The 2017 Arizona Diamondbacks were an unexpected delight, an eventual playoff team that was projected to be near the bottom of the NL West before the season. They had star power to burn; with Paul Goldschmidt and A.J. Pollock anchoring the lineup and Zack Greinke and Robbie Ray at the front of the rotation, the team had a top four to rival any team in baseball. After that, though, the drop off was severe. Maybe you could squint and see greatness in Jake Lamb, maybe you believed in the Shelby Miller bounce back, but the depth simply wasn’t there.

Those Diamondbacks made the postseason and won the Wild Card game, fueled by a deadline trade for J.D. Martinez, but their stars-and-scrubs construction was worrisome. Pollock missed time with injury, David Peralta didn’t take a step forward, and the cupboard generally looked bare. While the team’s pitching staff looked more promising thanks to breakouts from Patrick Corbin and Zack Godley, it wasn’t built to last. Corbin was only a year from free agency, Greinke was getting older, and Godley was more league average than a star in waiting.

By the end of 2018, that iteration of the Diamondbacks was no more. Pollock and Corbin left in free agency, Goldschmidt was a Cardinal, and the team made no secret that it was shopping Greinke. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s all their stars other than Ray, and he had underperformed massively in 2018. We baseball fans are pattern matchers, and this pattern is an easy one to spot: it was time for a tank and rebuild.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the bottom of the standings. The Diamondbacks, projected for the fourth-worst record in the NL before the season, are clinging to the fringes of the playoff hunt, with a 5.3% chance of reaching the Wild Card game. They’re 75-71, on the verge of putting together their third straight winning season. Most impressively, they’re doing it with an entirely new cast of characters. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers didn’t win the World Series in 2018, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a successful year. After several frustrating seasons of rebuilding, a division title (in a one game playoff against the hated Cubs, no less!) and a trip to the NLCS felt like huge strides in the right direction. It seemed as though the team had arrived a year early in a manner reminiscent of the 2015 Cubs, with better-than-expected seasons from young players and star turns from big offseason additions. In 2019, their young pitching staff would have another year of experience, and by adding Yasmani Grandal, the front office kept the talent pipeline primed.

144 games later, things haven’t gone as planned. The Brewers are out of playoff position, though they have lately gained ground, with only a 25% chance of reaching the postseason. Christian Yelich’s season-ending fracture adds injury to insult — a second straight MVP season would be a fun September storyline, and without Yelich’s bat, the team’s chances seem even more remote. Before his injury, however, Yelich was absolutely carrying the Brewers, improving on his MVP 2018 nearly across the board. Grandal has been magnificent as well, walking and slugging his way to a 123 wRC+ in addition to his usual excellent framing.

If those two have done so well, why aren’t the Brewers having a better season? Injuries have taken their toll. The pitching staff hasn’t developed as hoped, but that’s hardly shocking given how volatile pitching can be. More surprisingly, Lorenzo Cain has gone from down-ballot MVP contender to merely another guy, and on a team without much outfield depth, the decline has been particularly tough to deal with. While he’s been slowed by a knee injury since early August, his season was hardly better before then — his wRC+ has actually increased since sustaining that injury. What’s wrong with Cain?

One look at that oldest of statistics, batting average, will tell you something’s not right. From 2014 to 2018, Cain hit .300 or better four times and had an overall .301 average to pair with a .361 OBP. His .253 and .321 marks in 2019 are near career lows. The last time he was hitting like this, he wasn’t Lorenzo Cain, star outfielder. He was simply Lorenzo Cain, Royals prospect with a good glove. The gap between this Cain (0.9 WAR) and star-turn Cain (5.7 WAR in 2018) is so wide that it’s hardly believable.

