Do you know the pitcher with the highest swinging-strike rate in all of baseball this year? Well, it’s Jacob deGrom, no surprises there; it’s such an obvious answer that I probably didn’t need to ask. But do you know the pitcher with the second-highest swinging-strike rate? It’s Raisel Iglesias, and the Angels’ closer has been impressive so far this season, even if his run prevention numbers don’t quite show it yet.

If I could see only one pitching statistic, I’d choose swinging-strike rate. That’s not to say that nothing else matters; that’s decidedly not the case, and there are easy examples of both pitchers who miss bats but aren’t effective and pitchers who are effective without missing bats. But as a first pass, swinging strikes are great. Everything else is contextual. Called strike? That’s because the batter didn’t swing. Foul? It’s not always worth a strike. Groundball? The batter could hit it through the defense or find a gap. A swing and miss is absolute.

You probably don’t need to hear that. Whiffs have been the premium currency of pitching for a long time, long before we had the pitch-level data to track them accurately. I merely thought I’d mention it, because wow does Iglesias miss a lot of bats.

Most closers operate with a common template. Throw a really good fastball — a really good fastball — and spot an unhittable secondary pitch off of it. It’s not always about velocity, though it often is. But it’s almost always about a fastball and one pitch spotted off of it — a guessing game for the hitter with two bad answers.

Iglesias is that pitcher, kind of. Against righties, he relies on a four-seam fastball and a devastating slider. He mixes in a smattering of two-seamers and changeups, but mostly for show; more than 80% of his pitches are fastballs or sliders. Against lefties, Iglesias also relies on two pitches: his fastball and changeup. He throws each of them roughly 40% of the time, with sinkers and sliders comprising the remainder of his offerings.
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The major league season can seem interminable at times, but July marks a pivot from a stately march into a playoff chase. There are several milestones in the month — the halfway point of the season, the All-Star break, and so on — but the rubber doesn’t really hit the road until the trade deadline. By July 31 (or, this year, July 30), teams have to decide what their plans are for the rest of the year, and often future years as well. Buy? Sell? Hedge? The hot stove can determine the course of seasons, and we’re here to help you follow it.

FanGraphs has myriad tools that can help you figure out deadline targets, potential team weaknesses, and even who should be buying and selling. Let’s take a tour of those tools, because articles about which team should trade for which reliever might feed you for a day, but generating your own lists will feed you for a lifetime — so long as you derive sustenance from knowing which relievers and players on expiring contracts will most help your squad. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I took a look at the worst bunts of the season. They were all horrible! Balls were hit directly at fielders, lead runners were thrown out, and altogether the worst five bunts produced eight outs and no base advancements. Not great! But that’s only one side of the coin, and today I’d like to look at the bunts that have helped the batting team most so far this year.

You’ll notice that there aren’t any textbook sacrifice bunts on either list. That’s no knock on skilled bunters, but rather a function of the way I’m defining best and worst. Bunts, by their very nature, are hedges. They reduce volatility by definition — exchanging an out for some base advances is neither the worst nor best outcome of a given plate appearance, so a successful sacrifice bunt will inherently have a modest change in win probability relative to a play where something goes very right or very wrong.

Even so, today isn’t solely a showcase of bad defense. There’s some bad defense, but there’s also plenty of bunting for a hit. When you change the math by giving yourself a chance to reach base, bunts become far more valuable. It’s hard to greatly increase your team’s chances of winning while also making an out, so separating the sacrifice from the bunt is a prerequisite for having one of the most valuable bunts of the year.

For the most part, the plays on this list are all baseball being played at a high level. There are some defensive howlers, sure, but there’s plenty of skill here on both sides of the ball. Let’s take a look at the bunts that have helped out the most this year (through June 9), starting with an honorable mention.
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One of the bigger on-field stories of the 2021 season has been which pitchers are using foreign substances, and how much help they’re getting from it. Whether it’s Giovanny Gallegos and hat-gate, Gerrit Cole’s word salad about Spider Tack, or Trevor Bauer’s wildly fluctuating spin rate, what pitchers do to the ball has been a hot topic. Yesterday, the league opened a new chapter in the saga when they released a memo that details a drastically increased enforcement policy, one that promises more suspensions than seemed imaginable only a year ago.

The new rule is draconian and more or less without exception. If a pitcher is caught with foreign substances on the ball or on their person, they’ll be immediately ejected from the game. They’ll also be automatically suspended. The memo, which FanGraphs obtained a copy of, doesn’t specify a suspension length. It does tie the suspensions to the existing rules and past precedent, however, which suggests a 10-game suspension with pay for any violations, a figure the league made explicit in its press release.

“Any foreign substance” is a massive change from the way baseball is currently played. The rule is intended, at least in theory, to crack down on synthetic grip enhancers, such as Spider Tack, that create huge increases in grip strength and spin rate. Pitchers have used lower-potency grip enhancers for years; mixing sunscreen and rosin or dabbing pine tar on the fingertips are both time-tested practices. Read the rest of this entry »

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Here at FanGraphs, we’re always looking for an excuse to paraphrase Tolstoy, so let me introduce you to a principle I’ve recently noticed about sacrifice bunts. Successful sacrifice bunts are all alike (and boring). Every unsuccessful sacrifice bunt is unsuccessful in its own way. Let’s talk about the worst sacrifice bunts of the year and explore the myriad “own ways” you can fail.

