Every player, of course, goes through ups and downs, but not every player has the same range between the peaks and the valleys. Take Matt Shoemaker. Just a few weeks ago, there was an argument that he could be the worst starting pitcher in the majors. Even the Angels didn’t know what to do with him, and the Angels are in no position to be picky. Through six starts, Shoemaker had an ERA north of 9, and he’d allowed a slugging percentage close to .600. He looked like the major-league version of the non-prospect he was once considered. He was in over his head. Every at-bat was a nightmare.

Over the last three starts, Shoemaker’s allowed five runs. Better yet, he’s managed 28 strikeouts with just a pair of walks, and two outings in a row now he’s ripped off double-digit whiffs without a single free pass. Since the somewhat arbitrary date of May 12, Shoemaker’s allowed a slugging percentage of .256, a thousandth of a point better than Jake Arrieta. Shoemaker isn’t one of the best pitchers in baseball, and he isn’t one of the worst pitchers in baseball, but he’s looked like both, within a very short time frame. The rebound here has been extreme.

What’s been the key for Shoemaker’s turnaround? Maybe he polished his mechanics. Maybe he’s clearer of head. Maybe almost anything. But there’s certainly one thing that does stand out, which is Shoemaker adopting the Masahiro Tanaka strategy. Tanaka simply doesn’t throw many fastballs. Shoemaker as well has gone with something else.

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Heading into the 2012 season, Baseball America wrote of DJ LeMahieu, “Most scouts see him as a singles hitter who doesn’t provide enough beyond his batting average.” BA added that “his fringy speed and quickness don’t fit at second base.”

The latter turned out to be patently false. The 27-year-old won a Gold Glove at second base with the Rockies in 2014, and he remains a solid defender. He doesn’t look like a middle infielder — LeMahieu is 6-foot-4 — but his plus-2 DRS over the last two years puts him solidly in the gets-the-job-done category.

From an offensive standpoint, the singles-hitter label has a grain of truth to it. Despite calling Coors Field home, LeMahieu doesn’t leave the yard very often. Extra-base hits aren’t his forte (last night’s home run and pair of doubles notwithstanding). And while he’ll accept a free pass — his walk rate is a respectable 8.3% — no one is about to compare him to Eddie Yost.

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Ben and Sam banter about a play at the plate and a bad fun fact, then discuss the defensive-positioning differences between the Dodgers and Mets.

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Not too long ago, FanGraphs editor Carson Cistulli was watching a broadcast of a baseball game during which the announcer remarked offhandedly that the pitcher’s batting average of .231 was equivalent roughly to a .400 mark for a position player. His interest piqued, Cistulli asked his FanGraphs colleagues: if not .231 precisely, then what is the equivalent of a .400 batting average for a pitcher? After nobody else expressed any interest in doing the same, I endeavored to answer the mostly frivolous question.

The easiest way to go about solving the problem is probably to look at percentile ranks — that is, at seasons from position players, broken into percentiles by batting average, compared to the same percentiles for pitchers. That’s where I started, at least. I looked at all qualified position players from 1986 to 2015, finding nearly 5,000 player-seasons. Then I turned to pitchers. Because no pitchers qualified for the batting title during that time range, I chose a threshold (a somewhat random figure of 50 plate appearances in a season), yielding nearly 1,500 pitcher player-seasons.

I created percentiles for both groups and set them at 10%, 33%, 50%, 67%, and 90% to yield averages. The table below shows the results:

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How do you know when a knuckleball pitcher is good? It’s not an easy question to answer. We know it’s not just a matter of having a knuckleball — there have been bad knuckleball pitchers. But the pitches themselves aren’t easy to scout, and the whole idea behind an effective knuckleball is sort of the lack of consistency. There’s not a large sample of these pitchers to examine, which further complicates things. A knuckleballer is the most unusual player type in the game, someone who can be almost impossible to trust, but someone who also throws a pitch that seems almost impossible to hit.

There’s a line somewhere. There has to be. There’s a line beyond which a knuckleball pitcher is legitimately good, and maybe that’s when he throws 60 good knuckleballs out of 100, or maybe it’s when he throws 90 good knuckleballs out of 100. We’ve seen R.A. Dickey be an ineffective knuckleballer, and we’ve seen him be an effective one. The pitch gave his career a second chance, which is one of its magical aspects. At some point, I suppose, you just have to look at the numbers. The numbers will tell you when a knuckleballer is working. I don’t know of any other approach, and what the numbers are indicating is that Steven Wright has mastered the weirdest pitch in the sport.

