Sandy Alcantara has taken the next step. Already one of baseball’s better groundball-inducers, Alcantara has added the strikeout to his game in the second half of this season. In the process, he’s transformed from an above-average starter into one who is knocking on the door of ace status.

Over the last three years, Alcantara has been worth 7.2 WAR, a figure that ranks 27th among starting pitchers in that time. It has been volume-heavy value: his 3.94 FIP since 2019 grades out as just slightly above-average (93 FIP-), while his 434 innings pitched ranks ninth among all pitchers. His 21% strikeout rate and 8% walk rate scream nothing special, though his near-49% groundball rate kept the homers off the board.

Up until this season — and really up until its second half — that was Alcantara’s story. He was a very good pitcher, but there was still tantalizing potential he was seemingly leaving on the table. Even from 2019-20, when he struck out less than 19% of the hitters he faced, Alcantara’s average fastball velocity ranked near the top of the majors. Throwing both a four-seamer and a sinker, he averaged 95.7 mph with his fastballs, an 88th percentile mark. He also featured a slider and a changeup that both offered above-average called-strike-plus-whiff rates, suggesting Alcantara could better optimize those pitches for more strikeouts. If he could just strike out more hitters while maintaining his groundball rate, he had the potential to become an elite starter. And over his 12 starts since the All-Star break, that is exactly what has happened:

In the second half, Alcantara has struck out 28% of the batters he’s faced and walked fewer than 5%, all while keeping more than 50% of his batted balls on the ground. He has a 3.12 FIP over 78 innings, making him the 14th-most valuable pitcher in the game since the break. He’s been even better since August 1: with a 2.61 ERA and 2.80 FIP over 69 innings, Alcantara moves all the way up to eighth on the WAR leaderboard in that span. Read the rest of this entry »

Given his rise from dark horse to odds-on NL MVP favorite, it’s not a huge surprise that Bryce Harper has been the best hitter in baseball since August 1. Through Sunday’s action, he slashed.346/.464/.795 in 198 plate appearances, good for a 216 wRC+. That performance has catapulted him to the very top of the race, moving ahead of Fernando Tatis Jr. in betting markets as of Monday. A lot thus has been said about Harper, but much less has been written about the second-best hitter over this stretch (among the 251 players to amass at least 100 plate appearances). That hitter, as you could probably guess from this piece’s title, is Red Sox infielder Bobby Dalbec, whose .316/.409/.737 line nearly matches Harper’s, though it has come without the associated fanfare.

That’s understandable given Dalbec’s start to the season. Unlike Harper, who posted very good numbers before his recent stretch of sheer fire, Dalbec nearly found himself without a spot on Boston’s roster following the team’s trade for Kyle Schwarber. Through July 31, Dalbec was slashing just .216/.260/.399, with a 4.4% walk rate, a 37.5% strikeout rate, and 11 homers in 296 trips to the dish. That, coupled with less-than-stellar defense (it’s still rated as a negative), gave the Red Sox every reason to option him to Triple-A. Indeed, as Peter Abraham at The Boston Globe wrote on September 12, “That Schwarber was on the injured list at the time may have been what kept Dalbec on the roster.”

The hot start to Dalbec’s career last season — a 152 wRC+ and eight homers in just 92 plate appearances — seemed unsustainable given the small sample size, 42% strikeout rate, and .394 BABIP. As a result, ZiPS projected him for a 91 wRC+ this season, though Steamer was more bullish at 103. The poor start and the hot stretch since have resulted in season stats — a .245/.306/.497 slashline and 111 wRC+ — roughly in line with what I’d peg as his true talent level. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 14, 2016, Vince Velasquez took the mound for his second start as a member of the Phillies, having come over in an offseason trade with the Astros that sent Ken Giles to Houston. In an afternoon matchup against the Padres, he twirled one of the best-pitched games of the last decade, striking out 16 and walking none in a complete game shutout, allowing just three hits to boot. In the last 10 years, just 11 pitchers have struck out 16 or more in a game, and in these 13 performances (Max Scherzer has done it thrice), just five were complete game shutouts. He started his Phillies career on the highest of notes.

Fast forward more than five years, and Velasquez has now signed with those very Padres on a minor league deal in name only. As San Diego desperately tries to find pitching depth to stay afloat in the NL Wild Card race, Velasquez will start on Friday night in a pivotal series against the Cardinals, though he will not be eligible for postseason play if the Padres do secure a spot in October since he signed after the start of September.

