FanGraphs Baseball

Performances are magnified in October and April. Everyone watches the playoffs with greater focus, and in April everyone is starved for baseball leading to massive consumption and potential over-analysis. Carlos Beltran has had little difficulty delivering in October, with 16 home runs and a .333/.445/.683 line in 219 postseason plate appearances, but this April, coming off his worst season in 15 years, increased scrutiny is coming for the soon-to-be 38-year-old. In the second year of his three-year, $45 million contract, whether Carlos Beltran will be able to produce is a question without an easy answer.

In each of the last two games, Carlos Beltran has come to the plate for the New York Yankees late in the game, trailing by one or two runs with runners in scoring position. On Wednesday, with the Yankees down 3-1, Beltran came to the plate with the bases loaded against Brett Cecil with nobody out. A wild pitch advanced all the runners a base leaving men on second and third. He could not check his swing on a 2-2 offspeed offering.
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The Houston Astros just finished a three-game series at home against the Cleveland Indians, and a few things presented themselves in respect to our discussions during this past offseason. The discussions in question pertained to two subjects: the quiet strength of the Cleveland pitching staff, and the strikeout propensity of the Houston lineup.

It was hard to know exactly where the line between the two started and ended. We can say this about the Cleveland rotation: it looked good. Corey Kluber was Corey Kluber. Carlos Carrasco looked like he did at the end of 2014, looking unhittable with his high-90’s fastball and great changeup. Finally, Trevor Bauer put the icing on the cake in the third game, showcasing his combination of wildness and raw stuff to exit with a no-hitter intact after 6 innings. Cleveland fans are obviously encouraged by what they saw in the front end of their rotation this series. It’s not a surprise two of them just signed lengthy contract extensions.

On the other side, the results were clear in another way for the Houston offense:

• .208 OBP
• .048 ISO
• 37.5 K%

Those stats were informed in large part by performances like this, from Evan Gattis:

Gattis is also the only player since at least 1914 with 2 4-K games within his team’s 1st 3 games of a season

— Baseball Reference (@baseball_ref) April 9, 2015

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You almost couldn’t dream of a better matchup. Thursday in the capital, Stephen Strasburg went up against Matt Harvey. It would technically be possible to improve on that. Some would suggest Corey Kluber and Clayton Kershaw. Others would suggest Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw. But, on pure stuff alone, Strasburg’s a delight to watch, and Harvey’s every bit his equal. At least, that’s what we recalled. We also hadn’t seen Harvey pitch a major-league game in a while.

Harvey began and ended on a pitch count. He still managed to go longer than Strasburg did, spinning six shutout frames on 91 pitches. I don’t know if there was a single representative at-bat, but I will volunteer this first-inning showdown against Bryce Harper:

1. low curveball, 83, whiff
2. high fastball, 97, whiff
3. high fastball, 97, ball
4. high fastball, 97, whiff

In case that one doesn’t do it for you, you might prefer the third-inning at-bat, where Harvey whiffed Harper with a high fastball at 97. Or you could skip ahead to the sixth, where Harvey whiffed Harper with a high fastball at 96. Between Strasburg and Harper, the Nationals have two young stars who’ve generated near-unparalleled hype. Thursday, Harvey out-played them both. It was a rather emphatic way for the phenom to kick off what promises to be an electric campaign.

And the Mets themselves are thinking big things. Bigger things, at least, than they’ve been thinking about the last few years. This year, they want to be a year of transition from finding and developing talent to winning. Like a smaller-scale Cubs, if you will, and, like the Cubs, the Mets think they have the ability to get to the playoffs, even without the injured Zack Wheeler. It stands to reason that, if things go well this year for New York, it’ll be in large part because of what Harvey can do, now that he’s back.

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If someone asked you to guess which right fielder provided the most value on the defensive side of the ball last year, the only logical answer is Jason Heyward. Heyward was so far above his compatriots that you almost wonder if he was simply not supposed to be a right fielder and that Fredi Gonzalez’s lineup card handwriting was somehow confusing the players and sending them to the wrong positions.

Heyward posted 32 defensive runs saved and a 24.1 ultimate zone rating in 1317 innings in right field. No one else was even in the ballgame, but if you had to guess who was second, it might be a little more difficult. Enter Kevin Kiermaier. Kiermaier’s 14 DRS and 16 UZR in right field landed him at second on a list of right fielders sorted by DEF, which is UZR and the positional adjustment.

DEF is a cumulative statistic, meaning more opportunities can lead to higher numbers. Heyward’s DEF was 17.3 and Kiermaier’s was 13.3, but Kiermaier played just 526.1 innings in right field last year. If you convert those marks to a rate statistic, say UZR/150, then Kiermaier rockets up to an insane 56.6 UZR/150 while Heyward settles just above 20. By the numbers, Kiermaier was the most dazzling defender we saw in right field last year.

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In Monday’s “Opening Day Staff Survey,” Dave said the storyline he was most looking forward to this season was, “Breaking in young pitching prospects as relievers.” This was a little bit vague, but he elucidated on it further later that day when he recorded his weekly podcast with Carson. If you skip to the 30-minute mark, we get to the heart of the issue:

“Earl Weaver used to do this all the time with his relievers back in the 70s, but he broke them in as long relievers; we didn’t really have these one-inning specialists that they have today. So you’d break in these young pitchers, but they’d go two, three, four innings. They’d have to face hitters multiple times, they’d have to work on multiple pitches, they’d have to pace themselves a little bit. To me, that’s a little bit different than breaking in a guy as a ninth-inning guy or as an eighth-inning guy and telling him to throw as hard as possible for 15 pitches.”

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When you look at the player pages for a prospect, you’ll see present and future grades. When it comes to the grades per pitch, the difference between the two is mostly consistency. As Kiley McDaniel puts it, the future grade is “usually the best version of the pitch currently.”

If you watched Michael Pineda pitch yesterday, you know exactly what this means. By Gameday, he threw nine changeups, but by PITCHf/x he threw 12, and the number might be even larger. Only twice before in his 42 starts has he thrown that many. They weren’t all good. But when they were good…

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Ben and Sam talk about how we should talk about baseball’s latest decline in scoring.

Recently, I put together a calculator for my own personal use — and perhaps, eventually, the use of this site’s readers — that helps to translate (roughly) a batting prospect’s individual tool grades into wins. Lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel already provided something along these lines for Overall Future Value back in September by means of a chart, of which this is an excerpt:

Even for those of us unfamiliar with the parlance of scouting, this is fairly intuitive. A player who receives a 50 FV grade is regarded as an average player. An average player, in statistical terms, is one who produces roughly two wins over the course of a full season. It follows, then, that a player who receives a 50 FV is one we might reasonably expect to produce about 2.0 WAR in a season at the height of his talents. Players who receive better grades than a 50 are likely, by some order of magnitude, to produce more than 2.0 WAR; worse grades than a 50, less than 2.0 WAR.

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You’ve already read about the stuff being tried in an effort to improve baseball’s pace of play. You’ve already read so much of it you’re probably already tired of reading it. Sorry. Pace of play is a relatively boring subject, when compared to everything that happens in between the various delays and stoppages (i.e. baseball). But, hey, here’s something: last year, the median game duration was 3:07. So far this year, 2:58. Maybe that means something. Maybe all that means is it’s been just a few days. Don’t know, but, forget the macro. This is about the micro.

Among the new rules implemented: batters must keep one foot in the box. A candid Bud Selig:

“A guy gets in the batter’s box, ball one, and now he’s adjusting all this crap he has on,” Selig said. “And I’m thinking to myself watching the game, ‘What is he adjusting? He hasn’t swung the bat.’ ”

Bud Selig is very old, but that’s something I myself would’ve said, with the same terminology. Baseball has been littered with hitters who have to meditate between every pitch, and perhaps the worst offender has been Troy Tulowitzki. Back in 2008, Tulowitzki averaged 20.5 seconds between pitches. That subsequently rose every year, to last season’s 27.9. Tulo, like other hitters, would explain it as a habit. Part superstition, part taking a breather, part thinking things through. But Tulo wasn’t always like this. He grew into it. When he worked faster, he was an excellent player. He’s always been an excellent player, but his is a frustrating trend.

So how has he been changed? How has Tulowitzki responded to a new rule that addresses one of his quirks? We’ve got games, now. Games mean data.

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