Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. It’s an incredible time to be a baseball fan, particularly one who isn’t tied to a single team or division. There are three tight division races, and both wild cards hold some intrigue. Some of the brightest stars of the game are playing incredibly well right now. The A’s are on a kelly-green-clad respectability streak that is both improbable and delightful. The White Sox are fun to watch for their ever-evolving pursuit of futility (more on that below). There’s no time for August doldrums when the games are this exciting. So no more talking vaguely about what a great week this was; let’s get right to it. And thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format I’m borrowing here.

1. Barry Would Never

Perhaps the least likely story of the season, on an individual level, is Tyler Fitzgerald, who has turned into one of the great offensive forces in the game overnight. After putting up average offensive numbers as he climbed through the minors across four seasons plus the lost COVID year, he has established an everyday role on the Giants and unexpectedly caught fire this season. He’s now hitting home runs faster than I can count and getting his name in Giants history next to Barry Bonds for his power feats. (As an aside, this clip of Bonds and Greg Maddux discussing an old at-bat is amazing, and I highly recommend it.)
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On Sunday evening, Camilo Doval stepped to the mound without his usual light show. He showed the range of his game right away – after striking out the first two batters he faced, he walked Greg Jones, who promptly stole both second and third. Then Nolan Jones ripped a scorching line drive to center for a triple, Elehuris Montero stroked a line drive single, and two runs had scored just like that. To make matters worse, this wasn’t even against the Rockies – it was against the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.

It’s hard to wrap your head around Doval’s sudden fall from ace closer to minor leaguer. He debuted in the magical 2021 season, picked up closing duties at the tail end of that year, and looked like one of the best relievers in the sport almost immediately. In 2022 and ’23, he pitched to a 2.73 ERA and 2.87 FIP. He was wild at times, overpowering at others, and impossible to square up in every iteration. When you have a 100 mph cutter and a tight 90 mph slider to throw off of it, you don’t need much else. He was fifth in baseball in saves, ninth in reliever WAR, 10th in innings pitched among relievers; in other words, he was a one-man back-of-the-bullpen for the Giants.

One thing always bothered me about Doval, even when he was dominating the opposition for the last two years: His cutter doesn’t cut correctly. That sounds nonsensical, or at best like a weak nitpick. But here, take a look at his cutter as compared to Emmanuel Clase’s best-in-class offering, using our pitch-type splits:

The “cut” in a cutter refers to glove-side movement. A good cutter looks like a fastball out of the hand before the spin takes over; then it veers sharply away from the four-seam path that hitters have spent their whole lives tracking. It’s not just a matter of how differently shaped the cutter is from the rest of a given pitcher’s arsenal – just ask Mariano Rivera. Instead, it’s more about defying the brain patterns batters have built up over decades of playing baseball. That’s just not where a fastball should go, and so hitters either swing fruitlessly over it or, in the case of opposite-handed batters, end up breaking their bats when the pitch bores in on their hands.
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Last week, I cracked the PitchingBot black box open a tiny bit and asked it to show me the worst pitches of the year. It was for fun, mostly; I think there are some interesting data in there, but the main thing I learned was that the worst pitches are non-competitive balls. That’s always a tough concept to grasp, because the ones that stick with us are the hanging sliders and no-ride fastballs right down the pipe, the kind of pitch that we see and go, “Oh I could hit a home run on that.” Like this one:

That’s the worst pitch in baseball this year by one specific metric: the likelihood that PitchingBot assigns it of turning into a home run. I’ll show you some more of them in a moment, but first I thought I’d lay out how I did this so you can get a sense of how the model is reaching its conclusions.

Cameron Grove, the creator of PitchingBot, wrote about this idea back before he started working for the Guardians, and he was kind enough to nudge me in the right direction when it came to looking at pitches not just for the “worst,” but the ones that are the most crushable.
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I have a secret to tell, one that might surprise you. I think that baseball analysis is too complex. I can’t keep track of it all. There are too many numbers, too many ways to approach things, too many parts of the game that might be good in one context, bad in another, and neutral in a third. My whole job is to analyze baseball, and yet I find myself drowning in data more often than controlling it. My solution is to simplify. I look for players’ superpowers – carrying tools, in baseball parlance. Aaron Judge is power personified, with the rest of his game building off of that. José Ramírez is a bat control genius. Mookie Betts is the most coordinated man alive. Luis Arraez could hit soft line drives the other way in his sleep. These shortcuts help me think about how the rest of a player’s game fits in. But I have a problem: I’m trying to analyze Jackson Chourio, and I can’t figure out what his superpower is.

You might think it’s his speed. You wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. He’s one of the fastest players in baseball, and he uses that to his advantage all over the place. He’s an excellent baserunner and defender. He eats up ground in the outfield in huge loping strides, the kind of quick you only notice after the fact. I watch him and think he’s an above-average center fielder. The Brewers have only played him in the corners this year, since they’re overrun with excellent defensive outfielders and Chourio has the least experience, but he’s so good that if he ends up in a corner, he might be peak Jason Heyward there.

I guess we could stop the article there, but speed isn’t really a superpower for many great players. Sure, Bobby Witt Jr. and Elly De La Cruz are the current kings of sprint speed, but you don’t look at their games and say, “Oh, the main thing about them is that they’re fast.” That’s the territory of Billy Hamilton or Victor Scott II, and those guys just aren’t stars in the way that I think Chourio will be. I’m looking for an offensive weapon that makes everything work for him, one that explains how he’s hitting major league pitching at age 20. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is always a down period for me when it comes to baseball watching. July has everything now. There’s the All-Star Game, the draft, and the trade deadline. Our trade value series comes out sandwiched in between. From late June through July 31, it’s full tilt baseball, and the first few weeks of August are a letdown by comparison. This year, the Olympics fit into that gap perfectly, and I’ve been watching whatever random event catches my eye the same way I usually flip between baseball games. But fear not: There’s plenty of baseball still going on, and I can’t stay away for long. I’m back in the saddle, and this week has a ton of great plays to choose from. And thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format I’m borrowing here.

1. Twists and Turns in Pittsburgh
What kind of lunatic would say that August is the baseball doldrums? Oh, me? Well, ignore me, because some of the games this week have had juice. The Pirates are clinging to the periphery of the Wild Card race, while the Padres are roaring toward October with an absolutely scalding month of baseball. When the two teams faced off for their series opener in Pittsburgh this week, the Pirates were a game above .500, and after dropping that first game, they came back strong on Wednesday.

Some early offense staked the Pirates to a 6-5 lead even after starter Marco Gonzales got roughed up. Their best relievers were available. It looked like they might wriggle through. But Aroldis Chapman was a bit wild, and the Padres put two runners in scoring position with Manny Machado at the plate. No problem – Chapman just pulled out maybe the best pitch I’ve ever seen: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sorry, assorted old people and grumps of the world. Michael Baumann got you all riled up yesterday by looking into whether clutch exists. It does! It’s inarguably a real thing. It’s also not very predictive, and even maybe not predictive at all. I know! It’s shocking (note: it’s not shocking). After reading that, I had no choice but to look into that other baseball truism: momentum.

There have been plenty of studies about it. The findings are consistently uninteresting. It’s basically this: Momentum probably has some effect, but it’s minimal. You can slice it a ton of different ways and get some version of that conclusion, whether you’re talking about a big win helping the next day or a string of important games begetting more.

I thought I’d add to the literature with a different study. I can’t remember which game in particular, but I was watching some ball last week when a team tied the game in the bottom of the fifth or sixth. One announcer mentioned offhandedly that they were heading in the right direction and had the opposition right where they wanted them. This isn’t rare. If you watch baseball, you’ve heard some version of it for sure. I tuned out before the end of the game, so I can’t tell you whether they were right, but I made a note to look at it later.

That particular definition of momentum – rallying to tie the game in the bottom half of the inning – felt ripe for study. I grabbed game logs from every game played since 2000 to take a crack at finding this effect. I went through the score after every half inning and noted a few things. First, I noted the score differential. Next, I noted the change in differential since the last half inning. Finally, I checked who won the game in the end. That let me find whatever subset I wanted and study the difference between games that were tied when the half-inning began and the ones where the home team tied it up during that half-inning.
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The A’s have been a bummer of a team to follow for a few years now. They’re moving to Vegas. The fans are protesting, but probably fighting a losing battle. They’re going to play in Sacramento, in withering heat, at a (really nice!) minor league stadium. The owner’s a walking punchline. They lost 112 games last year and then made almost no moves over the winter.

Something’s been brewing in the East Bay, though. Not in terms of a surprise playoff contender – they’re 47-68 on the year, and their playoff odds hit 0.0% on June 10. But nonetheless, this is a much better team than last year’s edition, and it’s mostly happened thanks to internal improvements. This version of the A’s looks downright frisky. Last year, playing them was basically a bye series; this year, they’ve almost matched their win total from ’23 and we’re in early August. How’d they do it? In one word, variance. In many words, well, read on and find out.
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Last Friday, Davy Andrews put Aaron Judge into context. That’s fun for the usual reasons – “Wow, look how dominant Aaron Judge is!” never gets old. But his final conclusion – Judge hits like most batters do when opponents hang a bad slider middle-middle – got me thinking. We have a pitch-level model that estimates the worst pitches. Can we use it to get an idea of what it looks like to throw a pitch so bad it turns your opponents into Judge-esque offensive producers?

There’s an easy way to sort this out. When you look at a pitcher’s player page here at FanGraphs, you can see how we model each pitch. There are a ton of scores, but I’m going to be focusing on PitchingBot today, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. The player pages break each pitch down by command and stuff. In our internal database, it’s even better: You can look at any individual pitch and get a grade on it. I set out to find the worst pitches on the year to see whether they made hitters look invincible.

Ironically, the worst pitch thrown this year made the batter look extremely vincible. Here it is in all its glory:

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