Andre Pallante has a unique delivery and an atypical movement profile. He’s also adept at killing worms. Since debuting with the St. Louis Cardinals last April, the 24-year-old right-hander has a a 64.6% ground-ball rate, which ranks second only to Houston’s Framber Valdez among hurlers with at least 100 innings. This year he’s at 69.4%, behind only Baltimore’s Yennier Cano (minimum 15 innings). Making those numbers especially notable is the fact that Pallante’s primary fastball is a four-seamer. More on that in a moment.
Drafted in the fourth round by the Cardinals out of UC Irvine four years ago, Pallante was a starter throughout the minors, but he’s primarily worked out of the bullpen since reaching St. Louis. All told, he is 8-5 with a 3.34 ERA and a 4.17 FIP over 61 appearances, all but 10 of them as a reliever. And again, his delivery is unique. Last summer, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen described it as “looking almost more like a tennis serve than a pitcher’s mechanics.”
I asked Pallante for the story behind his pitching motion when the Cardinals visited Fenway Park last week.
“Honestly, I feel like there really isn’t a story,” replied the righty, who is 2-0 with a 4.50 ERA in 16 innings so far this season. “It’s just kind of always how I’ve pitched. For as long as I can remember, it’s how I’ve thrown from the mound.”
There actually is a story. Elaborating, the Mission Viejo native explained that he began long-tossing when he was around 12 years old, this at the behest of his father — “a pretty big in-taker of baseball pitching books” — with a goal of building arm strength. The end result, as Pallante put it, is “pitching mechanics that are kind of from long-toss mechanics, trying to throw the ball up in the air as high and hard as I can.” Read the rest of this entry »
Bryce Miller has come a long way in a short time. A fourth-round pick by the Seattle Mariners out of Texas A&M just two summers ago, the 24-year-old right-hander came into the current campaign ranked no. 83 on our Top 100 and made his major league debut earlier this month. Moreover, his three starts have been nothing less than stellar. Over 19 innings, Miller has fanned 18 batters while allowing just one run on seven hits and a single walk. His ERA is a minuscule 0.47.
Seattle’s pitching development acumen has played a big role in his success. Miller’s 96-mph four-seam fastball is in the 99th percentile for spin, but it wasn’t until he got to pro ball that he began utilizing it in an optimal manner. He has also advanced the quality of his secondaries and is attacking hitters with a more varied arsenal than he did as an Aggie.
“In college, we had Rapsodo and TrackMan, but I never really dove into that or really even knew what it meant numbers-wise,” explained Miller. “But with Seattle being pretty deep into analytics, that changed when I got here. They really opened my eyes on how my stuff plays and where I need to throw it.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tommy Henry isn’t a Statcast darling. The 25-year-old Arizona Diamondbacks southpaw doesn’t possess elite movement or spin on any of his four offerings, nor does he light up radar guns. What he does do… well, he pitches. Selected by the Snakes in the second round of the 2019 draft out of the University of Michigan, Henry might best be described as a purveyor of the art of pitching.
Fourteen starts into his big-league career — nine last year and five so far this season — Henry has admittedly had relatively modest success. He has a 5.23 ERA over 74 innings and has allowed 75 hits and 33 walks, with a pedestrian 49 punch
outs and a 15.3% K-rate. Writing him up prior to last season, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen opined that “No. 4 starter is a reasonable ceiling” for the crafty left-hander.
Henry discussed his pitchability profile — one that stretches back to his formative days in Portage, Michigan — toward the tail end of spring training.
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David Laurila: You grew up in a cold weather state. With that in mind, how have you developed as a pitcher?
Tommy Henry: “I would say the biggest development thing for me, as a kid, was that I wasn’t a hard thrower, so I had to learn how to ‘pitch.’ Basically, I had to learn what pitching was. My dad also forced me to throw a changeup at a young age. And honestly, a lot of me developing as a pitcher has been learning through adversity. There are a lot of things you’d like to learn before the adversity happens, but going through experiences and learning from those experiences has probably shaped me into the person I am today the most.”
Laurila: Elaborate on “not a hard thrower.” The term is obviously relative, but you grew up in Michigan, not a baseball hotbed like Florida or Texas. Read the rest of this entry »
Paul Goldschmidt has been one of baseball’s best players for over a decade. Seemingly Hall of Fame-bound, the 35-year-old St. Louis Cardinals first baseman boasts a career 145 wRC+ to go with a .296/.391/.527 slash line, 322 home runs, and 55.9 WAR. A seven-time All-Star and four-time Gold Glove winner, he’s been awarded five Silver Sluggers and is coming off a season where he was voted National League MVP.
