FanGraphs Baseball

Yoenis Cespedes has had a roller-coaster year. Hamstring, quad, hip, and heel injuries have cut weeks off his season. On the field, his overall performance isn’t inspiring; his walk rate is down, his exit velocity is diminished, and his wRC+ has dropped by 16 points. The outfielder’s hitting has fluctuated between dominant and poor, with his worst month coming in July: in 89 plate appearances, Cespedes launched just a single home run and recorded an isolated-power figure that was 43 points below league average.

Small windows of playing time can bring big performance swings, but Cespedes’ power drought wasn’t a product just of bad luck in a limited sample. Consider the chart below, which uses the LOESS method to smooth through Cespedes’ launch angle over the course of the season. Batted balls are ordered from the first (his first BIP on Opening Day) through the most recent (his last BIP yesterday). Horizontal bars are included to show his average launch angle in each of the four calendar months that make up the slugger’s season.

Cespedes’ average launch angle of 24.6 degrees in April was among the steepest in baseball. After sitting out May to recover from injuries, Cespedes returned for the next month and averaged a similarly high angle. He ended June with a .929 OPS, so his overall production didn’t signal anything out of the ordinary. But the real story is told by the smoothing curve, which shows how Cespedes was changing as a hitter. In June, his launch angle began a drop that accelerated into a plunge. By the latter part of July, he bottomed out at 12 degrees, a mark more fitting for a line-drive hitter than a slugger. His angle has climbed a bit higher in August, but it remains far below April’s range.

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I have followed Justin Smoak’s career with interest.

Before I was covering major league baseball, I reported on college athletics in South Carolina, first covering the Chanticleers of Coastal Carolina and later Clemson. During this period, Smoak became regarded as one of the best college players in the game while at the University of South Carolina. Mark Teixeira comps were being placed on him and some felt the Texas Rangers got a steal when he fell to the 11th overall pick in the 2008 draft. He was a switch hitter with power, batting skills and plate discipline. Read the rest of this entry »

Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels*, and (most importantly) lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated list — such as the revised and midseason lists released by Baseball America or BP’s recent midseason top-50 list — will also be excluded from eligibility.

*All 200 names!

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Ryan Helsley, RHP, St. Louis (Profile)
This now represents Helsley’s fifth appearance among the Five proper this season, moving him into a tie for second on the haphazardly calculated scoreboard located at the bottom of this post. Following his promotion to Double-A Springfield, the right-hander has continued to post impressive indicators. In the two starts and 12.0 innings he’s recorded since last week, for example, Helsley struck out 30% of batters faced, producing an 8:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio in the latter (and most recent) of those efforts, against Padres affiliate San Antonio (box).

Helsley recorded a number of swings and misses with his plus fastball and also cutter in that game. What else he did was utilize an objectively less impressive but still useful curveball for first-pitch strikes and awkward swings.

Consider three such curves from that contest:

The ability to extract value from a third or fourth pitch, even if it lacks the effectiveness of other offerings, is almost certainly of some benefit to a pitcher’s ability to assume a starting (as opposed to relief) role.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about their upcoming eclipse event, Jered Weaver’s retirement, a Tommy Pham tweet, and two recent examples of unorthodox positioning, then follow up on player nicknames, odd fields, two-touch fielding, and Khris Davis’s arm and, finally, answer listener emails about the Indians’ record and run differential, the Giants’ disaster season, whether javelin throwers would make amazing pitchers, Chris Davis striking out on pitches down the middle, whether Albert Pujols is underpaid, a blind free-agent market, the deadline acquisitions that have paid off the most so far, and more.

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There’s a difference between watching the game at home and watching at the park, that much is obvious. Personally, I’m more analytical at home, where I have the tools to identify pitch type and location with some precision, for example. At the field, I can only tell velocity and maybe spot the curveballs, so I get an adult soda, a good companion, and I talk and wait.

What am I waiting for? “People go to the game to see us put the ball in play, throw the ball away, and fall down,” Giants starter Jeff Samardzija told me the other day. “They want to see people doing things,” said Indians slugger Jay Bruce. I couldn’t disagree. The problem, if this is true, is that baseball is trending in the opposite direction. There are fewer balls in play now than at any other point in the history of the sport. There’s less of people doing things, to use Bruce’s words.

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Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto — they’re both cinch future Hall of Famers, as close approximations as any among current major leaguers to the ideal all-around hitter. They have consistently made hard contact to all fields, hit for average and power, and not conceded many free outs to opposing pitchers. And obviously, they’ve done it without any contribution from their legs; it’s been all bat.

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Because no one in the AL wild-card hunt feels much like being assertive, yesterday the Orioles and the Mariners played a game with potential playoff implications. The Mariners held a three-run lead going into the top of the ninth, but then Edwin Diaz came apart. Over the span of seven batters, Diaz walked three guys and hit two more. He benefited from a tremendous catch and from a borderline third strike call, but still Diaz couldn’t close it out. With the bases loaded in a 7-6 game, Marc Rzepczynski was called on to deal with Chris Davis. Rzepczynski was going for his second career major-league save.

The first pitch was a fastball off the plate inside, but Davis swung and missed. The second pitch was a fastball over the plate inside, and Davis swung and missed again. At 0-and-2, Davis had no reason to expect a fastball down the pipe. Rzepczynski had no reason to throw a fastball down the pipe. Rzepczynski threw one anyway, and Davis watched it sail. He watched it, and he watched it, until there was nothing left to watch.

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While there are certain events (like strikeouts, walks, and home runs) over which a pitcher exerts more or less direct control, it seems pretty clear at this point that there are some pitchers who are better at managing contact than others. It’s also also seems clear that, if a pitcher can’t manage contact at all, he’s unlikely to reach or stay in the big leagues for any length of time.

Consider: since the conclusion of World War II, about 750 pitchers have recorded at least 1,000 innings; of those 750 or so, all but nine of them have conceded a batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of .310 or less. Even that group of nine is pretty concentrated, the middle two-thirds separated by .029 BABIP. The difference between the guy ranked 125 out of 751 and the guy ranked 625 out of 751 is just three hits out of 100 balls in play. Those three hits can add up over a long period of time, of course, but it still represents a rather small difference even between players with lengthy careers. For that reason, attempting to discern batted-ball skills among pitchers with just a few seasons of data is difficult. Thanks to the emergence of Statcast, however, we have some better tools than just plain BABIP to evaluate a pitcher’s ability to manage contact. Let’s take a look at what the more granular batted-ball data reveals.

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It’s been a long season, so let me remind you of the start. These days, Sam Dyson is pretty good, and he pitches for the Giants. In April, Sam Dyson was pretty bad, and he was pitching for the Rangers. In the first game of the season, the Rangers led the Indians 5-3 in the seventh. The lead slipped away, and Dyson allowed three runs in the ninth to take the loss. In the third game of the season, the Rangers led the Indians 6-4 in the ninth. The lead slipped away, and Dyson allowed five runs to take the loss. The big knock was a one-out grand slam by Francisco Lindor; that currently stands as having been the third-highest-leverage plate appearance of the Indians’ year. The half-inning was as unforgettable as any half-inning can be in the first week of April.

The Indians got things started with a sweep, a sweep that featured plenty of good clutch hitting. That’s a great way to kick off a campaign, and it comes as little surprise that, in the middle of August, the team’s sitting fairly comfortably atop the AL Central. They’ve done well to hold off the Twins. They’ve done well to hold off the Royals. Ask the Indians, and they’d probably tell you they’ve expected to return to the playoffs from day one. They are plenty good enough. And yet in one sense, while the Indians have a good record, they’ve won despite their own efforts.

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