What is your favorite baseball memory? I posed that question to 10 major league players, and in nearly every instance, the response began with a question of their own: “Does it have to be from my own career?” While all were happy to share one (or more) meaningful memory from their time in the big leagues, it was primarily magic moments from their days as fans and/or young amateurs that stood out the most.
“I have two. Being able to have all of my family members at the All-Star game with me in San Diego in 2016 is one. The other is having my family with me in London, England for the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry series [in 2019]. They were all with me for the [2018] World Series as well, so there are actually three: All-Star Game, World Series, and being able to travel all the way to London, halfway around the world, to watch me play. In no particular order, those would be my favorite baseball memories.” Read the rest of this entry »
The St. Louis Cardinals played Friday night’s game in Boston with one catcher. Iván Herrera had been called up from Triple-A to replace the newly-sidelined Yadier Molina, but cancelled flights delayed his arrival. The highly-regarded prospect didn’t get to Fenway Park until the final inning of a 6-5 Red Sox win.
Asked who would have been used in an emergency had Andrew Knizner been injured, St. Louis manager Oliver Marmol named three possibilities: Edmundo Sosa, Brendan Donovan, and Nick Wittgren. That Marmol added, “Not necessarily in that order,” is intriguing, if not suggestive. Sosa and Donovan are infielders. Wittgren toes the rubber.
Might we have seen Wittgren, a 31-year-old pitcher with no professional experience at any another position, donning the tools of ignorance? It’s a definite possibility. Prior to the game, Marmol approached Wittgren and asked, “How do you think you’d do catching?” Wittgren replied that he’d be perfectly fine. Marmol responded with “I think so too.”
According to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold, Wittgren isn’t the first Cardinals pitcher to be designated (or at least hinted) as an emergency catcher. Jason Motte, who worked out of the St. Louis bullpen from 2008-2014 previously claimed that distinction. Even so, Motte had caught in the minor leagues. Wittgren would have been a novice.
The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and we’re once again hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features Oakland Athletics right-hander Paul Blackburn on his curveball, a revamped pitch playing a key role in what has been a career-best season.
On track to represent Oakland in next month’s All-Star game, Blackburn has won six of eight decisions — this for the team with baseball’s worst record — while logging a 2.26 ERA and a 3.09 FIP over 13 starts comprising 71-and-two-thirds innings. He’s thrown his curveball, a pitch he no longer grips in atypical fashion, 18.5% of the time.
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Paul Blackburn: “I started throwing a curveball right around my sophomore year of high school. I learned it from watching Barry Zito. I grew up in Northern California — I’m a Northern California guy — so I saw a lot of Barry Zito and his big curveball. Read the rest of this entry »
Kevin Youkilis could swing the bat. In 10 big league seasons, the player immortalized in book and movie form as “The Greek God of Walks” logged a .281/.382/.478 slash line and a 127 wRC+. At his peak, he was one of the best hitters in the American League. From 2008-10, Youkilis averaged 25 home runs annually while putting up a .308 batting average and a 150 wRC+. Over that three-year stretch with the Boston Red Sox, he walked 197 times and stroked 429 base hits.
In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series, Youkilis — now a part-time analyst on Red Sox TV broadcasts — discussed the art and science of what he did best: squaring up baseballs.
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David Laurila: Let’s start with the nickname you got early in your career. Looking back, what do you think of it?
Kevin Youkilis: “It was interesting more than anything. It’s not something I equated to. I saw myself as a hitter, and the walks just a byproduct of not getting good pitches. Part of the game is that you walk if you don’t get pitches to hit.
“At the beginning, it was a lot of… it was kind of crazy. There were all these media-driven things coming my way. That was the hardest part. I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ It was all fixated on walking, versus the other things I did well.” Read the rest of this entry »
Kyle Bradish has a promising future in Baltimore. The 25-year-old rookie right-hander has a 6.86 ERA and a 6.06 FIP over his first 42 big league innings, but he’s also got plus stuff and improving command. Acquired from the Angels in the December 2019 Dylan Bundy deal — Los Angeles had taken him in the fourth round of the previous year’s draft out of New Mexico State University — Bradish came into the current campaign ranked seventh on our Orioles Top Prospects list.