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Like my piece from two weeks ago, this one contains notes from the desert backfields of Extended Spring Training. Of note today: the professional debut of Brady Aiken. Appearances by Tim Lincecum, Huston Street and Dakota Chalmers serve your main side dish.

Brady Aiken, LHP, Cleveland Indians

Current Level: Extended Spring Training, Age: 19.3, Height/Weight: 6’4/225
Drafted: First round of 2015, 17th overall, signed for $2.5 mil

You should all know Aiken’s backstory by now (drafted by Houston, unsigned, Tommy John surgery, drafted by Cleveland), so let’s cut right to the chase and talk about the stuff. Aiken was 89-92 mph, with just decent arm acceleration and a bit of effort, though less of both than he had in high school. The fastball was quite straight and the kids at the White Sox’ Extended camp slapped it around. Aiken’s curveball has retained its impressive pre-surgery shape and depth. It bent in between 76 and 80 mph and a few of them were above average. The changeup (Aiken threw two, one at 85 and one at 86) was firm and below average, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect much more from a pitch so dependent on feel and release at this point in his rehab. Aiken will likely spend some time here in Arizona for Rookie-level ball before he heads to an affiliate, if he does at all. There’s no reason to draw conclusions based on how he looked, especially with so many opportunities for evaluation ahead, so keep in mind that this is just a snapshot of where things are at right now.

As you can see from the video, Aiken has become rather large. He’s listed at 205 pounds, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s pushing 230 right now. Whether that’s good or bad or anything at all is hard to say. Aiken was a workout warrior in high school (crossfit, box jumps, etc.) so it’s possible this is new found beef was added intentionally. It’s just one more thing to monitor throughout the summer. Aiken’s delivery in high school had, in my opinion, better pacing and balance and was generally more athletic and had less recoil than what he showed on Saturday.

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Heading into the season, there was probably no more polarizing team in baseball than the Diamondbacks. Despite adding Zack Greinke, Shelby Miller, and Tyler Clippard over the winter, our preseason forecasts pegged Arizona as a 78 win team, a win worse than they finished a year ago. The organization themselves saw a wildly different picture, and so many articles were written about the divide that I had to write a piece in March trying to dispel the notion that we had some kind of bias against the franchise.

You know what’s happened since then. First, the team suffered a devastating loss when A.J. Pollock’s lingering elbow issues turned into a season-ending injury right before Opening Day. Then Zack Greinke gave up seven runs in his first regular season start with the team, and struggled through a slow start to the season. Then Shelby Miller imploded, pitching worse than any other starter in baseball this year. And now it’s the end of May and the team is 23-30, already nine games behind the Giants in the NL West race.

But this isn’t a post gloating that we were right all along. In reality, some of the D’Backs optimism surrounding their team has actually been more correct than our pessimism about the team’s chances, if you look beyond the overall record, anyway. Our projections didn’t like the Diamondbacks because it had a negative view of their role players, thinking that this was basically a stars-and-scrubs team that relied too heavily on a few elite players. But so far, those role players have been carrying the team, keeping it afloat while the big names struggle.

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Last week, Rian Watt published a terrific piece at Vice Sports on the growing use of wearable technology by Major League Baseball teams for purposes of collecting players’ biometric data. If you haven’t read Watt’s article, go check it out, it’s fantastic. In short, though, the piece explores the ethical implications of MLB teams asking their players to wear devices — such as the Readiband sleep monitoring system recently employed by the Seattle Mariners — that collect data that can not only be used for purposes of fine-tuning players’ on-field performance, but also potentially for roster- and contract-related decisions as well.

For instance, while the sleep-tracking data provided by Readiband could certainly help players adjust their sleep patterns to maximize their chances of performing at a peak level on the playing field, this data could also give teams insight into a player’s habits undertaken in the privacy of his own home. It’s not hard to imagine a team ultimately incorporating such information, or other forms of biometric data, into their player evaluations in ways that may ultimately harm a player’s career prospects or earning potential.

In addition to the ethical considerations surrounding the use of these technologies explored in Watt’s article, the collection of biometric data by MLB franchises also has potential legal implications as well. As Watt notes in his piece, wearable technology may very well become an issue during this year’s collective-bargaining negotiations between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association. Indeed, Pirates’ infielder Cole Figueroa recently mentioned during an episode of the Effectively Wild podcast that a number of MLB players are growing increasingly concerned over the potentially adverse consequences of the growing use of this technology by their teams.

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