Author Archive

New York Can’t Catch a Break

You won’t find many joint Yankees/Mets fans, but if such a bizarre chimera exists, it’s been a rough few days for pitching health. On Tuesday, Noah Syndergaard made a scheduled rehab start for the St. Lucie Mets. He departed after only an inning, and he’s now been shut down for six weeks. Meanwhile, Corey Kluber made his first start since no-hitting the Rangers, only to leave after three innings. The Yankees placed Kluber on the Injured List and announced that he won’t throw for at least four weeks, with a return date still unknown.

Weird hypothetical New York fans aside, there’s an obvious link between these two situations. Both teams are suffering greatly in the wave of injuries currently sweeping baseball, and how both teams deal with the loss of their pitcher will do a lot to determine the outcome of their respective East divisions. Injury management is nothing new, but these two come at particularly pivotal times for both teams.

Syndergaard’s setback isn’t immediately devastating to the Mets. He was still likely more than a month away from returning to the major leagues, and the Mets planned around his absence. They acquired pitching in bulk this offseason; Taijuan Walker, Joey Lucchesi, Carlos Carrasco, and Jordan Yamamoto are all newcomers who the team expected to provide some coverage this season.

With Jacob deGrom looking no worse for the wear after a brief IL stint, the Mets are fine at the top of their rotation. Marcus Stroman, too, has been solid. Things dip from there — Walker, Carrasco, and Yamamoto are all on the IL, and Carrasco hasn’t pitched yet this year — but deGrom and a reasonable followup is all you need for an acceptable rotation. Walker will likely be back soon, to boot — he’s already throwing live batting practice. Read the rest of this entry »


Zack Wheeler Keeps Quietly Improving

Zack Wheeler signed a big contract before the 2020 season, and if we’re being honest, the Phillies paid for potential. That’s not to say Wheeler wasn’t an effective starter with the Mets, but his career numbers — a 3.77 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, a 22.8% strikeout rate, and an 8.5% walk rate — didn’t scream ace.

His stuff, on the other hand, spoke loudly. An upper-90s fastball and lower-90s slider invite comparisons with Jacob deGrom, and his curveball prevents batters from sitting on a single breaking ball. If you could design a pitcher in a lab — well, fine, you might come up with deGrom or Gerrit Cole. But if you ended up with Wheeler, you’d certainly be happy with your work.

When a pitcher’s results — and again, they were good results — fall short of what you’d expect from their stuff, any stretch of better outcomes feels like a tantalizing glimpse at what a breakthrough might look like. At this point, however, it’s not a glimpse: Wheeler has fully broken out into the ace the Phillies hoped for when they signed him.

Consider this: since leaving the Mets, Wheeler has the 10th-best ERA in baseball. It’s not some fluky sequencing effect, either. He has the eighth-best FIP in the game over that time frame, the 17th-best xFIP, and the 17th-best SIERA, another advanced ERA estimator. He’s done all of that while throwing the third-most innings in the game, behind only Shane Bieber and Aaron Civale. That combination of skill and volume puts him sixth among all starters in WAR over that time frame, in a virtual tie with Cole. Read the rest of this entry »


Forget (Some of) What You Know About Runners on Third

I’ll spare you the description of how I came up with the idea for this article. There was a lot of Alex Rodriguez’s announcing involved, and this is a family website, so my opinions on that will remain undiscussed. The point is, though, that it made me wonder about something I used to take for granted but have increasingly questioned: how do pitchers change their game plan with a runner on third base?

Depending on who you talk to, it might matter a lot or a little. Maybe pitchers won’t be willing to bounce one. Maybe they’ll pitch to a strikeout (assuming fewer than two outs), trying to keep the run from scoring. Maybe pitchers will completely ignore the runner on third and pitch normally. I’m legitimately uncertain. Not I think it’s 50% likely to be one and 50% likely to be the other — I have absolutely no idea how to weigh the relevant probabilities.

First things first; what about those bounced pitches? This is a classic announcer trope, but it’s a trope for a reason; throwing a pitch in the dirt really is more dangerous with a runner on third. Through the magic of run expectancy tables, we can see how much a one-base advancement costs the fielding team, based on whether there’s a runner on first, second, or third (I ignored other base/out states for brevity’s sake):

Change in Expected Runs After WP/PB
Runner On 0 Out 1 Out 2 Out
1 0.21 0.15 0.10
2 0.22 0.24 0.05
3 0.18 0.35 0.72

With no one out, everything is more or less the same; that runner on third was pretty likely to score anyway, in fact. As the outs pile up, allowing the runner from third to score hurts more and more — quite logical. Read the rest of this entry »


Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 5/24/21

Read the rest of this entry »


More Data About Sliders

Last week, I laid out some broad categorizations of what makes a slider effective, when viewed in the aggregate. As a quick recap: The most important single characteristic is hitting the corners of the strike zone. If you have a slider with plus horizontal movement, it’s also okay to miss over the middle of the plate. The middle of the plate is a great location early, but a poor location late in counts. There’s more, but those were the key findings.

That analysis left some additional factors out, because there are only so many tables you can fit into an article before it all starts to look the same. Additionally, some of those factors are beyond the scope of this analysis. Sequencing and tunneling, for example, are too complex to reduce to a two-dimensional grid. Deception might be even more confusing; I’d struggle to quantify it at all, let alone simplify it into a few buckets for analysis.

Today, I’d like to look at the rest of the factors I found easy to quantify and analyze. First, let’s talk about pitch movement. Last week, I looked at horizontal movement, because that’s the classic action we associate with a slider. It’s not the only type that pitchers throw, however. Sliders are such a broad category of pitch that they encompass pitches that mostly break sideways, mostly break down (at least, relative to a fastball), or have some mixture of the two.
Read the rest of this entry »


Willy Adames is Headed to Milwaukee

Since before the start of the season, the Rays have telegraphed their willingness to move Willy Adames. It wasn’t so much in what they said — in that they didn’t say much of anything — but two factors made it a nearly foregone conclusion. First, the Rays are *loaded* at shortstop in the upper minors. Second, the Rays don’t compete by letting surplus talent rot on the vine. Adames will be eligible for arbitration after this year, so his presence on the major league roster blocked those cheaper minor leaguers.

It was just a matter of getting past the Super-Two deadline and some team meeting their asking price. On Friday, both of those factors lined up: the Rays have traded Adames and Trevor Richards to the Brewers in exchange for Drew Rasmussen and J.P. Feyereisen, as MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported.
Read the rest of this entry »


Another Unique and Wondrous No-Hitter, Just Like Yesterday

For the better part of five years, Corey Kluber was borderline unhittable. At his double-Cy-Young peak, he was a one-man dead ball era, putting up a 2.85 ERA even as offensive numbers exploded across the league. Though he never closed the deal, he felt like a threat to pitch a no-hitter every time he started.

Kluber isn’t the same pitcher he once was. His walk rate is nearly double where it sat in those halcyon years; his strikeout rate has declined. His fastball doesn’t always crest 90 mph anymore. But he still has that same vicious cutter/slurve combination that powered his ascent, and let’s be honest with each other: This year, nearly every pitcher feels like a threat to throw a no-hitter every time out.

Kluber no-hit the Rangers last night, a capstone achievement that will forever feel slightly out of place with the arc of his career. That’s not to discount the moment: He was excellent last night. He worked off of his slurve rather than vice versa; he threw 31 of them and only 23 sinkers. From the start of the game, he was placing the pitch exactly where he wanted it, befuddling the Rangers’ lineup:

Kluber’s ceaseless desire to fill up the zone worked in his favor last night. He drew a whopping 25 called strikes, a number he hadn’t surpassed since his glory days. Batters step in against him wondering which breaking ball he’ll embarrass them with, which is a truly awful mindset to take into at-bats against a strike-throwing machine, but that’s always been his unique gift: He throws so many pitches that break at so many strange angles, putting batters at a disadvantage right from the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »


Yadiel Hernandez, Sleeping Giant

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Why is it so easy to fill in the pool that the Washington Nationals own? That’s right — it has no depth. The Nats have relied on a stars-and-scrubs approach for years, hoping that their stellar headliners can offset some of the clunkers at the bottom of the roster. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the central motivation behind their roster has been strikingly consistent in recent years.

In 2021, some of the stars aren’t shining as brightly as the team hoped. Juan Soto has missed three weeks with injury and is off to a slow, power-sapped start. Stephen Strasburg made only two starts before landing on the Injured List. Patrick Corbin has been disastrous. Offseason acquisitions Josh Bell and Kyle Schwarber, who were supposed to stabilize the lineup, are off to slow starts, Bell in particular. It’s not a great year for the boom/bust roster-building philosophy.

In a great stroke of irony, however, the Nats have found a solid bat that could lengthen their lineup and give Soto and Trea Turner some help. There are just two problems: they have nowhere to play him, and he still has some tinkering to do. Yadiel Hernandez looks like the kind of hitter that good teams need, an above-average bat summoned from the minors. Due to the team’s roster construction, he’s been banished to the bench. Should a spot open up, however, he might be the exact thing the team has been missing.
Read the rest of this entry »


Mets Add Maybin for Outfield Depth

The Mets have been no strangers to injury this year. As Jay Jaffe detailed yesterday, Michael Conforto and Jeff McNeil aggravated injuries on the same play Sunday afternoon. When Kevin Pillar was hit in the face by a pitch on Monday night, the situation worsened. In an attempt to keep their roster afloat, the Mets acquired Cameron Maybin from the Cubs for cash considerations, as Bob Nightengale first reported.

Maybin will be reporting to Triple-A, but that state of affairs probably won’t last long. The Mets started Khalil Lee and Johneshwy Fargas in the outfield last night, which brought their combined career major league start total up from one (Fargas started Monday night) to three. Dominic Smith anchored the unit, as it were, but Fargas and Lee have combined for 72 plate appearances above Double-A. It’s clearly not a working solution for the injury-ravaged club.

Maybin is an obvious short-term upgrade, but not so long ago, he looked like he might be more than an injury fill-in. In 2019, he played an abbreviated season with the Yankees and unlocked heretofore unseen power; his 11 home runs were a career high despite only 269 plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »


Parsing a Pile of Confusing Data About Sliders

What’s the most important characteristic of a slider? Let me show you a table:

Slider Value by Location, 2020-21
Attack Zone Run Value RV/100 Pitches
Heart -138.9 -0.7
Shadow -785.0 -2.5
Chase 163.8 0.8
Waste 465.2 4.5

There are two things that might need explaining in here. The attack zones are Baseball Savant’s way of cutting the strike zone up into granular pieces, and I think they’re neat. They look like so:

Run values are from the batter’s perspective, so that -785 runs in the shadow zone means that batters have been 785 runs below average — what they’ve done on all pitches across the whole year — when they faced sliders in the shadow zone. In other words, sliders on the corners of the plate have been excellent — not really a shock.

What’s the most important characteristic of a slider, then? Well, allow me to show you a different table:

Slider Value by Speed, 2020-21
Velocity (mph) Run Value RV/100
87+ -149.3 -0.8
85-87 -80.6 -0.4
82-85 -43.8 -0.2
<82 37.2 0.2

Read the rest of this entry »