Earlier today, the author published a post regarding rather young Mets shortstop Wilmer Flores and how — somewhat surprisingly, given basically every scouting report about him — Flores had played a mostly average shortstop over 400-plus innings.

Said post included select footage — both of Flores misplaying relatively harmless ground balls and also Flores recording outs on batted balls that are converted less than 50% of the time. What it lacked, however, was any footage of Flores making actual, normal shortstop plays. The purpose of this current post is to address that pressing issue.

Here, for example, is Flores cleanly fielding and throwing to first a ground ball by Miami third baseman Casey McGehee in the fourth inning of the Mets game last night:

And here’s Flores doing basically the exact same thing two innings later:

Finally, here’s Flores backhanding a Donovan Solano grounder in the ninth and, once again, making an entirely acceptable throw to first:

And because it exists, here’s a final GIF of that last play, except from a different angle:

Two years ago, Mike Trout had the best age-20 season of all-time, by Wins Above Replacement. Last year, Trout had the best age-21 season of all time, by Wins Above Replacement. This year, Mike Trout will not have the best age-22 season of all time, because he’s regressed a little bit and also because holy crap Ted Williams.

But just because Trout hasn’t had the best season of any player ever at this age doesn’t mean we can’t have fun appreciating where his updated career totals have him relative to everyone else who has ever played the game. So, here are the five best players through their age-22 season, by WAR.

Modern defensive metrics have error bars, of course, and that goes double for numbers from 100 years ago, so you can essentially do whatever you want with those DEF numbers and adjust accordingly; this list is not gospel. But there’s Trout at the top, and even if you ignored defense and position to just rate by offensive runs above average, he’d fall all the way to #2, behind only Ted Williams.

But that’s not unexpected; the guy who ranks #1 in WAR at both age-20 and age-21 should rank at the top of this leaderboard. So instead, here’s a slightly more fun list; the best players through their age-23 season, all time, by WAR.

Trout is virtually tied with Mickey Mantle for #4 on this list, ranking behind only three Hall of Famers. And Mike Trout has not yet had his age-23 season. That will be next year, and with another reasonable Trout season, he’ll pass Williams and take the top spot on that list too.

Things will get a little harder two years from now, since Ty Cobb put up 47 WAR through his age-24 season, meaning Trout will need 18 WAR over the next two years to catch him. He can do it — he’s put up 18 WAR the last two years — but it’s not a shoo-in, and so in a few years, we might actually have a list of best careers through a specific age where Trout is not #1. But it wouldn’t be too shocking if he caught Cobb and ended up atop that list too.

Let’s appreciate what we’re seeing here. The term generational talent gets thrown around too much, but Mike Trout is a generational talent.

San Francisco catcher/first baseman Buster Posey is widely regarded to be one of major-league baseball’s best hitters for reasons that are based in fact. Entering the season, for example, he’d produced among the 10-best league- and park-adjusted batting lines since 2010. This season he’s continued that trend, recording not only the 14th-best batting line among qualified players, but also, since the All Star break, producing the absolute best such mark among qualifiers. In the ways a batter can be good, Posey has been.

Who else is good is Clayton Kershaw. Indeed, for as talented as Buster Posey is at hitting, Kershaw is probably better than that at pitching. You and I, we could spend all day talking about Kershaw’s abilities. We won’t do that, probably — because we’ll never meet, for one reason, and also because, even if we did meet, one of us would probably have important plans that day — but we could, is the point.

In any case, the best pitcher and nearly the best hitter met yesterday afternoon in San Francisco. Among the various results was the one depicted above in GIF form, a swinging third strike on a Kershaw slider in the eighth inning. A reasonable person might reasonably have assumed that it was the worst swing Posey had produced this season. According to data at Baseball Savant, it’s only the 13th worst — where worst, in this case, is defined as “the pitch furthest from the center of the strike zone at which the batter has also swung.”

So, a reasonable person would have been wrong, is one point of this post. Although, not very wrong, is another.

In conclusion, here are all the swings and misses Posey has recorded out of the zone this season, his swing and miss against Kershaw circled in red:

In each of the past two seasons, Chicago White Sox rookie infielder Marcus Semien has recorded among the most impressive walk and strikeout rates in the high minors. Insofar as it’s generally the case that walk and strikeout figures from the high minors translate somewhat predictably to the majors, a reasonable person — and also the present author — might reasonably have expected Semien to approximate those same figures at baseball’s highest level. That he absolutely hasn’t presents a bit of a mystery.

Last year, for example, he recorded walk and strikeout rates of 15.1% and 15.8%, respectively, in 714 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A. An encouraging performance, that. Following a late-season promotion to the parent club, however, Semien produced figures of just 1.4% and 31.0%, respectively, in 71 plate appearances. Nor has he been immune from a similarly robust deterioration in plate-discipline/contact skills this season. Regard, firstly, Semien’s walk and strikeout figures in 366 plate appearances with Triple-A Charlotte: 14.5% and 16.1%, respectively — which is to say, almost identical to his minor-league numbers from 2013. Meanwhile, his walk and strikeout rates from 205 PAs with the White Sox? Just 7.8% and 30.2%, respectively.

Here’s roughly all that same information, except in table form and featuring Semien’s minor- and major-league data from 2013 and -14 combined:

One finds that, over the last two seasons, Semien has produced a walk and strikeout differential of just -1.0 percentage point in the minor leagues, but of nearly -30 points in the majors. To get a sense of how a player with Semien’s minor-league track record might perform in the majors, consider his Steamer and ZiPS projections. Both systems call for Semien to walk in about 10% of plate appearances and strike out in about 21-22% of them — roughly league-average figures, both of them. Semien’s actual plate-discipline numbers, though, are considerably below average.

To get a sense of where Semien might be having the most difficulty, I’ve embedded the following heatmap featuring his contact rate by zone during 2013 and -14. For every zone within which Semien has recorded a sample of at least 10 swings, I’ve included the difference between Semien’s own contact rate and the league-average one.

The space outlined in a cloying shade of green represents that area within which Semien has had some success. On pitches roughly in the middle of the zone, vertically speaking, Semien has produced roughly average contact rates relative to his major-league peers — and has even outperformed them on pitches low and outside. High strikes have posed a considerable problem, however: here Semien has recorded contact rates about 12 percentage points below league average. Lower pitches on the inside part of the plate also appear to have caused Semien some troubles.

Further consideration by pitch type might serve to understand even more about Semien’s surprisingly robust deterioration of plate discipline at the major-league level. That the author is writing even these words after 5pm on a Friday, however, suggests that such an inquiry will only appear in a sequel.

The Fans Scouting Report is back for 2014, and is now open for your consideration. Rather than add too much of my own commentary, I’ll just quote Tom Tango.

Baseball’s fans are very perceptive. Take a large group of them, and they can pick out the final standings with the best of them. They can forecast the performance of players as well as those guys with rather sophisticated forecasting engines. Bill James, in one of his later Abstracts, had the fans vote in for the ranking of the best to worst players by position. And they did a darn good job.

There is an enormous amount of untapped knowledge here. There are 70 million fans at MLB parks every year, and a whole lot more watching the games on television. When I was a teenager, I had no problem picking out Tim Wallach as a great fielding 3B, a few years before MLB coaches did so. And, judging by the quantity of non-stop standing ovations Wallach received, I wasn’t the only one in Montreal whose eyes did not deceive him. Rondell White, Marquis Grissom, Larry Walker, Andre Dawson, Hubie Brooks, Ellis Valentine. We don’t need stats to tell us which of these does not belong.

The Project

What I would like to do now is tap that pool of talent. I want you to tell me what your eyes see. I want you to tell me how good or bad a fielder is. Go down, and start selecting the team(s) that you watch all the time. For any player that you’ve seen play in at least 10 games in 2014, I want you to judge his performance in 7 specific fielding categories.

Try to judge ‘average’ not as an average player at that position, but an average player at any position. If you think that Ben Zobrist has an average arm, then mark him as average, regardless if you’ve seen him play 2B, SS, LF or RF.

Crowdsourcing has proven to be quite useful in many endeavors, and this is one of the best uses of crowdsourcing in a baseball environment. So, go take part.

Dan Connelly of the Baltimore Sun broke the news, since confirmed by MLB:

Waiting on official word but hearing Chris Davis has tested pos for amphetamines. 25 game suspension

— Dan Connolly (@danconnollysun) September 12, 2014

The Orioles have 17 regular season games remaining, so this puts Davis out for the rest of the year, plus eight additional games beyond the regular season. The interesting question, which I have not yet been able to find the answer for, is what this will do to his postseason eligibility when the suspension ends.

You’ll recall that MLB and the player’s association updated their PED suspension policy this year, after not being happy with Jhonny Peralta playing well in October last year, making players who failed a test for PEDs ineligible for the postseason, even if their suspension ended before the playoffs began. However, stimulants have a different tier of penalties than PEDs, as you’ll note by Davis’ 25 game ban, and it isn’t entirely clear whether this postseason ban applies to stimulants as well.

