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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Dylan Cease has a simple calling card: a four-seam fastball that he throws in the upper 90s. Every prospect evaluation of Cease centered on the heater, a bludgeon he would use, the theory went, to leave hitters with no good choices. He backed it up with a curveball and a developing changeup, but those were the backup dancers; the fastball was the star everyone came to see. There were questions about whether he’d be able to make the whole package work, but if it did, the heater would be the reason why.

Nine starts into his sophomore season, however, things haven’t gone according to plan. Cease’s 15.4% strikeout rate is the fourth-lowest among qualified starters, ahead of only Mike Fiers, Antonio Senzatela, and teammate Dallas Keuchel. The White Sox probably hoped Keuchel would help mentor their pitching staff, but uh… not like this. On the other hand, Cease is running a 3.33 ERA, better than team ace Lucas Giolito. Huh?

In an even stranger development, Cease’s fastball appears to be the culprit behind his poor strikeout rate. Though it hasn’t lost any velocity — his 393 four-seamers this year have averaged 97.4 mph — the pitch simply hasn’t missed any bats. Here are the 12 pitchers with the lowest whiff-per-swing rates on their four-seamers, as well as their average velocity:

That’s not a list of bad pitchers. It is, however, disconcerting to see a fastball-first power pitcher sharing space on a list of contact-heavy fastballs with literally Zack Greinke. Cease has an absolute cannon, but he isn’t missing any bats with it. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I came up with a simple idea: estimate home runs based on exit velocity. That sounds pretty straightforward, and it mostly is. For example, here are your odds of hitting a home run at various exit velocities when you put the ball in the air in 2020:

Of course, some caveats apply. I’m only looking at batted balls between 15 and 45 degrees, and the sample size is still small. But for the most part, and excluding the vagaries of that small sample, the conclusion makes sense. Hit the ball harder, and you’ll find more home runs.

Of course, real life is notoriously fickle. Sometimes you mash the ball and it’s a degree too low, or you hit it to the wrong part of the ballpark, or a gust of wind takes it. Sometimes you play in Yankee Stadium and get a cheapie, or smoke a line drive that leaves a dent in the Green Monster. Sometimes you make perfect contact, and it’s at 15 degrees instead of 25 so it’s a smashed single to right instead of a bat flip highlight.

Wait — hit it at the wrong angle? That seems like something in a batter’s control. It partially is, but I’ve chosen to exclude it for two reasons. First, I’ll point again to this excellent Alex Chamberlain article. You should really read it, but the conclusion is basically this: batters control exit velocity and pitchers control launch angle. That’s not exclusively true, and there are obviously fly ball and groundball hitters, but if you start giving batters credit for the exact angle of their batted balls instead of just generally saying “in the air” or “not,” you might be going too far.

Second, this way is simpler! Simplicity has value. Overspecify a model, and you can get very precise results that are also hard to interpret, or that depend heavily on small fluctuations in initial conditions. That’s not to say that such a model is a bad idea — merely that it’s not strictly upside to add more and more gadgets and whizbangs to it. You also risk losing the signal you’re looking for, which in this case is the ability to absolutely hit the snot out of the ball, sending it skyward at stupid speeds. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sentence you can find, on this very website, about Nelson Cruz: “Age and injuries have sapped Cruz’s speed in the outfield… Cruz has always struck out more than the average player, but his walk rate has dropped back below average the last few seasons. Cruz also has a durability problem, only playing in more than 130 games once in his career.” The fact that an outfield position is even in consideration should give you a clue that this isn’t current, but what year would you guess? 2016? 2017?

Here’s a further clue: the next line was “His (last year) was of course shortened by a drug suspension, which adds its own peculiar twist to his projection.” Yes, this was his 2014 writeup, penned just before he signed with the Baltimore Orioles. If that feels forever ago, that’s because it was. It’s two Cruz contracts, and 26.1 WAR, ago. Whoops!

That’s no slight on Matt Klaessen, who wrote that fantasy profile. Predicting Cruz’s age-related decline is a yearly tradition at this point. Here we are, though, in 2020, and the decline is still nowhere to be seen. Cruz is hitting .343/.432/.685, good for a 193 wRC+, the fulcrum of Minnesota’s offense. Naturally, then, I’m going to predict that Cruz is in for a decline… kind of. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time we saw Gerrit Cole in an Astros uniform, he wasn’t actually in an Astros uniform. He was, instead, in a Boras Corporation cap, ready to chart his own course through the league after a dominant run in Houston. When he signed with the Yankees, it felt almost preordained — one of the bright stars of baseball, either the best pitcher in the league or a close second, on the most storied franchise in the game. We get it — great players like the Yankees, and the Yankees like great players.

One look at the surface-level statistics will tell you that something hasn’t panned out in 2020. A 3.63 ERA? A 4.69 FIP? Thirteen home runs allowed in only nine starts?! He’s allowed a home run in each start, which is about as disastrous as it sounds. Heck, even his record tells you something is up; he’s 4-3 this year on an underachieving Yankees team, and while wins and losses are silly contextual statistics, Cole went 35-10 the last two years. Something is clearly up.

Far less clear? What that “something” is. There are some easy ways pitchers fail, ones you can see from a mile away. They lose velocity, and their fastballs become newly hittable. That hasn’t happened to Cole, though, at least not really:

Starters can also lose feel for one of their pitches, and change their pitch mix to compensate. That hasn’t happened either:

Uh… maybe he’s the victim of a poor early-count approach. He’s throwing fewer fastballs this year to start batters off, but just as many pitches in the zone. He’s not doing it by throwing more curveballs and sliders in the zone, either:

In other words, Cole is throwing fastballs less often to start, but he’s making up for it by throwing them in the strike zone more often. Sounds dangerous. Are batters suddenly teeing off on him on 0-0? Nope! They’re actually swinging less than ever, and the whole thing is too small-sample to matter anyway. He’s getting to 0-1 54.5% of the time, in line with his dominant 2019. Next! Read the rest of this entry »