The St. Louis Cardinals have scuffled in the early going. Even after a win against the Mariners on Sunday, their record stands at a paltry 9-13. Through the weekend, their 2.2-win dip in projected win total has been the sixth-largest decrease since the season began, and among serious contenders, their performance looks even worse: the Cards’ 22.2% decrease in divisional odds has been the league’s largest, bypassing the second-place Yankees (-19.3%), who’ve had to deal with the Rays’ historic start. Further, the Cardinals’ 18.6% drop in playoff odds is second only to the White Sox (-20.1%), who’ve played even worse at 7-15. But what’s plaguing the Redbirds?

We knew that their starting pitching was a weakness coming into the season, and it’s been even worse than advertised. We pegged their starting staff as the 20th-best during our positional power rankings, and they’re 26th in both ERA and WAR, and aren’t much better by FIP (24th), even after a stellar Sunday performance from Jack Flaherty. Though we anticipated his absence at the time, perhaps we underestimated the impact that Adam Wainwright’s early-season injury recovery would have on the staff as a whole. Nevertheless, the Cards’ pitching woes have been within our margin for error. On the other hand, their lack of outfield production has been more surprising.

Going from left to right field, we ranked the Cards 15th, eighth, and ninth in our positional power rankings. Their outfield bats have been solid if unspectacular thus far, with their 104 wRC+ tying for 13th in the league. Yet, their defense has dragged them down: by OAA, UZR, and DRS, they tie for 25th, have sole possession of 26th, and are in a four-way tie for 23rd, respectively. That all adds up to a WAR figure of just 0.3, good (or bad) for 21st in the league. Read the rest of this entry »

This young season has already introduced us to a few unique offerings. Brent Honeywell Jr. throws a true screwball. Kodai Senga throws a ghost fork. But one fascinating pitch has flown somewhat under the radar: Ian Hamilton’s slambio.

Maybe it’s because of the right-hander’s lack of a pedigree, or his status as a non-roster invitee during spring training. After all, Hamilton is a 27-year-old reliever who struggled through injuries and ineffectiveness over the past four years. At the same time, he looked like a find as recently as 2018, when he pitched to a 1.74 ERA and 2.44 FIP across 51.2 innings between Double- and Triple-A; he even averaged 96.7 mph on his heater in a brief eight-inning callup. The next season, he seemed poised to play an integral part in the White Sox bullpen, but he was struck by a foul ball while rehabbing separate shoulder and head issues stemming from a car accident. His poor luck nearly brought his career to an end, but he finally began to feel back to normal this offseason.

If you didn’t know about Hamilton before, I’ll be the first to tell you that he has been a joy to watch this season, not only because of his unique offering but also his comeback story, parlaying his rediscovered health into a spot in the Yankees’ pen, where he’s found early-season success with a resurgent fastball (averaging 95.4) and the slambio. The latter pitch has been nothing short of excellent thus far: a ludicrous 29.9% swinging-strike rate and worth 3.8 runs, which rank third and tied for fourth, respectively, among the 85 sliders thrown at least 50 times this year (as of Saturday night). The pitch’s unusually high rate of called strikes, 15.6%, given its whiffiness, also places it second among the 85 sliders in CSW%. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a tough start to the season for the Mets’ rotation. Their two-headed ace monster isn’t looking so fearsome, as Justin Verlander went on the IL before throwing a regular-season pitch — joining fellow free-agent signee Jose Quintana — and Max Scherzer has been ineffective through two starts. To make matters worse, Carlos Carrasco dealt with erratic velocity in the first of the team’s back-to-back blowout losses at the hands of the Brewers and yielded a six-spot against the light-hitting Marlins. But one major bright spot has shone.

Kodai Senga, the former three-time NPB All-Star, shut down the Marlins in his Mets debut. With a trademark offering he calls the “ghost fork” and an emblazoned glove to match, he seems poised to become a fan favorite.

Kodai Senga's ghost fork glove ? pic.twitter.com/0Xr9zaL8l7

— David Adler (@_dadler) April 2, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

Opening Day is tomorrow, but not everyone has their legs under them just yet. Take Miguel Vargas, whom I wrote about a couple of weeks ago — he wasn’t even allowed to swing for a quarter of his spring training plate appearances. While he’s swatted three doubles and a homer since taking the bat off his shoulder, he probably wouldn’t have minded at least a handful of extra reps.

And it seems like he isn’t alone. Teams have dealt with the usual rash of injuries this spring, and a sizable portion of Opening Day bats will take the field without the benefit of a full slate of spring training plate appearances. For his part, when Vargas broke his finger, the Dodgers were able to get him some semblance of in-game experience by having him track pitches without swinging. Read the rest of this entry »

The last domino in our top 50 free agent rankings finally fell Sunday morning, with Jon Heyman breaking the news of Jurickson Profar’s one-year, $7.75 million pact with the Rockies. The ex-Padres outfielder can earn an additional $1 million through incentives.

While I perpetually struggle to wrap my head around Rockies transactions, from Profar’s side, it’s clear why he took this deal. Given reports of a high asking price, he likely overestimated the strength of his market, and as the winter wore on, he probably realized that his best chance at besting the $7.5 million option he turned down to stay in San Diego was to wait things out until March and hope a spot opened up after the usual rash of spring training injuries. That plan has come to fruition, with a guarantee just north of the money he declined.

What’s more, the one-year deal gives Profar the chance to improve upon a career-high 2.5 WAR last season in the hopes of snagging his asking price in his next trip to free agency. Teams know how to adjust for park factor, but it’s still hard to think of a better place to go on a one-year contract than Coors Field. Read the rest of this entry »

Before Miguel Vargas doubled in his first plate appearance of the day last Thursday, he hadn’t lifted the bat off his shoulder his first 12 times up. Nursing a pinky fracture, he was just there to track pitches. Yet initially, this “strategy” paid unanticipated dividends: through seven looks, he walked four times and struck out three times, good for a .571 OBP (albeit with a 42.9% K-rate). However, pitchers ultimately adjusted, sending Vargas back to the dugout the next five times.

Apparently, opposing managers were made privy to his no-swing approach before each game. But even if Dave Roberts didn’t tell them about it, it was in the press as early as the morning of February 27, after which three of Vargas’ walks came. My colleague Davy Andrews, recounting this misadventure, posited that some of the pitchers treated Vargas like any other foe because they were just trying to get into regular-season shape.

But Davy also suggested pitchers may have been a bit incredulous that Vargas wouldn’t swing, up there with his batting gloves on and in his crouch. The incredulity slipped away, though, in those last five looks. Zack Greinke even toyed with Vargas, tossing him a pair of eephuses (eephi?) sandwiched by two full-strength heaters (thanks to Davy for doing the GIF work so I didn’t have to):

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a reader of this site, you probably know that spring training results don’t carry much weight. If you’re really invested in spring outcomes, try exploring them on a rate basis, as those metrics seem to provide the most signal. But what I’m most interested in during the spring are the underlying characteristics that drive outcomes, and often, those characteristics are much stickier than pure results.

Notching high exit velocities in-game, for example, can be thought of as a player tapping into their top-end strength. It can be tough to discern fact from fiction among the countless “best shape of his life” reports, but I figured there might be something to Brendan Donovan’s offseason adjustments when I saw him obliterate a home run to right field in his first spring plate appearance, 105.5 mph off the bat:

Now, 105.5 mph isn’t light-tower power, but it’s notable coming from the slap-hitting utilityman. After posting an ISO over .139 just once across the four minor league stops where he had at least 100 plate appearances, that mark dropped to a paltry .097 in Donovan’s big league debut. And he hit all of three balls harder than 105.5 mph in the majors last year, none of them going for homers, en route to posting an eighth-percentile barrel rate. Ouch. Read the rest of this entry »

Since joining MLB as an expansion team in 1993, the Rockies have won 46.9% of their games. Among active franchises, that mark stands as the third worst. Granted, most other teams have had a lot more time to establish themselves, and the Rockies have bested their 1993 expansion counterparts in the Marlins (though given the option, they’d probably take the Marlins’ two World Series championships). But they have also been handily outpaced by the 1998 expansion teams, the Diamondbacks and the Rays, who have each posted winning percentages of 48.5%. Further, the Rockies still have the fifth-worst winning percentage even if we limit our scope to 2000 onwards. These results don’t line up with the Rockies’ spending, especially as of late, which has placed them in the middle of the pack in terms of payroll — that is, until we consider the Coors effect.

