The 2012 MLB season began with a very public bounty of international talent — Japanese stars, Cuban expats and even a Taiwanese surprise. With the season dipping into its final six weeks, we are beginning to see both the good and the bad of these international players who made the direct transition to MLB rookie.

SP Yu Darvish — The biggest star from Japan since Daisuke Matsuzaka has had a very Daisuke Matsuzaka season — much despite steady predictions of the opposite. Well, actually, he has an 86 FIP-minus and 94 xFIP-minus. That’s at least a better FIP than Daisuke’s rookie year, but an identical xFIP.

Dave Cameron has written extensively on Darvish lately, noting Darvish has a command problem, the league has realized Darvish has a command problem, and Darvish has a scary group of command problem comparables.

At the same time, though, Darvish has been adjusting his approach to a less-aggressive (compared to the NPB) league. He has been toying with his repertoire, and I would not be surprised if he entered the 2013 season with a streamlined pitch selection that sets up his elite slider (one of the best in the league) more effectively and simply.
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When the New York Yankees selected Cito Culver in the first round of the 2010 draft, the pick was met with surprise — shock actually. From upstate New York, the teenage shortstop was pegged as a third round pick or later by most accounts. Two years later, Culver’s batting average is just above the “Mendoza Line” and his slugging percentage sits below .300.

Video after the jump

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Last week, I wrote about some findings regarding in-season fastball velocity loss and how experiencing a loss in different months affects a pitcher’s chances of finishing a season with diminished pitch speed. The general takeaway was that June and July were the most telling months.

But what about velocity gain? We know that, generally speaking, pitchers lose velocity more than they gain it. So while velocity loss isn’t good, it’s to be expected — and starting pitchers seem to be able to deal with that loss better than relievers. Pitchers who can stave off velocity loss (year-over-year change between +/- .5 mph) perform even better. Moreover, if a pitcher gains at least 1 mph on their fastball in a season they are twice as likely to maintain some or all of that gain the following year.

Gaining velocity, while not a guarantee of better performance, is certainly a boon to a pitcher and his organization. But given that velocity varies for all sorts of reasons, when can a team have confidence that the increase they’re seeing is real and sustainable?

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The AL East has been hit hard by injuries this season, with about a dozen above-average to star-caliber players needing lengthy stints on the disabled list. The Yankees have been without Michael Pineda all year and without Brett Gardner and Mariano Rivera for most of the season, and now they’re going to be without Alex Rodriguez until sometime in September. Felix Hernandez clipped him with a 3-1 changeup last week, breaking a bone in his left hand.

The Yankees have a healthy lead in the division — eight games in the loss column — and will platoon Eric Chavez and Jayson Nix at the hot corner for the time being. The 34-year-old Chavez is very quietly having a solid season off the bench, posting a 101 wRC+ overall with a 121 mark against righties. Nix, 29, has a 95 wRC+ overall and a 112 wRC+ against lefties. The concern is that all the extra playing time will expose Chavez to injury and just expose Nix in general given his career 72 wRC+. For the time being, they’ll do.

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[With apologies to Mike Keneally]

[Author’s note added later for anyone who cares: the mentions of the differences between subjective and objective senses of time should not be taken as technical or precise in the way one would expect when reading, say, a historical explication of classic philosophies of time. This is just supposed to be an entertaining way of launching a discussion of how a few years can seem so distant with respect to certain things in baseball. For a technical and precise account of the different senses of time in Augustine, Husserl, or whomever, you should look elsewhere. Sorry.]

The existential experience of time passing is different than the intellectual acknowledgement of “how much time has passed.” I do not mean anything “deep” by that — I’m generally opposed to depth, or at least the appearance of depth. What I mean is simply that while, for example, every year is about 365.242199 days, on a subjective, personal level, it feels as if some slices of time go by faster than others. An hour spent staring at a clock feels longer than an hour playing video games. An hour watching Stephen Strasburg pitch flies by faster than an hour watching Jonathan Sanchez pitch. You get the idea.

That is all a prelude to saying that 2009 “feels” pretty recent to me. I am not sure why. Maybe because when I first started blogging (for the dearly-departed SB Nation site Driveline Mechanics) around that time. “Pretty recent” is itself a vague description — it is not “objectively” a correct or incorrect description. But it really has been a while since 2009. It was three birthdays ago. Looking at the changing perceptions of particualr baseball players is one way of measuring how much time has passed. Without giving a full recap of the year, here are a few things from 2009 that drove home the reality that, in fact, 2009 was a “million” years ago.

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I’ve written quite a bit this year on trends in pitcher aging, specifically velocity loss and gain. In the last iteration I focused on the odds of pitchers gaining velocity back after a season where their fastball dropped by at least 1 mph.

In that piece I listed a few pitchers to keep your eye on given that their velocity was down from 2011. In June, I wrote about CC Sabathia for ESPN and noted that the big lefty is likely beginning to “age”, as the odds are quite a bit higher that pitchers over the age of 30 do not gain their velocity back once they’ve lost it.

After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that there is of course the chance that these pitchers will gain their velocity back by the end of the year (as I noted in both pieces). We know that, generally speaking, pitchers gain velocity as the season goes on. Temperatures rise, and so too do fastball velocities. If this is the case I wondered at what point in the season we can say with greater certainty that a pitcher is throwing as hard as he is going to throw. Is there a particular month where a velocity decline is more likely to translate to or predict a full season velocity decline?
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Two players I have always rather enjoyed — Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui — are in the twilights of their careers. And not only that, they are both having relatively miserable seasons at the plate.

At present, Suzuki is at a career-low 77 wRC+ and .281 wOBA. Matsui — playing in a reserve/pinch-hitting role for the first time in his career — has a disastrous 18 wRC+ and .195 wOBA. But both of these players have unusually low BABIPs and it is hard to know for certain if there has been a change in true talent levels or if this is random variation coupled with only mild aging.

In his reaction piece to the Ichiro trade, Eric Seidman rightly observed that Ichiro’s numbers should improve as he transitions from what has become an offensive deadzone in Safeco Park to the lefty-friendly grounds of Yankee Stadium, but how much can we expect his BABIP to improve? And what can the Rays expect from a 38-year-old Matsui, who may be needed more than ever with Luke Scott back on the DL?

Recent history suggests that both players are having abnormally bad BABIP, and they should improve if given consistent playing time through the rest of the season. But whether teams want to — or should — take that risk is another matter.
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And SHAZAM! Now’s there’s parity in the MLB!

The MLB is a funny organization. One would think that in a sport producing most of the world’s largest guaranteed contracts, the production being paid for on the free agent market would guarantee on-field success. But that is not the case. Large payrolls have been large busts, such is life.

We know that a larger payroll leads to more wins, if not necessarily a playoff appearance, but also that teams need a strong input from their farm system, too. Teams have to strike a balance with these two inputs. For some teams — like the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland Athletics — the vast majority of their talent input must come from the draft. They can afford only the January Free Agents — the unwanted scraps of the big market teams. Because of a matter of geography and history, newer teams in smaller markets like the Diamondbacks, Marlins and Rays will probably never again draw the kind of income the Mets and Yankees do.

So, an outsider might look at Wednesday’s Competitive Balance Lottery (CBL) and say, “Hey, well it’s good the MLB is trying to even things out a little bit, help out the little man.” But in truth, the CBL is a weak offering to a ever-crippled lower class. And if the MLB wants to keep small-market teams like the Rays capable of winning, they must undo their recent changes.
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Earlier this week, Sports Illustrated posted the results (in slide-show form, yay!) of recent survey they took asking 228 MLB players to name the most underrated position player in the game. These sorts of things usually generate “interesting” results, and this case was no exception. This is supposed to be a fun exercise, so it would be unfair to complain about the “unscientific” nature of the poll: why 228 players? How were they distributed across the teams? Were they position players themselves or a mix? How many votes did each player get? The notions of “underrated” and is itself vague (underrated by the media? The fans? Statistics?), so the respondents may have been thinking of different things when answering. Wouldn’t a truly underrated player fail to show up on a list of “top underrated players” at all?

Such complaints sort of miss the point. I assume this was simply meant to be a fun way to generate discussion. I personally would have liked to have seen one or two comments from respondents about each player to get a sense of what the respondents were thinking about when they answered. In any case, the list has some results that are pretty hilarious, as one might expect. One way of responding would be to come up with a different list. Grant Brisbee wrote up an excellent list of his own. Another would be to simply go through SI’s list and comment on it.

This post takes the second path, but the truth is, it is not quite the “fisking” one might expect. Yes, some choices are downright hilarious. However, given the qualifications above, I thought the responding players did okay. It is not the list I would have made, but they made some decent choices. Or maybe the list is like the movie Juno: the beginning is so horribly annoying that the rest seems better than it actually is.

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Yesterday we talked about the questions facing the National League contenders. Today, we turn our attention to the American League. Every team but the Twins, Royals and Mariners are within four-two-and-a-half games of a spot in the postseason, if you count the wild card play-in game part of the postseason. That leaves us with eleven teams still playing for something in 2012. Or does it?

In the American League East, the Yankees have a comfortable seven-game lead, and seem poised to pull away with the division title. Yes, with injuries to CC Sabathia and Andy Pettitte, the Yankees could improve by adding a dependable starting pitcher, but so far they haven’t been linked with the starters most likely to hit the trade market. Overall, though, the Yankees are in the best shape of any team heading into the second half.

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