Late-career resurgences from former stars are fascinating to me. This is a terribly difficult game even when you are at your peak strength and athleticism; as your body declines, it only gets more difficult. Some are just unable to adjust to new circumstances, including former stars. But every now and then, you have a hitter who can make the right tweaks to adapt to their new body and changed environment. There are only a handful who do that every year; this season, Evan Longoria is one of them.

After an injury-laden 2022, the future was murky for Longoria. Last year, he went on the IL for hand surgery, an oblique strain, and a hamstring strain, and ultimately missed the last week of the season after taking a 100-mph line drive off the thumb, leading to a fracture. He had no intentions of retiring before or after the fracture, though; it was only a bump in the road that his potential new team would have to consider, since the Giants did not exercise his club option. He ended up signing a one-year, $4 million dollar deal with the Diamondbacks, where he has enjoyed his best offensive season since 2016 by wRC+ and xwOBA. It comes in a limited sample and strategic playing time from Torey Lovullo, but it’s far from a fluke. Longoria is impacting the ball as well as he ever has in the Statcast era. Here is a table detailing his jump in performance and quality of contact relative to recent seasons:

Every single one of these metrics is a personal high for Longoria since 2015, and some by a wide margin, which is pretty remarkable for a player coming off so many injuries in the back half of their 30s. His HardHit% is fifth in the league among hitters with at least 50 batted balls, putting him in between Juan Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on that list. Pair that with great consistency in hitting the ball between eight and 32 degrees, and you have yourself an xwOBACON over .500 — also good for fifth in all of baseball among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve long been a staunch supporter of Ketel Marte. Switch-hitters with short levers are my personal favorite archetype. When you can produce 90th-percentile max exit velocity from both sides of the plate with only mid-teens strikeout rates, you’ll have my attention each and every night. It’s not always the case that switch-hitters have two contrasting swings, but it is for Marte. He is a natural right-handed hitter, which has played out clearly in his performance over the years, but every now and then, everything clicks on both sides of the plate. In fact, since his breakout 2019 season, he has been an above-average hitter from the left side every other year. But this season, he has taken off unlike ever before.

Throughout Marte’s career, there has been a stark difference in his power from the right side versus his left side. Despite being powerful in terms of exit velocity from both sides, he has always been better at creating pull side lift with his natural right-handed swing. That has resulted in a career ISO of .215 as a righty and .155 as a lefty. But like I said, things are clicking for him as a righty this year.

Before diving into the deep details, let’s look at his splits each year since the 2019 breakout:

There is still fluctuation, but in general, Marte is consistently well above average from the right-handed side. Last year was his worst mark since his breakout, and he was still a 125 wRC+ hitter. But with the more advantageous side of the platoon being the left side, his overall production is highly dependent on how he performs when facing right-handed pitching. So for the rest of this piece, I want to shift my focus to that side. This is the best Marte has been as a lefty since 2019, and that warrants an investigation on what exactly he has done to get here. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not crazy to see someone make the jump from a great reliever to an elite reliever. Every year, there are a handful of stellar relief seasons that we simply just did not see coming. I was a fan of Alexis Díaz after his stellar 2022 debut (1.84 ERA, 3.32 FIP, 32.5 K%), but I did not expect him to be this dominant, as he’s taken big steps forward in more or less every stat. What’s behind it?

When it comes to pitching development, it’s important to be unique; you don’t want to look like or throw like anybody else. If you’re going to be elite, you must find what makes you special and lean into it. For Díaz, his outlier skill is his ability to release the ball closer to the plate than anybody in the world from an unorthodox angle. He doesn’t have overwhelming velocity, yet his four-seamer is one of the best in the game, and the extension is a huge reason for it. It’s as if the ball is being shot at you from a little league distance by a softball pitching machine.