MLB’s official tweet mentions that Davis will be suspended for the postseason, but does not mention whether its for just the eight remaining games beyond the regular season — which would mean he’d be eligible to return for the World Series if the Orioles got that far — or whether the postseason ban for a failed PED test applies to stimulants as well. The best guess is that it doesn’t, and that Davis will be allowed to return for a potential World Series once his suspension ends, but that highlights a pretty odd divide in the rules. MLB’s penalties clearly judge a failed test for PEDs as a worse offense than one for stimulants, but it doesn’t exactly follow that having a recently-suspended PED user tarnishes the postseason in a way that a recently-suspended amphetamine user does not.

But it seems like those might be the rules, as odd as they seem.

Continuing the theme of filling in the gaps in the FanGraphs Library, today we’re debuting a glossary entry explaining Base Running (BsR). We’ve had BsR on the site for a while, and you can find mention of it in the glossary amid the entries for wSB and UBR, but never on its own. Considering that BsR is featured on the main leaderboard page and serves as one of the building blocks of Wins Above Replacement (WAR), it earned a full entry.

It also became clear that some people were confusing it with BaseRuns, which is an entirely different thing, and we needed a place to make the distinction clear.

As always, feel free to post any questions you may have about the metric in the comments below. You can also get your FanGraphs and sabermetrics questions answered Wednesdays at 3pm, during our chat designed specifically for that purpose. Should you have any related questions, feel free to contact me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44 as well.

Insofar as the Cape Cod League — that is, the country’s most notable collegiate, wood-bat summer league — insofar as it ended on August 15th, it is either (a) entirely absurd or (b) almost entirely absurd that one would choose to return to it on a Thursday in mid-September. Insofar, however, as that same league produced nearly half of this year’s first-round draft picks — and has a history of serving as a summer home to many future major-leaguers — it’s also the case that really any occasion is an appropriate one to consider the Cape Cod League in some depth.

To the end of doing that, below are the final SCOUT leaderboards for this year’s top Cape League hitters and pitchers — and notes concerning same. (All data courtesy Pointstreak. Find last year’s best performances here.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I pointed out to Chris Young that he may have been right about how the league was going. Jeff Sullivan found that contact rates on pitches high in the zone are down. David Appelman helped us show that the league has a low-and-in happy zone for home runs per fly ball. The league as a whole has a hole up and in. Evidence seems to be mounting that the league is full of low-ball hitters, perhaps in response to the strike zone expanding at the bottom of the zone or the increasing use of the two-seamer.

So, with the riseballers like Young — Jered Weaver, Sean Doolittle, and company — finding success, who are the guys they need to watch out for?

The first name came to Young easily. “Brian Dozier, he will yank that high pitch all day long,” said the Mariners’ righty. He’d probably seen something like this chart, which shows Dozier’s run production in each quadrant of the strike zone:

Young praised the Twin’s second baseman and his “level swing plane” as part of the reason Dozier does well against the high pitch. Take a look:

Young talked about a couple other guys, too. He said that Coco Crisp, in a normal year, is somebody he has to worry about, but that this year things have changed a little. The heat maps from last year and this year reflect that he might be on to something — Crisp isn’t quite the high-ball threat he was before. He mentioned that Brandon Moss “fouls that high pitch off, he can’t put it in play, but he won’t miss it either.” Moss does reasonably well against high and tight with respect to the league, actually.

Bradley Woodrum once took a look at swing planes and their effect on pitcher-batter matchups. Looks like there’s something to it. After all, Josh Reddick has one of the biggest uppercut swings in baseball (and he’s not changing it) and he’s about 50% better against ground-ball pitchers than fly-ball pitchers, accordingly. It makes sense that his swing would have trouble against the high pitch, and it does.

Really nailing this all the way might take more time than we bloggers can afford, but it wouldn’t be surprising if a team employee had put in hours of video work sorting players by their swing planes. High and tight might work for most of the league, but throw one there to Brian Dozier, and you’re in trouble.

In the seventh inning of the Cubs’ August 23rd game home against Baltimore, very potent infield prospect Javier Baez hit the seventh home run of his career in just his 82nd plate appearance. This impressive and immediate exhibition of power wasn’t particularly surprising. Both Baez’s minor-league numbers and the scouting reports suggested that, upon his promotion to the majors, that the 21-year-old Puerto Rico native would likely homer and strike out at rates considerably higher than league average.

Read the rest of this entry »