So far this year, there have been two ejections and suspensions for sticky stuff, along with two notable non-ejections. In all four instances — two of them just in the last week — the umpires involved made themselves available to a pool reporter for comment after the game. I cannot for the life of me imagine that the umpires want to be making these statements, but here’s the thing: So far as I can tell, they’re not required to. There’s no way that on an umpire’s list of favorite things to do after a game, Describe How Sticky Max Scherzer’s Hand Was ranks anywhere near the top 10. And yet, whether to justify their actions or out of a sincere belief that sunshine is the best disinfectant, the umpires have dutifully attempted to answer that impossible question. Not that I’m complaining. I adore these explanations. I don’t know how anyone could actually do a good job of explaining how sticky a hand was, but watching big league umpires give it their best shot is a truly rewarding experience.

I spent a morning trying to look up how tackiness is measured. It turns out there’s no one answer, but there is an ocean of scientific debate to dive into. I can now tell you the difference between probe testing, loop tack testing, the rolling ball test, and the peel adhesion test. Each test needs to account for variables like dwell time, contact pressure, temperature, and test speed. There’s also something called the finger test, which isn’t as gross as it sounds (but also probably is). Read the rest of this entry »

It’s officially hot start season. Now is the time when we write about players who have rocketed out of the blocks, then hope beyond hope that they don’t tumble to the track immediately after our articles get published. Today I’m looking at Jonah Heim, the Rangers’ switch-hitting catcher.

Heim has started off the 2023 season in a big way. Then again, maybe that’s not news, as Jonah Heim just has a tendency toward bigness. He’s 6-foot-4, which really should be too tall to be a catcher. Seriously, here he is (crouched!) next to Nick Madrigal just over a month ago:

I would pay good money to watch Heim pat Madrigal on the head and address him as “Scout.” Last year, the Rangers backstop accrued 2.8 WAR, which made him a top-10 catcher in baseball. It’s now May 17, and he’s already put up 1.9 WAR, ninth among all position players and second only to fellow-former-Athletic Sean Murphy among catchers. He’s slashing .313/.368/.519, up from .227/.298/.399 in 2022.

Last week, Esteban Rivera included Heim in an article about hitters who had improved after adding some movement to their swings this season. At that point, I was also interested in Heim’s breakout, but while I was watching him I got distracted by one of his very twitchy teammates. Heim’s production at the plate has improved in every single season of his career, and that trend will almost certainly continue this year. Even if his production were to fall off a cliff starting today, he’s already banked 144 plate appearances with a 144 wRC+.

When we talk about player breakouts, we look for reasons to believe that whatever changes they’ve made will stick around. We look for skills and tendencies that they haven’t demonstrated before, specifically the underlying metrics that tend to stabilize more quickly. Toward that end, I’m going to show you an extremely busy graph. Feel free to give it a quick glance and move on. Its purpose is to show you that almost nothing Heim is doing right now is completely without precedent:

Heim is at a career high or low in these metrics, but it’s worth keeping in mind that over the course of his young career, he’s already logged stretches at or near his current rate in all of them. If you’re looking for something in the numbers that says Heim is a completely new hitter, you’re likely to come up empty.

As a note, in this article I won’t spend much time separating out Heim’s approach or results from the left and right sides, because he’s only had 36 plate appearances as a righty. Almost all of the trends I’ll mention are true on both sides of the plate, but there’s just not enough going on from the right side to draw separate conclusions.

Let’s start with Heim’s approach. He’s been more aggressive at the plate, but he’s also been taking the first pitch more than ever:

If you ignore 0-0 counts, his swing rate on the pitches over the heart of the zone is four points higher than it was last year. Overall, his swing rate on pitches that Baseball Savant classifies as meatballs is up more than 10 points.

