About a year ago, I wrote about how umpires have improved at calling balls and strikes throughout the pitch tracking era. They have gotten a whole lot better, especially at identifying strikes. While everyone appreciates a more consistent and accurate zone, that has made things a bit harder for hitters overall. More importantly, their progress didn’t seem like it was showing any signs of slowing down. With the 2023 season in the books, it’s time to check in on whether that’s still the case. The methodology here is simple: check to see if Statcast agrees with the umpire’s decision for each called ball and strike. This isn’t a perfect method, as a pitch right over the heart of the plate is a much easier call than one right on the edge, but the enormous sample sizes (there were 376,635 takes in 2023) mean that things even out over time.

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A couple of weeks ago, Alex Coffey of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a profile of Ani Kilambi, the assistant GM who heads up the Phillies’ R&D department. Reading it, one detail immediately jumped out at me: Coffey published the name of Philadelphia’s proprietary database. It’s called Rocky. That’s a fun name, and it follows the league-wide trend of clubs giving their databases names that are both adorable and specific to either their team or city. It was the first time I’d come across the name, even though the article indicated that it had been around for years.

Like many people, I first learned about team databases when it was reported that Chris Correa, then the Cardinals’ scouting director, had illegally accessed Houston’s database in 2015; Correa later pled guilty to five criminal charges related to his unauthorized access. Even before that, though, teams were understandably secretive about the information they used. Milwaukee’s sports science wing is known as The Lab, and the Brewers have made it very clear that they don’t want anyone coming near it. The photos below are from an MLB.com article about The Lab in 2020.

That secrecy often extends to the name of the database. I imagine the thinking is that it’s harder to break into something if you don’t know what it’s called. Still, there was an inconsistency that bothered me. The names of these databases are a closely held secret, yet I already knew a handful of them. I wondered why that was, so I set off on a research marathon to find as many of the names as I possibly could. It took many, many hours, and my list is still not complete. Read the rest of this entry »

Edouard Julien had a remarkable rookie season. Called up for good in late May, he knocked 16 home runs and ran a 136 wRC+ over 109 games, finishing seventh in the AL Rookie of the Year voting. Among second basemen with at least 400 plate appearances, that 136 wRC+ ranked third in baseball, behind Mookie Betts and Jose Altuve and ahead of Luis Arraez. That’s pretty good company. Using the same plate appearances threshold, his 17.2% chase rate was the lowest in baseball, which enabled him to run a 15.7% walk rate, good for fifth highest. John Foley recently wrote an excellent breakdown of Julien’s patience over at Twinkie Town.

There are also plenty of non-baseball reasons to enjoy Julien. He’s the bearer of the fanciest name in MLB, and so far as I can tell he’s just the second player in big-league history whose name includes the vowels O, U, and A all in a row. The first was also an Edouard: Joseph Albert Rolland Édouard, better known as Roland Gladu. A French-Canadian like Julien, Gladu played all over the world, homering in the professional leagues of five different countries: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Great Britain. Julien’s name also flows off the tongue in a pleasing way. Because of the scansion of Edouard Julien, whenever I think about him for an extended period of time, this song gets stuck in my head:

I even wrote a Julien-inspired version of the song — mostly because I couldn’t not write one — which you can listen to at the bottom of this piece.

Back to baseball, there was a bit of helium in Julien’s 2023 numbers. His wOBA outpaced his xwOBA by 18 points, and his .371 BABIP ranked fifth in all of baseball. Understandably, the projection systems see him stepping back to a wRC+ around 115 next year. There are still some holes in Julien’s game. He doesn’t make enough contact, especially on pitches in the zone. Combined with his preternatural patience, that leads to a big, scary strikeout rate of 31.4%. While that did help him fit in with the rest of Minnesota’s roster, it’s not exactly ideal.

Today we’re going to worry about a different part of Julien’s profile: hitting left-handed pitching. To say that it wasn’t a highlight of his rookie campaign would be an understatement. Julien’s splits against righties and lefties were downright historic. In fact, he took home the first annual Scooter Gennett Award for Offensive Asymmetry, which goes to the player with the largest difference between their wRC+ against righties and lefties (minimum 400 PAs). Since 2002, which is as far back as our main leaderboard tracks handedness splits, 4,418 player seasons have met that PA minimum. Gennett became the face of the award thanks to a 2014 season when he put up an excellent 118 wRC+ against righties and a downright depressing -40 against lefties. In 2023, Julien put up a wRC+ of 151 against righties and 22 against lefties, for a difference of 129. Since 2002, only 10 players have had a wider range.

