FanGraphs Baseball

Now that the minor league regular seasons have come to a close, and we’ve reached the ides of September, most of the noteworthy roster-expansion call-ups are behind us. Nearly all of the players who were expected to have substantial impacts on the pennant races came up on the first of the month or shortly thereafter. However, a few more prospects were promoted over the weekend, as minor league clubs were eliminated from their respective playoffs. The most notable of the rookies called up over the weekend was probably Gary Sanchez, a catcher in the Yankees organization.

Sanchez has been on the prospect radar for a few years now, ever since the Yankees gave him a big bonus to sign out of the Dominican as a 16-year-old back in 2009. Sanchez hit an excellent .286/.350/.496 (134 wRC+) over his first three seasons in the minors, but followed it up with a less impressive .261/.329/.405 (107 wRC+) between High-A and Double-A in 2013 and 2014. The primary culprit for the change was a drop-off in power, which manifested itself in substantially lower isolated power figures. However, Sanchez’s pop made a comeback in 2015, during which he split time between the Double-A and Triple-A.

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Episode 594
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the hugely woebegone guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

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 24 min play time.)

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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
Houston at Los Angeles AL | 15:35 ET
Fiers (155.0 IP, 103 xFIP-) vs. Heaney (84.1 IP, 105 xFIP-)
This game represents an opportunity not only to survey, in Houston, a club currently involved in the league’s tightest divisional race — not only that, but also the first occasion on which to observe Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney since he became the first major leaguer to offer publicly a chance to invest in his success. Following an agreement with Fantex, Heaney will receive “$3.34 million in exchange for 10 percent of all future earnings,” according to Ken Rosenthal. Whether the same opportunity will be made available for major-league webloggers, the company remains not so much quiet as they don’t ever return your phone calls even though you left probably seven or ten messages on their voicemail last week and sent several emails with the word “Urgent” in the subject.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Television.

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Ben Revere puts the bat on the baseball. His 4.0 swinging-strike% is fourth lowest among qualified hitters, with only Michael Brantley, Daniel Murphy and Ben Zobrist whiffing less often. His 97.2 Z-Contact% is topped only by Murphy’s 97.7.

Putting balls in play is working out well for the left-handed-hitting former Phillie. Revere is hitting .342/.390/390 since joining the Blue Jays at the trade deadline, and last year he led the National League with 184 hits.

Revere has a low walk rate – 5.5% – but not because he lacks discipline. His Z-Swing% is 58.4, which is 12th lowest among qualified hitters. Speedy and lacking power, he isn’t a hitter you want to issue free passes to.

“I’m not going to get pitched around,” Revere told me last weekend. “Pitchers are like, ‘Don’t let this guy get on with an easy ticket, ’cause he ain’t gonna beat you with the long ball.’ Whether it’s off-speed or fastballs, they’re going to go straight at me.”

Revere went deep yesterday for just the fourth time in over 2,500 big league plate appearances. He was told to hit the ball the other way coming up through the Twins system, and his approach has essentially stayed the same. 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
Toronto at New York AL | TBA
Stroman (Season Debut) vs. Nova (74.0 IP, 115 xFIP-)
With their victory over the Yankees on Friday, the Blue Jays have put some metaphorical space atop the AL East between themselves and that same New York club. As for literal space, that remains mostly the same. In either case, what today represents, besides another encounter between two clubs competing for the division lead, is the season debut of beloved Toronto right-hander Marcus Stroman. This past February, Jeff Sullivan found that basically every pitch in Stroman’s repertoire is most similar to some kind of ace’s best pitch: Roy Halladay‘s sinker, Johnny Cueto‘s four-seamer, Jose Fernandez’s curveball, etc. A month later, Stroman had torn his ACL and was doubtful to return at all in 2015. The clear lesson: don’t permit Jeff Sullivan to render your name into print form.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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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.
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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
Toronto at New York AL | 19:05 ET
Price (196.1 IP, 83 xFIP-) vs. Severino (35.1 IP, 94 xFIP-)
On account of how yesterday’s version of this same precise matchup — which was also that day’s most highly rated game — on account of how it was postponed, it follows that all of the remarks which appear in that edition of these scores remain relevant today. It’s a reflection of that repetition which humans must constantly endure, this postponement.

In conclusion, here is “Monday” by dead Italian polymath Primo Levi:

Is there anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it’s supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There’s nothing sadder.

Except perhaps a cart horse
Shut between two shafts
And unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.

And a man? Isn’t a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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Thursday night, the Cardinals got thumped by the Reds, 11-0. Bad game. One of those games you just toss out and move on from. You might wonder what this has to do with clutch.

Conveniently, Thursday night, the Cardinals found themselves in basically zero clutch situations. For something a little more representative, consider Wednesday’s game, against the Cubs. Nine outs into the game, the Cardinals trailed 3-1. From there, they yielded no more runs; from there, they scored three more, all in the bottom of the eighth. In that way, the Cardinals won a game in which they were out-hit 11-5. They won a game in which they were out-OPSed .650-.526.

The Cardinals haven’t made a habit of that, exactly, but it gets at the idea. As I write this, the Cardinals have the best record in baseball, by a handful of games. Odds are pretty good they’ll reach or clear 100 wins. It makes sense that they also have the best run differential in the National League. Yet, interestingly, we can also consider OPS differential. By that measure, the Cardinals rank fifth in baseball, between the Pirates and the Yankees. That’s still good, obviously, but there’s something going on in between those numbers and the actual team record. Something that’s made the Cardinals look even stronger.

That something is clutch performance. The Cardinals have been clutch, far more clutch than any other team. It’s admittedly a difficult thing to quantify. And, admittedly, there are multiple definitions of “clutch.” The definition being used here is putting on a particularly good performance in pressure situations. You could think of the Cardinals as having had wonderful timing. It’s lifted their record above what you’d expect.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

In years past, I’ve looked at players who might win the Comeback Player of the Year Award. I don’t know why, but I just like this award. It sort of gets lost in the shuffle of awards season. It’s usually a feel-good story. I’ve felt like it is interesting to put some statistical context to the award. This year is no different. I never did last year’s post, but I did this in 2011, 2012 and 2013.

The methodology remains the same as it did in previous iterations. From the 2013 post:

Just like last year, the criteria is a player who posted 2.5 WAR or less last year, and has posted at least 1.0 WAR this year. Then I cull the list. The general standard is for a player to have roughly 2.0 more WAR this year than last, but this year I’m making an exception for catchers (roughly 1.5 WAR) and relief pitchers (roughly 1.0 WAR), as WAR may not be as fair to them as it is to others.

From there, we have to decide who is really making a comeback. Sometimes, guys just make the leap, or were never really good to begin with. But first, some honorable mentions.

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Is there a better pitch than a pitch that can get great whiffs per swing inside the zone? If they don’t swing, it’s a strike anyway.

To that end, and also in order to supplement my work in trying to identify pitches that would be better used as strike-stealing pitches (in the mode of Erasmo Ramirez and his slider), I ran a few leaderboards that might be interesting to you, the reader.

Here are league average in-zone and overall whiff rates by pitch type. Obviously, breaking balls have the biggest difference, since many in-zone breaking balls are ‘hung’ pitches that failed to break like they should have.

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