Here’s how Díaz’s release point compares to other pitchers with comparable extension:

Focusing first on release point, you’ll see that none of the other four pitchers in this small cohort gets their arm as low as the Reds closer. Combine this with top-tier extension and consistently being up in the zone, and you have the explanation for how Díaz’s Vertical Approach Angle (VAA) is so flat compared to those on this list. Horizontally speaking, only Jordan Romano is as far toward the third baseline, but Díaz’s low slot arm angle is very different for hitters compared to Romano’s. In terms of spin axis, only Devin Williams is somewhat close to Díaz. The other three pitchers are more over the top. From a pitch design perspective, that would be ideal for building the perfect four-seamer, but as you can see, being different is exactly how Díaz has been successful. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitching is complicated. There are so many layers to it, including mechanics, sequencing, proprioception, supination/pronation… the list goes on and on. Depending on a player’s personality and knack for including analytical information in their learning and development process, digesting this information can be a battle. Over the years, we’ve seen Sonny Gray progress through this experience with multiple teams; now in Minnesota, it seems like he is hitting his peak. As David Laurila wrote, Sonny Gray is evolving as a pitcher.

That interview that David conducted with Gray is a must read. Having the player’s perspective on how they’ve thought through their own changes and development experience helps gives direction to an analyst, and it’s clear in that interview that Gray’s goal is to have a pitch that moves in almost any direction. As somebody who doesn’t have overwhelming fastball velocity (16th percentile), it’s crucial that he stays unpredictable and deceptive. That hasn’t been a problem for him in the past, but this year he has leveled up his diversification. Below is a plot of his pitch movement chart in 2023 (top) versus 2022 (bottom):

Last season, there were essentially two tiers of separation: fastballs in one area, breaking balls in another. For the most part, there isn’t much negative blending happening within either pitch group. The two-seamer has distinct horizontal separation from the four-seamer, and the curveball has vertical separation from the sweeper. The horizontal distribution of the sweeper is on the tail ends of the curveball; Gray manipulated the pitch to have more or less sweep than the curveball to ensure that separation. This year, he has taken his 2022 arsenal, improved upon it, and added two more effective pitches in the cutter and changeup.

In this interview with Rob Friedman, Gray goes into deep detail about the shape of each of his pitches and why he thought it would be valuable to include two new ones, particularly the cutter, in his repertoire, and about the value of his cutter serving as an in-between for the two fastballs and two breaking balls. From the hitter’s point of view, doing that complicates attacking or locking in on one zone or speed. If you’re a left-handed hitter sitting on a four-seam fastball on the inner third, a cutter could move in and jam your barrel or, if it has a little more vertical depth, slide right under. The same idea can be applied for expecting breaking balls; the cutter can stay up and freeze you instead of having the level of drop or sweep of a curveball or sweeper. In addition, the cutter velocity is just a few ticks faster than the two breaking balls and a few ticks slower than the two fastballs.

Gray has has done almost everything possible to assure he maintains deception. His release points are consistent. He has multiple layers of movement both vertically and horizontally. He can vary velocity and movement within a given pitch. If you were to build a pitcher who doesn’t have great velocity but can spin the heck out of the ball, this is a darn good blueprint.

It’s important to see exactly how Gray uses these pitches within the context of an at-bat. You can have all this movement and velocity diversity, but you still need to command each pitch and sequence correctly. I’ll start with an at-bat against a right-handed hitter.

Pitch 1 (0-0 count, four-seamer)

Pitch 2 (0-1 count, cutter)

Pitch 3 (0-2 count, curveball)

Pitch 4 (0-2 count, sweeper)

Pitch 5 (1-2 count, sweeper)

Gray has gotten his cutter usage up to 17.6% on the year; you should expect to see it only one or two times in an at-bat. But this at-bat against Yan Gomes is a perfect example of how the pitch allows him to progress with a four-seamer through to a sweeper. Gomes didn’t pull the trigger on the upper third four-seamer but did on a cutter that had enough separation to miss his barrel. Gray followed up with a curveball out of the same tunnel, and Gomes chopped it on the ground for a foul ball.

