The San Diego Padres came into 2020 with one of the best late-inning setups in baseball. Their plan was simple: offseason acquisitions Drew Pomeranz and Emilio Pagán would handle high-leverage situations in the middle innings before passing the baton to Kirby Yates, one of the most dominant relievers in the game. That plan hasn’t worked out this year, largely because Yates will miss the rest of the season after surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. On Saturday, however, they made a move to replenish their planned area of strength, acquiring Trevor Rosenthal in a trade with the Royals.

Nationals fans might wonder whether acquiring Rosenthal is supposed to be a good thing. He was, no doubt, abysmal for them last year — he racked up a 34.9% walk rate over 12 games before getting the heave-ho. A slightly longer stint with the Tigers ended the same way — striking out 28.6% of the batters you face is good, but not when you’re walking 26.8% of them as well. The Royals signed him as a reclamation project, nothing more — a minor league deal that could escalate to as much as $4.25 million based on incentive bonuses.

Consider him reclaimed. In 13.2 innings this year, he’s been effective, striking out 37.5% of his opponents en route to a 3.29 ERA that, while still short of his peak, represents a huge improvement from last year’s disaster. It’s not all daisies and lollipops, even at surface level — he’s walked 12.5% of opposing batters and given up two home runs. Mid-three ERA relievers don’t grow on trees, though, and San Diego was intent on getting one.

In acquiring Rosenthal, the Padres are making a bet that they can fix him, because despite his acceptable results this year, there are worrisome underlying signs. As Johnny Asel pointed out, Rosenthal might resemble his St. Louis form superficially, but the way he’s doing it has changed completely. He’s flooding the center of the strike zone and daring batters to hit it, which explains the better walk rate but also the hard contact.

At his peak, Rosenthal was that most cherished baseball stereotype: effectively wild. He lived on the edges of the strike zone and just outside it. That ballooned his walk rate, but it also suppressed home runs; squaring up Rosenthal’s explosive fastball and where’d-it-go changeup was simply beyond most batters when he didn’t leave them hanging over the plate.

To wit, when batters swing at pitches he leaves over the heart of the plate, per Baseball Savant’s definitions, they’ve hit nine home runs in 774 swings. When they swing at pitches on the edges of the plate, they’ve hit two in 816 swings. That’s not wildly different from how major league pitchers work in general — Rosenthal suppresses home runs in a similar ratio in both places — but for a pitcher who will always allow some traffic on the bases due to his walk rate, home runs are an anathema. Read the rest of this entry »

When the league announced an expanded playoff format on the eve of the season, the Blue Jays were clear beneficiaries. In the old, five-team format, we gave them just a 9.7% chance of reaching the postseason; the cream of the AL crop had a stranglehold on those spots. With eight spots and only six teams in the top tier (New York, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, Cleveland, Houston, and Oakland), however, there was more space for interlopers. The Jays’ playoff odds in the new format opened the season at 29.8%.

With roughly half the season in the books, their odds have only increased. After Wednesday’s games, the Jays looked like a clear favorite for the final spot in the playoffs:

Still, as evidenced by the fact that their odds still hover at only 65%, they don’t have anything sewn up. Their pitching, in particular, has been a weak point. Hyun Jin Ryu has been as good as advertised holding down the rotation, but you can’t make a rotation out of one pitcher. Nate Pearson has struggled in his first taste of the big leagues and is currently on the Injured List, Matt Shoemaker has a lat strain, and Trent Thornton has hardly pitched this year due to injury. Piecing together the 31 remaining games of the season looked like a challenge.

To that end, the Blue Jays brought in reinforcements today, acquiring Taijuan Walker from the Mariners. In return, they’re sending a player to be named later. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic confirmed that the player will be outside the 60-man player pool of players eligible to be traded in-season this year, which means we won’t officially know who it is until the offseason, but the Jays have no shortage of interesting prospects. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve followed FanGraphs the past few years, you know the Yandy Díaz story by now. As an Indians prospect, his contact and on-base abilities marked him as a potential major league contributor, but his physique hinted at more: Díaz excelled despite a plethora of groundballs, and he also had elite bat speed and exit velocity numbers at times. If he could just aim up a little more, the thinking went, he could be the next launch angle success story.

When the Rays acquired him in a trade before the 2019 season, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The Rays acquired an already-usable player with a fixable flaw? We’ve certainly heard that story before. Indeed, Díaz spent 2019 putting balls in the air at a rate he’d never approached before. His fly ball rate spiked, his groundball rate dropped, and he hit double-digit homers for the first time in his professional career.

All of those balls in the air made Díaz a different hitter, but they didn’t change the core of his approach at the plate: wait patiently for a pitch he liked, then try to hit the snot out of it. As FanGraphs alum Sung Min Kim detailed, he mostly accomplished it without a swing change; he simply focused on finding pitches to drive rather than spraying grounders.

The evidence was there if you wanted to look for it. His air pull rate, the percentage of line drives, pop ups, and fly balls that he sent to left field, jumped significantly. At the same time, he started hitting fewer grounders; his GB/FB ratio dipped to heretofore unseen lows:

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By the third inning of Lucas Giolito’s start last night, a pattern emerged. The Pirates would attack him with lefties — they started seven left-handed batters — and Giolito would counter with his changeup. Cole Tucker, for example, faced three straight changeups after falling behind in the count 0-1. He managed to take the first one, but the second and third proved irresistible, and he fruitlessly waved at strike three:

By itself, there’s nothing remarkable about that sequence. Of course righties go to their changeup to combat opposite-handed pitchers — it’s only natural. Giolito has a good changeup, too. Why not use it? But these changeups were indicative of a larger trend, one that you could hardly avoid seeing last night as Giolito rampaged through the Pirates’s lineup on his way to a no-hitter: Giolito’s changeup is his best weapon, and he’s learning to trust it.

If you take a look at our Pitch Values, this is hardly a surprise. Giolito’s changeup is his most valuable on a per-pitch basis. The only year of his career it hasn’t produced better-than-average results was his 2016 cup of coffee in Washington; aside from that, it’s been a trusty companion, even when he wasn’t the pitcher he is today.

This year, however, he’s leaning into the pitch like never before. He threw 78 pitches to left-handed batters last night, and 36 were changeups. That 46.2% changeup rate was the third-highest he’s thrown in a single start. Four of his top five changeup rate starts have come this year:

In fact, he’s increased his usage of the pitch every year of his career:

Last night, that changeup usage paid off. He drew 13 swinging strikes on the pitch, a career high. He threw high fades, like this pitch to Tucker that ended the eighth:

He worked it below the zone, far too tempting for Jarrod Dyson to hold back:

Even when he left one in the zone, the deception, speed change, and movement were too much for Gregory Polanco:

Those three locations — really two locations, because the pitch to Polanco was probably the same rough idea as the one to Tucker — were the plan behind all of his changeups last night. Up and away, below the zone, or misses that drifted over the plate:

While the changeup served to finish lefties off, it also helped set up Giolito’s fastball, and vice versa. Miss a changeup away, as JT Riddle did here:

And you might still be thinking soft-and-away on this hard-and-in fastball:

That was a perfectly-located fastball for the situation. On 1-2, there’s no need to stay in the zone, and the downside isn’t hard contact but simply a ball or potentially a foul. Maybe a batter can make contact with that pitch, but it would take a superhuman effort to drive it to the outfield, much less over the fence.

Better fastball location has been a key to Giolito’s improvement, and he’s taken another step forward in it this year. In 2019, he made significant strides by simply throwing more strikes. He threw his fastball in the zone 57.3% of the time, a career high and four points higher than the overall league average. That aggressive approach put him ahead in counts and kept the pressure on hitters, but it came with a downside: he left 9.1% of his fastballs middle-middle (the league average was 8.2%), and as you might imagine, those pitches got hit hard.

This year, he’s dialed his zone-hunting back; he throws strikes at a roughly average rate. That’s come with a huge benefit; he’s cut his middle-middle percentage by two points, now 7.1%. That doesn’t mean he never misses, but there are fewer opportunities for hitters to take big hacks at centrally located pitches. Batting isn’t easy; you can get a good pitch to hit and still end up like Bryan Reynolds here:

Leave a pitch there often enough and the batter is sure to win eventually. But Giolito gave the Pirates only three such cookies last night. Fail to cash in on those, and you’re looking at a steady diet of unhittable changeups and painted fastballs. It’s simply a numbers game, though the numbers won’t always work out as well as they did against the Pirates. Dropping from 9% to 7% is roughly one fastball per game the opposing team doesn’t get to take a cut at, and in the long run, that adds up.

In fact, that’s my main takeaway from last night. No one has ever been a good enough pitcher that you should expect a no-hitter in a given start. Baseball simply doesn’t work that way. Last night, however, Giolito gave himself a phenomenally good chance to hold the Pirates hitless. He started early; he got behind in the count 1-0 only seven times and got ahead 0-1 17 times.

From there, he mostly gave the Pirates only bad choices. They couldn’t help but comply; they came up empty on 41% of their swings against his fastball, and that’s the easy one to hit. They whiffed on 56.5% of their swings against his changeup, and 72.7% of their swings against his slider when he deigned to throw it. He drew 30 swinging strikes last night, the highest total and percentage of swinging strikes for any starter this year. They’re a bad hitting team, one of the worst in baseball, but he also never gave them much of a chance.

That’s not to say the start was flawless. Thirteen strikeouts in a complete game means at least 14 balls in play, 14 chances for something to fall through. That’s a simple truth of pitching: you can’t avoid rolling the dice on a few balls in play, no matter how dominant you are.

One of the sticking points about sabermetric analysis of baseball is the role of luck in the game. The argument in favor of it is pretty clear: results follow a normal distribution in many cases, and the worst team beats the best team some amount of the time. No one would argue that baseball is deterministic. Thinking of the sport as a series of coin flips, though, robs it of some inherent drama. Is a no-hitter as impressive if it’s not a triumph of pitching but rather a string of 50/50 decisions coming up in Giolito’s favor?

I think people misunderstand what sabermetricians mean by luck. I certainly don’t think of it the way I see it popularly described. Sure, batted balls are inherently a roll of the dice. Microscopic differences in initial contact can be the difference between a liner in the gap and a screamer directly at a fielder:

Think of it this way, however. Have you ever woken up in the morning and felt an extra spring in your step? Ever thrown a ball around and thought “Wow, my arm is accurate today”? Of course you have, because it’s a natural part of the human condition. Do you have any agency over when it happens? Some, perhaps — you’re less likely to wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after a night of partying — but for the most part, it’s simply a feeling you get in the morning at random, waking up on the right side of the bed, so to speak.

Lucas Giolito woke up on the right side of the bed yesterday. The Pirates hitters didn’t. Play that game, in those exact conditions with those players at that exact moment, 100 times, and you wouldn’t get 100 no-hitters. You would, however, get sheer dominance. Giolito wasn’t simply “getting lucky” when he blew fastballs by hapless batters, or went fishing with his changeup and hooked batters 13 times. He was in the zone, executing all three pitches and rarely missing location, he and James McCann divining hitters’ thinking and twisting them into pretzels.

Call it luck if you’d like. It’s clearly not an average day for Giolito. Were he to pitch like this every time out, he’d be the best pitcher in baseball. But in the moment, I think it’s unfair to say he was simply “getting lucky.” On his best days, Giolito is capable of such a display. Those best days don’t happen frequently, of course. They happen far less often than his average days, and the average days are important, because seasons are built on average days.

For me, though, it’s a reminder of why it’s such a joy to watch a great pitcher. In the long run, randomness will prevail. Giolito will have some good starts and some bad starts, and the sum of his efforts will go down into statistical record. The average of those starts is what you can expect to see from him in a random game. But it’s not what you’ll actually get from him on a given night. Any start you watch could be the one where he’s feeling it, where he “deserves” the kind of performance we just saw, and there’s simply no way of knowing if you’ll witness it until you watch.

Last night was a fluke, in a mathematical sense — most of the time, Giolito isn’t that good. And yet, it was no fluke. If he could replicate his true talent level from last night, not all his high and low points but simply his form at that exact moment, he’d break baseball. It won’t last. Next time out, he might be great again or might be average, and there’s no way to know until it happens. That’s the joy of a great pitching performance. It might not be likely, but when it happens, it feels almost inevitable — give or take an assist from Adam Engel.

If you’re looking for a sure sign that a manager is thinking in old-timey baseball cliches instead of playing to win, listen for the words “save situation.” There are tons of reasons not to use your best reliever in a big spot — load management, handedness matchups, heck, maybe he ate some bad sushi last night. “We wanted to hold him for a save situation”? Nope! Bad management alert… or at least, it was until the rules of baseball changed.

Love or hate the automatic runner in extra innings, it’s changed the tactical calculus of baseball significantly. Teams haven’t bunted as much as I predicted, which is fascinating in itself, but today, I’m more interested in which pitchers are doing the extra innings pitching. Before 2020, “saving” a pitcher for a lead was self-defeating, but that isn’t an automatic truth, simply a contextual one. Let’s delve into why that was the case, and why it might not be this year.

To explain how this scenario worked in the past, I’m going to use a hypothetical situation. It’s the bottom of the ninth inning in a tie game, and the visiting team has two options for pitching: Nick Anderson or Aaron Loup. They’ll bring one of the two in for the ninth, the other for the 10th if necessary, and then completely average pitchers for every inning after that.

More specifically, they’ll be bringing in pitchers with the career rate statistics that exactly match Anderson’s and Loup’s. This is an abstraction, so we’re ignoring opposing batters and handedness matchups, which a real-life manager would care about: for this article, we’re only worrying about whether bringing in your closer makes sense with everything else held equal. Here are those result rates:

Anderson is clearly better. In fact, over a million simulated innings (every batter receives a random result from each pitcher’s result grid until there are three outs), he allowed 2.80 runs per nine innings, while Loup allowed 3.74 runs. Anderson was better in terms of the percentage of innings holding opponents scoreless, too: 80.3% of his innings were scoreless, as compared to 76% for Loup. Read the rest of this entry »

