Luis Castillo is Becoming Something Special

by
May 6, 2019

Sunday was a rollecoaster for Reds righty Luis Castillo. At Great American Ballpark, he needed just 32 pitches to set the Giants’ starting nine down in order for the first time, faced the minimum number of hitters through five innings, and didn’t allow his first hit until he’d gotten one out into the sixth — all while staked to a four-run lead. Before he could escape the frame, however, he allowed a walk and two other hits, including a game-tying three-run homer by Buster Posey. Given that he’d thrown just 81 pitches to that point, manager David Bell sent him back out for the seventh. He put up a zero, and left with the game tied, but the Reds lost, 6-5. Bummer.

The outing cost Castillo his lead atop an NL ERA leaderboard that at first blush appears to be drunk, with guys like Kyle Freeland (5.90 ERA),Yu Darvish (5.79), Aaron Nola (5.06), and Noah Syndergaard (5.02, even after Thursday’s heroics) stumbling along while Zach Davies (1.56), Castillo (1.97, up from 1.45 after his previous start), Caleb Smith (2.00) and Jordan Lyles (2.20) shine.

A closer look at the 26-year-old Dominican’s numbers shows that his spot there is no fluke. Castillo has shaken off last year’s sophomore slump with a performance reminiscent of his tantalizing 15-start rookie season from 2017, asserting his spot among the majors’ upper echelon of starters. Prior to Sunday, he hadn’t allowed more than two runs in any start this season, a performance that earned him NL Pitcher of the Month honors for April. In 50.1 innings though Sunday, he’s second in ERA, strikeouts (59), groundball rate (57.8%), and WAR (1.4), fourth in strikeout rate (30.3%), fifth in home run rate (0.54 per nine), and sixth in FIP (2.89).

Recall that Castillo, who was originally signed out of the Dominican Republic by the Giants in 2011, and traded to the Marlins in 2014 and the Reds in 2016, was effectively treated as a lottery ticket in deals that respectively sent Casey McGehee and Dan Straily the other way. He was also dealt to the Padres and back again in a mid-2016 pair of trades that centered around whether San Diego had been forthcoming regarding Colin Rea’s elbow issues.

Though renowned for a fastball that could reach 101 mph, he cracked only one major prospect list, placing 94th on that of ESPN’s Keith Law in the spring of 2017. Law graded his changeup as plus but noted that his third pitch was a fringy slider. Baseball America, which placed him second on its Marlins list that same spring but still shy of its Top 100, praised his easy velocity, projected his slider as above-average, and noted that “he has a feel for a power changeup, but he’s still finding the right grip. It has the potential to be an average pitch as well.” Our own Eric Longenhagen, who had Castillo 10th on Cincinnati’s 2017 list, described the slider as flashing plus and the changeup as ” below average but there’s good arm speed here (that should be obvious, this guy bumps 100) and it could get to average with reps.”

Read the rest of this entry »


What to Make of Matt Kemp, Free Agent

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May 6, 2019

It all started with what I thought was an innocuous tweet.

The Reds released outfielder Matt Kemp on Saturday, and I sent a tweet with a few sabermetric stats — wRC+, WAR, and xwOBA — from his 2019 season. A few hours later, actor Chad Lowe (the brother of Rob) quote-tweeted my original post remarking that, and I’m paraphrasing here, analytics are ruining baseball. (The actual tweet contains profanity, but here it is if you’d like to see it.) My mentions filled up from there, and my original tweet ended up getting ratio’d by baseball fans who do not care for advanced stats. Lowe’s tweet started a new debate over the prevalence of sabermetric stats in mainstream baseball analysis, and it all played out in my notifications tab.

Since Saturday, Lowe and I have found a point of similarity, that being that there are some unquantifiable factors that go into the construction of a winning baseball team. It was a crazy few hours on Saturday night, to say the least.

