On Monday, Ben Clemens published an article containing a list of the hitters who are getting the most power from the fewest swings and misses. It’s a ratio of barrels to whiffs, which Ben — because of his inexhaustible capacity for alliteration — calls “whomps per whiff.”

One name that stood out to me was Jake Cronenworth, who came in seventh on the whomps per whiff leaderboard. I first encountered Cronenworth many years ago, when he was the Shohei Ohtani of the Big Ten, and have been mightily pleased to see him evolve from a seventh-round pick to a two-time All-Star, and a starting infielder on a Padres team that usually buys its infielders from the Rolls Royce dealership.

A year ago, Cronenworth singed a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in brown and gold into the 2030s, and then the wheels fell off. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams has that look this year. After showing a glimpse of his offensive potential in 2023, his skills are on full display to start the season. Abrams’ projectable frame always seemed like it could facilitate him adding power. Whether he ever got to that power was dependent on his swing mechanics.

Up until this year, the lefty had a steep, pushy entry into the hitting zone. That resulted in a suboptimal launch angle distribution. In 2023, he had a 32.6% sweet-spot rate, which was in the 30th percentile. (A player’s sweet spot percentage is defined as the percentage of their batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.) So instead of hitting balls at launch angles that would result in line drives and hard-hit fly balls, Abrams hit a ton of popups and groundballs. His swing had a limited range of quality contact points.

He may have swatted 18 home runs, but those long balls were mixed in with consistent mishits. When you swing down into the hitting zone like Abrams did last year, it can lead you to be what a lot of hitting coaches call a collision hitter. If your bat path doesn’t have much room for error, you might still run into some homers from time to time, but there is only a tight window for you to do so. Rather than your barrel moving up through the entire hitting zone, it only does so at one point in space. That might be hard to conceptualize, so let’s check out some video of Abrams last year, focusing primarily on how his hands descend when he starts his swing. Read the rest of this entry »

This all started because I was staring at Jose Siri. I don’t think I’ve ever set out with the intention of staring at Jose Siri, but it ends up happening kind of a lot. He’s very watchable. He runs like the wind, if the wind had big muscles. He swings with a righteous fury, and on the rare occasions when he connects with the baseball, he threatens to reduce it to a smoking heap of carbonized yarn. He throws hard too, but not hard enough to wax poetic about it. A few weeks ago, I was researching tromps and whomps (you know, baseball stuff) when I noticed the emblem on Siri’s jersey. It wasn’t the entire Rays logo. It was just a tiny part of it meant to symbolize the whole. Jose Siri was wearing a metonym.

I started wondering about that yellow starburst design: where it came from, what it was supposed to be, and how long I’d been staring at it without actually seeing it. Despite the bright colors, Tampa Bay’s Columbia Blue alternates are the sparsest jerseys in baseball. No other team has a jersey whose front features a graphic with no characters whatsoever. Few teams in the history of the league have worn jerseys like that, and when they did, the graphics were much more representational than the asymmetrical sunburst shape that Tampa Bay uses to evoke a ray of sunshine. Over the past few weeks, I spoke to several people with knowledge of the intersection between art, graphic design, and baseball. I was also lucky enough to speak to two of the people who created the logo in the first place. As it turns out, that piece of the logo is called “the glint,” and it was born on a rooftop in New Jersey.

I first spoke to artist Graig Kreindler. He hadn’t noticed the jerseys either, and he gamely agreed to let me send him some pictures the moment before we got on the phone so that he could give me his reaction in real time. Kreindler loved the jerseys. “I had no idea that they’d gotten rid of the type altogether,” he said. “I love that idea of having your visual identity tied around something… that in this case is pretty abstract.” Kreindler specializes in gorgeously detailed paintings of baseball players and scenes, usually from previous eras. When I asked him whether he could think of anything comparable to the Rays jerseys, he brought up the Philadelphia Athletics of the 1920s, whose jerseys had an elephant on the breast, and who were apparently forbidden from smiling.

“Anything that makes me think of something vintage,” said Kreindler, “I’m all for it.” As a painter rather than a graphic designer, he was also acutely aware of how challenging this logo must have been to come up with. “I guess it’s kind of hard to make a shape —” he started, but then he cut himself off. “How do you illustrate rays of the sun?”

It’s a good point. After all, until a ray of sunshine hits something, it’s just a line. It’s hard to make that fun enough to put on a hat or a jersey. Still, there are plenty of wrong ways to answer the question. Just ask the Hagerstown Suns, who decided to lean into their name and ended up going full-on Raisin Bran.

MLB teams don’t just pick their own logos. The league has a carefully curated aesthetic, overseen by the internal MLB Design Services team. Some clubs have been around since the 19th century, and anything new needs to be of a piece with what came before, as well as with the league’s vision for the future. And there is more new design work than you might realize. Each season, there are a million things that require branding: the All-Star Game, the World Series, spring training, each round of the playoffs, the Home Run Derby, All-Star workout day, the Futures Game. Even the Winter Meetings get a new logo every year.

Long before Tampa Bay picked just a portion of its visual identity to focus on, it did the same thing with its name. From the franchise’s 1998 debut to 2007, the Devil Rays ran the worst record in baseball and finished last in the AL East nine times. When Stu Sternberg assumed full ownership of the team in 2005, it was in need of an exorcism. Whether or not it had anything to do with complaints from religious groups, Sternberg’s top-to-bottom reinvention of the franchise included a name change. Before the 2008 season, Tampa Bay dropped the word Devil and set out to rebrand around the idea of rays of sunshine. They were no longer fish; they were photons. (The devil can be hard to renounce, though. Rather than shell out for new uniforms, the team’s Appalachian League affiliate in Princeton, West Virginia, stayed the Devil Rays for an extra year.)

