Yesterday, I credited James McCann with throwing the slowest individual pitch of 2026, but it has been pointed out to me that McCann only threw the slowest tracked pitch of 2026. Twenty-one times, a position player threw a pitch so funky that Statcast threw up its electronic shoulders and assigned it a velocity of “–”. Often, it did so because the pitch was so slow that the cameras didn’t know what to make of it, or perhaps (just a theory) because the slowness of the pitch forced the pitcher to throw such a high-arcing rainbow that it was out of the path where Statcast expects to find pitches. I mean, what are you supposed to do with this pitch?
Either way, it’s possible that McCann’s pitch was, at worst, the 22nd-slowest pitch of the season. However, McCann still threw a plurality of those 21 untracked position player pitches, which means that he’s still most likely the person who threw the slowest pitch of the entire season. It just might not be the one we highlighted yesterday. Could it be this preposterous offering? We’ll never know. Read the rest of this entry »
Awhile back I was staring at the pitch movement chart of one player or another, and I got to thinking about cutters and gyro sliders. Often, cutters and gyro sliders end up right in the middle of the those charts. The cutter is designed to split the difference between a breaking ball and a four-seam fastball, and as its name indicates, the gyro slider leaves the hand with gyroscopic spin, which stabilizes the flight of the ball. I started wondering who throws the truest pitch in baseball, the pitch that moves the absolute least. I’m going to write about that later this week. It’s not today’s topic, though, because once I started down that path, I found that it kept branching.
I started wondering about who throws the sweepiest sweepers and the fastest fastballs and the sinkiest sinkers. Which pitch hits the edges of the zone most often? Which pitch fools hitters into chasing and which pitch fools them into taking called strikes? Which pitch tricks batters into challenging those called strikes? Which pitches miss bats the most and by the furthest? Which pitches get pulled, or skied, or beaten into the ground the most? We’re looking for the most extreme pitches in baseball, so now that the 2026 season is over, we’re not leaving any of the path with leaves no step had trodden black. We’re going to spend the week handing out some superlatives. This is part one, and it’s going to be focused mainly on velocity. Read the rest of this entry »
Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
On Wednesday night, for the second time in two days, the pitcher’s mound at Tropicana Field became the star of the World Series. Jacob Misiorowski, he of the 6-foot-7 frame and 7-foot-6 extension, was having trouble finding purchase with his front foot when he finished his absurdly long stride. On Tuesday night, Cam Booser, whose extension is not far from average, had suffered similar difficulties in the 11th inning of Game 4, so on back-to-back nights, we the baseball viewing public were treated to the sight of emergency mound repairs, replete with tamps and buckets of clay.
After Tuesday night’s difficulties, the broadcast made sure to be prepared to talk about the mound during Game 5, which the Brewers won, 4-1, to secure their first World Series in franchise history. One mound story came ready-made: Some players believe the pitching mound to be higher at Tropicana Field than at other ballparks. This is an easy thing to check. I’m going to run the numbers, but let’s start at the beginning.
You might have heard that assertion before. Alex Speier wrote about it in the Boston Globe in 2021. He noted that certain pitchers were credited with more extension at the Trop than in other ballparks, though he also raised the possibility that the difference was the result of some sort of calibration error, as 2021 was the first full season after Statcast switched tracking systems from Trackman to Hawk-Eye. Just last year, Chris Bassitt told The Athletic that Tampa Bay’s higher mound somehow increases his spin rate. Clearly, this narrative has taken hold around the league. None of us knows how often Major League Baseball is sending somebody out to measure each mound with a ruler, a protractor, and a plumb bob to make sure that each mound adheres perfectly to the rulebook specifications.
Moreover, it’s a fact that major league mounds can vary. In 2023, Eno Sarris had players vote on their favorite mounds. Tampa Bay’s came in first, partly because, said Paul Blackburn, “It’s definitely taller.” The rulebook is very specific about the layout of the mound, but the mound is created by people, and a different group of people at each ballpark. They do plenty of measuring, but the tolerances involved surely leave some wiggle room. The mound is built out of clay that is tamped down by hand, then covered with a thin layer of soil conditioner. There are different brands of clay and soil conditioner. There’s no rule about how compacted the clay of the mound has to be. Yankee Stadium’s “mound feel” graded out well in Eno’s poll. On the other end of the spectrum, you might recall that multiple players have complained that the mound in Sacramento is too hard.
Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
The mounds also change. The pitching rubbers wear out from time to time, necessitating reconstruction. When a ballpark has other events going on, the grounds crew has to take the whole thing apart and build it back up again, by hand, with more tamping. For Tampa Bay, of course, the whole stadium got rebuilt after it was destroyed by a hurricane. Regardless of the complaints in previous seasons, this year’s mound isn’t even the same by Ship of Theseus rules. It’s brand new.
At this point, we should acknowledge that the Rays aren’t hiding anything about the way they build their mound. In fact, here’s a whole video from 2015 in which they show you how they go about replacing the pitching rubber. Not only do they check the height of the mound, they check it with a laser level.
I mentioned the rulebook specifications earlier. Most of those rules are laid out twice. The second time comes on page 160, in Appendix 3, in a diagram that is, at the top, titled “Layout of the Pitching Mound,” but down below labeled “Suggested Layout of the Pitching Mound.” Read into that what you will.
The text below the diagram reads:
Pitching Mound: An 18′ diameter circle, center of which is 59′ from back of home plate.
Locate front edge of rubber 18″ behind center of mound.
Front edge of rubber to back point of home plate, 60’6″.
Slope starts 6″ from front edge of rubber.
The degree of slope from a starting point 6″ in front of the pitcher’s plate to a point 6′ toward home plate shall be 1″ to 1′, and such degree of slope shall be uniform.
Level area surrounding rubber should be 6″ in front of rubber, 18″ to each side and 22″ to rear of rubber. Total level area 5′ x 34″.
You might notice a few things here. It’s weird that it doesn’t say so in this section, but the rubber must be 10 inches above ground level. It says so on page two. The slope down toward the ground begins six inches in front of the rubber, it must be uniform, and it drops one inch per foot, which works out to a slope of 4.764 degrees. Then comes the even weirder part: The rulebook only says that this uniform slope needs to extend for five-and-a-half feet (or six feet from the front of the rubber). From that point on, the angle of the slope is presumably up to the discretion of the grounds crew. Here I would remind you that lots of pitchers have long enough strides that their front foot lands beyond that point.
I cannot imagine why the rulebook stops dictating the angle of the slope six feet from the rubber, leaving four-and-a-half feet of mound with no direction whatsoever. In theory, if one grounds crew sculpted a mound so that, after the point where the rulebook leaves off, the slope was a bit steeper, then pitchers would be able to stride farther and drop farther. That might make it feel like the mound – or at least the tabletop – is a little bit taller. The same effect could be achieved by not tamping the landing area as firmly, which would allow the pitcher’s front foot to plant deeper into the clay, again causing them to fall a bit farther and making the tabletop feel higher.
We also have to acknowledge that other factors can affect the perceived height of the mound. The backdrop is an important piece of the puzzle. When you’re standing on the mound, a home plate area that’s pressed right up against the back wall makes it feel like you’re 10 feet tall and standing right on top of the batter. When the back wall is farther back, it feels like home plate is 70 feet away. The height and slope of the stands behind home plate can also affect the perceived distance to home. Steep stands can make you feel like you’re at the bottom of a well, like you’re pitching uphill. This one is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if turf fields make the mound seem taller, because they don’t have blades of grass sticking up a little bit above the level of the dirt, making the ground feel a bit closer.
Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images
You might also recall earlier this month, when the Yankees surprised many of us by starting Gerrit Cole in Game 1 of the ALDS. They eventually revealed that they did so because his four-seamer plays up in the Trop. It gets more induced vertical break in the still air of a dome than it does outdoors, where a crosswind can foul things up. That’s particularly notable because in the same article where Bassitt told The Athletic that the high mound increased his spin rate, Jeff Hoffman said that the high mound increased the vert on his fastball. He may have been right about the effect but wrong about the cause, and that may be the key to the whole puzzle. Maybe the way the ball moves in Tampa Bay’s park is part of what makes pitchers feel like the mound is taller.
As I mentioned earlier, Statcast lets us check this pretty easily. This year, 10 Rays pitchers threw at least 100 four-seam fastballs both at home in Tropicana Field and on the road. I pulled their average release height (measured from the ground) and their extension for all of those four-seamers. Then I put all those numbers into a table so that I could share them with you, the fine people of FanGraphs.
As you can see, there’s almost no difference whatsoever. The average difference in extension was zero. Four pitchers had lower release points at home and six had higher release points. No player had a home-road split larger than 0.6 inches. The average difference was 0.008 feet, which works out to 0.096 inches. The average pitcher’s release point was a bit less than a tenth of an inch higher at home, and I’d remind you that release point can move around a bit. For example, during Game 5, Misiorowski’s four-seamer had an average release height of 5.16 feet, but he released balls as low as 4.96 feet and as high as 5.46 feet. That’s a spread of more than six inches.
The Statcast numbers indicate that pitchers are releasing the ball at the exact same height and with the exact same extension whether they’re in the Trop or elsewhere. If you really want to argue that Tampa Bay’s mound is taller, then I guess you can hang your hat on those 0.096 inches, but I think that’s well below the point of statistical significance. The mound is the same height.
Just for the sake of thoroughness, I also went back and checked the 2021 numbers that Speier cited. Once again, I wanted to compare apples to apples, so I only looked at four-seamers from pitchers who threw at least 100 in the Trop and 100 elsewhere. As Speier noted, there was a real measured difference in extension. The 11 players in that sample (congratulations to Rasmussen on being in both groups!) saw their extension increase by an average of 3.16 inches. Here’s the really interesting thing. Those players saw their release height drop at home, by an average of 1.01 inches. Maybe this was just a calibration issue. Or maybe the mound was slightly steeper, which caused players to stride slightly farther and release the ball slightly lower. We may never know the whole truth. But this issue no longer exists.
Mounds are definitely different around the league. I am on board with the idea that big league pitchers know the mound so well that they have a “The Princess and the Pea”-level ability to notice even the slightest differences. I also recognize that once a narrative takes hold, it’s hard to shake. We know that the air currents in the Trop make the ball move differently, and that at least one player attributed that difference to the height of the mound. I’m sure something about the background also makes the mound feel different, and probably something about the way the mound is sculpted. If there is a difference in the height of the mound, though, it’s less than a tenth of an inch, and I do not think even major league pitchers are sensitive enough to notice that, especially when there are so many other factors at play.
Mark Hoffman / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
In a different universe – perhaps one in which Junior Caminero fielded William Contreras’ two-out bouncer in the top of the fifth inning and fired to first base rather than second – Chandler Simpson’s stunning, self-obliterating catch in the second inning would have been the lasting memory of Game 3, and maybe the entire 2026 World Series. In service of the sublime, Simpson hurled himself into the left-field wall with such furor that he may have literally altered the stadium. And somehow, just before impact, he hauled in a baseball and, and just after impact, he kept hold of it. The catch saved a run, but not the game. It will go down as a footnote, a highlight that we’re at first delighted by and eventually accustomed to. But it deserves its own life and its own lore. I have made notes about the various small pieces of this play that can and should delight us for years to come.
Everybody Froze
For just a moment, everybody froze. The umpire and the catcher followed the ball as they always do. Sal Frelick finished his backswing and, as if caught halfway into doing the splits, held his bat out in front of him like a lightsaber while he tried to decide whether the ball would stay fair or slice foul. Freddy Peralta has never allowed a home run down the left-field line at Tropicana Field, but he clearly knows all about the short corner, which specializes in allowing 90-mph pokes like Frelick’s to leak out of the field of play. Peralta kept his head down, facing toward first base for just a split-second before curiosity got the best of him. Frelick finally decided the ball would stay fair and started running.
The Looming Wall
It’s hard to even see, but this is my favorite part of the play. This is Simpson, already at full speed by the time the broadcast cuts to the high home camera, gauging his distance to the wall. It’s his one and only chance to take his eye off the ball, to consider his own safety, to run the numbers. He has to figure out whether he can make the catch, whether he should pull up and play the ball off the wall. He does it so far from the wall, and you have to imagine that he did not like any of the answers he got. But he made the catch anyway. He didn’t slow down at all. He leapt for the ball and he crashed into the wall face first and he held onto the ball and he got it into the infield. He checked the wall, saw that the only way to catch the ball was to crash into it at full speed, and just went ahead and did it anyway.
This catch was no miracle. It was many, many flavors of wonderful, but it happened because Simpson quite simply looked at the wall and decided that he was willing to crash into it. Read the rest of this entry »
The first two games of the World Series were each decided by one run. By one measly run on Friday night and one measly run on Saturday night, the Rays found their backs against the wall. Erase a baserunning blunder here or a defensive lapse there, and the series could have been tied, or even 2-0 in favor of Tampa Bay rather than Milwaukee. Such things can haunt a team. In Game 3 on Monday night, the Brewers relieved the Rays of those would’ves, could’ves, and should’ves with a 10-1 thrashing that left no room for doubt. It was kind of like taking somebody’s mind off a scraped knee by punching them in the throat.
Lefty Robert Gasser, fresh off his first fullish major league season, continued his sparkling postseason run. Gasser went six innings, allowed just two baserunners, and because one was erased by a double play and the other on a caught stealing, he faced just 18 batters. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s the fewest batters you can face over six innings. Jackson Chourio, continuing his bid for World Series MVP and household name status, racked up four base hits, all of them hit 99 mph or harder. But singling out individual Brewers misses the larger point. All nine hitters in the Milwaukee starting lineup reached base. Eight of them had base hits. Eight of them had at least one hard-hit ball. Eight of them had at least one RBI. All nine of them scored. They outhit the Rays, 16-3.
The Rays started former Brewer ace Freddy Peralta, and for short while, it looked like he might give his old team fits and give the Rays a chance to climb back into the series. But a wild fifth inning put an end to that particular revenge fantasy. The Brewers led by so much that they emptied the bench to make sure everybody got to hit. They led by so much that they put in Brandon Woodruff, whose shoulder had kept him out since the Fourth of July, to pitch the ninth. The Brewers lead the series 3-0, and as we all know, that makes them the 44th team in AL/NL history to go up 3-0 in a seven-game series. Forty-two of the previous 43 went on to close the deal. In other words, history says the Brewers have a 97.67% chance of raising the trophy, while the Rays have just a 2.33% chance of snatching it from their yeasty, hoppy hands. Read the rest of this entry »
Kim Klement Neitzel-IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
On Saturday night, in the first inning of Game 2 of the World Series in Milwaukee, Rays left fielder Chandler Simpson slapped an RBI single through the left side of the infield. Once the hometown fans had finished groaning and the visitor’s dugout had exhausted its supply of high fives, Simpson’s presence on first base temporarily warped the gravitational pull of the World Series.