The fact that a starting-caliber arm became available in free agency in the middle of the last month of the season tells you two things, both obvious. For the Padres, it shows just how dire their need for pitching is. But I want to focus on the second obvious reality: To get released at this point in the year is proof that Velasquez hasn’t been particularly good. Indeed, in 81.2 innings, he’s posted a 5.95 ERA and 5.59 FIP, production that has been exactly replacement-level.

Velasquez has shown flashes of productivity, but his time with the Phillies ran thin after continually falling short of expectations. In May, Matt Gelb of The Athletic covered what he referred to as the righty’s last stand in Philadelphia and how he hoped to reinvent himself to increase his effectiveness. One thing stood out: He came into this season wanting to mix his pitches more effectively, reflecting on that April 2016 start to explain his change in mindset for 2021.

“Cool, I had 16 strikeouts,” Velasquez said. “But I fucking threw all fastballs. OK, that’s unique. But it’s not part of pitching. It’s not pitching. It’s not sustainable at all.”

As the Padres look to tinker with Velasquez, it is interesting to consider where they may start. Was his plan of throwing fewer fastballs working? Might he have just been choosing the wrong pitches to put in the four-seamer’s place? What is the way forward here? Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve read any of my articles of late, you would know that I am currently fixated on plate discipline. My piece on Jarred Kelenic sparked an article on take value and hitter approach. After that, a discovery that Darin Ruf is succeeding with one of the lowest swing rates in baseball despite not having phenomenal plate discipline on the surface inspired research into zone-swing differential and what it may tell us about a hitter.

Under the plate discipline section of player pages and on our leaderboards, we list both O-Swing% and Z-Swing%. On a handful of occasions, though, writers here have used zone-swing differential. Chet Gutwein defined this stat as D-Swing% in his piece about the NL West, and Justin Choi wrote about it in an article on the Blue Jays’ aggressiveness in early counts. In my most recent piece on Ruf, I cited zone-swing differential to conclude that while his overall swing rate is low, his discipline might not actually be that good, as he’s still swinging at a fair amount of pitches outside the zone, which you can see when you look at his below-average D-Swing rate.

The idea behind D-Swing% is simple: Hitters should be better when they swing at strikes and take balls. This isn’t the only way to succeed at the plate, but you would think that better hitters would have higher D-Swing rates on average. There were a couple comments about D-Swing rate on my Ruf piece, and that inspired me to look into it further. Is this a stat that tells us more about hitters than what we already have with the standalone O-Swing% and Z-Swing% stats?

This exact question was actually explored on the FanGraphs community blog back in 2017, where user Dominikk85 broke hitters into top- and bottom-30 groups by wRC+, ISO, OBP, and BABIP to see if O-Swing%, Z-Swing%, or what they referred to as Z-O-Swing% had the biggest impact in explaining the difference between the groups. They found that being more aggressive in the strike zone “helps the power but seems to slightly hurt the OBP,” but overall, they saw an advantage in using D-Swing% over the individual components.

I ran a similar study, but I wanted to control for more variables — zone rate and contact rate — to isolate the effect of D-Swing%, as many plate discipline metrics are interrelated. You may swing less at pitches in the strike zone if you are seeing more pitches outside, or you may choose to swing at pitches in the strike zone with which you can make contact (preferably hard), which may lower your Z-Swing% but raise your Z-Contact%. Without at least attempting to adjust for some of these variables, we may be missing out on conscious hitter tendencies that may be more the result of the pitches that they are seeing rather than their inherent swing choices. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always been a huge Darin Ruf fan, so getting to write about his 2021 success is a little bit more meaningful to me than it would be for almost any other player. Ruf is the last player I remember my grandfather singling out before he passed away, with the thought that Ruf, then a young prospect in the Phillies system, had the potential to be a productive big leaguer for our favorite team.

That was nine years ago. The Phillies promoted Ruf in late 2012 for his first cup of major league coffee, but he never amassed more than 297 plate appearances in any season for them. The bat was decent — Ruf posted a 105 wRC+ over 833 plate appearances, including a 125 wRC+ during his 2013 rookie season — but poor defensive numbers kept him barely above replacement-level in almost 300 games with Philadelphia. He was traded to the Dodgers in November of 2016, and even before he had an opportunity to make his organizational debut, Ruf’s contract was purchased by the Samsung Lions of the KBO. For three years, he raked in Asia, earning himself a minor league deal with the Giants for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. (I was pretty excited.) A year later, he’s now the best hitter on a playoff-bound team (Kris Bryant is a notable omission from this list — he has a 119 wRC+ in 128 plate appearances with the Giants so far):

It’s no secret that the Giants have been receiving incredible production across their entire lineup. Their position players have posted a collective 113 wRC+ this season, a figure that ranks second in the majors among teams’ non-pitchers. But even in a lineup filled with players having above-average offensive seasons, Ruf stands out with his .279/.401/.544 slashline and 155 wRC+. That wRC+ ranks seventh in the majors among players with at least 250 plate appearances overall, sandwiched between Juan Soto (156) and Shohei Ohtani (154). That’s pretty phenomenal company, and it inspires two obvious questions. First, how did Ruf become one of the best hitters in baseball, at least this season? And, of course, how sustainable is this? Read the rest of this entry »

I will never not be fascinated by the fact that hitters actually produce negative value when swinging. In my most recent article outlining the struggles of Jarred Kelenic, I briefly discussed this idea. Even in a sea of hitters who are below-average when swinging, Kelenic stands out as being particularly bad when he takes a hack; he’s been worth roughly -6 runs per 100 swings so far this year. And as I noted, the hitters who do the best at limiting the damage on their swings tend to be baseball’s most productive hitters overall. From that research, I found an R-squared of 0.714 between a hitter’s run value when swinging and their seasonal wOBA.

That makes a ton of sense: Hitters who maximize their production on swings — that is, both limiting whiffs and making frequent loud contact — tend to be better hitters overall. But this also got me thinking about the reverse: How does taking pitches influence a hitter’s overall production? From the Kelenic research, I found only a moderate correlation between take value and seasonal wOBA, with an R of 0.422 and an R-squared of 0.178. That’s not to say that better “takers” aren’t better hitters; it just suggests that having extremely high-value takes doesn’t necessarily lend itself to having more success overall. For posterity’s sake, here’s the plot of 2021 hitters’ run value per 100 takes and their seasonal wOBAs. Players on both ends of the wOBA spectrum are highlighted just to demonstrate a few individual examples: Read the rest of this entry »

In the days leading up to the trade deadline, Jarred Kelenic earned himself a mention in Jay Jaffe’s corner outfield replacement-level killers, a series that analyzes the players who are dragging down contending teams. The idea is to identify positions of need for potential trades to come, but Kelenic’s struggles in the majors weren’t going to force the team to make a deal. Instead, as Jay put it, “this should probably be a sink-or-swim situation unless he’s totally overwhelmed.”

Kelenic has already been in the spotlight because of the Mariners gaming his service time; his performance since his promotion has put him back in it. He got the call on May 13, but simply didn’t hit: In his first 23 games over a total of 92 plate appearances, he slashed .096/.185/.193. He collected just eight hits total and had come up empty in his last 44 plate appearances when the Mariners optioned him back to Triple-A in early June.

After a successful stint at Tacoma — a 137 wRC+ — Kelenic was brought back to Seattle. This time around, the results have been a bit better, but they’re still ugly overall, as he’s gone from a 10 wRC+ in that first stint to a .181/.263/.315 line and 65 wRC+ since his second promotion. Through Tuesday’s action, he’s up to a 45 wRC+ and -1.1 WAR in 64 games:

Even with the improved numbers since his return from Triple-A, Kelenic is still running the 11th-lowest wRC+ among qualified hitters in that time. He’s still not hitting well. But while there may not be one answer for why he is struggling, I believe that there’s a huge plate discipline problem that isn’t entirely captured in the walk and strikeout rates alone. Read the rest of this entry »

As Kris Bryant helps the Giants fend off the Dodgers in the NL West division race, his replacement in Chicago seems like a lock to break his old team’s rookie home run record despite being older than Bryant is right now. Patrick Wisdom, who turned 30 on August 27, has swatted 25 home runs so far this season, coming out of nowhere to produce one of baseball’s most fascinating stat lines.

