Do you know who throws the fastest fastball in all of baseball? Almost certainly! Maybe you don’t know it exactly — maybe you’re not sure whether Jordan Hicks counts while he’s recovering from Tommy John surgery, so you give it to Aroldis Chapman. Maybe you differentiate between starters and relievers and want to put Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, and Gerrit Cole in the conversation. For the most part, though, you know these names.

Let’s change it up slightly. Do you know who throws the hardest cutter? Again, there’s a decent chance you know that it’s Emmanuel Clase, though he, too, will miss the 2020 season. The second name on that list, though, is Michael Lorenzen, and even if you didn’t know he threw that particular pitch, you almost certainly knew that he throws hard and is good.

Why am I asking this? Because I’m setting up for a far stupider question: who throws the hardest changeup in baseball? Frustratingly, it’s also Syndergaard (minimum 100 changeups thrown). But he’s out for the season — the fastest active changeup in baseball, then! I can tell you with near-certainty that you didn’t guess it. Maybe you got the second-fastest — Jacob deGrom. Heck, maybe you got number four, Tommy Kahnle. I’m fairly confident, however, that you didn’t get number one: Orioles reliever Miguel Castro.

Now that I’ve told you that factoid, it’s time to anticipate your next question: so what? Why do we care who throws the fastest changeup in baseball? The fastest fastball is visceral; it’s as fast as anyone can make a baseball go, which is pretty clearly awesome. You can watch the fastest fastball and be impressed without caring about context. It’s just fast!

The fastest cutter isn’t quite the same, but a near-100 mph pitch with cut looks like witchcraft. Clase isn’t even that great, and he’s still a joy to watch. The fastest changeup, on the other hand, looks like this:

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In what’s becoming a weird tradition on FanGraphs, I wrote an article about bunting last week. It included the usual disclaimers: these are rules of thumb rather than absolutes, managers should absolutely consider edge cases, and so forth. Disclaimers are for nerds, though, and writing about bunts is a sure way to get a good amount of “Hey you have to consider the specific players doing it, stop using neutral contexts.”

Most of the time, I’d just ignore it. All players aren’t created equal, and yet rules of thumb exist. Surely managers are bright enough to realize that if Mike Trout is up there, maybe you should reconsider your guidebook written for average major leaguers. Today, though, I was looking for a topic. So let’s get Mike Trout up there! Let’s put Jeff Mathis on deck! Let’s create those corner case scenarios that everyone always mentions when writers talk generic rules.

The first scenario is simple: let’s put Mike Trout at the plate in a tie game in the bottom of the 10th. You probably already know the simple math: if instead of Trout a generic batter had the first at-bat of the inning, bunting would be a wise choice. Instead, we’re starting with Trout, followed by an exactly average team behind him. Read the rest of this entry »

Today on FanGraphs Live, let’s grapple with the fact that sometimes Christian Yelich gets hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

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You can’t make the postseason in a single day in July. You can’t be eliminated either, of course, even if you’re the valiant Brewers and your opponents are your perennial rivals, those darn St. Louis Cardinals. This past Friday, however, something momentous happened in our OOTP simulation.

Here, take a look at the box score:

So no, it wasn’t a spectacular performance, on either side, that makes this game the rare ultra-meaningful July clash. The 3-2 loss featured more squandered opportunities than you’d generally like to see, including two runners on third left stranded with less than two outs. That’s not really worth a column, though.

The scary part (and there is a scary part) probably jumps right out at you. But just in case, here’s the next day’s box score to drive the point home:

This one was a 4-2 win, keyed by a pinch hit home run from Justin Smoak — first and third, two outs in the top of the sixth, and excellent time to pinch hit. It dropped Jack Flaherty to a woeful 2-11 simulated record — oof. But the key to this game isn’t any of that. It’s Ben Gamel, batting seventh, with a quietly effective day. Read the rest of this entry »

There are plenty of rule changes coming to baseball in the 2020 season. We’ve written about many of them: the universal DH, the extra-innings rule, and expanded rosters, to name a few. Today, I thought I’d take a crack at something less immediately evident but still meaningful: the denser schedule.

In 2019, teams played 162 games in 186 days. That meant the schedule was 13% off days, give or take. Four of them were clustered around the All-Star break, but for the most part, they were spread out evenly. Off days are a welcome respite in a team’s schedule, a break from the grind. Sometimes they’re necessary for travel, of course, but mostly they’re meant just to be time for players to recover from the grueling march to October. This year, 60 games in 66 days means only 9% off days.

For most players, an off day is simply that. For pitchers, however, days of rest carry greater meaning. A day off is a day closer to starting again. Imagine a schedule with 80% off days — a game every five days. Your ace could pitch more or less every game, give or take a maintenance break here and there. Conversely, in a schedule with no off days at all, every pitcher would take the same number of turns in the rotation.

Given an off day, teams can, in theory, squeeze extra starts out of their ace. In practice, it doesn’t quite work that way. It also doesn’t not work that way, however; seven pitchers made 34 starts in 2019, more than a fifth of the games on the schedule. Teams are logical about giving their best starters extra turns when they can. An extra Justin Verlander start beats a Jose Urquidy start, no offense to Urquidy. Read the rest of this entry »

The alternate OOTP universe is now past the halfway point. Today, we’ll take stock of our Brewers, consider a few bullpen moves, and take a look around the league for outstanding performances. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, an interesting question got me wondering about Billy Hamilton and the new extra-innings rules. As it turns out, he’s a valuable runner to have on second base! So valuable in fact, that he projects to gain his team roughly 0.3 wins in a 60-game season just by being fast.

For the Giants, that’s great. For the other 29 teams in baseball (or 28 if the Dodgers end up rostering Terrance Gore), that’s no help. What should their strategy be in extra innings? I had all these run expectancy tables, so I decided to dive in.

First things first: let’s set the parameters of this discussion. I’m going to be considering two decisions. First, does bunting to lead off the inning make sense, and does that decision change based on whether you’re the home or visiting squad? Second, assuming bunting doesn’t make sense, what about stealing third? Presumably you’d steal with one out, what with not making the first out at third base and all, so we’ll focus on those two decision points: bunting to lead off, and stealing if the first at-bat doesn’t produce any advancement.

The value of being a home team is immediately evident when looked at through this lens. Consider a situation where the visiting team scores two runs in the top of the inning. Right away, a bunt goes out the window. That’s a big edge; in 2019, and excluding extra innings so that walk-offs don’t interrupt a team’s run scoring, teams that reached the position of a runner on second base with no outs scored two or more runs 29.1% of the time.

In other words, nearly a third of the time, bunting the runner over serves no purpose at all; your team will need two or more runs just to tie, so the position of that runner is nearly immaterial. Getting to act after knowing how many runs your opponent scored is huge. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the world of Out Of The Park, the day is June 29, and the teams have played roughly 83 baseball games. Real life, of course, is markedly different; the day is the same, but pretty much everything else isn’t. There have been no games, to name one obvious discrepancy. In a month’s time, however, the lines will be blurrier. Real teams will be playing real games, which makes the prospect of following along with a fake baseball team somewhat less exciting.

To that end, I’d like to take today to lay out my future plans for this series, as well as take a quick look at some outstanding performances across the league this year. Let’s handle the outstanding performances first, because they’re more fun: who needs to plan for the future when you can watch hulking sluggers swat dingers left and right?

Why bring up home runs first? Giancarlo Stanton’s superlative season demands it. The Yankees have played 84 games this year, and Stanton’s health has been uncharacteristically excellent; he’s appeared in 83 of them, almost exclusively in left field. More important than his position, however, is his bat:

That’s right: 40 home runs through 84 games. That’s a 77-dinger pace for a full season! The .300 average is mostly a byproduct of the home runs, but not exclusively; when you’re Stanton, getting down to 26.6% strikeouts is actually a big deal. He’s on pace for a season for the ages; not by WAR, necessarily, where his indifferent outfield defense holds him back. Even accounting for that defensive hit, however, his offensive prowess has him on pace for a 9-WAR season. Read the rest of this entry »