Ben and Sam discuss the Diamondbacks’ bench (literally), Johnny Cueto’s varied deliveries, Zack Cozart’s incredible power, the demise of David Wright, Ichiro and Rose, and Kershaw’s unjust walks.
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Earlier this week, we began a position-by-position look at hitter contact quality with a review of the first-base and DH population. Today, we continue to use granular ball-in-play data, such as BIP type frequencies, exit speed and launch angle, to review second basemen.
A couple of weeks ago, James Shields gave up 10 runs in a start against the Mariners, prompting the Padres owner to call the team’s performance embarrassing. He even cited Shields by name, saying that the pitcher — 18 months into a four year, $75 million contract — should be embarrassed by his outing. It would be the last start Shields would make as a Padre, as a few days later, San Diego shipped him to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for a replacement level arm and a 17 year old who is a long way off from the big leagues. In order to facilitate the deal, the Padres agreed to pick up $31 million of the remaining $58 million on Shields’ deal, giving the White Sox an innings eater at an innings eater price.
At least, that was the thought. In both of his first two starts in Chicago, Shields has been a disaster, giving up 14 runs and lasting only seven innings combined between the two outings. Combined with his final start in San Diego, Shields has now allowed 24 runs in his last three starts, and it’s not like it was just bad luck; he has a 13.48/8.46 FIP/xFIP over those outings as well. It’s likely that Shields will turn things around, as he’s not the worst pitcher baseball has ever seen, but you have to think the White Sox are already wondering if the Padres sold them a lemon.
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time a perfectly reasonable sounding plan — a contender taking on part of an albatross contract in order to get a fairly priced veteran without surrendering much value in return — went sour. In fact, if you look at the recent history of deals made in the same vein as the Shields trade, they’ve almost all been disasters for the acquiring team.
Now that the draft has passed it’s time to get caught up on the weekend’s most significant call-up, that of White Sox top prospect Tim Anderson. Anderson was hitting .304/.325/.409 at Triple-A Charlotte before his promotion.
First, let’s appreciate how incredible it is that Anderson has come this far in such a short amount of time. He didn’t begin playing baseball seriously until his junior year of high school and received no Division I offers despite playing just under eight miles from the University of Alabama and for a school that has produced big-league talent in the past in former reliever Brandon Medders. Instead, Anderson’s chief athletic accomplishment in high school came in basketball, where he helped Hillcrest High School capture an Alabama state title in 2011 (video here, Anderson is #12). Jalen Brown, who clearly looks like the best scorer on that team, ended up averaging just over 10 points per game at Shelton State College, another local school that whiffed on Anderson.
After he began focusing on baseball, Anderson ended up at East Central Community College in Decatur, Mississippi, and slashed .306/.425/.500 with 30 steals in 30 attempts (per Baseball Cube) as a freshman in 2012 but somehow went undrafted. He was finally unearthed during a small college summer league later that year, then blew up at an autumn JUCO showcase and was selected in the first round the following June.
Anderson has prodigious physical skill. He has plus bat speed, clunky-yet-effective bat control and an ability to drive the ball to various parts of the field despite footwork that’s usually indicative of pull-only hitters. In fact, three of Anderson’s four home runs this season have been to right field. Despite special bat speed, Anderson doesn’t yet have a feel for striking the baseball in a way that generates consistent lift, especially to his pull side, and most of his contact is hard but into the ground. It’s a unique contact profile and one that’s tough to grade, but generally scouts think Anderson will end up a 50 or 55 hitter.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Seattle at Tampa Bay | 13:10 ET
Paxton (16.0 IP, 45 xFIP-) vs. Snell (5.0 IP, 86 xFIP-)
If you’re the sort of person who’s impressed by strong fielding-indepenent pitching performances, then James Paxton’s most recent start (his third of the season) is for you. If you’re the sort of person who’s concerned only with a pitcher’s capacity to prevent runs — regardless of how he manages it — James Paxton’s most recent start is for you. If you’re the sort of person who’s like, “I’m more about guys with electric stuff. Like, they have this stuff, right? And that stuff is composed either mostly or entirely of electricity.” In that case, you might be Norm Macdonald, because he talks like that. But also, James Paxton’s most recent start is for you, probably. Finally, if you’re the sort of person who detests the rhetorical device anaphora, then this brief paragraph likely possesses little appeal for you. For that reason, and others too, maybe.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Tampa Bay Radio.
Yesterday morning, I published a post on the main site detailing Jose Altuve’s base-running woes of the past two seasons. Within that post, I noted that Altuve is a good base-stealer, citing his success rate on stolen-base attempts this season. “Among the 71 players with at least five steal attempts this year, Altuve’s success rate ranks third,” I said. The stat would’ve been cooler if I could’ve said he was first, but I couldn’t say that, because there were two Red Sox players in front of him.
Most efficient base-stealers, 2016 (min. five steal attempts)
Two Red Sox at the top! Bradley and Betts are a combined 16-for-16 on steal attempts this year. Interesting! Bradley has still never been thrown out on a steal attempt in his major-league career, about which fact I wrote in the offseason. He’s now eight successful steals away from tying the all-time record of consecutive successes to begin a career. And then Betts might just be the best all-around base-runner in the game.
So, those two have been perfect at stealing bases, but as I scrolled down the list of base stealing efficiency, something caught my eye. In 11th place is Hanley Ramirez — Hanley Ramirez! — who’s 5-for-6. Xander Bogaerts is four spots behind him, at 9-for-11. Two spots behind Bogaerts is Dustin Pedroia, 4-for-5.
