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For the better part of the last decade, Gerrit Cole has intrigued with potential. Twice a first round selection — after being drafted out of high school in 2008, he spurned the Yankees and went to UCLA instead — and the first overall selection in the 2011 draft, Cole’s velocity and frame have had scouts dreaming about what he could eventually turn into. But while the stuff has always been top-shelf, the performance haven’t always lined up with expectations.

In his final season at UCLA, in fact, he wasn’t even his own team’s best pitcher, as Trevor Bauer ran circles around him from a performance standpoint. Their lines, side by side:

Cole looked like an ace, but Bauer was the guy who pitched like one, striking everybody out in a way that you’d expect Cole to do, given his velocity and breaking ball. But the Pirates bet on his stuff and their ability to develop him into more than what he had been, choosing Cole with the top pick while Bauer went to the Diamondbacks three selections later.

In the minors, it was a bit more of the same, as he was good-but-not-great, and certainly wasn’t blowing away minor league hitters like you might expect for a top overall selection who throws 100 miles per hour. And when he got to Triple-A, the strikeouts mostly disappeared, as he managed just 63 strikeouts in 90 innings at the highest rung of the minor league level. He was still throwing hard, and still had a good breaking ball, but for whatever reason, batters were still making plenty of contact against him, and he’s never profiled as an elite command guy, so missing bats was always going to be his path to star status.

Things got a bit better after the Pirates promoted him to the big leagues, as his strikeout rate jumped to 21% in 2013 and up to 24% last year, but given that the league average strikeout rate in the majors is now 20%, these are still not dominating performances. And while Cole’s FIP-inputs suggested he was pitching fairly well, he posted an ERA just a bit below league average, as he allowed a .310 BABIP despite pitching for a team that shifted very aggressively and held opponents to a .287 BABIP overall. Heading into 2015, Cole remained more potential than performance, and at some point, he was going to have to do something to justify the belief that he could become an ace.

That point is here, and through the first two months of 2015, Cole has now become what people have been projecting him to be. A comparison of his 2013-2014 and 2015 lines, to highlight the changes:

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Recently, one of the hot topics in baseball statistics has been the appearance of a measurement for hard-hit balls: here at FanGraphs, we added hard-hit rate to our leaderboards before this season, adding along with it a wealth of opportunities for analysis. An issue with any new statistic is that it can be cited without fully knowing its true use or impacts, and so hard-hit rate has been making the rounds in player analysis, generally cited in respect to how well or how poorly they have been performing.

For hitters, it might go without saying that hitting the ball harder is generally a good thing: the aim of hitting, in a certain sense, would seem to be to hit the ball as hard as possible as often as you can (except in the cases of bunting or other situational circumstances). However, it hasn’t been clear yet how hitting the ball hard impacts other rate and counting statistics, and that seems to be a hole in our understanding of a statistic that is undergoing a moment in the spotlight.

The aim today is, at the very least, to explore how hard-hit rate impacts a few of those stats, as well as to begin a conversation that more astute statistical minds may be able to take to deeper and exciting places. There are a couple levels to this piece today, but there are surely many more that I have not reached: I don’t intend to make hard conclusions, but rather to explore and provide a well-intentioned foray into the data. With that said, onward.

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People have jobs and dogs and maybe kids and they sometimes drink beer (the people not their kids) (hopefully) so sometimes it’s tough to keep up with all the innovations going on in the baseball statistical community. One thing that used to be easy to keep up with though is the value of spring training stats, which we long thought to be as meaningless as anything uttered by a six-year-old whether they’ve had beers or not. There are so many factors that go into the steady playing field that is a Major League Baseball season that are not present during spring training, including player quality, opponent quality, physical condition or lack thereof, the extremes of the playing environments in Arizona and Florida, and so on, that it’s a wonder they even call it baseball. That’s what I’ve long held to be true. Way back in 2010 our Dave Cameron wrote on this here site that spring training stats are worthless. To quote him specifically, Dave wrote, “…spring training numbers just don’t mean a thing. At all. Anything.” I’m getting a tattoo of that right above the giant eagle with the banner reading ‘There is no such thing as a bitching prospect.’ Always double confirm your tattoos before sitting, friends.

