I don’t think you understand. You probably think you understand, but you don’t understand. Oh, you know that Spencer Strider is a bolt of lightning, a strikeout pitcher so overpowering that he might as well have been created in a lab. You know that he’s having a good season, surely; he’s locked in a tight race for NL Cy Young with Zac Gallen and Blake Snell. You know that he’s the logical continuation of the high-strikeout ace lineage, Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax or Roger Clemens for a new age. But I doubt you grasp how much of an outlier Strider’s 2023 season is, because I didn’t either until I took a closer look.

We have pitch-by-pitch data for every major league game on our leaderboards starting in 2002. That means we can calculate swinging strike rate, the percentage of pitches that result in a swing and a miss, for all of those years. I’ll tell you right off the bat that the single-season leader in this category is Jacob deGrom in 2020. In fact, four of the top five seasons on the list are from 2020; they’re outliers that were likely aided by the inherent randomness of a shortened schedule, in other words. For a rate statistic, that makes sense; the fewer innings you can throw to qualify, the easier it is to put up a wild number. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there. Are you a major league general manager or president of baseball operations? Do you work in a front office role for a playoff-contending team? Do you wish you had another starter, a good closer, or maybe an outfielder? Well, I’ve got great news for you, my friend. Operators are waiting now for your call: the Los Angeles Angels just yelled “Everything must go!” and threw their roster on the waiver wire like a miffed fantasy owner.

More specifically, the Angels placed Lucas Giolito, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López, Dominic Leone, Hunter Renfroe, and Randal Grichuk on waivers. For the next 47 hours, any team in baseball can place a claim on any or all of their services. It’s an unprecedented maneuver that could inject talent into playoff races across the league, and in an unpredictable fashion. If you’re on the fringes, you’ll get the first bite at the apple, but there are so many players here that even some teams currently in playoff position might end up with someone. If you’re looking for more specifics on the waiver process, Jon Becker wrote a nice explainer here.

Let’s talk about the way this works for the Angels first. Coming into yesterday, we projected them for a competitive balance tax payroll of $234,398,925. The first CBT threshold for this year is $233 million. That means they need to save around $1.5 million to duck under that threshold. The players put on waivers are owed around $6.44 million over the remainder of the year, and a similar amount even when CBT tax calculations are applied. The total tax savings will be slightly less than that, because the Rockies are paying a portion of Grichuk’s salary, but assuming most of these players find takers, the Angels will end up below that threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a month of upheaval in the AL West. As Jay Jaffe detailed, the Mariners are playing their best baseball of the season right now. A 9-1 stretch has carried them to the top of the division, turning what had been a two-team race all year into a three-way showdown. It’s the most competitive division race remaining, so a lot of people searching for a jolt of excitement down the stretch will be looking west.

Of course, Seattle’s climb to the top of the division didn’t happen in a vacuum. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and at the moment, that reaction is happening in Texas. The Astros spent the last week treading water, which allowed the Mariners to roar past them. The Rangers did them one worse; they’ve fallen into a 3-9 tailspin that turned a season-long lead in the division into a deficit.

It’s always tempting to turn a 3-9 stretch – or a 4-8 stretch, or really any stretch that takes a team out of first place – into a referendum on the squad. The Rangers should have seen this coming, the thinking goes. This team? With these weaknesses? It was always going to happen. But let’s withhold judgment for a few minutes and break it down like this: What’s going on in Arlington, and what has to change to turn the team’s fortunes around? Read the rest of this entry »

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Another week, another jam-packed baseball schedule. The biggest story of the week, no doubt, is Shohei Ohtani’s torn UCL, the most profound baseball-related bummer of the year in my opinion. Ohtani is such a globe-spanning superstar that news of this magnitude will naturally overshadow the rest of what’s going on in the sport. But I’m not here to mope. Like Zach Lowe and his seminal Ten Things basketball column, we’re here to celebrate some little oddities. So let’s get down to business. This week’s column is filled with delightful weirdness, and delightfully odd teams, to offset the Ohtani sadness. Do you like bunts? Do you like the Marlins doing weird stuff? Do you like baserunning adventures and underdogs taking on bullies? Then read on, because this column has all of that and more. Read the rest of this entry »

Look, I know that isn’t the line. It’s a chicken in every pot. But I came up with a good lobster pun last week, and I’m writing more about the ins and outs of teams driving home runners from third base, so I decided to go back to the well. You’ll just have to live with it; I’m the one driving the boat here, and as it turns out, it’s a lobster boat.

With the puns are now settled, let’s get down to business. Last week, I chopped up the 2023 season into halves to see how well various statistical indicators correlated with a team’s future ability to cash in their runners. As a recap, strikeout rate had a fairly strong correlation, and not much else did. Quite frankly, though, I wasn’t particularly convinced by that. There just wasn’t enough data. With only 30 observations, it’s too easy for one team to skew things, or at least that’s how it feels in my head.

There’s an easy solution: more data. So I used the same split-half methodology from last week and started chopping past seasons in two. More specifically, I picked the years from 2012-22, excluding the shortened 2020 season. In each case, I followed the same procedure: I split the season in two and noted each team’s offensive statistics in the first half. Then I looked at how efficient each team was at scoring when a runner reached third with less than two outs. I got a much bigger sample this time; 300 observations, which makes it a lot harder for a single outlier to mess things up. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams befuddles me. There’s no question that he has plus raw power in his bat. Look at this year’s statistics; he’s sitting in the 81st percentile for maximum exit velocity. But despite that fact, he’s in the 10th percentile for average exit velocity, and the 17th for hard-hit rate. He’s a power hitter! He’s a slap hitter! Both are true.

Likewise, I’m not quite sure what to make of the rest of his game. He has blazing straight line speed, and he uses that to his advantage on the basepaths. We have him down as the third-most valuable baserunner in the majors this year, behind only Esteury Ruiz and Corbin Carroll. But almost all of that value comes on stolen bases – he’s 25th in UBR, which measures non-steal advancement. And on defense, he has tremendous range and an average throwing arm, but grades out somewhere between average (DRS) and poor (OAA) anyway. His profile is a series of contradictions.

The thing is, all of these have been true about Abrams since the Padres drafted him in the first round in 2019. He was a divisive prospect from the start; it was never clear whether he’d end up as a slugging second baseman or a rangy, leadoff-hitting shortstop. Then the pandemic canceled the 2020 minor league season, and he missed most of 2021 with injury even as the Padres aggressively promoted him. Suddenly he was debuting in the big leagues at 21 as an injury replacement for, gulp, Fernando Tatis Jr. Life comes at you fast. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I’m not watching or writing about baseball, I like to play games. Board games, card games, video games — I’m not picky, I’m a fan of them all. I like them for many reasons: they help me keep my mind sharp, I love picking apart puzzles and trying to improve my own thought processes, and they’re just fun. One ancillary benefit: I end up hanging out with a lot of people who are younger than me.

At 37, I’m a card-carrying old in the gaming community. I can’t keep up with the youngsters in video games — my hand-eye coordination won’t cooperate — but in other arenas, I give as good as I get. It’s satisfying to butt heads with people much younger than me, and I think it helps to broaden my horizons. Also: I get to learn some wonderful slang. This is a long-winded intro that hasn’t been much about baseball, but there’s a slang payoff: “kids” these days like to call everything “mid,” and I love it.

Mid means more or less what you think it means: average or below-average. It’s broadly applicable, pejorative without being overly harsh, and conveys meaning quickly and efficiently. I’m a mid slang explainer, for example; not my fault, I’m too old to be better. But hearing one of my plays described as mid — a play I thought was perfectly average — got me wondering: who is the most mid hitter in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

Hello and welcome to another edition of Five Things, a collection of plays I had a blast watching. There was a lot to love in baseball this week: baserunning derring-do, great defense, and tons of exciting young players. There was so much to like, in fact, that I don’t have a single negative thing to say about what I watched on the field. The action was non-stop, and cool plays were everywhere, all the time. I left out an inside-the-park home run, for goodness sake. It might be the dog days of summer, but it was a spectacular week of baseball. So let’s get right to it. Read the rest of this entry »