It’s been a big season for Michael Saunders, and for his career. He’s long been dogged by injury questions, and a season ago he was limited to just nine games played. For 2016 he’s been able to stay on the field, and his bat has done the talking. He’s been part of a loaded Blue Jays lineup, but he’s still third on the team in wRC+, below Edwin Encarnacion but ahead of Jose Bautista. The Jays now have sole possession of first place in the AL East, and given some of what they’ve gone through, it makes sense that they might owe Saunders a great deal of gratitude, his recent slump aside. He’s mostly been stable, and he’s become rather strong.

Numbers are funny, though. There are different ways to spin them, even if you don’t want to spin them. It would be completely legitimate to say Saunders has been one of the best hitters on the team. You could also very legitimately say Saunders has been arguably the least-valuable hitter on the team. It’s true that he’s third in wRC+. It’s true that he’s last in WPA. In a few ways, then, Michael Saunders is having a season to remember.

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We’re now more than halfway through our division-by-division look at granular team ball-in-play data, as of the All Star break. Today, we take a macro-type view of the plate-appearance frequency and BIP exit speed/angle detail for NL East clubs.

About 90 games’ worth of balls in play is a fairly substantial sample size, one that enables us to make fairly educated guesses about the true talent level of each team. Let’s use this information to project true-talent team won-lost records and compare them to their actual marks at the break, examining the reasons for material variation along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Loewen was designated for assignment by the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday. His future is thus in limbo, but that’s nothing new for the 32-year-old southpaw. Loewen has become well-acquainted with adversity and uncertainty since being drafted fourth-overall by the Orioles in 2002.

A contract squabble delayed the start of Loewen’s professional career, and he had barely 100 big-league innings under his belt when elbow woes threw a monkey wrench into his pitching aspirations. No longer able to toe the rubber, the Surrey, British Columbia product — a promising hockey player in his formative years — was converted into a position player.

Not surprisingly, ups and downs followed. Loewen had his moments as a slugging outfielder, but there was a lot of swing-and-miss to his game and he never put it all together. A strong 2011 season in hitter-friendly Las Vegas prompted an opportunity with the Blue Jays, but a 6-for-32 cameo in Toronto brought expectations back to earth. A few years later — his elbow no longer barking — he came full circle. Like no one before him had done at the big-league level, the 6-foot-6 Lefty returned to the mound after once leaving it to become a position player. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to know the most insidious part of my job, it’s deciding what to write about when. Some of the decisions aren’t that crafty — sometimes I have to sit on a Kenta Maeda interview because August just wrote him up, for example. Other times, it’s a small move, like publishing a piece about a pitcher on the day he pitches instead of the day before.

But there are times that make me feel icky. Like the time I talked to Sean Manaea in May and never wrote it up because I felt like there were topics out there that might get more interest. And because I was waiting for a good stretch of ball from him. Well, congratulations to me for being a bad person — Manaea has a 2.84 ERA with 38 strikeouts and just eight walks in 44.1 innings since July tenth. Time to transcribe, you awful, awful dude!

The good news is that we can now check in on the things that Manaea was working on back then and see how they worked out. Welp. If I’d been less honest now, I could have said I planned this all along. Oh well, now you know more about me. Time to know more about Manaea.

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From 2008-11, Tim Lincecum and Justin Verlander were two of the five best pitchers in the world. The only three pitchers with a higher WAR than those two over that time period were into their 30’s. Verlander was coming off a Cy Young Award victory in 2011; Lincecum already had a pair under his belt from 2008-09. They were both under the age of 28, and were seen as perhaps the two most likely pitchers of that time to go down as all-time greats.

We know what happened with Lincecum. The following year, he lost his fastball. Without the fastball, he struggled to ever adapt. Essentially overnight, he became ineffective, and now five years later, it looks like his career might be over.

Verlander began to lose his fastball in 2013, and by 2014, he, too, was beginning to look ineffective. The strikeouts plummeted, and just two years removed from Lincecum’s swift decline, we began to ask questions wondering if Verlander was hurt or if he could ever be a front-line starter again. All signs pointed to no. As recent as midseason 2015, Verlander looked like one of the least valuable players in the game. It seemed as if we’d lost another one of the greats to the dreaded fastball decline.

Except, something’s happened. Over the last calendar year, here are the five most valuable starting pitchers in baseball, according to our measure of WAR:
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Just fourteen months after having been selected first overall in the draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Dansby Swanson is making his Major League debut for the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday. While Swanson doesn’t have a robust collection of plus tools and won’t be setting the National League ablaze with top-of-the scale speed or monster raw power, his skillset is air tight with nothing but the smallest of nits to pick. Combined with his ability to play most valuable of position in baseball, Swanson should provide All Star-level value for the Braves. Read the rest of this entry »

In retrospect, it was inevitable. Monday night, Bartolo Colon did what once looked to be impossible and drew the first walk of his major league career. The all-time leader in plate appearances without drawing a single free pass stepped to the plate in the fourth inning against Diamondbacks pitcher Robbie Ray and seven pitches later the history books were rewritten.

It was a bittersweet moment for me. Seeing a 43-year-old player achieve something on the baseball diamond for the first time is always thrilling, but this achievement also brought an end to one of my favorite streaks. In June, I wrote about Bartolo Colon’s record-setting game in celebration of an accomplishment I’d actively watched develop for months. The problem with records like these, however, is that it takes just one plate appearance to undo everything. Ben Revere had an incredible stretch with zero career home runs… until he didn’t. Bartolo Colon had an incredible stretch with zero career walks… until Monday. One of these days, Matt Albers and Ryan Webb may even draw a save and put an end to their remarkable streaks.

During Colon’s record-setting game — his record-setting plate appearance, to be even more precise – he provided a hint that this record would not be long-lived. The previous (and now current) record holder was Tracy Stallard whose career ended with zero walks in 258 plate appearances. When Colon tied Stallard’s record, not only had he never drawn a walk, he’d worked just six three-ball counts over those 258 plate appearances. So, naturally, in the record-breaking 259th PA, Colon worked a full count.

As it turns out, the impeccably timed three-ball count wasn’t a mere fluke, but instead was indicative of a significant shift in Colon’s approach at the plate. In his first two seasons with the Mets, Colon posted a 51.6 Swing% which was the 95th highest among 546 batters with 130+ plate appearances. This season, his Swing% has plummeted to 41.2% which ranks 446th among 517 batters with 40+ plate appearances. Although his Contact% has also dropped from a bad 63.5% in his first two seasons to an atrocious 48.5% this year, going from a guy who swung too much and rarely made contact to a guy who swung rarely and hardly ever made contact was enough to set up the inevitability of a base on balls.

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