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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Phil Coke, who joined the Blue Jays bullpen today, has traded in his slider for a cutter. I’ll write more on that in this Sunday’s Notes column. Tonight, I’ll share something the lefty reliever told me that seems hard to believe. Then again, the person he was talking about was no mere mortal on a baseball field.
According to Coke, Mariano Rivera could throw a cutter while long tossing.
“When I was a rookie, Mariano was my throwing partner,” said Coke, who broke in with the Yankees. “He was throwing me 300-foot balls that didn’t cut until the last five feet. It was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I was like, ‘How are you doing that?’
“The movement was short and late. It was crazy. He would throw the ball, and I’d be like, ‘Here comes a four-seamer.’ Then, wham! It was on line to hit me in the face, then all of a sudden I had to bail out from where I was standing to catch the ball way over there. Mariano would just smile at me.”
A cutter from 300 feet? Come on, Phil. How is that even possible?
“I swear on my life,” Coke told me. “It was crazy.”
The existence of this post on FanGraphs.com relies on the premise that not only is the author of the post a person, but also so is the reader. Individual human people, despite possessing rich and unique interior lives, often share certain concerns, as well. One of the author’s big concerns, for example, is to avoid fainting like the overwhelmed heroine of a French novel while having his blood drawn at the doctor’s office. Another, naturally, is not accidentally entering an adulterous affair merely to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life — much like the heroine of a French novel might, for example.
The universality of these sentiments is manifest, I’m sure.
A third and final of my concerns is knowing precisely which of the players about to appear, starting Saturday, in the College World Series — knowing which of those players has also recently been selected in the major-league draft.
What follows is an attempt to provide that sort of knowledge. I’ve benefited greatly from Baseball Reference’s draft database in the composition of this post. I’ve benefited equally from the contents of the Bota Box full of Malbec on top of my refrigerator.
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School
University of Arkansas
First Game
Saturday, June 13, 3:00pm ET vs. Virginia
Draftees
Andrew Benintendi, OF (7th overall, Boston)
Trey Killian, RHP (9th round, Colorado)
Bobby Wernes, 3B (30th round, Houston)
Tyler Spoon, OF (35th round, Boston)
Ben and Sam banter about Pat Venditte and Zack Cozart, then answer emails about batter-pitcher matchups, when to congratulate players, double Delino DeShieldses, and more.
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Pitching is an enigmatic thing. There are so many aspects to it that it can be difficult to get them straight in one’s head. A thing we all know about it, though, is the faster you throw the better you are. This is what makes Nathan Eovaldi so fascinating and yet so curious. Eovaldi has the fastest average fastball velocity of any starting pitcher in baseball at 95.8 mph. He started against the Nationals on Wednesday and hit 99 mph with his fastball in the third inning. Dude throws hard. And yet, outside of that, he’s not really anything special as a pitcher. In total value Eovaldi is Wade Miley. Miley has an impressive beard, but to paraphrase a great person, an impressive beard does not an impressive season make. The most valuable pitcher in baseball so far is Corey Kluber at 3.0 WAR. Kluber’s average fastball is 93.5 mph, 2.3 mph slower than Eovaldi’s. So clearly fastball velocity isn’t everything.
But why not? The quicker a pitch, the shorter the batter’s reaction time, and we’re talking about removing hundredths of a second. A 95 mph fastball will reach home plate in 0.4 seconds so removing those small fractions of a second you’d think would be problematic for the hitter. And they are problematic. The thing is, they’re not the whole story.
Every year around this time, Major League Baseball starts their periodic All-Star Game voting updates. This year’s process has been flawed, to say the least. And like we always do about this time, we go through and pick the updates apart and see who still hasn’t got their due, to try to find the right recipe for the game. In doing so this year, the most glaring omission appears to be A.J. Pollock.
As of Thursday, A.J. Pollock was 11th in the majors in position player WAR. Let’s start there. If we look at the top 10, we can note that as of our last ballot update — which was Monday for the American League and Tuesday for the National League — that every one in the top 10 had at least 900,000 votes, and all but Joc Pederson had at least one million. Pollock, however, didn’t rate. He wasn’t one of the top-15 vote getters among NL outfielders, and 15th place Starling Marte had totaled 635,125 votes thus far. So Pollock is pretty far behind his fellow WAR leaders.
MLB’s 86th All-Star Game is just over a month away, and if you’ve been paying attention to the early voting, you know you can actually skip the event and just watch any random Kansas City Royals game instead; it will basically be the same thing. The Royals have turned out their voting bloc in droves, and unless the other franchises make a late move, the American League is going to try and bunt, steal, and defend their way to a 1-0 win in Cincinnati next month.
Just as the game itself is an annual tradition, so too are summer columns suggesting ways to “fix” or “improve” the Midsummer Classic. Even Jonah Keri, an absurd optimist who probably has Everything Is Awesome as the only song in his Spotify playlist, hates the current All-Star format:
Jonah Keri: I’m the most positive guy you’ll ever meet. Also, I love baseball. Adore it. Bathe myself in it.
But All-Star week — the Home Run Derby, the actual All-Star Game, and especially the four days with no real baseball — are freaking terrible. Uh-oh. Here comes Angry Jonah.
Why the hell does this game “count”? It’s a total farce. AL All-Star manager John Farrell has already said he won’t use any pitcher for more than one inning under any circumstances. How is that managing to win? Why should that count?
I’m with Jonah. All-Star Week sucks. The Futures Game is fun and worth doing, but the rest of it doesn’t interest me at all. And MLB’s attempt to make the game “count” is silly, and has done nothing to change the fact that this is still an exhibition game designed solely to make a lot of money for the league. But I also recognize that it’s good for MLB to market itself on a large stage, giving people a mid-season event to turn into, especially where the game’s best players are all assembled together. But the All-Star Game isn’t really a baseball game, and it doesn’t show off what is good about the sport.
So I’d like to make a proposal to overhaul the All-Star Week. This idea still allows MLB to gather its best players in one location — in fact, even expands the number of players who get to participate — while also giving us three actual baseball games, with actual baseball rosters, played under normal baseball conditions. The concept? Battle of the Ages.
1) Italian-American switch-pitching Pat Venditte uses both hands to express himself on the podium.
2) It takes Pat Venditte twice as long as to stretch, and to get warm.
3) Pat Venditte’s six-finger glove was made by Mizuno for him, but the model was designed for switch-pitcher Greg Harris.
The Greg Harris Mizuno that Venditte uses. Photo Courtesy Jorge L. Ortiz and USAToday.
4) Pat Venditte’s name on the lineup is in blue, previously a color reserved for switch-hitters.
5) Pat Venditte dropped down to sidearm from the right side after surgery, but not because of the surgery. That was more “result-based” the pitcher said this week — he was having trouble getting righties out and Gil Patterson on the Yankees “pretty much forced me to pitch side-arm” for which the pitcher is now “very grateful.”
(Gil Patterson may have been looking at this diagram from Jeremy Greenhouse — showing the advantage for different arm slots — when he forced Pat Venditte to go sidearm.)
6) Player reactions to Pat Venditte aren’t actually that strange. “When you spend seven years in the minor leagues, the only hitters that haven’t seen you yet are the guys that have been established up here for a long time.”
7) “Almost all of the time,” the manager tells Pat Venditte which arm to use.
8) There are days when Pat Venditte is only available to pitch with one of his arms. He pitched the entire 2013 WBC strictly left-handed for Italy.
9) Pat Venditte’s arsenal is about the same against both hands, except he’s got more gas on his sinker and more drop on his slider from the right side.
As a righty:
| RHP Pitch | Count | avg(pfx_x) | avg(pfx_z) | avg(start_speed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SI | 26 | -6.1 | 6.3 | 86.7 |
| SL | 23 | 11.2 | -0.5 | 73.9 |
As a lefty:
| LHP Pitch | Count | avg(pfx_x) | avg(pfx_z) | avg(start_speed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SI | 6 | 6.3 | 6.5 | 81.8 |
| SL | 11 | -7.9 | 1.9 | 71.8 |
10) Pat Venditte’s sinker falls short of almost every benchmark — movement, velocity, and swinging strike rate at least — for an average pitch for either a lefty or a righty.
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: Hello friends!
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: Welcome to basically on-time baseball chat!
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: Ordinarily by now I’d have a JABO post live but I haven’t heard back from the editors over there so there’s the reason for that
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I bet no one is here because you’re on time for once. |
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: I actually had to give it a minute to let the queue get built up
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Fix the Mariner’s offense in 10 words or less….. |
So much of the analysis we do in baseball follows a pretty simple formula. We notice a player is getting different results, we look for explanations for the change, and then we speculate about whether the latter caused the former and if it will continue. Baseball includes so much random variation and you have to make decisions all the time about how much information is enough to rule out randomness as an answer. When it came to Phil Hughes in 2014, we didn’t have to worry too much about randomness as an explanation.
Hughes rattled off the best K/BB ratio of all time and was somewhere between very good and excellent for the first time in his career. While we can chalk lots of leaps up to random variation, Hughes seemed immune because he was such a drastically different pitcher in Minnesota compared to New York. It appeared to be quite clear why Hughes was so much better. He stopped issuing walks and pounded the strike zone. He bumped up his strikeouts as a result, and seemingly cut his home runs because he was in better counts and not in Yankee Stadium.
