It’s starting. The playoffs are coming, and the baseball is getting more intense. Bats will flip. Tempers will flare. Players will curse even more than they do already. That’s great. Everybody loves playoff baseball. But that also makes this a good time to appreciate baseball’s tender side. I would like to draw your attention to two plays that happened on Tuesday. Both were plays at the plate, and in both, the catcher and the baserunner crashed into each other. And then, in both, immediately after crashing into each other, the catcher and the runner checked to make sure that the other was ok. Our topic for the day is not sensual baseball, but rather sensitive baseball.

It’s not just that I love these moments, it’s that they fulfill a need. When two players collide, there is something in me that sees it as an opportunity for kindness. I find myself hoping that they’ll check in on each other, that they’ll let their humanity shine through the adrenaline and desire and competitiveness. And when the two players do in fact take the time to check on each other, it makes me feel good. In the middle of the game, I am willing more kindness into the world. I’m not sure why. That’s certainly not the main reason I care about baseball, but it’s there. Read the rest of this entry »

Johan Oviedo has a fastball problem. According to Baseball Savant, the Pittsburgh right-hander’s four-seamer has been worth -9.1 runs this season, making it the 26th-least valuable four-seamer and 49th-least valuable pitch in all of baseball. That’s what happens when a pitch has an 18.1% whiff rate and a 47% hard-hit rate. Luckily, Oviedo’s slider and curveball have been worth a combined 16 runs. That makes his breaking stuff the ninth-most valuable in all of baseball.

If you find yourself screaming at your computer that Oviedo should probably throw his curveball and slider more, guess who agrees with you? Johan Oviedo. Across six starts in April, Oviedo threw his breaking balls 63.5% of the time. Only one player, Hunter Brown, ran a higher breaking ball rate in April while throwing half as many pitches as Oviedo did. But now that you’ve stopped screaming at your computer, I need to tell you that Johan Oviedo disagrees with you too.

Oviedo’s breaking ball percentage has been falling for most of the season, and it’s settled in the low 40s. That’s right, it’s time to scream again. Why has Oviedo gone back to leading with his worst pitch instead of his best pitches? Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t have much in the way of groundbreaking analysis for you today. I’m here to write about something that’s pretty obvious: Brandon Woodruff is still awfully good. You probably knew that already without fancy stats or gory math. The Milwaukee right-hander owns a career 3.08 ERA and 3.18 FIP. He has been good at just about every point since his rookie year in 2017. Still, I’d like to address a few of the reasons that his continued success is a big deal. So until I get to the part where I can dazzle you with numbers, I will at least try to drop in some fun facts here and there.

Woodruff originally hit the IL with shoulder inflammation back in April, after making just two starts that were — stop me if you’ve heard this before — very good. His shoulder inflammation turned out to be a Grade 2 subscapular strain. The subscapularis is the largest muscle in your rotator cuff, and doctors can diagnose a subscapular tear using three tests with excellent names: the lift-off test, the bear hug test, and the belly press test. Sadly, none of these tests is quite as fun as it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Jonah Heim take a called strike that he felt should have been a ball. As a catcher, Heim knew better than to argue. Instead, he performed the delicate dance of the catcher who wants to make a point without showing up the umpire. I’m not sure if the clip below is the exact pitch I saw, but it’s certainly representative of the conundrum a catcher faces when he doesn’t like the strike zone.

You can see Heim duck his head and furtively say something to home plate umpire Doug Eddings. I like to imagine that whatever he says begins with, “I beg your pardon, good sir.” He doesn’t make a show of his displeasure. He asks something, Eddings nods his head yes, and everyone moves on with their lives. Still, Heim thinks he’s seen ball two, and it’s hard to blame him. Even the person operating the score bug got fooled.

