Archive for Teams

Travis Shaw had arguably the biggest hit of Milwaukee’s season yesterday. With his team on the verge of a crushing 10-inning loss, Shaw stroked a two-run, walk-off home run that helped keep the Brewers in the playoff hunt. A defeat wouldn’t have buried the surprise contenders, but it would have pushed them closer to the brink. They badly needed the win, and the Red Sox castoff provided it.

Even without Saturday’s heroics, Shaw has been a godsend for David Stearns and Co. Acquired over the offseason (along with a pair of promising prospects) for Tyler Thornburg, he’s contributed 31 long balls and an .877 OPS while solidifying the middle of the Milwaukee lineup. Last year in Boston, those numbers were 16 and .726.

The 27-year-old third baseman attributes his breakout to two factors: He’s playing every day, and he’s not stressing about things he can’t control.

“My mindset is a lot different,” Shaw told me earlier this week. “After what I went through last year, I needed to take a step back. There were some things I didn’t agree with, and there were some things I took the wrong way. I didn’t handle them very well

“I tried to play GM. I started reading into stuff — wondering why they’re doing this, why we’re doing that — and it ate at me. I worried about things I shouldn’t have worried about. In the second half, when I got to play, I felt like I had to get two or three hits to stay in the lineup. That didn’t bode well for my mental state, and it obviously didn’t work results-wise.” Read the rest of this entry »

In 2015, the Reds finally commenced their transition from contender to rebuilder. During that season, the club began handing playing time to a number of young players, with rookie pitchers accounting for more than two-thirds of the team’s starts. Last season, they followed up that effort with another round of rookie pitchers — a group which, in this case, accounted for one-third of Cincinnati’s starts. As I noted at the beginning of the season, the Reds became just one of a handful of clubs in history to allocate at least half of their starts to rookies in one year and then to follow up that effort by starting rookies in another 50 games the next season.

It’s my duty to inform you that the Reds are at it again — and this time, they’ve left all the other franchises in the dust.

For a little league-wide perspective, here’s the number of rookie starters each team has used over the past three seasons. If a pitcher was a rookie in 2016 but didn’t exhaust his eligibility and pitched again in 2017, that’s counted just once in the numbers below.

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I was recently talking to J.D. Martinez about launch angle and exit velocity and the like. Besides helping me to update my language, he also told me he didn’t really track his performance by those measures. Same thing for some other metrics I mentioned. It’s clear Martinez has some substantive thoughts on hitting, though. It would be strange if he didn’t use any of the data available to him. So I asked him… what do you track? What numbers do you look at?

“I track my swings and misses in the zone,” he said. “I can deal with swing and miss out of the zone. If I’m swinging and missing in the zone, I don’t like that. That tells me something is wrong. It tells me that something is not right with my swing, I’m fouling balls off. If the ball’s in the strike zone, I should be able to hit it. There are certain situations, take a pitch, that’s fine. But when I swing and it’s a strike — especially on a fastball and I’m not hitting it — that’s not good.”

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I realize that I can be a little too often drawn to bests and worsts. It happens because I’m lazy, but it also happens because those make for easy subjects to sell. I don’t need to convince you that the best of something is interesting. Same goes for the opposite. I’m just the messenger, providing exceptional fun facts. Baseball creates the fun facts. I just go and find them.

I have another fun fact to share with you. I have another potential historical worst. Several weeks ago, the Marlins were worth watching, because they were making an improbable surge into the wild-card race. The surge ended as abruptly as it started, and now the Marlins are just playing out the string. There are still players of significance, sure. Fans are still watching to see if Giancarlo Stanton will go yard. But let me give you a statistic to keep your eye on. Want a reason to pay attention to the Marlins’ final stretch? They could badly use some pitcher-hits. Otherwise they’re going to set a new low.

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I was invited to appear on Ben Lindbergh and Michael Baumann’s podcast over at The Ringer this week. Among those topics discussed was the challenge of scouting in today’s game (a topic which Jeff Sullivan has recently explored) and the difficulty with macro-level planning in the midst of a record home-run surge (about which I wrote earlier this week).

The game is being played at the extremes, featuring more home runs than ever and more strikeouts than ever. When players are changing skill sets and approaches so quickly, how must evaluators evolve? While speed and strength will never go out of style, what skills should gain and lose value in the eyes of evaluators? Michael noted that perhaps it’s adaptability that should take on greater weight in evaluation. In an era where it’s more difficult to predict what’s next, anticipating how the game (or the ball) will change might be a player’s best tool.

Along those lines, it might behoove evaluators to place more weight on players who are curious. In an age with endless data from Statcast and other sources, asking the right questions can help an athlete better understand and improve his own performance. That’s trickier to evaluate, of course: it requires getting to know the individual and/or performing other types of due diligence. But those traits can make an impact.

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Now that we’re close to the end of the season, you’re going to see a lot of talk about the bests in certain categories. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best pitcher. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best rookie. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best player (sort of). And there are further awards that are supposed to go to the best hitters. It’s seldom easy to identify a given season’s best whatever, but at least you can limit yourself to one year of data. That makes things simple, relatively speaking.

It’s half as simple, or twice as complicated, if you double the number of years. But that’s something you have to do if you want to measure improvement. And this is something I’d like to spend a few minutes on — who, among major league baseball players, is the most improved hitter? There’s no great reason to focus on this, I guess, but there’s no great reason to focus on anything. Major improvement is good. Makes for a compelling story. Why not find the most improved hitter? All we need to do is agree on a method.

