Miguel Vargas will take his first swing of spring training today. That wouldn’t be that notable, except that Vargas has already played in six spring training games and had 11 spring training plate appearances. He just hasn’t swung yet. That’s been necessary because of a hairline fracture in his right pinkie he suffered while taking groundballs. Vargas is the Dodgers’ fifth-ranked prospect, and with Gavin Lux out for the season and Messieurs Turner and Turner off to Boston and Philadelphia, Los Angeles needs him at second base. The Dodgers want Vargas getting game reps at the keystone and seeing live, competitive pitches. So there he is, playing despite the fact that he’s not medically cleared to swing the bat in a game.

Just seeing pitches is plenty important. You don’t need to swing to track pitches and work on your timing. Take Kyle Schwarber, whose heroics in the 2016 World Series came after a horrific knee injury cost him most of that season. After acing his six-month checkup and being cleared to hit, Schwarber flew out to the Arizona Fall League, where he could see as many pitches as possible before the Series. He played in two real games and two simulated ones, but the real work happened in the cage, much of it with the bat on his shoulder. Per Tom Verducci, “Schwarber hit or tracked 1,300 pitches in four days — many out of a pitching machine that fired major-league quality breaking pitches, some from two Class A pitchers the Cubs brought in to pitch to him in the simulated games and some from coaches.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes things just come together. On Wednesday, all the cosmic tumblers clicked into place at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers, Florida. In the first inning of a spring training game between the Twins and the Phillies, all the big stories of the offseason seemed to collide in one at-bat.

It started with Andrew Painter, the player who has thus far been the talk of spring training. The 19-year-old right-hander ranks fifth on our Top 100 Prospects list. His ascent was so rapid that he wasn’t even on last year’s list (he did make last year’s end-of-season update as a 60 FV), and now baseball is abuzz with the possibility that he might break camp as the fifth starter for the reigning National League champs. Painter even managed to make headlines during live batting practice.

There’s a lot about Painter that seems improbable. 19-year-olds who stand 6-foot-7 don’t often have 50/60 command grades. They’re the guys who spend years in the minors piling up walks and strikeouts while they slowly figure out where exactly all those limbs are supposed to go. Painter shouldn’t be free and easy throwing 99 mph in the zone. He should be a gangly, awkward teen like Alfredo Linguini from Ratatouille. Instead, he’s a commanding, fireballing teen who just happens to look like a whole lot like Alfredo Linguini from Ratatouille:

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On Saturday afternoon, Washington’s Josiah Gray pitched the first inning of his first spring training game of 2023. He threw nine pitches to mow down the Mets. Five of those pitches were cut fastballs, a new addition to his repertoire. If that doesn’t sound noteworthy to you, maybe you should ask Mark Canha, the player who faced Gray’s first cutter. After the pitch, he stared out at the mound for a long moment.

That is the face of a man who has just seen something he did not expect. Canha struck out (on a cutter), and on his way back to the dugout he stopped to tell Francisco Lindor a little secret. Want to guess what he said? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, I wrote about the improvements that umpires have made in calling balls and strikes according to the rulebook strike zone. Today, I’d like to focus on the other side of that equation: pitch framing. The consensus around baseball is that pitch framing’s story has followed a very familiar arc. Call it the Competitive Advantage Life Cycle:

• Teams realize the immense value of a skill.
• An arms race ensues as they scramble to cultivate it.
• The skill becomes widespread across the league.
• Since the skill is more evenly distributed, it loses much of its value.

Once everybody got good at pitch framing, nobody was great at it. As Rob Arthur has put it, “Catcher framing felt like it was disappearing almost as soon as it was discovered.” I even have fun graphs to drive the point home. There are definitely more useful ways of presenting the data, but I like how these ones let you watch the entropy dissipate over time in open defiance of the second law of thermodynamics:

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It’s always nice to feel welcome. After excelling for the White Sox as a stopgap shortstop in 2022, Elvis Andrus will return to Chicago in 2023, this time as the team’s starting second baseman. Toward the end of the 2022 season, he made clear to reporters that he would welcome a return engagement and was open to shifting positions if need be. Apparently Rick Hahn was listening. The deal, pending a physical, is for a reported one year and $3 million. ESPN‘s Jeff Passan and USA Today’s Bob Nightengale first reported the deal and terms, respectively. Amazingly, after 14 years in the big leagues, this was the first time Andrus had ever been a free agent.

Although Andrus didn’t make our Top 50 Free Agents list, he accrued more WAR in 2022 than 37 players who did, and he has, in my opinion, the greatest surname in all of baseball. Our crowdsourced predictions pegged him for two years and $20 million, so if one year and $3 million sounds like a lot less to you, then your math is spot on. According to MLB Trade Rumors, the only other teams reported to have interest in Andrus were the Red Sox and Angels. Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball will look significantly different in 2023 due to several new rules, but there’s another change that won’t attract as much attention as a pitch clock or all that steamy base-on-base action. Ten veteran umpires have retired and 10 new ones will be taking their place. I’d like to explore the effect these new umpires might have, but first, let’s look at the state of umpiring right now.

The short version is pretty simple: Since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, umpires have improved their accuracy in calling balls and strikes every single year. Accuracy has gone from 81.3% to 92.4%. If an improvement of 11.1% in 15 years doesn’t sound particularly big, consider it this way: incorrect calls have been cut by nearly 60%.

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Last week, pitching prospect Grayson Rodriguez was asked a great question on The Baseball Barb-B-Cast. Rodgriguez is ranked third in an excellent Baltimore system, and as a player who was drafted in 2018, his tenure with the club spans both the Dan Duquette and Mike Elias eras. The question was: How has the organization changed over time?

Rodriguez started his answer with, “Everything about the organization changed but the name.” He touched on technology, pitch development, and the turnover in the coaching staff, but the part I want to focus on came right at the beginning, when he was describing the Duquette era: “Our pitching philosophy was, it was like, ‘Hey, you know, as a starter we’re going to go out in the first three innings and we’re just going to throw nothing but fastballs, and we’re going to see if that works.’ And, like, terrible. Terrible idea.”

Yup. That does indeed sound like a terrible idea. It also made me wonder whether teams are as focused on establishing the fastball as they once were. A reduction in first inning fastball rate would make sense for a couple reasons. First, fastball usage has dropped overall as teams have learned that pitchers should throw their best pitch more often, and fastballs themselves have become less effective:

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There are a lot of ways to look at the numbers George Springer put up in 2022. Here’s the simplest: He had an All-Star season, posting a 132 wRC+ and piling up 4.2 WAR. That’s excellent. On the other hand, you could argue that he has been slipping for a while now. His wRC+ has declined in three consecutive seasons, and now that Kevin Kiermaier and Daulton Varsho are both Blue Jays, his days as a center fielder are officially over.

Analyzing Springer is tricky because he’s always been a great hitter no matter what was going on under the hood. He reached his offensive peak in 2019, posting a 155 wRC+ with the help of a career-high 43.2% hard-hit rate. Then in 2020 and ’21, his hard-hit rate came back to earth a bit, his pull rate spiked, and he literally doubled his launch angle. Despite the drastic changes, his wRC+ fell by just over 10 points, dropping him from elite all the way down to very nearly elite. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to an article where I’m wrong about everything. Like literally all of the things. Here’s what happened. I was thinking about the long, glorious farewell tour of Albert Pujols. After a five-year stretch during which he posted a wRC+ of 84, he put up a 151 wRC+ in 2022. That was the best he’d hit since his age-30 season. Pujols largely put up those numbers by smashing lefties. His 113 wRC+ against righties was good, but against lefties that number was 214. MVP Paul Goldschmidt was the only batter who performed better against lefties (minimum 130 plate appearances vs. southpaws).

Pujols’ resurgence really started in 2021, when he had a 145 wRC+ against lefties and a 35 against righties. That’s the season I was more interested in. As I thought about it, I started wondering whether the last part of his journey — established veteran defies the aging curve by settling comfortably into a platoon role — is happening more frequently. I had the sense that it was happening more frequently.

I was wrong. It is not happening more frequently. Here’s a graph comparing the last 11 years to the previous 10 years:

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Here’s something Joey Votto said while serving as a guest commentator in the Cincinnati broadcast booth in August: “The best in the game are matching the style of the game. The style of the game changes.” He was talking about hitting, but his point lined up with one of my favorite baseball metaphors. I often think of the game as an ecosystem. The players who thrive are the ones who are either built for or can adapt to the current game; changes to the style or the rules will always favor some players at the expense of others.

Changes will also favor some plays over others. As the infield shift rose to prominence, routine groundouts to shallow right field were fruitful and multiplied. Now that the shift has been outlawed, they’ll likely be pushed to the brink of extinction, and they’re taking one of baseball’s most exciting plays with them.

FanGraphs loves bunt doubles. This is a brief history of the bunt double by Jake Mailhot. This is a how-to manual for bunt doubles by the sainted Jeff Sullivan. In fact, he wrote about bunt doubles kind of a lot. As the shifting ecosystem means that bunt doubles are likely going the way of the dodo, it’s time to write the final chapter of their story. Read the rest of this entry »