For the first month of every baseball season, I’m a bit notorious for simply answering “April” as the convenient, one-stop-shop for questions relating to why someone’s favorite player is hitting .150. Once we start heading into May, telling people to be patient when 1/6th of the season is already over becomes an increasingly unujustifiable task. While rebuilding teams are in a place at which they can be patient, avoiding judgment is tricky for contenders, especially when every division leader is in first place by fewer than three games.

So let’s get out the guillotine and guess who can be saved and who is a lost cause.

Ryan Braun, Milwaukee Brewers

I remain quite torn about the state of doneness of the Hebrew Hammer. On one hand, he can still hit the ball with authority as seen by the fact that his average exit velocity, dipping under 90 mph, isn’t all that different from the numbers in 2016 and 2017, years in which Braun was still a contributor offensively. If you dig deeper into his pitch-by-pitch stats, Braun appears to be going dead-red for fastballs, and despite a career-low contact rate, he is actually making contact with fastballs at better-than-career-average rates (14.6% whiff/swing rate in 2019 vs. 19.8% career). But other than fastballs, he’s making much worse contact, missing almost half the changeups and sliders he’s offered at (career rate under 30%).

It makes me wonder about Braun’s bat speed. To my naked eye, it looks like he’s trying to compensate for decreased bat speed by making contact with his bread-and-butter pitch (Braun was one of the best fastball hitters in baseball in his prime). He also suggested he was changing his swing in order to hit more home runs. It’s unfortunate that swing speed isn’t one of the things you can get easily, but Alex Chamberlain identified stats that correlate with swing speed when reverse-engineering the scanty data available a few years ago. Isolated power, xwOBA, and contact rate all have a relationship, and in each of the three, Braun is at his career’s nadir.

I think there’s still hope for Braun, but if his bat is slowing down, I wonder if he’s taking the wrong approach in trying to hit for more power. A player with slower bat speed but who is also pulling the ball more (57% compared to 38% career) seems like one trying to cheat on the fastballs. I don’t think Braun’s as doomed as some on this list, but I think that he’d be better off not trying to capture his early-career power because it’s making him a one-dimensional hitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Early season performances are always tough to get a handle on, but on a team level, the 16-game mark is worthy of some note. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2012 book Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers (a book to which I contributed), Derek Carty — a name that should be familiar around here — found that at the 16-game mark, a team’s year-to-date record became as predictive as simply assuming they’ll finish at .500, as the largest possible sample of teams inevitably does. Through Monday, 19 teams have played at least 16 games, and 11 have played at least 17, which makes this a good time to take a closer look.

In his study, Carty examined non-strike seasons from 1962 through 2011, calculating the correlation between a team’s record after n games and its final record. After one game, for example, the correlation with teams’ final mark was just .12, while at the five-game mark it was .28, and at the 10-game mark, .42. The correlation reached .5 at the 16-game mark, rose to .52 at the 17-game mark, and so on. Carty made no mention of the likelihood of teams making the playoffs, though with changing postseason formats — including the introduction of a second Wild Card in each league starting in 2012, just when the book hit the streets — such information would be of limited utility.

To my knowledge, Carty hasn’t updated the study since publishing that, so we don’t know for sure that the 2012-18 period hasn’t altered his conclusion slightly. Since we’re not doing brain surgery here — just getting a preliminary read on where this season is heading for teams — it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I didn’t set out to re-create Carty’s study, but I did examine what 16-game performances from the two Wild Card era can tell us. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Yerry Rodriguez, RHP, Texas Rangers
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 14   FV: 40+
Line: 5 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 6 K

Notes
If you’ve watched Padres righty Chris Paddack at all this spring, you’ve probably seen how he gets after hitters with his fastball at angles and in locations where they struggle to do anything with it, even in the strike zone. Though Rodriguez’s delivery doesn’t look anything like Paddack’s, the same concept applies, and Rodriguez is able to compete for swings and misses in the strike zone in a notable way. Lots of pitchers’ fastballs perform better than you’d expect given their velocity, but Rodriguez also throws hard. His changeup is good, and while I’ve taken umbrage with his breaking ball quality during in-person looks, he does have strong raw spin and his arm slot helps his breaker play up. I think there are a lot of strong components here and consider Rodriguez a dark horse top 100 candidate for next year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Tyler Anderson, Steven Brault, and Mike Leake — on how they learned and developed their change-of-pace pitches.

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Tyler Anderson, Colorado Rockies

“In high school, I tried to learn how to pitch by watching other people. And I was doing all kinds of stuff. I was dropping down, throwing from all arm angles, throwing sliders. Then I got to college. At the University of Oregon, they preached fastball-changeup. Not only that, in the fall you weren’t allowed to throw breaking pitches; you had to go fastball-changeup only. Then, just before the season started, you could start mixing in curveballs and sliders.