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David Fletcher is 5 feet and 9 inches tall. By the standards of professional baseball, that’s quite short. He makes up for it a bit by standing upright in the batter’s box, but no one is going to confuse him for Aaron Judge anytime soon. That makes it all the more confusing that on Friday night, he did this:

First of all, wow! Are you kidding me? That ball was nearly five feet off the ground. Halfway to home plate, it was unclear whether Fletcher was taking a swing at a major league pitch or a piñata:

If you’ve been paying attention throughout his career, Fletcher making contact with that pitch will be less surprising. He’s a singular player, a contact machine who will defend the strike zone at all costs when the count reaches two strikes. So far this year, he’s swung at 51 pitches outside the strike zone and only missed nine of them. That 87.3% out-of-zone contact rate is higher than the league contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a wildly misleading set of years and statistics for you, to start this article off on a high note:

Boy, what a boring career. An average player, and average in a consistent way. There are no swings between 3 and 0, no is-it-a-breakout spikes or is-he-toast dips. Let’s zoom in slightly, though, because I’ll level with you: that was a cherry-picked set of statistics:

Fewer homers, wildly varying walk and strikeout rates — those static WAR totals were a trick! If you’ll forgive me the conceit, let’s do one last reveal of more statistics:

Ah, the magic of counting stats. Ian Happ is on pace to obliterate his best previous season. Let’s take a look at how he’s doing it, shall we?

When he reached the major leagues, Happ had an old man’s game trapped in a young man’s body; enough patience to draw a raft-load of walks, but also enough patience to get down in counts and strike out at an astronomical rate. The problem was that he didn’t draw enough of those walks to make up for the strikeouts: his batting eye simply wasn’t good enough to let him get away with the takes. After reaching a two-strike count, Happ struck out 54.4% of the time — that’s bad! The major league average over that timeframe stands at 42%. Read the rest of this entry »

Empty stadiums are hardly the weirdest thing about baseball in 2020. There’s the shortened season, the universal DH, the runner on second base in extra innings; if you’re looking for ways the game has changed, there’s no shortage. Today, however, I’d like to talk about those empty stadiums, and their effect on home field advantage. A quick warning: this is going to be an article full of dry tables and plenty of math. I think it’ll be worth it, though.

One question looms over everything else when it comes to home field advantage: what percentage of games does the home team win? Over a very long horizon, everything else is just noise. In 2019, for example, home teams won 52.9% of the games they played. In 2018, that number stood at 52.5%. Long-term home field advantage bounces around between 52% and 54%. It’s good to play at home.

How about this year? To look at 2020 data, we need to do a little manual work. So far this year, four teams have played “home” games in opposing stadiums: the Marlins, Blue Jays, Yankees, and Cardinals. The Orioles also played part of a suspended home game in Washington against the Nationals. In all forthcoming analysis, I’ve removed those games from both the home and away datasets used in this article. It’s never exactly clear what home field advantage is measuring — rest, comfort, the crowd, umpiring, or some mixture — so games with nominal home teams playing in away stadiums are best ignored for these purposes.

With that caveat out of the way and those games excluded, home teams have won 50.6% of their games through Monday, August 17. At the broadest possible resolution, home teams are winning a lower percentage of their games this year. Maybe the crowd really is king.

That’s wildly insufficient for our purposes, however. One of the key tenets of baseball analysis is that merely looking at wins and losses is usually insufficient unless your sample size is enormous. Normally, I’d suggest using Pythagorean expectation here to guess a record. That doesn’t work when looking at only home games, however, because home teams skip the ninth inning when ahead. In 2019, for example, home teams were outscored on the year. This year, they’re scoring slightly more runs than their opponents. We’ll need something more granular than Pythagorean record to find a result. Read the rest of this entry »

Off in the land of Out Of The Park Baseball 21, the doldrums of August have set in. The trade deadline is over — new acquisitions Brandon Belt and Jeff Samardzija are hardly the most exciting additions imaginable, but they’ve both given the team what we need, competent production at two weak points. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Pirates maintain a shaky grasp on first place; they’re two games ahead of the Brewers now, with every other team in the division at least 10 games in our wake.

Normally, the big news of the week would be Christian Yelich’s imminent return. A month and a half without an MVP candidate was a long road, but the team has done admirably, grinding out an 18-18 record. Take this year’s Brewers team and subtract Yelich, and a .500 clip would be hard to achieve. With Yelich in the fold by this weekend (assuming rehab goes smoothly), the division is ours for the taking again.

Unfortunately, “best player returns” doesn’t make for interesting reading. Did you know that Yelich is good? I did, and I bet you did too. Luckily, there’s a bigger mystery to dive into. While Yelich is the team’s best player, Josh Hader has the highest OOTP rating on the team, thanks to a setting that rates every player relative to their positional peers. On the 20-80 scale, he’s an 80 reliever, thanks to his unbelievable stuff grade:
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