Early season performances are always tough to get a handle on, but on a team level, the 16-game mark is worthy of some note. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2012 book Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers (a book to which I contributed), Derek Carty — a name that should be familiar around here — found that at the 16-game mark, a team’s year-to-date record became as predictive as simply assuming they’ll finish at .500, as the largest possible sample of teams inevitably does. Through Monday, 19 teams have played at least 16 games, and 11 have played at least 17, which makes this a good time to take a closer look.

In his study, Carty examined non-strike seasons from 1962 through 2011, calculating the correlation between a team’s record after n games and its final record. After one game, for example, the correlation with teams’ final mark was just .12, while at the five-game mark it was .28, and at the 10-game mark, .42. The correlation reached .5 at the 16-game mark, rose to .52 at the 17-game mark, and so on. Carty made no mention of the likelihood of teams making the playoffs, though with changing postseason formats — including the introduction of a second Wild Card in each league starting in 2012, just when the book hit the streets — such information would be of limited utility.

To my knowledge, Carty hasn’t updated the study since publishing that, so we don’t know for sure that the 2012-18 period hasn’t altered his conclusion slightly. Since we’re not doing brain surgery here — just getting a preliminary read on where this season is heading for teams — it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I didn’t set out to re-create Carty’s study, but I did examine what 16-game performances from the two Wild Card era can tell us. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

There are varying tactics when it comes to approaches at the plate. Getting ahead and waiting for the right pitch is one. Swinging at the first good pitch you see because you might not get another is a second. Protecting the plate when behind in the count comes up often. Hitters use some or all of that when they step up to bat, but Yoan Moncada’s patience last season ended up hurting what could have been a much better season. A more aggressive approach thus far has shown much better results this year as Moncada attempts to take the next step in his development.

Last season, Moncada has a walk rate of 10.3%, which is good, and a strikeout rate of 33.4%, which is bad. The only players at 23 years of age or younger to put up double-digit walk rates and a strikeout rate above 30% (which is going to limit how far back we go given the massive rise in strikeouts) are Kris Bryant (2015) and Joey Gallo (2017). Gallo hit 41 homers to make himself an offensively valuable player. Bryant was constantly making great contact when he did put the ball in play on his way to a Rookie of the Year campaign. Moncada hit the ball hard when he made contact, but not at the same level as Bryant, and ended with a 97 wRC+ on the year. Changes are necessary to improve on that mark, and it looks like Moncada may indeed be making them.

Last week at MLB.com, Mike Petriello also wrote about Moncada, noting just how terrible he was on two-strike pitches, notably pitches on the edge, which caused an absurdly high number of called third strikes.

That made the problem easy to diagnose, if not easy to solve. Don’t get to two strikes. But also, don’t get to two strikes being so desperate that you start expanding your zone and flailing at bad pitches.

We know this, because Moncada and the Sox spent a lot of time talking about it.

“As long as he maintains an aggressive approach within the strike zone, which he has been increasing,” Chicago manager Rick Renteria said to MLB.com in July, “he has a chance of having really good success obviously.”

“We made a plan,” Moncada said to MLB.com in December, referring to extensive offseason work with White Sox coaches. “Right now, I am in a better position to succeed and to be a better player next season. It was a very good experience, overall.”

“We ended up attacking the topic of his strike-zone approach,” Renteria said. “He has great ability to take pitches. That’s something that’s innate in him.”

Petriello noted that Moncada was being a bit more aggressive, particularly with the zone, and he was hitting the ball harder and striking out less, all good outcomes. Moncada has lowered his strikeout rate to 24% on the season, and while that might not necessarily represent a new skill level, even after 66 plate appearances it is enough to change our expectations considering last year’s 33% mark. Moncada’s walks have gone down to about 6%, but he is tearing the cover off the ball with a .242 ISO and a .395 BABIP, which has helped lead to a 152 wRC+. The decrease in walks isn’t great for Moncada, but the lowered strikeouts more than make up for that. Consider that when Moncada put the ball in play last season, he put up a 175 wRC+, one of the top 30 marks in the game. This year, he’s putting up a 227 wRC+ when he puts the ball in play, but he doesn’t need that to keep up to make a different to his overall line as we know that BABIP is going to come down some even if we reasonably expect him to post a high value. Read the rest of this entry »

T.S. Eliot once mused that April is the cruelest month, but for me, it’s the most curmudgeonly one. While baseball returning is always a good thing, a good portion of my April job is to (partially) crush the hopes and dreams of fans excited about hot starts from their favorite players. While stats don’t literally lie, April numbers, thanks to our old friend and scapegoat small sample size, only tell a little bit of the story of 2019. But as cautious as I try to be about jumping to conclusions in baseball’s first month, at least some of those torrid beginnings will contain more than the customary grain of truth. So let’s go out on that proverbial limb and try to guess which scorching Aprils represent something real.