“Before that, I’d thrown a palm ball. Honestly. I would hold it in my palm and throw a palm ball. It was slower. My dad knew about it from back in the day — it’s an old-school pitch — and mine was actually pretty good. It didn’t have a lot of spin, and as you know, limited spin creates drop. Mine would drop a lot, but it was too hard to control. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday, the Rockies and 24-year-old right-hander German Marquez reached an agreement on a five-year, $43 million contract extension, with the deal first reported ESPN’s Jeff Passan. The contract includes a club option for a sixth year, though that becomes a mutual option if Marquez finishes at or near the top of the Cy Young voting twice during the life of the extension, which runs through 2023.

The deal encompasses one pre-arb year (this season), all three of Marquez’s arbitration years, and either one or two of his would-be free agent years, depending on what happens with that club option. He’s now on track to hit free agency at age 30.

Marquez is a pro scouting success story and an example of how development often continues after players have reached the big leagues. Th Rockies acquired him from Tampa Bay along with Jake McGee in exchange for Corey Dickerson (who Tampa later traded for fringe prospect Tristan Gray) and Kevin Padlo (who did not make our Rays prospect list). Marquez reached the big leagues in his first season as a Rockie.

Then just a competent strike-thrower with two plus pitches — a fastball and a curveball — Marquez was in the middle of our 2017 top 100 prospects list in anticipation of him developing a third pitch, which occurred during his 2018 breakout in the form of a new slider. After tinkering with his seldom-used changeup and a hard slider during the spring and first half of 2018, he leaned more heavily on the slide piece down the stretch in 2018 and was dominant toward the end of the season.

What’s next? Perhaps increased two-seamer usage, which could be especially meaningful as a way of keeping the ball on the ground in Coors Field. It’d be ideal for Marquez to continue refining his changeup but, despite his strike-throwing prowess, he has some issues with release consistency (it was better last year, but is still relatively varied) that might impede development in this area if you buy that things like feel and release consistency are indicators of change development, which I do.

We don’t know how a new CBA might have impacted Marquez’s free agency were he not to have signed a deal and hit the market at 28. The financial security afforded by extensions makes more sense for pitchers, who are at greater risk of suffering a career-altering injury. But Marquez hasn’t been injured since 2014 and is built like a tank, so perhaps he’s at less risk of breaking than, say, Blake Snell, who seemed to set the market for this type of extension a few weeks ago.

A 2.7 WAR contributor in 2017 and a 4.2 WAR arm in 2018 (who was trending up late in the year), Marquez is clearly part of a Rockies very long-term core that includes recently-extended Nolan Arenado, Kyle Freeland, David Dahl and whomever among the Ryan McMahon, Garrett Hampson, Brendan Rodgers, Raimel Tapia, etc. group turn out to actually be good. Daniel Murphy and Charlie Blackmon have deals running through 2021, and Trevor Story is under team control during that stretch, too.

Other than Ian Desmond, who has been a replacement level player for the last two years, there are no scary long-term deal on the books, so the Rockies should be free to pay to add to this competitive core while it’s together for the next three seasons, especially while 40% of their division is rebuilding. The most likely trade chips on the farm are Tyler Nevin and Colton Welker, who are blocked by Arenado, and McMahon/Murphy.

Spring training numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s no denying that Ryan McMahon has been a monster in the month of March. In 59 Cactus League at bats, the Colorado Rockies infielder banged out 25 hits while slashing a behemothic .424/.470/.763. His 1.233 OPS led the leaderboards in Arizona and Florida alike.

No, he isn’t about to approach those numbers in games that count — this isn’t Ty Cobb we’re talking about — but the 24-year-old is being counted on to provide value to the Rockies lineup. Three games into the regular season, he’s done just that. McMahon has four hits, including a pair of doubles, plus two walks, in a dozen plate appearances. Lilliputian sample size? Sure, but it’s nonetheless a nice start for the 2013 second-round pick.

His 2018 rookie season was a disappointment. In 202 big-league PAS, he fanned 64 times, and logged a .683 OPS. That came on the heels of spring training numbers which, while not as heady as this year’s, suggested he was ready to rake at the highest level. Instead, he scuffled.

McMahon is self-aware enough not to have forgotten last year. Asked a few weeks ago about his scorching spring, he reminded reporters that it had only been a few dozen at bats — spring training at bats, no less — and that “Baseball is a very humbling game. You never have it all the way figured out.” Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Jon Gray, Mark Gubicza, and Garrett Richards — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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Jon Gray, Colorado Rockies

“I started throwing a slider in probably 2012. I first learned how to throw a slurve, and that taught me how to throw a slider. I remember my uncle teaching me to throw one. He was like, ‘Don’t be throwing curves. You need to throw slurves and cutters, so you don’t mess up your arm.’ He didn’t want any action on my wrist.