That history has colored how some people view the rebrand. Sarah Ingber is an artist who worked on the Too Far From Town project at Baseball Prospectus. When she looks at the new logo, her first association is a religious one: the Star of Bethlehem. However, she readily admits that the origin of the name change left her biased. “Devil Rays are a weird team name but cool animal,” she told me. “They can’t help their little head shapes. Justice for satanic nomenclature!”

Once the decision to cast out the devil had been made, MLB brought on FanBrandz, a sports branding agency run by Bill Frederick, to create the visual identity for the Rays. A team of four or five people worked on the project, with MLB vice president of design Anne Occi essentially acting as creative director. It was the first big project Maureen Raisch, a designer not long out of college, had worked on. “They really threw me in the deep end creatively, which was really exciting,” she said.

Raisch and Frederick explained that Sternberg, a Brooklyn native who grew up worshipping Sandy Koufax, had a very specific aesthetic in mind. “In the meetings, he really wanted the sophistication of the Yankees uniform,” said Frederick. “So that really drove the process.” The futuristic fonts and rainbow gradients of the Devil Rays were out. Navy blue was in. “Classic typography,” explained Raisch, “you want that in baseball. It’s right at home in the aesthetic of MLB.” However, she drew the line when there was talk of pinstripes. “Do not do it. You cannot,” she remembered thinking. “For God’s sake, you’re in the division with the Yankees!”

“I think that the glint came very, very late in the process,” said Frederick. “We had done quite a bit of exploration at that point.” His team had tried out concepts using sunbeams to create the leg of the R in Rays, or coming through the wordmark. “We had done some stuff that was very expressive, and it was determined that it really should become much more sophisticated.” Eventually, they hit on the winner. Said Raisch, “These classic baseball letter forms were going to be the thing. You kind of knew that.” That simpler design “needed that little special thing.” The idea for the glint arose during a meeting at MLB’s New York office in early January 2008. “We had this meeting, just up here on Park Ave,” said Raisch. “And something in this meeting sparked, where I go, “I know what we’re going to do.”

“We had played around a lot with it,” said Frederick. “And it just occurred to us at some point, and I think it was probably with Maureen. We said, ‘Well, what about what the sun does to the type?’ It actually reflects off the type, as opposed to trying to image sunbeams. And then Maureen basically took it on herself.”

Rather than simply draw a cartoon glint, Raisch preferred to work from real life. “I think it speaks to the way I approach creative work in sports,” she said. “I think everything should be kind of grounded in reality. Reality is what is familiar to the human eye, so you can’t fake it. Think of movies done with practical, in-camera effects. They’re the best, they hold up. Indiana Jones, from 1981, still looks great.”

Raisch went looking for gold lettering, the kind you’d get from a hardware store to put your street address on your front door. “So I go back home and all I could get is a [number] four. Like a mailbox, brass four.” She took it up to the roof of her Jersey City apartment and took pictures of the four catching the setting sun. “In my mind’s eye, it was more about maybe we bevel or give it a dimensionality, and you’d have this real hotspot. That was kind of the theory.”

Raisch still has the photos, which she showed to me. Wearing gloves to ward off the cold, she held the four by the base with a pair of needle-nose pliers. With a flaming sunset and shadowed Jersey City skyline as the background, the sun shines through the crook of the four, glancing off the corner and refracting into five beams of light. Another picture shows two images side by side, the glint coming off the four and the glint coming off the R in the finished Rays jersey. The two match almost perfectly.

“That’s how it was created,” said Raisch. “There’s my hand in a glove. I swear it’s my hand. That’s Jersey City also; not sunny Florida, you can tell.” The idea took off. Said Frederick, “I think it was very novel. It had a lot of energy. It was different, you know? It was special. And the team really embraced it, and we saw that aspect of the logo really gain traction very quickly after we introduced it. And the next thing you know we see it being used independently as its own graphic.”

He’s not wrong. The glint is absolutely everywhere. Glint-only hats were rolled out for spring training and batting practice in 2013. Since then, it has worked its way into every corner of the franchise. There are multiple variations of it on the team website. It’s on the mound and the outfield wall. The glint-only jerseys became the team’s spring training look in 2016 and the regular season alternates in 2022. “The jerseys themselves are awesome,” said Dan Abrams, the designer behind Athlete Logos. “I love the color combo and just having a graphic logo on the front chest like that.”

LJ Rader, the art history savant behind Art But Make It Sports, prefers the boldness of the original Devil Rays logo — after sending me a picture of Randy Arozarena in a throwback uniform, he wrote, “like, these slap so hard why would you ever not make this your branding” — but he did identify some touchstones for the glint. He first thought of it as a 21st century take on a Joan Miró star.

After chatting for a few more minutes, he sent an image of Edvard Munch’s “The Sun.” It was a picture he had taken at the recent Munch exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. That brought him to an ironic point about the heliocentric rebrand: The Rays play in Tropicana Field, arguably the gloomiest place in baseball.

Tampa Bay is well aware that some people adore its original Devil Rays look. This year, clubs were limited to four sets of uniforms. Rather than lose the glint or the throwbacks, the team jettisoned its road grays. (This proved wise, as it turns out that when exposed to so much as one drop of sweat, the new road grays take on the appearance of a drowned moth.) Predictably, some people are bothered by that decision. Chris Creamer, the founder and editor of SportsLogos.net, wants the team to pick a lane, rather than staying beholden to both its old and new identities. “If you are going to lean into the glint as the primary image of your brand, jump in with both feet,” he said. “Go with a yellow uniform. If this team is named after sun rays, the sun is yellow; let’s go yellow. Let’s really have fun with this.”

Still, the focus on the glint has only grown over time. Amazingly, the team didn’t alter the glint whatsoever when it decided to make it the focal point. When the glint is on its own, said Luke Hooper, who has designed many of the graphics here at FanGraphs, “you really notice how strange it is.” It would have been reasonable to rework it, given its new, more prominent role. But it still has the exact same dimensions, the little curve in the middle surrounded by all those sharp angles. The strangeness that gives it character really shines through.

