You know roughly what a good batter’s stat line looks like. Here’s Juan Soto’s league-leading 2020, for example: .352/.486/.703 with 20.2% walks and 14.8% strikeouts. In 2019, Mike Trout hit .291/.438/.645 with 18.3% walks and 20% strikeouts. These make sense as “good” in my head, even if I can’t calculate how many runs they were worth without looking it up. Salvador Perez has a 177 wRC+ in 140 plate appearances this year, one of the hottest streaks of his career, and he’s batting an unrecognizable .356/.371/.667. Huh?

Oh yeah — Perez is also walking 2.1% of the time this year while striking out in 20% of his trips to the plate. He has 10 homers and three (3) walks. He’s swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone 46% of the time, the fourth-highest rate in the majors. This is the plate discipline you’d expect from a light-hitting catcher, not from a guy who would have the third-highest wRC+ in baseball this year if he had enough playing time to qualify. We’re going to need an explanation here.

One look at Perez’s Swing/Take profile (courtesy of Baseball Savant) will get your regression senses tingling:

Perez swings at 70 percent of the pitches he sees in the shadow zone, the edges of the plate and the area just outside. Only five batters in the league have swung at more at pitches in that zone. He swings at 21% of pitches in the waste zone, the highest rate in baseball (league average is 5.5%). There are certainly productive hitters who swing a lot, but they usually do it by piling up value in the heart of the plate and living with the downsides. Perez creates more runs by swinging at borderline strikes and balls than he does by swinging at pitches down the pipe.
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On Monday night, I was watching the Cardinals battle the Royals when I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. As Adam Wainwright labored in the sixth inning — two runs in and runners on the corners with two outs — the Cardinals announcers mentioned one of Wainwright’s greatest strengths — in their minds, at least. “That’s something that Adam Wainwright is really good at, is not compounding the inning… going back and getting the next guy.” I’ve been a Cardinals fan my whole life — and to that tidbit, I said, “Huh?”

It was, in truth, something I’d never thought about. Are some pitchers better than others at turning off the tap, amping up their performance when they need it and keeping crooked numbers from getting even crooked-er? My saber sense was tingling — something about this didn’t sound quite right. But of course, these spots are exactly where if a pitcher could bear down more than expected, it would make the most difference. I decided I’d try to find out how real this effect was.

Defining what I was looking for turned out to be a difficult. What, exactly, does “not compounding the inning” mean? The announcers seemed to think it meant that Wainwright pitched better after runs were in, or at least pitched the same while most pitchers in baseball got worse. Either way, the general idea was that his ones and twos turned into threes and fours less often than average.

One possible reaction to that might be “So?” His ERA is his ERA, regardless of whether it comes via a three-run spurt and eight zeros over nine innings, or three one-run frames and six zeros. To that I say: reasonable point. There are still reasons to care, though. For one, if a pitcher were actually prone to clustering, they’d tend to underperform their FIP over time. One of the reasons home runs are so bad is because they always result in runs, whereas other hits can be scattered around in otherwise dry innings without damage. A cluster-prone pitcher wouldn’t have that advantage; when you give up baserunners in bunches, a single and a home run become much closer in value.

In the same way, a pitcher who was prone to lots of singleton runs allowed but then mysteriously got better after letting one in would beat his FIP over a long time horizon. Base/out states tend to be more dangerous after a run has scored, naturally enough. Getting better then, or not getting worse while most pitchers do, would be quite the superpower. Read the rest of this entry »

Ask 10 professional hitters what they’re trying to do at the plate, and you might get 10 answers. They might be trying to hit a line drive to center every time, or put the ball in the air, or stay back on offspeed pitches, or take what the pitcher gives them. Ask what they want to do, however, and if they’re honest, they’ll tell you they want to hit a home run.

How could you not want to hit a home run? The feeling of absolutely obliterating the ball must be magical. Want to take your time around the bases? It’s all up to you! Your teammates will all congratulate you. There are no fielders to interfere with it. It’s the perfect combination — the best contact you’ll ever make, and plenty of time to enjoy it.

Of course, most trips to the plate don’t end in a home run. For Rafael Marchan, in fact, none of his trips to the plate in a professional game had ever ended with that feeling of elation before 2020. That didn’t stop him from standing out as a prospect, because he checked a lot of other boxes: he’s a catcher with a plus throwing arm, and he has excellent contact skills. It’s a Wilson Ramos starter kit, essentially, and that was enough to make Marchan the Phillies’ 10th-best prospect heading into 2020.

Marchan didn’t look likely to break his string of homer-less professional plate appearances in 2020. He played in A- and Hi-A ball in 2019 and acquitted himself well enough even without the homers; his .271/.347/.339 batting line for the Lakewood BlueClaws was good enough for an unconventional 105 wRC+. That isn’t the kind of line that clamors for a big league call-up, and with no minor league season, it was shaping up to be a year of sitting quietly on the sidelines, not getting any better at hitting or any closer to the big leagues.

There was one thing working in Marchan’s favor: his age. A 2015 signee, Marchan was eligible for the Rule 5 draft after last season, and he would be again this year. The Phillies probably didn’t want to take the chance that someone would snap him up, and they at least wanted to get a look at him in camp before having to make a decision one way or the other. It was a no-brainer to add him to the 60-man player pool, even if we still thought his ETA was 2022.

While Marchan was in camp, impressing coaches with his defense and continuing to make contact against advanced pitching, the Phillies got funky at the major league level. On the August 31 trade deadline, they added David Phelps while activating Ranger Suárez and Jay Bruce from the Injured List. That meant they needed both 40-man roster space and active roster space, and Deivy Grullón got caught in the crosshairs.

Grullón was on the Phillies roster for Rule 5 considerations himself, but was stuck in between roles; he’d come up as a glove-first backstop, but the glove didn’t hold up at higher levels, and while his bat improved, it wasn’t enough to carry him. He looked like a fringy backup or a solid third catcher, which is exactly how the Phillies were using him, but they needed 40-man spots. They were going to lose him in the offseason, anyway: if they protected Marchan in the Rule 5 draft, that would in all likelihood mean releasing Grullón to make the roster work.

It probably wouldn’t matter much for Marchan, but that made him the third catcher on the Phillies’ depth chart this year. With only a month remaining in the season, he wouldn’t likely be needed in the bigs, and in most years, teams can always find a spare third catcher lying around rather than use a 21-year-old who has never played above A-ball if they need a spot start.

Of course, it’s not most years. When J.T. Realmuto injured his hip on September 12, the team added Marchan to the active roster. It was no big deal, from a 40-man perspective; they were going to add him this offseason anyway, so why not do it now? He’d serve as Andrew Knapp’s backup while Realmuto rested — it might only be a matter of days, but Marchan would probably need to catch at least one game, due to a double-header scheduled for September 14.

He went a solid 1-3 in one game of that double-header, and Realmuto didn’t recover quickly, which meant another start, on September 18 against the Blue Jays. And in that game, Marchan did the unthinkable: he hit his first professional home run. It was no cheapie, either; a 364-foot, 99.6 mph blast to right off of an A.J. Cole cutter.

Home runs don’t impress us as baseball fans the way they used to. They’re everywhere in the major leagues, so commonplace as to be boring. Eric Sogard, who looks like a substitute teacher, has a double-digit home run season. Jorge Polanco cranked out 22 last year. Home runs aren’t special anymore.

But c’mon — this is something else. FanGraphs carries minor league data back to 2006. Here’s a list of the players with the most minor league at-bats in that timeframe without a home run:

This list is a bit misleading. For one thing, two of the top four players had extensive pre-2006 minor league careers. In fact, both Gathright and Hopper hit homers before 2006 (Theriot, Ozuna, and Barrett did too, but they’re below Marchan on the list so we’ll leave them out of it). Gathright hit exactly one home run in his minor league career, and exactly one in his major league career. Close to what we’re looking for! But no cigar.

Hopper displayed a jaw-dropping lack of power; in a whopping 4,761 minor league plate appearances, he managed exactly three home runs. He also hit only a single major league home run, but it too was after he’d already gone yard in the minors.

If we’re looking for someone to top Marchan’s feat, then, Kyle Hudson is our best shot. Hudson, like Hopper, combined minor league longevity with absolutely no thump. He was drafted in 2008, then spent four years in the Orioles’ system before getting a shot in the big leagues in 2011. Like Gathright and Hopper, he was a speedy outfielder with questionable pop; he hit one home run in his last season at the University of Illinois, where he was a two-sport star who totaled 999 receiving yards over three seasons of football.

In his brief shot in the major leagues, however, Hudson didn’t exactly power up. He hit a desultory .143/.143/.143 in 29 September plate appearances, then left the Orioles organization in the offseason. He bounced around through five organizations before hanging up his spikes for good in 2015, with no professional home runs to his name.

So there you have it: as far back as I can scrape data, Rafael Marchan is the champion of hitting his first professional homer after a long, fruitless minor league stint. But that’s unsatisfying, even if he’s leaps and bounds beyond any other active minor leaguer when it comes to homer-less plate appearances. That’s because of a simple fact: having the longest streak of never doing something ends as soon as you do that thing.

Take John Gant. One of my favorite weird baseball statistics was that Gant was, briefly, the major leaguer who had the most plate appearances without reaching base. Then he reached base (on a home run, naturally). Now he doesn’t hold that record anymore. If your record involves never doing something, it’s hard to make it stick. Eventually, you’ll do it.

In that vein, I decided to dig a little deeper and look for players who had little power but not actually no power. Here’s a list of players with no more than three homers at the minor league level since 2006:

This is hardly a list of household names, unless you count Gore and Frazier. Ruíz and Weems both converted to pitching, so bereft of pop were they. The players in front of Machan on this list have combined for 35 major league homers, and Frazier has hit 33 of them. He has the vast majority of the major league plate appearances this group has accrued as well; this skillset simply doesn’t seem to get much of a chance in the majors.

That, of course, is mostly meaningless. Marchan is in the major leagues. He’s Philadelphia’s best catching prospect, and if Realmuto leaves this offseason, he might just be their best catcher, period. He’ll get more chances at the major league level, and the batted ball data, scarce as it is, already looks good.

He has a barrel! His hard-hit rate is 50%. The sample size is “go away, this isn’t a real sample,” but we’re not talking about Billy Hamilton here; Marchan’s maximum exit velocity, in six chances, is 99.6 mph, nearly equal to Hamilton’s maximum in 257 batted balls the past two years.

Rafael Marchan is a historical oddity; a near-powerless minor leaguer who still looks like he has a bright future in the major leagues. He’s also, though, a creation of this strange year. Players like Marchan develop slowly. He’s both a catcher and a switch hitter. If there were a minor league season, he might have shown up and shown the pop he’s now showing, hit a handful of home runs and found his way off of this strange list.

That might still happen. If Realmuto returns, Marchan will be back in the minors next year. He might be back in the minors even if Realmuto leaves; he’s a 21-year-old who has never played above A-ball before this year. He’s only here because of a string of unlikely circumstances. The team could drop him in Double-A and sign a veteran to hold down the position to give Marchan another year of seasoning.

I’m rooting for the exact opposite, though. I want him to stick in the majors and hit well enough that his minor league career becomes absurd. I want him to be Hamilton in the minors — although, not actually Billy Hamilton, because he somehow hit 13 homers in 2,272 plate appearances — and a normal hitter in the majors. Marchan isn’t a footnote of history just yet, but he could be, and that’s one piece of 2020 history I’d be happy to remember.

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For pitchers on the fringes of the major leagues, 2020 has been a strange year. The dense schedule means teams are cycling through bullpen pieces faster than ever in an attempt to keep fresh arms available. There are no minor league games for the players who aren’t on the active roster, merely alternate sites and live batting practice. It’s a strange, peripheral experience.

For Cardinals pitchers on the fringes of the major leagues, it’s been stranger still, because their schedule has been even more compressed. A string of double headers means pitchers who would normally be relief arms are making spot starts, which calls for more relievers to back them up. Twenty-one players have made relief appearances for St. Louis this year, all the way from Roel Ramirez up to Giovanny Gallegos.

Shuffling relievers means shuffling relief roles. That’s how Ryan Helsley, a hard-throwing righty who split time between Triple-A Memphis and St. Louis last year, ended up taking the mound for the Cardinals with a chance to record his first career save on Friday evening. Gallegos, the team’s nominal closer, is on the Injured List. Génesis Cabrera, the reliever who has thrown the most innings for them this year, had already pitched in the game. Alex Reyes, the most dynamic arm in the ‘pen, was gassed; he’d thrown 39 pitches already. Hence Helsley, who needed only two outs against the woeful Pirates to add “big league closer” to his resume. Read the rest of this entry »

Gregory Polanco had Greg Holland in a bind. Leading off the ninth inning in a one-run game, he worked the count to 3-1. Holland isn’t exactly a control artist, and none of his first four pitches had been in the zone — Polanco could sit dead red and only engage with a pitch he could pummel. He got it — middle-middle no less — and took a mighty cut:

Whoops! That wasn’t what Polanco was aiming for, and Holland got away with one. He finished Polanco off with a 3-2 slider below the zone, and the Pirates went down in order.

Everyone misses a cookie once in a while. Polanco, however, is making a habit of it this year. Here he is against Carlos Carrasco (see what I did there?) in August:

All told, Polanco has taken a swing at 26 pitches in the white hot center of the strike zone this year. He’s come up empty on 12 of them. That’s the worst rate in the majors this year — unsurprisingly — and the second-worst whiff rate on middle-middle pitches since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008. Among batters who took at least 25 cuts at down-the-middle pitches, only Kyle Parker (in 2015) did worse. You haven’t heard of Kyle Parker, because, well, he swung and missed at too many pitches.

While you might be surprised by that particular Polanco fact, it’s no secret that he’s having a down year. He’s batting .135/.190/.294 and striking out in more than 40% of his at-bats. Have a synonym for futile? It probably applies to Polanco’s 2020. It would almost be a surprise if he weren’t having a tough time with easy pitches, though maybe not to this extent. Read the rest of this entry »

To paraphrase the late, great Chris Wallace, if it ain’t one thing, it’s another freaking other. After MLB announced its bubble-esque postseason format, Rob Manfred slipped in the claim that expanded playoffs are likely here to stay.

Manfred, as he is wont to do, conflated what the owners — his bosses — desire with what has actually been decided; expanded playoffs would require an agreement between the league and the MLBPA. Even though Manfred’s declaration is merely media signaling, though, it’s worth discussing its potential effect on baseball’s competitive landscape, because it would be absolutely earth-shattering.

While the commissioner didn’t elaborate on what type of expanded playoffs he was talking about, it’s fair to assume that they might take the form of this year’s tournament — eight teams in each league qualify, with best-of-three series at the higher seeds’ home parks to cut the field in half — though they could also feature a 14-team field, a possibility reported by Joel Sherman in February. I’ll assume a 16-team field here, as I think the extra television revenue will prove awfully enticing. From there, there would be the normal five-seven-seven structure we’ve grown accustomed to.

In an abbreviated season, expanded playoffs make some sense. 60 games isn’t enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, so a postseason cutoff was always going to feel arbitrary. Sixteen, eight, 10 — none would feel normal, because this season isn’t normal. Given that, creating more of a tournament atmosphere via short series feels like a fun one-off plan.

If every possible 2020 playoff format is going to feel equally valid, the owners have an obvious reason to expand the postseason: money. Owners take in the vast majority of playoff revenue — players get a share of the gate receipts in the first three (in the case of the Division Series) or four (League Championship and World Series) games of each round, while the owners get the rest of the gate as well the television money, which overshadows revenue from ticket sales. More games means more games to sell to TV networks. Ask a group of businesspeople if they’d like some extra money at almost no cost, and well, they probably won’t say no.