At this point, Gomes had failed to differentiate his swing enough to get his barrel to any of these pitches, and Gray still had the sweeper in his back pocket. The first he threw was backed up out of the zone, but the second was placed in the same tunnel as the other three pitches, and Gomes swung too early on it. Again, the cutter isn’t the main weapon here; it’s another layer to keep Gomes guessing.

Now, here is an example of how Gray used the pitch against a lefty:

Pitch 1 (0-0 count, curveball)

Pitch 2 (1-0 count, cutter)

Pitch 3 (1-1 count, curveball)

Pitch 4 (1-2 count, two-seamer)

This is one of my favorite sequences from any pitcher all year. After starting with a curveball out of the zone against Brandon Belt, Gray followed up with a cutter that stayed up. Belt was clearly prepared for a breaking ball of some sort based on his timing and swing path, but the cutter got above his barrel. Because Gray was able to keep the pitch in the zone, Belt’s eye level was changed, leading to him chasing the next curveball below the zone. With a 1–2 count and two bad swings from Belt, Gray could’ve gone in multiple directions but ultimately opted for a front-door running two-seamer at the knees. Why? Because Belt had showed Gray that his swing was geared for middle-of-the-zone loft; horizontal entry low was unhittable for that swing path if Gray could execute it, and that he did.

Gray’s -5 run value on his cutter is eighth in the league, right behind pitchers with established elite cutters like Kenley Jansen, David Robertson, Marcus Stroman, and Camilo Doval. To add such an effective pitch — a .231 batting average against, a .233 wOBA, and it doesn’t have bad splits, with a .153 wOBA and -2.4 run value versus lefties — into your arsenal this quickly is a career-changing development. All that, and I haven’t mentioned Gray’s changeup usage and effectiveness thus far (-1 run value). Having a sixth pitch with a .125 batting average against is a premium not many other pitchers in baseball have, even if you just occasionally flash it (and Gray has thrown it just 6.4% of the time).

Gray is on pace for the highest fWAR of his career and is a mere 0.4 wins behind the AL leader, Kevin Gausman. There may be some regression coming considering he has only given up one home run all season, but that is a skill he’s displayed his entire career anyways. If he can keep this up and stay healthy, he is in a for a career year.

We are only a few weeks away from the midpoint of the season, and so far, there have been a fair share of surprises across multiple divisions. One of those comes from the NL East. No, it’s not the Braves, who sit atop the division with the second-best winning percentage in the National League; that was expected. The surprise is the Marlins, who are second in the division with a 37–31 record, 3.5 games ahead of the Phillies and 5.5 games ahead of the Mets. These are not insurmountable gaps, but it’s still impressive given what the projections were for Miami in particular.

With the ninth-worst run differential in the game, it’s not clear if the Marlins will sustain this winning pace. But they have gotten some legitimate performances from hitters that they simply have not had in previous seasons. Luis Arraez hasn’t stopped hitting since he got to Miami, and Jorge Soler is amidst yet another bounce back and clubbing homers all over the park. As a team desperate for offense, it’s been great to have those two hitting so well — and luckily, they aren’t the only two hitting. Bryan De La Cruz and Jesús Sánchez have been key to the Marlins’ success as well.

Both De La Cruz and Sánchez came to the team from fantastic player development organizations in Houston and Tampa Bay, respectively. De La Cruz is in his age-26 season, and Sánchez is in his age-25 season. Both are still under 1,000 career plate appearances and have been rather slow burns developmentally after struggling at different stages in their respective careers. And both have always shown interesting skills that suggested there was still some developmental meat left on the bone, as Eric Longenhagen would say. The flashes of success between 2021 and ’22 were interesting, but now each of them are legit contributors who have cemented their positions in the middle of Miami’s lineup and long-term plans. Read the rest of this entry »

Each season, there is a group of pitchers across the league who have notable velocity increases. In the age of hard throwers, it’s important to make sure you’re keeping up with the rest of the league. Every pitcher has a different situation, too. Some will adapt their body to increase how fast they move, and others will make a slight mechanical adjustment to clean up their kinetic chain — or a pitcher can do a combination of both those things.

