Sunday Notes: Kids in Mind, Kris Medlen Got Back on the Horse

Kris Medlen was a top-shelf pitcher in the 2012-2013 seasons. Over that two-year stretch, the righty fashioned a 2.47 ERA in 335 innings with the Atlanta Braves. Then things went south. His elbow began barking, and in March 2014 — for the second time in his professional career — he underwent Tommy John surgery.

The road back proved arduous. Medlen was decent after returning to a big-league mound in July 2015 — he went 6-2, 4.01 in 15 games with the Royals — but then his rotator cuff became cranky. A truncated and abysmal 2016 season spent mostly in the minors was followed by some serious soul searching.

“I considered calling it quits,” admitted Medlen. “It would have been out of injury frustration. I’d had two Tommy Johns, and that last season in Kansas City I had three rotator cuff strains. I was on my ass, on my couch, with my kids, until late January or early February (2017). My wife was supportive — she said it was fine if I wanted to stop, and it was fine if I wanted to keep going — but I think she could tell I was a little down.” Read the rest of this entry »


Effectively Wild Episode 1188: Season Preview Series: Diamondbacks and Brewers

EWFI

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the odd odds of Jason Heyward opting out, the Mike Moustakas and Carlos Gonzalez contracts, the origins of shifting, the always-all-out Noah Syndergaard, Shohei Ohtani, and a non-throwing outfielder follow-up, then preview the 2018 Diamondbacks (38:46) with AZCentral Sports’ Nick Piecoro, and the 2018 Brewers (1:14:14) with The Frosty Mug’s Kyle Lobner.

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A Ray of Hope About Tommy John Surgeries

A rough winter and spring got rougher for the Rays this week, as the team learned that Jose De Leon has suffered a torn ulnar collateral ligament and will require Tommy John surgery. Acquired from the Dodgers in January 2017 in exchange for Logan Forsythe, the now 25-year-old righty ranked among the game’s top-40 prospects by multiple outlets heading into both the 2016 and 2017 seasons. Alas, a trio of stints on the disabled list for a variety of arm ailments limited him to just 41 innings last year, 2.2 of them in his lone major-league outing.

De Leon is the second Rays pitching prospect to require Tommy John surgery this spring, 22-year-old righty Brent Honeywell, a consensus top-15 prospect (including 15th on the FanGraphs Top 100 list), having become the first. The loss of those two righties isn’t the only reason that the Rays plan to work with a modified four-man rotation. Their teardown, which includes the departure of Alex Cobb via free agency and the trade of Jake Odorizzi to the Twins, has led the team to try something different and cost-efficient with the fifth-starter spot, an experiment that could have larger ramifications around the game.

Because De Leon and Honeywell belong to the same team and because their injuries occurred during the same spring — one in which just two other professional pitchers have had Tommy Johnsurgery thus far — it’s natural to wonder if the Rays have a problem in this area. Historically speaking, it seems, quite the opposite has been true. According to the data in the Tommy John Surgery List kept by Jon Roegele, Rays major- and minor-league pitchers have undergone fewer TJs than any other organization since the start of 2010:

Roegele classifies every pitcher in organized ball who undergoes the surgery by the last level at which he pitched prior to going under the knife (in De Leon’s case, High-A via a rehab assignment). For the purposes of this accounting, I excluded all of the hurlers classified as high school or college because of the discrepancies in surgical timing. Consider the cases of a pair of 2015 first-round picks, Brady Aiken and Walker Buehler. Aiken underwent March 2015 surgery before being (re)drafted by the Indians, while Buehler had surgery in August of that year, after being selected by the Dodgers but before throwing a professional pitch. Neither injury is attributable to their respective teams. I chose to start with 2010 because that’s where Travis Sawchik’s recent illustration of declining league-wide levels of TJ surgeries cut off as well. More on that shortly.

Including De Leon (who hasn’t actually undergone the procedure yet), the Rays’ total of 10 surgeries in that span is the majors’ lowest, less than one-third that of the MLB-leading Mets — who, to be fair, haven’t had a pitcher above A-ball suffer that fate since 2015. Even so, using the start of 2016 as a cutoff, the Mets organization’s six TJs, though all from the low minors, place them third among the 30 teams, behind the Giants’ eight and the Reds’ seven. No other team has more than three, which is where the Rays will sit once De Leon goes under the knife.

Returning to the larger data set, one finds this: of the eight other pitchers in the Rays organization who’ve undergone TJ since the start of 2010, four have never reached the majors, including 2011 first-round pick Taylor Guerrieri and supplemental first-rounder Grayson Garvin. Two others had pitched elsewhere in the majors prior to going down — namely Burch Smith (April 2015 surgery; 10 appearances for the 2013 Padres) and Shawn Tolleson (May 2017 surgery; 215 appearances for the Dodgers and Rangers from 2012-16). The other two homegrown products who became rotation staples were Matt Moore (April 2014) and Cobb (May 2015).

