Today puts a neat bow on the with-no-live-baseball portion of the Out Of The Park season. Next week, there will be actual live baseball games. This week, it’s the OOTP All-Star Break, which means there won’t be any games all week. The All-Star Break is the traditional first-half/second-half delineation, so everything is lining up perfectly, a fake-baseball-video-game Stonehenge.

In the game, on the other hand, not everything is going according to plan. Last week, Christian Yelich strained his oblique, an injury that will keep him out of commission until the end of August. This week, we’ve relinquished the NL Central lead. Not to the jerk Cubs, or the flavor of the week Reds, or even Milwaukee’s long-term nemesis, the Cardinals. The Pirates — the Pirates! — have blown past us and now sit atop the division.

It’s not as though this came out of nowhere. They’ve been just off the pace for the better part of a month now, lurking in second place keyed by a robust pitching staff and just enough offense. They haven’t avoided the injury bug completely, but it’s been less harsh; closer Nick Burdi recently tore his labrum, Jarrod Dyson is on the shelf with a muscle strain, and Chris Archer missed his most recent turn in the rotation. Despite those injuries, however, the Jolly Roger has been raised:

It’s tempting to view these passing of the torch moments — the pursuing team tracking down their long-standing tormentor and seizing the reins — as final. A king has his reign, and then he’s deposed. It doesn’t work that way. We could be back in first place by the first game after the break and never give it up. We could trade the lead back and forth for the balance of the year. Any number of things could happen.

In other Brewers news this week, Brett Anderson, recently restored to the starting rotation, is on the IL with a dead arm. That’s his third trip to the IL this year, not to mention a four-day stretch earlier this season when he had a dead arm that didn’t require IL time. Oh yeah — he also has a 12.24 ERA. The time may have come to move on. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Miguel Castro’s hard changeup caught my eye. It’s a weird, good pitch, and it’s thrown by a pitcher who might otherwise fade into the background. What’s more, he’s still bad against lefties despite a spectacular pitch for attacking them. About the only thing that made sense to me in the whole scenario was that Castro uses his changeup to attack lefties, the way right-handed pitchers are supposed to.

We’ll get to whether that’s true in a moment. First, let me introduce you to a righty pitcher who looks at this conventional wisdom — changeups to lefties, sliders to righties — and says eh, pass. Maybe not introduce you, actually, because he’s a notable pitcher on a marquee team, but at least alert you to his weirdness. Meet Tommy Kahnle, the man who throws his changeup when he shouldn’t.

As a rule, pitchers hate changeups to same-handed batters. Of all the pitches that righties threw to righties in 2019, only 7.1% were changeups or splitters (a splitter behaves almost exactly like a changeup, and pitch classification algorithms sometimes struggle to differentiate between the two, so for the remainder of this article I’ll be lumping both pitches together). On the other hand, they love them against lefties — 17.5% of right-to-left pitches were changeups. It’s pitching 101.

Kahnle surely took pitching 101; he just doesn’t seem to care. His changeup is his best offering, and he absolutely leans on it against lefties. 59.6% of his pitches to lefty batters in 2019 were changeups. It can’t even properly be called a secondary pitch; it’s just a primary pitch! Nothing to see there — a changeup-heavy pitcher throws a lot of changeups to opposite-handed batters. Where it gets interesting is when he faces righties. What does he do there, in the matchup his pitch wasn’t designed for? Why, he throws a changeup 44.2% of the time, of course.

He’s not alone in this weirdness — Héctor Neris and Tyler Clippard, just to name two, do similar things. But Kahnle interests me, because he wasn’t always this way. In 2017, he was spectacular. A 2.59 ERA, a 1.84 FIP, a Gerrit-Cole-facing-minor-leaguers 37.5% strikeout rate and a minuscule 6.6% walk rate — he was nothing short of dominant. That year, he threw a changeup to righties 14.7% of the time. Huh? Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s article is about a form of baseball that doesn’t exist in real life. Let that be a disclaimer upfront — if you’re looking for an interesting middle reliever or 10 reasons why Christian Yelich is great against fastballs (number six will shock you!), this isn’t the article for you. That’s not to say those don’t exist — I wrote about Miguel Castro literally yesterday, for example. But today’s piece simply won’t be one of them.

With that out of the way, let’s set the stage. I’ve been playing a lot of Out Of The Park Baseball 21 lately. Some of that is for an article series, but some of it is because I want baseball in my life, and the game absolutely delivers. One mode in particular has been a great avenue for the analytical rabbit holes I love diving down: tournaments.

Without going into the specifics of the way the game is built, I’ll give a rough outline of the problem that first interested me. The standard tournament format is a 32-team bracket that plays best-of-seven series in each round. There’s no reseeding, no fancy gadgets; just 16 seven-game series, followed by eight, then four, then two, and then the finals.

In almost all other ways, the game approximates baseball. You field a 26-man roster, players need rest, and starters and relievers have realistic stamina. There are all kinds of fun roster choices to make — mid-career Tony Gwynn or young Pete Rose in right field, peak Ichiro or 1997 Bernie Williams in center, to name two — but for the most part, it’s a faithful simulation of baseball.

There is, however, one very specific wrinkle. In these tournaments, there are no off days. The first set of series takes place over seven consecutive days. As soon as the last series is decided, the next round begins the following day. You could, in theory, win the first round in seven games, win the second round in seven games, and end up playing on at least 18 straight days even if you sweep or get swept in the third round. Read the rest of this entry »

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »