Ben and Sam talk to Matt Trueblood about the teams that have hurt or improved their odds the most, and the aspects of performance that are significant in small samples.
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Yesterday I shared notes about the 33 players that should sign on or just after July 2nd and project for seven figures. A common question from readers was if their team had other deals I knew of or if they were planning to go over their bonus pool. I saved part two of this series to break down that question with the information I have currently.
First, a note about this year’s class. As I mentioned in my previous July 2nd piece, that this year’s class is above average, especially the depth of seven figure prospects, but the higher top bonuses this year (detailed here) relative to last year (listed here) doesn’t tell the whole story. Most scouts (myself included) would take last year’s top player, Brewers SS Gilbert Lara (Report & Video), who got about $3.1 million (the highest bonus last year) and probably would take last year’s second best player, Rays SS Adrian Rondon (Report & Video) over anyone in the 2015 class.
The difference in bonuses despite slightly lesser talent up top is due to a numbers of factors: this year, more teams are spending their full pools, some teams are still going well over their bonus pools and the deals started very early. Also hurting Lara’s bonus was that the drunken sailor of last year’s period, the Yankees, weren’t on him, so his price didn’t get bid up by them, while the Rays locked up Rondon so early that some teams didn’t get good looks at him. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.(Report & Video) was among the earliest deals in this year’s period, but it looks like he’s getting a retail price for his bonus.
| 12:17 |
: Hey everybody! Sorry for the late start. Had 12 central in my head. I’m filling in for Eno today, but hopefully not in an Erasmo-Ramirez-filling-in-for-Alex-Cobb-kinda-way.
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| 12:18 |
Better late then never, and you’re not even Eno are you. |
| 12:18 |
Another Dave Cameron wannabe.. strolls into the chat about 20 or so minutes late.. |
| 12:18 |
Where is Eno? WE WANT ENO! |
| 12:20 |
: Off to a fantastic start!
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| 12:20 |
Tanaka or Richards? |
In an otherwise depressing draft season, Kyle Funkhouser did his best to raise our spirits over the weekend, delivering a signature performance that – outside of Dillon Tate and the recently injured Chris Shaw – most of this year’s top amateur prospects have yet to.
The author is telling zero tales out of school when he suggests that baseball analysis — and conversation about baseball, in general — that it’s all improved by the introduction of concepts from other fields into that analysis and into that conversation. It’s obvious that the work at this site, for example, borrows liberally from economics and statistics. A passing familiarity with physics, meanwhile — with which endeavor Dr. Alan Nathan can be of some assistance — allows one to better understand PITCHf/x data. One finds, moreover, that group from Columbia University submitted a paper to this year’s Sloan conference on the use of neuroscience in evaluating a batter’s pitch recognition. Sabermetrics — under the banner of which all this research and all these tools loosely fall — isn’t an isolated field, but rather an interdisciplinary one that is improved by greater cross-referencing of multiple fields.
We’ll return to this discussion briefly, but first let’s consider some technicolor video footage, whose relevance will become clear momentarily.
That’s Mookie Betts stealing second base on Monday against the Washington Nationals and then also stealing third base moments later. When I first saw this highlight on Tuesday morning, it confused me. What I thought was happening was that Mookie Betts, after stealing second and returning to his feet, mistakenly believed that the throw from catcher Jose Lobaton had sailed into center field — but that, owing to a combination of his footspeed and Washington’s poor defensive positioning, that he successfully made it to third base, anyway.
What actually happened was that, with David Ortiz batting, the Nationals infield had executed a shift. Betts, recognizing that third base was left uncovered following his steal, attempted (successfully) to beat the nearest defender (in this case, pitcher Jordan Zimmermann) to it.
Before the start of the regular season, we took a look at a few American League hitters who, based on their recent batted ball profiles, looked to be headed for a decline this season. While the season is now a little more than a week old, it’s not too late to look at a couple of their National League peers. You’ll have to take my word for it that these players were chosen prior to Opening Day, and I didn’t wait for their early season slow starts to cherry-pick Matt Adams and Brandon Crawford as my two senior-circuit selections. Read the rest of this entry »
The Houston Astros are well known for swinging, missing, and striking out at an extremely high rate. It should come as no surprise the Astros are currently leading the American League in strikeout rate, even in the early going, striking out 26.2% of the time. However, the Astros are not first in Major League Baseball in strikeout rate. That honor goes to the Pittsburgh Pirates who have struck out 26.8% of the time so far this season. Excluding pitchers, the Astros still hold the lead (26.2% to 26.0%), but the Pirates have swung and missed a lot to start the year.
