FanGraphs Baseball

The list of guys with new pitches every spring runs deep (27 last year on Jason Collette’s excellent list). The list of those that continue to throw those pitches during the regular season is a little bit shorter (23 last year). And the group that see real success from adding that extra pitch is even shorter — ten pitchers added more than a percentage point to their swinging strike rate thanks to a new pitch last year.

This year, the Spring Training list was once again full. Brewers’ starter Jimmy Nelson is on there, and he’s often been called a two-pitch guy since his changeup is not a plus pitch. Now he’s added a spike curve to his mid-90s fastball and above-average slider. He used it plenty in his first start, so he’s already made the jump to the second list. Can his new pitch mean continued success this year?

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Matt Williams wasn’t a happy camper after yesterday’s loss at Fenway Park. It wasn’t so much the final score – Boston won 9-4 – it was the manner in which it transpired. The Nationals played defense like they were allergic to horsehide. A pair of sky-high fly balls were allowed to fall untouched. Ground balls resembled hot potatoes. Bag coverage was shoddy. Only one error was charged, but the ineptitude was undeniable.

The prohibitive favorites in the National League East have lost five of seven games, and while it’s way too early to panic, it’s never too soon for pointed questions. The Washington skipper received several of them after the defensive debacle. Here are a handful of his responses, which were delivered with exasperation and a hint of snippiness:

* “Balls that are up there for four, five seconds need to be caught. Ground balls (that) are hit need to be caught and thrown across the diamond. It’s got to get better.”

* “These are big league baseball players. They’re here because they can catch a baseball. Any time you go out there against a club like this and you don’t catch fly balls, and you don’t catch ground balls, they’re going to kick your fanny.”

* “A wake up call? We’re fully awake, man. Believe me. With all that’s been said about our club, we’re fully aware of it. We’re fully awake.”

* “Last year’s over, man. Last year’s way over. We have to catch the ball tomorrow.”

* “Nobody is playing tight. It’s a function of catching it, making pitches, and getting base hits. Nobody’s tight. Those expectations were there long before today.”

Chances are, this game, and the 2-5 start, will become forgotten footnotes in a pennant-winning season. But for now, Matt Williams’ team is playing poorly, and defense is one of the culprits.

Ben and Sam banter about Jon Lester and then talk to the entire TINO (There Is No Offseason) podcast crew about their breakout-player beliefs.

Episode 551
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 sample sizes, sample-size disclaimers, and metaphors regarding sample sizes.

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 38 min play time.)

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As baseball fans who happily allow themselves to be consumed by information, we know, automatically, what certain number sequences refer to. Take, for example, 40-40. That’s homers and steals, applying to the rare player both speedy and powerful. 30-100? Homers and RBI, which, whatever, don’t act like you didn’t know. 6-4-3? That’s a run-of-the-mill double play. 2-1? Padres game. It’s all a different language, and we’re fluent in it, even if it isn’t the sort of fluency you’re comfortable declaring on a resume.

But numbers are just numbers, and they can refer to anything. I mean, it’s possible that 6-4-3 could also mean six runs on four hits, with three errors. You just can’t be sure right away. Now, baseball makes this promise: any day at the ballpark, you might see something you’ve never seen before. It’s an element that helps to keep the game fresh, despite 162 repetitions. Not everyone, granted, might appreciate something rare, something historical. Kind of depends what we’re talking about. In this case, we have something appealing only to dorks. Sunday afternoon in Oakland, Mike Zunino and Felix Hernandez of the Mariners turned a 2-1 double play.

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Hello! The baseball season just started. We’ve gone from one Sunday to a second Sunday, and we still aren’t allowed to do anything with statistics because nobody cares about them yet. While, in theory, spring training is supposed to get everyone ready for the year, the beginning feels like an extended spring training, a transition period following a transition period, and at this point the standings mean nothing. If you were to ask a player today about the wins and the losses, you’d get laughed out of the clubhouse. It doesn’t just feel like there’s a long way to go — it feels like there’s the whole way to go. Also, the Indians and White Sox are four games back of the Tigers and Royals.

It happened fast. It happened before anyone cared, but the White Sox have been swept by the Royals, and the Indians have been swept by the Tigers. Series conclude every few days, and standings change literally every day, but this is notable because the AL Central has four teams who’ve been thinking about the playoffs. The same four teams are still thinking about the playoffs, but as much as you want to say nothing matters yet, everything matters. This is my most- and least-favorite post to write every season.

