On October 24, 2015, the Pittsburgh Pirates acquired Trevor Williams from the Miami Marlins in exchange for Richard Mitchell. Sort of. As ESPN’s Jayson Stark reported shortly thereafter, Williams was actually compensation for the Marlins’ hiring of pitching guru Jim Benedict. Mitchell was considered a non-prospect, while Williams was a former second-round pick, and is now working out of the Pittsburgh pen.

Last week, I asked Williams about the veracity of the report. Was he truly traded for a pitching instructor?

“It was weird,” said the 25-year-old right-hander.“On paper, I wasn’t, but in actuality, I was. It does make for a good story, because not many people get traded for a non-player. It is what it is. Whether you’re traded for a player, a front office guy, or a clubbie, you’re changing teams, you’re changing scenery.”

Williams wasn’t immediately aware of what had gone down. All he was told is that he was traded for “a minor leaguer.” Once the name became known, he went to his computer. 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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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Keon Broxton and batting helmets, statistical soothsaying, and the two-way-player attempts of Michael Lorenzen and Christian Bethancourt, then discuss the early results of several preseason players and teams of interest.

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Real 2017 games have been played in earnest, but sample sizes are so small that we might as well continue our look at 2016 starting-pitcher contact management by pitch type. Last time, we reviewed the AL ERA qualifiers; today, it’s the NL qualifiers’ turn.

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With the switch from the standard PITCHf/x pitch-tracking system to Trackman, a few missteps are to be expected. Dave Cameron, for example, recently pointed out that we have to be careful about reporting velocity right now. Jeff Zimmerman gave us a way to convert old velocities into today’s reality, and Tom Tango offered up way to use current readings to approximate velocities as they were calculated by the previous methodology. For those interested in the simplest possible method, it appears as though subtracting three-quarters of a mile per hour from a pitcher’s reported velocity arrives at roughly the same figure as the previous system would have produced.

But that doesn’t account for the situation in its entirety. If we look at what Brandon Finnegan did in his first (excellent) start, we’ll notice that the movement numbers are also a little off right now. It’s enough to want to throw your hands up and just emote, as I did on the latest episode of our Sleeper and The Bust podcast.

It’s okay to express frustration. It’s cathartic and release is good. Breathe deeply through the nose.

But we also need to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. Finnegan did not, as the leaderboards suggest, just record the ninth-most ride on a fastball that we’ve witnessed over the last 15 years. That’s not what was so impressive about the movement and velocities of his pitches in his 2017 debut. But discovering what was impressive can help us better navigate the suddenly unsteady waters of pitcher analysis.

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In 2015, Chris Rusin made 22 starts for the Colorado Rockies in what was a lost season for the ballclub. They finished in last place for the third time in four seasons, and their attendance dropped to its lowest mark in eight seasons. The club possessed a promising cache of prospects. Regardless, one couldn’t be blamed for feeling pessimistic about the Rockies’ future.

Fast forward to today, and Rusin is still with the team. Instead of working in a starting capacity, though, he’s been moved to the bullpen. And rather than occupying a large role in Colorado’s rotation, he’s not even a sure thing to serve as the club’s sixth or seventh starter.

This isn’t a product of Rusin’s failings, however. He was actually pretty good last year, recording an 83 xFIP- and 76 ERA- in 84 innings of starting and relief work. Rather, the change in Rusin’s role is emblematic of a new development in the organizaion — namely, that the Rockies suddenly have a great deal of pitching depth, both in the rotation and the bullpen.

Let’s start with the most recent starting pitcher to make his major-league debut for the Rockies, Antonio Senzatela. After showing well in 2015 in his first trip through the California League, Senzatela had a very trying 2016 season. First, he missed time due to a shoulder injury. Then, his mother died from cancer back home in his native Venezuela. At the time, the Rockies used his shoulder injury as cover to let him go home and spend time with his family, which isn’t only an understandable but commendable move by the organization. But for those tasked with determining how Senzatela would stack up as a prospect heading into this season, it certainly created uncertainty, as any season-ending shoulder injury normally would. He’s still not very projectable, but he might have snuck on to the back end of Rockies’ team lists had people known why he really missed the latter portion of the season.

Fast forward to 2017, and Senzatela’s major-league debut was certainly promising. Despite hitting Keon Broxton in the face (Broxton fortunately seems to have come away from the HBP unharmed), he was otherwise brilliant on the day, striking out six batters through five scoreless innings. The result was a Game Score of 66 — and a Game Score v2 of 66 — which is pretty good for a Rockies pitcher making his major-league debut. Take a look:

Now, some of this is damning with faint praise. The Rockies haven’t had a ton of good starting pitchers, and even fewer who turned in good debuts. But it’s better than the alternative, which would have been getting rocked. Senzatela’s outing is tied for third in terms of Game Score, and by itself in sixth place according to Game Score V 2.0. Not too shabby.

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Perhaps the best athlete, to date, is joining the revolution.

Said athlete is Yasiel Puig and said revolution is that of the fly-ball. It seems more and more batters are pushing against traditional coaching orthodoxy and endeavoring to lift the ball in the air.

Exhibit A from Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium:

According to MLB.com’s Austin Laymance Puig has been working with teammate Justin Turner on adding loft to his swing. And Puig is off to a tremendous start this season, having hit three home runs in four games.

“What I think about is putting the ball in the air,” Puig said via interpreter, “or else I’m going to have no money in my pocket.”

Turner, of course, is one of the key agents of the fly-ball revolution. If not the protagonist, he’s at least played an important supporting role. After a mediocre start to his career, Turner sought the help of outside hitting instructor Doug Latta, who believes that the ideal swing path is one that launches balls into the air. Turner’s mechanical adjustments turned him into a star. And now Turner is approaching players whom he believes can benefit from getting more balls into the air. The Puig-Turner relationship could perhaps be another example of the power of word of mouth, the power of peers to push a movement towards a tipping point.

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This is Joe Sheehan’s first piece as part of his April residency at FanGraphs. A founding member of Baseball Prospectus, Joe currently publishes an eponymous Baseball Newsletter. You can find him on Twitter, as well.

Like a lot of fans, I watched Sunday’s and Monday’s games fascinated by the number of pitchers who seemed to be throwing harder than they did last season. So it was a relief to see Dave Cameron’s note here Tuesday about why readings were higher. It will take some mental gymnastics to compare velo figures from 2017 to previous years, but I’m sure it will be second nature aft…

… wait, what?

This is what it’s like being a baseball fan in 2017. The issues you face are ones of reconciling changes in how the velocity of every single pitch thrown in MLB is tracked. It’s not about getting that data, but rather, about sussing out the difference between measurement points of the pitch on the way from the pitcher’s hand to home plate.

We had a different set of problems when we were putting together the first Baseball Prospectus annual, back in the winter of 1995-96. The challenges we faced weren’t discerning which measure of velocity to use, but rather, when we would get access to minor-league statistics, and how soon lefty/righty splits would be in our hands, and would anyone at all talk to us about prospects we only knew by their stat lines.

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Week: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4.

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.

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