Yoan Moncada

I’ve been burned before touching this hot stove, but there’s something so compelling about Moncada’s early-season performances as to once again disarm the skeptic in me. In 2018’s version of this piece, Moncada’s high exit velocity and his .267/.353/.524 April line had me believing that he had finally turned the corner, the one long-expected from a young, talented player with impressive physical tools.

As the narrator meme goes, he had not turned that corner. Moncada spent the next two months with an OPS that didn’t touch .600, and his final 2018 line represented no real improvement over his 2017.

Moncada is hitting the ball just as hard as he did last year, with his average exit velocity ranking sixth in baseball. But this time around, his performance is also coming with some significant progress in his contact statistics. Moncada’s profile has always been a bit weird in that he doesn’t seem to have a serious problem chasing bad pitches, certainly not as you would expect from a player who just led the league in strikeouts with the fourth-highest total in baseball history. But Moncada was in the top 20 in not swinging at pitches outside the zone.

In 2019, he’s been more aggressive, swinging at more bad and good pitches, but there hasn’t been a corresponding contact tradeoff, and he’s in fact making more contact overall, especially against good pitches. Given that one of the purposes of plate discipline is for hitters to actually hit the good pitch they eke out of the dude on the mound, I once again return to the ranks of the believers. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Boyd has been around for a bit. He was drafted by the Blue Jays in the sixth round of the 2013 Draft out of Oregon State University. He made the majors with the team but was traded to the Tigers at the 2015 trade deadline along with Daniel Norris and Jairo Labourt in exchange for David Price. As a prospect, he wasn’t too highly regarded. While he was a regular on Carson Cistulli’s Fringe Five column, he wasn’t highly ranked. Baseball America, for instance, included him in their organizational rankings only once (he was the 29th prospect in the Jays system after the 2014 season); he received sporadic mention at Baseball Prospectus.

After splitting time between the majors and Triple-A in 2016 and 2017, 2018 showed some promise for Boyd. His strikeout rate went up and his walk rate went down. His home run rate also went up and while overall he took a step forward as a decent rotation guy for the Tigers, there was room to improve. As my friend Brandon Day over at Bless You Boys noted, Boyd showed an extreme home/road split, which is one pitfall of being a flyball pitcher whose tendencies can be masked by playing in the pitcher-friendly Comerica Park. Boyd himself wasn’t satisfied either. He spent his offseason basically finding every way he could to improve himself. He lost 15 pounds, maintained his muscle mass, and even did DNA-based testing to find out what works and doesn’t work for his body.

And so far in 2019, Boyd has been a strikeout machine. In three starts, Boyd has racked up 40.3% strikeout rate, the second highest rate the majors behind Blake Snell. Yes, there’s the obligatory small sample size warning here. Boyd will likely not keep that rate up for the rest of the season. But looking at the changes he’s made and how the hitters have responded to them, there are reasons to believe that he could be taking the next step as a pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

The best rivalry in baseball right now might not be the Yankees versus the Red Sox, or the Dodgers against the Giants. Instead, it might be the one between the Orioles and the Nationals, a feud that has landed in multiple courtrooms and has been literally litigated almost non-stop for over seven years.

The dispute arises from the teams’ joint ownership of the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), though it also seems to have been fueled by what appears to be genuine antipathy from Orioles’ owner Peter Angelos for his team’s southern rival. Back in 2004, when the Montreal Expos were about to move to the District of Columbia, Angelos “went on Baltimore radio station WBAL-AM and pronounced that ‘there are no real baseball fans in D.C.'” Angelos was later the sole dissenting vote against the Nationals’ move, and given territorial rights disputes, having the Orioles on board became a matter of some necessity. So the two teams “worked out a deal whereby the Orioles would hold a majority partnership profit interest in MASN and get to telecast Nationals games at a substantial discount from 2005 to 2011. After that, MASN would be obligated to pay the Nationals ‘fair market value.'”

How Orioles-friendly was that deal?

When MASN was created to broadcast Orioles and Nationals games in the regional territory that once solely belonged to the Orioles, the Orioles owned 90 percent of the network and the Nationals’ stake would increase by 1 percent each year until 2032, when it reached 33 percent.

