Archive for Teams

The author attended a Double-A Eastern League game on Tuesday between the Bowie Baysox (a Baltimore affiliate) and New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Toronto) in Manchester, NH. What follows is a brief examination of three Blue Jays prospects from same.

Marcus Stroman, RHP

After returning in May from a 50-game suspension for a banned stimulant, the right-handed Duke product Stroman has been excellent for New Hampshire, having recorded strikeout and walk rates of 29.9% and 6.8%, respectively, entering Tuesday’s contest. Those figures situate him third among Eastern League starters behind only Cleveland prospect Danny Salazar (since promoted) and the Mets’ Noah Syndergaard by SCOUT, itself essentially a regressed (and probably poorly calculated) form of kwERA.

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In the beginning, there was Jose Molina. For real though, he’s really old. Molina hung around, and then baseball was invented, and then people figured out how to measure catcher pitch-framing, and then, initially, Molina really shined. Molina’s numbers blew everyone else’s out of the water, and so Molina became something of a cult favorite, and so on and so forth. You know how this story has gone. You know how Molina has become sort of popular, and you know how Molina is playing a lot for a contending team. Molina’s still really great at framing. It’s probably what he’s most great at.

Over time, I myself started to champion Jonathan Lucroy. Not because I thought Lucroy was better than Molina, but because I thought the two were roughly equivalent, and Lucroy didn’t get enough attention or respect. It seems to me Lucroy is one of baseball’s more underrated all-around players, and even still this year, Lucroy has been helping the Brewers’ pitching staff suck just a little less than it might otherwise. Lucroy’s still good, of course. Molina’s still good, of course. One doesn’t simply forget how to frame. But I was surprised when I took a peek at the 2013 pitch-framing leaderboards.

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This post is analysis free. It’s just a list followed by amazement. Here are the best hitters (by wRC+) through their age-21 season, all time.

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When it comes to thinking about the best pitchers in the American League this year, the names that jump out to most might be along these lines: Felix Hernandez (always awesome and having one of his better seasons), Max Scherzer and Anibal Sanchez (two non-Verlander Tigers having big years), Yu Darvish (strikeout machine), Chris Sale (great pitcher on a bad team), and Derek Holland (finally living up to his stuff in a hitter’s park). One pitcher that would probably come up less frequently is Hiroki Kuroda. He probably would not be totally ignored (especially by Yankees fans), but he has flown somewhat under the radar (has never made an All-Star game) for whatever reasons, some having to do the nature of his performance, some not.

External factors aside, an examination of Kuroda’s 2013 performance shows why he might not get as much attention for the year-end awards, but a deeper look also reveals his worthiness.

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So much of what we do is try to separate the signal from the noise. That is, a lot of what we do is investigate whether what we’re looking at, statistically, is real. We’re always chasing evaluations of a player’s true talent because we want to know what that player’s going to do. We want to know how his team is going to do because we think we want to know the future. As a group, we’re not horrible, but we’re not very good. There are biases that we have, there are things we don’t know and there’s the matter of players being humans and humans being all change-y. So often, we end up having to throw up our hands and say, “Welp.” Firm conclusions are hard to come by because firm conclusions are almost impossible to reach.

The greatest problem and the greatest solution is sample size. The rule of thumb is the smaller the sample of data, the greater the error bars around the actual signal. It follows, then, that the greater the sample of data, the smaller the error, assuming the players aren’t changing too much. If you observe one characteristic in one year, then that’s meaningful. If you observe it in three or four or five years, then that’s a lot more meaningful.  You’ve got signal that drowns out the noise. Which  brings us to Mark Buehrle and the Blue Jays.

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Winning streaks are fun, but they are usually gone just as quickly as they come. The Dodgers’ road winning streak, however, is nearing a month in length. It is now tied for the third-longest road winning streak in history, and a sweep of the Cardinals this week will give them the record outright. Since the record was established in 1917 and tied just once, in 1984, that is a pretty cool feat. Getting win #17 might be tough, as the matchup is Ricky Nolasco vs. Shelby Miller, but whether or not they get the record, it’s been a fun stretch of Dodgers baseball, and one that has put them firmly back in the pennant race. As such, I thought we could look back at some of the more important moments of the streak today. Read the rest of this entry »

St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Carlos Beltran!

