You’ve probably seen Adam Cimber pitch before. It looks strange, like this:

Or fine, maybe you haven’t seen Cimber himself, but you’ve seen someone like him. Righty, low arm slot, baffles same-handed hitters despite an eight-handle fastball (that’s one with an average velocity in the 80s, for those of you who don’t speak obscure bond market jargon).

As you’d expect, Cimber has been far better against same-handed batters in his career. It’s not particularly close, either; he’s allowed a .315 wOBA to lefties compared to just a .275 to righties. That’s just the name of the game when you’re a soft-tossing sidearmer. Batters who get a good look at your delivery will give you fits.

There’s another reason that sidearmers don’t fare well against opposite-handed batters: Their arsenal just doesn’t match up very well. If you can think of one of these pitchers, they probably throw a predictable mix of fastballs and sliders. It’s simply the natural arsenal from that arm slot. You can run fastballs in and mix in sliders that start out headed for the batter’s hip before ending in the opposite batter’s box. Read the rest of this entry »

At its core, hitting is about hitting fastballs. I’m not sure that’s a good thing – pitchers don’t throw as many fastballs as they used to, because they know that hitters are hunting fastballs. Look at the aggregate data, though, and it’s clear. So far this year, batters are 93 runs above average against fastballs, and naturally enough, 93 runs below average against all other pitches. Last year, they were 344 runs above average against fastballs. It’s a consistent pattern throughout baseball history. Ask a hitter, and they’ll probably tell you the same thing. You make your paycheck on fastballs, and you hope not to spend it all on everything else.

That’s not to say that it applies to all hitters equally. Mike Trout is a good secondary pitch hitter – he’s a great hitter overall. Rafael Devers might be a better secondary pitch hitter than he is a fastball hitter. The archetype exists, because, well, good hitters are good.

The opposite is true as well. Max Muncy has done almost all of his damage against fastballs throughout his career. So has Joey Votto, surprisingly enough – from 2018 to now, he’s been five runs below average against sliders, curveballs, changeups, and splitters combined. There’s no one way to be a great hitter – you can tattoo fastballs and live with the damage from everything else, hunt everything else and survive against fastballs, or find some happy medium.

I thought it would be fun to figure out who most embodies this “baseball is about hitting fastballs” lifestyle. In other words, I’m looking for a hitter who is good overall, but incredibly poor at handling secondary pitches. It won’t do to find someone who’s bad at hitting sliders because they’re just bad at hitting; Billy Hamilton is the worst slider hitter in baseball over the past five years (by run value per pitch seen), but well, he wasn’t in the majors for his hitting. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve watched any baseball highlights recently, you’ve probably seen a familiar face lashing line drives. Paul Goldschmidt has a 22-game hitting streak and 28 extra-base hits on the year, which makes him a regular in game recaps. That frequent loud contact has produced one of those hitting lines that makes it clear that we’re still early in the season: .352/.422/.626 screams “small sample!” as loudly as Dan Szymborski does every April.

Sure, that’s true. I don’t think that Goldschmidt is going to post a .402 BABIP on the season. I don’t think that he’s going to keep hitting homers on 18% of his fly balls while also hitting fly balls more frequently than he ever has, or posting a pristine strikeout rate while chasing more often than league average. But again, he’s hitting .352/.422/.626. He has plenty of space to cool off while still being red hot, so let’s look at how he’s setting himself up to succeed.

Want to hit a home run? Step one is to swing at a good pitch. Goldschmidt has done exactly that this year; the location and type of the pitches he’s hit for home runs look like a hitting textbook:

Hanging sliders, sinkers that don’t sink, and four-seamers all over the place? That’s how they teach it to you in slugger school.

When he makes contact, he’s pulling the ball more than ever. Eight of his 11 home runs have been pulled, with another two going to straightaway center. The lone exception? It was on that four-seam fastball away that you can see up above. Goldschmidt is, after all, still an excellent hitter, with enough power to hit the ball where it’s pitched. He’s simply picking inside and middle pitches and pulling them into the stands. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday afternoon, Juan Soto stepped up to the plate in the top of the first inning with a runner on first base. Soto, as he is wont to do, took the first pitch. He took the second pitch, too, as Kyle Freeland struggled with his command. Freeland relented and threw a slider over the heart of the plate, middle-away, hoping to sneak back into the count. Soto hit it 400 feet for a home run, putting the Nationals up 2-0.

When Soto batted to lead off the bottom of the fifth inning, Freeland was still pitching. Again, Soto got ahead 2-0. This time, Freeland was far more careful. He clipped the top of the zone with a fastball for a called strike one, then attempted to paint the corner low and away on his next pitch. He missed, and down 3-1, he threw another pitch low for ball four. Soto took his base, but the Nats couldn’t drive him home.

Why did Freeland challenge Soto in the first? Why did he change his approach in the fifth? I can’t read minds, but the decision seems fairly straightforward to me. In the first, Freeland didn’t have the luxury of pitching around Soto; a walk would put a runner in scoring position. In the fifth, the situation wasn’t quite so bad; a walk put a runner on base, which isn’t ideal, but there’s something primally scary about walking a runner to second.

That’s the theory, at least. It’s how I’ve understood baseball as long as I’ve watched it. Good hitter, base open, advantageous count? That hitter might as well send his bat back to the dugout, because he’ll rarely get a pitch to hit. Put that runner on first base, and the equation changes completely – now a walk hurts too much, and pitchers will take their chances in the strike zone.
Read the rest of this entry »

As you’re probably aware, Apple TV+ has stepped onto the baseball broadcasting scene this year, airing two games every Friday. They’re stylistically different from your average baseball broadcast, even at a glance. The colors look different, more muted to my eyes than the average broadcast. The score bugs are sleek, the fonts understated. The announcers are mostly new faces. And most interestingly, to me at least, the broadcast displays probabilities on nearly every pitch.

As a big old math nerd, I love probabilities. They appeal to something that feels almost elemental. Every time I watch a baseball game, I wonder how likely the next hitter up is to get a hit – or to reach base, or strike out, or drive in a run. It’s not so much that I want to know the future – probabilities can’t tell you that – but I would like to know whether the outcome I’m hoping for is an uphill battle or a near-certainty, and how the ongoing struggle of pitcher against hitter changes that.

The Apple TV+ broadcasts gets those probability numbers from nVenue, a tech startup that got its start in an NBC tech accelerator. According to an interview with CEO Kelly Pracht in SportTechie, the machine learning algorithm at the heart of nVenue’s product considers 120 inputs from the field of play in making each prediction.

Machine learning, if you weren’t aware, is a fancy way of saying “regressions.” It’s more than that, of course, but at its core, machine learning takes sample data and “learns” how to make predictions from that data. Those predictions can then be applied to new, out-of-sample events. Variations in initial conditions produce different predictions, which is why you can think of it as an advanced form of regression analysis; at its most basic, changes in some set of independent variables are used to predict a response variable (or variables). Read the rest of this entry »

Whether or not you’ve seen it, you likely know the premise of Freaky Friday. A mother and her daughter switch bodies in a great cosmic mixup, and hijinks ensue. Hello! Welcome to FanGraphs. I’m Ben Clemens, and today we’ll be covering classic teen cinema of the early 2000s (and mid-1970s), as personified by last night’s Giants-Mets game.

Tuesday night could have been just another day at the (beautiful, well-appointed) office for the Mets and Giants. After a comfortable win by New York in Monday’s series opener, the Giants returned the favor early in last night’s game. Chris Bassitt, the steadiest starter in a rotation buffeted by injuries, had his worst start of the year, surrendering eight earned runs in only 4.1 innings thanks to three homers, two by Joc Pederson. Logan Webb, meanwhile, cruised through five innings (six strikeouts, one walk, two runs), turning what was billed as a pitching duel into an 8-2 rout.

Teams don’t come back from six-run deficits. When Pederson launched his second homer, a two-run shot that pushed the score to 8-2, the Giants’ win expectancy climbed to 98.2%. Tune into 50 games, and you might see the trailing team pull one out. The Mets behaved accordingly; they brought in Stephen Nogosek, the last reliever in their bullpen, to eat some innings.

That’s the way the game could have ended – but let’s get back to Freaky Friday. In 2021, the Giants won these games, whichever side of the 8-2 score they were on. They were both excellent and a team of destiny, and you have to win plenty of tough ones to end the regular season with 107 wins.
Read the rest of this entry »

“When you’re pitched away, take the ball to the opposite field.” It’s a training mantra that seemingly exists everywhere. I heard it in Little League. I hear it on major league broadcasts to this day. The data show that hitters do it, and it’s just a natural swing. I can think of few hitting sayings I believe more than this one.

Of course, just because you can hit the ball the other way doesn’t mean you have to. Over the last two years, the list of righty hitters who have pulled the ball most when they swing at away pitches (from right-handed pitchers, just to standardize the sample) probably matches your intuition:

You basically understand the kinds of hitters on here. The guys ranked sixth and seventh are similar types: Salvador Perez and Mike Zunino. It’s big boppers who try to lift and pull the ball no matter where they’re pitched, as well as guys like Marcus Semien who sell out to pull in an attempt to juice their power. If you do the most damage on the pull side and accrue most of your offensive value through power, it’s a natural approach. You think anyone’s coming to the ballpark to see Patrick Wisdom slap a well-placed cutter the other way? They want dingers!

The list of the hitters who pull the ball least often when pitched away is mostly who you’d expect, and also not who you’d expect at all. Feast your eyes on the top five:

The top four are contact-oriented hitters with elevated groundball rates… and the fifth might be the most powerful baseball player in history. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees had the third-best bullpen in baseball last year, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that had changed this year. Last season’s two best relievers, Jonathan Loáisiga and Chad Green, have combined for 0 WAR and an ERA above 5.00, and Green will miss the rest of the season due to injury. Their highest-paid reliever, Aroldis Chapman, has lost more velocity and is recording strikeouts at a below-average clip. Their big speculative offseason addition, Miguel Castro, is below replacement level.

Naturally, they have the second-best bullpen in baseball in 2022. Michael King, who I recently wrote about, is the headliner so far this year, but he’s hardly alone. Clarke Schmidt, who profiles as a starter long-term, has looked good. Wandy Peralta is a competent lefty specialist. And that brings us to King’s running mate, the other best reliever on the Yankees: Clay Holmes.

Holmes is hardly new to the majors. He toiled in obscurity with the Pirates for years, walking too many to take advantage of his grounder-inducing sinker. Then the Yankees got their hands on him, and he turned that sinker into an entire identity, filling the zone and letting the chips fall where they may. Read the rest of this entry »

This Wednesday, Corbin Burnes had a forgettable start. In six innings, he allowed four runs and struck out five while walking none. The scoring came courtesy of two home runs, a three-run shot by Austin Riley and a solo homer by Marcell Ozuna. Burnes lasted six innings, and while the Brewers ended up winning the game 7-6 in extras, it wasn’t exactly the kind of start you expect from the defending NL Cy Young winner.

Last year, Burnes was downright electric en route to winning the award. He led the NL in ERA at 2.43, and his ERA was significantly higher than his 1.63 FIP. He struck out 35.6% of the batters he faced while walking only 5.2%. He did it in only 28 starts and 167 innings, which raised questions about the trade-off between transcendent pitching and bulk innings.

If you only looked at his first and most recent starts of 2022, you might think the same thing was happening again. You’ve already heard about the most recent one; in his first start, he went five innings against the Cubs, allowed three earned runs, and struck out only four while walking three. Sure, the runs were uncharacteristic, but five and six inning starts? We’ve seen that before. Read the rest of this entry »