This increased aggression has lowered Heim’s contact rate just a tiny bit, so his walk rate has dropped by a tick while his strikeout rate has held steady. However, it’s worth noting that Heim’s contact rate has dropped significantly on pitches outside the zone and risen on pitches inside the zone. A couple weeks ago, I noted that Randy Arozarena was doing the exact same thing: “He’s making more contact in the zone and whiffing more when he chases. I don’t know how repeatable that is, but it’s a neat trick if you can pull it off.” The trick was not, in fact, repeatable for Arozarena. Since then his zone contact rate has crashed, and it’s now to five points beneath its 2022 level. That’s definitely something to keep an eye on for Heim, but I’ll also note that he’s seeing an elevated number of pitches on the edge of the strike zone, and that’s likely the kind of statistical noise that could be affecting these numbers.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised, if Heim’s walk and strikeout rates haven’t changed much, then his newfound success must be driven by what happens when he puts the ball in play:

Well that definitely looks much better. Although Heim has not yet touched his max exit velocity from either 2022 or 2021, he’s hitting the ball harder, and he’s also barreling it up more often. Both his wOBA and his expected wOBA are more than 100 points better than they were last year. From both sides of the plate, Heim is hitting the ball in the air more, which is good, but we’re not just talking about average launch angle. We’re also talking about launch angle tightness. Take a look at his launch angle charts:

Heim has dropped the standard deviation of his launch angle by nearly six degrees, which is a huge amount. His popup rate is down 3.6 percentage points and his groundball rate is down 7.5. See the red area on the left, where all of Heim’s hits came in 2022? In 2023, that’s pretty much the only place he’s hitting the ball. In 2022, 55% of Heim’s batted balls came off the bat between 0-45 degrees. In 2023, it’s 73%. Jonah Heim is actually building the whole plane out of the black box.

It’s not just that Heim is hitting the ball in the air. Heim was already a pull hitter, but he’s increased his pull rate to 53.3%, eighth highest in the league. If you refer back to the busy graph at the beginning, you’ll note that his pull rate really took off early last summer. However, when it came to fly balls and line drives, he pulled the ball just 20% of the time last year. This year he’s at 52%. When he does pull the ball in the air, Heim’s performance is roughly the same as it was last year (although his expected stats are improved). It’s just that he’s doing that a lot more often.

As Esteban noted in his article, Heim’s swing adjustments have helped him reach pitches lower in the zone, which would help explain why he is missing less often against breaking stuff and hitting those breaking pitches 6 mph harder than he did last year. Here’s what that looks like in a heat map. Lots more contact at the bottom of the zone, even though his swing rate down there hasn’t changed nearly as dramatically:

Here’s one thing I find really interesting. So far I’ve been grouping Heim’s air balls together, but here’s what happens when you separate out his fly balls and his line drives:

Last year, Heim’s line drives were scorched at 96.5 mph, while his fly balls were hit at 89.9 mph, right around his average EV. This year, that trend has been completely reversed.

That’s probably a good thing. First, players hit a lot more fly balls than they do line drives. Second, as long as they’re not hit softly, line drives are always valuable. Despite dropping 6 mph, Heim’s line drives have only shed 23 points of xwOBA. Fly balls are more dependent on exit velocity to make it past outfielders and over the wall, so Heim’s xwOBA on them jumped more than 200 points. For both reasons, Heim has benefitted from allocating his EV where it can have the most impact.

Between this chart and his launch angle graphs, it seems reasonable to assume that Heim’s swing is geared more toward elevation than it was in the past. Last year, when he really got hold of a ball, he was hitting it at about 18 degrees. This year, his hardest hits have come anywhere between 16 and 34. However, his soft hit rate is also the lowest it’s ever been. Maybe it’s just that he’s just adding some liners by muscling a few more pitches over the infield than he used to, pitches that he might previously have popped up or rolled over. As I said at the beginning, most of Heim’s underlying metrics show him doing things that he’s been able to do before. Being aggressive while still walking and striking out at the same rate, pulling the ball in the air with power. Only time will tell whether he can keep them going at the same time.

The bat waggle is by far the most popular way to stay loose at the plate. Presumably that’s because waiting for a pitch is one of the few situations when it’s socially acceptable to waggle something. Life just doesn’t offer that many opportunities to waggle. Also, it’s a two-fer. It doesn’t just keep you loose; it also keeps your bat loose. It’s all well and good if you’re body’s ready to hit, but good luck trying to catch up to a Justin Verlander fastball with a tight bat. (Fun Fact: It turns out that bats — you know, the actual winged creatures — have their own waggle.)

But even after you waggle your bat, those last couple seconds are tricky. You’re locked into your batting stance, and now you’re just waiting there at the mercy of the pitcher (and the pitch clock). You’ve got to do something to maintain attack readiness. Some players bounce the bat off their shoulder, or bounce a little bit deeper into their crouch a few times. They rock back and forth, raise and lower their hands, or grind the toe of their cleat into the dirt. Some even make sure their pelvis is loose. Like, really loose. Like, very, extremely, possibly even dangerously loose.

That’s an entirely different kind of waggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan India started his career with a bang. In 2021, the Cincinnati second baseman put up a 120 wRC+ and 3.0 WAR over 150 games, good enough to snag National League Rookie of the Year honors. Last year, a hamstring injury limited him to just 103 games, and he struggled to a 95 wRC+ at the plate. He looked like a natural bounce back candidate coming into the 2023 season, and here he is bouncing back. After a big day on Sunday, India’s .306/.397/.460 slash line consists of three career-best figures. His underlying metrics are also better than ever in a host of categories.

Let’s start with plate discipline. India is chasing less than ever, whiffing less than ever, walking more, and striking out way less. Those developments are all — and please excuse the inside baseball jargon here — very good. His chase rate has either improved or held steady against every pitch type except for sinkers, which have been something of an Achilles’ heel this year. He’s hitting them harder, but 71% of the sinkers he’s put in play have been groundballs, up from 54% in previous years.

India is reaching base more and hitting the ball much harder. After the previous paragraph, you might assume that his increased exit velocity has come from hitting more pitches in the zone, but the difference is smaller than you might think: 87% of his balls in play came on pitches in the zone, as opposed to 84% in 2021. Further, a close look at his batting line reveals something interesting: Although he’s hitting the ball harder and his BABIP is at a career high, his production on balls in play is still a ways off from where it was in 2021.

Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing; walking more and striking out less has so far made this a worthwhile tradeoff. But it’s worth exploring why India’s newfound exit velocity hasn’t translated into as much power as we might expect. He’s currently running a .153 ISO, closer to the mark he put up last year than the .190 he posted in 2021. His barrel rate is likewise between his 2021 and ’22 figures, and his HR/FB is at a career low. Read the rest of this entry »

“What poor sucker is going to have to pitch in those games?” That’s what Meg Rowley asked last year on an episode of Effectively Wild after MLB announced a two-game series between the Giants and Padres in Mexico City. Those games happened over the weekend, and they lived up to those lofty expectations. Played at an elevation of 7,349 feet — more than 2,000 feet higher than Coors Field, in case you hadn’t been told several times already — they featured 15 home runs, including 11 in Saturday night’s 16–11 offensive explosion. Although Sunday’s game started with yet another home run, this time courtesy of LaMonte Wade Jr., the wind was blowing in, accounting for the paltry total of five homers. So far in the 2023 season, the average game has featured 2.26 home runs. By my calculations, that’s a whole lot less than 7.5 home runs per game. It was so wild that Nelson Cruz hit a triple yesterday. Let me rephrase that: The very nearly 43-year-old Nelson Cruz hit a stand-up triple yesterday. This was not baseball as usual.

All the same, it was extremely fun baseball. Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus put it best, tweeting, “The game is being played on the surface of the moon.” The ball moved differently out of the pitcher’s hand, off the bat, and coming off the turf. In this article, I’ll be relying on Statcast data, so I should note up front that the stadium was working with a temporary TrackMan setup, rather than the permanent Hawkeye systems installed in all 30 MLB parks. It’s reasonable to expect that the numbers are not quite as reliable as they normally would be, but they’re still plenty convincing. Read the rest of this entry »

After a fantastic run in the World Baseball Classic, Randy Arozarena has stayed red hot. Defensive metrics see him as a hair better in left field this year, and he’s also been slightly above average on the basepaths. That’s a big upgrade from the extremely entertaining but ultimately deleterious aggression he showed in 2022. Oh, and I should probably mention that he’s the eighth-best hitter in all of baseball right now, right behind some guy named Trout. Arozarena is running a 182 wRC+, up from his already very good career mark of 129. All three of the figures in his .348/.412/.584 slash line would be career-best marks over a full season. Put it all together, and Arozarena is currently on pace to double his career WAR total.

How is he doing all this? I’m not completely sure. Don’t get me wrong; the numbers tell a story, and there are some other convenient narratives at hand. I’m just not convinced of how everything fits together. That’s actually why I was so interested in writing about Arozarena. He’s way more fascinating than some guy named Randy has any right to be.

Let’s start with one thing we can be sure of: Randy Arozarena is absolutely hammering the baseball. He’s always been capable of posting eye-popping exit velocities, but this year he’s doing it consistently. Last year, his average exit velocity was 89.9 mph and his hard-hit rate was 40.7%, both solidly above average. This year he’s at 95.1 and 59.2%. That’s not just good; that’s Yordan Alvarez territory. In terms of contact quality, Arozarena has never had a stretch like this:

It’s not just that he’s hitting the ball harder than ever. He’s also avoiding mis-hits at a career-best rate. His 7% soft-hit rate is tied for seventh-lowest in the league, and none of the six players ahead of him has a higher hard-hit rate.

Arozarena is also lifting the ball more than ever. His line drive rate is at 20%, and his fly ball rate is at 38.6%. While both would be career highs over a full season, this isn’t completely unprecedented. Arozarena has had previous stretches with lower groundball rates, though combined with his elevated hard-hit rate, this one has led him to a career-best 16.9% barrel rate. What’s new is his launch angle tightness. Despite all this lift, his popup rate is at a career low. Arozarena’s average launch angle is up by 3.0 degrees, but the standard deviation of his launch angle is down by 3.3 degrees. He’s consistently hitting the ball where he can do the most damage, reaping all the benefits of an improved launch angle with none of the downside. Courtesy of Baseball Savant:

The last big change is that Arozarena is using right field like never before. Batters tend to elevate the ball more when they’re going the other way, but that’s not nearly enough to explain what’s going on here. His 36.6% opposite field rate is well above his 24% career average, and his pull rate is also at a career low. This is something entirely new. He’s now spraying the ball all over the field, and he’s never had a stretch where he’s gone the other way so frequently or pulled the ball so infrequently. Further, when he hits the ball to the right side, he’s hitting it with authority. His career average exit velocity on balls the other way is 88 mph. This year it’s 95.2 mph:

As you can see, Arozarena’s hard-hit rate is roughly unchanged when he pulls the ball. He’s hitting more grounders than normal to the left side, and he’s succeeding there partly by hitting the ball harder and partly through batted ball luck. However, on balls up the middle and to the opposite field, his hard-hit rates have skyrocketed and he’s hitting the ball in the air more than ever. In fact, the numbers indicate that his 229 wRC+ to the opposite field might actually be a bit lower than he deserves.

Arozarena’s profile has always been a little bit tough to parse. For example, take a look at the heat maps below. On the left is Arozarena’s career slugging percentage per ball in play. On the right is his contact rate:

Some of the pitches that Arozarena really crushes, like the ones at the top of the zone, are also the ones he swings through most often. In fact, if you take a closer look, you’ll notice that Arozarena also tends to have lower contact rates right in the middle of the plate, a trend that has continued this year. He’s capable of doing damage below the zone, or on pitches just off the plate outside.

I bring this up because this is the part of the article where I would normally dig into the underlying metrics and tell you that Arozarena is mashing the ball because he’s chasing less, getting ahead in the count, and taking advantage of meatballs in the zone. Or maybe that he’s just focusing on the pitches he can really crush. That’s how these things tend to work. And while Arozarena is in fact chasing less and seeing slightly more pitches in the zone, I don’t really think that explains the transformation in his batted ball profile.

Arozarena’s chase rate is 7.5 percentage points lower than it was last year. That’s a big drop, but it also leaves him right around his 2001 rate, and he wasn’t running a 180 wRC+ or a 60% hard-hit rate in 2021. He’s striking out a lot less and walking slightly more, but he’s also whiffing more often. In fact, he’s seen more strikes overall and spent a lower percentage of the time ahead in the count this year.

Arozarena’s overall contact rate is up slightly, though again, it’s not that simple. He’s making more contact in the zone and whiffing more when he chases. I don’t know how repeatable that is, but it’s a neat trick if you can pull it off. Combine it with a lower swing rate (particularly outside the zone), and all of sudden more of his batted balls come on pitches in the zone. But still, we’re only talking about an increase of 2.3 percentage points. That doesn’t sound like enough to explain a hard-hit rate that’s jumped nearly 20.

