One of my favorite articles to write is the “you won’t believe how this guy is succeeding” piece. You’ve seen me – and plenty of other writers – break it out over and over again. Maybe it’s a reliever with a weird pitch, or a starter with a blazing fastball who is nonetheless succeeding with secondaries. Perhaps it’s a hitter excelling thanks to a novel approach, or a slugger altering his game to prioritize something he didn’t before. In any case, it’s fun to subvert expectations, and it makes for a good story to boot.
Spare some thought for the players who succeed by doing exactly what you think they’re doing, though. They might not garner as many headlines, but that doesn’t make what they’re doing any less real. I have a specific example of this today, someone I was hoping to write about in the former style. I went looking for the one weird trick that made him tick, but I couldn’t find one. Brent Rooker is succeeding with one extremely normal trick: Every time he comes to the plate, he tries to hit a home run.
Here’s a representative Rooker swing:
Here’s another:
You’ll notice a few things right away. He swings hard – his average swing speed matches Bryce Harper and Matt Olson. He also swings with a pronounced uppercut. Most hitters hit more home runs on high pitches, thanks to the laws of physics. Rooker doesn’t have a single homer in the upper third of the strike zone this year; he’s either annihilating pitches down the middle or lifting low balls over the fence. Read the rest of this entry »
Blake Treinen has spent an entire career as one of the best sinker-heavy relievers in all of baseball. Since his debut, he’s been one of the best relievers in baseball — period. That sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t. From 2014 through 2022, he ranked ninth in FIP-based WAR and fourth in RA9-WAR among all relief pitchers. He also ranked second in groundball rate among relievers who threw 400 or more innings. That’s elite performance, and he did it with a consistent attack of sinkers and sliders.
As his career has worn on, Treinen has made one big shift: He started throwing a huge sweeping slider. He was an early poster boy for the sweeper revolution. From 2014 through 2020, his slider averaged about an inch of horizontal movement. Starting in 2021, he changed the way he threw it, and that number blew up to nearly seven inches. That turbo-charged his strikeout rate, and 2021 was one of his better seasons despite intermittent command problems.
Those two things encompass most of what people know about Treinen. He gets a ton of grounders and he throws a big old sweeper. In fact, he was at the vanguard of a pitcher type that now seems to populate every major league bullpen: the sinker/sweeper righty. You can picture this guy, even if you don’t know his name on every single squad. He lives on the east/west plane, and produces plenty of ugly swings and probably a hit batter or two when his sinker veers into the righty batter’s box seemingly out of nowhere. Read the rest of this entry »
For the past two-plus years, the Phillies have been one of the most successful teams in baseball. They’ve been to the World Series once and nearly made it back again last year. They’re sixth in the league in wins over that span and are within hailing distance of everyone other than the Dodgers and Braves. They have the best record in baseball this year, and it’s hardly smoke and mirrors; they’re playing .655 baseball with the run differential of a .654 team.
How do they do it? Their approach is strikingly simple. First, get a group of good pitchers. Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola form one of the best duos in the majors. Ranger Suárez is underrated, though less so after a banner first half. Cristopher Sánchez has been a revelation. The bullpen has been elite for this entire run. Simply put, the team doesn’t allow many runs.
The second part of Philadelphia’s winning formula is to have some burly power hitters smash dingers. Kyle Schwarber has hit 110 homers since the start of 2022, second only to Aaron Judge. Bryce Harper has missed time with injury, but he’s been one of the best in the game when healthy. The rest of Philadelphia’s attack is a bunch of complementary pieces (maybe that sells Trea Turner short, but I’m working an angle here) meant to help the boppers out.
Over the next few weeks, that proven formula is going to be severely tested. Last Thursday night, both Harper and Schwarber sustained fluke injuries. First, Schwarber planted awkwardly on a throw from the outfield and strained his groin. Calling it a fluke might not go far enough – this was only his third time in the field this year, as he usually handles DH duties. It wasn’t a contact injury, just an awkward step on a routine play.
Schwarber departed the game in the eighth inning. In the ninth, Harper grounded out to end the game. He felt his hamstring tighten up as he ran to first base. He was diagnosed with a strained hamstring, and both he and Schwarber hit the IL before the next day’s games.
First, the bad news. The Phillies are going to have to make the approach they’ve used to such good effect work without one of its key components. Harper and Schwarber have both been instrumental to Philadelphia’s recent run of success. This year, they’ve been the team’s best two hitters, give or take Turner’s abbreviated season. They’ve contributed 37 homers and an aggregate 150 wRC+. They’ve been worth 5.7 WAR, and that despite the positional adjustments that likely understate the value of first basemen and DHs.
