In my mind, Patrick Corbin is an archetype. He’s the idealized sinker/slider guy, pairing the two pitches so masterfully that batters can’t figure out which one is coming until it’s too late. His breakout in 2018 was foreshadowed by a solid 2017, when he upped the percentage of sliders he threw from 26.5% to 38%, and he hasn’t looked back since. After signing with the Nationals as a free agent, he’s delivered another solid season, sinking and sliding his opponents into oblivion, with a few four-seamers thrown in to keep batters honest.

That’s not all he does, though. That’s the business side of Patrick Corbin’s pitching, but sometimes he likes to goof around. Take a look at this ludicrous curveball he threw Manny Machado in June:

That is absolutely nothing like every other pitch Corbin throws. Machado’s not even mad; he’s impressed:

Yes, Patrick Corbin has a slow curve, and it’s a joy to watch. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably not dead, and if you’re not dead, you’ve heard all the fuss about soaring home run rates. I’m not here to judge your perspective on it — I think reasonable people can disagree on how they like their baseball, though I will say that I love a good strikeout and feel pretty neutral about home runs. But I think one thing everyone wonders about is who this all helps.

It’s not the pitchers, clearly. It doesn’t seem to be the big boppers — despite the stupendous home run totals, no one is threatening to hit 73 home runs any time soon. Heck, no one has approached 61 since Giancarlo Stanton’s chase in 2017, and that was a singular event rather than a wave of history-chasing sluggers. Is it the little guys? Freddy Galvis has 20 dingers on the year — that has to count for something.

There’s a lot of chicken-and-egg going on here and no real answers to the answer of who benefits the most from the livelier ball. That’s why I looked to the minor leagues to see which players were most affected by the new ball. That study was basically inconclusive, aside from showing that players with absolutely no power are barely affected.

I thought I’d take a different look at it today. It’s hard to say who has benefited the most from the new ball, but what if we could answer a different question: who would be most affected if the league surreptitiously replaced today’s baseballs with old ones overnight? Read the rest of this entry »

We treat the statistics around torn UCL’s and Tommy John surgery with abstract sadness. It’s awful that so many elbows blow out, but for the most part, it’s just a number. Sure, when a star is injured, we notice — Jordan Hicks, say, or Shohei Ohtani. Those are marquee names, and the disappointment over not getting to see them pitch is merited. But that doesn’t mean that other players who need surgery aren’t just as sad of a story.

Consider Dinelson Lamet. When he made it to the majors in 2017, he was a rare bright spot for the Padres. Three years after signing with them as an international free agent, he’d torn through the minors, striking out 27% of the batters he faced at a mix of levels he was too old (rookie ball at 22) and too young (Triple-A at 24) for. Without much reason to keep him in the minors, the Padres called him up.

Lamet wasn’t a star. He didn’t feature on Twitter highlights, wasn’t gunning for any records. His wasn’t a story to set the major leagues ablaze, the heralded Padre savior arriving to lead the team to the playoffs. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t effective, though; it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a great story.

Even as he tore through the minors, Lamet looked like a reliever before he got to the majors, with only two pitches he had confidence in. After throwing just two starts in Triple-A before 2017, he was an average pitcher over 114 innings with the big league club. The two-pitch arsenal played — his slider was good enough to offset the lack of a third pitch. A ZiPS darling from day one, he was living his major league fantasy — the Padres slotted him in as their number two starter for 2018.

And just like that, he was gone. He felt pain in his elbow while making his final start of the spring, and a few MRIs later, he went under the knife. If you weren’t a Padres fan or a fantasy baseball owner, though, you might never have known. Lamet was a long shot to make it from the start, and even though he’d defied the odds for a season, the abyss is never far away for a major league pitcher.

Lamet has always lived on the margins as a starter. Two-pitch pitchers have a tough time starting, and Lamet was no exception in his 2017 debut. The problem is two-fold — opposite-handed batters are tough to beat without a pitch that breaks away from them, and facing the same batter multiple times without a new look to show is dangerous. Lamet had particular trouble the third time through the order, but he suffered nearly as much against lefties:

Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve chosen topics to research and write about over the past few months, I’ve let an obsession creep into my writing catalog — I’m fascinated by pitcher and batter behavior in 3-0 counts. Whether it’s three-pitch strikeouts after falling behind 3-0, Ronald Acuña aggressively hacking on 3-0, or even just Brandon Belt sneaking in a bunt, I can’t get enough of the goofy ways baseball gets distorted in that most extreme of counts.

What’s so fun about 3-0 is that context matters. For a lot of baseball, looking at things in a context-neutral fashion is the best way to analyze it. A double is a double is a double, and it doesn’t make sense to treat one with the bases juiced in a tie game differently than you would a leadoff double in the first inning when you’re assessing a player. Hitters have little control over balls in play, and absolutely none over who’s on base when they come to the plate. Pitchers, likewise, can’t control sequencing — that’s why concepts like wOBA and FIP do a better job predicting future results than RBI and win/loss record (or, fine, ERA).

But one place context does matter is the count. The world of 3-0 counts is only barely related to 0-2 counts. A pitcher’s arsenal is limitless at 0-2, constrained mostly to fastballs on 3-0. Conversely, a batter has no choice other than to defend the strike zone on 0-2, whereas 3-0 opens up myriad possibilities. That context is what makes the realm of 3-0 counts so fascinating to me. Today, I thought I’d take a theoretical approach to the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that Nick Anderson is one of my favorite pitchers. When he ran a near-50% strikeout rate for the first month or two of the year, only months removed from being traded by the Twins to avoid a roster crunch, I was hooked by the story. More than the story, I was hooked by his curveball, a mid-80s, 12-6 snapping thing that ate batters alive:

Of course, I wasn’t the only person to notice, not by a long shot: the 37% strikeout rate he ran with the Marlins was a top-10 rate in baseball, and that’s not exactly easy to fake. The curve clearly played, getting whiffs on 53.7% of swings, third-highest in baseball for a curveball, and it wasn’t just numbers on a spreadsheet either — you can’t watch that pitch to Carson Kelly above and not say “ooh that’s nasty.”

When the Rays traded for Anderson at the deadline, I was elated. Anderson wasn’t exactly a household name, but he is in my household, and it was quite a thrill seeing a playoff-contending team, one who employs a noted reliever discoverer, concur with me that Anderson was a monster. The Rays don’t quite have the same reputation as the Astros for improving pitchers, but they do have a reputation for getting the most out of relievers, and an unlocked Nick Anderson sounded amazing to me. Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatis Jr. has been one of the most exciting players in baseball this year. I get giddy when he does things like this:

Or like this:

Despite that, I haven’t written about Tatis. It’s not that he wasn’t interesting enough. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, he should take it as a compliment that I’ve been writing about everyone in the league but him. I simply couldn’t find an angle that I felt captured what’s so awesome about Tatis. I still don’t have that angle, but I don’t care anymore. Fernando Tatis Jr. is the best, and it pains me that he’s day-to-day with a back injury right now. Let’s talk about him, because no day should go by without a Tatis highlight. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the season started, the National League looked like it would feature one of the most exciting and evenly matched regular seasons in recent memory. While the Dodgers were the clear class of the league, every team except the Marlins and Giants had legitimate playoff hopes. FanGraphs thought the Pirates had the third-lowest chances of making the playoffs, and they came in just above 10%. By contrast, seven teams in the American League had a 5% or less chance of reaching postseason play.

With the benefit of hindsight, even the Giants had their shot at a one-game playoff. They’ve faded now, 3 1/2 games out of the Wild Card race, but even that vastly outstrips what was expected of them before the season. Could this year’s NL be the platonic ideal of baseball, a cellar-less (again, other than the Marlins) league with every team at least somewhat in the running for the playoffs until the last month of the year?

Alas, it wasn’t to be. The Giants have outstripped expectations, but they’ve been replaced at the bottom of the table by another team with marginal hopes of contending this year, the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates don’t look like a team built to play for draft position. They made win-now trades as recently as last year, adding Chris Archer in what now looks like one of the most lopsided deals of all time. They came into the season hoping for breakouts from some of their hitters and got them — Josh Bell started the season mashing, and Bryan Reynolds has been a revelation.

Heck, as recently as the All-Star break, the Pirates looked like contenders. They were 44-45, only 2 1/2 games out of first place in the NL Central race, and one of seven teams within 2 1/2 games of the Wild Card. They’d outperformed their Pythagorean record to get there, sure, but what’s past is past, and the Pirates were a month or two of inspired baseball away from a playoff run. Our playoff odds still didn’t like their chances, giving them a 10.3% shot, but stranger things have happened: the Mets, after all, had only a 4.9% chance of reaching the playoffs on that date. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cardinals traded for Paul Goldschmidt this offseason, they added one of the most consistent and potent hitters in all of baseball to a team sorely in need of a jolt. As players go, Goldschmidt was about as safe a bet as there is. From 2013 to 2018, he had posted a wRC+ between 133 and 163 every season. His wasn’t a story of constant reinvention and tinkering: he was basically the same hitter every year. He walked a lot, struck out a lot, hit for power, and ran a high BABIP through a combination of his surprising speed and consistently above-average line drive rate.

If that’s what the Cardinals thought they were adding to the lineup with Goldschmidt, the early returns were disappointing. Fresh off of signing a five-year extension, Goldschmidt scuffled through the first months of the season. After starting off the season strong with a three-dinger game in his second game in a Cardinals uniform, he put up some alarmingly pedestrian numbers. He ran a 123 wRC+ for March and April, not up to his usual standards, and it went downhill from there. He declined to a 104 wRC+ in May and a shocking 57 wRC+ in June.

Alarmingly, it didn’t look like luck was to blame. Goldschmidt’s .302 BABIP was below his career average, but not concerningly so. His strikeouts were up a hair and his walks were down perhaps two hairs from his Arizona form, but nothing about that screamed regression. No, Goldschmidt’s problems boiled down primarily to one thing: he stopped hitting for power. In his last six seasons with the Diamondbacks, Goldschmidt had posted an ISO in the top 20 in baseball five times. The one year he didn’t, he propped up his value with a whopping 32 steals and career-best plate discipline.

With half of the 2019 season in the books, Goldschmidt’s ISO was below league average, leading to a 97 wRC+. Not just outside the top 20, not just below .200 — it was a puny .159, smack dab between Amed Rosario and Nick Ahmed. As for propping up his value with steals and plate discipline, he had zero steals and the worst K-BB% since his rookie year. Add it all up, and he’d been worth 0.7 WAR, less value than he’d accrued in his average *month* with the Diamondbacks. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an easy complaint that baseball fans the world over lob at analytical, number-driven sorts like me. “Hey nerd,” it starts. “Baseball is played on the field, and your numbers can’t measure heart and smarts.” The nerd part is constant, the things the numbers can’t measure varied. That complaint misses the mark, because no one loves baseball for the numbers without also loving it for the viewing pleasure. Appreciating the statistics doesn’t have to detract from how fun it is to watch a pickle or to see a beautifully executed tag.

While that complaint is mostly off the mark, it does get one thing about statistics right. There are some things that you simply don’t need a big sample size to know. Want to know if a player is adept at hitting the ball the other way with two strikes and runners in scoring position? You’ll need a sample that could blot out the sun. Want to know if a pitcher throws 100 mph? One or two pitches will do. Not everything needs to be regressed to the mean, and not everything needs thousands of data points to be valid.

Here’s merely one example: Emmanuel Clase has thrown 38 pitches in the majors. All of them have been this week. He has one strikeout, one walk, and nine batters faced. We’re nowhere near any of these numbers stabilizing, nowhere near his strikeout rate or walk rate or BABIP being meaningful. Despite all that, I can say this with certainty: Emmanuel Clase has a chance to be one of the best relievers in baseball, and he might be the most uncomfortable at-bat in the majors already.

Why? Well, Clase is a two-pitch reliever — 80% fastballs and 20% sliders. Look at pitch classifications, and the fastball usually turns up as a four-seamer. He averages 99 mph with it and has topped out at around 102 in the minors, which is already special enough, but that’s not even the interesting part. You see, it’s not a four-seam fastball, at least not in the way you think of that pitch. It’s not a fading, rising missile that explodes through the top of the strike zone. No, Clase throws a cutter, a 100-mile-an-hour optical illusion that bores in on the bats of lefties and the very souls of righties. One cutter was all I needed to see to know that I’m going to enjoy watching Clase for as long as he pitches. Read the rest of this entry »

For major league pitchers, the end always feels depressingly close at hand. In a game increasingly dominated by power and velocity, losing a tick can be the difference between sneaking a fastball past someone and watching a home run trot. Throw in elbow injuries, blisters, and hitters obsessively watching video looking for any exploitable edge, and it’s a miracle that any pitchers can sustain success.

Clayton Kershaw is no exception to this pattern. He may be the greatest pitcher of the 21st century, but that doesn’t give him special immunity from velocity loss or a license to avoid injury. Gone are the days of Kershaw posting sub-2 ERAs regularly. That’s partially due to the changing offensive environment, to be sure, but it’s also a reflection of the fact that Kershaw is aging. His strikeout rate fell last year to the lowest rate since his rookie season, a pedestrian 23.9%. He made less than 30 starts for a third straight season. His fastball velocity declined 1.5 mph. Age comes for everyone, or so it seems.

When Kershaw returned from a season-opening IL stint, he did so with old-man wiles. His velocity was down another tick, now approaching 90 mph. As Ben Lindbergh ably chronicled, Kershaw’s plan was to stick with what worked in 2018 and survive on sliders and first-pitch strikes. He became perhaps the most extreme pitcher in baseball, piping in first strikes nearly three-quarters of the time and afterward departing the strike zone entirely. He accomplished that trick by throwing his fastball 61% of the time to open at-bats and only 33% of the time after that.

However, even these extreme changes couldn’t hide the fact that Kershaw was slipping. At roughly the midpoint of the season, July 1st, Kershaw was 36th in WAR among pitchers, sandwiched between Kyle Gibson and Sonny Gray. He was marginally better, 24th, by RA9-WAR, but even there, it was weird seeing Kershaw’s name next to Yonny Chirinos and Zach Eflin. Some of this came from a limited workload, but his 3.23 ERA and 3.76 FIP told the same story. It wasn’t just the ball, either: his 77 ERA- and 89 FIP- were his highest since his rookie year, and his 22.7% strikeout rate was down even from last year’s low level. Read the rest of this entry »