It’s tough to imagine how the final few weeks of the 2019 regular season could have gone worse for the Chicago Cubs. Just two games back in the National League Central division on September 17, the team finished the year by losing 10 of its final 12 games, plunging not only out of the division race but out of the Wild Card hunt as well. It was a nightmarish run for the Cubs, but for one player on the team, that stretch represented the height of his season. Ian Happ, the young switch-hitting utility player, made 39 plate appearances in the final 14 games of the season and hit an astonishing .405/.436/1.000, crushing six homers and four doubles in that span. In the Cubs’ only two victories of that stretch, Happ went a combined 6-for-10 with three homers and two doubles.

It’s appropriate that it was Happ who enjoyed this success to close the season; it seemed like no one else on the team needed to finish the year on a high note as much as he did. He was the one who, just one year prior, had such a poor finish to the season that despite being one of the most exciting young players on his team, he went into the following spring training fighting for a job. Over the final two months of 2018, Happ hit just .192/.298/.333, with a wRC+ of just 72. Those two months tanked what had been a promising campaign, and had carryover effects well into the following year. In 56 spring training plate appearances in 2019, he ran on base and slugging percentages both south of .200.

This spring, it seems to be a different story, at least so far. Now carrying on his success, not struggles, from a previous season, Happ did this on Monday:

Kyle Hendricks CAN'T CONTAIN HIMSELF watching Ian Happ's solo shot.

( ?: @ESPN) pic.twitter.com/7QW5S14TR5

— Cubs Talk (@NBCSCubs) March 2, 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Lodolo went into last year’s draft rated as the top pitching prospect in a pool heavily populated by position players. Subsequently selected seventh overall by the Cincinnati Reds, the left-hander out of Texas Christian University now enters his first full professional season as a potential, if not probable, fast-mover. In big league camp despite a dearth of experience, Lodolo has impressed with both his arm and his demeanor. More on the latter in a moment.

Lodolo is ranked No. 92 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list, with pitchability perhaps his greatest attribute. He’s not your prototypical flamethrower — his heater sits 93-95 and touches 96 — but is rather a craftsman-in-the making. He’s also silky smooth. As Eric Longenhagen wrote in Lodolo’s scouting summary, the 6-foot-6, 195 pound southpaw’s “frame is ideal, his delivery elegant and repeatable.”

On Tuesday, I asked Lodolo for a self-scouting report. His response came as anything but a surprise.

“I’m obviously a guy who attacks the zone,” said Lodolo, who turned 22 last month. “I move my fastball in and out really well. I’ll pretty much throw anything for a strike, whenever in the count. I don’t think of myself as a power pitcher, although [power] is something I do kind of have. Luckily. I’ll use that to my advantage — for instance when I work up in the zone — but for the most the part, I take pride in my command, and in limiting free bases.”

He didn’t give up any freebies in his first taste of professional action. In 18 1/3 innings between Rookie-level Billings and Low-A Dayton, Lodolo didn’t issue a single walk. He fanned 30, and surrendered 18 hits. Read the rest of this entry »

We just updated our player pages! The pages might not look that different, but we’ve redone everything under the hood. We did this to achieve responsive player pages, and it also comes with improvements in speed and a better platform to develop new features in the future.

Quick Look

If you are on a desktop computer, the most noticeable difference on the new pages is the Quick Look section we’ve added to the very top of the page. These will have some popular stats for the player’s major league career and the current or most recent season. Retired players will only have their career stats.

For position players, we’ve also provided a summary of how many major league games the player played at each position, while a pitcher’s Quick Look will show their pitch repertoire. The position breakdown will double count games a player played at two or more positions, and does not include pinch-hitters or pinch-runners, so those values might not add up to games played. We display the Pitch Info classifications for the pitches where usage is 5% or greater for the season. Once again, these will only show for the current or most recent season.

Prospects and players who were recently prospects have their most recent scouting grades and team rankings from the prospect team shown. The report year those grades and rankings come from is shown and also serves as a link to The Board, allowing you to see that report’s entire class. Any in-season rankings are denoted with a (U) for Updated.

Table View Options and Minor League Stats

Minor league stats are no longer shown by default for every player. We do, however, show them for players who:

• Do not have any major league stats.
• Current players who have less than two years of service time.
• Retired players who have minor league stats in our database, but played fewer than three seasons in the majors.