Prior to this season, Wisdom had just 27 games of big league experience, including two with the Cubs in 2020, who re-signed him to a minor league deal in January. Though he posted “ridiculous” numbers at the team’s alternate training site last season, he seemed more likely to provide bench depth for the big league club than be a regular, only to end up playing 83 games split between first base, third base and left field, take 279 plate appearances, and post a .256/.320/.579 slash line.

There remain questions of sustainability. Wisdom isn’t a true-talent 136 wRC+ player, but he’s certainly more of a viable big league bat than initially thought. ZiPS projected him for an 82 wRC+ before the season, which was much more bullish than Steamer’s 70 wRC+ prediction, but both are still a far cry from the actual numbers so far. As a result, both systems have seen significant improvement in the underlying talent given the sizable sample of good performance: His rest-of-season ZiPS projection has him up to a 104 wRC+, and Steamer has him at 93. Read the rest of this entry »

As the Braves have moved up the standings, claiming sole possession of first place in the NL East for the first time this season, the left side of their infield has lead the charge. Granted, the whole team is playing well right now, but through August 16, third baseman Austin Riley and shortstop Dansby Swanson are each in the top-10 in WAR since the All-Star break, at 1.5 apiece.

I wrote about Riley earlier this season, so it makes sense to cover his left-side counterpart now. Plus, Swanson has always been a personal favorite of mine; in January 2020, I wrote about why I thought he was poised to break out ahead of last season. And while Swanson’s offensive numbers — he posted a .274/.345/.464 slash line and a 116 wRC+ — were the best of his career, critics could still point to a raised strikeout rate, high BABIP, and general lack of power. At the time, I said that Swanson’s improved plate discipline might be one sign of better days to come. But with the significant increase in strikeouts and no associated increase in power, it seemed fair to worry about what he’d do at the plate in 2021.

The projection systems were ambivalent on the sustainability of his 2020 as well. ZiPS had Swanson posting a 90 wRC+ this year; Steamer, slightly more optimistic, went with 93. His 2021 stats don’t deviate that much from those projections either: Through 495 plate appearances, he’s slashed .264/.316/.493 with a 110 wRC+ — better than the start of his career, but worse than 2020.  Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, Justin Choi took a look at the Blue Jays’ offense, observing that Toronto is succeeding by attacking in-zone pitches early in the count. It’s a strategy that has proven successful before: As Justin noted, you don’t want to give away a get-me-over strike. Falling behind 0–1 is too high of a price to pay if the first pitch is in the strike zone. No one exemplified this strategy more than George Springer, who had the majors’ highest differential between Z-Swing% and O-Swing% on the first pitch in 2020. Maybe that is why Springer was the Jays’ big free-agent splash last offseason: Not only is he a great player, but he also fits with that organizational philosophy that Justin outlined.

There’s more to be said about the impact that Springer has had on the Jays, however. It did take some time for him to settle into his new home, as he missed the beginning of the season due to an oblique strain, returned on April 28 to play four games as the team’s DH, then strained his right quad and found himself back on the IL until June 22. After the second return, though, he has been a mainstay in the lineup, and he’s quickly making a case as the most impactful-free agent acquisition of the 2020–21 offseason, even in spite of the comparatively lower volume.

Through Wednesday, Springer is hitting .285/.371/.645 with 16 home runs and a 170 wRC+ in 198 plate appearances across 46 games. The batting average and on-base percentage are roughly in line with his career marks, at 15 and 10 points above his career-average performance in each stat, respectively. It’s the .645 slugging percentage that sticks out like a sore thumb. Springer has never been a .300 ISO player, let alone a .360 ISO player. It’s been four years since Springer had an ISO this high in any 46-game stretch:

Springer has been the beneficiary of some good luck, but his barrel rate is a career-high, and it’s not even close. His average exit velocity, meanwhile, has ticked up by 2 mph year-over-year, getting above 90 mph for the first time in his career, and his sweet-spot rate — the percentage of batted balls between 8–32 degrees — is also at new heights. This has led to the best expected wOBAcon of Springer’s career, at .469. Other underlying numbers, like xwOBA, have been less favorable to his performance. (This is due at least in part to the highest strikeout rate of his career.) But the top line production is currently there, and even if regression does come, he’ll still be the George Springer the Jays were looking for when they signed him. Read the rest of this entry »