Neither Frederick nor Raisch had any idea that the team would come to focus on the glint. “No,” said Raisch. “Absolutely delighted. I think they make foam glints. I think there are people with tattoos, if you want to Google this. I know during the playoffs, I found a guy with it shaved into the side of his head.” Said Frederick, “We didn’t know it was going to take on a life of its own to that degree. It was fun to watch, because all of a sudden, they really embraced it and started using it all over the place: in front of the stadium, in the entrance, and in the outfield cutting it in the grass. It was just turning up all over the place. It was really fun. They were able to find the most fun aspect of the identity.”

At this point, FanBrandz has worked on 28 All-Star Games and more than 15 World Series. Raisch spent 14 seasons designing for MLB and the NHL. In 2019, she left to become a senior designer for the NFL. In 2022, she became creative director for the National Women’s Soccer League, entrusted with shaping the aesthetic of the young league the same way Anne Occi did for MLB. “We’re creating an ethos at this league,” she said. “The Tampa Bay Rays glint is older than this league. And if you’re a 10-year-old league… you can actually really do different things that an NFL and a Major League Baseball, over 100-year-old brands, can’t do.”

The last thing I asked Raisch was whether she would go back and change anything about her work for the Rays if she could. She didn’t miss a beat, jumping into an idea she’d had for working the glint into the hats. Just as quickly, she caught herself, and relayed something she heard from a designer who worked on the NWSL’s new championship trophy: “There’s a fine line between simple and elegant, simple and classy, and simple and bland.” She went on, “So no, we wouldn’t do more with that. That is what makes a major league franchise feel on the level of a major league. They’re simple, they’re elegant, they’re poignant. They’re not overdone. So putting the glint there, I just corrected my 22-year-old wannabe thing that I would have wanted to do. Because it would have been too much on a TV. It would have junked it up.”

The Rays rebrand remains special to Raisch. She even wears their gear around New York City, occasionally drawing the ire of hometown fans. “I’ve had Yankee fans get nasty with me,” she said. Then she laughed. “And I’m like, ‘But do you like the glint though?’”

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

It’s not easy to be in playoff position — no matter how early we are in the season — with an offense ranked 23rd in wRC+ entering Tuesday. But that’s exactly where the Tigers stood, above .500 despite an offense that’s better than only seven other teams. Spencer Torkelson doesn’t yet have a home run, Colt Keith has been anemic in his first few weeks in the majors, Javier Báez has continued his backslide, and Detroit is getting almost no offense from its catchers. Mark Canha, Riley Greene, and Kerry Carpenter have been great, but three well-performing hitters can’t carry the other six spots in the lineup. So, then, it’s not hard to see what’s keeping the Tigers afloat: the performance of their pitchers.

A FIP of about 4.00 has the Tigers right in the middle of the pack in pitching WAR, but in terms of ERA — however sustainable or unsustainable it may be — they are among baseball’s best teams at preventing runs.

Detroit’s main contributor has been, of course, ace Tarik Skubal. He’s already been worth 1.0 WAR over his five starts, striking out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced and walking less than 5% of them. He’s allowed just two home runs, a major improvement from a few years ago. He surrendered 35 homers over 149.1 innings in 2021, his first full season in the big leagues, when he was a fastball-heavy prospect who tried to shove his heater down batters’ throats, an approach that often led to uneven results. Now that he’s mixing his pitches, Skubal is overwhelming hitters and making it far harder to guess what he’s going to throw, leading to far more weak contact.

Other than Kenta Maeda, who’s struggled badly this year despite his five scoreless innings Tuesday night, the rest of the rotation is doing its job, too. Jack Flaherty has his best strikeout percentage since 2019, when he finished fourth in the NL Cy Young race, Casey Mize is fully healthy, and Reese Olson looks like a solid back-end starter.

Where the Tigers have especially shined is in relief. Their relievers have an incredible 1.83 ERA, which actually went up after Tuesday night’s 4-2 win over the Rays, though it’s worth noting that mark has been aided by an unsustainably low BABIP against. Jason Foley is the headliner in the bullpen, firing high-90s sinkers to keep his ERA spotless through 11 appearances, but he’s had plenty of help. Shelby Miller’s deceptive fastball is difficult to square up, lefties Andrew Chafin and Tyler Holton are getting out right-handed hitters as well as lefties, and Alex Lange has been effectively wild. Even multi-inning relievers Alex Faedo and Joey Wentz, who largely pitch in low leverage situations, are doing well.

Opposing hitters won’t continue to run such a ridiculously low BABIP, but Torkelson won’t go homerless either. Such are the ebbs and flows that come with a long season, and right now the pitching is flowing and the offense is ebbing, with the former doing juuuuuust enough to keep the Tigers in the conversation as true contenders.

Will Daulton Varsho’s Adjustments Stick?

By no means was Daulton Varsho bad in his first season with the Blue Jays, but he was definitely underwhelming. He was still worth over two wins on the strength of his outfield defense — he led the majors in defensive runs saved — after hanging up his catcher’s mitt for good. However, his bat lagged far behind, with his 107 wRC+ from 2022 dropping all the way down to 85 last year. His strikeout and walk rates were similar, and he actually hit more balls in the air, but fewer of his fly balls turned into home runs because he was popping up far more pitches and pulling the ball less.

In working with bench coach and offensive coordinator Don Mattingly to flatten his swing plane a little in an effort to create fewer automatic outs, Varsho is thriving so far in 2024. His hard-hit rate is the highest of his career, with his average exit velocity up a full mph from 2023. Ironically, his IFFB% is actually higher than it’s ever been, but it’s more than outweighed by better contact overall, which has led to six homers (already 30% of last year’s total) and a 158 wRC+.

Varsho still has some holes in his game: Along with the popups, he’s pulling even fewer of his balls in play, and while he’s walking more, he’s also striking out more than ever. His offensive profile right now looks more boom or bust than Varsho and Mattingly intended, and the bust could come as quickly as the boom did. But for now, he and the Blue Jays should keep riding the wave of his boom for as long as it lasts.

