We went over this just a couple of weeks ago: between Kyle Schwarber, Nick Castellanos, Rhys Hoskins, and Alec Bohm, the Phillies have no shortage of defensively challenged players who might be better served as the team’s designated hitter, and luckily for them, the DH is now a permanent thing in the National League. The team’s plan at the outset of the season was to use its two new free agent sluggers, Castellanos and Schwarber, to occupy that role while minimizing their exposure in the field, yet for almost two weeks now, the position has been occupied by Bryce Harper. The reigning NL MVP was supposed to be the team’s starting right fielder, but an elbow injury has led to him shelving his glove for the moment — and it’s coincided with him heating up after a slow start.
Harper started eight of the team’s first nine games in right field, but he hasn’t played the position since April 16. Instead, he’s remained in the lineup as the team’s DH for 12 straight games. He apparently injured the elbow while making a throw to home plate on an RBI single by the Mets’ Francisco Lindor on April 11:
During the past two years, we here at FanGraphs have spent a good bit of time staring into the abyss in contemplation. Specifically, we’ve wondered about a world without Mike Trout, or at least a world where he’s no longer the game’s top player. Who will inherit the mantle of this generation’s Mantle? What would our lowered expectations for Trout look like? What are the chances that in his age-30 season, he’s a bust? What would the playoff races look like without him?
Alas, we got an all-too-real demonstration of that last question just weeks after Dan Szymborski posed it last April, as Trout was limited to 36 games due to a right calf strain that he sustained on May 17. The strain, which occurred as he ran the bases on an inconsequential two-out popup, was supposed to sideline him for six to eight weeks, already the longest absence of his career. It turned out to be worse than expected; he never got comfortable enough in his recovery to begin a rehab assignment, and didn’t return to action before season’s end. Thankfully, he’s back now, and while he may not be better than ever, what his ridiculous stat line — .365/.476/.808 for a 270 wRC+, with all of those numbers major-league bests save for the batting average — presupposes is… maybe he is?
If Trout is on the precipice of age-related decline, it hasn’t come yet. After starting the year just 3-for-15, he’s put together a 10-game hitting streak, during which he’s putting up cheat-code numbers (.432/.523/.946). The streak went on ice for a few days when he was hit on the left hand by an 81 mph slider from the Rangers’ Spencer Patton on April 17; I don’t know about you, but I can’t watch the clip without the urge to yell, “Move, Mike!” when he reflexively pulls his hands down towards his waist and puts them in harm’s way. Thankfully, x-rays were negative, and while he missed three games, he’s kicked things up a notch since returning, with multi-hit efforts in four of his last six games, and seven of the 11 hits within going for extra bases. Read the rest of this entry »
At 12-5, the Dodger are off to their hottest start since, um, last year’s 13-4 opening run, and they’ve done it by once again combining the league’s highest scoring rate with its best run prevention. After winning 106 games last season, it’s not a surprise that they appear to be a powerhouse again, but as opposed to last year, this time they’re doing it with the help of Cody Bellinger, who has shown signs of turning the page on a miserable, injury-marred 2021 campaign.
Thanks to a six-game stretch in which he hit three homers and collected three additional extra-base hits, Bellinger was the NL Player of the Week for the week of April 18-24. After generating some concern with a spate of strikeouts during spring training, he’s hitting .238/.294/.508, which may not look like much but in this new dead-ball era is still good for a 133 wRC+. His numbers looked a lot better (.273/.333/.582, 165 wRC+) before he went 0-for-8 across the first two games of the Dodgers’ current series in Arizona — the point at which I began mulling this piece — but such are the perils of analyzing early-season baseball. The samples are small and the stats unstable, but even with those caveats in mind, we can start by noting that Bellinger’s four home runs are as many as he had during the entire first half of last season. Some highlights from his latest jag:
In large part, Bellinger’s 2021 problems were traceable to the high point from his previous fall. After hitting what proved to be the decisive home run in Game 7 of the 2020 National League Championship Series against the Braves, he dislocated his right (non-throwing) shoulder — not for the first time — on a celebratory forearm bash with then-teammate Enrique Hernández. He continued to play through the Dodgers’ World Series victory over the Rays (though he went just 3-for-22), then underwent surgery in mid-November, and didn’t make his Cactus League debut until mid-March of last year. Read the rest of this entry »
In the wake of a bumper crop of six honorees elected by two Era Committees in December — including the first Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball honorees since 2006 — the Hall of Fame has radically reorganized the way that it handles candidates who are outside the purview of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Last Friday, the Hall announced its latest restructuring, a return to a triennial voting system that would appear to make it more difficult for any candidate besides a modern-day manager, executive, or umpire to land on a ballot.
