Travis Shaw had arguably the biggest hit of Milwaukee’s season yesterday. With his team on the verge of a crushing 10-inning loss, Shaw stroked a two-run, walk-off home run that helped keep the Brewers in the playoff hunt. A defeat wouldn’t have buried the surprise contenders, but it would have pushed them closer to the brink. They badly needed the win, and the Red Sox castoff provided it.

Even without Saturday’s heroics, Shaw has been a godsend for David Stearns and Co. Acquired over the offseason (along with a pair of promising prospects) for Tyler Thornburg, he’s contributed 31 long balls and an .877 OPS while solidifying the middle of the Milwaukee lineup. Last year in Boston, those numbers were 16 and .726.

The 27-year-old third baseman attributes his breakout to two factors: He’s playing every day, and he’s not stressing about things he can’t control.

“My mindset is a lot different,” Shaw told me earlier this week. “After what I went through last year, I needed to take a step back. There were some things I didn’t agree with, and there were some things I took the wrong way. I didn’t handle them very well

“I tried to play GM. I started reading into stuff — wondering why they’re doing this, why we’re doing that — and it ate at me. I worried about things I shouldn’t have worried about. In the second half, when I got to play, I felt like I had to get two or three hits to stay in the lineup. That didn’t bode well for my mental state, and it obviously didn’t work results-wise.” Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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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In 2015, the Reds finally commenced their transition from contender to rebuilder. During that season, the club began handing playing time to a number of young players, with rookie pitchers accounting for more than two-thirds of the team’s starts. Last season, they followed up that effort with another round of rookie pitchers — a group which, in this case, accounted for one-third of Cincinnati’s starts. As I noted at the beginning of the season, the Reds became just one of a handful of clubs in history to allocate at least half of their starts to rookies in one year and then to follow up that effort by starting rookies in another 50 games the next season.

It’s my duty to inform you that the Reds are at it again — and this time, they’ve left all the other franchises in the dust.

For a little league-wide perspective, here’s the number of rookie starters each team has used over the past three seasons. If a pitcher was a rookie in 2016 but didn’t exhaust his eligibility and pitched again in 2017, that’s counted just once in the numbers below.

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I was recently talking to J.D. Martinez about launch angle and exit velocity and the like. Besides helping me to update my language, he also told me he didn’t really track his performance by those measures. Same thing for some other metrics I mentioned. It’s clear Martinez has some substantive thoughts on hitting, though. It would be strange if he didn’t use any of the data available to him. So I asked him… what do you track? What numbers do you look at?

“I track my swings and misses in the zone,” he said. “I can deal with swing and miss out of the zone. If I’m swinging and missing in the zone, I don’t like that. That tells me something is wrong. It tells me that something is not right with my swing, I’m fouling balls off. If the ball’s in the strike zone, I should be able to hit it. There are certain situations, take a pitch, that’s fine. But when I swing and it’s a strike — especially on a fastball and I’m not hitting it — that’s not good.”

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This is Mike Hattery’s third piece as part of his September residency at FanGraphs. Hattery writes for the Cleveland-based site Waiting for Next Year. He can also be found on Twitter. Read the work of all our residents here.

While the adoption in recent years of bonus pools both for domestic and international prospects has prevented certain clubs from optimizing their pursuit of amateur talent, the player-development strategies within organizations remain a wild frontier. Teams continue to innovate and find advantages, no matter how small. And the effects of that innovation continue to manifest themselves, it seems.

Consider: of the 10 players recently identified by Jeff Sullivan as successful non-prospects, two belong to the Dodgers and another two to the Indians. A pair of baseball’s top clubs, in other words, just happen to have stumbled upon otherwise marginalized talent. Whether that’s mere coincidence or a reflection of organizational competencies, these are the sort of developmental successes that can open windows of contention, especially for a small-market club like Cleveland.

In their pursuit of a competitive edge, teams have looked beyond the traditional player-development staff and budget. The Indians, for example, hired James Harris last offseason to lead player development. On the one hand, the hire made perfect sense: Harris’s core competencies are biometrics and nutrition. On the other hand, Harris had little experience in baseball, having served as chief of staff to former Philadelphia Eagles head coach Chip Kelly. The Philadelphia Phillies, meanwhile — as part of their own efforts to improve development and player performance — earmarked $1 million towards healthier meals for the team’s prospects.

These individual examples illustrate the pursuit, within organizations, of a competitive developmental advantage. Which leads to a question: what additional avenues could be pursued to create a short-term competitive edge?

A possible answer to that question begins with late psychological theorist Abraham Maslow. Maslow constructed a five-level “hierarchy of needs,” the highest of those needs being “self-actualization,” or the fulfillment of one’s potential. In order to reach that state, however, it’s necessary for the individual to satisfy the more fundamental needs that precede it.

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I realize that I can be a little too often drawn to bests and worsts. It happens because I’m lazy, but it also happens because those make for easy subjects to sell. I don’t need to convince you that the best of something is interesting. Same goes for the opposite. I’m just the messenger, providing exceptional fun facts. Baseball creates the fun facts. I just go and find them.

I have another fun fact to share with you. I have another potential historical worst. Several weeks ago, the Marlins were worth watching, because they were making an improbable surge into the wild-card race. The surge ended as abruptly as it started, and now the Marlins are just playing out the string. There are still players of significance, sure. Fans are still watching to see if Giancarlo Stanton will go yard. But let me give you a statistic to keep your eye on. Want a reason to pay attention to the Marlins’ final stretch? They could badly use some pitcher-hits. Otherwise they’re going to set a new low.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Glory Hole Recreation Area, solve the mystery of Bill Doaks, discuss archaic baseball language and how today’s baseball writing will age, and touch on an odd double play and another byproduct of 2017’s record home-run rate, then weigh in on the expansion of netting in ballparks and explore several ways in which MLB should borrow from baseball as it’s played in Japan and Korea.

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I was invited to appear on Ben Lindbergh and Michael Baumann’s podcast over at The Ringer this week. Among those topics discussed was the challenge of scouting in today’s game (a topic which Jeff Sullivan has recently explored) and the difficulty with macro-level planning in the midst of a record home-run surge (about which I wrote earlier this week).

The game is being played at the extremes, featuring more home runs than ever and more strikeouts than ever. When players are changing skill sets and approaches so quickly, how must evaluators evolve? While speed and strength will never go out of style, what skills should gain and lose value in the eyes of evaluators? Michael noted that perhaps it’s adaptability that should take on greater weight in evaluation. In an era where it’s more difficult to predict what’s next, anticipating how the game (or the ball) will change might be a player’s best tool.

Along those lines, it might behoove evaluators to place more weight on players who are curious. In an age with endless data from Statcast and other sources, asking the right questions can help an athlete better understand and improve his own performance. That’s trickier to evaluate, of course: it requires getting to know the individual and/or performing other types of due diligence. But those traits can make an impact.

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Now that we’re close to the end of the season, you’re going to see a lot of talk about the bests in certain categories. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best pitcher. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best rookie. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best player (sort of). And there are further awards that are supposed to go to the best hitters. It’s seldom easy to identify a given season’s best whatever, but at least you can limit yourself to one year of data. That makes things simple, relatively speaking.

It’s half as simple, or twice as complicated, if you double the number of years. But that’s something you have to do if you want to measure improvement. And this is something I’d like to spend a few minutes on — who, among major league baseball players, is the most improved hitter? There’s no great reason to focus on this, I guess, but there’s no great reason to focus on anything. Major improvement is good. Makes for a compelling story. Why not find the most improved hitter? All we need to do is agree on a method.

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