For this piece, the focus will be on slight mechanical adjustments that three specific pitchers have made this year that have allowed them to gain velocity. The interesting thing about this group is the difference in size variation and mechanical traits. There isn’t one single way to throw hard, and this group is a great way to highlight that. Read the rest of this entry »

Between Cody Bellinger’s perplexing season, Dansby Swanson’s continued excellence, and Christopher Morel’s power surge, there are a lot of fascinating things happening with the Cubs. But I want to focus on their cleanup hitter and right fielder, Seiya Suzuki. In his introduction to the majors, he posted a 116 wRC+ in 446 plate appearances, but various hand, ankle, and finger injuries throughout the year kept him from getting in a prolonged rhythm; a 158 wRC+ in the first month and a 139 wRC+ in the final month sandwiched a 98 wRC+ from May through August. We got a few glimpses of what peak Suzuki could look like; health was the key to that becoming a consistent display.

Unfortunately for him, he suffered an oblique injury during spring training that forced him to withdraw from the World Baseball Classic and slowed down the start of his season. Early-season oblique injuries are incredibly frustrating; as you’re ramping up activities, the last thing you want is to hurt a part of your body that compromises your rotational power. He returned to action on April 14, but he wasn’t the best version of himself. His groundball rate that month was 49.1%, most likely due to an overly flat swing path. His 30-degree Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) — the angle of the barrel at impact — was flatter than any of his best months in 2022 by at least a full degree without a corresponding increase in pitch height, making it very tough for somebody of his size and mechanics to cover breaking balls and offspeed pitches consistently without significant body angle adjustments to compensate for his high hands preset and flat path. The blueprint for success from the previous season didn’t look like this. Read the rest of this entry »

As a hitting mechanics nerd, there are a few players on my shortlist of guys who I would love to get in the cage with and talk about their process, development, and mindset in the batter’s box. J.D. Martinez is one of them. He’s established a reputation for himself as a cerebral hitter. It was a key reason for his breakout season in 2014, his rebound in 2021 after a rough shortened season in 2020, and now his resurgence in 2023. Despite an IL stint earlier this month for a back issue, Martinez has destroyed baseballs recently and pushed his wRC+ up to a 146 on the season. In May alone, he posted a 172 wRC+ and .392 ISO.

His power stroke is back after working on recovering it with Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc throughout spring training and the opening month of the season. The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya spoke to Martinez and Van Scoyoc in early April about Martinez losing efficiency in one of the most important aspects of his swing: his hand row. Martinez pointed to a line of physical compensations in his swing as a result of an ankle injury from the 2018 World Series that he reaggravated down the stretch in 2021. When you’re as in tune with your mechanics and where your barrel is in space as Martinez is, these little aggravations can significantly impact the way you understand how your body is moving. Before jumping into some video showing how Martinez has changed since last year with Boston, let’s take a look at some batted ball and performance data that detail how much better he has been this season:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to say this bluntly because it’s something that most should agree with: Harrison Bader’s defense in center field is special. Unfortunately for Bader and baseball fans, he has never totaled above 430 plate appearances in a single season, so we’ve never had the privilege to see him run around the outfield for a traditional full season and rack up defensive value. But even with this limitation, he’s still at or near the top of just about every aggregated defensive metric leaderboard for the last few seasons. If you watch him roam the outfield — and I mean really watch him — you realize that this is a player who does everything correctly out there and has an unflappable baseball IQ. If you could write a script on how to be the perfect outfielder, all you would need to say is “be Bader.”

