In Kansas City, Alex Gordon is more than just a Royals outfielder. He is the Royal of the 2010s, the face of the franchise during their two seasons of triumph, during their incredible run of back-to-back American League pennants and the 2015 World Series title. Gordon is arguably the most important Royals player since George Brett. And, fittingly, since the franchise was founded in 1969, Brett (84.6 WAR), Amos Otis (42.0), and Willie Wilson (35.2) are the only three Royals position players to produce more WAR than Gordon’s 32.0. It’s an indisputable fact that Gordon is one of the best players in franchise history, and his legacy has already been cemented as a true Kansas City Royal.

Unfortunately, Gordon’s best days are long behind him. In a four year stretch from 2011 to 2014, Gordon was the fourth-most valuable outfielder in baseball, consistently producing solid seasons on both sides of the ball. Alongside his excellent .283/.356/.453 triple slash line over 2,754 plate appearances, Gordon put up a total of 23.9 defensive runs above-average, good for the sixth-best defensive outfielder over that stretch.

Since 2016, the aging curve has come to bite Gordon, resulting in a couple of subpar seasons (0.6 WAR in 2016, -0.1 WAR in 2017) before creating some decent value in 2018 (1.7 WAR), mainly due to his defensive contributions.

To start 2019, though, Gordon has come out firing on all cylinders. Through his first 57 plate appearances, he’s put up an excellent .356/.456/.667 line with three home runs, seven walks and just five strikeouts. His 1.0 WAR is the fourth-most in baseball, as is his 198 wRC+. Even in a small, 13-game sample, Gordon is at a level that he hasn’t reached since August 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

Through their first 701 plate appearances of the 2019 season, the Seattle Mariners hit 38 home runs and posted a wRC+ of 145. Both marks were the best in the game by a fair margin, though you probably knew or could have guessed that already, because Jay Jaffe wrote about the team’s strong offensive start on this site last week. What you might not know is that if you ask Seattle’s hitters about the source of their success, they’ll tell you — after getting through the usual platitudes of “just playing as a team” and “taking it one game at a time” — that this year’s daily hitters’ meetings, led by first-year hitting coach Tim Laker, have been good. Really good.

“Those hitter meetings,” says fellow first-year Mariner Tom Murphy, “have been fantastic. It’s been one of the things that’s stood out to me this year. From the analytic staff to the hitting staff to the players speaking out about what they’re seeing, it’s been a triple-headed effort. Not only are we getting the statistics on what guys are throwing, their locations and pitch tunnels and stuff, we’re also getting real-world advice from players and hitting coaches together. That communication has been spot-on, and I really think it’s contributed to our success.”

Laker, 49, came up as a coach in the Diamondbacks’ system after spending parts of 11 seasons as a big-league catcher, mostly for Montreal. In Arizona, under the guidance of  instructors Craig Wallenbrock and Robert Van Scoyoc, he developed an approach to hitting and communication that focuses on finding the intersection between a hitter’s natural strengths and a pitcher’s natural weaknesses, then communicating an approach based on the center of that Venn diagram that’s simple enough for hitters to take to the plate without needing a cue-card.

“Pitchers have ranges, philosophy-wise, in which they throw their pitches,” Murphy says. “And our hitting team has put that into a simple system, which says, for example, that if a guy has low-ride [meaning a pitcher’s pitches do not deviate substantially up or down from their apparent path upon release] then he’s a ‘zero-ride’ and if he’s high, you’ll go up to three. Nice and easy. And then from there you can visualize the center of the strike zone, and know that a fastball right down the middle that’s a three-ride would play up at the top of the zone even if visually it starts out right in the middle. And if a guy has a lot of sink, anything that starts down in the zone is not going to be a strike, regardless of whether my eyes are telling me it’s a strike out of his hand. You have to find ways to prepare in advance for the tricks your eyes are going to play on you.”

