events. Prior to the Gomez sportsmanship incident, there was a sportsmanship incident in a game between the A’s and the Astros with Jed Lowrie and Bo Porter right in the middle.

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