The funny thing about being a phenom is you don’t really have to be phenomenal. Last season Mookie Betts was both exceptional and therefore the exception to that when he put up a 130 wRC+ in 52 games for the Boston Red Sox. He stole bases, he hit home runs, and he played center field after a life spent in the middle infield. He was your basic run-of-the-mill young star. But even young stars often struggle eventually, so this season figured to be somewhat of a learning process for the 22-year-old center fielder.

Betts didn’t disappoint at being disappointing. After a solid opening week that featured him almost single-handedly beating the expected best team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, in the home opener, Betts faltered. On June 10 — exactly one month ago for those of you without calendars — he was hitting .237/.298/.368. An 0-for-3 the next day made the numbers look worse. In this run environment that could play with exceptional defense, but for Betts that type of production was a disappointment. There was reason to believe he wasn’t playing quite that badly based on batted-ball velocity and a mid-.250s BABIP, and hey, fast forward* one month and Betts has brought his OPS up 131 points to .789.

*That’s a thing old people used to have to do when watching movies on videotape.**
**Videotape is what they used to have back before DVDs.***
***DVDs were what they used to… Actually, you know what? Forget it. I’m old.

During that time he’s put up a 189 wRC+ which, as Mike Petriello notes, puts him in the company of Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Manny Machado. Here are 10 ways Mookie Betts has turned his season around.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

When Alex Gordon got injured on Wednesday night, it was a big blow to the Royals, who have lost their best player for the next two months of the season. But with Detroit struggling — and having lost Miguel Cabrera themselves just a week earlier — and the Twins probably unable to keep playing as well as they have in the first half, the Royals will probably still be able to hold on to their division lead, even with Gordon on the shelf for the next few months.

However, Gordon’s injury does create a pretty significant hole on the American League All-Star roster. No, it’s not that Gordon is really that much better than Adam Jones, who will replace Gordon in the starting line-up, but that Gordon brought one unique skill to the American League’s offense: he bats left-handed.

With Jones replacing Gordon, all nine American League starters will bat from the right side of the plate. Let’s take a guess at what Ned Yost’s starting line-up might look like.

1. Lorenzo Cain, LF
2. Jose Altuve, 2B
3. Mike Trout, CF
4. Albert Pujols, 1B
5. Josh Donaldson, 3B
6. Nelson Cruz, DH
7. Adam Jones, RF
8. Salvador Perez, C
9. Alcides Escobar, SS

There are some pretty great hitters in the middle of that line-up, and guys like Trout have historically hit right-handed pitching just fine. But at both the top and bottom of the order, you have some guys on the team primarily due to their defensive abilities, and hitting right-handed pitching isn’t really their strong suit.

And the National League has loaded up on right-handed pitching. Of the 13 pitchers already on the NL roster, 11 of them are right-handed; only Madison Bumgarner and Aroldis Chapman are lefty hurlers on the NL’s squad. Johnny Cueto is likely to join that group via the Final Vote, which would push the NL up to 12 RHPs, many of whom are death to right-handed hitting.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

One of the things I find most interesting about baseball is how often players seem to try new things and then how often those changes seem to make little to no difference in their overall productivity. Batters alter their stances and pitchers try new grips and patterns all the time, but it’s actually pretty rare that a player makes a small change and becomes significantly different. A whole lot of effort goes into small changes, but the vast majority of these changes don’t seem to make a big difference, yet everyone is always making them. It seems like a lot of wasted energy.

Except that it’s not wasted energy as much as it’s about context. One reason all of these tweaks don’t have huge impacts is that everyone else gets a chance to respond to the adjustment very quickly and make their own. There’s so much information available to players and they’re generally a perceptive bunch. If Clayton Kershaw suddenly threw Paul Goldschmidt a 50-grade knuckeball, I would wager that Goldschmidt wouldn’t do much damage against that first one. Theoretically, Kershaw spent lots of man hours working on the pitch, but most hitters have faced knuckeballs and they would very quickly figure out that Kershaw has one and when he likes to use it. A pitcher adjusts, and then the hitters adjust to that adjustment. It goes on and on forever. If you don’t constantly tinker, you might be left behind.

At the beginning of 2014, there were a lot of questions about how well Jose Abreu would perform in the major leagues because we didn’t have any information about Abreu in the context of the American professional regime. His raw tools had our attention, but until we saw him face professionals in the American context, our information was rather limittarget=”_blank”. The question at hand was how Abreu would adjust to the major leagues.

