Being a fan of a rebuilding team is a tricky line to walk. You want the players to do well, obviously — you’re watching them every day, after all, and it’s only human to root for what you’re watching. At the same time, if they do too well, they’re probably getting traded — how much mental energy should you invest in a player who won’t be on your team in two months? Did that reliever you like find another gear? Cool, enjoy the two lower-level prospects the team will get back for him in a month. Rooting for a past-their-prime star? Well, if they have a good stretch, the team might ship the one face you remember from the good old days out for some salary relief.

There’s one great joy in watching a team that’s in the middle of a rebuild. Whether by accident or design, teams don’t end up trying to retool if they have a ton of solid major league players, which means there’s a playing time void that gets filled by whoever’s available. Minor league free agents and past-their-prime vets? Step right up. Lifetime minor leaguers looking for their first real chance? Someone needs to play third base, so grab a glove. When one of those lottery tickets hits, that feeling makes up for a lot of the bad parts of rebuilding. Here’s a player who has always wanted a chance, and your team gave it to him. If he’s young, he might even be around when the team’s good again, and you, the fan, were there at the beginning. All of this is a roundabout way of saying: Niko Goodrum might be awesome, and the Tigers gave him a chance.

If you haven’t heard of Niko Goodrum before, I can’t blame you. He got a cup of coffee with the Twins in 2017 before signing with the Tigers after the Twins released him, and he delivered a solid if uninspiring 2018 (103 wRC+ in 492 PA, 1.1 WAR) while playing across the diamond. He’s been excellent to start this year, putting up a 132 wRC+ with nearly as many walks as strikeouts while batting cleanup and playing both centerfield and first base. Now you, the sophisticated FanGraphs reader, are no dummy. You know that a 132 wRC+ a few weeks into the season isn’t all that outrageous. It’s above average, sure, but no one’s going to lose their mind over it. What makes me so sure Niko Goodrum is amazing all of the sudden? Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso, it should first be said, really isn’t a great defender. The Mets were quick to let everyone know this throughout 2018, when they didn’t call him up early in the year, when he won Defensive Player of the Month for the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate in July, and when they didn’t make him a September call-up in a completely lost season for the big league club. Seventeen games into his major league career, however, I can say one thing with certainty: I don’t care that he’s supposedly bad at defense. Alonso’s plate appearances are turning into appointment viewing, because he flat-out crushes the ball. I’m not talking garden-variety “boy, that large man can hit,” either. Alonso might not have the best strike-zone recognition, or the best general plate discipline, but when he makes contact, he’s doing damage like almost no one else in baseball.

If you want to understand how truly incredible Alonso’s start has been, you need to look past the WAR leaderboards. Heck, you need to look past the wRC+ leaderboards — like I said, his plate discipline is a work in progress. Alonso has a near-200 wRC+ with a 31% strikeout rate — the three players at the top of the wRC+ leaderboard check in at 11.5%, 8.6%, and 15.0%, respectively. No, the magic really starts when Alonso puts the ball in play, and I do mean magic. Take a look at the top 10 players in baseball in terms of barrels (a Statcast designation that basically means a ball that is tremendously likely to be an extra-base hit) per batted ball:

Think of it this way: about a third of the time that Alonso puts the ball in play, he’s hitting an absolute rocket. Just being on this list, let alone at the top of it, tells us something. This isn’t a list of guys who have lucked into some game power. It’s not a list you can get on just by taking some walks, like a wRC+ leaderboard — Alex Bregman might have had a nice 2018 at the plate, but it’s hard to fake hitting the ball this hard and this optimally (Bregman ended 76th in barrels per batted ball last year). This isn’t just home run power, either, though it’s certainly that — Alonso has six homers already, including a 118.3-mph, 454-foot missile off of Jonny Venters that had SunTrust Park looking like a water hazard at the Masters:

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The bottom of the eighth inning of last Wednesday’s Brewers-Angels game was, at first glance, fairly uneventful. Down 4-2, the Brewers called on converted starter Junior Guerra to keep the game in reach. He delivered — two strikeouts sandwiched a groundout, and the team went to the ninth down only two. Guerra is the fourth or fifth option out of the Brewers bullpen; he’s also a perfect embodiment of modern pitching. He threw 16 pitches in the inning, and less than half were heaters — six fastballs, four breaking balls, and six splitters. When he did throw fastballs, though, he put some mustard on them — two hit 96 on the gun, and he’s averaging about 95 mph so far this year.

These two trends — fewer and faster fastballs — are spreading like wildfire across the game. Sometimes it happens in jumps, like the Twins hiring a progressive pitching coach this offseason. Sometimes it happens organically, like Junior Guerra leaning on his splitter and slider a little more out of the bullpen. It’s a game-wide trend, though, and it seems likely to continue. This year, starters and relievers are both throwing their lowest share of fastballs since we’ve had pitch-level data. When they do throw fastballs, though, both groups are throwing them harder than ever before.

Without looking at a single piece of data, you could have convinced me that those two trends were likely true, but I wanted to look into the numbers to know for certain. First things first — we’ll need a consistent sample across years. Taking this year’s stats and comparing them to previous full-year averages won’t work, because pitchers consistently throw at lower velocities in March and April than they do in the year as a whole. In 2018, for example, March and April four-seamers were .2 mph slower than the year as a whole. Thus, we’re going to use data only through April 10th for every season to properly account for this systematic bias. Let’s take a look at that data, shall we? A quick methodological note: I’m excluding cut fastballs, as classification systems have real trouble differentiating them from sliders:

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“In the future,” Andy Warhol said, “everybody will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” Warhol wasn’t really a baseball fan (Pete Rose baseball-card prints aside), but it seems likely that major league baseball consulted with him, or at least took some inspiration. How else can you explain the phenomenon of the pop-up relief pitching ace? Nick Anderson has the lowest FIP (and xFIP) and the highest strikeout rate in baseball this year, and if you aren’t related to him, I bet you had to go look up what team he pitches for.

Anderson’s route to the spotlight (such as it is) has been incredibly circuitous. Early legal troubles, including an assault he contends was him coming to the defense of a friend, led to his starting in the independent leagues instead of affiliated ball. Anderson spent a year remodeling homes and playing amateur ball. When he returned, he pitched excellently for the Cedar Rapids Kernels and the Frontier Greys in 2015 (sub-1 ERAs and 9-plus K/9s in both stops). The hometown Twins scooped him up, and you have to think other teams weren’t far behind given the numbers, but still — he was out of baseball, fully out, just five years ago.

How crazy is it that we never saw Nick Anderson coming? Well, if you go by his minor league stats, it’s pretty crazy. In three-plus years of pitching (admittedly often at levels he was old for), he compiled a 2.25 ERA (2.35 FIP, 2.37 xFIP) with sterling peripherals — a 32.5% strikeout rate and a measly 6.2% walk rate. Still though, he enjoyed very little prospect shine — he was a reliever at best, and one without much pedigree. Aside from brief mentions as “Others of Note,” he pretty much flew under the radar.

When the Twins had a 40-man roster crunch after the 2018 season, they sent Anderson to the Marlins. I can forgive you if you don’t remember the transaction — Nick Anderson for Brian Schales was hardly the biggest transaction of November. Heck, it wasn’t even the Twins move with the most fanfare — that would be grabbing C.J. Cron off of waivers, a move that likely had something to do with trading Anderson. With little fanfare, Anderson made the Marlins bullpen out of Spring Training (eight innings pitched, 10 strikeouts, no walks), and just like that, baseball’s best current reliever (by the numbers) had arrived in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom’s 2018 will go down in history as one of the best pitching seasons of all time. There’s almost no way it couldn’t — pitchers don’t put up sub-two ERAs very often, and they record sub-2 FIPs even less frequently. By those stats alone, deGrom had the seventh-best ERA and eighth-best FIP since integration. Adjust for the run-scoring environment, and he falls all the way to ninth. Simply put, deGrom was sublime in 2018.

After a season of such historic magnitude, we’d be crazy to not expect regression. Everything broke so well for deGrom in 2018 that he could pitch every bit as well in 2019 and end up with meaningfully worse results. Indeed, ZiPS and Steamer both projected deGrom’s ERA to increase by essentially a run this season. Despite that, both projected him to put up the second-best ERA and FIP among starters, behind only Chris Sale. When you’re as far ahead of the pack as deGrom, you can significantly regress and still be one of the best.

It isn’t just projection systems that peg deGrom to come back to earth — the broad sweep of history suggests it as well. No matter how you slice it, pitchers who record a season like deGrom’s decline the next year. Want to focus on ERA? There have been 26 times since 1947 when a pitcher qualified for the ERA title and had an ERA below two. Excluding 2018 deGrom and 1966 Sandy Koufax (he retired after 1966 and so didn’t have a next season), these pitchers averaged a 1.77 ERA. The next year, they recorded a 2.78 ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

The first week of baseball is a wondrous time to be a baseball fan. It’s also a weird time to be a baseball writer. On one hand, baseball is happening, and that’s a relief after the long dark night of the offseason. On the other hand, not that much baseball has happened, and most of the seemingly noteworthy stories are small-sample noise. Give me an early-season take (Tim Beckham is great! Sandy Alcantara is a top-10 pitcher!), and I’ll likely dismiss it as a fluke. One performance this week, however, made me sit up and take notice. Corbin Burnes struck out 12 batters on Sunday, and the way he did it should have Brewers fans, and baseball fans in general, salivating.

At first glance, Burnes’ start against the Cardinals is a textbook case of not reading too much into a single start. He struck out 12 batters and walked only one, which is obviously incredible. On the other hand, he gave up three home runs and only lasted five innings, producing a what’s-going-on split of a 6.53 FIP and 0.00 xFIP. If I were a betting man, though, I’d wager that the strikeouts are more predictive than the home runs. Why? Corbin Burnes’ fastball was absolutely ludicrous, and in a way that you can’t fake.

Most of the things that happen in a baseball game are contextual. Did a pitcher strike a lot of hitters out? Well, consider who was batting. If it’s a bunch of high schoolers or the 2019 Giants outfield, that’s an extenuating circumstance. Did he give up a lot of home runs? A ton of factors go into that. One thing that isn’t contextual is a pitch’s spin rate. The batter doesn’t influence it. Pitch selection doesn’t influence it. It doesn’t take long to stabilize. It’s basically as clean as it gets in baseball statistics — you throw the ball, and you get your results.

When Burnes threw the ball on Sunday, the results were off the charts. Burnes fired 61 four-seam fastballs on Sunday. His velocity was down a tick or so from last year, when he worked out of the bullpen — nothing unusual about that. His spin, on the other hand, was wholly new. Burnes averaged 2912 rpm, and it’s hard to explain how crazy that is. It was nearly 150 rpm higher than last year’s league leader in average spin rate, Luke Bard. The fastball that Burnes spun most slowly, at 2660 rpm, would have been good for the second-highest fastball spin rate in baseball last year.

Burnes has always been a high-spin pitcher (11th in baseball among pitchers who threw at least 100 fastballs in 2018), but this is an entirely different level. Spin rates vary from start to start, but not like this. In fact, Burnes made thirty appearances last year, and the gap between the highest spin rate he recorded and the lowest was 270 rpm. Sunday’s start was 200 rpm faster than last year’s highest rate. Graphically, that looks pretty absurd, like so:

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Here’s something that won’t surprise you. The number one starter in all of baseball last year, when it came to getting batters to chase pitches outside the strike zone, was Patrick Corbin. Of course it was Patrick Corbin! Dude threw 95% sliders last year, and that’s only a little bit of an exaggeration (it was a little over 41%, if you’re intent on checking my math). The second guy on the list, a minuscule 0.1% of out-of-zone swing rate behind Corbin, was Jacob deGrom. I mean … yeah. DeGrom had a 1.7 ERA last year and struck out 32% of the batters he faced. People swung at a lot of pitches outside the strike zone.

At number three, though, the list takes an unexpected turn. The third-highest chase rate in baseball last year belonged to Miles Mikolas, and it’s hard to think of a pitcher who resembles Corbin and deGrom less than Mikolas does. While the aforementioned duo both had top-10 strikeout rates among qualified starters, Mikolas was in the bottom ten. Corbin and deGrom were exemplars of the new three-true-outcome direction baseball has taken (mostly one true outcome, in their case), while Mikolas had essentially the lowest three true outcome rate in all of baseball. What does it mean to generate a ton of swings outside the strike zone but few strikeouts?

Making sense of how Miles Mikolas operates is difficult. He’s kind of a unicorn — you probably think you can name pitchers like him, but none of them fit. Is he Kyle Hendricks, the pinpoint control artist with a preposterous changeup? Mikolas doesn’t even throw a changeup. He also sits around 94.5mph with his fastball, top 20 among qualified starters in 2018. Hendricks has the slowest fastball in that group. Is he a rich man’s Mike Leake, perplexingly effective despite never striking anyone out? That’s not it either — Leake never generates swings and misses, and never is barely an exaggeration here. He’s had a bottom-10 swinging strike rate every year he’s been a qualifying pitcher. Mikolas, meanwhile, is around league average. Leake also, somehow, throws significantly fewer strikes than Mikolas — Mikolas put the ball in the strike zone a league-leading 48% of the time last year. Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ve no doubt heard, we’re living in a golden age for position players pitching. Don’t believe me? Read the copious articles written about it in the past few years. At this point, you know the broad strokes of the genre. You know that position players are pitching a lot more often these days. You know that it’s funny because they’re not that good at pitching, but also funny because they’re not as bad as you’d think.

It’s gotten so common, so normal, that less than a week into the 2019 season, we’ve already had a game where position players pitched on both sides. That game had a little bit of everything: John Ryan Murphy was terrible, allowing seven runs in two innings. Russell Martin was perplexingly effective, setting the side down in order in his one inning of work to close out the Dodgers 18-5 win over the Diamondbacks. He was the first full-time position player to close out the ninth inning of a game since 1963.

There was one thing missing from that game, though — neither “pitcher” recorded a strikeout, and strikeouts have been, in my opinion, criminally under-reported in all the coverage of position-player pitchers. Those embarrassing-but-not-that-embarrassing pitching lines? They were compiled against real, honest-to-god major league hitters (and also occasionally pitchers pretending to be major league batters). We all know that position players pitch well enough to occasionally get strikeouts, and that’s a pretty great fact. Take a minute, though, to consider this: the pseudo-pitcher’s small triumph is also the batter’s great failure. He just struck out, the most miserable feeling in baseball, and he did it against a guy who’s out there goofing around.

In 2018, position-player pitchers struck out 22 batters. On the one hand, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but on the other hand — that’s a lot! Still, though, not all of these strikeouts were created equal. There’s a lot of distance between Gerrit Cole striking out against a utility infielder and Eugenio Suarez going down on strikes against a backup catcher. I wanted to chronicle this, because in a year there might be too many strikeouts for it to be interesting or too few to devote an article to. I sat down and watched all 22 strikeouts and separated them into tiers of embarrassment. These guys might be multi-millionaires. They might be unfathomably strong and coordinated baseball machines, but sometimes they mess up the easiest tasks. They’re just like us. Who couldn’t relate to that?
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After Manny Machado and Bryce Harper signed their gargantuan free agent deals, dominos began to fall left and right across baseball — if you’re of sound body and mind, you probably recently signed a multi-year extension with a major league franchise. When a star signs a new contract of any type, articles analyzing the contract’s value are never far behind, and this recent extension spree has been no exception. I wanted to get in on the action, but the analysis has already been done for the most part. Search for a player who recently signed a contract, and you’ll find FanGraphs analysis of it, likely with some dollars-per-WAR analysis. Chris Sale? Jay Jaffe’s got you. Kiley McDaniel covered Eloy Jimenez’s extension. Justin Verlander? Jaffe again. You get the idea. Craig Edwards even wrote about Harper vs. Machado in an exhaustive level of depth, down to figuring out state taxes.

What’s an author to do? Well, there’s one angle that hasn’t been covered for a while, believe it or not. More accurately, it’s been covered by a combination of shrugs and mathematical hand waves: the value of the opt-out in Machado’s (and Nolan Arenado’s) contract. The reason these haven’t been sufficiently covered is simple — they’re difficult to value. If we want to figure out how many wins a player projects for, a methodology exists for that exercise. Sprinkle in a little of the aging curve and the dollar value of the contract, and there’s one level of analysis. If you want to put everything in present-day dollars, it’s just more arithmetic, but the basic shape remains similar. Introducing opt-outs, however, is a step in a wholly different direction.
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If you watch enough baseball, players start to blend together in your brain. You know what I’m talking about — Corey Seager is injury-prone Carlos Correa. Ozzie Albies is caffeinated Jose Altuve (no small feat, since Altuve is a Five Hour Energy spokesperson). Newly minted $100 million man Alex Bregman is Anthony Rendon with good hair. The Bregman/Rendon comparison occurred to me even before I saw Bregman play. A highly-drafted college third baseman with an excellent all-around game? More power than you’d think despite a swing that seems designed to put the ball in play? Probably a little better at baserunning than you’d expect, even if he isn’t a burner? Yeah, that pretty much covers both guys.

Nothing Bregman has done since reaching the majors has changed this early comparison in my mind. Between 2017 (Bregman’s first full year in the bigs) and 2018, he’s recorded a 141 wRC+ to Rendon’s 140. Bregman has walked 11.3% of the time, Rendon 11.6%. Bregman has struck out 13.7% of the time to Rendon’s 13.6%. Bregman has a .219 ISO; Rendon’s is .230. Bregman has 50 home runs; Rendon has 49.

You get the general idea — both players have been incredible, and both have done it in really similar ways. Rendon has been worth 13 WAR over the past two years, second-best among third basemen. Bregman has been worth 11.1 WAR, good for fourth. Here’s another thing they have in common — they were both among the most extreme swing-rate changers from 2017 to 2018. Plot twist, though! It was in opposite directions. Bregman decreased his swing rate by the third-most among qualified hitters, while Rendon increased his by the second-most. Yes, we’ve finally found a place where Anthony Rendon and Alex Bregman are different — extremely different.

For Alex Bregman, 2017 must have been a mix of satisfaction and frustration. His 217 PA in 2016 exhausted his rookie eligibility, and while he held his own in his first big league action (114 wRC+), he looked very much like someone struggling to adjust to big league pitching. He struck out in 24% of his plate appearances, light years higher than his 10% career minor league rate (and 7.5% college rate). His swinging strike rate was 11.8%, meaningfully above league average. In short, he didn’t look like the hitter scouts expected him to be. Read the rest of this entry »