Injuries continue to wreak havoc on nearly every team in baseball. With the shortened season still close in the rear-view mirror and the realignment and delayed start to the minor leagues, teams have had to scramble to fill their major league rosters. Some teams have been able to weather these issues with extraordinary depth while others have been forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find replacements for their injured regulars.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (50%/50% FIP- and RA9-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking.

The top tier got a lot bigger this week. The Red Sox continued to play well last week but the White Sox stumbled a bit. They were swept in New York over the weekend and won just two of their six games. The real reason this tier has grown so large is because the other three teams are playing out of their minds right now. The Rays, Padres, and Dodgers have won 10, nine, and six games straight, respectively. Read the rest of this entry »

Harrison Bader is legitimately one of the best defensive outfielders in baseball. By whichever advanced defensive metric you prefer, he ranks in the top 10 among all outfielders since his debut in 2017. But while his elite ability with the glove is clear, the value of his bat has been a bigger question mark. Entering this season, in just over 1,000 career plate appearances, he had posted a league- and park-adjusted offensive line five percent below league average, which isn’t too bad considering his reputation as a glove-first center fielder. This year, though, his wRC+ is up to 108 in 70 plate appearances, and his approach at the plate is completely different.

Bader had shown some promise with the bat in the minors and in his previous four seasons in the majors, peaking as the No. 8 prospect in the Cardinals’ organization back in 2018 with a tantalizing power/speed profile. But the concern for him, as he quickly worked through the minor leagues, was a propensity to swing and miss that led to high strikeout rates. That inability to make consistent contact didn’t get resolved once he got to the majors: Prior to this year, his career strikeout rate was 29.1%, and last year, he struck out a career-high 32.0% of the time.

Bader missed all of April after suffering a forearm injury during spring training. But since getting back on the field at the beginning of this month, he’s provided some surprising production for the Cardinals as their everyday centerfielder, already matching his home run total from last year in almost half the plate appearances. The biggest change has come in his approach at the plate. His strikeout rate has tumbled from that career-worst 32.0% last year all the way down to 12.9%; among batters with at least 100 plate appearances in 2020 and at least 70 plate appearances in ’21, his huge decrease in strikeout rate is by far the largest in baseball. He’s also struck out in exactly as many plate appearances as he’s drawn a walk so far this season.

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We’re now a quarter of the way through the season and the biggest storyline has been the remarkable parity throughout baseball. A few pre-season favorites have continued to disappoint and some early season surprises have proven they’re for real, but with the standings so bunched up, anything could still happen. No team is on pace to win more than 100 games right now, and there are a gaggle of teams sitting just below or just above .500. With more teams sitting on the bubble between holding fast and selling, it should make for a dramatic summer.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (50%/50% FIP- and RA9-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking.

These two teams barely budged in the rankings this week. The White Sox crushed the Twins in a three-game series and then split a four-game set with the Royals that ended with a wild, walk-off win on Sunday. They now possess the best record in baseball backed by the best run differential in baseball. The concerns about how their offense and defense will perform without Luis Robert are still present — Billy Hamilton has been nearly as good in the field though definitely not with the bat. They’ll need to lean on their fantastic pitching staff even more to carry them through the season. Read the rest of this entry »

When Robbie Ray walked Freddie Freeman in the first inning of his start on Tuesday evening, it was the first time he had walked a batter since April 18, ending a 20.2-inning stretch without allowing a free pass. That’s quite an accomplishment for someone who has always been known for his elite strikeout abilities and a serious lack of control. Ray’s career walk rate sits at 10.9%, a touch above league average, but over the last four years, it’s ballooned to 12.3% and reached a career worst 17.9% last year. But across six starts this season, his walk rate has fallen to 7.2%, easily a career best.

As you’d expect with such a drastic change in his control, Ray has started pounding the zone this year.

In 2020, he was tied with Shane Bieber for the lowest Zone% among all pitchers with at least 50 innings pitches at 42.6%. This season, he’s among the league leaders in Zone%, at 56.7%. During the pitch tracking era, that’s the largest increase in Zone% from one season to the next by a wide margin.

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After three weeks of these rankings and plenty of feedback — both positive and constructive — I’ve decided to change the way pitching factors into overall team quality. I had been using FIP to assess pitching performance, but using only peripherals undervalued some teams who were actually quite good at preventing runs and overvalued other teams who couldn’t keep runs off the board despite good pitching fundamentals. So instead of using straight park- and league-adjusted FIP as the pitching metric, I’ll be using a straight 50/50 split of FIP and RA9- beginning this week. This gives us a way to evaluate a team’s pitching staff with a blend of actual run prevention (including teams who may or may not benefit from good defense) and pitching talent. This 50/50 composite is shown below as SP- and RP-. The rest of the factors remain the same — offense is represented by wRC+ and combined with the two pitching factors to create an overall team quality metric. Then a team’s expected win-loss record (“luck”) is factored in to produce a power ranking.

There’s a new team on top of the rankings this week. Despite losing Luis Robert for months on Sunday, the White Sox rose to the highest spot in the rankings after allowing just five total runs to score last week. Their starting rotation has been the best in baseball by a wide margin — the runs allowed by Lucas Giolito on Sunday were the first a White Sox starter had allowed in a week. There are certainly some concerns about their outfield, with two of their young stars now out for extended periods of time. Read the rest of this entry »

2021 must be the year for bizarro no-hitters. First, Joe Musgrove threw the first no-no in Padres history and was just a hit batsmen away from a perfect game. Likewise with Carlos Rodón’s no-hitter — one Roberto Pérez-sized foot away from perfection. Madison Bumgarner threw a seven-inning no-hitter that wasn’t officially a no-hitter. On Wednesday afternoon, John Means became the third pitcher to throw an official no-hitter this year, facing just 27 Mariners and coming oh so close to perfection.

