Note: the author recently employed new restrictions regarding eligibility for inclusion. Any player is excluded from eligibility whose name has appeared among the midseason prospect lists of Baseball America, Keith Law, or John Sickels.
The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple 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 both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) absent from the midseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Keith Law, and John Sickels, and also (c) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.
Episode 585
In this belated episode of FanGraphs Audio, fill-in host David Temple talks to former NotGraphs writers about what they are currently up to, and also about their memories of writing for the now-dead section of the Internet.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
Say what you will about the Mariners over the years, but at least they’ve thrown the American League’s last three no-hitters. And, say what you will about the significance of a no-hitter, but they’re undeniably exciting and cool, sometimes little oases of elation in a year that’s otherwise lost. You don’t need to overthink it. People like no-hitters. People like them because they’re neat. Hisashi Iwakuma just threw one, Wednesday afternoon in Seattle against the Orioles. The Orioles can hit pretty well!
It wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world, because Iwakuma has a history of being pretty good. It still qualified as a legitimate surprise, because Iwakuma had never before completed a major-league game, and this year he hasn’t entirely been himself. Much like Robinson Cano, it appears that Iwakuma has only righted himself too late to save the Mariners’ season. The best to hope for now is the occasional cool moment, and Iwakuma delivered as much as he could.
There are three reasons to be interested in Chase Utley as a baseball player. One, there’s his whole history. Utley’s track record of being one of the best second basemen in baseball. If his career ended today, he’d be a borderline Hall-of-Famer. Two, he’s available. The Giants are reportedly in negotiations, with the Phillies looking to keep getting younger. If you want Utley, you can have him, provided you give a little something, and provided Utley is open to the chance. Three, this:
Good news on Utley: Per source, he not only is feeling better, but also has figured out a flaw in his swing that was caused by ankle injury.
Utley’s numbers this year are very bad. He’s not one to typically offer excuses, but Utley injured his right ankle over the winter, and it never really got quite right. Lousy on-field performance followed, and then Utley went to the disabled list for a while. There’s no positive evaluation of what Utley’s been. The Giants are presumably thinking about what Utley might be now. They’d only be interested if they thought that Utley was better. His numbers since returning from the DL the other day are better. Small-sample numbers mean only so much, though. The numbers aren’t the encouraging thing. The swing is the encouraging thing.
Absent a Carlos Gonzalez-like run of home runs by Mike Trout, Nelson Cruz or another slugger over the last fifty games of the season, major-league baseball looks likely to fall short of a 50-homer season for the fourth time in five years and seventh time in the last nine seasons. Only Chris Davis and Jose Bautista have notched 50-homer seasons since the end of the 2007 season after 23 such seasons between 1995 and the 2007 season. Despite the relative drought in 50 homer seasons, power is up this season over last with multiple players poised to hit more than 40 homers after only Nelson Cruz hit 40 last season.
A month ago, major-league baseball moved to the All-Star break with just over half the season finished. At the time, seven players had at least 25 home runs, giving the league an outside chance of producing a 50-homer season. That group was led by a player who has yet to crack 40 home runs in Giancarlo Stanton. Unfortunately, he had already been injured for several weeks and, despite his 27 home runs, he might fall short of 40 homers again this year. Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and Bryce Harper were all one behind Stanton with 26 home runs, and J.D. Martinez and Todd Frazier entered the break with 25 home runs.
It will be a challenge for the 2015 USA Baseball Collegiate National Team (CNT) to match what the previous two editions of the club have achieved in terms of the draft. The 2014 CNT produced 10 first-rounders in this year’s draft, including five of the top six college players taken as well as four of the top six picks overall. The 2013 CNT also produced 10 first-rounders.
That’s why ranking the top-20 prospects on Team USA isn’t an easy exercise. The majority of the players have the tools to land in the first round, so there are a few places on this list where the talent runs together. Nevertheless, the obvious strength of this year’s team was power arms with pitchability. The weakness was the lack of impact middle infielders.
Because of the length of this feature, we decided to split the list into two parts. You can see the 11th-20th ranked players and honorable mentions here.
We love the deep dive here, and often it’s mechanical — this player raised or lowered his hands, or altered the grip on his pitch, or changed his foot tap. Sometimes, though, the dive can start from a place as simple as a change in mindset and approach.
Like when you ask Michael Brantley what the key to his late-career power breakout was. He shakes off the suggestion that he changed his swing or bulked up. To him, it was simple. “Last year I was more aggressive,” Brantley said matter-of-factly when I asked him about it.
And of course, as simple as that sounds, it’s just a platform, a jump-off point.
Last week, in this space, I wrote about Dave Dombrowski’s Achilles Heel in the wake of the Tigers letting go of their long-tenured General Manager. Yesterday, another long-term General Manager was relieved of his duties, as the Brewers have moved Doug Melvin “into an advisory role”, opening up their GM position for the first time since 2002.
Like Dombrowski’s start in Detroit, Melvin’s first few years in Milwaukee were pretty rough. The team lost 94 games in both 2003 and 2004, then hung around .500 for the next three years, so it was five years of laying the groundwork for a competitive team. But in 2008, things started to come together around a strong young core that included 24-year-old sluggers Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun and 25-year-old middle infielders J.J. Hardy and Rickie Weeks. To supplement the team’s homegrown core of All-Star hitters, Melvin made a big mid-season trade for CC Sabathia, whose dominant performance helped carry them to the team’s first postseason berth since 1982.
While Sabathia was just a half-season rental — and predictably signed for big money in New York that winter — the Brewers retained the young core that looked like it should form the foundation of a perennial contender. However, since the start of the 2009 season until Melvin’s resignation, the team went just 540-545 and only made the postseason in one out of those seven years. While Dombrowski is leaving Detroit on the back of a long run of success that may just now be coming to an end, Melvin’s track record is more of a long string of unfulfilled potential.
So why weren’t the Brewers able to turn one of the best young groups of home-grown hitters into a consistent winner? Unlike with Dombrowski, Melvin didn’t have one glaring flaw that came back to haunt him on an annual basis. Instead, the Brewers lack of success can be chalked up to three significant organizational failures over the last seven years.
The best part of writing about baseball? First, you get to watch baseball. Then you get to write about it. That’s how it works. The worst part? The worst part is that you can’t watch it all. No way. There’s like — add the two, carry the one — well, I’m no sabermetrician, but there’s like a lot of baseball to watch, way too much for the average human even if that human owns some sort of picture-in-picture-in-picture technology by which to watch, say, the trinitarian terror of Trout and McCutchen and Harper wreak simultaneous havoc.
What is this a long way of saying? This is a long way of saying that until Monday night, I had not personally witnessed (nor even been impersonally aware of) Johnny Cueto’s revolutionary wiggle. Have you seen this thing? The Detroit Tigers sure have. And so have fans of the Royals, at least those lucky enough to have witnessed the dominant shutout — four hits allowed, zero walks given, many wiggles supplied — that the newly acquired Cueto provided in his Kauffmann Stadium debut.
A trip through the archives reveals that Cueto introduced his wiggle-icious windup against the Nationals on July 7, rendering Ian Desmond but a helpless bystander. Watch the scene and realize that Desmond, poor Desmond, has just witnessed the dawn of a new age. Watch it and realize that Desmond just got Cueto’d!
It’s just crazy amounts of awesome, is it not? It’s as if Luis Tiant and Gale Sayers — well, that would be a biologic impossibility — as if Luis Tiant and whoever is the Lingerie League’s most evasive tailback spawned a super-incredible love child who boasts an outstanding four-seamer/changeup combo and who suddenly belongs on So You Think You Can Dance. Cueto thinks he can dance, and does. Taking the Tiantian pause to a delightful extreme, he turns his back to the hitter and promptly stops — so dramatically that you think you hit the pause button — and then shimmies like he’s trying to evade the Lingerie League’s leading tackler. You half expect — no, fully expect! — Cueto to add the terpsichorean equivalent of a triple Salchow, even if, were a runner on base, the umps would be like, “Um… balk?”
For his part, Tigers manager Brad Ausmus thinks the windup is illegal, as if Cueto should be ticketed and forced to attend Defensive Pitching School this weekend. Indeed, after watching the righty go all Dirty Dancing on a ninth-inning whiff of Ian Kinsler, Ausmus told the Associated Press: “Really, the way the rule reads, you’re not supposed to even alter your motion. That’s the way the rule reads.”
