A lot of my job involves spinning a story I don’t completely believe in. I know, I know, you’re shocked! You mean I don’t actually think that the four to five players I highlight every week are each breaking out by doing something they’ve never done before? And I don’t think that each of them is doing it sustainably? What are the odds?

Some of that comes with the territory. If you’re looking across the universe of major league players for something interesting, some portion of what you find interesting will have happened by random chance. That pitcher who’s striking everyone and their mother out? He might just be on a hot streak. The hitter who’s currently smashing high fastballs? There’s some chance he just felt really good for a week and then will stub his toe when walking out of the clubhouse tomorrow.

I know all that. One thing I wasn’t sure about, though, was how often false signals pop up. Even without searching them out, you might end up seeing a breakout around every corner. There’s a famous quote from Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson: “The stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions.” Is the same general idea true of batted ball data? I came up with a simple experiment to investigate. What follows is a breakdown of the exact method I used, but if you’re just interested in the conclusion, it won’t surprise you: When hitters put up hot streaks of a reasonable length, it’s a good but not infallible sign that they will finish the year as above-average hitters.

I took every batted ball from the 2022 season and broke it out by player. From there, I put them all in chronological order and calculated each player’s best stretch of 50 batted balls. I calculated it for a variety of “advanced” metrics: average exit velocity, xwOBA, and barrels per batted ball. Those are some of the most commonly used underlying statistics – if I’m citing someone who’s really hitting, I’d likely use batted ball outputs like this to assess the validity of their performance, so I excluded things like batting average on contact or wOBA on contact, which might be quite noisy in 50-ball samples. Read the rest of this entry »

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Welcome to another installment of my weekly look at five things that caught my interest in baseball. As always, I’m indebted to Zach Lowe of ESPN for the idea – his basketball column is a must-read, and his observant eye always inspires me to look a little closer at what I’m watching. This week’s edition features one of the best players in the game, a fourth outfielder, an old ace reinventing himself, a current ace who I’ve unreasonably projected my own mannerisms onto, and a switch-hitter who might not be switch-hitting anymore. Let’s get to it.

1. Ronald Acuña Jr., All-Everything Again
Baseball lost one of its most exciting young stars when Ronald Acuña Jr. tore his ACL in 2021. He was in the middle of breaking out – if you can truly break out from the elevated perch he already occupied – when it all just stopped. He didn’t play again for nearly a year, and 2022 Acuña wasn’t the same when he did return. He just didn’t have that extra gear that made him such a delight to watch when he debuted.

This year, it’s safe to say he’s back. His prodigious bat speed was already starting to reemerge in the second half of last season, but it’s on full display again in 2023. He’s back to being one of the fastest players in baseball, to boot; his 11 homers and 17 steals have me doing downright irresponsible 40/40 math on a nightly basis. He’s first in baseball in Wins Above Replacement among position players, which seems like a pretty good indication that he’s up to his old tricks. Read the rest of this entry »

Framber Valdez had a bad start on Monday. Over just four innings of work, he allowed four runs, all earned, thanks to a seven-hit barrage and two walks. Hey, that’s pitching. Everyone has bad games – or sometimes the hitters have good games. Eight of the 10 best starters in baseball this year, as measured by WAR, have already had a game where they allowed four or more runs. That’s also true for 17 of the top 20. We’re not that far into the season, but everyone has blowups from time to time.

That’s true… for everyone other than Valdez. He’s a machine. This is only the sixth start he’s made since the beginning of the 2020 season that didn’t last at least five innings, and he’s made 72 starts in that time. He set an all-time single season record with 25 straight quality starts (at least six innings pitched, no more than three earned runs) last year. He doesn’t get roughed up early and depart. He doesn’t allow a pile of runs. He’s on a truly remarkable tear, and I wanted to put some context around it.

To come up with a fair scale, I leaned on game score, a statistic created by Bill James and updated by Tom Tango that tries to distill each start into a single number. Fifty is average. Forty is replacement level. Seventy means a great game, and 90 a truly transcendent one. It’s a blunt tool, but it’s a useful way to explain how consistent Valdez has become. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony DeSclafani put up a clunker last Monday. He gave up five runs and 10 hits over seven innings — to the Nationals of all teams — and the Giants lost 5-1. That’s nothing out of the ordinary; good pitchers have bad outings all the time. DeSclafani has been solid in San Francisco, but he’s more above average than elite. Giving up five runs is hardly an earth-shattering outcome.

Would you find that start more interesting if I told you that all five runs came in the first inning? Probably – that’s a lot of runs to give up in one inning followed by six clean sheets. On the other hand, that’s baseball: sometimes you’re the steamroller, and sometimes the other team has your number for 15 minutes.

Afterwards, though, Maria Guardado’s game story had an interesting detail:

“After the rough start, DeSclafani convened with pitching coach Andrew Bailey in the dugout and learned that he wasn’t getting his optimal shapes on his slider and his two-seamer. He made a mechanical adjustment between innings, tweaking the way he took the ball out of his glove…”

For 100 years, that wouldn’t have been a particularly interesting quote. That’s just the kind of thing that pitchers and pitching coaches say after bad outings. “Oh, I/he was doing this thing wrong, as you can see from the runs. But then we changed that thing, as you can see from the lack of runs afterwards.” But these days, we can go to the tape. Read the rest of this entry »

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Welcome to another installment of my weekly look at five things that caught my interest in baseball. As always, I’m indebted to Zach Lowe of ESPN for the idea — his basketball column remains one of my favorite reads in all of sports. That’s all the time we have for an introduction today, though, because there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s get to it.

1. Meaningful Baseball in Baltimore
It’s been a minute. The Orioles started a comprehensive teardown in 2017 and doubled down on it by hiring Mike Elias from the Astros after the 2018 season. They’ve finished fifth, fifth, fifth, fourth, fifth, and fourth in the AL East since then. There was a lot to follow on the prospect front, but the major league team looked bleak; the closest they came to first place in that stretch was 15 games out, and that was in the abbreviated 2020 season. Last year there was a glimmer of hope – the team finished 83-79 and Adley Rutschman, a generational catching prospect, impressed in his debut. But that team didn’t quite feel complete; the front office traded players away at the deadline and kept some of its top prospects in reserve.

This year feels different, with this week’s series against the first-place Rays the highest-stakes baseball in Baltimore in quite some time. The Orioles aren’t just second in their division, they’re second in the entire American League. That series was phenomenal, close throughout and well played across the board. The Orioles took two out of three, with an aggregate 6-6 scoreline, and it felt like two good teams trading blows, not one juggernaut and one pretender facing off. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something we all know about Joey Gallo: He’s got power to spare. Even before he was a big leaguer, tales of his top-of-the-charts power made the rounds among talent evaluators and fans alike. The question was never whether his power would play in the majors, it was whether the strikeouts that came with that power would drag his production down. Those discussions didn’t stop when he made the majors for good in 2017. In fact, it’s 2023 now, and most of the same positives and negatives are still up for debate.

To wit: Through Tuesday’s games, Gallo has hit .189/.326/.541, which works out to a 137 wRC+. He’s also striking out 32.6% of the time – and that would be the lowest strikeout rate of his career. In just 89 plate appearances, he already has seven home runs. By most accounts, it would appear that Gallo is Galloing as hard as ever.

Plot twist: Gallo has made a big adjustment this year, one that seems to have steered him out of the rut he fell into in recent seasons. See, Gallo had a second carrying tool offensively, beyond the power. His thump made opposing pitchers so afraid of him that he ran up massive walk totals merely by being passably selective. In 2019, the season that saw him post his best batting line, he walked 17.5% of the time. In 2021, his second-best, he walked 18% of the time. It’s not so much that he had a perfect batting eye; rather, he just started swinging less in 2019, and pitchers avoided the zone against him to such an extreme degree that he drew piles of walks. He kept it up for a few years before starting to swing more again in 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, as you might have heard, the Guardians cracked the code. I say “you might have heard,” but let’s be honest: you heard. You couldn’t walk five feet without someone telling you that contact was in, that this team of genius mavericks had turned baseball on its ear by finding players who don’t fit the modern-day ideal. What dummies, those other teams! All you have to do is not strike out, and then baseball is easy. Why didn’t anyone else try this plan before?

Good news! The Guardians have continued their no-strikeout ways this year; they’re fourth in baseball in strikeout rate (lower is better), striking out only 20.3% of the time. But bad news! They stink. Their offense is hitting an aggregate .224/.301/.330, good for a 75 wRC+, the worst mark in baseball. The Athletics are in the middle of recreating the plot of Major League, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. The Nationals traded everyone who wasn’t nailed down, then traded the nails they had left over, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. They’re comfortably worse than everyone offensively; the Tigers are in 29th place, and they’re six points of wRC+ better. Only the Tigers and Marlins, who combine awful offense with awful baserunning, have scored fewer runs.

What gives? To some extent, this is about overhype. The Guardians had the lowest strikeout rate in baseball last year, but it’s not like they lit the world on fire offensively. They produced a 99 wRC+, which is below average (that’s how it works), and scored 698 runs, 15th in baseball. That’s despite playing a lot of games against the Royals, White Sox, and Tigers, who were all bad pitching teams. They did that with Andrés Giménez putting up a 140 wRC+ and Oscar Gonzalez coming out of nowhere to hit .296/.327/.461 over nearly 400 plate appearances. To put it mildly, those two haven’t backed up their performances this year. Read the rest of this entry »

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