Let’s start by addressing where Bader ranks next to his peers this season in terms of defensive metrics. I’m only going to focus on Outs Above Average (OAA) for this piece. Defensive metrics are a great starting point to a conversation like this, but they are a complement to video analysis that will show us the details of a player’s fundamentals and decision making.

Here are the leading outfielders in terms of OAA this season:

One of these is not like the others! Given that OAA is a counting stat, a player with at least 16 fewer games played (usually more) should not be on this list, but Bader only trails Robert this season in OAA, and that is mainly due to his Success Rate Added. That gives some more insight into how valuable he has been in his limited sample this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into the season, two players were the obvious front runners for their respective league’s Rookie of the Year award: Corbin Carroll and Gunnar Henderson. Not only were they each elite in the minors in 2022, they both came up to help their big league club late in the season and continued their incredible all-around play. Carroll hasn’t skipped a beat in 2023. He has a 140 wRC+ and 13 stolen bases, and has played good defense. But despite posting a 125 wRC+ in 132 plate appearances in 2022 — a performance that suggested he would hit, hit, and just keep on hitting — Henderson has struggled so far. After 161 plate appearances this year, he sits at a 103 wRC+. The holes that were present in his game in the minor leagues before 2022 have popped back up, leading to a 31.1 K% and a bottom-decile whiff rate.

Let’s go over a few notes from Eric Longenhagen’s offseason report on Henderson. I want to focus on three things: a worse than average in-zone whiff rate, a surgically precise approach, and huge all-fields power. For better or worse, these three aspects of his profile are all holding up almost perfectly. Right now, Henderson’s in-zone whiffs are indeed below average. This year, the league-wide in-zone whiff rate on fastballs is 16.9%. Henderson’s mark is 33.3% after being much better last year at 23.4%. Now let’s go to the good parts. His approach still seems to be surgically precise. His 20.4% chase rate is in the 89th percentile, so it’s not like pitchers are suddenly getting him to leave his ideal zones, and his highly impressive 16.1% walk rate has carried his offensive production this season. Lastly, his all-fields power is still present. He has two 400-foot home runs to left field and another that went so deep to right field in Kaufmann Stadium that the camera could hardly track it. I say all of this because it means Henderson is still who we knew him to be. But the main hole in his game is being exposed more in this year’s sample than last year’s. That’s what this piece will explore.

When such a talented hitter experiences a 10 percentage point jump in his whiff rate on fastballs in the zone, my mind immediately goes to two things: swing decisions and mechanical changes. I’ve already mentioned that it seems like Henderson’s approach hasn’t faltered out of the zone, but let’s double check that the trend holds in the zone – particularly at the top of the zone, since that’s the potential hole in his swing that we already have knowledge of. Interestingly enough, his swing rate has significantly decreased in the upper third from last season. In 2022, he swung at 72.4% of the pitches he saw in this zone; this year, it’s only 37.8%. Given that we know Henderson’s approach is so sound, it makes sense that he would try and cut down on swings in this zone. However, despite this logical downtick, Henderson has nearly doubled his Whiff% from 28.9% to 52.6%. This brings me right back to the other part of the investigation: his swing mechanics. Below are two swings from 2022, followed by another two from 2023. Each pitch is a fastball in the upper third:

2022

2023

The two swings from 2022 were both barrels hit over 100 mph. Eric noted in his report that one of Henderson’s key skills is his ability to let the ball travel deep into the zone before driving it to the opposite field. Both swings from 2022 displayed this ability, and the one against Justin Verlander’s nicely located four-seamer was even more impressive. If you have a hole in your swing and can still occasionally barrel the ball when pitchers attack that hole, you’re going to be alright. If you can’t get to that barrel, like what’s happening so far this year, then it becomes more of a concern.

Henderson’s swing against Reynaldo López wasn’t necessarily a bad one. It was hit at an ideal 27-degree launch angle. But it wasn’t hit nearly hard enough (88.7 mph) and resulted in a can of corn fly out. Similarly, against Josiah Gray, Henderson couldn’t get to quality contact and fouled the pitch straight back. I picked these two swings because each pitcher’s four-seamer hasn’t performed well this season (> .500 SLG%). It’s my quick way of showing that Henderson isn’t getting to four-seamers with sub-optimal pitch shapes. These are pitches that you’d expect most good hitters to have a decent shot at barreling up, especially one with Henderson’s skill and power. But he is either missing them altogether or not squaring them up.

Earlier this week, I talked about how Vertical Bat Angle (VBA), the angle of a hitter’s barrel at impact, could be a factor in explaining these types of fluctuations in a hitter’s performance and habits. However, this most likely isn’t the case with the struggling rookie. His VBA last September/October was 34.5 degrees; in the first month of this season, it was 34.6. Instead, I’d like to focus on a different measurement of bat path called Vertical Entry Angle (VEA), also courtesy of SwingGraphs, and its relationship with VBA. SwingGraphs defines VEA as the angle of the bat 83 milliseconds before contact, but for simplicity’s sake, it’s basically the angle of the bat right at the start of the downswing.

In this piece, D.K. Willardson presents data explaining how excessive flattening in bat angle from VEA to VBA can be a bat speed killer. This makes intuitive sense. From a pitching perspective, we know that having an asymmetrical relationship between the direction of your left and right arm can be a velocity killer. Luis Castillo needs a side-swiping glove to match his side arm slot, and Verlander needs a vertical glove tuck to match his high arm slot. Doing otherwise might kill their velocity. From a bat speed perspective, a hitter entering the zone at an extreme vertical angle and adjusting their bat too much to a flat angle can throw off the connection between their torso and hips and effectively decrease their rotational velocity. Now, let’s focus on how that relates to Henderson.

Last year, the degree of flattening between Henderson’s VEA and VBA was 15.4 degrees (49.9 to 34.5). In April, that number increased to 17.2 (51.8 to 34.6). The question is, did that result in any batted ball differences for Henderson? Well, yes it did. His max exit velocity is down 1.7 mph from last year, while his average exit velocity is down 1 mph. These fluctuations seem small, but Henderson was already teetering quite close to flattening out too much. Per SwingGraphs, that gap between VEA and VBA is the 11th highest in all of baseball this year and puts him next to other struggling hitters such as Alec Bohm and Trent Grisham. For Henderson, a slight dip in bat speed is a pretty darn good explanation for why he might struggle to cover the top of the zone. This might strike you as a bit too theoretical, but the results (quality of contact and whiffs) both track well with this explanation.

So how might the Orioles communicate this information to him (or another hitter with a similar issue)? For that, we’ll look at some slo-mo video. The first clip is a slowed down version of the swing against Verlander, while the second is the swing against López:

Unfortunately, I’m not an overlay wizard, so I can’t draw a distinct line at VEA, but the slo-mo video should help you see that the angle of his bat this season is steeper as it begins it descent. Henderson is obviously quite good at adjusting his bat angle according to pitch height, but by starting his entry more vertically, he’s forced to adjust his bat angle even further to get to the plane of the high fastball. All hitters have to adjust their bat angle at the top of the zone, but the more you increase how much you need to adjust it, the more time you spend getting to your ideal angle. The video suggests two potential options. The first is to cue the top of his bat in a different direction than he currently is if he wants to start his entry just a little bit flatter. The second is to slightly adjust his hand setup to start on the plane where he wants to be.

I know, all of this just to say he needs a cue to slightly change his entry into the zone. But with hitters this skilled, small changes are usually the difference between a slump and a hot streak. And it’s not like Henderson is hitting that poorly anyways. It’s more just that he isn’t performing to projections and probably his own expectations, especially when it comes to swing and miss. I expect him to get it going pretty quickly. He is simply too good to not be a force in the already gaudy Orioles lineup.