For years now, a simple message has been gaining traction in major league bullpens and pitching labs: Just throw it down the middle. As big league pitches have gotten speedier and bendier, the people who throw them have been increasingly advised to trust their stuff, stop nibbling around the edges, and attack the heart of the zone. Adam Berry wrote about the Rays adopting this approach in 2021. In 2022, Bryan Adams superfan Justin Choi looked into the numbers and noted, “In each season since 2015, when Statcast data became public, hitters have accumulated a negative run value against down-the-middle fastballs.” Last year, Stephanie Apstein documented the phenomenon in Baltimore, while Hannah Keyser and Zach Crizer did the same on a league-wide basis, describing the Rays model thusly:

Step 1: Develop unhittable stuff
Step 2: Let it rip down the middle
Step 3: Win

Just last week, Jeff Fletcher wrote that after trying and failing to get their pitchers to attack the zone more often, the Angels started putting their pitchers in the box to face their own arsenal, courtesy of a Trajekt pitching machine. “I knew my pitches were good,” said José Soriano through an interpreter, “but when I faced myself, I find out they’re really good. So I have more trust in my stuff now.” Pitches right down the middle are called meatballs for a reason, but if you’ve ever watched peak Max Scherzer demolish the heart of the other team’s lineup by simply pumping 97-mph fastballs across the heart of the plate, none of this comes as a galloping shock.

Still, I wondered whether I could find data to back up this shift in mindset. Are pitchers really attacking the zone more often? And are better pitching staffs (or staffs with better stuff) really attacking the middle of the plate more often? After all, the Angels rank 22nd in Stuff+ and 14th in PitchingBot Stuff, not to mention near the bottom in ERA, FIP, and xFIP. If they feel this good about their stuff, I’d imagine that every team does. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the course of his storied career, Andrew McCutchen has stood there and watched ball four go by 1,075 times. I watched something like 750 of those pitches on Thursday, and then I cut them down into supercuts. I hope to God I never to see another ball four. I was watching for something specific. I noticed the other day that McCutchen flips his bat a lot, which caught me off guard. If you’re a Pirates fan, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about, but I suspect people outside Pittsburgh might be startled by it, too. After all, McCutchen is a veteran who tends toward a more traditional playing style. That’s not to say that he plays without any flair or that he doesn’t have a sense of humor (he definitely does), just that he’s on the staid side of things. In fact, in October of 2017, McCutchen tweeted his disapproval of the trend.

The issue is not that McCutchen has necessarily changed his mind. He doesn’t really flip his bat when he hits a home run. He’ll do it on rare occasions, but most of the time, he handles his homers with a quiet cool. He finishes his home run swing one-handed, with the bat held low, and he simply drops the bat head toward the ground and lets go of the handle in a smooth continuation of that move. It’s a classic look, and though it’s hard to imagine that McCutchen doesn’t know he looks cool while he’s doing it, it doesn’t come off as an affectation.

Instead of home runs, McCutchen flips his bat when he earns a walk. I’m not the only person to notice this. A Ke’Bryan Hayes fan account started a Twitter thread of McCutchen’s bat flips back in May of 2023, adding a video each time he did it for the next two weeks. In July, the Pirates posted a compilation video on TikTok with the caption, “Either pitch to Cutch or risk getting bat-flipped on.” If you think about it, for someone who really loves bat flipping, the walk is the perfect time. First of all, just about everyone walks more often than they homer, which means more chances to party. Second, while a walk is good for the batter and bad for the pitcher, it’s not a big enough deal that the pitcher will feel like you’re rubbing their nose in it. Third, nothing is expected of the batter after a walk. There’s no risk of flipping your bat dramatically and then realizing that you should have been running around the bases because the ball isn’t carrying like you thought it would. Read the rest of this entry »

The phrase outer space has been around since 1842, but I’ve always thought that it’s a strange one. Space is the catchall word we use for any empty area. It’s a little bit silly that someone looked up at the unknowable vastness of the universe and decided to refer to it in the same way you’d describe a spare bedroom to a friend who needs a place to crash. Either way, there’s plenty of space out there. There’s space between planets and space between galaxies. Cosmic voids, the vast empty spaces between gravitationally linked galaxies, make up more than 80% of the universe.

Saturday was Space Night at LECOM Park in Bradenton, Florida. While Paul Skenes was dazzling a packed house in Pittsburgh, the Bradenton Marauders, the Pirates’ Low-A affiliate, held a stargazing session after the game and played “Space Oddity,” “Man in the Moon,” and “Mr. Spaceman” over the PA between innings. Staff members wore NASA flight suits. On the field, the Marauders overcame a two-run deficit to beat the Port St. Lucie Mets, 4-3, extending their winning streak to nine games. Also on the field: a turtle.

In the top of the second inning, with a 1-2 count on leadoff batter Yohairo Cuevas, the home plate umpire called time out and turned his head toward left field. It took a while for the rest of the heads in the park to follow, but when they did, they were rewarded with a show. A turtle roughly the size of home plate walked into left field as a defensive replacement. The human outfielders wanted no part it. Center fielder Sergio Campana gently pushed his teammates toward the turtle, and as they cautiously approached it, the turtle started hauling shell toward center field. Left fielder Esmerlyn Valdez waved to the bullpen for help. Eventually, reliever Magdiel Cotto jogged out, hoisted the creature from behind, and hauled it back to the bullpen. The whole saga lasted just over a minute, or as Reptiles Magazine put it, “Turtle’s Minor League Debut Short-Lived.” Read the rest of this entry »

Your local beat reporter has the power to shape the way you see your favorite team. Day in and day out, it’s their voice delivering the good news and the bad, telling you what’s happening on the field and in the locker room. If you’re lucky enough to love a team with a good beat writer, it can absolutely deepen your relationship with the sport. A reporter might become required reading because they write beautifully, make you laugh, really know the game, ask good questions, or build great relationships with the players. If you don’t have a good beat writer, it’s easier to drift away from the team, and even the sport. They matter quite a bit, is what I’m saying. Despite that fact, beat reporters are rarely the focus. For all they mean to us, we don’t even see their faces all that often. Most of the time, all we see of a beat reporter is a disembodied hand holding a recording device (or, as in the picture below, the very tip of their nose).

