Good Question:
I don't understand how Shohei Ohtani can be one of the best pitchers and one of the best hitters in baseball but NFL teams need two different players for field goals and punts.
— Mike Maher (@mikeMaher) August 20, 2021
At this point in the year, full season lines are heavily influenced by how a player started. That first month-to-6 weeks can hold a player down or prop them up for quite a while. Here are 10 players who have surged or fallen from their early season work. And yes, I grant that some of y’all have probably noticed a few of these and if that’s the case, just exclude yourself from the headline and roast the dweebs who aren’t as cool as us.
Yes… that’s right. As cool as us.
PITCHING
Kenta Maeda has a 2.98 ERA and 0.99 WHIP in his last eight starts since July 1st. In that time, he has a 31% K rate and 6% BB rate across 45.3 IP. In his first 12 starts, he had a 5.56 ERA, 1.55 WHIP, 21% K, and 8% BB in 56.7 IP.
Angels
• Dylan Bundy has reworked his delivery.
The suggested solution from Angels pitching coach Matt Wise was to revamp his arm motion. Instead of bringing his arm all the way back, Bundy would have more of a snap throw. The look of a short-armed toss.
…
This is at the root of why he started to look for speed with a longer delivery. And while it may have added a tick to his velocity, it also added a lot of movement and, thus, an inconsistent arm path.
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Wise hadn’t orchestrated this type of change at the big-league level. But he said other coaches have told him that it’s an eight-week process. It’s been exactly six weeks since Bundy vomited behind the Yankee Stadium mound. He was immediately pulled from the game — and, after, from the rotation entirely.He ended up making the change in just four weeks — half the time Wise expected.
He has performed better since rejoining the rotation but not great. Before moving to the bullpen, he made 14 starts with a 6.72 ERA (4.46 xFIP) and 1.42 WHIP (.305 BABIP). In the four starts since leaving the bullpen, he has a 3.72 ERA (5.34 xFIP) and 1.03 WHIP (.182 BABIP). I guess he’s “better”.
A few days ago, I saw this post from Eno Sarris:
Farhan Zaidi on older player value. “I don’t know that the old aging curves are especially helpful now. Players work on themselves year round in a way they didn’t. Actuarial results gleaned from census or overall data may be less valuable than what we know about the individual.”
— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) August 13, 2021
Zaidi’s mention of the “old aging curves” led me down an aging curves rabbit hole, where I read excellent posts from Mitchel Lichtman on creating aging curves (part 1 and part 2) and a few more recent studies by Jeff Zimmerman. I created my own aging curve using wRC+ as the metric and I looked to see where the Giant’s players fell on the line. Using the same techniques as described by Lichtman and Zimmerman, I used the delta method on all players who recorded at least 10 plate appearances in each season between 2008 and today. Here is the league-wide aging curve including the current year:
“Knocking Down The Door” is a weekly column highlighting minor leaguers who are making a case for a major league promotion. Listed below are the names of this week’s picks and the player’s team, age, level(s), prospect ranking, and last 2-3 weeks of statistics.
The analysis can be viewed in the embedded video of the previous day’s episode of The RosterResource Show, a weekly live stream focused on all things related to rosters, transactions, and RosterResource content at FanGraphs.
The 2021 version of Bullpen Report includes five different sections, as well as the closer chart, which can be found at the bottom of the page.
The “RosterResource” link will take you to the corresponding team’s RosterResource depth chart, which will give you a better picture of the full bullpen and results of the previous six days (pitch count, save, hold, win, loss, blown save.)
Click HERE to view the full Closer Depth Chart.
Read the rest of this entry »
NEW FEATURE ALERT! We have added an upgraded version of RosterResource’s Closer Depth Chart to FanGraphs. Read more about it here.
We will always include a link to the full Closer Depth Chart at the bottom of the Bullpen Report each day. It’s also accessible from the RosterResource drop-down menu and from any RosterResource page. Please let us know what you think.
The “RosterResource” link will take you to the corresponding team’s RosterResource depth chart, which will give you a better picture of the full bullpen and results of the previous six days (pitch count, save, hold, win, loss, blown save).
Read the rest of this entry »
I hope Miggy never retires.
just two guys being pals pic.twitter.com/tlFo64RXje
— Cut4 (@Cut4) August 17, 2021
8/17/21
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We are only a month into the “second half” but we are already seeing some pitchers turn their season around. I put it in quotes because it’s obviously not a pure 81/81 game split, but rather the halves are determined by the All-Star break. I’m sure some players use the time off to dig into their numbers and come up with a gameplan to improve while others likely just relax and enjoy the breather. These three arms have been markedly better since July and I wanted to investigate what changed to bring about these turnarounds.
Marco Gonzales, SEA
1H: 5.88 ERA/1.46 WHIP in 56.7 IP | 2H: 1.67 ERA/0.90 WHIP in 32.3 IP
While few fully believed Gonzales’s 2020 (3.10 ERA/0.95 WHIP) since it was just two months, he was still drafted for useful ratios over a good number of innings. At no point in the first half was his ERA below 5.00 and his 2.4 HR/9 was seeing him hit more waiver wires with each passing week. He opened the second half with a trip to Colorado which was sure to be a disaster given how his season was going to that point… so of course he put up a 5 IP/2 ER outing, notching his second win of the year.
