Major League Baseball officially flipped its calendar from April to May this past weekend, which means we’ve arrived at a juncture of the season—roughly 15 percent through 2015’s total plate appearances, if you want to get overly specific—where player performance, trends and adjustments can be dissected with a certain amount…
Last week, Colorado Rockies shortstop Trevor Story set the Major League record by hitting seven home runs in his team’s first six games of the 2016 campaign, passing hall of famers Mike Schmidt and Willy Mays, along with former Rockies great, Larry Walker, each of whom had hit six home runs…
Range and Positioning: Franco is able to read the ball off the bat very well, but often fails in completing the play because he is inexperienced and still learning to field the position. Franco’s range is a bit inconsistent, depending on his effort at attempting to make more difficult plays.…
Coming into the 2015 MLB season, Logan Forsythe was set to be the right-handed half of a second base platoon with Nick Franklin, a role that seemed to fit him well. He had been an above-average hitter against left-handed pitching but failed to finish a year with a wRC+ above…
Baseball Info Solutions’ Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) metric measures a player’s total defensive contribution at a given position, compared to league average. The primary component, as outlined in The Fielding Bible, is the company’s Range & Positioning system, which rates each fielder’s success at converting batted balls into outs. Using…
Range/Positioning: Brandon Crawford has plus agility and quickness, which provides him with above average range for the shortstop position. He glides on the infield, making the difficult plays look easy. Entering 2015, he had 21 Range and Positioning Runs Saved over his career. Crawford also entered 2015 having made 28 more…
In today’s baseball world there are a handful of guys on every team that throw absolute gas. In 2015, Nathan Eovaldi, has the highest average velocity for starting pitchers so far this year at 96.0 mph. However, Eovaldi’s past results have been rather inconsistent compared to other top flame throwers like Garrett Richards,…
It was a two-start stretch in June of 1938 that has since lived in baseball infamy. A rookie for the Cincinnati Reds, Johnny Vander Meer, completed what many to this day still believe is an untouchable feat: back-to-back no hitters. An accomplishment that seems more fairy tale than reality, this…
On the heels of Kansas City’s improbable postseason run in 2014 and now successful start to 2015, baseball has been further exposed to the importance of team defense. With an electrifying outfield headlined by 2014 Fielding Bible Award winners Lorenzo Cain and Alex Gordon, the Royals have owned the American League’s best defense since the…
Now that the 2014 major league season is down to the final four, we can reflect on how these four teams made it to the League Championship Series and how they stack up for a World Series run. To do so, I’ll look at the hitting, pitching, and defense of…