A chyron featuring Simpson’s stolen base totals for the regular season provided an impromptu long division lesson: 46 steals, 60 attempts, 76.7% success rate. The camera zoomed in on him as he conferred with first base coach Corey Dickerson (who, it’s worth noting, didn’t come close to stealing 46 bases in his entire 11-year career), and Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers did his best to look like he wasn’t eavesdropping. When starter Logan Henderson came set, the broadcast switched to a side-by-side-by-side shot that showed Simpson bracketed by Henderson and catcher William Contreras. Contreras stayed in a high, one-knee crouch and sneaked peeks down to first base before and after each pitch to Junior Caminero. Henderson tried to freeze Simpson by standing as still as a statue while the pitch clock ticked down toward zero on one pitch, then firing the next as soon as he came set. Everybody knew it was only a matter of time.
It happened on the fourth pitch. Despite Henderson’s best efforts, Simpson timed him up perfectly. At the exact moment Henderson raised his left heel, Simpson took off like a shot. The pitch was a fastball and Contreras was already on his feet by the time it arrived. He made a quick transition and fired a laser down to second base, a foot or two higher and more toward the first base side of the bag than he’d intended, but by no means a terrible throw. It didn’t matter. Simpson already had second base stolen. His hand touched the bag as second baseman Brice Turang’s glove closed around the ball. In a bit of visually pleasing accidental choreography, when Turang turned to attempt a swipe tag, Simpson was executing his own, equally sharp turn. He was also, temporarily, weightless.
By now, we imagine you have all heard about BLEPH. A few weeks ago, The Onion published an article that quoted FanGraphs contributor Derek Gardner extensively. In that article, Derek purported to be speaking on behalf of the entire analytics community in advocating for a new statistic called BLEPH. “We don’t care what it measures or how it’s calculated,” he said. “We just need something called B.L.E.P.H., and we need it now.” This is not the full truth, and we feel compelled to set the record straight.
First, we want to make it clear that Derek Gardner no longer works for FanGraphs. He was terminated for cause. Second, we take our stats seriously. We would never manufacture a new statistic just for the sake of creating a fun acronym. Because baseball analysis is already drowning in alphabet soup, we have a strict policy against creating new junk stats and acronyms unless we’re convinced that they’ll meaningfully expand the boundaries of sabermetric knowledge. We call it the Baseball Utility Terminology Threshold for Stopping Lighthearted Acronym Proliferation (BUTTSLAP).
This rigor is, in part, the reason that BLEPH became a national story in the first place. Before we get into the specifics, though, we should explain why we’re making all this public. In recent years, we’ve been inspired to learn that when we’re honest about our vision for the site and the challenges it faces, it can inspire a sense of camaraderie in our readers. All the same, that openness hasn’t normally extended to firings. Read the rest of this entry »
A couple years ago, I wrote an article about Amed Rosario. Rosario was just coming off the best season of his career, a 3.1-WAR 2022 campaign in which he’d posted a 104 wRC+ and manned shortstop for the Guardians. He’d led the majors with nine triples, but I was interested in another category where he’d not only led the league but also left everyone else in his dust. Statcast credited Rosario with 369 competitive runs. That was nearly 70 more than any other player in 2022, and it’s still the highest single-season total ever recorded.
As there’s no reason for you to remember what a competitive run is, let’s start with a refresher. In order for Statcast to do a good job of measuring a player’s average sprint speed, it needs to pick the right plays, when they’ll be running hard and reaching their maximum speed. If you hit a routine groundout to the shortstop and run down the baseline at a businesslike 80%, that’s not really a reflection of your top speed. You’re not running competitively. Statcast only assesses sprint speed on plays where a batter is running to first after a “topped” or “weakly hit” ball, or plays where they run two or more bases (except when they score from second on an extra-base hit). Those are competitive runs, and I’m going to quote from my old article to explain why I think they’re worth writing about:
I don’t know about you, but I think this is incredibly fun. Competitive runs is an incidental statistic. It’s just scaffolding for another stat, but there’s one person who plays baseball like competitive runs is his own personal pinball machine. The other reason I love it is that even though competitive runs exists only to serve a higher master, it’s still a descriptive stat in its own right. A player’s competitive runs total tells you plenty about the way they play the game.