He’s been as good as ever in the current campaign. Over 186 plate appearances, Goldschmidt is slashing .319/.403/.546 with seven home runs and a 163 wRC+. With the Arizona Diamondbacks from 2011-2018, he came to St. Louis prior to the 2019 season in exchange for Carson Kelly, Luke Weaver, Andrew Young, and a competitive balance pick.
Goldschmidt sat down to talk hitting when the Cardinals visited Fenway this past weekend.
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David Laurila: Some guys are big into hitting analytics, while others like to keep things as simple as possible. Where do you fit in?
Paul Goldschmidt: “Somewhere in the middle? I mean, you’ve got to know your swing and you’ve got to know the pitchers, but once you get in the box, you’ve got to see the ball and react. So for me it’s kind of finding that happy medium.
“I’m also always changing. I’m always adapting. I’m always trying to learn and get better. I don’t think there’s any time that you quite figure it out, you’re always trying to find whatever it takes to perform.”
Laurila: In which ways do you utilize hitting analytics?
Goldschmidt: “The biggest thing for me is finding the why. Analytics are very good at telling you what is happening, but they don’t necessarily give you the answer to why something is happening, whether that’s fly ball rate, groundball rate, hard-hit ball rate, strike zone judgment — all those things. It’s good to identify things you’re doing well, or not doing well, but the real challenge in this game is the why. With that, you can make adjustments and hopefully perform to the best of your ability.”
Caleb Durbin is an underdog’s underdog in an organization that boasts big-time star power. Acquired along with Indigo Diaz by the New York Yankees from the Atlanta Braves last December in exchange for Lucas Luetge the 23-year-old infield prospect is a former 14th round draft pick out of a Division-3 school. Moreover, he’s never going to be mistaken for Aaron Judge or Giancarlo Stanton. Listed at 5-foot-6 (he claimed to be an inch taller when I talked to him earlier this week), Durbin looks like a stockier version of Jose Altuve.
He’s currently hitting not unlike the diminutive three-time batting champion. In 112 plate appearances — 97 with High-A Hudson Valley and 15 with Double-A Somerset — Durbin went into yesterday slashing .319/.446/.385. His bat-to-ball skills have been impressive. The Lake Forest, Illinois native has fanned just nine times while drawing 15 walks.
Durbin’s numbers at St. Louis’s Washington University were even more eye-opening. With the caveat that D-3 isn’t exactly the SEC, the erstwhile WashU Bear batted .386 with 42 walks and 10 strikeouts in 439 plate appearances over his three collegiate seasons. Since entering pro ball in 2021, he has 70 walks and 62 strikeouts in 631 plate appearances.
“Low strikeout rates are something I’ve always had,” said Durbin. “That’s kind of been my elite tool, if you want to call it that. I feel like that’s always going to be there, so it’s just a matter of building on my contact quality.” Read the rest of this entry »
Erik Swanson has quietly emerged as a top-shelf reliever. Since the beginning of last season, the 29-year-old right-hander has made 75 appearances — 57 last year with Seattle and 18 this year with Toronto, who acquired him along with Adam Macko in exchange for Teoscar Hernández — and boasts a 1.64 ERA and a 2.18 FIP. Moreover, he’s allowed just 46 hits and fanned 93 batters in 71.1 innings. Thanks in part to one of baseball’s best splitters, his K-rate over that span is a robust 34.7%; with the Blue Jays this season, it’s an even higher 35.4%.
His path to Canada’s largest city was circuitous. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, Swanson proceeded to “bounce around a little bit growing up,” eventually landing in suburban Cincinnati where he graduated from Mariemont High School. From there it was on to Mount Carmel, Illinois, where he attended Wabash Valley Community College — “one of my only options for baseball” — and then to Council Bluffs, where he spent his sophomore year at Iowa Western Community College. It was at the last of those stops where he began to blossom as a pitcher. The Texas Rangers selected the raw but promising youngster in the eighth round of the 2014 draft.
More moves were afoot. Texas subsequently swapped Swanson to the Yankees in August 2016 as part of the Carlos Beltrán deal, and in November 2018, he was shipped from New York to Seattle in a trade involving James Paxton. The latter move went a long way toward shaping his future. A handful of months into his 2019 rookie season — his MLB debut came that April — Swanson was switched from a starter to a full-time reliever. Even more impactful was a suggestion he received from Seattle’s then-bullpen coach Jim Brower.
