Having started the year at 10-1, the Mets’ season is certainly going swimmingly. This team could realistically make a playoff run, which was something no one seemed to be certain of prior to the season. The hope for Mets fans is that the team’s decision makers in the front office don’t mess this up, or miss an opportunity to make sure this team maximizes its potential.

Mets ownership and management has been nothing short of infuriating in recent years, whether that has meant mishandling issues with injured players, failing to spend sufficiently on payroll despite being in the gigantic New York market, and countless other reasons. It seems reasonable to expect the team to be more ambitious in signing star players, or at least keep the homegrown stars healthy on the current team. The team’s treatment of medical issues are significant enough to justify their own post altogether, but exploring that will be left for someone else, or investigated another time.

Kevin Plawecki just fractured his hand, while Travis d’Arnaud is set to have Tommy John Surgery next week. The team needs help at Catcher, and if management wants to make sure this team remains in contention, they will trade for a useful backstop. Jon Heyman confirmed that the team is indeed interested in upgrading at the position:

Who could the Mets acquire via trade? The elephant in the room is J.T. Realmuto, an elite catcher who’d be an immediate upgrade over even the injured d’Arnaud and Plawecki long-term. He is also represented by CAA , like many prominent Mets stars (DeGrom, Syndergaard, Cespedes), making a trade for Realmuto seemingly more likely. In reality though, he is still on the DL for the Marlins, and the asking price in a trade for him would be far too steep for the Mets to be able to meet. Their farm system lacks the impact talent needed to land a player of Realmuto’s caliber, and trading useful major leaguers is effectively not an option for a contending team.

Could the Dodgers be convinced to deal Yasmani Grandal? Considering the performance of Austin Barnes at the end of last season, and their faith in him throughout the playoffs — It would not seem completely unreasonable for them to be interested in trading Grandal. Though for a team with serious championship aspirations, keeping around two starting caliber star-level catchers is justifiable. Add in the fact that Grandal has already been worth 0.7 WAR, and one realizes that the Dodgers very likely wouldn’t be interested in a swap.

A team can lose a catcher anytime to a concussion, or injury as a result of a foul tip, among other potential risks that are inherently a part of playing the position. Given this possibility, it’s reasonable to see why the Dodgers are content splitting playing time between two very talented backstops. The Mets are all-too-aware of this reality, with both their regular catchers set to miss significant time with injuries already this season.

If the team wanted to kind of take a lottery ticket on a Catcher, they could trade for Luke Maile, a strong defensive catcher who has hit surprisingly well to start the year. Defensively he was worth 4.9 runs in 46 games in 2017, and he has four hits with exit velocities over 105 mph already this year. If he can hit better than he has previously, Maile would be a great buy-low candidate for the team. He is blocked by Russell Martin in Toronto, so he could likely be acquired by the Mets pretty easily.

A strong option for the team, is the Cardinals’ Carson Kelly. Though he is seen as more of a defensive catcher, his 120 wRC+ in Triple-A last year illustrates that he is ready for regular playing time in the big leagues. He hasn’t hit at all in his brief major league time, yet has never gotten an extended look at the level. Being blocked by Yadier Molina, who is signed to a long-term extension, has left no real opportunity for Kelly to get the regular playing time he needs to develop as a hitter.

The scouting reports indicate that the 23-year-old has average hitting abilities, which coupled with his above-average to plus defense, should intrigue the Mets. The young backstop had an average pop-time of 1.96 seconds last season, which ranked 23rd among all major league catchers. By comparison, Travis d’Arnaud ranked 78th with an average pop-time of 2.06 seconds, while Plawecki ranked 86th with a time of 2.08. The Mets acquiring Kelly would be an upgrade for their defense at Catcher, which would be a welcome change for their pitching staff.

The Cardinals have to realize that Kelly doesn’t have a real chance to play regularly anytime soon, and the Mets know they have an obvious need behind the plate. A trade between the two teams seems like a good idea for both sides, considering each team’s situation. The latest Fangraphs prospect reports for the Cardinals in November of 2017 placed a 50 FV on Kelly, so to get a sense of what his trade value likely is, that will be used as the primary indicator.

Basically, he is expected to be a 2 WAR player per season and would be controlled through the 2023 season assuming he played the majority of 2018 in the major leagues. So this is a roughly 12 WAR player, over the course of the six years he would be under team control. As a contender, the Mets would not be interested in trading any of the players on their major league roster, so any trade would almost certainly involve sending minor leaguers to the Cardinals in return for Carson Kelly.

Mets pitching prospect Justin Dunn would seem to be a sufficient return in a trade with St. Louis, as he also received a 50 FV rating from Fangraphs prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. A reliever initially at Boston College, Dunn started some games at the end of his final spring with the Eagles, before being selected in the first round by the Mets in the 2016 draft. He already has a strong Fastball / Slider combination in addition to a developing Curveball and Changeup, all pitches that give him the potential to have a formidable four-pitch mix. His strong pitching at High-A this season has been encouraging, and he would be a welcome future addition to the Cardinals’ 15th ranked MLB rotation by WAR.

This would be a trade to benefit both teams and would improve the future outlook of the Cardinals while helping the Mets shore up the catching position long-term. If the Mets are really committed to winning and doing so with consistency — Trading for Carson Kelly would be a strong option for the team. After all, Syndergaard and deGrom won’t be around forever.

All Data in this article was taken from Fangraphs, Statcast, and Baseball Prospectus. 

Early season baseball is beautiful. It’s not that just that baseball is back. It’s that things get so weird so quickly. Take, for example, Mike Petriello pondering this:

Lol, y’all. For the record, Owings is at .478 going into his game on Friday and Sanchez has worked his way to .088. So, yeah, just a few days later and things are still weird.

But some things…some things that seem weird may not be weird. Yonny Chirinos might be one of those things.

Chirinos has been on the fringe of interesting for some time. Last July, Carson Cistulli wrote about him at FanGraphs for three weeks in a row. The gist, from blurbs in those pieces, is that Chirinos tends to sit in the low 90s with his fastball but can amp it up to 96 mph. He can do it late in games, too. He also throws two offspeed pitches — a slider and a splitter — and is comfortable throwing them anytime. He’s a guy who’s gotten better as he’s faced better competition.  

And now, after injuries to Brent Honeywell and Jose De Leon and Nathan Eovaldi, Chirinos is getting the chance to face the best competition in the world. And he’s rising to the occasion again. He hasn’t allowed a run through 14.1 innings and he’s striking out six hitters to every walk. But there’s more.

