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:

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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:

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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 »

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:

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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 »