Scott Kingery has had an eventful career.

A second round pick out of the University of Arizona back in 2015, Kingery breezed through Philadelphia’s minor league system. In 2017, he hit .304/.359/.530 with 26 home runs across 603 plate appearances split between Double-A and Triple-A. The next spring, Eric Longenhagen ranked Kingery as the team’s second-best prospect, calling him “a potential star.”

Kingery made national headlines that March when he signed a six-year, $24 million deal, becoming just the second drafted player to sign a multi-year contract before playing in a big league game. Soon after, Sheryl Ring analyzed each side’s motivation for making the move.

“The Phillies and Kingery both walk away with what they needed,” Ring wrote. “For the Phillies, their best chance to win now and, for Kingery, life-changing money. Deals don’t get any better than that.”

In his first taste of the big leagues, Kingery struggled. He played in 147 games, primarily at shortstop (887 innings), though he also saw action at six different positions and even pitched once. But his bat never came around. He slashed just .226/.267/.338 with eight homers and a 62 wRC+. Among batters with at least 400 plate appearances, Kingery was the fifth-worst hitter in baseball. Solid defense (3.4 runs above average) and baserunning (3.4) kept him on the roster, but Kingery was basically a replacement-level performer.

This season, Phillies fans are seeing a rejuvenated Kingery, and not a moment too soon. With Andrew McCutchen on the shelf with a torn ACL, Odubel Herrera on administrative leave after being charged with domestic violence, and Adam Haseley on the injured list after straining his groin, the Phillies’ outfield depth is perilously thin. A trade for Jay Bruce provided reinforcement, but Philadelphia needed someone else to step up, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Indians outfielder Jordan Luplow might not be a household name. But he has turned some heads in Cleveland with majestic home runs like this one:

That is quite the blast, but it’s clear the Indians’ Twitter account is being facetious. Luplow isn’t a legitimate Home Run Derby candidate, even with the All-Star Game being played in his home park in Cleveland. (Since 2013, at least one player from the hosting team participated in the Home Run Derby.) Francisco Lindor and Carlos Santana are much better options to serve as the hometown player.

Luplow has experienced something of a breakout this season. He is 25 years old and had just 190 plate appearances to his name prior to 2019. But, this season, he’s playing for an offense that has produced an 82 wRC+ team-wide, allowing him to serve as a bright spot in the order. In 120 plate appearances, Luplow has hit .248/.308/.523 with eight home runs and a 113 wRC+. His .275 ISO leads all Indians hitters, while also ranking in the top 10% of players with at least 100 trips to the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

If you take one look at Max Scherzer’s player page, it is not hard to identify where he has improved.

Both Scherzer’s strikeout (33.4%) and walk (5.1%) rates remain excellent, as is the standard. But his FIP (2.13) — which finds itself at the top of the pitching leaderboard — has fallen by more than half a run. If the season ended today, it would represent a career-low. This FIP decrease is due to a drop in Scherzer’s home run rate. In 2018, 2.7% of plate appearances against Scherzer resulted in a home run; in 2019, that figure is 1.7%.

Contributing to Scherzer’s home run reduction appear to be two main factors: better luck and more groundballs. His 8.0% home run per fly ball rate would represent his lowest mark since joining the Nationals. Considering that we’re in an era of home runs galore, some regression there is likely expected, though the seemingly livelier ball complicates that question. But a potentially more sustainable change rests in the large increase in Scherzer’s groundball rate, which he’s seen jump from 34.3% in 2018 to 42.8% in 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

Around this time last year, Ken Giles fell prey to the right hook… of Ken Giles.

On May 1, while with the Astros, Giles came into a scoreless game against the Yankees. After an Aaron Judge single, Didi Gregorius double, Giancarlo Stanton strikeout, Gary Sanchez homer, and an Aaron Hicks single, Giles exited the game, which, by this point, was no longer scoreless. The Yankees had mounted a four-run lead, and Giles had only recorded a single out. One might say that, as Giles left the field, he was not happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins have done a lot of winning lately.

