Happy Jameson Taillon Day to you and yours!

The right-handed prospect is set to debut for the Pirates tonight in their game against the Mets. This has been a long time coming for Taillon, who was selected second overall way back in 2010. He sat out the entirety of the 2014 and 2015 seasons following Tommy John and then hernia surgery, but has pitched better than ever in Triple-A this year.

In 10 Triple-A starts this season, he’s recorded a dazzling 1.93 FIP, striking out 26% of opposing hitters and walking a mere 3%. Running those numbers through the KATOH machine, I get a projection of 7.9 WAR for Taillon over the next six seasons, which would have placed him fifth among pitchers on KATOH’s preseason list. Given his recent performance, there’s little reason to think Taillon won’t succeed in the show. In order to account for Taillon’s missed development time, it might make sense to knock a year off of his age when calculating his projection. Running him as a 23-year-old rather than a 24-year-old yields a forecast of 10.7 WAR.

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With Jorge Soler headed to the disabled list with a hamstring injury, the Cubs have summoned outfielder Albert Almora from Triple-A. It seems Almora, who bats right-handed, will play primarily against left-handed pitching for the time being. The 22-year-old gives Joe Maddon yet another talented hitter to work into his endlessly deep and potent lineup. Almora was hitting .318/.335/.444 in Triple-A with 10 steals and a 13% strikeout rate.

The Cubs selected Almora sixth overall out of high school back in 2012, and he immediately began generating prospect hype. Baseball America deemed him the 33rd- and 36th-best prospect in baseball in 2013 and 2014 respectively. However, he didn’t crack Baseball America’s list in either of the two most recent years, likely because he’s moved slowly through the Cubs system while putting up unspectacular surface stats. He hit .270/.291/.392 between High-A and Double-A in 2014 and then slashed .272/.327/.400 in Double-A last season. Those aren’t exactly knock-your-socks-off numbers.

Yet, despite his flaws, KATOH’s maintained hope in Almora. Over the winter, my system pegged him for 5.2 WAR over the next six years, making him the 46th-best prospect in the game. Adding his 2016 numbers into the mix, Almora’s projection jumps up to 7.4 WAR.

Almora’s projection is primarily driven by two factors: age and strikeout rate. Although it feels like we’ve been hearing about him forever, Almora’s still just 22; and he just turned 22 a few weeks ago. Furthermore, he’s kept his strikeout rate between 10% and 13% the past few years, which suggests he isn’t getting fooled often.

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Recently, we massively revamped our Player Graphs and are continuing to add more features to them. Today, we added several batted-ball and plate-discipline stats both for pitchers and batters in a new drop-down menu. In addition, it’s now possible to combine certain stats on the same graph.

Here are a few release notes for the update:

• We have added GB%, LD%, FB%, HH%, MH%, SH%, Pull%, Cent%, Oppo%, O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, Swing%, O-Contact%, Z-Contact% and Contact% to all batters and pitchers.
• We’ve added K% and BB% for pitchers.
• By using the drop-down menus, readers are able to mix and match up to five stats on a graph as long as the stats are on the same scale.
• Stats are on the same scale if they are formatted in the same manner. For example, K% and GB% are both percentages. A stat like wOBA, meanwhile, uses the traditional three-decimal format. K% and GB% can be plotted on the same graph while wOBA can’t be paired with either K% or GB%.
• Readers are able to reset and clear the chart by hitting the “Reset” button on the right side of the drop-down menu.
• If a stat is greyed-out in the menu, it can’t be added to the graph. Either the player doesn’t have data for that particular stat or the stat cannot be matched with other stats currently on the graph. You can click “Reset” to start over and clear the current graph.

With this new interface we’ll continue adding more stats and features.

Remember when it was the end of spring training, and the Orioles were exploring ways to not have Hyun Soo Kim be on the roster? My computer tells me it’s June 6, and I have reason to believe my computer, and if you set a low enough minimum, Kim owns the highest wRC+ in Baltimore’s lineup. He ranks 10th in all of baseball, and though that 10th sandwiches him between Tyler Naquin and Steve Pearce — it’s early — it’s not hard to draw parallels between 2016 Kim and 2015 Jung Ho Kang. Kim presumably isn’t this good, but he’s talented, and now he’s showing that he can hold his own against big-league competition. It didn’t look like that in March, but March has lied to us before.

Let’s dig into Kim just a little bit. He’s batted 78 times, and nearly every single one of those plate appearances has come against a righty. So, that’s a factor. And he’s hit a ton of ground balls. He has one home run, but if Kim keeps putting balls on the ground, that limits his power upside, obviously. Now, Kim hasn’t chased out of the zone very much. He’s also been better than average at putting the bat on the ball. And we can address the grounders head-on. With help from Baseball Savant, naturally.

Statcast doesn’t quite record every batted ball, but it gets most of them, and Kim ranks in the 88th percentile in average batted-ball speed. That seems great, but then there’s this: Kim has hit his grounders harder. As a matter of fact, Kim leads baseball in average grounder speed. Leads baseball! Higher than 96 miles per hour. It’s good to lead in a contact metric, but then, hard grounders aren’t necessarily better than soft grounders. Generally speaking, hard contact is nearly wasted on a ground ball.

That’s the downside — Kim hits hard grounders, instead of hard flies. Now here’s the upside of that downside. Kim also has baseball’s fourth-highest average grounder launch angle. That might sound kind of funky, but Kim’s grounders so far have an average launch angle of -3.3 degrees. The league average is -9.9 degrees. So of Kim’s grounders recorded, they’ve been closer to the line between grounders and line drives. Here’s how the league has done, in batting average, by grounder launch angle:

• -5 to 0 degrees: .315 average
• -10 to -6 degrees: .200
• -15 to -11 degrees: .154
• -20 to -16 degrees: .120
• -25 to -21 degrees: .082

The closer you get to a flat exit, the more productive the batted ball. And that’s intuitive, I think, because those are the most like line drives, and defenders have the least time to react. Here’s Kim against Dellin Betances last Friday:

That was recorded as a ground ball. As a bonus, that features Kim making solid contact against elite-level velocity, but the point is that while Kim hit a grounder, he really hit more of a line-drive grounder. And there’s evidence that could be a skill of his. If this were to keep up, Kim wouldn’t hit a bunch of dingers, but he would hit liners and he’d end up with a strong average and BABIP. He’s used a lot of his hard contact on grounders, which is bad, but those grounders have almost been like liners, which is good. You understand. You’re a smart person!

Not every Kim batted ball has been recorded, but on the 15 without Statcast readings, Kim has gone 5-for-15 with two doubles, so I don’t think we’re missing a bunch of horrible contact. And data points get dropped for every hitter. We can use only what we have, and for Kim, there’s a good thing about the bad thing. And, you know, maybe in time he’ll start to elevate the ball even more. I don’t know what he’s going to do, and last year Kang hit more fly balls after April and May. If Kim puts that contact in the air, that’s great. If he stays as he is, that’s fine. Hyun Soo Kim is looking like he can cut it. Take that, March.

In The Only Rule Is It Has to Work, the excellent new book by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, the authors served as the baseball operations department for the Sonoma Stompers, an independent league team in the Pacific Association of Professional Baseball Clubs. The analytically inclined writers-turned-executives were given freedom to make roster, lineup and strategical decisions based on data, and among the most radical ideas explored in the book is the implementation of a five-man infield against an opposing player named Scott David.

The Stompers deploy a five-man infield against Scott David of the Pittsburg Diamonds, with Mike Jackson Jr. on the mound. (Source)

David is one of the best hitters in the league, one with seemingly no exploitable flaws in his approach, and the authors were struggling to come up with anything substantial to provide their pitchers in a scouting report. That is, until an off-hand remark was made about the possibility of enacting a five-man infield, and the realization that David was, in fact, the ideal candidate for the radical defensive alignment, for four key reasons:

1. He hits a bunch of ground balls
2. He sprays those ground balls all over the infield
3. He is an effective ground ball hitter
4. He has very predictable fly ball tendencies

As soon as I finished the chapter, I knew I needed to find Major League Baseball’s Scott David. Into the numbers I dove.

Using the FanGraphs leaderboards and BaseballSavant, I was able to put a number on each of the four tendencies above. Step one, ground ball rate, is simple enough to find. For step two, I calculated the difference between pull ground ball rate, and opposite-field ground ball rate to serve as a proxy for how often a player sprays his ground balls. For step three, I simply used ground ball OPS — no point in bringing in an outfielder if the player’s ground balls aren’t doing any damage. And for step four, I found the absolute value of a player’s pulled fly ball rate as a way to highlight predictable fly ball tendencies. Then I summed the z-scores of each of the four numbers to come up with a “Five-Man Infield Score.”

In the top five, we find guys like Eric Hosmer and Nori Aoki, but doing this to a lefty, as Lindbergh and Miller did, is admittedly more dangerous due to the exposure of the right field corner for an easy triple. Right-hander David Freese pulls too many of his ground balls; a normal infield shift will do the trick for him. Jean Segura is a decent candidate, though his ground ball rate and spray tendencies are not nearly as extreme as the number one name that pops up on our spreadsheet, far and away the most ideal candidate in Major League Baseball for the five-man infield: Howie Kendrick.

Look no further than his spray chart for convincing. The yellow dots are rough estimates of the optimal positioning against Kendrick in the proposed five-man infield:

Kendrick’s hit a ground ball on 65% of his balls in play, one of the highest rates in baseball. He hits them all over the infield, so shifting him with four infielders is impossible, and while Kendrick has been a pretty poor hitter this year, his OPS on ground balls is actually above-average, so there’s still hits to be taken away here. And as we can plainly see in his spray chart, there simply hasn’t been a need for a left fielder against Kendrick, so bring him in to play behind the second base bag, shift the the center fielder over slightly, and, voila! We’ve got a five-man infield, perfectly designed for Howie Kendrick, the only obvious candidate for a five-man infield in today’s MLB.

Now who’s going to be the first team to do it?

David Laurila published an interview with Lance McCullers last Friday. On Sunday, McCullers made his latest start, and here is about 1% of it:

Here is a view of the same thing happening, only taking place over a greater amount of time:

Good result. Good curveball! Nothing new there — McCullers tends to get good results, mostly because he throws a good curveball. His curveball bears a strong resemblance to that thrown by Craig Kimbrel, the difference being that McCullers is a starting pitcher, which is nuts. He’s not a two-pitch guy, but everyone knows the curveball is his weapon; as a rookie, his curve was worth about 18 runs better than average, while his fastball and change combined to be worth about -7.

You can’t learn a lot from one video clip. It’s always helpful to establish context. So, here’s the whole point of this. Last season, among starters, McCullers threw baseball’s hardest average curveball, by 0.1 miles per hour. In curveball rate, he ranked sixth. Good curveball, hard curveball, used it a lot. Moving on.

This season, among starters, McCullers has thrown baseball’s hardest average curveball, by 2.0 miles per hour. In curveball rate, he ranks first. He ranks first by more than seven percentage points. McCullers has thrown a curveball 49% of the time, and out of his five starts, his lowest rate is 42%. You think Rich Hill curveballs a lot? You think Drew Pomeranz curveballs a lot? They most certainly do, sure, but not like McCullers. No starter throws curves as often as he does, and no starter throws curves as hard as he does.

For what it’s worth, we have pitch-type information stretching back to 2002. The highest curveball rates on record for starters:

1. Lance McCullers, 2016, 48.5%
2. John Stephens, 2002, 46.0%
3. Phil Irwin, 2013, 41.9%
4. Pat Mahomes, 2003, 41.7%
5. Rich Hill, 2015, 41.5%

McCullers also ranks first in velocity, assuming this is a data glitch:

Compared to last year, McCullers has thrown plenty more curves. Statistically, that’s sensible, because the curve is his best pitch. Even now, the curve still has a strongly positive run value, while the other pitches don’t. It’s interesting to observe that the whiff rate at his curveball has only gone up, and rather substantially so. His fastball is like a secondary pitch at this point. Speaking of which — he’s throwing his fastball a little slower. He’s throwing his changeup a little slower. The curveball is harder. Part of this is probably just having a harder curveball, and another part is probably favoring the sharper curve over the loopier curve, as McCullers discussed with Laurila. He says he’s got two varieties of the breaking ball, and evidence suggests he’s been using more of the hard one.

So Lance McCullers is highly atypical. Or, he’s been so, so far. It’s worth noting it hasn’t all been good news — his ERA is over 4, in part because his walk rate has almost doubled. The strikeouts are up, and the grounders are up, but McCullers is searching for a groove. If and when he finds one, maybe it’ll feature fewer curves. Maybe the curves will be slower. I can’t tell you exactly where Lance McCullers is going to settle.

But the version we’ve seen this season? Haven’t seen a starter quite like this. Not, at least, for a long, long time.

A few days ago, the Giants lost Hunter Pence to the disabled list, weakening an already thin outfield, and making it likely that the team will have to start looking to the trade market to fill the hole at some point this summer. Then, Marlon Byrd got suspended for using PEDs, taking an outfielder off an Indians roster that was already weak in the outfield, forcing Cleveland GM Chris Antonetti to admit that they’ll probably start surveying the trade market for outfield help.

