Archive for Teams

We’re still 100 games away from the end of the season, but we’re getting closer to that time when teams have to decide whether they’re in or out of contention for the playoffs. Some clubs might have to make the tough choice of moving themselves out of contention despite having a reasonable playoff shot. In the American League, nearly every team is still in the race. That might change over the course of the next month, of course, but the field certainly looks like it will still be crowded come July.

There are five playoff spots up for grabs in the AL, and while a lot can and will happen the rest of the way, there are four teams to which our playoff odds give roughly an 80% or better chance of making the playoffs: the Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and New York Yankees. The Astros look well on their way to potentially 100 wins, while the Indians, Red Sox and Yankees appear to be moving toward close to 90 wins, a figure that generally amounts to a spot in the postseason. Those four teams total 359% of the 500% total odds available. After that, seven teams have something close to a 10%.

After the first four teams, no club has a better than a 50% chance at the playoffs. The team at the top, Toronto, is currently in last place in its division. Here are the playoff odds since the beginning of the season for the rest of the teams in the American League — with the exception, that is, of the rebuilding Chicago White Sox, who have been near zero all season long.

Does that look like an incomprehensible mess? Well, welcome to the AL Wild Card race. If it helps at all, the list of teams at the bottom of the chart is in order in terms of their current playoff odds. There are seven teams with close to a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, with a couple more in Kansas City and Oakland that possess an outside chance of getting back into the mix. If you picked the top team currently by the odds, Toronto, taking the field is probably a better bet.

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On May 10th, Jeff wrote a post here called “Well, the Orioles Are Doing it Again“, recognizing that the Orioles were once again winning a bunch of games despite a fairly pedestrian BaseRuns record. At the time, the Orioles were 22-10, outpacing their BaseRuns expected record of 16-16, as they had clutched their way to the best record in baseball.

A little over a month later, the Orioles are 31-31. They’ve gone 9-21 in their last 30 games, and they’re now a half-game out of last place in the AL East. But this isn’t a case where their reliance on winning close games has come back to bite them, with the one-run bounces going against them. They are still outpacing their BaseRuns expected win total by six games. They’ve won 9 of their last 30 games because they’ve played like a team that should have only won 9 of their last 30 games. And they’ve played that poorly because their starting pitching is awful.

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CLEVELAND — Tommy Kahnle is persistent.

The visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field features an arcade-style video-game machine that allows the user to choose from a variety of original Nintendo and Sega games. Kahnle, who will turn 28 next month, is old enough to have remembered the 1990s and played the eight-bit game systems. For two days in the clubhouse, he tried his hand at a variety of the games he played as a kid, more interested and focused on beating the games, more willing to hit reset and begin anew after each failed victory, than anyone else in the clubhouse.

And it is perhaps — in part, at least — that sort of persistence which has allowed a once wild arm DFA’d by the Rockies in November of 2015 to emerge as one of the most dominant relievers in the game. Jeff Sullivan recently investigated Kahnle’s curious and dominant April, and Kahnle has only continued to be something of the Craig Kimbrel of the AL Central.

The only pitcher striking out a greater percentage of batters than Kahnle (47.3%) this season is Kimbrel himself (55.6%).

More exhibits of evidence:

The only pitchers featuring superior K-BB% marks are Kimbrel (50.5 points) and Kenley Jansen (44.8).

The other amazing Kahnle Fact: he has the fourth-lowest zone-contact rate among relievers (71%). Batters both chase out of the zone and struggle to hit him in the zone. It’s an attractive combination. He has now sustained this success for better than a third of the season.

Kanhle has always had good stuff. His four-seam fastball ranks seventh in velocity among relief pitchers’ fastballs, and 31st in whiff-per-swing rate, according to the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards. He said he throws a traditional four-seam fastball but the pitch has some natural cutting action.

He’s second among reliever in whiff per swing (56%) on his primary secondary offering, a darting changeup.