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We’ve written about a possible sea change in baseball over the last few years here, using phrases like “point of contact” and “attack angle” to better articulate the emergence of a Fly-Ball Revolution, itself another relatively new expression. Add those phrases to all the ones we’ve been compelled to learn for the benefit of Statcast alone — terms like “launch angle,” “exit velocity,” “spin rate,” etc. — and it’s obvious that our baseball dictionaries are getting an update on the fly.

Simply because we’re using a new lexicon, however, doesn’t mean we’re using it correctly — or, at the very least, that some of our assumptions couldn’t benefit from an update, as well.

With that in mind, I decided to examine some of the most notable and commonly used terms in this new language of hitting. With the help of the players themselves, perhaps we can better see what lies beneath each of them and attempt to reach something closer to a common understanding.

Fly-Ball Revolution

“I wish you wouldn’t call it the ‘fly-ball revolution,'” Daniel Murphy told me earlier in the year. “Coaches then think we’re talking about hitting the ball straight into the air. Call it the ‘high-line-drive revolution.'”

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The Rockies are struggling again. After winning eight of nine to re-solidify their lead in the race for the second Wild Card spot, they’ve now lost five of seven, including their last three in a row. Meanwhile, the surging Brewers have won nine of 12, closing Colorado’s lead to just a single game. Yesterday, they got shut out by Matt Moore, who has been one of the worst pitchers in baseball this year. The team’s inconsistent offense broke up for 16 runs last Saturday, but scored a grand total of 12 runs in the other five games they’ve played in the last week, and now the Brewers are nipping at their heels.

But if you look at our Playoff Odds, our algorithm still thinks the Rockies are in a pretty good spot, with a 68% chance of capturing the second Wild Card spot, versus just 16% for the Brewers. With just a one game lead, this is a pretty big discrepancy, and might seem like our projections are just wildly overrating the difference between the two teams. However, those calculations aren’t just accounting for the projected performance of the Brewers and Rockies over the next week and a half, but also taking both teams’ schedules into account. And the schedules for the two teams couldn’t be more different.

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In one form or another, the majority of posts at this site are based on some type of leaderboard. Highest average velocity among qualified pitchers, lowest ground-ball rate among qualified batters: these are the sort of distinctions that attract the attention both of writers and readers — and even illustrate the game’s trends towards one pole or another.

Generally speaking, when Mike Trout appears on a leaderboard at FanGraphs, it’s because he’s exerted his excellence in yet another way. Currently, for example, Trout possesses the top batting line among all active players and also the second-most baserunning runs among active players and the second-highest WAR total among all major-league batters ever through age 25.

One capacity in which Trout hasn’t been able to exert his excellence, however, is team success. During his time in Anaheim, Trout has made the playoffs on just one occasion. It was in 2014, and his Angels were swept out of the playoffs promptly. The Angels have had some decent seasons during Trout’s career — they won 89 in 2012, 85 in 2015, and they also currently have a winning record. Odds are, however, that Trout is about to finish his sixth full season as the best player in baseball, and he’s never won a single game in the playoffs. That’s odd.

We know that baseball is a team sport, and even when one-third of teams make the playoffs every year, one player can’t do it alone. Every player is very much reliant on his team. Even Mike Trout.

If it seems unusual that a player of Trout’s stature has failed to win even a single postseason game, that’s because it is. To provide a little context before taking a more historic approach, below is a table featuring the best position players by WAR since Trout exhausted his rookie eligibility in 2012. I’ve also included the total number of postseason games each player has won during that time.

This is one of the few bad leaderboards on which Trout’s name appears. Since becoming an MLB regular in 2012, Trout has recorded double the WAR of all but 10 players. Of those 10 players, Paul Goldschmidt is the only one (besides Trout) not to win a playoff game. Arizona will get an opportunity this season to address that issue — and, of course, Goldschmidt himself recorded two playoff with the Diamondbacks in 2011. Of the top-20 position players since 2012, the only others not to win a playoff game are Giancarlo Stanton and Kyle Seager. With expanded playoffs, good players generally get opportunities to appear on a winning club at some point, and reaching a playoff series generally means winning a playoff game.

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Even the Cleveland Indians, the best team in baseball by run differential and authors of an AL-record winning streak, aren’t without question marks.

Currently, they’ve got a significant one — namely, in center field. Just over a week ago, Chris Davis stepped on Bradley Zimmer’s left hand as the latter attempted a head-first slide into first base. The result: a broken fourth metacarpal. Zimmer, who had taken over the lion’s share of work in center field, is now probably out for the rest of the season, including the postseason.

In the absence of Zimmer, Cleveland was left with a void in center. To understand how they’ve decided to address that void, it’s necessary to know a little something about the infield.

The Indians like their infield alignment. Recently, the club shifted Jose Ramirez from third base to second — where he rates as a well above-average defender — and assigned third-base duties to fellow Fringe Five alum Yandy Diaz and his intriguing gifts. That pair is complemented by Giovanny Urshela — at the very least, an excellent late-inning defensive replacement who also possesses enough glove to back up Francisco Lindor at shortstop. This was the formula the club used during their 22-game win streak.

With the infield settled, the Indians found themselves wondering what to do with longtime second baseman Jason Kipnis, who has recently returned from another stint on the DL.

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