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If you wanted to design a puzzle to attract my interest, you couldn’t do much better than pitchers who throw both sinkers and four-seamers. I love thinking about pitching. I love thinking about fastball spin, and I’ve been having a blast looking at approach angle recently. Want to kick it into overdrive, though? Add in platoon splits, and we’re really cooking with gas.

One of those weird, of-course-this-exists-but-we-don’t-talk-about-it splits is groundball pitchers against flyball hitters and vice versa. I first learned about this split in The Book, and while it’s always made sense, Alex Chamberlain put it into a pretty picture recently that brought it back to mind for me:

fly ball hitters perform better against ground ball pitchers, and ground ball hitters perform better against fly ball pitchers

(y-axis: pitcher influence on launch angle
x-axis: hitter LA, absent pitcher influence
colors: hitter wOBAcon bins) pic.twitter.com/K43Kj868T5

— Alex "Oxlade" Chamberlain (@DolphHauldhagen) January 21, 2022

There are some terms you might not know on there, like pitcher influence on launch angle. For that, you should read Alex’s work on launch angle here. Honestly, you should probably just read all of Alex’s stuff anyway – but particularly for this, his work is invaluable.

The key takeaway here? Against groundball hitters, sinkers are an excellent choice of pitch. The hitter tends to hit the ball into the ground and sinkers generally influence launch angles downward. The result is frequently a grounder, which is great for the defense. Similarly, if you’re facing a fly ball hitter, you want them to hit it even higher into the air, which means a four-seamer with solid rise is the ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

After more than a month of silence, talks between the league and the Players Association have finally heated up. Over the past week, the parties have exchanged proposals and counters, a welcome change from the negotiations’ previously slow pace; 42 days elapsed between the owners’ initiation of the lockout and their first proposal to the MLBPA. Yesterday, the two sides reportedly focused their discussion on players who have not yet qualified for salary arbitration, a key sticking point in the negotiations. Let’s go through each of those proposals and see what they would do to change the way young players get paid.

Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that the two sides each recently dropped aspects of past proposals that the other disliked. The league had previously proposed changes to the arbitration system, including the elimination of the Super Two classification that allows some players to reach arbitration a year early, a non-starter with the union. The union had proposed an age-based free agency system that would shorten team control in many instances, which was similarly unpopular with the league. Each side dropped those long-shot ideas in this round of bargaining. Now, on to what was proposed yesterday.

First, both sides proposed instituting new salary minimums. The MLBPA suggested a new minimum salary of $775,000. The league countered with a tiered structure – $615,000 for players with less than one year of service time, $650,000 for players with between one and two years of time, and $700,000 for everyone else on a minimum salary.

“Players on a minimum salary” might not sound like a key part of the structure of baseball, but they absolutely are, as FanGraphs alum Travis Sawchik has covered. These players aren’t a huge part of the money, of course – “minimum” is a helpful word there. In 2021, teams spent roughly $3.842 billion on player salaries, per Spotrac. Minimum salaries accounted for roughly $289 million of that, or 7.5% of the total outlay. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, I suggested a change to line scores that I think would go a long way towards updating them for the modern era. I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the broad strokes of the change – how errors and hits are no longer the most useful two data points, and how extra-base hits can tell you a lot about how a game felt.

One thing I couldn’t do before last Friday: get thousands of passionate baseball fans to read my idea and suggest changes. I still like my idea – one-base hits and extra-base hits instead of hits and errors – but I liked tons of the suggestions that I received in the comments as well. Rather than rule by fiat, I thought it would be interesting to poll the same people who came up with all these great ideas on which one they like best.

To demonstrate each of the possible scoring solutions, I’m going to use the contest between the Astros and A’s that led off last Friday’s column. As a reminder, here’s the line score rendered in the current style (courtesy of Baseball Reference):
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I have a problem. I can’t stop writing about how good Luke Weaver can be, even as he continues to be just okay. Don’t believe me? The first article I ever wrote was titled “Why is Luke Weaver so Effective?” When he started strong in the 2019 season, I was back on the same nonsense again, this time with “Luke Weaver, Retooled and Reimagined.”

As soon as I wrote that, he strained his forearm and barely pitched again that year. He came back in 2020 and 2021 and scuffled – he managed a 4.53 FIP (4.61 xFIP) in 117.2 innings, but a low strand rate as part of a brutal 2020 led to an aggregate 5.28 ERA. And here I am again, writing about how Weaver can excel in 2022.

