In Your Clubhouse, Taking Your Pitchers: AL Edition

Despite how well he's pitched lately, it's pretty clear that, barring injury, if the Blue Jays were to acquire a starting pitcher to anchor the rotation right now, and really turn this team in to something nasty, it would be JA Happ being relegated to the bullpen or the minors or wherever the fuck.  Obviously Buehrle isn't going anywhere, and if Drew Hutchison can stay healthy and stretched out and not need an extra day or two between starts, he'll remain in the rotation as well.  Stroman's looked great in the rotation, albeit over a very small sample, and RA Dickey is also a pitcher.

No matter who gets bumped in this scenario, though, that's not really what I'm here for.  It's mid-June, and we're about 6 weeks away from the trade deadline.  We have some sort of idea who is going to be contending, and who is already fucking out of the playoff picture.  We may as well go through the teams and try to figure out who the targets may end up being.

There are some obvious targets: really good pitchers who are approaching free agency who are on really bad teams.  Jeff Samardzija was in the banner photo before I changed it, and David Price is there now.  Both are obvious targets, though both of these guys may end up being outside the Jays' price range, as AA has stated that the Jays prefer a rental over a player with more control; he doesn't want to move top prospects or crush the depth anymore than what was done last year.

I'm just going to go team-to-team, division-to-division and explore.

AL East

I don't really expect the Jays to get David Price, for a multitude of reasons.  The first is that they are in the same division as the Rays, and the second is that Price is controllable through next season. Price, in effect, would be pitching against Tampa next year, rather than, say, pitching in the NL-- Tampa wouldn't have to worry about running in to Price other than during inter-league series.  The Jays would also be paying a large price for a year and a half of Price, and they apparently don't want to go crazy with the prospect sales.

Erik Bedard has pitched reasonably well (albeit in a good ballpark and with a strong defence) in Tampa this year, on a one year deal, and he might fetch a low-level prospect.  Other than that though, the Rays have a bunch of cheap, controllable pitchers in their rotation, and have little reason to move them at this point.

For the same reasons as the Price thing, I don't really expect any other trades from within the division either; New York and Baltimore are doing well enough that they aren't going to be selling, and I don't imagine Boston has any interest in improving the Jays either, after the Farrell fiasco.

Having said that, if Boston does completely fall out of it-- and they pretty much need to play .600 baseball from this point forward to have any chance-- I would expect them to sell at least something.  They do have a few pitchers in their rotation right now that could be useful to someone, though a lot of their team is under contract through 2015 or later.  They do have some pretty decent pitching prospects if they wanted to move some starters.

Jon Lester is going to be a free agent at the end of the year, and is having a great year, so he'll (a) fetch a lot in a trade relative to, say, letting him walk for a draft pick, not to mention the immediate return vs. a late first rounder who will take multiple years to develop, and (b) is going to cost a lot to sign long-term from 2015 onwards.  Lester has mentioned that he wants to stay in Boston for the rest of his career, but we all know how often that's bullshit.

John Lackey has rekindled his career last year and so far this year, and he also has an option on his contract for next year at $500k.  He makes what's left on his $15.25MM contract, and there's practically 0 risk at taking him on for next year.

Buchholz and Peavy have both been a mess this year, and Felix Doubront seems like the kind of arm you'd want to build around.  De La Rosa, Workman, and Webster are all on their way up or are there, so Boston might want to move something.

AL Central

The Tigers obviously aren't selling anything, and I don't think the Royals will either, unless they just go on a huge losing streak.  James Shields would be interesting if KC does fall off, but I kind of doubt that happens.  Cleveland probably hangs on as long as possible to make up their minds, so the two real sellers are Minnesota and Chicago at this juncture.

Cleveland is pretty likely to move Justin Masterson at some point if things do go any farther south, though he's largely stunk to this point in 2014; strikeouts are down, walks are up, and velocity is way down.  ERA estimators aren't exactly banking on his improvement, though his peripherals and batted ball numbers are close enough to being in line with his career numbers that a comeback wouldn't be a big surprise.  Might be worth a flyer.

The only other useful piece in Cleveland's rotation is budding ace Cory Kluber, and I don't see any reason they'd want to move him.

The Twins have Phil Hughes, but he just signed a multi-year deal in Minnesota, and I don't imagine they have a huge interest in dealing him halfway through the first year of that contract.  He's pitched very well to this point, and may have spun himself in to a situation where he can be of value to someone.  I guess the big issue is that he's pounding the strikezone, but isn't giving up any homeruns.  Moving from Yankee Stadium to Target Field is obviously going to do that, so his stats need to be taken with a grain of salt, but a 3.46 xFIP looks pretty good regardless.  I'd say that Minnesota wants Hughes to be part of the plan, though.

The White Sox have Chris Sale and Jose Quintana, and then absolutely nothing.  Sale would cost a goddamn fortune if the White Sox are even interested in selling him, which I doubt.  Jose Quintana just got a five-year extension this past offseason, and is probably also going nowhere, given how well he's pitched.  Everyone else in that rotation is a testament to why the White Sox are in last place in the division.

AL West

The A's are obviously buyers, and are actually probably buying starters.  The Angels are the current wild card leader, which makes them buyers too.  Seattle seems like they're going for it this year, so they're pretty unlikely to sell anything either.

Having said that, they're only a game over .500 and 7 games out of first in the division, so they're far from a sure buyer.  If things get bad, though, there's not much to move around.  Felix is staying put, and Hisashi Iwakuma is relatively cheap next year, with a $7MM option.  If the M's decide to sell, it will likely be one of their young pitchers being moved for an impact position player.  Between Taijuan Walker, Erasmo Ramirez, Roenis Elias, James Paxton, along with Felix and Iwakuma-- someone might have to move sooner rather than later.  Elias isn't anything special right now, but there's certainly a bit of upside there, and Ramirez has pitched like dick this year.  Unfortunately, the Jays don't really have the position depth or the MLB-ready prospect to move.  Anthony Gose is a fit for Seattle, but that's not enough to bring something major back, and he's probably a contingency plan in case Colby Rasmus jets in the offseason.

Texas is an interesting case.  They'd be nuts to trade Yu Darvish, especially after spending so much money up front to get him.  I feel like I'd want to keep him around for at least most of the 6 years if I spent $50MM for the opportunity to pay him $56MM.

I'd expect Texas to try and move something, somewhere.  They have a lot of money committed to the next few seasons ($109MM for '15, plus arbitration raises and options), and a lot of it is currently on the disabled list.  Fielder, Harrison, Holland, Moreland and Soto are all hurt right now, and it's pretty impressive that they're at or around .500 at this point.  They have a top-10-or-so farm system that could graduate some guys to the bigs soon, so they may want to move some more expensive guys and try to get younger.

Off the top of my head, Darvish, Holland, Perez, Tepesch (Harrison can't really be relied upon) are the main 'when-healthy' rotation, though Texas is usually pretty active in the offseasons, and they have a couple of decent prospects coming through the woodwork.  I can certainly see them trying to move position players for pitching help, or hoping to retool for the future.  Ultimately, I don't expect Texas to move much pitching, unless Derek Holland comes back before the all-star break, pitches well, and gets moved.  Colby Lewis could be worth a shot, considering his .394 babip, but it's tough to call him an upgrade over anything.

Finally, Houston.  The Astros are in a pretty full-fledged rebuild mode, letting the young guys play, for the most part.  Scott Feldman is interesting.  He's striking out approximately nobody, but his LOB% is due for regression (maybe with a better defense behind him?), but I'm still not entirely sure he's an upgrade over anybody on the Jays right now.

Everybody else in this rotation is young, cheap, and have several years of club control remaining-- exactly what the Astros are looking for.  I'm sure more than one of these guys are going to get squeezed out, but there's no reason for that to happen now.  They're much more likely to hang on to all of their young guys and let them develop while they're still cheap, and then trade them before they get too expensive if they aren't winning.

The one exception is Collin McHugh.  McHugh is 27 on Thursday, and is severely out-performing his career numbers.  There's definitely a change in his strategy so far this year (he's pitching both up and down in the zone this year with his fastball) and it has led to more strikeouts, but he's 27 and hasn't done anything before this year.  It's a pretty small sample, and he may very well completely explode before the deadline, and the Astros may have zero interest in moving McHugh, but he could be a sell-high candidate for the Astros.

As a whole, there's really not a whole lot going on in the AL.  The best targets appear to be on teams that aren't likely to send much our way.  As far as AL teams go, Boston and Texas may be the most likely teams to move starters, but neither are sure things, many teams will be interested, and there's a strained relationship between the Jays and Red Sox already.

It looks to me as though if the Jays acquire a pitcher at the deadline, it will come from the National League.  We'll look at that tomorrow.

Fun with Math and Playoff Odds

Hi.  I'm back.  I kind of decided last year that posting anything and everything that I thought of was sort of detrimental to this whole project.  Too much riff-raff, not enough good stuff.  Then I noticed that I wasn't writing anything at all.  Which is also detrimental to the project.  Guess I just have to start writing reasonable stuff, or at least make more .gifs of things, which I haven't gotten around to figuring out on Mac just yet.

Anyway, I kind of remember during last year's dumpster fire, mathematically taking a stab at figuring out what the hell was going to happen with the club, and what exactly was needed to even have a chance at sniffing the playoffs.

Obviously things are a little bit different this year-- the Jays have played 61 games this season, and have a 5-game lead in the division at the time of my writing this, having finished off a sweep of the Tigers this afternoon.  This is compared with a 25-34 record on this date last year, which was 10.5 games back of first.

Last year in mid-May, the Jays had, according to various sources and forumlae, somewhere in the area of 0.3%-5.8% chance at making the playoffs.  Then they got hot and got themselves to within a few games of the division, but still only found themselves at a high-water mark of like 17%.

Basically, you can get a pretty good idea of a team's end-of-season winning percentage and chances of making the playoffs by looking at their first 1/3 of the season (I read something 2 years ago that suggests something like 44 games is enough, though I can't find it at the moment).

So let's have a look at the math this year, huh?  I think the big thing to consider here is the relative pace that the non-Jays AL East teams are on this year.  Last year, four teams had at least 32 wins at this point, which is a .550 (or better) winning percentage.  I believe the number I was looking for last year was 93 wins, thanks to the pace everyone was on-- Tampa won 92 and lost the division by 5 games.

This year, you've got the Jays (.606), and then Baltimore (.526) as the next best.  As such, the O's are on pace for 85 wins, which should make 90* wins a reasonably safe benchmark for winning the division.


Charts that can be clicked upon to embiggen:

and playoff odds that reflect this:

• Sportsclubstats.com has the Jays at 96.5%
• Baseball Prospectus likes the Jays at 73.5%
• MLB.com has the Jays at 74%
• Fangraphs/Coolstandings** has the Jays at 85.9% to make at least the wildcard game, and 75% to win the division.

* -- If we want to use 93 wins again, which suggests that the Jays can play .554 ball through the end of the year, Baltimore needs to play .600 ball for the rest of the year, which is 97 wins extrapolated to a full year.  Boston would need to play .640 baseball, or 103 win ball.

** -- Fangraphs uses projected runs scored and allowed, and regresses YTD team performance in their future performance, and is probably worth checking out more than any of the others.

As far as that chart goes, it's just some quick back-of-the-envelope math that compares what teams have done so far this year with what they will need to do to get to 90 wins.  Those last two columns signify what winning percentage a team needs to get to 90 wins, and then the full season pace when that winning percentage is extrapolated.  In other words, if the Red Sox want to win 90 games this season, they need to play like a 99-win team from this point forward, whereas the Jays only need to win at an 85-win clip, thanks to the headstart they've given themselves.

So this all means a lot, right?

Of course not.  Lose 5 in a row, or 7 of 9 or whatever, and this division is entirely back to normal.  The point remains, however, that 61 games is a meaningful enough sample size to suggest that this result isn't a complete anomaly, even if we can expect some regression.

In closing, this brings me to a point made by Paul Beeston last week:

There’s no magic number for attendance; if there’s a deal, it’s not going to be money that determines if it’s going to be done, it’s going to be wins. If we’re winning we’ll do it. I hope we have that opportunity

It's fairly evident that the wins are there, and that the Jays need to make their improvements as soon as possible to cash in on their odds.  In fact, the wins don't even need to be there at anywhere near the pace that they're coming right now.

Of course, we know that teams aren't typically selling until the deadline, so as to maximize the return -- demand is higher at the deadline, after all, and teams don't want to start selling until they know that they're out of it for certain.  The point remains, though-- the combination of the division being weak, and the Jays getting themselves in to such a position early on means that the time to buy is whenever someone decides that they're ready to sell.

Let Him Start

You let him fucking start you goddamn sons of bitches.


(This isn't much of a blog anymore)

Piggybacking

Image Credit: Brendan Kennedy, The Star

That's what I'd call it, anyway.  Zaun called it a caddie on TV last night.  Either term is fine, I guess, as long as the point gets across.  Basically, I'm talking about what I think could/should be done with Dustin McGowan, until he's stretched out all the way and isn't getting tired 60 pitches in to each start.

I don't think it's a big secret that pitchers statistically perform relatively well their first time through the batting order in each game, and get progressively worse each subsequent time that they turn the order over.  Nobody's shut up about Dickey's struggles the 3rd time through the order all week long.  That's a bit of an extreme case, but the same thing can be said for every starting pitcher in baseball with enough of a sample size.  The more plate appearances a batter gets against a pitcher in a game, the better he will perform.

The Colorado Rockies, rather infamously, went with a four-man rotation at various times over the last two seasons, having young guys start games and typically only throw three or four innings, and then have someone else come and take over.  The idea was two-fold. Batters never see a pitcher a third time in a game, and the pitching staff gets to have a combination of regular work and enough rest.  The Jays have done the same with their A-ball rotations for the last few years, mostly as a way to keep everyone's innings and pitch-counts under control.

Obviously, the Rockies have stunk the last couple years, so it's certainly not perfect, but I think that's more a function of them being bad at baseball relative to other teams, and less so at the system working poorly over a pretty small sample.  Plus, that park.

And of course, I'm not suggesting that the whole rotation gets piggybacked-- just McGowan.

Really, this all stems from last night and the way Gibby's hook worked.  Again, Zaun had a bit of a rant about this, and I agreed with him wholeheartedly, even before he said it.  McGowan was yanked with the bases loaded and with nobody out in the 5th inning, having thrown 70 pitches.  Obviously, hindsight would suggest that he shouldn't have started the 5th inning, but even with my play of going through the order twice, no more no less, McGowan gets pulled at the same point in the game. Any way it gets sliced, McGowan doesn't face Markakis a third time.

Perhaps, though, if McGowan is tiring at the 60-pitch mark, he should throw his 4 innings, and then let someone else start the fifth fresh, rather then risk getting in to a jam that someone else has to come try to clean.  If the Jays are carrying 8 relievers, three of whom are longmen, they may as well use them to their full effect.

I guess I say this because Redmond came in to the game last night in a pretty shitty spot-- go-ahead run at the plate, bases loaded, none out, meat of the order coming up.  This is a high-leverage spot in the game (3.15 leverage index, and a .330 WPA for Cruz on the HR), and is probably a spot better reserved for, say, Brett Cecil, with Markakis and Davis at bat and in the hole respectively, plus how well he's handled Adam Jones.  Steve Delabar is probably good here as well, given his ability to get strikeouts.  If the idea is to get multiple innings from Redmond (or Happ, given the lefty-righty construction of the O's lineup), he should be coming in with a fresh slate.  Plenty of time to warm up, start of the inning, etc.  Let him feel like he's starting.

