Today’s the day that Jose Abreu wins the 2014 American League Rookie of the Year Award. Seems like they’re doing a whole announcement show, and nothing’s official yet because they don’t want to spoil the suspense, but the suspense has already long been spoiled, by Abreu and by the rest of the AL rookie class. There’s been a little bit of chatter that Abreu might have an MVP case. Now, he’s not going to have an MVP case, as reflected by the voting, but if a guy is getting talked up in some circles as a dark-horse MVP, he’s your Rookie of the Year.

A little over a year ago, the White Sox signed Abreu to a six-year contract. At that point, it looked like a heavy investment in a player whose value would be entirely tied up in his bat. Now, Abreu’s looks like one of the more valuable contracts in the game, as he’s coming off a season that saw him answer most of the questions about his productivity. Abreu wasn’t an outstanding defender at first base. He wasn’t a stealth quality base-runner, so everything really did come down to the hitting, but the hitting was phenomenal from start to finish, and it seems worthwhile now to reflect upon Abreu’s scouting reports around the time of his signing.

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The year is 2014. Barack Obama is the President of the United States. Oil is selling at $98.29 per barrel. Ebola is spreading in Sierra Leone. A European space probe, after 10 years of orbit, will soon connect with the comet it is intended to study. And Adam Dunn pitched in a regular season baseball game last night.

This is like the Ben Revere home run of position players pitching. This is what we’ve all been waiting for, even if we didn’t know it before last night.

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You might not have heard, but Jose Abreu is a pretty good hitter.

Who am I kidding, you’ve heard about that by now. You also probably heard he just wrapped up a 21-game hitting streak. That’s the second-longest streak in the majors this season. You might have heard it was the second time this year he’s had a hitting streak of at least 18 games. He’s a rookie. Rookies don’t really do that. Then you might have heard that those two hitting streaks were separated by just one game. That means you probably heard, or at this point just deduced yourself, that Jose Abreu recorded a hit in 39 of 40 consecutive games. During that second hitting streak, you might have heard he had a stretch of 10 consecutive plate appearances in which a pitcher failed to get him out. These are all really good things to say about a hitter.

Prior to Abreu reaching base in 39 of 40 games, he had reached base in 7 of his last 10. Prior to that, he was on the disabled list with a foot injury. That stint on the DL serves as a pretty convenient place to split Abreu’s season into two halves. What you see looks like two different hitters:
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Let’s talk for a second about Scott Carroll, a generally unknown right-handed 29-year-old rookie pitcher for the White Sox, although this isn’t really going to be about Scott Carroll. He doesn’t throw all that hard, topping out at around 91 mph. He doesn’t get a lot of strikeouts, but he also doesn’t limit walks particularly well, leading to the second-worst K%-BB% in baseball, minimum 80 innings. When he survives, it’s because of a somewhat-decent ability to get grounders. If and when the White Sox are good again, he’s probably not going to be a big part of it, but for a back-end starter on a bad team, you get by with what you can. Needless to say, Carroll exists in the big leagues on a razor-thin margin of error, though he’s occasionally capable of bursts of brilliance, like taking a one-hit shutout into the seventh inning against the Red Sox last month.

With all that working against him, for Carroll to succeed, a lot of things have to go very right. You’ll be forgiven if you didn’t pay much attention to Saturday’s huge Carroll/Yohan Pino matchup between the fourth-place White Sox and last-place Twins, but now matter how unimportant a game may seem, there’s always something of interest to be found. Unfortunately for Carroll, what he found was umpire Gary Cederstrom having what looked like a very bad day.

A really bad day, actually. Thanks to the wonderful Baseball Savant, we can look at umpires and see who called the most supposed strikes (per the PitchF/X zone) as balls. Since the start of 2013, this game ranked pretty highly… Read the rest of this entry »

Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
A strapping outfielder with a full set of tools, Cordell has ripped South Atlantic League pitching apart in his first full season.

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As a starting pitcher, you get to the All Star Game by dominating with a full array of pitches. You’re built to go deep into games and see lineups multiple times. You scout the opposing hitters and it’s all a lot of work. Then you get to the All Star Game, you break from your routine, you have to come in for a short stint, and you can air it out.

It’s a situation ripe for fastballs.

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There were a lot of good pitchers in the American League last year. Jose Quintana was one of them. There are a lot of good pitchers in the American League this year. Jose Quintana is one of them. You may not have noticed until recently, as he’s been on a very nice run of late, which was punctuated by five perfect innings to start yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

Quintana is an easy guy to ignore. He isn’t especially young. This is his age-25 season, and he’s in the midst of his third big-league season, and in his first season he wasn’t called up until early May. That’s pretty good, particularly for a pitcher, but it certainly isn’t remarkable. There are plenty of pitchers who have more than two full seasons under their belt by the time they get to their age-25 season.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
The SAL leader in wOBA also happens to be a catcher who should stick behind the plate.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
Beck’s all-around profile merits consideration.

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Certain guys, people just assume are going to get injured. For as little as we actually understand about pitching mechanics and injury risk, there are certain players who look like ticking time bombs. Chris Sale is considered one of those guys, and this is why:

Basically that simple. Sale is (1) a pitcher who (2) looks like that when he’s pitching. And Sale, sure enough, has had his injury scares. Earlier this very season, he was on the disabled list. But, a few years ago, Sale threw 192 innings. Last year he reached 214, and he still hasn’t had the disaster scenario. Sale’s kept himself healthy enough, and he’s recently made a change to try to keep it that way.

Thursday, Sale pitched against the Tigers, picking up a loss despite a winning effort. Three times, Sale had to go through Miguel Cabrera. Previously, when Sale and Cabrera matched up, Sale threw sliders a quarter of the time. But in the first inning, he threw Cabrera six fastballs and a changeup. In the fourth, he threw four fastballs and two changeups. In the sixth, he threw five fastballs. So, out of 18 pitches to maybe the best hitter in baseball, Sale didn’t throw a single slider, as he had often in the past. And to go beyond Cabrera, Sale struck out the side in the third on 13 pitches, and all three strikeouts came on changeups. It’s not a coincidence.

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