Glen Perkins has, somewhat quietly, become a dominating relief pitcher. He currently sits 5th among qualified relievers in FIP (1.84), 4th in xFIP (2.21), and he has 14 shutdowns against just two meltdowns. He’s into advanced statistics and knows what FIP and xFIP are. He’s going to represent the Twins in the All-Star Game next week, the team he grew up watching as a kid in Minnesota. And he’s signed to a well below market contract, one that pays him just $2.5 million this year, $3.75 million for the following two years, and then gives the Twins a $4.5 million option on his 2016 season. Because of all these things — okay, probably not the nerd part — the Twins are reportedly not willing to trade Perkins, as their preference is to keep him while they rebuild a new core of young players around him.

The Mets might do a similar thing with Bobby Parnell. He has also been excellent (2.16 FIP, 3.16 xFIP) since moving into their closer role, and as a 28-year-old under team control via arbitration for the next two seasons, the Mets are apparently disinclined to trade him. Neither team wants to send the message that their rebuilds are going to take years, and both are showing a preference to retain their young, cost controlled assets and simply move older pieces on larger contracts instead.

Here’s the problem. Closers — relief pitchers in general, really — are simply not worth building around. Today’s asset is tomorrow’s liability, and the Twins and Mets should learn from the mistake that the Royals made with Joakim Soria.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Two Debuts of Note
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Two Debuts of Note
The Purpose of This Post
The purpose of this post is mostly to inform the readership that two pitchers are scheduled to make their major-league debuts today (Saturday) — namely, Washington right-hander Taylor Jordan (against the New York Nationals) and Minnesota right-hander Kyle Gibson (home against the Kansas Citiers).

Read the rest of this entry »

Zoilo is — to put it lightly — not a popular name. So when Zoilo Almonte madness happened over the weekend, it was only natural to think of the other Zoilo in major league history: Zoilo Versalles. One of just 13 shortstops to be voted the most valuable player by the Baseball Writers Association of America, Versalles didn’t have a very long career. But in 1965, he commanded the nation’s attention.

Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction
Over the weekend, the present author visited Fifth Third Bank Ballpark in Geneva, Illinois — home to the Cubs’ Midwest League affilliate, the Kane County Cougars — for a game between those same Cougars and Twins affiliate, the Cedar Rapids Kernels. The objective of the trip was to interview very celebrated Minnesota outfield prospect, and the second-overall pick from last year’s draft, Byron Buxton.

In just his age-19 season, Buxton, who’s nearly as fast as Cincinnati prospect Billy Hamilton, has exhibited a startlingly mature offensive approach, posting nearly equal walk and strikeout rates while also hitting seven home runs in 240 plate appearances. His defensive range and throwing arm are also regarded as elite.

Excerpts from the author’s conversation with Buxton appear below. In addition to printing those excerpts here, the author has taken the liberty of commenting upon other aspects of his experience, as well — either because those aspects are informative (like, regarding the Kane County ballpark, for example) or amusing (like, regarding the author’s incompetence, for example) or both (although probably not both, in most cases).

It is not entirely clear whether this approach has anything like merit. In any case, it has occurred to the author that it’s not the worst possible idea — the litmus test by which he (read: I) composes most of his work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Vance Worley just got clobbered again, this time by the Braves. There’s no set and certain point at which a start turns into an official clobbering, but looking through Worley’s 2013 game log, I’d say this was the fifth or sixth time he’s been clobbered, in ten games. That’s an ugly ratio, and to make matters worse, recall that Worley was Minnesota’s opening-day starter. The Twins’ de facto ace owns an ERA over 7, with 82 hits allowed in just under 49 innings. His strikeouts are way down and on Wednesday he was chased by a double that followed an Evan Gattis grand slam. Two seasons ago, Worley finished third in the voting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

On May 17, Worley allowed one run in a start against the Red Sox, and he credited his improvement to mechanical tweaks he’d made in recent side sessions. He finished that start with three walks and a strikeout. At the end of April, following a rough appearance, Worley said he was throwing the way he wanted to be throwing. His pitches were fine, and his movement was normal. The results just weren’t present, for him. They still aren’t, and the only consolation for Minnesota is that Ben Revere has been bad, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Sports Illustrated’s 2013 baseball preview, Tom Verducci wrote a great profile of the Tampa Bay Rays and their approach to optimizing the performance of their pitching staff.

One topic that was especially interesting to me was the apparent importance the Rays place on the 1-1 count. Verducci recounts how pitching coach Jim Hickey described the organization’s focus on getting opposing batters into 1-2 counts:

The Rays believe no pitch changes the course of that at bat more than the 1-and-1 delivery. “It’s almost a 200-point swing in on-base percentage with one ball and two strikes as opposed to two balls and one strike,” Hickey told the pitchers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s go ahead and get one thing clear up front: nobody thinks about pitcher pace, firstly. Firstly, one always thinks about pitcher performance, and then after that come the various watchability factors. What matters most is that a pitcher is good, and when a pitcher is consistently effective, nobody really cares how he gets it done, so long as he does. But pitcher pace lurks in the background, and when a guy isn’t effective, a slow tempo won’t score him any points. One tolerates a slow pitcher when the slow pitcher helps. One quickly runs out of patience when a slow pitcher hurts.

Slow and bad — it’s the worst of the four boxes to occupy. Of course, there’s some relationship, as pitchers tend to work slower with runners on base, and bad pitchers have more runners on base. There’s more to think about, more people to pay attention to, more importance behind every delivery. But when Mark Buehrle sucks, he still sucks quickly. Not everyone is Mark Buehrle, and this is how we get to talking about Mike Pelfrey.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Getz hit his first home run in 1,144 plate appearances against Atlanta last night. It was rather overshadowed when the Braves smacked three home runs off of Kelvin Herrera in the eighth inning as if they had a whole lineup full of Chris Getzes. Getz does not have much power, but he does make up for it with other skills. Yeah, right. Getz is off to a pretty hot start (for him, certainly) this year, but he is a pretty terrible hitter. Over 1351 career plate appearances, he has a .258/.314/.323 (.286 wOBA) line. His utter lack of power is only part of the problem.

There have been hitters who have excelled without much power, of course. Even before Getz’s shot off of Kris Medlen, I had been thinking about looking at hitters who managed big numbers without much power. Baseball fans like benchmarks: 500 home runs, .300 batting average, 100 runs batted in, 20 wins. Some of them may be more telling regarding a player’s actual value than others, but we understandably like those standard numbers. So I decided to look at .400 hitters — well, .400 wOBA hitters. I think of a .400 on-base percentage as an “awesomeness benchmark,” and since wOBA is scaled on on-base percentage, it works well enough.

For the sake of historical curiosity, here are some of the .400 wOBA seasons with the fewest home runs.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great subplots of every Major League season is the rookies that come up and show a glimpse of baseball’s future. It’s what had us enthralled by Jackie Bradley Jr. all spring, what has us dutifully analyzing Julio Teheran appearances, and what has us so eagerly waiting for Jurickson Profar and Wil Myers. This season, we will track rookies, both the prospects and suspects, as they make adjustments to playing in the bigs. This bi-weekly list will highlight rookies who have accomplished the most in 2013, regardless of future projection (though that will always be discussed). These are the players whose week one performances deserve recognition.

1. Dan Straily, RH SP, Athletics

If we’ve learned anything from Yu Darvish this season, it’s that success pitching against the Astros is not exactly analogous to pitching against baseball’s other 29 teams. The Athletics know this, why is probably why just one day after an 11 strikeout, 0 walk performance (a start worth an unofficial 0.6 WAR by our metrics), the A’s were comfortable sending Straily back to Triple-A. As sixth starters go, Straily is an excellent one, with a fastball at 90-93 mph, 83-86 mph slider, and 82-85 mph change (let’s agree to ignore that low 70s curveball, please). He showed great command against the Astros, the best he’s had in all 8 starts at the Major League level.

But, I don’t want to get too wrapped up in Straily’s success. The Astros, as we’re finding out, are a historically swing-and-miss team. All 11 of Straily’s strikeouts were of the swinging variety, and amazingly, nine were against left-handed hitters. Brett Wallace and Rick Ankiel struck out a combined 6 times, all on Straily fastballs. While Baseball America’s scouting report of him, as the A’s #6 prospect, reads “[His] slider and change up are his two best offerings and account for the bulk of his strikeouts,” that wasn’t true against Houston. Eight of the 11 strikeouts were from the fastball, and a remarkable number of them looked like this to Jason Castro — right down the heart of the plate. If you want to see why we simply can’t get too excited about Straily yet, consider the caliber of competition:

Read the rest of this entry »