You know about the Cubs. It’s the team that entered spring training as the consensus World Series favorite. It’s the team with the already impressive collection of young stars who tacked on with a splashy offseason. It’s the team that already threw a no-hitter. The team with the potentially historic blend of discipline and power. Maybe you’re tired of hearing about the Cubs already. Maybe you think the coverage and attention has been overkill. Or maybe you think they’re deserving of more coverage, and more attention, considering they’re 14-5 with a run differential (+64) nearly as large as the next two best teams by that measure combined (Cardinals and Nationals, +74).

Whatever your stance, you’re getting one more Cubs post for the time being, because for all the attention the lineup and rotation has received, there’s another area in which they’re deserving of attention, an area that often goes overlooked but that can very much matter. In addition to the lineup having a top-five adjusted batting line with the most runs scored, the rotation being the best in baseball by ERA and second-best by FIP, and the defense leading everyone in Defensive Runs Saved, the Cubs have also been the best base-running team in the sport. Not only is it a continuation of last year’s success in that department, but it’s something that was seemingly improved by one offseason acquisition, and perhaps more importantly, amplified by another.

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About eight years ago, Tanner Roark was pitching in the independent Frontier League after his college team released him. He had an ERA greater than 20.00 in three games. Then the Rangers drafted him, traded him to the Nationals, and he switched to throwing only two-seamers as his main fastball. A few years later, he put up a three-win, 198-inning season, and now — after largely unsuccessful work out of the bullpen in 2015 — he’s a few days removed from a 15-strikeout game. The career arc was pretty tumultuous and incredible before Saturday’s game, and now it’s the sort of thing about which someone writes a book a decade afterwards.

Let’s start with a table to reinforce this day of strangeness. Below is a list of all of the 15-plus strikeout games in the past five years. There are 21 of them, from Jered Weaver’s (!) 15-K game in April of 2011 all the way up to Roark’s gem this past Saturday. Average fastball velocity displayed is for that particular 15-plus strikeout game:

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The Rays called up left-handed pitching prospect Blake Snell from Triple-A to face the Yankees in a spot start on Saturday. Snell looked very good in his debut. Although he lasted just five innings, he yielded just two hits, one walk and zero runs. By fanning six, he maintained the ~30% strikeout rate pace he’d been keeping in the minors for the last year-plus.

Prior to his call up, he owned a 3.01 FIP and 33% strikeout rate in three Triple-A starts this season. Last year, he blew through three minor-league levels — High-A, Double-A and Triple-A — and posted a 1.41 ERA and 2.71 FIP. Snell struck out an eye-popping 31% of opposing hitters, tops among pitchers to record at least 120 minor-league innings last year.

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Episode 648
Emma Baccellieri is a writer for FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus — as well as a contributor (past and/or present) to the McClatchy family of papers, the Charlotte Observer, and the Chronicle of Duke University. She’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This episode of the program is sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

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 59 min play time.)

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Ben and Sam banter about a behind-the-scenes Barry Bonds story, then talk to legal consultant Jason Wojciechowski about why it’s both good and bad that replay review is like the law.

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Brandon Guyer was hit by a pitch three times on Thursday, twice by David Price and once by Noe Ramirez. The Tampa Bay outfielder also had a pair of singles, reaching base a personal best five times as the Rays bested Boston 12-8.

The triple HBP feat tied a MLB record. It had happened 22 times previously, and Guyer was no stranger to the list. Last October, he hobbled to first base courtesy of three Mark Buehrle inside offerings. On the season, he was hit 24 times, the most of any American League player.

Following Thursday’s game, I asked the University of Virginia product about his proclivity to get plunked. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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We’ve gotten to see many sides of Nolan Arenado over the past two years. The maker of ridiculous defensive plays. The hitter of a multitude of home runs. The effusive trotter of the base paths. With regard to his plate discipline, however, Arenado hasn’t changed much since he got to the majors. To call him a “free swinger” doesn’t really do him justice: between 2014 and -15, Arenado ranked 10th in overall swing percentage (53.5%) and eighth in swing percentage at pitches outside of the strike zone (38.7%). As a result, he hasn’t walked much since he was called up in 2014 — at just over half the league average the past two years — which, hey, is something you might do too if you had the talent and skill to hit 40-plus home runs in the major leagues. In 2015, he saw the 17th-fewest pitches per plate appearance out of qualified hitters. Arenado hasn’t really waited around, is the point. He’s been aggressive in and out of the zone, and the trade-off has been fewer free passes. The reward was ten first-pitch home runs last season.

Swinging as much as Arenado has in the past two years tends to require other skills to offset/complement that tendency, like above-average contact rates, great power, or speed on the base paths. An illustration: of the ten leaders in overall swing percentage from 2015, five had below-average contact rates:

• Marlon Byrd (100 wRC+)
• Adam Jones (109)
• Avisail Garcia (83)
• Starling Marte (117)
• Ryan Howard (92)

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