Ben and Sam preview the Mets’ season with Mike Vorkunov, and Jeff talks Mets prospects with Toby Hyde of BP Mets and SNY.tv (at 22:49).
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Taylor Motter isn’t a household name. But he does have a way with words, and there’s a chance he’ll break camp as Tampa Bay’s 25th man. If that happens, the Rays roster will include a jack-of-all-trades dirt-dog whose phrasing is more Yogi Berra than Bull Durham.
Motter has played every position except catcher since being drafted out of Coastal Carolina University in 2011. He’s also swung the bat. Last season, in Triple-A, the former Chanticleer hit .292/.366/.471 with 42 doubles and 14 home runs. His running game was an asset, as he swiped 26 bases.
The self-described “blue collar grinder” will take a walk — he had 57 on the year — but he’s anything but passive.
“If I get something early and hard, I’m going to attack early and hard,” Motter told me. “I don’t like to get to two strikes. If I do, that’s my time to go to battle. It’s time to put on my worker’s cap and go to work. 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, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »
The New York Times has completed an investigation into the NFL’s concussion research and thus, by proxy, its public statements about the connection between playing professional football and concussions. They’ve concluded, simply, that the NFL has misled both the public and the players as to the very real negative health implications of playing pro football.
Anyone who has followed the NFL over the past few seasons shouldn’t be surprised by this finding. The NFL has a vested interest in presenting pro football, their product, as safe both for the players and for the fans, a vested interest that they pursue without regard to the health and safety of anyone involved with the sport. The idea the NFL might lie about concussions and brain injuries — or seek to cover up the connection between them and playing football — likely isn’t that surprising.
As baseball fans (though I count myself as a football fan as well) we should consider ourselves lucky. Baseball as a sport does far less chewing up and spitting out of it players relative to football, something that makes watching the sport as much as I (and I suspect you) do easier to handle from a moral standpoint. That’s not to say the sport is free of the nefarious — the treatment of minor leaguers does spring to mind, for example — but rather to acknowledge that baseball is in a better place when it comes to concussions than football.
Of course, that’s like comparing a regular person favorably to an axe murderer, so there’s some room to grow if you want to be a superhero. The point is, though, that baseball is, compared to football, doing alright when it comes to the concussion front. The NY Times isn’t going to break any front-page stories about Bud Selig covering up a concussion report. But that doesn’t mean baseball is in the clear.
Nathan Karns is currently competing with James Paxton for a spot at the back end of Seattle’s starting rotation. The 28-year-old right-hander has the potential to be more than a No. 5, however. Acquired by the Mariners from Tampa Bay in November, Karns has a big fastball, a power curveball and a much-improved changeup. In 27 games last year, he logged a 3.67 ERA and struck out 145 batters in 147 innings.
Karns has a studious approach to go with his raw stuff. That much was evident when the Texas Tech product broke down his repertoire and his pitching philosophy earlier this week.
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Karns on his approach: “I focus my pitching on the lineup I’m facing. I kind of preplan. I identify weaknesses and strengths, so that I can go in with a plan for each hitter. I’ll get their numbers. First-pitch swinging is one. Do they swing at first-pitch curveballs? I’ll keep little things like that in the back of my mind.
“The count and runners on base come into play. So does what I’m working with on a given day. For instance, if I can’t throw my curveball in the bullpen before a game, I’m not necessarily going to run away from it, but it might not be my No. 2 pitch that day. What I’m executing may cause me to adjust.
OK, perhaps vengeance isn’t the right word. After all, not a lot of teams actually have good designated-hitter situations. The National League teams, who don’t appear in this PPR but do show up on the DH depth chart, pop in first at sixth place overall. This is a little tough for them to do. For starters, NL teams don’t usually use a DH, so their standing there is part-DH, part pinch-hitter, and to reflect this lighter usage At the time of the piece, only six players were projected to garner 400 or more plate appearances as a DH: Billy Butler, Nelson Cruz, Edwin Encarnacion, Kendrys Morales, Mitch Moreland and David Ortiz. This year, that list has expanded to 13, as every AL team except for the Athletics and White Sox suddenly have full-time DHs. That’s nice to see, even if it won’t last with a couple of teams.
Read the rest of this entry »
| 9:05 |
: Hello friends
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| 9:05 |
: Welcome to baseball chat
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| 9:06 |
: To think, one week from now, we will finally still have spring training
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| 9:06 |
: Also, it feels weird to me that on Sunday, April 3, we’ll have three home openers, and one spring-training contest
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| 9:07 |
: Anyway. Chatting!
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| 9:07 |
: Please tell me the D’Backs have a Plato and Aristotle coming through the pipeline as well!
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In my Tuesday chat this week, a commenter asked me about the Mariners bullpen, which has already endured some key injuries this spring. I responded as such:
Six of 10 worry points is more than half the worry points. I can’t say for sure even how worrisome that is, because worry points are a thing I made up at 12:27 p.m. EDT on March 22, 2016, but I can say for sure that it’s more worrisome than a team whose bullpen deserves just four out of 10 worry points.
People seemed to like the worry-points concept, and a few commenters expressed a desire for a worry-point article, with a couple even giving me ideas. I didn’t use either of those specific ideas, but the silly worry-point concept did get me thinking about team risk, and how that can influence our perception of different ballclubs before the season begins.
Like, say you’ve got two teams, each projected for 85 wins. But one of those 85-win teams has one super-elite star that comprises a bunch of their value on his own, and therefore that team is just one injury away from losing a big chunk of those projected 85 wins. And not only that, but the supporting cast around that star is littered with players over 30, guys with past injury histories, and a couple guys coming off bad seasons who are being counted on to bounce back. The other projected 85-win team, on the other hand, is pretty clean — lots of guys in their 20s, little injury history, everyone is coming off pretty standard seasons.
On pure talent, both teams are projected to be equal, but that first team has worry points through the roof. It’s easy to see where things could go wrong. The other team feels safe. This could wildly change our (sub?)conscious perceptions of these otherwise equal-looking teams.
I’m kind of thinking about the Dodgers right now, but I’m also kind of not. I’m mostly wondering what the spread is? Every team has areas of concern. Some seemingly more than others, but then at the same time, every team has guys who feel as safe as can be that will inevitably become injured or underperform this year. This game is almost impossible to predict.
This is going to be one of those posts Jeff likes to run with a bunch of polls and then a crowdsourced follow-up, because the opinions of 1,000 of you on something none of us really know about are worth more than the opinions of one of me. Who am I to assign worry points to every team in baseball? The results of this will be interesting now, and they’ll be interesting later. You’ll all put your brains together, and you’ll determine a handful of teams that seem riskier than the rest, and a handful of teams that seem safer than the rest. And at the All-Star break and at the end of the season, it will be interesting to look back and see what happened to those risks. Did the risky teams succumb and/or underperform? Did the safe teams stay clean and/or overperform? Will there even be a noticeable spread in the results of this poll? Is any one team actually riskier than another? These are all questions I can’t answer on my own, but would like to see answered. I’m thankful not only to write for an audience, but a smart and engaging audience.
When we’ve written about the Diamondbacks this offseason, we’ve highlighted their seeming lack of depth, behind the stars. They appeared to be in position to give too much playing time to potential zeroes, potential zeroes like Yasmany Tomas. Tomas, of course, cost the Diamondbacks a fortune, and he remains plenty young and capable of turning things around, but he’s coming off a terrible season. You don’t want to guarantee anything to that kind of player. Turns out, the Diamondbacks don’t need to.
Some years ago, you easily could’ve argued Paul Goldschmidt was the most underrated player in baseball. Later on, A.J. Pollock became maybe the most underrated player in baseball, and then, David Peralta looked super underrated, and Ender Inciarte looked the same. Maybe there’s enough here to call it a pattern. And, now the team has a new candidate. He hasn’t proven anything yet, so he’s not underrated on the Peralta or Inciarte level, but it’s time to look out for Socrates Brito. All anyone cared about was the name. It’s become time to care about the player.
Used to be, you put a fly catcher in center and didn’t worry too much about offense, even if he batted leadoff because he was fast. Willie McGee and Otis Nixon come to mind, though their on-base percentages were decent enough, maybe. They didn’t have power, though. Those years, the position’s isolated power was around 10% worse than league average.
These days, it seems the position has evolved. There are center fielders now who don’t count fielding as their best strength, and their collective power is now closer to average than it used to be. Even Kevin Kiermaier — in some ways a throwback, defense-first burner — has decent power. Maybe down table, around two thirds down the list, you’ll find some guys that would have fit on any 80s squad in center.
But Leonys Martin, Billy Hamilton, and Odubel Herrera are today’s maybes instead of yesterday’s sure things, it seems. Today we wonder if Odubel’s defense is as good as his tools, or if Martin will ever hit lefties, or if Hamilton will ever hit righties. In any case, they provide diversity where some other positions have lacked it. There’s a long way from Yoenis Cespedes to Billy Hamilton.
Let’s separate the burners from the bombers among today’s center fielders!
Looks like two or three stars, a couple clearly above-average guys after that, and then a big bucket of decent. They won’t all get there the same way, but today’s center fielders can swing the stick a bit.
#1 Angels
| Name | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | wOBA | Bat | BsR | Fld | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mike Trout | 658 | .300 | .405 | .580 | .414 | 54.4 | 3.1 | 0.6 | 8.7 |
| Craig Gentry | 35 | .234 | .291 | .306 | .266 | -1.2 | 0.2 | 0.5 | 0.1 |
| Rafael Ortega | 7 | .237 | .299 | .318 | .275 | -0.2 | 0.0 | 0.1 | 0.0 |
| Total | 700 | .296 | .398 | .562 | .405 | 53.0 | 3.3 | 1.2 | 8.8 |
This ranking is not built on depth. Should (perish the thought) Mike Trout go down with a season-ending injury, the Angels’ center-field situation would drop down to the bottom of the heap. That may sound like a knock on Craig Gentry — a decent defense-first center fielder when his legs are right — but more it’s just another way to fawn about Trout.
There are so many ways to fawn, though. As August Fagerstrom pointed out in his player cap, he’s already accrued more wins than any player in the history of baseball through their age-23 season. Only Ted Williams, Joe Jackson, Stan Musial, and Ty Cobb were any better with the bat alone, and Trout adds legs and glove to the package. Or you can go the route of Tony Blengino, who found that Trout was better than Micky Mantle through the same age. Or Jeff Sullivan it up, and chronicle the way that Trout has adjusted to every single wrinkle that the league has thrown at him, like handling the high pitch, and now including now taking inside pitches yard to the opposite field.
Or you can just be succinct, as Fagerstrom was when he summed up his player cap on Trout: the best in the world.
