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 »

The bat tracking era is here, and nothing will ever be the same again. Wait, no, that’s not right. Baseball is going to continue pretty much exactly as it was. Pitchers will throw the ball, hitters will swing at it, and then people will run around the field either trying to catch it or touch bases. But baseball analysis is going to start looking different, because we analysts have new shiny toys and a plethora of new ideas to test out. That’s very exciting, and also possibly a little overwhelming. So today, I thought I’d take you on a tour of what the high-level summary numbers do and don’t say about hitting, as well as stump for more granular analysis. I’m sure I’m not alone on either of those points, but still, it’s good to say it out loud. So let’s talk about average swing speed, average swing length, squared-up rate and blast rate, shall we?

Swing harder, do better, right? Well, maybe. That makes sense broadly, and it particularly makes sense when you look at some of the names dotting the top of the swing speed leaderboard. Juan Soto, Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, William Contreras, Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, Gunnar Henderson — there are plenty of hitters at the top of the swing speed leaderboard who are unquestionably excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

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For years, Statcast cameras (and before that, radar systems) have captured reams of data about every single play in every single major league game. We know not just the speed of a pitch, but its release point in three dimensions, where it crosses the plate, and the spin imparted on the ball. When a hitter makes contact, we know how fast the ball is moving when it comes off the bat, as well as the angle and the exact place it lands in (or out of) play. But there’s one thing we haven’t seen publicly – until now. Baseball Savant has released bat tracking data to the public, and it’s an exciting time to be analyzing hitters as a result.

The Statcast team was kind enough to provide us with an early look at things. So while you’re playing around with the new leaderboards and reading this excellent article by Mike Petriello that breaks down how this new data works, I wanted to give you a few early observations of my own, to spark some discussion and hopefully make you as excited about this new treasure trove as I am.

First things first: You’re going to love squared-up rate. You can think of this as a mathematical way of describing Luis Arraez. For a given swing speed and a given pitch speed, there’s a maximum possible exit velocity. That’s essentially what you’d get if you hit the ball on the sweet spot exactly on plane. If you’ve ever swung a metal bat, you know what this feels like. Statcast considers a ball squared up if its actual exit velocity is at least 80% of its maximum theoretical exit velocity. In other words, it measures whether you caught the ball flush. Read the rest of this entry »

Daulton Varsho must have been bummed. After a breakout 2022, he got traded to Toronto, a World Series contender with a desperate need for outfielders. Then he had a down season, the Jays got swept out of the Wild Card round, and his old team made a surprise run to the World Series. Gabriel Moreno and Lourdes Gurriel Jr., the players Arizona got back for Varsho, were key parts of that run. Oh, what could have been.

The most worrisome of all those happenings, from Varsho’s perspective, was surely his own performance. Everything else was either partially or fully outside of his control, but this one seemed mostly on him, and it’s hard to add value offensively when you’re getting on base at a .285 clip. Yes, he’s a great defensive player and adds value on the basepaths, but most of a position player’s value comes from hitting, and quite frankly, his just wasn’t good enough.

But ah, how the tables have turned. A year after being one of the weakest links on an excellent Toronto offense, he’s one of the best players on a lackluster unit. Among Jays regulars, only Justin Turner and Davis Schneider have hit better. (Danny Jansen hasn’t played enough yet to count as a “regular” in my eyes.) There’s not much he can do about the rest of the team, but Varsho has reversed his own fortunes for the moment. Now there are two questions: How did he do it, and can he keep it going?
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Last week, I looked into the strange fact that starter usage hasn’t declined as precipitously as it first seemed over the past half decade. It’s downright strange that pitchers are throwing nearly as many pitches per start as they did in 2019, because it sure doesn’t feel that way. It’s even stranger that the average start length has declined by a mere half inning since 2008; I’m still scratching my head about that one even though I’m the one who collected the evidence.

One potential answer stood out to me: maybe I was just measuring the wrong thing. Meg Rowley formulated it a bit better when we discussed the article: Maybe by capturing all the pitchers in baseball, I was missing the change in workloads shouldered by top starters. In other words, no one remembers the pitcher who made the 200th-most starts (Xzavion Curry in 2023, Ryan Tucker in 2008), and the usage patterns of back-end starters don’t leave much of an impression in our minds. We care about the horses, the top guys who we see year after year.

Time for a new measurement, then. I took the same cutoff points from last week’s study, which serves to control for early-season workloads. But I further limited the data this time. I first took the 100 pitchers who had thrown the most innings in each year and called them “established starters” for the next year. Then I redid my look at pitch counts per start and innings pitched per start, but only for top pitchers in each year. Read the rest of this entry »

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