Here’s an easy way to think about how the Phillies will look without their stars: So far this year, they’ve won 55 games and lost 29, a .655 winning percentage. Now, let’s subtract the 5.7 wins between Harper and Schwarber and replacement level, and add those games to the loss column instead. Now they’d be a .587 baseball team. That’s a .068 drop in winning percentage, a significant gap.
That sounds pretty dire, particularly given that Harper and Schwarber don’t occupy roles that are easily replaced. The only other obvious DH on the roster is Nick Castellanos, and he’s no Schwarber. There’s no obvious first base replacement, either – Kody Clemens has played in each of the three games since Harper’s injury, but that’s more by necessity than design. His natural position is second base, and he’s played a utility role in recent years.
While the Phillies pitching staff is almost comically deep, the same can’t be said about their position players. Johan Rojas is back in the lineup as a frequent starter with Castellanos now out of the field, but he had been demoted to Triple-A on the back of a dreadful offensive start. Clemens has been injured himself. David Dahl is getting big at-bats for the team. Whit Merrifield is hitting .193/.273/.289 and will be playing much more to make the various positional permutations work. The Phillies have a 101 wRC+ if you exclude their two injured stars. This went from a fearsome lineup to a middling one overnight.
There’s good news for Philly fans, though. First, neither injury appears to be serious. The Athletic’s Matt Gelb reported that both players could at least theoretically miss the minimum 10 days with their injuries. Manager Rob Thomson said that he thought both players could be back before the All-Star break. Sure, having an average offense instead of a great one is a big problem should their injuries linger and cause them to miss the rest of the season, but if both Harper and Schwarber return on July 8, the team is only looking at six more games without their services. They’ve already gone 2-1 in their three games since the injuries.
Remember that 68-point drop in winning percentage? That comes out to a difference of 0.4 wins over a six-game stretch. Playing without your offensive core is a blow, but baseball is a game driven heavily by randomness. Over six games, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. No single player matters that much in the short run. No two players do, even.
I think that both Harper and Schwarber will get slightly more time to rest, though, which brings me to my second reason the Phillies don’t need to be excessively worried about these injuries. The All-Star break starts on July 15 and stretches for four days. Leave both players on the IL until then, and they could get a full 20 days to recuperate without missing an excessive number of games. The Phillies will only play six games between July 8 and July 18; it’s a relatively good time to have your best hitters on the shelf.
Will that cost the team another 0.4 wins in expectation? Sure, I suppose, though I think the actual amount is slightly less than that; Clemens appears at least a little better than replacement level to me. More important than exactly how many wins it costs them, though, is their current position in the standings. The Phillies are up eight games on the Braves. We give them an 81.5% chance of winning their division even after accounting for the dip in playing time for Harper and Schwarber. It’s never great to play with a diminished group, but these games don’t have the same import as they would if the team were locked in a tight divisional race.
When you think about it that way, a rest until July 19 starts to make a lot more sense. It’s highly unlikely that missing two hitters for six games will put Philadelphia’s season on a downward trajectory. The real fear here is some kind of injury recurrence. Soft tissue injuries are prone to re-aggravation, and both Harper and Schwarber have battled injuries in the past, though never of this exact type.
Part of the benefit of roaring out to an early divisional lead is that you can take a pragmatic approach to the rest of the year. Harper is notoriously competitive, and I’m sure he wants to come back as soon as is feasible. His return from elbow surgery in 2023 took less than six months, shorter than even the most optimistic recovery timetable predicted. But now is a good time to be prudent, because one week of games isn’t going to change the team’s season, but a month or two without Harper and Schwarber might.
If I were the Phillies, I’d stick to the more conservative recovery timeline regardless of what happens in the next week. If they’re particularly worried about getting caught by the Braves, though, they could always wait to see the outcome of their series in Atlanta this weekend before making any decisions. If they get swept and neither player experiences any setbacks in their injury recovery, maybe plugging Harper and Schwarber in for those last six pre-break games will become an attractive proposition.
Regardless of exactly how they manage things, though, the Phillies are surely breathing a sigh of relief. Without their two anchor hitters, the team really would look different. The success of their model depends on Harper being a superstar and Schwarber providing valuable offensive backing. For a day, that model got washed away and replaced with the unknown. What if one or even both of these strains were serious? What if something tore? It’s hard to imagine how the team would remake itself without these two, but luckily, it appears that we won’t have to find out for more than a few weeks.
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The parenthetical part of the title is largely just a nod to Zach Lowe, whose ESPN basketball column inspired this one. He occasionally mentions flaws or foibles holding a particular team or player back, in lovingly GIF’ed up detail. I’m more of a rah-rah type, and plenty of weeks I don’t have a single Didn’t Like in the column at all. This week, though, I can’t help it; mental lapses, baserunning errors, and overall sloppiness are all over the column. That’s not to say I don’t love watching it, because part of what’s fun about baseball is when a theoretically staid game gets messy, but let’s be clear: A lot of these plays are not good plays. We’ve got superstars getting confused, on-field collisions, and absolute howlers. Let’s get started.
1. The Profligate Nationals
The Nats are one of the unheralded fun stories of the baseball season. They’re hanging around .500 and playing like better days are ahead. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore look like franchise mainstays. James Wood, another part of the return from the Juan Soto trade, isn’t far off. Mitchell Parker and Jake Irvin might be mid-rotation starters. Jacob Young is an elite defender. They have plenty of interesting role players, and the whole team plays with reckless and joyful abandon.
That’s particularly true on the basepaths, where the Nats rank third in steals but only 11th in total baserunning value. They’re always angling for how to advance another base, whatever the costs. Sometimes that ends in tears. Read the rest of this entry »
This week marks the halfway point of the 2024 regular season. We’re out of silly sample size season now, having moved on to wondering which teams will add at the deadline and which will start building for tomorrow. Season-long leaderboards are populated with the best players in the league, just like you’d expert. The White Sox and Rockies are awful; the Yankees and Dodgers are great. Plenty of this season has gone according to plan.
Not everything has, though. The Blue Jays and Cubs didn’t get off to the starts they hoped for. On the other side of the coin, the Phillies and Guardians have both exceeded expectations by a mile. Perhaps not coincidentally, both teams have gotten superb performances from their relief corps all season. It’s largely the usual suspects: Emmanuel Clase is one of the best closers of the decade, while the Phillies had the best bullpen projection in the sport coming into the season. But it’s not exclusively the usual suspects. Case in point, or perhaps I should say Cade in point: Cade Smith.
If you’re not a Guardians fan, you might not know who Cade Smith is, and I can hardly blame you. He made his major league debut this season after a solid 2023 campaign during which he compiled a 4.02 ERA (3.42 FIP) and struck out 35% of opposing batters. He struggled to control his walks and Triple-A hitters touched him up for six homers (20% HR/FB), but all told, it was a good year. He broke camp with the big league team; those same power rankings that liked the Phillies so much had Smith down for 61 innings of work as a middle reliever. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. I’m not sure if this is by design or simply a scheduling coincidence, but this week was full of compelling matchups between current rivals. The Cubs and Cardinals squared off. So did the Yankees and Orioles. The Guardians and Mariners aren’t exactly rivals, but their series rocked too, and I’m sad I couldn’t find a way to squeeze them in this week. That said, there’s a ton to talk about, so let’s get to it, after our usual nod to Zach Lowe of ESPN, who is surely enjoying a well-deserved vacation after the conclusion of the NBA season. To baseball! Read the rest of this entry »
No one deserves a .414 BABIP. That’s just not how things work. Hit the ball as hard as you want, spray line drives to all fields with reckless abandon, secretly slather grease on your opponents’ gloves – none of those things can keep your batting average on balls in play at such a lofty level. It’s a good marker of small samples. If someone is BABIP’ing .414, it’s too early to believe their stats.
Let’s use Heliot Ramos as an example. Ramos is on fire so far this year. He’s hitting a ridiculous .319/.394/.560, and doing it while striking out nearly 30% of the time. It doesn’t make sense. No one hits .300 while striking out that often. No one runs a .400 OBP with a strikeout rate that high unless they’re walking like Barry Bonds. Ramos is doing neither.
I can keep listing the things that don’t make sense here. Ramos isn’t exactly a launch-and-crush kind of guy – he’s hitting 1.7 grounders per fly ball, with the league average around 1.4. But it’s working out for him – he’s batting a scalding .367 on those grounders with a .411 slugging percentage. That’s the 11th-best mark (minimum 40 grounders) in baseball for average, and the 15th best for slugging percentage. Read the rest of this entry »
At first glance, Josh Rojas and Derek Zoolander don’t have a lot in common. Rojas is a third baseman, while Zoolander is a fictional male model. Rojas is from Arizona, while Zoolander is from an unnamed coal mining town in Appalachia. They have different jobs, different lives, and again, one is a fictional character. But one thing unites the two: Their careers took off when they learned how to go left.
In 2022, Rojas settled into a role as an everyday third baseman after years of bouncing between positions. Just one problem: He was one of the worst defenders in the major leagues at the hot corner. That was the consensus of scouts when he was a prospect, and defensive metrics bore it out. He particularly struggled ranging towards second base. Statcast breaks defensive opportunities up based on which direction a player has to move to make the play. When Rojas was moving to his right, forward, or backward, he was one run above average defensively. When he went left, he was seven runs below average. Read the rest of this entry »
