FanGraphs Baseball

We are excited to have Corinne Landrey join the FanGraphs writing staff. She’ll be contributing here several times per week, and is going to be an excellent addition to the site. Below is her first post as a FanGraphs author.

If you know one thing about Cole Hamels beyond his profession or employer, it’s likely the fact that he throws a magnificent changeup. It’s the pitch upon which Hamels’ impressive career has been built from the moment he made his major-league debut as a 22-year-old kid. Like any successful pitcher, Hamels has had to adjust and improve over the years first by refining his curveball and later adding a cutter to his repertoire, but the changeup has been the omnipresent ace up his sleeve throughout his major-league career. Until now, that is.

For the first time in Hamels’ decade-long career, his changeup is no longer serving as his go-to secondary pitch. That honor now belongs to the cutter he began using in 2010 after watching his teammate Cliff Lee use the pitch with tremendous results down the stretch the previous season. Since then, the pitch has developed into Hamels’ preferred third pitch and now its usage has officially surpassed the changeup:

This year Hamels has gone to the cutter 202 times, or on 24% of his pitches, whereas the changeup has been used just 185 times, or 22 percent of the time. This usage shift, however, is not the result of a season-long trend. In fact, during the month of April, Hamels threw his changeup more than he threw any other pitch, fourseamer included. But after his start on April 20th, something changed.

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Episode 656
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the sad human 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 1 hr 8 min play time.)

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Last night, in Baltimore, Mookie Betts did this.

Those three home runs pushed his season total to 12, putting him in a tie with guys like Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera, Giancarlo Stanton, and George Springer, among others, and ahead of a group that includes Jose Bautista, J.D. Martinez, and Miguel Sano. Through the first two months of the season, Betts is hitting for the kind of power you expect from a slugging cleanup hitter, not a diminutive leadoff guy. And while Betts hasn’t had any three-homer nights before, this power surge isn’t that new.

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We’re doing it. It’s happening again. We’re forgetting about Mike Trout. It’s like collectively, we’re a second-grade teacher with a real-life wizard in our classroom and yet we never call on him or her to be the volunteer for any of the science experiments, so as not to single out the wizard kid while also ensuring that we remain impartial to the other, more normal children, except we know damn well that the normal kids would rather see the wizard kid perform science experiments rather than do it themselves. Call on the wizard kid! Mike Trout is right there!

Y’know how I know we’re forgetting about Mike Trout again? It’s June 1. We’re one-third of the way through the baseball season. Trout has been tagged in exactly one FanGraphs post since Opening Day. It was a post about whether Bryce Harper is better than him. Since that post, Harper’s hit .207 with a 115 wRC+. Trout’s slugged .641 with a 198 wRC+.

For the year, Trout’s been the most valuable position player in baseball. He’s been a top-three bat mixed with a top-three base-runner. He’s seventh in the league in on-base while also ranking among the league’s top-20 power hitters. He’s projected to finish the season with 9.7 WAR (yawn, but it’s not 10), which would give him 47.3 WAR over his first five full major-league seasons. And that’d be the ninth-best five-year peak of any hitter, ever. And Mike Trout is 24.

Even though we, the collective second-grade teacher, don’t call on the wizard kid in class, we’d be lying to ourselves if we said we weren’t curious what he or she were doing at all times. We’re curious what the wizard kid does at recess, we’re curious what the wizard kid eats for lunch, we’re curious what the wizard kid does at home, we’re even curious how the wizard kid gets to school. Broom? Honda Odyssey? Intangibility?

We want up-to-the-minute updates on the developments of wizard kid’s life, so we should want up-to-the-minute updates on the developments of Mike Trout’s game, too. Let’s now briefly discuss five things that are different about Mike Trout.

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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
Tampa Bay at Kansas City | 20:15 ET
Archer (60.1 IP, 88 xFIP-) vs. Duffy (30.2 IP, 86 xFIP-)
Would you like to know what life is like? Here’s what it’s like. Over his first six starts, Chris Archer produced a 3.22 xFIP but 5.01 ERA. Which is to say, he allowed nearly two more runs per nine innings than one might generally expect given certain predictive indicators. Over his next five starts, however, Archer produced a 4.07 xFIP and 4.18 ERA. Which is to say, he pitched worse in terms of those indicators, but actually conceded fewer earned runs. Now ask yourself, “How’s anyone supposed to learn anything when they get better results with the worse process?” Now continue by answering yourself, “I don’t know, stop harassing me.” This! This is what life is like!

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Tampa Bay.

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Tuesday afternoon, the Mariners clobbered the Padres, and this happened:

The Bethancourt in question is Christian Bethancourt, the only major-league Bethancourt, and as you can see, he finished the game hitless. Bethancourt, though, has finished a lot of games hitless. He’d never finished a game at second base, and he’d definitely never finished a game at second base after having caught, pitched, and played left field. Sometimes the whole structure of baseball collapses when a blowout gets blowout-y enough, and on Tuesday, Bethancourt became the fifth player we know of in big-league history to play all those positions in a game. He’d still be the fifth ever even if you took away the pitching appearance. The four previous times this happened, the player played literally every position, the manager clearly just having fun. Bethancourt stumbled upon a brand new box-score line. Baseball still has its firsts.

The question of the day, which means nothing: all right, so, Bethancourt appeared at four different positions. How comfortable was he at each? Time to analyze some body language. Sure, bodies can lie, but they don’t know how to speak in cliches.

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Every player, of course, goes through ups and downs, but not every player has the same range between the peaks and the valleys. Take Matt Shoemaker. Just a few weeks ago, there was an argument that he could be the worst starting pitcher in the majors. Even the Angels didn’t know what to do with him, and the Angels are in no position to be picky. Through six starts, Shoemaker had an ERA north of 9, and he’d allowed a slugging percentage close to .600. He looked like the major-league version of the non-prospect he was once considered. He was in over his head. Every at-bat was a nightmare.

Over the last three starts, Shoemaker’s allowed five runs. Better yet, he’s managed 28 strikeouts with just a pair of walks, and two outings in a row now he’s ripped off double-digit whiffs without a single free pass. Since the somewhat arbitrary date of May 12, Shoemaker’s allowed a slugging percentage of .256, a thousandth of a point better than Jake Arrieta. Shoemaker isn’t one of the best pitchers in baseball, and he isn’t one of the worst pitchers in baseball, but he’s looked like both, within a very short time frame. The rebound here has been extreme.

What’s been the key for Shoemaker’s turnaround? Maybe he polished his mechanics. Maybe he’s clearer of head. Maybe almost anything. But there’s certainly one thing that does stand out, which is Shoemaker adopting the Masahiro Tanaka strategy. Tanaka simply doesn’t throw many fastballs. Shoemaker as well has gone with something else.

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Heading into the 2012 season, Baseball America wrote of DJ LeMahieu, “Most scouts see him as a singles hitter who doesn’t provide enough beyond his batting average.” BA added that “his fringy speed and quickness don’t fit at second base.”

The latter turned out to be patently false. The 27-year-old won a Gold Glove at second base with the Rockies in 2014, and he remains a solid defender. He doesn’t look like a middle infielder — LeMahieu is 6-foot-4 — but his plus-2 DRS over the last two years puts him solidly in the gets-the-job-done category.

From an offensive standpoint, the singles-hitter label has a grain of truth to it. Despite calling Coors Field home, LeMahieu doesn’t leave the yard very often. Extra-base hits aren’t his forte (last night’s home run and pair of doubles notwithstanding). And while he’ll accept a free pass — his walk rate is a respectable 8.3% — no one is about to compare him to Eddie Yost.

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