Of course, I think we all know which side of the “saber v. Traditionalist” debate I fall upon, so this article isn’t going to be a further discussion about that. What I actually want to get into is the topic that prompted this whole debate: Kemp. Read the rest of this entry »


Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 5/6/19

by
May 6, 2019
12:04
Avatar Dan Szymborski: The hatches are battened, the sails are trimmed, the splines have been reticulated, and the hedgehog has been hidden, so let’s do this!
12:04
Gub Gub: If you were a long-haul trucker, what would you name your truck?
12:04
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Trucky McTruckface.
12:04
Colin: Dan, do you think Jose Ramirez turns it around? What would you project ROS?
12:05
Avatar Dan Szymborski: I still suspect that he does.
12:05
Avatar Dan Szymborski: Though I still don’t quite get why he’s so BABIP anemic.

Read the rest of this entry »


Wade LeBlanc, Michael Lorenzen, and Lou Trivino on Cultivating Their Cutters

by
May 6, 2019
Learning and Developing a Pitch, 2019

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Wade LeBlanc, Michael Lorenzen, and Lou Trivino — on how they learned and developed their cutters.

———

Wade LeBlanc, Seattle Mariners

“I learned a cutter in 2009. I taught myself. That was after I got my brains beat in, and got sent back to Triple-A. I figured it was my last shot. If I was going to make anything out of this career, I was going to have to find something that worked.

“My fear about throwing cutters, or sliders, was always arm issues. I’ve never actually had an arm issue, but that was the fear. I didn’t want to throw something that could cause some problems with my arm, so I’d held off. But at that point, I was on my last legs. It was either figure something out, or go home. Read the rest of this entry »


Kyle Hendricks Threw the Least 2019 Game of the Year

by
May 6, 2019

Friday afternoon at Wrigley Field, a week after lasting just five innings (and giving up seven runs) against the Diamondbacks in Arizona, Kyle Hendricks threw perhaps the finest game of his six-year career. Nine innings. No runs. Four hits. Eighty-one pitches, not one of them flying faster than 90 miles per hour and only 18 of them landing, unchallenged, outside of the strike zone. If Noah Syndergaard’s complete-game, 10-K, no-run performance against the Reds on Thursday — during which he hit the home run that won the game 1-0 — was the logical end of 2019’s high-strikeout, high-velocity environment, then Hendricks’ was its precise opposite: the least 2019 game of the year. That these two starts could come on consecutive days is why we love baseball; it’s a beautiful game.

If you are willing to accept a contextual definition of “struggled,” then Hendricks probably struggled most in the first inning (the other candidate is the fourth, about which I’ll say more later). He went 2-1 on the always-dangerous Matt Carpenter to lead off the game, then retired the Cardinal star on the fifth pitch of the sequence with a sinking fastball right down the middle. Nobody knew it at the time, but Hendricks had already thrown more than six percent of the pitches he’d throw in the entire game. It took him just five more pitches to close out the first inning — four to Paul Goldschmidt and one to Paul DeJong — and Hendricks was on his way.

The DeJong plate appearance was perhaps the most critical of the entire game for what it told Hendricks and catcher Willson Contreras about how the Cardinals would approach him on Friday. When Hendricks has struggled this year, it’s been when he’s forced into the strike zone late in counts when hitters know he’s got to be there. Eight-eight miles an hour, in that situation, is often just too easy for big-league hitters to hit. Against DeJong, though, Hendricks saw what would become a trend for the Cardinals throughout the game: A willingness to be aggressive early in the count. Hendricks was perfectly willing to play into it. After starting the first two hitters with at least two balls before first getting into the zone, Hendricks started 21 of the next 27 with a pitch in the zone. Read the rest of this entry »


The Unstoppable Matt Shoemaker

by
May 6, 2019

I thank God every day. It’s still a dream. Being here, it’s a dream. It’s surreal and I’m trying to hold onto it.

– Matt Shoemaker, 2013

***

The Blue Jays are playing the A’s. Two out, an 0-2 count in the bottom of the third, a runner on first. Matt Shoemaker is facing Stephen Piscotty.

You can probably guess what’s coming next. It’s Shoemaker’s specialty, his put away pitch, the pitch he has thrown 71% of the time this season when facing a right-handed hitter in a two-strike count: a splitter, diving out of the bottom of the zone. Matt Chapman guesses, and he takes his chances, straying a few steps away from first. Stephen Piscotty guesses, and when the pitch leaves Shoemaker’s hand, he doesn’t swing.

They guess right — it’s a splitter, low, and it hits the dirt in front of Danny Jansen. Ball one. But Jansen recovers it faster than Chapman can recover his steps. He throws to first, where Rowdy Tellez is waiting, ready. They have Chapman caught. And as Tellez chases after him, ball in hand, Shoemaker does what he’s supposed to do. He runs from the mound to cover first, and when the ball comes his way, he, too, is ready. He sprints alongside Chapman, both of them unstable, the unwieldy dance of the rundown clearly in its dying stages. Shoemaker reaches out his glove, turns to avoid a collision, and suddenly —

Something is wrong. Read the rest of this entry »


Job Posting: Detroit Tigers Baseball Operations Software Engineer

by
May 6, 2019

Position: Software Engineer, Baseball Operations

Location: Detroit, Michigan

Description: The Detroit Tigers are currently seeking a Software Engineer. This role will be responsible for development and maintenance of software projects within Baseball Operations. This position will report to the Sr. Software Engineer, Baseball Operations.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Perform general development and maintenance tasks for the upkeep of internally developed software products.
  • Use modern software techniques and best practices in all parts of the software life cycle.
  • Support the integration of baseball analysis into our proprietary tools and applications.
  • Assist with the design and development of new software products.
  • Other projects as directed by the Baseball Operations leadership team.

Minimum Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

  • BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, similar technical field of study or equivalent real-time experience.
  • Demonstrated knowledge in developing in a Web-based object-oriented product environment.
  • Demonstrated knowledge in working with medium-to-large scale relational databases.
  • Ability to work in all phases of the product lifecycle, from requirements gathering to design, testing, and implementation.
  • Ability to learn new technologies and techniques as necessary.
  • Familiarity with the sport of baseball, baseball-specific data, modern statistical techniques, and sabermetric analysis.

Preferred Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

  • Experience with data pipelines, data warehousing, or data engineering, especially using SQL Server.
  • Experience developing web APIs using Java or C#/.NET.
  • Experience with JavaScript visualization tools such as D3.js or Plotly.js.
  • Experience with cloud services and/or container technologies.

Working Conditions:

  • Office environment.
  • Occasional evening, weekend, and holiday hours may be required.

To Apply:
To apply, please complete the application here.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Detroit Tigers.


Job Posting: Tampa Bay Rays (Multiple)

by
May 6, 2019

Please note, this posting contains multiple positions.

Position: Baseball Research & Development Analyst (Multiple Roles)

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida

Description: The Tampa Bay Rays are searching for their next Baseball Research and Development Analysts. Their R&D group helps shape their Baseball Operations decision-making processes through the analysis and interpretation of data. They are seeking those with a passion for baseball and a desire to contribute through mathematics, data analysis, and computation. The next members of their R&D team will be intellectual contributors that can work both individually and collaboratively, come up with interesting research questions to explore, find ways to answer those questions through the available data, develop, test and validate quantitative tools, communicate the results of their research, and work to apply their research outcomes to improve how their organization operates. They want to work with people who care about being a good teammate, want to make a positive impact on their organization, have an innovative spirit, and will explore new ways to make them better. Does this describe you?

Duties & Responsibilities:

  • Develop models to answer various questions and problems posed by decision makers
  • Generate internal quantitative tools for use by other members of the department
  • Administer the processing of quality data from various sources
  • Examine the relationship between the data from various sources and player performance
  • Create reports at the request of various stakeholders
  • Investigate ways to improve current tools

Skills:

  • Fluency in R or Python
  • Experience with statistical modeling and machine learning
  • Candidates with non-traditional schooling backgrounds, as well as candidates with traditional degrees in related areas, are encouraged to apply

To Apply:
To apply, please complete this application.

