From Clayton Kershaw to Chad Billingsley to Rubby de la Rosa (a recent victim of Tommy John surgery), the Los Angeles Dodgers have displayed a knack for developing top-flight pitching talent. The newest hurler to emerge is Nate Eovaldi, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg in what should be LA’s strong wave of young, cost-controllable talent. Other names to tuck away for future reference include Allen Webster, Zach Lee, Garrett Gould — and recent first-round pick, Chris Reed.
Eovaldi is probably the least-heralded prospect of the group. A former 11th-round selection in 2008 out of high school in Texas, he would have gone much higher if he hadn’t been slowed by Tommy John surgery in his junior year. He received an over-slot deal and has not had any major issues with his elbow in pro ball. Breaking out in 2011 at double-A, Eovaldi did a nice job of keeping runners off base (6.64 H/9) and struck out his fair share of batters (8.65 K/9). On the downside, the 21-year-old is a fly-ball pitcher and has struggled with his control (4.02 BB/9). Eovaldi is probably in the majors a little early, but his mid-90s fastball has a lot of promise; he just needs to learn to better-control his secondary pitches and learn the value of changing speeds.
by Carson Cistulli - August 22, 2011
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Tampa Bay’s Desmond Jennings will use his sunbeam superpower to unsettle Justin Verlander.
Featured Game Detroit (2) at Tampa Bay (7) | 19:10 ET
• Justin Verlander, first among AL pitchers in SIERA (2.75) and WAR (6.2), pitches tonight for a Detroit team that improved its playoff odds either to 69.1% or 79.2% last night, depending on which methodology you prefer.
• Owing to how the center-field camera at Tropicana Field is one of the league’s better ones, tonight represents an opportunity to get all familiar-like with Verlander’s stuff.
• Apropos said stuff, here’s what Verlander throws according to Pitch F/x: fastball (45.6%), curveball (18.8%), changeup (18.2%), slider (8.6%), two-seamer (8.8%).
• Per pitch-type runs (which buckets four- and two-seam fastballs together), literally all those pitches are worth more than a run per 100 thrown.
• Literally literally. Not fake literally.
Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 5.3.
by Lucas Apostoleris - August 22, 2011
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After a hiatus of over four years, Jerome Williams is back in the majors. After coming up with the Giants as a 21-year-old in 2003, he’s bounced around to the Cubs, Nationals, Twins, Dodgers, and Athletics organizations, putting up unspectacular numbers. He also had a 2010 stint in Taiwan. The Angels brought him back to the U.S. before this season, and he had some success at Triple-A Salt Lake, posting a 4:1 K/BB ratio in 73 2/3 innings. He got the call to the major leagues last week, making a three-batter relief appearance on August 17th before being slotted into the rotation for a Sunday start against the Orioles. He impressed, allowing one run in seven innings while striking out six and walking nobody. Since his last appearance in the major leagues, he’s made some adjustments to his pitching style: first, he’s throwing harder. As Williams noted in a interesting post game interview with The Orange County Register’s Sam Miller, he used to conserve his fastball velocity but now prefers to go right after hitters. Consider the velocities for his different pitch types:
It’s important to note that we have extremely little PITCHf/x data on Williams from before his 2011 return – in fact, there’s just one 2007 start (that was the first year with any regular season f/x data) at which we can look pitch by pitch, so, basically, we’re just comparing one 2007 start to one 2011 start. Not my favorite thing to do, but it’s necessary when the samples are so small.
Essentially, he’s throwing his fastballs ~2 mph faster, his change and curve ~1 mph faster, and his slider more than 3 mph faster. According to his interview with Miller, he started tightening up his slider in 2009 and he nows thinks of it as a cutter. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the next few days, you’re going to read an awful lot about how Jered Weaver left money on the table to re-sign with the Angels and pitch close to home. That is almost certainly true, since he probably could have commanded a significantly larger deal had he stayed healthy through 2013 and hit the free agent market, where prices for pitchers of his quality are significantly higher than the $17 million per year he just agreed to. But in addition to his desire to stay close to home, Weaver also knew that re-signing with the Angels was in his best long-term interests, because he’s pitching in one of the best environments possible for his skillset.
More than anything else, the defining characteristic about Jered Weaver is that he’s a fly ball guy. In fact, he’s one of the most extreme fly ball pitchers in all of baseball. Since the start of the 2009 season, the only starter who has generated fewer ground balls than Weaver is Ted Lilly – Weaver is 73rd out of 74 qualified pitchers in ground ball rate.
Moving the Needle: Pablo Sandoval‘s two-run homer puts the Giants ahead in the 11th, +.492 WPA. The Giants tied the game at four in the fourth, and then waited seven more innings to score another run. Both teams threatened in the ninth, loading the bases, but neither came through. In the 11th the Giants got a one-out walk, and then two batters later Sandoval blasted them to victory. Ramon Ramirez, filling in for the injured Brian Wilson, pitched a perfect bottom half.
Notables
J.D. Martinez: 3 for 5, 1 2B. He drove in two runs. J.D. Martin, on the other hand, is … I have no idea.
Rich Harden is effective when healthy, but that caveat is more relevant for him than it is for most others. Over nine major-league seasons, he has never thrown 200 innings in a single year. Since logging 189.2 frames in 2004, he hasn’t even thrown for more than 148 innings in a season — and he’s working on his second consecutive year with fewer than 100 innings to his stats line. He can’t seem to stay healthy long enough to have an impact commensurate with his talent.
Regardless, Harden’s possibilities are tough to ignore. He misses bats at an elite rate for a starter and induces feeble contact when batters connect. He has a career .274 batting average on balls in play, significantly lower than the league average. He also ranks third among starters with at least 200 total innings since 2008 with a 10.1 K/9: only Brandon Morrow and Tim Lincecum have a higher rate. Over the same span, batters have whiffed at 13 percent of Harden’s offerings, by far the highest rate for a starting pitcher. Cole Hamels ranks second at 11.7 percent. He’s a starter with elite reliever numbers.
It’s easy to see why teams are always interested in him despite the checkered injury history, and why that interest persists even with a small sample of starts this year.
Jered Weaver is one step closer to becoming an Angel For Life. Sunday night, the Los Angels Angels of Anaheim agreed to a five-year, $85 million dollar contract with their 28-year-old ace.
Weaver’s status as one of baseball’s premiere pitchers is certain. Weaver has only once failed to post an ERA below 4.00 (2008) and is now in his second straight season with both ERA- and FIP- marks below 75. He ranks third among qualified starters in ERA- over the past two seasons and fourth in FIP-, among such names as Justin Verlander, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Felix Hernandez, to name a few.
Two of Weaver’s contemporaries near the top of the list supply near-perfect context with which to evaluate his new extension. Justin Verlander signed a five-year, $80 million contract extension with the Tigers before the 2010 season, and the Mariners locked up Felix Hernandez with a five-year, $78 million extension.
by Carson Cistulli - August 21, 2011
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Winston Churchill, were he alive, would be confounded by Luis Valbuena.
Featured Game Cleveland (6) at Detroit (2) | 13:05 ET
• Rookie Jason Kipnis, in case you hadn’t heard, was placed on the 15-DL on Friday.
• With Orlando Cabrera gone, that leaves 25-year-old semi-enigma Luis Valbuena to pick up the majority of second-base starts.
• Luis Valbuena, Triple-A: 883 PA, .302/.388/.470.
• Luis Valbuena, Major Leagues: 791 PA, .223/.283/.340.
• Semi-enigma!
Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 5.6.
The following Game Scores include the new and improved playoff-odds adjustment, which you can learn about in your brain by clicking here.
by Carson Cistulli - August 20, 2011
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Friday night, Angel outfield prospect Mike Trout hit the second home run of his very short career. That Trout has any home runs at all at his age places him into a pretty exclusive club.
Though Trout is technically 20 years old — having celebrated his birthday on August 7th — he’s currently in his age-19 season (the cutoff being July 1st, or roughly halfway through the season).
Over the last 25 years, only 10 major leaguers have hit a home run before their respective age-20 seasons. Below is that list of players, including how many homers each one hit in his age-19 season and also each player’s career WAR per 650 plate appearances:
Obviously, these players didn’t go on to have (almost uniformly) excellent careers because they hit a home run at age 19. Rather, the mere fact that each was given the opportunity to play at that age is indicative of the sort of skills each possessed.
In either case, it’s excellent company that Trout is keeping at the moment.
This stuff is probably less impressive than Arizona débutante Wade Miley’s.
Featured Game Arizona (9) at Atlanta (4) | 19:10 ET
• Left-hander Wade Miley, 24, makes his major-league debut tonight in place of the recently acquired — and even more recently injured — Jason Marquis.
• Which, one weird thing about Miley is how he posted considerably better numbers at Triple-A this season (54.1 IP, 9.28 K/9, 2.65 BB/9, 0.66 HR/9, 2.98 FIP) than he did at Double-A (75.1 IP, 5.50 K/9, 3.35 BB/9, 0.72 HR/9, 4.25 FIP).
• This, despite the fact that both the league and the park in which the Double-A Mobile BayBears play is pitcher-friendlier than the equivalents for Triple-A Reno.
