Archive for Colorado

Mike Tauchman deserves nothing less than the clickbaitiest of headlines. He’s my favorite player nearly no one has heard of or cares about, a name I draft that genuinely forces people to Google his name, a Triple-A hitter not only too old to be a prospect but also maybe too old to be a post-hype prospect, if he ever were a prospect, which he never was.

No one has heard of or cares about him because of any combination of: (1) he is not and never was a prospect; (2) there are a fair number of actual prospects in Colorado’s actual farm system who are actually exciting; (3) prospect status notwithstanding, he has no path to playing time because the Rockies habitually bury their actually exciting talent. At 28, Tauchman ain’t getting any younger, and I ain’t either. He deserves all the hype he can get, and I’m here to dish it out.

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In a fairly surprising turn of events, the Rockies demoted Jon Gray Saturday. Gray has arguably been baseball’s most enigmatic pitcher this year, posting a career-worst 5.77 ERA supported by career-best peripherals — e.g., a 13.4% swinging strike rate (SwStr%) underpinning a 28.9% strikeout rate (K%), and fielding independent metrics of 2.78 xFIP, 3.08 FIP, and 3.15 SIERA. Given our most basic sabermetric understandings of baseball, Gray should be a very good pitcher, even if he pitches half his starts at hitters’ paradise Coors Field.

I have written about how a common-breed Rockies pitcher’s peripherals might be penalized for calling Coors Field home (Gray inspired this bit of research as well). FIP metrics generally underestimate ERA by anywhere from 0.8 to 1.3 runs for home starts (compared to 0.0 to 0.2 runs for road starts), suggesting that Rockies pitchers may underperform (a) their FIPs by 0.35 runs or (b) their SIERAs by 0.65 runs — given error bars, maybe more.

Still, that doesn’t explain why Gray’s ERA is nearly 6 right now. I shed light on the ridiculousness of the move; his strand rate (LOB%) is suppressed and his batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is elevated, even compared to his uniquely bad baselines. I’m not sure there’s much more to it.

Nick Mariano of RotoBaller noted here that Gray’s fastball has been incredibly hittable since his debut and especially this year. Despite my thoughts on the inevitability of regression in Gray’s favor, I wanted to pursue Mariano’s train of thought a little further. Gray’s fastball is bad, but how bad? And why?

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It has been a wacky first week of baseball. One part heartbreaking, two parts breathtaking, eight parts endlessly fascinating, the sport never ceases to amaze. Some storylines (I can’t even avoid that pun if I tried) with serious fantasy implications emerged last week — namely, the historically great start to Trevor Story‘s career and the earth-shattering injury that ended Kyle Schwarber’s season.

I’m here, like everyone else, to discuss the former. I’m sure you’ve read your fair share of takes. This fruit is hanging so low, I almost stepped on it. I hope this doesn’t exhaust you, and I hope this doesn’t bore you. Because Story is more than just a statistically anomalous home run-hitting machine. He has a ceiling, and he has a floor, and I want to find out where — or, perhaps more abstractly, who — exactly they might be.

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