Yesterday, Major League Baseball delayed the start of the regular season. The decision, in retrospect, was an easy one: every major sport is now shut down. It’s a public safety concern in addition to a player safety issue, and the combination made it impossible to wait. Opening Day has been postponed by at least two weeks, and May might be a more realistic start date.

In their understandable haste to delay the season, MLB left some loose ends. Today, they’ve started to address those. Yesterday, players were simply waiting at team facilities, unsure of next steps. Some spring training games were played even after the announcement that the season would be delayed indefinitely. Teams had no games, but there was no official announcement of what their players would do.

Today, the league eliminated the confusion. Spring training facilities league-wide will be shuttered by mutual agreement of the commissioner and the player’s union:

https://t.co/VTXLnDTZsH spring training facilities shut, players allowed to return home means it is going to be quite a while until MLB games are played.

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) March 13, 2020

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When I first learned about a mysterious cabal of smart nerds who were analyzing baseball, I took the words I got from them as though passed down from heaven. I read Moneyball, of course. But I also read about DIPS theory, wOBA, and whatever else I could get my hands on. I read The Book so many times I wore it out and had to buy a new copy. It felt like there were cheat codes just under the surface of the sport that someone was highlighting for me.

Many of those lessons from 15 years ago are still kicking around in my head. I’m skeptical of BABIP-driven hitters, perhaps more skeptical than I should be. I dismiss batters with anomalous platoon splits, even if there’s something about them that really does make them unique. And recently I realized that I might be misunderstanding the signaling value of strikeout rate.

Back in the early 2000s, batters who struck out more hit better. That sounds counterintuitive, because strikeouts are bad. It’s actually not that weird though. Barry Bonds struck out more than Ozzie Smith in his career, just to pick two illustrative examples. Bonds isn’t even a great example, because his batting eye was otherworldly. Alex Rodriguez struck out twice as often as Omar Vizquel.

The popular opinion was that strikeouts weren’t really a negative indicator. A strikeout was bad, sure, but it was often a hidden indicator of some positive process under the hood. No one would say that being sore is good for your health, and yet people in great shape are probably sore more often than sedentary types, what with all the exercising. Amount of time spent being sore very likely has a positive correlation with health.
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The 2019 Minnesota Twins hit, roughly speaking, all of the home runs. That’s not precisely accurate of course, but it’s close enough for government work; they set an all-time record for home runs. Of the 12 Twins who came to the plate 300 times in 2019, 11 hit 10 or more bombs. Bomba Squad isn’t just a nickname; it’s an accurate description of a team filled to the brim with home run hitters.

This article is about that 12th Twin. Luis Arraez had 366 plate appearances last year. He hit just four home runs. That was the sixth-lowest home run total among players with 350 or more PA, and the names below him aren’t inspiring; Billy Hamilton, Tony Wolters, Yolmer Sánchez, Nicky Lopez, and Dee Gordon weren’t exactly offensive powerhouses.

All told, only 29 batters hit less than 10 home runs in 350 or more plate appearances. That reflects the democratization of home runs, but it also means that it’s difficult to contribute offensively without dingers. In fact, 27 of those 29 players had a wRC+ below 100. The only two exceptions? Nick Markakis, who squeaked over the finish line with nine bombs and a 102 wRC+ — and Arraez, who batted .334/.399/.439 on his way to a scintillating 125 wRC+.

It’s not weird, not even a little bit, that players who don’t hit home runs are generally bad at offense. There’s no single outcome as helpful to a team’s cause as a home run. If you had to predict a player’s offensive output and you could only have access to one outcome type, you’d pick home runs, right? Walks might be okay, and doubles might be as well, but singles? Triples? Heck, throw in BABIP and strikeouts if you want. Nothing comes close to home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

You shouldn’t trust spring training statistics. Opposition quality is, to put it kindly, uneven. Non-roster invitees and overmatched minor leaguers get their turns in the spotlight. A home run off Johnny Washedup or Mike Minorleague isn’t the same as one off a fifth starter, let alone Gerrit Cole.

So of course, today I want to talk about an off-the-radar reliever putting up good numbers in spring training. “But Ben,” you might say. “Did you read the paragraph that you yourself just wrote?” Good point, conveniently voiced reader. But here’s a trick to writing about spring training performances that might stick. I want to talk about Jonathan Hernández. And while he’s looked sharp this year, I want to talk about him not because he’s been good for the last month but because I think he was already good.

An origin story is in order. Hernández signed with the Rangers as an international free agent in 2013, when the Rangers were the unquestioned best team at finding international talent. He slowly but surely climbed the minor league ranks as a starter. His sinker/slider combination was good enough to tread water, but never dominant.

Early in his career, he’d shown excellent command. As he ascended the minors, he added exciting velocity to the sinker. But the command waned as the velocity increased, a classic tradeoff. In 2018, he walked 13% of the batters he faced in Double-A. We put him 19th on the Rangers prospect list heading into 2019, reflecting excitement about his velocity and concerns about a relief role. Read the rest of this entry »

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Keston Hiura hit 38 home runs last year. There are qualifications to that statement, sure — 19 of those home runs came in the homer-happy PCL, and the majors weren’t much better when it came to mass dingerization. But still — Keston Hiura, who hit 13 home runs in 535 plate appearances in 2018, hit 38 home runs in 2019. What did he do to become such a great power hitter, and should we expect to see it again in 2020?

The first place you’d generally look, when considering an outlandish result like this, is for something wildly unsustainable. Maybe he turned half of his fly balls into home runs, and we can just point at that and move on. Indeed, Hiura’s HR/FB% was a juicy 24.1% in the majors last season, and an even more preposterous 36.5% in Triple-A.

Let’s throw out the Triple-A numbers for now. The combination of a new stadium in San Antonio and a wildly changed offensive environment makes putting those home runs into context difficult, so we’ll simply focus on the major league numbers. Non-pitchers hit home runs on 15.4% of their fly balls in 2019. Lower Hiura’s 24.1% to average, and he would have lost out on seven home runs. Easy peasy, let’s get lunch… right?

Well, yeah, not so much. I prefer to look at a different denominator: balls hit with between 15 and 45 degrees of launch angle rather than “fly balls.” That adds some line drives, which are potential home runs, and removes balls hit at too high of an angle to get out. Hiura had 83 of those in 2019, and turned 22.9% of them into homers. The league turned roughly 15% of theirs into dingers. Still the same seven home runs.

But batters aren’t all average. They have control over their home run rates, far more so than pitchers. Regress Hiura’s results in 2019 back towards the mean, and they suggest a true talent home run rate around 20.5%. That would still give him 17 home runs in the majors, not too much worse than his actual production. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a look at any Mets prospect list from 2017 and Amed Rosario was the headliner. He was all fast-twitch muscles and gorgeous defense. His frame was the type that looks perfectly suited for shortstop: tall and rangy, but not so lanky that he couldn’t one day hit for power. We saw him as a 65 FV prospect, the third-best in all of baseball.

After 2017 and 2018, that assessment looked sorely misguided. Over 762 plate appearances across those two seasons, he put up every scary number imaginable. He walked only 4.2% of the time while striking out 22% of the time, both worse than he’d performed in any full minor league season. Pitchers knocked the bat out of his hands; he hit for a .129 ISO despite 12 triples. The speed that made those triples possible didn’t translate into extra value; his BABIP was only .318, which is good but not great, and he was caught stealing a brutal 14 times.

Those are just offensive outputs, but the offensive and defensive approach were perhaps even scarier. He swung at 42% of pitches outside of the zone, the sixth-highest chase rate in the bigs. Every hitter who chased more often than him, however, channeled their aggression better; he somehow swung at a below-average percent of pitches over the heart of the strike zone in 2018 despite all the chasing. Read the rest of this entry »

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In April of 2018, Trevor Bauer conducted an experiment. While he never admitted it, he mysteriously threw the ball with significantly more spin for an inning. Given Bauer’s repeated insistence that adding pine tar or some other equivalent foreign substance could increase his spin rate by 200-300 rpm, and the fact that his spin rate was almost exactly 300 rpm higher in the first inning as compared to the rest, he might as well have winked.

So, uh, let’s talk about last September. The following graph is Bauer’s average four-seam fastball spin rate by game:

Now, I’m not a baseball scientist. But short of Alan Nathan and Meredith Wills and David Kagan, those are in short supply. So I thought I’d conduct a non-rigorous but still curious investigation of these September starts to see if I could get to the bottom of what happened.

Let’s get something out of the way first: my base case, before I started investigating, is that Bauer got back into the sticky stuff. The jump is just so clean, so consistent within each game, that it doesn’t look at all accidental. In a single earlier game, on August 19, Bauer seemingly discovered some spin, posting his then-highest single game average spin rate, just over 2500 rpm. For the rest of 2019, however, he lived between 2250 and 2500 rpm. Then, like magic, every single pitch Bauer threw in September had a spin rate higher than 2500 rpm.

What could cause this, if it isn’t some type of sticky substance? It’s a long shot, but maybe Bauer started cutting the pitch. What does that mean? If you already know, you can skip this section, but I’ll go over it quickly. Picture a tire rolling down the road. Now, picture that same motion by a ball in air, with no road in the way. That’s transverse spin. Picture the baseball with that tire-style spin, with the car in reverse, and you have a 100% spin efficiency fastball. Read the rest of this entry »

The “problems” the Los Angeles Dodgers face must seem foreign to most other major league teams. When Dave Roberts discussed his Opening Day rotation last weekend, it wasn’t in the same way most managers do. You know that way, because your favorite team’s manager probably does it. “Here are three good starters, one starter who we hope is good, and one starter who we hope is decent.” Not every team takes this approach, of course, but the league isn’t awash in great fourth starters, never mind fifth starters.

But the Dodgers aren’t the league. Their top three — Clayton Kershaw, Walker Buehler, and David Price — are locks. The team is using Julio Urías, who has bounced between starting and relieving, in the rotation. And Alex Wood, who was an above-average pitcher each of his last two years in Los Angeles before injuries ruined his 2019, is overqualified as a fifth starter.

It doesn’t stop there; the next four starters are all interesting as well. Dustin May, who might have made the rotation decision tougher for Roberts if he weren’t injured, is a top 15 prospect in all of baseball. Jimmy Nelson may not pitch, but if he does, he’s potentially excellent. Tony Gonsolin filled in last year in the rotation when the team faced injury issues and acquitted himself well. Read the rest of this entry »