Archive for Indians

Eighteen months ago, Yan Gomes was considered the “other guy” in the deal where Cleveland strengthened its infield depth and added Mike Aviles. Cleveland made the move for Aviles after going through myriad replacements at shortstop in 2012, when Asdrubal Cabrera was injured or needed a day off. The move was also made to beef up the team’s right-handed-batting depth because the team had an American League-worst .234 team batting average and .296 wOBA against left-handed pitching. Aviles came to Cleveland with a career .276 batting average and .317 wOBA against lefties in 421 plate appearances, while Gomes had very limited exposure at the major league level.

Ben Zobrist is the exception to the thought that if you can play multiple positions, you can’t play any position. If a player is good enough at any one position, organizations will leave that player there as long as possible until skill or better talent behind that player dictate a move. The latter scenario victimized Gomes as Travis d’Arnaud was coming through the organization at a similar pace. The team exclusively used Gomes at catcher in 2009 and 2010, but then gave him 20 games at first base in Double-A New Hampshire. In 2011, Gomes got  47 games behind the plate in 83 games and d’Arnaud did a majority of the catching. In 2012, Gomes caught 39 games while spending 42 games at other positions on the field as d’Arnaud once again did most of the catching. Gomes was never ranked in the top 30 prospects by Baseball American while he was in Toronto’s organization; he was 27th in Cleveland’s rankings after his trade.

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When the Indians selected Francisco Lindor 8th overall in the 2011 draft, he possessed a high floor and upside. Drafted out of Montverde, Florida, he was an accomplished shortstop but questions about how long it would take his bat to develop surrounded the young Puerto Rican. In his full season, Lindor has put rest to any doubt whether he will be one of the game’s brightest stars. Coming into 2013 he was ranked 20th by Marc Hulet, 9th by my colleagues at Bullpen Banter, and 8th by myself and early returns suggest he has staked his claim on next year’s top spot.

Lindor projects to be an elite defender, if he isn’t already. While not he’s a burner – his time from home to first is consistently a shade below four seconds, great but not excellent for the position – his defensive range can be attributed to the quickness of his first step, not his speed. His ability to covers yards of dirt in a single step is bolstered by his confidence using his backhand on balls hit towards third base. At 19 years old, his instincts actions at shortstop are remarkable making Mike Newman’s nickname for him – “Bruce Lee Lindor” – oddly fitting.

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Ubaldo Jimenez was once a terrific young starting pitcher for the Colorado Rockies. He had tremendous raw talent and pitching acumen to boot. If harnessed, he figured to miss bats, keep the ball on the ground and limit walks while remaining on the effectively wild side. He could dial it up to 96 mph — average fastball velocity of 95.8 mph in 2007 — and threw a top-notch, looping curveball that was tough to pick up with his herky-jerky windup. He was, potentially, the prototypical pitcher capable of succeeding at Coors Field.

After posting WAR totals of 4.3, 5.9 and 6.4 from 2008-10, he took a step back last season. His strikeout, walk and groundball numbers were very similar to the prior three years, but he served up more home runs and was less effective at stranding runners. Last season was a case of strong ERA estimators that belied better performance than his actual earned run average. As such, he seemed like a prime regression candidate this season. Through 28 starts and 161.1 innings this year, however, Jimenez has just 0.4 WAR. After averaging 5.5 WAR from 2008-10, Jimenez isn’t currently on pace to finish with even one win above replacement over a full season.

While last season’s relative struggles — he had been so effective that 3.5 WAR represented a down year — at least gave hope to improved performance, everything has gone wrong this season. Jimenez has regressed, but not in the direction his 2011 peripherals portended. Instead, he is set to finish this season with the worst numbers of his career across the board. He quickly went from one of the best to one of the worst, and it doesn’t seem that the major causes are easily fixable.

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The Indians acquired Lars Anderson from the Red Sox on Tuesday, sending knuckleballing prospect Steven Wright — not to be confused with this guy — to Boston. Anderson was once considered one of the top prospects in the game, but struggled in major league cups of coffee (or shots of espresso given how short his major league stints were in 2011-12) and was never viewed as a viable long-term solution at first base or designated hitter.

From 2008-10, however, he was the talk of the rumor mill. His name popped up in practically every Red Sox trade rumor. Last offseason, the Athletics were interested in him as part of the Andrew Bailey package. In July 2011, the Athletics were close to acquiring him in exchange for Rich Harden.

In 2009, Anderson was frequently discussed as part of a potential prospect package for Roy Halladay. The year before that he was mentioned as a key part of a rumor surrounding then-Padres starter Jake Peavy.