RIP to Robert Suarez’s Fastball Streak

All good things must come to an end, and so it has with Robert Suarez’s fastball streak. For 79 pitches, the Padres’ closer threw nothing but four-seam and two-seam fastballs, until, finally, he mixed in a changeup at Coors Field on Monday night.

Although his ERA has fluctuated in his three MLB seasons since coming over from Japan, Suarez has been mostly the same pitcher when looking at xERA, though FIP feels differently about his 2023. At any rate, Suarez is taking a new approach in 2024; his pitch mix was essentially unchanged from 2022 to 2023, but now he’s throwing his two fastballs nearly 90% of the time.

The rest of his pitches are changeups, meaning Suarez doesn’t have any breaking pitches in his arsenal, but hitters have been flummoxed nonetheless. That fastball-changeup combo is enough to give hitters fits. Entering play Tuesday, he’s allowed just one run in 10.2 innings and earned eight saves. That’ll play.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Rockies (and their charter pilots) running afoul of the FAA, Jackson Holliday’s slow start, whether the Astros or Twins has hurt their division-title chances more, two embarrassing umpire incidents, offense being down relative to last season, the concept of a “combined Maddux,” Shohei Ohtani’s WAR as a DH, the Blue Jays’ self-funded ballpark renovations, new research on Tommy John surgeries in Japan, and more.

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme 2”
Audio outro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Rockies plane video
Link to AP on the Rockies
Link to new flight deck rule
Link to Blum on Holliday
Link to O’s prospects joke
Link to Animorphs meme
Link to white guys selfie meme
Link to article on Scott
Link to story on Mays start
Link to story on Mantle start
Link to change in division odds
Link to García injury update
Link to RP fWAR
Link to Dan S. on the Astros
Link to Boone ejection video
Link to EW on ump-heckling
Link to CNN on Boone ejection
Link to SI on Boone ejection
Link to KBO ABS incident
Link to offense through 4/22
Link to Joe Sheehan on offense
Link to BallparkPal thread
Link to “Maddux” glossary entry
Link to “combined Maddux” mention
Link to WAR leaderboard
Link to Jaffe on the Dodgers
Link to Cardinals funding post
Link to more on Cards request
Link to article on Jays funding
Link to Diamondbacks statement
Link to Jim Allen TJ research
Link to archived version
Link to SABR on Tippy’s pickoffs
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Thanks to an eight-run fifth inning that included Andy Pages‘ first major league home run, the Dodgers beat the Mets 10-0 on Sunday to avoid being swept at home. Even so, they’re off to a sluggish start this season after committing nearly $1 billion in free agent contracts this past winter and pushing their payroll to a club record $314 million. Maybe they’re not the juggernaut that figure suggests, though even given their star-laden roster, they came into this season as a work in progress.

The Dodgers entered Sunday having lost seven of their past nine games. They dropped the finale of a six-game midwest road trip to the Twins, then two of three to the Padres at Chavez Ravine, followed by two of three to the Nationals and two in a row to the Mets. The skid undid a 10-4 start, and they were in danger of — gasp — sinking to .500 had they lost on Sunday. They weren’t exactly getting steamrolled by powerhouses, either. The aforementioned teams had a weighted projected winning percentage of .472 at the outset of the season, and finished Sunday having produced a .453 winning percentage outside of this nine-game stretch against Los Angeles.

For the Dodgers, run prevention has been the biggest issue. Even with Sunday’s shutout — their first of the season, with eight dominant innings from Tyler Glasnow and one from Nick Ramirez — they’re allowing 4.54 runs per game, 11th in the National League. While they haven’t allowed runs at that clip over a full season since 2005, they allowed exactly the same number of runs over their first 24 games last year while going 13-11, then picking up the pace and winning 100 games. Déjà vu all over again? Read the rest of this entry »

C’mon now. You don’t really believe in Reed Garrett. Honestly, you might not even know who he is unless you’re a Mets fan or really into interchangeable middle relievers. Garrett debuted for the Tigers in 2019, tossing 15.1 forgettable innings. He departed for Japan and pitched for the Seibu Lions for two years, where he was good but not great. Upon returning to the states, he delivered more of the same: nine bad major league innings for the Nats in 2022, 20 split between the Orioles and Mets in 2023, and plenty of minor league time mixed in.

Some of that minor league time was fairly good. Garrett struck out 28% of opponents while pitching for the Norfolk Tides, the Triple-A affiliate of the Orioles, in 2023, though he walked 10% there and 14.5% in his time with the Mets. He posted a 1.59 ERA there, too, though it came with an unsustainable 91.9% left-on-base rate. He even looked fairly decent for the Nats in Triple-A in 2022, recording a 3.04 ERA in 47.1 innings with a 27% strikeout rate. We listed him on our Positional Power Ranking bullpen preview — as the 11th reliever out of New York’s bullpen, with a projected ERA of 4.75.

Garrett has thrown only 10.2 innings since then, which doesn’t sound like enough to change opinions of anyone. But my, oh my, have they been good innings. Let me just put it this way: We now project his ERA the rest of the way at 4.07, a drop of nearly three quarters of a run. Imagine how good someone has to be in less than 11 innings to outweigh their entire career up to that point. Garrett has faced only 41 batters this year; 21 of them have struck out. Ah, yeah, that’ll do it.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Nationals are 10-11 coming out of last weekend’s 2019 World Series rematch with Houston, which is a mild surprise. I thought they’d finish way off the back of the pack in the NL East, and based on how the Marlins have faceplanted out of the gate, it seems I owe the Nationals an apology. And this is not a case of a mediocre team coming off the blocks hot by beating up on a bunch of glorified Triple-A opposition. Washington has played some pretty solid competition, with a series win against the Dodgers on the road sprinkled in there, too.