For some reason, that little moment has been rattling around in my head. I tend to think too much about the relationship between umpires and catchers. It doesn’t seem possible that they could spend every night doing what they do in the proximity that they do it in without developing a bond. Read the rest of this entry »

Have I got news for you. The J.P. Crawford you know and love is now 50% more powerful! After running an ISO of .099 over the last two seasons, the Mariners shortstop is at .150 in 2023. And that’s not all. With that power has come increased production: Crawford’s 133 wRC+ is not just the best of his career, it’s second among all shortstops, trailing only Corey Seager’s 179 wRC+. Let’s act now and figure out what Crawford is doing differently this season.

With Crawford, plate discipline is always a good place to start. Crawford has always run low chase rates, but this season, he’s down to 21.2%. That’s fifth-lowest among all qualified players, and it’s led to a 15.6% walk rate, fourth-highest. However, while Crawford is chasing less and walking more, he’s also striking out more. While his 19% strikeout rate is still better than the average player, it’s a jump of more than five percentage points from last season.

Crawford is running a career-best 37.3% hard-hit rate. That’s still well below average, but it’s a huge jump for someone who was in the fifth percentile in 2022. It may seem like Crawford has made the classic power-for-contact tradeoff, but that’s only true to an extent. Players who make that tradeoff usually whiff more because they’re being more aggressive at the plate. Crawford is hitting the ball harder and striking out more, but he’s actually been more passive than ever. His swing rate has dropped by almost exactly the same amount on pitches inside the zone and outside the zone.

I’m going to show you three heat maps. The one in the middle is Crawford’s slugging percentage on balls in play over the course of his career. It shows where he does damage. On the left is Crawford’s swing rate in 2022, and on the right is his swing rate in 2023:

This is as big a change as you’re going to see. Last year, Crawford would swing at pretty much anything over the heart of the plate. This year, he’s focused on a much smaller area, pitches in the absolute center of the zone, much closer to where he really does damage. Here’s what that looks like in terms of Baseball Savant’s swing/take decisions:

Crawford is chasing less, so the improvements in the shadow and chase zones shouldn’t surprise us much. The heart of the plate is where things get interesting. Let’s break those numbers into their constituent parts:

In both 2022 and thus far in 2023, when Crawford took pitches over the heart of the plate, he was worth -11 runs. That’s makes sense, as all of those pitches end up as called strikes. When he has swung at pitches over the heart of the plate, he’s been 16 runs better than he was last year! His wOBA on those swings has gone from .312 to .400. Crawford is taking more strikes, which hurts a little, but he’s more than making up for it when he does swing.

Still, none of this explains why he’s making less contact. Here’s the thing I think is really fascinating. Take a look at Crawford’s whiff percentage broken down by pitch type:

Crawford is gearing up to hit the fastball in a way he hasn’t been in previous seasons. He’s missing them a bit less often, and his wOBA against them has jumped from .315 to .394. Gearing up to hit the fastball can have a side effect: getting fooled more often on softer stuff. Crawford is whiffing a lot more against breaking balls and offspeed stuff. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s performing worse on softer stuff. Take a look at his actual results, once again using Baseball Savant’s run values:

Crawford is indeed doing worse against breaking stuff, but he has completely turned himself around against both fastballs and offspeed stuff. How is he doing so well against changeups and splitters when he’s whiffing on them over 50% more often than he did last year? Furthermore, since he’s now much worse against breaking balls, why haven’t pitchers started throwing them way more often?

The answer to the first question is that Crawford is offsetting all those extra whiffs by hitting the ball much harder, especially against offspeed stuff. His soft contact rate has dropped to a career low, and his 95th-percentile exit velocity increased from 105 mph to 106.2. As for the second question, breaking stuff often requires a hitter to chase in order to be effective, and Crawford doesn’t do that. If your plan is to get Crawford out by deluging him with soft stuff, you’re likely to end up behind in the count.

As I pulled all these numbers together, I was reminded of something Robert Orr wrote back in June for Baseball Prospectus. Orr detailed how Ronald Acuña Jr., previously a dead-pull hitter, had begun letting fastballs travel a little deeper and sending them the other way, which led to a convenient knock-on effect:

“What happens when Acuña thinks a fastball is coming and he’s wrong. If he starts on time for 96 and gets 96, then he laces a base hit into the gap. That’s good. If he starts on time for 96 and gets 87, though? That’s when he can catch the ball out in front of the plate, and that’s where homers are. That’s better.”

Crawford is coming from the opposite end of the spectrum. He ran a 34.2% pull rate last year, compared to Acuña’s 44.5%. But this year, they’ve ended up in the same place: Crawford at 41% and Acuña at 40.5%. Here’s what the change looks like when you break it down by pitch type:

Crawford is pulling the ball way more often, especially against non-fastballs. Those pulled balls haven’t turned into homers, because even this version of him is still way less powerful than Acuña, but he’s gone from the bottom end of the spectrum up toward the middle. Further, Crawford’s 39.2% groundball rate is the lowest it’s been since he became a regular starter. Meeting those balls out in front is helping him pull them in the air, making the most of his increased power.

Under normal circumstances, I might have ended this article here. We’re pushing 2,000 words, and I’ve typed the name Crawford so many times that I’ve lost the ability to comprehend its meaning. It’s just a string of letters to me, and that A-W-F-O section in the middle is really starting to freak me out. Who does that? The only word I can think of that contains an A-W-F-O stretch is ‘clawfoot,’ and I think we can all agree that that’s one of the creepiest words in the English language. However, there are two things I’d still like to address. The first is how Crawford came about this extra power. You might remember that he’s tried to improve his power output before. Before the 2021 season, he packed on 20 pounds of muscle in hopes of increasing his slugging. Unfortunately the Get Yoked, Go Smash method only raised his ISO by 20 points, while his hard-hit rate actually got worse.

This year, he’s increased his average exit velocity by 3.9 mph, the third-highest jump among qualified players. Some of this can be explained by choosing better pitches to hit and pulling the ball more often. Some of it can likely be explained by improved health, since Crawford played through back, pec, leg, and knee injuries last season. Lastly, Crawford trained at Driveline this offseason, after taking six weeks to recover from all of the injuries to all of his body parts.

While I was researching this article, I stumbled onto an episode of the Sea Level podcast that featured Maxx Garrett, the hitting trainer who worked with Crawford this winter. I’m normally reluctant to draw a straight line from a swing change to improved results. There are so many factors involved in hitting. Seemingly everybody comes into spring training in the best shape of their life and with a new swing. Some of those players are bound to improve, and while the hard work they put in during the offseason likely helped, giving all the credit to their new bat waggle is often a facile conclusion. However, Garrett gave host Ben Ranieri some pretty interesting details that dovetailed nicely with what I found in the numbers.

First, Garrett confirmed that the focus was on improving Crawford’s bat speed, as his plate discipline is already elite. Referring to his notes, he said that Crawford’s bat speed was measured at 65.6 mph at the beginning of training and 71.1 at the end. “We saw some movement things, especially with his setup, his load, kind of that load, stride, into landing, where he was in some unique positions that not many of our high-level hitters get into,” said Garrett. “And it was making it harder for him to produce as much force as he was capable of.”

Let’s go to the tape. On the left is a swing from 2022, and on the right is a swing from 2023:

I’ve pulled some stills below to illustrate the differences. Crawford starts off with his stance much more closed. He’s changed his bat angle, lowered his hands, and tucked both his hands and elbows closer to his body. Once he gets into his leg kick, he’s crouching slightly deeper, his front shoulder is angled downward, and his shoulders are rotated further away from the pitcher. If not for his hair, his entire name would be visible on the back of his jersey. The follow-through makes it easy to see how much harder Crawford is swinging, and how much higher he’s finishing. Keep in mind that Crawford crushes both of these pitches. They’re both middle-middle four-seamers that result in hard-hit balls to right-center. Crawford actually hits the ball on the left much harder, but look at how he finishes. He’s much more upright, much less athletic. The swing on the right is clearly more explosive:

Garrett also said that they focused on Crawford’s attack angle, helping him to hit the ball in the air more. This is the part that made me sit up and listen: Garrett described a drill that involved feeding Crawford fastballs from an extremely high attack angle and from off to the side, beyond the right base side of the rubber. “So basically, an extreme lefty release,” he said. “And that was forcing him to get his barrel out front, have it work up. His intent was to move fast, hit the ball higher, to the pull side. Really get his barrel out front, working up more into the ball.” To me, that sounds like a pretty good explanation for the way Crawford has been able to attack fastballs, punish offspeed stuff, and pull the ball in the air this season.