First, some ground rules. I’m looking at every bunt through June 9; that’s the last day I pulled data for. (Don’t you worry: I don’t need an excuse to write about future bad bunts later this year.) I’m ranking them based on win probability added. I’m considering the results of the play, not just the decision to call for a bunt in the first place. That might be more theoretically useful, but it’s a lot less fun; we want to watch bunt train wrecks, not debate the finer points of ex-ante strategy. The worst bunting decision of the year is arguable, and dependent on many factors which can be hard to pin down. The worst result? It’s pretty clear, as you’ll see.
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On Wednesday night, Nick Madrigal hit a groundball to third base. That’s a normal state of affairs; he’s fourth in the majors in total grounders so far this year. While hustling down the line, however, he tweaked something in his leg and pulled up slightly. It looked like it might be a nagging injury, but the truth turned out to be far worse: Madrigal was diagnosed with a complete tear of one hamstring tendon and a partial tear of another, and the Sox have placed him on the 60-day IL.

Madrigal and the club have a decision to make. A surgery to fix the tears would end his season. The earliest timeline for rehabilitation, though, would place him back on the roster around the end of August, and there’s no guarantee that rehab would go smoothly. The final decision on whether to opt for surgery won’t come this week, but in the meantime, it’s not too early to consider what it means for the AL Central-leading White Sox.

Whether batting at the top or bottom of the lineup, Madrigal had been a spark for Chicago this year. His contact-focused, all-fields grounder game doesn’t resemble the way that baseball is played in the major leagues today, but that doesn’t make it any less effective. Hitting everything you swing at and running like mad afterwards is an effective strategy, particularly when you don’t have power to rely on as a backup. It’s worked to the tune of a .305/.349/.425 line so far this year, good for a 118 wRC+.

Some of the component stats are downright hilarious. Madrigal’s 7.9% strikeout rate is absurd; his 5.1% walk rate is comparatively normal but still much lower than league average; his 3.03 GB/FB ratio ranks fourth in baseball. His 3.7% swinging-strike rate is second only to David Fletcher, and his 91.8% contact rate is the best mark in the majors. If you’re not going to hit the ball hard or at least in the air, you need to make up for it by putting a ton of balls in play, and Madrigal unquestionably does that.

Of greater concern to the White Sox than how he arrives at his offense, however, is how much offense he provides. That’s mostly covered by the 118 wRC+, and that’s a big chunk of offense to replace. Only eight players we list as second basemen have bested that mark, and that includes Max Muncy, Chris Taylor, and Jazz Chisholm Jr., who all get a decent amount of playing time elsewhere on the diamond.

That doesn’t take into account defense, and while defensive metrics don’t agree on Madrigal (UZR and OAA like him, DRS doesn’t), his speed and smooth work with the glove are universally praised by scouts and team executives, not to mention teammates. He looks to be a plus defender at the position, another tough thing to replace midseason.
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When Kevin Goldstein previewed each NL team’s trade deadline reach-out calls earlier this week, he listed a smorgasbord of available Marlins. Corey Dickerson, Jesús Aguilar, Miguel Rojas, Starling Marte; if you’re looking for a hitter, the Fish have you covered. Want to shore up your pitching and catching? Sandy León, Yimi García, and Ross Detwiler say hello.

If I were calling the Marlins, though, I’d be tempted to skip that extensive selection and order off-menu, as you might with Wondee Siam or, if you’re less of a cheap New York dining hipster, In-N-Out Burger’s well-known but unlisted selections. Forget those brand name offerings; I’d be interested in finding out what it costs to get John Curtiss.

Curtiss hasn’t been a Marlin for life. He’s not an under-appreciated gem they’ve nurtured through their farm system. In fact, he started in the Twins system and excelled in the minors before scuffling (15 IP, 7.20 ERA) in two brief call-ups. The Twins shipped him to the Angels to ease a roster crunch, the Angels granted him free agency, and a brief stop with the Phillies ended with 12 poor minor league innings and a release.

That’s not quite a fairy tale story, but then things got interesting: the Rays, who know a thing or two about finding undervalued relievers, entered the picture. He carved through the AL East in 2020, but got shelled in the postseason. With the Rays facing a 40-man roster crunch (water is wet, the sky is blue, and the Rays have too many viable major leaguers), they traded him to the Marlins in exchange for Evan Edwards, a fourth-round pick in 2019.

The general story — the Rays turn a pitcher they found on the ground into a valuable draft pick — favors Tampa Bay, but in this case, Curtiss looks like a diamond in the rough. He’s always had some juice — he throws a mid-90s four-seamer and an upper-80’s slider, and both pitches miss their fair share of bats. He put up 30% strikeout rates nearly every year in the minors, and that’s mostly continued in the bigs. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler O’Neill’s batting line doesn’t make any sense. I don’t mean that in a good or bad way, though I’m sure a line like his will elicit bad feelings in plenty of people. That line, just for the record, is .278/.309/.611, with a 2.6% walk rate and 34.2% strikeout rate. As you might surmise from the silly slugging percentage, he’s clubbed 13 home runs already this season, which would put him on pace for 52 in 600 plate appearances. True outcomes? Tyler O’Neill is a champion of truth.

Strikeouts and home runs have always gone together. Babe Ruth is the all-time true-outcome leader when compared to his era. But O’Neill kicks it into overdrive. Most sluggers use their prodigious power to get on base; they draw walks because pitchers are afraid to face them in the strike zone. O’Neill, again, is walking 2.6% of the time. That would be the worst rate in baseball if he qualified for the batting title, tied with Salvador Perez.

Nothing I’m saying here is particularly new. O’Neill’s 34.2% strikeout rate is virtually identical to his career mark. His 37.1% home run per fly ball rate will surely come down, but his career mark is 23.3%. His maximum exit velocity on the year is exactly identical to his previous career mark. Why write about him now? Read the rest of this entry »