Keep in mind, a lot of this is small sample size theater. There aren’t that many left-handed pitchers, and if your team doesn’t trust you to hit against them, you’re not going to get what few chances are available. This can also create a chicken-and-the-egg situation. You can get fewer PAs against lefties because you can’t hit them, or you can fail to hit lefties because you don’t see them often enough to get comfortable. Julien had just 48 PAs against lefties in 2023. Of the 4,418 seasons in our sample, only 42 of those players faced lefties less often than Julien’s 11.8%. Julien would probably improve against lefties if he ever got regular plate appearances against them, but even if he doesn’t, it would be foolish to assume that a wRC+ of 22 represents his true talent level.

However, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in December, Nick Nelson noted Julien’s splits with Double-A Wichita during the 2022 season. Julien slashed .332/.465/.566 against righties and .210/.373/.276 against lefties. If you’re keeping score at home, that works out to OPS splits of 1.031 and 649.

There’s one more important caveat before we dive into the numbers: The splits don’t matter that much. Most pitchers are righties. That means Julien will get to face righties most of the time, and it also means that finding a righty to platoon with him won’t be terribly hard. If his platoon splits were to stay exactly the same, Julien would still be a league-average hitter as long as he didn’t face lefties more than 40% of the time, and that’s not going to happen. Of our 4,418-season sample, only 27 players ever saw lefties that often.

However, none of that made me less curious about what was going on when Julien faced lefties, so I broke down the splits.

His strikeout rate is higher against lefties, but the walk rate is what really jumps out. It’s 13 percentage points higher against righties than against lefties. That’s an enormous difference! All of our small sample size caveats apply, but in terms of walk rate, depending on the handedness of the pitcher, Julien goes from very nearly Juan Soto to literally worse than Javier Báez. Let’s take a look at what’s going on under the hood:

Well that’s simple enough. Julien swings a lot more against lefties, especially outside the zone. He’s still patient by any reasonable standard; a 21.5% chase rate is still in something like the 92nd percentile. However, Julien also whiffs more, and not just outside the zone. His zone contact rate is already the most worrisome part of his profile, and against lefties it’s even worse.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t stop there. When he does put the ball in play against lefties, Julien not only hits the ball a lot softer, but he hits it straight into the ground.

There’s a big difference if you go by Statcast’s hard-hit rate, but take a look at the soft, medium, and hard percentages, which come from Sports Info Solutions. By their reckoning, Julien’s hard-hit rate is more than 30 percentage points lower against lefties. And then there’s the launch angle. Julien hits the ball on the ground more than would be ideal against righties, but against lefties? That’s not a typo; just one of Julien’s 30 batted balls was a fly ball. That’s how you get a 24:1 ratio of groundballs to fly balls. What does that look like in a heat map? It looks like never hitting the ball out of the infield.

This doesn’t seem to be a pitch location issue. When facing Julien, lefties have targeted the bottom of the zone more often than righties have, but only slightly. The same is true of his swing decisions. Julien swung at lower pitches from lefties, but just barely. It doesn’t seem to be a pitch type issue either. Against lefties, 56.7% of his balls in play against came on sinkers, breaking balls, or offspeed pitches, compared to 48.4% against righties. That’s not an insignificant difference, but it’s nowhere near enough to explain an 18.2-degree shift in launch angle. It just seems to be the way he hit the ball against lefties.

This is, I swear, the last time I remind you that everything I’ve just said is based on small samples, but seriously, the samples are very small. I’m hoping that we’ll get some bigger samples in 2024, but so far that doesn’t seem likely. He started just seven of the 38 games the Twins faced a left-handed starter with him on the roster, ceding the keystone to Kyle Farmer and Jorge Polanco. Polanco’s current contract ends after 2024, with a club option for 2025. Even if the trade rumors around Polanco turn out to be true, Farmer and the Twins just agreed on a one-year deal, avoiding arbitration, with a mutual option for 2025. It’s a bit disappointing. I would love to see what Julien could do over a bigger sample. If he does turn out to be passable against lefties, it would be extremely fun to watch and it could propel him to another level. And if it turns out that a 22 wRC+ really does represent his true talent level, that would be pretty interesting, too. More importantly, it would lock up the Scooter Gennett Award for Offensive Asymmetry for years to come.

Sometime during the second inning, I climb past a dozen rows of empty yellow seats toward the usher at the top of the section. “¿Cuando vienen todos?” I ask when she looks up. When are they all coming? This is my first Dominican Winter League game, and I was prepared for pandemonium: the energy, the blaring music, the crush of the crowd. Instead, the stadium is desolate.

The usher looks confused by my question, and I worry that my iffy Spanish is to blame. “¿Quién?” she asks. Who?

We look around the empty stadium, and though we say the exact same thing at the exact same time, our inflections couldn’t be more different. Mine is declarative: “La gente.” The people. Hers is interrogative: “¿La gente?” I realize that she wasn’t confused by my grammar; she was confused by the fact that I expected anyone to be here in the first place. My ears are too slow to process the entirety of her explanation, but I catch enough. This game doesn’t matter. The semi-final round of the playoffs begins in a few days and both teams have already clinched their spots. Nadie viene. Nobody’s coming. Read the rest of this entry »

The free agent market is finally starting to move. Rhys Hoskins is headed to Milwaukee, finalizing a two-year, $34 million contract with an opt-out after the first year, per Scoop Czar Jeff Passan. You don’t have to squint to see the fit here. Milwaukee needs hitting, Hoskins needs a place to hit, and it’s always nice to feel wanted. The option effectively makes this a pillow contract for Hoskins, who ruptured his ACL in spring training and missed the entire 2023 season. (This seems like a good place to note that the deal is almost certainly still pending a physical.) If he proves that he can still hit like Rhys Hoskins, he can opt out and go after a bigger deal while he’s still a fresh-faced 31-year-old with the world at his feet, rather than a doddering, unemployable 32-year-old. If he needs another year to knock the rust off, well, I’ve heard great things about Milwaukee.

Hoskins ranked 20th on our Top 50 Free Agents. Ben Clemens estimated that he would receive a three-year contract for a total of $45 million, meaning that Hoskins fell short of the estimate in terms of years, but exceeded it in terms of average annual value. Michael Baumann did a lot of the legwork a couple weeks ago, so I’ll leave it to him to remind you of just how good a hitter Hoskins is:

The value that Hoskins brings is obvious. His power can be streaky on a game-to-game basis — a danger of being a three true outcome-heavy hitter — but in the aggregate, he’s one of the most consistent players in baseball. Hoskins is a career .242/.353/492 hitter, with a 13.5% walk rate and a 23.9% strikeout rate. That’s a career wRC+ of 126.

In four full seasons in the majors (discounting Hoskins’ 50-game rookie season and the 41 games he played in 2020), he’s never been worth more than 2.4 WAR, nor less than 2.0. His full-season career low in wRC+ is 112, while his full-season career high is 128. You can like or dislike the total package, but you know what you’re going to get.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about Emmanuel Clase. Specifically, I wondered whether a lower release point, or whatever caused that lower release point, was the reason his performance took a step back in 2023. I don’t know the answer for sure. I don’t even think there is a way to know the answer for sure, but I’ve spent the last few days thinking about release points. Clase’s has fallen roughly two inches over the last two years. That feels like a lot to me, but I realize that I don’t have a basis for that feeling. What happens to a pitcher’s release point on a year-over-year basis? Does it stay the same? What constitutes a normal amount of variance? Does it only fall off once things are starting to go wrong? Does it slowly degrade over time just like the pitcher himself, who is after all merely an ephemeral vessel of bone and sinew, destined to return unto the dust?

Naturally, there’s only one place to find answers for metaphysical questions like these: Baseball Savant. I pulled the average vertical release point for every pitcher in the Statcast era, calculating the year-over-year change for their primary fastball. For pitchers who threw both a four-seamer and a sinker, I ignored whichever pitch they threw less often. I also threw out seasons in which players changed their release point by more than four inches, which to me indicates an intentional change to a pitcher’s delivery and overall approach to pitching. We’re interested in cases like Clase’s, where his release point changed unintentionally as he tried to pitch in the same way.

That left me with a goodly sample of 5,353 player seasons. In addition to calculating the change in vertical release point, I also noted the change in fastball velocity, along with the changes in the pitcher’s overall FIP-, whiff rate, and groundball rate (adjusted to league average). The first thing I did was create an aging curve, but before I show it to you, I’d like to tell you what I was expecting to see. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2023, Emmanuel Clase ran a 3.22 ERA and a 2.91 FIP. His 44 saves were a career high and five more than any other pitcher. Compared to the rest of the league, he was great. Compared to prior versions of Emmanuel Clase, however, he was dreadful. In 2021 and 2022, Clase was an unstoppable force of nature, running a 1.33 ERA and a top-five groundball rate while striking out more than a batter per inning. Then in 2023, Clase fell off a cliff, though admittedly, he landed on another, still pretty lofty cliff; not with a splat, but gently, into some soft, leafy bushes.

What happened to Clase? Everything happened! There were situational factors and mechanical factors. There were changes in consistency and approach. Everything is connected when it comes to pitching, with one factor cascading upon another. The fun is in following the chain. Read the rest of this entry »

This was supposed to be a simple one. To ease my way into 2024, I dipped into the bag of fun ideas that I’d been saving for the offseason. Once we get past the All-Star break, there’s so much serious baseball being played that I try not to pitch too many frivolous stories. I don’t always succeed, but I try. As a result, when the season ends, the Notes app on my phone is full of hastily-typed fragments:

• The noise Andrew Vazquez [sic] makes when he pitches
• The Palmeiro Award – goes to the least deserving GG winner each year
• Players tearing their pants when they slide. Andrew Benintendi 8/15/23
• Where do pop-ups come from?
• Pitchers who make the most fun noises

The idea for this article was called Weakest hit balls of the year, and it seemed pretty straightforward. Take a look at the batted balls with the lowest exit velocity and have some fun writing about nubbers, squibbers, and dribblers. As it turns out, that’s actually a slightly tricky assignment.

First, there are plenty of plays to weed out. Statcast sometimes struggles to track balls hit directly into the ground. It must be hard to get a good reading on a ball that only travels a foot or two before hitting the ground and changing direction. A lot of those topped balls have no Statcast data whatsoever, but for some, Statcast records the speed and angle not of the ball off the bat, but of the ball bouncing off the dirt. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Ben Clemens broke down the trade that sent Tyler Glasnow to the Dodgers, as well as the extension that Glasnow signed soon afterward. In this article, our focus is the conditional option at the very end of the contract. Before the 2028 season, the Dodgers have a $30 million team option. If they decline to exercise it, Glasnow has his own $21.5 million player option. When I read about the structure of the options, my first thought was to wonder why this doesn’t happen all the time. Here’s how Ben interpreted the situation:

“It seems likely to me that one of those two will be exercised; in my mind, it’s a five-year, $135 million deal with a $10 million kicker if he’s pitching well in year four. The circumstances where neither side exercises their option just feel much less likely than one side or the other being an obvious yes.”

I was inclined to agree. It is sort of like a performance bonus: Pitch well and we’ll bring you back for $30 million, but if you don’t, then you’ll be back for $21.5 million. The $8.5 million difference is a lot of money, but it’s also small enough that, depending on the market and their own particular health and performance, a player might not be certain that they’d make it up in free agency. It might just be easier and safer to stick around. The more I thought about it, though, the more wrinkles I saw. Read the rest of this entry »

Last winter, Mets prospect Ronny Mauricio took the Dominican Winter League by storm, slashing .287/.335/.468 for Los Tigres del Licey and earning MVP honors. The 22-year-old was off to an even better start in the 2023–24 season, batting .433 with four extra-base hits in seven games, but all that ground to a halt on Monday. Facing rivals Las Águilas Cibaeñas, Mauricio attempted to steal second, but when he tried to make a sudden stop, his right leg buckled. On Tuesday, SNY’s Andy Martino reported that the injury is a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Although the Mets won’t put a timetable on his return until after he undergoes surgery, even the most aggressive rehab schedule would have him missing at least the first half of the season before getting his legs back under him in the minors. It’s grim news for a young player who was primed to get his first real shot at breaking camp with the big club. Read the rest of this entry »