Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve written about the Houston Astros an awful lot recently. Between Lance McCullers, Vincent Velasquez, and of course, Carlos Correa, they’ve had more than their share of impact prospects arrive in the majors this year. Today, I’m back to analyze yet another Astro who was recently called up the big club: Domingo Santana.
You might have missed Santana’s call up among the flurry of blue-chip prospects who got the call this week. I almost missed it, and I monitor these things about as closely as anyone. But while Santana’s upside is nowhere close to that of a Byron Buxton or Francisco Lindor, he’s someone worthy of our attention.
Before the Astros called him up to replace Colby Rasmus, who’s currently on the bereavement list, Santana was absolutely mashing in Triple-A. His 176 wRC+ was the highest of all qualified hitters at the level. He also lead Triple-A in walks and slugging percentage. Sounds great, right? What’s not to like about a 22-year-old who’s hitting .320/.444/.584 in Triple-A?
Blind comparisons are always fun. They’re fun because we have set notions about who players are, and when we strip away names, similarities that we didn’t think possible come to the surface. With that said, here are two players:
| BB% | K% | HR | ISO | BABIP | wRC+ | WAR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Player A | 7.9% | 18.2% | 22 | .345 | .289 | 172 | 3.8 |
| Player B | 7.6% | 18.3% | 17 | .252 | .327 | 154 | 3.9 |
Player A, as you might have guessed by the title of the article, is Todd Frazier. Player B — he of the lower ISO and almost exact same strikeout and walk rates — is Josh Donaldson. An oft-used term is “the poor man’s version of so and so,” but currently, Frazier isn’t the poor man’s version of anyone — in fact, he’s been one of the best players in baseball through the first two months of the season. Donaldson is too, and he probably plays a little better defense than Frazier does.
However, the Reds third baseman is up there: he has almost the same WAR (3.8) as Mike Trout (3.9), and his current ISO is third only to Bryce Harper and Giancarlo Stanton’s. That doesn’t mean Frazier will finish this season with the same WAR as Trout, or the same ISO as Harper or Stanton, but it’s interesting and requires our attention.
Alex Rodriguez nearly connected for his 3,000th career hit on Thursday night. Barring some very unfortunate incident, it seems like it will only be a matter of time before he does actually notch it. But rather than wait for it, let’s be proactive and break down his first 2,999 hits. There’s a lot of cool facts about them, and after playing around in the Baseball-Reference Play Index for a few hours, I want to share them with you.
First, let’s do a pie chart of his hit breakdown, both by hit type and team.
I think it’s interesting that he remains among the top 10 in Mariners history in singles, doubles and home runs. As he’s fourth in homers, it’s safe to say he’ll probably be in that top 10 for a long time. But even in doubles and singles it’ll be awhile. He’s ninth in doubles at 194, and the next-closest active player is Kyle Seager in 18th place at 121. After that, it’s Dustin Ackley down in 30th place at 88. Singles is similar — Rodriguez is 10th with 570 singles, and Seager is back in 23rd place with 376 singles. There isn’t another current Mariners player in the team’s top 50.
In the first chapter of his (excellent!) Big Data Baseball, Travis Sawchick describes how now-Pittsburgh Pirates General Manager Neal Huntington used an interesting bit of historical analysis to help inform a controversial roster move. Writes Sawchick:
Using the software [DiamondView], the Indians made key decisions, such as when they elected not to sign aging star Jim Thome to an extension after the 2002 season, in part because of the database, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. […] Huntington noted that the Indians found in a payroll analysis that no major league club, dating back to 1985, had won a World Series when committing 15 percent or more of its payroll to one player.
Let’s call that 15% rule The Thome Corollary.
Has The Thome Corollary held up in the years since 2002, when price tags for choice free agents and franchise cornerstones has escalated at a rate far greater than your journeyman’s/rookie’s salary? The answer is: “No, The Thome Corollary has not held up,” or, “Yes, it sure has, with some small tweaks.”
I’ve had something of an obsession. I feel like it’s an understandable one, but that’s the way everyone feels about his/her own obsessions, so let me explain a little bit. Mike Trout’s the best player in baseball, right? I mean, even if you don’t think he’s No. 1, he’s one of the top two or four or five. And he’s probably been No. 1. He’s done silly things to our WAR statistic. Trout makes people think about Mickey Mantle, and not in a way where it’s like, “Mike Trout is good, but he’s no Mickey Mantle.” He might really be the new Mickey Mantle. He’s great. OK. You know that.
Trout’s been amazing, but last year it became apparent he had a weakness. It became increasingly apparent to everyone, and it was ultimately exploited in the playoffs by the Royals. On the off chance you don’t remember what I’m talking about, Trout was incredibly vulnerable against high fastballs, and particularly high, inside fastballs. There was no mystery. Teams would face the best player in baseball, and they knew what they had to do to get him out.
