Some say it’s all been done before. That’s perhaps mostly true, but as something only mostly true, all of it has not actually been done before. This is especially true if you are willing to include qualifiers. Take this example: Before last weekend, no player had ever completed a cycle with a walk-off homer when the team was trailing at the time of the blast, per Baseball-Reference’s Play Index. Nolan Arenado has now eliminated that previous distinction.

Cycles are fairly rare, occurring 255 times, per Baseball-Reference, roughly once every 700 games, and this decade has been in line with that average. Since the beginning of last season, there have been 99 walkoff wins that ended in a homer, about one in 35 games. Of those 99 walkoffs, just 19 were come from behind homers, and only 13 came in the ninth, roughly one in 266 games. Put those two together, and we have about a one in 750,000 chance of both happening in a game. Given we’ve had about one quarter of that many games played over the last 100 years, it seems reasonable we’ve waited this long.

There have been a few other similar games over the years if you relax some of the requirements. There were only nine games in the Baseball-Reference Play Index where a player hit for the cycle and had the game winning hit in a walkoff. Many might have seen that the last player to hit a walkoff homer to complete a cycle was Carlos Gonzalez in 2010. He hit his shot to break a 5-5 tie against the Cubs. Hopefully the seven year difference between occurrences adds to the perceived rarity as opposed to making it seem commonplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Eno Sarris wrote that Shane Greene “features a cutter and a slider, but where one begins and the other ends is tough to decide.” Sarris concluded his article by opining that the Detroit Tigers right-hander “has four breaking balls.”

PITCHf/x shows something different. They don’t have the 28-year-old reliever throwing a cutter at all. What they have is a combination of sliders and curveballs, with a notable flip-flopping of usage. Per PITCHf/x, Greene threw 46.6% sliders and 7.9% curveballs last year. This season, the pitch-tracking algorithm has him at 13.3% sliders and 30.1% curveballs.

And then there’s his heater. Greene has been two-seam heavy since moving to the bullpen last year, but while PITCHf/x has him throwing just 1.8% four-seamers this season, the system indicates he threw 19.6% four-seams (versus 25.2% two-seams) in 2016.

Intrigued by these conundrums, I went directly to the source. Greene, who has a 1.71 ERA and a 10.2 strikeout rate per nine innings over 33 appearances, broke down his repertoire when the Tigers visited Fenway Park last weekend.

———

Greene on his repertoire: “The pitch that’s 88 to 91 [mph] and is moving like a slider, I call it a cutter. I call it that because when I earned the pitch, I already had something I called a slider. It’s harder, so I try to use it more as a cutter — not so much as a swing-and-miss pitch, but to miss barrels with. And sometimes it gets big, and sometimes it stays smaller.

“The pitch that is 82 to 84-ish, sometimes 85, is what I call my slider. A lot of people think it’s a curveball, but that’s been my slider since I was in high school. Same pitch.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Opening Day, Edwin Encarnacion made his presence immediately felt with his new team. With Cleveland down a run, one out in the eighth, and Matt Bush on the mound, Encarnacion homered to tie the game in Arlington. It was his second hit — in just his fourth plate appearance — for his new team. By WPA, it was the biggest play of the game to that point (it would end the day as the second-biggest). By the time he came up for his fifth plate appearance, Cleveland had pulled ahead by three runs, and they would go away winners. Unfortunately, Encarnacion wouldn’t hit another homer for 13 games. In the 12 games between those homers, he would hit just .182/.308/.205 (48 wRC+) in a 53-PA stretch that had some Cleveland fans feeling a whole lot of buyer’s remorse.

Fortunately, Encarnacion hasn’t maintained that horrid performance all season. In fact, as the calendar has flipped to June, he’s been on fire. His 228 wRC+ for the month is tops in the majors, and his 132 wRC+ for the season is now 32nd among qualified hitters. In case you hadn’t noticed that he was heating up, he punctuated the hot streak yesterday with two homers off of Twins starter Kyle Gibson, accounting for the only three runs Cleveland would require to secure both the win and also four-game road sweep of the Twins. He then tacked on an RBI single and a sac fly just for fun, which made him responsible for driving in all five Cleveland runs on the day. Not bad. And the home runs were pretty, to boot, both landing in Target Field’s second deck.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the draft officially behind us, MLB’s calendar has officially flipped to Trade Season. With six weeks before the non-waiver trade deadline, teams now have to get serious about deciding which direction they’re going to go; trade talks can often take a while, and teams generally want to get looks at guys they may get in return, which necessitates knowing whether to send additional scouts to cover the majors or the minors.

