FanGraphs Baseball

J.D. Martinez is a thoughtful baseball player who has made major changes to his swing mechanics. As much as writing is what gets me out of bed on Monday mornings, it seems a shame to sully this one with too much of my own clumsy verbiage. So what follows is just J.D. Martinez, running us through the myriad realizations and swing changes he’s made since he was once a struggling Astro. Of course, there are a few edits and moving pictures.

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Episode 571
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he discusses the one weird trick regarding the draft, the inevitability of the Mark Trumbo trade, and also the forthcoming FanGraphs Live event in Washington, DC.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 41 min play time.)

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We tend to take the greatest players for granted, so it ought to tell you something when even one of the established elites is raising eyebrows. Chris Sale’s one of the very best starting pitchers in the world, of that there’s no question, and still he’s recently been generating all kinds of positive attention. Just Monday, he struck out 14 against the Astros in eight innings. It was his fourth consecutive start with double-digit strikeouts, and his fourth consecutive start with at least 20 missed bats. I won’t go through the specifics, but in terms of unhittability, Sale just tied one record with Sandy Koufax. He set a couple new all-time White Sox records, and he became the first pitcher to do a particular something since Randy Johnson. This is Chris Sale at the top of his game, and no one’s allowed a lower contact rate over the season’s last month.

Sale has established a few new personal bests, which, again, is a difficult thing to do, when you’ve been as excellent as he has. It seems like forever ago that he owned a near-6 ERA and people were wondering whether something was wrong. He’s yielded eight runs in six starts, he’s on a career-low FIP, and he’s on a career-low xFIP. When you look at the overall picture, at this point Sale looks more or less like himself. But underneath, you can see him evolving, and now Sale’s turned into one of the rarest sorts of pitchers.

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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
Arizona at Los Angeles NL | 22:10 ET
Ray (11.0 IP, 87 xFIP-) vs. Frias (42.1 IP, 102 xFIP-)
In addition to representing an opportunity to collect another data point in a series of data points relevant to Carlos Frias’s career as a major leaguer, what else this game represents is an occasion, apparently, to observe left-hander Robbie Ray sitting at 94 mph with his fastball. A departure, that, from the version of Ray who made nine appearances with Detroit last year and recorded an average fastball velocity of 91.3 mph. Perhaps a result of that added velocity, Ray has produced excellent fielding-independent numbers over his first two starts with Arizona, posting a 9:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 44 batters over 11.0 innings with his new club.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Television.

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At first glance, Cleveland’s starting rotation could be considered one of the league’s poorest in terms of performance: their 4.40 ERA has them 9th-worst in the majors, and the fact that the Indians are 27-29 (though seemingly improving) probably doesn’t help them shed that label. Those surface-level numbers hide a lot, however. In fact, they obscure what is on pace to be one of the most strikeout-heavy rotations in the history of baseball, one whose on-field performance is being negatively impacted by factors largely outside of their control. Where does the 2015 Cleveland starting staff rank so far in a historical context of some of the great rotations throughout history? Let’s find out.

We’ve talked about Cleveland’s woeful defense in this space before. There’s a reason for that: it’s both historically terrible (since 1950, only the 2007 Rays converted fewer balls in play into outs than the 2015 Indians), and it impacts the pitching staff to a great extent. The Cleveland defense has become something of a hot topic: by all accounts, it’s basically turning the pitching staff into a bunch of pumpkins.

What the Indians rotation should be is a markedly different story from what it currently is: if we boil down the numbers only to what pitchers can control (i.e. if we take the terrible defense out of the picture), Cleveland’s rotation is at the very top of the league: by one measure, Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), they’re the fourth-best starting staff in baseball. By another (xFIP), they’re number one.

This means that Cleveland’s defense has probably let them down to a serious extent, and also that they’ve been unlucky — though the elevated batting average on balls in play (BABIP) the Indians rotation has shown might be due in some part to the types of pitchers that Cleveland likes to bring through their system (hard throwers who are prone to giving up hard contact). Taken together, however, all of these factors should give us some optimism that there might be better times ahead for the rotation, even if the defense doesn’t improve very much.

The conversation about the rotation’s hypothetical vs. real-world results is just the introduction to why we’re really here, though. Now that we know Cleveland’s rotation has been subject to some unfortunate outside influences for the first two months of the season, let’s compare this rotation to other rotations throughout history, especially in terms of strikeout rates.

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In recent articles, we’ve discussed many of the various aspects of the emerging granular batted-ball velocity/exit angle data that is becoming more pervasive in the game today. We’ve already covered both the overall hitting and pitching contact-quality leaders and laggards in both leagues, and have now begun to dig deeper into some of the nuances that make it less than advisable to simply accept raw contact authority at face value. Let’s investigate the impact of pulling the ball on the ground at an excessive rate. Last time, we looked at the 2014 AL extreme ground-ball pullers. Today, it’s the NL’s turn.

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Over the last calendar year, there are 139 qualified major-league hitters. Prorating their plate appearances to 600 per person, one finds that Mike Trout has the highest WAR at 7.2, followed by Russell Martin, Buster Posey, and Anthony Rizzo. None of that should come as much of a surprise, but the hitter right behind that group and just ahead of Josh Donaldson, Andrew McCutchen and Bryce Harper could provide a bit of shock. Over the last calendar year, Kevin Kiermaier has been worth six wins per 600 plate appearances.

Kiermaier, who has worked to improve his offense, is incredibly reliant on his fantastic defense for his great WAR numbers. While Kiermaier is a valuable player, it is possible that his WAR total is inflated by defensive numbers that are likely to come down over time. Kiermaier has logged roughly 1200 innings in the outfield and has a UZR/150 of 42.1, but only six active outfielders with at least 2,500 innings have a UZR/150 greater than 15, with Lorenzo Cain, Ben Zobrist, Peter Bourjos, Brett Gardner, Josh Reddick, and Jason Heyward falling between 16 and 22 — that is, roughly half Kiermaier’s current rate. Although he’s been good, Kiermaier is probably not the fifth-best player in baseball over the last year, and his defensive numbers should serve as a reminder that defensive statistics take some time before they become reliable.

Yesterday, I covered some players whose current WAR was potentially undervalued due to lower than normal defensive numbers in an article titled Heyward, Pedroia, and Your Annual Reminder About Defense. The present article renders yesterday’s title false as the articles together are now daily reminders, but this post should be the final one in this series with few, if any, more reminders coming in the near future. The caveat regarding small sample size from Mitchel Lichtman and our FanGraphs library is quoted more fully in yesterday’s piece, but to summarize: use three seasons of UZR when being conclusory about the defensive talent of any given player.

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I already chatted for nearly six hours during last night’s picks, wrote a bunch of mock drafts and, with the help of David Appelman, made a Sortable Draft Board full of the top players with tools, reports, video and where they were taken last night, but I thought I should drop in and give some thoughts on last night’s first two rounds of the draft.

The top-11 picks went pretty much as expected, with those players all projected there in some order. Husky Canadian prep 1B Josh Naylor crashed the party, jumping from late first-round expectations to 12th overall, which was the first big surprise of the night, similar to what Kodi Medeiros did last year with the Brewers. Often, what fans will term a “reach” or “overdraft” is a team deciding they want a player and realizing he won’t be at the next pick. I support this idea from the team’s side, especially if you can save some money, because when we look back at the draft in 10 years, we won’t say “this guy wasn’t a good value here,” we’ll either say he was good or he wasn’t. Don’t forget that rankings and mock drafts are a guide, not the correct answer. When you can’t trade picks, you take the guy you want and sometimes it’ll look like this.

The rest of the first round was composed of names I had projected in that range or ranked within my top 50-60 players, except for the Orioles at pick 36 with Ryan Mountcastle, whom I heard last week had some people looking at him in the second round. Mountcastle is a unique player with above-average bat speed, bat control, raw power and speed to go with a projectable frame and a long track record of hitting, so he clearly checks a lot of boxes. His swing is a little awkward, he didn’t hit for power in games this spring and scouts think he might be a left fielder, but you can clearly see why teams would be on him with a high pick and I’m betting the Orioles wouldn’t have gotten him with their next pick.

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Now that we have to take the Astros seriously, we also have to take the Astros’ players seriously, and among the first you must consider seriously is Dallas Keuchel. Keuchel is no one’s idea of a traditional ace, but the Astros are no one’s idea of a traditional competitive team, and you can’t get around Keuchel’s results. Down the stretch in 2013, he was a sleeper. At this point, he’s established, proven, reliable. Keuchel’s a big reason why the Astros are where they are, and if they do ultimately make it to the playoffs, Keuchel ought to be a weapon.

You know enough of the biography, I bet. Keuchel wasn’t a highly-regarded draft pick, and when he was coming through the system, he never ranked in Baseball America’s top-10 Astros prospects. When Keuchel was a big-league rookie, he wound up with more walks than strikeouts. Then, in what geologists would consider a “flash,” Keuchel figured it out and started getting results to match the big boys. He continues to drop his xFIP, as he’s more than adequate in all three components. His most visible strength, of course, being keeping the ball on the ground. But Keuchel does even more to maximize his skillset. We always look at walks, strikeouts, and homers. Those won’t tell you the whole Keuchel story.

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