FanGraphs Baseball

Sometimes very talented position players stall on their way to the majors but stick around until they finally make good on their potential. Other times, slightly less talented position players keep slowly moving up the rungs of the minor-league ladder until they finally get their chance. This latter path marks the one traveled by Ryan Schimpf of the San Diego Padres, who is one of the better old rookies of the last half-century.

On the pitching side, however — especially where starters are concerned — the good old rookie is a more rare commodity. Junior Guerra is one such rookie, though, and the 31-year-old — off the disabled list tonight for the Milwaukee Brewers — is having one of the more remarkable pitching seasons in major-league history.

If you are a fan of either the Milwaukee Brewers or Carson Cistulli, you are likely familiar with Guerra. As to the former, Guerra has pitched very well this season, making 17 starts with a 2.93 ERA (68 ERA-), 3.65 FIP (84 FIP-), and 2.3 WAR on the season. As to the latter, regard:

• In early May 2015, after Guerra’s first 24.2 innings in an MLB organization in half a decade, Cistulli placed Guerra in his Fringe Five, noting that he had been signed by the White Sox out of the Italian league after having also pitched professionally in Spain and Wichita. (He’s pitched in Mexico, too, but after his release by the Mets in 2009, he went six seasons without pitching for an MLB organization).
• Just one day later, so entranced by Guerra’s profile, Cistulli furthered his study of the aging prospect in a post, showing off his mid-90s fastball and devastating splitter in helpful .gif form.
• That season, Guerra appeared not once, not twice, but three more times that year in the Fringe Five, making him one of the most prevalent players in Cistulli’s weekly exercise with his pace only slowed by four relief innings in the majors with the Chicago White Sox, who placed him on waivers at season’s end, when he was picked up by the Milwaukee Brewers.
• To nobody’s surprise, Cistulli then placed Guerra in his Fringe Five earlier this season, and when Guerra made his debut for Milwaukee, Cistulli called it a Jubilee Event.

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For the second straight year, I have been given the right to cast a vote for the National League Cy Young Award. Last year, the task of picking between three deserving winners was practically impossible, and I ended up going with Jake Arrieta over Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke by the thinnest of margins. After last year’s embarrassment of riches, however, it looks like this year, the choice will come down to picking between some candidates with some more obvious flaws.

Just going by runs allowed, there’s a big pile of guys who have all been roughly similar in value.

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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
Toronto at Tampa Bay | 19:10 ET
Stroman (167.0 IP, 78 xFIP-) vs. Cobb (Season Debut)
Last year, Toronto starting pitchers combined to produce a collective 10.9 WAR. This year, with roughly a month remaining in the season, they’ve already surpassed that mark, having recorded 12.3 WAR as a group entering play today. Naturally, Aaron Sanchez (3.7 WAR) and J.A. Happ (2.7 WAR) have been central to that effort — and have produced numbers roughly equivalent to Stroman’s own 3.0 mark. Normalize for the vagaries of home-run allowance, however, and Stroman not only represents the best pitcher on his own club, but the third-best starter among all major-league qualifiers. Translating that to run-prevention would benefit the Blue Jays greatly, which club currently faces among the least certain postseason scenarios in the majors.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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I hadn’t planned on talking to Zack Greinke about the game he’d started the night before, but then, for the second time in his career and the first time since his rookie year, he went six innings and recorded only one strikeout. It was a win for the team, but maybe not his finest game, that one against the Giants on Tuesday night. So I had to say something. “They make a lot of contact,” he grumbled, “but it wasn’t ideal.”

When I asked him if anything was different, he shrugged. “Against guys like Denard Span, Ben Revere, Buster Posey, I’m not going to spend a lot of pitches going for the strikeout. They make too much contact.”

We’ve heard this sort of thing before, of course. Pitching to contact is even espoused as a general philosophy by some organizations. But it’s a little surprising to hear from this pitcher, who regularly strikes out 200 batters a year, even if he’s told us before that pitching to FIP — pitching to limit the walks and increase the strikeouts — just led to hard contact in the zone.