“I learned how to throw that, a slurve, which is kind of the basics of a slider. In high school, I didn’t really have a grip. I didn’t know how to hold one, I guess. I just kind of made up my own grip and went with it. I didn’t watch baseball growing up — I watched none — so it was kind of hard. Read the rest of this entry »

Chuck Cottier made his MLB debut in a star-studded environment. Playing second base, he was in the Milwaukee Braves lineup alongside the likes of Hank Aaron, Del Crandall and Eddie Mathews. The first ground ball he fielded on that April 1959 afternoon came off the bat of Roberto Clemente, on a pitch thrown by Warren Spahn. Harvey Haddix, who a month later would take a a perfect game into the 13th inning against the Braves, was on the mound for Pittsburgh.

Cottier’s first professional game was also memorable. Just 18 years old at the time — he’d signed at 17 out of a Grand Junction, Colorado high school — Cottier was playing for the Americus-Cordele Orioles in the Georgia-Florida League. It was 1954, and the minor league landscape was different than it is today.

“The lowest league was class D,” explained Cottier, who is now 83 years old and a special assistant to the general manager with the Washington Nationals. “From there it went to C, B, A, Double-A, Triple-A, and many of the organizations had two teams in each classification. We had three Triple-A teams at one time.”

Displaying a sharp-as-a-tack memory, the venerable baseball lifer told me that his first-ever game was played in Fitzgerald, Georgia, in a ballpark with a skinned infield. One play in particular stood out. Cottier remembers a “big left-handed hitter named Thompson” smashing a one-hop line drive that hit him just above the wrist, caromed over his shoulder, and rolled all the way to the fence.

Several hours later, his ride stopped rolling. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Arenado is one of the best hitters in the game. The 27-year-old third baseman has won four consecutive Silver Slugger awards, averaging a a 127 wRC+, 40 doubles, and 40 home runs over that stretch. Ensconced in the heart of the Colorado Rockies batting order, he’s driven in 503 runs, the most in MLB by a comfortable margin.

Like many players, Arenado has evolved. Unlike one of his new teammates, he’s done so in a more traditional —less nerdy, if you will — manner. On Tuesday we heard from Daniel Murphy on how he transformed himself into an elite hitter. Today we hear from Arenado.

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David Laurila: We first talked during your 2013 rookie season. How have you most changed as a hitter since that time?

Nolan Arenado: “When I’m going well, I’m good at staying on my back leg. I didn’t do that back then. I was a front-leg hitter. That’s why I wasn’t driving the ball out of the ballpark. I was good at putting bat to ball in 2013, but that’s it. I was just slapping the ball for a knock.

“I had to learn how to be quicker without jumping at the ball. I had to learn to control the middle-inside pitch, because they were beating me there. I was kind of drifting, and I was getting jammed. In 2014, I started focusing on getting the head out. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Murphy can rake. Since breaking into the big leagues in 2008, the 33-year-old infielder has slashed .299/.344/.458. Moreover, he’s become a better hitter — a more dangerous hitter — in recent seasons. While a knee injury limited him last year, Murphy’s left-handed stroke produced 146 extra-base hits and a 144 wRC+ between 2016-2017. And now he’ll get to play his home games in Coors Field. The Colorado Rockies signed him to a free agent deal back in December.

Murphy, who could accurately be described as a hitting nerd, talked about the art and science of his craft this past weekend at Colorado’s spring training facility in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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David Laurila: Hitting analytics are becoming an important part of the game. To what extent can they translate into improved performance? I’m referring primarily to the swing.

Daniel Murphy: “I think we were doing that even before there was a measure for it. If you talk to any hitting coach, he’s going to say, ‘I want you to get a good pitch to hit. I want you to hit it hard.’ — that’s exit velocity — ‘and I want you to impact it in the gap.’ — that’s measurable by launch angle. What’s really changed is that we can quantify, and measure, exactly what hitting coaches have always been telling us to do: Hit the ball hard, in the gap.”

Laurila: Basically, what Ted Williams was preaching 50 years ago.

Murphy: “That, and it’s measurable. If you talked to Ted, he would probably say, ‘I don’t want the infielders to catch my batted balls.’ Maybe I’d be putting words in his mouth, but that’s something I strive to do. I don’t ever want the infielders to catch my batted balls. No strikeouts, no popups, no ground balls. I want to hit line drives and fly balls. Line drives would be Position A, and if I miss, I want to miss in the air, over the infielders’ heads. Read the rest of this entry »