Baseball Chatter 05/10

When putting together the draft guide this season, I noticed that the Phillies not only had all right-handed starting pitchers in their rotation and all but one of their bullpen guys are right-handed. They haven’t had a lefty in their rotation since 2016.

Out of curiosity I took a look at their pitching prospects and found out that 12 of their top 16 pitching prospects are right-handed. Interesting in itself, but even more interesting that they demoted their only lefty yesterday. Their 25-man roster now includes 13 right-handed pitchers and 12 offensive players. The Phillies have a serious lack of love for left-handed pitchers.

Patrick Corbin has shown an alarming drop in velocity over his last two starts. As you can see illustrated in the graph below, it maxed out at 96.88 mph in his sixth start and plummeted to 86.67 in game seven. It wouldn’t be so worrisome if it had bounced back in his eighth start, but it did no such thing.

MLB polled 35 batters asking: “When you look at your stats at the end of a given year to evaluate yourself, what number do you gravitate toward?”

Here are the results:

  1. OPS (10) including Tommy Pham, Charlie Blackmon and Brandon Nimmo All have excellent OPS
  2. OBP  (6) Daniel Robertson and Yonder Alonso
  3. RBI (5) Russell Martin and Stephen Vogt Interesting that it is two catchers.
  4. Runs (4) Mike Trout (more than 100 runs scored five of six seasons) and Mookie Betts (more than 100 runs scored in two of three seasons)
  5. AVG (3) Joc Pederson, who we all know, is horrible at batting average.
  6. Games Played (3) Adam Jones (no fewer than 137 games played since 2009) and Freddie Freeman
  • Hard Hit Percentage (1) Jed Lowrie Here are Lowrie’s soft, med and hard hit percentages over the past three seasons, including 2018: 
  • BB% (1) Tim Anderson His walk percentage over the past three seasons: 3%, 2.1%, 5.8%
  • RC (1) Brian Dozier Here is Dozier’s wRC over seven MLB seasons. (wRC is used instead of RC now, and anything above 100 is above average.) Let’s get busy Dozier. 99, 117, 102, 131, 125, 80

Aroldis Chapman threw the fastest pitch of the 2018 season right into Jackie Bradley Jr. That was the third time Chapman has pounded Bradley with one of his faster than fast fastballs.

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