Despite the deal, which the Sports Business Daily called “one of the most lopsided deals in sports TV history,” Angelos still voted against the Expos’ move to Washington, D.C. And since that deal was struck, the Orioles have resisted MASN’s obligation to pay the Nationals anything close to “fair market value” as required by the contract for Washington’s broadcast rights. Remember, the Orioles still own better than 70% of the network, so they control how much the network pays. Read the rest of this entry »

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 — Chris Archer, Kyle Crick, and Jameson Taillon — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

Chris Archer, Pittsburgh Pirates

“In [high school], I was dating this girl whose brother played in the minor leagues with the Red Sox. His name is David Penny. He had some shoulder issues and didn’t make it beyond Low-A, but he was a prominent figure, baseball-wise, in my hometown [Clayton, North Carolina]. He thought that I had the right arm slot for a slider — at the time I was only throwing a curveball — and taught it to me.

“When I got drafted, the Indians scrapped it. I didn’t throw one slider in 2006, ’07, or ’08. What happened was … it was interesting. First day, I was with the rookie-ball pitching coach, and he saw all four of my pitches. He was like, ‘OK, we need to develop your fastball command and your changeup.’ He said the only way to do that would be by eliminating one of my pitches, which would force me to throw the other ones. That particular bullpen, my curveball appeared to be better than my slider, so he said, ‘Curveball, fastball, changeup — that’s it.’ So for those three seasons, I was curveball-fastball-changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about baseball equivalents of Tiger Woods winning the Masters, follow up on two topics from the previous week (Willians Astudillo’s disputed whiff and Don Zimmer’s bases-loaded suicide hit and run) and, in a time-honored tradition, discuss whether selected league-wide stats from the first few weeks of the season are reflective of real trends.

Audio intro: The Milk Carton Kids, "Nothing is Real"
Audio outro: The Zombies, "Play it for Real"

Link to Rob on stopping at second
Link to Ben on avoiding the strike zone
Link to changes to curtail sign-stealing
Link to FanGraphs post on 2019 pitch selection
Link to Sam on pitchouts
Link to Ben on pitchouts
Link to Jeff on first-pitch swings
Link to Sam on young players’ production
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Since the inception of the MLB Draft in 1965, there have never been two players drafted in the first round from the same high school in the Northeast in the same draft class. Jack Leiter and Anthony Volpe, both senior Vanderbilt commits at Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey, have the potential to change that this year. I watched Delbarton face off against Red Bank Catholic High School on Saturday afternoon along with several dozen scouts. What follows are my takeaways from their respective performances in the game.

Jack Leiter, RHP
Current 2019 Draft Ranking: 28

Leiter is, as you might have extrapolated from his last name, the son of the former major leaguer Al Leiter, who accumulated nearly 2,400 career innings pitched and a total of 36.5 WAR across 19 seasons. Al’s brother, Mark, also pitched in the big leagues for 11 years, and Mark’s son, Mark, Jr., debuted with the Phillies in 2017. Jack’s performance on Saturday showed a glimpse of the potential that suggests he could one day join his dad, uncle, and cousin in a big league uniform.

Leiter stands at 6-foot-1, 195 pounds, with a fairly slim frame and well-distributed strength. I wouldn’t describe him as slight, but he’s relatively average-sized and doesn’t have a build you’d typically expect out of a high school right-handed pitching prospect. Leiter’s arm action and delivery are amongst the best I’ve seen from a high school prospect. He has a simple, uptempo delivery, delivering the ball from a high three-quarter slot with above average arm speed, and he stays on line with the plate very well. He has a medium length arm swing with a loose, easy path and is on time throughout his delivery. There is some stiffness on his front leg during his follow-through, but this isn’t a concern for me, as it occurs after release. Everything works in-sync and fluidly together, and he repeats his delivery extremely well for any prospect, especially one in high school.

Throughout the outing, Leiter showed flashes of a legitimate three pitch mix. He came out of the gates hot, touching 96 early and sitting 92-95 for the first three innings. His higher slot generated more plane than angle and he’ll likely look to work with more four-seamers than two-seamers long term because of it. His calling card is his curveball, a big breaking 74-77 mph downer that flashes plus. He spins the ball well, generating good tilt and depth to the pitch and enabling himself to miss bats below the zone.

Also a part of his arsenal was a slider, which worked 84-85, that he broke out a bit more often as the game went on. The slider is fringy, working between a 40- and 45- grade, as it had true shape but sort of rolled out of the hand. I do think it’ll be a nice supplement to the arsenal long-term, but I don’t think it has a chance to be anything better than average at best and will likely stay a supplementary offering. Leiter didn’t throw any changeups in game but threw several in warmups and showed some feel to command the pitch, although he did slow his arm down to throw it. Given the ease with which he throws and his consistent delivery, I would have no issue projecting a changeup of similar quality to his slider in his pitch mix long-term, which would round out a solid four-pitch mix for a starting pitcher.

