FanGraphs Baseball

Few people benefit in Pittsburgh from Starling Marte’s 80-game steroid suspension, but Andrew McCutchen could be one of them.

After McCutchen logged the first eight seasons and 10,317.1 innings of his defensive career exclusively in center field, the Pirates elected to move him — against his wishes — to right field this year. The idea? To accommodate the more able glove and fleeter feet of Marte in center field. While moving a Face of the Franchise off a position at age 30 is unusual — just a reminder that Derek Jeter never moved to second base — consider McCutchen’s four-year Defensive Runs Saved numbers: 2013 (5), 2014 (-13), 2015 (-8), 2016 (-28).

The -28 was an MLB worst last season.

The right-field experiment had worked out reasonably well early this season, even if McCutchen’s heart wasn’t into it. But that experiment is on hold now, as McCutchen receives a second — and perhaps a last — chance in center field. McCutchen seemed pleased to return there when speaking with my former employer, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“Center field is where I need to play. It’s where I want to be at. If I’ve got to show a couple people that — show I can do what I need to do — that’s what I’m going to do.”

During his stunning age-29 season, stunning for the extent to his production collapsed, McCutchen claimed he was healthy. But teammate Gregory Polanco appeared to suggest that McCutchen actually wasn’t. “He seems faster than last year,” said Polanco. “His knee is healthy again and he’s flying.”

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Christian Arroyo, 3B, San Francisco (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 1  Top 100: 69
Line: 4-for-5, 2B, HR

Notes
That’s a home run in two consecutive games for Arroyo — both in Sacramento’s Raley Field, which is pitcher-friendly compared to most other PCL parks. Arroyo’s home run on Monday was a 350-foot opposite-field poke. I wouldn’t prematurely jump ship on Arroyo despite his modest statistical output last year. He’s still just 21, already at Triple-A and has rare bat-to-ball skills. He’s a better defensive fit at second or third base than shortstop (where he’s playing most of his time now) and lacks power and great walk rates. But Arroyo is tough to strike out and should be able to play somewhere favorable on the defensive spectrum or several positions. If the bat maxes out, he could profile similarly to Martin Prado.

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This is Joe Sheehan’s’s third 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. Read all our residency posts here.

Starling Marte has been suspended 80 games for a first violation of the Joint Drug Agreement. Per MLB, Marte tested positive for Nandrolone. He accepted the suspension, calling his actions “a mistake” without denying responsibility for the positive test. Marte will be eligible to return on July 18, when the Pirates play their 94th game of the season at home against the Brewers. Per the latest changes to the JDA, Marte will also be ineligible for the 2017 postseason.

This is a blow for a Pirates team that needed everything to go right to challenge for a playoff berth. Already playing without infielder Jung Ho Kang, whose DUI violations have left him unable to secure a visa, the loss of Marte for 80 games projects to something like a two-win hit for a team that didn’t have two wins to spare. The Pirates have moved Andrew McCutchen back to center field to cover for Marte, and Marte’s playing time will fall mostly to Adam Frazier, off to a .295/.354/.455 start while playing five positions. Jose Osuna and John Jaso should get some extra PAs in Marte’s stead as well.

On the horizon is Austin Meadows, the No. 5 prospect in baseball according to Eric Longenhagen and No. 7 prospect according to MLB.com. Meadows, though, is off to a .146/.217/.244 start at Triple-A, running his line at that level across two seasons and 191 PA to .198/.277/.407. Meadows’s prospect status is intact; it’s just not likely that he’ll be ready for the majors before Marte can return.

Since the penalties for failing tests were increased in 2015, in the wake of the not-shady-at-all Biogenesis “investigation,” 14 players have been suspended 16 times under the MLB regime. (Jenrry Mejia, the Mets relief pitcher, was dinged three times in 10 months and is serving a lifetime ban.) Half of those are pitchers, and the other half have combined for 270 home runs in more than 10,000 plate appearances, 159 of those homers by Marlon Byrd. I mention this because it’s important to remember that Starling Marte’s suspension is result of home runs. Every single suspended player over the last 13 years owes his punishment to home runs: home runs none of them hit, home runs that were misunderstood in the moment and remain poorly understood today, home runs that were nevertheless used as a pretense for an elaborate campaign that assumes all players cheat and forces them to prove otherwise.

MLB expanded by two teams in 1993, adding the Florida Marlins and the Colorado Rockies. Offense jumped, as it always does in expansion years, from 4.1 runs per team-game to 4.6, helped by 81 games in the thin air of Denver. The strike years of 1994-95 saw an average of 4.9 runs per team-game, then 5.0 in 1996 before a dip to 4.8 in 1997. At that moment, it seemed as if the expansion effect was washing out of the player pool.

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Position: Tampa Bay Rays TrackMan Stringers/Operators

Location: Port Charlotte, Fla.

Description:
TrackMan Stringers/operators will be responsible for running the TrackMan system for Charlotte Stone Crabs’ home games they’re assigned in Port Charlotte, Fla. The number of games each stringer works varies by week. Stringer(s) will start as soon as possible.
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Sometimes baseball is good, and sometimes baseball is bad, but always, baseball is weird. It can be weird because a player gets hit by pitches in four plate appearances in a row. It can be weird because a game ends with a strikeout, and then everyone celebrates, and then the umpire decides the pitch the batter missed wasn’t actually missed after all, even though it clearly and totally was, and then the game awkwardly resumes and ends with a strikeout a second time. And it can be weird because a guy like Kyle Hendricks walks a guy like Tommy Milone on a number like four pitches. There’s always this undercurrent of weird, and from time to time it bursts to the surface like a baseball-y geyser.