It’s a complicated job. It requires knowledge of the game, constant creativity, tight deadlines, long hours, travel, and the ability to forge good relationships with players despite the fact that you sometimes have to stick a recorder in their face and ask, “So what was going through your mind when you made the error that cost your team the game?” In order to learn more about what the job actually entails, I reached out to Andrew Golden, who took over as the Washington Post’s lead beat writer covering the Nationals this season and has been on the beat for a few years.

Although he’s barely three years out of college, Golden’s credentials are imposing. In high school, he played baseball and wrote about sports for the school paper and for a blog he ran with some friends. He double-majored in journalism and African American studies at Northwestern, where he covered sports for the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, earning internships at the Kansas City Star, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post. The Post internship came immediately after graduation, and he was hired full-time when it ended. Golden had spent three months covering the Washington Commanders and another three covering various sports when an editor asked him if he’d like to cover the Nationals, working with the lead beat writer at the time, Jesse Dougherty.

“I always loved baseball,” he told me. “It’s my first love, and so l hoped at some point I could cover it. I just didn’t think it would happen the way that it did.” He joined the club during the last week of Spring Training in 2022. “To go from helping out with Navy basketball coverage to then suddenly you’re in the clubhouse and you see Juan Soto and Josh Bell, it was very much a culture shock… I don’t think I talked to Juan Soto for the first month, I was so starstruck.” When I spoke to Golden last week, he took me through the nuts and bolts of the job, and humored me when I asked questions like whether it was possible for a beat reporter to be an introvert.

For Golden, 24, a normal day on the beat starts at 9 a.m., earlier if it’s a Sunday. The first thing he does is go over the previous day’s game. “I typically like to look back at the night before and see the big trends,” he said. “Obviously, when you’re writing on deadline, there are certain things that you might miss because you need to type or something happened in the late innings that maybe you missed. So I typically like to go back and look at the night prior and do some studying… I go back and look at Baseball Savant. Does anything stand out? Did this pitcher utilize one pitch more than he normally does? Those sorts of things. What trends did I miss?” He’ll also catch up on the previous day’s news at each level of Washington’s farm system and read whatever might have been written about the Nationals or their players from other news outlets. For the first of several times throughout the day, he’ll consult with his editors about what he’s working on now and what he might work on next.

Most importantly, he’ll research and write. In addition to writing game stories, beat reporters write everything from statistical deep dives to profiles of coaches and players to breaking news about the business side of the game. At 5:12 on Friday morning, the Post published an article Golden wrote about how Trevor Williams has succeeded by using his four-seamer less often. On the day we spoke, he mentioned that he was researching Luis García Jr.’s recent success at the plate. If all that sounds like a lot, well, it is. Later in the interview, I had to circle back and make sure that I understood the logistics of, specifically, at what point of the day Golden has time to do normal person things like go to the store. The answer: whenever he finishes all of the work above. “I get normal things done,” he laughed. “There is that free time, that flexibility during the morning, definitely. I promise I have groceries in my fridge.” For that reason, he dreads 4:00 p.m. games, which don’t leave time to do anything either before or afterward. “I love 1 o’clock games or 7. You know you’re going to have the front or the back end free, but 4 o’clock is right smack in the middle.”

It’s not always feasible, but for a typical 7 p.m. game, Golden prefers to get to the ballpark at 1:45. The clubhouse opens to reporters at 3, and until then he writes down questions he’d like to ask and keeps an eye on the field. “I like to be there early. Sometimes you’ll see a guy on the field doing something and it might pique your interest.” At 3, he goes down from the press box to the clubhouse. “It’s open for 45, 50 minutes, so that’s your time to talk to players, talk to front office people if they’re there, talk to whoever’s around.” Reporters are only allowed in certain parts of the clubhouse. Places like the kitchen, training room, and bathroom are off limits. Some parts Golden has never seen even once. “There’s two sections,” he said, “an office area and a coaches’ locker room area where we’re not really allowed. And there’s a back section we’re not allowed either, and I truly can’t tell you what’s back there.” Manager Davey Martinez talks to reporters at 4, and after that reporters go on the field to watch batting practice.

Lane Thomas taking swings in the final round of BP: https://t.co/asTCGf2Jih pic.twitter.com/s4WXkXN5F5

— Andrew Golden (@andrewcgolden) May 7, 2024

“You can still get players then if you want,” he explained. “If you can grab them coming off the field, that sort of thing. That’s typically when I like to talk to Darnell Coles, the hitting coach. The hitting coach is really busy, but I always know that he has to come off the field and walk past me, so I can get him when he’s coming off the field.” Golden laughed as he said the last part, but he explained that learning each player’s routines and figuring out how to be in the right place at the right time is actually a crucial part of the job. “I think that’s one of the things about the beat that people don’t realize. There’s definitely a rhythm to how things go. You know the relievers will always be around because they’re not doing a ton of prep work before the game… But starting pitchers are rarely around because they’re obviously going through their whole routine to get ready. And the hitters are kind of hit or miss. It depends on when they go to the cage and what their routine is. That’s one thing I didn’t know early on, like, ‘Oh, I want to talk to Josiah Gray.’ And Josiah was figuring out his routine and going through his stuff, and I was like, ‘Man, why is he never here?’ You have to kind of give these guys these moments and try to figure out what their routines are, and you build around that.”

Once batting practice is over, reporters return to the press box to eat dinner before the game. For a night game, Golden’s 700- to 800-word game story is due when the final out is recorded, which means that he’s taking notes and writing throughout the game, then rewriting when new developments come up. “That was an adjustment too,” said Golden. “When do you start writing? Because obviously things can change. If somebody hits a go-ahead home run in the eighth inning, it can completely flip your story… Sometimes it just takes time to kind of develop that muscle and learn how to do that. I think that was a struggle at first, but then it starts to get a little bit easier, it starts to come to you a little more naturally.” Many beat writers also tweet the play-by-play throughout the game. Here’s a sample of Golden’s Twitter feed during last Wednesday night’s 12-inning affair between the Nationals and Orioles. Luckily for him, colleague Spencer Nusbaum was in charge of the game story that night.