• In his scouting report on Miley from back in February, Prospect Maven Marc Hulet suggests that Miley’s strikeout numbers have generally lagged behind his stuff.
• And by “stuff” I’m assuming Hulet means his pitches.
Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 5.4.
The following Game Scores include the new and improved playoff-odds adjustment, which you can learn about in your brain by clicking here.
by Steve Slowinski - August 19, 2011
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Coming into today, I can’t say I had more than a surface-deep opinion on Jim Hendry. I don’t follow the Cubs as closely as I do other teams, and while I knew that Cubs fans didn’t like him, I’d never done enough research to form an opinion more than, “Eh, he’s not the best.” And now that Hendry has been fired by the Cubs, I’ve done plenty of research and spent the day reading around…yet I still don’t know exactly what to think about him. Hendry is a tough knot to untangle.
I don’t think you’ll find any Cubs fans out there that criticize Hendry’s character. From all reports, he’s a stand-up guy that cared deeply about his players and the Cubs franchise. Heck, he stayed on for multiple weeks after he was fired, for the sole purpose of helping the Cubs sign their draft picks and transition smoothly. If that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.
But the Cubs are currently adrift without any real focus or direction. They are on pace for their second straight fourth place finish in the NL Central, and they haven’t had a strong, competitive team since 2008. And yet, Hendry built this team as if he intended to compete this season, signing Carlos Pena and trading for Matt Garza. Did Hendry misevaluate the Cubs’ place on the win curve? What was his plan going forward? Did he necessarily have one? With all these questions swirling around him and the Cubs, it’s about time Hendry moved on.
So what exactly was Hendry? A good GM? Bad GM? As you’d expect, the answer is somewhere in between.
Due to a back injury to veteran Kevin Youkilis, the Boston Red Sox club has promoted catcher/designated hitter Ryan Lavarnway to the Major Leagues. He made his debut Thursday night against the Kansas City Royals and went 0-for-4 with a strikeout. Lavarnway, 24, is not going to step into the Red Sox lineup and immediate produce at the star level that Youkilis has (4.1 WAR in ’11), but he should be slightly-above replacement level in the short term.
I’ve been eagerly anticipating Lavarnway’s arrival in the Majors. Out of the five pre-season Top 10 prospect lists for Boston [Baseball America, Kevin Goldstein, Keith Law, John Sickels], the scribe from minorleagueball.com and I were the only ones to place him on the Boston lists (Law earns mega points, though, for placing both Will Middlebrooks and Xander Bogaerts on his list).
Jim Hendry has been relieved of his duties as general manager of the Chicago Cubs. We’ll have plenty of time to look back on his place in GM history, but for now, let’s look forward. Cubs chairman Tom Rickettsgave us the checklist today, when he said that he was looking for a candidate who had analytical experience in a winning front office and who would focus on player development. Time to rank the potential replacements using those requirements.
Jim Hendry is reportedly out as the general manager of the Cubs. I’ll leave a general summary of Hendry’s tenure to someone else. In the meantime, I thought that an appropriate tribute to Hendry’s time at the Cubs’ helm might be a retrospective look back at one of his signature moves: the eight-year, $136 million contract with Alfonso Soriano that began in 2007. The idea behind a contract retrospective is simple: it is easy enough to look at a contract and call it good or bad after the fact, but if we reconstruct what was known about the player at the time, did it make sense from that perspective? This one’s for you, Mr. Hendry.
NOTE: If you haven’t seen the poll, then click that FIRST, then come back here to read more.
***
This is a the final part of a three-parter (for today anyway).
One thing that I wanted people to consider is that adding to one guy is like subtracting to another guy.
Say we look at our two players:
Player X: 105 runs created in 105 games
Player CD: 125 runs created in 162 games
The typical replacement-level process is to start with this guy:
Baseline: 0.35 runs per game
And we subtract that from each player.
So, Player X goes
from 105 runs created in 105 games
to 105 – 105*.35 = 68 runs created above Baseline
And Player CD goes
from 125 runs created in 162 games
to 125 – 162*.35 = 68 runs created above Baseline
Therefore, in terms of runs above replacement, both are at 68 runs.
But, what if instead of subtracting as I’m doing here, I simply ADD 0.35 runs per MISSING game.
Now we have this:
So, Player X goes
from 105 runs created in 105 games
to 105 + (162-105)*.35 = 125 runs created WITH baseline
And Player CD, having played all 162 games, remains at: 125 runs created
See? In both cases, we get the exact same answer.
When it comes to MVP talk, I presume a fair number of readers can’t fathom giving runs to a player for missing a game. That those 57 missing games should get zero runs, and therefore, the 105 runs in 105 games must remain identical in value to 105 runs in 162 games.