The last thing I need to mention is less fun. Crawford’s defense has been quite bad this year. A Gold Glover in 2020, Crawford’s 14 errors are tied for fifth-most in the league, and most defensive metrics rank him as one of the game’s worst fielders. That’s a real bummer, because if Crawford rated as even a league-average defender at short, he would be a top 20 player in all of baseball this season. It’s always good to take defensive metrics with a grain of salt, and any player experiencing such a big drop-off is a candidate to regress back to the mean the following season. Crawford has already turned himself into an All-Star caliber player this season. If he can hold on to some of his gains at the plate and get his defense back toward the middle of the pack, the future is even brighter.

All numbers are as of Wednesday morning.

You’re going to hear a lot about the Braves over the next couple months. They’re the best team in baseball, and that’s how it goes. Some of you are Braves fans, so getting to see more of your favorite team in October will just be one more drop of good news in a season filled up to the brim with happy headlines. But for those of you who are indifferent or ambivalent toward the Braves, for those of you who loathe them in your very core, I have a little treat. That’s all this article is: a treat to bring a bit more fun to the wall-to-wall coverage awaiting us all.

On Tuesday night, Daniel Vogelbach homered to straightaway center field and Michael Harris II attempted to rob it. Harris tried very hard, and I went back and watched the replay to see exactly how close he came to making the play. However, after watching a few times, my attention shifted. I kept rewinding because I noticed that something was sticking out of Harris’ glove and flapping like the tongue of a golden retriever:

That’s the little positioning card that tells Harris where to stand for each batter. Those cheat sheets are a small part of the revolution in outfield positioning that has hammered BABIP league-wide over the last several years. Your local sports outlet probably wrote about the phenomenon when these cards started appearing back in 2018, but at this point they’re old hat (especially for the Yankees, who literally kept the cards in their hats). Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins are in first place. I’m not talking about the standings, though it’s true that they’ve got a substantial lead over the Guardians in the AL Central. The Twins are in first place where it counts: on the strikeout leaderboards. Minnesota’s pitchers are striking out 25.7% of the batters they face, and Minnesota’s batters are striking out 27.2% of the time. Both of those numbers are the highest in baseball this season, and the latter is just a tenth of a percentage point off the all-time record set by the 2020 Tigers. In all, the Twins are on pace to be involved in 3,211 strikeouts, the most of all-time.

In a way, the Twins are on the cutting edge. We are living in the strikeout era, the golden age of the golden sombrero. If you sort every team offense in AL/NL history by strikeout rate, 299 of the top 300 played in this century (congratulations and apologies to the 1998 Diamondbacks). Relative to the rest of the league, the Twins aren’t close to making history; they’re just the team in first place. Their offense’s 118 K%+ pales in comparison to the 163 put up by the 1927 Yankees, to pick a notable example.

The game has been trending toward more strikeouts for as long as it’s been around, and if the Twins do end up setting an all-time record, it likely won’t last all that long. Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t honor them for racing out ahead of the pack and playing winning baseball in the crushing maw of the strikeout apocalypse. Read the rest of this entry »

Look, Juan Soto is going to be fine. In fact, he’s probably fine already. At some point during every season, we start worrying that Juan Soto isn’t performing like Juan Soto anymore, and then he starts performing like Juan Soto again. You know why? Because he was Juan Soto the whole time, and as we all know, Juan Soto was built by robo-umpires from the future and sent back in time to teach us the exact parameters of the strike zone. The robo-umps also gave him the ability to hit dingers and do a little dance in the batter’s box to help him blend in with us humans. Point is, Juan Soto will be fine.

I pitched this article on Monday afternoon, when Juan Soto was definitely not fine. He was in a bit of a slump, batting .121 with a -14 wRC+ over his last eight games. We’re talking about a very small sample here, but once there’s a minus sign in front of your wRC+, it’s not just bad for a time-traveling strike zone robot. It’s bad for a regular human, too. Still, that’s not what made me want to write about Juan Soto. This is what made me want to write about him:

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember the springtime? We were so young and carefree, so full of hope. We hadn’t even breathed in our first lungfuls of Canadian wildfire smoke. Pitchers were full of hope, too. They’d spent the whole offseason in a lab, or playing winter ball, or maybe just in a nice condo, trying to figure how to get better.

Amazingly, a lot of them settled on the exact same recipe for success: start throwing a cutter. You couldn’t open up a soon-to-be-shuttered sports section without reading an article about some pitcher whose plan for world domination hinged on whipping up a delicious new cut fastball. Now that we’re in the dog days of summer, it’s time to check and see how those cutters are coming along. Are they browning nicely and just starting to set? Or have they filled the house with smoke, bubbling over the sides of the pan and burning down to a carbonized blob that needs to be scraped off the bottom of the oven with steel wool?

I pulled data on every pitcher who has thrown at least 400 pitches in both 2022 and ’23, focusing on the ones who are throwing a cutter at least 10% of the time this year after throwing it either infrequently or not at all last season. These cutoffs did mean that we missed some interesting players like Brayan Bello and Danny Coulombe, but we’re left with a list of 25 pitchers.

So did their new toys turn them into peak Pedro? The short answer is no. Taken as a whole, they’ve performed roughly as well as they did last season. As you’d expect from any sample, roughly half our pitchers got better, and half got worse. Of the pitchers who improved from last year to this year, I don’t think I can definitively say that any of them reached new heights specifically because of the cutter. Read the rest of this entry »

After trading away veteran pieces and restocking the farm system at the deadline, the Mets have pivoted and are now focusing on the future. That being the case, it both was and wasn’t a curious time for the team to option Brett Baty, seemingly their third baseman of the future, to Triple-A Syracuse on Monday. Now is the time to let the kids play and figure things out at the big-league level, but Baty has been struggling so mightily that he might need a change of scenery. He’s running a 77 wRC+ on the season, and since the start of July, he’s at a measly 39. He hasn’t recorded a hit since July 23, a stretch of 25 plate appearances. That’s the second-longest active streak in baseball, behind the also recently demoted Corey Julks with 42. Combine that with poor defense, and Baty certainly sounds like someone who could use a little time away from the spotlight to figure things out.

The Mets have said the same. “We think this is what’s best for Brett, which is what’s best for the Mets, for the time being,” Buck Showalter told reporters. “Just because something’s delayed doesn’t mean it’s denied.” He added, “I’d be surprised if he doesn’t take a little time – two or three days – and then all of a sudden kind of get back to who he is and who he’s capable of being.”

What complicates the issue is Baty’s service time. It’s a tricky situation because, to borrow a phrase, the timing is nothing short of predominant. Between this year and last, Baty has accrued 162 days of major league service time, just short of the 172 that constitute a full year. When the Mets started the season with him at Triple-A Syracuse, it seemed like they might be deliberately gaming the system. He was 23rd overall in our prospect rankings and, along with Mark Vientos, had torn up the Grapefruit League. The Mets did call Baty up in mid-April, early enough that he’d have a chance to accrue a full year of service time, but once he arrived in Flushing, they still seemed to be on the fence about him, even though he had raked in Syracuse and continued raking for his first month in the big leagues. He was kept in a loose platoon with Eduardo Escobar, starting against righties and sitting about half the time against lefties — not necessarily how you handle your third baseman of the future. Read the rest of this entry »