Archive for Teams

The shift! It’s the hot new thing, even if it’s not necessarily a new thing. (There’s evidence Ted Williams had to deal with it decades ago.) Some teams use it a lot, and some not so much, but it’s impossible to argue that it hasn’t had an increasing impact on the game over the last few years. It may not be the only reason that major leaguers have a .212 BABIP and .230 wOBA on ground balls so far this year as opposed to .222 and .239, respectively, in 2007 (and decreasing steadily since), but it’s certainly a part of it. We are all but certain to see more shifts across the sport in 2014 than we ever have before. “Hit ’em where they ain’t,” Wee Willie Keeler was purported to have said over a century ago, and it’s good advice. The only problem is, where they are — or ain’t — is changing.

What’s interesting, then, is not so much about which teams employ the shift, but how batters react to it. Thanks to the work of Jeff Zimmerman at The Hardball Times earlier this year, we’re able to get a look at how certain batters hit in 2013 with the shift both on and off, and the results were often more extreme than expected. (Ryan Howard’s .533 BABIP without the shift as compared to .312 with it stand out immediately.) It stands to reason that if you were one of the hitters on the list with a large split between being shifted and not, you should expect to see it even more this season.

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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.

Alex Balog, RHP, Colorado Rockies (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Top-15: N/A   Top-100: N/A
Line: 11 IP, 9 H, 5 R, 1 HR, 9/5 K/BB, 4.09 ERA, 4.38 FIP

Summary
The 70th overall pick in last year’s draft struggled mightily upon his introduction to pro ball in 2013, but has regained the stuff that got him drafted so high.

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Just like any reasonable person would’ve expected, the Los Angeles Dodgers currently have sole possession of first place in the National League West. And just like any reasonable person would’ve expected, right now the Dodgers’ team leader in wRC+ among regulars and semi-regulars is Dee Gordon, at 174. As a neat bit of ephemeral trivia, Gordon’s wRC+ is 43 points higher than his 2012 wRC+ and his 2013 wRC+ combined. And by combined, I don’t mean averaged out. I mean added together. Through two weeks, the Dodgers’ biggest weakness has been one of their biggest strengths, and this is an example of why the playoffs don’t crown the best team in baseball. Sometimes, over little samples, Dee Gordon out-hits Hanley Ramirez.

Some more neat ephemeral trivia: Before the season started, Steamer projected Gordon for 0.3 WAR. Meanwhile, ZiPS projected Gordon for 0.7 WAR. Already, Gordon’s been worth 0.6 WAR, so he can be replacement-level from this point forward and the Dodgers won’t be worse off than they were expected to be. Following about a season’s worth of games of being terrible, Gordon’s gone from busted prospect to contributor, and he even went so far as to hit a legitimate home run off Max Scherzer. Sunday, he did something more his own speed.

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Maybe the most annoying thing you could say is that the Brewers are going to regress. They’re not going to keep winning 83% of their baseball games. They’re not going to end the season with a +378 run differential. They’re not as good as a 1.80 team ERA, and they’re not going to keep running a .250 BABIP against. They’re on a nine-game winning streak, but they’re going to lose, and they’re going to lose, inarguably, dozens of times. The Brewers, in truth, aren’t close to this good. No kidding. This year’s Brewers aren’t literally the best team in the history of baseball.

But every hot streak is unsustainable, just as every cold streak is unsustainable. Any team that wins nine in a row and any team that wins 10 of 12 will have contributing factors you can’t expect to keep up in the long run. What’s important isn’t determining whether or not the Brewers will keep winning at this clip. They won’t. What’s important is determining where the Brewers stand now, relative to where they stood a couple weeks ago before the season was underway.

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Right-hander Ubaldo Jimenez produced his third consecutive poor start for the Baltimore Orioles on Sunday, recording just three strikeouts against 27 opposing batters while posting a single-game xFIP of 5.23 (box). It was also the third consecutive start for his new club in which Jimenez produced an average fastball velocity below his 2013 average of 92.1 mph (or 91.9 mph average when accounting for all pitches classified as either a four- or two-seam fastball).

It’s both (a) largely unimaginative and also (b) not entirely inappropriate to begin any investigation into a pitcher’s poor performances with an investigation into velocity trends. A hastily performed study by the present author, for example, demonstrates that — amongst a large pool of starting pitchers from 2002 to -11 — that every mile-per-hour was worth about a tenth of a run of xFIP. Such a study, of course, accounts mostly for pitchers who have already adapted to their own particular velocity limits. One assumes that any one individual pitcher, when compelled to work with reduced velocity, would demonstrate an even greater increase in xFIP.

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The Dodgers are off to a 9-4 start, despite plenty of roadblocks on the way. Clayton Kershaw has pitched just once and likely won’t be back until well into May. A.J. Ellis is out with knee surgery. Brian Wilson has had elbow trouble. The Yasiel Puig saga never seems to end, on or off the field. Matt Kemp has three homers, but only one hit otherwise. Maybe the success is because five of those wins have come against Arizona, who seem to be worse than anyone expected, but it’s also because Zack Greinke & Hyun-Jin Ryu & Dan Haren have been great, the bullpen has been effective, Dee Gordon has been shockingly useful so far… and because Adrian Gonzalez has been surprisingly powerful.