Why do I keep doing it? Because I keep believing it! I can tell you truthfully that I think he has the tools to be a second or third starter, even though he’s been more like a fourth or fifth option so far in his career. You might wonder how that’s the case – after all, he’s basically a two-pitch pitcher, he doesn’t throw particularly hard, and his changeup, easily his best pitch, got tattooed in ‘21. I’m here to tell you: you just have to believe.
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Admit it: you don’t like line scores. If you look at them, it’s only in passing, or to make yourself a little angry (the indignant kind) after a game your team lost. Nine hits, and we only scored two runs?!? The other team scored four runs on four hits?!? There ain’t no justice. They even made an error, and we kept a clean sheet! How could this have happened?

Of course, if you weren’t looking at a line score, you probably wouldn’t make either of those complaints, because it’s unlikely that which team made an error had that much of a bearing on the outcome. And that’s a shame, because the line score should be a great source of information. It’s an ingenious construction – tons of data conveyed in a compressed format. The inning-by-inning scoreline gives you the dramatic beats of the game – who scored when, whether it was a comeback or a wire-to-wire romp, and so on. The smattering of information on the right tells you roughly how the runs scored with great efficiency.

Or at least, it should tell you how the runs scored. The problem is, it really doesn’t. Take this one (courtesy of Baseball Reference), from an April 1 tilt between the Astros and Athletics:

The Astros barely out-hit the A’s. They played atrocious defense. They won by seven runs anyway. That’s because a single and a double (or a triple or a home run) count the same under “hits.” Meanwhile walks don’t count anywhere but errors, which occur far less frequently than walks and produce similar results, take up a third of the available real estate. Home runs matter more than either, and are nowhere to be found. Let’s look at a more complete tale of the tape for this game:

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Let’s start this one with the basics. What’s a four-seamer, and what’s a sinker? At their core, they’re both fastballs; the main difference between the two is in the grip. Place the seams perpendicular to your index and middle fingers? That’s a four-seamer – each finger crosses two seams. Place the seams parallel to the fingers? It’s a two-seamer or sinker – one seam per finger.

Of course, you could also define them by their movement. Does it have a ton of tail and not much ride? It’s a sinker. Does it mainly fight gravity with backspin, paired with far less tail? It’s a four-seamer. If you think of archetypical examples of each, it’s easy to tell the difference. Think Clayton Kershaw’s four-seamer – all backspin – and Adam Wainwright’s sinker – boring in on righties’ hands and knees.

Real life doesn’t operate in archetypes, though. Real life is messy. Statcast doesn’t get to stop the game after each pitch and ask a pitcher what he threw, and not every fastball is a textbook definition of its type. Plenty of pitchers throw both varieties of fastball, and they can look extremely similar, even with the benefit of high-speed cameras and piles of pitch data.

Want a practical example? You’re in luck – or, well, not really. I’ve walked you into wanting a practical example with my introduction, and that’s on purpose, because today I want to talk about Aaron Nola’s two fastballs. Nola, like many pitchers, throws a sinker and a four-seamer. Like many pitchers, he releases them from a consistent arm slot – a remarkably consistent arm slot, in fact:
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“Just platoon it.” Whenever a team has a weak spot in their lineup, that’s the first thing I think of. Limp left field production? Just sprinkle some platoon on it, and you could be living large. Second base got you down? You’re just one platoon away from competence, or even excellence if you play your cards right. Second base and left field are bad? Bam, platoon them both!

It isn’t actually that easy. If you want to deploy a platoon in the majors (as opposed to in theory, my favorite place to deploy platoons), you have to wrangle with reality, which is notoriously unforgiving. In that vein, this is an article I’m writing to remind myself how hard it is to run multiple platoons at once. It’s not necessarily a reason not to platoon. It’s not even a critique of platooning. It’s just that in my head, and potentially in yours, teams are passing up platoon spots left and right. Here are some reasons why that isn’t true.
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Brent Suter shouldn’t be this good. Honestly, he shouldn’t even be good, period. He throws a fastball in the mid-80s, and he throws it a lot. He complements it with a changeup and a curveball, but neither of those pitches are excellent. No, it’s mostly a slow fastball; among pitchers who threw at least 50 innings last year, Suter had the fourth-highest fastball frequency (77.1%). If you’re Richard Rodríguez (No. 2 on the list) or Jake McGee (No. 1), sure, fire away. But Brent Suter? It feels like a recipe for failure — and yet, it keeps working for him.

Why? I decided to investigate it, because frankly, I like oddities. Do you really need to read about how Max Scherzer succeeds by throwing multiple excellent pitches with pinpoint control? Probably not; he’s just great. But Suter throws BP fastballs and embarrasses hitters. Look at this:

That’s crazy — I didn’t know Jace Peterson could play first base!
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