One of the classic criticisms of the front-page entries on FanGraphs is that it can sometimes look like writers are just scanning different leaderboards until they find a subject. Now, there’s nothing actually wrong with that, I don’t think. That’s why the leaderboards exist — so we can all learn from what they say. It’s not like we can easily and automatically keep track of everything by ourselves. Still, I understand where the criticism comes from. And so I’d like to be up front here: This post is about something I didn’t expect to see on a leaderboard. There’s no deeper inspiration. But when I saw a player’s line, I knew I couldn’t not write about it.

In the early going this season, the White Sox have been a pleasant surprise! They’re hanging tight with the Indians, and they’re well ahead of, say, the Royals. One element that’s driven the White Sox has been the pitching staff, and, specifically, the bullpen. Even coming into the year, the team had Nate Jones and David Robertson, so the bullpen wasn’t likely to be terrible. To this point, it’s second out of all big-league bullpens in ERA-. It’s first in K-BB%. That…isn’t what anyone expected. And now, a plot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cleveland’s got a good pitching staff. It’s part of what got them to the World Series last year, and it’s what they’re hoping to ride to another playoff berth. They’re blessed with excellent arms like Corey Kluber, Andrew Miller, Carlos Carrasco, Cody Allen and Danny Salazar.

Michael Martinez is not, by trade, a pitcher. He’s technically a hitter, but his career 33 wRC+ doesn’t exactly support that claim very well. The best way to describe Martinez from a job description standpoint would be to say that he’s a fielder, a utilityman, perhaps. He’s a survivor, who’s managed to stick on big league rosters in some capacity since 2011 despite being a nearly nonexistent asset at the plate. Martinez is the ultimate 25th man, who will be forever emblazoned in the visuals of history by making the out that won the Cubs their first World Series in more than a century. One of the jobs of a 25th man is to do anything that is required of him. And that means that in certain situations he’s a pitcher, too.

Cleveland was losing 10-4 to Chicago in the ninth inning last night, following a disastrous outing from Josh Tomlin. Rather than burn another reliever, Terry Francona turned to Martinez, his trusty 25th man. For the first time in his big league career, he took the mound. Martinez had somehow avoided the task until now, despite being the last man on the bench for some bad Phillies teams. The only other time he’d pitched was all the way back in A-ball in 2007, when he’d gotten into two games and totaled 1.2 innings of work. He did not allow a hit in either outing, because A-ball is a magical place.

The big leagues are not A-ball. The big leagues are full of hitters who sneeze at A-ball pitching, and one or two who hit like Michael Martinez. Everyone on the White Sox is technically a big league hitter. Yet we can all agree that there are more difficult assignments than innings composed of Carlos Sanchez, Omar Narvaez, Leury Garcia, and Tim Anderson.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two seasons ago, Kris Bryant was regarded by many as the top prospect in all of baseball. After having dominated all levels of the minors, he appeared to be a candidate to begin the season on the Cubs’ 25-man roster. The conditions were nearly ideal. Not only had Bryant proven himself in the minors, but the club possessed no one of consequence to start at third. Furthermore, the Cubs intended to contend in the NL Central.

Despite all the arguments in favor of Bryant breaking camp with the Cubs, he was sent to Iowa. He waited a week and a half, at which point the team called him up. He proceeded to have a great season. By waiting to promote him, though — a decision that wasn’t without some controversy — the Cubs ensured that Bryant wouldn’t be a free agent until after 2021 instead of 2020.

The Chicago White Sox’ Yoan Moncada, named the top prospect in baseball recently by Eric Longenhagen, deserves (and doesn’t deserve) the same fate. Allow me to explain.

The Chicago Cubs “generously” gave Kris Bryant a $1 million dollar salary this season when they could have given him close to half, but that is nothing compared to the potentially tens of millions of dollars they stand to gain by having Bryant’s services in 2021. One year of a great player in his prime — and Bryant will be 29 years old in 2021 — is incredibly valuable. The cost of six wins on the free-agent market is roughly $50 million. Such a large figure might seem improbable at first: no players receive $50 million salaries and some six-win players (David Price and Max Scherzer, for example) do hit free agency. However, those players sign multi-year deals, often receiving the same salary in Year One as Year Seven despite the fact that expected production in that first season greatly exceeds that of the latter years of a contract. The production and salary are expected to average out by the end of a deal, with overpayments in later years compensating for underpayments in the earlier ones. The point here — and one that makes sense even in the absence of the math — is that one extra year of a player’s services can be incredibly valuable.

As for what such a young and talented player deserves in terms of compensation, there are a lot of ways to attack the concept. Kris Bryant deserved to be on the Opening Day roster in 2015 due to his play. Unfortunately, that play — and the promise it suggested — rendered Bryant too valuable for the Cubs not to manipulate his service time. Therefore, they waited those 10 days.

That isn’t a great system. It creates disincentives, even if very small, to putting the best team on the field. But it’s the system under which MLB is operating presently. And it matters right now because of Yoan Moncada.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Anderson and the Chicago White Sox have agreed to an extension that will pay the young shortstop $25 million over six years and which includes two team options that could double the amount of the contract.

The deal is both big and small. It’s the largest contract ever given to an MLB player with less than a year of service time. So that’s significant. On the other hand, the contract also figures to pay Anderson an average annual value that equates to an amount less than deals signed this winter by Boone Logan and Mitch Moreland. If Anderson doesn’t progress as a major-league player and is out of the league in a couple years, he’ll have at least made $25 million — a substantial figure, in other words. If Anderson is good, then the White Sox will have themselves a huge bargain.

Contracts like Anderson’s aren’t very common. While extensions are signed with some frequency by players who’ve recorded a year-plus of service time — and occur with similar frequency for players at each year of service time until free agency — that’s not the case for players like Anderson, who have little experience in the majors.

Consider: since 2010, there have been 143 extensions of three or more years given to players who’ve recorded less than six years of service time, per MLB Trade Rumors. Of those deals, Tim Anderson’s is just the fifth signed by a player with less than a year of service time. That’s a rarity, as the graph below reveals.

As to why these contract extensions are so rare, one likely explanation is the lack of incentive for a team to pursue a deal any earlier. While extensions such as these can certainly represent bargains for team — and while teams certainly like bargains — clubs can frequently secure players for similar terms after a year or two of play. That allows them to gather more information about the player in question.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2017, I am probably more interested in Adam Eaton than I am any other player in baseball. As the centerpiece of a controversial blockbuster, coming off a monster season where a lot of his value was tied a huge swing in his defensive value, Eaton was always going to be a fascinating experiment for paying a perceived premium price for outfield defense. But it gets even more interesting, because the Nationals are switching him from right field back to center field, so we throw a position switch in the mix as well, and get another data point on whether his weird splits between RF and CF actually mean anything.

So when the MLBAM guys released their outfield catch probability leaderboard last weekend, Eaton was naturally one of the first players to examine. And when Jeff took an early look at the published 2015-2016 data, he found that Eaton ranked seventh in Catch+, or whatever we might want to call plays made above the averages of the buckets they had opportunities in. And when he looked at the catch data relative to the range portions of UZR and DRS, he actually found that the Statcast data showed that Eaton had the largest positive difference, suggesting that, by hang time and distance traveled variables, Eaton may have been even better defensively than the public defensive metrics thought.

So yeah, Eaton is really interesting. But the more I dig into Eaton’s defensive data, the more remarkable it all gets.

Read the rest of this entry »

Previous editions: AL East / NL East.

Opening Day is just over the horizon, though we have to navigate the remainder of the World Baseball Classic and the entirety of March Madness first. In the meantime, let’s continue our look at the upcoming season, with the third of our six divisional previews.

Read the rest of this entry »

For Lucas Giolito, KISS doesn’t mean Keep It Simple Stupid. Given his intellectual curiosity — picking Max Scherzer’s brain didn’t hurt — the acronym more aptly equates to Keep It Simple Smart.

Giolito is now in the White Sox organization, having been acquired by Chicago from Washington in December’s Adam Eaton mini-blockbuster. Blessed with a big arm and a made-for-movies persona, the 6-foot-6 righty projects as a front-line starter, but only if he can keep his delivery in sync. That was an issue in last year’s six-game cameo with the Nationals, when he allowed 39 baserunners in 21.1 innings.

