Earlier this year, Diamond Sports Group declared bankruptcy. That dry corporate action, precipitated by a huge debt burden, is starting to have real world consequences. This Tuesday, DSG missed a payment to the San Diego Padres, as Alden Gonzalez first reported for ESPN. That terminated the contract between Bally Sports (a Diamond subsidiary) and the Padres. By Wednesday, the Padres were off of Bally and broadcasting their own games via Major League Baseball.

That’s a pretty big escalation in what until now felt like a slow-moving situation. In fact, in bankruptcy court, Rob Manfred testified that the league received less than one day’s notice of this missed payment. “[They told us] less than 24 hours before they were going to go off the air that they were going to stop broadcasting Padres games,” he said. (Diamond’s lawyers have contested that timeline.) That led to the Padres terminating their contract with Bally Sports, naturally enough, and to MLB stepping in to broadcast games.

It’s no accident that the league was ready to wade into daily game production. They hired Billy Chambers, formerly a Fox Sports and Diamond Sports executive, as executive vice president of Local Media earlier this year. Hiring a regional sports network executive is a pretty good way to start building your own regional sports capabilities, and the league appears to have moved quickly here. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Olson is striking out a lot. Exactly 30% of the time, to be precise. His swinging strike rate has never been higher. He’s only posted a lower contact rate once, in his disastrous 2020 campaign. Obviously, then, you know how he’s doing this year: incredibly well. His 140 wRC+ is the second-best mark of his career. Clearly, something interesting is going on, so let’s take a look at what it might be.

Honestly, the strikeouts are nothing new for Olson. His career 24.1% strikeout rate isn’t ideal for a top-tier hitter, particularly one with limited defensive value. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of his game. You can succeed while striking out a lot, but you have to do a lot of other things well to strike out a quarter of the time and be a great hitter.

Throughout his career, Olson has mostly done that. Take his 2019 season, when he struck out 25.2% of the time. He hit for a ton of power – even playing in the cavernous Coliseum, his ISO was in the top 15 in the majors – and walked enough to post a reasonable OBP. But you can see the downside easily. Consider 2022, for example. Olson again struck out roughly a quarter of the time – 24.3% – and walked a similar amount. He again posted a top-15 ISO; a lower number, to be sure, because 2022 had far fewer homers than 2019. But he ran a .274 BABIP, and that along with the fact that he was playing in a better offensive environment but putting up similar numbers meant he was only 20% above average rather than 35% above average.

Seen next to each other, these two seasons explain the chief worry with Olson. Without much change in his underlying skills, he was only 20% above average offensively last year:

That’s still a nice player, but a first baseman with that kind of batting line is hardly an All-Star. It was the 13th-best batting line for a first baseman in the majors, hardly better than his replacement in Oakland, Seth Brown. That’s the kind of tightrope that a player with Olson’s skill set is always walking; a slight dip in power or BABIP can be the difference between average and excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a big year for the MLB rulebook. After decades of tiny incremental changes, the league made three huge ones in 2023. They instituted a pitch timer, changed the size of the bases, and restricted defensive positioning for the first time in modern history. But how have these new rules changed how the game looks on the field? I broke down each one to find out.

Games Are Shorter

The biggest change to the game this year was the introduction of a pitch timer, and it’s had a huge impact on game length. Per Baseball Reference, the average nine-inning game has lasted two hours and 37 minutes this year, down from three hours and three minutes last year. You have to go back to 1985 to find a shorter average game length.

Despite that drastic change, the amount of action in a game hasn’t changed much. Plate appearances per game are roughly unchanged: there are 75.6 this year, quite close to the 76.4 average in the 21st century. Pitcher per plate appearance are stable: 3.9 this year, 3.9 for the last 10 years on average.

The difference is all pace. Per Statcast, pitchers are taking three fewer seconds to throw with the bases empty and 4.5 fewer seconds to throw with a runner on base. The bases-empty change is welcome but only gets us back to the numbers that prevailed 15 years ago or so. The change with runners on base is far more important; we’ve likely never seen a faster pace when pitchers are holding runners, though the data only goes back to 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another installment of my weekly look at the plays and players that caught my eye. As usual, thanks go to Zach Lowe, who pioneered the concept for ESPN and is one of my favorite sports columnists. This week’s edition features fakes galore, a fun underdog story, outfield defense both good and bad, and a heaping helping of the Braves, Dodgers, and Rays. Let’s get to it.

1. Willy Adames, Dekemaster General
Baseball players love to pull off fun and unusual plays. You can see it in their faces when something unique happens. As far as I can tell from my last few years of baseball viewing, there’s no one this is more true of than Willy Adames. He’s a corner case waiting to happen, and I can’t get enough of it.

Here’s an example from recent memory: Adames is always ready to deceive the runner at second base after a steal. Tommy Edman stole second base against the Brewers earlier this month, getting such a clean jump off of Corbin Burnes that the catcher had no chance to nab him:

That’s a great play by Adames just to reel in the throw, which could easily have flown into center field. It wasn’t a particularly impactful time to keep Edman from reaching third base, what with two outs in the inning and all, but every 90 feet helps. But after making that spectacular play, Adames tried to make an even more spectacular one. He started gesturing towards the outfielder as if to say he’d lost the ball:

Read the rest of this entry »

If Nolan Gorman were filling out a hitting resume this year, he might struggle with the “weaknesses” section. “I care too much,” he might have to settle for, or “my teammates say I have trouble letting go after work.” It would have to be one of those silly platitudes; he’s in the midst of an admirably complete season. It’s not just his .301/.392/.636 slash line, though that’s great. He’s been good against four-seam fastballs, good against sinkers, good against curveballs, good against cutters and changeups; the only pitch he’s struggled with even a little bit is the slider, and he’s still roughly average there. He’s hitting for power and average, taking his walks, and even holding his own against opposing lefties.

That balance is all the more impressive because it’s a 180-degree turn from last year’s campaign. Gorman’s 2022 ended in disappointment. He was called up to the majors in mid-May and briefly found everyday playing time, but by season’s end, the bloom was off the rose. He slumped badly down the stretch, posting a .138/.219/.310 batting line in September, and was demoted to Triple-A before season’s end.

What went wrong? This:

And this:

And this:

Yes, Gorman had trouble with high fastballs. “Trouble” is understating it, really. He was downright atrocious against four-seamers. He ran an 18.3% swinging-strike rate against them (counting foul tips). Edwin Díaz, the best closer on earth, got swinging strikes on 18% of his four-seamers. We’re talking Joey Gallo territory among hitters, or lost-phase Keston Hiura. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard for me to explain how much I enjoy watching Mookie Betts hit. He has an air of quiet confidence that reminds me of how I feel when I’m at my very best. That slider, low and tight? He doesn’t need it, so he’s ignoring it. Fastball away? Eh, he’ll find something better to attack. Then that perfect pitch comes by, and he springs into action, trading his air of barely concealed boredom for ferocity.

Luis Robert Jr. is a joy to watch as well, but for completely different reasons. He’s a coiled spring at the plate, waiting to burst into action. He’s one of the best athletes in all of baseball and at times one of the best players, period. His phenomenal bat control and speed let him feast on pitches all over the plate and even off of it, and you can see it in his statistical record: few walks, huge swing rates, and a minor strikeout problem that was minor only because of his rare combination of power and contact.

Betts and Robert have been very different players in their respective major league careers. But they share one distinction this year: they’re the two players who have cut back on their fastball swing rates the most. They’re numbers one and two with a bullet:

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »