You might have heard that the Mets got hit by a record 112 pitches in 2022, but New York wasn’t the only record breaker in that particular category. Cincinnati’s pitching staff breezed by the 2021 Cubs’ modern era record of 98 HBPs with weeks left in the season, and they kept right on plunking. In the last game of the year, Graham Ashcraft sailed a sinker into both the triceps of Patrick Wisdom and the record books, giving the Reds 110 hit batters for the season. That number edged them past the 1899 Cleveland Spiders as the most contact-oriented team of all-time.

Those bloodthirsty Spiders hit 109 batters and lost 134 games, then folded just before the invention of the zeppelin. Eleven of those HBPs and losses were credited to Harry Colliflower, a former carpenter who won his first start, then lost 11 straight decisions and his spot in the big leagues. That’s the company the 2022 Reds kept. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s Winter Meetings are in full swing! Now is time to make some trades. Now is the time to sign some free agents. You and I are going to put together a team. What should our team look like? Don’t worry. I’ve already decided for us.

In 2022, Mets batters got hit by 112 pitches, setting a new single-season major league record. Ever since they broke the record, I’ve been wondering how many HBP a team could rack up if they made it their sole mission. That’s our challenge.

We’ll be building our roster using Steamer projections for the 2023 season, and we’ll assemble a lineup with the goal of obliterating the Mets’ record. We’re going to get hit often and we’re going to get hit with style. To get us in the spirit of the enterprise, I’ve named our new team the Cooperstown Contusions. Before you ask, yes, our mascot will be an anthropomorphic bruise:

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You might want to buckle up. This is an article about small sample sizes, so there’s a statistically significant chance that things are about to get rowdy. It was supposed to be an article about which outfielders are better or worse than you’d expect them to be based on their sprint speed.

Just for fun, here’s the chart I started with. I turned Outs Above Average into a rate stat I’ll call OAA/150. It’s a player’s OAA per 1,350 innings, or 150 games. (I tried several other metrics, dividing by chances instead of innings, and working with UZR and DRS range metrics. This worked best for my purposes.) The sample is 544 outfielder seasons in which the fielder had at least 50 chances on balls with a catch probability below 96% (hereafter known as starred chances). I’ve labeled the two players who stood out the most in either direction in 2022.

Daulton Varsho good, Andrew Vaughn catastrophically bad. No surprise there, but I love charts like this, thick at the bottom and thin toward the top. They show how many paths there are to each outcome. Speed is a big component of OAA; the correlation coefficient of the two is 0.54. But outfielders also need to get good jumps, make plays at the wall, and be able to run down balls in all directions. There are lots of different combinations of skills that can land you in the bottom or middle of the chart. To get to the top, you need to be good at all of them. You also need to be lucky. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Renfroe was probably getting tired of Milwaukee anyway. After spending the first four years of his career in San Diego, he will join his fifth team in five years as the Brewers sent the 30-year-old outfielder to the Angels in exchange for pitchers Janson Junk, Elvis Peguero, and Adam Seminaris.

Starting with the Los Angeles side of the deal: the Angels know what they’re getting in Renfroe. He’s a bat-first corner outfielder who relies on power to make up for what he lacks in on-base ability. After a poor showing in 2020, he bounced back with a 113 wRC+ in ’21 and posted a nearly identical season in ’22, good for a 124 wRC+ in the tougher offensive environment. He hit 60 home runs between the two seasons and posted a .315 on base percentage in both. He’s projected to make $11.2 million in arbitration this year, then move on to yet another team in 2024 as a free agent.

Renfroe owns a career wRC+ of 136 against lefties versus 97 against righties and has often been viewed as a platoon candidate. He improved his wRC+ to 120 against righties in 2022, however, after putting up 101 wRC+ in 2021. And while his defense isn’t to OAA’s liking, DRS and UZR both tend to rate him right around average, and his excellent arm helps to make up for what he lacks in range. He’ll slot into the outfield next to Mike Trout and Taylor Ward. Steamer projects the trio for 10.3 WAR — a big improvement after Los Angeles got just 0.3 WAR from its left fielders last year, good for 27th in the league. Even though Steamer expects Renfroe to take a step back next year, his projection of 2.0 WAR would patch a significant hole. Read the rest of this entry »

During Game 3 of the ALCS, Jeff Francoeur noted that 10 of the 12 pitchers who had surrendered postseason home runs to Alex Bregman were All-Stars, eliciting a comment about how Bregman hits well against good pitching. That’s undoubtedly a fun fact, but the notion has been rattling around my brain for the last couple weeks. I’ve definitely heard stories about players who hit good pitching, but I’ve never heard of anyone looking at splits based on the quality of the pitcher on the mound.

The main problem with that idea is a logical one. Break down any batter’s performance into its constituent parts, and you’ve entered a zero sum game. If you’re at your best against great pitchers, that means you’re hitting worse against everyone else. It’s hard for me to imagine that there are many players who fare better against Justin Verlander than they do against, well, anyone on the Nationals.

There could be players who are less bad than average, but if I had my choice of superpowers, I’m not sure that’s the one I’d pick. It would definitely help out in the playoffs, but over the course of the season, batters see a lot more average and poor arms than they do great ones. I’d rather perform well the majority of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the years, plenty of FanGraphs articles have started out with a writer clicking around on the leaderboards looking for something interesting. Only the truly great articles, however, come about when the writer distractedly clicks on the wrong leaderboard because they’re busy baking adorable miniature cakes. With that auspicious beginning, let’s talk about pitchers hitting in the era of the universal designated hitter.

We’ll start with a simple question: Who was the best hitting pitcher in 2022?

Did you think it was Shohei Ohtani? Oh sweet, naïve reader. You make me laugh. It wasn’t Ohtani. That would’ve been the right answer if the question had been, “Who was the best hitting pitcher in 2022 (minimum two plate appearances)?” But that wasn’t the question, and you have fallen right into my trap. (Don’t worry; nothing bad happens if you fall into the trap. In fact, there’s candy down there.) Read the rest of this entry »

Even though Dansby Swanson checks in at number eight on our recently published top 50 free agent rankings, it feels like no one knows just how much to believe in him. Obviously, that’s not completely true. I’m sure Swanson strongly believes in himself. There’s a Re-sign Dansby Swanson petition on Change.org; I bet the 12 people who signed it believe in him quite a bit too. The rest of us, however, fall somewhere in the middle.

Swanson had a career year in 2022. His 6.4 WAR was 12th best in all of baseball, and 3.0 above his 2021 total. While the big jump is encouraging, it also makes him a regression candidate. Of the 83 position players with 500 plate appearances in both 2021 and ’22, only four improved their WAR total more. Aaron Judge improved by 5.9 WAR in 2022, and it’d be extremely unreasonable to expect him to put up anything like a repeat performance. The next three players, Eugenio Suárez, Nolen Arenado, and Manny Machado, were all bouncing back from a down year in 2021. Like Swanson, all three saw their BABIP improve by at least 40 points. Swanson was the only player of the group whose WAR in 2022 was three wins higher than in their best previous season. Read the rest of this entry »

Today we’re going to watch the most spectacular catches of the 2022 season. Not all of them, though; that would take too long. Instead, we’re going to skip all the exciting ones to focus on the greatest, most boring plays of the year.

Last week, I wrote about right fielders Kyle Tucker and Nick Castellanos. The latter got a great deal of ink for making sliding catches on balls Tucker likely would have gotten to easily. In this article, we’ll focus on the inverse: Players who made difficult plays look routine. The goal here is not to downplay cool diving catches, but to celebrate great plays that might have gone unappreciated. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been watching the playoffs, you’ve likely heard at least one broadcaster call Houston right fielder Kyle Tucker underrated. In Game 1 of the World Series, Tucker did his best to remedy the situation, blasting home runs in his first two at-bats. On Monday, MLB announced that after two years as a Gold Glove finalist, Tucker had finally won the award. Still, he’s not the right fielder everyone’s talking about:

Nick Castellanos stole Tucker’s thunder not once but twice, saving Game 1 with a sliding catch, and making a nearly identical play on the first pitch of Game 3. As if that wasn’t enough, the World Series’ third-most talked about play in right field didn’t belong to Tucker either:

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Some kids dream about playing in the World Series and getting the big hit. Fewer kids, one imagines, dream about playing in the World Series and taking the big hit, but that small group might include Aledmys Díaz.

In Game 1 of the World Series, Díaz came to the plate with two on in the bottom of the 10th inning. After a wild pitch moved both runners into scoring position, David Robertson hung a curveball high and inside, and Díaz did his best to thrust his shoulder into the path of the ball, barely missing. The next pitch wasn’t a hanger, but that didn’t stop Díaz from sticking his Kevlar-covered elbow into the ball and trotting off toward first base. Read the rest of this entry »