FanGraphs Baseball

This past Sunday, I wrote about how Adam Ottavino is studying Garrett Richards‘ pitch usage in hopes of improving his performance against left-handed hitters. Not included in the article were details about his signature pitch, which is actually three pitches in one. The Colorado Rockies reliever throws his slider from two arm angles and with two different grips. As a result, the shape varies, as does the velocity, from 80 to 87 mph. Ottavino explained this to me – and touched on related subjects – last week in Phoenix.

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Adam Ottavino on release points: “I was recently looking at my release point charts on Brooks Baseball – all four years of data they have on me – and it’s interesting to see that the data is consistent with the mechanical adjustments I’ve made. You can see when I’ve moved over on the rubber. It’s interesting to look at how I’ve evolved over the last three years, and how the things I tried to do, I actually did do.

“On both axis, my release point was the most consistent in 2013, which is actually the year I had the most success. Last year it was a little less consistent, but that’s partially because I was changing my arm angle slightly on breaking balls. I was doing that intentionally to affect some sort of different view from the hitter’s perspective.”

On his slider variations: “I throw sliders multiple ways. They all read the same – they read as sliders on PITCHf/x — but they are three different pitches. There’s more of an up-and-down, more of a slurve, and one with more of a straight lateral break. I do that with two different grips. As a pitcher who throws such a high percentage of breaking balls (47.3% in 2014), I don’t want to make them all exactly the same, Even if the hitter reads slider out of my hand, he can’t be totally sure where it will end up.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben, Sam, and guest Jake Silverman banter about Tommy Lasorda and franchise players, then answer listener emails about interviews, ejections, and MLB information-sharing.

Episode 539
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 multiple injured pitchers, the wide-ranging effects of their injuries, and also Cubs prospect Kris Bryant for reasons that are manifest.

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 45 min play time.)

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Ben and Sam preview the Athletics’ season with Philip Michaels, and Sahadev talks to Bay Area News Group A’s beat writer John Hickey (at 22:50).

Even with almost unlimited resources, assembling a good rotation can be a difficult task. The best rotation in Major League Baseball this season is expected to be the Washington Nationals. The Nationals signed Max Scherzer to a huge free agent contract. The franchise drafted Stephen Strasburg and Jordan Zimmerman and both players have missed seasons due to Tommy John surgery. They traded prospects to get Gio Gonzalez and Doug Fister. The Nationals have put together an incredible rotation, but it took a lot of money and prospects to create and the result will be fleeting. Zimmerman and Fister are pending free agents with Strasburg just a year behind them.

Moving pieces around to create a rotation was not easy for the Nationals, and for those with considerably less resources, a cost-effective rotation that looks good on the field is a difficult proposition. There are a few ways to measure the effectiveness of a rotation. The way that matters most is the play on the field. In that regard, the Nationals are the best in baseball with the Los Angeles Dodgers coming in second. The graph below uses the data taken from the FanGraphs Depth Charts for starting pitching.

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Over the winter, the Reds remade their starting rotation, trading away both Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon, getting younger and cheaper players back in return for a pair of arms headed into their walk years. However, they declined to go into a full rebuild, keeping both Johnny Cueto and Mike Leake despite the fact that they’re also pending free agents; the Reds wanted to take one more shot at winning with their current core, especially given that they’re hosting the All-Star Game this year.

Now, the Reds actually pulling off this contend-while-kinda-rebuilding plan seems like a bit of a longshot. We currently have them projected for 75 wins, last in the NL Central, with just a 2.7% chance of winning the division and a 5.9% chance of capturing one of the two Wild Card spots. And it’s not like we’re out on a limb here; Bovada has the Reds over/under at 77.5. Baseball Prospectus is slightly more optimistic, pegging them at 79 wins, matching Clay Davenport’s projected win total.

So, in general, the pre-season forecasts peg the Reds as something like a 75 to 80 win team, meaning they need to find an extra dozen or so wins in either surprisingly strong performances or sequencing luck in order to sneak into a playoff spot. It definitely is possible, especially if the team gets strong bounce back performances from Jay Bruce and Joey Votto, but the Reds are going to need to get a few breakthrough performances from unexpected sources. When you’re starting from this position and trying to win, you need to take some gambles and have them pay off.