“He told me to think about throwing the splitter and pairing that up with my fastball,” Swanson said. “My changeup hadn’t been very good. A lot of guys were shutting it down right out of the hand, and I was also having a tough time throwing it in the zone. So I started messing around with grips after the 2019 season. The splitter changed the course of my career.”
It took time for Swanson to develop what is now his signature pitch. The COVID-19 pandemic shutting down spring training in 2020 just as he was getting a feel for it was one hurdle to overcome. His anatomy was another.
“I’ve got really small hands,” he admitted. ”Initially, I was having a lot of pain [below the crook of the pointer and middle fingers] because I couldn’t get around the baseball very well. It definitely wasn’t a good pitch from the get-go.”
North Dakota backroads provided a panacea. Swanson had moved back to Fargo in 2015 — his family had previously relocated when he was six years old — and spent many hours of his offseason driving around in his pickup truck with a baseball tucked between his fingers, stretching them out. The increased flexibility improved the comfortability of his new splitter grip, the genesis of which was a video clip of a now-Blue Jays teammate.
“One of the guys I watched when I was trying to figure it out was Kevin Gausman, who was with the Giants at the time,” Swanson said. “I watched a video where he explained his grip, I started holding it similar to the way he does, and from there it kind of just clicked.
“Initially, I’d tried to use a traditional splitter grip, but my hands just couldn’t do it. I ended up bringing [the pinky and ring fingers] up on the side. They’re together with [the middle finger]. Then I’m just kind of running the two seams and getting around it a little bit. Gausman’s is similar to that. but he’s got bigger hands than I do, so he’s actually able to curl [his index finger] a little bit. I don’t do that. He’s also got the one seam that comes down the middle, and I’ve got the two seams that comes down the middle.”
Asked how Swanson’s and his pitches compare, Gausman, who arguably possesses the game’s best splitter, pointed both to movement and mechanics.
“It’s a different shape of a split,” Swanson said. “I would say he probably has more horizontal, while I have more vert. He’s also got a little funk in his delivery and hides the ball really well. I think hitters see his later than they do mine. So while the grips are very similar, the way we throw is pretty different. Arm angle, approach angle… but what matters is that we both have success with the pitch.”
That’s an understatement. Opponents are batting .203 with a .234 slug against Gausman’s split this season, and they’ve fared even worse against Swanson’s. The well-traveled reliever has delivered 124 splitters this season — 48.6% of his total pitches thrown — and allowed a .105 batting average and a .158 slugging percentage. Not bad for a kid from Fargo, which is how Swanson identifies himself, despite plans to change his home address yet one more time.
“I’m Fargo through and through,” he said. “Even though I haven’t spent my entire life there, it will always be home for me. I’m actually moving north, though, to Roseau, Minnesota, where my wife is from. Roseau is 12 miles from the Canadian border, around 3,000 people live there, and I love that area of the country. I love the outdoors, so it’s the perfect place for me.”
Given the success he’s having on mound, Toronto is a perfect place for him as well. Fargo’s own has been a stalwart out of the Blue Jays’ bullpen.
Josh Winckowski has been an invaluable piece in the Boston bullpen this season. Pitching in multiple relief roles — he’s entered games in the each of innings five through nine — the 24-year-old right-hander has a 1.57 ERA to go with a 2-0 record and one save. Acquired by the Red Sox from the New York Mets in February 2021 as part of a three-team, seven-player trade that featured Andrew Benintendi, Winckowski has tossed 23 frames over a baker’s-dozen outings.
He’d primarily been a starter prior to this season. All but six of Winckowski’s 90 minor-league appearances came as a starter, as did all but one of the 15 he made last year in his first taste of MLB action. That he’s thriving as a former 15th-round pick whose repertoire lacks power is also part of his story.
“I went through every level of the minor leagues and had to prove myself at all of them,” said Winckowski, whom the Toronto Blue Jays drafted out of Estero (FLA) High School in 2016 and subsequently swapped to the Mets in the January 2021 Steven Matz deal. “Somewhere in the middle there was a pitch-to-contact-and-miss-barrels.’ That’s the sweet spot for me. Quick outs — two or three pitches for outs — is definitely my game. It’s where I’m at my best.”
Winckowski does have the ability to strike batters out. While his K/9 is a modest 7.04 — last year it was just 5.6 — he fanned 9.2 batters per nine in Triple-A. Moreover, he’s not a soft-tosser. But while his sinker averages 95.1 mph, reaching back for more juice isn’t how his punch-outs come about. Read the rest of this entry »
Alex Verdugo has been one of the hottest hitters in baseball. Over his last four games, the Boston Red Sox outfielder is 8-for-19 with four doubles and a pair of home runs, and two of his hits have been of the walk-off variety. Moreover, he’s swung a productive bat all season. Verdugo’s left-handed stroke has produced a .317/.381/.524 slash line and five long balls in 139 plate appearances. His wRC+ is a healthy 148.