The new system won’t please everybody, particularly in spots where it appears to counteract the recent flow of honorees. Fourteen candidates have been elected in the past six elections, including seven living ex-players, the first of their kind since the much-criticized 2001 election of Bill Mazeroski. By comparison, 16 candidates were elected via this route from 2003–16, including just three ex-players, all deceased. While critics can argue — and I have – that some of those recent honorees are below Hall standards, others such as Minnie Miñoso, Ted Simmons, and Alan Trammell were ripe for reevaluation via the additional research and advanced statistics that have come forth since their time on the BBWAA ballots. Those following in their wake may have a harder time getting a similar reappraisal. Read the rest of this entry »
Miguel Cabrera had to wait a couple of extra days to make history, thanks to a hitless afternoon capped by a controversial managerial decision and then a rainout. Nonetheless, on Saturday afternoon he collected his 3,000th career hit with a single off the Rockies’ Antonio Senzatela. In doing so, he joined some elite company as not only the 33rd player to reach 3,000 hits, but also the seventh to do so as a member of the 500-homer club and the third to reach both of those round numbers with a career batting average of .300 or better. The other two? Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. You may have heard of them, and even if you don’t put much stock in batting average, you have to admit that’s about as cool as company gets.
What’s more, Cabrera actually owns the highest batting average and on-base percentage of the seven players who have both milestones, with a wRC+ that trails only Mays and Aaron:
For all of his struggles over the past half-decade, Cabrera would still have to go 0-for-352 to drop his batting average to .299. Even with those struggles and his lack of defensive value (he’s 102 runs below average in terms of Defensive Runs Saved, inlcluding 11 below in just 847.1 innings at first base since 2018), he ranks 11th in JAWS among first basemen (68.8/44.8/56.8), in no danger of slipping below Palmeiro (13th at 71.9/38.9/55.4) or Murray (16th at 68.7/39.2/53.9). And while he may be the last to reach 3,000 hits for some time given the dearth of candidates (Dan Szymborski put Jose Altuve, who has 1,783 hits, at 34% and Freddie Freeman, who has 1,723 hits, at 28% last September), he’s hardly the least. Read the rest of this entry »
The Hall of Fame has restructured its Era Committees again. Here’s the new structure …
22 Apr 2022
2:03
Jay Jaffe: I will cover this early next week, but for the moment it’s worth sharing that I confirmed with the Hall that yes, the four candidates who aged off this year’s ballot — Bonds, Clemens, Schilling, and Sosa — will be eligible for the 2023 Contemporary Players ballot.
2:05
Jay Jaffe: Finally, I’m going to go see some baseball nerd friends who are in a band — including Mike Petriello and Michael Clair — play a show in Brooklyn tonight. if you’re local, check it out
By his own definition, Max Scherzer had a shot at a no-hitter. In the nightcap of Tuesday’s doubleheader against the Giants at Citi Field, in his first home start since signing with the Mets, he held San Francisco hitless for 5.2 innings before Darin Ruf lined a single to left field, ending the 37-year-old righty’s quest for his third career no-no. “My rule of thumb is when you get one time through the order, you got something going. You get two times through the order, you got a shot,” said Scherzer afterwards. He had turned the lineup over for the second time earlier in that inning; Ruf was the 21st batter he faced.
Scherzer wasn’t the only pitcher to make a run at a no-hitter this week. In the span of just over 24 hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, five starters made it through at least five innings without yielding a hit. Just hours after Scherzer’s effort, the Braves’ Max Fried retired the first 15 hitters he faced at Dodger Stadium before Hanser Alberto lined a single to right field. The next day, the Brewers’ Brandon Woodruff, the Dodgers’ Tony Gonsolin, and the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani all found the holes in opponents’ bats. While none of them made it as far as the nail-biting time in the eighth or ninth innings, the conditions appear primed for the 2022 season to pick up where last year — a season that featured a record nine no-hitters — left off.
Through the first two weeks of the season, starters have taken no-hitters into the sixth inning 10 times:
Even before the controversy involving Kershaw — who became just the second pitcher pulled from a perfect game in the seventh inning or later — and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, Padres manager Bob Melvin pulled starters with no-hitters in progress in back-to-back games. What’s more, they were his first two regular-season contests with his new team! Like Roberts, Melvin made his moves in light of the fact that his starters hadn’t fully built up their pitch counts after shorter-than-normal spring trainings, and like Kershaw, both Darvish and Manaea publicly supported their manager’s decision. Read the rest of this entry »
Matt Olson isn’t the only recent recipient of a contract extension who’s off to a ridiculously hot start. The Guardians’ José Ramírez is putting up even more eye-opening numbers than Olson, and he added to those with a grand slam and an RBI double against the White Sox during a Wednesday doubleheader, driving his season total to 20 — in 11 games!
I generally don’t care about RBI totals much, particularly since I’m more than a decade removed from my days of playing fantasy baseball. You might not care much about them, either, having grown to appreciate the modern-day cornucopia of statistics that do a better job of measuring batter skill. But hey, we’re just two weeks into the season, and with none of the stats under discussion having stabilized, it’s a good time just to appreciate extremes of performance while connecting them to more solid truths. Ramírez’s incredible hot streak provides us a good opportunity to appreciate the player before us (and I promise you, I won’t spend the entire piece rambling about ribbies).
And so here we are. In Wednesday’s opener, the Guardians piled 10 runs on White Sox starter Dallas Keuchel, one in the first and then nine in the second, during which the Chicago lefty failed to retire any of the 11 batters he faced. A pair of errors by shortstop Tim Anderson didn’t help, and neither did manager Tony La Russa’s apparent desire to avoid going to his bullpen so early. Ramírez, the sixth batter of the inning, unloaded on a center-cut cutter that turned a 3–0 game into a 7–0 one:
Man, that ball got outta here in a hurry, which will happen when you hit one with an exit velocity of 111.6 mph. It was Ramírez’s fourth homer of the season, and his second grand slam; he hit his first one off the Reds’ Daniel Duarte in the ninth inning of an April 12 game, that while batting left-handed:
Beyond the slam, Ramírez didn’t get another hit in the first game, an 11–1 rout. He went 1-for-3 with an RBI double and a walk in the nightcap, a 2–1 win by Cleveland. Read the rest of this entry »
Less than two weeks into the 2022 season, the Braves and Dodgers crossed paths for the first time, not only rekindling the rivalry between the teams that have met in the last two National League Championship Series en route to World Series wins but also presenting the chance for their recent free agent additions Freddie Freeman and Kenley Jansen to receive some well-deserved fanfare in the presence of their old pals. Freeman figured prominently in Monday night’s game, clubbing a solo homer in his first plate appearance against his old team, furthering a strong start with his new one, while Matt Olson, the Braves’ choice to fill his sizable shoes, collected his fourth three-hit game of the young season and briefly took over the major league lead in WAR and the NL leads in batting average and on-base percentage. His team ended up on the short end of a 7-4 score, and he took an 0-for-4 on Tuesday, though the Braves evened the series in a 3-1 victory closed out by Jansen.
Few players in recent memory have been placed under the microscope as swiftly as the 28-year-old Olson. On March 13, he was still the first baseman for the A’s, though amid the team’s umpteenth teardown, multiple suitors had expressed interest in trading for him. A day later, he was suddenly the new first baseman for the Braves, as the defending champions acquired him in exchange for four players, effectively slamming the door on the Freeman era. The day after that, Olson became a franchise cornerstone himself by agreeing to an eight-year, $168 million extension. Read the rest of this entry »
Clayton Kershaw isn’t the only Dodgers lefty who has been putting up zeroes. So far in the young season, Andrew Heaney has thrown 10.1 innings without allowing an earned run through his first two starts, including one on Sunday, when he held the Reds to just one hit over six innings while striking out 11. In the wake of a disappointing 2021 campaign, Heaney has overhauled both his delivery and his repertoire, and it has quickly paid dividends for the Dodgers.
The 30-year-old Heaney signed a one-year, $8.5 million deal with Los Angeles on November 10, a surprisingly quick and lucrative signing for a pitcher coming off such a forgettable season. He didn’t crack our Top 50 Free Agents list, but he was the first free agent signed to a major league deal last fall, that after reportedly more than a dozen teams, including the Blue Jays, Cardinals, Nationals, Red Sox, and Reds, expressed interest.
Heaney spent the first four months of the 2021 season with the Angels, whom you may recall actually acquired him from the Dodgers in exchange for Howie Kendrick in what was effectively a three-way deal with the Marlins back in December ’14, at the dawn of the Andrew Friedman era. On the heels of three years of more or less league-average work with the Angels — and fewer injuries than usual — Heaney was hit for a 5.27 ERA through the first four months of last season, though his FIP was a more promising 4.06. As suggested by his .319 BABIP at the time, the gap between those two numbers owed something to his pitching in front of one of the majors’ worst defenses, and so his July 30 trade to the Yankees in exchange for prospects Janson Junk and Elvis Peguero made some sense. Old friend Eno Sarris summarized Heaney’s appeal:
Very interested to see what Matthew Blake does with Andrew Heaney. He’s always off the charts by advanced metrics (104 Stuff+, 107 Command+, top 25 K-BB), has high spin, low slot 4-seamer, and has underperformed his estimators. Tough park, but maybe some clay here to be molded.