All of the above information would place Leiter firmly in the first round of the draft as a right-handed pitcher showing two plus pitches and with a chance to stay as a starter long-term. The main issues I have in projecting him highly are his build and his age, which are, in some ways, connected. Leiter’s velocity tapered in the fourth inning of his outing and while he finished with 11 strikeouts in five innings, the opposing Red Bank Catholic lineup strung together some decent contact in the latter two frames of his outing. His fastball velocity was 88-92 for those two innings and his curveball, while still showing quality depth, did not flash plus like it had in the early innings. Leiter’s fastball doesn’t play any higher than its true velocity and as it tapered, it became more difficult for him to miss bats.

A high school pitcher’s velocity falling off is not a concern in and of itself. In fact, it’s fairly common. Leiter’s average size, however, could lead to some concerns long term about his durability or his ability to maintain effectiveness without mid-90s velocity. That, combined with the fact that Leiter will be 19-years-old at the time of the draft and will ostensibly be a year ahead of his 18-year-old peers developmentally, could lead some teams to shy away from him. The demographic of high school right-handed pitchers has not been great historically, and when you combine that with the fact that this particular pitcher is of average size and is older than his peers, it will likely lead to reservations in draft rooms.

With that being said, Leiter’s delivery and his stuff speaks for itself. He’s clearly talented enough to be a first round selection as a potential No. 4 or No. 5 starter long-term – with a mid-90s fastball, a curveball that flashes plus, a usable slider, and a plus delivery – and I think a team will take a chance on him. Leiter’s talent puts him in the back end of the first round typically, and I could see a team selecting him there or at some point in rounds two through four for what is the equivalent of late first round money.

Anthony Volpe, SS
Current 2019 Draft Ranking: 33

Volpe has long been a mainstay at the highest profile amateur baseball venues, playing for Team USA in Taiwan at 12-years-old and participating in several dozen showcase and tournament events in high school, including last year’s Perfect Game and Under Armour All-American games at Petco Park and Wrigley Field, respectively. His experience is evident on the field – Volpe shows plus feel to play on both sides of the ball, which helps to elevate his game above his collection of relatively average tools.

A right-handed hitting shortstop, Volpe is short and muscular, with especially strong legs and a lively look to his frame. He’s a good athlete who moves around the dirt well, showing average range and an average arm with instincts that might enable him to play slightly above those. He has good hands and takes very good angles to balls, seemingly never fielding an in-between hop and doing a good job getting around and fielding the ball. I think he has a chance to be average at shortstop and could provide good utility value moving around the dirt to both second base and third base long-term.

Offensively, Volpe hits from a spread stance with high hands, even with the pitcher. He’s compact to the ball and is an aggressive hitter who showed a pretty good approach at the plate, looking to drive the ball to the gaps. He is a 55 runner who runs hard and takes good angles around the bases. His swing – compact and consistent — showcases both fringy quickness and bat speed. He really pinches his hands in and artificially gets his bat on plane (think J.D. Martinez from gather to contact, and not Alex Bregman). This isn’t necessarily an issue, but Volpe has 40-grade raw power and is already relatively mature physically.

This type of swing path – one that pulls the hands in and then drives the barrel downward into the hitting plane and pushes it through with the hands – typically leads to an opposite field-heavy approach. Someone like the aforementioned Martinez, who artificially gets on plane, overcomes suboptimal contact points because he’s so strong. In 2017 and 2018, Martinez’s average exit velocity and launch angle to right field were 92.6 mph and 25.3 degrees, respectively, and he hit 54.6% of batted balls to right field at above 95 mph. It’s extremely difficult to imagine Volpe impacting the ball that much and with that much regularity long term.

Volpe showed his feel to hit and his opposite field approach on Saturday by driving a line drive to right center field for a home run, although the right center field fence was just 330 feet away so this ball would have likely been a double or a triple on most fields. My concern is not with his ability to make contact or his ability to hit the ball to right field; it’s with his ability to drive the ball with power and pull the ball consistently. I can see an average hit tool long-term due to the feel to hit and pitch recognition skills, but the lack of power and the artificial nature with which his barrel gets to the zone concern me with respect to his ability to drive the ball consistently.