Even without the 2010 cutoff, the Rays’ track record in this area is rather remarkable. As I noted at SI.com at the time of Moore’s surgery, the last Rays major leaguer to undergo the procedure before him, and the only one since the beginning of 2007, was Jason Isringhausen in 2009. Izzy was 36 at the time and particularly battle-scarred, having endured at least six previous arm surgeries, including 1998 and 2008 TJs, while with the Mets and Cardinals, respectively.

The Rays’ low total of TJs is said to owe something to the fact that Dr. James Andrews is their team physician. Andrews, of course, is one of the industry’s leading orthopedic surgeons and, according to Roegele’s data, the all-time leader in TJs performed (193, or 110 more than runner-up Dr. Lewis Yocum and 159 more than the procedure’s creator, Dr. Frank Jobe). Andrews is also the co-founder of the American Sports Medicine Institute, which has worked to dispel common myths about the surgery and offer recommendations for keeping youth, amateur, and professional pitchers healthy.

Until the end of last season, the Rays also employed Josh Kalk, an analyst who in February 2009 wrote for The Hardball Times about using PITCHf/x data in a neural network to identify injuries and very soon afterwards was hired by the team, eventually rising to the rank of director of pitching research and development. The Tampa Bay TimesMarc Topkin described Kalk as “an expert in PITCHf/x data and injury prevention studies and modeling” at the time of his departure from the organization. (He landed with the Twins.) From Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan we learn that, in 2015, the Rays broke ground by installing Kinatrax, a markerless system of capturing biomechanical data, at Tropicana Field. (The Cubs followed suit in 2016, and at least one other team has done so as well.)

Back to Sawchik’s work. Two months ago, he asked via his article title, “Have we Reached Peak Tommy John?” The whole piece is worth a read, but here’s a simplified presentation of the data he cited, with position players and the aforementioned high-school and college hurlers weeded out:

At the major-league level, 18 pitchers underwent TJ last year, one fewer than in 2016. The high total in this span was 35 in 2012, and it was 30 as recently as 2014. In terms of all professional pitchers, last year’s total of 69 TJs was down 12.7% from 2016 and 36.7% from 2015. We can hope that the industry may be past that two-year spike, though it’s probably too early to tell whether it’s just randomness as opposed to better means of prevention.

Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been advances or successes that could be having an effect, thanks not only to the efforts of Kalk and (presumably) other analysts but also other routes of treatment. For example, where platelet-rich plasma injections once appeared to be a Hail Mary when it came to avoiding Tommy John surgery, recent years have seen Masahiro Tanaka (diagnosed with a UCL tear in mid-2014) and Aaron Nola (mid-2016) flourish at the MLB level without surgery. Seth Maness underwent a modified Tommy John procedure called primary repair surgery that allowed him to return to the majors inside of nine months.

Maybe the industry is turning the corner, but if history is any guide, the next few weeks will feature more stories like those of De Leon’s, as pitchers face the hard facts that they just can’t continue without repair. Just under 30% of the surgeries from the past four seasons took place in March or April, with the figure varying only between 25-30% in that span; last year, it was 19 out of 69. Within the next two months, we’ll have a better idea of the trend’s direction.


Scouting Corey Kluber as an Exercise

In my weekly chats or in the comments section of certain posts, readers often ask a question like, “Does Pitcher X have ace potential?” or some variant of it. While it makes sense that people would be curious about such a thing, the answer is (by definition) almost always “No.” Because there are so few aces in the majors, the probability that any prospect would develop into one is necessarily low.

When I’m at games — and especially when I’m at spring-training games — I’ll occasionally run into someone like Corey Kluber, though. And while I realize nobody’s wondering if Kluber has a chance of succeeding in the majors, there’s some value in writing up guys like this as an exercise, to illustrate what an ace looks like on paper. So that’s what I’ve done here. (Note, as well: context is important when reading the following, as it’s the product of an abbreviated spring look.)

Kluber was 90-92 in my viewing, with enough movement on his fastball to merit a half-grade bump. That’s about 1.5 ticks slower than his average fastball velocity from last year, but this is typical of early-spring Kluber. I put a 55 on his fastball while observing im and imagine it’s plus during the season when he’s throwing harder.

He mixed in a cutter, slider, changeup, and a curveball. The cutter was 86-88 with tight, late movement. It was consistently plus, flashing plus-plus, and Kluber put it where he wanted to when he wanted to. It’s likely that the slider and curveball are the same pitch and that Kluber can just manipulate the shape and depth of the pitch, but the ball acts differently enough when Kluber does this that he functionally has both, even if the catcher puts down the same sign for both. When his breaking ball behaved more like a curveball, it was a 50, a deep, but blunt, 80-82 mph curveball. The slider was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and Kluber threw a few 80-grade sliders in the outing, while most were 70s in the 83-85 mph range. These had more horizontal movement and, like everything else Kluber does, located with precision. I saw a few changeups that I thought were average.

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Albert Pujols Is Here for Your Jerseys

One of the fun things about baseball, I think, is that players on opposing teams spend quite a lot of time standing next to each other and not moving very much. You don’t get this in basketball. If Dikembe Mutombo spent too much time standing still next to Michael Jordan, he was liable to find his face on a poster somewhere. Not so in football, either — the possibility for interaction is limited mostly to comings and goings on and off the field, and there’s a martial quality to the whole affair that inhibits relaxed conversation of the type you and I might have were we standing together quietly on a baseball field and not doing very much at all.

Anyway, last night I was mucking around on YouTube and found this video called “MLB Friend Joke“. This is a video title apparently conceived with a search engine, and not a human being, primarily in mind, and this is also what my friends fervently hope I am leading up to when I start sentences with phrases like “so I heard this great story about the 1940s Cincinnati Reds last night.” I watched this video because I was tired and didn’t have anything else to do.

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How the Supreme Court Could Open a New Revenue Stream for MLB

The State of West Virginia – or, rather, certain legislators in the State of West Virginia – have decided that they want to legalize sports gambling. This has created a kerfuffle in the Commissioner’s office, which has lobbied hard against the bill. Said Rob Manfred last Friday regarding the bill: “Major League Baseball and the other professional sports also have a strong interest, because it is, after all, our product that people are seeking to bet on… Unfortunately in West Virginia, there’s only one interested group that has dominated the substance of this bill, and that’s the gaming industry – the people seeking to make money from sports betting.” Manfred also voiced concerns that the proposed legislation doesn’t sufficiently protect gambling addicts.

Assuming West Virginia governor Jim Justice signs this bill, West Virginia will have legalized sports gambling. For our purposes, “sports gambling” means pretty much what it sounds like — things like betting on the outcome of baseball games. West Virginia wants to legalize it to make money off of it; fees and the like appended to sports gambling are expected to generate $30 million for the state’s coffers in just the first year.

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Jeff Sullivan FanGraphs Chat — 3/9/18

9:04

Jeff Sullivan: Hello friends

9:04

Jeff Sullivan: Welcome to Friday baseball chat

9:04

Bork: Hello, friend!

9:04

Jeff Sullivan: Hello friend

9:05

Dylan: I know it’s early and spring training but this is the best you could hope for out of Dan Vogelbach, right? How encouraged can we be?

9:05

Jeff Sullivan: .636 OBP, with as many home runs as strikeouts!

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The Idle Thoughts of the First Pitcher to Ride a Bullpen Cart in 2018

Mickey Haefner, man.

*****

That left-handed knuckleballer. Hit Ted Williams with a pitch in a tune-up game before Teddy’s only World Series. Williams said his arm “swelled up like a boiled egg,” whatever that means, then went just 5-for-25. All singles. Red Sox lost in seven. Thanks to ol’ Mickey.

*****

It wasn’t his idea to have the Red Sox scrimmage against the American League All-Stars while the National League had their best-of-three playoff to decide their World Series representative. Still. How did Ted Williams not have him killed? How did Mickey Haefner survive long enough to make history?

*****

*****

Paul Lukas admitted the bullpen historical record is imprecise. He also wrote that a 1950 newspaper report mentioning a “little red auto” was the first known instance of a report on bullpen vehicles. Then you found it: Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1950. You trust Lukas. You trust the Tribune. Cleveland 5, White Sox 2. Cleveland didn’t need a reliever that day. White Sox brought in Haefner first. Might as well figure it was Mickey freakin’ Haefner.

*****

That game was in Cleveland. The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball, 2d ed. sounds trustworthy and regal. Said Cleveland GM Hank Greenberg came up with the whole bullpen cart idea.

*****

Mickey damn Haefner.

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The Best of FanGraphs: March 5-9, 2018

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 Rays’ Modified Four-Man Rotation

Chris Archer could receive up to 36 starts with Tampa Bay’s new scheme.
(Photo: Keith Allison)

The prospect of a six-man rotation has either been discussed or confirmed by a number of clubs this offseason. The Angels will use one to help ease along Shohei Ohtani’s development as a pitcher. The Rangers also have plans to experiment with one (although Cole Hamels isn’t an advocate). Mickey Callaway mentioned at the beginning of February that the Mets might utilize six starters at points of the season.

The Rays, as they often do, are trying something different. In this case, they’ve announced plans to use just a four-man rotation in 2018.

 

 

 

 

 

As manager Kevin Cash suggests here, it wouldn’t be pure four-man rotation. Instead, when a hypothetical fifth starter was needed, the club would just utilize relievers exclusively. So it’s four starters plus a bullpen game.

Given trends going in the opposite direction, this plan could lead to disaster, although it isn’t clear that the five-man rotation is obviously superior. Tampa Bay is in a fairly unique personnel situation, so there’s some logic behind the decision. The move isn’t likely to work, but it might be worth a shot.

When discussing the possibility of the Los Angeles Angels’ use of a six-man rotation, I noted the importance of having starting pitching depth and no ace. To effectively deploy a four-man rotation, the opposite is true; indeed, it’s the presence of an ace and little rotation depth behind him that give rise to the unique possibility. A team also requires a deep bullpen and multiple players with minor-league options, so that, whatever starting depth the club does possess, can be easily moved back and forth between the majors and minors.

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