Michael Pineda is having a hard time right now. Not when it comes to plate appearances ended by the umpire — his strikeout minus walk percentage is 21st in the big leagues, just ahead of Jake Arrieta’s. Usually that’s good enough, since K-BB% was once shown to be the best in-season predictor, and because it’s hard to be bad if you’re striking a bunch of guys out and not really walking anyone.

Usually. But not right now. Not in the Bronx, at least. Because, since 2000, nobody has recorded a K-BB% over 15% (Pineda is at 17.7% currently) and suffered from a worse batting average on balls in play. Nobody has allowed more homers per nine innings in that group, either. After contact, the ball has not been Pineda’s friend.

Still, we might just chalk it up to luck and call it a day. We might, if it wasn’t so obvious from watching Pineda that he’s having trouble with command and that things aren’t quite right.

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Most of what I do here is provide you with fun facts. Let’s be real — you already have a decent idea of which players are good and which players are bad. A healthy portion of my job, then, is to tell you what you already know, but in some new and different way. When it works, I think we all get to come away feeling smart! Hopefully it continues to work.

What I have for you here is an Andrew Miller fun fact. Not just a fun fact — my absolute favorite Andrew Miller fun fact, at least of the moment, at least as long as it’s factual. It’s not like you didn’t already know that Andrew Miller is good. We all came to terms with that years ago, and Miller hasn’t gotten any worse. He’s gotten better! Boiled down, this post is just “Andrew Miller is great at pitching.” But there’s this thing, see. He turns hitters to brain-dead mush.

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Yesterday, we tackled the best final seasons for pitchers. Today, let’s tackle the position players, so we can get to the heart of the question of just how good David Ortiz needs to be to crack one of these lists. The rules and breakdowns are the same as before, so I would encourage you to read yesterday’s post to peep those. Once again, big ups to Jeff Zimmerman for data help.

30-39 WAR

Best Final Season, Position Players with 30-39 WAR

Player	Final Season	Age	WAR	Career WAR
Roy Cullenbine	1947	33	4.4	33.8
Chick Stahl	1906	33	3.7	33.1
Tony Cuccinello	1945	37	3.0	32.2
Gil McDougald	1960	32	2.8	39.7
Joe Adcock	1966	38	2.5	34.2
Elbie Fletcher	1949	33	2.4	30.7

The guys on this list are definitely not household names, but there are some interesting, if also tragic, stories here. Let’s deal with the tragic first. There are six players here because one of them, Chick Stahl, committed suicide during spring training of the 1907 season. He had been named the Americans’ (Red Sox) player/manager over the winter, and something drove him to take his own life. This was surely a big loss for the team, as they had been counting on him to help lead them. He was the fifth-best hitter in the game just a couple years earlier in 1904.

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A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

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The Yankees have called up 23-year-old Dominican-born catching prospect Gary Sanchez from the minor leagues. Sanchez was off to an excellent start in Triple-A this year, slashing .288/.336/.541 in 27 games. Heading into the year, he ranked 21st on KATOH’s top 100 list, second to only Chance Sisco among catchers. Sanchez’s 2016-to-date performance has only served to improve his prospect stock. He figures to serve as New York’s designated hitter for the time being with Alex Rodriguez on the shelf. Read the rest of this entry »

Originally I wanted to sit here and write about the Reds’ godawful bullpen. But then the research started bumming me out, so I turned my focus to the opposite of the Reds’ godawful bullpen, which is Andrew Miller. I find Miller to be much more pleasing, so here comes stuff about him.

You might remember that, before the year, Miller sustained a fracture in his non-throwing wrist. So there was concern that he’d have to be sidelined for a while, which would deal a blow to the Yankees’ biggest strength, but Miller opted to play through the discomfort. He’s so far allowed an OPS of .273. He has an xFIP- a little over 0, an ERA- of exactly 0, and an FIP- somehow under 0. No less deliciously, Miller is presently the only pitcher in baseball who’s gotten a higher rate of swings at pitches out of the zone than at pitches inside of the zone. Andrew Miller basically turns hitters into pitchers, except he turns them into pitchers who have to be hitters. To make matters worse for them, they’re effectively pitcher-hitters at the highest-leverage spots. Andrew Miller is good.

There are so many ways to demonstrate how Andrew Miller is good. That paragraph demonstrates it. Everything after this demonstrates it. I decided to pull up Miller’s log of plate appearances on the year, and sort them by leverage. I looked to see how Miller has done in the toughest of the tough situations. Miller so far has 33 batters faced. Here are the 10 most important showdowns.

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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Unless you’ve been following the Yankees this year, there’s a decent chance you have no idea who Ronald Torreyes is. That’s understandable. I’ve been monitoring him for a while, but that’s only because I spend an inordinate amount of time parsing through minor-league data to identify players like him: players who are way, way off the prospect radar, but who project to be impact big leaguers.

Torreyes is off to a torrid start this year. In limited action with the Yankees, the 23-year-old infielder is hitting .667/.667/1.000. That’s a 401 wRC+. In nine trips to the plate, he has two singles, a double, a triple and only one strikeout. I know: small sample, blah, blah, BABIP, blah, blah. But Torreyes’ first nine plate appearances have been about as good as it gets.

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Starlin Castro has spent a lot of his career being frustrating, and he’s spent a good chunk of it being disappointing, but a player can’t be either of those things unless he has a certain amount of ability. Fans have to like you before they can later be frustrated by you, and so Castro’s time in Chicago was a bit of a roller-coaster. His time in New York will also have its ups and downs, but in the earliest possible going, it’s been all gold stars. Castro has two homers and seven hits in 12 trips to the plate, so gone are the concerns about how he might adjust. Yankees fans haven’t been let down yet.

You know what time of year it is. This is when we make too much out of everything, because we’re just excited to have new data. By the end of the season, Castro’s slugging percentage is probably going to look more like .400 than its current 1.250. This much I can assure you, though: Castro is showing that he’s carried over his late-season adjustments from 2015. It got kind of lost, but Castro finished last year strong. Then he had a good spring training. Now he’s off to a hot start. Castro isn’t going to finish as the best hitter on the Yankees, I assume, but he’s a better hitter now than he was for a lot of last summer. Pictures are going to help with this.

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Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Minnesota / Milwaukee / New York (NL).

This afternoon, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the New York Yankees. In this companion piece, I look at that same New York farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Yankees have the 5th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH, due in no small part to the system’s depth. As you can see below, the Yankees have a lot of prospects projected for one or two WAR.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

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