FanGraphs Baseball

With five days left until the trade deadline, things seem to be picking up, with one big move nearly happening last night, and some others potentially getting done today. So while I was originally planning on running these speculative guesses as my Monday piece, I figure I might as well publish it now before teams make a good chunk of this irrelevant.

So, what follows are my guesses as to who goes where before July 31st, based on what teams are rumored to be looking for and who we know is available. The tricky part of an exercise like this is that there are also guys who are available that we don’t know about, and if a team penciled in for one of the available guys goes for the mystery box instead, it will have a domino effect, driving that available player somewhere else, and messing up multiple guesses in the process. So, by Friday, I’d be surprised if I got more than a few of these right. This is really more just for fun than any kind of serious attempt at handicapping exactly where everyone is going. But let’s see how I do.

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Kevin Pillar is a stud with the glove. The Blue Jays center fielder has 14 Defensive Runs Saved, which ranks him second behind Kevin Kiermaier among fly chasers. Unlike the Rays’ hit robber, he didn’t reach the big leagues because of his defense.

“I got here because I hit well at every level in the minor leagues,” said Pillar, who put up a .322/.364/.477 slash line down on the farm. “My offensive production overshadowed my ability to play defense, but I enjoy playing center field and I enjoy making good plays. I have fun out there.”

He’s certainly been fun to watch. Pillar passes the eye test with flying colors, as evidenced by myriad appearances on highlight reels. But while he’s surprised a lot of people with his Devon White-like play, he hasn’t surprised himself. 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
Los Angeles NL at New York NL | 19:10 ET
Undecided (N/A) vs. Harvey (118.1 IP, 92 xFIP-)
Reports indicate that this game might represent the major-league debut of right-handed Dodgers prospect Zach Lee. A first-round selection out of a Texas high school in 2010, Lee notably forewent an opportunity to play quarterback at LSU by signing with Los Angeles. As Kiley McDaniel notes, Lee’s arm speed has declined since turning professional, although he’s still managed to record an above-average strikeout- and walk-rate differential as a 23-year-old in Triple-A this year. Even without Lee, this game offers the opportunity to observe two clubs, in the Dodgers and Mets, both contending for division titles. It also offers the opportunity to observe Matt Harvey, who is human but not actually all-too-human.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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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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Earlier today, Dave wrote about how we might be in a buyer’s market now. He was referring mostly to starting pitchers, but might that apply to relievers as well? The only reliever we seem to be getting news about is Jonathan Papelbon, and the news is that his market seems to be drying up. And with the Red Sox and Rays now looking to trade relievers, there may be more guys in play than previously thought. Either way, the Cardinals, true to their form, weren’t waiting around for the market to heat up. They have acquired the first relief pitcher of the trade deadline season, and didn’t pay much for it. Via Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald:

#marlins to receive double A RHP Kyle Barraclough from cardinals for Steve Cishek

— clarkspencer (@clarkspencer) July 24, 2015

Steve Cishek is an interesting get. Entering the year, he was one of the better relievers in the league. From his full season debut in 2011 through the end of 2014, he had the 19th-best FIP- among qualified relievers, and three of the guys on the list ahead of him are out of baseball now. Last season, he whiffed a career best 30.6% of the batters he faced. He rode his slider — which he didn’t learn until 2009 — into prominence, and last year leaned on it more than ever.

This year, he hasn’t been as effective. Or, he wasn’t as effective in the season’s first two months. At the end of May, he had a 6.98 ERA, 4.20 FIP and 4.37 xFIP, and he had struck out 17 batters against 10 walks in 19.1 innings. He finished the month by taking the collar in a loss to the Mets, and that was the final indignity that got him sent packing.

After six scoreless, walk-free innings in Double-A, he was called back up, and has been much better since — a 0.71 ERA, 2.27 FIP and 3.49 xFIP in 12.2 innings. He has struck out 11 and walked just 4 since being recalled. And those strikeout numbers may come up in the near future, as Cishek’s contact percentage hasn’t changed since 2012. While his strikeout percentage last year may have been on the high end of the spectrum, this year’s 19.4% K% would seem to be on the far low end.

With the positive recent results and the harbinger of better results in the future, there is a decent chance that Cishek’s early season troubles are behind him, and that he’ll be a vital member of the Cardinals bullpen moving forward. They don’t need him to be the closer, Trevor Rosenthal has that job covered. The Cardinals in fact already had a pretty strong bullpen. Kevin Siegrist and Seth Maness both have good SD-MD numbers as well, and overall the unit’s FIP- ranks 10th for the season, though it has been just 15th over the past 30 days. Add in Cishek and the rehabbing Jordan Walden, and there is quality depth there. And it didn’t cost St. Louis hardly anything.