While his fastball velocity is up from 94.6 mph in 2014 to a career-best 97.9 mph this season, while his changeup has better fading action away from Coors Field as one would expect, the secret to Kahnle’s success actually isn’t a secret at all.

“Getting ahead of hitters, really,” Kahnle told FanGraphs. “It’s tough to get guys out when you are falling behind a lot. It’s even tougher to strike guys out when you are not ahead. I would credit it to me getting ahead and these adjustments to mechanics.”

Kahnle has trimmed his walk rate to a career-low 6.6% this season, down from a 16.6% last season. His career average is 13.1%. His first-pitch strike rate has jumped to 60.4% from 52.8% a season ago, and from 52.3% for his career. His zone percent has increased to 50.5% from 47.3%.

For his career, Kahnle has been ahead of hitters in 214 plate appearances. In 239 plate appearances batters have been ahead of Kahnle. But this season, through Sunday, Kahnle has been ahead in the count 36 times compared to the hitter being ahead 23 times.

Consider the old Kahnle, and this infamous walk-off walk from last June:

And the new Kahnle dotting 100 mph:

With a wipeout changeup:

He’s more often getting heading in counts and is more often producing two-strike anxiety in hitters, as his swinging-strike rate has jumped from 10.8% to 17.0%.

Said Chicago White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper to The Athletic back in April: “The only thing between him and staying here forever is just throwing his fastball, his breaking ball, his change over the plate.”

And Kahnle is throwing his pitches more often over the plate.

Consider the fastballs he threw to left-handed hitters last season:

his season ….

And this season:

Kanhle credits some mechanical changes and work with Cooper to turning his career around. He has worked to lower his leg kick since last season. “I used to come up a little too high… It would cause a lot of things to go on,” Kahnle said. He also tried to have his back leg not dip quite as much as it did earlier in his career, causing him to elevate pitches and get inconsistent with his release point. He also developed a glove “tap” last year to get his “arm out quicker.”

But the most important change, he said, was keeping his head focused longer on its target, the catcher’s glove.

“A lot of people had talked about keeping my head on line, but I had never understood what they meant,” Kahnle said. “I kind of figured it out towards the end of the spring this year.”

Sometimes players don’t understand the language of a coach, sometimes there is a communication gap, and Kahnle said he had to develop a feel for what coaches meant by “staying on line.”

One day in Arizona this spring, he decided he was going to focus on the catcher’s glove as long as his he could. He was going to keep his focus there as close to his release point as he could, until his delivery took him somewhat dramatically to the first-base side of the pitching mound.

“I finally started doing it. I guess it worked,” Kahnle said. “All of the sudden, this year, it started clicking.”

And if Kahnle has really found a new level, if he’s really given the rebuilding White Sox a relief ace on the cheap, then it will be one of the better finds of the 2015-16 offseason.

The story of Kahnle is one of persistence and it’s also one of failure. This a pitcher who, like so many others before him, failed to pitch successfully at Coors Field. It was pitching at Coors that perhaps accelerated Kahnle’s realization that he had to make changes, that he had to be open to significant adjustments.

“Especially when I started to fail in Colorado, I knew I needed to change some things,” Kahnle said. “It was last offseason I really started to work on some things.”

Pitchers shed by the Rockies often come with a discount because they come with messy performance lines. But Collin McHugh figured it out at sea level in Houston after leaving Coors Field, as has Juan Nicasio in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, as has Drew Pomeranz (at times) in San Diego and Boston. If you were willing to take a project, there was upside in Kahnle. A failed Rockies pitcher with stuff, a willing and persistent experimenter. Kahnle is looking more and more like he’s reached a new level, an elite level.

Last year, Brian Dozier hit 42 home runs for the Twins. He’d never hit 30 before that, so it was fair to wonder if the power was repeatable. Earlier this year, he was on pace for a total much more similar to his career norms… and yet some of the factors we used to look at last year’s home runs suggest that he should have recorded more homers this year already. Notably, Andrew Perpetua’s xStats metric indicated last week that Dozier had an expected home-run tally that was four homers higher than his actual number.

