Victor Martinez leads the majors in wRC+. Victor Martinez doesn’t appear on the first page of our WAR leaderboard. These are the kinds of results that make people question whether defense is too heavily emphasized in WAR, and certainly, Martinez’s status as a full-time DH is the primary factor in the divergence between his offensive value and his overall value.

But I’m not trying to talk about that again. Instead, Martinez is instructive of another issue, as a reminder that on base percentage is not created equal for all players. After all, the entire goal of reaching base is to score runs, and players turn their baserunning opportunities into runs at different clips. In fact, the range of scoring runs as a percentage of times on base can be pretty large.

The league average player in the AL — we’re ignoring the NL because of pitcher hitting, for this case — scores 30% of the time they reach base on a non-HR. The guys who lead the league in turning times on base into runs are, as you’d expect, quite fast: James Jones leads the league at 48%, and not coincidentally, he’s also 25 for 26 in stolen base attempts this year. Jones’ speed allows his times on base to be more valuable than a player with the exact same OBP.

But then there are guys on the other side of the ledger. Victor Martinez isn’t the slowest guy in baseball, but he is a converted catcher in his thirties who has already had knee surgery, so not surprisingly, he doesn’t score as often when he gets on base. For the season, Martinez has come around on just 24% of his times on base, even though he’s had J.D. Martinez and his .538 slugging percentage behind him for most of the year.

Martinez isn’t last in the league in this category, though; In fact, he’s not even in the top 10. Here are the 10 players who have scored the least often on their run-scoring opportunities.

Escobar is a surprising name, because he’s a shortstop with some speed, but this is probably just a function of the Rays offensive problems this year, as his career mark is 30%, and his career low before this season was 28%. Certainly, a player’s teammates offensive production can have an impact on this number, and Escobar is an example that this isn’t entirely within a player’s control.

But look at the rest of the names on the list. DH, DH, C, DH, DH, 1B/DH, C, 1B, 3B. This is basically a list of the slowest players in the game, and the guy who hits last in the string of decent hitters on the Mariners. Ortiz’s number is almost shockingly low, as he’s only scoring once every seven times he gets on base.

Speed has often been overrated in baseball circles, as it usually is found in guys who can’t hit all that well. But it does matter, and when evaluating offensive performance, we should remember that a nifty OBP from a baseclogger is not equal to that same OBP from someone who can actually run.

The fun thing about data is that we can say the same thing many different ways. If I wanted to prove a point, I could throw up a series of graphs and charts to enhance my argument. I actually plan to that very thing quite soon, so stay tuned, America.

We know that we are in a golden age of pitching. That the hitting boon of the early 2000s has ended, and a combination of regression, shrinking strike zones, stronger drug screening and other things is leading to pitching prowess coming back in a big way. You are discerning baseball fans, so you were already aware of this. If you are new to baseball or an alien or just like graphs, here’s some proof.

Strikeouts are up, FIP is decreasing. I could have thrown a bunch of other lines in there as well, but it doesn’t seem necessary. To be completely honest, this recent supremacy of pitching can be summed up in this recent tweet from Jeff Passan:

This is really hard to believe: Victor Martinez is the only player in baseball with an OBP above .400. Recent years: '13: 7. '12: 4. '11: 6

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 8, 2014

Here’s a graph to compliment:

One, ONE dude has an OBP above .400 this season. In fairness, Giancarlo Stanton (.399), Jose Bautista (.397), Andrew McCutchen (.397) and Paul Goldschmidt (.396) are all within spitting distance. But let’s say one more player hits that threshold this season. That’s still the lowest number of qualified batters since 1983. The 1999 Cleveland Indians had five qualified batters that had a .400 OBP or better.

There’s also another side to this coin. Victor Martinez, at age 35, is getting on base more than anybody. Martinez really is having a banner year. He’s reached his highest WAR since 2007, and is set to have the best hitting season of his career. He is currently second in the league in wRC+, behind only Jose Abreu. He’s hitting better than Stanton, Mike Trout or Yasiel Puig. Did I mention he’s 35? Given his age and his performance during this, his contract year, the 2015 offseason should shape up to be a very interesting one for the VMart camp.