You can toggle the minor league stats into view as always, with the table options between the table header and the data grid.

On mobile, those table view options are hidden but are accessible via the settings gear on the top-right of the table.

Game Logs

The game log calendar has been updated as well. Days when the player played a game are shown in black and have a dot underneath the date. Clicking update will load the new date range. You are also able to select an entire season or all games that we have available. If you select a very long range, it might take a while to load.

We also now have game logs and play logs available for players who played from 1974 to 2002. These behave just like the game logs and play logs of current players. 1974 is as far back as our play-by-play data currently goes.

Mobile

We made the data grid pages responsive. Much like The Board or the minor league leaderboards, you are able to scroll across the table while the season for the row is fixed in the left column.

For the moment, the visualization-based pages still require the full desktop view to use. We hope to move everything over to a responsive view soon.

Other Notes

Fantasy Player Profiles are still in the process of being written and will be available soon. The placement of the profiles on the player pages haven’t changed.

Back in January, we announced the creation of legacy pages for all players pages. The HTML structure on those has not changed. However, they are not meant as a fully-featured alternative, so navigation might not work and new features we develop in the future will not be added to them. This is meant as a stop-gap for any research tools you might have that rely on the HTML structure.

As always if you find any issues or bugs, please let us know in the comments!

With David Price shipped off to Los Angeles with Mookie Betts and Chris Sale’s spring beset by arm issues, the Red Sox rotation looks incredibly weak. With questionable internal alternatives, the Red Sox have added a potential solution from the free agent market in Collin McHugh, who will earn a base salary of $600,000 with incentives based on innings and active days on the roster that could push his earnings to a bit above $4 million.

Of course, McHugh was still on the market because he wasn’t cleared to throw until recently. He began last season in the rotation, but after four quality starts to begin the year, his performance went downhill in a hurry. Four ugly outings followed those four good ones and after two relief appearances, the latter a two-inning, four-strikeout performance, elbow soreness (but a clean MRI) meant time on the injured list. McHugh missed more than a month, then returned in a bullpen role at the end of June. He pitched well out of the pen, putting up a 3.65 FIP and 2.70 ERA through the end of August. Unfortunately, the elbow soreness returned; McHugh returned to the injured list and was eventually shut down for the season.

McHugh’s best years came as a reliable member of Houston’s rotation from 2014 to ’16. He made 90 starts and pitched at an above-average level, putting up an average of three wins per season. Elbow issues at the beginning of 2017 limited him to 12 starts at the end of the season before he was given a long relief role in the playoffs, where he made two appearances. He pitched the entire 2018 season in the bullpen before his up-and-down 2019 campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A quote from Eric Longenhagen is a good way to lead an article on Nolan Jones. Our resident prospect guru wrote the following about Jones, who ranks No. 54 on our recently-released 2020 Top 100 Prospects list:

“Jones is a giant corner infielder with among the best eyes for the strike zone in the minors and some of the most impressive raw power, as well.”

Those platitudes are largely backed up by the numbers. Cleveland’s second-round pick in the 2016 draft stands an imposing 6-foot-4, 220 pounds, and his OBP as a professional is an impressive .409. Pairing those attributes with his preponderance of power, Jones projects to have — again per Longenhagen — “among the highest three true outcomes percentages in the big leagues.”

Jones has a solid understanding of his strengths, and a pretty good idea of what he needs to improve upon. And he’s already made some meaningful adjustments since being selected 55th overall out of Philadelphia’s Holy Ghost Prep. In an effort to make his bat path more efficient, Jones has tweaked both his stance and where he holds his hands. The kinetic chain being what it is, one feeds into the other. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s pretty easy to see the Brewers locking up Christian Yelich through the 2028 season as a win-win. (Indeed, we might even be able to add an extra win for Brewers fans.) Christian Yelich gets a high salary for a long period of time and the Brewers retain one of the best players in baseball for nearly a decade. Jay Jaffe went through the contract yesterday, noting the very good ZiPS projections for Yelich as well as the lack of spending on players in their 30s in free agency over the last few seasons. The three seasons Yelich had remaining on his previous deal meant he wasn’t going to get the $300 million contract he would have if he had been a free agent now, but the Brewers’ $215 million commitment (roughly $175 million beyond his previous deal) represented a good compromise. Just how well the contract plays out depends on how Yelich plays in his 30s. So let’s see how players like Yelich have fared in the past.

To find players like Yelich, I looked at outfielders going back to 1969 with between 20 and 30 WAR between the ages of 24 and 27 years old, with Yelich’s 25.4 in the middle. I took out the players who weren’t within 25 runs of Yelich’s -5.4 defensive runs. Then, I removed players with fewer than six wins in their age-27 season to keep them in range of Yelich’s 7.8 WAR season last year. Here’s how those players compare to Yelich, from 24 to 27:

Read the rest of this entry »

Keston Hiura hit 38 home runs last year. There are qualifications to that statement, sure — 19 of those home runs came in the homer-happy PCL, and the majors weren’t much better when it came to mass dingerization. But still — Keston Hiura, who hit 13 home runs in 535 plate appearances in 2018, hit 38 home runs in 2019. What did he do to become such a great power hitter, and should we expect to see it again in 2020?

The first place you’d generally look, when considering an outlandish result like this, is for something wildly unsustainable. Maybe he turned half of his fly balls into home runs, and we can just point at that and move on. Indeed, Hiura’s HR/FB% was a juicy 24.1% in the majors last season, and an even more preposterous 36.5% in Triple-A.

Let’s throw out the Triple-A numbers for now. The combination of a new stadium in San Antonio and a wildly changed offensive environment makes putting those home runs into context difficult, so we’ll simply focus on the major league numbers. Non-pitchers hit home runs on 15.4% of their fly balls in 2019. Lower Hiura’s 24.1% to average, and he would have lost out on seven home runs. Easy peasy, let’s get lunch… right?

Well, yeah, not so much. I prefer to look at a different denominator: balls hit with between 15 and 45 degrees of launch angle rather than “fly balls.” That adds some line drives, which are potential home runs, and removes balls hit at too high of an angle to get out. Hiura had 83 of those in 2019, and turned 22.9% of them into homers. The league turned roughly 15% of theirs into dingers. Still the same seven home runs.

But batters aren’t all average. They have control over their home run rates, far more so than pitchers. Regress Hiura’s results in 2019 back towards the mean, and they suggest a true talent home run rate around 20.5%. That would still give him 17 home runs in the majors, not too much worse than his actual production. Read the rest of this entry »

With Ben Lindbergh on vacation, Meg Rowley and Sam Miller answer a few very special listener emails on Shohei Ohtani, what they want to know about the 2020 season (complete with a twist), and how we treat umpires. Plus, a Statblast!

Audio intro: The Police, “Message In A Bottle”
Audio outro: Letters to Cleo, “Cruel to be Kind”

Link to Meg’s piece “Time Has Come Today”
Link to order The MVP Machine

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While the Brewers showed a disappointing inclination to cut costs this winter in a division that’s ripe for dominating, they didn’t disappoint when it came to their franchise player, Christian Yelich. Some of the team’s secondary talent, names like Eric Thames, Gio González, and Travis Shaw, were left to find richer pastures, but the Brewers made sure to lock up the services of the player who was truly indispensable. Yelich didn’t get Bryce Harper or Gerrit Cole money, but that was never in the cards with free agency years away, him hitting the market in his 30s, and coming off a significant injury. My colleague Jay Jaffe has smithed up many additional words on Yelich which you should go read now.

When seeing the Brewers close a long-term pact with their superstar, it’s not hard to contrast it with the behavior of the Cleveland Indians. A team with a larger market but worse attendance, the Indians were very close to the Brewers in revenue in the most recent Forbes estimates, with $282 million in revenue compared to $288 million for the Brew Crew. There’s some give and take in these numbers with baseball’s books not being open for all to peruse, but the figures probably aren’t that far off the mark. After all, compared to companies in other industries with similar revenues, baseball teams are relatively simple corporations. The big-ticket revenues and costs are in fact quite well-known, so there’s only so far these numbers can miss.

My fellow FanGraphier Craig Edwards convincingly argued last week that the question of the Indians being able to afford to extend Francisco Lindor a new contract is more a question of willingness than ability. Read the rest of this entry »