Want a good example of how tough it is to pitch? Look at Sandy Alcantara. He was the consensus NL Cy Young last year, with a 2.28 ERA accrued across a whopping 228.2 innings. Stamina, command, grounders, and strikeouts: what more could you ask for? I had him 10th on last season’s Trade Value Series and if anything, the consensus feedback I received rated him even more highly.

Of course, the good times didn’t continue, which is why I’m writing this article. Alcantara has been downright ordinary this year – he came into last night’s game with a 5.08 ERA. He’s walking more batters, striking out fewer, and getting fewer grounders. He’s averaging fewer innings per start. Every single bright light in Alcantara’s 2022 performance has been dimmed this year.

The reason why isn’t particularly hidden: as Robert Orr documented back in May, Alcantara’s changeup is the culprit. It was his best pitch last year. By pitch values, it’s been his worst pitch this year. At the time, he was throwing it in the strike zone too frequently, and batters weren’t chasing the pitch when he left the zone. He wasn’t getting the same downward bite as last year, either, which helped explain the other problems. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, this year’s bumper crop of pitching prospect debuts has overwhelmed you. I write about baseball for a living, and it still gets to be too much for me sometimes. Mason Miller, Bryce Miller, Taj Bradley, Bobby Miller, Grayson Rodriguez, Andrew Abbott, Michael Grove… you could almost make an entire starting rotation just out of Millers. Some of these debuts have been spectacular. Some have been lackluster. Some are works in progress. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s hype.

That leads me to Eury Pérez, our top pitching prospect and perhaps the most anticipated debut of the year. It’s easy to equate all debuts, or at least to think of them as quite similar until a pitcher does something to set himself apart. Don’t fall for that trap, though. I’m here to tell you: Pérez is amazing, and it’s time to start paying attention to him if you’ve been missing out.

One thing is almost universally true about the heralded pitching debuts this year: these guys have stuff coming out their ears. I don’t mean that in an ‘ew gross earwax’ way, either: they’re tooled up like you wouldn’t believe. I think that’s just the way the world works now. Teams are better than ever before at applying objective measurements to individual pitches. In the past, a guy toiling in Hi-A with so-so numbers wasn’t going to the bigs regardless of how much vertical break he imparted. Now, if you’re throwing a fastball that looks at home in the majors, your team knows right away. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another installment of Five Things, a look at odd circumstances and delightful happenings that caught my eye this past week. With the NBA solidly in its offseason, Zach Lowe’s column is taking a break, which means I might be the only Things show in town right now. This week was an awesome one for watching baseball, and I had a hard time narrowing the list down. I hope you like legends making big plays, unheralded rookies swinging games, and two Bay Area teams headed in opposite directions. Who am I kidding? Of course you like those things. Let’s get to it.

1. Joey’s Back!
The Reds are so much fun that I thought about making an entire five things column out of things I’m loving in Cincinnati these days, but I think we just call that an article, so I’m going to settle for writing about one of the best parts of their recent winning streak. As fun as it’s been to see the baby Reds gain confidence and romp to the top of the NL Central, there was something missing. All these kids are fun, but they were missing the team’s best player in a generation while he rehabbed in preparation for what will almost certainly be his last ride.

I started to get excited when Joey Votto’s goofy bus driver persona resurfaced. But I won’t lie to you: I was worried that he might not fit in as well as hoped. The infield was already packed with contributors, and Votto might lead the team to some tough playing time decisions they didn’t really want to make. He wasn’t even that good last year! It was definitely not preordained that everything would work out. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Romano is one of the best closers in baseball, but you wouldn’t know it from perusing your average sports page. He’s a quiet star, in the mildly pejorative sense often implied by “quiet” — not well-enough known, not well-enough talked about, somehow lacking in whatever je ne sais quoi that makes you a star.

Here’s the thing, though: that’s silly. At FanGraphs, we try to avoid that very way of thinking, and yet we’ve written almost nothing about Romano in the past few years. An interview here, a hockey anecdote there, the occasional fantasy piece — it’s not what you’d expect from a guy at the top of the bullpen hierarchy for a playoff team. I’m not kidding myself; this article is Canadian fan service. Let’s talk about what makes Romano so dang good, and ignore why audiences in America seem to ignore him.

If you’re looking at it from a pitch perspective, this one is pretty easy. Romano is good because he throws a hellacious fastball and backs it with an above-average slider. His fastball is a work of art. All the things you’ve heard about what makes a four-seamer good? He has them. He avoids the dreaded line of normality that plagues some heaters that underperform their radar gun numbers; his is mostly up-and-down. Per Baseball Savant, his fastball drops 1.7 inches less than the average four-seamer thrown with similar velocity and also gets 2.4 inches less arm-side fade. In other words, when he throws it to a righty, it ends up less inside than they expect, and also meaningfully higher. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Justin Choi wrote a fascinating article about sinkers. You should read it, because Justin’s stuff is great, but I’m going to summarize it here because I want to riff on it a little bit. In essence, Justin pointed out what we all kind of knew but didn’t talk about much: sinkers are much better against same-handed batters. Teams have caught on, and they’re changing usage accordingly.

Here’s a great chart from that article: the percentage of all right-handed sinkers that are thrown to right-handed batters:

That’s pretty straightforward: pitchers are increasingly using sinkers only when they have the platoon advantage. Here’s another way of looking at it: the percentage of sinkers among all pitches thrown by righties to lefties, league-wide:

In plain English, pitchers have stopped throwing sinkers when they’re faced with opposite-handed batters. Meanwhile, they’re throwing right/right sinkers as frequently as ever:

Those two charts hardly look like the same pitch, and in fact they aren’t really. Righty pitchers are actually playing two slightly different games: they’re pitching to same-handed batters and separately pitching to opposite-handed hitters. The object of both games is to get the batter out, so it’s not like the games are that different, but it’s inconceivable that the same pitches would be best against both sides. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien is up to his usual tricks. He’s eighth among all position players in WAR, comfortably the best on a first-place Rangers squad. For the third straight year and the fourth out of five, he’s on track to rack up four-plus WAR as one of the two best players on his team. For someone who didn’t post an above-average batting line until his seventh major league season, it’s an impressive accomplishment.

Perhaps more impressive to me: he’s doing it right under our noses, and no one seems to notice. Semien is good at everything but not in a way that adds up to a tremendous offensive line. His best skill might be durability. He’s clearly a very good player, but his particular set of skills are highlighted by the framework we grade him under. I’m interested in Semien as a player, and I’m also interested in why he’s the poster boy for both what WAR gets right and where it has limits.

Let’s start with how Semien does it. It’s fairly straightforward: he’s above average at every phase of the game. It begins with his plate discipline. To put it simply, he doesn’t make bad decisions about when to swing. In each of the past five years, he’s accomplished an impressive double: chasing fewer pitches than league average and simultaneously swinging at more in-zone pitches than league average. To state the obvious, that’s a great way to both rack up a pile of walks and avoid strikeouts. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another installment of Five Things, a look at some things that caught my eye in baseball this week. As usual, I’d like to thank Zach Lowe, whose NBA column inspired me to start this one. This week has a few more things I don’t like than usual, from young players with defensive issues to young players missing the season with injury. Don’t fret, though: there’s a heaping helping of good defense, and even some amusingly awful plays for comic relief. Let’s get right to it.

1. Abysmal Defense in Winning Efforts
It’s hard to overstate how poorly the Giants fared on defense last Sunday. They kicked things off by letting a popup fall between three defenders, and that was just the beginning. They let that run score in ignominious fashion:

There’s no sugarcoating it; that was ugly. This might be worse, though:

Read the rest of this entry »

OAKLAND – The Coliseum was rocking for the first pitch of last night’s game. A crowd of 27,759 roared as Yandy Díaz grounded out to first. “Sell the team! Sell the team! Sell the team!” The coordinated chant broke down into roars and cheers as Ryan Noda gathered up the grounder and stepped on first, kicking off the wildest Tuesday night game you could ever imagine.

The fans – 23,000 more than attended Monday night’s fixture – came out to protest owner John Fisher’s attempt to move the A’s to Las Vegas. They came out to protest Fisher’s management of the team in general. More than either of those causes, however, they came out to cheer for the A’s. As much as the team’s recent trajectory makes them hard to root for, as much as ownership and the front office seem to be steering into the skid, Oakland fans remain some of the most passionate in baseball.

If you’ve never heard of a reverse boycott before, that’s not surprising: the fans more or less improvised the idea on the fly. Jeremy Goodrich, a college student and lifelong A’s fan, created a change.org petition calling for Fisher to sell the team instead of relocating. Stu Clary, a longtime fan, saw the petition and floated the idea of selling out a weeknight game as a signal that fan support for the A’s is merely dormant, not extinct. The concept caught on almost immediately. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know that Andy Warhol didn’t actually say “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”? I was shocked to learn the truth. Apparently, two museum employees invented the quote when they were working on a Warhol exhibit. That makes the saying more interesting to me, actually: two anonymous people creating the work of someone famous for the democratization of art is enjoyable. But I digress: the point of bringing that quote up is that Nick Anderson is well into his second fifteen minutes of fame, and I’m pretty sure that this, too, is something Warhol would approve of.

It’s hard to imagine a better pitcher getting a worse contract than the one Anderson signed this offseason. He was one of the best relievers in baseball, period, from his 2019 debut until tearing his UCL in 2021. Heck, he was top 15 in reliever WAR from 2019 to ’21, and he basically didn’t play in one of those years. Sub-3 ERA, sub-3 FIP, the fourth-highest strikeout rate in baseball (39.6%) — Anderson was an elite closer, and the Rays used him accordingly. The Braves are paying him only $875,000 this year. That’s some kind of bargain.

As Esteban Rivera detailed last November, there were reasons to doubt that Anderson would come back strong. He looked diminished in his last few appearances before hitting the IL; his biggest weapon, a fastball with excellent carry that left batters flummoxed, lost its usual carry. Vertical approach angle is all the rage in pitch design these days, and that’s the case because it neutralizes the biggest weapon hitters have: power on contact. You can’t hit a home run if you can’t hit the ball, and flat-angled four-seam fastballs are great at doing just that. Read the rest of this entry »