Think about what we have here. This event just took place earlier Wednesday afternoon. Kyle Hendricks is the pitcher people have loved to compare to Greg Maddux. At times, the comparison hasn’t even seemed all that crazy, and Maddux could use a bucket of baseballs to go hummingbird hunting. Tommy Milone, meanwhile, is and will forever be Tommy Milone, and not only is Tommy Milone a pitcher, but he’s also a pitcher you might not have even realized was still pitching in the majors. He is! Although, this afternoon, he was both pitching and hitting. As a hitter, he walked on four pitches, against Kyle Hendricks. OK.

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Earlier today, Nicolas Stellini documented umpire CB Bucknor’s tough night behind the plate at SunTrust Park on Tuesday. As Stellini noted, it’s only April 19 and we already have a contender for the worst call of the year.

But we also have a contender for the best call of the year.

As tough a night as Bucker endured, his performance also included one of the most courageous third-strike calls I’ve seen. Really! In fact, considering the actions of the Atlanta catcher, it might have been among the best strike calls I’ve seen.

On the seventh pitch of Wilmer Difo’s seventh-inning at-bat on Tuesday night, Braves right-hander Mike Foltynewicz missed his intended location by the width of the plate. The pitch, nevertheless, did graze the lower portion of the strike zone, and it was justly called (by Bucknor) a third strike.

While the pitch didn’t reach its intended target, it was a nearly perfect offering in one sense — namely, that it was difficult to hit or, at least, hit well. But it was surprising that Bucknor called the pitch a third strike, as Braves catcher Kurt Suzuki failed to catch the pitch. Instead, Suzuki whiffed on it.

It’s rare to see a major-league catcher fail to secure a fastball that passes through the strike zone. And it’s even more rare to see such a pitch actually called a strike by the home-plate umpire.

On one of the worst of nights we might see from a home-plate umpire this season, Bucknor also made one of the best calls we might see all season.

Here’s video of the pitch in question:

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You know how this works: Early into any season, many of us get obsessed with checking on fastball velocities. Big positive changes might portend great success — or surgery. And big negative changes might indicate future struggles — or surgery. It’s all guesswork in the first half of April, but it’s something, something potentially meaningful. Fastball speeds generally don’t lie to you. It’s this line of thinking that brought Jake Arrieta to my attention a short while ago; out of the gate in 2017, Arrieta wasn’t throwing the same stuff. He’s a high-profile pitcher, who’s put up high-profile numbers, and so any change is an important one.

I’ve kept my eye on Arrieta. I tend to dismiss pitchers who are dismissive of velocity changes, because they all say the same thing. At the end of the day, velocity loss is correlated to performance decline. There are exceptions, but there are exceptions to almost everything. Yet, there’s a complicating factor here. Arrieta’s velocity is down, and on its own, that’s troubling to me. But within context, perhaps we’re just observing something intentional. You know who else has lost velocity? Jon Lester. Also Kyle Hendricks. Also John Lackey. And also Brett Anderson. All the other guys in Arrieta’s starting rotation.

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Everyone has bad days at work. You’ve had them. If you read my work, you sure as heck know I’ve had them. Even Mike Trout’s theoretically had one or two. Not everyone can be on top of his or her game at every second of every minute on the clock. It’s just a simple fact of life.

CB Bucknor seems to have these nights more often than most. Any cursory poll asking for the names of the worst umpires in the big leagues will yield Bucknor’s name as one of the most popular answers. Less cursory polls have produced a similar result. He has long been at the center of some of baseball’s more frustrating officiating experiences, whether it be with his work behind the plate or on the bases. It was the former that drew the ire of just about everyone in Cobb County last night, especially that of Jayson Werth.

Werth, at this stage of his career, has fully bought into the Danny Glover-in-Lethal–Weapon method of thinking. He’s too old for your crap, and he’s been here long enough to tell you why you’re wrong. It’s a pretty fun thing to behold, especially when he’s had it up to here with whatever injustice has been perpetrated that day. The crap, in Werth’s estimation, began with his fourth-inning plate appearance. Here’s a graph of the pitches from same. (Note: from catcher’s perspective.)

He struck out. BrooksBaseball and PitchInfo think the third pitch was a strike, and video from last night shows that it was borderline, but not an egregious call.

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Take a look at Charlie Blackmon’s defensive charts and you’ll notice that he has a good side, one where he’s made a higher percentage of catches than the other. On the one hand, that seems strange: humans are largely symmetrical creatures. On the other, maybe it makes perfect sense: most people have dominant hands and eyes and move better in certain directions.

Nowhere is the latter point more painfully clear to me, personally, than on the basketball court. As much as I practice going to my left, I usually do something very silly when I attempt the feat in a game. If I get to the left and actually get to the hoop, my mechanics fall apart when I get there, and I end up doing a strange thing with my right hand that leads to cuss words more often than points.

So when I saw this map for Blackmon, I figured it was all about that first step. See those hits over his left shoulder that are colored blue? Those are relatively high-percentage catches that have fallen into play against him. Must not be stepping well in that direction, I figured.

But when I asked the outfielder about those hits and his first step, he laughed. First, he thanked me for highlighting his shortcomings. Then he said something surprising — “I prefer the ball to my left,” he said. “There’s something I don’t like about running towards a ball to my right.”

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Lewis Brinson, CF, Milwaukee (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 1  Top 100: 16
Line: 4-for-6, 2B, HR, 2 R

Notes
Brinson has hit in five consecutive games since returning from a dislocated pinkie. Injuries and strikeouts have long been Brinson’s issues, but he’s made significant adjustments in what are now parts of six pro seasons. Once vulnerable on the inner half due to lever length, Brinson can now pull his hands in and, even though he isn’t getting extended, he’s strong enough to do things like this:

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