Archive for Red Sox

There are a bunch of things we know to be true about Aaron Cook, or at least things we have no reason to question. Aaron Cook played for the Rockies, and he recently played for the Red Sox. More recently he was signed by the Phillies. He is a man, and he is a man of more than 30 years, and he is a man who grows reddish facial hair when he wants to, and even when he doesn’t. Aaron Cook knows many things about the game of baseball. Last season, Cook posted one of the lowest strikeout rates ever.

Strikeouts, of course, have never been a big part of Aaron Cook’s game — when he’s right, he gets a bunch of grounders. When he’s wrong, he also gets a bunch of grounders, but the overall results of everything are worse. Cook, in 2012, didn’t post the lowest strikeout rate in baseball history. He did post the lowest strikeout rate since the strike, at 4.9% of all batters. There were 411 batters, and 20 of those batters struck out. When Cook was in triple-A in 2012, there were 153 batters, and 16 of those batters struck out, so this was predictable to some extent.

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Only 27 players have hit 100 or more homers and stolen 400 or more bases in their career. Eleven of them are in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and four others can reasonably be expected to reach Cooperstown. But there are some names on the list you wouldn’t pull off the top of your head. Tommy Harper? Yep, he’s one of those names. He is also a possessor of that rare feat: the Random Career Year.

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At the end of last May, Phil Dumatrait announced his retirement from professional baseball. It was an announcement that went largely unnoticed — note the three retweets — and that makes sense, because Dumatrait hadn’t pitched in 2012, and for his career he threw just 151 major-league innings over parts of four seasons. Many of them were not good innings, and while there are the usual qualifiers about how Dumatrait was one of the very best pitchers in the entire world, relative to his big-league peer group, he was lacking a certain something. “Ability to have consistent success,” is what he was lacking.

Dumatrait, like all professional ballplayers, once had a lot of promise. Dumatrait, unlike all professional ballplayers, was selected as early as in the first round in 2000. In fairness, that wasn’t much of a round — the two guys selected before Dumatrait have been worth negative WAR, and the six guys selected after Dumatrait fell short of the bigs — but Dumatrait found his way to prospect lists. According to Baseball America, he was seventh in the Red Sox’s system before 2002. He was fifth in the same system the next year, and the year after that, he was sixth in the Reds’ system, one behind Joey Votto. Phil Dumatrait looked like he could be something, for a while. And, ultimately, he was a big-leaguer, if a relatively unsuccessful one.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Even More Javier Vazquez Baseball Coverage, Crazy!
2. Action GIF: Javier Vazquez’s Curveball
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Puerto Rican League

Even More Javier Vazquez Baseball Coverage, Crazy!
Since last week’s update of the Puerto Rican League leaderboards, former major-league pitcher and potentially-again major-league pitcher Javier Vazquez has made another start (his fifth) for the Leones of Ponce — in which start Vazquez posted the following line (box): 6.0 IP, 25 TBF 7 K, 3 BB, 1 HR, 4:6 GO:AO. The performance further increased the right-hander’s lead over the league’s other starting pitchers, per the regressed pitching metric SCOUT- (below).

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Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
2. Graphs: Miguel Tejada’s Career in WAR
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League

Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
Kansas City Sign Chavez, Tejada
The Kansas City Royals have signed outfielder Endy Chavez and infielder Miguel Tejada to minor-league deals, reports MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell. The latter will become an MLB deal worth $1.1 million, according to Dionisio Soldevila of ESPN Deportes (with credit to MLB Trade Rumors’ Edward Creech for collecting same information). Tejada, who enters his age-39 season, has been worth 43.8 WAR over his career, although only about one of those wins has come over the previous three seasons.

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I had abbreviated looks at two more Blue Jays hitters with big, recent international bonuses and am tossing in the one pitcher with some prospect standing from the game I saw of the Red Sox. All three of these players have big bonuses, tools and expectations, but little experience in organized minor league games.

Two of the highest recent bonuses from the July 2 market have been handed out to hitters but the Blue Jays in 2B/CF Franklin Barreto (2012) and SS Dawel Lugo (2011). Barreto signed for $1.45 million, one of the top bonuses in the first year of fixed international bonus pools while Lugo signed for $1.3 million last season under the old rules.

Barreto won’t be 17 until spring training, is the equivalent of a high school junior and is actually younger than most of the top prep prospects for the 2014 draft. I point that out so you realize how much more projection is necessary to see what he’ll become and I’m guessing his age is a reason that Barreto barely even played in instructs. He obviously has plenty of instruction to absorb and I only saw him in part of one game.

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The Red Sox have been one of the baseball’s most active teams on the free agent market this winter, inking David Ross, Jonny Gomes, Shane Victorino, Koji Uehara, and maybe Mike Napoli (depending on a recent hold-up with his physical) as they look to pick up the pieces following a last place finish in 2012. Their August blockbuster with the Dodgers freed up hundred of millions of dollars in payroll space, and so far that money has been put back into the team in the form of sensible, short-ish term contracts. The pitching staff still needs work, but up until the today the only position they had not addressed was shortstop.

The internal options were not all that appealing. Ivan DeJesus Jr. hasn’t played much shortstop in recent years and Pedro Ciriaco managed an 85 wRC+ (2.9 BB%) in 272 big league plate appearances this year. Prospect Jose Iglesias is a wizard with the glove, but he owns a .251/.302/.287 career batting line. In Triple-A. In almost 800 plate appearances. There’s a minimum acceptable level of offense at the big league level, and it’s not very likely the 22-year-old Iglesias can provide it right now. Defensive skill only goes so far.

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According to Ken Rosenthal, Ryan Dempster is close to signing with the Boston Red Sox. Assuming the deal gets done, you’re going to hear a lot about how Dempster is an NL pitcher transitioning to the AL East, and how this is bound to go poorly. You’re going to hear about Dempster’s 5.09 ERA with Texas after the mid-season trade ended his long stint as an NL only pitcher, and you’re going to hear about how he got taken apart by the Yankees, giving up eight runs in six innings of work.

Because Dempster is headed for his age-36 season, has a fastball that sits around 90 mph, and had spent his entire career in the NL before the mid-season trade to Texas, many are going to expect Dempster to be exposed in the AL East. Whenever a pitcher without top-shelf velocity makes the move from the NL to the AL, and especially to the AL East, there’s always an expectation of disaster. The theory goes that pitchers with marginal velocity can dominate in the NL, but get exposed when facing the big bats of the super scary American League East.

The problem is that we’ve got too many pieces of evidence to suggest that it’s not true.

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The Red Sox have found their seventh inning man. The club signed 38-year-old right-hander Koji Uehara to a one-year deal with a $4.25 million base salary Thursday.

Boston’s bullpen struggled last season from Andrew Bailey’s injury to the early implosion of Mark Melancon to the eventual meltdown of Alfredo Aceves. The club finished in the league’s bottom half in both ERA (3.88) and FIP (3.91). Uehara is one of the best control pitchers in the big leagues and he can generate swings and misses. Should Andrew Bailey struggle to get on the field again, the Red Sox have a player they can trust in the later innings in Uehara.

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