It’s the whole team! But is it really the whole team? I made a new spreadsheet of team base-stealing efficiency. I think this plot is pretty fun:
Dillon Gee isn’t a Met anymore. Nor is he a starter (at least not as his primary role). The 30-year-old right-hander is working out of the bullpen in his first season with the Royals. No longer needed in New York, he inked a free-agent deal with Kansas City over the winter.
Gee was a solid, albeit unremarkable, starter for the Mets from 2011 to -14. Then the deGroms, Harveys and Syndergaards burst onto the scene (the ageless Bartolo, too). That made it time to move on, and Gee is now a long reliever making spot starts for a new team. He’s adapting well. In 12 appearances for the defending World Series champs, he has a 3.98 ERA and a career-best 8.2 K/9.
Gee talked about his transition earlier in the season.
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Gee on transitioning to the Royals and a relief role: “I’m probably a better pitcher now than I was in my earlier years. This is just the role I have now. I kind of got phased out in New York. They obviously had some young studs coming up, and I lost my spot there. I had a few opportunities to remain a starter with other teams, but I chose to come here and contribute out of the bullpen for a winning team.
We’ve entered into the Statcast era, but just before the Statcast era, we had to make do with more subjective evaluations. Among the evaluations was the Fan Scouting Report, a Tangotiger project to crowd-source player defense. One of the categories to be evaluated as part of the Fan Scouting Report has been arm strength. Okay, so, getting to the point, Ben Revere became a big-league regular in 2011. I looked at all the reports for outfielders who were regulars between 2011 – 2015, splitting into individual player-seasons. This is a five-year window, yes? I sorted all the players in ascending order of perceived arm strength. I isolated the worst 20. Here’s how many times the following players appear in the worst 20:
Overall, combining the seasons, Revere rated second-worst in arm strength. He also tied for worst in arm accuracy, so, you know, that sucks. Revere has a weak arm, relatively speaking, and he’s always had a weak arm, relatively speaking, and this is all to establish the setting. Revere is a center fielder who can barely throw, and that’s why Miguel Montero went and tried to tag up on a routine fly near the track.
“Bold,” is one thing you could say. “Disrespectful” would be no less accurate. Montero clearly didn’t respect Revere’s throwing arm, and, well, there’s really no reason to. But this time Revere got the last laugh, and it’s not like his throw was even particularly impressive. It was off-line and short of the bag, but Montero might’ve spent too much time thinking about Revere’s arm and too little time thinking about the fact that he himself is a 32-year-old catcher. Yeah, Revere has gotten a lousy rating out of 100 in arm strength. Montero just last year got a 25 for his speed.
The best part of all: Statcast era, right? I asked Daren Willman about the Statcast reading for Revere’s assist, which was his first of the season. Willman:
Doesn’t look like the system captured the MPH for that throw…
Even Statcast doesn’t know what to do with a Ben Revere outfield assist. The entry’s blank. As blank as Joe Maddon’s mind grapes.
Revere now has as many assists this year as Jason Heyward.
At the very end of the most recent episode of FanGraphs Audio, host Carson Cistulli and guest Dave Cameron were bantering about players whose primary offensive skill was once thought to be limited to controlling the strike zone and making contact, but who have since added plus power while maintaining most of that strike zone control — guys in the mold of Jose Altuve, Matt Carpenter, Mookie Betts or Xander Bogaerts.
During this conversation, Cistulli submitted an anecdote that made my ears perk up:
Carson Cistulli: This is uber-anecdotal, but I do feel as though we see more players going from this high-contact, control sort of skill set and developing power from that direction than, say, the Joey Gallo skillset, where the power is obvious but the ability to make contact — I feel like those players do not grow into contact.
Dave Cameron: I think that’s absolutely true. Contact rate is something that is very difficult to change. Your swing is kind of your swing, to some regard. You can change it, but it does not appear that players have as much ability to shift from a Giancarlo Stanton-level contact ability to a Mookie Betts kind of contact level. We just don’t see those dramatic changes.
CC: And it’s your brain, too, right? Isn’t your brain involved in that?
DC: Yeah, it’s like how fast your mind fires when it sees a pitch and how well it picks up the spin of the ball and the location of the ball, and it tells your hand-eye coordination and how quickly you can get the bat through the zone. There’s a lot of neuroscience that goes into that ability.
It’s an interesting conversation for a number of reasons — namely the distinction between innate vs. physical abilities — but the reason it made my ears perk up is because I’d just been thinking about Joc Pederson, who’s currently doing the exact sort of thing Cameron and Cistulli submitted was more difficult to do.
Pederson was a polarizing figure as a rookie in 2015 thanks to his red-hot start, his dreadful second half, and perhaps more than anything else his three-true outcomes approach at the plate which, after the All-Star Break, resulted in countless whiffs and very few homers. It’s the exact sort of skillset that fanbases tend not to appreciate, because nothing looks uglier than a swing and a miss.
What isn’t ugly is this:
Largest improvements in contact rate
That’s every qualified hitter from 2015 to 2016, and Pederson’s lead is enormous. Last year, Pederson had the second-worst contact rate in the league, within spitting distance of Ryan Howard. This year, he’s climbed nearly all the way to league-average, making company with guys like Carlos Correa and Starling Marte.
And Pederson hasn’t traded any of his power for this newfound contact. Rather, he’s added power.
This plot nicely ties together the strides Pederson’s made at the plate:
That’s Pederson way up top in the yellow, the most encouraging dot in the entire image, unless you’re partial to DJ LeMahieu’s place to his right.
You’ve got to love what Pederson’s doing. The interesting thing is that his season wRC+ (117) is essentially unchanged from last year’s (115), due mostly to the fact that his walk rate has taken a bit of a hit. Goes to show that walks are valuable, too, and so was last year’s version of Pederson. This year’s version is just what people wanted to see.
