A year and a half ago, one of baseball’s top pitchers was a Long Island Duck.
A good starter for two seasons seemingly undone by injuries, Rich Hill bounced around as a reliever with exceptional career persistence and little else. He was reborn as a starting pitcher in the independent Atlantic League at age 35 and, within two months, became arguably one of the five best starting pitchers in the majors. He might have quit five years ago; last month, he signed a contract that guarantees him $48 million.
That’s quite a career path. If you graphed it, it’d look ridiculous. Well, OK, now we have to graph it:
So which active player’s career path is the most interesting, the most surprising? It’s Hill’s title to lose. Here are the contenders to unseat him:
Category of interestingness : Nobody Could Have Predicted This.
Case for: Trout’s career graph wouldn’t look like Hill’s, dancing haphazardly like a Plinko chip. His graph would be a straight line up, from high draft pick to top prospect to best young player to best current player to in the conversation for best player ever. It’s easy to get lulled into the predictability of a straight line, but remember that each of those leaps was unexpected. If you’d told a team drafting in the first 23 picks of the 2009 draft that you were from the future and that Mike Trout was going to turn into perhaps the greatest player in the history of the sport, they wouldn’t have even let you stick around to tell them about the 2016 election. Put another way, Mike Trout has outperformed his projections every year, usually by large margins, despite those projections getting to reassess him each time based on his extraordinarily consistent greatness. Here’s PECOTA (a metric for forecasting players’ performances) vs. his performance:
The difference between 27.1 wins and 46.6 is massive. I don’t know that any player has made PECOTA “miss” by a larger cumulative margin over the past five years than Trout.
Case against: The arc, such as it is, is in our expectations for him and our understanding of him. Trout hasn’t really changed since the first month of his rookie year, and his minor league performances were so dominant that he probably hasn’t actually changed much since the day he was drafted.
Category of interestingness: The Extremely Deferred Superstar
Others in this category: Daniel Murphy , Josh Donaldson , Josh Hamilton , Jake Arrieta
Case for: When he was 27, Bautista was traded by the Pirates for a player to be named later, who turned out to be a Robinzon Diaz , a catcher hitting .244/.266/.336 in Triple-A. Bautista had recently been optioned to the minors, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review led its news story on the trade by acknowledging Bautista’s career had already been long and frustrating. “Four years after he took a winding road back to the Pirates,” it began, referring to the year in which Bautista had been plucked in the Rule 5 draft and then traded three separate times. He had never produced an above-average offensive season to that point, and he wouldn’t in his first full season with Toronto, either. This is when teams give up on players, especially former 20th-rounders who had never been top prospects.
“This guy isn’t like Mike Schmidt,” Blue Jays GM J. P. Ricciardi said the day the trade was made. “He’s not going to come out and hit 40 home runs. ”
He hit 54 home runs at age 29. He hit 43 the year after, and he hit 40 at age 34. From ages 29 to 35 — his most recent season — Bautista hit 249 home runs, more in that age span than all but 12 players in history. Alex Rodriguez hit fewer from 29 to 34 than Bautista did. So did David Ortiz. The 12 players ahead of him on that list (including Mike Schmidt) had hit, on average, 198 home runs through age 28, while Bautista had hit 59.
Case against: When he was 27, Bautista briefly went to Triple-A. Big deal. Rich Hill pitched in the minors at age 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34 and 35.
Category of interestingness: The Relievers
Others in this category: Sean Doolittle , Fernando Rodney , Kenley Jansen , Joe Blanton
Case for: Nathan was drafted out of a Division III university as a shortstop, hit .232/.320/.345 in his first pro season, committed 26 errors in 54 games (at a level where official scorers are, anecdotally, known to be forgiving), and left baseball for a year rather than convert to the mound, as the Giants wanted him to do. He earned his business degree, then returned to baseball — Giants GM Brian Sabean making him write a letter explaining why he wanted to return. Nathan worked his way to the majors as a reliever, survived shoulder surgery, was one-third of one of the most lopsided trades ever, and immediately became a relief ace in Minnesota. From 29 to 34, he was arguably the best reliever in baseball, better even than Mariano Rivera. Indeed, there has probably never been a reliever better from ages 29 to 34:
So that’s at least two, maybe three, fascinating twists in his story, and he’s only 34 to that point. Next came Tommy John surgery, a couple more All-Star appearances, and then a second Tommy John surgery, at age 40. In 2016, at age 41, he made 10 appearances and didn’t allow a run.
