FanGraphs Baseball

Pardon me; I don’t mean to interrupt your afternoon. If you’re here, though, you might well be a bit curious about Adam Eaton. Which is good, because I am, too! To get started, you know those player caps we have on most pages? The profiles and quick opinions, I mean, written by various FanGraphs authors. They’re written during the winter, providing brief player analysis, and here’s a link to Adam Eaton’s page. I’m going to pull a little excerpt. This isn’t intended to pick on Chris Cwik. Anyone would’ve written the following.

Since Eaton isn’t going to add any pop, his performance will likely be based on the guys behind him.

Made total sense at the time. Eaton is a little dude, with an extended track record of hitting groundballs. Last year, as an everyday player, Eaton was literally out-homered by Ben Revere. He went deep just the once, and so he was seemingly easy to project. Speed and contact. Decent number of walks. We all knew what Adam Eaton was, up until we didn’t. This season, Eaton’s already knocked nine dingers. Put another way, he’s tied with Adrian Beltre. Chase Headley and Jason Heyward, too. Adam Eaton wasn’t going to add any pop. Adam Eaton added a lot of pop.

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It’s not uncommon for a narrative to develop around a great team — nor, specifically, for it to develop around the particular player on that great team who best represents the collective identity. For a club that exhibits a lot of power, the most powerful player is the focus. When a team is full of idiots, the most idiotic player garners a lot of attention. For a young team, the youngest, a gritty team, the grittiest, etc. These portrayals might not be entirely accurate, but they help tell stories and mold perspectives about a club’s identity as they march closer to the end of the season and, subsequently, the playoffs. Repeating the exercise for a disappointing, mediocre team can be an interesting process. So it is with this season’s Detroit Tigers and the one player who most embodies their season: Anibal Sanchez.

Injuries to players like Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander have played a role in Detroit’s disappointing 54-57 season, but Cabrera hit incredibly well for half a season and has already produced an above-average line. Verlander, a focal point for the club in the past, has barely pitched at all this season, lacking the requisite presence to represent the 2015 Detroit Tigers. Ian Kinsler has had an odd, but effective season. J.D. Martinez has had another great year, and Yoenis Cespedes had played very well before his trade to the New York Mets. The offense has not been the Tigers’s problem this season with one of the better run-scoring teams in the majors and a 109 wRC+ to back it up. The defense has been average overall so the onus shifts to the pitching.

The bullpen has been bad, ahead of only Boston’s and Texas’s while sitting at essentially replacement-level. If you are looking for someone to blame for the season, the bullpen is an easy target, having recorded just 27 saves against 14 blown saves — and their ranks for both Shutdowns and Meltdowns are near the bottom third of all bullpens. Simply being the weak link on the Tigers does not make the bullpen representative of the team at large, however. Despite the mess of a bullpen, the team is still close to .500 — and Detroit has succeeded in previous years despite similarly weak collection of relievers. So we move to the rotation. David Price was phenomenal, Alfredo Simon exceeded his projections, Justin Verlander has been bullpen-level bad, and none of the other starters had any expectations on them heading into the season, leaving Anibal Sanchez as both a player with decent expectations and a failure to reach them.

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As a counter to the idea that baseball is complicated and unpredictable: sometimes, baseball can seem ever so easy to understand. Not long ago, the Blue Jays traded for Troy Tulowitzki, perhaps or probably the very best shortstop. Shortly thereafter, the Jays also traded for David Price, easily one of the very best starting pitchers. Since Tulowitzki joined the lineup, the Jays have gone 11-1, and the one loss was a Tulowitzki day off. Over the weekend, the Jays pulled closer to the Yankees by sweeping them in their own stadium. Why wouldn’t that happen? Two superstars were added to what was already a pretty good club. Pretty good + superstars = even better! We’ve figured this game out.

The Jays have eaten up ground faster than anyone could’ve reasonably imagined. Sometimes there are concerns that adding pieces at the deadline can disrupt a clubhouse atmosphere, but all the lights are green in Toronto, and the probabilities that encouraged Alex Anthopoulos to act aggressively have only gotten significantly more positive, validating the moves that were made. The Jays are built to bludgeon, but they’ve also meaningfully improved the pitching staff, with everything clicking about perfectly at the moment. The question now needs to be asked: how good is this team? When a team’s on a winning streak, it’s almost impossible to imagine it losing. The Jays will lose, and they’ll do it several times. But is any other team positioned to lose less?

