Coming into 2022, Mike Yastrzemski was something of a cipher. Was he a late bloomer who suddenly learned how to hit? From 2019 through the 2021 All Star break, he was excellent, to the tune of a .266/.350/.514 slash line, a 128 wRC+, and 48 homers in 932 plate appearances. Or was he old news, a flash in the pan that pitchers developed a counter for? In the second half last year, he hit .212/.281/.483, struck out nearly 30% of the time, and generally looked like the career minor leaguer he’d been before 2019.

This year, he’s been back on track, and it’s largely been due to a better on-base percentage. Some of that is striking out less; he’s turned in a career-low swinging-strike rate and career low strikeout rate to go along with it. Just as importantly, though, he’s doing better on balls in play, and doing so partially by bunting — something of a San Francisco specialty this year.

In the first 300 games of his career, Yastrzemski bunted ten times. That generally tracks; he’s not particularly fast and hits for power. Why would he do anything other than clock balls over the fence — or, in spacious Oracle Park, into triples alley and off the wall? In fact, you might think that 10 bunts was 10 too many, if it weren’t for the fact that he turned six of them into hits.

This year, he’s put that plan into overdrive, with three bunt hits already after a third of a season. He’s been part of a concerted San Francisco bunting effort so far this year. The team has gone after shifts that don’t respect bunting ability by targeting them early and often, and its captain, Brandon Belt, is something of a bunting enthusiast himself. In fact, the Giants lead baseball in bunt hits, with 11, despite having exactly zero of the 75 fastest runners in baseball this year, per Statcast’s sprint speed leaderboard.
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I have something of an annual tradition here at FanGraphs. Once a year, give or take, I write about how Yordan Alvarez is underrated. I can’t help it; he continues to be one of the very few best hitters in baseball, and he continues to get less credit than he deserves. Now, though, he doesn’t need credit, because he has cash — $115 million worth, to be precise — as he and the Astros agreed to a contract extension that will keep him in Houston through 2028:

Slugger Yordan Álvarez and the Houston Astros are in agreement on a six-year, $115 million contract extension, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Contract kicks in next season. Biggest contract ever for a DH and $26M/year for 3 FA years. And Astros lock up a great hitter.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 3, 2022

Even though I just mentioned what an excellent hitter Alvarez is, it bears repeating. This year, he’s hitting a scorching .295/.391/.624, good for a 192 wRC+, second in baseball. He’s doing it without a ludicrous BABIP; in fact, his .280 mark looks likely to increase as the season goes on. That makes his offensive production all the more remarkable; it’s easy to post a hot batting line if you’re BABIP’ing .400, but Alvarez does it the old-fashioned way, with walks and extra-base hits.

How does Alvarez get to that massive production? By obliterating the baseball consistently. He’s barreled up a whopping 19.1% of his batted balls this year. That’s Stantonian power, or even a bit better; Stanton checks in at 17.2% since the start of the 2015 season, for example. Since Alvarez came up in 2019, he’s sixth in baseball in barrel rate (among hitters with at least one season qualifying for the batting title), and the guys in front of him are a who’s who of enormous power hitters:

This list does a good job of explaining the possible highs and lows of Alvarez’s production, but it leaves something out. One way to rack up barrels is to be powerful and almost exclusively hit fly balls. Sanó, Gallo, and Sánchez get to theirs that way. So, too, does Trout. He’s become increasingly fly ball-heavy in recent years in an attempt to tap into his power.
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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.
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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.
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