Of course, none of the above concerns mean that a swing like Volpe’s isn’t fixable. He’s been lauded in the industry for his baseball IQ and showed nothing on Saturday to make me reach a different conclusion, so there is the possibility that he can make adjustments to his swing and drive the ball more consistently. And regardless, this is a well-rounded high school infielder with a high baseball IQ, a chance to stay at shortstop, and average hit tool potential. That’s an intriguing profile, and one that doesn’t last beyond the first few rounds of the draft, as there is bat-to-ball and utility value in the profile. His lack of a plus tool and the uncertainty about his ability to hit for better than 40-grade power push him into more second or third round contention for me, but I could see a team who values versatility and strong contact skills taking him a little higher than that and letting their minor league hitting coaches get to work.

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Patrick Sandoval, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 16   FV: 40
Line: 5 IP, 4 H, 2 BB, 0 R, 9 K

Notes
Acquired from Houston in exchange for Martin Maldonado last summer, Sandoval now has 45 strikeouts in 28.2 career innings at Double-A. He continues to work with middling fastball velocity but some mechanical elements help it to play better than 90-94. Houston got Sandoval to open his front side a little more, tilt his spine, and release the ball with a more vertical arm slot than he was using in high school. It’s a weirder look for hitters and creates more backspin and, therefore, more “rise” on his fastball. Sandoval also works heavily off his two secondary pitches, and his changeup may be better than we currently have it projected to be on The Board. The strike-throwing is still inconsistent start to start, but Sandoval is officially having upper-level success for a franchise that keeps having injury issues on the big league roster, so perhaps he should be included in the Canning/Suarez/Barria group of young hurlers who may help the Angels sooner than later.

Nate Pearson, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays
Level: Hi-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 4   FV: 50
Line: 5 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 9 K

Notes
Pearson was removed from his previous start after just 27 pitches, so it was a relief to see him back and dominant five days later. Pearson’s future as a strike-thrower is hard to anticipate. He was wild last fall but he hadn’t pitched all year due to a fractured ulna, so that wildness could have just been due to rust. He threw 43 of 59 pitches for strikes yesterday, a sign he may actually be able to harness his alien stuff and find a way to start long-term. He may be on an innings limit this year, so unless the Jays expertly manicure his workload with a big league goal in mind (perhaps that two-inning outing last start is an indication of how they’ll handle Pearson throughout the year) it’s unlikely we see him in the big leagues until next year at least. It’s still too early to reposition Pearson in our rankings due to increased confidence that he’ll start, but yesterday’s outing, during which he sat 94-98 and touched 102, could soon be part of a body of evidence indicating we should.

Anderson Tejeda, SS, Texas Rangers
Level: Hi-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 4   FV: 45+
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR

Notes
These were Tejeda’s first two homers of the year. He’s back at Hi-A despite having success there last year, presumably so the Rangers can let Michael De Leon (who peaked as a teenager) get regular at-bats at Frisco for the third consecutive year. Tejeda is off to a strong start, and may force a promotion to Double-A (and into our Top 100) if he keeps it up for another few weeks.

Ljay Newsome, RHP, Seattle Mariners
Level: Hi-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: NR   FV: 35
Line: 6.2, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 10 K

Notes
We touch base on players like Newsome when we write the org lists. He threw a lot of innings last year and he barely walked anyone, so we checked on the stuff to see if it cleared the bar to stick someone on the list at all. With Newsome, that had not been true. Despite all the strikes, his fastball has been in the mid-to-upper 80s basically since high school, and those guys typically max out as spot starters. Now, Newsome is different. He took part in an offseason velo program and now resides in the 91-94 mph range. He’s clearing his front side a little more, his two-seamer has more tail, he’s working up in the zone with his four-seamer more often, and is setting up his changeup better. Take the performance of a 22-year-old repeating Hi-A with a grain of salt, but know Newsome has grown and changed, and is off to a strong start.

A Weird Box Score
Tulsa pitchers combined to no-hit Arkansas into extra-innings last night, but still lost due to a slew of walks in the 10th inning. The Arkansas staff allowed five hits, but fewer total baserunners than Tulsa did, so in my opinion, justice was done.

Weekend Notes
I saw mostly amateur stuff over the weekend, as both Adley Rutchsmann and Andrew Vaughn (the top two prospects on our Draft Board) were in the state of Arizona. Neither did anything to merit a move in our rankings. The only surprising moment of my weekend was seeing a person in a Detroit Tigers polo operating an Edgertronic camera. To this point, I had only seen Houston employees training cameras like that on hitters.

We’ve begun experimenting with high speed video and while some of its applications (beyond just looking cool) are obvious, especially as it relates to pitching (who is spin efficient, who is not, ah, there’s also a two-seamer, etc), we’re curious if there are applications on the hitting side beyond just breaking down mechanics.