Not that they were able to consistently pull it off. But my obsession was tracking how opponents were pitching to Trout because there was so much to gain from attacking his weakness. He was like an otherwise unbeatable video-game boss with a flashing red rectangle under the chin where he could be felled were he struck just so. Every team had the report, and as more time passed, Trout saw more elevated, inside fastballs. It seemed like something would eventually have to give. Either Trout would make an adjustment, or the major leagues would defeat him and knock him from his perch.
Over the winter, Trout talked from time to time about the hole in his swing. His typical line was that he’d just have to lay off the high-and-tight fastballs, because he said they were usually out of the zone. In reality, a lot of them were in the zone, so Trout’s response was incomplete. He had to know the pitches he’d be seeing, so he had to try to get himself ready for those. And, sure enough, in the early going of the 2015 season, Trout was a high-inside-fastball magnet. Teams hadn’t forgotten what they’d learned the previous summer.
But there’s a funny thing about the best players in baseball. They know how to adjust, especially when they’re young. During the offseason, Trout had a goal. And it became pretty clear early that Trout had fixed his weakness. Gone was the vulnerability. Trout improved his contact against those high, inside fastballs, and he improved his ability to hit them hard. There were loud hits and loud outs. All of them warnings. Trout had adjusted to the adjustment. Which meant it was up to the pitchers again to make an adjustment. How, now, would they work with the league MVP?
| 9:09 |
: So let’s talk about baseball
|
| 9:09 |
: Walk-off balks, anyone?
|
| 9:09 |
Send help. |
| 9:10 |
: It’s always interesting when something goes even more wrong than anyone could’ve expected. It would’ve been one thing to say the White Sox were going to be mediocre. But a historically bad assortment of position players? It’s a catastrophe.
|
| 9:10 |
: Good luck!
|
| 9:11 |
How much of the Lagares injury affecting his defense explanation are you buying, if any? |
On Monday, I took a look at the hitters that KATOH liked the most from rounds two through eight of last week’s amateur draft. I was planning to follow up with a complementary piece on pitchers the following day, but was rudely interrupted when basically all of the top prospects were called up to the major leagues. But now that we have a respite from this year’s onslaught of prospect call-ups, we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming. Here are a few of the pitchers, in order of projected WAR, who slipped past the first round but caught KATOH’s eye.
Garrett Cleavinger, LHP, Baltimore Orioles
Draft Round: 3rd
Projected WAR: 6.6
Garrett Cleavinger was positively dominant in his three years in the University of Oregon’s bullpen. The hard-throwing lefty pitched to a 1.94 ERA over his college career, and struck out an impressive 13.3 batters per nine innings. He was most dominant of all in his junior campaign, where he struck out a whopping 14.9 batters per nine, while walking a manageable 3.8. It’s well known that relief pitchers are generally less valuable than starters. But among relievers, Cleavinger’s performance was about as good as they come. The fact that he pitched in the Pac-12 conference also works in his favor.
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
Pittsburgh at Washington | 19:05 ET
Burnett (85.2 IP, 85 xFIP-) vs. Ross (13.0 IP, 65 xFIP-)
There are a number of events on which a pitcher exerts zero influence. The tides, for example. Middle East relations. A wife who, for some reason, insists on preparing dishes with improbable quantities of cilantro despite the fact that it tastes to her spouse like the bitter tears of orphan children. In the face of all these, a pitcher is a helpless and wriggling creature. With regard to those areas over which a pitcher does possess some control, however, Washington right-hander Joe Ross has been nearly flawless over his first two career starts, producing a 12:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 13.0 innings while also inducing grounders on over 60% of batted balls against him. What one finds here today is that same Joe Ross scheduled to record his third start — in this case, against a Pittsburgh club whose odds of qualifying for the divisional series are approximately a 50-50 proposition.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Washington Radio.
Command is a funny thing. It’s not easy to spot in the numbers. You have to watch a game and see the pitcher consistently miss his spots before you start to understand that even a guy with great walk rates may not have great command. Taijuan Walker does not have good command. He also walked 9.5% of the batters he faced in the minor leagues, a number that isn’t as far off the American League average this year (7.6%) as you might expect.
Pretty sure the catcher wanted this fastball low and away.
Over the last four starts, Walker has walked three batters in 29 innings. If you have an opinion regarding Walker’s command, you probably won’t change it over four starts. But Walker is still young enough, and not yet fully formed — perhaps there’s something else he’s done that can help us better understand why command is so hard to quantify. And also how likely it is that Walker can keep up this production.
