Author Archive

Does Ronald Acuña Jr. Help His Teammates See More Fastballs?

Ronald Acuña Jr.
Isaiah J. Downing-USA TODAY Sports

As somebody who grew up playing baseball and continued to play through college, I’m familiar with all the old school adages that this game has. As I tried to develop my own abilities, I needed to figure out which were true, which were false, and which had some grey area. Swing down, for example, is not necessarily what hitters do in practice, and I had to relearn that. Then there is the “squish the bug” cue for your back foot. That actually makes most hitters get too spinny and reinforces an incorrect interaction with the ground. These are just a few hitting examples. But for this piece, I’m going to focus on stealing bases.

When an aggressive base stealer is on first, they command a level of mental real estate in a pitcher’s mind, though it’s important to note not every pitcher is the same. Some are more equipped to handle a runner than others. That could be due to a good pickoff move, quick time to the plate, or simply because a guy remains unfazed no matter the situation. This is all common knowledge. What isn’t, and what I’ve been pondering as one of the grey area tropes, is whether pitchers change their pitch mix when there is a threat to run. In general, I always thought this was true, but I never went back and looked at any data to confirm it. But we live in a baseball world with solid data accessibility, and luckily, this question can be answered thanks to Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »


The Cole Train Has Taken Kansas City by Storm

Cole Ragans
Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports

This year, trade deadline season kicked off when the Rangers acquired Aroldis Chapman from the Royals at the end of June. Texas desperately needed relief help, so it pulled an early trigger in getting Chapman a full month ahead of the deadline. In today’s game, teams moving rental relievers typically do not get anything too exciting in return. That seemed to be the case with Kansas City’s part of the deal: Cole Ragans and 17-year-old outfielder Roni Cabrera. Emphasis on seemed.

Ragans had pitched 24.1 innings in relief across 17 games with the Rangers after an extended but rough debut in 2022. Like last year, things hadn’t gone well. He walked 13.2% of the batters he faced, and hitters slugged .561 against his four-seamer. In that short span, he accumulated -5.2 run value on that pitch alone. Even with a nasty changeup and a four-tick velocity jump from ’22, he was still struggling to get the results he needed.

But after his move to Kansas City and a rough first outing, everything changed. Eno Sarris’ profile of Ragans from last week does a fantastic and thorough job at explaining his career turnaround, from his training at Tread Athletics in the offseason to create his velocity jump to consulting with them and Royals pitching coach Brian Sweeney after his first start in Triple-A Omaha to add his gyro slider. I strongly urge you read the piece, because mine is as a supporting actor to that story. Read the rest of this entry »


Francisco Lindor’s Hot Summer Has Put Him Back on Track

Francisco Lindor
Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

Since the beginning of 2021, when Francisco Lindor joined the Mets, he ranks fifth in position player WAR (16.2) behind Aaron Judge (20.4), Freddie Freeman (17.9), Mookie Betts (16.8), and José Ramírez (16.5). While others at his position have seen their production tail off for one reason or another, he has remained excellent thanks to his all-around game.

In recent seasons, though, Lindor has struggled at the plate for prolonged periods. But this year and last, he has made up for slow starts with excellent second halves. From an overall production standpoint, he is an extremely similar hitter from both sides, but since the most advantageous platoon split comes as a left-handed hitter, his bouncebacks have often been driven by adjustments on that side of the plate. That story tracks this season, too, as Lindor is on one of the best stretches of his career as a lefty. Here are the differences between his left-handed production before and after the start of July:

Lindor Left Handed Production
Split wRC+ xwOBA xwOBACON K% BB% SwSp% SwSp EV
Apr-Jun 93 .344 .399 22.8 10.2 43.2 94.8
July-Aug 182 .380 .422 20.0 13.1 41.0 95.6

Lindor’s SweetSpot% from this side is top notch; that wasn’t — and never has been — an issue for him. His adjustable bat path and swing decisions propel him to launch the ball consistently at an ideal angle. Oddly enough, despite this consistency in his spread of launch angles, his performance was still down in the first few months of the year, and even despite a couple of percentage points decrease in SweetSpot%, his performance and expected outcomes on balls in play still ticked up from July on because of a rate that is still high relative to his peers. To understand why that resulted in more success recently than at the beginning of the year, we have to do some digging into those sweet spot batted balls. Read the rest of this entry »


Let’s Talk About Freddie Freeman, Baserunner Extraordinaire

Freddie Freeman
Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports

Freddie Freeman is a fantastic baseball player. Since the beginning of 2020, he is tied with Juan Soto for fourth in wRC+, sitting at 157. He is also as durable as any other position player in the league, ranking third in games played in that same span. But wRC+ and durability aren’t why I’m here to discuss Freeman today. Instead, I’m interested in his baserunning.

