FanGraphs Baseball

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
Seattle at Cleveland | 12:10 ET
Happ (65.1 IP, 98 xFIP-) vs. Marcum (26.0 IP, 103 xFIP-)
As bearded philosopher-king Owen Watson demonstrated recently in the electronic pages, Cleveland’s rotation this season is producing strikeouts at an historical rate — even after adjusting for how the whole league is already producing strikeouts at an historical rate. Curiously, that’s not the immediate appeal of this game. Indeed, right-hander Shaun Marcum’s 24.1% strikeout rate as a starter does compare favorably to the league as whole, but ranks only fifth among starters on the club. The appeal, rather — according to the dubious methodology used by the author — lies in Cleveland’s batting corps, a group that has hit and run the bases at levels roughly one and two standard deviations, respectively, above the league average. Moreover, one finds that they control the strike zone excellently, having produced the league’s lowest collective swing rate at pitches out of the zone, but the third-highest rate of contact overall.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

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Carlos Martinez is a starting pitcher now. He’s not some guy who throws 75 pitches and four innings a game. This year he’s often exceeded triple digits, and he’s one of the big reasons why the St. Louis Cardinals are where they are despite the loss of some important players. Before the season, there was some uncertainty surrounding Martinez, and it’s still not clear how he’ll hold up down the stretch. But after pitching well in Colorado on Wednesday, Martinez has turned in six strong starts in a row. His ERA is a hair under 3, and he has the peripherals to match.

With every starting pitcher who’s ever become good, the reasons behind the success are numerous. It’s never as easy as, “He replaced this pitch with this other pitch,” or “He added a tick of velocity.” So understand that, with Martinez, I’m sure there’s been a lot going on. Most conspicuously, Martinez is now throwing a changeup he believes in. Even though observers liked Martinez’s changeup in the minors, it wasn’t there for him in the bigs, and he had problems putting lefties away. That problem is in the process of being resolved, as Martinez has evidently found a changeup he likes.

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The Indians drafted an ambidextrous pitcher earlier today, taking Ryan Perez out of Judson (Illinois) University in the 12th round. According to Cleveland scouting director Brad Grant, the 21-year-old Perez is a different kind of switch-pitcher than Oakland’s Pat Venditte.

Unlike Venditte, Perez doesn’t switch hands each time a new, different-sided batter steps into the box. On multiple occasions, Indians scouts watched Perez throw the first five innings of a game left-handed, and the next two right-handed. As for whether the team plans to have him begin switching for a platoon advantage, a la Venditte, Grant said “We’ll get him in the system and try to figure it out.” Plans are for Perez to begin his professional career with short-season Mahoning Valley.

According to Grant, his scouting staff turned in reports on Perez as both a left-handed and right-handed pitcher. The club feels he’s “a little further advanced (left-handed), but he has talent from both sides.” Perez “throws just as hard from both sides and is up to 90 mph,” and “has got a breaking ball with both hands.” His arm slot, which is the same from each side, isn’t as low as Venditte’s, but rather “more of a three-quarters slot.”

Perez’s primary difference from Venditte is the manner in which he switches, and from a durability point of view, it may be advantageous. As Grant put it, the most-unique of Cleveland’s 2015 draft picks has “the flexibility to throw in back to back to back games, because he could go left-handed one game, right-handed the next, then go back to left-handed the next day.”

There’s a belief that, when a guy throws a no-hitter, that means that somewhere along the line a defensive player made a hell of a play to keep it alive. There are certain famous examples that prop the theory up, and without doubt, there are easier plays made, and more difficult plays made, every single time. One of the interesting things about Chris Heston’s no-hitter is that no defensive plays really stand out. Granted, because of the strikeouts, there were just 15 balls put into play, but all of those turned into 16 outs, and no one had to make an all-out dive. It was, in retrospect, an easy-seeming no-hitter, if that’s not an oxymoron. (It is, but, anyway.)

Heston’s not the best pitcher to ever throw a no-hitter. Nor is he the worst. In fact, we don’t yet really know what Heston is, because his big-league career is barely underway. All we know for sure is he’s something of a groundball machine. There are only so many ways to analyze a game like this, such that you’re in any way original, but then there is that new Statcast wrinkle. We’ve got some Statcast information for all of Heston’s balls in play allowed. That’s potentially useful.

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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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We haven’t spoken about Xander Bogaerts at length in these digital pages for some time, so let’s remedy that situation. It seems like a good time to check in on the young shortstop’s development as a major-league hitter: Bogaerts is posting a wRC+ north of 100 in the first two months of the season, and he’s also almost cut his strikeout rate in half compared to last year. There’s also this group, which is an interesting subset of players, of which Boston’s shortstop is the leader — hitters with the highest increase in batted balls to the opposite field this season over last season:

Though it’s still perhaps a little early to be putting a ton of confidence in these numbers, changes as large as these in a hitter’s opposite-field tendencies merit attention. Opposite-field approach is often a good place to look when searching for a reason behind a change in type of production, and, given the drop in Bogaert’s ISO numbers from last year — .123 in 2014 vs. .106 this year — plus the fact that we’re over the ISO stabilization point, it’s one of the spots we’re going to focus on.

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Throwing a no-hitter can seem like a random occurrence. Edwin Jackson has a no-hitter. Dallas Braden has a no-hitter. One of Bud Smith’s 24 starts in the majors was a no hitter. Philip Humber has a perfect game. Tim Lincecum threw zero no-hitters in his incredible prime, and has thrown two since entering his decline. Pedro Martinez never threw one. Steve Carlton never did, either. No-hitters in major-league baseball require incredible skill, opportunity, and some luck. Thousands upon thousands of pitchers have had all three of those things, but fewer than 300 pitchers in MLB history have thrown a no-hitter. Chris Heston is now among that rare group.

Tidbits using the Baseball Reference Play Index:

• Chris Heston is only the 13th pitcher in MLB history to throw a no-hitter within his first 15 games in the majors. The last pitcher to match that feat was Clay Buchholz in 2007.
• Heston’s no-hitter was only the third in history in which the only hitters to reach base did so by means of a hit-by-pitch (HBP). The other two were Kevin Brown in 1997 and Lew Burdette in 1960.
• Heston’s three HBPs are the most in any no-hitter.
• Only ten pitchers have thrown a nine-inning no-hitter with a higher Game Score than Heston’s 98. Clayton Kershaw’s 102 mark from last season remains the top score.
• Of the 24 pitchers to throw a no-hitter within their first 30 games, Heston is the fifth-oldest at 27 years and 60 days. Bobo Holloman was the oldest at 30 years and 60 days when he threw his no-hitter in 1953 for the St. Louis Browns. Read the rest of this entry »

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On Tuesday night, in just his second game since being promoted to the big leagues, Astros shortstop Carlos Correa launched the first home run of his Major League career. Houston fans certainly hope that it won’t be the last, as the first overall pick from the 2012 draft is now being looked at as a potential franchise cornerstone; an offensive middle infielder who impacts the ball on both sides of the game.

It is not too difficult to look at the 6-foot-4 Correa and envision the heir to Troy Tulowitzki’s throne. At the time of his call-up, Correa was the consensus best prospect in baseball, thanks mostly to his destruction of Double-A and a solid performance in Triple-A despite the fact that he won’t turn 21 until September. While Correa had certainly performed well climbing the minor league ladder the last few years, he really broke out at the beginning of this season by developing additional power.

In Double-A, 24 of his 45 hits went for extra bases, which is the kind of mark you expect from aging players who can’t hit singles because they pull all their ground balls right into the shift. When you see that kind of power from a middle infielder, especially one who isn’t yet of drinking age, the sky really seems to be the limit.

But as we discussed in this space a week ago, projecting future power output is a tricky business. While a player’s power production is perhaps the most important variable in determining offensive production, it’s also the most difficult to forecast. Especially for taller, skinny athletes, power can develop later on into a player’s career, well after his other tools have gotten him to the big leagues.

But it doesn’t always develop quickly, and sometimes it doesn’t develop at all. In talking with some people in the game about Correa, I was struck by how similar the descriptions sounded to conversations we had a few years back about another can’t-miss slugging shortstop: Xander Bogaerts. Like Correa, Bogaerts rocketed through the minors, getting to the big leagues as a 20 year old, and was considered the cream of the prospect crop at the time. And while he’s showing real improvement this year on both sides of the ball, we’re coming up on 1,000 at-bats in the big league career of Xander Bogaerts and he still has a grand total of just 15 home runs.

To this point, just 29% of his career hits have gone for extra bases. While he’s raised his average this season to .297, he’s slugging just .401, and his improvements have come entirely from reducing his strikeout totals. Rather than morphing into more of the slugging shortstop he was projected as, Bogaerts’ offensive profile now looks more like that of a traditional middle infielder. At just 22, it’s still far too early to declare that he’s a finished product, and Bogearts still has plenty of career left ahead of him, but he is a reminder that we can’t just assume every player is going to add power in a nice linear fashion as they get older.

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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
Houston at Chicago AL | 20:10 ET
Velasquez (Debut) vs. Quintana (67.1 IP, 96 xFIP-)
Outfielder Preston Tucker, ranked 18th among Astros prospects by Kiley McDaniel this past offseason, recorded his debut for Houston on May 7 and has since produced a batting line about 20% better than league average. Right-hander Lance McCullers made his debut about 10 days later, and has proceeded to record one of the best fielding-independent pitching marks among all starters in the meantime. With regard to shortstop Carlos Correa, he first appeared for the parent club just two days. Regardless, he’s already recorded more home runs than nine qualified hitters and more stolen bases than 39 of that same group.

In light of the above, the reader should not be surprised to learn that, today, yet another Houstonian is expected to debut for the club. Right-hander Vincent Velasquez was ranked third among Astros prospects by Kiley McDaniel this preseason and 75th among all prospects everywhere. According to McDaniel, he sits at 91-95 mph — and, indeed, skewed towards the higher end of that range during the Arizona Fall League last year, according to Brooks Baseball. He’s struck out over a third of opposing batters over five starts at Double-A Corpus Christi.

The human brain, which is marvelous but also feeble, is inclined to suppose that, merely because the debuts to have preceded Velasquez’s — that because those debuts have amounted to nothing but great success, so will this new player’s. That, obviously, isn’t really the case: Velasquez’s performance is dependent almost exclusively on Vincent Velasquez’s own capacities. That said, his capacities appear to be pretty substantial. Substantial capacities, in conclusion, is what Vincent Velasquez possesses.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Radio.

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