Certainly, it’s early. While Chirinos is ranked here against last year’s qualifiers, he wouldn’t actually qualify yet for this year. No pitcher does, because it’s so early. Plate discipline numbers tend to stabilize quickly, though. After just his first couple games, the odds are good that hitters will continue to make contact at the same rate against Chirinos that they already have. After a couple more starts, we’ll be able to say with relative conviction if he’ll hit the zone the same way he has through his first three appearances. The same goes for the rate at which he’s coaxing swings out of the zone.

Things get a little foggier when it comes to Chirinos’s first pitch strike rate. He’s probably only a fifth of the way toward that crazy 71.7% number becoming reliable. But let’s consider how he’s done it to this point. Statcast has him at 18 called first pitch strikes, five whiffs, and eight foul balls. He’s throwing about three sinkers to every slider at the start of an at-bat, and occasionally gets funky by throwing something else. But it’s mostly a two pitch mix. And if you check the leaderboards so far, you’ll see he’s surrounded by loads of legitimate and other emerging talent.

Once he’s gotten ahead, Chirinos has done well by distributing his three primary pitches well, supporting the reports linked above from last season. His sinker runs one direction, his slider jumps the other, and his splitter acts like it’s fruit falling through the bottom of a grocery bag. In any given matchup, he can control three parts of the zone.

Just about the only way Chirinos could be making more of an impact right now is if he were going deeper into games. He’s averaged a shade over 60 pitches per appearance so far, and 64.5 per start. I don’t know if the Rays are stretching him out, or if they’re being super cautious against him facing batters a third time, or both. The team’s history may suggest they’ll eventually be willing to let him go further into games, though. The Rays rank tenth in MLB from 2015-17 in innings thrown by starters.  More than 22% of those innings can be attributed to Chris Archer alone, but it’s still worth keeping an eye on.

Either way, it’s probably fair to hedge a bet that Chirinos could continue producing really effective five inning outings and sprinkle in a few that are more than that.

Sometimes, what seems weird is actually just a new kind of awesome.

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Plate discipline data from FanGraphs. Pitch mix data from Baseball Savant.

Getting talked up as a second baseman can be hard. Jose Altuve, Brian Dozier, Daniel Murphy, and Jonathan Schoop occupy a lot of that conversation. Other, older guys like Robinson Cano and Ian Kinsler are still kicking around. Whit Merrifield says hello from Nowhere, too. And then there’s Cesar Hernandez, who seems to get talked up most for how underrated he is.

He’s one of only two holdovers on the Phillies since he came up in 2013 — the other is Luis Garcia — so even after this offseason of the team shedding some of that sluggish rebuild weight and adding some bona fide muscle, they must see something in him. He’s not just an asset to turn. This is true even after signing Scott Kingery, whose primary position is the same as Hernandez’s, to a six-year extension before he’s even played a single game in the Majors.

Hernandez is remarkably consistent. He strikes out less than 20% of the time, walks more than 10%, will display occasional pop, and can handle the glove at the keystone. But even consistency needs to evolve sometimes in order to keep pace, and we may have seen the next step from Cesar Hernandez last year.

The change, in a word: discipline. Per Pitch Info, we can see how Hernandez apparently decided to just stop chasing pitches out of the zone. In the first half, he ranked 29th in MLB, directly ahead of Edwin Encarnacion, and fourth at his position. That’s already pretty good. But in the second half, he shot up to eighth in MLB and tied with now-teammate Carlos Santana, and second at his position.

It’s one thing to see a relatively sharp change in a stat and be able to acknowledge how a player’s performance improved or declined. It’s another to process how directly it possibly influenced his overall production. Consider that Hernandez swung at 5.2% less pitches in the second half. Nearly 80% of that decrease was the direct result of letting pitches outside the zone go. That’s four balls for every called strike.

The difference in Hernandez’s approach fueled a drastic increase in OBP and was a big reason he became 25% better than league average at creating runs. It’s no wonder he went from being worth less than a win before the All-Star break to 2.4 after it.

Check out the gifs below. They’re both of the switch-hitting Hernandez swinging from the left side at a pitch to the same outside third of the plate:

The first is against a Yu Darvish fastball in May and resulted in a weak groundout to Elvis Andrus. It has a nice Fox Trax spot to show you how it was out of the zone. The second is against a Robert Gsellman fastball in September, around the same outside third of the plate, and was a double. This one doesn’t have a tracker showing you it was more over the plate, but, per Statcast, it was.

If you’ve heard of pitchers working the plate side to side, Hernandez does a little bit of the same with his swing, working horizontally. He pulls out his hips behind him and lets his bat drive through the zone on a similar plane. The small difference in pitch selection between the two gifs was the difference between a dribbler and an extra-base hit, and Hernandez made this a regular thing from mid-July and on.

It appears as though he didn’t make any mechanical change that allowed him to better cover the plate or access the ball when it got there. This is true whether he batted lefthanded or righthanded. His plate discipline, then, really does seem to be the result of simply choosing to swing at only what’s within the zone. Last August, I wrote about Rhys Hoskins being exciting in the context of the current Phillies, and how he offers a threat that the rest of the lineup doesn’t. If Hernandez’s plate discipline sticks in 2018 — the handful of games so far hasn’t allowed for a stable sample size yet — then he, too, will offer a skill that makes the lineup tougher and more of a threat.

It’s been a weird year for the Phillies already. Between Gabe Kapler and younger talent making a push for playing time, it could get much weirder. But an eye like Cesar Hernandez’s at the plate every day could help steady the ship.

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Pitch Info Data from FanGraphs. Gifs made with Giphy. 

It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on with a player when their numbers get skewed. Sometimes its injury, others could be due to team/manager/front office resentment, more often than not it can be attributed to bad luck. However, when numbers begin to become conventional or eclipse career norms on a regular basis, under certain conditions, it behooves me as a curious self-proclaimed ‘baseball scientist’ to look into that.

Today’s subject is one Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels. Observe his monthly OPS through his seven seasons in Major League Baseball.

Before I proceed, this is not an indictment or deposition on Trout. This is a scrutinization that will attempt to answer why his OPS drops so sharply once we hit the dog days of summer.

Trout is a great player, no one can deny that. You ask just about any baseball player if they’d like to have numbers like Trout and they’d answer before you even finish the question.

A simple assumption through basic observation would be that it’s the fault of the three true outcomes; striking out more and walking less while his power remains the same or takes a dive as well. Since I don’t have a better explanation yet, we’ll stick with that.

But first, I wanted to see if Trout was any sort of outlier; does the average player peak mid-season, then drop off as Trout does? Sort of.

I see the same dip, somewhat as steep for Trout, in July but followed by a resurgence into August. OK, so nothing extreme; basically the same start with a disjunct finish.

