Archive for Starling Marte

Each baseball fan has a set of specific events throughout time they remember fondly. Some exist in said group because of their emotional impact on your fandom. Others remain on the peripheral of importance because of a random characteristic that still stands out.

Those peripheral events, for me, are often those I’ve seen on live television. I don’t think of these events often, nor do I keep a record of them, or have some strict guideline for what sticks in my head, but when a story in the present day sparks my memory, a picture often emerges. My teenage years watching baseball were done one of two ways: sitting on the ground in front of my laptop with MLB.tv fading in-and-out, or scouring local stations for a good matchup. These two primary settings allowed for many one-off memories to accumulate.

When I began to think about Pittsburgh Pirates’ outfielder Starling Marte — due to this offseason’s stagnation — I thought back to the first pitch he saw in his major-league career. Just over five years ago, 23-year-old Starling Marte took the first pitch Dallas Keuchel threw on July 26 out of Minute Maid Park. The rarity of that event — a prospect’s debut, leading off a game, first-pitch home run — forces me to remember that bomb whenever Marte steps into a batter’s box. Because I happened to see it live, that memory has stuck.

For the wider population of fans, what now supersedes that milestone is Marte’s run-in with performance-enhancing drugs.  Suspended for 80 games during the 2017 season, this mistake by Marte will couple itself with any other success he has.

Predicting how Marte would fare upon his return during this layoff in 2017 raised some interesting, PED-related questions. Would his power drop? Would his speed deteriorate? What about his overall durability?

Nestled within all those asks is what exactly the effect of PEDs on an athlete’s body is after stopping use. Much more intriguing is this question: does any use at all matter as much as stopping that use? In other words, do the effects of PED use in the first place help prolong success?

I mention this because Marte joins Dee Gordon as the more prominent speed-first users of prohibited substances in the recent years. The drugs Gordon and Marte took were different from my understanding — nandrolone versus a stacked dose with clostebol — but maybe some intrigue exists in the stats before and after use?

The overall comparison doesn’t show us much. Even in what I highlighted with darkened gridlines — slugging percentage and wRC+ — has more noise within it than signal. Two main questions exist, among many others, that don’t have answers.

• What portion of the “before” PED use window contains tainted statistics?
• What portion of the drop is due specifically to the lack of steroids in the body?

But perhaps our intentions with those questions are incorrect. Think back to the question I asked before showing this dataset: do the effects of PED use in the first place help prolong success?

What if the muscle memory and learning that takes place while a player is under the influence of the drug extends beyond the window where a player can run a positive test?

With some high-level Googling, I found one instance where this idea might be a reasonable rabbit hole to dig into (BBC News). Certainty around this topic, however, is impossible, given all the variables. Some selection bias brings us the average fan to Nelson Cruz and Bartolo Colon as examples of this idea. But assuming two players with demonstrable skills outside of steroid use represent a wider population is not an appropriate assumption. We’re left in limbo regarding how much one positive test early on can affect one’s long-term production.

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Let’s leave the uncertainty around long-term effects of Marte’s steroid use alone for now and focus on what has happened in Marte’s career.

The attribute his value has been tied to for most of his career, like Dee Gordon, is speed. But for Marte, age-induced deterioration of that attribute may be underway as he heads into his 29-year-old season with the Pirates.

It wasn’t too long ago we were concerned about the viability of McCutchen’s long-term impact, yet speed has a much greater weight on the impact of Marte as a player than McCutchen. I remain perplexed as to how Marte intends to turn around this decline in sprint speed as he starts to fall away from elite towards the 27.0 feet-per-second average the standard MLB player possesses.

Marte can still produce with his bat, but after seeing this decrease in peak sprint speed, I wonder if he becomes less reliant on his wheels to buoy his BABIP and the resulting average he’ll post. The Pirates’ outfielder might need to adjust.

To counteract this potential speed regression, Marte might want to adjust back to his approach from 2015, where he popped 19 home runs.

What we do know from that year presides in his tendency to pull the ball above his career average, which resulted in the majority of his home runs landing somewhere near the corner in a park’s left-field seats. He was also more aggressive than he had ever been in his career in 2015, but since, Marte has reverted to a contact-based approach, raising his zone-contact rate by two percent and overall contact rate by three percent.

With all this said, the form and substance of Marte’s swing has been largely the same since the early days of his career. Each of the four videos embedded within the GIF below are base hits to left field for Marte. Instead of focusing on the moments just before contact — where most hitters look identical — focus on his pre-pitch rhythm and timing.

Marte has a unique pulse when it comes to the timing mechanism in his hands, as his bat moves towards the first-base line twice prior to his load. The speed at which he executes this varies slightly based on the pitch, but his front foot’s inward turn and hip rotation remain unaltered from this selection of swing in our four-year sample.