Position: Product Designer

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida

Description: The Tampa Bay Rays are hiring a Product Designer to improve their existing products and build new features in their products. The goal is to provide their end-users with an intuitive and consistent experience throughout the entire suite of applications. They are searching for someone who is self-motivated and acquires skills quickly. This role will have a direct impact in the software that is used for all aspects of their Baseball Operations department and on the experience of users in different capacities around the world. Their ideal candidate will have experience and demonstrated success in the items listed below.

Duties & Responsibilities:

  • Create a design framework of reusable components to standardize the UI across the entire web app
  • Develop new user-facing features, and improve the existing UI/UX
  • Ensure the technical feasibility of UI/UX designs
  • Be responsible for all design choices from inception through launch
  • Collaborate with other team members and stakeholders from beginning to end with regards to UI/UX design and usability to ensure that the stakeholders needs are met in coordination with the Baseball Systems Development Team

Skills:

  • Be able to implement your designs using HTML & CSS
  • Understanding of when it’s best to use different technologies such as Flexbox and CSS Grid
  • Understanding of server-side CSS pre-processing platforms, such as Sass
  • Familiarity with client-side scripting and JavaScript frameworks such as Vue, React, jQuery, vanilla JavaScript & ES6
  • Good understanding of asynchronous request handling, partial page updates, and AJAX and how it will affect your design choices
  • Knowledge of image authoring tools, to be able to crop, resize, or perform small adjustments on an image. Familiarity with tools such as Gimp or Photoshop is a plus.
  • Understanding of the Git version control system

To Apply:
To apply, please complete this application.

Position: Data Engineer

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida

Description: The Tampa Bay Rays are seeking a Data Engineer to join their Baseball Systems department to help ensure data integrity and that users have acceptable performance when accessing the database. This role is responsible for importing data from external providers, integrating data from different sources, and working with members of the R&D department to operationalize analytical products. This person will interact with multiple departments and staff members, sometimes all at once, to take feedback as well as to make recommendations for improvements. The sole focus of this role is the performance of the database – a critical aspect of the success of the Rays Baseball Operations department – and the necessary interaction with the Research and Development and Baseball Systems groups to achieve that goal. Problem-solving skills and being an excellent teammate are a must in this role.

Duties & Responsibilities:

  • Responsible for development and support of integrations with external data providers
  • Address data quality issues and implement procedures for error checking and monitoring
  • Ensure the database performs up to an acceptable level
  • Coordinate R&D models with the daily flow of data to ensure that they are synchronized
  • Explore emerging technologies and determine their fit with the Rays’ current platform

Skills:

  • Advanced understanding of SQL
  • Experience with R, Python, or other scripting language
  • Proficiency with evaluating and improving the performance of SQL queries
  • Ability to assist in the development of data models optimized for business intelligence and/or analytic workloads
  • Knowledge or experience with semi-structured or unstructured data stores
  • Comfort with exploring and evaluating new technologies
  • Ability to manage multiple tasks and priority levels at once

Technologies:

  • RDBMS (SQL Server, MySQL)
  • SQL Server Integration Services
  • Cloud Technologies (Azure, AWS)
  • Apache Project (Hive, Spark, Kafka, NiFi)

Education/Experience:

  • Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering Degree or commensurate experience

Demonstrated success with:

  • Data Ingestion
  • Data Processing (Cleaning, Transformation, Integration, etc.)
  • Data Warehousing

To Apply:
To apply, please complete this application.

Position: Junior Data Technician

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida

Description: The Rays’ Junior Data Technician will be responsible for assisting with the inspection, validation, calibration, and processing of multiple data sets. Their new hire will partner with the Data Technician to thoroughly vet, critically assess, and curate many data sources used by the Baseball Operations department. They will work collaboratively while ensuring the reproducibility and reliability of the Rays’ data processing by standardizing procedures and generating documentation. This role will interact with multiple departments and staff members to take feedback as well as to make recommendations for improvements.