I was curious about it, so I decided to go directly to the source. Before a recent Twins-Giants game in San Francisco, I made a trip to the visitor’s clubhouse with video of the longest fly balls that Dozier has hit this year. “Where are those missing home runs?” I asked him.

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In addition to calling up stud center-field prospect Lewis Brinson, Milwaukee also recently summoned talented lefty and KATOH crush Josh Hader. Although Hader’s worked primarily as starter in the minors, the Brewers plan to use him out of the bullpen for the time being. A 19th-round pick out of high school, Hader’s been exceeding expectations for years. He owns a 3.87 FIP and 27% strikeout rate in 541 minor-league innings. In 25 starts between Double-A and Triple-A last year, he pitched to a sparkling 3.07 FIP with a 31% strikeout rate.

Things didn’t go as swimmingly for Hader in Triple-A this year, however. He maintained a solid 22% strikeout rate, but matched it with a 14% walk rate and coughed up an uncharacteristic 14 homers in 52 innings. The end result was a 5.37 ERA and 4.93 xFIP, which doesn’t exactly scream “big-league ready.”

Still, KATOH remains optimistic. My system projects Hader for 5.0 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 5.7 WAR by KATOH+, which incorporates scouting rankings. That makes him one of the top 10 pitching prospects in the minors, and a mid-top-100 guy overall.

To put some faces to Hader’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the 6-foot-3 lefty. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Hader’s Double-A and Triple-A performance and every season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.

Despite his relative lack of prospect pedigree, Hader’s stuff is almost certainly of big-league quality. The lefty’s fastball averaged over 94 mph in his debut, and both his slider and changeup project to plus according to Eric Longenhagen. However, scouts have long contended that Hader profiles best as a reliever. To wit:

• Eric Longenhagen, 2017: “Those who consider him a reliever cite the rarity of a delivery like this in starting rotations across baseball, the potential platoon issues Hader might face as a low-slot lefty, and his fringey control.”
• Baseball America Prospect Handbook, 2016: “His reliance on his outstanding fastball combined with just ordinary control make him a possible bullpen candidate.”
• Baseball America Prospect Handbook, 2015: “Durability will always be a question because of Hader’s size and how he slings the ball across his body… His reliance on his fastball profiles him better as a reliever.”
• Baseball America Prospect Handbook, 2014: “It’s one of the most unconventional deliveries a starter could use… Scouts see him as a future lefty reliever where his low arm angle will make life difficult for lefthanders.”

Despite the persistent “future reliever” label, Hader dominated for years as a starter in the minors. But when he finally sputtered in Triple-A, the Brewers seemingly decided to try him in the pen. Given his stuff and minor-league performance, I have little doubt that he’ll be a dominant force there.

At the end of March, the Rangers and Rougned Odor agreed to a six-year commitment, worth just shy of $50 million. Since then, Odor has gone from being a guy coming off a .502 slugging percentage to being a guy actively slugging .359. When you look for reasons why the Rangers are standing a little bit under .500, you should give plenty of consideration to the fact that, for two and a half months or so, Odor has played around the replacement level. His wRC+ is quite literally just about half what it was a season ago.

So, what’s ailing Odor at the plate? Here is a decent and very simple clue:

As a rookie, Odor was good for 19 pop-ups and nine home runs. As a sophomore, he finished with 26 pop-ups and 16 home runs. In what left the impression of being a breakout junior season, Odor wound up with 16 pop-ups and 33 home runs. But now Odor’s a senior, I guess, and his current line includes 19 pop-ups and nine home runs. Fully a quarter of Odor’s fly balls have qualified as pop-ups. That rate is extreme — too extreme — and it’s evident right away that Odor is back to just not squaring up the ball often enough.

In the plot, you see Odor’s rates of infield flies per fly ball, and home runs per fly ball. Here are the former rates, subtracted from the latter rates:

• 2014: -8.8%
• 2015: -7.3%
• 2016: +8.8%
• 2017: -13.2%

That’s just HR/FB% – IFFB%. To further contextualize things, here are Odor’s year-to-year MLB percentile rankings in the same stat:

• 2014: 8th percentile
• 2015: 7th
• 2016: 76th
• 2017: 1st

Odor, by this measure, was very bad, then very bad, then pretty good!, and now very bad. It’s not that he isn’t a half-decent power hitter, but he pops up too often for someone who hits so many balls in the air. Last season made it seem as if Odor had managed to conquer one of his biggest drawbacks, but now it’s back with a vengeance, and Odor is having difficulty keeping his head above water.

This doesn’t actually explain whatever the problem might be. It’s just another indicator that a problem has existed. And it’s also important to point out that, when Odor popped up a bunch in 2015, he still managed to hit all right. But Odor changed his approach over time to become more fly-ball friendly, and the pop-up issue has been worse than ever. Odor is trying to get under the ball, but in a sense he’s been too successful. The mis-hits have dragged down his batting line, to a woeful depth.

Odor will adjust, and the stats will improve. I can’t see him finishing all that close to a wRC+ of 54. But, given how aggressively he swings, he’s given the impression of being awfully volatile. Volatile players go through some miserable slumps. Rangers fans have seen the worst of Rougned Odor again, and this needs to get turned around within a week or three if the team wants to mount a serious charge for the wild card.

With the weekend now officially in the books, Aaron Judge is the new owner of the longest home run of the season. He’s also the new owner of the fastest-hit home run of the season, which is additionally the fastest-hit home run of the admittedly brief Statcast era. Allow me to note that these were two different home runs.

Aaron Judge is not the result of some kind of hype train gone off the rails. He’s not just some hot hitter who’s got number-types overexcited. Sure, he could cool off. Sure, further adjustments will be made. But Judge, in April, was baseball’s sixth-best hitter. In May, he was baseball’s fourth-best hitter. In June, he’s been baseball’s second-best hitter. Aaron Judge is a candidate to win both the Rookie of the Year and the MVP awards at the same time, and he’s doing things other players don’t do. At least, other players not named Giancarlo Stanton. Pre-Statcast, we would’ve assumed that Judge is a freak. With Statcast, we know that Judge is a freak, someone pushing the limits of on-field human capability. If you’re not in love with Aaron Judge, it’s not some noble rebellion against the media’s east-coast bias. It’s about you closing off your own heart.

Judge is amazing. He’s why every big-power type with a strikeout problem gets chance after chance. Judge is the embodiment of so many dreams come true. Here’s what’s just as nuts: Judge isn’t solely responsible for carrying the Yankees’ offense. Judge is but one soldier in the Yankees’ push for home-run supremacy.

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As a rookie in 2010, Stephen Strasburg turned in an amazing 68 innings of baseball. He struck out 33% of the batters he faced, posted a 2.91 ERA, and recorded an even better 2.08 FIP. Alas, it wasn’t to last: his season was felled by an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery. Seven years later, he’s putting up his best numbers since that debut season. This season, if nothing else, has underscored a point that’s often ignored: Stephen Strasburg has already had a pretty good career.

Often, we focus on the negative — or, at the very least, allow our enthusiasm to create expectations that are unlikely to be fulfilled by reality. In the case of Strasburg, a highly touted former No. 1 pick, there’s been plenty of room for such expectations — or there has been for me, at least. In my head, I’m often overly critical of Strasburg, because he’s an injury risk. He’s only tossed 200 innings in a season once, and he only reached 180 innings in one other season. And yet, in his last outing, he passed the 1,000 innings pitched mark for his career. He’s one of just 1,219 pitchers who have done so, out of 9,366 players who have pitched throughout history. That’s just 13% total to have reached 1,000 IP, and Strasburg is among them. Not bad for a guy who’s always injured.

When Strasburg put up 2.5 WAR in those 68 innings back in 2010, you’d be forgiven if you thought a string of five-win seasons were about to follow. He’s never quite gotten there. His best was a 4.5 WAR in 2014. He might have gotten there last year, as he compiled 3.9 WAR in 147.2 IP. But alas, elbow trouble limited his contributions once again. But while he’s never reached the 5 WAR threshold in any given season, he’s tallied at least three wins in five straight seasons, and he’s working on his sixth this season. That sort of consistency is hard to pull off. For instance, the only other pitchers who tallied at least 3 WAR in each season from 2012 to 2016 were Madison Bumgarner, Cole Hamels, Clayton Kershaw, David Price, Chris Sale and Max Scherzer. And while those six pitchers averaged 1,060 IP across those five seasons, Strasburg tossed just 832.1 IP, making him far, far more efficient in his consistency.

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Three months ago, few would have predicted the Brewers would be atop the National League Central in June, but here we are. The Cardinals, Cubs, and Pirates have all fallen short of preseason expectations, while Milwaukee has surprisingly kept their record above .500. Regardless of what the standings say, Milwaukee’s roster pales in comparison to the Cubs’ and Cardinals’ on paper, which is why we give the Brewers a mere 3% chance of winning the division.

Milwaukee’s team just got a bit better, however, as they’ve called up top prospect Lewis Brinson to play some outfield. Brinson was having a fine season in Triple-A, slashing .312/.397/.503. He’s hit very well for a center fielder — and exceptionally well for a good defensive center fielder who’s only 23.

Brinson’s come a long way since his early days as a professional, especially in the strikeout department. He struck out an alarming 38% of the time in Low-A back in 2013, but has hacked several percentage points off that mark since. His 22% strikeout rate in Triple-A this year is still a bit high, but not alarmingly so. He’s made this improvement without giving up much in other categories, either. His 20 extra-base hits, seven steals, healthy walk rate, and center-field defense more than outweigh the remaining strikeout risk.

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Long-time UCLA baseball coach Gary Adams was nearing the end of his coaching tenure when he made his way to The Ball Yard in 2003 to talk hitting philosophy. The Ball Yard is a spartan hitting facility, containing two batting cages, located in a nondescript building in a business park in Chatsworth, Calif. There, Doug Latta and Craig Wallenbrock, a former major-league scout, worked as private hitting instructors. There was a UCLA connection: Bruins star Chase Utley was a client of Wallenbrock, and other UCLA players had worked at the facility.

Whatever you want to call the effort in the majors to hit balls less often on the ground, much of the grassroots movement — many of the alternatives to traditional and professional hitting philosophy — began at places like The Ball Yard, the hitting equivalent to garage start-ups.

At some point, Adams and Latta engaged in a separate conversation as they walked to exit the facility. After Adams listened to their philosophies on the swing, after hearing Latta’s antipathy for a ground-ball-oriented approach, Adams asked Latta a hypothetical question: what kind of swing would he have recommended Dave Roberts to adopt? Robert was a former UCLA standout under Adams, one who became a useful major-league player, mostly known for his speed. He is, of course, now the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Roberts slashed .266/.342/.366 over parts of 10 major-league seasons.

Even many proponents of the #NoGroundballs club would look at Roberts as an exception, a player who should put the ball on the ground to ensure that his speed is a factor as often as possible. As a layman of hitting mechanics, that concept makes sense to this author.

“I think that’s what Dave did. He made it to the big leagues,” Latta said of hitting ground balls. “But I think Dave Roberts could have had an outstanding career. He had incredible makeup. He’s a phenomenal manager because of his makeup and the way he approached the game. Good outfielder. But what happens if he suddenly hits like a Justin Turner? (Turner is a Latta client.) He could have been one of the great lead-off men of his generation.”

Had he worked with Roberts, Latta would have recommended dramatic swing changes. Perhaps today’s Roberts comp is Billy Hamilton: a player with incredible speed but whose swing and whose ability to hit have limited his overall value and the utility of his speed. Hamilton is a player who has probably been coached to hit the ball on the ground since he began playing baseball. With changes to his approach and swing, Latta thinks, the offensively challenged Hamilton could get to some untapped potential. (Hamilton has a 60 wRC+ for the season and 70 for his career.)

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