Mike Napoli was, at least at the time, an under-discussed portion of not only one of the worst trades of recent times, but also the puzzling follow-up trade in which the Jays sent Napoli to the Rangers for reliever Frank Francisco. Even given that at the time Napoli was not projected to be the monster he turned to be in 2011, that seems really weird given that his hitting style seemed to fit right into the type of sluggers the Jays love to collect.

In any case, after dealing with injury issues early in the year Napoli turned into one of the great stories of the 2011 season, as he not only hit for great power even by his previous standard, but significantly upped his average (by cutting his strikeout rate and boosting his BABIP) to finish the season with a .320/.414/.631 (144 wRC+) line that rivaled Josh Hamilton’s from 2010.

Even given reasonable expectations for regression, Napoli’s 2012 has been disappointing. While he has dealt with health issues this season, going on the disabled list this weekend after trying to play through an injury, Napoli has never really gotten going in 2012. After a career best wRC+ in 2011, Napoli currently has a seasonal career worst 105 wRC+. The easy thing would be to simply point to average on balls in play dropping back closer to his pre-2011 rates, but the issues go beyond that. His drop in power is particularly interesting.

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Last night, Yu Darvish took the mound against the Red Sox, and not surprisingly, he racked up a lot of walks and strikeouts. This is a common trend for Darvish, who has ended 39.6% of opposing plate appearances with a walk, hit batter, or a strikeout. Darvish is the kind of pitcher who succeeds or fails on his own, relying less on his defense than just about any other pitcher in the sport.

It’s not unusual for guys with premium stuff — which Darvish definitely has — to struggle with command early in their careers. However, as Bill Petti showed back in May, normal aging curves for starting pitchers don’t show a drastic improvement in command. Is it any different with high walk, high strikeout guys who simply need to learn to harness their stuff? Or, to put it another way, have other Darvish-like starting figured out how to throw strikes and take advantage of their velocity and movement?

To look at this, I applied the new filters available on the leaderboard to restrict the list to guys who matched three variables – walk rate, strikeout rate, and fastball velocity. Since we’re relying on velocity as an input, that means we can only look back to 2002, so our sample is smaller but we’re more likely to get a better match in terms of stuff, so that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. To come up with a list of guys who have had similar seasons to what Darvish is having now, I filtered using a minimum of 100 IP, 12% BB%, 20% K%, and FBv of 91.0 mph. While Darvish is well above the 20% strikeout mark, we do want to account for the fact that strikeout rate has been trending upwards, and so slightly lower K% in prior years were similar in terms of difference to league average. The list of names who match those inputs aren’t all that flattering.

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As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, the Rangers have summoned third base prospect Mike Olt from Double-A, and he’ll be joining the team in Texas in time for tonight’s game against the Angels. With Adrian Beltre manning the hot corner, though, third base is not in his immediate future, and the Rangers certainly aren’t calling Olt up to sit on the bench. Instead, his arrival signifies the likely end of the Michael Young Era in Texas. At least, the era where Young played any kind of meaningful role on the team.

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With Ryan Dempster unwilling to go to Atlanta and the Dodgers unwilling to pay up, the door opened on this trading deadline afternoon for the Rangers to swoop in and grab one of the season’s most surprising starting pitchers. Texas will send right-hander Kyle Hendricks and infielder Christian Villanueva to the Cubs to complete the deal.

For the Rangers, dealing with injuries to Neftali Feliz and Colby Lewis as well as the ineffectiveness of Roy Oswalt and Scott Feldman, starting pitching suddenly became a need. The Rangers are six games clear of a Wild Card and a near-lock to make the playoffs, but the Athletics and Angels are within 3.5 and 4.0 games respectively, and with the Angels nabbing Zack Greinke a division title is by on means locked up. The Rangers sensed a need for starting depth and pounced.

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This was written in January, but is being re-posted with Villanueva on his way to Chicago as part of the Ryan Dempster trade.

In 2011, Hickory was a hotbed of minor league talent including the best true shortstop prospect in baseball and multiple first round picks in catcher Kellin Deglan, center fielder Jake Skole and pitcher Luke Jackson. If not for being blown away by Boston Red Sox shortstop prospect Xander Bogaerts, my trip to Greenville would have been highlighted by a modestly performing, all but unknown third base prospect named Christian Villanueva. Villanueva went on to belt 10 home runs and steal 14/15 bases over the final two months of the season raising his prospect profile to legitimate sleeper.

