On Saturday, I joined upwards of 20 scouts gathered behind the plate at Ramapo College in Mahwah, New Jersey to watch RHP Norge Carlos Vera throw live against 12 batters. The 19-year-old Cuban was originally on the list of players who would have been eligible to sign with a major league club on July 2 before the Trump administration reversed the Obama-era United States-Cuba détente.

Vera’s father, Norge Luis Vera, is a former Cuban National Series star who pitched for Santiago de Cuba. He was a member of three Cuban Olympic teams, winning two silver medals (2000 in Sydney and 2008 in Beijing) and a gold medal (2004 in Athens) and holds the all-time Cuban National Series record for postseason wins, with 32. He also got the win in an exhibition game against the Orioles on May 3, 1999 at Camden Yards, going seven innings in a contest that also featured José Contreras pitching for Cuba.

The younger Vera debuted in the Cuban National Series – Cuba’s highest level of professional baseball – as a freshly-turned 18-year-old in August 2018, throwing seven scoreless innings against Granma, a team that had a cumulative wOBA of .372 heading into the outing. He was the second youngest member of the 2019 Cuban National Team that came to the northeast part of the United States to play against independent Can-Am League teams this summer. He defected while in New Jersey in late June or early July, shortly after striking out seven New Jersey Jackals hitters in four innings.

Kiley spoke with an international scout that was one of a relatively few at that start and Vera was 91-94, hitting 96 or 97 mph depending on the gun, mixing four average or better pitches for a starter look. He has since been training in northern New Jersey with former minor league pitcher Doug Cinnella. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Playoffs begin Tuesday evening as the Milwaukee Brewers (89-73) head to the nation’s capital to face the Washington Nationals (93-69). After a season during which most of the National League was in the playoff picture until very late in the season, both teams finished their respective campaigns in surprisingly convincing fashion, managing to clinch postseason appearances with time to spare. Both squads also fell short in their improbable runs for a division title late in the season, but making the Wild Card is still good enough to earn a bit of bubbly.

For the Washington Nationals, the end of the Bryce Harper era didn’t spell the end of their contending years. As it turns out, there is a foolproof way to replace a Bryce Harper: make a new one. Juan Soto only needed 121 minor league games to prepare for instant stardom in the majors had a fantastic 2018 run, hitting .292/.406/.517 with 22 homers and 3.7 WAR in 116 games for Washington. But Harper was still the Big Name on the team, and it wasn’t until his lucrative departure to Philadelphia that Soto could define Washington’s outfield.

Anything can happen in one game — the Detroit Tigers beat better teams on 47 occasions this season — but if I’m one of the other NL playoff teams, the Nationals aren’t the team I’d be pulling for to win. When considering the playoff construction of the teams — with less of an emphasis on depth and more on the top of the rotation — ZiPS projects the Nationals as the second-best squad in the National League. Second-in-the-National-League means they even edge out the Atlanta Braves by the slenderest of threads.

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Joe Maddon has managed for 14 MLB seasons, and in nine of them his team has won 90 or more games. He captured a pennant in Tampa Bay, and most notably a World Series title with the Cubs. Four of his five years in Chicago have included October baseball.

Not this year: not after a September swoon that saw the Cubs lose nine straight down the stretch. Despite having a plus-106 run differential — by comparison, the playoff-bound Brewers and Cardinals are plus-one, and plus-93, respectively — Maddon’s club is heading home after today’s game.

The bespectacled and thoughtfully-loquacious denizen of Hazelton, PA was to meet with Theo Epstein last night, and not simply for a cold frosty. Speculation has been swirling about Maddon’s future — this is the final year of his contract — and in all likelihood there was some solemnity to the Saturday evening sit-down. It will come as a surprise if we don’t soon learn that the Joe Maddon era is over in Chicago.

