William Contreras stopped being an unheralded star a while ago. He was merely “the backup catcher” in Atlanta, but he smashed last year as the undisputed starter in Milwaukee and he’s backing it up with another spectacular season. He’s the face of one of Statcast’s new bat speed metrics. He’s a shoo-in All-Star and one of the betting favorites to win NL MVP. So this isn’t a “hey, have you heard he’s good?” article, because of course you have. The real question is, what has he changed this year?

Contreras’ standout skill is his thunderous raw power. He cracked 20 homers in just 376 plate appearances during his breakout 2022 and is one of the hardest swingers in the game. As you might expect, he has swing-and-miss issues, with his 13.4% swinging strike rate the price he pays for trying to crush everything he swings at. But that’s ok. His hard-hit rate, barrel rate, maximum exit velocities, and HR/FB rate are all gaudy.

Here’s the thing, though: While power might be his most obvious carrying tool, Contreras has quietly developed into much more than just a one-note power hitter. You can’t see it in the surface numbers – he’s walking about as much as he always has and striking out as frequently as he did last year – but he’s completely revamped his approach at the plate, and it’s downright sterling these days. In fact, maybe we should be talking less about how Contreras compares to Juan Soto in squared up contact, and more about how he compares to Soto in strike zone mastery. Read the rest of this entry »

I like to make up statistics. Why? Because it’s fun, mostly. There’s so much baseball analysis on the internet these days that without shaking things up, it’s hard to say something truly interesting. Isolated power? You’ve seen it a million times. Strikeout rate, or even strikeout rate implied by whiff rate? Boring. xWhatever, something with BACON in it? We’ve done that before.

Most of my random gimmick stats don’t really catch on. But I’ve used two this year that I think have some real analytical interest to them, and they’re not exactly on the FanGraphs leaderboard page. So I’m going to maintain some Google Sheets with them highlighted, and I’m also going to intermittently highlight the best performers.

Remember whomps per whiff? That one is just fun to say, and particularly fun to hear Vinnie Pasquantino say. Also, it seems like it’s doing something right. Here are the top 10 hitters in baseball by that statistic this year, minimum 500 pitches seen:

Oh look, another statistic that tells you Juan Soto is amazing. What he’s doing this year is truly ridiculous. He’s absolutely clobbering the ball and yet rarely swinging and missing. He’s as far ahead of Ryan O’Hearn in second as O’Hearn is ahead of Taylor Ward in 10th. He has more barrels and 30 fewer whiffs than Shohei Ohtani. Read the rest of this entry »

Statcast’s new public repository of bat tracking data has been out for a few weeks now. Like every number manipulator with a sense of curiosity and middling technical skills, I’ve been messing around with the data in my spare time, and also in my working time, because messing around with data is both my job and hobby.

Mostly, I’ve been reaching some conclusions that mirror what others have already shown, only with less technical sophistication on my part. This article by Sky Kalkman does a great job summing up the biggest conclusion: Pitch location and spray angle (pull/oppo) influence swing length so much that you probably shouldn’t quote raw swing length. But I thought I’d look for something slightly different, and I think I found something.

Here’s the high level conclusion of my search: When pitchers throw harder fastballs, hitters slow down their swings to compensate. It sounds counterintuitive. Shouldn’t hitters speed up their bats to try to get to the faster pitch? But I had a hunch that this wasn’t the case. If you listen to hitters describe their approach against flamethrowers, they focus on shortening up and putting the ball in play. “Shortening up” might sound like it describes swing length, but it also surely describes swing speed. A hitter who is just punching at the ball likely won’t swing as hard as one trying to launch one. If you’re prioritizing having your bat on plane with the ball as long as possible, you probably aren’t focusing as much on raw speed. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. By now, you surely know the drill. I credit basketball genius Zach Lowe for creating the format I’m using, make a few jokes about how much baseball I get to watch to write this column, and then give you a preview of what you can read about below. This week’s no exception! I get to watch a ton of baseball, and this week I watched a lot of birds and a lot of bunts. I also watched a lot of the Pirates, just like I do every week. Let’s get right into it.

1. Reversals of Reversals of Fortune

For most of the 21st century, no one would bat an eye if you told them the Cardinals swept the Orioles. The Cards have been good pretty much forever, and the O’s went through a long dry period. But starting last year, things have changed. The Orioles last got swept in early 2022, and they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball since then. The Cardinals fell on tough times after 2022’s Molina/Pujols swan song season. Coming into their series this week, the O’s had the second-best record in the AL, while the Cardinals languished near the bottom of the NL at 20-26.
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I’m writing this article for selfish reasons. Every Monday, I chat with FanGraphs readers (come hang out with us! But not next Monday, because it’s a holiday). Four or five times per chat, someone asks a variation of the same question: “Should my team trade this reliever who has been better than expected to a contender for a huge haul?” Four or five times per chat, I say that they should, but that no one would trade with them. So now, I’m trying to put some numbers to it.