When a team exceeds expectations like this, there’s usually a good bullpen involved. Sure enough, Nats closer Kyle Finnegan has been strong (though his underlying peripherals are concerning), but the team’s real standout has been Hunter Harvey. Harvey made his first appearance in Washington’s second game of the season, entering in the eighth inning of a tie game in Cincinnati. It didn’t go well; he allowed two runs in one inning of work. But the offense bailed him out, tagging no less a reliever than Alexis Díaz for three runs in the top of the ninth. So despite a rough day at the office, Harvey escaped with a win.

And perhaps as a token of gratitude, Harvey has been basically untouchable since. In his past nine outings, totaling 10 innings, Harvey has struck out 17 batters, walked none, and allowed just a solitary run. He’s recorded holds in seven of those appearances and a positive WPA in all nine. His FIP in that span is below zero.

Far out. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Andrew Golden of the Washington Post asked several Nationals pitchers where they focus their gaze as they prepare to pitch. They all seemed to have different answers. “When we go to the bullpen, that’s what we’re finding out,” said Robert Garcia. “It changes every pitch,” said MacKenzie Gore. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where a person directs their attention, about how much control they really have over it, about things seen and unseen. That’s because for the past few months, something has been slowly creeping both into my field of view and into my consciousness.

During spring training, as I watched footage of pitchers and catchers working out, there was often something lurking off in the periphery. Although it was brightly colored, it didn’t draw attention to itself. It didn’t move at all. But once I started seeing it, I couldn’t unsee it. I couldn’t help looking for it, scrolling through the social media feeds of beat writers for evidence. Here’s a picture Newsday’s Tim Healy took a few weeks ago. Adrian Houser is pitching, and J.D. Martinez is standing in the batter’s box watching pitches. But someone else is lurking behind J.D. Martinez, watching him.

J.D. Martinez is standing in to track pitches during Adrian Houser’s bullpen session. pic.twitter.com/QR9X9Fu3F9

— Tim Healey (@timbhealey) March 23, 2024

That’s the Designated Hitter. It’s a dummy shaped like a batter. The idea is to set it up in the batter’s box so that pitchers can simulate facing an actual batter. The cord dangling from its elbow is intended to give pitchers a frame of reference for pitching inside. It turns out that just about the entire league uses it. I wasn’t trying to catalog every single team, but even so, I found Designated Hitters in the bullpens of the Astros, Brewers, Cardinals, Dodgers, Mariners, Marlins, Mets, Red Sox, Tigers, Twins, White Sox, and Yankees. Back in 2022, James Fegan captured video of multiple White Sox pitchers using the DH during side sessions.

It’s not just the majors, either. The Designated Hitter has permeated every level of the sport. It’s especially prominent at training facilities. If you’re a pitching nerd who pays attention to what’s going on at Tread or Driveline, you’ve almost certainly seen it in use. On particularly fun occasions, you’ll see it in use by way of high-speed cameras as MLB pitchers work on their repertoires. Chris Langin, Driveline’s Director of Pitching, published the clips below on Twitter (and graciously granted me permission to compile them in the video below).

Colby Morris has pitched in the minors and interned at Driveline, and he’s now an associate pitching analyst in the Giants system. Understandably, he can’t talk about the specific training methods the Giants use, but he’s a big fan of the Designated Hitter. “My personal philosophical opinion is pitchers should throw almost every pitch with one,” he told me. “I loved using it while playing to hold myself accountable and gain confidence throwing inside to hitters.”

The Designated Hitter is even more popular at the amateur level, especially college. In the pros, it’s somewhat rare to see one in action. Coaches or teammates will often stand in, whereas the dummy is saved for more specific exercises. College baseball and softball programs use it constantly. Some softball programs have taken to marking them up with red, yellow, and green tape, like a traffic light. The green goes at the chest and the knees, where you want to locate a pitch. The red goes thigh-high, where you very definitely don’t. College teams also have entirely too much fun with the dummy; I’ve seen players running relay races with it, using it as an air guitar, and even holding wedding ceremonies with it. Several have named theirs.

Quick snippet of @kaileywilliams0 & @skylarmacias44 being a brick wall behind the dish ? #BeAFreakinUnit pic.twitter.com/qEwFr0WHlD

— Aggie Softball Managers (@ManageThis12) September 16, 2021

You may have noticed that aside from the colors, every one of these dummies is exactly the same. They all have the same upright, but somehow still hunched-over batting stance. The Designated Hitter is the only game in town. I decided to find out where it came from and how it seemingly found its way into the bullpens of America. I also decided to answer other important questions, such as which current MLB player has the most similar stance to the Designated Hitter. Although there were many contenders, Oakland’s Lawrence Butler is the winner. All the dummy needs is a longer bat and an oven mitt in its back pocket.

Joe Murphy, a former catcher at the University of Rhode Island, started ProMounds in 2001. Murphy was a high school teacher and baseball coach in Massachusetts, and he wanted his pitchers to be able to throw off a real mound at the beginning of the season, when the cold weather forced them to practice indoors. He invented a portable, lightweight mound made of turf-covered foam, and it turned into a business when his fellow coaches started asking if they could buy their own. Murphy enlisted his parents and fellow teachers as the company started growing. The name changed to On Deck Sports when he started branching out into other kinds of field equipment and training aids. Eventually, it became Murphy’s full-time job, and On Deck started fitting out entire baseball and softball facilities.

Although On Deck Sports owns the Designated Hitter, it didn’t create it. Murphy first encountered it at a trade show, and bought it in 2010. Trade shows are the way to get your product in front of coaches who might be interested in buying them, but they can also be expensive and difficult to navigate. When Murphy started making mounds, he learned that if you’re only selling one product, even one that sells well, it’s hard to make the numbers work. “It costs quite a bit just to mobilize and travel the trade show space,” he said. “When you have one product it can be really difficult. When I met Jim, it was getting to that point for him.”

Jim Haller was a fireballing right-hander out of Creighton Prep in Omaha. The Dodgers took him ninth overall in the 1970 draft, but injuries derailed his career, starting with a collision at first base during fall instructs. In 1971, playing for Double-A Albuquerque, he got hit in the jaw by a ball during batting practice. On August 4 of that year, he threw 14 scoreless innings against Dallas Fort-Worth. He ended up with a no-decision thanks to future big-leaguer Tom Walker, who beat Albuquerque 1-0 with a 15-inning no-hitter. “My arm never recovered after that,” Haller told me. “My arm was dead. Nowadays, can you imagine a first-round draft pick going six innings?”

On September 25, 1974, Dr. Frank Jobe performed the first ever UCL reconstruction surgery on Tommy John. Earlier that morning, he operated on Haller, cleaning up his elbow and performing an ulnar nerve transposition surgery. “I gave him hell,” Haller joked. “I said, ‘I think you took something out of my arm and gave it to Tommy.’” Jim pitched through the 1975 season, but never made it past Triple-A. “When the Dodgers sent me down the road, there was good reason,” he said. “I couldn’t get anybody out.” The numbers tell a more complicated tale. He always walked a lot of batters, but over two seasons and 52 starts in Triple-A, Haller ran a 2.90 ERA. He eventually went into manufacturing, but stayed around the game. In the early 2000s, he was coaching for the independent Lincoln Saltdogs when he and his business partner, Steve Zawrotny, came up with the idea for the Designated Hitter together.

Murphy connected me with Haller, saying, “He tells a great story.” He wasn’t wrong. Haller is retired now, living 30 miles outside Omaha in a town of 80 people. He still trains pitchers, but only if he thinks they have a real shot. Our first conversation took place while Haller was driving to pick up a dresser, and he was incredibly engaging, launching into the story of the Designated Hitter the moment we finished saying hello. I was dealing with bronchitis at the time, so the conversation followed a halting roundabout: I would ask a question, Haller would answer with a story. Eventually he’d make a joke, and I would start laughing, only to end up dissolving into a coughing fit. Then I’d apologize, he would say not to worry about it, and I’d ask another question.

Said Haller, “I don’t know if Steve said or I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a hitter up there?’ But you can’t just put a hitter in pads and let him take shots.” It’s not hard to see why the idea struck them as a good one. As Murphy said, “When was the last time you pitched a game and no batter stood in? So why would you practice without it?” I told Haller that the DH would have solved one problem I had when I was younger: I never saw enough left-handed batters to feel comfortable pitching against them. He brought up a similar concern. “There’s guys that throw a breaking ball right at a hitter. Well, where do you aim a breaking ball if there’s no batter there?”

Zawrotny was also a pitcher, and he has been running a strength and conditioning company for baseball and softball players for over 20 years. Although he and Haller didn’t know it when they started working on the idea, there were already two similar products on the market. Luckily for them, both had serious design flaws. The first was called the Pitcher’s Pal. It was essentially a crash test dummy holding a bat, and while it was used by at least one MLB pitching coach, it never caught on. Murphy recalled that it was “very oversized and awkward,” but I wasn’t able to find any real information about it. I found much more information about a different Pitcher’s Pal, which was designed to help people who play horseshoes. It was basically a tire iron with a handle.

The second competitor was the Bullpen Buddy, an absolutely hilarious inflatable batter licensed by MLB. The Bullpen Buddy needed to have its feet filled with sand in order to stand up. To make it a switch-hitter, it featured a fascinating here’s-the-church, here’s-the-steeple grip on the bat, along with a removable head that mostly just wobbled around crazily. Also, the air valve was located on the back of its upper thigh, which meant that in order to blow it up you more or less had to press your face directly into its butt. On the positive side, it bore an uncanny resemblance to Anthony Rizzo.

Unlike Rizzo, however, the Bullpen Buddy wasn’t great at getting hit by pitches. It had a tendency to tip over, and the soft plastic was prone to bursting on impact. It doesn’t take a sports psychologist to realize that if you’re trying to instill confidence in a young pitcher who’s struggling with poor control, you probably shouldn’t make them throw to a batter who might, when hit with a wayward pitch, literally explode.

Haller and Zawrotny worked out the general idea for the design over texts and emails, and filed for a patent in February 2007. The Designated Hitter came in three sizes, for players of different ages. The final shape wasn’t drawn. Haller knew a player on the University of Nebraska baseball team and asked him to pose while the team was in Omaha for the College World Series. “I’ve got a buddy in Omaha that’s kind of a wizard with computers and photography,” he said. “We shined a light on [the player], and we had a shadow on the wall and we took a picture of that.”

Once they’d crafted the final design, Haller paid $20,000 to have a mold created. The DH is made of rotationally molded thermoplastic, so it’s hollow inside and weighs only seven pounds. It then gets bolted onto a base made of recycled rubber, the same kind you’d find on the bottom of an orange traffic delineator. That’s not an accident. “I used to steal those bases. I took those off the highway for about three months,” Haller said. “At construction sites, they would put traffic cones in those so they wouldn’t blow over, so then I tracked down the company that made them in California.”

Haller and Zawrotny got the first DH molded by a company in Iowa, bolted it onto one of the purloined bases, and brought it to work to test it. That is, Haller asked his pupils to throw at it as hard as they possibly could. “And it just worked spectacularly,” he said. “We had guys that threw hard. I would keep a pocket full of hundred-dollar bills, and I would say, ‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you can break it. I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you can knock it over.’” At first, the pitchers were throwing from the rubber, the full 60 feet, 6 inches away. When it turned out that the DH wouldn’t so much as budge, he let them start moving closer. “So I had guys standing five, 10 feet away from this thing, and you just couldn’t break it. We even had them do it with softballs too because of the bigger mass.” Take a moment to picture the scene: Haller with a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, a gaggle of pitchers buzzing around in front of a two-dimensional batter, waiting their turn to take a running start and fire a softball at its center of mass from point blank range. One by one, they muscle up and unload, only for the ball to fall harmlessly to the ground. One by one, they’re defeated by seven pounds of plastic.