Of course, no one has to cement their decision on June 19th, and the results of the next month or so will move some teams from one side of the ledger to the other. But as trade talks begin to begin in earnest, let’s take a look at where all 30 teams stand now, and what we should expect them to do before July 31st.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs, like all teams, are looking for an edge, for many edges.

The current front office began by focusing on position-player talent with premium draft picks, believing such prospects were safer bets to become impact major-league players. So far, so good.

When the world shifted three infielders to the right or left of second base, the Cubs started to shift less — and continue to do so. The result: one of the game’s most efficient defenses in recent history.

The club is interested in soft power, too. The Cubs have facilitated communication and collaboration between different departments — as have many other clubs — and better ways to facilitate cooperation. One way might be through the game’s only round clubhouse.

The Cubs, in brief, have exhibited a number of ways to get ahead.

July 2 marks the beginning of the hard-cap era for international signings. It also marks another opportunity for the Cubs to get ahead. This year, teams will no longer be allowed to lavishly outspend bonus-pool limits. Teams like the Cubs will now face a penalty for exceeding pool limits, losing the ability to extend anything greater than a $300,000 bonus to an international player. The Cubs have exhibited some creativity in recent years, however, in their attempt to work around pool limits. They’re likely to continue to do so.

Now the Cubs have perhaps found another edge in their pursuit of talent: Mexico.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the earliest days of spring training, Jeff Sullivan was moved by a mammoth home run to pen (type?) a piece on how difficult it is to exaggerate Aaron Judge’s power. Here’s the video of his inspiration:

Well, as the solstice approaches, the season nears its halfway point and Aaron Judge has continued to distinguish himself in his first full year in the Bigs. He currently dominates the Statcast Leaderboard, leading the majors in maximum exit velocity, average fly-ball/line-drive exit velocity, and barrel percentage. He’s second in average exit velocity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bud Black pitched twice in Denver.

The first occasion was as a minor leaguer for the Omaha Royals in 1983 when he faced the Denver Bears, the Triple-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers. A decade later, Black returned to Mile High Stadium at the foot of the Rocky Mountains for his first and only major-league start at 5,200 feet above sea level — in this case, against the expansion Rockies on May 12, 1993. The next closest stadium in elevation at the time was Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium (1,050 feet) followed by Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (886 feet). Perhaps in all of professional baseball only Mexico City’s Foro Sol (elevation: 7,350 feet) was an environment less conducive to pitching.

Even as a minor leaguer in the early 1980s, Black had heard all about the perils of pitching in the thin air of Denver, about what it means to have fewer molecules bouncing off batted balls and pitches. Most often Black heard about how ineffective breaking pitches were there, with the Magnus force exerting less influence over a ball due to an air density of just 82% compared to sea level.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Gregg didn’t follow in his father’s footsteps. Eric Gregg — one of the first African-American umpires to work in the major leagues — called balls and strikes in the National League from 1975-1999. Kevin graduated from James Madison University with a degree in Sports Management, and is now the Senior Director of Media Relations for the Boston Red Sox.

While his late father plays a big role, he wasn’t the initial impetus when I approached Gregg for this story. Rather, I’d been thinking about how different people follow baseball in different ways. Not everyone has the same relationship with the game, nor the same perspectives on it.

When you’re in Gregg’s position, you watch a lot of baseball, and you do so studiously, through a unique lens.

“I’m at about 130 of the regular-season games, and I’m watching every single pitch,” explained Gregg. “I’m scoring the game, literally writing everything down. Being into every pitch is part of my job. I need to know what issues may come up for the players, or for the manager, who meets with the media on a daily basis. What were the strategies that worked and didn’t work? There’s also the baseball information side — getting game notes ready.” Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »