Seth Lugo has a quality bender, and he relied on it heavily this year. The New York Mets righty ranked seventh among qualified relievers in curveball frequency at 33.9%. It’s hard to argue with the results. Lugo made 54 appearances — all but five out of the bullpen — and logged a 2.66 ERA and a 3.17 FIP while fanning 103 batters in 101.1 innings.

The increased usage — and the effectiveness that went along with it — stood out to Travis Sawchik. My former FanGraphs colleague likened Lugo to a right-handed Rich Hill in this informative piece that ran on these electronic pages back in mid-June.

Two months later, I asked Lugo for the story behind his go-to pitch, and about his approach to attacking hitters.

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Seth Lugo on learning to throw a curveball: “My dad was my coach growing up. We used to go to a local college — Centenary College, in Shreveport, Louisiana — and the coach there showed my dad how to teach young pitchers to throw breaking balls, curveballs. He showed him what he thought was safe, what would keep your elbow healthy.

“He used a tennis-ball container. You’d throw it, and make sure that it went end-over-end. That way you’d be taking pressure off your elbow. I was throwing a tennis-ball container and making sure it was spinning the same way. Or maybe a Pringles container. Either one. If it started to spin sideways instead of going end-over-end … that’s not how you want to throw it. Anyway, you’d practice that a few times, then switch to a curveball. That’s how I learned. This was when I was 10 or 11 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

Hall of Fame debate season is upon us, and subjectivity is inherent in the process. For every no-brainer candidate there are always several for whom a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down is largely in the eye of the beholder. Pushing bias aside — not always an easy exercise — one must weigh a ton of factors. Think “The Scales of Justice,” but with WAR, win totals, and DRS taking the place of a blindfold, a balance, and a sword.

Cutting to the chase, Omar Vizquel — arguably the most-polarizing player on the current ballot — probably deserves to be enshrined in Cooperstown. Attempting to not clumsily put a thumb in my eye while stating his case, I hereby offer the following statistical facts:

Vizquel ranks 43rd all-time with 2,877 hits. Nine of the 10 players directly below him on that list — Brooks Robinson among them — are in the Hall of Fame. The one who is not is Harold Baines. Vizquel had more hits as a shortstop than did Cal Ripken.

Vizquel has 3,727 total bases. That is more than the career totals of Edgar Martinez (3,718), Andruw Jones (3,690), Lou Whitaker (3,651), Mark McGwire (3,639) and Scott Rolen (3,628). Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Murphy won’t be available in next month’s Rule 5 draft. Along with four other players, the 23-year-old right-hander was added to the Toronto Blue Jays’ 40-man roster yesterday. His addition was well-earned. A third-round pick in the 2013 draft, Murphy has been a picture of perseverance. As noted in the feature we did on him last February, Murphy has undergone Tommy John surgery, thoracic outlet syndrome surgery, and had a nerve moved in his elbow.

This season, he went from question mark to fast-mover. In 27 starts — all but one with High-A Dunedin — Murphy fashioned a tidy 2.64 ERA and fanned 141 batters in 152.2 innings. Those numbers earned him an accolade; Murphy was named the Florida State League’s Pitcher of the Year.

The innings total was especially meaningful to him, as was the fact that he made all of his scheduled starts. Calling it “a big step,” the Chandler, Arizona native was able to show the organization — and prove to himself — that his am and body could hold up over a full season.

He also showed that he could hit triple digits. But while he considered it “pretty cool” to have hit 100 mph on the radar gun, Murphy was more enamored with a pitch that traversed 60-feet-six-inches in a comparably meandering manner. Read the rest of this entry »

Ray Black hasn’t received much attention here at FanGraphs. That’s understandable. The 28-year-old San Francisco Giants reliever has consistently been clocked at over 100 mph, but only when he’s not on the shelf. And he’s spent a lot of time on the shelf.

Black had Tommy John surgery as a high school senior, a knee issue in college, then missed his first two-plus professional seasons after undergoing labrum surgery. A seventh-round pick by the Giants in 2011, Black didn’t take the mound until 2014. More obstacles followed. Notable among them were a second elbow surgery — this time to remove a bone spur — which resulted in him missing almost all of 2017.

This past season he missed a lot of bats — and not just down on the farm. Black made his long-in-coming MLB debut in early July and went on to fan 33 batters in 23.1 innings. He was even more overpowering in the minors, logging 66 punch-outs in 35.2 innings between Double-A and Triple-A. Not surprisingly, velocity played a big role in that success; he reached triple digits numerous times.

His heater and a return to health weren’t the only reasons he reached the big leagues this summer. With the help of San Francisco’s minor league pitching coordinator, and the Giants analytics staff, Black has become a bit of pitching nerd.