Earlier this week Maddon was asked about having used the word “optimistic” when addressing his tenuous-at-best situation. His response suggested something other than an expected return engagement at the Friendly Confines. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the fourth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

The final weekend of the 2019 season is upon us, and while five of the divisions and all of the super-complicated tiebreaker scenarios are off the table, with three games to play, each league has multiple scenarios that could result in at least one tiebreaker game. Seven hundred or so words is worth a picture, so first, behold this:

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Félix Hernández didn’t always throw his signature changeup. When he was a teenager coming up through the Mariners organization, his best pitches were his electric fastball and a nasty curveball. That breaking ball has stuck with him in some form or fashion throughout his career, but his changeup was an afterthought until around 2009, the year before he won the Cy Young award. Since then, his cambio has become almost synonymous with his approach as a pitcher.

The changeup has existed in the game as long as pitchers have been trying to disrupt the timing of the opposing batter. But Félix’s changeup was unlike any that had come before. “There is no one in baseball that throws a Félix Hernández changeup — no one,” Brandon Moss told Sports Illustrated back in 2014. What made it so unique was it’s combination of high velocity and elite vertical movement. He threw it around 90 mph when almost no one else in baseball was throwing a changeup that hard. Conventional wisdom assumed that the velocity differential was the most important aspect of a good changeup. Afterall, what better way to disrupt the timing of a batter than to throw two pitches with a significant gap in speed even though they look the same out of the hand.

Based on Harry Pavlidis’s research into effective changeups, we know that a large velocity differential is beneficial for inducing swings and misses. But he also found that changeups with good separation from the fastball by movement can also be effective. Félix’s cambio had the high velocity of a fastball — and the resulting small differential — but it dropped off the table like a splitter. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals haven’t simply been building a franchise since 2005, they’ve been building traditions. Traditions like the running of the presidents, or whatever #Natitude was. These days, the fans cheer “N-A-T-S, NATS, NATS, NATS!” when something good happens, which is, yes, entirely co-opted from the NFL’s New York Jets.

But the most enduring tradition of the Nationals’ brief history is what has happened after each time they’ve reached the playoffs: They lose, sometimes horribly, and always crushingly.

This year, having clinched a spot in the NL Wild Card game, the Nationals are preparing to do it again.

But this time, oh ho boy, it’ll be different.

Maybe.

Before we get to why, here’s how it’s gone down the last four times:

2012
98-64 (Best in MLB), 23.7 WAR (6th in NL), 101 wRC+ (T-3rd in NL), 194 HR (2nd in NL), 105 SB (T-5th in NL)

Top pitcher: Jordan Zimmerman (5.5 WAR)
Top position player: Bryce Harper (5.2 WAR)

When the team with the best record in baseball is up 6-0 in a deciding NLDS game 5, you’re probably okay to keep the plastic up in the clubhouse. “Not so fast,” said noted slugger Pete Kozma. Read the rest of this entry »

Wearing his emotions on his sleeve start to finish — from the moment that he walked through the bullpen door to chants of “Let’s go, Félix!” to his own tearful salute to the fans upon being pulled with one out in the sixth inning — on Thursday night at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Félix Hernández made the 418th and likely final start of his 15-year run with the Mariners. He tipped his cap to the King’s Court upon entering, fell behind early while struggling with his command and control, strutted a bit after a strikeout, exulted in Dylan Moore’s spectacular, run-saving catch to end the fifth inning, competed like hell with a tenacity that far outstripped his stuff, and then bowed to the frenzied crowd of 20,921 before exiting the field. Some 2,800 miles way in Brooklyn, watching the outing on my office TV as I pecked out an article full of objective measures regarding his place in history, I struggled to keep it together. I can only imagine how Mariners fans felt.

It’s an understatement to say that the parting of Hernández — whose seven-year, $175 million contract has run its course — and the rebuilding Mariners is a bittersweet moment for the pitcher, the team, and their long-suffering fans, or fans of great baseball players in general. There’s certainly plenty of reason to ponder the peaks of his run and recall the good times, the hopes he represented as a teenaged arrival on a team whose championship aspirations had been so often thwarted. His dazzling combination of an electrifying, darting sinker, a knee-buckling curve, and a signature hard changeup propelled him to a Cy Young award, two ERA titles, six All-Star appearances, a perfect game, and 2,524 strikeouts. He arrived as “King Félix,” and grew into the moniker. From 2009-14, he was the best pitcher in the American League by ERA, FIP, strikeouts, and WAR.

For as cool as all of that was, the reality is that this sendoff is as much about Hernández’s decline as his stardom, and the ache and sorrow over close calls and missed opportunities that have deprived him of a chance to test his mettle in the postseason. He’s no Ernie Banks, hanging around into his 40s in a reduced role at a new position. This parting is all happening more than six months before the pitcher’s 34th birthday, an age when he should still be a productive major leaguer if not necessarily one at the pinnacle of his career. Perhaps he still can be, but his recent performance doesn’t suggest it, not with a season ERA that has almost literally tripled since 2014, when he netted his second ERA title and finished as the runner-up in the AL Cy Young voting for a second time. For the first 12 years of his career, he was clearly on a Cooperstown-bound path, but there’s little to indicate he can continue traveling that road.

The rare 21st century pitcher to debut before his 20th birthday — Dylan Bundy, Elvis Luciano, and Julio Urías are the others — Hernández got an early start towards stardom. While pitchers who debut at that tender age have a leg up when it comes to reaching the Hall of Fame just as their position-playing counterparts do, the effect is not as great. I noted in connection with Ronald Acuña Jr.’s debut last year that 25 of the 244 players who had at least one plate appearance in their age-19 seasons (10.2%) wound up in Cooperstown, about 8.7 times the overall rate (1.18%). For pitchers active in their age-19 seasons, the total is 17 (not counting Babe Ruth, who converted to position playing) out of 296 (5.7%), about 4.9 times the overall rate. It’s a reasonable assumption that the difference between the two rates owes a fair bit to some combination of injury rates and workloads as they relate to young pitchers, but that’s a question for another day. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday evening in Flushing, Jacob deGrom put a bow on another superlative season. For seven innings, he flummoxed the Marlins, striking out seven while only allowing two hits. It wasn’t surprising, exactly — deGrom is one of the best few pitchers in baseball and the Marlins are, well, the Marlins. For once, the Mets provided deGrom with copious run support — the three they scored in the first would have been enough, but they added six more runs over the next two innings.

With 32 starts in the books, deGrom looks to have handily lapped the field in the Cy Young race. If FIP-based WAR is your preferred metric, he ranks second in the majors, behind only Gerrit Cole and half a win clear of Max Scherzer. By RA9-WAR, he’s also second in the majors, this time behind Justin Verlander, and miles ahead of NL runner up Jack Flaherty.

Craig Edwards published a Cy Young tracker last week if you’d prefer to dig even deeper into the minutiae, but deGrom was already in the lead, and his two most recent starts (14 innings, 16 strikeouts, one walk, and no runs) only widened the gap. There probably won’t be much surprise come awards season.

But while there isn’t much suspense when it comes to ranking deGrom’s preeminence in the National League this year, his two-year run has vaulted him into select historical territory. His ERA-, which controls for scoring environment, works out to 51 over the last two years, which means he allows about half as many runs as a league average pitcher.

That 51 ERA-, ludicrous as it is, can’t compete with the best seasons of all time — Pedro Martinez’s preposterous 2000 worked out to a 35 ERA- (1.74 ERA in Fenway in the heart of the steroids era, goodness gracious), and there have been 42 qualifying seasons with an ERA- of 50 or lower since 1901. Even if we limit ourselves to 1949 and beyond, there have been 24 of those seasons. There are plenty of Hall of Famers on the list, but also Kevin Brown, Dean Chance, and Trevor Bauer. Read the rest of this entry »