The 2017 MLB Draft kicks off tonight at 7 p.m. ET, and the Minnesota Twins will have the first pick from what is generally considered to be a pretty a mediocre class. And how the rest of the draft goes depends on how the Twins answer one pretty simple question: can a high-end MLB player really contribute as both a hitter and a pitcher?
As usual, Mike Trout is at the top of our WAR leaderboard. That will only be true for a little while longer, however, as Trout’s lead is down to just one tenth of one win, and he’s unfortunately on the shelf for the next couple of months. Based on the current trajectory, at some point in the next week or so, Zack Cozart will usurp Trout at the top of that list. For all the great performances we’ve seen in the first half of 2017, it’s the Reds 31 year old shortstop who is currently stealing the show.
While the Reds are currently fringe Wild Card contenders, sitting at 28-30, the reality remains that they are very likely to be sellers instead of buyers over the next two months. The team is clearly prioritizing the future over the present, and with a league-worst pitching staff, it is unlikely that the Reds will manage to stay close enough to the win-now teams in the NL to incentivize the front office to dramatically shift course in an effort to take advantage of a stronger-than-expected first half. And as a team looking towards the future, the most obvious trade chips are impending free agents, which is a class Cozart also falls into. When you’re a rebuilding team with a player headed towards free agency who is nearly leading everyone in WAR, a trade seems inevitable.
So as the Reds and the rest of baseball head towards the July 31st trade deadline, perhaps no question will loom larger than this one: how good is Zack Cozart now?
Sometimes baseball history requires an explanation. History is happening all of the time, and we try hard to point it out when it does. I don’t think requiring an explanation necessarily makes certain achievements any less remarkable, because context is important, and there are numbers that need adjustments. Like, it could take a while to convey just why last year’s Cubs defense was so amazing, but at the end, you’d understand how amazing it was. It just takes some mental digging and sorting.
Explanations, though, lose people. You’re left with a receptive audience, but the audience is smaller than it would’ve been, at the beginning. There’s baseball history of the sort that appeals to dorks, and there’s baseball history of the sort that appeals to everyone. That second kind is powerful. That second kind brings fans to their feet. Over the weekend, there was a standing ovation for Edinson Volquez. Tuesday evening, there was a standing ovation for Scooter Gennett. Scooter Gennett hit four home runs in a baseball game. That’s historic because he hit four home runs in a baseball game. That’s as simple as history’s ever going to get. And so Scooter Gennett has made himself unforgettable.
There was a time, early last season, when an increasing number of people was jumping on the Phillies bandwagon. The team was rebuilding and overachieving, but there were early signs that the front office had assembled a dynamite pitching staff. While the Phillies were the rebuilding team getting the most positive attention, the Reds might’ve been the rebuilding team getting the most negative attention. Rebuilds are rebuilds, and losing teams lose, but the Reds didn’t seem to have anything exciting. The Phillies were a team with possible studs. The Reds were a team with just about nothing to speak of.
As 2016 rolled on, the Phillies dropped off, while the Reds improved. The Phillies had the National League’s worst second-half record. The Reds closed out by playing .500 baseball. And now it’s 2017, and the Phillies continue to struggle. They presently have the worst record out of anyone, while the Reds have been somewhere in the vicinity of average. Suddenly, it’s the Reds who have players to talk about. It’s the Reds who look a little bit promising. They just — well, the season’s been weird. At the same time, the Reds have been very good and very bad.
“It’s like a boxer who is always trying to lead the guy into his straight. You have to manipulate him with your footwork. Same type of thing in baseball. You have to figure out a way to funnel [the pitcher] into your hot zone. That comes with patience and that comes with accepting or realizing there will be some error on their side.
“It’s almost like as a hitter you have to be a counter puncher. The best way to be a counter puncher is just to sit and wait and absorb and then counter with whatever you think your strength is.”
—Joey Votto to David Manel, last September
CLEVELAND – Baseball is an unusual team sport in that the defense possess the ball. Pitchers have the advantage of dictating the action, the location, and type of pitch. But the idea articulated by Votto in the epigraph above is fascinating, this idea of “funneling,” of batters influencing pitchers. It led me to Votto’s locker in the corner of the visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field last week.
A willing and introspective Votto is a great resource if you’re interested in discussing the art of hitting. I suppose it’s akin to having access to this generation’s Ted Williams. I was curious to learn more about this idea of dictating action from the batter’s box, imposing will from there, to learn more about Votto’s renowned selective aggressiveness. Votto leads baseball in the ratio of swings on pitches in zone compared to swings out of the zone as Ben Lindbergh noted recently. But I was particularly curious to speak with Votto because it seems like several of the game’s best young hitters are following elements of Votto’s approach. With the data-density charts that have become available in recent years, we can now see what maturation, what selective aggressiveness, looks like.
Miguel Sano has become a fearsome hitter because he’s more selective. It appears as though he’s looking in a smaller area to do damage this year. While Bryce Harper declined to discuss his approach, he also appears to be having great success by zeroing in. And there was, of course, the great April surprise that was Eric Thames, who credits his success in part to taking advantage of idle hours in South Korea where he learned to be selectively aggressive, or perhaps and even more refined version of that philosophy that Votto dubbed “funneling.”
In the second half of last season, the Reds played just about .500 baseball, and they were driven in large part by a new version of Joey Votto — a version of Joey Votto that refused to strike out. However, while Votto drew himself a little bit of attention, it never became a major story, mostly because of the Reds’ miserable first half knocking them off of everyone’s radar. By the time August rolls around, there are teams that are already out of the hunt, and those teams don’t get very much coverage.
It’s still the first half of this season, and the Reds have played just about .500 baseball. They’ve been driven in large part by a sustained version of Joey Votto — a version that still refuses to strike out. Don’t get me wrong, Votto was never particularly whiff-prone. It’s not like this is Chris Davis learning to put everything in play. But Votto’s a guy who’s entered his mid-30s. Contact is thought of as a young-player skill. In this way, Votto’s turned back the clock, and also bucked the league-wide strikeout trend that so many others have fallen into.
When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.
There’s an argument to be made that we’re exposed to too much Statcast data. It’s kind of a silly argument, and it’s easy enough to avoid, but there might indeed be overuse, or at least over-citation. It’s a function, I think, of enthusiasm; think about the data we have access to now. Not very long ago, such an amount of information would’ve been unimaginable. Now we have everything. It’s no wonder some people want to refer to it all the time. It’s an information miracle. Sometimes the enthusiasm can go a little overboard.
What I personally don’t have much use for is the normal stuff. I don’t care about regular pitches, or regular home runs. A home run, by its very existence, has to be hit pretty hard, at a vertical angle. I don’t need to hear that some guy hit a homer 105 miles per hour. I’m intrigued when the home runs are particularly fast. I’m even more intrigued when the home runs are particularly slow. That brings us to Wednesday.
People love experiencing rarities. We flock to see Halley’s Comet when it comes around every 75 years, and to botanical gardens to see the blossoming of a flower that smells like death. There’s a thrill to seeing — or in the case of the flower, smelling — something that few others have. It’s not a unique experience, but it’s close. We likely experience many of little moments like this every day without realizing it. We only register the major events, like comets or death flowers, or Joey Votto pop ups.
Since he first entered the big leagues in 2007, Joey Votto boasts the lowest infield-fly-ball rate among all qualified batters at 1.3%. That figure was slightly lower before yesterday’s game against the Cubs, when he did this.
That’s the first batted ball that Votto has popped up to an infielder in fair territory since September 16th, 2016 — and that previous pop up was caught on the outfield grass, what Play Index describes as being in the “Deep SS-3B hole.” In fact, every pop up to an infielder by Votto in 2016 was described as deep in the hole. To find Votto’s last pop up that was caught by an infielder in fair territory that was actually in the infield, you’d have to go all the way back to May 24th of 2015, when Trevor Bauer got him to pop up to second base.
Round bat, round ball, traveling in different directions: the eight-word story of hitting really captures some of the difficulty of that practice. When you get into the art of choking up — moving the hands up the barrel and shortening the bat — you uncover a whole world of players attempting to address that difficulty. David Kagan examined the physics of choking up today at The Hardball Times. Here, we ask the practitioners what they think. It turns out, the players serve up some conventional wisdom, but also some insight into the reasoning behind the practice.