Bryce Miller led off last Friday’s game with a fastball to Yandy Díaz. He missed low and away, and Diaz took the pitch for ball one. Miller came back with another fastball, wildly away, then another one low to send the count to 3–0. But then things turned. He threw another fastball right down the middle for strike one, fired one past Díaz for strike two, and finally threw a perfectly-located missile that Díaz waved through. Six pitches, six fastballs, and one out: it’s exactly how Miller drew it up at home.

The rest of the first inning held more of the same. He threw Wander Franco three straight fastballs to garner another strikeout, one that Luke Raley tapped into play (he reached on a fielding error), then six straight fastballs to Randy Arozarena to duplicate the 3–0-to-strikeout path he’d walked against Diaz. All told, Miller threw 16 fastballs in the first inning and nothing else whatsoever.

To some extent, this was an unsurprising tactic. Miller boasts one of the best fastballs in baseball, period. It’s one of those mindbending pitches that seems to defy gravity by rising out of its path halfway to home plate. Whether you’re looking at it statistically or visually, it’s hard to find faults. He’d used it nearly two-thirds of the time heading into last Friday’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers came into 2023 with a ton of question marks. Was a platoon of James Outman and Trayce Thompson truly the answer in center field? Was Miguel Rojas a sufficient backstop given Gavin Lux’s injury? Was Jason Heyward’s bat salvageable, and where would he play if it was? Was Miguel Vargas ready? The offense was hardly up to the standards of the team’s recent run.

They didn’t answer all those questions positively, but with the benefit of hindsight, the offense seems fine. The team is hitting a collective .243/.328/.446, good for a 110 wRC+. They’re one of the best baserunning teams in baseball. Mookie Betts can play shortstop now, which is neat. But they’ve exchanged those worries for one that has dogged every team in baseball over the years: Is there enough starting pitching to go around?

In the past week, the Dodgers were dealt two more blows on that front. One is a bump in the road: Clayton Kershaw’s sore left shoulder sent him to the IL Monday, where he hopes to make a minimum 15-day stay. That’s mildly concerning, but if Kershaw and the Dodgers are right, it’s just a temporary setback. One of Kershaw’s potential replacements got far worse news, however. Yesterday, the club announced that Dustin May will have elbow surgery to repair his flexor tendon, which means he’s done pitching in 2023. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another look at five things that caught my eye in baseball this week. As usual, I’m following a template set by Zach Lowe, who is great at his job and popularized the concept. Summer doldrums are here for many teams, but nearly everyone is in the race and there’s still plenty of fun baseball happening. I was particularly drawn to two young catchers this week, as well as two key members of the 2019 World Series winning Nats and some great baserunning. A quick programming note: I’m spending this whole weekend on vacation and not watching any baseball, so this column will take a break next Friday and return the following week. Let’s get started.

1. Patrick Corbin (Briefly) Returning to Form
I won’t surgarcoat this – Patrick Corbin has been one of the worst starters in baseball over the past three years. He went from key cog in the Nats’ World Series machine to a guy who couldn’t buy an out in seemingly no time at all. He has a 5.89 ERA since the start of 2021. The only worse marks posted by a pitcher with 200 or more innings belong to Dallas Keuchel, who played himself out of baseball with remarkable speed in 2022, and ex-teammate Chad Kuhl, who got released earlier this week. Keuchel accrued his 6.35 ERA over 222 innings; Corbin has thrown a remarkable 421. He’s actually among the top 25 starters in innings pitched over those years, despite the eye-watering ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »