Archive for Teams

“Watch a batting practice of mine and it’s real boring,” said Freddie Freeman with a smile. The Atlanta first baseman is back, and he’s playing third base right now. You’d think the change of position might be the strangest thing about him. After studying angles with the team’s infield coach Ron Washington, though, he feels like playing third won’t actually be so difficult. What’s weirder is his approach during batting practice. As both his numbers and geometry suggest, however, his unusual BP strategy makes sense for him.

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Over the winter, the Dodgers re-signed Rich Hill. They did so because they knew that, when he was able to pitch, Hill looked like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. And then 2017 went and got underway. Through the earlier part of 2017, Hill looked like one of the more frustrating starting pitchers in the game. The stuff, for the most part, remained there, but Hill didn’t have his same control, and his remarkable curveball was no longer working. I wrote about Hill in the middle of June, at which point his curveball had the lowest run value among all curveballs, out of everyone. It made me wonder where, exactly, Rich Hill was. Could someone who reappeared so suddenly disappear with similar speed?

Since I wrote about Hill and his struggles, he’s gone back to looking like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. In three starts, he’s allowed four runs over 19 innings, with six walks and 26 strikeouts. The easy explanation is that Hill has simply regressed to the mean. That is, his newer mean, the one he began establishing a couple years ago. That explanation would ignore the changes that Hill has folded in. Regression to the mean isn’t an automatic process. Rich Hill has simultaneously simplified and grown more complex.

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We might as well start this off with a Buster Olney tweet:

Teams asking about Justin Verlander; perception is DET looking for big,big,big return w/out salary offset. Owed $70m for rest of ’17,’18.’19

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) July 4, 2017

Just from reading that tweet alone, one could infer a few things. One, that the year hasn’t gone very well for the Tigers. That much is true, and the Tigers are only in the playoff race in the way that everyone in the American League is still in the playoff race. The Tigers are closer to the AL basement than they are to a playoff spot. Two, that Justin Verlander is available, and he’s been good enough to be interesting. That much is also true. And three, that a Verlander trade is going to be very challenging to execute. That much is certainly true. Verlander’s is the most fascinating name on the trade market, but as things stand, I don’t know how two sides could come together.

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According to this weekend’s ESPN Sunday Night Telecast, Bryce Harper has, in recent years, often performed his pregame routine and taken batting practice indoors, in the bowels of major-league ballparks, much to the disappointment of ballhawks across America. But Harper revealed himself over the weekend in St. Louis, taking BP on the field, and any time a star like Harper deviates from a routine, it raises curiosity. During the broadcast, ESPN’s Jessica Mendoza related how she’d asked Harper about the change. He said he wanted to hit some batting practice home runs, wanted to see the ball travel.

Perhaps he wanted to see how an adjustment, something akin to an R&D prototype, would work outside a lab setting, outside of an indoor batting cage.

When I think about Harper’s swing, I think about the violence of it. The leg kick, the force compelling his back foot — his left foot — to rise from the ground. Former Nationals beat writer Adam Kilgore wrote an excellent multimedia piece about Harper’s swing for The Washington Post several years ago.

From that piece:

[Nationals video coordinator Rick] Schu scanned through video and found film of Harper hitting. He arranged clips of Harper and Ruth side-by-side on the monitor and stopped at the moment each hitter’s bat connected with a pitch. In each still picture, he saw a stiff front leg, an uncoiling torso and a back foot lifting off the ground. “Wow,” he thought. “That’s identical.” …

“The full thing is God-given,” Harper said. “I don’t know how I got my swing or what I did. I know I worked every single day. I know I did as much as I could with my dad. But I never really looked at anything mechanical. There was nothing really like, ‘Oh, put your hands here.’ It was, ‘Where are you comfortable? You’re comfortable here, hit from there.’ ”

What’s interesting, at least to this author, is that Harper is willing to tinker with a gift that allowed him to reach the majors at 19. What’s perhaps troubling for the opposition is that he continues to look for ways to improve despite already possessing an NL MVP on his resume and returning close to that form thus far in 2017. He’s still just 24 — he won’t turn 25 until October — and is four months younger than Aaron Judge. His youth suggests he’s still learning himself and the game. And on the ESPN telecast, Harper debuted an apparent decision to trade power for control — or at least explore it. It’s not a swing I recall him taking — at least not regularly — a swing seemingly executed at 80% effort.