Duties & Responsibilities:

  • Builds statistical models and automated systems to process, evaluate, and calibrate data
  • Assures that data received from external sources is of usable quality and standardized
  • Reviews discrepancies in data, gathers clarification or advises end users of issues related to data set
  • Supports the analysts that use the data set
  • Interacts with staff on matters affecting the data and makes recommendations for improvement or process enhancement
  • Produces documentation outlining standard processes

Skills & Education:

  • Familiarity with R and SQL or proven ability to learn new a programming language quickly
  • Knowledge of statistical modeling
  • Candidates with non-traditional schooling backgrounds, as well as candidates with traditional degrees in related areas, are encouraged to apply

To Apply:
To apply, please complete this application.

Position: DevOps Engineer

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida

Description: The Tampa Bay Rays are seeking a DevOps Engineer to embed with their Baseball Research & Development department to improve the efficiency and increase the reliability of their products and tools. A primary goal for this position is to reduce the amount of time spent on code and infrastructure maintenance while positively impacting research progress. This person will work in collaboration with current staff and develop best practices for the department. This role will have the expertise to develop a framework to facilitate continuous evaluation of their models to ensure reliability and optimize speed. Their new hire will also have a strong ability to relate to staff and effectively communicate new practices. If you have a passion for improving processes, automation, developing best practices, and being a great teammate, consider the responsibilities below.

Duties & Responsibilities:

  • Improve the overall efficiency of the R&D group and reliability of production models and code
  • Oversee computational infrastructure, make decisions on the best approach, and configure the infrastructure accordingly
  • Improve database performance by reducing the inefficient ways database resources are used
  • Facilitate the reliability and quality control of the Rays’ various models
  • Develop internal software packages (R, Python) that can be leveraged to make development and deployment more efficient
  • Manage a server that houses various analytical tools
  • Coordinate with Data Engineering to deploy the Rays’ pipeline in their main data import procedures, when possible
  • Develop API’s for their models for live data processing and for exploration of models via interactive apps
  • Assist analysts in the development and maintenance of various apps

Skills & Education:

  • Continuous Integration and Deployment in a data science environment
  • Containerization technologies
  • Automated testing tools
  • Package development
  • Scripting Languages (Python, Powershell, Perl, etc.)
  • Candidates with non-traditional schooling backgrounds, as well as candidates with traditional degrees in related areas, are encouraged to apply

To Apply:
To apply, please complete this application.

The Rays are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Tampa Bay Rays.


Sunday Notes: Grayson Greiner Compares His Dingers

by
May 5, 2019

Grayson Greiner hit the first home run of his brief big-league career two weeks ago Friday. He then banged out number-two the following Tuesday. What did the blasts have in common? I asked the Detroit Tigers catcher that very question a day after the second dinger.

“They were similar pitches,” Greiner told me. “They were kind of down in the zone, and middle-in-ish. Both fastballs. One was off Ryan Burr, a right-hander for the White Sox, and yesterday’s was off Chris Sale. The one off the righty was on a 2-2 count, and the one off Sale was 1-1 count. I think the counts being even is a reason they were both home runs. I wasn’t sure what was coming, and that made me stay back a little bit longer, instead of getting out front. I was in a good, strong hitting position.”

Greiner and Burr know each other, having played summer ball together when they were collegians. Baseball friendships being what they are, Greiner received a text after the April 19 game saying, ‘Congrats on the first homer. I wish it wasn’t off of me.’ He didn’t hear from Sale after taking him deep. “He probably doesn’t know who I am,” was Greiner’s guess as to why that didn’t happen.

The fact that Sale is Sale, and Fenway is Fenway, made Greiner’s second-ever home run even more meaningful than his first. Read the rest of this entry »


FanGraphs Audio: Ben Clemens, Live from a San Francisco Airbnb

by
May 4, 2019

Episode 860

I welcome FanGraphs contributing writer Ben Clemens (@_Ben_Clemens) to the program to offer our listeners a chance to get to know one of the site’s new writers. We discuss Ben’s former life in finance, his cross-country move, his love of the St. Louis Cardinals, and his approach to baseball writing and watching. Plus, we marvel at Jackie Bradley Jr.’s very poor start, and Cody Bellinger’s very good start.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 56 min play time.)

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