FanGraphs Baseball

On July 31st, the Royals were basically dead in the water. On the day before the team had to make a final buy, sold, or hold decision, KC stood at 49-55, 12 games out of first place in the AL Central. They’d been outscored by 59 runs. And to top it off, Wade Davis had to go back on the DL with a flexor strain, signaling that he hadn’t been able to get past the arm problems that had already cost him part of the season. The Royals hadn’t been very good with him in 2016, and now were looking at likely spending the rest of the season without one of the main reasons they’ve been able to win the last few years.

And yet, despite four months of struggles and Davis’ absence, since the calendar flipped over to August, the Royals have been almost unbeatable. They’ve reeled off 16 wins in 21 games, including their last nine, and have breathed some life back into a season that looked to be dead and buried. The graph of their end-of-season expected record tells the story pretty well.

In a season of ups and downs, August has been the biggest up so far, and unsurprisingly, the Royals have been winning games with the same kind of crazy formula that allowed them to make a couple of postseason runs the last two years.

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Imagine you’re floating on a raft down a lazy river. It can’t be so hard to imagine, it’s still August. In one hand, naturally, you’ve got an adult soda; the other, you place into the water to check the temperature. Suddenly, you’re headed — slightly but perceptibly — towards the bank on the same side as that hand you’ve submerged. Now stop imagining.

In layman’s terms, what you’ve done is to use your hand as a rudder of sorts. That’s one way of characterizing the effect. What you could also say, however, is that you’ve disrupted the laminar flow, creating a force that alters the direction of the object within the flow. Those aren’t layman’s terms.

Whatever the precise words you’re using, they’re all relevant to a baseball flying through the air. The seams cause drag in different ways, and that drag causes movement. Physicist Alan Nathan does a better job explaining it both here and elsewhere, but that’s a simple way to understand the relationship of the seams to movement.

Trevor Bauer is currently showing the best horizontal movement on his sinker of his career. That’s what this graph illustrates:

When I asked him about it, he agreed that it was good earlier in the year. Not recently, though. “Recently, it’s been shit,” he told me Tuesday afternoon. And you can see that, yes, indeed, the horizontal movement has been more erratic than it was earlier in the year.

Part of that is just the fact that the body changes slightly over time. It’s related to the difficulty in improving command. Little muscles act differently as they get more or less fatigued than the muscles around them. “I also overhauled my delivery a couple of years ago, and I’m starting to get better muscle memory for this new delivery over time,” Bauer pointed out. So that’s helped him get to this point where he’s commanding the ball better, which has allowed him to throw the front-door sinker to lefties more often this year, a big part in putting up his best strikeout- and walk-rate differential this year (and overall numbers) against lefties of his career.

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Tyler Clippard has always been a smart pitcher. That’s evident from his erudition as well as his results. Based on my experience, the 31-year-old reliever is equally adept at discussing his craft and flummoxing opposing hitters with solid-but-unspectacular stuff.

As noted in this past Sunday’s Notes column, Clippard has recorded the lowest BABIP against (.237) of any pitcher to have thrown at least 500 innings since 2007. That’s when the righty broke into the big leagues. Pitching for the Nationals, A’s, Mets, Diamondbacks and now the Yankees, Clippard has 45 wins, 54 saves and a 2.94 ERA in 539 appearances (all but eight out of the bullpen). Augmenting his ability to induce weak contact is a better-than-you-might-expect 9.9 strikeouts per nine innings. He’s made a pair of All-Star teams.

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Clippard on his BABIP and creating plane: “Someone brought it to my attention a few years ago. I guess it didn’t surprise me when I learned that. I’m constantly trying to figure out ways that I can pitch to get the weakest contact, whether it’s from my arm slot or my pitch selection. That’s kind of how I’ve always pitched. I’ve always tried to maximize my room for error. I’m not a guy who is going to have pinpoint command, so I’m always trying to create more plane, more deception.

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It was fair to wonder about the potential of the Indians’ offense when Peter Gammons went on live television during the Winter Meetings and reported that Michael Brantley would be out until August after learning his shoulder injury was worse than originally expected. It might’ve been fair to wonder about it before then; this was a unit that was below average by wRC+ in 2015, and added to their lineup only Rajai Davis, Mike Napoli, and Juan Uribe — a trio of 34- to 36-year-olds who were coming off just average offensive seasons themselves — in what was then seen as an underwhelming offseason. Everyone expected the Indians to pitch, but without Brantley, could an outfield of Davis, Abraham Almonte, and Lonnie Chisenhall lead a playoff team?

And then Brantley’s shoulder issues wound up being worse than even Gammons reported, and Cleveland’s best hitter over the previous two seasons managed just 43 painful plate appearances before succumbing to another shoulder surgery that ended his season once and for all. Essentially one-third of their entire offseason busted — Uribe was designated for assignment in early August — and yet here we are, more than two-thirds of the way through the year, and the Indians have managed a top-five offense by runs scored and a top-10 group by wRC+. Arguably, it’s the hitting that’s been their biggest strength, before the pitching.

Even more shocking is that same lackluster outfield unit currently ranks third in WAR and sixth in wRC+. A lot of that has to do with Tyler Naquin tapping into unforeseen power and hitting like Anthony Rizzo, but even more important to the Indians’ success this season has been the fact that, despite Brantley’s lost year, they haven’t actually been without him at all. Turns out the key to not missing your All-Star left fielder is to simply clone him using a 5-foot-9 utility infielder:

Jose Ramirez has provided the Indians with a near-exact replica of Brantley’s 2016 preseason projected numbers, and due to Ramirez’s superior base-running and defensive abilities, he’s already outperformed Brantley’s full-season WAR projection in just 466 plate appearances. Ramirez even took the impersonation a step further by filling in as the team’s primary left fielder for much of the season — despite having played just 14 major-league innings in the outfield prior to this year — before returning to a more familiar post at third base upon Uribe’s dismissal from the team.

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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
San Francisco at Los Angeles NL | 22:10 ET
Cueto (173.2 IP, 85 xFIP-) vs. Hill (76.0 IP, 84 xFIP-)
With the exception of a five-pitch appearance on July 17, from which he was forced to depart because of a troublesome blister, left-hander Rich Hill hasn’t produced an actual start-start since July 7th, when he recorded 10 strikeouts in six innings against the Astros in Houston. Tonight marks not only his return to the mound after that extended furlough, but also his debut as a Dodger, by which team he was acquired at the trade deadline.

Hill’s most notable quality, of course, is the capacity to throw a curveball that replicates precisely — according even to scientists, probably — the dimensions of a Fibonacci spiral. Regard:

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Television.

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Per at-bat, Manny Machado is better this year than he was last year. That’ll happen with a 24-year-old. Or at least that’s what people tell me, I don’t remember those halcyon days myself. What’s most interesting, of course, is how he’s done it. You can tell that he’s hitting for a bit more power by hitting more fly balls, and that he’s improved against breaking balls. That much is on the player pages. But was it the result of a mechanical adjustment, or an approach adjustment? Ask the player, and the answer is yes. And no!

“I haven’t really changed anything,” the Orioles infielder said recently of his swing. “You get a little smarter with the pitches they’re going to throw to you, what they are trying to do to you. Try to look more for a pitch you can drive.” When pushed on that particular subject, he admitted what most hitters would probably admit if they were being honest. “I’m sitting dead red. Looking for a fastball down the middle, more or less.”

“What’s my power, what’s my cookie?” he added with a smile. As for his answer, it does appear as though the fastball up has rewarded him with the best results. He’s been more aggressive on the fastball out over the plate and that’s resulted in more fly balls and power. Here’s his swing rate on fastballs last year (left) and this year (right).

Sitting on that high fastball has made the low pitches look less attractive — the same thing Adrian Beltre found when he started looking for the high fastball — and that has, in turn, dampened Machado’s ground-ball rate on fastballs.

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Andrew Miller made a batter look silly last night. Andrew Miller makes batters look silly most nights, but last night, a batter looked particularly silly. One surefire way to identify a batter who just got done looking silly is to check whether he’s laying down in dirt right after he swung. Let’s see.

Q: Was This Major Leaguer Laying Down in the Dirt Right After He Swung?

A: Sure was

That there batter sure looked silly. The good news for Khris Davis is, he’s not alone. He didn’t even take the season’s most ill-advised swing against Miller. As our own Jeff Sullivan pointed out back in May, maybe the thing Miller does very best is force hitters to take ill-advised swings, at least certainly relative to the ones they don’t take. I’ll explain. When Jeff wrote his article in May, Miller’s O-Swing% against was higher than his Z-Swing% against, making him the only pitcher in baseball with such a distinction. To translate that into English: batters were swinging at would-be balls from Miller more frequently than they were swinging at would-be strikes. That’s not how hitting is supposed to work.

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Here’s a little game for you to play: Try to name, off the top of your head, the current Oakland A’s starting rotation. It’s not so easy. It’s not even easy for me, and I’m the guy on staff in charge of the A’s team depth chart. Sonny Gray is sidelined. Rich Hill is gone. Henderson Alvarez never showed up. On and on it goes. The upside is that, at this point, the rotation doesn’t matter much, since Oakland’s games don’t matter much. The downside is that Oakland’s games don’t matter much, partly because a quality rotation never came together.

Yet in some ways it can be liberating when everything goes wrong. You get to experiment as an organization a little more, because you don’t have to put up with the burden of stakes. You can try things out, just to see, and for no other reason or reasons. Because of the way things have gone, the A’s have had to scramble for pitching help. Monday, they got six shutout innings from an unlikely starter against the Indians. That starter? Andrew Triggs.

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