As soon as their stories have been filed, reporters head back down to the clubhouse to hear from players and coaches again. “While we’re down there, our editors are editing the story,” said Golden. “And then we’ll come back up, and then we’ll add quotes in, and that’ll be the final story. So it’s probably an hour between when I file the first one and the second one.” At that point, the reporters finally get to go home or to their hotel, unless it’s getaway day. Golden generally prefers to go straight from the ballpark to the airport so that the next day, he can wake up in the city where he’ll be covering the game. I stammered a bit after Golden finished walking me through a normal day on the beat. It was a lot to take in. “So, so that’s — I mean, that’s a long day,” I said. “Yeah,” he said, laughing. “It is a grind. I’m sure people kind of know that, but I don’t think they know the extent. I mean, I have friends who are like, ‘Well, the game starts at 7. Don’t you get there at like 5:30?’”

It’s a grueling job: a month away from home during spring training, then a six-month-long season of days like the one described above, half of them on the road, with few days off. Knowing that, I asked Golden whether my impression of the beat writer demographic was correct. I’d noticed that beat writers tend to be either very young reporters or veterans who have been doing it forever because they’ve found a way to balance the lifestyle. “Yeah, that’s absolutely correct, at least from what I’ve seen,” he said. “I remember somebody telling me when I started, ‘Yeah, this is a job that you have when you’re single and have no kids’… You do it when you’re young, because it’s easier to manage a 162-game season when you don’t have all those other responsibilities, families, all that stuff.”

Golden recently got engaged, and the quirks of his job have been a part of the relationship from the very beginning. His first date with his now-fiancée was supposed to take place on the first Sunday of October 2022, but the Nationals and the Phillies needed to play four games in three days, all of them rain-soaked because a hurricane was bearing down on the east coast. Golden was texting her throughout the weekend, trying to explain the scheduling and scoring arcana that would determine whether he could make it or whether they’d need to reschedule. “It’s hard to explain how ridiculous it is. I’m trying to explain to her… we just have to get to the fifth inning and then we’re good. She’s like, ‘Why do you only need to get through half a game?’ There are so many things about baseball that we think are so normal that actually are not normal to normal people.” To make the grind more manageable, he now sends his parents and his fiancée an email every month with his entire travel itinerary, down to the flight numbers and hotels.

Golden mentioned another challenge to working the beat for an extended period of time: finding new ways to tell the same story. “I think when you first get started on the beat, everything feels new,” he said. “Coming up with ideas can be challenging when you’ve written stuff before. Trying to think, ‘How can I make this new?’ or ‘How can I make this different from before?’” As with any job, some days are harder than others. “There are some days where you just don’t have it. There’s just some days where you’re tired, you just got off a plane this morning and you drove to the stadium. And it’s day eight of a road trip and you’re like, ‘Man, I just don’t have it today.’ Those days definitely happen.”

All of this makes Golden more impressed by the veterans who have been doing it for years and years. “There are people who do balance both and who do this for a very long time. Mad props to them for that,” he said. “I can imagine trying to balance all those things, but it definitely is either younger people or people who have been doing this like 40 years and really know the business, know everybody in the business, and know the organization. The people who have institutional knowledge, it’s really interesting. One of our beat reporters is Mark Zuckerman [of MASN]. He’s been covering the team since 2005. He has an institutional knowledge that I just don’t have.”

He’s freezing https://t.co/ay0BgrIPUB pic.twitter.com/mXA6lMTx7B

— Spencer Nusbaum (@spencernusbaum_) March 26, 2024

That brought us to another important part of the job: Beat writers need to develop relationships with the people they’re covering. I asked Golden whether he has an easier time talking to players now than he did when he first started. “Definitely, yeah,” he said. “When you first join the beat there is a bit of — it’s not discomfort, but — I guess discomfort is the right word. They don’t really know you, you don’t really know them, and now you’re developing trust with them.” The most important thing is putting in the time, especially on road trips. “When you travel, and they realize that you’re traveling with them a lot and they see you on the road a lot, you’re going through the ride with them. I think they start to respect you more and they start to open up more, because they also understand you are going to be around.” Traveling and befriending writers in other cities has also made that easier. For example, when the Nationals signed Eddie Rosario, Golden asked Justin Toscano, who covered Rosario for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for advice on how to connect with him. He also traded notes about Jeimer Candelario and Nick Senzel with Charlie Goldsmith of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which was easy because Goldsmith also happened to be Golden’s college roommate.

Golden mentioned several other ways to build trust with players. When they see you keep your word about not printing off-the-record comments, they start to trust that you’re not there to make them look bad. Similarly, they appreciate when a writer strikes the right balance when someone’s struggling. Some of the Nationals follow Golden on social media, where it is sometimes his job to talk about what’s going wrong with the team. “It can be a little bit awkward having to go to guys and be like, ‘Hey man, what happened there? Why’d you make that mistake?’ Or, ‘What was going through your mind?’ It can be awkward, uncomfortable. Nobody wants to ask about failures.” Managing to tell the truth respectfully makes a difference. “As long as you’re fair, and you’re not attacking them personally, I think people can respect that… I think a lot of times, people think the players will get upset if you say something negative. But I also think if you pretend like everything is positive and going well, I think they get upset with that too. Where the guy is 2-for-40 in his last 10 games, and you’re like, ‘What do you think you’re doing well at the plate right now?’ And they don’t want to hear that… You don’t want to personally attack somebody or say something negative about them as a person. But I also do think there’s a balance. You want to be honest with where they’re at. And if they get upset with your honesty, you have to live with that.”

