Hi everyone! Welcome to the inaugural live chat of the FanGraphs Book Club! We’ll get started at 9 pm, and Ben and Sam will join us at 9:30. That’ll give us all 30 minutes to talk about the book amongst ourselves, and line up some really great questions for them. So, I would say, don’t put questions in for them now, let’s save those until they log on to the chat.

I hope you all are as excited as I am to talk baseball books! As a reminder, if you want to join our Facebook Group you can do so here.

Post chat addition:
I’ve already put a poll for next month. Find that poll here.
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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 the eighteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Trevor Bauer, Joe Biagini, and Noe Ramirez — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Trevor Bauer (Indians) on His Slider

“I wanted to add a Kluber-esque lateral breaking pitch, so I studied everything about it — spin axis, spin rate, trajectory, movement — and tried to copy it. I’ve done a pretty good job so far.

“It doesn’t come out of my hand the same way Kluber’s does or Stroman’s does, but I’m able to generate the same movement profile on it, because… it’s an iterative process. OK, this is happening and it’s not exactly what I want, so let me find a different way to hold it, or a different way to throw it, or a different cue. Let’s look at that at 2,000 frames per second. OK, does that have the desired effect? Yes or no. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I took up the mantle from Dave Cameron and published this site’s 11th annual Trade Value series. If you’re new to the concept, the Trade Value series represents an attempt to rank the most valuable assets in baseball, accounting for each player’s current skill level, age, and health while factoring in controllable years or contract status (with lots of advice from scouts and execs). Few, if any, of the players are likely to be traded in reality; however, the rankings represent an opportunity to see how the industry is and isn’t valuing players.

An unusual thing happened in this year’s series — namely, the top two spots in the rankings went to a pair teammates, Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez. By my reckoning, the combined eight years for which their contracts are controlled by Cleveland are worth around $385 million*. They’re incredibly valuable.

*To arrive at this figure, I used ZiPS projected WAR, projected dollar-per-WAR inflation, discounted values for years further into the future, and a linear concept of dollar-per-WAR. This is more of a ballpark number since clubs on either extreme of the payroll spectrum may value each win much more or less than the average team that’s assumed in this sort of calculation.

In the wake of this year’s edition, I began thinking: would any clubs have sufficient ammunition for Cleveland even to consider a possible trade of Lindor and Ramirez? As with the Trade Value series itself, this is mostly a hypothetical question. The Indians, as a contending club, have little incentive to deal two of the majors’ best players. Still, I was curious if any club could put together enough assets even to make it possible.

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Let’s play a little game. Here’s a table ranking five pitchers in a mystery stat for 2018:

One of these pitchers is not like the others. One of these pitchers didn’t get any All-Star consideration and, barring a miracle, won’t get any Cy Young votes at the end of the year. Obviously, it’s not Sale or Scherzer, who started the All-Star Game, and it’s not Bauer, who was on the AL squad.

That leaves Paxton and Maeda, and you can bet that AL manager A.J. Hinch was thinking about the former much harder, at least before his recent struggles and lower back stiffness, than NL manager Dave Roberts was about the latter — and Maeda is Roberts’ own pitcher!

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Josh Hader is a lefty relief pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers. You know this; you read this site. Josh Hader has had, statistically speaking, an awesome season. You don’t accidentally strike out 17 guys per nine — in this case, better than half of all batters he’s faced. And Hader seems to have embraced a role of which other pitchers might be wary of great. So it wasn’t surprising when Jon Heyman tweeted this:

By now, you probably know the rest of this story. During the All-Star Game, whilst Hader was in the midst of a surprisingly poor performance on the mound, Hader’s high-school record suddenly came back to light. As the Washington Post’s Kevin Blackistone explained,

Tuesday night’s revelation [was] that Josh Hader, one of the pitchers showcased in Major League Baseball’s 89th All-Star Game, was a serial hate tweeter as a star athlete at Old Mill High School in suburban Baltimore’s Anne Arundel County.

It’s probably important before continuing to understand what kind of hate, exactly, we’re talking about. (Warning: the content is pretty offensive.)

What we have here is unmistakably racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and misogynistic hate speech. And that doesn’t happen by accident, either.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Luc Rennie, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: NR   FV: 30
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 14 K

Notes
Rennie is four appearances deep into his first year back in affiliated ball since 2015, when he was with Baltimore. He’s spent the last several seasons with Evansville in the independent Frontier League and was injured for a portion of that time. He was dominant for the Otters this spring and signed with the Mets earlier this month. Last night he pitched the game of his life and struck out 14 hitters, a Columbia franchise record, with most of them coming on a plus upper-70s 12-6 curveball. Rennie has five pitches. His fastball has natural cut, he has a two-seamer, an average mid-80s slider, that curveball, and a below-average changeup. He’ll run the fastball up to 95 but sits 90-92 and mixes his breaking balls well. Rennie is carrying a 0.83 ERA through 21.1 innings at Low-A.

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The first pitch Blake Snell ever threw as an American League All-Star ended up in the left-field bleachers. I assume he had other plans.

That this might, for some, represent an enduring image of Snell’s All-Star experience is a bit of a shame, because most of the pitches he threw last Tuesday night were actually pretty good. In his first inning of work, he got Javy Báez to reach out on a letter-high fastball and bounce the ball back to the mound; he walked Paul Goldschmidt on a borderline 3-2 fastball; he struck out Nolan Arenado with a gorgeous curveball on the fourth pitch of the sequence; and he retired Freddie Freeman via ground out. In his second inning, he struck out Matt Kemp and Bryce Harper consecutively before losing Nick Markakis, of all people, on a 3-1 fastball that missed badly. He was pulled after that in favor of Joe Jiménez. All in all, though, not bad for a 25-year-old.

In fact, of the 39 pitches Snell threw on Tuesday, just one — the one Willson Contreras deposited into the left-field seats — was hit in the air at all. The rest were either taken or, in the cases of Báez and Freeman, hit into the ground. I want to fixate on this for a moment because I think it’s at least somewhat relevant to Snell’s breakout 2018, in which he’s finally managed to pitch ahead of his peripherals (and up to his potential) to the tune of a nifty 2.27 ERA in 119 big-league innings. After long being part of the future for Tampa Bay, Snell is now firmly part of the club’s present and has established himself — albeit tenuously, for the moment — a place among the top-25 or -30 starters in the game. But how?

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In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters, yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of killing a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’s 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical all-star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. It’s a concept I’ve revisited on several occasions over the past decade, both at BP and beyond, albeit not for a while. With the trade deadline looming, this seems an ideal moment to dust it off and identify some of the bigger holes at each position among contenders.

When it comes to defining replacement-level play, we needn’t be slaves to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 1.0 WAR from a position to this point might be considered fair game, even if in some cases that means an above-average starter and ghastly backups. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which, of course may depend upon which metric one views) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. In theory, a team may be well ahead of replacement level at a given position but has lost a key contributor due to injury. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it.

For this series, I’ll start with the catchers and go around the diamond, pointing out the most egregious examples of potential Killers at each position among contenders, which I’ll define as teams with playoff odds of at least 15.0%, a definition that currently covers 15 teams (sorry, Angels, Giants, and Pirates, and fuhgeddabout it, Mets and Blue Jays). I’m less focused on these teams’ solutions; colleague Dan Szymborski will examine the potential trade candidates at each position.

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