Entering games on Monday, Minnesota was 36-16. No team in baseball had more wins, and no team in baseball had a better record. They’ve been buoyed by a potent offensive attack, becoming just the second team in baseball history to hit 100 home runs over their first 50 games in a season. Their pitching, too, has been quite good, as one might expect for a team that is already 20 games over .500 this early into the season.

Clearly, the 2019 season is going just about as well as the Twins could have expected. They’ve already built a double-digit lead in the AL Central, and their playoff odds reflect this newfound dominance:

The only place where the Twins were struggling was in attendance. As Craig Edwards chronicled at the end of April, baseball attendance to begin this season was a mixed bag. But the Twins in particular seemed to face difficulties putting people in the seats at Target Field. At the end of April, their average home attendance of 17,007 fans was the ninth-lowest in baseball, and their year-over-year change of -4,065 fans per game represented the third-most per game of any team.

Those weren’t promising numbers, especially for a team that had jumped out to a 17-10 record after the first month, holding an early AL Central lead.

In the weeks since, though, the Twins’ attendance has seen a major turnaround. On Sunday, Target Field hosted its largest crowd since 2016, with an official attendance of 39,913. That represented the third time in four games that the park hosted a crowd of at least 30,000. With that in mind, take a look at the Twins’ 5-game rolling average attendance since the beginning of 2017. (Single admission doubleheaders were counted as one game for this graph.) Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I published an article about Memorial Day as it relates to the baseball standings. In sum, I wrote about the baseball adage that one should not check the standings until Memorial Day. Using data from 2010 to 2018, I looked at the correlation between Memorial Day winning percentage and end-of-season winning percentage and constructed a linear regression line to fit the data.

Within the piece, I used the regression equation to discuss full-season scenarios for the Twins and Nationals, two teams that have surprised — albeit for different reasons — this season. The response to the article was interesting, and some asked for me to take a look at full-season projections for all 30 teams based on the regression. Read the rest of this entry »

At some point during the baseball season, it’s no longer “early.” I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. When an unexpected team starts out hot — a la the Mariners, who started 2019 on a 13-2 tear — the response of most rational baseball fans is that “it’s early.” For Seattle, the idea that it was far too early to evaluate the true talent level of the team was absolutely correct. From April 12 on, the Mariners are 10-26 and have sunk to last place in the AL West. Natural regression happened.

Because of the randomness and variation that often does occur during small samples within the marathon baseball season, it’s an old adage to avoid checking the league standings until Memorial Day. Clearly the idea behind this theory is that around Memorial Day, every team has played at least a quarter of their season. With that in mind, the results we have witnessed thus far become significantly more meaningful, and it’s no longer “early.”

I decided to set out and check this theory. Just how accurate are the standings on Memorial Day? Is there hope for a team like the Nationals, who have struggled thus far but still remain a talented squad on paper, to come back? Let’s break down the general trend while also talking about some of the biggest outliers (in both directions) in recent memory.

My process for this study was fairly simple. I collected every team’s record on Memorial Day from 2010 to 2018 and compared it to their record at the end of the season. This gave me a sample size of 270 baseball seasons, all of which occurred in relatively recent memory. I plotted the results in a scatterplot, and here it is:

There’s a pretty strong linear correlation here, evidenced by our r-value of 0.756. The r-squared value tells us that the regression equation for Memorial Day winning percentage accounts for 57.1% of the variability in the end-of-season winning percentage. This means that 42.9% of the variability is still unaccounted for, so while Memorial Day certainly tells us something about a team’s end-of-season record, there’s still so much that can change between now and October. This conclusion is what I’d expect. Read the rest of this entry »

It was rainy, it was short, and yet, it was the first time in 382 games that a Chicago White Sox pitcher had recorded a complete game.

On Saturday, in an effort that required just 78 pitches, Lucas Giolito became the first White Sox pitcher to throw a complete game since Chris Sale on September 16, 2016. He allowed just one run on three hits and struck out four.