Toward the end of the conversation, I asked Golden what people might not understand about his job. He mentioned the hours and the various unseen aspects, but he also talked about the perspective that comes from doing it day in and day out, and the way that all of his research allows him to ask the right questions. “Having to know the ins and outs of the team, and thinking critically about every roster move. What does this mean? Even just now, Robert Garcia just returned from a rehab assignment, and then Matt Barnes got DFA’d. And what does it mean? What does it mean for Tanner Rainey? I think my first year, I was not thinking like that. Now, your brain naturally goes like that. It’s an odd thought, like, ‘Man, my brain moves like this now?’ But there’s a lot of thought that goes into this.”

Yesterday, I wrote about at the mysterious disappearing zone rate of Mookie Betts. Today, we’ll be looking at a player who has seen his zone rate go in the other direction: Adley Rutschman. This season, opponents are throwing 51.7% of their pitches in the zone against Rutschman, up from 47.3% in 2023 (and 45.9% in 2022). That jump of 4.4 percentage points is the fourth largest among all qualified players. The trend is much stronger when Rutschman is batting right-handed, but as you can see from the world’s tiniest table, it’s also there when he’s batting lefty.

In yesterday’s article, I broke down the reasons that throwing fewer pitches in the zone to Betts (or at least the approach that led to fewer pitches in the zone) made some sense. I don’t have any such argument today. If anything, I think pitchers should be throwing Rutschman way fewer strikes. The reason is simple: He’s chasing way more than he did last year. In 2023, Rutschman swung at 23.4% of pitches outside the zone, which put him in the 81st percentile. This season, he’s at 32.5%, which puts him in the 22nd percentile. That is an enormous change, the third highest among all qualified players, and it hasn’t been limited to one side of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

In-zone rate is one of the most fascinating stats in baseball. It definitely means something, but you sometimes need to sort through a couple different factors in order to determine just what that something is. If pitchers think they can knock the bat out of your hands, they’ll come right after you inside, but if they’re scared you’ll do damage, then they’ll nibble around the edges. If you chase too much, they’ll look to tempt you outside the zone, but if you make good swing decisions, you can force them to throw it over the plate. Fastballs end up in the zone more often than breaking balls and offspeed pitches, so if you struggle to catch up to velocity, you’ll see more pitches in the zone. There’s always some randomness thrown in for good measure too, but generally speaking, that’s the matrix.

If you combine all those factors, you’ll see that most of the time, players who take big hacks see fewer pitches in the zone than those who just try to put the ball in play. Since 2021, Salvador Perez and Bryce Harper have seen the fewest pitches in the zone, while Myles Straw and Ha-Seong Kim have seen the most. But there are some elite players who combine the best of all worlds: They make good swing decisions and they combine power with contact ability. If you hang it, they’ll bang it, and if you bury it, they’ll spit on it. These players usually end up with a zone rate that’s somewhere in the middle, simply because there is no one good way to pitch to them. Think Joey Votto, Alex Bregman, and our subject for today: Mookie Betts.

If you’re a baker, you might be fond of the kitchen sink cookie: the cookie where you mix anything and everything that might be delicious into the dough. Pecans and peanut butter chips? Sure. Toffee bits and white chocolate? The more the merrier. Betts is baseball’s version of the kitchen sink cookie, studded with athleticism, coordination, savvy, skill, versatility, maybe even some shredded coconut. There’s no such thing as a right way to pitch him. He has weak spots, but he’s excellent at hitting the kinds of pitches that are usually located in those spots because he’s good against every kind of pitch. He’s never excelled against pitches at the top of the zone, but he destroys four-seam fastballs. If you want to beat him up there, you really have to hit the very edge, because if you miss high, he won’t swing, and if you miss low, he’ll clobber it. He’s also had trouble low and away, but again, he’s always been solid against the breaking pitches that most righties try and throw there.

This year, Betts is batting leadoff in front of reigning AL MVP and current Triple Crown candidate Shohei Ohtani and perennial MVP candidate Freddie Freeman. There’s nobody in baseball with better lineup protection, so you could be forgiven for assuming that he has been seeing a lot more strikes this season. He has not. In fact, his zone rate has fallen from 49.1% in 2023 to 45.4% this season. That drop of 3.7 percentage points is tied with MJ Melendez for the second largest among all qualified players, behind only Anthony Volpe, who went from 50% to 46.1%. That leaves Betts with a zone rate in the 13th percentile of all qualified players.

So far, 10.1% of the pitches Betts has seen have been in the waste zone, and 24.4% have been in the chase zone. Both of those numbers are the highest he’s ever recorded. Just 23% of the pitches Betts has seen this year have been in the heart zone. That’s the lowest rate he’s ever recorded, and it’s also eighth lowest among the 196 players who have seen at least 400 pitches this season. Pitchers are avoiding him like never before, and it’s not just that he’s seeing fewer strikes. They’re trying to execute a specific plan.

They’re trying to hit that outside corner. Betts is seeing fewer four-seamers, and more sinkers and offspeed pitches. Those offspeed pitches, as well as the breaking balls he’s seeing, are more concentrated on the outside edge of the plate.

Strictly speaking, this plan is not working. Betts is already sitting on a major league-best 3.0 WAR, and his 193 wRC+ is second only to the 217 mark of the player who is, in theory, protecting him in the lineup. It’s hard to argue that the league has finally figured out a player who’s currently on pace for 12.8 WAR.

However, this plan is absolutely changing the shape of the production Betts is putting up. First, the good news: He’s running a career-high 16.3% walk and a career-low 9.6% strikeout rate. His 1.71 walks per strikeout are miles ahead of Vinnie Pasquantino’s 1.36 in second place. Now the bad news: Betts’ hard-hit rate and 90th percentile exit velocity are down significantly. His pull rate is down to 32.6%, the lowest of his entire career and a drop-off of more than 13 percentage points from 2023. He hasn’t hit a homer since April 12 or an extra-base hit since April 28. Here’s what that looks like in heat map form. The map below shows Betts’ value according to Runs Above Average per 100 pitches.

If you’re a pitcher, that makes it pretty clear: outside good, inside bad. Even with Ohtani and Freeman looming, it might make sense to try to hit your spot on the outside corner and risk giving up a walk. Furthermore, this plan is not without precedent. If you go back and look at the heat maps of the pitches Betts has seen in recent years, one of them jumps out as similar to this season.

In 2021, pitchers tried a similar tack, aggressively going after the outside corner. Betts ended up with a 131 wRC+ — the worst mark he’s had since 2017. If you’re an opposing pitcher with no good options — which is to say any pitcher who finds themselves 60 feet, 6 inches away from Mookie Betts — why not try an approach that has, at least grading by the ridiculous curve of Betts’ stellar production, worked before? Look at how many of his hits (especially his extra-base hits) went to left field last year.

Right field is just a sea of gray outs with a few green singles sprinkled in. In 2023, Betts had a .602 wOBA when he pulled the ball, .396 when he hit it straightaway, and .189 when he hit it to the opposite field. Why not do everything you can to keep him from pulling the ball and encourage him to hit it the other way? Unfortunately for opposing pitchers, this tactic requires a high level of precision. Betts doesn’t seem to mind taking his walks, and on the rare occasions when he does get a pitch to hit on the inner half, he’s making the most of it.

However, there are a few signs that he’s had to adjust to combat this approach. He appears to be setting up closer to the plate this season. In the pictures below, I’ve copied and pasted a second home plate right next to the actual home plate to give a better sense of scale.

In theory, moving a few inches closer means that the inside pitches Betts usually mashes are now a little bit further inside, which should give him less time to turn on them. Furthermore, his chase rate is up a bit from last season, and it has been rising in recent weeks.

This could just be regression. Betts has an 83 wRC+ over his last nine games, but it’s not like he was going to run a 250 wRC+ and a 12% chase rate all season. However, he really is chasing more — not a lot, but more than he did in April and more than he did in 2023. We’ve seen him move closer to the plate, and it’s certainly possible that seeing so few pitches in the strike zone has made him a little bit sick of waiting for his pitch and more likely to swing at something he shouldn’t. We’re only a fifth of the way through the season, and all the numbers you’ve seen so far are likely to continue to regress to the mean. Betts will likely face more pitchers who are bold enough to challenge him inside (or at all). But for now, it looks like he’s still adjusting to this new approach.

On April 28, the Mets walked off the Cardinals in the 11th inning. It was a huge moment, made even bigger because the embattled Mark Vientos delivered the knockout blow in just his second big league game after starting the season in the minors. That night, John DeMarsico, director of SNY’s Mets broadcasts, posted a video of the play that was shot from inside the production truck. It’s something he does occasionally, though this video had a twist: the audio from the triumphant final scene of Moneyball was overlaid on the broadcast.

Walk-Off: A behind-the-scenes featurette #Baseballiscinema pic.twitter.com/ZrgRleH9SB

— John DeMarsico (@JohnDeMarsico) April 29, 2024

DeMarsico is renowned for adding cinematic flourishes to SNY’s broadcasts, but when I watched this particular video — hearing dramatic music play as the voices in the truck worked together to decide what shot should come next — I was struck by the way DeMarsico is entrusted with telling the story of the game. SNY’s team is universally acknowledged to be one of the best in the business. At any given moment, DeMarsico can choose multiple shots that would look great and tell the viewer what is going on, but his job is bigger than that. His job is to use those images to craft a narrative. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, in his 26th game of the 2024 season, Alex Bregman hit his first home run. It didn’t come a moment too soon. Over his first 25 games, Bregman had run a wRC+ of 65. Until this year, he’d never had a stretch of 25 games in a single season in which he’d hit so poorly. Even in his worst season, an injury shortened 2021 campaign, he still finished with a 114 wRC+ and 2.1 WAR. So far this season, Bregman has been worth just 0.2 WAR. A cursory look at Bregman’s numbers over those first 25 games tells a very simple story: zero home runs, .268 SLG, .052 ISO. That’s not just a power outage. That’s a catastrophic grid failure. Only once before has Bregman posted an ISO this low over a 25-game stretch: In 2017, in the 54th through 78th games of his entire career, his ISO was .044. Because he’s been an impact player for so long, it’s easy to forget that Bregman is just 30 years old. It’s not as if Father Time has suddenly caught up with him, and he’ll surely bounce back at some point. But what’s going on right now?

Bregman has always had a somewhat odd offensive profile. As Houston hitting coach Troy Snitker told reporters, “He doesn’t hit for power because he hits the ball harder than most guys; he hits for power because he hits it in the air more than most guys.” In his entire career, Bregman has posted an above-average hard-hit rate just once, and he’s never broken 40%. However, he has impeccable plate discipline and bat-to-ball skills, and he’s constantly pulling the ball in the air. Although he’s recorded an above-average barrel rate just once, he’s never once had a below-average sweet spot rate. If you’re pulling the ball in the air, especially at Minute Maid Park, you don’t need to hit the ball hard enough to qualify for a barrel; you just need to hit it hard enough to get to the Crawford Boxes. Since 2015, Bregman has hit 18 home runs at or below 95 mph, second in all of baseball to Didi Gregorius with 19.

Snitker saw Bregman’s approach as an opportunity. “So with guys like that,” he said, “if you can have any small improvements to how hard the ball is coming off (the bat), he benefits the most, because he’s already getting the most balls out there.” This offseason, Snitker proposed weighted bat training in order to increase Bregman’s bat speed, with the goal of adding just a single mile per hour in exit velocity: “Just his batted-ball profile with 1 mile an hour is worth a lot in production,” said Snitker. Bregman explained that the focus was “trying to move (the bat) as fast as I could.” After four months of training, Bregman said, his bat speed numbers increased significantly without having any adverse impact on his mechanics. Coming into spring training, Bregman said he felt like his swing was “in the best spot that it’s been in years.”

