Apologies on this being late as my day job has been swamped in recent weeks, but I promised a breakdown of Ben Revere’s 2016 season to come, so here we are, making up for lost time. I liked Revere as a fit in Toronto for a number of reasons during the 2015 season, but some of those reasons have become muddled as we get ready to flip the calendar over.

From a natural fit standpoint, it’s hard to imagine a better place for Revere to play his home games than on Astroturf, at Rogers Centre where his game of speed, ground balls and contact plays up about as well as one could imagine. For his career, and granted it’s a terribly small sample size, the numbers bear it out:

Turf (167 PA): .331/.348/.376
Grass (2,493 PA): .292/.327/.347 Read the rest of this entry »

Admit it, you were a Gregory Polanco owner, held onto him all season long, and were disappointed by his performance. Though you felt he wasn’t a bust per se, it sure felt like he failed to earn his cost, right? If you recall, and I promise not to get upset if you do not, the RotoGraphs five ranked him 46th overall among outfielders in the preseason. Now tell me if it surprises you that he actually finished 32nd in value, earning $14.58. Because that is what happened according to Zach Sanders’ calculator.

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Prepare for an adventure in which we fly over to the FanGraphs leaderboard, choose a minimum of 120 plate appearances, and sort in descending order by ISO. Unless you played in an AL-Only league and were trying to catch the standings leader who owned this very character, you might be shocked who sits ranked second. Obviously, I gave it away in the title of this article. But if you remain stumped, it was 32-year-old Franklin Gutierrez. The man didn’t even play in 2014 due to health reasons and came into 2015 with a career ISO mark of just .135.

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At some point in the next few days, or perhaps in the hours between when I wrote this and when it will be posted, you’ll be treated to an article about Billy Hamilton. Said post will come courtesy of my colleague Alex Chamberlain. Alex always offers a few nuggets of analytical gold. I’m looking forward to what he digs up regarding the preeminent burner in the league.

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Baseball, in all its glorious history, bears as its fruit some remarkable encounters between legends of the game. Allow me to recount a charming, wholly undocumented, 100%-real encounter between some of baseball’s greats:

…And then Billy Hamilton, to whom his colleagues and comrades affectionately referred as “Billy Hams,” appealed to the Baseball Gods:

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You all remember the clever hashtag #ManBearPuig that parodied the brilliant South Park episode ManBearPig, right? Of course you do, because you use Twitter and you love South Park. Sadly, Yasiel Puig is quickly shedding his ManBearness. After posting a scintillating .398 wOBA during his 2013 debut, his performance has declined for two straight seasons, with the fall off this year a precipitous one. Will ManBearPuig make his triumphant return?

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Coming into 2015, baseball fans everywhere had the same question on their collective minds: “Is J.D. Martinez sustainable?” The question was more than fair, as there were plenty of indicators that the now-28-year-old’s 2014 breakout could be a fluke.

It was all too easy to point at Martinez’s batting average on balls in play (.389 in 2014) and write off a good portion of his .315/.358/.553 slash. His power spike — from a .120 isolated power in 2013 all the way up to a .238 ISO the next year — was impossible to ignore, but naysayers still had avenues through which to dismiss it.

Martinez may have hit 23 homers in 480 plate appearances in 2014 — with another ten in just 71 PA in Triple-A before his promotion — but had never hit more than 19 in any season, at any level. Moreover, he hit just 19 total homers in the 864 PA he compiled in 2012-2013. Now all of a sudden, he hits 33 of them in one year? This was another area that was relatively simple to disregard as flukish.

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Carlos Gomez stunk in 2015. That statement is relative, of course — Gomez is a good ballplayer, and 2.6 wins above replacement (WAR) in 115 games ain’t so shabby — but for a consensus top-10 fantasy pick in 2015, he was a bust.

For anyone who hasn’t followed the trajectory of Gomez’s career over the years, it has been a tumultuous one. A top-100 prospect who bounced from team to team early on, Gomez hit his stride in a half-season sample for the Brewers in 2011 during which his isolated power (ISO) spiked 60 points alongside season-long paces (600 plate appearances) of 19 home runs and 37 stolen bases. Fantasy owners who noticed the improvement and expressed skepticism toward a depressed batting average on balls in play (BABIP) were rewarded handsomely in 2012. Gomez paid even more dividends in 2013 as he demonstrated the legitimacy of his gains.

We’ve reached a strange point in his trajectory, however. Gomez, having turned 30 three days ago (happy birthday, Carlos!!!!) and coming off his worst offensive season in half a decade, may be declining or, at the very least, have fallen from his elite offensive perch for good. Gomez’s production in terms of weighted runs created (wRC+) depicts a sharp and sustained increase in production followed by a two-year plateau and then a profound leap off said plateau in 2015.

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Maybe. End of article.

In late August of 2014, the Red Sox signed Rusney Castillo to a seven year contract and the considerable hype was ignited. Unfortunately, Castillo battled injuries, was shuttled back and forth between Triple-A and the big league club several times and was disappointing at the plate at both the minor and Major League levels. But Castillo seemingly has all the tools. Will they translate into actual performance?

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As a random side note, Paul Sporer reached out to me when he saw that I was going to write about Aaron Hicks to make sure we weren’t going to step on each others’ toes. In the spirit of preserving his and my work, here’s a link to what he wrote — which I have not/will not read until after this is published.

As a Twins reporter and low-end minor league junkie, I’ve been a Hicks advocate since his 2012 season at Double-A New Britain. Hicks hit .286/.384/.460, which to me is a triple-slash with some inherent aesthetic beauty. Hicks had 116 strikeouts that year — high, to be sure — but backed it with 79 walks. I had read reports on him that said he was ultra-disciplined to the point of almost being too passive at the plate. Could that even be possible?

I was about to find out. Read the rest of this entry »