Archive for Teams

New York Mets pitching prospect Domingo Tapia is in the midst of a breakout season for Savannah of the South Atlantic League. With nearly eight strikeouts per nine innings and a ground ball rate of 65%, his 2.65 FIP is good for second best in the league behind San Francisco Giants 2011 supplemental first round pick Kyle Crick. So what’s driving his success? A mid-to-upper 90’s fastball with heavy sink which rates as one of the single best pitches I’ve scouted in person. But what about the rest of his arsenal? It lags significantly behind, but Tapia may be taking a rather unique approach to to starting as an attempt to maximize what the young right-hander does well.

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Subjective questions swirl around most awards discussions — should a pitcher win MVP, should the Rookie of the Year be the best player that season or the one with the brightest future, does the Manager of the Year and/or MVP need to come from a playoff team, etc. But Comeback Player of the Year may be the most loosely defined award. As I detailed in this exercise last season, the only criteria is that a player “re-emerged,” which is very much open to interpretation. So, let’s try to take an objective look.

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Chipper Jones announced in March that he would retire at the season’s end. He cited various reasons for ending his hall-of-fame career and admitted that he was tired of living the baseball lifestyle. Always one to answer questions honestly in an era of generalities, he said that his decision was firm; no matter what, he was done once the Braves’ season ended.

As expected, his steadfastness to that decision has been tested, and reporters frequently ask whether he’s changed his mind. Maybe there’s a point to those questions. After all, Jones has a .379 wOBA and 2.9 WAR right now. And he’s on pace for his best season in four years. He projects to finish the season with a .372 wOBA and 4 WAR, and players don’t generally retire after posting numbers like that.

So where does his final season rank among career-concluding seasons throughout history. Is he truly going out on top?

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“Why don’t you take a look at the chart with the average against cutters in the big leagues, batting average against and then come back and tell me that that’s a great pitch,” Duquette said.

In an interview with Steve Melewski that is destined to provide content for weeks, Dan Duquette outlined the Orioles’ philosophy when it comes to the cut fastball. In essence, the pitch won’t be taught in their minor league organization. “We don’t like it as a pitch,” the Baltimore GM said.

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Major League Baseball suspended Melky Cabrera for 50 games after he tested positive for testosterone, a substance banned under the league’s Joint Drug Policy. The suspension is immediate, meaning Cabrera won’t be seen in the orange and black, patrolling left field and accumulating hits, for the rest of the season. After their loss yesterday to the Nationals, coupled with the Dodgers win over the Pirates, the Giants fell out of first place in the National League West for the first time since late June. Losing Cabrera will hurt the Giants as they battle the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks for the division title, and try to stay in the hunt for a wild card spot.

Cabrera’s has been the Giants’ second-most productive hitter, behind Buster Posey. His season line is .346/.390/.546 for a .387 wOBA and a 146 wRC+. He was a steady and effective presence as the number three hitter in the Giants’ lineup, where he whacked 25 doubles, ten triples and eleven home runs in front of Posey. It will be impossible to replicate that production. The question is how best to replace it.

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Felix Hernandez’s perfect game on Wednesday was a testament to both his excellent stuff, but also a well-deserved outcome for an excellent game plan executed by he and catcher John Jaso. A former Ray himself, Jaso appeared to know just how to approach the Rays lineup, getting increasingly good results as the game went along:

That’s 5 swinging strikes through the first 61 pitches, and then 19 through the remaining 53 pitches. How did Felix do this? He and Jaso took advantage of an aggressive Rays plan by placing filthy breaking stuff further and further from the zone.
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With about a month left in the minor league baseball season, one of 2012’s worst kept secrets has been the prodigious speed of Cincinnati Reds shortstop prospect Billy Hamilton. With 139 stolen bases entering today’s action, Hamilton is six away from the minor league record of 145 set by Vince Coleman in 1983.

Video after the Jump

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Toronto Blue Jays General Manager Alex Anthopolous, in a bid to get people to start calling him “Double Down,” has re-signed back-up catcher and Angels legend Jeff Mathis for a guaranteed two years and $3 million with a club option for 2015. I just went back and checked — this does not seem to be an Onion article. Seriously, though, teams have their reasons for doing things like this, even if they are not always apparent (or good). Let’s try and think it through.

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Aaron Hill hit 62 home runs between the 2009 and 2010 seasons. It took him just two years to over triple the home run output of more than 1800 prior plate appearances.

Hill is just one beneficiary of Rogers Centre’s kind left field, a list that now includes Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and apparently Jeff Mathis. The main difference between pre-2009 Hill and post-2009 Hill was a change in fly ball rates — an increase of about seven percentage points. By lofting the ball and utilizing that left field, Hill turned from an unremarkable contact-hitting second basemen into an elite power force at the position — for reference, Robinson Cano has 61 home runs over the past two calendar years (covering 320 games).

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According to excellent journalist Andy McCullough at the New Jersey Star-Ledger, the Mets are going to keep working on an extension with their newfound elder statesman ace, R.A. Dickey. The team elected to wait and see what the season would bring before putting pen to paper, which was a smart move considering that the organization owns an affordable $5 million option for the 2013 season. But now that he’s put up a Cy-worthy season, the discussion has changed. Making the conversation difficult is the lack of comparable players.

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