FanGraphs Baseball

Chris Coghlan isn’t the same hitter he was when he captured NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2009. His numbers aren’t quite as good, but the Marlin-turned-Cub nonetheless feels he’s better. At age 30, he has a more learned understanding both of his craft and the stats that matter.

Coghlan has put up a .272/.353/.443 slash line since coming to Chicago prior to last season. This year he will easily eclipse his career best in home runs, and his walk rate has never been higher. Coghlan is by no means a star, but he’s been a cog in the Cubs lineup against right-handed pitchers. He has just 27 plate appearances against southpaws, which is his lone complaint.

Coghlan talked hitting prior to a recent game at Wrigley Field.

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Coghlan on his swing: “Pitchers are going to run it and sink it on you. If you’re too flat on your bat path, you’re going to swing right over the top of the ball, or hit it right into the ground. You need to have an entry plane that’s up enough, or steep enough, to get underneath the ball, to lift it. The more rotational you are, the flatter you are, yeah, you’re going to run into some line drives if the ball is elevated, but for the most part it’s going to be tough for you to square it up.

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Ben and Sam banter about trade arbitrage and Jon Lester, then discuss the Angels’ front-office overthrow.

I’m in the Red Sox clubhouse for the vast majority of their home games, so I could easily write about the team on a regular basis. I choose not to. They get plenty of coverage as it is, and there are 29 other clubs. For the most part, I keep my Boston content to a minimum.

Brock Holt being named to the American League All-Star team is something I can’t refrain from penning (to use an archaic term) a few words on. After all, I’ve been banging the Holt drum since early in the current campaign.

Holt is a throwback, the type of player who provides value beyond his raw numbers. And his numbers aren’t chicken soup. Playing every position on the field besides pitcher and catcher, Holt is hitting .295/.383/.424. On a team of underachievers, he’s anything but.

This past weekend, I asked A.J. Hinch about Holt. The Houston Astros manager described him perfectly, saying Holt “does everything pretty well, maybe without dominating any one particular part of the game.” He called Holt “a tough out” and “a very impressive player.” As you might expect, he lauded his versatility.

A few weeks earlier, another manager expressed even more admiration. Holt hit for the cycle against the Atlanta Braves at Fenway Park, and after the game I spoke to Fredi Gonzalez. As I was exiting his office, he stopped me with a tongue-in-cheek request.

“Can you do me a favor?” asked Gonzalez. “Go over there and tell (Holt), ‘If they don’t want him, we’ll take him.’ I’ve always loved that (expletive). He’s a nice player to have, because he can play all over the field and he gives you a helluva an at bat.”

Brock Holt – essentially a throw-in in the December 2012 Joel Hanrahan–Mark Melancon deal – is the lone All-Star representative for a team with a payroll pushing $200 million. That’s a story well worth writing about.

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Addendum per Red Sox media relations: Holt is the first player ever to be named an All-Star after appearing at 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, and RF prior to the All-Star break.

Last winter was the winter of Cole Hamels trade conversation. As it became more clear the Phillies were going to hold on for the time being, it became necessary to try to forecast the midseason trade market. Hamels was obviously going to be out there. And then people wondered about Johnny Cueto. On the one hand, it made sense, with Cueto due to become a free agent, and the Reds seemingly not very good. But the Reds also wanted to win — everyone wants to win — and in the middle of May, the Reds were caught in that in-between position, with as many wins as losses. That’s not a good place to find yourself, when you’re on the verge of having to rebuild. Since then, though, the Reds have lost 60% of their games, so they’ve at least gotten clarity. These Reds ought to sell. While nobody likes losing, at least losing has made the Reds’ decision easier.

Where the Reds know what they ought to do, though, the situation has grown increasingly complicated in Detroit. Many have been predicting the Tigers’ coming demise for a while, and though that might be overstated, it’s not an organization on the upswing. It’s more of a win-now ballclub, but it’s a win-now ballclub with about as many losses as wins, and a few days ago Miguel Cabrera went and hurt himself. For the next six weeks — roughly half of the remainder — Miguel Cabrera will be replaced by not Miguel Cabrera, and that’s a huge void for a team that’s been struggling for a month and a half. The Tigers, I’m sure, would love to know how to proceed. Unfortunately, nothing about this is simple. The Tigers are navigating a ridge while they’re fully exposed.

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For the past two years, there’s been a dark horse in the MVP race. Though he might never had a shot at winning the award with the likes of Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout putting up the types of seasons they did, Josh Donaldson has nonetheless been one of the best players in baseball since the start of 2013. This year, we’re witnessing an interesting development: a plate approach adjustment to take advantage of the offense-friendly Rogers Centre.

We’ve gotten accustomed to seeing a high level of production out of Donaldson since August of 2012: above average walks, a lot of power and elite defense. His offensive output was tempered in 2013 and 2014 by the fact that he had to play his home games in pitcher-friendly Oakland; the prevailing thought was that moving to the Rogers Centre in 2015 could possibly vault him into an even higher echelon among power hitters.

