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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The week before Christmas, I conducted an investigation into the Giants’ strange sinker-ballers. Logan Webb and Alex Wood enjoyed spectacular years, and they both did it using sinkers they released from a low starting point, which created a unique look for batters.

You probably didn’t read that article, and that’s okay. It was the peak of the holiday season. You were likely out in the world like me – seeing family, drinking eggnog-flavored coffee beverages, and generally making up for last year. My consumption of baseball media went way down, and I do this for a living.

As a self-interested person, I suggest you go back and read that article. I thought it was pretty good! More importantly, though, I’ve been doing more research into what the heck a “flat sinker” even is. The concept just doesn’t fit into my brain, and when that happens, I like to hit myself over the head with data until something clicks. So today, please enjoy some random things I’ve researched while trying to understand why in the world “flat” (approach angle) and “sinker” (pitch type) coexist. Read the rest of this entry »

For nearly a decade, you couldn’t go a week in the offseason without seeing an article about the American League’s dominance over the National League in interleague play. I know – I was already a rabid consumer of Hot Online Baseball Takes™ at the time and drove myself to distraction trying to find reasons to believe or disbelieve it. But it was interesting! The AL and NL split World Series roughly down the middle, but the AL kept winning interleague play and World Series games. Was it just a better league?

In 2018 and ’19, the trend flipped. The NL won the interleague season series in both of those years, which marked their first victories in that theoretical season-long series since 2002 and ’03. It had been quite a while, in other words.

By 2020, “who’s winning the interleague series” didn’t feel as interesting, and the unique pandemic-shortened schedule drove that point home even more surely. Due to geographically-divided schedules, there were nearly as many interleague games in 2020 as there were in ’19 (298 league-wide as compared to the standard 300 on the schedule every year since 2013), despite playing a 60-game season rather than 162. Not only that, but there wasn’t the usual rotation of opponents and rivalries. Instead, each division played its opposite-league counterpart. Read the rest of this entry »