Sunday Notes: Saber Seminar, Yelich, Shipley, Hooton, Aardsma, more | FanGraphs Baseball

Tom Tippett took questions from the audience after speaking at this weekend’s Sabermetrics, Scouting and the Science of Baseball seminar in Boston, and one in particular caught my attention. Boston’s senior baseball analyst was asked to compare Theo Epstein, Ben Cherington and Dave Dombrowski, all of whom he’s worked for as a member of the Red Sox front office. His response (edited here for concision) was as follows:

“Theo was very analytical,” said Tippett. “Very creative, always pushing the envelope on new ideas, open to complicated things. Dave keeps things simple. I think that’s a virtue. Sometimes you can make things more complicated than they need to be. Dave is very straightforward.

“Dave has a good feel for what needs to be done and he quickly gets to a short list of options for dealing with a problem. He quickly acts to address a problem. That simplicity is a big plus. I’m not saying that’s a negative for Theo. A lot of the good stuff we did was based on his creativity and willingness to look at things in very different ways.

“Ben came up through the scouting and player development ranks, and the wave of young players we have right now is his doing. That’s his strength. He was more corporate than the other two. His personality is more reserved.

“Dave has a smaller inner circle that he works with when he’s making his decisions. Under Theo, it wasn’t uncommon for 20 people to be in the room. When it got to decision time he would shrink that down to a smaller group.”

Christian Yelich starting to hit for power | MLB.com

Yelich hits the ball hard. Everybody has just been waiting for him to start putting a little more loft into his swing. Maybe he’s starting to do that.

Yelich has long been considered a “pure hitter” who works the gaps, and he’s living up to that reputation. With two hits on Friday, his slash line is now .320/.396/.499.
The past couple of years, Yelich has ranked at the top of all players in ground-ball percentage. Last year, for instance, his ground-ball percentage was 62.5 percent, compared to his fly-ball percentage of 15, according to FanGraphs.

This year, his ground-ball percentage has lowered to 58.9 percent, with a fly-ball increase to 16.7 percent.
“I know he’s working on some things,” Mattingly said. “If that continues, he turns into a really, really, scary guy from the standpoint of if he starts hitting for that kind of power, then the RBIs will start piling up.”

Yelich, Realmuto make mark on historic night | marlins.com

The clubs came to Fort Bragg for just one game, which lasted two hours and 59 minutes. They left with the experience of a lifetime.

“Nothing but goosebumps,” Realmuto said. “I got goosebumps multiple times tonight. The flyover for the anthem, and when they were chanting [‘U.S.A.!’].”