As recently as two years ago, Anderson was viewed as a key part of potential returns on all-stars and award winners. Since then, his stock has fallen to the point that he only netted the Red Sox a risky Double-A knuckleballer.

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Well, here we are, my top highlight of the 2008 season. In third place was Chipper Jones and his quest for a .400 batting average that kept us all entertained well into June, and second place involved everyone, including the notoriously tough Phillies fans really pulling for Junior Griffey to hit that 600th home run. First place, however, is a no-brainer for me, and goes to CC Sabathia’s absolutely incredible performance this season. And I’m not just talking about his statistics in a Brewers uniform, but while with the Indians as well.

CC started the season rather poorly, as after four games, his numbers were: 18 IP, 32 H, 27 ER, 14 BB, 14 K, an OPS of 1.170, and a 13.50 ERA. Over his next 14 starts, all with the Indians, Sabathia allowed just 25 earned runs, two less than his total in the initial four. He walked just 20 while striking out 109 and allowing only 85 hits in 104.1 innings. This resulted in a .591 OPS against and a 2.16 ERA. It is irresponsible and incorrect to ignore his atrocious first four starts, but he managed to put together a tremendous 14-start stretch before even landing a plane ticket to Milwaukee.

Following the trade with the Brewers, Sabathia had a somewhat wild first start in the senior circuit but followed it up with three straight complete games, one of which was a shutout. In these three starts, he amassed 27 innings, allowed just 15 hits and three earned runs, walked just three hitters and struck out 26 of them. All told, in 17 starts with the Brewers, he threw seven complete games, produced a K/BB ratio above 5.0 (128/25), and a 1.65 ERA.

Put together, he made 35 starts, threw 253 innings, walked 59, fanned 251, and surrendered 2.70 earned runs per nine innings. In case you are curious just how good he was following those four atrocious starts to begin the year–or just how bad those four starts were–here are his stats from starts #5-35: 235 IP, 191 H, 45 BB, 237 K, .570 OPS, 1.88 ERA, 5.27 K/BB, 2.45 FIP. Again, it is incorrect to ignore those starts, but this what Sabathia did from the end of April until the end of the season. He virtually willed the Brewers into the playoffs, and made four straight starts to close out the season on three days rest. His numbers in that span? 28.2 IP, 24 H, 6 ER, 4 BB, 26 K, 1.88 ERA.

With the Brewers, he surrendered 4 ER just once, never venturing higher than that number. Three earned runs were allowed twice; Two earned runs on four occasions; 1 earned run six times; and no earned runs in four different starts. That is domination. His lowest game score was 43 and he produced a game score of 70+ in seven of 17 starts for the Brewers. I have never followed a pitcher, or watched each of his starts, for a team other than my own, except for Greg Maddux prior to this season. From the time Sabathia joined the Brewers, though, I found myself tuning into each and every one of his starts, growing more and more impressed with each passing pitch. His tremendous season, especially with Milwaukee, is my top highlight of the 2008 season.

Bottom of the second. No score. Indians vs. White Sox. John Danks on the mound, Jhonny Peralta on first. Victor Martinez at the dish. Danks checks the runner, delivers the first pitch to Martinez. CRACK! Victor launches the ball deep to the leftield line… it… is… outta’ here! Indians fans cheered as the Tribe took a 2-0 lead in a game they would go onto win 9-3. Believe it or not, this was the first home run of the season for Victor.

Yes, Victor no longer belongs to the 200+ PA/0 HR club. Its other members: Joey Gathright, Chone Figgins, Omar Vizquel, Brendan Ryan, Miguel Cairo, Augie Ojeda, and Juan Pierre will have to say goodbye to their colleague.

Sure, Victor’s season has been hindered by injuries but, still, 57 games and neary a dinger until last night? From Victor Martinez? The guy might not be Barry Bonds out there, but over the last four years he was an extremely solid bet to OPS around .860, with 20+ home runs and 35+ doubles. Including last night, Victor is hitting just .274/.328/.344, with 1 home run and 12 doubles.

According to his gamelogs, this is by far the most games he has ever gone without a home run. From April 16, 2005-May 27, 2005, he went homerless in a string of 32 games. This almost doubled that amount. As Dave mentioned last week, his replacement Kelly Shoppach is leading all AL catchers in home runs, so the Indians are still getting production from that department, just not where they expected. The Tribe won’t make the playoffs this year but a hearty congratulations goes out to V-Mart on his first home run of the year. I hope he got to keep the ball.