Given the offday Monday, Mcgowan can be skipped in his next scheduled spot.  Whether they decide to ramp up his work between now and his next start to try and build more stamina, or just decide to let him do as he's been doing and go with a piggyback is obviously yet to be seen.  I'm certainly not ready to give up on the McGowan-as-a-starter business, but if you've got a starter who is tiring after 60 pitches and keeps getting beaten up and yanked in a jam in the fifth, something needs to be done.  There's my idea.

A Cry for Sanity

That sure looks like the image of a guy who just struck out, doesn't it?

Now, I'll not be the first to mention that Ryan Goins is on this team thanks in large part (whole part?) to his defense, and that we aren't supposed to expect him to do much hitting, if any.  We knew he couldn't hit, and that he was going to strike out at an outrageous clip, provide no walks, no steals, and relatively few quality plate appearances.  We didn't necessarily agree with it, but we knew what was coming.

I also know that we're 9 games in to the season, which amounts to 20 plate appearances for Goins, and that probably 18 of them have been utter garbage. Those 20 plate appearances amount to about 60 innings defensively, which certainly haven't been bad, especially given that he can fill in admirably at SS, along with playing a pretty good 2B.

Goins has been getting pinch-hit for late, or has been stuck in to games as a defensive replacement quite a bit so far over the first 9 games (you're looking at the "Inngs" tab to show what innings he's played in each game), so it's not like the Jays aren't already well aware that Goins should be batting is little as possible.

I don't think I've said anything yet that nobody knows, so maybe I'll just say what we're all thinking: send Goins down to the minors, and do it now.

I realize that we're dealing with a really small sample here, but Maicer Izturis seems completely reborn.  I don't expect him to continue slashing .455/.500/.500, but I would expect something a bit closer to his .270/.332/.373 career batting line than what he did last year, even if he is on the decline part of his career.  His fielding should also improve from the -18.5 he put up last year according to Fangraphs.  He's no longer a good player (was he ever good?), but if there's anything that we can draw from a 9 game sample, it's that he's also not the worst player in baseball.  That's a role reserved for Ryan Goins, I guess.

Beyond Izturis, Jonathan Diaz is certainly making the most of his first real look in the bigs.  He's not hitting the cover off the ball, but he's at least not flailing away at everything in sight.  Diaz is definitely a defense-first kind of guy, but he's also walking at a 10% clip.  Again, it's only 19 plate appearances, but (1) walk-rate is one of the first stats to stabilize, at around 120 plate appearances, and (2) Diaz has a career 13.9% walk-rate over 3000+ minor league plate appearances.  I'd say 10% in the bigs is a bit ambitious, but something close to that isn't outrageous.  Goins, to compare, has a 7.8% walk-rate over 2100+ PA's in the minors, and a 2.3% walk-rate over 141 MLB appearances.  Again, walk-rate tends to stabilize around 120 PA's.

Diaz isn't a bad fielder either-- he's playing shortstop, after all, and seems to be doing a reasonable job over a pretty small sample.  Given that, I don't think we're really missing all that much by sending Goins down, are we?  Especially if it's Munenori Kawasaki coming up the other way?  Imagine the standing O's and the walks.

Of all the middle infielders on the big league roster right now, Goins is playing the worst baseball by far.  We're (apparently) about a week shy of having Jose Reyes back, which obviously leaves enough room for two of Izturis, Goins, and Diaz.  Diaz has outplayed Goins badly so far, and I'm sure he's good enough to figure out 2B, especially in a reserve role.  Let Goins figure out how to hit AAA pitching, and if he can't do that, then he certainly shouldn't be in the majors, glove be damned.

Reyes Hurt

Except Blue Jays.

Seriously, hamstring tightness BEFORE I GET HOME FROM WORK.

Why?

No, Maicer Izturis should be on this team.