Going back to his monthly performances, what also stood out is that as his at-bats increased, his OPS seemed to decrease. However, that only occurred once he surpassed 500 ABs. In the scatter plot below, the coefficient of determination reveals that just about 60% of Trout’s OPS change is attributed to his increase in ABs. That’s a pretty good interrelationship.

So far we know that Trout seems to fade in late summer and that his OPS plummets as his at-bats go up. Is it as simple as that? I can somewhat understand that as the season progresses, players get worn out and, sometimes but not always, their production drops. But the ABs situation makes it more intriguing; you’d think a great hitter is usually always great regardless of the number of times he comes to bat. It doesn’t always follow that the more chances you have the more likely you are to fail.

Remember my original supposition of K/BB/HR variation causing his OPS drop? That’s an invalid inference because we have the same thing happening; as ABs increased, his strikeouts and walks did also. Home runs bounced a little with no correlation to AB figures.

Trout’s strikeouts did jump quite a bit from June to July while his walks increased at the same rate as his ABs. However, his biggest OPS drop-off was from July to August, so we can’t parallel that to a conclusion. The following month (July to August), his ABs increased at the same 11% with both walks and strikeouts growing at the identical rates.

Not satisfied, I needed a couple of player comps to see if they showed any of the similar tendencies I see with Trout. Using his career wRC+ (the best all-inclusive offensive stat) of 169, I see Joey Votto, Miguel Cabrera, and David Ortiz in his range.

• Votto- 162
• Cabrera- 158
• Ortiz- 151

Now, lets move back to their OPS. I took the quad’s career monthly average and created a comparison chart. Keep in mind we aren’t concerned about the numbers, only the trends.

And, because I’m a cheapskate, I have to use Google Sheets to create this chart which will not let me customize the labels.

 So you have: Trout, Cabrera, Votto, Ortiz

Cabrera dips about the same time as Trout but his trend line is much more stable. Votto seems to get better as the season goes on, while Ortiz seems to match pretty well except for his minor improvement in Sept/Oct.

So, is Trout and anomaly? Not really; Oritz has very similar tendencies, but also played twice as long as Trout has. To say for certain they match will take more playing time for Trout. In any case, for a player as good (and highly regarded) as Trout, that drop-off is still vexing.

So, I moved on to check and see if his hitting tendencies change. We can view Trout’s career monthly contact figures to determine if there are any obvious signs that could give any sort of explanation for the drop. Things like putting more balls on the ground instead of the air, contact type such as line drives which end up as hits more often, any infield pop-ups indicating a change in swing path, and directional hitting in regards to beating any sort of “shift” to his hitting proclivities (e.g. more balls are finding well-positioned fielders).

A couple of things stand out. The first being his line drive rate; dropping from 23.6 to 19.2 from June to Oct. Secondly his hard contact; while not a huge difference, we can see less potential for barreled contact. Lastly, as you would expect, his BABIP and OPS drop sharply from June on; .395 to .333 and 1.036 to .919 respectively.

Perhaps looking into what causes line drive as well as his hard contact regression will provide the answer; are there changes in exit velocity and/or launch angle? As a reminder, we only have the data that is available through the Statcast era (2015-2017), so take this with a grain of salt; I’m not sure we can glean much from it but its worth looking because it covers roughly half of his career.

• June- 13.8 degrees/91.6 mph
• July- 13.9 degrees/91.4 mph
• August- 14.3 degrees/91.3 mph
• Sept/Oct- 14.7 degrees/91.1 mph

There are drops but the change is slow; launch angle changes by nearly one degree and exit velocity declines by .5 MPH. Can we claim that as the cause? It’s hard to say because as I noted, it only covers his last three years.

To reinforce the lack of apparent swing path/tendencies, observe the gif that goes in chronological order from June through Sept. Do you see any pronounced change, because I don’t?

Perhaps I’m thinking about this too hard. Perhaps I’m asking the wrong question(s). Perhaps its just the way it is; sometimes you eat the ball and sometimes the ball eats you. As I said before, this isn’t a judgment or doubt on Trout’s ability; when he’s at his worst, he’s still better than most of the other hitters in the league.

This post and others like it can be found over at The Junkball Daily.

There has been a lot of concern over Shohei Ohtani, and his rough spring training performance recently. Considering the hype he has come with, it is only natural for people to react as strongly as they have. Given his track record in the Nippon Professional Baseball League, and the presence of his impressive physical abilities, it is frustrating to see him struggle.

What must be considered more seriously, is the significance of the transition Ohtani is making. There has to be better recognition of his being human. He does not speak the language in a new country where customs, culture, and even life philosophies are often very different than back home in Japan. Based on the information available surrounding his appearances hitting, and pitching, it seems that this is simply a guy adjusting to his new life in the United States.

Also significant are the differences between the Baseballs,  such as the NPB ball that has higher seams, as well as the mounds in Japan that are softer than the contrastingly more solid mounds in Major League Baseball. These are factors affecting Ohtani, and his transition, that must be considered.

To begin, Ohtani’s pitching mechanics and delivery as a whole, seem to be somewhat different than they were in Japan. His approach and intentions have looked to be the same, but the execution has been slightly off. These gifs are slowed down to show the differences in Ohtani’s mechanics in Japan during the 2017 season, and 2018 in Spring training. Take a look at the location and execution of his fastball in said seasons:

2017 in Japan:

2018 Spring Training:

The key aspect to watch here is the contrast in the times it takes him to bring the ball to the plate. In real time, from the start of his throwing motion to when he releases the Baseball, Ohtani throws the ball in 1.8 seconds in 2017. In contrast, during his most recent Cactus League start in the second gif, he releases the ball in 2.2 seconds following the beginning of his throwing motion. Is he trying to reach back for more velocity this spring? His mechanics seem to indicate such a suggestion.

Looking at the freeze frame just after he releases the ball, Ohtani’s arm slot is higher on the left than on the right. Ohtani’s back foot is higher than it was previously. His whole body is slightly more upright, his arm is further behind his lower half, and he is not as balanced on the left in comparison with the frame on the right.

He does not drag his back foot on the mound anymore, the way he used to in Japan. This has caused him to have less balance in his delivery to the plate, which will be explained further later on. It is likely that Ohtani has no interest in sliding his foot across the harder mounds in the United States, which is clearly hindering the execution of his mechanics.

Furthermore, he is opening his body more in his pitching motion this spring, than he used to in Japan. Being more upright means that it’s harder for him to get on top of the Baseball, which makes it more difficult to keep the ball down in the zone when he wants to throw it there. Having his arm behind his lower half as seen on the left, is putting more unnecessary stress on it as well.

His balance point is off on the left, too – This makes it more difficult for him to sync his arm and lower half, as well as locate his pitches. Ohtani has better control of his body in the frame on the right, thus allowing him to have more fundamentally sound mechanics.

Often, when a pitcher is not fully finishing his delivery, he (Hopefully someday She!) is overthrowing. Ohtani has indicated that he feels hardly any anxiety surrounding his performance, however it seems that he may be pressing a little, based on the contrast between the mechanical execution of his delivery in Japan, and here in the United States.

The finish of the delivery with his back leg swinging up as it always does, is more pronounced and noticeably higher on the left than on the right. Given that the pitches were thrown to similar locations in both frames, this is likely an indicator of him putting more effort into his delivery:

His non-throwing arm and glove are much higher on the left, and his pitching arm is visible on the left while it is not on the right. His left arm is actually turned up-and-out in his pitching with the Angels, whereas in Japan his arm is folded inwards, and is much closer to his body. This is simply further evidence of his seemingly increased level of effort while pitching this spring.

There is also the possibility that he is hurt, as his change in mechanics would support, too. Maybe his elbow is not as healthy as it has been made out to be. Regardless of the cause, Ohtani is not himself at the moment.

What is interesting, is that the pace of his delivery has slowed, while also becoming more stiff and less explosive. The abilities are there for him to perform at a much higher level, and it would really help him to stay within himself more and execute the fundamental aspects of his delivery.

It is likely difficult for him to adjust to the mounds in the United States, which could be affecting his delivery and mechanics significantly. Above all else, it seems that this is a case of a 23 year-old acclimating to a completely new country and culture. He is learning countless new things about life here, and his poor performances this spring seem to be a reflection of the recent change in his life, more than anything else.

The most glaring issue in his pitching thus far, has been in his mechanics. The pitches he is throwing are objectively impressive, they just aren’t being placed where Ohtani wants them to be as a result of his delivery being out of sync. He is absolutely fine, and simply needs to make a few adjustments to get back to being the potentially dominant pitcher many envision.

Video in this piece was taken from MLB.com.

Let’s start off with a guessing game. Below are two players. Try to tell who they are.

So, who are they?

Maybe the title of this post helped you figure it out. They’re both Jonathan Lucroy. Player A is Lucroy in 2016, when he was worth more than four wins. Player B is him in 2017 when he was barely worth one win. But these two lines represent the same player in name only. In 2016 Lucroy was the most valuable catcher in the game. And then last year, he was the fourth-worst.

Moving down the chart above, one could reasonably tell Lucroy’s story. Maybe the difference on balls in play is what drove him from about 40% above league average at the plate to about 10% below league average. But that wasn’t just bad luck; his contact numbers probably justify the drop. Driving the ball with less authority means hitting more playable dinkers. That creates lower BABIP and wOBA. It’s also not going to help if you hit an additional 16% grounders from one year to the next, which Lucroy did, because, those playable dinkers are the worst playable dinkers a hitter could generate.

In some sense, catchers aren’t supposed to be as good as Lucroy has been in the past. Expecting him to stay that good forever would be silly. But so would expecting him to fall off the edge of a flat earth into the same relative nothingness as Martin Maldonado. Jeff Sullivan broke down Lucroy when he was traded to the Rockies last season and found that in addition to his offensive stats cratering, so had his previously excellent framing numbers. He went from being one of the game’s very best at stealing strikes to being one of its very worst. So maybe Father Time had simply claimed eminent domain instead of moving next door. 

The numbers bear out Lucroy’s fall as much as numbers can. But the same thing that makes them so endearing — their blindness — sometimes means they still aren’t telling the whole story. Below are two gifs. On top is Lucroy as a Brewer in 2016, driving a JC Ramirez fastball up the middle. Below is Lucroy as a Rockie in 2017, pulling off of a Ross Stripling slider.

Above, the Angels defense was presumably playing at double play depths, making a play up the middle more accessible, if still difficult. Thought it was a grounder from Lucroy, it was a screamer, coming off the bat at 100.7 mph (he averaged 87.6 in 2016). Below, Lucroy forced Corey Seager to make a bit of a play, but Seager was able to because the ball only came off Lucroy’s bat at 88.4 mph (he only averaged 85.1 last season). Both pitches were in the middle third of the plate. The swings are similar enough. But check out the stills below as the ball arrives at the plate.e.

In this picture, from when he was still a Brewer, Lucroy is very much in control. He’s square, and his body is getting ready to move together. All the MSPaint lines are moving in the same direction, showing that his kinetic chain is tuned up. That basically means his big muscles were ready to transfer power to his little muscles. The next frame shows it stayed that way. The swing is coming from his center of mass. Sure, he grounded out, but he was together. Groundouts happen.

But look at this still, from when Lucroy was a Rockie last year, and good grief. His body is moving in so many directions it looks like it’s in a traffic jam. His hands are going down and away, his hips are pulling in the other direction, and his legs are digging directly ahead. The kinetic chain is nowhere to be found, and Lucroy’s one body is effectively acting in three independent manners. Doing that on a regular basis would go a long way toward explaining his sudden inability to drive the ball, and how he lost 2.5 mph of exit velocity on average per batted ball. 

Lucroy’s legs being hurt, but not enough to sideline him to ensure they’re healed, could explain an inability to rely on his core to support his kinetic chain. However, per Statcast, his sprint times were nearly identical between 2016 and 2017. In fact, he was actually .2 seconds faster last year than the year before. But that’s only his legs. Maybe he had an issue with his core — a set of big muscles —  that kept his swing from staying in sync and glove from reacting as well when framing.

Baseball Savant only has so much video to examine. Lucroy’s broken kinetic chain in 2017 appears to be pretty consistent, though. And sure, these were different pitches, from different pitchers, with presumably different camera angles. I can’t tell you the ball was at the exact same distance from Lucroy in each instance. But a nagging injury influencing a mechanical flaw isn’t entirely implausible, even if speculative.

If Lucroy can smooth out his mechanics and is even half of what he used to be, that’s still twice as much as he was last year. Or maybe he did just fall off a cliff. But at one year and 6.5 million, it’s easy to understand why the A’s would want to find out. 

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Mystery player data from FanGraphs. Gifs made with Giphy; videos from Statcast.

Now that most rosters have been finalized ahead of opening day, there can be more specific speculation as to how certain groups of players on teams will perform.

As the use of bullpens becomes more significant in baseball, it is increasingly important to consider their performance. The Yankee bullpen is looking fantastic, which is fairly obvious to most at this point in time. A bullpen that is especially intriguing heading into this season is that of the Padres. While the team is not expected to contend this season, their bullpen is lining up to be quite unique.

Outside of Brad Hand, this is a group of relievers hardly anyone has ever heard of. Either because they simply have not played in the Major Leagues at all prior to this year, or have had mediocre performances in their time at the Major League level, these guys seem pretty lackluster to the average person.

This begs the question: Could the Padres have a trio of relievers similarly dominant to that of the Yankees’ Aroldis Chapman, David Robertson, and Dellin Betances? The idea is ambitious, however, the trio of Brad Hand, Kazuhisa Makita, and Kirby Yates have shown themselves to have the potential to be just as good this season. These three are players who have immense potential as relievers, whose variety of arm angles, and styles of pitching could be set to give opposing hitters fits this summer.

The bullpen is obviously led by Brad Hand, who will be the Closer for the Padres – What makes him unique is that he throws a lot of innings, and truly doesn’t care whether he’s pitching the ninth, or the earlier innings of a game. This means he can be used in the most high-leverage situation of a game, which is the ideal way for relievers to be used, a-la-Andrew Miller in the 2016 postseason.

Padres manager Andy Green said of Hand: “I’ve never been around a pitcher that takes the ball as willingly and as often as he does.” Hand pitched 79.1 innings for the team in 2017 – 6th most among all relievers in Baseball and first among Closers. With 11.8 K/9 in that many innings, take a look at the slider that generated a 21.2% whiff rate in 2017:

He didn’t locate this slider very well, but even when left up in the zone, the pitch is objectively good enough that it can still usually generate whiffs.

New Japanese pitcher Kazuhisa Makita is also on board with the Padres, who was signed from the Saitama Seibu Lions of NPB. A submariner who releases the baseball six inches off the dirt, Makita is arguably the most interesting reliever in the Major Leagues this year. His fastball has topped out around 81 mph this spring, and he also throws a curveball that has been clocked as slowly as 52 mph, and usually sits 56-59 mph.

It is unprecedented for a pitcher to throw at such a lower velocity than is traditional in the Major Leagues, though his 2.83 career ERA in the NPB suggests he is a very capable pitcher. His pitches and pitching style are so unique, that watching them gives one a better understanding of his pitching than words could ever describe.

He’s especially adept at painting the outside corner:

It’s certainly a very different arm angle, and he looks to have pretty good command of his pitches.

Makita seems to often throw his fastball on the outside corner more than anywhere else, based on his pitching style in his appearances this spring.

Though Makita is legitimately unafraid of throwing his pitches to any part of the plate, notably pitching up in the zone at times as he does here:

It will be especially interesting to see if Makita generates a ton of pop-ups from hitters in front of, and under his often 81 mph Fastball in 2018.

What is even more fun, is Makita’s curveball, because of how slow it is. It has been described as “Bugs Bunny” and “Eephus Curve” among other names thus far. Thus far though, the pitch has played as well as any other pitchers’ Curveball.

Here is his curveball:

As far as how his stuff will translate to success in the Major Leagues, the Padres have been liberal in allowing Makita to pitch his own style. Backup catcher A.J. Ellis made echoed this sentiment nicely: “we just want to let that style translate here as opposed to making him fit into what we think he should be.” Makita is unlike any pitcher the League has seen in years, so it is encouraging that the team will give him the independence to continue to attack hitters as uniquely as he did in Japan.

Amid all the power relievers looking to often whiz the ball past hitters with velocity, Makita has the chance to finesse his way to success in the big leagues. In an era in which hitters continue to counter power pitching with higher launch angles, and fly-ball swings, Makita’s pitches that rise on hitters will require legitimate adjustments from them. He probably won’t strike out a lot of hitters, though he figures to be a guy who will generate a lot of weak contact.

There is no standard for this kind of a pitcher in the modern era throwing at such a low velocity, and maybe he just won’t throw hard enough to ever be very good. However, if his approach to pitching is successful, the Padres will have found a truly rare kind of dominant reliever.

Another member of the bullpen is Kirby Yates, who almost struck out 14 batters per nine innings last season. His 13.98 K/9 was 5th best among qualified Major League relievers, behind guys including Kenley Jansen, Dellin Betances, and Craig Kimbrel. Yates upped his Split-Change usage to 14.2% in August, and 25.6% in September, which helped him to a 14.6% K/9 rate in those months. He gave up 17 hits during that time, yet not a single one of them was on a changeup, according to Baseball Savant. His split-change had a 22% whiff rate last season, easily being the best swing-and-miss pitch in his repertoire. Here is the split-change in action this spring:

He also throws a high spin-rate fastball often up in the zone, which from his shorter arm slot was hard for hitters to make solid contact on last season. Yates ranked third in swinging strike rate, at 17.4% –  Among relievers who threw at least 50 innings last season, behind only Craig Kimbrel, and Kenley Jansen. With the increase in split-change usage, Yates could potentially take the next step as a reliever, and become even better than he was last season. Thus far, the results have been promising from a guy who was claimed off waivers from the Angels in 2017.

The three pitchers explored above, may not be likely to have the success they are sort of touted to have, as this article indicates. Especially in the case of Makita and Yates, people are not expecting them to be as good or comparable to Chapman, Robertson, and Betances. They probably aren’t going to be a three-headed monster, as the Padres hope.

Brad Hand is legitimately talented and should be recognized the way the members of the Yankees trio are. The point is that the other two pitchers have shown flashes of brilliance, in the case of Makita because of his unique style of pitching. Yates got hitters to swing and whiff at a level nearly as high as Craig Kimbrel, and Kenley Jansen.

Being a smaller market team, the Padres have to be more careful with their money than a team like the Yankees, who signed Robertson and Chapman to hefty free agent deals. Quietly San Diego might have found their own funky three-headed monster to anchor the late innings of their games this season. They’ve acquired and signed the aforementioned three relievers for a combined total of $7,145,833 in 2018 – The Yankees trio, in contrast, is due $38,100,000 in 2018 salaries according to Spotrac.

The team will never have the financial might of the Yankees, but they have shown a creative way to build a bullpen, that will be interesting to watch this season. Reliever performance is volatile, and the sentiment that these guys are nothing more than flashes in the pan is perfectly legitimate. What they have is a chance to be excellent relievers, and that chance is worth examining.

All Data used in the article was taken from MLB.com, Baseball Savant, Spotrac, and Brooks Baseball.

The tools hadn’t quite come together for Eddie Rosario until last year. Through his first two seasons, he had a penchant to swing often and at anything. While his power still made appearances, his overall line was diminished by his lack of selectivity at the plate, which resulted in far too many Ks compared to his bottom-of-the-barrel walk rate. In 2017, hitting coach James Rowson made note of Rosario’s focus on becoming an “all-around hitter,” and evidently, that had him heading in the right direction.

Part of becoming that kind of all-around hitter had to be closing the gap between his BB% and K%. After posting very poor BB% of 3.2% and 3.4% in his first couple seasons, Rosario made the jump to 5.9% last year and coupled that with a hefty decrease in Ks as well — from around 25% to 18.0%. And this was hardly a fluke. Rosario has swung less and less over his three seasons in the majors, and that decrease in Swing% has been due almost entirely to a decrease in O-Swing%.

He’s seen fewer first-pitch strikes whether by chance, by choice, or by pitchers respecting his talent a bit more, but regardless, what is most notable is his precipitous drop in O-Swing% and SwStr% with a steady Z-Swing%. Together, these stats suggest that Rosario made a distinct effort to recognize and lay off pitches he can’t do much with. While he has somewhat of a reputation for being a bad-ball hitter, Rosario seemed more committed to finding “his pitch” to swing at in 2017. Career highs in nearly every offensive category you can think of seem to set Rosario up for another fine year, but the sustainability of this progress relies on him leaving his old tendencies in the past.

With his new approach, Rosario was able to put his sneaky raw power on display. Per Baseball Savant, his xwOBA on all types of batted balls were more or less in line with his career norms. Only his flyball wOBA (.560) outpaced its xwOBA (.411) by a good margin. It’s fair to assume this means there is some regression baked in here, but in reviewing more than a handful of highlights, I noticed something particularly interesting.

In 2017, Rosario seemed to handle pitches up in the zone far better than he ever had previously. Clip after clip showed Rosario slamming up-and-away pitches to left field and handling pretty much anything else elevated. Referencing the gameday zones shown below, we can see just how well Rosario has hit elevated pitches over the years.

Given that we’re interested in how sustainable Rosario’s uptick in power is, let’s take a look at his flyball xwOBA in zones 1, 2, 3, 11, and 12.

Combining these zones, we can see the overall increase in xwOBA, and for good measure, I’ll lump his line drives from those zones in as well.

Whether the scope of this analysis is too narrow is up to the reader, but at the very least, the preceding data confirms my suspicions. The jump in xwOBA is a translation of exit velocity increases and more optimal launch angles, indicating that Rosario put much better swings on elevated pitches last year, and he was rightfully rewarded with by far the best power numbers of his career.

Checking out some Swing% heatmaps, we could infer why he had so much success on high-balls last year. The following heat maps are in order from 2015 to 2017.

Obviously, Rosario was quite the free swinger in 2015, but he quickly shied away from the outside part of the plate the following year. Perhaps focusing on the inside edge more wasn’t quite the remedy he was after, yet it seemed to represent a step in the right direction. He was more patient on outside pitches, and that trend expanded into greater selectivity more so than passivity in 2017 where he opened up those middle-away zones a little and became even more reluctant to offer at up-and-outside pitches.

Clearly, something was up with the way Rosario approached his at-bats. And with this newfound approach, he made more contact on both outside and elevated pitches.

Following the logic that if he can find “his pitch,” he can make more frequent, quality contact, it seems that better judgment around the edges of the zone over the past two years has started to transform Rosario’s approach from purely aggressive to selective aggressive. We know he has the power to muscle the ball around a bit, and we know his bat-to-ball skill is great too; his success is largely just a matter of swinging at the right pitches instead of swinging at everything. Rosario wanted to be more of all-around hitter, and that’s exactly what he did.

A slow start to spring training (only 7 games and 20 PA so far) might have him showing some rust early on this season, but if he can maintain his approach, Rosario can sustain his above-average offensive performance in 2018. Actually, he must maintain this approach to remain productive. With large steps forward in BB%, K%, and HR/FB% namely, he demonstrated a clear departure from his earlier days, but if he regresses in those areas, he could dip below 100 wRC+ again.

In fact, if we take his 2017 BB% from 5.9% down to 4.5%, his K% from 18.0% up to 21.2% (league average), and his HR/FB from 16.4% down to 13.8% (league average), we get the following 2017 output for Rosario:

Veritable skills don’t evaporate overnight, and you don’t massively improve your plate discipline stats by accident so I wouldn’t expect to see such a steep decline in production from Rosario in 2018, but it’s important to note that those modified rate stats would still represent career-bests for him. This “What If?” stat line simply highlights how important maintaining his 2017 approach will be for him this year. There is plenty potential for Rosario to post another .800+ OPS season as a selective, high-ball hitter, but his track record suggests the bottom could fall out if pitchers can effectively force him out of this new comfort zone.

In July of 2013, Jose Altuve agreed to a four-year contract extension with two club options for the 2018 and 2019 seasons that guaranteed $12.5 million and a $750,000 signing bonus. Now that the Astros have picked up the club option at $6 million for the 2018 season and will pick up the club option at $6.5 million for the 2019 season, the deal will end up totaling 6 years for $25.075 million (this figure includes $75,000 accrued in incentives). What is important to note about this extension is that the deal bought out all three of Altuve’s arbitration eligible years (2015-2017) at $2.5, $3.5, and $4.5 million respectively and through the club options, controls his first two years of free agency.

In 2013, Altuve was following a 2012 All-Star campaign where he slashed .290/.340/.740. However, at the time the deal was signed on July 13, 2013, Altuve had seemed to regress slightly hitting .280/.317/.671 through 86 games. Following the 2013 season, Altuve’s stock soared, culminating in an MVP 2017 when he led the majors with an 8.3 WAR.

(Image from sportingnews.com)

Looking back on this contract, the deal obviously resulted in a large team surplus; however, contracts like this have had mixed results in the past (think Allen Craig) so I must stress that the point of this article is not to bash Altuve for signing the deal or laud Jeff Luhnow and the Astros for getting this deal done when they did. The point of this article is, if we hold Altuve’s past performance constant, had Altuve not signed this extension and instead had gone the more traditional route of going through three years of arbitration then hitting free agency, how much could he have expected to make along the way? Although I could see this article going in many different directions, such as trying to assess the level of risk Altuve signed away in July of 2013 or, in a similar way, trying to quantify the amount of the risk the Astros took on by signing the deal (this risk is definitely magnified due to the fact they started the 2013 season with a payroll of just $22 million), I believe knowing what transpired over the last 6 years, calculating the surplus on this deal is that most interesting way to proceed.

For the purpose of this article, I am assuming that Altuve worked on one-year contracts through the 2017 season when he would have hit free agency. I am also assuming that during each arbitration year, any of the three possible arbitration outcomes (player victory, team victory, or prior settlement before a hearing) could have occurred. To assist in keeping track of the many numbers presented in the remainder of this article, I have prepared the following table:

2013/2014 Offseason

Since Altuve would have been under team control, 2014 is the easiest season to estimate surplus and was clearly the most player-friendly year for Altuve. During 2014, Altuve’s salary jumped from the $510,000 he most likely would have received under team control to a $1.25 million base salary plus a $750,000 signing bonus and $25,000 in incentives. Hence, during the 2014 season, Altuve saw approximately $1.515 million dollars in surplus on this deal. For a player under team control, this number is pretty much unheard of, however, after 2014 is where the deal’s problems started.

2014/2015 Offseason

The 2014 season was clearly a breakout campaign for Altuve who hit .341/.377/.830 with 56 stolen bases and 225 hits. Since we are talking about his first arbitration-eligible offseason, it is important to keep in mind that Altuve’s .341 batting average and 225 hits both led the league. These more traditional statistics may not impress the sabermetrically savvy readers of FanGraphs, but the truth of the matter is that arbitration salaries are still very much reliant on these traditional metrics.

In the 2014/2015 offseason the largest contracts awarded to hitters who were arbitration eligible for the first time were Chris Carter ($4.175 million), Trevor Plouffe ($4.8 million), and Dayan Viciedo ($4.4 million; however, Viciedo was released at the end of Spring Training of 2015). None of these players are great comps for Altuve who only hit 7 home runs in 2014; however, they clearly set the market for top first-time arbitration eligible hitters. While someone like Carter may have hit 37 home runs and used this traditional measure of player value to push his deal up, Altuve did smack 47 doubles during the 2014 campaign and actually had an OPS that was 31 points higher than Carter’s (.830 vs. .799). I think a fair claim to make from this is that both sides would have seen tremendous value from Altuve and my estimate of a $5.0 million salary for a first-time arbitration eligible player is fair. This gives the Astros $2.475 million in surplus on the 2015 contract for Altuve who in reality received $2.5 million and $25,000 in awarded incentives. This changes the tide and brings the total surplus of the contract through 2015 at $960,000 in favor of the Astros.

2015/2016 Offseason

In 2015 Altuve was named to his third All-Star team and continued to impress, leading the league in hits and stolen bases for the second year in a row on his way to finishing in the top ten in MVP voting and winning a Gold Glove Award at second base. During the second year of arbitration salaries tend to jump up a lot, so after backing up his 2014 campaign with an even stronger 2015 season, a fair estimate for his 2016 salary is $11 million. Now, since Altuve ended up earning $3.525 million in 2016, assuming the $11 million salary is correct, the Astros’ surplus in 2016 was $7.475 million, making the total surplus of the deal through 2016 $8.435 million in favor of the Astros.

2016/2017 Offseason

I’m sure this will come as no surprise that Altuve backed up his All-Star 2015 campaign by leading the league in batting, increasing his home run total to 24, and finishing third in 2016 MVP voting. These are exactly the type of numbers that jump out of a presentation to an arbiter and due to the precedent of great value placed on high impact position players in their third year of arbitration, it is fair to assume that the 2016/2017 market would have been high on Altuve. Further evidence of this fact can be found in the 2017/2018 market that saw Josh Donaldson set the arbitration record by reaching a 2018 salary of $23 million. In addition, Bryce Harper settled on a 2018 salary of $21.625 million in May of 2017 after coming off a massive step back in production from 2015 to 2016 that saw him hit 18 fewer home runs and his on-base percentage to drop 87 points (Harper did rebound strongly during the beginning of 2017 right before this deal was signed). For these reasons, it is safe to assume that Altuve could easily have expected a 2017 salary of $20 million, leaving $15.5 million in team surplus and totaling $23.935 million in the deal.

2017/2018 Offseason: Free Agency!

Finally, a lot has been made over the free agent market this year, but the fact of the matter is that this past offseason Altuve would have been a 27-year-old reigning AL MVP hitting free agency. If the 5 year 151 million dollar extension he signed yesterday is any indication of the deal he would have received, I think 8 years at $225 million paying $23 million in 2018 and $25 million in 2019 is a conservative estimate. Based solely off this past year’s market, people may scoff at the length and dollar value of this deal, but the comparison of what Altuve’s situation would have been to the situations of this year’s free agent class are not strong due to the fact that the three main reasons this class struggled, do not pertain to Altuve. The first reason this past year’s free agent class struggled is that teams now have a better understanding of how players age and are not offering long contracts to players hitting free agency at 29 or 30 years old anymore. The second reason is that not enough teams are trying to compete for a playoff spot in 2018 due to the many rebuilds that are taking place. Because of this fact, there were fewer teams in the market submitting bids and driving up prices. The third reason is that lower WAR players who excel at putting up big numbers in traditional statistics like home runs (i.e Mike Moustakas) are finally being more fairly valued.

Being one of top players in the league at just 27 years old Altuve would have faced none of these problems even if only one team (say Milwaukee) had competed with the reigning World Champion Houston Astros to sign Altuve. The presence of just one other team in the market would have been enough to drive up the price making the Astros not afraid to pull the trigger on this big deal.

For the purpose of this article, the only two years we are worried about are the first two years (2018-2019), which are covered under Altuve’s actual contract at $6 million and $6.5 million. Thus, the Astros will receive $17,000,000 in surplus in 2018 and $18,500,000 in surplus in 2019, totaling $59,435,000 in surplus during the length of this 6-year contract. Talk about a team friendly deal!

(Image from clickhole.com)

Lastly, a quick note on what transpired yesterday. In my opinion, Altuve signing his second extension is a double down on the risk-averse behavior he first exhibited in 2013. Had he waited the two years until his current deal expired and hit free agency at age 29, teams once again may have shown the pattern of this past offseason and may not have been willing to give a 29-year-old more than a 5-year deal. Thus, Altuve’s contract way back in 2013 may have dealt his hand yesterday and forced him to sign this contract. The 2013 team friendly deal once again works perfectly for the Astros who were able to extend Altuve for five years while getting to take him off the books by his age 34 season.

The details on player contracts were taken from spotrac.com.

Tucker Barnhart has been an invaluable defensive catcher for the Reds recently, and his impressive 2017 season earned him a Gold Glove. After all, he had a .999 fielding percentage in 2017! He truly was a really important part of the Reds team last season and should be commended for his efforts.