Read the rest of this entry »

Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet 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
New York AL at Boston | 19:10 ET
Pineda (99.2 IP, 67 xFIP-) vs. Buchholz (110.0 IP, 81 xFIP-)
Following a loss to Tampa Bay on June 27, Boston’s probability of qualifying for the divisional series fell to roughly 8% by the methodology used at this site. After winning eight of ten, however, that same club’s odds have ascended to 23% by that same measure. The relative optimism of the latter figure is informed less by the Red Sox’ current record and more by their expected future performance. Consider: despite possessing the fourth-worst winning percentage in the American League, the club presently features the AL’s top projected rest-of-season winning percentage. That reliance on future performance adds considerable urgency to games like this one, against an immediate competitor for a playoff berth.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Boston Radio.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland A’s lost by four runs on Thursday. Granted, it was a two-run game in the bottom of the eighth. But, still. Four runs. The A’s currently have the worst record in the American League. They’ve lost by at least four runs 11 times. The Royals easily have the best record in the AL. Kansas City has lost by at least four runs 15 times. Four runs is an arbitrary cutoff, but this helps to demonstrate something you’ve probably already heard: The A’s are badly underperforming, and in the weirdest way. By the standings, in the AL, no team has been worse. By other metrics, in the AL, arguably nobody has better.

For a more rich and representative 2015 A’s experience, consider Wednesday. Sure enough, the A’s lost to the New York Yankees — but they lost by one. The game ended with the tying run in scoring position. The Oakland bullpen coughed up four runs; the Oakland defense coughed up the other one. It’s not that the Yankees didn’t do enough to win. It’s that the A’s did, too. Yet they came up short. The market is just waiting for Billy Beane to sell.

It isn’t new that the A’s are underperforming the numbers. It’s already been written about here, there and everywhere. Just in April, the team went 9-14 while outscoring its opponents. Lately, the team has been more successful, despite its recent setbacks. But while you’re probably tired of hearing about Oakland’s misfortune, you might not be aware of the magnitude of what’s happened. This isn’t the kind of thing that happens to someone every year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s go ahead and get this out of our systems: Wednesday night, some Cardinals got ejected for complaining in a game the team won. Some people might call that the very most Cardinals thing. Those same people are just people who don’t like the Cardinals, but, whatever, everyone’s entitled to his or her own feelings, and we should get this out of the way before proceeding. All right, it’s out of the way! So let’s unpack a picture:

What you see is a play in progress. It’s a bases-clearing double, that put the Cubs ahead. As the Cubs were in the process of rounding the bases, and as the Cardinals were in the process of retrieving the baseball from the outfield, Yadier Molina argued with home-plate umpire Pat Hoberg. We see Molina with his back turned to the plate, even though there might soon be a play right there. (There wasn’t.) Arguments are common; arguments during plays are less common. Molina was shortly ejected. The same went for his manager. The game had been leading up to this moment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Longtime Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan loves the sinker. The Braves’ Leo Mazzone was all about establishing the pitch low and away. Rick Peterson may hate the cutter.

The Mets’ Dan Warthen may not have the name value of legendary pitching coaches that have come before him, but he does have his own pitch. If you want to see what it looks like, you just have to notice how the Mets, as a team, are outliers when it comes to slider velocity and movement.

The Mets are throwing a different kind of slider.

Read the rest of this entry »

A couple weeks ago, we took a look at the most and least authoritative hitters of all time, utilizing raw contact scores, or production relative to the league on all plate appearances not resulting in a strikeout or walk. One of the reader comments suggested to take a look at the most productive low-authority hitters, and the least productive high-authority hitters. Earlier this week, we looked at the former, and today we discuss the latter.

First of all, a review of the methodology, and some parameters. We calculate raw contact scores by stripping away the strikeouts (Ks) and walks (BBs), and applying run values to all balls in play based on the norms for that era. The results are then scaled to 100. Raw contact scores were calculated for all regulars going back to 1901. Since we don’t have access to granular batted-ball data going that far backward, we’re not going to be able to adjust for context. That context includes the effects of ballparks, individual player’s speed, and of course, luck. In a given year, that those factors might affect an individual player significantly. Over the long haul, however, raw ball-striking ability, or lack thereof, as well as contact quality, the respective frequency of line drives and popups, of weak and hard contact in general, tends to carry the day.

Read the rest of this entry »