Against the hard-throwing Carlos Martinez, Harper shelved his signature leg kick. To commence his swing, he slightly raised his right foot but not completely from the ground, and took a much less explosive movement. He seemed to consciously trade power for control.

Consider Harper’s first swing of the evening:

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Dominic Smith, 1B, New York NL (Profile)
Level: Triple-A Age: 22   Org Rank:  3 Top 100: 73
Line: 3-for-5, 2B, 2 HR
Notes
Most developmental paths are long and winding, but Smith has been robotically effective since his first full pro season. He has made hard, all-fields contact each year, his home parks always tossing his slugging figures around. Even his year-to-year batted-ball profile has been consistent. He’s a high-probability regular with a chance to be a three-plus-win player if the glove scouts see shows up on paper.

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After their roster was ravaged by injuries, the Yankees promoted a trio of promising hitting prospects last week in Tyler Wade, Miguel Andujar and Dustin Fowler. Fowler, the most promising of the three, was supposed play regularly in New York’s outfield. Unfortunately, his big-league career was derailed as soon as it started in horrific fashion.

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At a table in the center of the visiting clubhouse last week, in the depths of Cleveland’s Progressive Field, Jonathan Lucroy was seated holding his catcher’s glove in his left hand and a flat-head screwdriver in his right. He used the tool to loosen and tighten different laces in the glove. He spent perhaps 20 minutes on glove maintenance that day — a day on which, incidentally, he wouldn’t appear in the starting lineup.

There’s been some focus on Lucroy’s glove recently. Lucroy’s glove, his receiving skills, were once the game’s best. What’s happened to Lucroy’s framing in recent years, however, is something of a mystery.

There have been some stunning declines in baseball over the last few seasons. There was Andrew McCutchen’s age-29 drop-off, unprecedented in its depth for a star-level player, and his cold start to the current season. There’s Jake Arrieta’s decline from Cy Young winner in 2015 to middling starting pitcher since the second half of last season.

Perhaps less apparent, less publicized as these — but still as significant — is what has happened to Lucroy’s framing numbers.

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Jorge Mateo, SS/CF, New York AL (Profile)
Level: Double-A Age: 22   Org Rank:  6 Top 100: 91
Line: 4-for-10, 2 3B, HR

Notes
As the dominoes fell following Gleyber Torres‘ injury, Mateo landed in Trenton. He split time between shortstop and center field down at High-A and the Yankees have the option to continue working him at both spots at Double-A with utility prospect Thairo Estrada on the roster. He struggled to do everything on the offensive end but steal bases in Tampa, failing to do damage anywhere but to his pull side. He’s off to a terrific start in Trenton, though, tallying five walks and three triples in just six games.

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If you had told the Angels before the season started that they would be in the thick of the Wild Card race approaching Fourth of July weekend, it’s likely they would have been pleased. Our preseason projections suggested they were an 83-win team and so far they are on pace for 82 wins. They’ve outplayed their run differential and their raw statistics slightly, but they looked like a roughly average team and have played like a roughly average team.

What’s noteworthy is that they’ve managed to stay on this pace despite losing Mike Trout to injury more than a month ago. It’s not news that the Angels are as good as we thought they were, but the fact that they’ve stayed on track without the services of the game’s best player sent me searching. With all due respect to Martin Maldonado, Cameron Maybin, Andrelton Simmons, and Eric Young (?!), it’s the bullpen that has stood out so far, and that bullpen has been led by Blake Parker.

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If you were to pick a face, a player, to represent where baseball is trending, Joey Gallo might be the one.

This post isn’t intended to serve as an endorsement of Gallo as an elite player, but rather to suggest that he embodies its trends as well as anyone. The game continues to include more home runs, more strikeouts, more walks, and fewer balls in play — to the angst of some (many?). Gallo is one of the Three True Outcome kings in the sport, a point detailed by one of FanGraphs’ community writers earlier this year.

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