Put that way, the system sounds almost too simple — bucketing continuous data into three or four tranches is not, after all, rocket science. But in the psychological world of hitting, simplicity is a virtue in its own right, and finding ways to communicate complicated data simply and actionably is where teams are currently looking to find any edge they can. In the Mariners’ case, the particular challenge they’re working to tackle this year is finding ways to get their players attacking each night’s particular starting pitcher while not getting too far out of their own comfort zone. That’s a tall order for hitters who have often been raised spend their days thinking of ways to keep their approaches consistent, not tailor them to each night’s starter. But Laker things he’s found an approach that works: translating the message into a specific external cue or physical action.

“For example,” says Murphy, “if we’re facing a big sinker-ball guy, then maybe a good external cue for most guys is to try to hit a popup or a ball way up in the air, so we get underneath that ball path and our swing plane plays better to that guy. Whereas against a guy with a lot of rise on his fastball, like a Verlander, we’re going to try to hit a lot of line drives or almost ground balls to manipulate ourselves without thinking too mechanically to get the desired bat path to that ball. That’s what we do well as players, is move physically, and Laker has been great about taking the statistics and giving us a plan to take into the game that’s more externally focused; that’s still us, but tailored to the pitcher.”

“I think what we’re looking for is guys that have swings that can cover more than one spot,” Laker told me. “I think our guys are good enough that if we adjust the slices they’re swinging in just a little bit on a monthly basis, that they’re good enough to hit in different zones and not just get pigeonholed into one specific spot where they are kind of at the mercy of the pitcher, just hoping that he’s going to make a mistake in the one spot that they’re looking at.”

Perhaps to Laker’s surprise, that approach has found resonance even with Seattle’s veterans, like Jay Bruce. “I think you have to try and walk the line a little bit,” he told me. “Because at the end of the day, they have to throw the ball over the plate. They’re going to miss, and they’re going to make mistakes. And on the one hand if you go chasing what they do you get yourself in trouble, but also I think being cognizant of their approach and their plan and what makes them have success against you is important, too. Finding that balance has been good this year.”

For a relatively young team, hearing that message from all angles — coaches, analytics staff, and veterans — is critical. “That’s when those meetings become really powerful,” says Laker, “When our younger guys can listen to Jay or Edwin, guys who’ve faced other starters a number of times, and hear them say, ‘Here’s what he’s done to me, here’s what his pitch looks like to me, here’s how it moves, here’s what he’s trying to do.’ I think that carries a lot of weight. I think the more we can get hitters involved in what we’re trying to do, and have a collaboration in an open forum, that’s good.”

The Mariners probably aren’t going to have the best offense in baseball all year long. They might not even have the best offense in baseball all April long. But if you’re chalking up their early-season numbers to mere good luck, or running into a stretch of pitching that’s performing below its level, I’m not sure you’re correct. Pitching has under-performed against Seattle for much of this young season (the just-concluded Astros series perhaps excepted) because the Mariners have been highly intentional about finding ways to make it so, and about communicating with their players in such a way that tailoring an approach to each night’s pitcher doesn’t feel like telling hitters to do things they’re not used to. So far in 2019, it may just be working.

12:00

Dan Szymborski: I WANT MY ELEPHANT

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Begin communiqué.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Next year, minimum option times are going to be 20 days.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: err 15 days

12:02

Dan Szymborski: 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

The bottom of the eighth inning of last Wednesday’s Brewers-Angels game was, at first glance, fairly uneventful. Down 4-2, the Brewers called on converted starter Junior Guerra to keep the game in reach. He delivered — two strikeouts sandwiched a groundout, and the team went to the ninth down only two. Guerra is the fourth or fifth option out of the Brewers bullpen; he’s also a perfect embodiment of modern pitching. He threw 16 pitches in the inning, and less than half were heaters — six fastballs, four breaking balls, and six splitters. When he did throw fastballs, though, he put some mustard on them — two hit 96 on the gun, and he’s averaging about 95 mph so far this year.

These two trends — fewer and faster fastballs — are spreading like wildfire across the game. Sometimes it happens in jumps, like the Twins hiring a progressive pitching coach this offseason. Sometimes it happens organically, like Junior Guerra leaning on his splitter and slider a little more out of the bullpen. It’s a game-wide trend, though, and it seems likely to continue. This year, starters and relievers are both throwing their lowest share of fastballs since we’ve had pitch-level data. When they do throw fastballs, though, both groups are throwing them harder than ever before.

Without looking at a single piece of data, you could have convinced me that those two trends were likely true, but I wanted to look into the numbers to know for certain. First things first — we’ll need a consistent sample across years. Taking this year’s stats and comparing them to previous full-year averages won’t work, because pitchers consistently throw at lower velocities in March and April than they do in the year as a whole. In 2018, for example, March and April four-seamers were .2 mph slower than the year as a whole. Thus, we’re going to use data only through April 10th for every season to properly account for this systematic bias. Let’s take a look at that data, shall we? A quick methodological note: I’m excluding cut fastballs, as classification systems have real trouble differentiating them from sliders:

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared at FanGraphs on April 15, 2019 to mark the 72nd anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking major league baseball’s color line.

Jackie Robinson Day marks the 72nd anniversary of the breaking of baseball’s color line, an annual opportunity to take stock of Robinson’s immeasurable courage in confronting racism as well as the immense talent he showed while playing at the highest level. Earlier this month, Major League Baseball commemorated the centennial of Robinson’s birth and furthered his legacy by renaming Historic Dodgertown — the former Navy housing base in Vero Beach, Florida that served as the Dodgers’ spring training headquarters from 1948-2008, which MLB assumed operational control of on January 2 — the Jackie Robinson Training Complex.

Recognized as “the jewel of Florida’s baseball crown” even after expansion put two teams in the state on a permanent basis, the facility was the first fully integrated major league spring training site in the South, a “haven of tolerance” in the words of historian Jules Tygiel. “It was, without doubt, the first crack in the wall of prejudice that continued to plague baseball for the next 15 years,” wrote Sam Lacy in the Baltimore Afro-American. On this anniversary, its role in Robinson’s story, and in the history of baseball’s integration, is worth considering.

While the April 15, 1947 date is etched into history, Robinson actually signed his first professional contract on August 28, 1945 at the Dodgers’ business offices at 215 Montague Street, a location just a five-minute walk from this scribe’s residence. While team president Branch Rickey hoped to wait until November or even the following January to announce the historic deal, a confluence of factors involving city politics forced the acceleration of his timetable. The contract was announced on October 23 in Montreal, where Robinson would play with the Royals, the Dodgers’ top minor league affiliate and a site well-insulated from the racism and segregation prevalent in the United States. Still, the Dodgers had to navigate significant logistical hurdles to prepare Robinson and his teammates for the season.

During World War II, wartime travel restrictions had forced major league teams to conduct spring training close to home. The Dodgers, who had trained in Havana, Cuba in 1941 and ’42, spent the springs of ’43 through ’45 headquartered at the Bear Mountain Inn in the Hudson Valley, often negotiating snow-covered fields. With restrictions lifted for the 1946 season, Rickey chose to headquarter the major league team in Daytona Beach, Florida, with the minor leaguers — over 600 of them, to stock 27 affiliated farm teams (!) — about 40 miles inland in Sanford.

Segregation reigned in Florida through Jim Crow laws, which were particularly prevalent in Sanford, where Robinson and pitcher John Wright, a Negro Leagues veteran signed by Rickey about a month after Robinson, could not stay with the team at the lakefront Mayfair Hotel. With the help of Pittsburgh Courier sportswriter Wendell Smith, Rickey arranged for Robinson and his wife Rachel to be housed with a college classmate of Smith’s in the black community of Sanford. The newlywed Robinsons endured all manner of indignities and insults on their 36-hour journey from Los Angeles to Sanford, including being bumped off a flight from Pensacola in favor of a white couple, only to be driven from their new residence by threats of violence from local bigots. The couple — and indeed, plans for the entire Royals’ spring training — was moved to the more moderate climate of Daytona Beach, a city that had black police officers and bus drivers. There the Robinsons boarded with a local black businessman named Joe Harris and his wife, Dufferin. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.

Other Prospects of Note

Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Young Guys Who Might Pop
Rylan Kaufman, LHP
Wilmin Candelario, SS
Jeison Guzman, SS
Maikel Garcia, SS
Raymond Lopez, CF
Anderson Paulino, RHP
Rubendy Jaquez, 3B

Kaufman was a $722,000 JuCo 12th rounder who can really spin a curveball (2750 rpm average in pro ball). He’s still just 19, has a lanky frame, and already bumps 92, 93 on occasion. Candelario is a balletic defensive shortstop who adds little flourishes to just about everything he does. The entire offensive package is below-average right now, but we’ll see what happens with the frame. Speaking of waiting on the frame, Guzman is now 20 and has finally started to fill out in a positive way. He’s going to strike out a lot, but has a chance to rise into the main portion of the list this year. Garcia is a smooth, rangy defender and has a good frame but he’s very weak with the bat right now. Lopez looked intriguing (above average runner, gap pop, feel for center field) before he was seriously injured in 2017, and then he had a bad 2018. He’s a bounce back candidate. Paulino is a strong-bodied 20-year-old who sits 93-97. His upper-80s slider has vertical break, but it’s blunt and lacks that bat-missing bite. Realistically, he’s a developmental bullpen piece, but there are some late-inning components in place if that slider gets tighter. Jaquez is 20 and has above-average bat speed.

Potential Role-Playing Arms
Jonathan Bowlan, RHP
Zach Haake, RHP
Arnaldo Hernandez, RHP
Andres Machado, RHP

Bowlan’s stuff has been all over the place, sometimes even during the same start. He was 89-95 during his first outing and could be a sinker/slider reliever, but the Royals have done fairly well with sinkerballers lately. Haake will show plus stuff for an inning or two before his command starts to waivers. He could be a mid-90s, plus slider reliever. Hernandez is 23 and could be a changeup-centric reliever if his fastball ticks up in relief. Machado is a mid-90s/cutter reliever without a pitch that will obviously miss bats.

Bench Types
Michael Gigliotti, OF
Gabriel Cancel, 2B
Bubba Starling, CF
Blake Perkins, CF
Kort Peterson, 1B
Juan Carlos Negret, RF
Cristian Perez, SS

Gigliotti was a plus runner with feel for the zone who was a 40 runner this spring, his first back from an ACL tear. If the speed returns, he’s a likely bench outfielder. Cancel is a career .265 hitter, is at Double-A, and could be an infield utility bat. We still think Bubba Starling, who runs well and plays a fine center field but has never found a good swing foundation, plays in the big leagues. Perkins is now 23 and still lacks physicality, but he can really run and play center. Peterson is a corner guy with some contact skills. Negret has plus power but little feel for contact. Perez is an instinctive defender with some feel to hit.

System Overview

We spent a lot of effort trying to discern what the Royals were trying to do with their 2018 draft bonus pool, which was the biggest in baseball last year, because it was going to have such a profound impact on the rest of the draft. They ended up with all college value picks (and, eventually, Rylan Kaufman), which tasted disappointingly vanilla at the time, but now looks like a clear-headed approach as it yielded five of the org’s top 10 prospects and several other interesting ones, our Bowlan skepticism be damned.

This is a top-to-bottom reset, with maybe four or five players on the big league roster who are realistic parts of the next competitive Royals team, at the same that there aren’t any top 100 prospects currently in the system. The big wave of talent that represents the crest of the rebuilding wave is at Hi-A Wilmington right now, and whomever becomes the second pick in the upcoming draft (be it Adley Rutchsmann or Andrew Vaughn, the two players we think are the most likely to go first or second based on talent) should be advanced enough to join them pretty quickly, so long as the Royals don’t take a high schooler. Whoever the pick, barring a sizable leap from one of the 45 FV players on this list, the new 2019 draftee will immediately be the club’s No. 1 prospect. Perhaps, if enough of that wave actually pans out, they’ll be good again sooner than the overall quality of the farm indicates.

We also have them linked to outfielder Erick Pena, who is No. 4 among our 2019 July 2 prospects at the time of publication. So there’s some more exciting talent coming. But right now, the most important parts of the org are the amateur scouting and player dev staff who might help Kansas City create tradable big leaguers.