Baserunning is certainly not the most important aspect of Freeman’s game, but he is darn good at it. Before I get into how and why, though, I want to talk about his lack of speed. At 26.6 ft/s on average, Freeman is a 35th-percentile runner; in the landscape of the league and other good baserunners, he is a bit of a tortoise. But that doesn’t stop him on the bases.

When it comes to baserunning, your chances are much better of being above average on the basepaths if you can boogie. If you peruse the BsR or Statcast Runner Runs leaderboards, you’ll see mostly 90th-percentile runners and above, with the bottom line being in the mid-70s. Rarely does a name like Freeman’s pop up, but he ranks 17th of 139 in BsR and 37th of 295 in Runner Runs. For him, these results come about because of other aspects of the game that you don’t need speed for: instincts, reads, and preparation. The further down you are in the speed department, the more important these skills become. This wasn’t always a positive part of Freeman’s game, but in the last few years, he has been consistently above-average. Read the rest of this entry »


Triston Casas Is Thumping in Boston

Jamie Sabau-USA TODAY Sports

Things didn’t look so hot for Triston Casas in the first few months of the season. From the beginning of the year through the end of May, he had a 95 wRC+ and a .195/.326/.376 slash line. He wasn’t doing enough damage in the heart of the zone and had a suboptimal launch angle distribution. That’s a fancy way of saying he wasn’t consistently making pitchers’ mistakes hurt because his batted balls were all over the place. His promising future as a masher had a bit of a cloud over it, but after an explosive July, there is good reason to be more confident in him.

Casas’ turnaround has multiple layers to it. Along with a slight mechanical tweak, he has taken on a more aggressive approach while focusing on contact towards the middle of the field. With a solid combination of power and natural lift, he is able to play with the big parts of Fenway Park. He isn’t utilizing the approach we’ve seen many lefty Red Sox hitters adopt over the years of peppering line drives and fly balls off the Green Monster. In fact, he’s 134th out of 143 qualified hitters in Oppo%. Instead, he sticks to where his bat path plays – the middle of the field. Well, that was his approach in July, anyway. Below is a table showing Casas’ horizontal and vertical batted ball profile by month this season:

Triston Casas Directional Rates
Month wRC+ GB% Pull% Straight% Oppo%
April 60 32.7 30.6 42.9 26.5
May 106 42.9 53.1 30.6 16.3
June 132 41.3 53.4 31.7 15.9
July 218 27.7 34.0 51.1 14.9
August 73 41.7 41.7 41.7 8.3

He had a good June, but in terms of his batted ball profile, it didn’t look like his breakout July. In July, he stayed off the ground at an extreme rate while hitting half of his batted balls up the middle. There are only three qualified hitters in baseball with a groundball rate below 30% for the entire year: Jack Suwinski (26.1%), Nolan Gorman (27.8%), and Mookie Betts (28.0%). This isn’t in the table, but Casas’ July HR/FB ratio was 29.2%, which would put him behind only Shohei Ohtani if he were to sustain it over the full season. To see Casas hit at rates similar to elite guys like Betts and Ohtani is both good and bad. He doesn’t have the raw power or hit tool to live in outlier territory on a consistent basis, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate his success. Rather, it shows us what Casas needs to do to be a consistent power hitter. If his swing tweak and new approach enable him to more consistently hit the ball in the air, we should have greater confidence in his ability to sustain success, even as his stats become less extreme.