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Ray Black on technology and his slider: “The increase of technology in the game is incredible. StatCast. TrackMan. The Rapsodo machines. They show you your release point, the way your fingers come off the ball — all of this in super slow motion. You can break it down to so many frames per second.

“After one game against the Diamondbacks, they showed me the side-by-side of my fastball and my slider. If I throw my slider correctly, it’s mimicking my fastball — I’m keeping it on the same plane long enough that the hitter can’t recognize it. The technology can basically tell you if you had a good one or a bad one, and I had it working that day. This was after I got sent back down to Triple-A in late August.

“I’d given up a walk-off home run on my slider, in Cincinnati [on August 17]. When I went back and looked at that one, side by side with my fastball, I could see a big hump. I looked at the velo as well, and it had gone from an 88-90-mph pitch down to an 83-84-mph pitch. It was slurvier, with a hump, and it got tagged. Read the rest of this entry »

Kieran Lovegrove is among the plurality of players currently available in the minor league free-agent market. That should change in the not-too-distant future. The 24-year-old right-hander throws gas, and while his location is sometimes scattershot, he’s moving in the right direction. Six years after being drafted by the Cleveland Indians out of a Mission Viejo, California high school, he finished this season in Triple-A Columbus.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa — he came Stateside at age five — Lovegrove made giant strides this year. Pitching out of the bullpen, he punched out 10 batters per nine innings and put up a career-best 2.73 ERA in 41 appearances. Two months after being promoted to Double-A, he represented the World Team in July’s All-Star Futures Game.

It’s taken the 2012 third-round pick time, but he’s finally begun to figure things out — at least when it comes to what works for him, and what doesn’t. While he’s no dum-dum, his attempted deep dives into the hows-and-whys of his chosen craft have only served to muddy the waters.

“I’m a thinker, and if I’m given too much information I start to think about it,” reasoned Lovegrove, whose level of familiarity with Yogi Berra is unknown. “Because of that, I’ve kind of had to avoid the analytics thing. But I have found out that when my ball is down in the zone it tends to sink, and when it’s up in the zone it four-seams. When I can throw up is when I’ve been going down. It’s all about setting up hitters, and actually pitching as opposed to just throwing the ball.”

His heater has a mind of its own. Read the rest of this entry »

Does Shohei Ohtani’s success portend more two-way players in MLB? Opinions vary, albeit with the bears clearly outnumbering the bulls — at least in terms of expected production. While a certain amount of copy-catting seems inevitable, the presumptive American League rookie of the year paired a .925 OPS with a 3.31 ERA and a 10.95 strikeout rate. He was dominant on both sides of the ball in a way that’s unlikely to be replicated by anyone other than himself.

A pair of former two-way players I spoke to this season are among the skeptics. Which isn’t to say they hate the idea. Nor do they feel the Brendan McKays of the world don’t deserve every opportunity to show they can follow in Ohtani’s footsteps (hopefully without elbow surgery being part of the equation).

Steven Brault created a bit of a buzz by going his first 33 big-league plate appearances without striking out. On the heels of that eye-opening accomplishment, I asked the Pittsburgh Pirates left-hander for his opinion on why a player should, and shouldn’t, be able to play both ways at the highest level.

“The reason you should is that you’re good enough,” responded Brault, who’d excelled as a two-way player at Division II Regis University. “If you’re a good enough hitter, and a good enough pitcher, it stands to reason that your team would want you to do both. The reason you shouldn’t is that you can’t play every day. That’s been the case with Ohtani. On the days he pitched he didn’t hit, and on the day before he didn’t hit. Same for the day after. They had to make sure his body was ready to pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Albert brings a combination of common sense and analytic know-how to his new job as St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach. He also brings with him a degree of familiarity. Prior to joining the Astros organization in 2013, Albert spent five years tutoring up-and-coming hitters in the Cardinals’ farm system.

Last season was his first at the big-league level. After four years as Houston’s minor-league hitting coordinator, the 38-year-old spent the recently completed campaign as the Astros’ assistant hitting coach. His expertise is multi-faceted. Along with being a new-age hitting guru, Albert is a certified strength-and-conditioning specialist with a master’s degree in exercise science.

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Jeff Albert on hitting: “From a coaching perspective, I think you could make the argument that art and science are the same thing. The art is the way you apply the objective information — the scientific information — within the context of the human element and the environment. So, I don’t look at it as being one or the other. I look at it as having information that will help an individual player perform better.

“Ted Williams gets a lot of credit for his book [The Science of Hitting], and rightly so. Wade Boggs had one I really liked — The Techniques of Modern Hitting — and he’s talking about many of the same things. The two are considered different types of hitters, but both are talking about things like swing path, hitting line drives, and making solid contact to the outfield.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brock Burke was nowhere to be found on top-prospect lists when he was featured here at FanGraphs last June. But he did merit our attention. Tampa Bay’s third-round pick in the 2014 draft had one of the lowest ERAs in the minors at the time. While the sample size was small — just nine starts on the season — his dominance was undeniable. He’d begun to put himself on the map.

