Yesterday, I discussed the April batted ball distance surgers. So naturally, today I’ll check in on the decliners. Because regression to the mean is such a powerful force, a distance decline sticks more often than a surge does. In other words, I would be more concerned about a decliner than excited about a surger.
Contract year. He got skinny. He’s 27 years old. This will be the Panda’s year. This will be the year Pablo Sandoval puts it all together.
So far, so not good. Sandoval’s power is down, his strikeout rate is up, his swing metrics are all messed up, and his owners are considering dropping him in mixed leagues. What’s up with this skinny sad Panda?
We’re a month through the season, and fantasy owners are already jumping to huge conclusions regarding the 2014 season. These tiered rankings attempt to capture the production from the first month of the season, moving some players up and down where I felt it was necessary, but largely, I attempted to refrain from getting too caught up in the ebbs and flows of single-month performance. There are five months remaining in the 2014 season. Lots will change, and I didn’t want to make the tiered rankings a simple “who is performing well right now,” as that’s not overly useful.
Anyway, here we go.
Now that we’re more than a month into the season, we finally have enough data to start taking batted ball distance numbers seriously. When developing my latest xHR/FB rate equation, I limited the player population to include only those who recorded at least 20 home runs and fly balls. At this point, the majority of the leaderboard sits between 20 and 25, so let’s dig in and start by looking at which hitters have experienced the largest increase since last season.
First a look at the running totals through half of week four:
8-4 record
3.44 ERA
8.6 K/9
2.9 K/BB
1.15 WHIP
Not a bad start. Here’s a look at this week’s recs, with team wOBA in parentheses:
LHP Jon Niese – 12.1% ESPN/16% Yahoo!/68% CBS (52% start) – @ MIA (.327), v. PHI (.305) Read the rest of this entry »
This past Sunday, I headed to downtown Oklahoma City to see the Redhawks, Houston’s Triple-A affiliate, take on the Nashville Sounds. The starting pitcher for the Sounds was Jimmy Nelson, the top pitching prospect in Milwaukee’s system. I hadn’t yet gotten the chance to see Nelson pitch in person, and I was looking forward to seeing him do so against a strong Oklahoma City lineup that included Jon Singleton, Domingo Santana, Max Stassi and Robbie Grossman.
Nelson is a pretty imposing figure on the mound, standing 6’5″ and weighing 245 pounds. The University of Alabama product has the type of frame that I can easily picture handling 200+ innings a year; he tossed a total of 162.1 frames in 2013.
Coming into the season, much of the hype surrounding young pitchers centered on guys like Danny Salazar, Masahiro Tanaka, Gerrit Cole, Archie Bradley, and Noah Syndergaard. The Kansas City Royals, however, opted to hand over the fifth-starter role to the flame-throwing righty, Yordano Ventura, who had limited hype and never rocketed his way up draft boards.
He burst onto the scene in 2013, consistently hitting triple-digits with his fastball and striking out over a batter per inning in Double-A and Triple-A. The 22-year-old struggled slightly after being promoted to the big leagues, which stifled the hype as we approached the 2014 regular season, but fantasy owners who swiped him late in their drafts are celebrating Ventura’s stellar month of April. He has compiled a 1.50 ERA (2.69 FIP) and has been a quality source of strikeouts.
The goal of this brief article isn’t so much to tout his first five starts of the 2014 season, as it’s rather to isolate a couple factors that lead me to believe Yordano Ventura is poised to find significant success as a major-league starter throughout the remainder of the year.
Yesterday, I ran out of time while writing my MASH Report to look at how the possible effects of diminished velocity could have on Clayton Kershaw. Well, using a couple of untested, but promising ideas, it seems he will be may not struggle with less fastball speed.
The worries with Kershaw stem from this tweet.
89-91, touched 92 a few times. RT @gq2scoops: Anybody know how Kershaw’s velocity was tonight?
— Dustin Nosler (@DustinNosler) May 1, 2014
He could be getting some of his strength back, but a possible 2+ mph drop could mean trouble for him. Kershaw’s fastball has at least averaged 92.5 mph in each of his six previous season. By looking at how he has produced previously at times with a lower velocities my indicate how he will do in the future.
“See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return” -David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
David Foster Wallace was writing about tennis, not baseball, but one wonders what the “Game” did to Scott Kazmir. A young, left-handed phenom leading the league in strikeouts at age 23 is suddenly out of the league by 28. Finished. He reaches back and instead of finding mid-90s heat, the ball is coming out too slow to retire big league or even minor league hitters. Instead of entering the prime of his career, he was trying to find himself in independent ball with the Sugar Land Skeeters. The who now?
Kazmir described what went wrong with his career when he told FanGraphs last year, “Basically, I ended up building bad habits. Once you do something over and over, it’s hard to get back where you were. You’re healthy, but you don’t have that feel anymore.”
Russell A. Carleton recently wrote of habits, “Baseball players grow and change like everyone else, because they are human. It’s hard for humans to change a behavior and to sustain that change — how’s that New Year’s Resolution going?”
The simplicity of that statement–It’s hard for humans to change a behavior and to sustain that change–hit me like a ton of bricks. Intuitively, that’s obvious, but there are a lot of bad habits I’ve been trying to change to no avail. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t able to just pick up one day and become like a perfect Buddhist or something. It turns out that change isn’t so easy for us humans. Who knew?
Back to Kazmir. He went on to say, “There were things going on in my life. I don’t want to get into it too much, but there was some stuff that became overwhelming…Things started snowballing in my life. There were a lot of questions I had to answer after I got released. What am I going to do? How am I going to go forward in life?”
What exactly did Kazmir put himself through to be able to come back with a vengeance? He posted a 4.04 ERA with solid peripherals and improved velocity last year in Cleveland. After averaging 86.5 mph on the heater in 2011, his velo was back up to an average of 92.5 mph last season. His 3.51 FIP, 3.36 xFIP, 24.1 percent strikeout rate, and 7.0 percent walk rate pointed to a pitcher who was much better than his decent ERA indicated.
A’s general manager Billy Beane rewarded Kazmir’s resurrection with a two-year, $22 million deal this winter. Thus far, Kazmir has continued to deliver. He’s given the A’s five quality starts in six tries with a 2.11 ERA and a 2.43 FIP. His average velocity is down a little from 92.5 last year to 90.8 thus far in 2014, though that could be the result of his decreased usage of the four-seam fastball.
When I saw him throw against Seattle earlier this year, he was often hitting 95 on the radar gun the A’s telecast was using, though that was his best velocity day of the season. Kazmir missed some time during the spring with a triceps strain, which is why I didn’t ultimately draft him in fantasy despite spending the winter writing open letters to Brian Sabean demanding that he sign Kazmir. Sabean never got back to me as per usual, and Tim Hudson has been exceptional, but where would the Giants be with Kazmir instead of Tim Lincecum or Ryan Vogelsong in the rotation? They’d be better right now, and I’d be even happier.
Given that Kazmir hit the market coming off a strong season at just 30 years old and had to settle for a two-year deal this winter, perhaps there’s something in his medicals to be concerned with. The spring triceps strain and early season velocity fluctuations are signs that Kazmir still bears close monitoring despite his dominance thus far.
Kazmir somehow found a way to go forward in life and get his career back on track. It’d be interesting to find out the details on the path he took. How did he put what appeared to be irrevocably broken back together? More importantly, can he sustain it?
No team has won more games over the last two-plus seasons than the A’s, who are 208-144 since the beginning of 2012. If Billy Beane’s stuff is going to start working in the postseason in 2014, having a healthy, dominating Kazmir alongside the sensational Sonny Gray at the top of the Oakland rotation will be a huge key.
The game has a way of eventually exposing you. Baseball will bring to your knees in failure. Not may players have fallen as far and as quickly as Kazmir did, but not many players have bounced back as suddenly to the heights Kazmir is reaching in his career once more. Can he sustain the changed behaviors and performance of the last season-plus?
His peripherals say yes but his bizarre career trajectory makes him an endless mystery. Did the game smooth out his rough edges and remove from him that which he hopes will never return?
