Archive for Teams

On Thursday, the Mariners announced that Ichiro Suzuki would transition to the role of Special Assistant to the Chairman, effective immediately. While the agreement covers only the 2018 season, it appears quite likely that we’ve seen the last of the wiry, slap-hitting international superstar in a playing role, even given his stated desire to play “at least until I’m 50.” At 44 years old, he was hitting a meager .205/.255/.205, and with outfielders Ben Gamel and Guillermo Heredia now both on the roster, his continued presence created a crunch whose resolution couldn’t even wait until this weekend’s series with the Angels, which might have included a possible encounter with the pitching version of Shohei Ohtani.

From the Mariners’ PR department:

“We want to make sure we capture all of the value that Ichiro brings to this team off the field,” [general manager Jerry] Dipoto said. “This new role is a way to accomplish that. While it will evolve over time, the key is that Ichiro’s presence in our clubhouse and with our players and staff improves our opportunity to win games. That is our number-one priority and Ichiro’s number-one priority.”

Ichiro will work in collaboration with the Mariners Major League Staff, High Performance Staff and Front Office personnel. He will assist, based on his experience, with outfield play, baserunning and hitting. And he will provide mentorship to both players and staff.

The plight of Ichiro wasn’t far from my mind as I wrote about Albert Pujols‘ crawl to 3,000 hits, and the struggles of other players when they made the push for that milestone. Back in 2013, when Ichiro was playing for the Yankees, I had the privilege of covering his 4,000th hit — his combined NPB and MLB total — for SI.com. At the time it was clear that his offensive skills had faded, and the celebration felt like a stand-in for that of an increasingly unlikely 3,000th major league hit. At 39 years old, he didn’t figure to collect the 278 he still needed. I even asked the question myself as to whether the more conventional milestone was in his sights. “I don’t make goals that are so far away,” he said through his translator. “What I do is do what I can every single day and build off that and see where that takes me.”

Lo and behold, Ichrio built off enough days to reach 3,000 while enjoying an unexpected renaissance with the Marlins in 2016. Even having not debuted stateside until he was 27 years old, he was the fourth-fastest player to 3,000 hits in terms of plate appearances, and sixth-fastest in terms of at-bats. As with the 4,000th combined hit and his long-awaited MLB pitching debut from October 4, 2015, the milestone 3,000th, a triple against the Rockies on August 7, 2016, brought a good bit of joy to the game. It also sealed the deal, once and for all, on his future enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. While his anachronistic slash-and-run style rarely produced the value to rival that of the era’s top sluggers, it was a vastly entertaining one nonetheless, and he staked his claim on a plaque via his initial decade-long run, during which he annually made the All-Star team, won a Gold Glove and cranked out at least 200 hits. He led the AL seven times in that category, setting a major league record with 262 hits in 2004 and claiming two batting titles as well as his AL Rookie of the Year/MVP combo in 2001. He will be eligible for the Hall of Fame in 2024 if he doesn’t return, although Seattle’s 2019 season-opening series in Japan offers a tempting possibility for a cameo.

Ichiro’s awe-inspiring total of 4,367 hits (1,278 in Japan, 3,089 here) will stand as the signature accomplishment for a player who has spent more than a quarter-century serving as a wonderful ambassador for the sport on two continents. Here’s hoping he can continue that ambassadorship in a non-playing capacity for years to come.

Wednesday night, in a game against the A’s, the Mariners started James Paxton and received one of the most dominant starts in the franchise’s whole entire history. A couple innings after Paxton was removed, the Mariners lost, and the conversation deteriorated into an argument over bringing in the closer in a non-save situation. Thursday has brought the additional news that Ichiro Suzuki is transitioning into a non-roster advisory role, so it would be easy for Paxton’s start to get lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t the most important story of the game, and the game is no longer the most important story of the day.

But I won’t turn down many opportunities to write about James Paxton. I have the freedom to write what I want. And Paxton wasn’t only good against the A’s. He wasn’t only overwhelming. He was almost genuinely unhittable, collecting 16 strikeouts over the span of seven innings. Paxton issued one single walk, and he allowed a handful of hits. Nobody scored. Of Paxton’s 105 pitches, an incredible 80 of them were strikes. I know that, through the lens of ERA, this year’s Paxton has been modestly disappointing. That ERA misleads, and Wednesday provided a reminder that Paxton is almost as good as it gets. And as he went about setting down the A’s one by one, Paxton followed a pretty simple game plan. It’s one that could hint at even more to come.

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Scott Barlow made his big-league debut on Monday. Pitching for the Kansas City Royals against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, the 25-year-old right-hander went three effective innings in a 10-6 loss. With family watching from the stands, he allowed just one run while working the sixth, seventh, and eighth frames. Needless to say, it was a night the former Los Angeles Dodgers farmhand — a 2011 sixth-round pick out of a Santa Clarita, California high school — won’t soon forget.

Barlow, who signed a free-agent deal with the Royals over the winter, took us through his once-in-a-lifetime experience the following afternoon.

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Scott Barlow: “Around the fifth inning, [bullpen coach] Vance Wilson told me, ‘Make sure you’re staying loose,’ so I started stretching and kind of getting my energy going. This is my first time ever at Fenway, so I was also soaking up the scenery a little bit. Tim Hill started warming up, and they called down to have me warm up with him.

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Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Alex Rodriguez: at some point soon, Albert Pujols will join this exclusive company, the list of players who have attained both the 3,000-hit and 600-home-run milestones. With a home run and a double off Dylan Bundy on Wednesday night, the 38-year-old slugger is at 2,998 hits after collecting just four in his previous seven games. His mid-April hot streak, such as it was, is a memory.

Baseball’s major milestones and records are supposed to be opportunities to celebrate careers, the totality of a player’s accomplishments, the road he took along the way, and the connection to history. But as they tip their caps, too often they remind us that the man we’re cheering is far from the player he once was. In Pujols’ case, the difference is particularly striking, as it’s almost impossible to fathom the gap between “the best player of this young millennium” and “the worst regular in the majors,” or how a single player might hold both titles at the same time. Any honest reckoning with his career, however, will take us to this uncomfortable place.

The Pujols who earned the first of those titles is the one we’ll be celebrating when hit number 3,000 drops. That guy — a powerful but bad-bodied 13th-round 1999 pick out of Maple Woods Community College who rocketed three levels in his lone minor league season and was in the majors by 2001 — is the stuff of legend. Pujols’ All-Star and unanimous NL Rookie of the Year-winning debut (.329/.403/.610, 37 HR, 130 RBI) began an amazing 11-year run during which he hit a combined .328/.420/.617 while averaging 40 homers, 121 RBIs and 7.4 WAR, made nine All-Star teams, won three MVP awards and a batting title, with 19 top-three slash-stat finishes. In 2006, -08 and, -09, he led the league in slugging percentage, wRC+,and WAR. His 81.4 WAR for that span was 27.1 more than the next-highest total, Bonds’ 54.3, and his 167 wRC+ trailed only Bonds’ 208, over more than double the plate appearances. On a rate-stat or prorated basis, Bonds did have more value during the period the two players overlapped, but beyond the video-game stats he put up from 2001 to -04, he didn’t have much value outside the batter’s box, producing just 7.1 WAR from 2005 to -07, his age-40 to -42 seasons.

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Tanking is a problem. Professional sports like baseball are built on the assumption that both sides are trying to win. Organizations putting forth less than their best efforts hurts the integrity of the sport and provides fans with little reason to engage. That said, the perception of tanking might have overtaken the reality of late. Competitive imbalance is not the same as tanking. Sometimes teams are just bad, even if they are trying not to be.

Tanking concerns are not new. Two years ago, just after the Astros and Cubs had turned their teams around, the Phillies were attempting to dismantle their roster by trading Cole Hamels. The Braves had traded multiple players away from a team that had been competitive. The Brewers, who traded away Carlos Gomez, would soon do the same with Jonathan Lucroy after he rebuilt his trade value.

The Braves, Brewers, and Phillies all sold off whatever assets they could. Two years later, though, those clubs aren’t mired in last place. Rather, they’re a combined 54-37 and projected to win around 80 games each this season in what figures to be a competitive year for each. While the Braves and Phillies could and/or should have done more this offseason to improve their rosters, neither resorted to an extreme level of failure, and the teams are better today than they would have been had they not rebuilt. While accusations of tanking dogged each, none of those clubs descended as far as either the Astros or Cubs. None came close to the NBA-style tank jobs many feared.

One might suspect that I’ve cherry-picked the three clubs mentioned above, purposely selecting teams with surprising early-season success to prop up a point about the relatively innocuous effects of tanking. That’s not what I’ve done, though. Rather, I’ve highlighted the three teams Buster Olney cited by name two years ago — and which Dave Cameron also addressed — in a piece on tanking.

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CLEVELAND — In case you’ve not been logged into your social-media account in the past several days, Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer has been outspoken about rampant use of pine tar (and other grip-aiding substances) in the game.

Bauer’s position is basically that the playing field ought to be level: either MLB better enforces the pine-tar rule or it makes grip-aiding substances legal. And Bauer knows it would be about impossible to enforce the current rule. Bauer says he has tested pine tar in a lab setting and said it significantly increased his spin rate. He claims it has a greater effect than steroids on performance.

“I’ve melted down Firm Grip and Coca-Cola and pine tar together,” Bauer told reporters Wednesday. “I’ve tested a lot of stuff. At 70 mph, when we were doing the tests, spin rates jumped between 300–400 rpm while using various different sticky substances. The effect is slightly less pronounced at higher velocities — more game-like velocities — but still between 200–300 rpm increase.”

As many in this audience are aware, the greater the fastball spin rate, the more “rise” effect the pitch has, the more it resists gravity, the more swing-and-miss it generates. More spin equals more swing-and-miss. That’s been proven by Driveline Baseball, where Bauer trains, and FanGraphs’ own Jeff Zimmerman.

There is incentive to add spin. And now with Statcast and its TrackMan Doppler radar component in all major-league stadiums, pitchers have had the ability to measure their spin to better understand some of the underpinnings behind their performance in game environments.

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Last week, the bell tolled for the 2018 season of the Diamondbacks’ Taijuan Walker. The week before that, it tolled for the Padres’ Dinelson Lamet, and before him, the Angels’ JC Ramirez and the A’s A.J. Puk. If it feels like March and April are particularly full of Tommy John surgery casualties, that’s because they are, at least when it comes to recent history. In early March, just after Rays righty Jose De Leon discovered that he had torn his ulnar collateral ligament, I noted some recent trends regarding everyone’s favorite (?) reconstructive elbow procedure, including the extent to which those early-season injuries are rather predictive of the season-long trend. With April now in the books, and with my nose still in Jon Roegele’s Tommy John Surgery Database, the situation is worth a closer look.

Via the data I published in the De Leon piece, just under 28% of all Tommy John surgeries done on major- or minor-league pitchers (not position players) from 2014-17 took place in March or April, with the figure varying only from 24.8 % to 30.0% in that span. Even expanding the scope to include February as well, which doesn’t increase the total number of surgeries by much but does capture significant ones such as that of Alex Reyes last year — gut punches that run counter to the optimism that reigns when pitchers and catchers report — the range is narrow, with 27.5% to 33.0% of pitcher surgeries taking place in that span.

After my piece was published, a reader pointed out that The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh took an in-depth look at the phenomenon, but intuitively, it’s not hard to understand. Not only do pitchers’ activity levels ramp up dramatically once spring training begins, as they move from lighter offseason throwing programs to facing major-league hitters and therefore place far more stress on their arms, but many pitchers are finally forced to reckon with injuries that did not heal over the winter.

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A couple Fridays ago, Tyson Ross took a no-hitter against the Diamondbacks into the eighth inning. It was complicated, even as no-hitters go — no-hitters are special, and the Padres have never thrown one, but it should also be more about the team than the player. On top of that, Ross was allowed to throw 127 pitches, and he’s a guy with a record of arm problems. Even going into the eighth, Ross completing the no-hitter seemed highly unlikely. You could argue, if you wanted to, that Andy Green took too great of a risk.

Over the course of that dominant start, Ross racked up ten strikeouts. And as long as we’re here, let’s consider that record of arm problems. Ross had a miserable 2017. That followed a differently miserable 2016, in which he was able to make only one start. What that would suggest is that, these days, Tyson Ross might be fragile. On the other hand, what if he’s not? What if he’s actually all the way better? Because it’s looking to me like Tyson Ross is all the way better.

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The Pittsburgh Pirates enter play today at 17-13, just a half-game behind the division-leading Brewers and Cubs, and a similar distance from a Wild Card spot. Surprisingly, their Pythagorean record basically supports their record to date, as does BaseRuns. By whichever measure one uses, the Pirates have been good — which is no small surprise in light of preseason expectations that characterized this as a rebuilding club.

Still, the Pirates’ start, whilst evidently supportable by the play on the field, has nonetheless been the product of some good fortune. There was the Rays’ decision to offload Corey Dickerson, who has authored a 136 wRC+ and is second on the team in WAR. There’s been the sudden breakout of Francisco Cervelli, who has gone from a poor man’s Russell Martin to something more like prime Jonathan Lucroy. The pitching staff has also helped, with Ivan Nova refusing to walk anyone and Nick Kingham emerging for an excellent debut. With the Dodgers and Nationals off to slow starts and a dogfight emerging in the NL East, there’s at least a plausible path to the postseason in Pittsburgh: they have a 12% chance at a playoff spot after being in the single digits in the preseason.

And that’s why Jung Ho Kang is suddenly relevant again.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the fifth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Danny Duffy, David Price, and Sergio Romo — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Danny Duffy (Royals) on His Changeup

“My changeup used to be a two-seam circle. It was a really good pitch in the minor leagues because of the difference in velocity — I could get away with lack of movement — but, up here, it was starting to get ineffective.

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