For all of the hand-wringing about Tim Lincecum’s sudden decline in San Francisco, there’s been another surprising implosion that seems to be flying far under the radar. Longtime Brewer Rickie Weeks, who had been essentially tied with Brandon Phillips as the National League’s best second baseman over the previous two seasons, limped into the All-Star break with a dismal .199/.314/.343 line. There’s more to life than batting average, of course, but of the 155 qualified hitters this year, he currently stands dead last, the only man in baseball with an average south of .200. His Brewers start the second half five games under .500 and eight games behind the Pirates after making it into October last year, and while the absence of Prince Fielder and the struggles of John Axford seem like obvious culprits, Weeks’ sudden transformation into “Brendan Ryan on a bad day” can’t be dismissed as a huge reason why.

It doesn’t take a ton of research to see Weeks’ biggest issue in 2012, and that’s that he’s simply having difficulty making contact. For a guy who struck out 20.8% of the time last year and had never topped 24.4%, seeing his whiff rate jump up to 28.6% this year is jarring. It’s the seventh highest rate in baseball, and at least some of the guys ahead of him – like Adam Dunn & Pedro Alvarez – are compensating for that with huge power when they do connect. Weeks isn’t putting bat on ball, and when he is, he’s either not making solid contact or not getting any love from the BABIP gods with a .267 mark that’s far below his career norms. It’s a bad combination, and the fact that the outcome is poor shouldn’t be surprising, though he is attempting to compensate with patience, leading to a career-high walk rate.

Yet despite Weeks’ sorry position on the bottom of the leaderboards, I like to think there’s some hope here, and not just because I have a hard time believing that a player with his track record can completely disappear in his age 29 season. Over the last month – arbitrary endpoints, I’ll admit – he’s looked more like the Weeks of old, hitting .280/.363/.460 in 113 plate appearances, along with two home runs in his final three games before the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Even with all that we know about ERA and how questionable it can be in evaluating the value of a pitcher, a 4.98 mark is still pretty ugly, especially in the lowered offensive environment we’re seeing this year. In fact, it’s so ugly that it ranks among the bottom 10% or so of all qualified major league pitchers, mostly above struggling youngsters like Jake Arrieta, Luke Hochevar, Hector Noesi, & Mike Minor, along with whatever it is that’s ruining Tim Lincecum’s career. It’s not a great group to be in, but for Detroit starter Max Scherzer, that 4.98 stands out as a phenomenal reason to target him as the trade deadline nears.

If you look at that list of poor ERA starters, two things immediately stand out about Scherzer. First, his FIP is a much more reasonable 3.76, one of the highest ERA-FIP differentials in the game; second, his K/9 rate is an outstanding 11.36. Other than Stephen Strasburg’s 11.81, no other starting pitcher in baseball has a higher mark, and I’m guessing you could win a lot of bar bets by knowing that the highest K rate in the American League belongs to Scherzer, not Felix Hernandez or Yu Darvish or Justin Verlander.

Of course, you don’t get to such a high ERA by accident, and in Scherzer’s case, there’s some pretty obvious reasons behind that. You can point to his 1.39/9 homer rate, high even for a pitcher who doesn’t have the built-in advantage of Comerica Park, and his .359 BABIP, far above his career mark of .318. The BABIP gap may be a little tough to fully overcome, given the atrocious defense the Tigers roll out behind him on a nightly basis, but everything else is trending in the right direction. Read the rest of this entry »

If Cincinnati’s Johnny Cueto had managed to pitch just six more innings in a 2011 that started late because of right shoulder inflammation and ended early because of a strained lat, he’d have finished second only to NL Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw with a 2.31 ERA. (Assuming that in those six innings, he pitched to a consistent level of production as he had before, of course.)

Ending up behind only Kershaw and just ahead of Roy Halladay is pretty impressive company, yet I can’t say I was completely buying into Cueto simply based on that. His sparkling 2.31 ERA was hardly backed up by a 3.45 FIP and a 3.90 xFIP; along with declining velocity and strikeout rates, it seemed that Cueto’s nice season was more a mirage of a career-low .249 BABIP than anything else. I believe that prior to the season on another site, I named him my “most overrated” pitcher headed into 2012, figuring that the ERA would likely to return back to his previously established rates.

Three months into the season, Cueto is outdoing himself with a 2.21 ERA despite having his BABIP indeed return to almost exactly his career average, and clearly I couldn’t have been more wrong about him. How is he doing it? Read the rest of this entry »

Other than perhaps Baltimore’s Dylan Bundy, there’s maybe no pitching prospect in the minors more highly touted than Arizona’s Trevor Bauer, the third pick in last year’s draft. After being pulled from his Triple-A start following only 50 pitches on Sunday, Bauer is reportedly on his way to the bigs to start for Arizona against the Braves on Thursday, kicking off what is sure to be years of me confusing him with Diamondback rotation mate Trevor Cahill.

Bauer comes up to replace the recently disabled Joe Saunders in an Arizona rotation which is suddenly in need of help. Cahill’s been fine, and Wade Miley has been a shocking success story, but Daniel Hudson has been injured & ineffective while Ian Kennedy has been unable to recreate his magical 2011. That’s after Josh Collmenter flamed out early in the season, and with Saunders on the shelf, there’s great opportunity here for Bauer to take advantage of.

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Through the first two-plus months of the year, Toronto had been fortunate enough to have one of the healthiest rotations in the big leagues. With the exception of one Joel Carreno start in the third game of the season, the quintet of Ricky Romero / Brandon Morrow / Henderson Alvarez / Kyle Drabek / Drew Hutchison had started every Blue Jays game through June 16. Consistency isn’t quite the same as effectiveness, of course, since Alvarez & Drabek were each cruising along with ugly FIP scores over 5.50, but nonetheless, few teams had made it that far into the season with such a low turnover in the rotation.

That situation fell apart completely in the span of four days last week, as Morrow (oblique), Drabek (elbow), and Hutchison (elbow) each hurt themselves and landed on the disabled list. Drabek will have Tommy John surgery and will be out until well into 2013; Hutchison’s fate is yet to be decided but a zipper of his own hasn’t been ruled out. Neither had much fantasy relevance, but the loss of Morrow for a month or more is acute, as he’d evolved into one of the better starters in the game, most recently ranked as the #20 overall starter on the latest Yahoo! leaderboards.

With the trio gone, Toronto suddenly has to fill 60% of their rotation. Let’s look at who’s left standing and who is now in line for opportunity; you might want to take the very young and very old out of the room before continuing, because it’s not pretty…

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For most of the second half of the new century’s first decade, there was little question about the two players at the top of the heap when it came to production from second base. Chase Utley in Philadelphia and Brian Roberts in Baltimore, just 100 miles apart via I-95, were the gold standard for power, speed, and defense. Between 2005, Utley’s first full season, and 2009, Roberts’ last, they were not only the two most valuable second basemen in the game, they were two of the top 20 most valuable players, period.

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In late February, the Astros shocked the baseball world by announcing they’d be converting longtime starter Brett Myers into the bullpen to serve as closer. Considering that the Houston rotation looked incredibly thin beyond Wandy Rodriguez & Bud Norris, many questioned the logic beyond trading ~200 innings of Myers as a starter for ~60 innings of him as a reliever. A third of the way through the season, the move has worked out reasonably well for the surprisingly competitive Astros, as Lucas Harrell & J.A. Happ have capability bolstered the rotation and Myers entered play on Tuesday tied for fourth in the NL with 14 saves, making him one of the few to survive the unending turnover and volatility in the ninth inning so far this year. Though I hardly need to remind you that saves don’t exactly equate to quality and that Myers’ sparkling 2.25 ERA isn’t backed up by his 4.08 FIP, saves are still a mainstay category in nearly every fantasy league, and that alone makes Myers valuable.

Yet it’s also that value which comes from saves that’s exactly why he’s one of the best sell-high players of the first half of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

For most of his three full seasons in the big leagues prior to 2012, Dexter Fowler had been a decent (if unexciting) placeholder in the middle of the Colorado outfield. His wOBA marks of .345, .335, & .346 between 2009-11 were roughly average, and while he chipped in a few steals (52 over the three seasons) and a nice amount of triples (39), he was generally an unremarkable player, held back largely by a strikeout rate (23.1% last year) that usually only works when it’s balanced out by considerable power. Last June, he really hit rock bottom when instead of rejoining the Rockies after recovering from an abdominal injury, he was optioned back to Triple-A. And why not? At the time, he was hitting just .238/.340/.348 with only two successful steals in eight attempts.

Fowler even struggled back in the minors, hitting only .237/.345/.381 in 27 games for Colorado Springs. When he returned to the Rockies after the All-Star Break, it was less because he had forced his way back and more because Carlos Gonzalez had been dealing with a sore wrist, creating a need for another outfielder. But Fowler doubled in his first game back and scored ten runs in his first eight games; over the remainder of the season, he was a new player, hitting .288/.381/.498 with 37 extra-base hits and ten steals.

Despite his hot finish to 2011, few believed he’d suddenly turned a corner. At Yahoo!, for example, he was ranked as the 48th-best outfielder heading into 2012; here at FanGraphs, our consensus rankings placed him 62nd. Yet here we are, two months into 2012, and Fowler has the sixth-highest wOBA of any qualified outfielder, a ranking which had been third overall before Tuesday’s hitless outing.

Should we have seen this coming?

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Last summer, the Dodgers traded longtime shortstop Rafael Furcal to the Cardinals, hoping to get something out of their oft-injured star before he reached free agency. Furcal was not only a useful cog on the St. Louis march to the championship, he’s been the best shortstop in the National League so far in 2012. The Dodgers, meanwhile, were left to fill shortstop with the overmatched Dee Gordon, who is almost certainly only still in the majors because the club simply has no viable alternatives to turn to.

Yet the Dodgers didn’t come away completely empty-handed, picking up 25-year-old Alex Castellanos in exchange for Furcal. Castellanos was crushing the ball for Double-A Springfield at the time of the trade – .319/.379/.562 (.411 wOBA) – and has continued to do damage since joining the Dodger organization, putting up a .361/.465/.711 (.493 wOBA) line for Triple-A Albuquerque this year that doesn’t even feature the usual massive home/road splits you’ll generally see from Isotope players. While the hit tool seems to be for real, Castellanos has never been seen as being on the fast track to the bigs, held back by questionable place discipline (411/122 K/BB in parts of five seasons) and an uncertain future on defense, since he’s shuttled from third base to right field to second base over the last several years.

Castellanos would have almost certainly been among those called up in April as the Dodgers suffered through a variety of injuries, but a strained hamstring on April 24 sidelined him for nearly a month; now, with Matt Kemp headed back to the disabled list and Castellanos once again healthy, he’s finally received the call. It remains to be seen exactly how he fits into the lineup, since his transition to second base was reportedly going well, and the Dodgers are without regular second baseman Mark Ellis through at least the All-Star Break thanks to a serious leg injury. However, Castellanos’ move to second is still a work in progress, and manager Don Mattingly indicated that he’ll likely use Castellanos mainly as an outfielder for now, preferring to stick with Elian Herrera, Ivan De Jesus, & Jerry Hairston at second base.

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You’d have been hard-pressed this offseason to find an unbiased observer who didn’t think that the three-year, $27 million contract that the Marlins handed to closer Heath Bell was foolish. (In fact, look no further than our own Paul Swydan’s review in December.) Yet while few liked the idea of giving such a large contract to a declining closer on a team which had more pressing needs, nobody could have foreseen just how disastrous Bell’s Miami debut would be. After blowing four saves in his first eleven appearances with the Marlins, Bell was bounced from his job in early May, and it was no fluke; after melting down on May 4 against his old San Diego teammates, Bell had struck out just six in 8.2 innings while allowing 25 baserunners and 11 earned runs.

Bell’s demotion lasted only about a week, as Steve Cishek & Edward Mujica handled the late-inning duties for the club until Bell returned to the role on  May 11. Since then, Bell has seen better results, saving four and winning two in seven outings. That’s miles ahead of his performance in April, and considering his reputation & contract this turnaround ought to be enough to solidify his hold on the closer’s job for the foreseeable future. Fantasy players have noticed, since he’s among the most-added relievers this week after many had cut bait on him earlier this month.

Yet while that all seems nice on the surface… it’s hard to say that he’s “back”, isn’t it? Read the rest of this entry »