Before looking at the mechanical tweak, I want to focus on where and when the Red Sox first baseman has been more aggressive. The data below details his swing rates on pitches in the upper and lower third of the zone:

Triston Casas’ Increased Aggression
Month Upper Third Lower Third In-Zone 0-0
April 69.4 50.8 44.2
May 63.0 51.6 48.6
June 73.1 67.5 40.0
July 82.1 71.7 62.5
August 40.0 62.5 30.0

When the calendar flipped to June, Casas got significantly more aggressive at the top and bottom of the zone. As July rolled around, he doubled down on that aggression while adding more early count swings. There is an old school mantra that the best pitch you’ll see in an at-bat is the first one. Pitchers want to get ahead and take advantage of the hitter trying to find their timing. Still, if a pitcher lays in a cookie, the hitter should attack it. It’s always a sound approach to hunt the heart of the zone, and if you’re a struggling rookie, it makes even more sense to simplify things. When Casas implemented that strategy in July, it paid off.

He had success in the first two months of the season on 0-0 pitches in the zone, with a .424 and .681 xwOBA, respectively. In June, he ran a .026 xwOBA on these pitches across 18 total swings, though the results on those swings seem like a small sample blip; 11 of them were foul balls and three were whiffs. Something was off there, but the trend didn’t continue into July. Casas flipped the script and bumped up his swing rate by over 20 percentage points while running a .476 xwOBA. If a pitcher attacked him in the zone to start the at-bat, he put on an A swing. Now that he seems to have a better feel for his swing, he’ll have to strike the right balance of patience and aggression depending on how pitchers approach him.

Let’s look at the adjustment that helped things click mechanically. Here are a few swings from May and June before Casas made the change:

And here are a few during his stellar month:

Every hitter has a different feel for how to turn their barrel over and enter the zone. Some are more handsy, like Marcus Semien, while others aren’t handsy at all, like Casas. My use of two different angles from before his tweak is intentional. One shows his hands relative to his body on a straight angle, and the other shows how far he tucked them behind his ear. There was a good bit of movement that was triggered by his hands. But after his tweak, his barrel was almost perpendicular to the ground, with his hands working according to the movement of his entire upper body load rather than on their own. This brings me to the idea of connection. Before explaining what that means, take a look at this video posted by Alex Speier from a few days ago:

This is a drill that hones the feeling of early connection between your upper body and barrel. By holding the bucket between his arms and chest throughout his swing, Casas establishes where his barrel is in space relative to his arms and torso. The result is his hands being along for the ride, rather than being the driver of the swing. In other words, his barrel placement is the result of how his upper body moves in space. While the swing in this video isn’t what it looks like in game, it helps give Casas the feel he needs to have an efficiently sequenced load and plane of rotation. You’ll notice that his hands are hardly moving during this practice swing. That ties directly to what we saw him change in July. His hands aren’t tipping until his shoulders do, and he’s not letting them guide his swing path. The result is improved barrel control stemming from better feel for where his barrel is in space. The data backs that up too. July was the first month Casas had a SweetSpot% above 37% on the season, and he blew that mark away, with 49% of his batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.

Usually, we don’t get a look into drill work like we did here. Connection drills are very common but can look confusing to the casual viewer. Luckily for us, a logical story can be told here. There is a direct line between Casas’ batted ball data and swing tweak, and the connection drill swings. I often talk about players finding their blueprint for success. A lot of the time, a particular drill can help a hitter get back in line with that blueprint. Casas now appears to have a better idea of idea of what that looks like for him, and specific cues for how he can stay there.

All this said, it doesn’t necessarily mean Casas has figured out hitting. Like most hitters, he has holes that can be exposed. As he finds success, pitchers will adjust their mix or location. Since August began, Casas has faced a career-high rate of breaking balls. He hadn’t seen more than 34% breakers in any month, but after 73 pitches this month, that rate is up to 50.7%. It’s working too – his whiff rate on that pitch group is 41.7% and he has yet to barrel a breaking ball. It’s a cat and mouse game that he will have to continuously adjust to while trying to find stability.

How Casas progresses versus his opponents’ changing approach will be crucial to our understanding of where his floor and ceiling will ultimately settle. At the very least, though, we’ve seen what the best version of Casas might look like, even if it hasn’t lasted a full season. A 122 wRC+ in your first full season ain’t too shabby.


Going Oppo Has Propelled Christian Yelich’s Resurgence

Kyle Ross-USA TODAY Sports

Watching the ebbs and flows of Christian Yelich’s career has been very interesting. From 2018 to 2019, he was one of the best players in baseball, winning the NL MVP in 2018 and placing second in the voting the following year. He was sending balls to the moon like he never had before (some of that might have owed to the livelier ball, but Yelich also hit the ball very hard those years, and continues to). Then from 2020 to 2022, he was just an average dude. He had a 108 wRC+ over that span, swatting just 35 home runs and accruing 4.4 total WAR.

Typically, I’d say that a player like Yelich already has a blueprint for success. Faced with a few down seasons, his focus should be on regaining the traits that had served him so well previously. However, a lot of what we know about the Brewers outfielder needs to be thrown out the window. This is a different player from the one we saw during Yelich’s MVP run, and he’s also a different player from the one we’ve watched the last two and a half years. Instead of figuring out how he could get back to his old self, Yelich seems to have decided to blend all of his previous years together to create a new version. And with a 129 wRC+ and 3.6 WAR so far this season, Yelich has shown he can still be a star player — it just looks different. Read the rest of this entry »


Brewers Secure More Stability at First Base With Carlos Santana

Carlos Santana
Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports

This might sound familiar, but Carlos Santana has been traded to a playoff contender. After signing a one-year deal with the Pirates in the offseason, he has been sent to the Brewers to help reinforce the second-worst offense in the National League (88 wRC+). In return, the Pirates will get back teenage shortstop Jhonny Severino, an international free agent who signed for $1.2 million last summer and only has 60 professional games under his belt.

At this late point in Santana’s career, he has established himself as a reliable, average player, playing in 94 games, accumulating 393 plate appearances, and posting a 99 wRC+ this season after a 102 mark last season. The production comes through in a slightly different way, but he has a 99 wRC+ from the left side and a 100 wRC+ from the right side. Similarly, he is a reliable defender; so far, he sits at +2 OAA with a 0% success rate added. Across the board, this is an average dude.

We know who Santana is. Santana knows who he is. The Brewers know who he is. That isn’t super sexy, but the Brewers do not need sexy at first base; competence is a good first step for them. In Jay Jaffe’s Replacement Level Killers series, they topped the list at first base; no team has gotten less production at the position. Santana has accumulated 1.0 WAR on the year, so it’s not as if he is a huge difference maker, but he can provide a necessary stability as Milwaukee tries to hold on to first place in the NL Central.

As for the Pirates’ side of things: Severino doesn’t have much professional experience. This year, he has only played 12 games with 52 plate appearances in the complex league thanks to a sprained left wrist. In terms of his profile, he is a big, projectable infielder who most likely fits at third base long-term but is currently at shortstop. Overall, he has a 40 Future Value and slots in at 23rd on the Pirates list in the same tier as prospects like Dariel Lopez and major leaguers such as Nick Gonzales.

There is upside in Severino’s power, which looks like it will work to all fields. At 18 years old, he is already showing legitimate pop. There is also downside in the hit tool, though. From the little that we’ve seen, he is running a 30-grade chase rate, and his 1% walk rate is slightly concerning. But that could improve with more time; for example, he ran a 7% walk rate in 198 plate appearances last year.

To round this out, let’s look some of Severino’s at-bats:

There are a lot of lower body movements happening, and some stepping in the bucket. Maintaining connection to the ground throughout your swing is a very important part of the learning process of hitting. As you grow into strength, your effort levels to produce power become more controlled. That will be a focus for Severino as he develops and eventually moves out of the complex league. There are multiple swings here where his first move is his lead hip drifting toward third base. Sometimes he counters his stepping in the bucket with a scissor kick to even things out, but by then he already lost his hands. On the other hand, there are some swings here with serious thump (2:15 is a great example). The rotational power is clearly there; it will just be a balancing act for Severino as he ages and faces better competition.

Teams like the Pirates bring on players like Santana for a few reasons, but one of them is hoping he plays well enough to garner a return like this at the trade deadline. There is no guarantee that Severino will help the next good Pirates club, but in a deal like this, all you want is an opportunity to have something to work with, and that’s exactly what they got. For the Brewers, it shores up what has been a significant hole as they make a playoff push.