Most pitchers don’t make it to age 32. Of those who have, only 5 percent — 51 pitchers, total, since 1950 — made it to age 42. That Nathan, a pitcher who has twice gone under the knife in the past 10 years, might, is just the latest exclamation point in a remarkable career. And it might not even be the last: With one more solid season, he’ll pass Trevor Hoffman by Baseball-Reference’s wins above replacement model. He’s already ahead of Hall of Famers Rollie Fingers and Bruce Sutter.
Case against: Pretty much every great reliever falls into it as a backup plan after failing somewhere else. There are a lot more converted position players and failed starters and busted prospects than there are Huston Streets, groomed for the job from college. Nathan’s surprising career is practically routine for the role.
Category of interestingness: The Resilient Old Men
Others in this category: Scott Kazmir , Adrian Beltre , David Ortiz
Case for: In the spring of 2010, after four years of being terrible and hurt and large, Bartolo Colon underwent a surgery that none of us had heard of and that the league hadn’t yet approved. His doctor, Joseph Purita, was more realistic than reality was:
“I was the biggest skeptic of all,” Purita said. “When they told me about this, I don’t mind doing this case, I don’t mind helping him, but don’t expect this fella to go back to playing ball. He’s 36, 37 years old, elbow and a shoulder injury, in a pitcher? Let’s be realistic here. ”
But after missing all of the 2010 season, and convincing most of us he was retired , Colon began racking up accomplishments that only an extremely old pitcher qualifies for: He led the league in shutouts at 40! Best walk rate in baseball at 42 and 43! An All-Star at 43! Suspended PED user and still among the most beloved players in baseball! More WAR after turning 38 than, oh, Matt Garza has in his entire career! His first career walk (and first career home run) at age 43. And he only throws one pitch! And he almost never touches first base! And he’s just so fun!
The day he signed with the Yankees, post-surgery, in 2011, the New York Post’s headline for the news was “Fat Chance. ” He has been more valuable than all but 27 pitchers in baseball since then. He’s only one win above replacement behind Stephen Strasburg , who at the time might have been the best pitching prospect in history, and who would debut that same season.
Case against: To somebody less forgiving of PED usage, there’s nothing all that remarkable about his career: Top prospect became a top pitcher until age and injuries withered him; late-career resurgence coincided with chemical assistance.
Category of interestingness: Was Supposed To Be Nothing
Others in this category: Corey Kluber , Jose Quintana
Case for: In the 43rd round of the 2008 draft, the Rangers took Cody Eppley and the Orioles took Oliver Drake. Each signed and each has produced 0.1 WAR in his career to date. The draft went 50 rounds that year, but Eppley and Drake were the last players chosen and signed who have produced positive WARs in their careers. Clubs sat around naming hundreds of young men who would contribute nothing, while Matt Shoemaker sat at home disappointed. “But I don’t understand,” he told his dad.
It’s not unheard of for a player to go undrafted yet find his way to the majors. Shoemaker’s journey was fitful even by undrafted standards. In 2011, at age 24, he was the (Double-A) Texas League’s Pitcher of the Year, and the Angels’ Minor League Pitcher of the Year, but when the big league club’s rotation was crumbling, they wouldn’t call him up. (They instead went so far as to sign Jerome Williams , who had been out of the majors for almost five years and who could justify his own candidacy in this article.) Shoemaker’s chance seemed to be past him: He got pounded in Triple-A for the next 2½ years, before he was suddenly summoned to the Angels’ major league rotation in 2014. He finished second in Rookie of the Year voting, went 16-4 to lead the league in winning percentage, was terrible in 2015, was even worse over the first two months of 2016, got demoted back to Triple-A, got recalled, then ripped off a stretch of 20 dominant starts in the majors:
Corey Kluber, 20 most recent starts: 2.73 ERA, 135 innings, 148 Ks, 39 walks
Shoemaker, 20 most recent starts: 2.83 ERA, 130 innings, 121 Ks, 17 walks
And then his season ended on a line drive comebacker in September.
Over the past eight years, then, there have been multiple long stretches when it was not clear that Matt Shoemaker was good enough to pitch in the minors and multiple long stretches when he might certainly be an ace in the majors. These stretches intermingle with one another, different-colored beans in the same soup. His next five years might be the least predictable in all of baseball, even harder to predict than Hill’s.
Case against: I’m not sure there’s a case against him for this title. Ultimately, the major leaguer with the most interesting career depends on what you find interesting. I’m probably most interested in the players who are told, at 22, that they’re just not very good — and who keep persisting, onstage, in public, in defiance of this expert assessment. I’d have never had the guts. We all age at different rates, and Shoemaker either developed courageous self-confidence earlier than many of us do, or he developed a sense of realistic resignation much later than many of us do. Whichever it was, the fact that he is not a teacher right now makes his the most interesting career path in the game. That fact alone makes the next two months a season for optimism and hope, rather than a season of cold actuarial tables.