Gonzalez is currently riding a nine-game hitting streak. He’s had at least one extra base hit in each of the last eight games and homered four games in a row, both one shy of tying team records. He’s tied for second in the bigs in homers with five — and hit at least one additional ball, arguably two, that might have made it out of most parks that aren’t Petco — and he’s tied for first in ISO with Jose Bautista at .400. (His .427 wOBA is nice as well, and No. 16 in baseball, but hard to get too excited about when Chase Utley is still rolling along at .607.) He’s raising hopes that at 31 (he’ll be 32 in May), it’s not too late for the Dodgers to get the elite hitter that San Diego and Boston saw between 2006-11, rather than the merely above-average second-level first baseman that the Red Sox and Dodgers saw in 2012-13. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a hell of a stretch for Jose Dariel Abreu. Coming out of Cuba, he signed with the White Sox for life-changing money. He put together a decent spring training under completely unfamiliar circumstances, and then in his major-league debut, he went 2-for-4 with a double. He was intentionally walked twice in his second-ever game, and at this writing Abreu owns a .300 average, and eight extra-base hits and four home runs, those dingers all in the span of three games. Few players in baseball are flying higher than Abreu at the moment, so I don’t feel guilty about pointing something out.

Right now, Abreu has four home runs. A few days ago, Abreu had zero home runs, when he stepped in against Chad Bettis in Colorado. Abreu worked a 12-pitch at-bat, and on the final pitch — low and in — he unloaded. Abreu blew the game open, and for the first time, he’d gone deep in the bigs. It is, presumably, a memory he’ll keep and cherish forever.

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Maybe the most fun you can have with the Danny Salazar start is by just going over the fun facts. Salazar faced the White Sox Thursday, and he’d go up against 18 batters. Six of them hit the ball fair, and six of them ended up with hits. Two batters walked, meaning ten batters struck out, in just 3.2 innings. The following facts are also true: Salazar recorded zero non-strikeout outs, and the White Sox hit to a 1.000 BABIP. So how do you explain the one extra out? Adam Eaton was gunned down at second trying to turn a single into a double. In that way, Eaton was the spoiler.

It was a conspicuously ridiculous start. You don’t need anybody to tell you nothing like that had ever happened before — you can tell that immediately by looking at the numbers. Salazar finished with a 12.27 ERA and a 0.51 xFIP. In fairness, a year ago, Joe Blanton had a start with a 13.50 ERA and a 1.51 xFIP. Roy Halladay had a start with a 13.50 ERA and a 1.58 xFIP. Over the long run, you care more about the xFIP. In the shorter run, though, how does something like this happen? How did Danny Salazar steal from what I can only assume was the Rich Harden personal notebook?

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Perhaps we should be used to this by now. Just four years ago, Craig Kimbrel was just some guy who walked more than 18 percent of the batters he faced. Now, he’s Craig Kimbrel. In the same timeframe, Drew Storen went from talented rookie set-up man to closer on a suddenly not terrible Nationals team. In their wake, young relievers like Kenley Jansen, Kelvin Herrera, Trevor Rosenthal, Addison Reed and others have taken the baseball world by various degrees of storm. And there was this Aroldis Chapman guy, too.

This season has been no different. Seemingly anonymous relievers have been springing from the figurative woodwork to capture spots on the top of various reliever leaderboards, most notably K% and velocity. Let’s meet some of them, shall we?

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Last October, Shelby Miller became something of a mystery. After spending the year in the Cardinals rotation and developing into one of the league’s best young hurlers, Miller became nothing more than an active roster cheerleader in the postseaosn. He pitched one inning in the Cardinals five game NLDS victory over the Pirates, then didn’t enter a game in either the NLCS or the World Series. All told, St. Louis pitchers threw 152 innings in October, but even with that workload, the Cardinals managed to give 151 of them to pitchers not named Shelby Miller.

He insisted he wasn’t hurt. If he was injured, the Cardinals could have simply replaced him on the playoff roster with someone else, someone they would use. The fact that they carried him for all three postseason series suggests that it wasn’t a predetermined plan to not use him and supports Miller’s assertion that he could have pitched. Mike Matheny didn’t just trust him in any kind of meaningful situation, and the Cardinals didn’t play many low leverage innings in October.

The Cardinals didn’t say much publicly about their decision, but it was reported over the winter that Miller was dealing with some shoulder fatigue in September, so despite Miller’s claims that he felt good, there might have been a physical reason for his absence. However, with an off-season of rest, the Cardinals have put Miller right back into their plans, and were presumably hoping that a little rest would allow Miller to go back to what he was during the regular season last year.

Well, apparently, an off-season of rest hasn’t fixed anything, because the Shelby Miller that has taken the mound for two starts in April mostly looks like the September version who the Cardinals decided wasn’t up to pitching meaningful innings in October.

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