When I asked Amir Garrett about his slider last weekend, what I was really doing was asking about a mystery pitch. Which isn’t to say that it’s not a slider. Labelling pitches — especially breaking pitches — can be tricky. If the spin and movement suggests one thing, and the person throwing the baseball calls it something else… what is it?

First things first. Garrett came into pro ball with scant experience on the diamond. Basketball was his sport. The Cincinnati reliever did play baseball growing up, but he stopped at age 14. From there, he “literally didn’t play again until [age] 18.”

A few months after Garrett’s 19th birthday, the Reds — having seen him throw in the mid-90s during a tryout camp — selected the southpaw in the 22nd round of the 2011 draft. Shortly thereafter, they introduced him to a pitch other than a fastball. Whether or not it’s a slider is an exercise in semantics.

“I didn’t know how to pitch, so I was just flicking a ball in there,” explained Garrett. “Curveball, slider, whatever I was calling it is what it was at the time. Kind of the same now. Whatever I throw, that’s what it is. I guess it’s a slider. I don’t know.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners’ fun, surprising, and unsustainable start (and how it might affect the franchise), Austin Hedges’ chest protector, the extraordinary nature of Ozzie Albies’ extension, why he might have signed it, what it says about baseball’s economic market, and why we should care, the frustrating MLB/MiLB crackdown on sharing game video, Marcell Ozuna’s weird week, whether we’re beyond the golden age of bloopers, and the Twins’ meltdown inning against the Mets.

Audio intro: Sonny & The Sunsets, "Cheap Extensions"
Audio outro: Herman’s Hermits, "Marcel’s"

Link to Sam on creating MLB nicknames
Link to Dan on the Albies extension
Link to Craig on the Albies extension
Link to Meg on baseball and politics
Link to Ozuna blooper
Link to story on highlights crackdown
Link to summary of the Twins’ ugly inning
Link to Dylan on FanGraphs Audio
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Episode 858

FanGraphs Audio returns to welcome Dylan Higgins, FanGraphs editor and important podcast person, to the program for the very first time. Dylan and I engage in a little bit of editor talk, and also recount some of Dylan’s experiences as a baseball intern in Australia, and with the Pacific Coast League. We also discuss the matter of minor league fandom, and the proper etiquette for those who attend baseball meetups.

Warning: this episode contains exactly one unbleeped swear, which appears around the 8 minute 38 second mark, and is well telegraphed in advance, but which will scar and alter young listeners.

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 46 min play time.)

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Michael Lorenzen loves to hit, and he’s good at it. The Cincinnati Reds reliever — and sometimes outfielder and pinch hitter — went 9 for 31 last year, with four home runs. A black hole in the batter’s box he’s not.

His college numbers were every bit as boffo. In his three years as a centerfielder and part-time pitcher at Cal State Fullerton, Lorenzen slashed .324/.394/.478. But when push came to shove, scouts were more impressed with his right arm. In 2013, the now 27-year-old was drafted 38th overall by the Reds as a pitcher. His hitting days were over, at least to the extent that he was no longer a position player.

But again, Lorenzen loves to hit. That’s something that’s never changed. And while this might surprise you, he feels that he’s a better hitter now than he was before. The reasons why might surprise you, as well.

———

David Laurila: Do you view hitting as more of an art, or as more of a science?

Michael Lorenzen: “I look at hitting as a blend of both, which is funny, because in my current role I do a blend of multiple things. That’s the way I think, too. I consider pitching to be both an art and a science. There’s never … if you’re sold out to one thing, you’re missing so much. To me, balance is key to all things. If you’re sold out to being an art, you’re missing all the science. If you’re sold out on all the science, you’re missing out on all the art. That’s how my mind works.”

Laurila: How would you describe yourself as a hitter?

Lorenzen: “Stylistically, I… I’m usually going to come in in a pinch-hitting role. That’s going to define my approach. As a pinch hitter, I’m coming in to swing the bat. I’m not coming in to get to 0-1 and 0-2 without swinging the bat. I’m looking for a pitch to hit, trying to do some damage.”

Laurila: Would your approach be different if you were playing every day? Read the rest of this entry »