The Rockies’ pitching has long dragged down the fortunes of the team as a whole. Since 2000, they’ve easily been the worst staff in the majors with a 4.93 ERA. But it isn’t entirely their fault: pitches move sub-optimally and balls fly further in Colorado. The front office has tried various remedies, in particular opting for more groundball-heavy or low-BABIP pitchers. Neither of those strategies has worked all that well, but some proposals carry promise, like the idea of relying more on gyro spin and/or using the lesser impacts of Magnus force in Colorado in an advantageous way.

But the innovation in Denver appears to be at a bit of a standstill, possibly due to unrealistic expectations about the Rockies’ current level of competitiveness. Self-evaluation issues aside, on a recent episode of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley described the Rockies as a team that could theoretically be more consistent if they truly figured out how to navigate playing half of their games at Coors. That got me thinking, and while I certainly don’t purport to provide the final answer, I do hope to supply a different perspective on the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about arm angles, Nestor Cortes, and some appearance-based expectations hitters might have about a pitcher’s craftiness. During my data mining, I also noticed that Rich Hill popped up at or near the top of many arm angle rankings. Specifically, among the 473 hurlers who threw at least 500 pitches in 2022, Hill had the broadest range of arm angles and the second-highest arm angle standard deviation. Below are his release points in colorful dot form (via Baseball Savant) and his arm angle frequencies in histogram configuration:

Hill typically comes at hitters from a three-quarters slot, though he does near a completely overhand slot at times. When he drops down, he provides his foes with anything from a sidearm to a fully submarine look. Cortes, for his part, placed second in range (just 0.4 degrees behind Hill) and fourth in standard deviation (2.5 degrees behind). But as you can see below, Cortes’ more significant drop-downs were not only less frequent than Hill’s but also closer to a more typical Cortes look. Whereas Hill has a very obvious gap between his drop-down and standard release, Cortes runs the gamut of angles between the two:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally a 36th-round pick in the 2013 draft by the Yankees, Nestor Cortes spent time with the Orioles and Mariners before returning to the Bronx and putting it all together toward the end of the 2021 season, his age-26 year. Even upon breaking out, he was dubbed an “everyman” by the New York Post, overlooked by scouts because he didn’t stand as tall as other hurlers and because he lacked overpowering velocity. Yet in 2022, Cortes mowed hitters down to the tune of a 2.44 ERA and 20.3% K-BB rate. Far from an everyman, he was a standout athlete.

The southpaw’s breakout wasn’t a product of a mid-career growth spurt. If anything, his emergence came in spite of his 5-foot-11 height; his 159 ERA+ in 2022 tied him for the 27th-best mark among sub-six-foot hurlers since the Live Ball era began in 1920. Rather, the most concrete reasons for Cortes’ improvements include a velocity jump in both 2021 and ’22 (though his velo is still below average) and the introduction of a cutter paired with a revamped slider. Yet despite the ambiguous impact it has on his game, what perhaps differentiates Cortes the most from other pitchers is his approach on the mound, including but not limited to his varying arm angles.

The hurler’s drop-down moves have been the subject of many an article, including Lucas Kelly’s piece on this very site. The discussion on arm angles more broadly, however, has been rather muted, save for Logan Mottley’s (now of Fanatics, previously of the Texas Rangers) post describing how they can be calculated from Statcast data and Ben Palmer’s piece for Pitcher List digging into the Mottley data.

Even in these articles, there is no mention of how stature might play into the effectiveness of certain arm angles. Instead, there seems to be an implicit assumption that if one arm slot proved more effective on average (which, to be fair, no one has concluded), it should automatically be utilized more, without regard for what might feel most natural for a given pitcher. What would happen if we tried to convert more pitchers to a sidearm slot, or at least push them to vary their arm slots a la Cortes? Using Mottley’s calculations, I took a crack at these questions myself. Read the rest of this entry »