Here’s the bigger thing: Name a split, and within that split Arozarena is hitting the ball harder this year than he did last year. Ahead, behind, or even in the count? Randy Arozarena is hitting the ball harder. Inside or outside the zone? Randy Arozarena is hitting the ball harder. Heart, shadow, or chase zone. Fastball, breaking ball, or offspeed. Lefty, righty, home, away, fly ball, groundball, line drive; he’s even hitting his popups harder. His numbers are down just a hair on the inner third, which is certainly understandable given his new propensity to rip the ball the other way, but that’s really all I could find. The guy is just plain hitting the ball harder, and I’m not prepared to conclude that it all comes down to his swing decisions.

That brings us to our two tidy narratives. The first is something Adam Berry described somewhat bluntly on the Ballpark Dimensions Podcast. “He was openly not really looking into scouting reports,” Berry told Mike Petriello. “He would ask the hitting coach or the manager, whoever ‘What’s this guy’s fastball?’ That’s all he needed to know before he went up for a plate appearance. He even told us last year at one point he didn’t know other pitchers’ names. He knew his fellow Cubans, and he knew Gerrit Cole, and that was it.”

Joe Trezza gave a more nuanced picture at MLB.com. It’s not that Arozarena couldn’t be bothered, Trezza explained, “He eschewed data, preferring to stay in the moment and let his natural ability take over. Sometimes, he told teammates, he didn’t even want to know the opposing pitcher’s name.”

I am definitely willing to believe that more preparation has helped Arozarena. Lest we forget, this wouldn’t be the first time that Arozarena has decided to put in extra work to up his game and done exactly that. Arozarena is still chasing breaking stuff at almost exactly the same rate, but he is laying off more four-seamers above the zone and offspeed stuff below it. That could be due to having a better idea of how pitchers are attacking him. At the very least, it’s safe to say that incorporating new information into his gameplan hasn’t hurt.

The other thing that could tie our story up with a bow is that Arozarena has made some significant changes to his swing. Last year his stance was extremely upright. This year, he’s crouching a bit more, as he did in 2020. Last year, his hands were up above his ear and he kept his back elbow up, with his bat at a much flatter angle. This year, he’s lowered his hands to shoulder height, with his elbow less elevated and his bat nearly vertical. All of that is completely new. When he goes into his load, he’s rotating his body away from the pitcher less and keeping his shoulders much more level. 2023 is on the left and 2022 is on the right:

Last year, you could pretty much see all of the 56 on Arozarena’s back; this year, you can only see a small part of the six.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any information about Arozarena’s new stance. He was using it both in spring training and at the World Baseball Classic, so it’s clearly the result of offseason work. To my knowledge, no one has written an article about it. Andrea of Scout Girl Report was the only person I found who’s mentioned it on Twitter.

I don’t know whether Arozarena made these changes on his own, with outside coaches, or with Tampa Bay’s coaching staff, and I haven’t been able to track down a quote about what he hopes they’ll do for his swing. I assume that the desired effect of all these adjustments — deeper crouch, lower hands, less rotation pre-swing — is to make him quicker, starting out with the various parts of his body closer to where they need to be when he begins his swing. Shortening up in this way clearly hasn’t hurt his power. He even set a career exit velocity record last week by hitting a Levi Stoudt four-seamer 114.3 mph. It could also be that lowering his hands and staying more level were changes intended to help him elevate the ball, in which case they have been a soaring success.

So this is where I’m going to leave you. Randy Arozarena is off to a great start. He’s got a new swing. He’s studying scouting reports. He’s chasing less. Through some combination of these factors, he’s elevating the baseball, using the whole field, and hitting it very, very hard. Maybe that’s all we need to know.

I
Drew Smyly is seven innings into a perfect game.
He’s thrown nothing but sinkers and curveballs.
It’s a day game at Wrigley and the ball melts into a swirl of white t-shirts,
Materializes in the catcher’s mitt,
Then says hello-goodbye to each of the infielders in turn
As another Dodger slides his bat back into the bat rack.
Drew Smyly is seven innings into a perfect game.
Drew Smyly is about to be tackled by his catcher.

II
Yan Gomes lands and keeps rolling, longer than he needs to,
Eventually settling on his hands and knees, head hanging,
Not remotely like girls who throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
Smyly comes to rest with his weight on his pitching elbow, legs crossed,
Like Reclining Venus in pinstripes. He shakes his head and smiles, “My bad.” Read the rest of this entry »

Well, shoot. After grounding out to shortstop in the second inning of Wednesday night’s game against the Nationals, Jorge Mateo was removed due to hip discomfort. The Baltimore shortstop is officially day-to-day, and Rotowire reports that he seems to have avoided a serious injury, but the timing still stinks. Mateo is on the hottest streak of his short career: After 16 games, he has a 192 wRC+ and 1.1 WAR, tying him for third and fourth in baseball, respectively. Naturally, he wasn’t going to be able to keep this up for a whole season; he has a .378 BABIP, and his wOBA exceeds his xwOBA by 59 points. It’s April 20, and the regression monster is laying in wait right for him right now.

But that’s part of what makes his hot start so fun. This is Jorge Mateo! The light-hitting, glove-first speedster. He was a fun player when he was just stealing bases, making jump throws from the hole, and trying to beat out infield hits. All of a sudden he’s got a .638 slugging percentage. In the last 16 games, he’s raised his career wRC+ by 9%. Obviously, I’m going to examine whether any of this looks sustainable, but first let’s take a moment to enjoy what we’re seeing while spring is in the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Kwan and Myles Straw have extremely similar profiles. Both are small, speedy outfielders with great gloves. Kwan was a center fielder in both college and the minors, but Straw’s presence forced him over to left, and both took home Gold Gloves in 2022. On offense, they feature almost no pop, but they both survive through excellent bat-to-ball skills and plate discipline. They chase pitches outside the strike zone approximately never, and somehow they swing and miss even less often. You could practically snap their Baseball Savant sliders together like Legos.

Kwan’s is on the bottom and Straw’s is on top, but it doesn’t matter all that much; in most categories they’re nearly identical. That’s not to say that their performance is identical. Thanks largely to Kwan’s truly elite ability to avoid strikeouts and his lower groundball rate (plus a bit of batted ball luck), he put up a 124 wRC+ in 2022, nearly twice Straw’s. Still, the two Cleveland outfielders are very much playing the same game.

Crashing this scrappy little party after a May call-up was Oscar Gonzalez, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound right fielder with big power potential, no defense to speak of, and so little plate discipline that he finished the season just 0.4% shy of the worst chase rate humanly possible (also known as Javier Báez’s’s chase rate). He also absolutely towers over the 5-foot-9 Kwan and the 5-foot-10 Straw. Gonzalez looks like he could pick up the two Gold Glove winners and use them to play G.I. Joes. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re not supposed to find this charming anymore. I know that. The Era of Position Players Pitching was established all the way back in 2017, when Jordan Walker was a scant 15 years old. The shine has officially worn off watching non-pitchers huck batting practice fastballs toward the general vicinity of home plate during garbage time. But could we maybe enjoy this one, just once more, for a treat? I promise I’ll be extra grouchy once we’re done.

There are a few things that make this instance of position player pitching particularly fun. The first is that the player who took the hill is absolutely the most exciting choice possible. When the Baseball Savant arm strength leaderboard debuted in October, Nate Eaton ranked at the very top, with a 98.1 mph average throw that made Esteban Rivera weak in the knees. At the beginning of the 2022 season, Eric Longenhagen hung an 80 on Eaton’s arm, writing “Eaton has below-average offensive ability, but he can play a variety of positions and he has one of the best throwing arms in professional baseball, a rocket launcher that might merit a look on the mound if/when Eaton and the industry declare him to have plateaued as a position player.”

Luckily, we didn’t have to wait that long. On Monday, the Kansas City utilityman played the fifth different defensive position of his young career, pitching a scoreless bottom of the eighth in an 11-2 loss to the Rangers. He threw 22 pitches, striking out one and allowing two singles. Eaton threw five pitches upwards of 94 mph, while Kansas City’s starter, one Zack Greinke, topped out at 91.3 mph. It’s two days later, and Greinke’s final curveball is just now about to cross home plate. Read the rest of this entry »