Archive for Matt Shoemaker

A fine extra-day-off to you all…unless you have to pull the “work on a holiday” thing. Props to you for sure. Either way, thanks for reading and for all of the comments in the previous weeks.

I mentioned this last week, but I want to camp on this topic for a second. The number-one purpose of a team’s minor league farm system is to develop future talent, we all know that. However, there is a extra fringe benefit that having lower-level teams provide, and that is a place for their injured MLB guys to go down and get some valuable game experience before their official return back to the show. You can “simulate games” all you want, but that extra kick of adrenaline that comes from real competition is something practice can’t provide. For the majority of the season, it’s a regular thing to send a guy down to the minors for a game or tow or three. Now we are the point in the year where most minor leagues begin playoffs today or tomorrow, and it is a little much sometimes for a minor league manager fighting for a title to be expected to throw a random guy from the big-league team into their mix for one game.

Which leaves really the fall instructional leagues as a team’s only viable option for rehab assignments for their players at this point in the season. Made up mainly of AA-and-below level players, and even then, doesn’t start for about another 2 weeks. This “black hole” of games is definitely something to be factored into how fast/slow a team decides to bring an injured player back, or to shut him down altogether.

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We got off to a pretty solid start in week 18, with Kevin Gausman and Dan Straily putting up scoreless outings before seeing that Homer Bailey got rocked a bit, but overall we’re halfway through that week with a 3.77 ERA and a pair of quality starts under our belts. One issue: We somehow missed that Dan Straily was starting Tuesday with an off-day on Thursday, so he won’t be making two starts this week, but will be doing so next week with a Monday start.

With that said, if you grabbed Straily, use him this week instead! He had a very nice start and has been one of the hardest pitchers to square up in the NL all season.

Here’s how we’re doing through half of week 18 overall:

40-38 record
3.93 ERA
8.1 K/9
2.9 K/BB
1.31 WHIP
57 quality starts

….and here are this week’s recs (with team wRC+ in parentheses):

RHP Tom Koehler – 40.3% ESPN – @NYM (93), @CLE (104)

It’s understandable if Koehler doesn’t do much for you on the whole, as he’s got a so-so ERA with some iffy peripherals as a 30-year-old who has put together mostly a nondescript career. But he’s been very, very solid over the last month or so — so much so that it stands to take note of. He’s carried a 2.16 ERA through four August starts so far (20-5 K/BB ratio in 25 innings, .599 OPS against) and he was also solid in July (3.33 ERA). All told, since July 1 — a span of nine starts — he’s got a 2.77 ERA, .650 OPS against and 36-12 K/BB ratio in 52 innings. He lost to the Mets twice already this season, but now seems like as good of a time as ever for him to get off the schneid. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Sullivan wrote about Matt Shoemaker last week, being one of the first (to my knowledge) to note that Shoemaker had recently ramped up the usage of his splitter. I’m reluctant to overdo it, but you should read that first. I’d also like to borrow one of the main points he made in order to better establish my narrative. I hope you don’t mind.

Sullivan noted Shoemaker’s increased use of the splitter in all counts. Which is great, because it’s arguably his best pitch. His slider is good, too — both induce an almost-equal percentage of whiffs per swing — but it’s the splitter that has coerced a meager .117 isolated power (ISO) in his Major League career. That’s a big part of it. More splitters means fewer other things, and those other things, as Sullivan noted, have generally been bad.

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Despite the small sample, the pitching trend continues (as of 4/11):

Strikeouts are up. Offense is down. The MLB ERA as it stands is 3.39! You can read why in the The Hardball Time’s Baseball Annual 2015: Jeff Sullivan looks at whether or not sabermetrics have tipped the balance of power toward pitching and defense — it has. PITCHf/x evaluation is one major reason.

More and more, pitchers know what works within their own repertoires, and we can then tell some “reperstories” based on their pitch characteristics (movement and velocity) and outcomes (swinging-strike and groundball induction).

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It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

Thanks in large part to a breakout performance from Garrett Richards, the 2014 Angels rotation was around league average according to WAR, which is quite a bit better than they were expected to perform. Unfortunately, Richards went down with a knee injury in August. How quickly he can return to the mound and how healthy he is when gets there will be a huge part of how good this staff is this year. Past Richards, the Angels have three fairly reliable if unexciting pitchers projected to throw 190-ish innings. Just from writing up a few other teams for our depth chart discussions, I can tell you that’s not a luxury too many other teams have. So despite Richards’ absence early in the year, this staff is more settled than most. Read the rest of this entry »

After evaluating Zack Wheeler and Jacob deGrom in my previous post on the 2015 Mets Commanding Rotation, I was hoping to follow-up by looking at pitch release point consistency for a number of pitchers that prevented contact in the zone but didn’t have elite swinging-strike/contact rates. Initially, I found good results using root-mean-square deviations.

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