We are trying something different with the audio file to see if smaller size may help some of you that have struggled with playing it. For whatever reason, the recording session had a Beastie Boys "So Whatcha Want" sound to it and Jason did his best to filter out the background noise. The file is 50.7 MB this week.  Please give us feedback on the listening experience.

Our podcast RSS feed

Read the full article...

I wrote an article last September in which I detailed the surprising pitching of the Oakland Athletics. The piece included a breakdown of four different A's pitchers, and I noted that many of the players shared specific similarities which reflected an organizational trend toward mechanical efficiency. The A's have a long history of successful pitching development, and the team's mechanical points of emphasis were apparent by looking at the tendencies of the players whom they had developed and/or acquired over the years.

I spent much of the offseason poring over pitcher mechanics and preparing over 100 mechanical report cards for the pitchers in the 2013 Starting Pitcher Guide in my first year working with Paul Sporer on his annual project. I had already watched the majority of these pitchers in the past, spread out over months or sometimes years, but the examination of so many pitchers over such a short timeframe revealed a number of other patterns that cropped up with pitchers from certain organizations.

Doug Thorburn’s baseball obsession runs much deeper than the pitching mound, so he’ll be expressing his compulsive thoughts on other baseball topics in this new semi-weekly column. His regular column, Raising Aces, can still be found at the usual time and channel.
 

I sit in my baseball cocoon (a.k.a. “the office”), watching a live game of playoff-caliber baseball at three o'clock in the morning (PST), with two teams representing their home nations in front of a packed stadium. The home-field advantage leans toward team Japan, and the two-time defending champs are looking to punch their ticket to San Francisco with the top seed and a victory over the surprising team from the Netherlands. Every few years there is a small window of opportunity to watch important baseball games on a night owl's schedule, and I realize that it's a good day to see the sunrise.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

We are trying something different with the audio file to see if smaller size may help some of you that have struggled with playing it. This week's episode is once again 2:39 in length but the file size is just 38.3MB. Please give us feedback on the listening experience.

Our podcast RSS feed

Read the full article...

In last week's episode of Raising Aces, we looked at those pitchers who have increased fastball velocity over the last three seasons. The article was inspired by the general tendency for pitchers to lose velocity as they age, and with this premise in mind, I decided to flip the switch and go digging for those pitchers who have lost some speed over the past three years.

For the purposes of this analysis, I chose to utilize the same threshold as with the pitchers who were over the radar: to qualify for the study, a starting pitcher had to have thrown at least 500 fastballs (or sinkers in select cases) in both the 2012 and 2011 seasons, and the average velocity of those pitches in 2012 had to be at least 0.50 mph lower than in each of the previous two seasons. The purpose of these boundaries is to capture a sustained loss in velocity across multiple seasons.

Read the full article...

It has been 28 days since my last entry into the chronicles of Raising Aces, and though I did manage some vacation time during the break, my baseball schedule has been otherwise locked and loaded throughout the month.

I had a blast with our mock arbitration series in early February, in which I went toe-to-toe with Ian Miller for a couple rounds of “name that comp.” I also dropped by the Effectively Wild studios to share my thoughts about the 2013 Athletics with Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, and behind the scenes I have been preparing more than 100 mechanical profiles for this year's Starting Pitcher Guide with Paul Sporer, which is currently in the final stages of production.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

If you haven't read Russell A. Carleton's article from Monday on the factors that really predict pitcher injuries, go do that now. Then listen to his subsequent tour of the baseball podcast circuit, from Buster Olney's Baseball Tonight to Ian Miller's and Riley Breckenridge's Prodcast. I'll wait.

Read the full article...

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

In the first edition of Bush League, I discussed the viability of sofa-scouting high-level prospects by scouring the archives of MiLB.tv (for a modest subscription price). I also noted the advantages when evaluating pitchers as compared to position players, given the additional off-camera variables that exist for scouting hitting and defense, along with the caveat that pitchers can have volatile mechanics during their development years. The subjects of the original piece included the top two picks from the 2011 draft, Gerrit Cole and Danny Hultzen, and today we’ll take a look at another Pirate-Mariner combination of high-end pitching prospects.

Jameson Taillon and Taijuan Walker were both high-school products of the 2010 draft. Taillon was selected at number two overall by the Pirates, behind top pick Bryce Harper, and Walker was chosen 41 picks later by the Mariners during the supplemental round. I reviewed both pitchers back in July with a brief study of their back-to-back one-inning stints in the Futures Game, and the early returns were impressive. The mechanics of minor-league players are fickle and a pitcher might show different looks on any given day, especially when making a rare relief appearance in a nationally-televised showcase, so the offseason presents a great opportunity to take a deeper look into the performances of these two high-profile prospects.

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

At the risk of sounding like a homer, some of the most thought-provoking articles that I have read over the last 10 years have been published right here at Baseball Prospectus. These works of analytical art have influenced and often reinforced personally-held beliefs about the sport, from Nate Silver's statistical shenanigans to Mike Fast's work with batted-ball data and Max Marchi's studies of pitch-framing. The piece that made the most lasting impression was a 2007 article by BP founder Gary Huckabay, in which he made the bold proclamation that “Baseball analysis is dead.”

Huckabay went on to qualify the statement, specifying the diminishing rate of return on the investment of performance stats and citing the marginal utility that had been offered by the latest advances in sabermetrics. He emphasized that the major lessons of statistical analysis had already been learned and postulated that the next major breakthrough would come from elsewhere. Gary's words were prescient, as the revelations that grew from the work of Fast and Marchi were made possible by the recent revolution of ball-tracking technology, including HITf/x and PITCHf/x. 

The remainder of this post cannot be viewed at this subscription level. Please click here to subscribe.

Gio Gonzalez had a breakout season in 2012, finishing third in the Cy Young voting in his first year with the Washington Nationals. Despite the dominant campaign and a track record for success, Gonzalez had to live in the shadow cast by the spotlights surrounding teammate Stephen Strasburg, putting up with the common perception that he wasn’t the best pitcher on his own team, let alone the whole league.

The trade that brought Gonzalez to the nation's capital marked the fourth time that the southpaw had been dealt since being selected by the White Sox in the supplemental round of the 2004 draft. The Pale Hose shipped him to Philadelphia as the PTBNL in a deal that brought Jim Thome to the south side in November of 2005, only to re-acquire Gonzalez a year later (along with Gavin Floyd) in a swap that put Freddy Garcia in purple pinstripes. The Sox then broke up with Gio for a second time after just 13 months, packaging him to Oakland in a deal that brought Nick Swisher to Chicago. 

Read the full article...