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 »

Last week, I wrote about the handful of pitchers who drop their release points significantly when facing same-sided batters. Today I’m going to highlight a few who change their release points by a different method. Before we get to them, I’d like to talk a bit about why anybody would risk messing with their release point in the first place. This is an article about the potentially transformative power of scooching over.

I started thinking about arm angles with a very blunt test. For the last seven years, I pulled every pitcher’s average release point and their wOBA against lefties and righties, then calculated the correlation between them. I also pulled average velocity as a control variable of sorts. The correlation coefficients are small, but they line up with what we’d expect:

Unsurprisingly, it’s always good to throw the ball hard. Against same-sided batters, pitchers who release the ball lower and wider fare better. Against opposite batters, a wide release point is associated with poor results. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in November, left-hander Tyler Anderson signed with the Angels, and Ben Clemens wrote a super interesting piece about the deal. How did Ben make his article so interesting? By cheating. He was already writing a cool article about Anderson, so rather than start from scratch, he just folded the existing article into one about the signing. It was unfair to the rest of us who struggle to keep up with Ben even when he’s not juicing.

What Ben noted is that in 2020, Anderson started throwing his sinker from a lower arm slot against lefties. More recently, he started doing the same with some of his cutters. Dropping down some for his cutters meant that hitters could no longer assume that a low release point meant a sinker was coming, and it also improved the cutter’s performance. In 2022, lefties had a wOBA of .268 and an exit velocity of 79.5 mph against Anderson’s regular cutter. The drop-down cutter was at .124 and 76.3.

Inspired by Anderson’s novel approach, I went looking for pitchers who do the same thing. We’re not just looking for players who drop down some to throw certain pitches; there are too many of those to list. We’re specifically looking for players who dramatically change their arm angle depending on the handedness of the batters they’re facing. Once you weed out position players, who understandably have very inconsistent release points, there are only a few players who fit those parameters. Just six pitchers had a difference of more than three inches between their vertical release points against righties and lefties:

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Just under a year ago, Jake Mailhot identified Texas first baseman Nathaniel Lowe as a player with breakout potential. In fact, he wrote a whole article called, “Nathaniel Lowe Has Breakout Potential.” Then the 2022 season happened, and — you guessed it — Nathaniel Lowe officially broke out. He hit 27 home runs and raised his wRC+ from 114 to 143. Good for Nathaniel Lowe! He’s a slugger. Good for Jake Mailhot! He’s a clairvoyant.

The thing is, Lowe didn’t exactly follow the script laid out for him. Jake noted that for the last month and a half of the 2021 season, Lowe added some “responsible aggression,” lowering his strikeout rate despite swinging more often. He did that by making a ton of contact in the zone. Jake broke Lowe’s 2021 plate discipline stats down in a table, using August 16 as the dividing line. I’ve gone ahead and added 2022 to that table:

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The Nationals have found the left-handed bat that they were looking for. Yesterday, Bob Nightengale reported that Dominic Smith has signed a one-year deal that will send him down I-95 to Washington. Robert Murray of FanSided reported that the deal was for $2 million, with performance bonuses worth up to another $2 million. According to Joel Sherman of the New York Post, those bonuses relate to the number of plate appearances Smith makes. The Nationals 40-man roster is full, so they will need to make a move in order to clear space for Smith.

After snagging Jeimer Candelario on a one-year deal in November, the Nationals have now filled both corner infield spots with free agent bounce-back candidates. In Washington, Smith might finally get the one thing he’s always needed: time. After six big league seasons, the 27-year-old Smith has never had a regular position, and has topped 200 plate appearances just once.

Nightengale also reported what might be the most important part of this story: that Smith will be playing first base for the Nationals. Although the team non-tendered Luke Voit earlier in the offseason, that was not necessarily seen as a certainty. Manager Dave Martinez said during the Winter Meetings that he hoped first base would be the primary position of 2022 rookie sensation Joey Meneses. Over the course of his career, Smith has spent more innings in the outfield than he has at first. It’s at least reasonable to imagine that playing every day at his preferred position could make a real difference to a player who’s never had the luxury of stability. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but here at FanGraphs we enjoy the occasional number. Even our logo has its own bar graph. Today our topic is competitive runs, a statistic that rarely gets the love and appreciation it deserves, due to the fact that it’s mostly made up. Competitive runs is a classification created for Statcast. In order to measure average sprint speed, you need a pool of plays when players will presumably be running their hardest:

Competitive runs are essentially just the sample size. When you go to Baseball Savant’s leaderboard, the players are always sorted from fastest to slowest. However, you can also sort by competitive runs, and I can never resist. All season long, one player was absolutely trouncing the field:

Amed Rosario is the grand champion of competitive runs. The difference between Rosario in first place and Brandon Nimmo in second place is the same as the difference between Nimmo and Jeff McNeil in 34th place. I’m sure Nimmo takes some solace in knowing that he’s the undisputed leader of the non-competitive run. Whether it’s a walk or a hit by pitch, the dude straight up loves scampering to first base for his own particular reasons:

Turning our attention back to Rosario: It’s not as if he’s just racking up competitive runs as a counting stat. He also leads the league on a rate basis, no matter which rate you choose:

I don’t know about you, but I think this is incredibly fun. Competitive runs is an incidental statistic. It’s just scaffolding for another stat, but there’s one person who plays baseball like competitive runs is his own personal pinball machine. The other reason I love it is that even though competitive runs exists only to serve a higher master, it’s still a descriptive stat in its own right. A player’s competitive runs total tells you plenty about the way they play the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Right-handed reliever Mychal Givens is returning to the Orioles. The deal is for one year and $3 million, with a mutual option for 2024 worth $6 million. If he declines the 2024 option, he receives a $1 million buyout. If he accepts and the Orioles decline their end, he receives a $2 million buyout. Baltimore’s 40-man roster is full, so the team will need to make a move to clear space for him.

Coming off a 2022 season in which he posted a 3.38 ERA and a 3.96 FIP over 61.1 innings, Givens provides some experience to a young Baltimore bullpen that features standouts like Dillon Tate, Cionel Pérez, and closer Félix Bautista. Baltimore’s relief corps was ninth in the league with a 3.49 ERA in 2022, with a 3.72 FIP and 3.53 SIERA that ranked seventh and 13th, respectively.

The Orioles selected Givens out of high school in the second round of the 2009 draft. Originally a shortstop, he missed a couple of seasons after injuring his thumb sliding into first, strengthening the arguments of baseball curmudgeons the world over. He converted to pitching in 2013, reached the majors two years later, and made an immediate impact, posting a 1.80 ERA and 0.9 WAR in just 22 appearances. Over his first four big league seasons, his 5.1 WAR was 15th among all relievers. Read the rest of this entry »