He also gave us a name! Denard Span, he of the 3.7% career swinging strike rate, good for 11th-best overall since he’s been in the league. Span, because of his contact-oriented skill st, has forced Greinke to approach him differently.

So let’s look at Greinke’s plan against Span this past Tuesday and see what he was trying to do.

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Byron Buxton played a major league game for the Minnesota Twins last night, the first since his most recent demotion to Triple-A Rochester last month. Also, in that game, Byron Buxton hit a big dinger:

It’d be great to see Buxton succeed. You hate to see any individual fail, let alone one with the type of promise which Buxton possesses. He’s still just 22 — this thing’s far from over — but thus far, Buxton’s done little to deliver on that promise. So we look for developments.

Upon his demotion in early August, I detailed, with the help of hitting instructor Ryan Parker, the numerous changes we’ve already seen in Buxton’s swing. So of course, I was interesting in seeing what that swing looked like this go-around. Particularly so when that swing led to a dinger in Buxton’s first game back.

Buxton had a leg kick in high school, which the Twins muted upon their drafting of him in favor of the organization’s go-to “front foot down early” hitting approach. That’s what we saw in 2015. That’s what we saw in the beginning of 2016, too, though after his first demotion to Triple-A in April, he returned a month later with a leg kick. Given the lack of success Buxton experienced in that stint, it was worth wondering whether Buxton and the Twins would stick with the leg kick, or revert to the original plan.

The leg kick’s still there, and maybe the most important note to be gleaned from this at-bat is that Buxton stuck with the leg kick throughout the count, even after it got to two strikes, something he wasn’t always doing his last time in the bigs. Where Buxton used to shorten up by going back to the toe-tap with two strikes, we’re now seeing Buxton commit to the leg kick more than ever, though it comes with the same caveat Parker provided in my analysis of Buxton last month: the foot’s still coming down before the upper-half of the swing begins, negating much the timing and power the leg kick is intended to provide.

As a counter, watch the .gif above again and pay close attention to where in the swing Buxton’s front foot plants on the ground, and then do the same for this Josh Donaldson swing:

Of course, comparing any hitter to Donaldson is unfair, but if you want to see what an effective leg kick looks like, look no further than Donaldson.

It’s just another something to monitor with Buxton. They could’ve abandoned the leg kick altogether, and they didn’t. To me, that’s a positive sign. The kick itself could still probably use some ironing out, but the committal with two strikes seems to indicate that the plan is to stick with this approach for the time being. The strikeouts never went away, but Buxton homered in four consecutive Triple-A games last week, and he’s already got the first of this go-around in the bigs under his belt. Byron Buxton isn’t going away any time soon, and neither is his intrigue.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on a midseason list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Yandy Diaz, 3B/OF, Cleveland (Profile)
Last week, August Fagerstrom wrote a piece documenting how, in the absence of Michael Brantley, Cleveland’s Jose Ramirez had performed an admirable impression of the injured outfielder. Here’s how he summarized the similarities between the two players:

Brantley never struck out; Ramirez has never struck out. Brantley ran a league-best 92% contact rate; Ramirez this year is 11th, at 88%. Brantley walked enough to turn his elite batting average into an elite on-base percentage; Ramirez has done the same. Brantley suddenly began hitting for more power than folks had expected; Ramirez has 10 dingers.

Now that Ramirez has become Brantley, that leaves the role of Jose Ramirez available to another member of the Cleveland system. The most likely candidate to fill that vacandy? Yandy Diaz. Like Ramirez, he’s always recorded excellent contact rates. Like Ramirez, he’s always recorded above-average walk rates. Like Ramirez, he’s exhibited more power as he’s ascended through the affiliated ranks. And like Ramirez, he’s demonstrated positional flexibility, as well.

This past week has been representative of Diaz at his best. Over 24 plate appearances for Triple-A Columbus, the 25-year-old Cuban has recorded walk and strikeout rates of 8.3% each while also producing a .273 isolated-power figure on the strength of three doubles and home run — this while making starts at third base, left field, and right field.

