Archive for Teams

Josh Hamilton is the most aggressive hack in baseball. This isn’t news, of course, but to put his hacktastic ways in context, here is where Hamilton’s swing rates rank among batters with 500+ PAs in the last year.

O-Swing%: 42.7% (150th of 151)
Z-Swing: 82.0% (151st of 151)
Swing%: 57.9% (150th of 151)
Zone%: 38.8% (151st of 151)
Contact%: 64.9% (151st of 151)

The only guy who has swung the bat more often than Hamilton is Delmon Young, but 46.1% of the pitches Young has been thrown have been in the strike zone. Hamilton is pitched around more than any other hitter in the game, and yet he swings more often than anyone, with the exception of one replacement level scrub.

Josh Hamilton has always been an aggressive hitter. Josh Hamilton has a career major league batting line of .301/.360/.542. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Well, it is broke(n), but most importantly, this isn’t the approach that made Josh Hamilton an elite Major League player. This approach is new, and if he doesn’t make some changes in a hurry, he’s on his way to becoming the new Ryan Howard.

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Stetson Allie sat, staring at the ground as Rockies farmhand Drew Beuerlein verbally tore into him. Moments before, the 240-pound Allie delivered a glancing blow on a home plate collision, unable to jar the ball loose from the 24-year-old catcher. As teammates took the field, Allie continued to sit as if he’d been shaken up during impact. The pitcher-turned-first-baseman eventually rose to his feet and gingerly took two steps towards the third base dugout before he quickened his pace.

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One of the best things about really getting into the regular season is that we’re starting to get some meaningful data. One of the best things about getting meaningful data is that it’s accompanied by a lot of meaningless data. True insight can be gleaned from the former, but fun? You can have fun with both. Let’s talk about pitchers stealing bases.

A year ago, pitchers combined for seven stolen-base attempts. The year before that, they also combined for seven, and the year before that, they combined for three. Then six, then ten, then 12, then seven, then nine…it isn’t often that pitchers get on base, but it also isn’t often that, once on base, pitchers attempt to steal. Pick your favorite reason, or combine them. They want to avoid injury. They want to conserve their energy. They aren’t properly trained for aggressive base-running. They don’t want to distract their hitters. They don’t want to give up a rare opportunity to not watch from the dugout. They want to actually exchange words with the first-base coach. Nobody thinks about pitchers stealing because pitchers don’t steal. On April 25, Cliff Lee tried to steal. On April 26, Andrew Cashner tried to steal.

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The Astros are not a good baseball team. But, as Tyler Kepner detailed in the New York Times this weekend, they are a baseball team with a plan. Whether or not that will lead to wins this season is another matter, but the fact that they have a plan is shining through, even amidst the deluge of runs allowed. Read the rest of this entry »

As you read this, the Boston Red Sox have the best record in all of major-league baseball, unless you’re reading this at least a few days after it was published. The Red Sox’s success is less of a surprise than the Blue Jays’ lack of success, but nobody expected Boston to start this well, and the organization is well on its way toward restoring the city’s confidence in the team. The Red Sox have gotten to this point by getting valuable contributions from their position players and from their pitchers. That will not be the only obvious sentence in this post.

We should pause to acknowledge what the Boston pitching staff has done to date. If the season were to end today, we’d all be left wondering, “wait, what?” But eventually we’d get over it and look at the statistics, and the statistics would show that the Red Sox have the highest team pitching strikeout rate in baseball history. As a team, the Sox have struck out 26.7% of opposing batters, and second place would be the…2013 Tigers, at 25.8%. Third place would be the…2013 Reds, at 23.3%. Fourth place would be the…2013 Royals, at 23.2%. So times have changed and strikeouts are up, but for the sake of perspective, the Red Sox as a team have a higher strikeout rate than both Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax. This is, of course, a team effort, but the greatest individual contribution so far has been made by Ryan Dempster.

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Before the season season started, members of our staff took a shot at prognosticating the season, despite the fact that we all know You Can’t Predict Baseball. Of the 31 authors who participated, 15 of them — myself included — selected the Blue Jays as the favorites to win the AL East, and nine of the 16 who didn’t pick Toronto to win their division had them as a wild card club. The Blue Jays off-season makeover convinced most of us that they were a good team with a good shot at playing in October.

It might only be April 29th, but there’s a pretty good chance that 24 of us are going to end up being wrong, because while we’re still in the first month of the season, the Blue Jays season is in jeopardy.

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When the Indians selected Francisco Lindor 8th overall in the 2011 draft, he possessed a high floor and upside. Drafted out of Montverde, Florida, he was an accomplished shortstop but questions about how long it would take his bat to develop surrounded the young Puerto Rican. In his full season, Lindor has put rest to any doubt whether he will be one of the game’s brightest stars. Coming into 2013 he was ranked 20th by Marc Hulet, 9th by my colleagues at Bullpen Banter, and 8th by myself and early returns suggest he has staked his claim on next year’s top spot.

Lindor projects to be an elite defender, if he isn’t already. While not he’s a burner – his time from home to first is consistently a shade below four seconds, great but not excellent for the position – his defensive range can be attributed to the quickness of his first step, not his speed. His ability to covers yards of dirt in a single step is bolstered by his confidence using his backhand on balls hit towards third base. At 19 years old, his instincts actions at shortstop are remarkable making Mike Newman’s nickname for him – “Bruce Lee Lindor” – oddly fitting.

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Through five starts, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright has a 1.93 ERA, 1.09 FIP, and 2.13 SIERA. Of the 144 batsmen to face Wainwright, 37 struck out and just 1 walked — Bryce Harper in the 6th inning of last Tuesday’s game. Wainwright has induced a career-high 55.8% groundball-rate; he has held opponents to 8 earned runs, 9 runs total, scattered across 37 and 1/3 innings.

Wainwright is not “on fire.” He is fire. Butane lighters hang pictures of him on their bedroom walls. Local volunteer firemen warn children about Wainwright during school visits.

So how does an excellent pitcher produce results like a deity pitcher? For Wainwright, the tactic appears to be: (a) Throw a full spectrum of fastballs, (b) select from that fastball spectrum at an increasingly unpredictable rhythm, and (c) pitch against the right teams.
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A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:

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Entering the spring, Gerardo Parra was once again a man without a home. After a starting a career-high 124 times in 2011, and doing so handily, Parra shifted back into part-time status in 2012. But with Adam Eaton and Cody Ross both suffering injuries before the season began, and Jason Kubel landing on the disabled list with a strained left quad two weeks into it, Parra has once again been seeing regular action. In the process, he has not only acquitted himself well, but also helped hold down the Dbacks offense in the early going.

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