Young players are fun, because young players are fresh. They give us something new to think about, keeping baseball just spicy enough to ward off too much boredom. Every young player comes with some form of strength, and it’s entertaining for a while. In time, we get used to it. Then there are new young players.

When Andrelton Simmons was younger, he was all over the internet. His strength was that he played like one of the best defensive shortstops in baseball history, and that made an immediate impression. It felt for a while like, every other day, there was a new Simmons clip that people would fawn over. And, justifiably so — Simmons was doing things other people couldn’t do. But, ultimately, humans are humans, and Simmons stopped feeling so exciting. We came to expect the defense. The bat didn’t develop. New players came around. Simmons turned just 27 last September, but he was all but absent from the conversation about the new wave of shortstops.

And, hell, that makes some since, given that by now Simmons counts as a veteran. This is his sixth year playing in the major leagues. I mentioned, though, that he’s only 27. Simmons is making himself relevant again. He’s showing off a new trick, one we waited for for years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Stairs loves to teach hitting, and he has plenty of teaching to do. The 49-year-old former slugger is in his first season as Philadelphia’s hitting coach, and given the youthfulness of the Phillies lineup, he’s got his hands full. Raw talent dots the roster, but that’s essentially what it is. Finished products are in short supply.

Stairs isn’t heavy-handed with his approach — he wants his hitters to be themselves — but at the same time, he knows what does and doesn’t work. With 19 big-league seasons as a player under his belt, he understands the nuts and bolts of the craft as well as anyone. So while he’s being entrusted to mold and shape young Phillies, he’s not doing so in a cookie-cutter way. For Stairs, it’s all about doing what you do, but in a more efficient, and more productive, manner.

———

Stairs on exit velocity and launch angle: “I think it’s mostly just different terminology now. Hitters have always thought about exit velocity, just not in those words. Our thought process was hitting the ball hard and getting the proper angle to the baseball.

“You’re not creating exit velocity by swinging harder. It’s about making solid contact. It’s about being short to the baseball with a quick, compact swing. We have guys like Tommy Joseph, and Cameron Rupp — their swings are so short that, at times, when the ball comes off their bat, it accelerates. You create bat speed and exit velocity by using your top hand and driving your bat through the zone.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the Red Sox started Pablo Sandoval at third base, the first time in four games he’d been in the starting line-up. He responded by singling to lead off the second inning and miraculously drew a walk in the third inning, which should tell you how sharp Jeremy Hellickson was last night. In the 8th inning, he was replaced by Josh Rutledge for defensive purposes, despite the fact that Rutledge has regularly graded out as one of the worst defensive infielders in baseball. But for Sandoval, this was a pretty successful night, reaching base twice and handling all four balls that he fielded.

But the fact that this is what constitutes a successful game for a player on a team trying to win is why the Red Sox should realize it’s time to just move on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chat begins at 12:45 PM ET.

Read the rest of this entry »

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game.

How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.

Most Highly Rated Game
New York AL at Oakland | 22:05 ET
Montgomery (63.1 IP, 104 xFIP-) vs. Gray (47.1 IP, 73 xFIP-)
Oakland starter Sonny Gray throws either one or four or endless different sorts of breaking ball, Eno Sarris revealed in a post published this morning at the site. Among those infinite variations is this specific one, a pitch that travels at 94 mph and features slider-type break:

According to Gray himself, the movement here is a product of just a small alteration to his four-seam-fastball grip, which isn’t typically how human people are capable of producing such movement. At the margins of what is possible, is where Sonny Gray is located — at least so far as this one physical act is concerned.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Oakland Radio.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, I published a post projecting the players taken on day one of the draft. Yesterday, I did the same for the players taken on day two. Let’s take a look at what my math says about the players taken on the third and final day of the draft.

Below, you’ll find some quick thoughts on KATOH’s top-five hitters and top-five pitchers selected in rounds 11-40. Below that, you’ll find by a giant, sortable table with projections for all drafted players for whom I have projections. As a reminder, I only have projections for college players who logged at least 100 plate appearances or batters faced in a Division 1 conference. I do not have projections for JuCo or high-school players. Note: WAR figures are projected totals for the relevant player’s first six years in the majors.