The catch? Let Giolito explain it himself. As he told NBC Sports Chicago after the game, “I don’t consider it a complete game until I get nine.” Indeed, Giolito’s effort to snap a long stretch of bullpen usage was only five innings long. The game only lasted an hour and 31 minutes, if you choose to exclude the three-hour delay. A rain-soaked Chicago took care of the rest.

What’s lost in this whole story is that Giolito was solid on Saturday yet again. He’s had an up-and-down career so far, from being the Nationals’ prized pitching prospect to struggling in his first taste of the majors in 2016 to being the centerpiece in the Adam Eaton trade to posting the worst K-BB% among starters last year. But in Saturday’s start, never mind its length, Giolito lowered his ERA to 3.35. His 3.00 FIP is sterling. His 1.3 WAR in just 43 innings represents a 1.7-win improvement over his career total entering this season.

In sum, Giolito went from being league-worst to pretty, pretty good. The next step — the excellence — still comes in flashes, as it often has over his young career. Since the start of May, Giolito has posted a 1.85 ERA with 27 strikeouts to just eight walks over 24.1 innings. By WAR, he’s been the eighth-best starter this month. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Rockies signed Ian Desmond to a five-year, $70 million deal in December of 2016, they did so with the intention that he’d be their first baseman for the foreseeable future.

At the introductory press conference, general manager Jeff Bridich expressed his excitement to bring the two-time All-Star aboard.

“A couple of years ago, we started talking about versatility and athleticism becoming a priority for this organization, along with getting veterans of character,” Bridich had said at the time, per Thomas Harding of MLB.com. “[Desmond] represents all of that, and that is the exciting thing.”

Unfortunately, in Desmond’s first two seasons with Colorado, the results weren’t there. In 2017, Desmond hit .274/.326/.375 and a 69 wRC+ across 373 plate appearances. Despite being signed for the purpose of playing first, Desmond spent the majority of his inaugural season with the Rockies in left field, where he struggled to post positive results (-4.7 UZR in 557.1 innings). All in all, he was worth -0.8 WAR.

The following season told a similar story. Over 619 plate appearances, the slash line (with a particular emphasis on power) was slightly improved at .236/.307/.422 and a 81 wRC+, but officially sliding into a full-time role at first base was not helpful (-2.5 UZR in 1,158 innings). That, plus a poor positional adjustment, killed Desmond’s overall output for a second consecutive season. He put up -0.7 WAR.

Those two paragraphs represent a brief summary of Desmond’s first two seasons with the Rockies. Clearly, they haven’t been great. And, after a quick look at his 2019 numbers, it appears we are seeing more of the same. Through games on Tuesday, Desmond has had 132 trips to the plate this year, slashing .208/.273/.400 with a 62 wRC+. If anything, Desmond’s offensive production looks more substandard than it has been over the past two years. Considering the numbers we’ve seen already, to think that he could be even worse is alarming. Read the rest of this entry »

When describing the swing changes that have rekindled his career at the age of 36, Hunter Pence made sure to mention what will remain the same, even despite all the differences.

“It looks different and feels different,” Pence told Jon Taylor of Sports Illustrated in April. “The bat path is totally different, and the muscles I’m firing with are different. But because it’s me and my genetics, you’re going to see similar movements.”

Indeed, Pence’s 2019 swing — responsible for a .316/.389/.658 slash line (168 wRC+) through 90 plate appearances as of May 13 — doesn’t look drastically different when compared to his 2018 swing. And yet, Pence is currently in the midst of his most successful 26-game stretch since 2014, back when he was contributing to the Giants’ third World Series title in five years.

Much like the hitter himself does, the “similar movements” certainly stand out in the 2018 version of Pence’s swing versus its 2019 upgrade. Pence has always had one of baseball’s more unusual swing paths, and his personal style and feel — due to what Pence referred to as his “genetics” — are still clearly present.

Here’s a Pence single from 2018: Read the rest of this entry »