O’s Snag Fujinami From A’s in Bid To Create Their Next Lights-Out Reliever

Shintaro Fujinami
D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports

I am a big fan of trading for reinforcements well ahead of the trade deadline. If you can add a piece that will make even a small difference, then do it early if the deal makes sense. That is exactly what the Orioles have done in acquiring Shintaro Fujinami from the A’s, adding to what was already a league-best bullpen led by Félix Bautista and Yennier Cano. In return, Baltimore sent 26-year-old prospect Easton Lucas to Oakland.

Before jumping into Fujinami’s profile and potential, let’s learn a little about Lucas. He initially came to Baltimore’s system from Miami in a trade for veteran infielder Jonathan Villar in December 2019. Since 2021, he has worked his way from High-A to Triple-A as a reliever, peaking at 56.2 innings last season. But after looking the best he has in his career with a 2.66 FIP and 38.7 K% to start the year in Double-A, he’s struggled after stepping up to Triple-A, with a 7.31 FIP and 4.61 ERA in 13 innings.

Even with these recent struggles, there is reason to believe Lucas can be a legitimate middle reliever in the big leagues. Per Eric Longenhagen, his average fastball velocity has jumped significantly, from 90.7 mph to 94.5. He also utilizes two slow breaking balls: a slider that was in the high-70s, and a curve that was in the mid-70s. But like his fastball, those pitches have seen a velocity jump as well; the curve has turned into a low-80s slider, and the old slider has tightened up to become a high-80s cutter. That is essentially a 10-tick bump in both breaking balls. With these changes, Lucas has also faded his changeup usage. Long story short, he is now a four-seamer/cutter/slider guy with a significant stuff boost, giving him more of a shot to be a big leaguer.

Let’s pivot back to Baltimore’s side of things. On the surface, Fujinami has been one of the worst pitchers in baseball this season. He began the year as a starter and allowed 24 earned runs in under 15 innings, walking virtually everyone he faced. He has been much better since moving to the bullpen, posting a 3.90 FIP in 34.1 innings, but much of that performance is very recent. In May and June, he still had a FIP over 4.00 with a BB% north of 10.

After back-to-back rough performances at the end of June against the Blue Jays and Yankees, Fujinami changed his pitch mix, and it seems as if he has settled in as a four-seamer/splitter pitcher. He used his cutter a few times in a recent appearance, but it’s clear that his plan is to use a two-pitch mix. How has that worked out? Let’s look at the four-seamer swinging-strike leaders in July:

July Swinging Strike% Leaders
Player Fastballs Thrown Swinging Strike%
Paul Sewald 32 46.9
Tanner Scott 30 46.7
Lance Lynn 52 42.3
Griffin Canning 29 41.4
José Berríos 28 39.3
Rafael Montero 31 38.7
Kutter Crawford 39 38.5
David Bednar 32 37.5
Shintaro Fujinami 38 36.8
George Kirby 90 36.7

Obviously the sample size here isn’t anything significant, but this bump deserves attention. Despite consistent four-seamer usage — between the high-50s and low-60s — Fujinami’s four-seamer swinging-strike rate hadn’t broken 26% in any month. The pitch wasn’t effective, but it has become a weapon in the last few weeks.

As I already mentioned, Fujinami has used a two-pitch mix of late, but how have the fastball and splitter adapted since his recent surge? (I didn’t include his velocity increase between these two time periods because that is largely due to him no longer starting; his fastball jumped two ticks and his splitter jumped one as a reliever.)

Fujinami 4-Seam/Splitter Changes
Pitch Split V-Rel H-Rel IVB HVB VAA HAA Tilt
4-Seamer Pre-July 5.5 -2.2 13.8 -11.0 -4.7 -1.1 1:29
4-Seamer July 5.5 -1.9 14.4 -11.0 -4.6 -0.8 1:25
Splitter Pre-July 5.6 -2.0 3.2 -9.8 -6.8 -0.9 2:05
Splitter July 5.7 -1.8 2.8 -10.9 -7.2 -0.6 1:47

At 93.3 mph, nobody throws a splitter harder than Fujinami other than Jhoan Duran. On top of that, you can see some concrete changes in the pitch’s shape to make it play better with the four-seamer. Most interestingly, the 1:47 tilt on the pitch has moved closer to the four-seamer’s movement. That complicates things for hitters: if Fujinami is throwing both pitches out of similar release points with indistinguishable tilt differences, hitters are going to have trouble either getting their barrel on the splitter or catching up to the heater. The high velocity combination doesn’t give you much wiggle room to figure out where each pitch is headed.