A seventh round pick in 2012, Kyle Barraclough didn’t reach Double-A until his age-25 season this year, and in his first 24.2 innings there, he has walked 17.7 percent of the batters he has faced. He also walked a higher percentage of batters in his second turn at High-A than his first. He gets a decent amount of strikeouts, but he is not going to generate much excitement, and he represents another data point that the trade market thus far is favoring the buyers.

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) 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.

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Ben and Sam banter about analytics and secrecy, then answer listener emails about aces in relief, the Phillies’ terrible rotation, and more.

When Rangers lefty Matt Harrison hobbled off the mound in the second inning of a game against the Astros in May of 2014, you, like any rational observer (such as the esteemed yours truly), probably experienced the lumbar equivalent of a sympathetic pregnancy. You probably winced — and just in case the initial wince didn’t register with the awww-jeeeez registry, winced again — and then reached for your lower back, wiggled it around while listening to the unmistakable sounds of Pachinko and fell to the floor in unmitigated agony after reaching for the business card of a chiropractor.

Or something like that.

Mercy.

It was painful to watch, and more painful, surely, for poor Matt Harrison to bear. Having already undergone a pair of 2013 surgeries to repair a herniated disc, Harrison, with his head bowed and back slightly but tellingly bent, walked gingerly to the dugout that day with four earned runs (in 1.2 innings) in his wake and, worse, one lumbar spinal disc fusion surgery in his future.

Couched in the careful language of objective reports were subtle eulogies to his once ascendant career, little nods to the possibility — the probability — that the 6-foot-4 former All-Star had thrown his last big league pitch, or, really, his last pitch, period. After all, nobody else in the history of baseball — a sport, mind you, in which unfettered actions of the spinal column are pretty key to performance — had ever undergone the same surgical procedure, let alone returned from it. In a season that saw so many Rangers sojourn in long disability, Harrison seemed bound for a permanent stay.

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When examining the Rest of Season projections from either ZiPS or Steamer, one will notice in both systems that Giancarlo Stanton is expected to finish just short of the league lead in home runs. While this is a tremendous accomplishment on its own, Stanton’s projected presence near the top of the home-run charts looks like an even more tremendous feat considering that Stanton has already missed 22 games this season, and will be missing even more as he recovers from a fractured left wrist.

At first glance the two projection systems regard Stanton very differently: ZiPS projects Stanton to finish second in the league in home runs at 43 — a single dinger behind Mike Trout — and Steamer projects that Stanton will finish tied for sixth, at 36. Upon further inspection, both projection systems regard Stanton’s on-field skills very similarly: ZiPS is projecting a home run once every 13 PAs, and Steamer once every 12.67 PAs. (Stanton has deposited a souvenir in the bleachers once every 11.7 PAs so far this season.) The true difference is that ZiPS is more confident in Stanton’s continued health, projecting only nine missed games from Stanton for the rest of the season, while Steamer projects that Stanton will finish the season with about 100 fewer PAs, or I guess about 25 missed games on top of the ZiPS projection.

So I wondered: how often does a player reach the league lead of a cumulative counting stat while missing such a huge chunk of the season? It turns out that players who finish on the edge of qualification actually hit the top 10 in some category just about every year — except when it comes to total hits, and home runs.

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Ratings news were a mixed bag for Major League Baseball over the past few weeks. The Home Run Derby was the number-one rated cable show of the week and saw a significant increase from the previous year with more than seven million viewers. The All-Star Game itself was a disappointment in the ratings, as the broadcast was at its lowest-viewed level of all-time — although it did have more viewers than any other program that week, and the ratings were in line with the past few years. The best news MLB received in the ratings department came in the form of local broadcasts, which are once again dominant. The most troubling item over the last month was the news that ESPN had lost more than seven million subscribers in the past four years, perhaps a sign of the crumbling cable model.

Breaking each one down:

All-Star Game and Home Run Derby

The Home Run Derby was a clear success for MLB after a disappointing rain-delayed derby last year. The derby did a 4.9 rating, a big increase over the 3.9 from 2014 and aided by the excitement of a new timed format that kept the event lively. The show averaged another 75,000 viewers digitally over the WatchESPN app, per Forbes, with more than 250,000 unique viewers. The derby’s viewership nearly doubled the second-highest rated cable show of the week (TNT’s Major Crimes) and was the seventh-most watched show of the week when including broadcast network shows.

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