In the years that Haller sold the DH, he could only recall one that broke, due to a defect. He and Zawrotny were also pleased to find that, as intended, the design’s flat shape and square corners minimized deflections that could injure a catcher, a concern that plagued the Pitcher’s Pal.

With the product proven, they got to work. Zawrotny was in Oklahoma, focusing more on marketing, while Haller was in Nebraska, assembling and shipping the DHs. They both visited trade shows to demonstrate it to coaches. Early on, pitching guru Tom House told Haller that the DH was worthless. His research indicated that pitchers don’t even see the batter while they’re pitching. The slight still rankles Haller, but the DH took off quickly. “Our original purchasers were high schools, local high schools here in the Omaha area. And Omaha, we’re a baseball area. The College World Series kind of makes us a baseball town. Steve went to trade shows in Texas and sold a bunch, but it was primarily high schools, and then the colleges caught on. And then I think we gave one to some big league club for spring training, and that took a while to catch on. But I honestly think players were demanding them, and that probably helped the sales.”

Luis Severino coming at you during a bullpen session pic.twitter.com/vKkLuQ345v

— Greg Joyce (@GJoyce9) February 15, 2023

Haller remembered one player in particular who loved the Designated Hitter early on, although he couldn’t come up with the player’s name. The player spent most of his career with the Cardinals, and then bounced from team to team for a few years. Each time, he’d make sure the new team’s bullpen had a DH. After struggling for another minute or two, Haller gave up on trying to remember the name, but an hour or two after we hung up, he called me back and shouted, “Isringhausen!” I laughed, then coughed.

Eventually, the demand became too much for Haller and Zawrotny, who were both coaching and training while managing the Designated Hitter. They sold it to On Deck in 2010. “When Murphy came to us and was interested in buying the entire product, Steve and I thought, This is too big for us. We’re not going to get the job done. So we sold it to Joe. I’m happy for him.” Haller is proud of what they accomplished: “I’ll look at somebody I respect in the big leagues, somebody’s mechanics I respect, and you’ll see the thing standing there.” However, that doesn’t mean he has no regrets about letting the DH go. “Steve and I, we came up with a winner,” he said. “I wish we could’ve cashed in on it.” They have since come up with other ideas, but nothing they’ve believed in strongly enough to pursue.

On Deck now manufactures the Designated Hitter at a factory in Georgia. The company adjusted the mold so that it comes in two pieces, bolting together at the hitter’s waist, which makes it easier to ship and transport. That’s the only significant change it made, and the DH is still more or less indestructible. “The breakage and the quality control around it,” Murphy said, “it’s so fractional that it’s not even measurable.” When I asked how many Designated Hitters were in bullpens across the country, he estimated that the number was in the tens of thousands.

When I asked Haller if there was anything he wishes he could go back and change about the product, he already had an answer ready: the name. “We thought we were clever as hell calling it the Designated Hitter,” he said. But they realized that the name made it sound like the opposite of what it was: a device to help hitters rather than pitchers. “It was too late, we had money sunk into it,” he said “And that wasn’t Steve’s fault. It was my fault.”

There’s no getting around the fact that the Designated Hitter is, in some ways, a deeply silly product. It’s not as silly as a decapitatable Anthony Rizzo, but there’s always going to be something funny about an indestructible two-dimensional batter. Sometimes the simplest solution to a problem is elegant, the single stroke that clears everything extraneous away. And sometimes the simplest solution strips the problem down to its essence, laying bare the absurdity of the entire exercise. The faceless, depth-less DH is somewhere in between, using the absolute minimum information possible to convey the idea of a batter. It’s not so much a designated hitter as a deconstructed hitter. The first time you notice it, you’re bound to think of Ricky Vaughn taking a dummy’s head clear off with an errant fastball in Major League. All the same, I was moved to hear the passion with which Murphy and Haller talked about it. The idea had been around for a long time; it was just waiting for people who cared enough to get it right. “I don’t know, man,” Haller said. “I’m not that smart, but we fell into one.”

Although I’ve focused on usage across Major League Baseball, that was never intended to be the main market for the Designated Hitter. From the very beginning, Haller and Zawrotny saw it as a teaching tool for young players. “Youth pitchers, they hit a kid, and they might not want to pitch anymore,” Haller said. “When you’re 10, 11 years old and you’ve got a guy hitting you, a lot of kids get scared to death and it ruins their whole baseball experience.” Haller is still very much a coach at heart, and he told me enthusiastically about the two pitchers in high school he’s currently training. Though he’s still a board member, Murphy recently sold the majority of On Deck Sports and went back to coaching. “We use it in our bullpen every day,” he said.

Speaking with Haller, it’s not hard to see how his own experiences as a pitcher led him to value the idea of a tool for practicing command and learning to pitch inside without fear of hitting a batter. Later in our conversation, I started asking him about his own experiences. When I told him I’d read that he once struck out Hall of Famer Dave Winfield four times in a row in an American Legion game, he joked, “I was so damn wild he just wanted to get the hell out of there.” He came back to that idea several times. “I didn’t know how to pitch,” he said. “I threw hard. I’m 6’6”, 225; I threw hard as hell. I’m there in Vero Beach, I’m around Don Sutton and Tommy John and Andy Messersmith, and they’re throwing seven, eight miles per hour less than me.” The Designated Hitter was created for kids like him, along with the kids who have to stand in against them. “These guys on little league teams are just bigger than their peers, so they don’t really learn the finer skills,” he said. “I felt bad for these kids. I was six feet tall in little league. Can you imagine these kids facing me?”

About two months ago, pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, marking a ceremonial end to the winter and the beginning of a new season. But as players showed up to camp and exhibition games began a couple weeks later, two pitchers were notably absent.

Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, our fifth and sixth ranked free agents entering the offseason, each signed contracts dangerously close to the start of the season, with the latter coming off the market just two days prior to Opening Day. Both had to settle for much shorter-term deals than they were expecting, with combined guarantees undershooting our crowdsourced projections by $188 million.

As the first to sign, Snell was the first to make his debut, starting the Giants’ 11th game of the year after pitching in simulated games against his teammates. Montgomery reported to Triple-A, making two starts in Reno before being activated by the big club last Friday. His first start of the year, interestingly, came against the Giants and opposite Blake Snell, so it offered an early look at how this unconventional offseason might have impacted each pitcher.

Snell vs. Montgomery was an exciting matchup thanks to their track records of excellence and the intrigue surrounding their offseasons, but also one that came with many unknowns. How would Montgomery fare in his first major league action of the season? Would Snell bounce back after two consecutive poor outings? How much rust would each deal with after a month of ramp up time?

Snell’s top of the first inning was relatively uneventful; he used his slider and changeup to record three straight outs after a leadoff single. Next, it was Montgomery’s turn to face a Giants lineup stacked with right-handed platoon hitters like Austin Slater and Tom Murphy. Slater led off, and Montgomery’s first offering of the year was a sinker that clocked in at 91.4 mph, two ticks shy of last year’s average. He sat in that velocity band throughout the game, a symptom of the late start to his spring. Slater eventually grounded out on a curveball low in the zone, and the next two hitters were also retired on routine grounders.

Outside of being left-handed pitchers on short-term contracts, Snell and Montgomery have little in common, especially with respect to their pitching styles. Snell refuses to conform to the so-called strike zone, rapidly changing batters’ eye levels with fastballs above it and breaking balls below it. His brand of high-strikeout, high-walk baseball has netted him two Cy Young awards, though he ran a more pedestrian 96 ERA- across the four seasons separating them. Montgomery, on the other hand, prefers to live in the zone with his plus command and arsenal of downward-breaking pitches. He’s never reached the heights of Snell’s peak years, but has outproduced him by WAR over the past three years.

Snell pitched a clean second inning, capped off by a seven-pitch showdown against Gabriel Moreno. After falling behind in the count 3-1, he got Moreno to swing and miss below the zone, then foul off the next pitch to keep the count full. He threw two fastballs and four sliders to get here. So what did he do next?

This is an example of Snell at his best, the version that knows where each pitch is going even when not throwing strikes. Primed for a fastball or slider that would have ended up down the middle had it been aimed at the same spot out of the hand, Moreno went down on a curveball that dropped two feet more than any of Snell’s other pitches. Last season, Snell’s 310 swinging strikes on out-of-zone pitches ranked second in baseball, and most of them came on breaking balls that tunneled well with his fastball before falling off the table.

Unfortunately, Snell failed to execute this strategy for the rest of his start, as too many offerings leaked over the middle of the plate. In the third, a slider and changeup down the middle resulted in loud contact from Blaze Alexander and Ketel Marte. In the fourth, Alexander struck again, this time against the fastball. Snell allowed four more hits in the fifth before being pulled mid-inning, failing to complete five frames for the third consecutive start. The Diamondbacks collected nine hits, the most he’s allowed in a start since 2019.

Most of the hits Snell allowed were the result of the Diamondbacks capitalizing on pitches down the middle, which were uncharacteristically frequent from someone whose pitches tend to magnetize away from the zone. But in this three-start sample, Snell has been leaving more pitches over the heart of the plate, resulting in both more loud contact and fewer swinging strikes in the zone.

While Snell’s command certainly isn’t where it was last year, Montgomery had no such issues locating his pitches throughout his start. He landed an impressive 23 of his 30 sinkers in the strike zone, taking advantage of its high groundball rate; batters have slugged under .375 against in each of the past two seasons. With a strike-stealing machine in his arsenal, many matchups against Montgomery ended in either an early groundout or a pitcher-friendly count that allowed him to deploy his curveball and changeup, the latter of which earned four of his eight whiffs on the night. While he spiked a few curveballs in the dirt, he had excellent feel for locating his changeup, consistently landing it on the armside half of the plate.

Without his typical velocity, Montgomery struck out just three batters (one of which came on a pitch clock violation). Instead, he recorded outs by keeping his pitches away from barrels and limiting the quality of contact against him, tallying nine groundouts in six innings of work while allowing a hard-hit rate of just 32%. Aside from a Jorge Soler homer that marked the only blemish on Montgomery’s record, none of the other batted balls he allowed were particularly threatening; over two-thirds of them had an xBA below .200.

Another trend to watch from Montgomery’s start was his increased use of his changeup and curveball. He’s thrown his fastballs about half the time throughout his career, but he dropped that usage to about 40% in his first game with the Diamondbacks. This shift may simply be the result of good advance scouting — Giants’ right-handed hitters currently rank 28th in wOBA against non-fastballs — but it could also be part of Arizona’s teamwide shift toward more diverse arsenals, especially from its starting pitchers. This season, Merrill Kelly has added a slider to his kitchen-sink arsenal while Slade Cecconi is throwing far more splitters at the expense of his fastball. Montgomery’s curveball has been a successful out pitch and could potentially generate even more outs if he continues to throw it 30% of the time; during his career, batters have generated a pitiful .177/.209/.307 line against it.

Montgomery was removed from the game after six innings and 78 pitches, and Arizona’s offense teed off in the late innings of the game, which ultimately resulted in a 17-1 wallop. Both starting pitchers still have more ramping up to do at the big league level, with Montgomery working back to regular season velocity and Snell still searching for his command after three bad outings. That said, I think there’s reason to be optimistic about both pitchers. Even with an 11.57 ERA, Snell’s peripherals are nearly in line with last season’s numbers, and he tends to improve as the year goes on, with a career FIP nearly a run better in the second half of seasons. Montgomery showed off his advanced pitchability despite his diminished stuff, with a possible arsenal change that could lead to improvements.