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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. The top 10 prospects will be coming tomorrow.

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The Brewers announced today that Doug Melvin is going to “transition into an advisory role” with the team, which is probably the nicest language you can use to fire someone. The Brewers have been in need of a new direction for a while now, and a new front office should help kickstart a rebuild that is already a bit late in getting started.

In terms of potential candidates, Twitter is already offering plenty of speculation.

#Brewers have hired executive search firm Korn Ferry to organize GM search. Will target younger candidates with knowledge of analytics.

— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) August 11, 2015

Number of people in the industry think Brewers will look within for next GM–Ray Montgomery is well regarded around MLB.

— JJ Cooper (@jjcoop36) August 11, 2015

Cooper’s tweet is somewhat reinforced by this follow-up from Tom Haudricourt:

Attanasio made it clear that he considers Craig Counsell the team's manager and GM candidates will be told so.

— Tom (@Haudricourt) August 11, 2015

If you’re committed to Counsell as the manager, and that is not a negotiable point, outside candidates may be less interested in the job, knowing that they not get to pick their own staff. An internal candidate like Montgomery, who worked with Counsell in the front office before he was named manager in May, would probably have less of a problem going with the continuity line of thinking.

If the team does decide to go outside the organization, Jerry Dipoto would probably be one of the more popular names, though given that he just lost a power struggle with an owner over an empowered manager, perhaps this wouldn’t be the kind of spot he’s hoping to land. There are also an army of highly qualified assistant GMs around baseball, many of whom will likely make for excellent GMs when given the opportunity. The Brewers could also go big and aim for Dave Dombrowski, but they’d probably have to make him team president to compete with other offers he’s going to get, so if they’re just looking for a GM, he’ll probably have better options.

Either way, this should lead to some necessary changes in Milwaukee, and perhaps help the team get along with renovating the roster while admitting that the current group is unlikely to contend in the NL Central in the near future.

All it takes is a game like the one Noah Syndergaard had over the weekend — five runs in four innings despite six strikeouts against two walks — to be reminded that even a Norse God has to maintain his game by refining it. Though Syndergaard’s curve is already a top-ten hammer by whiffs, he’s been working on it. And he might be adding a new baby weapon to go along with it.

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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.

Let’s start off this article the way I started off my presentation to SABR: with a quick poll. And you might as well be honest, now, because otherwise you’re just bullshitting yourself, and that would just be pathetic.

• How many of you played Little League when you were a kid? Hands up, please. OK… keep them up. Now:
• How many of you ever hit a home run in a Little League game? If you did, keep your hands up. OK… now, finally:
• How many of you hit an actual home run clear over the outfielders’ heads and were able to trot all the way around the bases in a Little League game?

Not so many of you, right? Only the very best players on any given Little League team ever hit that kind of home run. If you’re like me, and like most Little Leaguers, if you ever hit a home run in Little League, this is what it probably looked like this:

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As we head into mid-August, there are roughly 50 games left for each team on the schedule, and we’re reaching the point of the season where we can begin to cull the list of potential candidates for the three major awards. So, today, let’s take a look at the legitimate MVP candidates in both leagues, and handicap how this might play out over the next six weeks.

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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
Washington at Los Angeles NL | 22:10 ET
Ross (45.0 IP, 66 xFIP-) vs. Greinke (152.1 IP, 83 xFIP-)
Both Washington rookie Joe Ross and also San Diego right-hander Tyson Ross, who are brothers, feature sliders which currently sit within the league’s top ten by linear-weight runs among all starters — a notable accomplishment, especially, in the case of the former Ross, who’s recorded fewer than 50 major-league innings this season. Were the author capable of it, he would craft a long-form narrative piece exploring the implications of a family genetically predisposed to mastering this one pitch, considering both the practical kinetic explanations and also the more profound, nearly mystical, fraternal ones. Lacking both of skill and also tolerance for the sort of precision required by such an endeavor, however, what I’ve done instead is merely to produce this paragraph which invokes the possibility of such a piece. Less substantial, that, but also much less tedious for everyone involved.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Television.

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