FanGraphs Baseball

Last week, people talked a lot about shifts. People talked about shifts because baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts, and baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts because shifts are up and runs are down. Now, it’s been mostly demonstrated that shifts are far from the main reason why run scoring is on the decline, but we all can at least agree that shift usage has skyrocketed. Last year there were almost six times as many shifts employed as there were in 2011. That’s a huge increase in not very much time. Seeing arrangements like this is becoming more common, and these days it’s a surprise when a pull-hitting slugger doesn’t face an adjusted infield.

With shifts on the rise as a defensive strategy, we’ve tried to figure out ways to counter the strategy with a different one at the plate. Ben Lindbergh wrote an excellent recurring column at Baseball Prospectus, detailing bunts against the shift. That’s the obvious bit — it seems almost too easy to get a free single when the third baseman is hugging second. Somewhat famously, bunts against the shift remain unusual. But there’s also the matter of hitting the other way. If a batter starts to spray the ball more, it could effectively undo the shift, and some players have talked about emphasizing an all-fields approach. So, out of curiosity, have we seen any progress? Have hitters demonstrated a better ability to go the other way?

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Episode 526
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 Atlanta prospects and New York Yankees prospects and certain finer (but also less fine) points concerning collegiate prospects.

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 5 min play time.)

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If you’re a Rays fan, you want Mark Sappington to make the team this year. If you’re a member of the Tampa Bay media, you really want Mark Sappington to make the team. Trust me on this one.

A 24-year-old right-hander from Peculiar, Missouri (yep), Sappington is 6-foot-5, throws 100 mph, and supplies quips at a mile a minute. Think Justin Masterson, smiling, sans a sinker.

The Rays acquired the happy-go-lucky hurler from the Angels in November – in the middle of the Arizona Fall League season – for Cesar Ramos. Going strictly by the numbers, it was a curious deal. A fifth-round pick in 2012 out of Rockhurst University, Sappington was 4-11, 6.04 this year between high-A Inland Empire and Double-A Arkansas.

I asked Sappington why the Rays were interested.

“Shoot, you got me,” responded the big righty. “I did kind of find my groove after moving into the bullpen, where I was able to harness all of my energy into one inning. I get pretty amped up on the mound. I get in the zone. I get in the Z.”

His mid-season move to the pen resulted in more mid-90s velocity readings. There were a few 98s and 99s, and Sappington told me he hit 100 in the AFL. Command is his biggest issue. He said it’s a matter of “getting through the baseball,” and when his timing is down he can throw the ball where he wants to. When it’s not, “That’s when there’s a little craziness.”

Mike Foltynewicz told me this summer that his control improves when he dials down from 100 to 94-95. Mentioning that to Sappington elicited admiration. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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When I wrote on Monday about the changing policies and confusion surrounding MLB, OFAC, U.S.-Cuba relations and the unblocking process for Cuban ballplayers, this situation seemed like a muddled mess. After my first article on the topic, Yahoo’s Jeff Passan and Baseball America’s Ben Badler added further details throughout the week and reported statements from OFAC and MLB as both sides were looking to clarify their stances. There was some urgency to conclude the negative PR whirlwind, with high-ranking MLB officials upset about not being able to sign three notable Cuban players left in limbo by this delay, with the total value of their potential contracts easily in excess of $100 million.

I was first turned onto this story by Cuban phenom Yoan Moncada’s agent David Hastings, who has taken some flack in the industry for being a first-time agent and representing such a high profile player, but it appears this situation has shaken out after a one week long media cycle. OFAC sent Hastings a letter within the last hour further clarifying their stance from previous statements earlier this week. According to Hastings, the letter stated that OFAC will not grant a specific license to Cuban nationals who are already unblocked via the general license. This applies to Moncada and the other two notable Cuban nationals waiting to be unblocked, second basemen Hector Olivera and Andy Ibanez.

OFAC’s earlier statements left an opening that they could be held responsible for the delay, as they said granting both general and specific licenses to certain Cubans would be handled on a “case-by-case basis.” This suggested that OFAC could hand out the specific license and end the delay by meeting MLB’s standard for unblocking a player. At the same time, OFAC said only the general license is necessary to clear a Cuban national to sign with a team, but MLB asked for more from the Cuban players, an MLB-only policy that changed at some point in the last few years.

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Episode 525
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the moribund guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 7 min play time.)

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Last time, I looked at which MLB teams do and don’t pursue players born in the five most prolific non-draft-eligible countries (the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and Japan). Part of the goal there was to identify which of the 30 MLB organizations are the most aggressive and/or progressive in terms of finding the best talent they possibly can o’er the entire globe.

Of course, looking at how teams approach well-established springs of baseball talent like the Dominican is hardly the only way to identify whether or not a team is looking for new and novel opportunities outside of the Nifty Fifty. In the past twenty or so years, there are five other countries who — while they have not produced a similar total number of MLB players as the aforementioned Established Five — are producing more and more MLB-caliber players as time goes on: Australia, Colombia, Curacao, South Korea, and Taiwan. Teams who sign the most players from these locales are, at the very least, in admirable pursuit of new and unexpected sources of that rare gem: an MLB-caliber player.

This time I will only be tallying which team signed which player as an international free agents — I will not be tallying other MLB teams that each player eventually played for during their careers stateside. Players who were born in these countries but who were eventually drafted in the rookie draft are excluded from the count. I used a lot of help from Baseball Reference and Baseball Almanac. Here we go!

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At the Cincinnati Enquirer, C. Trent Rosencrans notes that, after Ichiro Suzuki plays his first game in a Miami Marlins uniform, the Reds will be the only of the 30 MLB teams to never employ a player born in Japan at the major-league level. (Tip of the hat to MLBTradeRumors.)

Here is a quote that Rosencrans shares from Reds General Manager Walt Jocketty:

We do have some people who do cross-checking, we don’t have a scout in Japan. It’s too costly.

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Yesterday, Dave put forward a proposal about how Major League Baseball could possibly improve its pace of play and run scoring in one fell swoop: limit the number of pitchers allowed per game to four. He couched it by saying that it was an admittedly crazy idea. But after compiling a grid of how many pitchers are used per game, I’m not so sure that it is.

What I wanted to see is a grid of how each team used its pitchers. How many games with two pitchers, three pitchers, etc. Thankfully, Baseball-Reference’s pitching game logs are very accommodating in this regard. In order to get a representative sample, I scrubbed out extra inning games, as well as games that were shortened for some reason (most likely rain). That leaves just the games where the pitchers threw eight to nine innings. Now, there’s certainly a chance that there was some weird game that was stopped for rain after eight innings, but barring that, this should be a sample of all the “regulation” games from last season. No team had fewer than 141 of these games, and no team had more than 154. Most of the games removed were extra-inning games, there were just a handful of shortened games.

Enough talk, let’s get to the grid:

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Understand that I’m not a pitching coach. I’ve never played one on TV, and if I were asked to serve as one for an actual team, I’d be wildly out of my element. Pitching is complicated, and pitchers in the major leagues are impossibly good, and pitchers in the major leagues also have reasons for doing what they do however they do it. I don’t know if what follows is good advice for Kevin Gausman and James Paxton, or garbage. It’s just, there’s at least enough here that we can have a conversation.

Thursday, I wrote about the Rays and collecting and encouraging high fastballs. I’m interested in this high-fastball thing — it’s an intuitively sensible way to attack hitters who are increasingly prepared to hit down low. The Rays have talked about this idea. The Astros have talked about this idea. Brandon McCarthy has talked about this idea, during an interview for the Hardball Times Annual. It’s a trend, seemingly, to counter a different trend. But it’s worth noting, not just any fastball should be thrown high. You need to have some command, and you need to be able to generate the right kind of spin. You want to have a fastball — a four-seamer — with a high PITCHf/x vertical-movement reading. That’s not the way pitchers themselves think about it, but that’s how we can understand it.

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