Bradish discussed his developmental path, and the M.O. he takes with him to the mound, when Baltimore visited Fenway Park in late May.
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David Laurila: What do you know about pitching now that you didn’t when you entered pro ball?
Kyle Bradish: “A lot of it is the analytics, which we didn’t have to the same extent when I was in college. I’m getting adjusted to that, learning about things like spin efficiency and all that stuff.”
Jared Walsh is a studious hitter. He’s also a productive hitter in the middle of the Los Angeles Angels lineup. In just over 1,000 big league plate appearances, the 28-year-old first baseman has 50 home runs to go along with a .269/.325/.499 slash line and a 122 wRC+. This past Saturday, Walsh went deep for the 11th time on the season while hitting for the ninth cycle in franchise history.
A two-way player at the University of Georgia who has also taken the mound in pro ball — including five times for the Angels in 2019 — Walsh lasted until the 39th round of the 2015 draft. To say he’s gone on to exceed most expectations with the bat would be an understatement.
Walsh discussed his watch-and-learn approach to hitting when the Angels visited Fenway Park last month.
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David Laurila: Let’s start with your M.O. as a hitter. What are you looking to do when you’re in the box?
Jared Walsh: “In my perfect world, I’m a line drive into left-center and a line drive into right-center kind of hitter.”
Ezequiel Tovar came into the season ranked as the No. 4 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system. Despite being just 20 years old, he might finish it in the big leagues. In 229 plate appearances with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats, Tovar is slashing .317/.393/.579 with a 165 wRC+. Moreover, he has a dozen home runs and has swiped 16 bases in 17 attempts.
His calling card is his glove. Described by our own Eric Longenhagen as “a no-doubt shortstop with balletic defensive footwork and a well-calibrated internal clock.” Tovar had received similar rave reviews from MLB scouts in the Arizona Fall League. And that was before he blossomed with the bat.
I asked Yard Goats manager Chris Denorfia about the offensive strides that have elevated Tovar’s profile.
“Coming into this year, I was told that there was some chase on down-and-away sliders,” said Denorfia, who played 10 big-league seasons. “But I haven’t seen what everybody was talking about. Somewhere between the Fall League and this spring, he’s made this developmental jump. Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase. Whether you call it slowing the game down, or just having enough reps, he’s made that adjustment. It was probably the one thing that was holding him back, which is kind of weird to say, because he was only 19 last year.”
The discipline is reflected in the numbers. Despite being one the youngest players in his league, Tovar possesses a 9.6 walk-rate and a 22.3% K-rate. When you add his improved pop to the equation, it’s easy to see why speculation of a call-up — premature that it may be — has begun to grow legs. Read the rest of this entry »
The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and we’re once again hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment, presented in a Q&A format, features Seattle Mariners reliever Paul Sewald on his slider.
Since signing with Seattle as a free agent prior to last season, Sewald has won 12 of 16 decisions, logged 15 saves, and has a 2.86 ERA, a 3.20 FIP, and 123 strikeouts in 85 innings. The 32-year-old right-hander has thrown his signature slider — a pitch he completely revamped after coming over from the New York Mets — 42.8% of the time.
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David Laurila: You’ve developed a great slider. What’s the story behind it?
Paul Sewald: “Since the beginning of time — before TrackMan, before Rapsodo, before everyone realized exactly what the pitch does — every pitching coach in the history of the world said, ‘You need two planes on your slider, you can’t have it go just sideways. That’s not how you get outs.’ So that’s what I thought. I tried to make it have two planes.
“When I first started throwing it, it was very slurvy. It wasn’t very hard, but it did move in two planes. It wasn’t a curve. It wasn’t a slider. It was somewhere in the middle. That’s how I grew up throwing it, and I always went back to that line of thinking. Slurvy or not, it had to have two planes.
“Then I got over here to the Mariners and it was, ‘We don’t care if it moves one centimeter down, we just want you to sweep it as far as you can possibly sweep it.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s interesting. I haven’t been trying to do that, but I throw across my body, so it seems like something I could do.’
“Immediately that worked. It was overnight. In camp last year, I didn’t pitch very well, but that was because of my fastball. The slider was very good. As soon as they told me, ‘We don’t care about any depth, we just want sweep,’ I took off with the slider. It was a very easy and very comfortable switch for me.”
Laurila: Outside of having the right delivery — throwing across your body — how did you go about getting the action the Mariners were looking for? Read the rest of this entry »
Alex Bregman has a reputation for being a studious hitter. Moreover, he has a well-earned reputation for being a productive hitter. The 28-year-old Houston Astros third baseman boasts a .371 wOBA and a 139 wRC+ in just over 3,000 career plate appearances. At his best, he’s been a beast; in 2019, he slugged 41 home runs and slashed a robust .296/.423/.592.
Recent seasons have seen Bregman perform below his pre-pandemic standards, but even with the downturn he’s been putting up solid numbers. His wRC+ since the start of the 2020 season is equal to this year’s 117. Still in his prime from an age standpoint, he remains a feared hitter in the middle of the Houston lineup.
Bregman talked hitting when the Astros visited Fenway Park in mid-May.
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David Laurila: How would you describe your approach to hitting?
Alex Bregman: “The most important thing is knowing what kind of hitter you are [and] knowing what’s going to make you successful. I think that swinging at pitches you can do damage with is extremely important. I think that taking pitches that you can’t do damage with is extremely important. In my best years, I’ve swung the least, while in my worst years I’ve swung the most. I’ve put balls in play that I shouldn’t be putting in play, because they weren’t pitches that I can do damage on.”
Laurila: How can a hitter go about controlling that? A swing decision is something that happens in a blink of an eye.
Bregman: “Good hitters can recognize when pitches are coming into that zone. They can do that early and be able to make a decision, ‘yes or no,’ pretty quickly.”
Owen White opened a lot of eyes last year, and he did so by consistently shutting down the opposition. Pitching primarily with the Low-A Down East Wood Ducks, the 22-year-old right-hander punched out 56 batters in 35.1 innings and posted a 3.06 ERA. He then put the finishing touches on a stellar first professional season by dominating the Arizona Fall League, winning all five of his decisions, logging a 1.91 ERA, and again fanning over a batter per inning. Buoyed by those performances, the 2018 second-round pick — Tommy John surgery and the pandemic delayed the start of his career — came into the current campaign No.84 on our 2022 Top 100 Prospects list.
His second professional season has been more of the up-and-down variety. In nine starts with the High-A Hickory Crawdads, the hard-throwing China Grove, North Carolina native has a middling 4.73 ERA, albeit with 61 strikeouts in 45.2 innings. Displaying plus stuff as he develops, White continues to miss bats.
White, who was ranked No. 5 on our newly released Texas Rangers Top Prospects list, discussed his repertoire and approach to pitching at the tail end of the Arizona Fall League season.
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David Laurila: Let’s start with who you are as a pitcher. Give me a self scouting report.
Owen White: “I think what separates me right now is the difference between my four- and my two-seam. I’ve gotten a lot more ground balls here in the Fall League. I’m able to elevate the four-seam, then follow that with a two-seam to produce ground balls and double plays. In the long run, that saves me pitches. Those two pitches have definitely benefited me the most.”
Laurila: How long have you been throwing both a two- and a four-seam?
White: “When I got drafted, I was mainly two-seam. After I had TJ [in 2019], I started throwing only four-seams. Then this year I started working on a sinker. It really kicked in this summer.”
