Before Tuesday, this postseason had been a tale of a starting pitcher renaissance, with over a third of the starters in the Wild Card round authoring shutout performances. It was a good bet that we would see more of the same in this season’s first playoff game between the Phillies and Braves, the majors’ second- and seventh-ranked teams, respectively, in starter WAR. Yet neither Max Fried nor Ranger Suárez made it out of the fourth inning, garnering just 10 outs apiece on a warm, sunny day in Atlanta.

Fried didn’t look right from the outset. In his shortest start since April of 2021, his velocity was down across the board. With the exception of his curveball, all of his other pitches saw decreased spin as well, and for some, less movement, too. Fried dealt with similar dips in his last start, but he was also coping with illness. Today’s loss of crispness comes with no such caveat, not to mention six extra days of rest. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the dog days of summer, the Yankees’ bullpen has been dogged by injuries and ineffectiveness. It began with the losses of Michael King and Chad Green for the season. But those that shored up the ‘pen in their wake have since gone down as well.

Clay Holmes‘ shoulder issue and recent struggles have called into question just how much the team can rely on him come the playoffs. Surprisingly stellar rookie Ron Marinaccio exited his last regular-season game early due to a lingering shin injury and has been ruled out until at least the ALCS. This came on the heels of Zack Britton’s 60-day IL placement, as his late-season comeback attempt fell short. Stalwarts Wandy Peralta, Miguel Castro, and Albert Abreu are also either still injured or shaking off the rust. Not to mention the unceremonious end to the Aroldis Chapman saga: he was left off of the ALDS roster for missing a mandatory team workout on Sunday.

Thankfully for the Yankees, despite a disastrous trade deadline in which they ended up sacrificing 1.8 WAR, they did manage to acquire some bullpen reinforcements. Relievers tend to accumulate less WAR due to their lower volume of innings, downplaying the surface-level effectiveness and importance of lower-profile acquisitions Scott Effross and Lou Trivino. Their significance is only set to increase with the Yankees’ bullpen situation becoming increasingly dire. (Update: Unfortunately, shortly after this piece was published, Jack Curry of YES Network reported that Effross, who was absent from the Yankees’ ALDS roster when it was released on Tuesday, will need Tommy John surgery.) Read the rest of this entry »

In my time at Sports Info Solutions this summer, I scored both of Janson Junk’s 2022 major league starts. Typically, getting assigned to an Angels’ game, especially a Mike Trout-less one (he was injured at the time), would elicit a groan. However, come the second Junk start, I was admittedly a bit excited, because in his first turn, I saw a lot of this:

I kept the audio in that clip so that you can hear the announcer say “there you go, there’s another one” — specifically, another whiff on a high slider. I put the announcer’s assertion to the test by defining a high pitch as one in the highlighted part of Statcast’s strike zone:

In that start against the Royals alone, Junk threw 36 sliders, 17 of which were high. All four of his slider whiffs came on the high hard ones. In his next start against the lowly A’s, Junk didn’t fare as well, but the high slider wasn’t to blame. He threw 24 more sliders, eight of which were high. His only slider whiff came on a high one, and the two doubles he allowed off sliders were not off high ones.

Sadly, that’s all the data we have to go on, as Junk was demoted after failing to quiet Oakland’s typically silent bats. In Triple-A the rest of the year, he pitched to a 6.12 ERA and 5.10 FIP, making it unlikely he’d receive another nod in the majors this year. So I had to search elsewhere for a verdict on whether high sliders were truly effective in the majors. They certainly remain uncommon, with little change from last year to this year:

Using my Statcast-aided definition of high sliders, their usage has actually decreased from 18.0% last year to 17.3% this year, a statistically significant difference. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alex’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Alex is a recent honors graduate of Vassar College, where he served as the sports and senior editor of the award-winning Miscellany News. He has also written for PitcherList and Sports Info Solutions, the latter of which he video-scouted for as well. His main interest lies in cognitive psychology, a woefully under-studied area of baseball research. For his senior thesis, he constructed a neural network that predicted pitch speed and location based on early trajectory information; he used the model’s errors to learn more about how batters might integrate a pre-pitch “guess” with their real-time perceptions. He is fascinated by pitch sequencing and is a swinging-strike enthusiast.

Julio Rodríguez. Michael Harris II. Adley Rutschman. We all know the names atop this year’s extraordinary position player rookie class. You have to go back to 2015 for the last time three different first-year hitters each accrued four or more wins; then it was Kris Bryant, Matt Duffy, and Francisco Lindor. Those names should put into perspective just how much baseball has gone by since then. But when Steven Kwan surpassed the 4-WAR mark on Sunday with a three-hit, five-RBI effort, cementing the Guardians’ American League Central crown, this year’s class became the first since 1964 to have four rookies each with four or more wins.

All told, the big four at the top have overshadowed some other stellar performances. Bobby Witt Jr. has joined the 20-20 club already; along with Rodríguez, they make up the first rookie duo to do so since 1987. Jose Siri has authored an excellent defensive season, ranking fifth in the majors in Statcast’s Runs Above Average. While not the age of a traditional rookie, Joey Meneses has come out of nowhere to post a 158 wRC+ across the last two months of the season. And among hitters with at least 400 PAs this year, Brendan Donovan ranks seventh in the majors with a .389 OBP. Read the rest of this entry »