If you want to figure out who the most fearsome power hitters in the majors are, you can consider any number of criteria. The longest home runs? The hardest-hit batted balls? Those both make some sense. The raw number of home runs? Sure, why not? Personally, I like to look at barrels per swing — how frequently a given batter converts a swing into loud contact.

That’s often what we’re asking when we think about sluggers. If you hit 30 bombs but do it by swinging frequently and putting the ball in the air with average raw, that’s not really what I’d consider a slugger. Similarly, if you almost never make contact, I don’t care too much what happens when you do. Turning swings into smashed baseballs? That’s pretty much what I want to see.

The statistic has the added bonus of mostly passing the sniff test. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Shohei Ohtani are in the top 10. So are Ronald Acuña Jr., Fernando Tatis Jr., Yordan Alvarez, and Max Muncy. Some of this year’s fun surprises — Byron Buxton and Joey Votto — are on there, too. Aaron Judge is 11th. Who tops the list? I’m glad you asked:

That’s right: Mike Zunino is, by this metric at least, the best pure power hitter in baseball. He’s having a whale of a season, too, hitting .209/.296/.553, good for a strange-looking 131 wRC+. Though he’s barely above the Mendoza line, he’s clubbing enough homers (and it’s really just homers — he only has 10 doubles) and taking enough walks (9.4%) to make up for his ghastly 35.6% strikeout rate. Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox have been so consistently the class of their division this year that it’s easy to lump their individual performances together. The offense? Scintillating. The starters? Carlos Rodón and Dylan Cease have been pleasant surprises that turned the rotation from good to one of the best in baseball. The bullpen? It’s been great, and almost forgettable in its greatness, with a top-10 ERA, a top-five FIP, and piles of strikeouts, grounders, and pop-ups.

You probably know that Liam Hendriks is the ringleader. He was a key offseason addition, coming off of a superb 2020 for Oakland. But you might not have noticed how good his three-year run has been. He has been one of the best handful of relievers in the game — again. He’s done it while throwing a ton of innings — again. Put it all together, and this recent run of excellence gives him a strong claim as one of the best relievers of the 21st century.

One way you could try to contextualize Hendriks’ string of excellence is by looking at three-season stretches by relievers. The king of this metric is, naturally enough, Eric Gagne. From 2002 to ’04, he was a machine, throwing 82.1 innings each year and delivering an aggregate 1.79 ERA, 1.57 FIP, and a whopping 11.7 WAR. That number hardly sounds like a reliever, but most relievers don’t deliver seasons like Gagne’s. He’s head and shoulders above the rest of the list:

Hendriks places a solid 23rd in all three-season totals this century. It’s hard to crack this list, though. For one thing, plenty of relievers double up by having two excellent seasons sandwiched by two okay seasons. Gagne isn’t the only name on there more than once; there are plenty of Kimbrels, Riveras, Chapmans, and the like in the top 25.
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Let’s get right down to the question that all baseball analysis is asking at its core: Which of these two players would you rather have on your team, all else being equal?

It’s a close one, right? That’s largely because I decreed it to be so; these aren’t real players, just stat lines I made up that have the same wOBA. Who would you rather have? They’re extremely different, of course; one gets a ton of value from walks and singles, with some doubles sprinkled in for good measure. You can surmise that the other gets a ton of value from home runs — look at that slugging percentage — but does worse elsewhere.

Oh yeah, a few other caveats. These are underlying talent levels; you might look at Player A and say that the BABIP can’t continue, or Player B and say the HR/FB rate can’t be real, but for our purposes, these are the lines they’ll put up over 1,000 PA, or 10,000, or 1,000,000. This is their real skill level. Given that, in most cases, it doesn’t matter much which one you choose, because they’re about the same. That’s the point of wOBA, after all.

That’s not a very interesting answer, so I decided to go deeper. I constructed a generic American League lineup. I removed intentional walks so that we’re comparing apples to apples. The result looks like this:

I threw that lineup into a lightly modified version of my lineup simulator, a short snippet of code that lets you put in a lineup (based on the probability of each outcome every time they bat) and get an estimate of how many runs they’d score per game. This one comes out to 4.53 runs per contest, which is close enough to the actual AL average for my purposes. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I compiled the worst bunts of the season. They were bad in various ways — poor execution, great defense, a spot where failing was particularly painful — but they all cost their team dearly. Today, we’re looking at the opposite: the bunts that have added the most value.

As a refresher, this absolute gem was the best bunt of the first third of the season:

That perfect execution of an audacious plan is the platonic ideal of a bunt. If every successful bunt this season was like that, this would be a really fun series to write. A well-placed bunt is art; post five of those, and I could skate by with almost no commentary and let the GIFs do the talking.

Sadly, that’s not quite the case. There’s quite a bit of bad defense this time around — plenty of errors in the top five. That’s just how bunts work: they’re designed to force the defense to make a play, and while defenders are excellent, they’re not automatons. A sacrifice bunt that works as planned is never going to be one of the best plays a team can make — it’s designed to minimize variance, neither as bad as a strikeout nor as good as a single. The best bunts of the year by WPA, then, need to either score runs without surrendering outs or feature dubious fielding.

So yeah, some of these bunts aren’t perfectly placed gems that the defense has to eat. Some of them are just players making bad throws or bad decisions. As a palate cleanser, though, take a look at this beautiful honorable mention. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, I took a look at the worst (and best) bunts of the year. I couldn’t help myself. It’s simply too much fun to watch the best-laid bunting plans go down in flames, while a perfectly executed bunt is one of the most exciting plays in baseball.

Originally, I planned on waiting until the end of the season to update both lists. I forgot something, though: the end of the season is really busy and fun as it is. Playoff races, individual awards, wondering where the Mets went so wrong. There are already innumerable annual traditions to write about at season’s end. Instead, I decided to get a head start on these standout bunts, and circle back if one improbably beats them out for the worst (or best) bunt of the year.

As a reminder, here was the worst bunt of the first third of the season:

That one was really bad, both in execution and outcome. It cost the Cardinals dearly — more than a quarter of a win by WPA. It’s not easy to lose so much value in a single play on offense. With that in mind, I’ll be answering a bonus question for each bunt in this list: was it worse than José Rondón’s ill-fated attempt? Without further ado, let’s get bunting. Read the rest of this entry »

Mere weeks ago, the Toronto Blue Jays were 66-61, the last of five teams in contention for two Wild Card spots. They looked the part — their +112 run differential led those five, and adding José Berríos at the deadline helped stabilize their rotation. That’s all well and good, but they were 6.5 games out of the second Wild Card, and their bullpen was undoing a lot of the rotation’s good work, especially new acquisition Brad Hand’s 8.22 ERA and 8.12 FIP.

Despite their evident talent, our playoff odds game them only a 4.7% chance of reaching the playoffs at their nadir on August 27. A one-in-20 shot isn’t impossible — less than 5% of plate appearances end in a home run, and yet we see tons of those every day — but things didn’t look good for Toronto. But here we are, three weeks later, and the Jays are in the first Wild Card spot (in a tie for it, but still). How did those rampaging Jays do it? Let’s take a look. Here’s a graph of what we’ll be talking about:

First things first: if you want to overcome a big deficit quickly, stop losing. The Jays have gone 14-2 in their past 16 games, scoring a comical 7.5 runs per game while allowing just over four themselves. That’s good for a Pythagorean record of .774 (using the Pythagenpat formulation of it), or in regular English, “Stop using a record estimator when a team is scoring twice as many runs as they allow, of course they’re doing well.” Read the rest of this entry »

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In 2020, Carlos Santana had a down year. That happens to players all the time, and it’s particularly excusable in the pandemic season. Sixty games can make anyone look bad, and that’s before you get into the vast changes in routine. So while a .350 slugging percentage is obviously concerning, particularly from a first baseman, it’s nothing that you couldn’t hand-wave away by whispering his walk rate or xwOBA to yourself in a soothing voice.

In 2021, Carlos Santana is having a down year. If once is a coincidence, twice is a trend, and this certainly looks bad. The Royals’ problems don’t start at first base, but he certainly hasn’t been the answer there, and I’m skeptical that things will get better. Yes: Carlos Santana has turned into a pumpkin. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Braves signed Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies to phenomenally team-friendly contracts before the 2019 season, two distinct possibilities loomed. First, the team could bank the money they saved and put out a good team at a discounted price. Second, they could reinvest those savings and attempt to put together a great team. Which they chose would say a lot about how the team planned on operating long-term.

The question is no longer open. The Braves have overcome a season-ending injury to Acuña to surge to the top of the NL East, and while the Phillies and Mets continue to nip at their heals, they’re well on their way to a fourth straight division title. They’ve done so thanks to some new young contributors — Austin Riley and Ian Anderson have come into their own this year. They’ve made some savvy signings and trades — Charlie Morton has been their best pitcher this year, and Jorge Soler has been excellent since joining the team.

Now, the Braves are making moves to prolong their stay atop the division. In late August, they signed Travis d’Arnaud to a two-year extension. They followed that up by signing Morton to a one-year deal (both contracts have team options tacked on). Let’s take a look at both of those deals, as well as how they affect the team’s outlook for next year and beyond.

Signing d’Arnaud to an extension — two years and $16 million with a team option for a third year — was hardly an obvious move for the team. He missed the majority of the season after tearing a ligament in his thumb in May. He’s hit well since his return, but even so, his seasonal line works out to an 84 wRC+. Combine that with solid receiving, and the total package works out to a roughly average catcher.

What made the Braves so eager to lock d’Arnaud up? His replacements fell well short of that average catcher bar. On the year, Atlanta’s catcher position has produced -1.4 WAR, the worst mark in the majors. It’s not an individual problem; a huge array of catchers have combined to weigh the position down:

Relative to that mess, d’Arnaud is a huge improvement. That’s not to say that Contreras won’t figure it out, or that Vogt isn’t a capable backup. But for a team with an embarrassment of riches at most positions, giving away so much value at catcher doesn’t make sense. It gets worse: the list of free agent catchers this offseason is nasty, brutish, and short. Yan Gomes and Martín Maldonado are the headliners, and it gets worse from there. Miss signing your target, and you might be in for a long offseason. Read the rest of this entry »