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Cubs third-base prospect Kris Bryant produced one of the top minor-league seasons in recent history last year, recording a weighted batting line approximately 90% better than league average over 594 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A while also playing a seemingly competent third base. Were minor-league WAR a thing, Bryant would have recorded the best one of those in all of affiliated baseball — roughly the equivalent of nine wins.

Largely as a result of that wildly successful 2014 season, Bryant enters 2015 featuring the top WAR projection among all rookie-eligible players — and one of the top WAR projections realistically possible for a player who’s made zero major-league appearances. His performance over the first couple weeks of spring training indicates — to the degree that spring-training performance can indicate such things — that he’s, at the very least, unlikely to be overwhelmed by major-league pitching.

Before Kris Bryant led all the minors in home runs, he led all the NCAA in home runs, too. In 2013, as a junior at the University of San Diego, Bryant hit 31 homers. That June, he was selected second overall in the draft by the Cubs. The next month, he was presented with the Golden Spikes Award.

Technically, the Golden Spikes Award is presented each year to the best amateur player in the country. In practice, however, the award has been given to a college player (either the four-year or junior-college variety) every year since its inception in 1978. Bob Horner was the Golden Spikes recipient that year following his junior campaign at Arizona State — a performance which convinced Atlanta not only to select him first overall in the draft that year, but also to send him directly to the majors, where he produced a 2.3 WAR in 359 plate appearances.

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Last season was a banner year for the Baltimore Orioles. The team won 96 games in the regular season and advanced to the ALCS despite a whirlwind of adversity: significant injuries to Matt Wieters and Manny Machado, and huge power declines from Chris Davis and J.J. Hardy. Hardy’s 2014 was quite interesting. He was hampered by back issues throughout the season, hitting only nine homers after clubbing a total of 87 his first three years in Baltimore, but it ended well, as he quickly signed a three-year, $40 million extension after the season ended. The scary thing is, Hardy’s offensive performance last season was quite a bit worse than his .268/.309/.372 line indicated.

Hardy was the Brewers’ second-round draft pick in 2001 out of Sabino High School in Tucson, Ariz., and quickly advanced through the minor leagues. He was given a challenging assignment in his first full pro season in 2002, opening at High-A and receiving a promotion to Double-A by season’s end. Each year, I compile an ordered list of minor-league position player prospects based on their OBP and SLG, relative to their league and level, adjusted for age. Traditional scouting techniques are then used to tweak the order. Hardy’s minor-league performances resulted in three top 100 rankings, quite unusual for a shortstop. His peak ranking was No. 20 after the 2003 season, when he hit 12 homers as a 20-year-old in the pitcher-friendly Southern League. Such rankings and performances projected a long major league career, with some offensive upside.

Hardy indeed has had a long run as a regular MLB shortstop, arriving in 2005 with only a couple of injury interruptions since. After hitting all of 29 minor-league homers — with that single-season high of 12 — Hardy has gone on to hit 167 as a big leaguer, clearing the 20-homer mark five times. In many ways, Hardy has tracked the performance of Jimmy Rollins, who hit 36 minor league homers — also with a single-season high of 12 — before hitting 215 in the majors through his age-35 season. Rollins also was a second-round high school draftee, and earned a ranking on my minor league position player prospect list four times, including two top 100 slots, with a peak at No. 44 in 2000.

They’re very similar defenders, as well: solid but unspectacular range, great hands and extremely accurate throwing arms. Both like to swing the bat, causing their respective OBPs to suffer as a result; but they grew into some power, and have extremely respectable 97 (Rollins) and 96 (Hardy) career OPS+ marks for shortstops. The big difference between them, of course, is Rollins’ speed, which separates the two into different tiers as players.

Enough about Rollins. Let’s get back to J.J. It’s tempting to chalk up the entirety of Hardy’s 2014 offensive struggles to his back injury, which primarily affected him in the early stages of the season. After all, he didn’t hit his first homer until June 21, and then managed eight more the rest of the way. That’s way down from his 2013 total of 25, but one can easily make the case that a healthy Hardy would have hit 15 or so. Once you dig a little deeper into the numbers, however, other disturbing items emerge. To get to the bottom of Hardy’s 2014 campaign, let’s examine his plate appearance frequency and production by BIP type data. First, the frequency info:
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