The first argument against doing this is fairly simple: Reliever performance doesn’t work that way. To measure this analytically, I took a bunch of recent seasons (2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023) and split them into two. I looked at the correlation between first-half numbers and second-half numbers for every reliever we listed as qualified in the first half of those seasons. I was looking for a simple question: How much can we infer about second-half numbers based on first-half numbers?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is “not very much.” There’s an obvious problem. Relievers simply don’t pitch very many innings. Last year, Jake Bird led all relievers in innings pitched at the All-Star break, with 53.1. Most relievers had meaningfully fewer innings. They didn’t pitch a ton of innings in the second half, either, because that’s just not how relief pitching works. Only 20 relievers threw 70 or more innings last year.
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What’s wrong with Edwin Díaz? In a single GIF, this is what’s wrong with Edwin Díaz:

I don’t want to tell him how to pitch, because he’s Edwin Díaz and I’m an anonymous person on the internet. But putting a slider right in Josh Bell’s nitro zone is not a great way to approach a high-leverage at-bat. Bell put a good swing on it, which was hardly a given, but Díaz put himself into that situation and paid the price for it.

On a superficial level, there’s not a lot of uncertainty over what’s wrong. During the 2023 World Baseball Classic, Díaz tore his patellar tendon, and then he missed the entirety of the season recovering from surgery that repaired that tendon. He’s back on the mound, but he’s clearly not the same pitcher that he was in his dominant 2022 season.
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This article isn’t really about Joey Ortiz. Or, well, it is, but it’s also about how numbers will fool you. Let’s start with a few numbers, then. Ortiz is walking 12.9% of the time so far this year, far more than average and far more than he ever did in the high minors. He’s chasing pitches outside of the strike zone only 24% of the time, a huge change in approach. Last year in the minor leagues, that number stood at 34.5%. As a result, he’s swinging and missing far less often. There’s the story of how Ortiz has improved.

Just one problem: That story doesn’t hold up to closer examination. Let’s break the strike zone up into four parts the way Baseball Savant and the Statcast team do it. There’s the heart of the plate (heart), the edges of the plate and the area just off of it (shadow), the area where good breaking pitches often end up (chase), and the land of non-competitive pitches (waste). You’d expect Ortiz to swing less frequently than average at chase and waste pitches. You’d be wrong:

That’s baffling. For comparison’s sake, teammate Rhys Hoskins has similar chase and zone swing rates, and he’s swinging at 17% of chase pitches and 1% of waste pitches. He’s also swinging more frequently than Ortiz at pitches over the heart of the plate.
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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. After taking a week off to recharge and travel, I was itching to watch some baseball this week, and the sport delivered. After spending last week in New York, I had the city on my mind, and the Mets delivered with some exciting series against the Braves and Phillies. There was good rivalry action out west, too, with the Dodgers and Giants squaring off. And of course, there’s that classic rivalry, Tommy Pham against the concept of ever taking a single play off. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for the inspiration for this series. Let’s get right into it.

1. Max Effort Every Time

Tommy Pham is my favorite baseball player. To be clear, I don’t think he’s the best baseball player. I’m not sure that I, personally, would want him as a teammate, even. He’s too intense for my laid back view of the world. But his maniacal drive is absolutely delightful to watch, and it’s particularly delightful now that he’s on a team that is absolutely not competing for a playoff spot this year.
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It’s not quite right to say that Fernando Cruz was a late-blooming prospect. That would imply that he was a prospect, and he wasn’t, at least not really. He was picked in the sixth round of the 2007 draft as a hitter, but never made it out of A-ball in four years. He tried pitching after that, and it worked, but not enough for the Royals to keep him. He kicked around the minors, indy ball, and the winter league circuit for more than a decade. He played in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. He was living a full baseball life, and almost exclusively outside of affiliated ball. Over the 2021-2022 winter, though, Cruz put on a show, racking up a 2.03 ERA with 81 strikeouts in 61 innings of work across three leagues and the Caribbean Series.

You can have big league potential without pitching in affiliated ball, and the Reds saw it. They signed Cruz to a minor league deal before the 2022 season and sent him straight to Triple-A, where he was one of the best relievers in the minors right away. He earned a promotion to the big leagues that September, and he hasn’t looked back since. Now, at 34, he’s off to one of the best starts of any reliever in baseball when it comes to missing bats. It’s a remarkable story, and he’s a player worth celebrating. How in the world did he sneak past everyone for so long, and how is he thriving now? I hope I’ll be able to tell you. Read the rest of this entry »