Since Dave’s piece was published, some studies, including here at FanGraphs, have showed that on-field success or failure in certain categories, such as strikeout rate (K%) and walk rate (BB%) for pitchers, during spring can foretell the same type of success during the regular season. This makes some sense as batting is reacting, so the quality of the batting would, in theory, heavily depend on the quality of the pitching, but pitching is an action not dependent on anything but itself. The quality of hitters will impact it, but a well-executed slider isn’t likely to be hit by anyone, regardless of whether they’re a major league regular or an org lifer in spring training to fill out the roster.

To be fair to Dave, he was talking about home runs and batting average, which are two traditional stats whose predictive value from spring training remains largely moot. Still, that there is some nuance to the whole value of spring-training stats is, to me at least, surprising, given all of the above. This past spring, March 31 to be exact, our Eno Sarris noted that strikeout rate for hitters stabilizes at around 100 plate appearances, and that because some hitters achieve that number of plate appearances or more during spring training that it might be worth keeping an eye on. He then created a leaderboard listing the hitters who cut their strikeout rates down the most during 2015 spring training when compared to the 2014 season, then he highlighted seven of those players. You can see his complete list here, but I think the list of seven players is worth revisiting to see if the players’ predicted progress is progressing through two months of action. So I did! And you’re reading it right now!

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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
New York AL at Seattle | 22:10 ET
Sabathia (60.1 IP, 90 xFIP-) vs. Montgomery (MLB Debut)
One’s interest in this game — as opposed to the Toronto-Washington one, for example, featuring Max Scherzer — depends largely on one’s interest in Seattle left-hander Mike Montgomery. Acquired by the Mariners from the Rays at the end of March — and acquired by the Rays before that in the deal that sent James Shields to Kansas City — Mongtomery appeared three times among the top-50 prospects on Baseball America’s annual list. The last such appearance occurred in 2012, however, and the now 25-year-old left-hander has produced pretty ordinary results in the high minors since then. This year the numbers are more promising, though. Over nine starts and 53.0 innings for Triple-A Tacoma, Montgomery has produced strikeout and walk rates of 21.8% and 6.9%, respectively, while all signs indicate that he still possesses the above-average fastball cited by Kiley McDaniel this offseason. The combination of performance, physical tools, and pedigree conspire to produce not only an unintentional burst of alliteration but also some interest wherein Montgomery’s near future is concerned.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Seattle Radio.

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Hello, and welcome to a post where you do the answering. Usually, in the course of writing our content, we try to offer something conclusive. We tackle a subject, and toward the end of the article, we discuss what might lie ahead for the player, or the team, or the policy. None of that here. What’s offered below is relevant information, but then there’s a poll, where you decide which answer suits you better. The question being asked: of the following two players, which one do you think will sooner record his first-ever major-league hit?

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The Houston Astros are 31-20 and on top of the AL West by four games. They’ve been winning in a signature way: by striking out a lot (the most in the league), hitting a lot of home runs (the most in the league), and recording a string of solid starts (10th-highest WAR among starting staffs). One way we didn’t expect the Astros to dominate this season, however: their bullpen. After two months, the Houston bullpen is ranked first among all major-league teams by strikeout and walk rate, and they also have the second-best ERA. Is this just a run of early-season success? Or, like the Royals, have the Astros built a relief corps that only a select few clubs have?

The bullpen was a major focus of the Astros’ offseason plans before the start of the 2015 season, as they added Pat Neshek, Luke Gregerson, Will Harris, and Joe Thatcher to a group that finished dead last in bullpen ERA in 2014. Neshek and Gregerson were brought in as high-pressure help, with Gregerson installed immediately into the closer role. Gregerson has struggled (relatively speaking) to the tune of a 3.74 ERA, but he’s really been the only one in the bullpen who hasn’t been lights out, and he’s chosen great times to be bad, blowing only one save.

What’s been the key to the success for the Astros bullpen? First of all, they’re striking out an incredible rate of opposing batters. Houston relievers have struck out 28.8% of the hitters they’ve faced — a figure which would be the most ever for a bullpen in history. They’ve also limited walks, only handing out free passes to 6.2% of opposition batters. That walk rate would be good for 25th-best in baseball history if the season ended today. Looking at these two figures, it’s not hard to see why the Houston bullpen has been great: success usually follows pitchers who strike out a high percentage of batters while keeping walks to an absolute minimum.