Batting average isn’t the most valuable statistic, but the three components that make it up are all trending in the wrong direction for Cain. First, there’s strikeout rate. Strikeouts count against average without giving you a chance for a hit, so limiting strikeouts is a key component to hitting for a high average. It’s a part of the game that Cain has often excelled at — he hasn’t struck out more than the league average since 2014, and he actually got better at it as the league has gotten worse, posting a career-low 15.2% rate last year. This part of Cain’s game is worse, but that’s hardly surprising given the high bar he set last year, and his 16.9% strikeout rate is still tremendous.

If it’s not the strikeouts, is it the home runs? Home runs are hits that don’t give fielders any play on the ball, an automatic outcome not subject to the vagaries of defense and luck. If Cain lost a lot of home run power, we’d see it in batting average, and it would also sap his overall value tremendously. Read the rest of this entry »

While a strikeout is always nice, a pop up is typically also a great outcome for a pitcher. In fact, FanGraphs treats infield fly balls and strikeouts as equivalent when it comes to calculating FIP-based WAR. If you want to read more about it, our Glossary has a good overview, and this Dave Cameron article is particularly useful. As Dave puts it, “infield flies are, for all practical purposes, the same as a strikeout.”

That logic makes perfect sense, and that’s why infield fly balls are baked into WAR calculations with the same value as strikeouts today. By my calculations (necessarily a bit inexact as Baseball Savant categorizes balls in play somewhat differently), a measly 36 of the 3,866 infield fly balls this year have turned into base hits, mostly on flukes like this:

Justice was served on this play, and you could even debate the word “infield” since it landed on the outfield grass, but you get the general idea: short of a weird shift, very few infield fly balls turn into hits.

But just because few of them become hits doesn’t mean no one’s getting on base. Cameron again: “Sure, maybe you or I wouldn’t turn every IFFB into an out, but for players selected at the major league level, there is no real differentiation in their ability to catch a pop fly.”

Sure, major league infielders, even the very worst of them, have preternatural hand-eye coordination and have spent thousands of hours of their lives catching baseballs. By their very nature, infield pop ups give fielders a long time to react. That ball is in the air for three, four, even five seconds. It’s one of the easiest plays you’ll ever get as a defender.

That’s all true, and yet infielders have dropped 38 pop ups this year. That simple play, baseball’s version of a wide open layup, isn’t always converted into an out. To be fair, six of them hardly count as being infield fly balls — this Starlin Castro drop should probably have been played by an outfielder, for example:

That still leaves 32 plays in which the pitcher got one of the best possible outcomes and got a baserunner for his troubles. Obviously, the fielders are to blame somewhat in these situations. But how much are they to blame? Let’s take a look at a few different kinds of infield fly balls that didn’t go as the defense planned. Read the rest of this entry »

If you follow baseball from the East Coast, it’s easy to forget about Kyle Seager. Though never quite as famous as his performance would merit, he’s been a star for the better part of the last decade — he and Félix Hernández were the solitary workhorses trying to drag the Mariners out of a playoff drought and back to glory. Seager arrived in the majors at the tail end of Félix’s peak, but they were both always there, annually among the game’s best and never in the playoffs.

That feels like eons ago now. The Mariners have been redefined since then; by Jerry Dipoto’s manic trading, by the delight of watching Daniel Vogelbach hit, by painful injuries and eagles landing. Meanwhile, time has dragged the old generation down. With Félix’s rapid decline as a guidepost, it’s easy to lump Seager in with him as a deprecated model of Mariner.

The numbers tell the story. From 2012 to 2016, Seager posted a wRC+ between 108 and 134 every season and averaged 4.5 WAR per year. He seemed to only be getting better — 2016 was his best season yet, a 5.2 WAR, 134 wRC+ masterpiece when he struck out only 16% of the time and walked at a 10.2% clip. A down 2017 (106 wRC+) was understandable, with a low BABIP and slightly worsening plate discipline dragging down his overall line, but a downward trajectory for a 29-year-old was enough to make observers a little worried.

2018 was worse — his walks plummeted, his strikeouts ballooned to 21.9%, and he posted a lower ISO than he had in dead-ball 2014 on his way to an 83 wRC+. He started 2019 on the injured list after hand surgery, a worrisome injury for any hitter. It was slow going upon his return, and as the Mariners wilted after their strong start, it felt as though Seager’s career was doing the same. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not breaking any news in saying that Alex Bregman is having a great year. He’s batting an otherworldly .295/.416/.570, good for a 162 wRC+, while walking more than he strikes out and playing his usual excellent defense at third base. He’s fifth in baseball in WAR, and only Mike Trout’s constant unrelenting excellence prevents Bregman from being the presumptive AL MVP.

I could talk about all of that, but that would be boring. Do you really want to hear that Alex Bregman is good? If that’s what you’re here for — he’s good! He’s great! Boring. If that’s what you’re after, go browse his player page — it won’t disappoint. I want to tackle something slightly different today.

This year, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call Bregman a power hitter. His .278 ISO is 14th-best in baseball, sandwiched between Kyle Schwarber and Freddie Freeman, and his 33 home runs are both a career-best and a top-20 mark in baseball. Heck, he was in the Home Run Derby, and nothing says power hitter like baseball’s annual celebration of dingers. He hit 31 home runs last year, too — this isn’t a purely 2019 concern. Here’s my hot take: Bregman still isn’t a power hitter — and if he unlocks that, there’s a new level of stardom available to him. Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins are undeniably one of the most exciting stories of the year. They’ve hit, and I’m approximating here, eighteen million home runs on their charge to the top of the AL Central, holding off the Indians with burst after burst of offense. Their starters are deep and talented — Martín Pérez, whose resurgence has been a fun story, is their fifth-best starter by WAR, with 1.8. José Berríos keys the unit, but Jake Odorizzi, Kyle Gibson, and Michael Pineda are all having excellent seasons.

While all the sluggers and starters have top billing on the team this year, their bullpen has been quietly excellent. They’ve been the second-best group in baseball by WAR this year, the best by FIP-, and have walked batters less frequently than any other relief corps. If win probability added is more your speed, they’re eighth in the league. A year after being below average across the board, their sterling last 30 days (3.24 ERA, 3.30 FIP, 1.6 WAR) has helped the Twins remain atop the AL Central after a brief swoon.

But calling it a group effort is misleading. They’re a group, to be sure — seven relievers with at least 20 innings pitched have posted park-adjusted FIPs and ERAs better than league average. They’re more Derek and the Dominos or the White Stripes than a true group, though. Taylor Rogers is the rock of the group, a bona fide stopper putting up his second straight dominant year of relief. He’s still best known for having a twin brother in the majors, but maybe it’s time he’s known more for his pitching than his family. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs, we strive to provide you with entertaining baseball content. In the past, that often meant articles written by Jeff Sullivan. Now that he works for the Rays, that’s not an option — but still, some of our articles resemble his work. For the most part, that’s not on purpose, just a side effect of all of us reading so many of his pieces over the years. Today isn’t that. Today I’m going to riff on a classic.

Twice a year, Jeff wrote about the worst called ball and strike of the half season. Sometimes it was a comedy. Sometimes it was a straightforward discussion of how a pitch down the middle was called a ball. Either way, it was a wild ride, and it’s wholly Jeff’s.

That’s okay, though, because called strikes and called balls aren’t the only things that can be bad. Okay, fine, the worst called ball was pretty bad:

But that’s not why we’re here! Today, I want to look at the worst swinging strikes of the season.

The worst swinging strike is harder to pin down than the worst called strike. For example, this swinging strike is on a pitch that’s incredibly far out of the strike zone:

That’s not a good swing. It’s not particularly close to being a good swing. About the best thing you can say about it is that maybe the ball will get away from the catcher, but with a runner on first, that’s scant comfort. If the ball could travel through the ground with no resistance, Statcast projects that it would have crossed home plate nearly two feet below ground level. Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Hosmer is a hard man to shift against. Though he fits the two main criteria for an overshift (namely: he’s left-handed and plays baseball), that’s where his list as an ideal candidate ends. If ever anyone was going to poke a groundball the opposite way, it would be Hosmer — his groundball rate is perennially among the league’s highest, and he hits a fair number of them to the opposite field. Teams generally agree — he’s faced a shift in fewer than half of his bases-empty plate appearances this year, and only 40.7% overall. Both place him in the bottom third of left-handed batters when it comes to the defensive alignment.

You don’t have to dig into his groundball numbers for long to work out why. The reasoning behind a shift is simple; hitters pull groundballs. League-wide, a whopping 55.5% of groundballs have been pulled, against only 12.1% hit the opposite way. The split is the same regardless of handedness, but first base is conveniently located on the lefty pull side of the field, which makes shifting a left-handed batter a high-percentage move.

For some reason, though, Hosmer doesn’t fit that mold. In 2019, he’s pulled only 46.4% of his groundballs, almost exactly equivalent to his career average of 46.3%. He’s at 16.3% opposite-field groundballs for his career over a whopping 2,263 grounders. His pull rate is in the bottom 20% of batters this year, and was in the bottom 3% last year, the bottom 10% two years ago, the bottom 15% for his career — you get the idea.

This isn’t to say there’s no merit to shifting against Hosmer — you’d need a more detailed mapping of infielder speeds and groundball exit velocity to work the math out perfectly. But look at his groundball (and blooper) distribution from 2016 to 2019 and tell me you want to shift against this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Amir Garrett emerged from the bullpen into quite a jam. With the Reds up 5-1 heading into the eighth, all had seemed fine, but Michael Lorenzen allowed the first three batters he faced to reach base. As Garrett prepared to face Anthony Rizzo, one swing of the bat could tie the game. Knowing that, Garrett didn’t mess around — he went to his best pitch right away.

The first slider he threw might have clipped the inside edge of the zone, but it was called a ball. Still, down 1-0, he didn’t give in. He went back inside with a slider — and hit Rizzo. That free base drove in a run, and now Garrett was right back where he started with one less run to work with.

With free-swinging Javier Báez up next, it was time for another slider. Garrett again clipped the corner, and this time was rewarded with a grounder that Joey Votto threw home for a force out. Garrett breathed a sigh of relief. There was no time to relax, though — with only one out, the situation was still precarious.

Ian Happ, coming off of a scorching-hot six game stretch where he had compiled a 343 wRC+, stepped in next. Fortunately, though, Happ has one major weakness: sliders. Garrett took no prisoners:

Read the rest of this entry »

Gio Gonzalez is expressive on the mound, there’s no doubt about that. He tends to wear the result of the most recent plate appearance on his face. So if I told you that he threw a 3-2 pitch to Javier Báez, and followed it by looking like this:

What would you think happened? A double off the wall? A home run? Perhaps a smashed line drive that miraculously found a glove?

What if I told you that the pitch was a fastball that ended up here?

Okay, now you have a good guess. You’d make that face too if you walked Javy Báez on an uncompetitive pitch. There’s not much good to say about a pitch that missed the outer edge of the plate, per Statcast, by 13.2 inches.

Ha, I’m joking. It’s Javy Báez. That was a strikeout:

You might think, after that intro, that this is an article that will take issue with Javy Báez’s plate discipline. It is most emphatically not that. This is a paean to Báez’s singular, tremendous talent. Who else in baseball can swing at that pitch and also be a star? Who else can swing at that pitch and even be a major leaguer?

The book on Báez has always been that he has all the power in the world and none of the plate discipline. In the minors, he had unheard-of pop for an elite, up-the-middle defender — the kind of tools prospect evaluators drool over. There was just that one little thing: as his Triple-A manager, Marty Pevey, said when he was called up: “It’ll be a learning curve for Javy. He’ll want to hit every ball 600 feet. He’s such a great competitor.” Read the rest of this entry »