Last week, FanGraphs wrapped up our annual Trade Value Series. As a window into teams’ valuation of players, it’s an invaluable resource, built as it is from a mixture of industry sources. One thing it isn’t, though, is a list of players we realistically expect to be traded. The top 10 players on the list, for example, have an average of six years of team control remaining, and all of them except Vladimir Guerrero Jr. play for teams that are currently contending. They’re great theoretical trade pieces, in other words, but not likely to actually be traded.

That conundrum, the fact that the most valuable players are among the least likely to be traded, has always been a feature of the exercise. Mike Trout topped the list for five straight years at one point, for example, and was quite literally too valuable for teams to be able to acquire, even if the Angels had been willing to deal him. Evan Longoria, likewise, was a repeat Trade Value champion, but his first extension with the Rays made him so valuable to the team that they couldn’t even contemplate moving him.

Most of the time, then, the Trade Value Series is more of a Theoretical Value Series. Most isn’t all, however, and that’s where this article comes in. One of the benefits of having 12 years of trade values is that we can look at things that don’t happen all that often. If only 1% of top-50 players get traded, we should still have six results in our sample. With the benefit of aggregation, then, let’s take a look at how often the trade in trade value comes into play.

The first question you probably have is how often a player on the Trade Value list gets traded at all. The answer to that is tricky. For example, here are the number of Top-50 and honorable mention players traded within the next year after appearing on a FanGraphs Trade Value list:

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Here’s a sentence that I didn’t think I’d be writing in 2019: Andrew Miller has accumulated -0.2 WAR this season. By FanGraphs’ version of WAR, he’s been less valuable than a replacement-level reliever. Here’s another sentence that makes a little more sense, but is at odds with the one I just wrote: Andrew Miller might be the Cardinals’ best reliever. Now, reliever performance is volatile and all, but we’re going to need an explanation. How can those two things be true at once?

Let’s start with Miller being below replacement level, because that would have been a surprising assertion before the year. Andrew Miller has faced 139 batters this season. He’s allowed eight home runs. 6% of his plate appearances have ended with the opposing batter trotting around the bases. That surely already sounds like a ton — indeed, Miller is second in the majors in home runs allowed per nine innings, behind only Josh Osich. You don’t need a sabermetric writer to tell you that’s bad.

As bad as 2.2 home runs per nine innings sounds, though, it might be underselling how wild Miller’s season has been on the home run front. Josh Osich is a great example of the kind of pitcher who normally leads the league in home runs allowed per nine. He’s a pitch-to-contact depth reliever who works by letting opponents put the ball in play and counting on his defense to make plays behind him. Now, that strategy mostly hasn’t worked — Osich has a career ERA of 5.11, and his FIP is 5.31, so it’s not as though he’s just been getting unlucky. Still, while Osich is homer-prone, he’s mostly just contact-prone, with the home runs a cost of doing business. Strike out only 19% of the batters you face, and there will be plenty of opportunities to give up home runs.

Andrew Miller’s case of the dingers isn’t like that at all. Miller is actually one of the least contact-prone pitchers in all of baseball this year. Only 51% of the batters he has faced have put the ball in play. That severely limits the opportunities they have to hit home runs. Osich, for comparison’s sake, has let 75% of batters put the ball in play. Miller is giving up home runs at a truly alarming rate considering how few opportunities he gives batters to put a ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

The list of batters who go down in the count 0-1 least often mostly makes sense. Mike Trout and Cody Bellinger are in the top five, due to a combination of their sterling batting eyes and pitchers staying away from them. Justin Smoak, Mike Moustakas, and Anthony Rizzo comprise the rest of the top five, and even if they don’t quite have the fearsome power of Bellinger and Trout, they have enough power that pitchers often pitch them carefully. Smoak has the lowest ISO of the five at .205. Pitchers are being rationally cautious.

Number six on the list will make you question what you think you know about first strike rate. David Fletcher, the Angels infielder, is number six, and he couldn’t look any more different than the guys ahead of him. I don’t mean physically, though that’s true as well — at 5-foot-10 and 175 pounds, Fletcher isn’t an imposing power presence. No, what I mean is that Fletcher plays baseball in a style that can best be described as a throwback. Not only that, he’s succeeding, putting together a second consecutive solid major league season despite a game that would look more at home in the 1980s than in 2019.

If Tyler O’Neill is one extreme of the game, David Fletcher is the other. Think of a stereotype about baseball in 2019, and Fletcher probably defies it. Strikeout rates inexorably on the rise? Fletcher is striking out 8.3% of the time this year, the lowest rate among qualified hitters. Big swings and big whiffs? Fletcher makes contact on a dizzying 92.1% of his swings. The world gone mad for home runs and power? Fletcher’s .126 ISO is 12th-lowest in baseball this year, and that comes largely from his 20 doubles; he hits home runs on 5.6% of his fly balls, the sixth-lowest rate in the majors.

It’s easy to read the headlines in 2019, to see Pete Alonso hitting balls to Andromeda and Christian Yelich crushing home runs on nearly a third of his fly balls, and think that the only way to succeed in baseball is via home runs. There’s some truth to that, honestly — as pitchers throw harder and harder, stringing together a series of hits gets increasingly challenging, and a home run lets the offense skip all of that. That’s not a rule, though — it’s merely the path of least resistance. Read the rest of this entry »

On an extremely superficial level, Tyler O’Neill looks like any other high-level prospect bouncing between the minors and the majors. After posting a 107 wRC+ in his first shot at Triple-A in 2017, he’s been excellent there over the past two years, putting up a combined 143 wRC+ in 427 PA. He’s been above-average in parts of two seasons in the majors — a 121 wRC+ over 232 PA. If the Cardinals didn’t have such an outfield logjam, he might have earned more major league playing time; indeed, the team traded Tommy Pham last summer in an attempt to find more plate appearances for O’Neill and Harrison Bader.

Look even slightly closer, though, and the narrative of O’Neill as average baseball player falls apart. Here is O’Neill, after his teammates tore off his jersey and undershirt following a walk-off home run. Even through the water droplets on the camera lens, his bulk is obvious:

How average can someone with biceps the size of most human beings’ legs be? Read the rest of this entry »

Ronald Acuña had Steve Cishek right where he wanted him. He had worked the count to 3-0, and with a man on first base, Cishek was in a tough situation. The Cubs led by only two, and that put Cishek in quite the bind. Walk Acuña, and the tying run would be aboard with no one out. Give him a pitch to hit, and the game could be tied in a single swing. Acuña waited, Cishek dealt, and the result:

Cishek, no doubt, made the exact pitch he was hoping for. Still, it was a tremendously aggressive swing from Acuña, at a pitch that he couldn’t do much with. No real harm done — Acuña walked on the very next pitch. Cishek, as it turns out, was wild that day — he’d walked Freddie Freeman before Acuña, and he walked Nick Markakis after him to load the bases. All three scored, and the Braves won. Still, what was Acuña doing swinging there? Cishek had thrown seven straight balls to start the inning. The Braves weren’t punished for Acuña’s aggression, but the swing seemed a bit out of place. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most significant stories of the past few years of baseball has been the changing composition of the baseball. I mean story in the grand narrative sense, but I also mean it in the sense of literal stories. The slice-open-a-baseball-and-catalog-its-contents article has gotten very popular over the last few years, as have studies of drag and bounciness. Physics is having a moment in baseball analysis.

One of the frustrating parts of breaking down the new ball’s effect on offense is that there was no clean way to isolate which hitters were helped most. Many batters adapted their swings to the new ball as the ball kept changing. The ball undoubtedly led to more home runs, as an independent panel reported in 2018. Which batters, though, were the biggest beneficiaries of the new ball? The launch angle revolution might increase batters’ home run rates, but surely a lot of its popularity comes down to the fact that home runs started flying out of the park at elevated rates as the ball changed. Separating cause from effect as swings and baseballs change over years’ worth of games is difficult. Our own Jeff Sullivan took a shot at it in 2016, but didn’t find much evidence for one group over another.

Luckily, this season provides a convenient, natural experiment. To much fanfare, Triple-A switched over to using the major league ball this year. Home runs predictably skyrocketed, driven by the new ball. This creates an opportunity for all kinds of research, such as this attempt by Baseball America to test out whether the ball changes fastball velocity. I thought I’d take the occasion of this new ball to investigate something I’ve always wanted to know about the home run surge: what types of hitters does the new ball help most? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been on something of a fastballs-down-the-middle kick recently. I hadn’t realized that it was possible to be so bad at hitting them until I looked into Wil Myers and his flailing ways. Then I started looking at a few underperforming hitters, and I was shocked by how many batters were missing middle-middle fastballs. Pitchers are throwing fastballs less often than ever before, and they’re designing new breaking balls every offseason. Meanwhile, some batters can’t handle a straight pitch in the center of the hitting zone. Baseball is weird sometimes!

Looking into these center-cut whiffs was baffling. There were a decent number of Jacob deGrom and Chris Sale fastballs on there, sure, but there were also plenty of replacement level relievers. Does the pitcher even have anything to do with it? Sure, Clayton Kershaw used to be great at throwing down the middle, but he’s thrown 96 pitches over the heart of the plate this year and gotten a paltry four swinging strikes. Aroldis Chapman excelled at it in 2016, but he’s thrown 43 of them this year and gotten only five swinging strikes. What if it’s a batter-centric phenomenon? Could it just be that batters sometimes miss because baseball is hard, regardless of pitcher?

Ha, no. Silly Ben. If you watched the 2018 playoffs, you’d already know: Josh Hader is the absolute king of throwing down the middle and coming out unscathed, and it’s not even close. Hader’s fastball is a magic trick, a sleight of hand performed on batters. In your head, he’s probably getting all his strikeouts at the very top of the strike zone or even a little above that, getting hitters to swing at pitches they can’t do anything with. That’s true, of course, but he’s also beating hitters when he messes up. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s strange to say for a player who has been a magnet for controversy for most of his major league career, but Yasiel Puig has had a pretty quiet 2019. It’s likely you know two things about his season so far. First, he was pressing to start the season, swinging at far more pitches than usual and getting poor results to show for it. Through June 9th, in fact, Puig had a 58 wRC+. Second, Puig fought Pirates. Not in a curse-you-Jack-Sparrow way, either — the still of his one-man brawl against the Pirates was the image of the early season.

After that, you’d be forgiven for thinking Puig and the Reds might just fade into obscurity for the rest of the year. As of that June 9th date I selected up above, Puig had been worth -.6 WAR on the year, and the Reds were eight games out of first in the NL Central. But a funny thing happened on the way to playing out the string: the Reds, and Puig, played themselves back into contention as the rest of the NL Central fell apart.

If you look at Puig’s stats right this minute, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. He has a 101 wRC+ on the year and has been worth exactly 1 WAR in just over half of a season. That sounds like a roughly average player. But here’s the thing: we’re barely a month past June 9th. Puig, as you’ll recall, had been worth -.6 WAR up to that point. In the past month, Puig has been a house on fire. How has he done it? He’s gotten back to being Puig. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Ottavino has had a strange 2019. Last year, he reinvented his game in a single offseason. This year, he’s mostly sticking with what worked in 2018, and the results have been pretty good. Despite pitching in homer-happy Yankee Stadium, he’s posted a 1.80 ERA (39 ERA-), and his strikeout rate is a gaudy 32.2%. He easily could have been an All-Star, even if his FIP is a less-inspiring, if still good, 3.85. His walk rate, too, has spiked — to 15.8%, near a career high. It’s too early to say whether Ottavino will back up his breakout 2018 or regress closer to his FIP by season’s end.

What it’s not too early to say, however, is that watching Ottavino pitch this year is an absolute joy. His slider, which he throws more than 40% of the time, has always been his calling card, and it’s as fun as ever, taking a great liquid arc across the plate that can make you question physics. His fastball, a hard two-seamer that he uses more like a four-seam fastball, locating it high in the zone, is a delightful offset to the slider. His cutter — well, his cutter isn’t as fun to watch as the other two pitches, but it sits in between them in velocity and movement and helps disguise everything else. What’s so great about Ottavino, though, isn’t just his raw stuff. It’s the way he uses those pitches that is so fun, and this year, he’s using them to get called strikes by the bucketload.

When you picture a 2019 slider in your mind’s eye, you might picture Ottavino’s, or maybe Patrick Corbin’s. Big break, the batter desperately trying to adjust his swing to hit something that’s falling down and away from him, and the catcher blocking a bouncing ball to record a strikeout. Ottavino still has that pitch in his arsenal, of course. Take a look at him going right after noted slider-masher Lourdes Gurriel and coming out on top:

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Earlier this year, when I delved into Zack Greinke’s 2019 season, I was impressed by how militantly Greinke follows one common-sense pitching rule: he does absolutely everything he can to avoid walks when the bases are empty, then pitches to avoid contact as soon as a runner reaches base. It’s a classic piece of pitching strategy, but the lengths to which he’s willing to change his approach to match the situation were eye-opening. Greinke’s dogmatism got me thinking: are there areas of pitching where context is so strong that it dictates specific strategies?

Luckily, there’s been a wealth of research on the intricacies of pitching to the situation. Colin Wyers, the current head of R&D for the Astros, wrote an excellent investigation of the topic that holds up well today, but many more writers have tackled this problem. Mitchel Lichtman periodically addresses pitching strategy, Matt Swartz took a good look at the question, William Spaniel considered one narrow case in an interesting way — the list goes on and on. Rather than attempt to go toe-to-toe with these excellent analyses (preview: I’d lose), I’m going to take a slightly different tack. Instead of talking situational pitching broadly, let’s look at a couple situations where behavioral change makes sense and see if pitchers can actually exert any control over it. Read the rest of this entry »