And I also think that those who support replacement level don’t realize that they are giving credit for the missing games, that they are in effect adding 20 runs to our Player X here.
In the end, it all comes down to an equivalency. You have someone with 105 runs created in 105 games. Is that better or worse, for MVP talk, than someone who created 106 runs in 162 games? How about 109 runs? 112?
The average Fangraphs reader made that decision: the average is 125 runs created in 162 games is equivalent to 105 runs created in 105 games. And so, the average Fangraphs reader supports adding 0.35 runs per game, for every missing game.
by Carson Cistulli - August 19, 2011
· Comments (7)
One of these things is decidedly not like the others.
Featured Game Cleveland (6) at Detroit (2) | 19:05 ET
• The recently added playoff-odds adjustment continues to bring considerable joy to the author.
• Because without it, I mean, this game would come out as probably a 6 by NERD.
• That would, of course, pretty seriously undervalue what I’ll call the Drama Factor of this game.
• That’s different, of course, than Drama Factor, the book by Haitian-American author Wanda Toby, who, per Amazon, is “driven to write by the passion of creation.”
• Which passion, interestingly, is the same one I feel when I see Modern Family’s Sofía Vergara.
Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 4.9.
The following Game Scores include the new and improved playoff-odds adjustment, which you can learn about in your brain by clicking here.
Player X created 105 runs in 105 games. AFTER which player would you slot him in, wrt MVP?
And I gave a list of Player A (150 runs) to Player F (100 runs). But in all cases, those guys played 162 games.
A straight arrow reader deduced the true intent of the question:
So the question is how you handle 57 games of production from somebody else.
a. Do you ignore it completely and just judge the guy on his 105?
b. Do you assume replacement level production?
c. Average?
If you simply give this player zero credit for the missing 57 games, then you would slot this player who created 105 runs in 105 games in between Player E (110 runs in 162 games) and Player F (100 runs in 162 games).
But perhaps you want to go the other way, and figure that the missing 57 games will be picked up by an average player, and so, you credit Player X with those runs (28.5 runs in this case), and so his 105 runs in 105 games is EQUIVALENT to created 133.5 runs in 162 games. Therefore, you’d slot him between Player B (140 runs in 162 games) and Player C (130 runs in 162 games).
Perhaps you think both those options are unfair:
(i) it’s unfair to presume an average player would pick up the slack
(ii) it’s unfair to presume that those 57 games would be a complete black hole
So, perhaps you decide that those 57 games need to get some runs credited to our Player X. Since the average player would create 28.5 runs, and a black hole player (i.e., pitcher as batter basically) would create 0 runs, then maybe something in-between, say 14 runs is what you should count.
Our Player X, with 105 runs in 105 games would be equivalent to a player with 119 runs in 162 games. And so, you would slot that player between Player D (120 runs in 162 games) and Player E (110 runs in 162 games).
The consensus pick was between Player C (130 runs in 162 games) and Player D (120 runs in 162 games). Therefore, Player X (105 runs in 105 games) would be equivalent to a player with 125 runs in 162 games.
Mathematically, you’d write this as:
105 – 105x = 125 – 162x
Rearranging the terms:
20 = 57 x
Solving for x gives us x = 0.35
Therefore, we give our Player X a rate of 0.35 runs per missing game.
Since the average rate (as noted in the poll) was 81 runs in 162 games, or 0.50 runs per game, then our “replacement level” is 0.35 runs per game, or -0.15 runs relative to average.
And -0.15 runs per game times 162 games is 24 runs per season. That’s where you readers have established the replacement level. And, as luck would have it, that’s pretty much exactly where saberists like to set the replacement level.
How you chose your answer is exactly how you handle replacement level for MVP discussions. For those who slotted him between the 110 and 100 runs created player, then you don’t believe that you should use replacement level for MVP discussions.
Moving the Needle: Mark Trumbo delivers a win with a walk-off homer, +.690 WPA. The Angels were three outs from getting swept at home by the Rangers, which would have effectively ended their chances at contention. But Torii Hunter led off the ninth with a single, and then Trumbo blasted a walk-off homer. The Angels are still 11 behind Boston in the loss column for the AL Wild Card, and they’re six behind Texas in the West. Somehow, seven and 12 seems a degree worse, even though it’s just a one-game difference.
Notables
Jered Weaver: 7 IP, 6 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 5 K. His only blemish was a high changeup that Mike Napoli blasted a good 450 feet.
Colby Lewis: 7 IP, 4 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 7 K. That’s just what the Rangers needed to complete the sweep. Unfortunately, the revamped bullpen can’t be perfect every game.
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