Archive for Teams

The Cubs, like all teams, are looking for an edge, for many edges.

The current front office began by focusing on position-player talent with premium draft picks, believing such prospects were safer bets to become impact major-league players. So far, so good.

When the world shifted three infielders to the right or left of second base, the Cubs started to shift less — and continue to do so. The result: one of the game’s most efficient defenses in recent history.

The club is interested in soft power, too. The Cubs have facilitated communication and collaboration between different departments — as have many other clubs — and better ways to facilitate cooperation. One way might be through the game’s only round clubhouse.

The Cubs, in brief, have exhibited a number of ways to get ahead.

July 2 marks the beginning of the hard-cap era for international signings. It also marks another opportunity for the Cubs to get ahead. This year, teams will no longer be allowed to lavishly outspend bonus-pool limits. Teams like the Cubs will now face a penalty for exceeding pool limits, losing the ability to extend anything greater than a $300,000 bonus to an international player. The Cubs have exhibited some creativity in recent years, however, in their attempt to work around pool limits. They’re likely to continue to do so.

Now the Cubs have perhaps found another edge in their pursuit of talent: Mexico.

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In the earliest days of spring training, Jeff Sullivan was moved by a mammoth home run to pen (type?) a piece on how difficult it is to exaggerate Aaron Judge’s power. Here’s the video of his inspiration:

Well, as the solstice approaches, the season nears its halfway point and Aaron Judge has continued to distinguish himself in his first full year in the Bigs. He currently dominates the Statcast Leaderboard, leading the majors in maximum exit velocity, average fly-ball/line-drive exit velocity, and barrel percentage. He’s second in average exit velocity.

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Bud Black pitched twice in Denver.

The first occasion was as a minor leaguer for the Omaha Royals in 1983 when he faced the Denver Bears, the Triple-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers. A decade later, Black returned to Mile High Stadium at the foot of the Rocky Mountains for his first and only major-league start at 5,200 feet above sea level — in this case, against the expansion Rockies on May 12, 1993. The next closest stadium in elevation at the time was Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium (1,050 feet) followed by Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (886 feet). Perhaps in all of professional baseball only Mexico City’s Foro Sol (elevation: 7,350 feet) was an environment less conducive to pitching.

Even as a minor leaguer in the early 1980s, Black had heard all about the perils of pitching in the thin air of Denver, about what it means to have fewer molecules bouncing off batted balls and pitches. Most often Black heard about how ineffective breaking pitches were there, with the Magnus force exerting less influence over a ball due to an air density of just 82% compared to sea level.

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So, I already had a post published today that talks about the struggling Rich Hill. Here it is! That includes just about everything I have to say. There’s one fact, though, that I wish I’d slid in, but it eluded my notice. I only stumbled upon it while talking about Hill this morning on Effectively Wild. Let’s stop beating around the bush.

Rich Hill is all about the curveball, right? Throws it all the time. Or, at least, throws it close enough to half of the time. Between 2015 and 2016, when Hill re-emerged, he had baseball’s third-highest curveball rate. No one didn’t know about that, and, of course, the curveball rated well, in terms of being an effective pitch. You are probably aware of our pitch-type run values. Between those two seasons, Hill had baseball’s fifth-most valuable curveball, by raw value. Focusing on all the pitchers who threw at least 100 innings, and then converting that curveball value to a rate stat, Hill ranked in third place. Nothing here is surprising. Hill threw the curveball a lot because the curveball was good. It’s a big part of what allowed him to occasionally resemble an ace.

Turn now to 2017. Hill has thrown 37% curveballs. That’s down, but it’s still very high. Hill has still been throwing plenty of curves. And yet, let’s look at the pitch-type run values again. Here are baseball’s least-valuable curves to this point:

Rich Hill: last place. Last place, even, by a couple of runs. The run values are by no means perfect measurements, but they do generally point you in the right directions — good pitches tend to get good values, and bad pitches tend to get bad ones. Rich Hill’s curveball has been horribly unsuccessful, the very most unsuccessful, after starring as a nearly unparalleled weapon. Hill won’t be right until his curveball is right. Said curveball has too often been wrong.

This doesn’t so much change the analysis. It’s still a problem of location, which is still a problem of either injury or mechanics. That’s what the Dodgers have to figure out, and these numbers don’t really help to shed light on what’s going on. The Dodgers already knew that something was awry. But still, this manages to tell a heck of a story. Rich Hill’s world-beating breaking ball has completely abandoned him. You could say that life has really thrown Rich Hill a curveball. Do not say that, though. It’s stupid.

Living in a world where Mike Trout doesn’t suit up nightly leads to some difficult questions about who might be the best player in his absence. Given their similar ages and trajectories, Bryce Harper is a decent choice. That said, we could consider a host of names, including Jose Altuve, Kris Bryant, Mookie Betts, Josh Donaldson, Clayton Kershaw, Manny Machado, Corey Seager… you get the idea. There are a lot of really good baseball players out there who aren’t Mike Trout and all have good cases for second-best player.

If we focus just on offense, the field changes a little bit. Bryant is probably still up there. Harper and Donaldson, too. Joey Votto has a pretty good case, Anthony Rizzo is still very good, and Aaron Judge is certainly a force this season. But if you combine track record, current performance, and expected future performance, Paul Goldschmidt might top them all.

In terms of hitting, patience, and power, Goldschmidt is the complete package. He’s got a career batting average over .300, on-base percentage over .400, and slugging percentage over .500. The only other active players to meet those standards are Mike Trout and Joey Votto. And while those numbers are subject to Goldschmidt’s inevitable decline, players who retire with .300/.400/.500 slash lines tend to end up in the Hall of Fame. Chipper Jones and Frank Thomas are two the most recent examples. And Goldschmidt might be having his best year with the bat. His .323/.448/.596 receives the benefit of his home park, but the 164 wRC+ plays anywhere.

Hitting isn’t the only aspect of Goldschmidt’s offensive profile, either. He’s an excellent runner, both stealing and taking the extra base on batted balls. The list of players with more steals than Paul Goldschmidt since the start of the 2015 season is a short one. They are (in order of total stolen bases): Billy Hamilton, Dee Gordon, Jonathan Villar, Jose Altuve, Starling Marte, Jarrod Dyson, and Rajai Davis. When you take into account runs generated from stolen bases and losses from caught stealing, the list of players better than Goldschmidt over the last two-plus seasons is even shorter: Hamilton, Gordon, and Dyson.

It’s not just on steals where he generates runs. He’s also in the top 10 since 2015 in Ultimate Base Runs (UBR), which measures extra bases taken. So far this season, his percentages of going first to third on a single (50%), first to home on a double (57%), and second to home on a single (63%) are all well above the respective league averages of 28%, 40%, and 60%. He’s done it without making an out.

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A couple of years ago, Jose Bautista had some advice for Marcus Stroman. “He said I should screw with my timing more,” the Jays’ right-handed pitcher told me a couple weeks back. Maybe you’ve seen him employ the strategy this year. It’s a fun and makes watching him more interesting. The effect it has on his ability to prevent runs is less obvious, though.

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If the data age were to help one group of pitchers more than any other, if video and scouting reports and pitch data were to help one club’s pitchers relative to all the other ones, you could make a case it should be the Colorado Rockies.

As we know, the Rockies play in baseball’s most extreme run environment. But it’s not just the predominately negative effects of mile-high altitude that make things difficult for Colorado’s pitchers. It’s that those same pitchers also have to visit 14 other National League ballparks that play much differently than their own park — this after more than a month of training in a different environment during spring, as well. Perhaps it is information that can better guide Rockies’ pitcher in making adjustments from location to location.

Jake McGee struggled at times during his first year in Denver last season, a year when he was also dealing with a knee injury. This year he’s healthy, and this season he’s diving into data more than ever before. The combination has allowed the Rockies to enjoy one of the game’s most dominant relievers through the first third of the season.

The Rockies’ surprising start — surprising to some — has been, in part, fueled by a bullpen that ranks second in the NL in WAR (2.6), and third in ERA- (81). Both McGee and offseason reclamation project Greg Holland are significant reasons for that success.

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From the case of Rich Hill, I’m not sure one could learn any lessons. For one thing, he still has more time to pitch, so his final chapters are unwritten. But even if Hill is already underwater, so what? No one needs to be told that there are risks inherent in committing to a free agent 37-year-old. And it’s not like anyone else is following the Rich Hill career path. His case is unique. What matters for him might not apply to anyone else. Everything about what he is is atypical, and so we stand to learn about Hill and Hill only.

It is fair to say, though, there are things to be learned. The Dodgers are probably anxious to learn them, because they’re counting on Hill, and he’s not pulling his weight. Now, no one thought Hill would throw 200 innings. I don’t think anyone expected 140. But here’s Hill now, at 35 innings after eight starts, eight starts in which he’s run up a 5+ ERA. Hill’s strikeouts have fallen and his walks have exploded, and Thursday in Cleveland saw him cough up seven runs. Rich Hill isn’t right, and although the Dodgers aren’t so worried about his June, they’d like to know if he’ll be fine by October. Something right now is borked up.

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Young players are fun, because young players are fresh. They give us something new to think about, keeping baseball just spicy enough to ward off too much boredom. Every young player comes with some form of strength, and it’s entertaining for a while. In time, we get used to it. Then there are new young players.

When Andrelton Simmons was younger, he was all over the internet. His strength was that he played like one of the best defensive shortstops in baseball history, and that made an immediate impression. It felt for a while like, every other day, there was a new Simmons clip that people would fawn over. And, justifiably so — Simmons was doing things other people couldn’t do. But, ultimately, humans are humans, and Simmons stopped feeling so exciting. We came to expect the defense. The bat didn’t develop. New players came around. Simmons turned just 27 last September, but he was all but absent from the conversation about the new wave of shortstops.

And, hell, that makes some since, given that by now Simmons counts as a veteran. This is his sixth year playing in the major leagues. I mentioned, though, that he’s only 27. Simmons is making himself relevant again. He’s showing off a new trick, one we waited for for years.

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Matt Stairs loves to teach hitting, and he has plenty of teaching to do. The 49-year-old former slugger is in his first season as Philadelphia’s hitting coach, and given the youthfulness of the Phillies lineup, he’s got his hands full. Raw talent dots the roster, but that’s essentially what it is. Finished products are in short supply.

Stairs isn’t heavy-handed with his approach — he wants his hitters to be themselves — but at the same time, he knows what does and doesn’t work. With 19 big-league seasons as a player under his belt, he understands the nuts and bolts of the craft as well as anyone. So while he’s being entrusted to mold and shape young Phillies, he’s not doing so in a cookie-cutter way. For Stairs, it’s all about doing what you do, but in a more efficient, and more productive, manner.

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Stairs on exit velocity and launch angle: “I think it’s mostly just different terminology now. Hitters have always thought about exit velocity, just not in those words. Our thought process was hitting the ball hard and getting the proper angle to the baseball.

“You’re not creating exit velocity by swinging harder. It’s about making solid contact. It’s about being short to the baseball with a quick, compact swing. We have guys like Tommy Joseph, and Cameron Rupp — their swings are so short that, at times, when the ball comes off their bat, it accelerates. You create bat speed and exit velocity by using your top hand and driving your bat through the zone.

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