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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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Mike Trout topping the WAR leaderboard, Stephen Wright’s vulnerability to the elements, and baseball-player social media behavior, then talk about the increase in game times in 2017, the factors slowing pace of play, and the coming of the pitch clock.
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I got asked the question in my chat this week. Dave also got asked it in his. What do you do to solve Byron Buxton’s problems at the plate? This is essentially the question. People want to know. The answer, to me, is you let him play. It seems that we get these questions each April about a phenom struggling in his first taste of a full major league season. So while I’m writing this piece with Buxton in mind and as the lead example, it is also sort of universal.
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Previous: AL Starters’ Changeups.
While 2017 sample sizes build to a credible level, we’ll continue our series on 2016 ERA qualifiers’ pitch-specific quality. We’re giving all of the offerings a letter grade, weighted 50% on bat-missing and 50% on contact management. Last time out, we looked at AL starters’ changeups; today, we’ll switch to the senior circuit.
Cleveland’s got a good pitching staff. It’s part of what got them to the World Series last year, and it’s what they’re hoping to ride to another playoff berth. They’re blessed with excellent arms like Corey Kluber, Andrew Miller, Carlos Carrasco, Cody Allen and Danny Salazar.
Michael Martinez is not, by trade, a pitcher. He’s technically a hitter, but his career 33 wRC+ doesn’t exactly support that claim very well. The best way to describe Martinez from a job description standpoint would be to say that he’s a fielder, a utilityman, perhaps. He’s a survivor, who’s managed to stick on big league rosters in some capacity since 2011 despite being a nearly nonexistent asset at the plate. Martinez is the ultimate 25th man, who will be forever emblazoned in the visuals of history by making the out that won the Cubs their first World Series in more than a century. One of the jobs of a 25th man is to do anything that is required of him. And that means that in certain situations he’s a pitcher, too.
Cleveland was losing 10-4 to Chicago in the ninth inning last night, following a disastrous outing from Josh Tomlin. Rather than burn another reliever, Terry Francona turned to Martinez, his trusty 25th man. For the first time in his big league career, he took the mound. Martinez had somehow avoided the task until now, despite being the last man on the bench for some bad Phillies teams. The only other time he’d pitched was all the way back in A-ball in 2007, when he’d gotten into two games and totaled 1.2 innings of work. He did not allow a hit in either outing, because A-ball is a magical place.
The big leagues are not A-ball. The big leagues are full of hitters who sneeze at A-ball pitching, and one or two who hit like Michael Martinez. Everyone on the White Sox is technically a big league hitter. Yet we can all agree that there are more difficult assignments than innings composed of Carlos Sanchez, Omar Narvaez, Leury Garcia, and Tim Anderson.
From results to stuff, Drew Pomeranz became Rich Hill’s doppelgänger last season. He even took an unorthodox route, like Hill, to the front of a rotation. The former fifth-overall pick in the draft was traded to the Rockies early in his career, struggled as most young arms do in Colorado, had some moments in Oakland in a mixed relief-and-starting role, and arrived at Padres’ camp last spring competing for a rotation spot.
Hill and Pomeranz share many traits. They’re both left-handed. Both also feature some of the highest average spin-rates on their four-seam fastballs, allowing them to pitch up in the zone due to the perception of rise. Last season, Hill’s fastball averaged 2,456 rpm; Pomeranz’ averaged 2,471 rmp. (The MLB average is about 2,220.) They also have curveballs of dramatic shape and arc as their signature pitches, and they each trust the bending pitch.
Among pitchers who logged at least 100 innings last season, Hill led all major-league pitchers by throwing his curveball at a 42.4% rate. Pomeranz was second with a 39.2% usage rate.
Both received advice on curveball usage. Hill was convinced by Brian Bannister to depart from conventional pitch usage as a member of the Red Sox; Pomeranz, by the Padres’ coaching staff, according to MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell.
The Padres made a point of asking Pomeranz to throw his hook more than he did in three seasons as a starter with Colorado — when he used the pitch less than 17 percent of the time.
Pomeranz increased his curveball usage from 17% in Colorado to 26.8% and 30.6% in Oakland in 2014 and 2015, respectively, while working primarily out of the bullpen. From his 2015 level at Oakland, Pomeranz then increased the pitch’s usage by nearly a third last season at the heeding of the Padres staff.
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It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis in the offseason — there’s no actual baseball to analyze! It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis during spring training — the results don’t matter and we don’t get all the same stats! It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis in the first few weeks — it’s all a small sample size! The lesson overall? It’s very frustrating to do baseball analysis.
But it’s also very rewarding, and so we make a go of it even when we’ve barely completed 10 games of a 162-game season. One thing to which we turn at this point of the season is pitch velocity and movement. My personal sense is that these things become meaningful quickly. Very quickly.
While there’s research that has pushed me in that direction, I hadn’t seen work that looked at precisely how quickly movement and velocity stats stabilize, or become meaningful. So I asked Brian Cartwright to run the numbers.
Over the winter, the Cardinals talked a lot about upgrading their defense and getting more athletic in the outfield ,in particular. They let longtime Cardinal Matt Holliday go become a DH in the American League, preferring not to put his glove in left field any longer. After trying to trade for Adam Eaton, they eventually signed Dexter Fowler to play center field, allowing them to move last year’s center fielder (Randal Grichuk) back to left field.
Fowler’s not a great defender, but Grichuk is a better athlete than most left fielders, and Piscotty appears to be a decent right fielder, so this group looked like a solid-enough group of gloves. It’s not the Rays or the Red Sox, but the new Cardinals outfield looked capable of running down enough balls in the gap that outfield defense wouldn’t be a huge problem.
Over the last couple years, the author has published a periodic statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.
What follows represents the most current such report for the 2017 college campaign.
As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.