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When the Reds signed Aroldis Chapman out of Cuba, a brief attempt was made to make him a starter in the minors, but in the majors, he has pitched exclusively out of the bullpen. Raisel Iglesias, a fellow Cuban import who has been ticketed by some for the bullpen, has already made one more start than Chapman with his debut on Sunday against the Cardinals. Iglesias made it through five innings, giving up three runs while striking out four and walking two. There are still some concerns that could cause him to end in the bullpen, but he showed an impressive fastball that fooled Cardinals hitters when he dropped his arm angle.

Iglesias pitched as a reliever in Cuba and has not been seen too often since signing with the Reds last July for seven years and $27 million. In Kiley McDaniel’s write-up on the Reds prospects, he had this to say about his performance in the Arizona Fall League:

He sat 91-95 and hit 97 mph in these outings, with his stuff varying a bit in each outing. Iglesias is about to turn 25 and there’s some east/west, inconsistency and effort to his delivery, but scouts see the elements of average command in the tank. Iglesias has a four pitch mix and his slider will flash plus every now and then, so there’s mid-rotation upside.

Iglesias’ slider performed well, striking out Jason Heyward in the first inning.
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We’re a week into the Major League season, which means most regular hitters have roughly 20 to 25 at-bats, and each team’s best pitcher has maybe thrown 13 or 14 innings. These are the smallest of small samples, and almost anything is possible over the course of five or six games. Right now, we have things like Jose Iglesias leading the American League in Batting Average and Kevin Kiermaier leading the AL in Slugging (.941). Among the many dominant pitching performance from the first week, you’ll find names like Aaron Harang, Tommy Milone, and Jason Marquis.

For years, the analytical community has strongly advised against reading anything into early-season results, making the phrase “Small Sample Size” into a term you’ll even hear on broadcasts. We have an entire entry in the FanGraphs Library devoted to sample size, and another on regression to the mean, which is a related concept. If you’re reading FanGraphs, odds are you’re probably aware of the fact that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on a week’s worth of data. The Braves are not the best team in the National League. The Tigers aren’t the ’27 Yankees. Over any given week, weird stuff is going to happen, and we just notice it more at the start of the season because it’s the only thing that has happened yet; if you look at any seven day stretch throughout the year, you’ll find similarly odd results.

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As of March 16th of this year, everything was decidedly not sweetness and light for Boston right-hander Joe Kelly. On that day, he recorded his third (and ultimately final) start of spring training, over the course of which he conceded three runs in just 2.2 innings, bringing his spring ERA to 11.05. Worse yet, he was compelled to leave that start due to biceps tightness in his biceps (i.e. the place where that kind of tightness is most commonly found). The outlook was sufficiently grim that managing editor Dave Cameron was forced to publish a post here considering other starting possibilities for the Boston Red Sox.

Following a retroactively dated trip to the disabled list and a pair of minor-league spring-training appearances, Kelly made his season debut on Saturday. It’s hard to know what Kelly’s expectations were or what the organization’s were, but “low-ish” is an objectively reasonable assumption. If nothing else, there had to be concerns regarding Kelly’s endurance. Of the two appearances he’d made since leaving his spring start with an injury, his highest pitch count was 78. “Ideally he’d have another outing to build arm strength before an MLB game,” John Farrell said in the presence of Providence Journal reporter Tim Britton. That ideal scenario did not become a reality. Instead, Kelly’s next appearance was Saturday’s.

There were reasons, in other words, to expect the worst for Joe Kelly’s start on Saturday at Yankees Stadium. In reality, however, Kelly’s results from that start were actually the best. Not the best in every sense of the word, but certainly among the best so far as Kelly’s major-league career is concerned. He allowed just one run over 7.0 innings. He posted the lowest single-game FIP (41 FIP-) of all his starts ever. And another thing he did was to surpass his previous single-game strikeout mark. Previous to Saturday, he’d recorded six strikeouts in a single game on seven different occasions. On Saturday, however, he produced eight strikeouts (i.e. two more than ever before).

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Last week, I wrote a piece looking at minor league players who saw stark decreases in the number of pitches they saw inside the strike zone. My analysis was inspired by recent research by Rob Arthur that suggested drops in Zone% can be early predictors of a breakout. Essentially, Arthur found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. By his theory, a pitcher knows a good hitter when he sees one, and chooses to approach him with caution. So when pitchers change their approach, it’s often because the hitter’s gotten more talented.

One of the hitters who jumped to the top of my list was Richard Shaffer, a third baseman in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. Shaffer spent the entire 2014 season in Double-A Montgomery, where he hit an uninspiring .222/.318/.440. Although he hit for a good amount of power last year, the rest of his game left a lot to be desires. KATOH wasn’t thrilled with this lack-luster season — especially his elevated strikeout rate– and gave him just a 50% chance of even reaching the major leagues. Here’s a look at my system’s full break-down of Shaffer’s odds.

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