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There was some talk not long ago about Eric Hosmer and his impending 2018 free agency, with years in the range of 10, and dollars in the range of $200 million. Of course, this talk was being put out there by Hosmer’s camp, and of course Hosmer’s camp’s got nothing to lose by talking up their client. Hosmer’s going to hit free agency at a relatively young age, and just last year he was a 25-year-old former third overall pick coming off the best season of his career, in which he became more or less the face of a World Series-winning franchise. He’s been incredibly durable, he’s had his fair share of big moments and won his fair share of awards, and he’s the kind of guy that seems to be held in high regards by teammates and within baseball circles.

Hosmer’s got his virtues, and Hosmer’s agent, Scott Boras, is just doing his job, a job at which he excels. But it was clear at the time that Hosmer was never going to earn $200 million, or probably anywhere near $200 million, and it’s become clearer since. In the month and a half since the $200 million talk began, he’s slashed .215/.292/.349, good for a 66 wRC+, and while Hosmer’s bat (and his team) have been heating up lately, each likely seem too late to save their season. The Royals currently stand with playoff odds below 5%. Hosmer currently stands with a season batting line which barely rests above the league-average mark, and a Wins Above Replacement figure that has a negative sign in front of it.

Hosmer, clearly, is a talented ballplayer. You don’t go third overall in the draft without talent. You don’t break into the majors as an above-average hitter at 21 without talent. You don’t post a top-10 average exit velocity and hit homers like this without talent. So how do we get to September with a -0.2 WAR?

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If you follow baseball at any level, pitch counts are a part of your life. Some people hate them, some people think they need to be more heavily enforced for amateurs. They impact our thinking about pitcher health, durability, and effectiveness. Every broadcast tracks them.

The interest in pitch counts isn’t simply a media/outsider-driven affair, either. Teams have significant financial and competitive incentives to keep pitchers healthy and effective, and it certainly seems like they’ve stopped pushing their pitchers as much within individual games over the last decade.

But even amid this general trend, something significant happened over the last two seasons. Instead of following the long-term trends, pitch counts fell sharply starting last year and have fallen again in 2016. While we can’t offer a definitive explanation without spending time inside the heads of MLB’s managers, the evidence seems to suggest that the culprit is something other than a newfound appreciation for protecting arms.

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As things stand today, September 2nd, there is a two-way tie between the Orioles and Tigers for the second Wild Card spot in the American League. The Orioles, whether due to the phenomenal exploits of their closer or their inability to convince projection systems of their success, have been the focus of much discussion. It strikes me, though, that the Tigers are flying a bit under the radar. Their best players are guys we’ve talked about for years like Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler, and Victor Martinez. Even J.D. Martinez’s success is starting to become yesterday’s news. Outside of the success of Michael Fulmer and Justin Verlander’s resurgence, the Tigers have suffered from being a bit boring, whether that’s fair or not.

They haven’t needed to go on a massive run to get themselves this close to playoff position, as their playoff odds have hovered around 25% for the majority of the second half and topped out at 60% in the start of August. Their current position on the very edge of playoff contention, however, is thanks in part to an 8-2 run over the last week and a half. Some of their key offensive forces — such as Cabrera and the Martinez not-brothers — have been thoroughly predictable over this stretch, but one player who stands out as being somewhat surprisingly good and productive of late is the man in the midst of a disappointing first year of a nine-figure contract: Justin Upton.

Over the past three weeks or so, Upton has been the epitome of a streaky player. From August 9th to August 18th, he took 32 plate appearances and recorded just one hit, giving him a -87 wRC+ — which is evidently a real number a hitter can post over an extended stretch. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn Upton got a day off on August 19th — a -87 wRC+ tends to inspire managers to give a guy some rest — but since his return on August 20th, he’s been an absolute monster at the plate for the Tigers. In those 46 plate appearances, he’s hit three home runs and posted a tremendous 225 wRC+. Yeah, that’ll do. If the Tigers can get the most recent version of Upton to sustain this late-season breakout, it would be a massive boost to their playoff aspirations. Is there any evidence that this mini-breakout is part of a larger trend toward a more productive Upton?

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