Let’s see what this looks like in practice. Here is an at-bat from last week against Alex Kirilloff:

Pitch 1 (0-0, four-seamer)

Pitch 2 (0-1, splitter)

Pitch 3 (0-2, splitter)

Pitch 4 (0-2, four-seamer)

From Fujinami’s perspective, it doesn’t get any better than this. Kirilloff got his best pitch to hit in the 0–0 count and passed it up. After that, he had no chance. The 0–1 splitter is a nice example of how even a little bit of difference in movement and location can affect a hitter’s swing. The vertical orientation of the splitter was enough for Kirilloff to pull off and chop a foul ball. On the following pitch, Fujinami showed how he can induce a little more horizontal break than a hitter would expect from his release point. It’s not overwhelming, but it’s enough to fool Kirilloff and force an emergency hack. Then, on the final pitch, he blew Kirilloff away with triple digits above the zone. This is perfect execution and sequencing, and it’s exactly what the Orioles will be looking for.

Baltimore has developed a great reputation when it comes to helping relievers get the most out of their stuff and body. If anybody is equipped to help a high-octane reliever with a four-seamer/splitter combination, it’s the Orioles. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fujinami ends up making a slight tweak or two upon his arrival, but I’m confident that would be focused on propping up the two-pitch mix that he has effectively established in the last couple of weeks.


For Bellinger and Paredes, It Pays To Pull

Isaac Paredes
Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports

I experience baseball in many different forms. Writing is obviously one of them. Watching (both in person and on television) is another. Playing doesn’t happen as much as I’d like to, but it’s still one of them. The last one, which has become the most accessible to me, is through data: performance, expected stats, projections, etc. Data serves as a conversation starter or a thought provoker for me, and I rely on it heavily in my writing to tell the story of a player’s triumphs or struggles, especially Statcast data.

When working with Statcast information, it’s important to understand the inputs that create the data points. For example, I know that xwOBA is formulated using a combination of exit velocity and launch angle (and sometimes sprint speed). Perhaps it would be helpful if there were more inputs such as batted ball spin or spray angle, or perhaps it would complicate things. But what is important is that I know those are not included in the formulation — knowledge that I can use when assessing players for whom those inputs could be statistically important. I’m specifically thinking of the profiles of Isaac Paredes and Cody Bellinger.

Neither Paredes nor Bellinger have big power in terms of raw exit velocity, and neither is a batting average king (although Bellinger is over .300 at this moment in time). Instead, they rely on consistent contact to the pull side in the air to make up for their lack of raw power. I have an idea in my head of what a good hitter is. One of my most general criteria is the ability to hit the ball consistently hard, but it’s important to leave wiggle room there so you don’t exclude the edge cases, like Bellinger and Paredes. Both are below the 20th percentile in terms of average exit velocity and below the 10th percentile in HardHit%, but both have ISOs over .200 with double-digit home runs and doubles. That’s unusual, but it brings me back to stressing the importance of spray angle for a certain group of hitters. Read the rest of this entry »


Here Are Four Hitters Primed For a Big Second Half

Bobby Witt Jr.
Peter Aiken-USA TODAY Sports

Having reached the post–All-Star break world, you may find yourself perusing various stat leaderboards trying to get a grip of who has performed to, above or below expectations. I consider myself a relatively positive person, so when somebody isn’t performing to par, I like to explore their profile in search of a hint of their previous self, or in the case of a prospect, their best future self.

For this piece, I’m going to dive into a group of these players. The criteria aren’t too strict; I’m generally looking for players who are roughly 15 points or more of wRC+ below their preseason ZiPS projection. Other than that, there is some combination of batted ball data, mechanics, and a splash of subjectivity affecting my choices. With that said, let’s jump into it, starting with a former top five prospect. Read the rest of this entry »