Well, boo you, Brad Ausmus!
Remember: We watch baseball. A lot of it. And watching baseball is supposed to be fun. Seriously, does this look like someone who’s busy reading the rulebook?
This article was originally developed as an oral presentation given by the author to the Society for American Baseball Research at their SABR 45 Convention in Chicago on June 27, 2015. The presentation, which featured the innovative use of video, audio and transitional animation embedded within a PowerPoint deck, was awarded the annual Doug Pappas Research Award as the best of the 32 oral presentations made during the convention that weekend.
This article has been repurposed from that deck. Since the Retrosheet play-by-play data on which this study was predicated were updated just days before the original presentation, all the data provided during the oral presentation have been updated for this article.
In yesterday’s installment of Little League Home Runs in MLB History, we reviewed the proposed definition of the Little League home run and found both the earliest recorded incidence of the event, and the earliest use of the term. In today’s post, we’ll examine some of the numbers and oddities surrounding historical Little League home runs.
But first, let’s enjoy another highly entertaining Little League home run (LLHR), coincidentally by the same guy who made the second error on the Cabrera LLHR we saw in Part I:
The fans in Milwaukee didn’t sound too happy to see that, did they? And Wilin Rosario really looked a little worse for the experience, didn’t he? He should probably consider hitting the treadmill more…
Little League Home Runs: Data and Oddities
In any event: out of the 148,390 games available to us to query on through the end of the 2014 season, we discovered, according to our simple definition, a total of 258 Little League home runs in Major League history, which works out to about 1.74 Little League home runs per 1,000 MLB games. So if we were to look just at the historical average outright, that would mean that in a typical modern season of some 2,460 or so games, including All-Star Game and the postseason, it should work out to a little more than four Little League home runs per season, on average. But there’s more to it than just that, as we’ll see shortly.
Of the 258 Little League home runs in total, 253 of them occurred during the regular season. Four occurred during postseason play, including that earliest known one from the 1911 World Series that we shared with you yesterday; and also one that occurred during the 1919 World Series. OK, now, I know what you must be thinking, but counterintuitively, that LLHR was not given up by the cheatin’ Black Sox in order to satisfy their gambler patrons, but instead by the Reds during Game Two of the Series. The batter, Ray Schalk, came around to score on a single to right and two Reds throwing errors, one by the right fielder to second and another by the third baseman to home in a futile attempt to nail Schalk at the plate. (And I’m sure Schalk received a rousing reception in the dugout from his Black Sox teammates once he arrived there, amirite?)
And then there’s the one Little League home run that occurred during an All-Star Game, hit by Leo Durocher in 1938, involved a couple of other Hall of Famers, and was called by WGN Radio’s Bob Elson, who was broadcasting the game throughout the Mutual Network that day:
Pretty exciting stuff, huh? That’s the earliest broadcast of a Little League Home Run I could manage to locate, and I’m fairly certain that’s the earliest radio clip of any Little League home run that’s available. But you’re the crowd, so I invite you to source an earlier example than this if you can, so we can acknowledge its existence.
Let’s take a look at a few stats and oddities in the history of the Little League Home Run. Broken down by how many were hit in how many seasons, here are how the numbers look:
But it actually gets more interesting when you step back and look at the forest a bit, instead of staring at a succession of trees. If you break it down by era, you can definitely a pattern at work:
You see a really high rate of Little League home run incidence taking place before 1929, which may or may not be an anomaly. But either way, there is a definite trend of Little League home runs diminishing over time, which you can tell because I asked Excel to add a trendline to the data, and there it is, in bright red dots below, and since Excel is pretty good at math, I will trust that it’s accurate:
The main takeaway here is that, even though there looks like a lot of up and down between eras, the highs and the lows are both going lower over time, and in fact the five-year period we just concluded saw the lowest rate ever for Little League home runs.
My theory about this drop in number is that, quite straight, players play better defense today overall than they ever have in history. Fielding is simply better. Yes, you could talk about, “Well, nobody playing today is as good a defender as Willie Mays was”, and OK, that’s fine, I’ll give you that one for the sake of moving the discussion along. But even so, that’s only one guy. I’m talking about defense overall.
What can’t be disputed is that there are many fewer errors per game today than there were a few decades or a century ago, and whether that’s because of better instruction today’s players received starting with — ironically — Little League, or because of better equipment, better gloves, better fields, or even that official scorers aren’t handing out errors on questionable fielding plays like they used to — whatever the reason is, the overall trend in baseball towards fewer errors is also reflected in the declining incidence of Little League home runs over the years.
Here’s an analysis across time by month of year:
This basically shows flatness across months, except that March-April looks unnaturally low and I’m not sure why. The number is roughly a third of any other month, and even taking into account a higher percentage of off days and weather postponements, I don’t believe there are only about a third the games played in the season’s first month versus the other months. I’m not even sure it’s a fluke. Maybe there’s something going on there? Thoughts, anyone?
By inning might make a little more sense:
You can see that the 3rd through 7th innings have the highest numbers of incidence, and then you start to see fewer from the 8th inning on. This might be because teams become more conservative, perhaps especially when they have small leads to protect or small deficits to overcome, so maybe there’s more putting the ball in their pockets. In the ninth and beyond, of course, teams tend to play even more conservatively. We see fewer Little League home runs in the 9th and extra innings combined than in the 8th inning alone, and that makes intuitive sense.
Little League home runs started by play type strikes me as interesting:
I didn’t expect to see singles making up more than half of all Little League home runs, and doubles almost a quarter. I would have bet money I would see Little League home runs started by infield errors composing a much bigger portion of the total, maybe even more than half overall.
But when I looked closer at the Retrosheet event descriptions, more than a third of those 134 singles were specified as starting on infield hits. So there apparently have been more infield Little League home runs than it might look like at first glance, and in my opinion, the infield Little League home run is definitely the purest form of the art.
Note that of Little League home runs started by infielder errors, the most were by pitchers with 16, and then by third basemen with 12. But out of the 148,390 games available to query on, only one started on a catcher error! Isn’t that wild? You’d think a lot more errant throws by catchers on bunts or dribblers in front of the plate would end up deep down the right field line, sending the batter-runner to third easily and leading to more overthrows of third that would send him home, wouldn’t you? But no…
One last thing about that table: you must be asking yourself, “How the hell can anyone hit a Little League home run on a walk?” Yes, it is absolutely as crazy as it sounds. This one was uncovered just this year with the mid-season update of the Retrosheet play-by-play archives, and occurred with the Yankees’ Lou Gehrig at bat in the fifth inning of the first game of a doubleheader against the White Sox on July 14, 1930. An account of that play shows up in the Retrosheet play-by-play for the game thusly:
Gehrig walked [Lazzeri scored (error by Mulleavy) (error by Tate) (unearned) (no RBI), Gehrig scored (unearned) (no RBI)]; the White Sox argued about the walk; Greg Mulleavy flipped the ball to the mound; Bennie Tate picked up the ball and threw it away
Isn’t that play nuts? More to the point, how can this play be called a Little League home run, even satisfying the definitional requirements of two errors and the batter scoring on the play? That’s a discussion we can take on in (spoiler alert) the third and final post of this series, going up tomorrow.
Here are Little League home run totals by franchises hitting them:
…and by franchises giving them up:
The thing to note here is that, obviously, practically all the top franchises on both lists are “Original 16” franchises (denoted in blue). The top expansion team on the Hit It list is the Astros, and then the Angels and Mets, all welcomed to the big leagues in the early 60’s. The top expansion franchises on the Gave It Up side are the Brewers-parentheses-Pilots, circa 1969, and, again, the Mets (1962) and Padres (1969).
You will note that Arizona has never hit one, and Tampa Bay has yet to give one up, and each have a “2” on the other side of their ledger. Both are 1998 teams.
But because these lists are biased towards the Original 16 and other clubs who have been in the majors longer, a better list for comparison might be one that shows Little League home runs per 1,000 games played by each club, which is what these tables, ranked by rate per 1,000 games from highest to lowest, do:
When you closely examine the rates by team, you start to see more expansion franchises float toward the top. But I do find interesting that even when analyzing rate per 1,000 games, Original 16 teams are still better represented than mere chance would dictate. Here’s what I mean: original 16 teams make up a little more than half of all teams — actually, 53%. But six of the top seven clubs which have Hit It, by rate, are Original 16s, and that’s 86%; and ten of the top 12, or 83%, which gave it up are Original 16s.