At the midpoint of this season, that’s exactly what has happened. Take a look at Donaldson’s yearly stats since the start of 2013, the first year he was the productive hitter we see today:

A few things of note this season: Donaldson’s strikeouts are up, his walks are down a fair amount and his power is more substantial. We tend to see walk rates improve as players age, so this is a little strange. What could be causing his drop in free passes? Let’s look at Donaldson’s stats away from Rogers Centre this year:

His rate stats look in line with his career norms since 2013, but everything else has been pulled down in some part by bad batted-ball luck. How about his stats this year at Rogers Centre?

There we have it. Compared to his overall stats the past two years, he’s basically not walking, he’s striking out more and he’s hitting for much more power when he’s playing at home. What we seem to be seeing is a different approach when Donaldson is in Toronto — one that allows him to take advantage of his home park’s natural power-boosting tendencies. Let’s go into the reasons for the numbers.

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Ben and Sam return from a semi-extended absence to banter about Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, a David Ortiz fun fact, All-Star voting, Cardinals hacking, and more.

The trade deadline is 25 days away, and with so many teams bunched up in the middle of the standings, there could be a serious shortage of talent available for teams looking to upgrade. In particular, available hitters seem to be particularly scarce, as the few sellers that exist in the market are mostly going to be selling veteran pitchers. Between Cole Hamels, Johnny Cueto, and Jeff Samardzija, some pretty good arms will likely change teams in the next few weeks, but for teams like the Pirates and Cardinals — who could use a bat far more than another arm — the pickings are beyond slim.

Right now, in fact, it appears that the best hitter likely to change teams before the deadline is Brewers first baseman Adam Lind. Yes, the same Adam Lind who was traded for Marco Estrada over the winter, because the Blue Jays didn’t really want to pay him $7.5 million to DH for them. Lind wasn’t exactly a hot commodity during the off-season, and given his track record, it’s not hard to see why teams weren’t exactly falling all over themselves to add him to their line-up. Here are Lind’s seasonal wRC+ marks by year since he broke into the big leagues.

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One particularly appealing quality of European football for people like the author who are desperate to exude an air of worldliness, is the lack of official club nicknames. Manchester United, for example, are known popularly as the Red Devils*, Southampton as the Saints, and Everton as the Toffees. In none of those instances, however, does the nickname appear either on the club’s uniform or its official crest. Rather, the nicknames are largely — or, at least, more largely than in the States — the province of supporters and journalists, lending some (perhaps illusory) sense of the communal to the wildly capitalist affair of spectator sports.

*A devil actually does appear on the current iteration of Man U’s crest, but was added nearly a hundred years after the original formation of the club.

Nor is this sort of arrangement entirely alien to American baseball. The Brooklyn Base Ball Club was known alternately as the Grays, the Grooms, the Bridegrooms, the Superbas, and the Robins, before officially adopting the (Trolley) Dodgers nickname in 1933. And even despite the ubiquity of official nicknames in the modern version of the game, there are still unofficial ones used with considerable frequency — as in the instance of the Pittsburgh Pirates, for instance, known popularly as the Buccos; the Los Angeles Angels, known as the Halos; or the San Diego Padres, known as the Friars.

This post is designed to serve as an appeal to readers to supply those commonly used nicknames (like Buccos and Friars and Halos) which are distinct from the official one used by the club itself. Readers are invited to err on the side of the obvious. (So, even suggesting the O’s for the Baltimore Orioles is still of some benefit.)

With a reasonably complete list assembled, writer/grapher/researcher Sean Dolinar will attempt to discover which of these unofficial nicknames is currently in greatest use among fans and journalists. The results, one supposes, will be useless and fascinating.

Bryce Harper is having a career year emerging as one of baseball’s elite players. He leads all qualified batters in Major League Baseball in wins above replacement (WAR), weighted on-base average (wOBA), isolated power (ISO), and weighted runs created (wRC+). Harper has a wRC+ of 223, which means he’s created 2.23 times as many runs as the league average. wRC+ compares players to the rest of the league, because the stat is calculated relative to the league average.

I created a few interactive histograms to place a few of Harper’s stats in more context. For those who are not entirely familiar with histograms, they show the distribution of a particular stat. A narrow distribution has individuals clustered closer together, while a wide distribution has individuals that differ more. You might be familiar with the ubiquitous bell curve – the normal distribution. Histograms are important because they can provide a lot of information about the league quickly. While the wRC+ stat tells you how much better than league average the player is, it doesn’t tell you how many other players did as well.

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Here’s a little thing that steamrolled into a big thing, for just a moment, and then disappeared. I talked to Ender Inciarte many weeks ago, and it set me off on a path that took forever to complete.

Here’s what Inciarte said:

Against lefties, I try to let the ball get deeper and try to hit it the other way. Against righties, I feel like I can use the whole field. I don’t hit a lot of extra base hits against lefties, but I just try to do my job, which is to get on base.

It’s not the craziest thing you’ve ever heard. I’ve heard from many switch-hitters that they are different hitters from each side of the plate, and this is just the non-switch-hitter analog. Against righties, he’s one hitter; against lefties, he’s another.

But two questions immediately came to mind. How extreme is he? And, given his decent platoon splits to date, could he be providing a road map for others to follow?

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