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The best article I’ve ever read about Adam Ottavino was written on this site. Travis Sawchik wrote it, years ago, and ever since then I’ve found myself following Ottavino’s career and thinking about that article. The season after he revamped his pitching arsenal by throwing by himself in a Manhattan storefront, he had a career year for the Rockies. The season after that, he returned to New York to pitch for the Yankees, and after a brief detour to Boston in 2021, he’s back in his hometown pitching for the Mets. Now, though, he’s doing it with some new tools.

That fateful offseason, Ottavino learned to command his slider. But that wasn’t the pitch he was trying to learn at the start. Take a look at his pitch mix by year, and you can see the cutter he planned on integrating:

Big sweeping sliders like the one Ottavino throws pair well with sinkers, and he changed his primary fastball accordingly. But sweeping sliders and sinkers both display large platoon splits, so he also picked up a cutter to pair with his two primary pitches. That was the idea, at least. In practice, he didn’t throw his cutter much against lefties, and by 2020 he didn’t throw it much at all. From 2020 through ’22, he threw that cutter only 3.7% of the time overall.

In a perhaps related development, Ottavino has gotten shelled by lefties since 2018: from that year through ’22, he allowed a sterling .256 wOBA against righties and a middle-of-the-road .313 mark against lefties. That’s hardly surprising; he basically only threw two pitches, and neither of them are at their best against opposite-handed batters. The Yankees used him more or less as a righty specialist and then traded him to the Red Sox in a salary dump to make their bullpen work more efficiently. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another installment of the five things that most caught my eye in baseball over the past week. As I mentioned last time and will no doubt continue to mention long into the future, this column was inspired by Zach Lowe’s excellent weekly NBA column. To quickly recap, the idea here is that there are constantly tons of little, delightful things going on in baseball. They can’t all have a column of their own, but that doesn’t make them any less pleasing – or irksome. The following isn’t an exhaustive list; it’s merely a few things that I think you’ll enjoy.

1. One Pitch Knockouts
I discovered a new category of walk-off this week, and I can’t believe I’ve never recognized it before. Let’s set the stage: the Twins and White Sox took a 3-3 game into the bottom of the 10th inning. The White Sox had failed to score in the top of the inning, which put them in a dire situation. Willi Castro started the bottom of the 10th on second base, 180 feet away from ending the game. Jesse Scholtens, hardly Chicago’s best reliever, took the mound. Merely living to fight another inning felt like a long shot.

As it turns out, the Twins didn’t need a whole inning. They needed exactly one pitch:

The official game log had this to say: “Michael A. Taylor singles on a bunt groundball to third baseman Hanser Alberto. Willi Castro scores. Throwing error by third baseman Hanser Alberto.” A more succinct description: “Michael A. Taylor bunts, chaos ensues.”

That was a great spot to bunt, the best possible result, and also a downright hilarious way to end a 10-inning game. Baseball is all about the slow build. Sure, home runs are a quick jolt of offense, but most rallies feature hits, walks, and errors building on each other to a triumphant conclusion. Instead, this time the slow build was all about what happened between innings. Players jogged to their positions. Scholtens threw warmup pitches. Castro ran out to second base. Both broadcasts explained the finer points of extra-innings strategy. It was all supposed to be a buildup to an exciting duel, with high-stakes batter/pitcher confrontations stretched out over multiple at-bats and plenty of pitches. Instead, it ended right away, and with a bunt, and a baseball that hit Taylor in the head (he was fine):

Would I want every game to end on a bunt? Of course not. I wouldn’t want every extra innings game to end on the first pitch, either. But there’s something delightful about the inversion of form here that I want more of. Not with a bang, but not with a whimper either. The zombie runner might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it makes for some delightfully whimsical endings. The Twins didn’t care, though; they mobbed Taylor past first base. He looked appropriately sheepish, but hey, a win is a win:

2. How the Mets Roll
Baseball is a fair sport in the long run, but the long run can take a while to show up. There’s no rule that says your hard contact has to get rewarded; you can hit five screaming line drives in a row and have each one find a fielder’s glove. I’m not a major league hitter, but I imagine that one of the hardest parts of their job is keeping an even demeanor even when the game feels like it’s stacked against you.

Of course, that’s not the only way things can go. Sometimes you feel jinxed, and sometimes you’re the New York Mets this past Monday. In the bottom of the seventh inning, the Mets were nursing a two-run lead against the dangerous Padres when Mark Canha led off with a double. This is a bunt-friendly column, so you know what happened next: Luis Guillorme tried to bunt Canha over to third for a good shot at an insurance run. What you might not have guessed is that Guillorme bunted the ball perfectly:

“You couldn’t roll it out there any better” is an overused announcer trope. That implies that it would be easy to roll it out there. I’ve played bocce ball enough times to know that rolling the ball that far and with that slim of a margin for error is tremendously difficult. This ball had to walk a fine line to stay fair, and it juuuuuust got there:

Two batters later, things got sillier. Tomás Nido cued one off the end of his bat, and, well, you’ll just have to see this one:

I’m just gonna say it: you couldn’t roll it out there any better. It sat on the chalk! Poor Yu Darvish just shook his head ruefully; what other option did he have? Seriously, you need to see that one again:

Every base hit is a line drive in the next day’s box score, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to get a gift every once in a while. If you’re not convinced of how good that feels, just take a look at Nido and Tommy Pham in the aftermath:

Bonus Mets content: the broadcast remains as delightful as ever. Tune in for a random afternoon game, and you’re liable to hear sentences that have never previously been conceived of. “That was a snappy Tom – put that in your Bloody Mary,” said Keith Hernandez this Wednesday. He was talking about a David Robertson curveball, for the record.

3. Alek Manoah’s Non-Competitive Pitch Problem
If more pitchers were like Alek Manoah, baseball would be a lot more fun to watch. He works deep into starts, wears his emotions on his sleeve, and challenges hitters rather than nibbling. He went at least six innings in 25 of his 31 starts last year, a welcome throwback in a world increasingly populated by five-and-dive starters and one-inning reliever parades.

This year, Manoah hasn’t found his form. His strikeout and walk rates are both 15.9% — that’s far too many walks against not nearly enough strikeouts. He’s already had starts of 3.1 and 4.1 innings, each shorter than any start he made last year. He’s lost a little velocity, but that’s not the biggest problem here. No, the thing that’s most vexing Manoah is a troubling increase in non-competitive pitches.

Manoah’s game is built on efficiency, and part of that is not wasting pitches. Baseball Savant has a handy “waste” zone – it refers to pitches thrown so far away from the strike zone that they hardly ever draw swings (roughly 6% in each of the past five years). Every year, only about 9% of pitches fall into that non-competitive bucket. Last year, only 8.3% of Manoah’s pitches ended up in the “waste” zone. Pitchers almost never intend to throw it there; those are just the pitches where their mechanics betray them, and they either yank the ball or have it fall off their hands weirdly.

This year, Manoah’s mechanics have been betraying him a lot. In his second start of the season, he threw 16 waste pitches out of 98 total, a 16.3% mark. On Tuesday, he threw another 15 (16% of his 94 pitches). His fastball velocity was down in both starts, too: he bottomed out below 88 mph, and he’s averaging roughly 1 mph less this year than last.

In graphical form, it’s just as ugly. Here’s a good Manoah start from last year:

Here’s this Tuesday’s start:

It doesn’t take a data scientist to spot the problem. Manoah couldn’t land his slider, and he left a bundle of sinkers above the zone too. The AL East is going to be a grindhouse this year. The Rays have already pulled out to a sizable lead. If Toronto is going to chase them down, their ace needs to start repeating his delivery and stop giving batters free pitches.

4. Blind Tags and Ghost Tags
2023 is not a good year for fielders who like tagging out runners. The bases are bigger, which means it’s harder to find runners. Pickoff throws are limited, which means runners are getting better leads, and the pitch clock only exacerbates that problem. The end result is that a chance to tag a runner out, whether on a stolen base attempt or not, presents itself far less often than a year ago.

What’s a fielder to do? If you’re Brandon Crawford, you just get better at tagging. The Royals are aggressive on the basepaths, which is a mixed blessing: it means more chances to tag someone out but a lower likelihood of succeeding. A lower likelihood isn’t the same as no likelihood, however. When MJ Melendez tried to advance on a fly ball to center, Crawford wasn’t having it:

That’s just perfect. He had no time to execute a standard spin-and-find. He knew where Melendez was likely to be, and he could hear him; that would have to be enough. You need a firm grasp of your position to execute a tag like this:

And just for fun, one more angle of it:

Of course, not everyone has eyes in the back of their head. That doesn’t stop infielders from getting their tags in, though. Take this beauty, pointed out by a reader last week. Francisco Lindor did some tagging (and acting) without even having the ball to prevent Christian Yelich from getting a free base:

Tagging a guy after he’s safe in the hopes that he’ll come off the bag for an instant is no fun. Doing it without the ball so that he gets paranoid about getting tagged out and don’t advance, while the ball kicks around the outfield? Sheer genius.

You don’t have to be a Gold Glove shortstop to get in on the tagging party, either. Brendan Donovan is more notable for his positional versatility than his defensive value; he’s slightly below average at a wide array of defensive positions. That measures his range, sure hands, and arm, though. His imaginary tagging? It’s off the charts:

You can’t see it from that angle, but Nolan Gorman’s errant throw got all the way to the wall in left field. Yonathan Daza was sure he knew where the ball was, though: in Donovan’s glove. He jammed his finger slightly on the play, which might have helped distract him, but that canny fake tag saved a base either way.

Maybe I’m grading on too much of a curve, but I’m more impressed by Donovan’s wherewithal than by Lindor’s. I expect Lindor to make genius plays I hadn’t thought of and to look smooth while doing so. I picture Lindor mulling over his grocery list while he’s in the field; he seems to have everything under control to the point where he has time to think about other things. Donovan is more of a max-effort type. But in the world of effective fake tags, they’re both number one in my book.

5. Ezequiel Tovar’s Balletic Defense
Ezequiel Tovar’s transition to the major leagues is still a work in progress. He’s batting .209/.227/.302 so far, and didn’t take his first walk of the season until Wednesday. The power he intermittently showed in the minors has mostly disappeared. He swings too much. The road to positive offensive value looks tenuous.

The Rockies will likely give him time to develop that offense, though, because Tovar is a breathtaking defender. Here, watch him not turn a double play and still make it look like art:

You could hang that toe drag in the Louvre. The snap throw afterwards is audacious. You need to see this in slow motion to truly appreciate it:

Want him to range deep into the hole and come up with one? I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the throw, but I can say for certain that it’ll look pretty:

When he’s charging the ball, he sets his feet instinctively and fires with a stable platform from positions where most players couldn’t:

Tovar is hardly a finished product. In a thus-far minuscule sample, both DRS and OAA think he’s below-average defensively. As I already mentioned, his offense has a long way to go. But if you’re looking for some of the prettiest infield defense in baseball, don’t overlook Colorado. Tovar has the skills to be a highlight reel defender for years to come.

That brings us to the end of another installment of the five things that most caught my eye this week. Our sport is full of tiny, delightful, maddening moments like these, which is a big part of why I love it so much. Until next time, I hope you have as much fun watching baseball as the Rays do playing it:

If there’s one thing I remember the Cubs of recent vintage for, it’s winning the curse-breaking World Series in 2016. What, you were expecting something else? But if there are *two* things I remember the Cubs of recent vintage for, the second one is failing to sign their marquee players to contract extensions. Kris Bryant, Javier Báez, Willson Contreras, Anthony Rizzo: all four felt like candidates for a contract extension that made them a lifetime Cub, with a jersey retirement ceremony and fawning coverage from national media for their sparkling career.

Each of those four plays for another team now. The Cubs never turned that dynamic core into a second championship, or even a second World Series appearance. For a team that had dynastic aspirations, it’s a strange look. To the Cubs’ credit, it’s also a look they seem intent on changing. After signing Nico Hoerner to a three-year extension, they took care of another core player, agreeing to a three-year extension with Ian Happ worth $61 million, as Bleacher Nation’s Michael Cerami first reported.

Happ represents a bridge between the 2016 squad that has now mostly departed and the modern-day Cubs team. He debuted in 2017, and while he spent most of ’19 in the minors, he’s otherwise been a fixture in the Chicago lineup ever since. He’s also been a fixture in the field, though not always in the same place. In 2022, however, he settled into an everyday left field role and put up his best season as a professional.

A quick look at Happ’s statline might leave you wanting. He doesn’t hit a ton of home runs or get on base at an unbelievable clip. He doesn’t have a shockingly low strikeout rate for modern baseball. He simply does everything well, with no real holes in his game other than a slightly elevated strikeout rate, and that adds up to solid overall performance even without anything that will blow you away. Here, take a look at it in percentile form, as compared to all qualified hitters:

The funny thing about those numbers is that Happ’s game doesn’t feel middle-of-the-road at all. He’s capable of enormous top-end power but until 2022 had paired that intermittent thump with plenty of empty swings. His career swinging-strike rate is roughly 14%; he shaved that to 11.8%, and the hits flowed like wine. That’s how you can post your lowest career ISO and beat your career batting line anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Walker, the Cardinals’ phenomenal young outfielder, is off to a scintillating start to the season. In his first 10 games, he’s hitting an impressive .326/.370/.512, comfortably better than league average. The Cardinals promoted Walker to the majors despite a positional logjam, and he’s done nothing to make their job easier; he looks like a foundational part of their future. And oh yeah, maybe you’ve heard, he’s on quite the hitting streak.

You probably didn’t come here for a lecture from me, but here’s a quick one about hitting streaks. I think they’re really cool. I think it’s amazing that Walker is now in second place for the longest hitting streak to start a career for players under 21 years old, and that he passed Ted Williams for that honor. That’s awesome, and I’m sure that he’ll treasure that memory for years to come. Eleven games! It’s truly amazing. I just don’t think it’s useful for my purposes, which is to wonder how good Jordan Walker is. Here’s one example of a hit that kept Walker’s streak alive, the sole hit he recorded on April 3:

That’s clearly a hit, and I’d even say that it’s a good piece of hitting. What does it have to do with how well Walker is adjusting to the majors? Not much, I’d venture to say. The streak is a tremendous achievement, it’s super cool, and I don’t think it’s worth mentioning beyond that. Read the rest of this entry »

After a decade of hand-wringing and tedious arguments on both sides, MLB restricted defensive shifts this past offseason. Much has already been written about the pros and cons of this decision, and I’m not going to take the time to recapitulate all of those arguments here. One debate in particular really caught my eye, though: Would teams still play an overshift-esque alignment by moving an outfielder to the shallow right field position occupied by shifted second basemen in pre-restriction shifts?

I expected it to be a rare tactic, but still one that came up from time to time. Five-man infields already existed; in fact, I ran the math on when they might make sense in 2019 when the Dodgers tried one. The exact conclusion of that piece isn’t important; the point is that teams sometimes thought a five-man infield was the best defensive alignment when any defense was allowed, so they would surely prefer it with restrictions on other alignments in place. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

This won’t surprise you if you’re an NBA fan, but I love reading Zach Lowe’s 10 Things column every week. Lowe is a basketball writer for ESPN, and his column is packed with data-driven anecdotes that wouldn’t quite fill a column on their own but are interesting nonetheless. Somehow, it had never quite occurred to me to use that format in baseball, but it feels like a perfect fit.

It had never occurred to me, that is, until I tried to write about the first observation that you’ll see in this piece. I couldn’t turn it into an entire article, but I kept trying because I really wanted to write about it. There just wasn’t enough meat on the bone, but I didn’t want to leave it there. Then I started noticing other little things I wanted to highlight, and a lightbulb went off.

My plan is to start writing up five things that have caught my interest every Friday. There’s a lot of baseball in the world, which means a lot of interesting but bite-sized stories, ones that wouldn’t work on their own but are nonetheless too good to ignore. Without further ado, let’s get to liking (and, occasionally, not liking) things. Read the rest of this entry »

This offseason, FanGraphs got some new stuff. More precisely, we got some new ways of measuring stuff, and command, and pitching overall, via pitch-level modeling. You can read about PitchingBot here and Stuff+ here. They’re really cool! Pitch modeling is a wonderful tool to both verify the eye test – that nasty-looking slider you saw, it’s actually nasty – and to find new pitchers to keep an eye on. Sure, strikeout rate and ERA and FIP can do that too, but stuff is a purer signal, because it’s entirely in a pitcher’s control. There’s no question of whether a hitter spoiled a great pitch, or whether that ball should have been a home run. There’s only the pitch, with its movement and velocity and release point.

Eno Sarris, the proprietor of Stuff+, has written about how quickly that model stabilizes, but for our purposes, let’s just say this: these pitch modeling tools give a great early look at which pitchers are working with the best tools early in the year. That doesn’t mean that they’ll all be great – they might not wield the tools in the correct order, or they might struggle with command, or they might wear down as the season goes on – but it does mean that they’re starting with an advantage.

I’d caution you against using these with excessive granularity this early in the season. If a pitcher’s Stuff+ has declined from 119 to 116, or if your team’s swingman has vaulted two points above the fifth starter, there’s probably not much signal in that. Instead, I’m going to paint with a very broad brush. I’m going to look at three groups of two today: two pitchers who both models agree have great stuff, two pitchers who both models are down on, and two where the systems disagree.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Vargas couldn’t swing. I don’t mean that in the insulting way that little leaguers sometimes do — “hey batter, you’ve got nothing, you can’t even swing.” I mean that he was medically prohibited from swinging. That didn’t stop the Dodgers from playing him this spring, as Davy Andrews detailed for this very site last month. It did mean, however, that he had to watch every pitch thrown to him, ball or strike, and simply take it. Not exactly the way he expected to enter his first spring training with a big league job nailed down, I’m sure.

The pinky finger fracture that kept Vargas from swinging has healed, but you might not know it from his batting line so far this year, because it seems he took that lesson to heart. Five games into his 2022 season, he’s come to the plate 18 times. In nine of those plate appearances, he’s walked. That 50% walk rate is amazing on its own, and I’ll come back to that, but the way he’s gotten to it is downright stunning.

The key to walking a lot is not swinging at bad pitches, and Vargas is doing that to a fault. Per Statcast, he’s swung at four of the 50 pitches he’s seen outside the strike zone in 2023. That’s the best rate in the majors, which is impressive on its own; 205 batters have seen at least 25 pitches outside the strike zone already this season, and every single one of them has swung at them more frequently than Vargas. We’re talking all the various plate discipline geniuses already enshrined in the pantheon of good eye; they’re all looking up at Vargas’ extreme selectivity. Read the rest of this entry »