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Here’s something you probably already knew about me, or at least inferred: I love baseball. It would be hard and unsatisfying doing this job otherwise. Here’s something you might not have known, though: I don’t actually attend that many games. I watch tons of games on TV, and I spend tons of time analyzing individual snippets, but that doesn’t leave much time to go to the ballpark, grab a seat, and take in a game.

Last Thursday, I made some time. My mom is in town visiting, and the Giants were playing the Diamondbacks in a day game — Logan Webb against Zac Gallen, two excellent pitchers facing each other in a game that didn’t have a ton of playoff implications. My wife was able to squeeze in a bit of time away from work, so the three of us got cheap seats down the left field line, bought nachos and beer, and sat down for a relaxing afternoon.

The game writ large wasn’t particularly interesting. Webb didn’t have it; he didn’t strike out a single batter, and the Diamondbacks blooped and lined their way to five runs against him. Gallen was dealing; he went 7.1 strong innings with 12 strikeouts and nary a walk. Final score: 5–0, visitors. But baseball is amazing! In that boring, snooze-worthy game, I found four fascinating individual plays to talk about. So let’s talk about them, by themselves, without any need for a connection to the season as a whole.
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If you want to play a game you probably won’t win, watch a reliever you haven’t heard of pitch one inning and try to decide if they’re good. I don’t want to say it’s impossible, because that’s not quite the case, but it’s phenomenally difficult. Do they throw hard? Probably, because most relievers do now. Do they have a secondary pitch that makes hitters look like they’re playing baseball for the first time? Probably, because trying to hit a slider when you just saw a fastball is one of the hardest things to do in sports.

The eye test isn’t enough. What’s worse, the results test isn’t enough. Reliever ERAs are unreliable across whole seasons, never mind a single week or month. One seeing-eye single, or one down-the-middle cookie that gets fouled back instead of pummeled to Kalamazoo, can completely change a pitching line. Even more “stable” statistics bounce around wildly in small samples; whether a reliever has their good slider working or not might be the difference between a three-strikeout outing or a few walks and a trip to the showers.

Why the long windup about how we can’t know how good pitchers are? Well, I’m pretty sure Guardians reliever Trevor Stephan is good, whatever the sample size. I know what I just said… but, look at his pitches, will you?
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Coming into the year, expectations were high in Arlington. The Rangers, fresh off of a 100-loss season, went big in free agency, bringing in Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Jon Gray. They shopped in the second tier of free agents as well, signing Martín Pérez, Garrett Richards, Brad Miller, and Kole Calhoun to short-term deals. Trades brought in more starters: Mitch Garver joined the team this spring, and last year’s Joey Gallo trade netted several potential contributors in Ezequiel Duran, Josh H. Smith, and Glenn Otto.

Depending on how you weigh the contributions of those last three, that’s something like nine new players. It didn’t make the Rangers overnight playoff contenders – we gave them a 75-win projection and an 8% chance of reaching the playoffs before the season started – but it felt like the opening salvo of a new contender. Sign your free agents when you can get them, supplement them with a burgeoning farm system headlined by top prospect Josh Jung, and pretty soon, you’ve got a stew going.

A lot can change in a few months. This week, the Rangers ownership group, led by majority owner Ray Davis, delivered a clear sign that they aren’t happy with the way things are going. On Monday, they relieved manager Chris Woodward of his duties. Woodward had overseen some down years in Texas after taking over before the 2019 season. He’d shepherded this team adequately, at least as far as wins and losses go; we’re currently projecting the Rangers for 72.5 wins, basically the same as their preseason expectation, and it’s not like we were outliers in that projection; pretty much everyone around pegged them in the 70-75 win range.
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Speculating about the playoffs in August always feels strange. The regular season isn’t over. It isn’t nearly over, either – the 45 or so games remaining on each team’s schedule will change how we think about them. The best two records in baseball belong to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros right now, but some team could go 35-10 and wrest that title away from them.

Still, today I’m going to speculate about the playoffs. Whether the Dodgers and Astros hold onto their top spots or not, they’re both playoff locks – our Playoff Odds give them both 100% odds of reaching the postseason. In the past week, they’ve also each gotten rotten injury news that will affect their playoff rosters. So suspend your inherent skepticism of articles in August that talk about October as we consider the playoff impact of losing Walker Buehler and Michael Brantley. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sunday afternoon, Drew Rasmussen had everything working. For eight innings, his fastball/cutter combination kept Orioles batters off balance, with intermittent sliders only deepening their confusion. The first 24 Orioles to come to the plate walked away empty-handed. It took Rasmussen just 79 pitches to navigate those eight innings. He was on course for both a perfect game and a Maddux, and the Orioles looked unlikely to stop him.

They managed to break through. Jorge Mateo led off the ninth inning by lacing a double down the third base line. He advanced on a groundout, then scored on a wild pitch. Rasmussen didn’t even manage a complete game; after Brett Phillips reached on a dropped third strike, Kevin Cash went to the bullpen for the last two outs of the game. It wasn’t the crowning achievement for Rasmussen that it might have been, but this season has been a success nonetheless, and a near-perfecto presents a great excuse to examine what’s gone right.

I last checked in on Rasmussen after his first start this season, when he adopted a new sweeping slider and threw it a ton. In 2021, he’d been a fastball-first pitcher with a slider that changed shape as he worked on it throughout the year. In 2022, he came out featuring the slider, with a new cutter to boot. Would 2022 be the year of the sweeper for Rasmussen?

As it turns out, not so much. His first few starts represented a local high in slider usage, and he’s been leaning on the pitch less and less since. He’s filled in that gap by going back to his high-octane fastball and by trusting that new cutter:

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On Wednesday, the Detroit Tigers fired general manager Al Avila. Mired in last place in the American League Central in what was supposed to be a resurgent season, the firing fit the mood around Detroit. This was meant to be the Tigers’ triumphant return to postseason contention, a culmination of seven years of stockpiling and honing. Instead, it’s been another lost season, adding to the gulf that separates today’s Tigers from the perennial World Series contenders of a decade ago.

It didn’t have to happen this way. Going into the year, we projected the Tigers as a 76-win team. That projection felt conservative; they won 77 games in 2021 and added Javier Báez and Eduardo Rodriguez to a promising core of young talent. Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal, and Matt Manning all stood ready to anchor the rotation. Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene, two of the top prospects in all of baseball, would give the offense a boost. On the eve of the season, they added Austin Meadows. All of the arrows were pointing up.

Four months later, all of that optimism has disappeared. Báez is having one of his worst years as a professional. Rodriguez got hurt early in the year and then hit the restricted list while dealing with a personal matter. He last pitched in the majors on May 18; when he took the mound for Single-A Lakeland this past Saturday, it was his first game action since June 9. Meadows, the third piece of the team’s major league talent trifecta, has missed extended time with a laundry list of injuries, and playing hurt when available has resulted in sub-replacement-level production.

That alone would hurt the offense, but it gets worse. Torkelson, who came into the season as our fifth-ranked prospect overall, made the Opening Day roster. To put it mildly, things haven’t gone according to plan since. His .197/.282/.295 line led to a demotion to Triple-A, where he’s also scuffled. Greene broke his foot in spring training and hasn’t lit the world on fire since joining the big league club in June. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a spray chart of Manny Machado’s groundballs this year:

And here’s a heat map of all of the grounders he’s hit in his career:

Oh, hi there. Don’t worry, you haven’t inadvertently stepped into a list of every player’s batted ball tendencies. Part of writing is building a sense of mystery. I’m just setting you up for a payoff later on. Whoops, gave that one away too easily! In any case, let’s move on. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a one-number kind of analyst, Teoscar Hernández is having an unremarkable season. After posting a 132 wRC+ last year, he’s back at it with a 129 mark this year. His overall batting line is down – .274/.326/.495 compared to .296/.346/.524 in 2021 – but between playing all of his home games in Toronto instead of Dunedin and Buffalo and the overall decline in league-wide offense, he’s been roughly the same hitter relative to league average in both years.

If you look at his underlying rates, you still won’t see much difference. Hernández is walking 0.5 percentage points more often this season than last season. He’s striking out 1.4 percentage points more often. He’s running a similar ISO, a similar BABIP, and a similar barrel rate. But zoom in juuust a little bit and things splinter:

Here’s one story you could tell about his season: he scuffled to start the year, made some adjustments that righted the ship somewhat but resulted in too many strikeouts, and finally dialed things in. You wouldn’t even necessarily be wrong; descriptively, those things all happened. Under the hood, though, Hernández made a big adjustment, one you won’t see in that data. Read the rest of this entry »