My worry is that pushing Marte towards the 2015 version of himself, with pull-happy tendencies and a little bit more aggression, may not lead to the power result we want. With his speed possibly deteriorating, the balls he rolls over on with his sights set on the bleachers will turn into hits less often. We might want Marte to trade some of his contact for power, but my inclination is that such a trade, at present, is not one-for-one and would result in a net-negative effect.

This contact approach of Marte’s may be the new normal, and I remain worried about what the ceiling of productivity can be if he doesn’t find a second wind in the speed department. Marte can still be an asset to the Pirates, and isn’t a financial burden, but it might be too late to expect 2015’s power-speed combo that had the chance to nudge Marte towards the elite bracket of outfielders in baseball.

Bill Brink of Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that Marte is making up his lost at-bats in the Dominican Winter League for Leones del Escogido. The results, so far, in a small sample have not been great:

.197/.244/.316 in 76 at-bats, with a 21:3 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Marte’s evolution as a hitter will become clearer as our post-PED sample size increases. The Pirates’ outfield, once considered the best in baseball with McCutchen, Marte, and Polanco, now finds itself in a pickle, especially if Cutch is traded, Marte’s speed continues to trend south, and Polanco can’t stay healthy.

This article originally appeared on the Pirates blog Bucco’s Cove.

“Speed kills.” –Al Davis

Starling Marte is having a hell of a season stealing bases and this is one of the things that should have propelled him into the All Star Game without needing the stupid final vote. He is the top baserunner in the NL this year, he’s second in the league with 25 stolen bases, and he has a better percentage than the leader Jonathan Villar.

A recent game against the Cardinals gave a strong piece of evidence of Marte’s preternatural baserunning ability when he stole second base with Carlos Martinez pitching in the sixth inning:

The Pirates’ announcers commented on the fact that people very rarely steal off of Martinez. I went to look at the numbers: in 399 2/3 innings since entering MLB, Martinez has yielded only 10 stolen bases in 19 attempts. I think the 19 attempts is really indicative of his abilities to control the running game; people just don’t even try to run on Carlos Martinez. Martinez ranks 36th among all pitchers in SB/IP who have thrown at least 200 innings since 2013, which is decent. However, if we limit ourselves to looking at only righty starters over this time period (since it is much harder to steal against lefties and game circumstances are a bit different between starters and relievers), Martinez ranks 13th among pitchers with the same innings restrictions. (I’m not including tables for all of these stats, but if you want to see for yourself, mosey on over to the Baseball Reference Play Index, where all of this data comes from.)

Martinez has really shut down the running game since becoming a full-time starter in 2015, however. Over that time period, he ranks fourth among all pitchers (lefty, righty, starter, and reliever alike) having at least 250 innings in SB/IP, yielding only four SB in nine attempts over 282 innings.

(Note: If you bump this down to 150 innings to get more relievers on the list, Martinez is still in the top 10 for SB/IP.)

Of the four pitchers ahead of him in the table, two are lefties. (Sidebar: How the hell is R.A. Dickey on this list given the fact that he throws a knuckleball? It seems like it should be really easy to steal on him given that.) Martinez is similarly ranked (fifth) if you look at SB/Total Baserunners over the same period; in short, Martinez is really, really good at controlling the running game.

Furthermore, reigning eight-time Gold Glove winner Yadier Molina was behind the dish attempting to throw Marte out. Molina ranks first among all catchers since 2002 in his ability to control the running game by the defensive metric rSB. Obviously Martinez’s ability to prevent the stolen base is helped by having Molina behind the dish, but the combination of these two has been deadly over the past season and a half, making Marte’s accomplishment all the more impressive.

The Martinez/Molina duo (and Martinez in general) has only allowed one other stolen base this season so far. Who was it? None other than Bartolo Colon! Actually, I’m kidding, it was Starling Marte, which is almost as crazy! He has the only two stolen bases this season against a guy who only gave up two all of last season. These are also the only two attempts against Martinez all season. On May 6, after a bunch of false starts, pickoff moves, foul balls, and laughs between Molina and Marte, he finally got his stolen base:

The thing I find most entertaining is how loose everyone seems, goofing off and laughing about the play that just happened, which seems relatively rare in this day of boring interviews and generic soundbites. Molina had a good laugh about that one, but he was pretty upset about the more recent stolen base.

There’s nothing to be mad about, though; Martinez and Molina simply got burned by the best baserunner in the game right now.

