12:04

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to my “Ides of August” chat! Today is the third anniversary of my daughter’s due date; she put off her arrival for another 11 days while we tore our hair out, in marked contrast to the way her two writer-parents approach deadlines. Anyhoo, my piece staring into the heart of darkness that is the 2019 Tigers just went live https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-tigers-might-be-historically-bad/ And in honor of getting to use the phrase “heart of darkness” into my work, I’m spinning the Peter Laughner box set this afternoon. Laughner was the original guitar player for Pere Ubu when they did their first two singles (“30 Seconds over Tokyo” b/w “Heart of Darkness” came first) and left behind an incredible legacy for somebody who died young at age 24.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Anyway… on with the show.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: This is quite likely my next article, so look for it either tomorrow or early next week at FG.

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Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about how Gleyber Torres’s ownership of the Orioles and Aristides Aquino’s home-run spree are emblematic of 2019, fun facts about players’ accomplishments in their first X games, home-run fun facts and the juiced ball, Juan Soto vs. Ronald Acuña, Jr., two recent Scott Boras quotes, the Dodgers’ near-record extra-base-hits game, and Jeff Mathis’s offensive ineptitude and defensive prowess, then discuss an ESPN oral history of the 1994 strike, touching on whether the sport would have survived the extensive use of replacement players, the change in media coverage of baseball labor issues, what the biggest loss would be if the rest of the 2019 season were canceled, and more.

Audio intro: Chance The Rapper, "Juice"
Audio outro: The Rock*A*Teens, "Pretty Thoughts Strike Down the Band"

Link to story on Torres and the Orioles
Link to Ben on breakout batters
Link to Jay Jaffe on Aquino
Link to C. Trent Rosecrans on Aquino’s swing change
Link to list of players with most batting runs through age 20
Link to Sam on Scioscia, Mathis, and Napoli
Link to Sam on Scioscia and defense again
Link to R.J. Anderson on Jeff Mathis’s game-calling
Link to worst offensive careers (min. 2500 PA)
Link to worst offensive single seasons (min. 200 PA)
Link to Tim Kurkjian’s oral history of the strike
Link to Ben on Lords of the Realm
Link to the book Baseball’s Power Shift
Link to Emma Baccellieri on players’ social media advocacy
Link to Evan Drellich’s oral history of the strike
Link to Bryan Curtis on the liberalization of sportswriting
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Ronald Acuña Jr., with 34 home runs, 28 stolen bases, and six weeks left in the season, has a chance to become the fifth player to join Major League Baseball’s 40-40 Club. If Acuña’s membership application is approved by feats of baseballing, he’ll join an exclusive fraternity of Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Alfonso Soriano. Okay, mostly elite.

As someone who apparently became a “veteran” baseball analyst at some point, I’m not always sure if the game has changed or if I have. When I was a kid, there’d be talk of 20-20 clubs, 30 HR/100 RBI guys, and scores of home run milestones. But you don’t hear about these baseball clubs as often as you used to. Has fandom changed this much or have I become jaded about these kinds of statistically interesting accomplishments? Or is that some of the older markers for performance, such as the 400 Homer Club, have become less exclusive institutions to join than a sandwich shop that give you a 10th sub free after buying nine?

The 40-40 Club, on the other hand, still excites me. Part of it could be that Jose Canseco’s charge on his way to becoming the founding member of this fraternity in 1988 was still very early in my Serious Baseball Fandom phase. I’ve loved watching baseball from the age of three, but it wasn’t until a few years later I really became a serious fan of the game, aided by my grandfather getting me a subscription to Sports Illustrated in 1986, a bit before my eighth birthday. While I watched the 1983-1985 World Series games, the 1986 World Series was the first one where I really followed every pitch, watching to the end even on school nights. I can still remember Tim Teufel‘s error as much as Bill Buckner‘s more famous one, and am able to exactly replicate Marty Barrett‘s closed stance and Sid Fernandez’s three-quarters delivery.

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Fernando Tatis Jr. has been one of the most exciting players in baseball this year. I get giddy when he does things like this:

Or like this:

Despite that, I haven’t written about Tatis. It’s not that he wasn’t interesting enough. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, he should take it as a compliment that I’ve been writing about everyone in the league but him. I simply couldn’t find an angle that I felt captured what’s so awesome about Tatis. I still don’t have that angle, but I don’t care anymore. Fernando Tatis Jr. is the best, and it pains me that he’s day-to-day with a back injury right now. Let’s talk about him, because no day should go by without a Tatis highlight. Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly three months into this season, José Ramírez was one of the worst hitters in the game. On June 24, Ramírez had played in 77 games, come to the plate 328 times, and put up a 66 wRC+ which ranked 153rd out of 160 qualified batters. Only good baserunning and decent defense kept Ramírez above replacement level. Since June 25, Ramírez has come to bat 172 times and put up a 143 wRC+ and 1.8 WAR, with both figures ranking among the top 25 players in the game. Before the season, Ramírez was projected for a 138 wRC+ and 6.3 WAR, so he went from one of the worst hitters in baseball for half a season to nearly the exact player he was projected for the last quarter of a season. While slumps and streaks invariably have a lot of contributing factors, it certainly seems like Ramírez spent the first part of the season not trying to crush the game and simply flipped a switch in late June.

The dates used above aren’t exactly arbitrary. On June 25, I wrote a post entitled José Ramirez Isn’t That Far Off. In that piece, I discussed a few different theories behind Ramírez’s struggles, including too many fly balls at poor angles and failures in attempting to adjust to the shift. Ultimately, I went down a plate approach rabbit hole and concluded Ramírez was swinging and making contact on too many pitches when behind in the count instead of just looking and swinging at pitches he could drive. I concluded with this:

Ramírez simply isn’t commanding the strike zone like he used to, and it is showing up in increased swings on breaking and offspeed pitches out of the zone. Ramírez needs to be able to hunt for those fastballs in the plate, and to do so, he has to be able to avoid the breaking stuff. He hasn’t done a poor job of that relative to other players, but part of what made Ramírez a very good hitter was getting in favorable counts and taking advantage. The league might have caught up to him a little bit, but the problem appears to be more on Ramírez’s end and swinging at pitches he didn’t used to. That also means the issue could be fixable. Bad luck has certainly played some role in Ramírez’s big drop, as it might not be as bad as it appears, and if Ramírez can control the plate like he has in seasons past, he just might turn things around.

Ramírez has certainly made me look good over the past couple months, but we can take a closer look at the analysis from June and see if the reasoning still fits. First, let’s look at Ramírez’s swings by count type compared to last year, the early part of this season, and his recent hot streak. Read the rest of this entry »

In modern baseball, it’s hard to win if you can’t develop talent, particularly as the sport’s best teams get even better at turning raw ingredients into functional ballplayers. The best example these days is Houston’s pattern of acquiring pitchers with high-spin fastballs or curveballs and polishing them into All-Stars. As has been detailed at length here and elsewhere, Houston’s success with that breed has powered the club to the top of baseball’s hierarchy. They’ve worked wonders with Gerrit Cole, Charlie Morton, and Ryan Pressly. They may run it back again with Aaron Sanchez and Joe Biagini.

But the Astros aren’t the only team with a competitive advantage on the mound. Before Morton and Cole exploded, Cleveland was widely considered the gold standard at developing pitching talent. They earned that reputation: former and current rotation stalwarts like Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, Trevor Bauer, Danny Salazar, Mike Clevinger, and Shane Bieber all became significant contributors in just the last several years. Of those, only Bauer and Carrasco had major prospect hype, and even those two took their lumps in other organizations before straightening things out in Ohio. Indeed, Cleveland’s ability to turn wayward arms into productive contributors sparked their mini-dynasty in the AL Central, and may again prove decisive in this year’s playoff push.

Cleveland’s player development staff has worked its magic on a variety of pitchers; Salazar and Kluber, to name two, are very different hurlers. One commonality, though, is that they end up with a lot of right-handed pitchers who are really good at tunneling on the glove-side corner. Kluber is perhaps the best at this: The late action on his slider and two-seam fastball make the pitches perfect for starting near the corner and forcing hitters to guess which direction it’s going to move.

Increasingly, it appears that this is a replicable strategy. The latest guy to carry the mail? Aaron Civale, a 24-year-old righty who barely snuck onto Cleveland’s top prospect list earlier this spring and has flourished in three big league starts this summer. Through 18 innings, he’s allowed just two runs and has whiffed a batter per frame while walking only four. Read the rest of this entry »

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Unless you’re a die-hard Reds fan, you probably hadn’t heard of Aristides Aquino before this month. The 6-foot-4, 220-pound right fielder been part of Cincinnati’s system since being signed out of the Dominican Republic in January 2011, but his overly aggressive approach at the plate offset his considerable raw power and limited his attractiveness as a prospect, particularly as he aged. He entered this season, his age-25 campaign, with one major league plate appearance to his name, but the combination of an overhauled swing, a 28-homer showing at Triple-A Louisville, and the July 31 trade of Yasiel Puig led to his promotion to the majors, and since then, “The Punisher” has clubbed his way into the record books.

Aquino joined the Reds for a four-game series in Atlanta at the start of August, and after going 0-for-6 with three strikeouts in his first two games, went 2-for-2 with a walk against former Cy Young winner Dallas Keuchel on August 3. After singling off Keuchel in the second inning for his first hit, he walked in the fifth and then hit a game-tying three-run homer in the seventh, though the Reds lost 5-4. He then reeled off a nine-game hitting streak, keeping it alive with a pinch-single on August 4. He homered off the the Angels’ Jose Suarez on August 6 in Cincinnati as part of his first three-hit game, then went yard in each of the first three games of a four-game series against the Cubs, dinging Cole Hamels and Yu Darvish in back-to-back contests. On August 10, he launched three homers, two off Kyle Hendricks and one off Dillon Maples, then added yet another homer on Monday night against the Nationals’ Tanner Rainey. His hitting streak came to an end with an 0-for-4 showing on Tuesday, though he did make some contact. Through 42 plate appearances, he’s put up video game numbers: .385/.429/1.026 for a 267 wRC+.

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C.J. Chatham doesn’t fit the stereotype of the modern-day hitter. At a time when driving balls in the air is all the rage, the 24-year-old Red Sox prospect channels Wee Willie Keeler. Contact-oriented, Chatham believes in hitting ‘em where they ain’t.

“When they shift me, I don’t care where the pitch is; I’m going to go the other way and get a hit,” Chatham told me early in the season. “I might even break my bat, but I’ll squeak it through the space where the second baseman isn’t standing. A lot of my hits are through the infield that way. That’s kind of what I do.”

The approach has its merits. Chatham was leading the Double-A Eastern League in batting average (insert large grain of salt here) when he was promoted to Triple-A Pawtucket yesterday. His slash line was .297/.332/.401; last year, those numbers were .314/.355/.384 in High-A. Pair those lines with a solid glove at the shortstop position, and the lack of power — 12 home runs in 1,015 professional plate appearances — can largely be overlooked. Or can it?

He’s doing his best to ignore the skeptics. Read the rest of this entry »