FanGraphs Baseball

Guess what! It’s time for my first pitch-framing post of the season. There will probably be dozens more of these. I don’t know what those ones will be about, but the purpose of this one is to highlight the early performance of Angels catcher Chris Iannetta. I know, of course, it’s super early! I know, of course, current statistical arrangements will change over the coming five and a half months. But so far, Iannetta rates as one of the top pitch-receivers in the game. He ranks very high according to Matthew Carruth’s method. He ranks very high according to the Baseball Prospectus method. And that one adjusts for a whole lot of stuff. Through these weeks, Iannetta has been getting strikes and avoiding balls.

Which some catchers do commonly. You know the guys who’re considered good at this. What makes Iannetta interesting is, this is a first for him. Not that the season is over and we’ve confirmed that he’s a good framer now, but he’s played like a good framer, and, previously, that hasn’t been him. Let’s go back four years. In all four years, by Carruth, Iannetta has rated as below-average. In all four years, by Baseball Prospectus, Iannetta has rated as below-average. As recently as 2013, Iannetta looked like one of the worst receivers in baseball, by the numbers. So you wouldn’t expect him to be where he is today.

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One year ago today, I wrote an article right here called  “The Indians Are Missing The Easy Ones,” which looked into just how awful the Cleveland defense had looked to that point. Though it included all the usual “it’s still early in the season” caveats, the simple fact was that the Indians had done little to help what had been (and would be) a fantastic young pitching staff with repeated miscues in the field, flaws that seemed obvious even in mid-April. (It was also a great excuse to have an article full of blooper GIFs. This is going to come up again.)

As it turned out, it wasn’t just a small sample size problem. The Indians went on to have the worst DRS in baseball at a shocking -75, and as Jeff Sullivan ably noted in August, the defensive gap alone was a huge component of what set the Indians apart from the Royals. If you buy into the idea that 10 runs equal a win, then DRS saw a difference of 11 wins between the two clubs on defense alone. Even if you don’t completely accept that full value as an accurate accounting, it’s pretty clear that poor fielding was a huge detriment to the 2014 Indians, and that’s a big deal considering that they missed the wild card by just three games.

So! Now it’s 2015. With somewhat of an inflexible roster, management was limited in the moves they could make, so while things look similar, they aren’t identical. The Carlos Santana third base experiment is long over. Asdrubal Cabrera‘s adventures at shortstop are now Tampa Bay’s problem, with Jose Ramirez presenting a far superior defensive option. Yan Gomes‘ second half looked a lot better than his first half. Nick Swisher’s achy knees haven’t yet appeared in a game. Tyler Holt showed defensive value as a backup outfielder late in the year. Jason Kipnis swore he was healthier after oblique and hamstring issues helped to tornado his 2014 season.

Story after story after story came up about the team’s focus on it this winter. This was never going to be a good defense, not with so much of the same cast and crew, but maybe enough had changed to think, okay, maybe this won’t be so bad. So how’s that going? Read the rest of this entry »

The Hunt for Alex Rodriguez began early in spring training, and the feel one got from most of the reporting was almost akin to that of a death watch. Expectations were, to put it mildly, quite low, and the potential for theater was very high; the perfect combination for a media firestorm. Well, something very interesting has happened on Rodriguez’ way to the boneyard; he has looked quite useful, maybe even well above average in the season’s early going. There’s a long way to go, with many chapters yet to be written, but exactly how unusual and historically significant might a full-blown A-Rod Renaissance be? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about defining team success, four-man outfields, pitcher offensive futility, baseball’s Star Wars trailer moments, and more.

As a member of UMass’s graduate-student union during a contract negotiation with that school’s administration in 2007, the present author may or may not have uttered the words “This is what democracy looks like” whilst walking in a circle and holding a picket sign. Luckily for the reader, what follows isn’t an example of what democracy — but rather of what very promising White Sox left-hander Carlos Rodon — looks like when the latter is making his major-league debut, which thing he did on Tuesday night in the sixth inning of Chicago’s game at Cleveland (box).

In terms of both of fielding-independent pitching and also just the regular kind of pitching, Rodon’s debut was not a success. He conceded three hits and two runs over 2.1 innings. He recorded a 1:3 strikeout-to-walk ratio. He entered the game with his club down 1-2. It was 1-6 when he departed.

Given Rodon’s arm speed, however, and his slider and his previously established levels, it’s unlikely that many of his future appearances will be so disappointing. In either case, what follows is a brief visual summary of Rodon from his debut.