I would say congratulations, but this probably isn’t the kind of award you want to win. So, let’s just skip the festivities and skip right to the recap, shall we?

In last night’s game between the Dodgers and Cardinals, Los Angeles held a 3-1 lead heading into the bottom of the 7th inning. Zack Greinke was pitching well, but he’d thrown 93 pitches and after facing a pinch-hitter for Adam Wainwright, was going to have to roll through the top of the batting order for the fourth time. This is danger territory, the type of spot where rallies are frequent and leads are often blown. Pitchers are less effective as they get deeper into the game and hitters perform better against a pitcher they’ve faced multiple times that day. The recipe for a comeback was in place.

And Greinke really hurt himself by walking the light-hitting Adron Chambers, who had pinch-hit for Wainwright leading off the inning. That walk took six pitches, and ended with Greinke throwing three straight out of the zone to put Chambers on first base. This brought up Matt Carpenter, the Cardinals All-Star second baseman, and the beginning of the best part of St. Louis’ offensive attack.

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Monday night in Washington, the Braves beat Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals by a 3-2 score. The beginning of the Nationals’ MLB.com game recap reads so casually you almost skip right over the astonishing part and miss the absurdity. Quote:

WASHINGTON — The Nationals entered Monday night with nine chances remaining to cut directly into the Braves’ 12 1/2-game lead in the National League East. They wasted the first of those chances in the opener of a three-game series, as Justin Upton’s go-ahead solo home run in the eighth inning lifted Atlanta to a 3-2 victory.

Braves in first, check. Nationals with chances left, check. Nationals with a blown chance, check. Twelve and a half games. Wait. Now thirteen and a half games. Because the Braves won. The number is inserted as if the gap isn’t completely ridiculous. The number is inserted as if Nationals fans ought to be holding out hope.

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As good as Jose Fernandez is, there still exists a critical angle. Fernandez, of course, pitches for the Marlins, and the Marlins get a lot of things wrong. The Internet usually doesn’t let those things go by unacknowledged, and the Marlins, this year, placed Fernandez on their opening-day roster. Fernandez was coming straight from Single-A, and had the Marlins waited even just a couple weeks, they could’ve preserved an extra year of team control. Instead, Fernandez is due to become a free agent in five years, instead of six. Viewed objectively, viewed just on paper, that decision is needlessly wasteful. The Marlins had no plans to contend. Fernandez didn’t need to be up that quick.

But there’s no sense in letting that dominate the conversation, because let’s revisit the beginning of that paragraph: “As good as Jose Fernandez is.” Fernandez just, and I mean just turned 21, and he’s outstanding. It’s fine to talk about contracts and service time, and those details are important, but that’s not nearly as interesting as on-field performance. Though Matt Harvey’s drawn more of the headlines, Fernandez has more quietly exceeded most reasonable expectations, and in the interest of better appreciating what he’s done, I thought we could take a few minutes to dig in. Let’s go beyond “Jose Fernandez is great.” What are some of his defining characteristics?

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For a while, Biogenesis didn’t exist. Then for a while, Biogenesis did exist, but we didn’t know anything about it. Then we started to know a lot about it, and in particular a lot about its distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, but it didn’t seem like baseball would be able to hand out much in the way of discipline. Then it seemed like baseball would be able to deliver suspensions, but not until 2014, after appeals were dealt with. Now baseball has handed out suspensions and all but one will go un-fought. This Monday is the big day: on this Monday, players tied to Biogenesis have been given official discipline.

Naturally, people are going to have questions. What does a 50-game suspension mean? What are the rest of the consequences out of all this? It’s too soon to really have an FAQ, because this early no Qs have been FA’d, so consider this FAQ more anticipatory. Let’s focus on the suspended Nelson Cruz, and the suspended Jhonny Peralta.

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