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 »

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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 »

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When MLB added a pitch clock for the 2023 season, stolen base fans started salivating immediately. They had good reason to: when the pitch clock and its associated limit on pickoffs came to the minor leagues, stolen bases exploded. As spring training progressed, the evidence mounted: teams would steal more often, and they’d be successful doing it.

Still, there was no knowing how cleanly those warmup game stolen base numbers would translate into regular season games. Maybe teams were getting their stolen base practice in so that they could use it in key spots but would dial their aggression back when faced with the prospect of making real-life, actual outs on the basepaths. Maybe pitchers were sandbagging their best moves in anticipation of over-eager base stealers and would start racking up free outs left and right starting on Opening Day.

With the first 50 games of the seasons in the books, it’s safe to say that steals are here to stay. Just watch the Orioles, as Michael Baumann noted, and you can’t help but see it. To get an idea of just how much things have changed, I came up with a straightforward idea: compare the first 50 games of this season to the first 50 games of last year. Figuring out the right sample to compare to is always tricky, but one way to get around that is by simply looking at the start of each season. Against that backdrop, a huge change in stolen base rate probably means something.

And oh yes, the change in stolen base rate is huge. In the first 50 games of the 2022 season, teams stole 33 bases on 47 attempts, getting picked off four times. That was a slow start to the year, and both stolen base attempts and success rate ticked up slightly as the year went on, to just over one steal per game. This year, the first 50 games have featured 70 successful steals already, more than double last year’s rate. Read the rest of this entry »

The baseball season is only one day old, so it’s probably too early to draw any conclusions. The Reds will probably be bad. The Astros will probably be good. The Angels will probably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and end up around .500 despite employing two of the best players on the planet. Other than those broad strokes, though, it’ll take us a little while to know much for certain.

With that stipulated, let’s make far too much of something that a player did, not even yesterday, but in spring training. That sounds like a fun way to start our year. Ryan McMahon is embarking on his seventh major league season (counting a cup of coffee in 2017). He’s a defensive standout, heir to Nolan Arenado as an elite Rockies third baseman. He sports a career 89 wRC+. He also hit a ball tremendously hard in spring training, so now it’s time to dream on him as a power threat, or at least an above-average offensive player.

The list of the hardest-hit balls in spring training is filled with hitters you’d expect to see. Giancarlo Stanton places both first and third. Oneil Cruz makes an appearance in the top 10. Jordan Walker, who ascended to the major leagues on the back of his raw power, is in the top five. Franmil Reyes and Franchy Cordero, both of whom have power to spare, place highly. Then there’s McMahon, who smashed a grounder at a shocking 117.8 mph, the second-hardest-hit batted ball that Statcast recorded all spring. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals have put themselves in a bit of a bind. They take sustainability seriously, building to compete both now and tomorrow. They never rebuild, never go all in, and always balance the present and future responsibly. If your goal is to win forever, you have to think about more than just the next year when you make a decision. For all that focus on long-term planning, though, they have a lackluster rotation, and it’s slated to get a lot worse after this year.

Of St. Louis’ top five starting options, only one, Steven Matz, came into the spring under contract for 2024. That might not be a problem if there were a heaping helping of starting pitching prospects knocking on the door to the major league clubhouse, but there aren’t. Gordon Graceffo isn’t far off, and if you’re willing to do a lot of projecting, Tink Hence might be major league ready before too long, but the up-and-down fifth starters and swingmen with live arms that other teams use to bulk up their starting rotation in times of need don’t really exist here.

Now, the Cardinals have two starters under contract for 2024 after signing Miles Mikolas to a contract extension that will pay him $40 million for the 2024 and ’25 seasons, as Derrick Goold first reported. That doesn’t exactly create a complete 2024 starting rotation, but it’s twice as many pitchers as St. Louis had before last Friday. Bam, problem solved! Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, we looked at the teams in the bottom half of the league’s rotations. Now to close out the positional power rankings, we look at the game’s best.

Welcome to the last installment of our positional power rankings (well, other than tomorrow’s summary post). We’ve saved the best for last, whether you’re looking for total projected WAR or stars named. The best pitchers in baseball are increasingly pitching together, leading to two- and even three-star team-ups that dot the top of our rankings. It’s still an overall squad ranking, though, which means the teams that emerge on top combine stars with depth that can chip in either to the back of the rotation or higher up if injuries demand it.

Oh, yeah: injuries play a big part in this year’s list. Whether it’s the Yankees and their strange mix of depth and uncertainty, the Rangers signing a trio of talented but oft-injured starters, or the Brewers hoping to get enough innings from the top end of their rotation to buy time to figure out the bottom, how the depth chart shakes out and how many innings the top starters pitch will determine who ends up getting the most out of their starters this year. It’s not even just injuries to stars; health matters for depth options too, as teams invariably find out when they’re calling James Shields in August to see if he’s available. Read the rest of this entry »