Needless to say, the results have not been there. Bregman’s hard-hit rate is down, as are his average exit velocity and his 50th percentile exit velo. However, his 90th percentile EV is doing just fine and he’s nearly matched his max from last season. It’s not that he can’t hit the ball as hard as he used to; it’s just that he’s not doing it as often.

But it’s not just his contact quality; it’s his entire batted ball profile. Bregman’s groundball rate has exploded while his pull rate has cratered. His pull rate hadn’t been below 42% since his rookie season, but this year it’s at 33.7%. Only once before has he had a groundball rate as high as 40%; this year he’s at 42.7%. Look at his spray charts from 2023 and 2024. There’s so much less in the outfield, especially to the pull side.

Bregman’s line drive rate has cratered. When he hits the ball on the ground, he’s rolling over the it and sending it to shortstop rather than ripping it down the line. His fly ball rate is nearly the same, but when he puts it in the air, he’s often dropping his back shoulder, resulting in a weakly hit ball to right field.

If we combine the contact quality and batted ball profile, the picture becomes more clear. In 2023, Bregman’s hard-hit balls had an average launch angle of 13.6 degrees, and his balls that weren’t hard-hit were at 20. This year, those numbers are 10 and 26.8. As it’s currently constituted, Bregman’s swing just doesn’t seem as optimized as it once was for hard contact in the air. In the launch angle charts below, I’ve highlighted the exit velocities above 80 mph. In 2023, his average EV was that high on just about anything except popups and balls hit straight into the ground. This year, not only is he hitting the ball at optimal launch angles less often, when he does, he’s hitting it softer.

So that’s the bad news. Now let’s look at some reasons for optimism. First of all, it’s still April (or at least it was while I was writing this). Bregman usually starts slow, though not this poorly; his career 110 wRC+ in March/April is his worst of any month. And maybe he just needs some time to get used to his new swing. Second, a big reason for Bregman’s problems is that his line drive rate cratered, and line drive rates are notoriously fickle. Third, Bregman has been seeing tougher pitches this season. Because he succeeds by lifting the ball to the pull side, it’s no surprise that pitchers have always tried to attack him away and down. However, they’ve done a much better job of hitting that outside corner this season. He’s seen more pitches on the edges of the zone and fewer pitches right down the middle than in any previous season. The heat maps below show the location of the pitches he saw in 2023 and 2024.

After looking at these, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Bregman has made worse swing decisions and had a harder time pulling and lifting the ball. Assuming pitchers don’t remain that precise all season, this could be something that evens out over time.

When a player stops pulling the ball, it also makes sense to check whether they just can’t get around on the fastball anymore, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. Although he’s had poor results against four-seamers, a pitch he usually crushes, Bregman is both chasing and whiffing against them less often than he did last year. It’s breaking and offspeed stuff that’s giving him fits, and players don’t usually forget how to hit soft stuff after eight excellent big league seasons. That lends credence to the idea that Bregman has merely been struggling with timing issues. That his homer last night came against a changeup should make it all the more encouraging.

Let’s assume that Bregman’s weighted bat work did give him some more power. Maybe we should be encouraged by the fact that his exit velocity hasn’t fallen all that drastically, considering the fact that he hasn’t really been swinging at the right pitches or making the kind of contact he wants. Maybe when he does figure those things out, that extra power will announce itself.

It’s also worth noting that Bregman’s batting stance looks different this season. His stance was slightly closed in 2023, but this year he’s squared up to the pitcher and a little more upright. Additionally, his leg kick is often less pronounced now than it was last season. In the stills below, I captured Bregman at the moment when his knee was at its highest; it’s subtle, but you can see that it’s a bit higher on the left, in 2023. Despite these changes, by the time he gets his foot down, it looks to me like he’s in pretty much the same hitting position that he was last year.

I don’t want to come anywhere near blaming Bregman’s struggles on his new stance or the changes he made to his swing. There are a million things that could be affecting his performance, and it would be facile to seize on the few that I can see or read about in the Houston Chronicle. That said, these are a lot of changes to make to a swing in a single offseason, especially when that swing has been so effective. Maybe Bregman just needs some time to get used to facing big league pitching with this swing, or maybe he needs to consider returning to what was working for him before. After a two-hit perforamnce in Mexico City on Sunday, Bregman noted that he something seemed to click when he tried getting into his load earlier. Either way, things are bound to pick up sooner or later, if for no other reason than that they couldn’t get much worse.

From now on, maybe we should ignore the numbers until Juan Soto is leading the league in walks. Soto has had the highest walk rate in baseball in each of the last four seasons. And he’s close this season! He’s got 21 walks (tied for first) and a 17.4% walk rate (tied for third). But first place belongs to Riley Greene, and that’s a surprise. Greene is not the person you’d expect to top this list. Excepting a two-game stint in Single-A in 2022, he hasn’t run a walk rate above 12% at any stop of his career, but this season, he’s at 19.6%. Since 1903, the largest single-season jump in walk rate by a qualified player in AL/NL history was 10.7 percentage points, by Barry Bonds in 2004. Right now, Greene is sitting on a jump of 11.2 percentage points. He’s also sitting on a 157 wRC+, thanks to a .244 ISO that ranks 22nd in baseball, just behind Soto. Aside from the fact that it’s still April, what exactly is going on?

For the second year in a row, Greene has cut his chase rate, and this year the drop is more than five percentage points. Want to walk more? Not swinging at balls is a great start! But take a look at his swing rate on pitches inside the zone.

It’s down by nearly 10 points! Among all qualified players, Greene has the 12th-lowest overall swing rate, by virtue of being 27th lowest outside the zone and 24th lowest inside it. It’s not just that he’s chasing less, it’s that he’s being much less aggressive overall. With such a big drop on pitches inside the zone, I wondered whether Greene had become too passive. After all, his exit velocity numbers are down a bit, and his 63.2% swing rate on meatballs (pitches right down the middle that you should definitely be swinging at) is 15th lowest among qualified players. However, according to Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric, not only is Greene making better swing decisions than he did in 2023, he ranks 17th in all of baseball (minimum 70 plate appearances). Greene has cut his swing rate in the heart zone by 15 percentage points, but apparently cutting nine percentage points off his swing rate in the chase zone was a worthy tradeoff.

Despite being so much choosier, Greene has improved his contact rate by less than a percentage point, which is somewhat odd. We can see what’s happening when we break things down by pitch type. He has cut his in-zone swing rate by roughly the same amount against all three categories of pitches, but look at the breakdown of his chase rates.

Offspeed pitches are still his biggest problem, but he’s halved his chase rate against fastballs, and cut his chase rate against breaking pitches by a quarter. No one who has seen at least 100 fastballs outside the zone has chased fewer of them than Greene. This helps explain things: He’s making a hair more contact on pitches inside the zone, but his contact rate on pitches outside the zone has fallen by nearly five percentage points. That’s what happens when the pitches you’re chasing are harder to hit. In 2023, fastballs (which run lower whiff rates) made up 37.6% of the pitches Greene chased. So far this year, they’re just 19.2%.

It’s important to keep in mind that a player’s contact rate on pitches outside the zone isn’t necessarily that important. Chasing and whiffing isn’t great, but chasing and making weak contact is usually worse. That’s part of the reason Greene is getting into deeper counts and working so many walks. Even though he’s swinging at way fewer strikes, more of the balls that Greene actually puts into play are coming on pitches in the zone: 83.1%, up from 80.7% in 2023.

Before we end, I would like to take you on a brief detour. I mentioned before that Greene’s in-zone swing rate has dropped more or less indiscriminately. He’s down roughly eight points against offspeed pitches and 10 points against fastballs and breaking balls.

Understandably, opponents have reacted to this by throwing Greene a lot more offspeed pitches. In a somewhat odd side note, Greene is under the impression that he has, in fact, stopped chasing changeups. “Heater in, changeup away,” he told reporters. “It’s almost automatic now. Until I can prove that I can lay off the changeup away, they’re going to keep throwing it. And I feel like I’ve been doing a good job recently of laying off the changeup away.” To be clear, he is swinging at significantly fewer changeups, but only inside the zone (where he’s swinging at less of everything). That is in itself a victory, as offspeed pitches give Greene a ton of trouble, but he’s still chasing them at a nearly identical rate. In 2023, 14.6% of his swings came against offspeed pitches. In 2023, that number is 28.6%. It’s nearly double! His 2023 swing rate is on the left, and 2024 is on the right.

Greene has done a great job of laying off elevated fastballs this season, and he’s also done a better job of laying off low breaking balls. But because so many of his swings are coming against changeups, his swing zone is focused down and away. When he swings at offspeed pitches, he’s worse than ever. He’s running a .158 wOBA and a 50% whiff rate against them, and his 83.5 mph exit velocity against them is dragging his overall EV numbers down. However, because he’s picking better fastballs and breaking balls to swing at, he’s barreling up nearly twice as many balls as he did in 2023.

These are all knock-on effects of the big news. The big news is simple: Riley Greene has slashed his chase rate against breaking pitches and decided to stop chasing fastballs entirely. That’s why he’s walking more, and that’s huge. Even if he never figures out how to stop chasing changeups, this is an improvement. However, we’ve still got a few more days left in April, so I am legally obligated to end by throwing some cold water on everything I just told you. Take a look at the 15-game rolling average of Greene’s walk and chase rates.

In both 2022 and 2023, Greene started out passive, and then got more aggressive over the next couple weeks. Presumably he’ll start swinging more at some point, and presumably Soto will ease back into pole position. But even if Greene’s aggression goes all the way back to his career norms, it’s definitely encouraging that he’s displaying better pitch recognition and a better understanding of the strike zone. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for Greene to get some of his old aggression back, especially if he can keep any of the gains he’s displayed in the past month.

In the first at-bat of Monday’s game between the Yankees and the A’s, Carlos Rodón fooled Esteury Ruiz with a back foot slider. Ruiz tried to check his swing, and the ball actually hit him in the back foot. It was very much a borderline call, and first base umpire John Tumpane ruled that Ruiz held up and should therefore be awarded first base. Naturally, umpire antagonist extraordinaire Aaron Boone started complaining about the call and quickly earned a warning. Enjoyably for everyone involved, the television broadcast picked up the warning perfectly. “Hey, guess what,” shouted home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt. “You’re not yelling at me. I did what I was supposed to do and checked. I’m looking for him to get hit by the pitch. You got anything else to say, you’re gone. OK?” A chastened Boone raised his hand to signal that he understood. Moments later, he became the first manager in the history of the game to be ejected while examining his fingernails.

What happened, of course, is that a fan seated in the front row directly behind Boone yelled at Wendelstedt, who mistook the voice for Boone’s. Wendelstedt’s refusal to listen to either Boone or the many other people who tried to explain that the voice hadn’t come from the Yankee dugout at all is its own issue. So too is his farfetched post-game contention that he was reacting to a different voice entirely: “I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.” One of the last things Boone said before leaving the field was, “You guys are in trouble for this.” I suspect that he’s wrong, and for the same reason that Wendelstedt felt comfortable telling reporters a tale that could so easily be proven wrong: Umpires are rarely held accountable for these kinds of mistakes (at least not publicly). However, none of that is our topic for today. Our topic is something much more specific. I have a suspicion as to why Wendelstedt was instantly certain that Boone was the one who shouted. It’s not just that the fan shouted; it’s what he shouted.