The 26-year-old Tucson native has slashed .290/.346/.433 in his three-plus years wearing a Red Sox uniform, and to say that his performance has attracted a fair amount of scrutiny would be an understatement. That’s understandable. In February 2020, Boston acquired Verdugo, along with Connor Wong and Jeter Downs, in exchange for Mookie Betts and David Price.
Verdugo discussed his evolution as a hitter, which has included the realization that trying to hammer home runs is detrimental to his success, prior to Tuesday’s game at Fenway Park.
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David Laurila: This is your 10th professional season. Comparing now to then, how similar or different are you as a hitter?
Alex Verdugo: “I think I have the same mindset of what I’m trying to do. I’ve always been a guy that likes to hit the fastball to left and then pull the offspeed pitches. What’s changed throughout the years is how I deviate from my game plan. Back in the minors, back in the first couple of years, and even last year… I know my strengths, but I would be like, ‘You know what? I’m going to try to hit for power. I’m going to try to lift this. I’m going to try to pull a heater.’ Read the rest of this entry »
Tanner Bibee will be coming off a successful big-league debut when he takes the mound for the Cleveland Guardians tonight against the New York Yankees. Last Wednesday, the 24-year-old right-hander allowed six hits and one run with no walks and eight strikeouts over 5.2 innings versus the Colorado Rockies. Since starting his professional career last season, Bibee has a minor-league resume that includes a 10–2 record, a 2.13 ERA, and 186 strikeouts in 148 innings.
His ascent up prospect rankings has been swift. Unranked within the Cleveland system a year ago, the 2021 fifth-round pick out of Cal State Fullerton came into the current campaign No. 70 on our Top 100, with a 50 FV. As our lead prospect writer Eric Longenhagen wrote in February, “What a difference a year makes… Bibee now looks like a polished mid-rotation prospect.”
Bibee discussed his debut and the plus repertoire he brings with him to the mound when the Guardians visited Fenway Park this past weekend.
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David Laurila: You just made your big-league debut. How would you describe it?
Tanner Bibee: “It was a whirlwind. It was hectic. It was all of the above. Every single thing that you can think of — the emotions, all of the work I’ve put in to get here… it was all just crazy hectic.”
Laurila: You hit the first batter you faced with a pitch.
Bibee: “I got [Charlie] Blackmon 1–2 and then tried to really hump up on a heater. I probably missed my spot by about 30 inches. I yanked it and drilled him.”
Laurila: Basically, you overthrew the pitch.
Bibee: “100 percent. I mean, I do that sometimes. I’ll hump up and try to throw a fastball up towards the top, but the command wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be on that one. Obviously.” Read the rest of this entry »
Bill Haselman precipitated a memorable brawl on June 6, 1993. Plunked by a Mike Mussina pitch, the Seattle Mariners catcher charged the mound and proceeded to tackle the Baltimore Orioles right-hander. The melee that followed was a doozy. Tussles involving numerous players took place all around the infield, and when all was said and done, seven players were ejected, and at least four were injured — including one who had played in 1,790 consecutive games.
“It was just a weird situation,” recalled Haselman, three decades later. “Chris Bosio was pitching for us — he’d come back from a broken collarbone — and he threw balls behind Mark McLemore and Harold Reynolds. The first one wasn’t on purpose. The one he threw behind Reynolds [in the bottom of the sixth inning] was on purpose. Reynolds had bunted for a hit against him with two strikes, and he’d also always hit Bosio well [14-for-28 lifetime]. Back then, that’s what you did: you hit a guy. The pitch went behind him.
“We come up in the seventh and Mussina punches out Jay Buhner and Mackey Sasser,” continued Haselman, who is now a coach for the Los Angeles Angels. “I’m up next, and I had an idea of what might happen. I never had any thought of charging the mound — I’d never done it in my life — but for some reason, I did. It was ‘Boom!” Then there was a brawl.”
Haselman had homered off of Mussina earlier in the game, but the erstwhile backstop doesn’t believe that had any bearing on the HBP. Rather, it was because Bosio had thrown behind a pair of Birds. Mussina’s pitch didn’t miss, and that fact that it was a shoulder shot contributed heavily to Haselman’s impromptu mound visit. “I didn’t like it being so high, near my head,” he explained. “That’s why I went out there.” Read the rest of this entry »
