FanGraphs Baseball

In the year 2016, pitchers continued to hit, even though they are very bad at it. This is not good for the pitchers’ own teams, but this is good for science. It stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Aroldis Chapman. That doesn’t happen. Among the matchups that do actually happen, it stands to reason the most terrifying pitcher for another pitcher to try to hit against would be Noah Syndergaard. Let’s look at how that just went.

Over the course of last season, including the playoffs, Syndergaard had more than 50 matchups against opposing pitchers. As this particular split is concerned, that’s a fairly large sample size. How do you think the pitchers all did? You might be tempted to believe they all struck out. No, that’s not realistic. They didn’t even go hitless! So maybe the data won’t raise your eyebrows in the least, but don’t be mistaken — Syndergaard was dominant. (Obviously.)

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Position: Boras Corp. Baseball Research Analyst

Location: Southern California
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As I mentioned recently on Twitter, a friend of mine asked how common it is for a pitcher to be drafted by a major-league team after he’s already undergone Tommy John surgery.

I honestly didn’t know the answer, but assumed the rate was rather low.

I grabbed data on Tommy John surgeries from Jon Roegele’s indispensable database and draft information from Baseball-Reference. I focused on drafts that have occurred since 1986 and just the first 10 rounds. I then isolated individuals drafted as pitchers and merged the two data sets based on player name.

The overall rate of teams selecting pitchers who have already undergone Tommy John surgery appears to be 1.8%. Now, that rate changes a bit over time. There are many reasons for this, I’m sure: increased prevalence of the surgery, teams becoming more comfortable selecting a player who has undergone the surgery, and simply better data in the Tommy John database for later years.

In any case, here’s the rate trend by year:

Starting in 2006, the rate begins to increase, with the highest rates coming the past three seasons. On average, teams are now selecting pitchers with a prior Tommy John surgery between 7-9% of the time.

Who’s getting selected and by whom also differs to some extent.

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The Positional Power Rankings series continues, because it would be weird if it didn’t. In here, we’re going to deal with shortstops on a team-by-team basis, wherein all the teams are ranked by projected WAR. The projected WARs, of course, will often end up different from the actual WARs, but these are basically our best estimates of positional true talent given what we know today, and the rankings are an excuse to write some commentary on everyone. I know it’s already linked up there, but here’s the series introduction, again, if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at. It’s not that complicated! Except the projected-WAR part. That part is incredibly complicated. Here is a graph of everything:

There exists a belief that we’ve entered something of a golden age of shortstops. Relative to the league overall, shortstops just had their best offensive season on record. They also had their best collective WAR season in modern history. The belief begs for an explanation. One potential explanation would be that, no, there’s nothing here, and it’s all just random noise. That’s always one potential explanation for anything, and it’s never the fun one. Another potential explanation would be that, like so many things in baseball, it’s cyclical, and now we see shortstops on a temporary upswing.

My current preferred explanation is that teams now are more reluctant to move good players off shortstop. So many great players throughout baseball history used to be shortstops at some point. Players have been moved off because they got too big, or didn’t have enough mobility. Perhaps now teams don’t care so much about shortstop size. And it makes you wonder about the role of modern defensive shifting. It’s possible teams feel like new defensive alignments have reduced the need for extreme shortstop range. This is speculation on my part, but it’s where my mind is at the moment. Big players can stick, now more than ever. Let’s now talk about some big shortstops, and some littler shortstops. (There are still some little shortstops.) Off we go!

The place people care about most is first place, and here we have the Astros, which I’m sure will provoke something of a debate. I’ll note, though, that the only thing separating the Astros from the second-place team is the depth; the starters are projected to be virtually identical. I’ll say again, lots of teams have good shortstops. Lots of teams wouldn’t want to lose their own shortstops. The Astros are among those teams.

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Getting better at something can open you up to new risks. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that getting better at something can make you realize that you have to get even better at it. Addison Russell has worked hard to become a decent breaking-ball hitter. He’s made strides. Pitchers have responded, though — and used his confidence against him. So he’ll have to take another step forward to keep pace.

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This is Kate Preusser’s third piece as part of her month-long residency. Read her previous posts here. Listen to her appearance on FanGraphs Audio here.

When Benji Gonzalez, a 27-year-old non-roster invitee for the Twins, poked a single into right field to break up a perfect game being thrown by the Rays’ pitching staff one week into spring training, I admit to sighing in relief. No need for asterisks, then. No need for the arguments about whether a perfect game thrown by multiple pitchers counts as much as one thrown by a single pitcher. No reminders that spring training doesn’t count and that this technically wouldn’t go down in the record books as a perfect game.

Of course, spring training doesn’t count, but the white whale of a perfect game, even in spring training, even thrown by multiple pitchers, is such a compelling figure in baseball that discussion of it would have been inevitable — and made more inevitable, perhaps, by the fact that baseball fans haven’t seen a perfect game, spring training or otherwise, in five years.

There has already been one recorded spring-training perfect game — a Red Sox win over the Blue Jays in the year 2000, featuring starting pitcher Pedro Martinez. Pedro would go on to have a complicated relationship with the perfect game and the no-hitter, coming close but never quite getting there. The role he played in the perfect spring-training game is rarely noted. Once more for the folks in the back: spring training doesn’t count. Even Rays pitcher Danny Farquhar thought they were playing shuffleboard:

“It was probably two outs into my first inning when I realized we had a perfect game,” Farquhar said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, we have a lot of points, and they have zero points. I’m going to try and not mess this up.'”

The eloquent Lord Farquhar receives partial credit for this response. The Rays — whose 17-run offensive onslaught managed to so confound all involved parties that even Farquhar himself didn’t realize it was a perfect game until he was two-thirds deep in his own inning — did indeed have a lot of points. The Twins, however, didn’t just have zero points, they had perfectly zero points, and the Rays staff was hurtling toward rarefied air in the baseball sphere, even if this achievement would have to ride in a little sidecar or sit at a table in the back near the kitchen.

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Welcome to Day Three of the 2017 Positional Power Rankings from FanGraphs. For some background on how these posts work, read the introductory post by Dave Cameron. Click on the links above to examine other positions.

The rankings below come from the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections. While the projections spit out specific numbers, these projections are estimates and teams that are within a few tenths of a win of each other have similar forecasts for the season. While I didn’t create the projections, the commentary is my own.

Last season was marked by a surge of offense throughout baseball, and this was very much the case for second basemen, who posted one of the greatest seasons of all time for the position. While it might be tempting to point to some sort of emerging group of players set to change the way we think about the position, the evidence doesn’t support that hypothesis. Of the top-eight players, only Jose Altuve will play this season under the age of 30, with many of the best already in their mid-30s. Jose Altuve is the exception, not the rule, as the young star has a sizable lead over his competitors at second.

This is the first time in half a decade that the team with Robinson Cano isn’t atop this list. Cano didn’t stumble far and other aging vets fall in line behind him. As far as the order in which clubs appear here, there could be a shakeup before the year is out. A couple teams near the top might be shopping their second basemen if they fall out of contention. If you’re looking for a team to rise, look to the south side of Chicago, where the best prospect in baseball could get his first real shot at a starting job later this season.

Episode 726
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses Toronto’s Steve Pearce, matters relating to Steve Pearce, and also matters that possess no relevance to Steve Pearce at all.

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 38 min play time.)

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