We’re all smart people, we all know things. But sometimes, a simplified, boiled down perspective can really pull everything together. The offense/pitching dichotomy ebbs and flows. Batting will again rule the day at some point. But even fans of dingers and high-scoring games must admit we’re in a pretty special time right now. This is our grandparent moment — when, in 30 years, we can tell all those whippersnappers about baseball during our day. When nobody scored any runs. And we walked uphill both ways to watch it on our cell phones. And we were grateful.

Earlier today, Finnish martial artist and FanGraphs contributor August Fagerstrom submitted for the consideration of everyone a collection of reasons to believe in Cleveland right-hander Danny Salazar. As Fagerstrom notes, Salazar’s eight later-season starts in the majors compare favorably not only to the eight starts he recorded earlier this season but also to the most recent eight starts made by basically every pitcher in the majors. His 54 FIP-, for example, is the ninth-best such figure among qualified starters over the last month.

Nor is Salazar the only one among Cleveland’s starting pitchers to have produced elite-type numbers of late. In fact, over the last 30 days, Cleveland’s rotation has recorded the best league- and park-adjusted xFIP and FIP and ERA — and also the best WAR figures, too, of both the fielding-independent and run-allowed variety.

Regard, by way of illustration, the top-five rotations over the past month, sorted by WAR:

It might be difficult for some, owing to the alarmingly large gap between Detroit’s fielding-independent and run-prevention numbers, to say that the Tigers have featured the second-best rotation over the past month. Regardless, the point remains: by any criteria one might choose to define pitching success, the Indians have been the best by it over the last month.

Here are the individual starters who’ve contributed to that cause, with their numbers from the last 30 days:

Before the current season, this group above had produced 7.6 WAR total over 882.0 innings in the entirety of their collective careers. As a group, they had accounted for fewer wins than Justin Verlander did by himself in 2009 — and way less efficiently, too.

Of late, however, this same cadre of relative misfits has been excellent, producing a collective total of 4.6 WAR in 161.2 innings since last month at this time — or, a slightly higher rate of WAR per inning than Felix Hernandez has produced in 2014.

It is not only probable but also a definite certainty that Jon Daniels and Thad Levine and Ron Washington and probably also, like, half of the dogs in the Dallas Metro Statistical Area are more qualified than the present author to hold forth on what is best for the Texas Rangers. Nor is it my intention, at all in what follows, to hold forth on any such thing.

Rather, the purpose of this brief post is only to submit a formal request — or, as formal a request as one is capable of making by means of an internet weblog featuring banner ads for the Brazilian Butt Lift. The request is as follows: that they (i.e. the Texas Rangers) allow pitcher Alex Claudio to start one and/or more than one baseball games this September.

For those readers who are less well acquainted with fringe prospects, below are some relevant facts regarding Claudio.

He:

• Is a 22-year-old left-hander from Puerto Rico; and
• Began the current season in the High-A Carolina League; and
• Subsequently recorded strikeout and walk rates of 23.3% and 3.6%, respectively, in 92.0 innings across three minor-league levels; and
• Has recorded strikeout and walk rates of 31.3% and 6.3%, respectively — and also a ground-ball rate of 55.0% — in 7.1 relief innings for Texas following a mid-August promotion; and
• Has recorded, in those 7.1 relief innings, an average fastball velocity (84.6 mph) just a little bit slower than Cardinals infielder Daniel Descalso;
• Has recorded the absolute slowest average changeup velocity (67.5 mph) among anyone to throw a pitch this season.

So far as dramatic effect is concerned, it’s possible that the facts above aren’t ideally arranged. What one needs to know about Claudio, though, is that he (a) features conspicuously underwhelming arm speed, but has also (b) produced decidedly above-average figures (so far) at four different levels this season.

It’s not uncommon, probably, for a relief pitcher to ascend a couple levels and then find success in the majors based on his ability to dominate same-handed batters. Unlike other left-handers with sub-optimal velocity, however, Claudio doesn’t necessarily profile as a LOOGY. While he throws from a low-ish arm slot and features an effective slider, Claudio’s beautiful and strange changeup allows him to neutralize right-handed batters reasonably well, too.