The problem, though, is that they’re going to join a pretty large number of contenders looking for outfielders. The Nationals are likely to be looking for an OF this summer, as Michael Taylor and Jayson Werth haven’t exactly inspired much confidence to this point. The Cubs could be in the market for an outfielder if Jorge Soler doesn’t start hitting fairly soon. The Red Sox probably won’t go with Blake Swihart or Brock Holt as their regular left fielder down the stretch, so they could be in the market for an outfielder as well. The Mariners probably wouldn’t mind a better option than Nori Aoki if they could find one. The White Sox could pick up an outfielder and move Melky Cabrera to DH, or move Austin Jackson to a fourth outfielder role if they found an upgrade in center field. The Orioles seem to not trust Hyun-Soo Kim, so when he cools off, he might get displaced as well.

Point being, there are a lot of potential buyers for outfield upgrades this summer. But the list of available outfielders, right now, looks pretty short.

The Brewers would move Ryan Braun, but first he has to prove he can stay in the line-up on a regular basis, which has been a problem lately. The contract, age, and PED history will likely scare off a number of buyers as well. Carlos Gonzalez should be available, but the Rockies have declined to move him the last few times he should been available too, so who knows what they’re going to do.

Jay Bruce is out there, but he’s a DH at this point of his career, and shouldn’t interest any team that cares about their pitchers. Ditto Matt Kemp, who is also running a .250 OBP and owed a crazy amount of money. Maybe the Braves would move Nick Markakis, except he’s not very good, and also overpaid. On the buy low side of things, the Rays could probably be talked out of Desmond Jennings, but he hasn’t hit in a couple of years now, and injuries seem to have sapped him of some of his athleticism.

Josh Reddick would probably be the best available outfield option for most teams, but he’s currently hurt. He should be back in time to serve as a decent July trade chip, but there’s also only one of him to go around, and certainly more than one team in the market for outfield help.

Given the lack of supply and the abundance of demand, it will probably make sense for teams on the bubble of contending to listen to offers for their productive outfielders. This could be the ideal time for the Yankees to get maximum value for Brett Gardner, for instance, or for the Rockies to put Charlie Blackmon on the block. With the current state of weak outfields on contending teams and not a great crop of outfielders available in trade, there may be an opportunity for a team to get a nice package for any kind of decent outfielder. There just don’t look like there are that many decent outfielders out there to be had right now.

This brief post about Sabermetrics Day on June 19th at Richmond County Bank Ballpark — home of the Yankees’ New York-Penn League affiliate in Staten Island — is designed to apprise the public of certain, possibly useful information.

First, one finds that the Staten Island Yankees have recently announced the participants in the Q&A Panel scheduled to occur from 2:00 to 3:30pm. From the club’s press release:

Dave Cameron – Managing editor and senior writer for FanGraphs; Owner/Operator of U.S.S. Mariner; Former contributor to ESPN, The Wall Street Journal, Baseball Prospectus.

Carson Cistulli – Senior writer for FanGraphs; Creator of NERD, SCOUT, and historical GBz%; Former editor of NotGraphs and writer for The Hardball Times.

Jonah Keri – Writer for CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated; New York Times best-selling author of Up, Up, and Away and The Extra 2%.

Emma Span – Senior Editor for Sports Illustrated; Author of 90% of the Game is Half Mental: And Other Tales from the Edge of Baseball Fandom.

Dan Szymborski – Baseball analyst for ESPN; Founder of Baseball Think Factory; Creator of ZiPS projection system.

Ben Lindbergh – Staff writer for FiveThirtyEight; Co-host of Effectively Wild; Co-Author of The Only Rule Is it Has to Work; Former editor-in-chief for Baseball Prospectus; Former staff writer for Grantland.

Meg Rowley – Writer for Baseball Prospectus and SB Nation’s Lookout Landing.

That same press release carries a combination of bad and also good news for those interested in gaining access to the event. Once again, from the communiqué de presse:

Tickets for the VIP Q&A Panel are sold out. However, there are still tickets available for the Statgeek Picnic featuring the full roster of writers and analysts. For the a lineup of confirmed special guests or for more information, visit siyanks.com/sabermetrics.

Sometimes, you write about something and the commenters unlock something that started in your piece and ends up somewhere more definitive. We were looking for the problem with Michael Pineda earlier today, and it looked like his release points were a bit off and his stuff a bit flat, but not in any crazy way.

But then people pointed out that he’s throwing his fastball lower in the zone, and that it has less sink. And also that he’s been way worse with men on base.

Well, if you take that second part, it really looks like he’s struggling from the stretch.

@DrewDinkmeyer @enosarris suspect some correlation here to struggling from the stretch also. Opp avg up 50, ops up 100 w/ men on for Pineda

— James Van Horn (@Jvh927) June 2, 2016

So I did a simple query for his movement and location with runners on and with the bases empty, and there differences are fairly stark.

First, with nobody on.

Michael Pineda Velocity, Movement, Location and Release (Bases Empty)

Pitch	Velocity	Horizontal	Vertical	Crosses Plate Vertically	Release Point
FC	93.2	1.2	7.1	2.68	6.65
FF	93.1	-2.4	8.5	2.33	6.73
CH	87.7	-7.5	6.3	1.81	6.86
SL	85.4	1.1	1.0	1.27	6.60

Now, with runners on.

Michael Pineda Velocity, Movement, Location and Release (Runners On)

Pitch	Velocity	Horizontal	Vertical	Crosses Plate Vertically	Release Point
FC	93.7	1.0	7.7	2.68	6.49
FF	93.5	-2.6	8.7	2.36	6.66
CH	87.9	-8.2	6.8	1.82	6.76
SL	85.8	1.1	1.2	1.85	6.57

On average, the throws harder and from a lower release point when there are runners on. Understandable, perhaps, he’s trying to get out of the inning. At first, though, a different of an inch on the release point seems like it’s just another small thing that could be meaningful or not.

But look at where the slider cross the plate with men on base. It’s a full seven inches higher! When the bases empty, his average slider crosses the plate nearly three inches off the bottom of the plate. With runners on base, it crosses the plate four inches above the bottom of the strike zone on average. That’s a big difference!

And yet… it’s once again not something that’s necessarily mechanical. This could be the effect of confidence in the numbers.

I once talked to Ryan Vogelsong about why he was better with runners on base than he ‘should be,’ and he said “the biggest thing is… not giving up hits with runners on base.” He didn’t tell me at the time, but it looks like he, like many Giants, was willing to give up a walk with runners on instead of giving up a hit.

Maybe Michael Pineda could take that philosophy to the mound today, especially with his slider.

The Indians outfield, already seen as a rather glaring weakness for a team with intentions of contending, just took another hit. Marlon Byrd has been suspended for 162 games after testing positive for performance enhancing drugs, multiple sources reported Wednesday afternoon. It’s the second positive test of Byrd’s career; he was suspended for 50 games in 2012 after testing positive for Tamoxifen. Cleveland Scene’s Vince Grzegorek was first with today’s news, and FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal later confirmed it.

Byrd is far from a superstar, but he was a key part of Cleveland’s now-dangerously thin outfield depth. Before the suspension, he was doing precisely what he’d done the previous two seasons: hit for enough power to be a slightly above-average hitter while providing average-or-better defense in right field. He was a body capable of performing adequately in a major league outfield, and the Indians don’t have many of those left. Their current everyday outfield looks like this:

• LF: Jose Ramirez
• CF: Rajai Davis
• RF: Lonnie Chisenhall

No platoon partners, nothing. That is, as my colleague Eno Sarris put it, a utility infielder (who, granted, has been Cleveland’s best hitter this year), a career fourth outfielder, and a platoon third baseman.

The immediate problem for Cleveland is that Byrd represented half of a right field platoon with Chisenhall, who owns a career 89 wRC+ against left-handed pitching. Davis would be a sensible partner in right with Chisenhall, if he weren’t being asked to handle center field on an everyday basis in the absence of Abraham Almonte (PED suspension which ends 30 days) and rookie Tyler Naquin (21 strikeouts and two walks in 65 plate appearances). Michael Brantley still has no timetable for his return to left field, and word out of Cleveland has not been optimistic about his 2016.

The stopgaps have done their job — between Ramirez’s exceptional play and Davis, Byrd and Chisenhall performing adequately, the Indians outfield currently ranks 10th in WAR — but they can’t reasonably expect this unit to maintain its current level of production. Our projections see the Indians outfield putting up just 3.1 WAR the rest of the way, the worst figure in the American League.

Top prospects Bradley Zimmer and Clint Frazier are both crushing Double-A, but Zimmer is striking out in 30% of his plate appearances and he’s supposed to be the more polished product. This Indians front office has been notoriously cautious with their promotion of top prospects, and so it seems unlikely that we’ll see a knee-jerk reaction that brings Zimmer or Frazier to Cleveland anytime soon.

It’s possible that they’ll just recall Naquin and hold pat — they still have the second-best playoff odds of any American League team thanks to their top-five rotation and middle infield tandem — but with the depth as thin as it is, it might be time for the Indians to revisit those offseason trade talks.