Similarity rank: 0

Sentiment rank: 1.4

© Source: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/18399702/has-anyone-had-crazier-career-path-rich-hill
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Associated Press
Thursday, Jan. 12, 2017 | 1:02 a.m.
BOSTON — Have you ever wanted to know what Tom Brady sees as he stares down a pass rush, scans the field for an open receiver … or brushes his teeth in the morning?
This year’s Super Bowl broadcast could be just what you’re looking for.
Thanks to a 360-degree replay technology called “Be the Player,” Fox TV broadcasters will be able to show a play from virtually any spot in the stadium within minutes of the action taking place. The spin around and zoom “freeD” system has been used at other sporting events — including the NBA and baseball All-Star Games and the Olympics — but this will be the first that goes the last step and shows things from the athlete’s perspective.
“The difference here is you would be able to go in and see from his vantage point what the player actually saw,” said Zac Fields, a senior vice president for graphic technology and integration at Fox Sports Group. “It’s something that most of us have never been able to see before. The vantage point that most of us have on TV is really different than what the guys see on the field. That’s what the promise of this technology is. ”
Intel is rolling out the new technology at this year’s Super Bowl, and promoting it in an ad that will feature Brady in his everyday life — waking up, making breakfast, brushing his teeth — with the tagline: “Intel replay 360 makes anything look epic. ” As the Patriots quarterback snarfs down a pancake, the camera spins around to a new angle and shows the crumbs falling from his mouth.
And, if New England makes it to the Feb. 5 Super Bowl in Houston, there will be even more opportunities to see things from Brady’s perspective.
“It’s something that fans have always dreamed about: ‘What did Tom see when he threw that pass?'” Jeff Hopper, the general manager of strategy and marketing for the Intel Sports Group, told The Associated Press in advance of the announcement. “Everyone wants to be the player, to see what it’s like to see it from that point of view. ”
To make the “Be the Player” video possible, Intel has installed 38 separate 5K resolution cameras in a perimeter inside NRG Stadium, creating what Hopper calls “a volumetric capture of everything that’s going on the field. ” The cameras are connected by five miles of fiber optic cables to a special control room, where a half-dozen Intel producers, working with one from the Fox Sports broadcast, can pick out and package the replays that will be used in the broadcast.
The massive amount of data — about 1 terabyte per 15-30 second clip — allows producers to position a “virtual camera” anywhere it wants — including, virtually, inside a player’s helmet. (Early versions even toyed with superimposing a facemask on the screen, though that has apparently been dropped.) It will take about two minutes to produce the clips, meaning it’s not yet ready for instant replay but could, for example, be available to show a new view of a touchdown by the time the teams are done with the extra point or kickoff.
In an interview in Boston’s Back Bay this week, Hopper said there could be up to 20 “Be the Player” replays, though ultimately it is up to Fox to decide how to use it.
“It will depend upon the story you are trying to tell,” Fields said. “It’s not something we’re planning on using because it is a new bell and whistle. It is a storytelling tool, and that’s how we’re planning to utilize it. ”
Right now, use of the system is limited to big events: It took about a month to retrofit the stadium in Houston with all of the equipment needed for the freeD data capture. Also, each 15-30 clip consists of about 1 terabyte of data.
But Hopper said new stadiums are already being built with the cameras in mind.
“Anyone who’s building a new stadium now is saying, ‘What do we need to do to make it freeD ready?'” he said. “Because everyone sees it as the future. ”
Eventually, Hopper said, the technology will not be limited to storytelling.
Teams and leagues are hoping to mine the data to improve performance. In the X-Games, Hopper said, the athletes were eager to figure out how high they jumped and use that information to tune their techniques — or just brag about big air with the competition.
In time, coaches will be able to use the video to see what their player saw, instead of relying on overhead shots of the field. And, as the turnaround time quickens, the technology would also help replay reviews by giving officials the ability to freeze the action and zoom in at any angle to look, for example, to see whether a player’s knee was down before the ball popped out.
“We’re working with pretty much the entire sports world,” Hopper said. “All the leagues, all the teams. I don’t think there’s anyone that we’re not. We can’t do them all, but we’re talking with them all. ”
And Hopper envisions a sports world where every fan will be able to immerse himself in the game on his phone or a virtual reality headset — not just view the shots curated by a TV producer sitting in a trailer next to the stadium.
“That’s good; I think it’s interesting. But the transformative nature of what we’re working on is: Everybody gets to do it themselves,” Hopper said. “Ultimately you’ll be able to be on the field, with the players — the best players in the world — whatever sport that is, whether it be soccer, football or cricket, whatever. You’ll be able to be part of the action. I don’t think you can get any more immersed. “

Similarity rank: 1.1

Sentiment rank: 1.5

© Source: http://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/jan/12/360-degree-replays-at-super-bowl-a-taste-of-whats/
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