The 22-year-old former first-round pick believes that striking the right balance is the secret to future success. Being studious and cerebral comes naturally to Giolito, but at the same time, he understands that simplicity is a pitcher’s friend.

———

Giolito on how analytics impact his thought process: “It’s tough, because they make it a little more complicated, and when I’m pitching I like to make it super simple. But things like spin rate and extension play a role in, ‘How good is your stuff?’ What I especially looked at last year was… usually, I’m a big extension guy. On my fastball, I’ll get seven-foot-whatever.

“I was looking at some numbers, and saw that I was down to six-foot-eight, six-nine, six-whatever. That’s not what I should be doing. Sure enough, video showed that I was flying open and yanking everything. So that stuff can be very helpful. Same thing with spin rate. Is the ball coming out of your hand at its best right now? It used to just be a feel thing, and now you can actually look at the numbers to back it up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brett Lawrie isn’t quite ready to sign with a club, according to a report by Jim Bowden from Wednesday afternoon. Lawrie is still working through a soft-tissue, lower-body issue. Teams like the Blue Jays, Mets, Rays and Royals reportedly have some level of interest in Lawrie after he was released by the White Sox.

What kind of role Lawrie can expect to land is unclear. And what we can expect from a player who was once one of the more exciting prospects in the game — who was once selected 15th overall in an ESPN franchise player draft in 2012 — a player whom Bowden himself once predicted would become a batting champion, is uncertain.

After he burst on to the scene with a .293/.373/.580 slash line in a 43-game span as a rookie, Lawrie averaged two wins per season from 2012 to -14. But in what was supposed to represent the beginning of his prime years in 2015 and 2016 — i.e. his age-25 and -26 seasons — Lawrie’s performance continued to decline. Most notably, what was once a strength, his bat-to-ball skills, began to erode.

Perhaps we can pinpoint the beginning of the issue. It’s difficult to have a tougher day than Lawrie endured on April 7, 2015, for the A’s against the Rangers. Over the course of four plate appearances, all of which ended in a strikeout, Lawrie saw 12 pitches: eight sliders, three curveballs, and just one fastball. For posterity, the following footage documents those 11 breaking pitches.

His first at-bat versus Colby Lewis:

His second at-bat versus Lewis:

In the seventh, against Keone Kela:

And in the ninth, to end the game, against Neftali Feliz:

That was not the look of a player who appeared comfortable. Lawrie takes for called strikes almost all the breaking pitches in the zone. He swings, on the other hand, at all the pitches that fall out of it. He also appears to be anxious or over-hyped before triggering his swing. He’s a high-energy player. Perhaps, too high-energy.

It was just one game. But it was a most unusual performance. And it was that second game of his 2015 season that perhaps created a template for other teams to follow, which explains why Lawrie’s ability to make contact – once one of his strongest skills – has eroded as teams have attacked him with more breaking stuff each of the last two years.

Teams have increased their curveball and slider usage against Lawrie. Only 6.8% of pitches Lawrie faced in 2014 were curveballs. Last season, that rate had nearly doubled, to a career-high 11.3%. In 2014, 16.8% of pitches Lawrie saw were sliders. That jumped to a career-high 22.4% in 2015, and 19.2% last season.

Correspondingly, Lawrie’s swinging-strike rate has jumped, from 8.8% in 2014 to 11.9% in 2015 and to a career-high 13.2% last season. His contact rate with pitches in the zone has declined each year from a career-best 90.5% in 2012 with the Blue Jays, to a pedestrian 80.9% mark last season.

The book appears to be out on Lawrie, as seen in this Brooks Baseball chart:

What’s troubling about Lawrie’s career trend is that often, when we think of a hitter losing contact ability, we think — or hope, for his sake — that there ought to be a corresponding improvement in power. This is especially true for a player in his 20s. But not only has Lawrie seen his ability to make contact erode, his isolated slugging has declined from its 2014 level.

I asked Sean Dolinar for help in researching hitters who have had two-year contract trends like Lawrie, combined with loss of power. Among the sample that includes all qualified hitters since 1950, Lawrie has the ninth-greatest increase in strikeout rate.

Of the top-12 players here, Jones produced four total wins over the next four seasons, the final four of his career. Morneau remains unsigned this spring. Napoli’s struggles continued into 2015, though he enjoyed a 34-homer season last year on a one-year deal with Cleveland. McGwire’s final season was in 2001. Kubel last played in the majors in 2014.

Of course, all of them were all over 30.

Some good news for Lawrie: Clark rebounded to post five consecutive seasons of wRC+ 129 or better.

As for the 30-and-under crowd, Langerhans never again received more than 139 plate appearances in a season. Weis was a reserve middle infielder who finished with a 61 wRC+ for his career. Kemp received just 59 more plate appearances in the majors. Johnson is one modest success story: he went on to post four seasons of wRC+s 108 over his career.

Two other significant success stories that suffered similar contact collapses include Dave Henderson, who rebounded at age 29 and posted three 125 wRC+ seasons through age 32, and Mike Stanley, who improved in his age-30 season and produced seven straight seasons of 117 wRC+ or better. But they did not suffer isolated slugging losses.

Lawrie’s No. 1 PECOTA comp is Ryne Sandberg who, after a eight- and six-win seasons early in his career, went through an age 26-27 lull, before entering a five-year peak.

So there’s some hope mixed in with some concern.

In examining Baseball Reference’s top similarity scores for batters comparable to Lawrie through age 26, there are some troubling comps, like that of the most similar hitter, Gene Freese, who enjoyed only one more season (1961) with a starting job in the majors. Another, Russ Davis, produced a 92 wRC+ for his career and 0.0 WAR over over 612 career games.

Logan Forsythe and Justin Turner are two interesting names, appearing as the No. 5 and No. 6 most similar batters to Lawrie, though Turner needed to reinvent his swing to become a star. And perhaps Lawrie needs to make a significant swing adjustment to cut down on his pre-swing movement. The most encouraging name on the list of most similar batters through age 26 is Edwin Encarnacion, who posted a .790 OPS and 102 OPS+ with the Reds from 2005 to -09 and who has since recorded a .850 OPS, 124 OPS+, earning three All-Star invites in the process.

Beyond the bat, Lawrie offers defensive versatility: he’s been an above-average defender for his career (32 defensive runs saved) at third base and plays an acceptable second base. But it’s the bat that will make or break his career. History shows of those players who have endured a similar erosion of contact skills without a gain in power many never recover, though some do. There are even some stars in the group. While Lawrie’s collapse is a bit unusual, there are likely multiple career trajectories he could follow dependent upon health, adjustments and opportunity.

I’d like to believe this guy still exists:

But that walkoff homer from his rookie year is beginning to seem like a long time ago. While there’s evidence of similar players turning around their careers, Lawrie must show the league he has the ability to punch back.

As if being a 27-year old rookie weren’t hard enough, Ryan Schimpf went at things in an unprecedented way last season. While the fighter — schimpf literally means “to curse and fight” in German — probably established himself as a useful major leaguer with a couple of important tools, regression will come for a player with such an extreme batted-ball mix.

Since we started recording these things, no batter has ever had a qualified season during which he hit fewer than four grounders for every 10 fly balls. Schimpf hit three for every 10 in his debut last year. Even if you relax the entry to 300 plate appearances, the San Diego second baseman is an outlier — only one person has ever recorded a higher fly-ball rate.

Read the rest of this entry »

My regard for Mark Buehrle is growing.

We often don’t fully appreciate people or things while we still have access to them. Buehrle quietly slipped into retirement prior to last season after a remarkable career during which he struck out batters at well below league-average rates, possessed a sub-90 mph fastball for much of his career, and yet accumulated 52 WAR and a 215-160 record over 18 seasons in the majors.

His success was curious, though he was not without his gifts. He could paint corners as well as any starter in baseball. Consider his 2015 fastball location via Baseball Savant:

That’s excellent, but it pales in comparison to Buehrle’s signature skill — namely, the pace at which he worked.

With the mounting concern regarding pace of play from the commissioner’s office, with so much being made of the subject in the media, with pace itself slowing after progress made in 2015, has anyone checked in with the this century’s quickest-working pitcher to get his thoughts on pitch clocks, pace and of a pitcher’s process?

Read the rest of this entry »