Here, for example, is the fourth pitch of Rodon’s appearance and also the fourth ball he threw:

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When the Marlins reorganized their front office not too long ago, one of the hopes was that Jeffrey Loria would no longer so frequently meddle in the team’s operation. In 2015, however, the team has stumbled right out of the gate, and there’s chatter that Loria is getting involved. From a recent report about manager Mike Redmond being on the hot seat:

According to sources who have heard rumblings, Redmond is on the hot seat and the the organization is already bouncing around possible replacements. One possibility: Wally Backman, the Mets’ Triple A manager.

You can take this for whatever it’s worth:

#Marlins official just assured me there is “no truth” to rumor Mike Redmond could be fired after 3-10 start.

— Mike Berardino (@MikeBerardino) April 20, 2015

If you want to play semantics, now the Marlins are off to a 3-11 start. So Redmond could be fired right now and the official wouldn’t technically have been a liar. The thing about votes of confidence is that you can never really know what they mean. They’re either one thing or the exact opposite, and we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do off the field, because we don’t know what the Marlins are going to do on the field.

But we can step back from manager speculation. The Marlins will make whatever decisions they make, and as easy as it is to pin these things on Loria, maybe there’s more of a consensus. Maybe Redmond deserves to be fired; I have no idea. Analysts can seldom add value to the subject of managerial job security. I have one point, though, that I feel like ought to matter: these Marlins probably weren’t going to be very good. While the start has been disappointing, it needs to be compared against what would’ve been a reasonable expectation.

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During Ned Colletti’s tenure as the General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a hallmark of the franchise was lavish spending on relief pitchers. A year ago, their Opening Day bullpen combined to make $33 million, by far the most of any team in baseball. To pitch in front of All-Star closer Kenley Jansen, Colletti shelled out big money to sign former All-Star closers Brian Wilson and Brandon League; even his idea of a bargain signing was signing injured former All-Star closer Chris Perez and hoping he returned to his prior form.

Colletti valued experience and track record, going after guys who were on the downsides of their careers, but had been effective ninth inning guys in the past. Unfortunately for him and the Dodgers, he routinely overestimated the shelf life of a relief pitcher, and ended up with expensive, ineffective setup guys incapable of getting the ball to Kenley Jansen with a lead. Last year, those three combined to give the Dodgers 158 mediocre innings, posting a 3.71 ERA and a miserable 4.17 FIP; they also combined to make $20 million between them, a total higher than 25 other MLB teams spent on their relief corps.

Last winter, the Dodgers replaced Colletti with Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi, poaching two analytically-inclined executives from the Rays and A’s respectively. Those two franchises have spent years building bullpens on the cheap, and not surprisingly, the Dodgers 2015 bullpen looks a lot different than their 2014 bullpen.

Gone is Brian Wilson, released despite the fact that he exercised his $9 million player option for the 2015 season; the new-look Dodgers decided they’d rather pay him that money to sit at home rather than let him take the mound. League is on the disabled list with a shoulder problem and won’t be joining the team any time soon. Perez signed a minor league deal with the Brewers this winter, and currently has a 9.00 ERA in Triple-A. Even Kenley Jansen, the team’s one actual good reliever from a year ago, has yet to throw an inning for the team in the regular season, as he had surgery to remove a growth from his foot during spring training.

From four closers to no closers in a year’s time, the Dodgers bullpen couldn’t possibly be any different than it was a year ago. And despite their lack of anything resembling a proven ninth-inning workhorse, LA’s bullpen has been nothing short of amazing so far.

The current group, listed with their 2015 walk, strikeout, and groundball rates, are included in the table below.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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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Just as we were all finally getting over our Kris Bryant Day hangovers, the Cubs gave us something else to celebrate. As you’ve likely heard by now, the Cubs summoned Addison Russell to the major leagues yesterday. He started at second base last night, and went 0-5 in his big league debut.

Russell’s promotion came as something of a surprise. Although he’s a very talented player, and is one of the most highly-regarded prospects in the game, he’s had very little exposure to high-minors pitching. He’s played all of 77 games above A-Ball, and only 14 of those games came in Triple-A. Due to this relative lack experience, most anticipated that Russell wouldn’t make it to the majors until late 2015, if not sometime 2016. Yet here we are. It’s April 22nd and Russell is playing major league baseball. Read the rest of this entry »