Though there was another catcher last season, who was better than Barnhart. The player who was more impressive last season, who did not receive sufficient recognition for his efforts, is Austin Hedges. He took over the starting catching job for the Padres last season, and despite having a 71 wRC+, the team stuck with him behind the plate for the entirety of the season. The team is rebuilding, but traditionally when a player is producing so poorly on offense, they do not continue to receive everyday playing time. Unless they are so talented on defense, that it simply doesn’t really matter that they don’t hit very well. This is exactly the reason for Austin Hedges taking over the starting catcher role in San Diego last year.

Hedges should have won the Gold Glove at catcher last season, though obviously the reasoning behind him being superior to Barnhart must be explained. These are the likely reasons why Barnhart won the Gold Glove, and why they are flawed in being able to truly represent his individual performance as a catcher:

1. .999 Fielding Percentage – This hinges too significantly upon the official scorer’s rulings. Evidently Barnhart got very lucky this season in terms of  being held culpable for defensive miscues by the official scorers.
2. 44% Caught Stealing Percentage – Pitchers are much more significant to this statistic than people are often aware of. If a pitcher cannot hold runners on or is slow in his delivery of pitches to the plate, the catcher’s chance of throwing runners out can sometimes be eliminated altogether.

Miguel Montero echoed this sentiment perfectly in June last season, and despite his words resulting in his being released by the Cubs, it nonetheless holds true: “It really sucked because the stolen bases go to me. And when you really look at it, the pitcher doesn’t give me any time.”

Furthermore, Blue Jays outfielder Anthony Gose addressed base stealing, saying “It has nothing to do with the catcher,” and that “It’s on the pitcher and his times.” While this statement may be taking things too far, the idea here is that the pitcher is more significant to limiting baserunners than people often realize. As far as this concept is related to Barnhart and Hedges, the point is that Barnhart was simply helped out more by his pitchers, who were faster at pitching to the plate than the Padre pitchers Hedges was handling.

Barnhart also led the league in runners caught stealing, with 32, however, this statistic is flawed for the same reasons as Caught Stealing Percentage. Hedges’ fielding percentage was .990, and he had a 37% Caught Stealing percentage. Focusing on these simple statistics is not sufficient for evaluating catcher defense, which should be obvious in the context of how they were debunked earlier in the article. There are actually more advanced, as well as simple measurements that both indicate Hedges’ superiority over all other catchers in baseball defensively.

First of all, looking at the Baseball Prospectus defensive catcher data, reveals that Hedges lead the league in 2017 in multiple statistics:

Leading the league in Fielding Runs Above Average, and Adjusted Fielding Runs Above Average, is no small feat. Clearly, Hedges has a special defensive ability, that has not seemed to be recognized sufficiently. As far as the data above is concerned, he is a step ahead of even the second-best defensive catcher in the Major Leagues last season.

Recently Statcast released public data measuring catcher pop times, and Hedges topped the list in average pop time:

Also significant here is the fact that many catchers’ pop times on plays that resulted in runners being caught stealing, were slower than their average pop times. This confirms the earlier point that caught stealing statistics are influenced by the pitcher’s ability to get the ball to the plate quickly or not. Barnhart checks in at 22nd on the list of catcher pop times, recording pop times of 2 seconds flat across all three times being measured in the table above. Yet he led the league in runners caught stealing, which illustrates the effects of pitchers and obviously baserunners, on the caught stealing percentages of catchers. Hedges was objectively the fastest at getting the ball to second base last season among Major League catchers, which is yet another reason for his being the premier defensive catcher in Baseball.

Borrowing from Travis Sawchik’s piece last June, he says this regarding Pitchers and Catchers handling baserunners:

“Generally speaking, pitchers with times of 1.3 seconds and quicker to home are going to slow the run game, while anything above 1.5 seconds is going to entice teams to run. As such, a battery is generally looking to record a total time of 3.3 seconds or less. That should prevent most baserunners from stealing. Between 3.3 and 3.5 seconds is average. Above 3.5 seconds is likely to be a problem.”

Given that Hedges’ average pop time is 1.89 seconds, Padre pitchers can actually release the ball in 1.41 seconds to home plate, for the batteries to record a total time of 3.3 seconds. What is special about Hedges, is that he actually helps compensate for pitchers who are slow to the plate, because his release is lightning quick, and his throwing arm is so accurate. Watch him make up for Tyson Ross’ 1.59 second time in his pitch to the plate, and throw out Elvis Andrus with a pop time of 1.82 seconds:

Ross threw a slider at 85 mph, yet Hedges was still able to throw out the runner. Watch Jedd Gyorko’s glove here – He does not move it at all to catch the throw. It was not only lightning fast, but also a near-perfectly accurate throw. There are no catchers in Baseball who would have made that play, outside of Austin Hedges. The times of Ross and Hedges are self-timed by the writer of this article, and the average times were 1.59 and 1.82, though if one wants to they can time it themselves – The times will be quite similar to the numbers above.

Even more impressive than this play, however, was when Hedges threw out Billy Hamilton from his knees this past August. His Pitcher Luis Perdomo threw a low slider in 1.42 seconds to the plate, and Hedges actually has a pop time of 1.72 on this play to just get Hamilton. He was called safe initially but was determined to be out after replay review. Hedges didn’t even make a standing throw!

Hedges combined with Ross for a total time of 3.41 seconds, and with Perdomo for a time of 3.14 seconds. Both times making up for a pitcher who was slow in delivering his pitch to the plate.

Statistical analysis is the basis of the article, yet at times it really is valuable to just watch a player in action, in order to truly understand what makes him talented. In the case of Hedges, there are plays he makes as a catcher that others at his position simply can’t make.

Watch Hedges reach for a low and-in pitch, then quickly get out of the crouch and run in the opposite direction to make an incredible play here:

The Padres pitchers appreciate the effort, and ability Hedges brings to the table every game he plays, as Padre closer Brad Hand said very well:

“He does his homework. All the pitchers here have good trust in him. That’s good to see. He’s a young catcher, and you don’t really see that too often, a rookie catcher gaining that kind of trust from his pitching staff right out from the get-go. That’s a credit to him and the hard work he puts in.”

There are other talented defensive catchers in Baseball, yet there are none at the level of Austin Hedges. He knows how to handle the pitching staff, frames pitches as well as any catcher, blocks balls in the dirt with the best of them, and has a lightning quick release to throw out runners. The data presented earlier backs all of those claims. And the gifs help one visualize the true wonder in his defensive capabilities. The next time someone asks about the best defensive catcher in Baseball, the answer is now Austin Hedges.

Data used in this article was taken from Baseball Prospectus, Fangraphs, Statcast, and Video from MLB.com