Like, for example, how he decisively neutralized Collin Cowgill recently by means of his changeup:

And then how, here, he neutralized Cowgill again via the changeup on the very next pitch:

Again, though: the intention of this missive isn’t necessarily to argue that adding Alex Claudio to the rotation might make the Rangers better. Rather, it’s to point out that it would obviously make them more interesting — and that, given his record to date, that Claudio probably wouldn’t embarrass either himself or the club.

One of the great things about FanGraphs is the ever increasing number of stats and features available on the site. One of the downsides of that is that if you miss the initial announcement, things can get awfully confusing awfully quickly. In my efforts to update and expand the FanGraphs Library, I noticed a number of stats that slipped through the cracks and failed to get their own entries after debuting on the site. Today, we are correcting another one of those absences.

One of our most prominently displayed statistics is Defense, or Def if you’re checking out the leaderboards or player pages. We rolled Off and Def out about a year ago as simple combinations of stats we already offered on the site, but if you weren’t hanging out on FanGraphs in mid-September 2013, you might not have known what they meant. Def is simply fielding runs above average (Ultimate Zone Rating at FanGraphs) and the positional adjustment added together and tells you about a player’s total defensive value relative to league average. It is a cumulative stat, so it is based on the quality and quantity of your performance. To learn more about run value stats, check out last week’s entry in the Library.

As always, feel free to contact me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, in the comments, or during my weekly chat at 3pm eastern on Wednesdays with any and all FanGraphs and stat related questions.

A few years back, Mike Fast wrote an article for The Hardball Times called “Lose a Tick, Gain a Tick”. It basically looked at everything to deal with gaining or losing fastball velocity. Recently, I wrote a RotoWire article where I basically had to recreate Mike’s data, and I thought I would share the results.

The part of the article I looked into was the change in pitcher results, as their fastball changed velocity. Originally, Mike found starters saw their RA go up by 0.28 RA for each mph in fastball velocity they lost. For relievers, it was .45 RA. While I didn’t use RA values, I did get ERA, FIP, xFIP and K% changes between the 2013 to 2014 season. Here is what I found:

Read the rest of this entry »

If I asked you to guess who has been the best hitting team in baseball this year, who would you answer? Before writing this post, I probably would have guessed the Angels, though they actually don’t lead the league in any category one might consider a decent measure of team offense. If you just wanted the answer to be simple, you could go with the A’s, who have scored the most runs (650) of any team in the game, though there’s a traffic jam at the top, as the Tigers (649), Rockies (647), and Angels (642) are all close enough that they could take the lead with one big blowout.

But run scoring is hitting and baserunning and the order in which those events occur, so if we were just asking about which team has hit the best this year, using total runs scored might not give us a great answer. The next simplest answer would be to use something like wRC+, which focuses solely on a team’s performance at the plate and is agnostic about how they sequence those hits, so it is measuring what we generally think of as hitting talent. It also adjusts for park effects, which we want to do. By this measure, the best hitting team in baseball this year has been the Detroit Tigers, with a wRC+ of 109.

But even that’s not really looking at things on a level playing field, because the Tigers are in the AL and get to use the DH, while NL teams have to let their pitcher hit, which drags down their overall totals. So, what we really want to use is wRC+ with pitcher-hitting excluded, so that we’re just evaluating one team’s hitters against another. And if you use the toggle to look at team batting with pitcher’s excluded, you’ll find the best performance by a team’s hitters this year comes from the Pittsburgh Pirates, with a 113 wRC+.

Yeah, I was stunned too. Very quietly, the Pirates have really hit the ball this year. We know about Andrew McCutchen, but Russell Martin is basically hitting like Buster Posey, Neil Walker has been the best hitting second baseman in the NL, and play-everywhere-guy Josh Harrison has hit better than Robinson Cano this year. Toss in an improved bat from Starling Marte and a couple of okay platoon-types in Ike Davis and Travis Snider, and the Pirates line-up has performed better than any other in baseball this year. Who knew?

Last month, the present author utilized what a reader might have recognized as “the least possible amount of effort” to the end of compiling a pair of leaderboards — one for hitters, one for pitchers — of all the players who’d been traded both (a) during the month of July and (b) to a contending club, where contending was defined as a club that possessed better than 10% odds of qualifying for the divisional series as of July 31st.

What follows is a list of all those same players, sorted by their WAR totals from the month of August:

Here are some observations regarding same:

• Oakland batters and pitchers produced just a 5.3 WAR collectively in August, the 20th-best such mark in the league. Notably, the five acquisitions included here accounted for slightly more than two of those wins — or, roughly 40%. The remaining 25 or so members of the roster, meanwhile, to have recorded a plate appearance or inning — they produced just three wins collectively (and Josh Donaldson was responsible for nearly two of those).
• Former Oakland outfielder Yoenis Cespedes recorded a 1.2 WAR for Boston in August — a better mark, that, than every Athletic besides the aforementioned Donaldson.
• Right-hander Brandon McCarthy has produced nearly an identical park-adjusted xFIP with the Yankees as he did previously with Arizona (73 xFIP- with the former, 77 xFIP- with the latter). His park-adjusted ERAs, however, have been wildly different (70 ERA- with the former, 131 ERA- with the latter). According to WAR as calculated with ERA (and not FIP), McCarthy has been responsible for 1.3 wins with the Yankees after accounting for -0.2 (negative wins, that is) in Phoenix.

News broke last night that Braves reliever Jonny Venters has yet another torn ulnar collateral ligament in his pitching elbow. This comes a day after the Braves shut down Venters’ rehab program after the pitcher felt discomfort. We now know why he felt said discomfort.

Venters had joined a growing group of pitchers like Brian Wilson, Joakim Soria, and, more recently, Jarrod Parker who all required a second Tommy John Surgery. According to our own Jeff Zimmerman’s TJS database, were Venters to get a third surgery, he would be the second pitcher to ever do so. The first was Jason Isringhausen.

Read the rest of this entry »

There will be more of these with September call-ups looming and with 50 Future Value as the cut-off for who gets a post, Herrera just barely qualifies.  Take a look at the Rangers list or yesterday’s Rockies list to get an idea of what 45 and 50 FV means.  The last of the 50 FV prospects is generally around the 150th best prospect in the game.

Thanks to Jeffrey Paternostro for the above video.

Hit: 45/55, Game Power: 45/50, Raw Power: 50/50, Run: 50/50+, Field: 45/50, Throw: 45/45+

Note: From now on, when I list scouting grades for a player in an article, they will appear on his player page in real time, so pop over to Herrera’s page and marvel at technology.

Using the process from the org prospect list format, the triple slash line upside for Herrera is .280/.345/.430.  This is taking the projected tools above, converting them into stats (i.e. 55 bat converts to .270s batting average), then rounding up a bit (how much for each tool depends on the player) to account for “upside” rather than “projected output.”

Dilson Herrera is a bit of a grinder, with one scout comparing him to Mark Ellis.  That may not be what Mets fans are hoping for from a hotshot prospect that hit his way from A-Ball to the big leagues in his age 20 season, but part of the appeal with Herrera is how quickly he reached his ceiling (or close to it).

He was a known prospect on the July 2nd circuit from Colombia but only got a $220,000 bonus, with multiple millionaires from him class looking like total busts already.  This was due in part to Herrera’s 5’10 stature, the fact that he wouldn’t fit at shortstop in the big leagues, he isn’t a quick-twitch athlete and his swing is a little funny.  He’s worked his way to being an average second baseman, which was also in doubt at one point, and will post average to slightly above run times.

Herrera loads his hands up (behind his ear) rather than back (at or below shoulder height) like most hitters do.  This normally creates length to a swing, with the quick downward motion to start a swing often leading to more downward motion than is necessary and a loop to the swing path.  Herrera has had to prove it for the past few years, but he has very good awareness of the bat head, feel to hit, bat control or whatever you want to call it and he makes more consistent hard contact that almost any other hitter with this swing.

Being this advanced at the plate at 20 often leads to All-Star upside, but as I mentioned above, Herrera isn’t that kind of guy physically.  He’s a solid 50 for most scouts and he may reach that ceiling by Opening Day next year.  Not bad for one of the two players (along with Vic Black) the Mets received from Pittsburgh last season in exchange for two rentals (Marlon Byrd and John Buck).