But in a full baseball season, a 16-game playoff does something else entirely. One of the neat features of a 162-game season is that it does an excellent job of determining which teams are best. On a given day, anyone can beat anyone. In the broad sweep of time, however, five percent edges add up. That doesn’t mean the 10 best teams always make the playoffs, but it does mean that you can be fairly certain the top team in each league is better than the sixth-best team. Read the rest of this entry »

If you like last-second changes to the postseason structure, this has been the year for you. Hours before the season started, MLB announced an expanded playoff format that will see 16 teams qualify. Yesterday, the league announced another structural change:

The 2020 @MLB Postseason will begin with the AL Wild Card Series on Tuesday, 9/29, while Game One of the 2020 World Series at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas will be played on Tuesday, 10/20. pic.twitter.com/KSzWMSAcBk

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) September 15, 2020

The bubble-like-substance playoffs (more on this in a moment) require some unpacking, so let’s unpack. The National League playoffs will take place in Texas — in Houston and Arlington for the NLDS, then Arlington for the NLCS. The American League playoffs will be their mirror in California — the ALDS will be in Los Angeles and San Diego, with the ALCS exclusively in San Diego.

It sounds weird, offhand, to have the NL playoffs in AL stadiums and vice versa. It’s a necessary step, however, to avoid creating home field advantage in a system designed to create neutral sites. Play AL games in Houston, and the Astros could find themselves “at” the Rays in a game played in Minute Maid. While home field advantage has been subdued this year, it also hasn’t been zero. The season is already going to be extremely weird, but MLB — rightly, in my opinion — drew the line at some playoff teams playing in their home cities.

That’s not to say it can’t happen — at least theoretically. The World Series will be played in Arlington, too, and the Rangers are not yet mathematically eliminated from postseason contention. As the only one of the four host cities not currently in playoff position — and fortuitously for MLB, the team with the newest stadium — Arlington was a natural choice for the World Series.

Oh yeah — though most news releases have called these bubble cities, and the playoffs a bubble system, that’s an inaccurate characterization. Teams in postseason contention will move to hotels next week for the final stretch of the regular season to “quarantine,” which I’ve placed in quotations because that’s not a great description of staying in a hotel but continuing to travel between cities and go to the ballpark. Many of us call that “business travel,” though baseball prefers the pandemic nomenclature.

From there, the league will establish “bubble sites” — again, quotations because of characterization — in each city. These will consist of locations near the ballpark where each team is sequestered. MLB has not yet announced a protocol for the various ballpark staff in each city, but they’ll be involved somewhere in the process as well. The teams will still travel between rounds, which further makes the term “bubble” confusing. It’s a permeable bubble that is sometimes not a bubble, I suppose.

Bubbles, or lack thereof, aside, there will be one major structural change to the postseason. For this year — and presumably this year only — the divisional and championship rounds will be played without off days. The divisional round will take place over five consecutive days, followed by a day off, followed by as many as seven consecutive days of championship series play.

To a far greater extent than the “bubble” system, this will change the way the postseason works. The former cadence of the playoffs lent itself to shortened rotations. The fifth game of the divisional series took place six days after the first — two travel days, one after the second and one after the fourth game, accounted for the time.

The way the math worked, it was hardly “strategy” to switch to a four-man rotation. It was simply the only way to do business. The starters from Game 1 and Game 2 were always available on full rest for Game 5. It’s not rocket science to use one of those two instead of a fifth starter. The two off days in the championship series enabled the same strategy.

With no travel days this year, a potential Game 5 would only be four days after the first game of the series. That would be three days’ rest for the Game 1 starter, with the alternative being a fifth starter or bullpen game. In isolation, that might lead many teams to go with the three days’ rest plan. The fifth starters for the 16 teams with the best playoff odds aren’t exactly an imposing group:

Your mileage may vary on which of these pitchers are actually their teams’ fifth starters, but it’s a rough cut of the kind of pitching talent that would show up in these games. Most teams would jump at the chance to use a top starter on short rest over them if that were the entire equation.

Due to the compressed nature of the second round, however, it won’t work that way. After a travel day, the championship series will begin. It, too, has no rest days, which puts you in the same bind, only with your best starter unavailable to start the series. To make two starts in that round, a pitcher who threw in Game 5 of the divisional round would need to start Game 3 (on three days’ rest) and then Game 7 (on three days’ rest again).

Quantifying the cost of consecutive short-rest starts is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s not free. Use a fifth starter, and you can get two full-rest starts from your ace in the second series. Is upgrading from short rest to full rest twice in the next series worth the difference between pitching your fifth starter and pitching your ace on short rest? The answer likely varies by team, and that’s an interesting tactical consideration where none previously existed.

Of course, just because something creates interesting tactical questions doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. If your opponent could choose your best player and force them to bat once and once only in each game, choosing when to use them would be interesting, but it wouldn’t be fun, or fair, or desirable in more or less any way.

The rollout of this new structure isn’t as capricious as that, but it’s close. Per Aaron Boone, teams only learned of the new structure this week, after the trade deadline. This means that no team had a chance to prepare for this style of playoffs — fifth starters have traditionally carried less trade value than their regular season value would indicate because the playoff structure diminishes their value, which won’t be the case this year.

I’d love to see this playoff setup in coming years, because the decision between short-rest aces and fifth starters is an enjoyable decision to consider. It also amps up the drama of the game — if one team uses their fifth starter and the other their ace, there’s a great risk-reward story to be told. If one team jumps out to a lead, they might consider pulling their ace early — the Jack Flaherty gambit. There are plenty of opportunities for shenanigans.

Dropping this rule on September 15 doesn’t mean that the shenanigans won’t happen, but it does feel like it unfairly changes the rules of the game at a late stage. The Dodgers happen to have Tony Gonsolin — for my money the best fifth starter of the bunch — but other teams would likely have pursued rotation upgrades had they known this detail. The 2020 season has been full of rules changes and convenient one-season gadgetry, but that was done out of necessity. Nothing prevented MLB from making this tweak before the trade deadline, which would have made it feel far more reasonable to me.

Regardless of a random internet baseball writer’s opinions on fairness, the new postseason format is set. The games will be fast and furious, wall-to-wall baseball: as many as 24 games in four days to settle the Wild Card round, followed by another blitz of between 12 and 20 games over a six-day span.

One silver lining: this plan likely covers enough contingencies that it makes further alterations unnecessary. Bad air quality in California? The league is leaning toward using Phoneix as an alternate site. Want to bring in a player from your alternate site? You can’t — teams will submit 40-man rosters to MLB by September 20 and “quarantine” the whole group. Fans in the stands? Uh… okay, this one isn’t settled yet.

For the most part though, the structure of the playoffs is set, at long last. All that remains is a sprint through the last two weeks of the season, followed by a second sprint through the postseason. May your fifth starters be ever in your favor — at least for 2020. Oh, and — also maybe 2021 and beyond. Rob Manfred told The Washington Post that the expanded postseason is likely to remain beyond 2020 if owners get their way, a distressing possibility for a sport that still plans to play 162-game regular seasons.

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Last week, I dug up an old concept: expected home run rate. The idea is deceptively simple: assign some probability of a home run to each ball a batter hits in the air, then add them up. It tells you some obvious things — Fernando Tatis Jr. hits a lot of baseballs very hard — and some less obvious things — before getting injured, Aaron Judge had lost some pop.

One question that many readers raised — reasonably so! — is whether this expected home run rate actually means anything. The list of over-performing hitters was full of sluggers. How good is this statistic if it tells you that good home run hitters are, in fact, not as good as their home runs? Sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me.

In search of truth — and, let’s be honest, article topics — I decided to do a little digging. Specifically, I wanted to test three things. First, how stable is expected home run rate? In other words, if a player has a high expected home run rate in a given sample, should we expect them to keep doing it? If the statistic isn’t stable, what’s the point?

Second, how does it do at predicting future home runs? In other words, does an expected home run rate in, say, July predict what will happen the rest of the year? It’s also useful here to see if expected home run rate (from here on in, I’ll be calling this xHR% for brevity) outperforms actual home run rate as a predictor. If xHR% doesn’t do a better job of explaining future home runs than actual home runs, what use is it? Read the rest of this entry »