FanGraphs Baseball

“I’ll be honest. I think pulling the ball is the best way to get hits,” Charlie Blackmon said before a game against the Athletics, as we went over the various changes in his hitting profile from year to year. Maybe that’s baseball 101, but going the opposite way has its prominent supporters.

In the age of the shift, though, is Blackmon’s assertion itself still so obvious? Pull the ball a ton and you’ll end up seeing more defenders where you want the ball to go. Unless you have a certain skill that has fallen out of favor in baseball.

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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 Oakland | 22:05 ET
Doubront (14.0 IP, 77 xFIP-) vs. Gray (129.2 IP, 86 xFIP-)
While the author is unable to cite any such documents specifically, reason dictates that there are probably hundreds or even thousands of tirelessly researched and scrupulously peer-reviewed scientific papers all of which conclude that human decision-making is a largely arbitrary endeavor. Today, instead of continuing to ignore this difficult truth, the reader has an opportunity to embrace it — by watching Toronto left-hander Felix Doubront pitch for some reason. Doubront has produced two curious starts for the Blue Jays, conceding just a single walk against 52 batters while recording a 69.0% ground-ball rate — this, however, while also allowing eight runs over just 11.2 innings. A compelling blend of success and failure, that. As to whether it’s a reason for watching Doubront, however — let’s regard this concern as moot for the moment.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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The All-Star Game is behind us, which means everyone now is paying attention to the coming trade deadline. The appeal, I think, is about two things: One, we’re just engineered to crave roster change. Two, we’re led to believe this is when winners are made. Or at least, this is when winners do something that puts them over the hump; and this is when losers can try to collect prospects. For the next week and a half, the trade deadline will be the most important thing. Regardless of whether it deserves that status, this is the annual routine. Right now, it’s all about possible moves.

Related to that, Bob Nightengale caused a stir with his report that the Detroit Tigers might sell — and might therefore sell David Price. It’s significant not just because the Tigers don’t usually sell, but also because Price is an ace, and available aces are diamonds every July. Consensus is that there’s no sexier addition than a No. 1 starter, which is why there’s also so much attention on Johnny Cueto and Cole Hamels. And Jeff Samardzija and James Shields, and so on. The idea is that a front-line starter becomes even more valuable in the playoffs. And people are inclined to believe that, in the playoffs, pitching is what matters most. So this time of year, the supposedly most desirable pieces are the best and most durable arms.

This calls for a simple analysis. Actually, this calls for a very deep and thorough analysis, but I’m not very good at those. A simple analysis is the fallback. Front-line starters have been traded midseason before. What’s happened with the teams that got them?

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A lot of player interviews are a waste of time. This one isn’t. This is Lance Lynn, being interviewed in early June, after shutting down the Brewers:

Lynn talks a lot about the fastball, which is appropriate, because Lynn threw 119 pitches in the game, and if his words are to be believed, exactly one of those wasn’t a heater. According to the numbers we have, it was more like three non-heaters, but there’s no point in getting too hung up on this; either way, Lynn threw a crap-ton of heaters. He used it almost exclusively to keep the Brewers quiet, and that was mostly in keeping with Lynn’s evolved pitcher profile. Earlier in the year, when Bartolo Colon was on his run, much attention was paid to his unusual and seemingly simple pitching style. Lynn has become the best Colon comparison we have. Only he’s younger, and stronger, and better. On the surface, Lynn has one of the most simple game plans imaginable. Which means he’s figured out a complicated way to make it work.

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The New York Mets’ young trio of Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, and Noah Syndergaard have garnered quite a bit of attention of late. Our own Dave Cameron put all three pitchers in the first 30 names in his Trade Value series. The Mets were the only team with three pitchers on the list, and all three are 27 years old or younger. The Mets staff has carried a woeful offense and kept them in contention for a playoff spot. John Smoltz recently called the Mets’ young collection of talent “way better” than the 90s Braves teams that included Hall of Famers Smoltz, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine. While the young group is no doubt talented, how do they compare with other young groups around the league?

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Last season, the Orioles unexpectedly won the AL East. I say “unexpectedly” for two reasons. One, because almost nobody called for it during the preseason. And two, because Baltimore experienced injuries to and underperformance by some of their best players to such a degree that, had any of us known about it beforehand, it would have caused us all to project them falling backwards into last season, let alone last place. At the end of the year, their top-five players by WAR were Adam Jones, Steve Pearce, Nelson Cruz, J.J. Hardy, and Nick Markakis — a list within which Chris Davis, Matt Wieters, and Manny Machado (i.e. much of the team’s hypothetical core) are conspicuous by their absence.

This season things are different. This season, the list basically goes like this: Manny Machado, Manny Machado where you mispronounce his name for some reason, Manny Macahdo where I mistype his name for some reason, and then two more Manny Machados where you and I summon the humanity to get the man’s name right. Essentially this season, the second-place Orioles are Manny Machado and a bunch of .500-ish players or worse. That’s how good Manny Machado has been in 2015.

You may have read Dave Cameron’s recent trade-value series. If not read it. READ IT. On it, Machado ranked eighth, which is a very high ranking. However, if you look at the projected WAR by ZIPS over the next five seasons listed for each player in the articles and then re-ranked the players on that basis, you’ll get a top two of Mike Trout (double duh) and then Manny Machado himself. Machado, whose name my computer badly and inexplicably wants to change to “man mated,” has the second-highest projected WAR over the next five seasons. He’s that good now. He projects to be better soon. He hasn’t always been that good, though.

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Last Monday, at Just A Bit Outside, I looked into this year’s positional rookie class, and the fact that they were the best first-half class in the past ten years when measured by Wins Above Replacement. They have more overall total WAR, more individuals with over 1.0 WAR, and represent the first rookie class in at least a decade to have two rookies with over 3.0 WAR in the first half (Kris Bryant and Joc Pederson).

In short, this is a sort of renaissance year for positional rookies, and the article led me to wonder just how great 2015’s rookies are when compared to a larger sample of years, and a larger number of criteria. So here we are!

We’re going to be focusing mainly on positional players in today’s piece, as they’re really the standout group this season; rookie pitchers are having an about average year (by WAR) compared to years in this past decade, so that’s a topic for another day. As a primer, I’ll provide two charts from last week’s piece to get the ball rolling, and to get us up to speed with what was already covered.

First, I took the top-20 rookies by first-half WAR for each season in the past decade and looked at combined WAR:

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The adage that power is the last tool to develop floats around every year when trying to explain why a certain prospect has or has not realized his raw power in game situations. When I first heard the idea, it made sense. A hitter’s power develops as he gets stronger getting into his early-to-mid-20s, and… that was enough for me. The problem with this concept is that many of these hitters whose power we expect to develop sometime in the future already have the ability, just not the means to use it regularly. It’s not, in other words, merely a matter of getting it done in the weight room. And oftentimes, the smooth-stroking high-average doubles hitter never gets any attention for his power, then becomes a home-run monster as he matures. As an evaluator you need to understand how that happens and when it applies to individual hitters.

For this noninclusive inquiry, I wanted to look at two hitters lumped into the first group, those believed to have the raw power to be legitimate home-run hitters and how that power has or hasn’t manifested itself in the professional game. In looking at how hitters are able or unable to tap into their raw power skills, we can have a better idea of how to evaluate whether other players will be able to develop those skills into tangible results. Xander Bogaerts and Carlos Correa provide two excellent examples of this paradigm. Bogaerts has shown he can hit for moderate power in the minors against age-advanced competition, but has not yet brought it to Boston in his young career. Correa has started to showcase his power in the early going this year, though prior to this season it was more projection than demonstration. He was touted as a five-tool prospect going into the draft, and our own Kiley McDaniel graded him out in October as having a present 60 raw power tool (65 potential) with a 55 potential game power ability, or approximately 19-22 homers per season.

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