I know that I’m not alone in saying that one of my favorite parts about baseball is the projection of young players. In fact, I’d probably even say that I enjoy dreaming on what young players could be even more than I enjoy players for what they actually are. It’s one of the reasons I follow the Cubs and Twins (get well soon, Byron) farm systems as closely as I do the A’s and Dodgers big-league clubs. Obviously, it’s especially exciting when a group of young prospects on the same team all come up and meet expectations, as rare as that may be. To take it one step further, it’s just the best when all of that talent is concentrated in one positional group (pitchers, infielders, outfielders). So in an effort to combine my love of projection with what is currently happening on the field, I’m going to take a look at a couple of the most exciting young units in baseball.

Here are the top ten outfields as currently ranked by fWAR:

Of the top ten, only two teams are currently starting an outfield where all three players are 28 years old or younger. Now, it would be pretty funny if I said they were the Orioles and Blue Jays just to make you angry, but since you’re a person who ostensibly reads titles before you read articles, you know that these two teams are the Pittsburgh Pirates and Miami Marlins. Spoiler revealed.

Anyways, both young outfields are clearly extraordinarily talented. Each unit has an excellent case as the most promising outfield for the next five or ten years. That said, it’ll almost surely be a young outfield that exceeds them, because if baseball does nothing else, it destroys our expectations each and every season.

But focusing on the task at hand, the two outfields are very similar if you look at them in a certain arbitrary way. They each feature one superstar (Andrew McCutchen and Giancarlo Stanton), a strikeout-prone “tools” guy (Starling Marte and Marcell Ozuna) and a skinny corner guy with all-star potential (Gregory Polanco and Christian Yelich). Now, those descriptions don’t really matter, but they’re interesting nonetheless. What does matter, however, is performance on the field.

The Pirates outfield has probably been the more hyped unit so far, and I think the majority of people would choose them to be better going forward as well. Their core three is currently the more productive, and they blow away the Marlins in production over the next four years, using the Oliver projection system.

If the projections turn out to be correct, the Pirates outfield is going to be, on average, 4.8 wins per season more valuable than the Marlins. But I have a couple of issues with these projections.

First, wow do they hate Marcell Ozuna. This is somewhat understandable considering Ozuna never was that highly regarded as a prospect, and some people thought that the Marlins were making a mistake by promoting him to the big leagues so quickly last year. But as he’s shown since his call-up, Ozuna is actually pretty valuable. In only 70 games in 2013, he was worth 1.6 fWAR. In 2014, he’s been hitting for power and been worth nearly 2 wins with a month and a half left to go in the season. He’s not a perfect player (28.7 K%), but I think it’s fair to say that he’s not the borderline replacement-level guy that he is projected to be right now.

My second issue is that I just can’t get comfortable projecting Gregory Polanco as a 5 fWAR player just yet. He’s obviously a top prospect holding his own in the majors, but five-win players are really good. Only 19 position players were more valuable in 2013 than the 5.2 fWAR that Polanco is currently projected to reach by 2018. I certainly won’t be shocked if he reaches that level, but man, as fun as prospects are, sometimes they bust for no apparent reason. I’ll need to see a full productive season before I feel good about calling him a future MVP vote-getter.

Unfortunately for the Pirates’ case in this argument, the outfield fWAR top ten that I posted at the beginning of the article largely reflects the contributions of a player whom I have not mentioned thus far: Josh Harrison. At just 27 years old himself, Harrison has continued to be productive after what most assumed was just a hot couple of months. However, with Polanco now in the majors, it looks as though Harrison will be playing in the Pirates infield over the coming years, assuming all of the outfielders are able to retain their health. So it will likely be up to Polanco to replicate Harrison’s 2014 numbers (144 wRC+) going forward, a tall task even for someone as talented as he. Combine that with the possibility that Andrew McCutchen begins to decline upon hitting 30 in a couple years, and the Pirates outfield may not look quite as pretty as it does on paper at the moment (though it’ll still probably be really good).

Now, rather than continue to list reasons why you shouldn’t choose the Pirates, let’s talk about one final reason why you should choose the Marlins in our completely meaningless debate. Talent aside, the Marlins’ greatest advantage over the Pirates is their youth. Stanton is actually the oldest of Miami’s outfielders at the decrepit age of 24, while Ozuna and Yelich are 23 and 22, respectively. As a group, they certainly have the longest way to go to reach their ceiling, but they also have the most time to get there. And if you’re like me, you may be inclined to be on upside.

When choosing between these two outfields, there’s really no wrong option, as cliche as that may sound. They each have a combination of current production and future projection that we simply don’t see very often. Personally, despite all of the reasons I listed against them, I’m still inclined to go with Pittsburgh, but the choice is harder now than it was when I began this post. Either way, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll be able to sit back and enjoy both units, hopefully for the next decade or so.

This article was originally posted on gappower.wordpress.com, a site you’ve definitely never been to. I’ve checked. You can also find me on Twitter, at least occasionally.