In order to lead the league in competitive runs, you need to put the ball in play a lot, which means no striking out and, to a lesser extent, limited walking. You need to hit the ball weakly and on the ground, but you also need to reach base a lot so that you can make all those first-to-thirds and second-to-homes. Your offensive game needs to revolve around speed and ground-based contact. I’ve left out one other prerequisite, but already, it’s starting to sound like I’m describing one player in particular, right?
If you’ve been following the postseason closely, you probably know why every Guardians player celebrates a single by turning to their dugout and flashing their teammates a thumbs down. “When a Guardians hitter notches a single, he stands on first base, peers toward the dugout and flashes either two thumbs up or two thumbs down, depending on how hard he struck the ball.” That’s how The Athletic’s Zack Meisel described the celebration back in July, in an article documenting the remarkable way that Steven Kwan was turning things around after a dismal start to the season.
The celebration is actually more specific than that, though. The Guardians aren’t just indicating whether they hit the ball hard. They’re indicating whether it met Statcast’s official threshold for a hard-hit ball. Travis Bazzana explained the premise to some sort of FanDuel-affiliated Instagram influencer at the All-Star Game back in July:
“Yeah, so it’s funny. When you hit it hard, if you hit it over 95 mph, you’re supposed to give a thumbs up. And if you hit it a little soft, like dink hit or groundball, it’s a thumbs down. The joke in today’s game is you want to hit the ball hard, you want to hit the ball in the air. And so it’s like, ‘Oh it’s a bad hit if I hit it soft.’ It’s kind of a funny joke.”
If you’re wondering why Bazzana felt the need to bookend the explanation with avowals that the joke was indeed funny, it’s because he delivered it with all the enthusiasm of a recently dissected frog. Clearly, life has taught Bazzana that if he wants someone to pick up on the fact that he’s telling them a joke, he’ll need to say so explicitly both at the beginning and end of that particular instance of hilarity. I would love to see him attempt stand-up comedy. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re keeping score at home, the ALCS has now gone back and forth twice. On a frigid Saturday night in Cleveland, Tampa Bay’s big bats finally woke up. The Rays beat the Guardians, 7-3, to win Game 4 and even the series at 2-2. The game was originally scheduled for Friday night, but pouring rain destroyed that plan. The low temperature and a light west-southwest breeze kept multiple would-be homers in the ballpark, and the rain-soaked grass slowed down balls in the outfield. However, it didn’t stop the Rays from scoring more than three runs for the first time in the series. The Rays were more aggressive than the Guardians in terms of asking their best arms to get big outs. They countered a Cleveland bullpen game with a surprising amount of starting pitching, and they got big performances from Yandy Díaz, Junior Caminero, and Jonathan Aranda. The series is now guaranteed to end in St. Petersburg.
Both teams had the option to adjust their pitching plans after the rain banged Friday night’s game. The Rays could have thrown their ace, Drew Rasmussen on regular rest, rather than scheduled starter Nick Martinez. However, they knew they still would have needed Martinez later in the series, and it made sense for manager Kevin Cash to stick with his plan. Things were more complicated for Guardians manager Stephen Vogt.
With none of his most trusted starters available on normal rest on Friday, Vogt had no choice but to plan on a bullpen game, even though his bullpen was overworked. The postponement gave his relievers a much-needed game of rest. It also gave him the opportunity to hand the ball back to Game 1 starter Foster Griffin. Getting some length from Griffin would have been huge, because the postponement meant that if the series went seven games, the teams would play four games in a row, once again taxing the bullpen. However, Vogt stuck with opener Shawn Armstrong, and was cagey with reporters before the game when asked whether Griffin would pitch. It seemed like his plan for cobbling together nine innings was very contingent on how the game unfolded. Read the rest of this entry »