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“As a whole, not specifically regarding potential deals, we need to add a lot of pitching to the system. It’s not enough to have a handful or two. You need waves and waves coming through your system, and we don’t have that. We hardly have even one wave coming, so we need to rebuild a lot of pitching depth.”

–Theo Epstein, July 18, 2012

On Monday night, the Chicago Cubs executed a pair of trades, sending players to both the Braves and the Rangers in exchange for pitching, pitching, pitching. Here’s the breakdown of those trades:

Braves get:
SP Paul Maholm
OF Reed Johnson

Cubs get:
SP Arodys Vizcaino
RP Jaye Champman

***

Rangers get:
C Geovany Soto

Cubs get:
SP Jake Brigham

The Braves trade feels a bit like a fleecing for the Cubs; the Rangers trade is at best a wash. Let us see why.
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Amidst Monday night’s flurry of trades, the Texas Rangers picked up a new catcher: Geovany Soto, formerly of the Chicago Cubs. The Rangers plucked the 29-year-old out of the North Side for the low price of Double-A right-hander Jake Brigham, a name absent from organization top prospect lists this season. Soto will take the roster spot of Yorvit Torrealba, designated for assignment by the Rangers to complete the move.

In 2008, Soto was NL Rookie of the Year, bringing home the honor with a 119 wRC+. Over the last four years, Soto has accumulated 11.0 WAR and a 108 wRC+ despite injuries limiting him to just 1,813 plate appearances. The injuries are back this year — a meniscus tear docked him 29 games — and the bat has disappeared. Soto is hitting just .199/.284/.347 (67 wRC+), leading one to wonder just exactly what he has left for hte Rangers.

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Source:Cliff Lee is in play in trade talks today. Rangers obviously the most logical landing spot, with 3B Mike Olt as possible centerpiece.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) July 30, 2012

With the unnerving (and, it should be noted, unexpected) success of the first edition of Hypothetical Trade Theater, in which the author suggested that Jean Segura and someone resembling (or actually being) right-handed pitching prospect Ariel Pena would likely be part of an Angels’ trade package for then-Brewer Zack Greinke, the same author now presents a sequel — in this case, in response to suggestions that the Texas Rangers might have interest in Phillies left-hander Cliff Lee.

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I’ve written quite a bit this year on trends in pitcher aging, specifically velocity loss and gain. In the last iteration I focused on the odds of pitchers gaining velocity back after a season where their fastball dropped by at least 1 mph.

In that piece I listed a few pitchers to keep your eye on given that their velocity was down from 2011. In June, I wrote about CC Sabathia for ESPN and noted that the big lefty is likely beginning to “age”, as the odds are quite a bit higher that pitchers over the age of 30 do not gain their velocity back once they’ve lost it.

After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that there is of course the chance that these pitchers will gain their velocity back by the end of the year (as I noted in both pieces). We know that, generally speaking, pitchers gain velocity as the season goes on. Temperatures rise, and so too do fastball velocities. If this is the case I wondered at what point in the season we can say with greater certainty that a pitcher is throwing as hard as he is going to throw. Is there a particular month where a velocity decline is more likely to translate to or predict a full season velocity decline?
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Earlier this week, Sports Illustrated posted the results (in slide-show form, yay!) of recent survey they took asking 228 MLB players to name the most underrated position player in the game. These sorts of things usually generate “interesting” results, and this case was no exception. This is supposed to be a fun exercise, so it would be unfair to complain about the “unscientific” nature of the poll: why 228 players? How were they distributed across the teams? Were they position players themselves or a mix? How many votes did each player get? The notions of “underrated” and is itself vague (underrated by the media? The fans? Statistics?), so the respondents may have been thinking of different things when answering. Wouldn’t a truly underrated player fail to show up on a list of “top underrated players” at all?

Such complaints sort of miss the point. I assume this was simply meant to be a fun way to generate discussion. I personally would have liked to have seen one or two comments from respondents about each player to get a sense of what the respondents were thinking about when they answered. In any case, the list has some results that are pretty hilarious, as one might expect. One way of responding would be to come up with a different list. Grant Brisbee wrote up an excellent list of his own. Another would be to simply go through SI’s list and comment on it.

This post takes the second path, but the truth is, it is not quite the “fisking” one might expect. Yes, some choices are downright hilarious. However, given the qualifications above, I thought the responding players did okay. It is not the list I would have made, but they made some decent choices. Or maybe the list is like the movie Juno: the beginning is so horribly annoying that the rest seems better than it actually is.

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