Over seven years of watching Aaron Boone yelling at umpires, two things have always stood out to me. The first is that Aaron Boone loves to address the umpires by name. On Monday, the kerfuffle started when Boone yelled to Tumpane, “Hey! It’s a full swing, John!” Toward the end of the ordeal, he told Wendelstedt, “I’m not leaving, Hunter.” Here’s the thing about humans: Unless we’re either greeting someone, trying to get someone’s attention, or specifying which person we’re speaking to, we don’t actually say each other’s names very often. If you’re simply using someone’s name to get their attention, you put it at the front of the sentence, in order to make sure they hear the rest of what you say. Boone doesn’t do that nearly as often. He puts the umpire’s name at the end of the sentence, which is something you do in order to add more emphasis. If you watch footage of his ejections, you’ll hear him shout, “Bear down, Brennan,” at Brennan Miller, “Where’s that pitch, Sean?” to Sean Barber, “Jeez Lance,” to Lance Barrett, and plenty more. Maybe it comes from the fact that Boone has spent his entire life around the game and knows absolutely everyone. Or maybe at some point he took a Dale Carnegie class and learned that the sweetest thing a person can hear is the sound of their own name. Maybe this is just how he thinks schmoozing works. I removed curse words from some of these quotes, but the point remains. Boone loves to remind the umpires of their own names.

The second thing I’ve noticed is more important to my theory. Like any true coach, Boone is a teacher. He doesn’t just complain about the umpire’s calls. He couches his complaints as constructive criticism. He implores them to get better and he tells them that it’s not too late to improve. Not two weeks ago he told umpire John Bacon, “Come on, John. You’re better than that.” Boone employs classic coach-speak, telling them to get it together, to clean it up, to bear down; all of those vague, unhelpful bromides your high school coach used to hurl at you rather than offering actionable advice. “I need you to get better,” he’ll yell.

This is an innovative approach, especially when the target for all of this encouragement is an umpire. By berating the umpires under the guise of offering friendly advice, Boone has somehow found a way to be passive aggressive while shouting at the top of his lungs. It’s borderline gaslighting and it honestly might be a scientific breakthrough: caring so loudly that the object of your affection has you removed from the premises. Boone has literally gotten ejected for telling an umpire, “I’m just trying to help you.” He then got suspended for screaming at the same umpire from such close range that he ended up spitting on him, an action that is not traditionally considered helpful. I can’t tell if Boone saves this coach-speak specifically for umpires, or whether he’s been around the game so long that this is just how he speaks to everyone all day long. I can absolutely see him growing more and more exasperated as he waits for his coffee during the morning rush at Dunkin’ Donuts, then finally striding over and telling the poor kid behind the counter, “I need you to bear down, Derek. Right now.”

Like many motivators, Boone has a go-to rallying cry, a phrase intended to fire up his charges. That phrase is Let’s go, and as you might have noticed, he’s not alone in that. Let’s go is having a moment. Although it has been around for centuries, its status as a catch-all exclamation has grown explosively over the last few years. Luke Winkie documented the phenomenon for Slate back in June:

Clearly Let’s go has become a hinge point for the male vocabulary, a shortcut for all intragender communication. The term is utilitarian, flexible, and fundamentally meaningless; it’s another way to say, “Yes, a thing exists.” I first started noticing its encroachment about three years ago, when suddenly every sentence that came out of my mouth seemed to be punctuated in the exact same way. Did I engineer a deft maneuver in a board game? Let’s go. Did my girlfriend and I settle on a takeout order? Let’s go. Does the bloodwork look good? Let’s go.

As in the examples above, Let’s go is usually reserved for happy moments. That’s even more true in the realm of baseball. It’s the kind of thing you’re likely to see Sarah Langs, a beacon of baseball joy if there ever was one, tweeting to mark the occasion of the first game of the season.

But in keeping with the cynicism of his attempts to help the umpires become the best versions of themselves both on and off the field, Boone charges up this positive colloquialism with all the negative energy he can muster. He’s not the only coach to say this phrase, but he says it way more than anybody else. At this point, Let’s go (with or without the adornment of an f-bomb) is basically Aaron Boone’s catchphrase, especially when it comes to umpires. It didn’t take me long to assemble the clips below.

Knowing all this, take a moment to put yourself in the Hunter Wendelstedt’s extremely inflexible shoes. It’s Monday afternoon. You’re approximately eight seconds into the game and Aaron Boone is already chirping, because apparently the wood sage and sea salt aromatherapy candles in the Yankees clubhouse have not succeeded in calming him down even a little bit. Mere seconds after administering a warning, you hear a shout coming from the exact same spot. The fan’s voice wasn’t picked up by television microphones, but according to the lipreading of Jomboy, what he shouted was, “Let’s go, home plate!” (I’m not 100% convinced that’s what he said; he might have just shouted Go or, Yo, but both of those options are close enough that they could easily be confused for Let’s go.) As for the second part, addressing the home plate umpire as Home Plate is hilariously dumb. It reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, spoken by the character Debbie Fogle. “I’ve never even had a nickname,” she says. Then she reconsiders, “I mean, I guess people do call me ‘Hey Lady.’”

So the fan shouted two things: One of them was absolutely something Boone would say, and the other was something Boone would never say. On the one hand, if there’s one thing Wendelstedt knows, it’s that Aaron Boone knows his name. Boone is more likely to address an umpire by their first, middle, and last names like a parent grounding their kid for cursing — “Harry Hunter Wendelstedt, I am very disappointed in you.” — than he is to address the home plate umpire as Home Plate. If he’d stopped to think about it, Wendelstedt would’ve realized that no one in the ballpark was less likely than Boone to address him by his position rather than his first name.

On the other hand, before he heard, “Home plate,” he heard Boone’s catchphrase. No wonder he thought it was him. And Wendelstedt isn’t exactly a stop-and-think-about-it kind of guy. He started winding up to toss Boone before the butthead in the front row got to the T in Plate, and he refused to let anything he learned over the next few hours change his mind. Besides, over his decades as an umpire, I’m sure Wendelstedt has been called Home Plate enough times that it’s basically his version of Hey Lady.

So that’s my theory. Boone got ejected because the fan yelled exactly the right thing to make the umpire think it was the manager. By having a catchphrase, Boone has made himself very easy to impersonate. Even if you call the umpire something the real manager would never call them — Home Plate; or Blue; or Hey Umpire Guy; or Excuse me, Mister Moustache Man — as long as you throw in a Let’s go (and maybe some profanity for good measure), you’re basically Aaron Boone.