Ben, Sam, and Will Woods talk about the Royals’ latest dust-up, the Mets’ 11-game winning streak, and Giancarlo Stanton’s almost physics-defying home runs.
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You might be getting kind of sick of me writing about fastballs, and elevating them. That’s totally fine, and I don’t intend to keep on writing about them forever and ever. There are two contributing factors. One, I need to write a lot, so I can’t throw away very many ideas. And two, when I get something I’m interested in, I stay interested in it for a while, performing all the analysis I can think of to see if there’s anything new to be said. I don’t want to keep writing about high fastballs, but this post is kind of about high fastballs, and if it helps at all, you can think of it as being a post about Clayton Kershaw. Or, inspired by Clayton Kershaw.
Kershaw’s fresh off a nine-strikeout start in San Francisco. For the most part he looked like himself. For the most part he’s looked like himself. While his ERA’s over 4, his xFIP’s under 2, and his strikeout rate is higher than ever. His repertoire is fine. Kershaw looks like Kershaw, which is good if expected news for the Dodgers, but I can at least point out this one little thing about him. Check out where his fastballs have gone.
Like most headlines in news media and also all other kinds of media, the headline of this particular media post has been constructed less to fully represent the truth and more to tell a version of the truth that is most compelling to prospective readers. In the case of this title, at least, the infraction is only slight. Indeed, instead of stating that a fifth of Buck Farmer’s pitches are unhittable, it’s only really accurate to state that nearly a fifth of Buck Farmer’s pitches have been swung at and missed. So far, that is.
Buck Farmer, in case it has slipped the reader’s mind, is a right-handed pitching prospect in the Detroit system — ranked third in that system by Kiley McDaniel this offseason, but also absent from McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list.
Since the middle of March, the author has published each week a statistical report designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have enthusiasm for collegiate baseball, if not actually expert knowledge of it. These posts have served as a means by which one might broadly detect which players have produced the most excellent performances of the college season.
What follows is another edition of that same thing, updated through Thursday.
As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done is utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.
While I was on my daily ambulation through the equivalent of the basement archives at Baseball Reference (the manager pages), I came across a strange fact: Kevin Cash, rookie manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, has challenged nine times this season and has not won a single time. That seems very strange, given the fact that managers generally have a good idea of when they’re going to win challenges nowadays: it’s why they stand at the top of the dugout steps while someone looks at video before they actually challenge.
We’ve had just over a year of the challenge system in major league baseball, and already we have a good idea of the types of challenges managers are most likely to win, the ones they’re likely to lose, and the ones that still seem to go either way for reasons that haven’t been and might never be fully established. That understanding is engrained in managers to varying degrees, and we now have enough data on the subject to identify the ones that seem to get it and the ones that don’t.
So, how and why exactly has Cash gone 0-9 so far this year? Does it matter that he seems bad at winning challenges? It also got me thinking: how have other managers fared, and are we thinking about this in the wrong way?
Guessing the starting pitcher with most strikeouts per nine innings early on in the season should not be too difficult. Clayton Kershaw has struck out more than a batter per inning in his career, and in the early part of this season has shown more of the same, striking out 35 batters in just over 24 innings pitched for an excellent 12.95 K/9. There are a few other players we would expect to see in the top ten in the early going with Felix Hernandez, Matt Harvey, and Gerrit Cole fanning a bunch of players along with Trevor Bauer’s quest to never allow a player to make contact with a baseball (19 IP, 26 K, 11BB), and even Brandon McCarthy, Tyson Ross, Chris Archer, and Francisco Liriano are not a complete shock, but to see Jason Marquis in second place on this list behind only Clayton Kershaw is very surprising no matter how early we are in the season.
That Jason Marquis has pitched 15 innings thus far in 2015 is an unusual development given the way his career has taken shape. Here are his numbers over the past five years.
| IP | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | ERA | FIP | WAR | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 58.2 | 4.8 | 3.7 | 1.4 | 6.60 | 5.65 | -0.4 |
| 2011 | 132 | 5.2 | 2.9 | 0.8 | 4.43 | 4.09 | 1.2 |
| 2012 | 127.2 | 6.4 | 3.0 | 1.6 | 5.22 | 5.09 | -0.3 |
| 2013 | 117.2 | 5.5 | 5.2 | 1.4 | 4.05 | 5.65 | -1.2 |
| 2014 | |||||||
| Totals | 436 | 5.6 | 3.7 | 1.3 | 4.85 | 5.00 | -0.7 |
As I tweeted yesterday, Bahamas-born and recently but shortly American-educated shortstop Lucius Fox was declared an international free agent by Major League Baseball. He won’t be eligible to sign until July 2nd when the 2015-16 signing period opens and the team bonus pools reset, but he would’ve waited until then to sign anyway, since most of the 2014-15 signing pool money had been spent.
Fox was always seen as likely to land as an international prospect since he was born in the Bahamas and moved back home, but it wasn’t a slam dunk because MLB is very aware of player moving out of the U.S. to potentially get more money by ducking the draft. Many elite domestic prospects have investigated this process and found the red tape to make it nearly impossible to work through.
As I wrote last week, the 2015 international signing markets, which opens on July 2nd, is already mostly shaken out at this point. I currently project 25 players to get $1.2 million or more and it appears that 22 of them have deals already. Of those three, the highest bonus should be about $1.5 to $1.7 million while the five top bonuses in the class range from $3.0 million to $4.4 million.
How do you build a bullpen? How do you turn a bad one around? Fans in Detroit and other inquiring minds might like to know. The Dodgers might have a bit of a blueprint for us.
The bullpen in Chavez Ravine last year… it wasn’t good? Only four National League teams were worse by Wins Above Replacement, and it doesn’t get any better if you use ERA. “You can say it was bad,” said A.J. Ellis with a smile before a game with the Giants.
Things are a little different this year. Of course, it’s a small sample, but 41 innings in, the Dodgers bullpen is the best in ball. The components look good, too, with the best strikeout rate in baseball and good velocity. “It’s a nice arsenal of arms that keep coming out as the game progresses, guys that can fill multiple roles, guys that can go long, guys that can come in and face just one hitter,” Ellis said of the new look pen.
But is there a road map here? Dave Cameron talked about the way many of these relievers were acquired, but is there a way you use the relievers they acquired as a road map for future bullpen turnarounds?
Last night, with the Red Sox and Rays tied 5-5 in the seventh inning, Kevin Cash brought Brad Boxberger into the game. On the one hand, this was a bit weird, because Boxberger has been serving as the Rays closer while Jake McGee is on the shelf, pitching exclusively in the ninth (or 10th) inning so far this year. On the other hand, it was a bit awesome, because Cash recognized that there might not be a higher leverage situation in that game than facing David Ortiz, Hanley Ramirez, and Mike Napoli with the score tied.
Rather than risk a weaker member of his bullpen giving up the lead to Boston’s best hitters, Cash went with his relief ace, and Boxberger responded by striking out the side. The Rays then took a two run in the bottom of the seventh inning, and after regular setup man Kevin Jepsen pitched the 8th, the Rays handed the ball to Steve Geltz to pitch the ninth inning, where he recorded the first save of his career.
After the game, Boxberger said this to MLB.com about his usage.
“It’s a little bit different than the rest of the year has gone,” Boxberger said. “But Cash told me and [Kevin] Jepsen a little bit earlier that we’re just going to try and preserve anything we have.”
And preserve they did.“It obviously worked out tonight and this was the first go of it,” Boxberger said. “So it’s a little bit different for us, but I think going forward it’s going to help keep us in some more ballgames. Just do what we can to win some.”
The idea of the ninth inning holding special powers where only the chosen can pitch has been propped up by a few decades of everyone treating it that way, but slowly, teams are starting to shift away from that rigid structure. While there may be enough value in having predetermined usage patterns to keep from going all the way back to pre-closer relief usage, it seems that it is more efficient to have the flexibility to at least make exceptions to the ninth-inning-only idea. Different isn’t always received well, but as more outings like Boxberger’s occur and random middle relievers start converting lower leverage saves, the idea of the sanctity of the ninth inning will wear off.
This change will likely occur at a glacier pace, but it is beginning.
| 10:35 |
: last night felt like
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| 10:36 |
:
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| 10:36 |
: see you soon!
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| 12:00 |
call your friends, its eno chat time |
| 12:00 |
Scared about Melancon? Or is it just 2 bad outing? |
| 12:01 |
: Definitely scared. Watson finished the game last night, and they do have Bastardo, but they already moving on. I even like Arqimedes but if Watson closing now it’ll take a blow up to get the Arq in that role.
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