This, I believe, is directly related to the chart we saw earlier showing that rates of Little League home run were way higher in the early eras of the game, since the Original 16s were the clubs that were around when those rates were so much higher.
Home teams appear to have a minor advantage in hitting the Little League home run, the inexplicability of which is augmented by the realization that they don’t have to hit in their half of the ninth inning in about 45% of games:
Size of foul ground available might be a contributing factor to higher rates of Little League home runs. The Ballpark Database at Seamheads.com allows us to download a zip file that includes a spreadsheet indicating, by ballpark/by year, whether the amount of foul territory in a given “ballpark year” is large, neutral or small (L, N, S) or, for modern parks, how much foul territory it has in thousands of square feet (ranging from 40.700 at the various iterations of O.co Stadium, down to 18,100 at Fenway Park). While the inexactitude of the L/N/S scale renders this a less than an airtight analysis, the results are still logically directional:
This table indicates that, among ballparks characterized by descriptive nomenclature for foul ground size, large (+8.3% more versus average) and neutral (+12.8%) are more likely to experience Little League home runs, making up 76% of total incidents, with small parks (-22.3%) far less likely to see such plays. However, among the 63 incidents occurring in ballparks which report their foul ground territory in numbers, the typical Little League home run occurred in parks with roughly 2% less foul ground than average. Twelve Little League home runs occurred in ballparks without any available data.
Here’s a neat little oddity I came across, which I can’t really explain:
National League teams have hit far more, and have given up even more far more (if that’s a thing), than American League teams. NL teams hit +35% more and gave up +41% more than AL teams. Really odd, right?
But this table is even better, I think:
When you break it down by era, you see that in the vast majority of eras, the NL gave up more, and sometimes a lotta lot more, than the AL, right up to the last two periods combined in which NL teams gave up 15 total and the AL gave up just six. So if we initially thought the DH thing might have had anything to do with the difference in Little League home run rates between the leagues, we’d apparently be wrong.
There might be some other non-performance reasons why this difference should exist — harsher official scorers in the NL? Bigger ballparks in square footage in the NL overall? I don’t know — but what is clear is that this is a persistent thing.
The record for the player with the most career Little League home runs — how many would you think that would be? Would you think that it’s two? Or maybe three? How about four or more? When I made this presentation and asked the audience to guess, about half thought it was four or more, and the other half was split between two and three.
Well, the answer is: two. And these are the sixteen players with two:
You will notice some pretty good base stealers here: all of them except one have at least 65 career steals. (If you can tell right away without looking which one it is, then you’re really good.) This kind of suggests that you have to have a somewhat long career to get two, although Tony Fernandez got his two Little League home runs on back-to-back days against the Tigers in 1988. By contrast, Jim Gilliam’s twotimes came ten years apart from one another.
And tied for second in career Little League home runs, with one, is 226 other guys.
The last piece of trivia — as if this entire subject weren’t trivial enough already — is this: out of the 258 Little League home runs found in major league history so far, only six of them came on three errors. All the rest came on two.
And here are those six:
You might be asking yourself, exactly what does a three-error play look like? Let’s take a quick look at the earliest one on the list, which was hit by the exquisitely unibrowed Cardinals rookie Wally Moon in 1954. With a runner on third, Moon hit a grounder to the second baseman who exercised his fielder’s choice by trying to nail the runner advancing to the plate, but instead threw wildly past the catcher for the first error; Moon then tried to advance to second, drawing the throw from the catcher who instead heaved it into center for the second error; Moon then chugged around third toward home as the center fielder picked up the ball and threw wildly past the plate to allow Moon to score. And that’s one way in which you can commit three errors on a play.
My favorite three-error Little League home run, though, is by Jeff Leonard in 1988, the only such play during which all three errors were committed by one player: Tommy John.
Yes, they could give him three errors on the play! And they did! And thank God for that, because that helped me for this article.
In the next and last installment, we will contemplate the current proposed definition of the Little League home run and discuss whether it should be reconsidered, and if so, how.