The southpaw out of Evergreen, Colorado wasn’t nearly as good after a mid-summer promotion from low-A Bowling Green to high-A Charlotte. His ERA as a Stone Crab was exponentially higher than it was as a Hot Rod — a Brobdingnagian 4.64 as opposed to a Lilliputian 1.10.

This year he flip-flopped his ebbs and flows. The 22-year-old lefty started slow, then got on a serious roll after earning a promotion to Double-A Montgomery in July. In nine starts for the Biscuits, Burke put up a 1.95 ERA and punched out 11.9 batters per nine innings. If win-loss records are your cup of tea, six of seven decisions went his way.

He blames this season’s slow start on a confluence of timidity and anger. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Sunday’s notes column led with Scott Radinsky’s evolution as a pitching coach. Admittedly old-school when he first started out, the former big-league left-hander has since incorporated a heavy dose of new-age into his approach. TrackMan and the Angels’ analytics team were his allies as he served as Anaheim’s bullpen coach each of the past three seasons.

Today we’ll hear from Radinsky on several of the team’s relievers going forward. He won’t be with them — along with a few other Angels coaches, he won’t be returning — but he certainly knows each of them well. Having been hands-on with their development — particularly the youngsters of the bunch — he sees plenty of blue skies ahead for the club’s bullpen.

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Radinsky on Hansel Robles: “Sometimes it takes awhile for a guy to buy in to what we’re sharing with them, but once he does, he can make real strides. It’s not the Bible, but it is well-thought-out information. This isn’t like back in the day when a pitching coach was on his own island and relying on the naked eye. It’s valuable data that is given to us as coaches, and it’s our job to translate it and pass it along to the players. We can use it to make them better.

“We had guys come [to the Angels] and buy in. They would realize, ‘Damn, man.’ Hansel Robles, from the Mets. This guy was headstrong about using his fastball. His fastball is a great pitch — he can really backspin it at the top of the zone — but our encouragement was, ‘When the catcher puts down slider, you don’t always have to shake. Utilize the thing.’ And do you know what? The more he used it, the better it got. Not only that, the more respect his fastball got. The next thing you know, he became more of a complete pitcher, and we were able to use him in higher-leverage situations.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Detroit Tigers have a rich history. The franchise has claimed 11 American League pennants and four World Series titles since being established in 1901. An “Olde English D” has emblazoned the jerseys and caps of numerous all-time greats.

The fan base is reliably loyal. The club is coming off a pair of 98-loss seasons, and there hasn’t been a championship to celebrate since 1984, but people in Detroit, and throughout the state of Michigan, continue to show their support. They love their Tigers.

In celebration of the iconic franchise, I asked a cross section of people within the game if they could share their thoughts — and perhaps a few anecdotes — on baseball in Detroit.

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Michael Fulmer, Tigers pitcher: “With the new renovations and Little Caesars Arena, it’s cool to have all four major sports teams in a four-block radius. And I feel that Detroit is a diehard baseball city. Michigan as a whole. The fans are unbelievable. They’ll let you know when you’re doing good, and they’ll also let you know when you’re not doing so good. That’s OK. You can’t blame them for that. They want us to win, and we’re doing everything we can for them. But they are sticking with this team through thick and thin. They’re excited about the younger players. The feedback we’ve gotten, and the high energy we’ve gotten from this team, is cool to watch.

“Mr. Kaline and Alan Trammell bring a lot of history. Willie Horton. Those guys are around the clubhouse quite a bit, and it’s really cool to be able to talk those guys. They’re legends. I grew up hearing those names, so to be able meet them in person and talk baseball with them… it’s really cool.

“Jack Morris isn’t around as much as some of the other guys, but I have talked to him a few times. They’re obviously retiring his number this year, and last year I got to catch a first pitch he threw out. That was pretty cool, too.”

Dave Dombrowski, former Tigers GM: “It’s a great baseball city. It’s a historic franchise — Detroit is one of the original baseball cities — with a lot of great players in different eras. Detroit supports all sports, including baseball. The fans are very passionate. They love their Tigers.

“I remember when I first took the job. They weren’t drawing very well, but people who had known the city for a long time were telling me what a sleeping giant it was. That’s because of the love people had for the team. And that’s what it turned out to be.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to win a championship while I was there. We won everything short of that a couple of times. But again, the fans are very supportive. You see Tigers memorabilia items everywhere. They welcome the old-timers, the guys who were part of the franchise in the past.”

Read the rest of this entry »