Darren McCaughan, RHP, Seattle, 2.3 WAR

McCaughan allowed just 20 walks across 120 innings with Long Beach State this season, finishing up with a sparkling 2.50 ERA. He doesn’t rack up the strikeouts like many of the pitchers drafted before him but has three years of strong performance in the Big West to his name.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Grips are meaningless,” Oakland A’s starting pitcher Sonny Gray once told me. Maybe that’s why we haven’t yet had a good talk, despite calling the same clubhouse home half the time. He didn’t quite mean “meaningless,” it occurred to me, when we finally discussed his repertoire. But there’s another reason he’s found it difficult to talk the way pitchers often talk to me: He’s changing things from pitch to pitch, according to what he sees. That includes grips, finger pressure and pitching mix. It’s hard to say he’s been doing something different when he’s always doing something different.

It’s difficult to figure out the righty. His breaking balls, for example: One classifying system says he’s currently throwing more sliders than ever. One says he’s in a three-year high for curveballs. A third says he’s right about where he’s always been, but that his recent good stretch may have coincided with an increased use of his slider.

Is he throwing more sliders now that he’s healthy? Gray shrugs. “Even before I got hurt, I was throwing sliders, and I was throwing them at 88, 89 mph,” he says. No system has him throwing a breaking ball that hard. “Whatever people call the pitch is what they are going to call it. It’s a hard curveball, I guess. The grip is a little bit different, but it does have a curveball action.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Near the end of spring training in 2013, just days before the Cleveland Indians were to travel north, then-middle-infield prospect Tony Wolters was called into the manager’s office at the club’s complex in Goodyear, Ariz.

There, Terry Francona and a number of front-office members awaited. They offered Wolters a choice. One option was that he could remain a middle infielder, even though he might be unable to stick at shortstop and even though his .260/.320/.404 line the year earlier at High-A hinted at insufficient offensive production for second base. Furthermore, with Francisco Lindor and Jason Kipnis in the organization, his opportunities would be limited. The other option? He could try his hand at catching.

Wolter’s experience behind the plate, to that point, had been limited to catching one game at Rancho Buena Vista High, from which school the Indians had selected him in the third round of the 2010 draft. He was to turn 21 in June. He had not risen above A-ball.

“They gave me a day to think about it,” Wolters said. “It was kind of the end of spring, so I had to tell them. I couldn’t say ‘No’ to Tito [Francona]… The main thing was, I just wanted to do what they wanted me to do and I felt I could do it.”

Thus, one of the more unusual position changes — at least as measured by successful outcomes — in recent professional baseball began. A reverse Craig Biggio, a move from the middle infield to catcher. The Indians gave Wolters a brief tutorial. He borrowed a glove and caught his first bullpen. Who pitched? Pre-breakout Corey Kluber. “He was pretty good,” Wolters responded. “That day he wasn’t spotting up, so I kind of got messed up a little bit.”

As the Indians’ major- and minor-league teams departed to begin their respective seasons, the club held Wolters back for one week to receive a crash course in catching at their Arizona complex. After a week of experience, he was sent off to High-A ball to become the Carolina Mudcats’ starting catcher. Along the way, he worked with coaches like former major leaguer Sandy Alomar to learn some intricacies of the craft.

Now fast forward three years. Last season, as a member of the Rockies, Wolters ranked as the ninth-best framer and 10th-best overall defensive catcher in the majors, according to Baseball Prospectus’s catching metrics. Ever since Colorado claimed him off waivers on Feb. 16, 2016, Wolters has become one of the better values and under-the-radar additions in the majors. He entered play on Wednesday with a batting line just 10% shy of league average at one of the game’s weakest offensive positions. In 111 career games, he’s accumulated 1.5 fWAR and 2.2 bWARP. He’s helped the Rockies to a 42-26 mark, percentage points behind the Dodgers, entering Thursday.

But what is most interesting about the Wolters story, at least to this author, is how quickly he acquired the skills necessary to become one of the better defensive catchers in the game (even if he’s rated as more of a league-average catcher to date in 2017). Whatever the precise level of his skills, average or better than that, he reached that level quickly. It raises the question of how many other position players could have benefited themselves and their teams by making the move to catcher where the position’s collective wOBA (.307) is above only that of shortstop (.304) this season.

Read the rest of this entry »