The Pirates have struggled a little out of the gate, getting swept by the Cincinnati Reds to begin the season on their way to winning three out of their first eight games. The pitching has been mostly solid, with a 3.55 ERA and 3.21 FIP, although the bullpen has been credited with the loss in three of the five Pirates losses. In the early-going the Pirates have hit just .221/.270/.366 with a wRC+ of 80. Those numbers are not all that concerning this early, but the Pirates lack of patience is surprising even as strikeout rates across MLB continue to move upwards.
A deviation in the Pirates strikeout numbers in April is not unusual for the team. While the Pirates have switched out Russell Martin for Francisco Cervelli and given Gregory Polanco a full-time role, most of the team is similar to last season. The Pirates struck out more last April than any other month in 2014. As the chart below shows, the same was true throughout MLB last year, although the effect was not as pronounced for MLB as a whole.
Read the rest of this entry »
Vanderbilt junior right-hander Carson Fulmer entered the spring as a probable first-round selection in this June’s amateur draft. His performances, certainly, have only reinforced the likelihood of that contingency. After hovering among the conference leaders for a while, Fulmer appeared atop the (maybe) predictive leaderboard for the SEC published here earlier this week. His most recent start was his best of the season. Pitching at home against Ole Miss, Vanderbilt produced a 14:0 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 30 batters over 9.0 innings (box).
Lest there were concern about Fulmer’s endurance or his capacity to maintain velocity into the later innings, the purpose of this post is to assuage that particular concern. The other purpose is to “produce content” lest the author is “fired from his job.” The third and final purpose is to use do some work with the word lest. For practice, like.
Here, by way of example, is Fulmer’s third-to-last pitch from that start against Ole Miss — a 94 mph fastball:
There’s a lot going on with Kevin Gausman right now. He’s throwing a curveball, instead of a slider. I learned that from another baseball writer earlier today in my email. He’s working out of the bullpen, instead of the rotation. I learned that from general news, and from all the people who complain in our weekly chats. And, all of a sudden, he’s throwing high fastballs. I learned that accidentally through research of other stuff. This is of particular interest to me.
In January, I asked a simple question: should Kevin Gausman and James Paxton throw more high fastballs? The thinking was this: the Rays have been prioritizing high fastballs. An effective high fastball has a particular movement, with lots of rise as observed on PITCHf/x. Gausman and Paxton throw fastballs that qualify, but they also threw the bulk of those fastballs low. What if they didn’t do that? Could more strikeouts and success follow? I didn’t know, but I thought it at least worth wondering.
During the FanGraphs trip to Arizona in February, Carson remarked that I was squeezing an awful lot of juice out of the pitch-comp fruit. It’s true, I was — it was an idea I found interesting, and, more importantly, I didn’t have much else to write about. But now we’ve got a baseball season, a whole brand-new one, which means I get to resume writing about the thing I find perhaps the very most interesting: pitching to Mike Trout. I’ve probably written about this 10 times. I’ll probably write about it another 100 times. Many of you are probably sick of it. I might never grow sick of it.
Scouting reports make the rounds. At first, information is private, exchanged only within the industry. At some point, something gets leaked, or identified by an analyst. Then a report will make the rounds within analytical circles. Analysts write, so reports will be exposed to analytically-minded fans. But things can keep going, if sufficiently remarkable. Sometimes you’ll have a scouting report that makes its way into general baseball knowledge, even among people who don’t think in such granular terms. The Mike Trout scouting report is out there. I don’t even need to tell you anything about it because you’ve been hearing about it for months. Everybody knows. A few days ago I was listening to Mariners radio announcer Rick Rizzs, and he was talking about the importance of pitching Trout hard and in and up. It might be the only thing he has in his brain from within the past 12 years.
So it’s 2015 now. How is Mike Trout being pitched, given, you know, everything?