A fan unfamiliar with the minutiae of the baseball rule book might wonder why Means’s dominant start wasn’t considered a perfect game. After all, he faced the minimum number of batters without allowing a walk, hit-by-pitch, or an error. For Means, his dalliance with perfection was thwarted by a wild pitch on a third strike, allowing Sam Haggerty to reach base. He was the 12th pitcher to face 27 batters in a no-hitter without throwing a perfect game. It was the first no-hitter in Major League history where the only baserunner reached on a dropped third strike.

Rule 5.05(a)(2) is an oddity that has lived on in the baseball rulebook for centuries. It’s a relic of a time when strikeout and walks didn’t exist and the batter simply had three attempts to hit the ball. After their third try, the ball was considered in play and the batter could attempt to run to first base to avoid the out. As the game evolved over time, and strikeouts were introduced, this archaic rule lived on, one that, in this author’s opinion, doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of the modern game.

That dropped third strike rule was the only thing separating Means from the first perfect game since Félix Hernández threw his in 2012. That it happened in the third inning made it completely innocuous during the run of play. Haggerty was thrown out attempting to steal second a few pitches later and the game moved on. Except Means retired the next 19 batters in a row and that seemingly benign event became the only blemish on his otherwise perfect afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

One month down, five more to go! The final week in April saw the top teams in the American League and National League fall back towards the pack. The standings are pretty compact around the middle, which is as much an indicator of parity as it is a reflection of a wild month of baseball. Scoring is down. Pitching is dominant. Here’s the third week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking. Since we’re so early in the season, teams can move up and down the rankings pretty dramatically if they have a particularly good or bad week. Read the rest of this entry »

If you pull up the Statcast batting leaderboards and sort by hard hit rate, the number one player won’t surprise you; it’s Giancarlo Stanton with a full two-thirds of his batted balls hit harder than 95 mph this year. But if you set the minimum batted ball filter to 40 events, the third name on the list is quite surprising: Evan Longoria. The 35-year-old third baseman is putting up some of the most encouraging offensive numbers since his heyday in Tampa Bay. And if you look a little further down, another veteran third-baseman shows up: Kyle Seager, who is carrying much of Seattle’s offense on his shoulders. These two veterans are simply crushing the ball right now and are enjoying late-career resurgences to help their respective teams get off to hot starts in April.

Longoria more than Seager has struggled offensively in the recent past. Since being traded to San Francisco prior to the 2018 season, he’s put up a 93 wRC+ in three seasons, accumulating just 3.1 WAR. That’s a significant step back from the peak of his career when he was widely considered to be one of the best, most consistent third basemen in baseball. After three disappointing years in the Bay area, his Statcast batting profile looks completely different this year. He’s posting career highs in average exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard hit rate leading to the highest power output of his career.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the conversations around the changes in the ball introduced this year, you’d know that nearly every batter is seeing higher exit velocities on their hardest hit balls in play. Here’s what Justin Choi wrote in early April:

“The pressing issue, though, is that inflated exit velocities on batted balls force us to view the improvements of hitters with a rather healthy dose of skepticism. So far into the season, many players have surpassed their previous max EV highs; to my knowledge, 19 of them did so by a margin of 2 or more mph. But how can we tell which of those power surges are genuine? Did they make mechanical adjustments, or are they beneficiaries of the new baseball?”

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Another week of the 2021 season is in the books and it was a wild one. The A’s finally lost a game, the Reds couldn’t win one, and the Dodgers and Padres played playoff-esque baseball in a drama-filled four-game series over the weekend. Here’s the second week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking. Since we’re so early in the season, teams will move up and down the rankings pretty dramatically if they have a particularly good or bad week.

The same two teams sit atop the rankings but they’ve switched positions. Neither team had an outstanding week — both teams split a series against the Mariners but the Dodgers lost their four-game set against the Padres after a wild Sunday night game that went to 11 innings.

The Red Sox now have the best offense in baseball and Eduardo Rodriguez has turned in two fantastic starts to help their rotation gain ground in the rankings. After developing a case of myocarditis — an inflammation of the heart muscle — brought on by contracting COVID-19, there was no way to know what to expect from Rodriguez this season but he’s picked up right where he left off after his breakout season in 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

The quality of Dustin May’s raw stuff is undeniable. He throws his sinker with the highest average velocity of any starter in the majors and it’s ridiculous tailing action makes it one of the most GIF-able pitches in baseball. During each of his starts, Twitter is flooded with GIFs like this one.

Dustin May, Filthy Two Seamers.

Get out of my head, Joe Davis! (but, yeah, you're right ?) ? pic.twitter.com/gw5ZV2bxGk

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 15, 2021

It’s not just May’s sinker that stands out. His entire arsenal is composed of pitches with elite characteristics. Here’s a look at May’s repertoire and each pitch’s percentile ranks when compared with their respective pitch types:

May’s velocity on each of his pitches obviously stands out; he’s among the league leaders in average velocity on all four of his pitches. On three of his offerings, he has elite movement in one direction or the other. It’s a truly impressive arsenal without peer in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »