Thanks to the magic of Statcast and PITCHf/x before it, the means by which to evaluate pitchers have grown exponentially. Beyond ERAs and per-nine rate stats — and beyond DIPS, FIP, and BABIP, too — we now quantify pitch usage, velocity, spin rate, movement, whiff rates, pitch tunnels, quality of contact and more. It can get dizzying, and you can find some way in which just about every pitcher this side of Clayton Kershaw is below average. Last year, 68 pitchers threw at least 120 innings and finished with an ERA- below 100. Only 54 finished with a FIP- below 100, as well. Raise the bar to 162 innings and the count falls to 32 pitchers, occupying 21% of the majors’ 150 rotation jobs. As balls fly out of the park at record paces, relatively few starters have enough stuff to dominate. The vast majority are just trying to command a fastball well enough to get a shot at fooling hitters with their offspeed stuff.

Given 30 major-league rotations, 15 have to be below average, and among them are all too many pitchers easy to ding for their middling velocity, lack of command, failure to get hitters to chase their breaking stuff, or inability to stay healthy. Their projections inevitably look dire or at least uninspiring, and writing about them can feel like shooting fish in a barrel. Yet even among these lesser rotations, tiny miracles that defy our projections occur all the time. A pitcher learns a new grip, or irons out his mechanics, or gets a competent defense behind him. Suddenly, he’s living up to the visions of the men who scouted him, or at least outpitching the numbers that tell us all of the ways in which he is lacking.

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Manny Margot upped his launch angle more than any other player in the second half of the 2017 season. Eno Sarris wrote about that fact in January, and as he did so with data alone, a not-insignificant piece of information remained unaddressed: How purposeful was the change, and what (or who) prompted it?

The answer to the latter question is Johnny Washington. San Diego’s assistant hitting coach made the suggestion, and knowing that “hitting the ball in the air gives you more chances in the gaps,” Margot took it to heart.

The 23-year-old outfielder confirmed that “right around the halfway point” is when he began trying to hit more balls in the air. The ways in which he accomplished that goal were twofold. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the passage of the so-called “Save America’s Pastime” Act, the future of minor-league spending, the endangered status of lower-level independent leagues, Ryan Zimmerman’s spring-training trailblazing, leadoff hitter Aaron Judge, actual likely Opening Day Dodgers starter Matt Kemp, a Zack Greinke anecdote, and Miguel Cabrera’s solution for not knowing teammates’ names, then preview the 2018 Mariners (20:38) with FanGraphs’ Meg Rowley, and the 2018 Rockies (53:35) with Rockies Magazine’s Jesse Spector.

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Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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The Cardinals don’t have a rotation problem. Which is to say, they don’t have a rotation problem right now. What they do have — as the title of this post suggests — is a potential problem in the first few months of the season if the current members of the rotation underachieve. For most teams with fine rotations — like the Cardinals — the cause for concern is a lack of depth. That is not, however, the Cardinals’ issue at the moment. The Cardinals’ potential issue is that their current sixth and seventh starter might be significantly better than the pitchers in their starting five.

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The current post is the last of this week’s installments in the positional power rankings. (Pitchers will appear next week.) If you’re the sort of person who’s unfamiliar with what a “positional power ranking” is, you have every right to read the introductory post by Dr. Jeff Sullivan, a real medical doctor who is certified to comment on all manner of physical maladies and whom you should contact with real, pressing, possibly urgent health concerns.

If, on the other hand, you’re acquainted with these particular rankings of power, consider turning your attention immediately to the chart below, which depicts WAR projections for all the American League’s designated-hitter depth charts.

Historically, the offensive burden on designated hitters is high. It probably should be high: the position carries little in the way of other obligations. If a designated hitter isn’t hitting, he doesn’t have much other value to his club. Maybe he’s a proficient interlocutor, one capable of identifying the common ground between himself and those around him. That’s an important skill. How it translates to run-scoring, though, isn’t immediately obvious.

By the numbers, the Yankees probably have the best designated hitters. The White Sox probably have the worst, according to the same numbers. All the other clubs appear between those two. All other commentary on the topic appears below.

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GOODYEAR, Ariz. — As you might imagine, Joey Votto has excellent eyesight.

And as you might also suspect, Votto knows his exact quality of eyesight, improved after undergoing LASIK surgery as a minor leaguer.

“20-13 and 20-17,” Votto told FanGraphs of his most recent right and left eye test scores. “I had good vision beforehand. It started going wonky [early in my professional career]. I didn’t want to deal with contacts.”

At 33, Votto was the best hitter in the NL last season. After a down 2014 season, in which he was limited to 62 games, he’s shown no signs of aging– if anything, he has improved, “aging” like a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild.

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I remember, when I’ve written some positional power rankings before, I got to write about shortstops. And when I wrote about shortstops, Troy Tulowitzki ranked way above everyone else. It was always laughable at the time how much better he was than his peer group. It’s no longer so laughable because now this paragraph just serves as a reminder that we all get older and time is a monster to even the innocent. Tulowitzki is never healthy these days and we’ve entered a whole new age of young and talented super-shortstops. But anyway, I’m drifting from the point. When I wrote about prime Tulowitzki, I got a kick out of how much better he was than the next-best guy. Now I’ve gotten the chance to write about center fielders. This is the hardest I’ve laughed in days.

When this post went up a year ago, the Angels were first at 8.3 projected WAR, and the Rays were second at 4.7. And now, the gap has only grown. The gap between the Angels and the Rays is, by itself, bigger than almost every single team’s center-field WAR projection. You aren’t here because you needed to be reminded that Mike Trout is good. I’m not here because I need to remind you that Mike Trout is good. But just in case anyone was slipping — just in case you hadn’t thought about it enough recently — Mike Trout is good. Mike Trout is so good that, if you took Mike Trout, and then you removed from him enough talent to make the next-best center fielder, you’d still have enough left over to have an All-Star center fielder. Provided you took only talent, and not arms or legs or eyes. Even Trout’s career couldn’t survive the loss of one of those. (Probably.)

Below, summaries of every team’s center-field situation. Here’s the introduction to this series, in case you’re behind. If you are behind, boy, do you ever have a lot of reading to do. Cancel your plans for the weekend.

Much digital ink has been spilt regarding the plight of minor-league baseball players. Dating back to the filing of the first minor-league wage lawsuit in back 2014, countless pieces have been written denouncing Major League Baseball for paying minor-league players a sub-minimum wage. Indeed, the optics of an organization that generates $10 billion dollars per year in revenues electively deciding to pay thousands of its full-time employees at below a subsistence level is — needless to say — not great.

So it was not surprising that the news that Congress appears posed to officially exclude minor leaguers from (at least some of) the protections afforded under federal wage and hour laws resulted in an immediate wave of outcry by numerous commentators. Specifically, as Sheryl Ring discussed earlier in the week, news reports emerged on Sunday night that, after years of persistent lobbying efforts, MLB was posed to succeed in persuading Congress to include a provision in its omnibus spending bill that would exempt minor-league players from Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law establishing the minimum wage and overtime rules that millions of Americans take for granted.

On Wednesday night, the actual language of the provision that Congress would be voting on was released:

In some respects, the specific legislative language is better than critics had anticipated. Rather than entirely excluding minor leaguers from the right to the minimum wage — as had originally been feared — the provision’s focus was actually a bit narrower. Instead, it simply provides that minor league players are not entitled to overtime benefits when working more than 40 hours in a week, so long as they are otherwise paid a weekly salary compliant with the federal minimum wage (at least during baseball’s regular season). In other words, the exemption doesn’t deprive players of the right to the minimum wage, just to overtime compensation.

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