This mostly unexpected domination out of the Astros bullpen has come from a few unlikely places. First, there’s newcomer Will Harris, who’s struck out 29 batters in 24 innings of work while posting an elite ground-ball rate (58.3%). As the most-used pitcher out of the Houston pen, his two pitch, hard cutter/curveball combination has been very effective in two parts of the strike zone: 10 out of his 13 strikeouts with the cutter have been in the upper half of the strike zone and above, while all but one of his 11 strikeouts with his curveball have been in the lower half of the zone and below. This is what success in changing eye levels looks like:

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Strictly based on WAR, the top middle-infield tandem so far has been playing half the time in Miami. The season hasn’t been a complete disaster for the Marlins, because they’ve observed steps forward by Dee Gordon and Adeiny Hechavarria, and that bodes well for the future, if the present is a little bit shot. Also based on WAR, the Marlins’ lead is about as small as it gets. Right on their heels is the Giants’ tag-team of Brandon Crawford and Joe Panik. The difference is something like one-tenth of one point. Let’s not split figurative hairs.

It’s a really interesting evolution that’s taking place in San Francisco. Crawford’s offensive development has been something to behold, starting out as a glove-first shortstop with a better bat than most pitchers. Crawford, now, is one of the best shortstops in baseball, provided the season doesn’t wear him down. But any attention paid to Crawford is attention not paid to Panik. And while Panik didn’t begin his big-league career in the same sort of way, he’s also reaching a level at the plate few would’ve imagined. Joe Panik isn’t just a slap hitter. Joe Panik is a genuine threat!

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Episode 566
Michael Matuella is both (a) a junior right-hander at Duke and also (b) among the upcoming amateur draft’s likely first-round selections. Lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel spoke with him — regarding his recovery from a recent Tommy John procedure, among other topics — for this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 31 min play time.)

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In our continuing effort to help improve the understanding of the stats we use at FanGraphs, I created a diagram that shows the different inputs for seven of the most popular composite batting stats: AVG, BABIP, OBP, ISO, SLG, OPS, and wOBA. The intent of this diagram is to visually show how the various batting stats are related to each other, and what factors into each stat. For a more thorough description of what the stat measures and its correct interpretation please visit our library. Fortunately, this diagram isn’t as complicated as the diagram for WAR.

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The first-place Minnesota Twins have 30 wins on the season and sit 11 games above .500 as we enter June. Questioning Minnesota’s sustainability as a first-place team is going to be a topic of discussion for as long as Minnesota remains in the race. Jeff Sullivan detailed the Twins’ performance a few weeks ago and not much has changed since then aside from more Twins’ wins. Dave Cameron warned this morning about being mindful of the future when considering potential mid-season moves. Even mainstream statistics makes it easy to see why there are questions about the Twins. The team is 13th in batting average (excluding pitchers), 24th in on-base percentage, 23rd in slugging percentage, and their ERA for both starters (14th) and relievers (17th) are merely average. While there are questions about the Twins sustainability as a winner, there are fewer questions about the short-term sustainability of the performance of leadoff man Brian Dozier, who has played excellently in May and should have another good year after a five-win 2014 season.

While Paul Goldschmidt and Matt Carpenter are the poster boys for non-prospect players who have excelled at the major-league level, Brian Dozier is cut from the same mold. An eighth-round pick out of Southern Mississippi in 2009, Dozier was a senior sign who received just a $30,000 signing bonus. Dozier played well in the minors, but starting his professional career made him older than most of his competition. Dozier performed poorly when called up to the majors in 2012, hitting .234/.271/.332 in 340 plate appearances. That performance carried over into the first two months of 2013, but Dozier rebounded to post a wRC+ of 117 from June through the end of the season.

Dozier’s mini-breakout carried over to 2014 with a five-win season, as he hit 23 home runs with a 13% walk rate that was fifth in the American League. That performance earned him a contract extension for four years and $20 million, buying out his arbitration years but keeping his time to free agency intact. Dozier got off to a slow start this season, hitting just one home run in his first 90 plate appearances despite decent walk and strikeout numbers. Since that time, Dozier has had a run of good play coinciding with the Twins good fortune. He’s hit eight home runs since his slow start and his 170 wRC+ in May is seventh among AL batters.

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