It’s not that anything more needs to be done. It’s not like Mike Trout desperately needed to fix the hole in his swing, lest he be in danger of suffering a complete collapse. Things were going just fine. That hole in Mike Trout’s swing, the one that kept him from hitting high fastballs, is like the Pablo Honey record in Radiohead’s discography. Would everything be better if it were just gone? I mean, yeah, technically. But the discography, as a whole, is still essentially flawless even with Pablo Honey, so we can all live with it.

Mike Trout went and deleted Pablo Honey anyway. It wasn’t necessary for survival, but everyone knew it was a problem, and everyone knew we’d be better off without it, so Trout went and fixed the hole in his swing. He started hitting those high fastballs, and no one ever had to hear Creep again and the world was a better place. But, listen. Someone’s gotta get in there and wipe out Fake Plastic Trees, too. Not all of The Bends; the rest of the record can stay. But Fake Plastic Trees has gotta go. Maybe I’m getting greedy, asking for even more tweaks after the big one’s already been made, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

This next tweak, it doesn’t have to do with Trout’s swing. For all intents and purposes, that’s about perfect. The high fastball was the only real weakness, and that’s been patched. When pitchers stopped throwing him high, they started throwing him outside, but that didn’t really work. Maybe you’d like to see Trout swing at a first-pitch curveball or two, but that’s a very minor thing, and Trout literally never swinging at first-pitch curveballs might actually be a feature, rather than a bug. Point is: the swing, for now, requires no further adjustments, and I’ve already linked to Jeff Sullivan about a hundred times in this piece. When Trout’s swing requires another adjustment, he’ll let you know.

It was exciting last year, knowing that Trout had this weakness, and knowing that Trout knew about this weakness, and knowing that Trout planned to fix the weakness. He’s never been shy about these things. During Spring Training, he came right out and said it:

“Plain and simple, I was chasing the high pitch. Everybody knows that,” Trout said. “The majority of time, they’re balls, and I was chasing them.”

Usually, us writers have to seek out these adjustments. We’ve got to watch with a close eye, and see if the numbers back it up, and then ask the player about it. In this case, Trout came right out and told us. “Hey, everybody. Makin’ an adjustment here. Free blog content.”

The next item on Trout’s to-do list isn’t exactly a secret, but Trout’s done us the favor of letting us know he’s planning on another adjustment:
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Ben and Sam preview the Brewers’ season with BP Milwaukee’s Ryan Romano, and Jeff talks to freelance writer Jack Moore (at 23:16).

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On multiple occasions last year, the author published a statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.

What follows represents the first such report for the 2016 college campaign, which began last Friday.

As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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The Milwaukee Brewers had a good offseason. As Dave Cameron wrote earlier this week, “If you want to see a blueprint for how to rebuild, look at what the Brewers did this winter.”

David Stearns, who replaced Doug Melvin as the club’s general manager in September, has been the main architect. An assistant GM in Houston before coming to Milwaukee, Stearns is laying the groundwork for what he envisions as an Astros-like level of resurgence.

Stearns addressed offseason player-acquisition strategy earlier this week in Phoenix.

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Stearns on preparing for the offseason: “Preparation starts in August. You start to look at what your team might look like going forward — what your needs are, what the availability of other players might be. Read the rest of this entry »

One week into the college baseball season, Louisville head coach Dan McConnell’s decision to bat Corey Ray atop the order this year looks like it’s going to pay dividends for the next four months.

If you’re unfamiliar with what the star outfielder has done over the four games since he moved up to the leadoff spot from the three-hole last season, consider this cartoonish statline: .733 AVG (11-for-15); .750 OBP; 1.533 SLG; 1 double; 1 triple; 3 HR; 6 SB.

For sure, Louisville’s two opponents for those four games – Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Eastern Kentucky – aren’t teams that we could have expected to offer much resistance. But no matter: it’s an exceptional beginning that deserves mention as the five-tool prospect looks to establish himself as the best position player in the 2016 draft class.

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The other day, I asked you a stupid question: how excited are you about the coming baseball season? It doesn’t seem like that interesting of a question, and, let’s face it — we’re hanging out on FanGraphs, which means we’re all already total baseball dorks. Of course everyone’s kind of amped to have baseball coming back. It’s the reason we’re here.

Though it was a silly question, however, silly questions lead to data, as long as you’re keeping records. That’s what I was hunting for. That’s what I’m always hunting for. By putting up a poll for fans of every team, not only can I calculate an excitement rating, but I can also examine excitement ratings relative to the whole league. Out of a simple Internet post, I now have a whole spreadsheet that tracks how baseball fans feel, and if you’re curious to see how the polling shook out, just scroll down. You don’t even need to read the words if you don’t want to. Believe me, I won’t know.

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It all makes the Orioles look bad, which isn’t fair. It was supposed to be easy enough for the Orioles to sign both Yovani Gallardo and Dexter Fowler. Then, within a few days, the Gallardo talks nearly fell apart, and the Fowler talks did fall apart. Instead of the Orioles and Fowler having an agreement, it turns out Fowler wanted a one-year opt-out, which the Orioles wouldn’t give him. That’s a perfectly defensible stance, but here’s where we are now: Baltimore doesn’t have Dexter Fowler. Fowler has gone back to the Cubs, for a year and $13 million. It’s all been a pretty stunning turn of events, and the breakdown in the Baltimore talks has allowed the Cubs to answer the last big question they had.

For the Orioles, it’s a bad look, and it’s frustrating, because now they have to keep poking around to fill a hole they thought they’d fill. It’s probably somewhat bad for morale, and now you can likely expect the Orioles to get in contact with the Reds about Jay Bruce. It’s not the worst fallback in the world. Yet this is all really about the Cubs. The Cubs get to keep Fowler, if only for a year. It reduces the uncertainty for what’s pretty clearly a World Series favorite.

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