Trailing 30 - August 2

Here is an explanation of this weekly feature, listing the best and worst of past 30 days, made possible by FanGraphs' Leaders application. Comment for the week: The cutoff here is close enough to predict Players and Pitchers of the Month. American League: Mike Trout and...oh, I don't know...Scott Kazmir? Easy picks in the National League: Carlos Gonzalez and Zack Greinke.

   American League              National League

   Team W-L                     Team W-L      

1. Kansas City     18- 9     1. San Francisco   15- 8

   New York        16- 8     2. Pittsburgh      15-10    

3. Chicago         16-10     3. Los Angeles     14-10         

4. Los Angeles     14-10        New York        14-10   

5. Hou, Min        12-12        Philadelphia    14-10        

   Worst Team W-L               Worst Team W-L

1. Tampa Bay        9-15     1. Cincinnati       8-17      

2. Oakland          9-14     2. Miami            8-16       

   Texas            9-14     3. Colorado        10-13      

4. Boston          10-14     4. Cincinnati      11-14
5. Det, Sea        11-15     5. Milwaukee       11-13

   Batting Average              Batting Average     

1. Hosmer, KC       .390     1. Parra, Mil       .421  

2. Cabrera, Chi     .386     2. LeMahieu, Col    .418      

3. Kinsler, Det     .383     3. Posey, SF        .413           

4. Bogaerts, Bos    .380     4. Votto, Cin       .395          

5. Cain, KC         .365     5. Gonzalez, Col    .386       

   Lowest Batting Average       Lowest Batting Average  

1. Vogt, Oak        .171     1. Castro, Chi      .136          

2. LaRoche, Chi     .172     2. Ahmed, Ari       .157       

3. Hunter, Min      .179     3. Bryant, Chi      .163
4. Perez, KC        .188     4. Pederson, LA     .170           

5. Butler, Oak      .189     5. Peterson, Atl    .180      

   On Base Percentage           On Base Percentage  

1. Trout, LA        .441     1. Votto, Cin       .540           

2. Sano, Min        .435     2. LeMahieu, Col    .480          

3. Cain, KC         .432     3. Parra, Mil       .477         

4. Hosmer, Oak      .429     4. Harper, Was      .448          

5. Teixeira, NY     .426        Kang, Pit        .448      

      

   Slugging Percentage          Slugging Percentage   

1. Trout, LA        .800     1. Gonzalez, Col    .855        

2. Teixeira, NY     .733     2. Parra, Mil       .724     

3. Cain, KC         .671     3. Kang, Pit        .663       

4. Cabrera, Chi     .653     4. Bruce, Cin       .652       

5. Rodriguez, NY    .646     5. Votto, Cin       .651        

          

   Home Runs                    Home Runs

1. Trout, LA          11     1. Gonzalez, Col      11
2. Rodriguez, NY       9     2. Duda, NY           10        

   Teixeira, NY        9     3. Gonzalez, LA        8
4. Cespedes, Det       8     4. McCutchen, Pit      6
   Cruz, Sea           8     5. 11 with             5

   Runs                         Runs    

1. Cain, KC           23     1. Gonzalez, Col      21        

2. Eaton, Chi         22     2. Parra, Mil         20     

3. JD Martinez, Det   20     3. LeMahieu, Col      19
   Seager, Sea        20     4. 3 with             18
5. 2 with             19        

   RBI                          RBI      

1. Cabrera, Chi       24     1. Gonzalez, Col      25        

2. Donaldson, Tor     23     2. Howard, Phi        23      

   Morales, KC        23     3. Bruce, Cin         20       

   Trout, LA          23     4. McCutchen, Pit     19
5. Davis, Bal         22     5. Pence, SF          18   
                             

   Stolen Bases                 Stolen Bases             

1. Dyson, KC           8     1. Hamilton, Cin      11
2. Reyes, Tor          6     2. Gordon, Mia         8     

3. 5 with              5     3. Heyward, SL         7   

                                Pollock, Ari        7
                             5. 4 with              6
                                                     
   Saves                        Saves

1. Holland, KC         7     1. Kimbrel, SD        11

2. 5 with              6     2. Melancon, Pit       8

                                Rosenthal, SL       8
                             4. Casilla, SF         7
                                Familia, NY         7

   ERA                          ERA

1. Kazmir, Oak-Hou  0.35     1. Kershaw, LA      0.22

2. Tillman, Bal     1.31     2. Greinke, LA      0.95

3. Heaney, LA       2.20     3. Leake, Cin       1.25

4. Price, Det       2.25     4. Lackey, SL       1.26

5. Samardzija, Chi  2.27     5. deGrom, NY       1.30

   Worst ERA                    Worst ERA

1. Hutchison, Tor   7.46     1. Burnett, Pit     6.60

2. Gallardo, Tex    5.96     2. Wisler, Atl      5.52

3. Hutchison, Tor   5.68     3. de la Rosa, Col  5.40

4. Lewis, Tex       5.63     4. Rusin, Col       5.25

5. Bauer, Cle       5.46     5. Morton, Pit      5.04

   WHIP                         WHIP

1. Kazmir, Oak-Hou  0.73     1. Greinke, LA      0.58

2. Samardzija, Chi  0.81     2. Kershaw, LA      0.59
3. Salazer, Cle     0.88     3. deGrom, NY       0.61

4. Tillman, Bal     0.90     4. Lester, Chi      0.74
5. Gray, Oak        0.92     5. Leake, Cin       0.83

   Strikeouts                   Strikeouts

1. Archer, TB         40     1. Kershaw, LA        52     

2. Keuchel, Hou       38     2. Lester, Chi        43

   Price, Det         38     3. Lynn, SL           40

4. Sale, Chi          36     4. Syndegaard, NY     38

5. Salazar, Cle       35     5. Arrieta, Chi       37

Johnny Cueto, Kansas City Royal

Johnny Cueto, of course, lost the most famous Pirates game of this generation, the 6-2 victory over Cincinnati in the wild card game of 2013. Other than that, though:

• He has an 18-4 record against Pittsburgh. That's twice as many victories as he has against any other club.
• He's pitched two of his career five shutouts against the Pirates.
• His career 2.13 ERA against the Pirates is his lowest against any team (minimum 50 innings pitched), as his 0.984 WHIP.
• His slash line allowed against Pittsburgh: .201 batting average, .260 on base percentage, .324 slugging percentage. Naturally, each of those are the lowest he's allowed (minimum 50 innings pitched). That's basically like the Dodgers' Zack Greinke last season. As a hitter. Greinke, a pitcher, batted .200/.262/.350 in 2014.

The Pirates have ten more games this year against the Reds. They'll be glad to not have to face their old nemesis. He's been traded to Kansas City. But he's a free agent at the end of the season, so he could come back to the National League.

Waino

This is a Pirates blog, but I'd like to talk about a Cardinals player. Adam Wainwright is St. Louis's best pitcher. Going into last weekend, he led Cardinals starters in innings and ERA. Last year, he led Cardinals starters in innings and ERA. In 2013, he led Cardinals starters in innings and ERA. He missed 2011 recovering from Tommy John surgery, and he was used somewhat cautiously in 2012. But in 2010, he was second on the team in innings (by 4.2) and led in ERA. In 2009, he led the team in innings and was second in ERA. From 2009 to 2014--including his missed Tommy John season and his recovery year--his 2.83 ERA was the third best in baseball (behind Clayton Kershaw's 2.33 and Felix Hernandez's 2.73) among pitchers with at least 1,000 innings pitched. He'd been credited with 92 wins, the fourth most (after Justin Verlander's 106, Jered Weaver's 96, and Kershaw's 93).  He finished second in the voting for the Cy Young Award in 2010 and 2013 and third in 2009 and 2014. That's four top-three finished in six seasons, one of which he missed and one of which he was coming back from major surgery. All told, Wainwright is not only clearly the Cardinals' best pitcher, he's also one of the best in baseball, probably the second best in the National League after Kershaw.

And he's done for the year. This is what happened to him on Saturday:



Diagnosis: Torn Achilles tendon. Out for the year. Injury expert Will Carroll (that's his Twitter handle, too: @injuryexpert) notes

Surgery and rehab has developed over the past few seasons and players in the NFL and NBA have come back well. That bodes well for Wainwright.

That's good for Wainwright and the Cardinals, but only for 2016. For 2015, they'll have to make do without one of the best starting pitchers in baseball. In a National League Central race that's expected to be tight, with the Pirates and Cubs seen vying for second place behind the Redbirds, it's looking a lot more like a three-team race. (As of this morning, the 13-6 Cardinals are a game ahead of the 12-7 Cubs and three ahead of the 11-10 Pirates).

Somewhat surprisingly, Wainwright's injury has re-ignited the designated hitter debate. As you almost certainly know, given that you're reading this blog, the American League has a designated hitter for the pitcher and the National League does not. This has been the case since 1973, so with the DH now in its 43rd season, it would be, as lawyers would say, settled case law, one might think. One would be really, really wrong. The discussion of a universal DH has set off a free-for-all on the internet. I'm not surprised. I attend a lot of baseball lectures and conferences, and saying something along the lines of "abolish the DH" or "we shouldn't have two leagues playing two different rules" is a guaranteed applause line. And I don't mean polite applause, I mean the kind of applause that political candidates get when they're talking to their supporters: Loud, enthusiastic applause, punctuated by whoops and whatnot.

The relationship to Wainwright is that if he hadn't been batting, he wouldn't have ruptured his Achilles tendon. (Probably not. He could've ruptured it pitching or fielding or jogging in the outfield between starts. We'll never know. But since he didn't have a history of Achilles problems, this looks much more like a fluke accident than one waiting to happen.) So if we have a DH, we don't have Adam Wainwright rupturing his Achilles tendon getting out of the batter's box, and we don't have Chien-Ming Wang, a 19-game winner for the Yankees in 2006 and 2007 and off to a 6-0 start in 2008, injuring his foot in an interleague game and pretty much never being the same pitcher again. 

Now, let me give you two disclaimers:

1. I think the prevention of pitching injuries is not a great justification for the DH. Yes, what happened to Wainwright and Wang and others is terrible. Had they not been batting, I'd wager, they wouldn't have gotten hurt. But what happened to them is pretty rare. We don't get a lot of pitcher injuries from swinging the bat or running the bases.
2. I'm pretty agnostic on the DH issue. I'm mildly in favor of expanding it to the National League, for reasons I'll explain below. But I'm OK with leaving things as is, and I'd be OK if major league baseball were to abolish it. I just can't see getting worked up over the issue. It doesn't affect my enjoyment of the game, one way or the other. 

That being said, I'm going to show you a graph. I do a lot of charts and graphs here, and I know that it's a bit much for some of you. So this'll be the only one for today. And I'm not going to tell you (yet) what it is. I'm just going to present it and let it sink in, OK? Here goes:

Here's how you should perceive a graph like that: It's measuring something that's in steady decline. Ignore the scale on the left, and this could be something like infant mortality rates, or percentage of Americans engaged in agriculture, or proportion of homes heated by wood, or something. It's a pronounced, consistent, downward trend.

OK, enough mystery. I used a statistic called wRC+. It's an overall measure of offensive contribution computed by FanGraphs. It stands for weighted runs created. The + means that it's normalized: It adjusts for each player's home park and the year in which he played. The average wRC+ every year is 100. Good hitters are above 100, weaker hitters are below it. All-star Andrew McCutchen had a wRC+ 168 last year, the best in all of baseball. Since the average is 100, McCutchen's 168 means that he was 68% better than the average batter last year. Light-hitting middle infielder Clint Barmes had a 79 wRC+, meaning he was 21% below the league average. I'm not saying that wRC+ is the perfect measure of offensive performance, but it's a consistent calculation that evens out the variations between high-offense and low-offense eras.

Anyway, the graph is the combined wRC+ for pitchers beginning in 1901. That's a pronounced, consistent, downward trend. PItchers are getting worse and worse at batting. And, when you think about it, that's not surprising: Pitchers don't bat. There's a DH in high school. There's a DH in college. (Note that the DH in high school can be used for any hitter, not just the pitcher, and in both high school and college, a manager may elect not to use the DH if the pitcher's a good hitter.) There's a DH in the rookie and Class A levels of the minors. There's a DH in Class AA and AAA unless both teams playing a game are National League affiliates and agree not to use it. The list of leagues in which the DH is not used is shorter than the list of leagues that use it. The holdouts are the National League, Japan's Central League, Japanese high schools, American Legion, and Little League. That's it. I'm probably missing some obscure leagues, but it's not uncommon for a National League pitcher to not swing a bat in a game from the time he leaves Little League until he reaches the high minors.

So even if the American League were to eliminate the DH, pitchers would still be lousy hitters, because they don't learn to hit as they're developing. Yes, that might change with time if other leagues drop the DH as well, but there's no guarantee that they will.

We're left with pitchers being almost automatic outs. When you hear about good hitting pitchers, you hear about Madison Bumgarner and Zack Greinke, among others. Bumgarner, somewhat famously, hit more grand slams last year (two) than Derek Jeter did in his entire career (one). Greinke provided these memorable moments during the Dodgers' Divisional Series against the Cardinals:

So yeah, a DH would deprive fans of seeing Bumgarner and Greinke hit. But hold on: Bumgarner's career slash line (batting average/on base percentage/slugging average; the average in the majors last year was .251/.314/.386) is .160/.201/.247. Greinke's is .214/.263/.325. You may have heard of Mario Mendoza, the 1970s-era weak-hitting shortstop. Sometime in the late 1970s, some player--the identity's unclear--coined the term "Mendoza Line." Back then, Sunday newspapers listed overall batting and pitching statistics for the players in each league. They'd list batters in descending order of batting average. Due to space limitations, they wouldn't display every batter, just those above a minimum level. It seemed that the last name listed among hitters would always be Mendoza's. He habitually hit around .200. The player in question talked about starting the season so slowly, he was "hitting below the Mendoza line"--his batting average was so low the papers didn't even bother printing it. It's come to mean, in common usage, a batting average of .200. 

Well, Mario Mendoza's career slash line is .215/.245/.262. That means that Greinke's hitting a little better, and Bumgarner a good deal worse, than the man whose name signifies futility with the bat. And they're the best of the bunch. Last year, pitchers as a whole batted .122/.153/.152. So far this year, they're even worse: .095/.119/.109. 

So if you like the DH because it adds offense, fine. If you don't like it because it takes away strategy, OK. If you like it because you don't want to see a pitcher who's cruising get pulled by a pinch hitter, I see your point. If you don't like it because it removes things like pinch hitters and double switches, I get it. If you like it because it'd prevent injuries like Wainwright's, sure. But you really can't say that the DH takes the bat out of the pitcher's hands, because pitchers haven't had a bat for a long time. There have been, in baseball history, 66 pitchers who batted at least 500 times and maintained an OPS+ of 50 or more, which means that their on base plus slugging was at least half of the average. Of them, only one--Carlos Zambrano--started his career in this century. All but eight retired before the American League adopted the DH in 1973. Exactly two-thirds were done playing before the end of World War II. Pitchers capable of much more than laying down the occasional bunt have been out of baseball for a long, long time. Getting rid of the DH, whatever its merits, isn't going to bring them back.

That's why I'm in favor--just mildly--of expanding the DH to the National League. I don't get any enjoyment from watching pitchers at the plate. Yes, there's the comic relief of Bartolo Colon's at bats, but they just can't hit, and that's not going to change. 

Reality Check: Adam Wainwright

Cardinals manager Mike Matheny is a regular on MLB Network Radio on Sirius/XM. Yesterday he was asked about Adam Wainwright, the ace of the Cardinals' pitching staff. He remarked that Wainwright is great but underappreciated, noting that he wasn't named NL Pitcher of the Month in April despite leading the league in a number of categories.

That made me think: Which categories?

ERA? Nope, his 1.20 ERA was second to Cincinnati's Johnny Cueto's 1.15. Pitcher of the Month Jose Fernandez was fourth at 1.59.

WHIP? No, he allowed 0.78 walks and hits per inning pitched, fourth in the league after Cueto (0.77), the Giants' Tim Hudson (0.74) and the Cubs' Jason Hammel (0.69). Fernandez was right behind Wainwright at 0.83.

Strikeouts? Wainwright was sixth with 42. Strikeout percentage? Eleventh, 25.3%. Strikeout to walk ratio? Seventeenth, 3.82. Fernandez was first, first, and sixth.

Pitches in the strike zone? Wainwright was 16th, 52.7%, ahead of Fernandez's 19th-place 52.3%. How about getting batters to swing at pitches outside the strike zone? Fernandez led the league with 37.2%; Wainwright was 23rd at 30.7%. 

Keeping the ball in the park? Only 2.6% of Wainwright's fly balls allowed went over the fence, second best in the league, a percentage so freakily low it's almost certainly a product of some luck. (Sure enough, it's a higher-but-still-outstanding 6.3% in May.) 

He didn't lead the league in innings pitched (third) or batters faced (sixth). He didn't allow the lowest batting average on balls in play (fourth). He didn't lead in baserunners left stranded (eighth). 

The only category I could find in which Wainwright led the league was wins. He was tied for first with the Dodgers' Zack Greinke with five. But even that's a little suspect; in a league in which the average pitcher got run support of 3.97 per nine innings in April, the Cardinals supported Wainwright with 5.80, seventh in the league, higher than Greinke (5.60) and Fernandez (5.45), to name two.  

In short, other than wins, I couldn't find anything in which Wainwright led the league in April.

Dillon Gee, Cy Young Contender

Nice research by Aaron Gleeman over at Hardball Talk - since last May 30, the Mets' Dillon Gee (for those of you who aren't Mets fans or fantasy players - he's a righthanded starting pitcher) has the fifth best ERA in the majors. Here's the article. Here's the key quote:

Check out where his 2.66 ERA ranks among all MLB pitchers with at least 20 starts during that nearly year-long span:
     Jose Fernandez    1.56
    Clayton Kershaw   1.89
    Zack Greinke      2.29
    Max Scherzer      2.53
    Dillon Gee        2.66

The two obvious reactions: (1) Dillon Gee, huh? (2) Man, that Jose Fernandez.