Owners of the majors’ fourth-best record (37-20) and second-best run differential (+92), the Astros have been humming along in typical powerhouse fashion, but a recent rash of injuries is testing their depth. In a 15-day span they sent Jose Altuve, Collin McHugh, George Springer, Max Stassi, and Aledmys Diaz to the injured list, all for comparatively mundane-sounding injuries to muscles and joints. On Wednesday they gave us something new, namely the news that Carlos Correa had suffered a fractured rib while receiving a massage at his home, which will sideline him for four to six weeks.

It’s a bizarre injury worthy of a Jayson Stark column, and one that set off speculation as to its veracity, to say nothing of the jokes. Unlike the Mets’ handling of Yoenis Cespedes’ recent eyebrow-raising ankle fractures, which the outfielder suffered on his ranch, the Astros gave no hint that Correa’s injury was the result of any mischief. Via The Athletic’s Jake Kaplan:

“Players do a lot of things outside of the field that we’re never aware of or not aware of. Everybody’s trying to get better in their own way, and I’m sure he was receiving treatment for specific reasons,” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened that way, but we’re concerned right now mostly about getting him back. He’s going to have to rest for a little bit, let the bones heal and get back to doing the physical activity that will help him be back on the field.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not a secret that baseball at every level is being changed by the information gleaned from advanced tech like TrackMan, StatCast, and about a dozen other platforms. There are examples of changes in swing plane, pitch grips, sequencing, and location from every team in the big leagues derived purely from this data. It’s also generally known that this progressive approach has reached into the minor leagues for many teams and is also spreading to amateur baseball. Because the pitching end of this march began early (PITCHf/x came about nearly a decade before we heard the term exit velo), progressive hitting knowledge has lagged years behind pitching, and now the fact that colleges haven’t fully embraced it is affecting the draft and what kind of talent gets to campus.

Eric and I have spoken with numerous scouts in recent weeks about a topic that came up innocently in our draft prep but that, when we dug deeper, appears to be indicative of a larger trend in the game. There are an unusual amount of high school position player prospects who are signable in the $250,000 to $500,000 bonus range. One crosschecker said his region normally has at most one prospect per year of this sort, and this year there are at least seven. Every other regional or national scout we’ve asked has confirmed that they’ve noticed the same thing, but none had a ready-made explanation for why it is happening. We put together a hypothesis, and got universal agreement that we were onto something.

Colleges Coach Hitters for College
Many, if not most, top collegiate hitting prospects need a substantive swing change right after they’re drafted to match what’s going on in pro ball. Last year South Alabama’s Travis Swaggerty (reduce effort/movement) and Wichita State’s Alec Bohm (extend arms/increase loft), our fourth and fifth prospects in the draft, most needed to modernize their swings. This year our 12th and 26th prospects, Texas Tech’s Josh Jung (more pull/lift/loft) and Missouri’s Kameron Misner (eliminate toe tap/improve timing), are the two prospects in greatest need of a swing change. It’s not every player, and some prospects I haven’t mentioned need less obvious adjustments, but this is also choosing from a group of the most elite tools and performances in the country.

You may ask why collegiate hitting coaches aren’t addressing these issues. A more fully actualized and pro version of these hitters would surely help their college team in the short term, right? Not necessarily. BABIPs are much higher in college because of the lower skill level, particularly on defense. It’s common for some top programs (especially on the west coast) to have middle-of-the-order batters bunt early in games, and since those bunts result in errors much more often in college, it’s a better strategic play than it is in the majors. An opposite field, line drive, and grounders approach also results in more hits than it would in pro ball while a groundball, at any level of baseball, is more likely to result in a hit than a fly ball. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve surely heard the sentiment: that pitcher is boom-or-bust. When he’s dialed in, he’s unhittable, but sometimes he just doesn’t “have it.” It’s a non-falsifiable claim, of course. It’s nearly impossible to say what constitutes having it or not, and harder still to know if it’s predictive. For the most part, your talent level is your talent level. Great pitcher? You’ll have fewer blowup games. Bad pitcher? Random chance is going to give you your fair share of crooked numbers.

This unprovable fact, however, set me onto an interesting train of thought. What if run clustering isn’t a purely random process? What if some pitchers, not through any innate streakiness but merely by virtue of the outcomes they allow, give up runs in interesting patterns? Take a groundball-heavy pitcher, for example. When a run scores against him, it’s almost certainly due to a series of groundball singles and walks. If one run scores, there’s often another runner in scoring position right away. The state of the world upon giving up one run, for this Zack Britton-wannabe pitcher, is such that he’s immediately threatened with more runs.

Contrast that to a different type of pitcher, a Nick Anderson-style strikeouts and dingers fly ball pitcher. When our punch-outs and fly balls pitcher gives up a run, it’s often on a solo shot. When that’s the case, one run is in, but the resulting situation isn’t threatening anymore. The bases are empty, the damage done in a single instant. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to wonder whether the two allow runs in different bunches?

Still, those are a lot of words with no real evidence behind them. Who’s to say which of those pitchers allow more big innings? Who’s to say if they’re even equally good pitchers? The guy who allows a lot of home runs sounds like he might allow a lot of big innings, just by virtue of being someone who allows a lot of home runs. We need to be more precise to say anything with conviction. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about a small way in which Willians Astudillo made the world better, baseball as a conversational icebreaker, Cody Bellinger’s incredible WAR pace, whether Bellinger is overshadowing the rest of the Dodgers (and Clay Bellinger), and a few of 2019’s other breakout batters, present a Stat Blast about Statcast no-hitters (and Statcast hitting streaks), then answer listener emails about whether playoff odds are fair to teams that appear out of the race and why we don’t see more pitchers pulled in the middle of plate appearances.

Audio intro: The Flying Burrito Brothers, "Cody, Cody"
Audio outro: Stephen Malkmus, "The Hook"

Link to Petriello on Bellinger’s possibly best-ever season
Link to Sam on Bellinger’s possibly best-ever season
Link to Sam on Statcast no-hitters
Link to MLB.com on Statcast hitting streaks
Link to Sam on alternate timelines
Link to Sam on season simulations
Link to Sam on season simulations again
Link to Sam on out-of-contention teams
Link to Nate on FiveThirtyEight forecast calibration
Link to FiveThirtyEight forecast calibration interactive tool
Link to Ben on matchup decisions
Link to article about Girardi pitching change
Link to 2015 podcast conversation about Girardi pitching change
Link to Foley’s book-signing event
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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The 2019 MLB Draft is upon us, and a few threads that help comprise the full, 40-round tapestry have piqued our interest. The individual players involved, and the pirate crew of scouts and analysts who shape their organizations’ futures are, of course, annual focal points of the process. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, then you’ll also want to check out our prospect resource, The BOARD, which has player rankings and reports for this year’s draft class. It will be updated continuously over the next few days. You’ll also want to refer back to the draft order, pick values, and bonus pool amounts, which can be found here. For the latest gossip, please enjoy our recent mock draft.

Rounds one and two of the draft begin Monday, June 3 at 7pm Eastern. Day 2 includes rounds three through ten and begins Tuesday at 1pm; the final thirty rounds begin Wednesday at noon.

As is the case every year, this draft has some deeper themes and details. Here we outline some of the things we find fascinating, or that individuals who play a role in this process (amateur scouting personnel and player reps) are talking about.

Strategy Trends

Forward Thinking Now Means Tools
During the Moneyball era, traditional, scout-centric teams took upside/tools, while progressive teams leaned on statistical performance and perceived safety. These days with showcase stats, TrackMan and other advanced tech, better understanding of biomechanics, draft models, and the rising cost of elite major league free agents, the progressive clubs now feel comfortable taking upside players just like the traditional teams did. Tools can be quantified to some degree (i.e. spin rates, velo, exit velo, etc.) and, especially when a progressive scouting org is also a progressive player development org, teams are confident they can shape those tools into performance even if the player in question hasn’t performed. It moves the group of players valued due to their performance — think big conference college players with strong peripherals — down the board board if they don’t have sufficient physical talent. The Dodgers and Yankees, who both also seem less inclined to care about pitcher injury, are two prominent examples of teams who operate this way. Read the rest of this entry »

The journey that made Takaaki Yokoyama the first Japanase player with Diablos Rojos del Mexico in 79 years of franchise history was not a planned one.

Back in 2014, when he made his debut in Japan with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, his main goal was to make a living in Japanese baseball. In order to do it, he had a what might be called a typical repertoire for a Japanese pitcher — fastball, sinker, curveball, slider, and changeup. But he struggled with home run issues and below-average velocity on his heater (138.9 kmh or 86.3 mph). He tried to improve his offspeed stuff after a rough couple of years, moving from a classic changeup to a splitter. That bumped up his velocity on offspeed pitchs almost 4 mph but did nothing to correct his main problem in NPB: his fastball was getting destroyed. According to Deltagraphs, his four-seam fastball had a -10.6 run value in less than 20 innings pitched in 2016. Two years later, he was released.

Luckily for Yokoyama, that wasn’t the end of the road. The 28-year-old right-hander teamed up with a group of international players to showcase themselves in several spring games organized by Yokoyama’s agent and translator, Toma Irokawa, in an effort to offer their services to American teams.

The plan worked for him. He signed with the New Jersey Jackals in the CanAm league and was about to get his first shot at independent baseball until things hit a snag.

“He had everything set up but problems with the immigration process delayed us. In the middle of that process, we got the call from Diablos Rojos,” remembers Toma.

Word of Yokoyama and the showcase had spread, and a team in need of bullpen help was about to get it in the form of its first Japanese pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

With the team prospect lists wrapping up today, multiple top 100 types having recently graduated, and the draft coming early next week, it’s a natural time to take a snapshot of where things stand in terms of the game’s farm system rankings.

We’ve taken Craig Edwards’ values for prospects by tier and totaled up what each of the 30 clubs had in their farm system over the winter. We also have a “Now” ranking with graduated prospects taken out (see the sidebar here for a full list of graduates), as well as a post-draft number based on our valuations of what teams’ draft picks are worth (in other words, our expectation of what we expect them to sign). Orgs are ranked based on the “Now” ranking; the total number of prospects and average per prospect value are also from that “Now” figure.

The previous version of this org ranking from the end of the 2018 season can be found here. Below is the grid with the breakdown of prospects by FV and club, so you can see the shape of a system:

There is some wiggle room in the team rankings, as you could argue that a team with a couple million dollars less in value, but with that value concentrated in many fewer prospects, actually has more trade value. As a thought exercise, you’d want a $100 million prospect more than 100 $1 million prospects, which this ranking would technically call equal. Exactly where that cutoff lies and what the discount rate would be for a multi-player package isn’t clear just yet. Would you need $120 million of value in two prospects to part with one $100 million prospect? How much would you need for a three player package? These are questions we plan on answering down the road.

There will be an update moving the FV of dozens of prospects right after the draft, and draftees who haven’t yet signed but who we expect to sign (essentially all top 10 round picks) will also be added right away. With that in mind, because THE BOARD will change in a significant way right after the draft, we wanted to capture how things looked both during the winter and in this pre-draft, pre-trade deadline moment. At some point soon after the draft concludes, we’ll have dynamic farm rankings on THE BOARD that will update whenever we change a pro prospect’s FV, which will happen frequently after this first update goes live.

Read the rest of this entry »

“You have to be good to be a hot dog,” said Pirates play-by-play broadcaster Greg Brown during Tuesday night’s Reds-Pirates contest, quoting Dock Ellis to conclude an anecdote about the May 1, 1974 start in which the Pirates’ free-spirited righty intentionally drilled the first three Reds he faced. In illustrating the long and oft-heated rivalry between the two teams, Brown appeared to arrive at an epiphany regarding the home run celebrations of Derek Dietrich — a subject of unhealthy fixation that had dominated an often cringeworthy broadcast while clumsily recapitulating the game’s generational culture war. The 29-year-old utiltyman had just clubbed his third dinger of the game, fourth of this week’s series, seventh in eight games against the Pirates, and 17th overall, the last a career high and a total tied for fifth in the majors.

Dietrich, who spent six years toiling for the Marlins before being designated for assignment and released last November (stellar personnel management there, Jeets), isn’t a player over whom opponents generally obsess. Beyond being a bat-first type whose defensive versatility depends upon certain levels of tolerance, he’s earned a reputation as something of a cut-up. In the minors, as a member of the Double-A Jacksonville Suns in 2013, he put on a display of his juggling skill that progressed to as many as five balls, then to bowling pins, literal machetes, and flaming torches:

Read the rest of this entry »