Is it just me or has there been a recent dearth of articles focused on Cliff Lee lately? It seems like all the major sources used up their Cliff Quota earlier in the year when he looked more like a fluke than now when he seems to be much more for real. Regardless, it’s time to check back in with our AL Cy Young Award-favorite and see how his season looks and what it might look like when September ends… and wake me up when that happens… ten points to whomever catches that reference.

In 23 starts, Lee has gone 161.2 innings, giving up 152 hits—just 7 of which are home runs—and 22 walks while fanning 128 batters. His HR/9 of 0.39 leads all of baseball, as do his 1.22 BB/9 and 5.82 K/BB. He has a 2.45 ERA which happens to be lower than any other starter and his FIP, which could show whether or not he has been lucky or unlucky, comes in a mere three-hundredths of a point higher at 2.48… which also happens to be the best in the bigs.

Another indicator of luck is BABIP, where we would expect someone not “for real” to have a very, very low mark; Lee’s is right around the average .300 at .307. His strand rate is 78.1% which, while very impressive, is not ridiculously unsustainable, especially for someone pitching on as elite of a level as Lee. All of these numbers have translated into a league best 4.97 WPA, a league best 3.90 WPA/LI, and a league best 4.07 REW.*

*There have been a lot of questions regarding REW. To clarify, it is Wins based on shifts in Run Expectancy, not Win Expectancy. It is essentially BRAA (Batting Runs Above Average) quantified in terms of Wins.

Seems like I’ve been writing the words ‘league’ and ‘best’ an awful lot so far. I’d stop, but the Indians lefty happens to lead baseball in many important categories. A really interesting note is his shift in GB/FB ratio. Prior to this year his ratio had never topped 0.84, whereas right now he has a 1.29, meaning he has been inducing many more groundballs. Not only does it seem that Lee’s numbers are the results of skills rather than luck, he seems to have become a different type of pitcher.

His in-season projection calls for 61 IP, 58 H, 6 HR, 15 BB, and 42 K over his remaining nine starts which would result in the following seasonal line: 32 GS, 222 IP, 210 H, 13 HR, 37 BB, 170 K, 1.11 WHIP, 2.78 ERA, 2.79 FIP.

Tom Tango discussed a really interesting way of turning the +WPA and -WPA found here into a W-L metric, so what happens when we plug Lee into that equation? His 16-2 becomes a 13-3, so his W-L has done a pretty good job of letting the public know how good he has been. With that in mind, has this guy already wrapped up a Cy Campaign? Is there any way he doesn’t win the award? I mean, his remaining nine starts are calling for a bit of a regression and even if he regresses more than that his numbers should still end up better than any other AL starter. If not, who would step in and take it away?

Part of my daily routine involves checking the league leaders page here and sorting by various stats. In doing so this morning I found that there are currently four players, with enough PA to qualify for the leaderboard, who are yet to hit a home run.

Juan Pierre, Julio Lugo, and Jason Bartlett are not necessarily surprising members of the club but, as the title of this post suggests, the fourth member is Victor Martinez. While not a power threat of the Albert Pujols or Ryan Howard ilk, he has hit 16-25 home runs each of the last four years with a steadily increasing OPS of .851-.879 in that span.

Through 54 games this year he has 0 home runs, a .333 SLG, and a .665 OPS. Granted he is injured right now but Indians fans might want to hope the lower numbers are a result of poor health rather than a shift in performance. It’s still too early and his updated projection may not have changed too drastically however something is definitely up.

His flyball percentage of 38.2% last year currently sits at 29.2%. He also has a BABIP of .314 so it is not as if he has been extremely unlucky. His walk and strikeout rates have curiously decreased as well. Plate discipline stats look very similar across the board with the exception of pitches swung at outside the zone. He’s swinging at 29.83% of those OOZ pitches—up from 23.76% last year—yet making essentially the same 76% of contact.

Victor’s first home run in 2007 came in his fifth game; he homered in his second game in 2006; in both his eighth and ninth games in 2005; and his second game in 2004. The 54 homerless games this year is a little over four times the aggregate total preceding his initial dinger in the last four years. With his injury, V-Mart may miss 6-8 weeks, meaning it could be the middle of August before he hits his first home run… if that.

Everyone knew this would be an important season for Cy Young Award incumbent C.C. Sabathia. Pitching in the final of his contract, with the type of money Johan Santana proved pitchers could receive, all Sabathia really needed to do was pitch like some semblance of what we have come to expect from the huge Indians lefty. After his first four starts panic began to surface across some of the blogosphere due to the following numbers:

4 GS, 0-3, 18 IP, 32 H, 27 ER, 14 BB, 14 K
13.50 ERA, 2.56 WHIP, 1.00 K/BB

Those are not numbers indicative of a potential 150 million dollar man. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending how you look at it, Sabathia has been terribly unlucky for most of the season, not just due to his FIP coming in so much lower than his ERA or a very high BABIP, but because his overall numbers are tainted for the most part by just 2 of his 14 starts.

4/11: 3.1 IP, 12 H, 9 ER, 2 BB, 4 K
4/16: 4.0 IP, 8 H, 9 ER, 5 BB, 1 K

Take away those two starts and here Sabathia’s numbers:

14 GS: 91.1 IP, 95 H, 28 BB, 87 K, 4.34 ERA, 1.35 WHIP
12 GS: 84.0 IP, 75 H, 21 BB, 82 K, 2.79 ERA, 1.14 WHIP

Believe me yet when I say those two starts, just 14% of his season, severely affected the rest? Remove them and Sabathia starts to look like teammate Cliff Lee or even current saber-darling Edinson Volquez. While I am normally not a fan of removing information to make someone look better it is hard to look past those two starts, which seem way, way behind him, hindering his overall numbers from reflecting his true performance level.

In fact, lately, Carston Charles has been even better, as from 5/9 to 6/10 he has a 1.77 WPA, thanks in large part to these numbers:

5/9-6/10: 7 GS, 53 IP, 45 H, 10 BB, 50 K, 2.04 ERA, 1.04 WHIP

Fangraphs recently added a feature on the leaderboards allowing us to look at performance over the last 7, 14, and 30 days; in the last 30, just Scott Kazmir has been a more productive starting pitcher than Sabathia. His overall numbers may look worse than in recent years but do not let them fool you: Over the last month, and essentially ever since April 16, Sabathia has largely (very largely in his case) been himself.

Indians lefty Cliff Lee recently put the finishing touches on an absolutely incredible April. Ironically, the 6 IP, 3 ER, 3K performance on Wednesday night—one many pitchers would love to have—was far and away his worst of the month. He will likely garner AL Pitcher of the Month honors, in unanimous fashion, and rightly so: Anyone who posts a legitimate W-L of 5-0, a 0.96 ERA, 16.0 K/BB, and has surrendered just one home run in 37.2 innings truly deserves any and all recognition.

Oh, and Lee also pitched 28 consecutive scoreless innings.

It began in the fifth inning of his April 13th start and lasted all the way until the seventh inning of Wednesday’s start. Despite this, he did not even get halfway towards Orel Hershiser’s oft-underrated and mind-boggling 59 consecutive scoreless innings record. Seeing as Lee’s effort has come to an end I decided to break everything down and analyze what happened in these innings. Hmm… a summary of Cliff’s streak… wait for it… Cliffsnotes:

Overall Streak Line: 28 IP, 10 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 24 K

Of those 28 innings, 18 were perfect (no baserunners) and 4 more saw Lee face the minimum; in each, singles were erased by double plays.

He allowed 11 runners to reach base and only two found themselves at third base. In the fifth inning on April 24th, Jose Guillen doubled and advanced to third on a wild pitch. With two outs, Lee struck Miguel Olivo out to end the threat. In the fifth inning Wednesday night, Wladimir Balantien reached third before Ichiro Suzuki flied out.

The situation with the highest Leverage Index (1.95) occurred when John Buck led off the ninth inning on April 24th; Buck flied out.

He found himself in eight situations with a Leverage Index of 1.60+ and produced the following results: 4 flyouts, 2 groundouts (1 GIDP), and 2 strikeouts.

His WPA over the course of these four games (31 IP) accounted for 1.72 wins; his WPA during this streak (28 IP) accounted for 1.67 wins.

Using TangoTiger’s Marcel projections I classified those with expected slugging percentages of .445+ as power hitters and under that mark as contact. Against Lee, power hitters went: 5-25, 2B, 4 GIDP, 5 K. Contact hitters went: 5-69, BB, 19 K.

The blog Defensive-Indifference does not think Lee will be able to sustain his current pace and I happen to agree. One of the reasons he is unlikely to continue dominating is that his current BABIP of .195 exceeds expectations based on a line drive frequency of 13.7%; with that frequency it should be closer to .257. Additionally, despite posting a 0.96 ERA, his FIP implies it is closer to the 2.01 mark; still great, but not superhuman. Regardless of what happens from May until September, though, Lee had an absolutely phenomenal opening month.