Armed with a mono-pod / advanced selfie stick, and the lack of ability to be embarrassed, I asked Sam Fuld if he would do a video interview with me about preparation before the A’s first game of the year. After all, the players have been preparing for games every day for a month now, but this one’s different. And how has his pre-game and offseason routine changed?
A few years ago, Brandon McCarthy threw out a question that baseball Twitter scrambled to research: how often do Opening Day starting pitchers throw a first-pitch non-fastball? Suggested is that first-pitch fastballs, here, are extremely common and extremely predictable, and the results fell in line. It wasn’t clear there had been any first-pitch non-fastballs, and if there had been, there hadn’t been more than one or two, excepting, of course, the occasional knuckler. Baseball season has started. How does baseball season usually start for every team? With a fastball. It’s almost like a ceremonial first pitch, after the ceremonial first pitch, and before the actual baseball stuff.
Monday afternoon, baseball season started for the Yankees and the Blue Jays. In the top of the first, Masahiro Tanaka opened things by pitching to Jose Reyes. That season-opening pitch of 2015: a low slider, for a called strike, at 81 miles per hour. No mystery — it was a certain first-pitch breaking ball. The next pitch was a splitter. The following pitch was also a splitter. Reyes went down on three strikes, and Tanaka was off to the best of all starts.
Episode 546
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses three of his nearly final organizational lists, in addition to other pressing matters.
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 1 hr 2 min play time.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
If you’re here on FanGraphs, you’re probably familiar with the concept of lineup optimization. If you’re familiar with the concept of lineup optimization, you probably know that the No. 2 hole has been criminally misused, according to the numbers, by managers throughout baseball history.
Throughout time, the No. 2 hole typically has been occupied either by a.) light-hitting up-the-middle players because they’re fast, or b.) light-hitting up-the-middle players, because they can bunt.
The Book says that’s a flawed way of thinking:
The Books says the #2 hitter comes to bat in situations about as important as the #3 hitter, but more often. That means the #2 hitter should be better than the #3 guy, and one of the best three hitters overall. And since he bats with the bases empty more often than the hitters behind him, he should be a high-OBP player. Doesn’t sound like someone who should be sacrificing, does it?
It seems like managers have been getting better with this in recent years. The Reds finally gave in and (correctly) started batting Joey Votto second last season. Same with Joe Mauer. You saw Evan Longoria there sometimes, and even Jose Bautista made a few appearances in the 2-hole. Progress was being made.
And if this year’s Opening Day lineups are any indication, we’re witnessing a breakthrough. Here’s the names of some guys who hit second for their ballclubs on Opening Day:
Sure, there’s still some Odubel Herrera’s, and… uh… hey, Mike Moustakas, but there’s three catchers in that list, zero middle infielders, and it’s a group of guys who likely wouldn’t even have been considered to hit second just a handful of years ago.
I wanted to see if this might be an actual league-wide trend worth noting, so I did some number-crunching. I used the excellent BaseballPress to find all 30 of last year’s Opening Day lineups, and I plugged in the 2014 projected OBP — according to ZiPS and Steamer — all the players to find league averages for each spot in the lineup. Then, I did the same thing with this year’s Opening Day lineups and projections, and then I compared the two. Of course, there’s more to optimizing a lineup than just on-base percentage — power and speed play a lesser role, too — but nothing trumps OBP, and this took longer to do than I thought it would, so OBP will serve us just fine.
The results are encouraging:
| OBP, by batting order |
||||||||||
| 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 0.329 | 0.326 | 0.356 | 0.337 | 0.326 | 0.317 | 0.312 | 0.308 | 0.298 | |
| 2015 | 0.323 | 0.334 | 0.349 | 0.334 | 0.318 | 0.314 | 0.305 | 0.305 | 0.301 | |
| Difference | -0.006 | 0.008 | -0.007 | -0.003 | -0.008 | -0.003 | -0.007 | -0.003 | 0.003 | |
Offense is down across baseball and so, naturally, we find lower OBPs across the board. That is, except for in the 2-hole. I didn’t include pitchers, so the 9-hole only has half the sample size and could be subject to some noisy fluctuation. But there’s no mistaking that the No. 2 spot in the order, at least for Game 1 of 162, is finally being better utilized by managers across baseball.
Because there’s a lot of noise, we tend to look past spring training stats. But recent work suggests that using spring training stats can improve projections, and our own Mike Podhorzer worked with Matt Swartz to show that a pitcher’s strikeouts and walks in the spring are meaningful results.
In other words, if we use our small-sample tools, maybe Spring Training really is a little bit like September: expanded rosters, some meaningless games, but still baseball, being played at a high level. The veterans usually play veterans early in the game, and the minor leaguers don’t get the same number of innings or plate appearances to be grouped with the veterans in any statistical mining we might do.
So, that said, let’s look at the starting pitchers, and their strikeouts. These strikeout rates are basically half-way to the stabilization point — the point at which they represent more signal than noise — and they’ve been (mostly) facing the veterans before they leave early, along the right field line.
Over the weekend, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Kansas City Royals. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Kansas City’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Royals system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.
Below are the top-five prospects in the Kansas City system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.
Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.
5. Brian Flynn, LHP (Profile)
| IP | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | FIP | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 7.4 | 2.6 | 0.9 | 3.74 | 0.2 |
At points during the 2013 season, the left-handed Flynn appeared to be developing into a legitimate candidate for a major-league starting role. He produced strikeout and walk rates of 28.7% and 3.5%, respectively, over his first four starts at Double-A before earning a promotion to Triple-A, where he proceeded more or less in the same fashion, if with some of the decline in his rates that one might expect from facing more difficult competition. He hasn’t exhibited that same sort of ability in the majors yet, however. Traded to Kansas City this offseason in exchange for Aaron Crow, he has the potential to become one of the Royals’ large collection of former starters who’ve found considerable success in the bullpen.
At some level, Opening Day represents the birth of a new season and facilitates all the optimism associated with new beginnings. At the same time, however, that new season is also embedded within a perpetual cycle of recurring baseball seasons and their attendant narratives and symbols.
Pursuant to that latter point, one finds that while certain things are changing, at least one thing is also staying the same — namely, Edwin Encarnacion’s weird T-Rex arm that emerges any time he records a home run. This phenomenon has been documented before. Below, it’s documented again.
First, Encarnacion hits a home run in the third inning against Yankees starter Masahiro Tanaka:
We know that Craig Kimbrel stands atop any reliever leaderboard you can gussy up. Does he stand so far away from second place that he’s a one of a kind guy right now? That’s easy enough to answer.
The Cleveland Indians already had much of their team in place for many years on the position player side after extensions for Michael Brantley, Jason Kipnis, Yan Gomes, and Carlos Santana. In one weekend they solidified their future on the pitching side as well, locking up ace and Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber as well as fellow rotation member Carlos Carrasco. Deals for pitchers are never a guarantee of performance, but with the cost to acquire pitching outside the organization so high, the Indians made out very well in securing potentially six years of free agent years with $60 million in guarantees.
Carlos Carrasco was not the player most likely to receive an extension, but he will now be guaranteed $22 million over the next four years with two club options after that believed to be worth around $10 million. Carrasco entered arbitration for the first time this year and was set to make close to $2.3 million this season. Extensions for players in their first year of arbitration are not common. Before this offseason, there had not been an extension for a player with between three and four years of service time since January 2011, when Johnny Cueto signed a four-year deal with the Cincinnati Reds for $27 million that included a team option and bought out two potential free agent years, per MLB Trade Rumors Extension Tracker. Even expanding the parameters a little finds few players close to Carrasco’s situation in the recent past. Gio Gonzalez signed his five-year, $42 million deal as a super-2 three years ago, and Jaime Garcia was about two months from arbitration when he signed his four-year $27 million in July 2011.
Read the rest of this entry »
We made it through. We’re still here, baseball’s still here, and we can all agree that everything is better today. Opening Day is when we crack the first egg to make a massive, delicious omelet. In many ways, there isn’t a better point in our yearly lives than the moment just before the first pitch of the first game for our favorite team: the amalgam of our hopes and expectations stretch out in the green expanse before us, realized in our mind’s eye all at once, and we drink them in.
Every once and a while, we see something a little more special than usual on Opening Day: a player hitting the ground running, acting like they could’ve been done with spring training weeks ago. They dominate on a day when many players might be hoping to ease into things.
In honor of this auspicious day, and to welcome back the time of the year when games mean something, I’ve combed through some particularly noteworthy pitching performances for the first counting games in the historical record (live-ball era) of previous seasons. With any luck, we’ll have another one to catalog today. Let’s get to it.