Heaney began his Yankees career in inauspicious fashion on August 2, serving up four homers in four innings — or really, four homers in the span of six batters while making his second run through the Orioles’ lineup. Things went downhill so quickly that by the end of the month he had lost his rotation spot, and made just one relief appearance after September 13. He was tattooed for a 7.32 ERA and 6.93 FIP in just 35.2 innings for New York, and finished the year with a 5.83 ERA and 4.85 FIP, his worst marks in any of the five seasons in which he’s pitched at least 50 innings.
Even given those gaudy numbers, it’s not hard to see the more tantalizing aspects of Heaney’s performance, some of which Sarris referenced. He stuck out 26.9% of all batters while walking just 7.3%; his strikeout-walk differential of 19.5% ranked 31st among the 129 pitchers with at least 100 innings last year, and was within 0.3% of the likes of Joe Musgrove, Walker Buehler, Alex Wood, and Frankie Montas, all of whom had successful seasons. Per Statcast, his 32.5% chase rate placed him in the 91st percentile, and the 2,443 rpm spin rate on his four-seam fastball put him in the 90th percentile.
That good stuff was undone by his allowing 2.01 homers per nine, the majors’ sixth-highest rate among pitchers with at least 100 innings. Heaney’s 89.3 mph average exit velocity (36th percentile), 40.8% hard-hit rate (32nd percentile) and 9.4% barrel rate (21st percentile) were nothing to write home about, either. His fastball averaged 92.0 mph, but on contact, it was hit for a .271 average and .537 slugging percentage.
As The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya summarized, the Dodgers and other teams interested in Heaney liked his skill set enough to overlook last year’s results:
“His fastball possesses the type of characteristics teams crave. When he’s right, he’s shown an ability to miss bats. Los Angeles has shown an ability to better access that with certain arms, tailoring their pitching development to individualized results in a collaborative effort from the front office on down.”
In short order, the Dodgers have worked with Heaney to rebuild his mechanics, adjusting his arm slot, correcting his tendency to become too rotational, and placing him in the middle of the rubber instead of moving from side to side in search of a fleeting advantage. Their biggest move, however, was to junk Heaney’s curveball, which had below-average horizontal and vertical movement, in favor of a sweeper, a popular new variant of the slider that gets more horizontal movement. According to Sarris, on the Dodgers’ staff alone, seven pitchers including Buehler, Julio Urías, Blake Treinen, and Evan Phillips added a sweeper or adjusted their breaking balls to become one last year (Urías calls his version a slurve). Wrote Sarris in October. “[F]or most Dodgers sliders, the difference between the spin axis the batter sees, and the movement he expects from that spin axis — a phenomenon known as seam-shifted wake — is significant. That unexpected movement is up and out, so these sliders generally have less drop and more sweep than they appear they will as they spin out of the hand.”
When Heaney signed, Baseball Prospectus‘ Michael Ajeto correctly anticipated that the Dodgers would work to add a sweeper to his repertoire, given the mediocrity of his curve and changeup. Wrote Ajeto:
“Sweepers are great pitches in a vacuum, and if Heaney succeeds in folding one into his repertoire, he’ll almost certainly add more whiffs to his profile. But, like any pitch, its success is still dependent on its relationship with the pitcher’s fastball. Heaney’s fastball and changeup get more arm-side movement than average, and so it only makes sense that Heaney would take his curveball and make it move more side-to-side.”
Spoiler alert, that’s more or less what’s happened:
Via Statcast, Heaney’s curve averaged 46.8 inches of drop last year, whereas the new slider has averaged 39.9 inches. The new pitch actually gets less horizontal movement in an absolute sense (5.6 inches versus seven), but more movement relative to its vertical drop.
Given a spring training compressed by the lockout, the Dodgers and Heaney had a lot of ground to cover, and they could be forgiven if this overhaul wasn’t yet ready for prime time. So far, however, the results have been eye-opening. In his first appearance, on April 12 against the Twins, Heaney threw 4.1 shutout innings, allowing just three hits and an unearned run while striking out five. He generated 15 swings and misses on just 67 pitches, nine of which came from among his 34 sweepers (sliders, as Statcast records them, though at Baseball Prospectus, the Pitch Info leaderboard separates them out), including two put-aways apiece against Byron Buxton and Gary Sánchez:
Heaney also got six whiffs and eight called strikes from among his 30 four-seam fastballs, for a 47% CSW on the pitch and a 37% CSW overall.
On Sunday, Heaney retired the first seven batters he faced, five of them by strikeout. He struck out leadoff hitter Kyle Farmer and then four and five hitters Joey Votto and Tyler Stephenson via sliders, finishing the side off in the second by getting Aristides Aquino looking at a low fastball. He began the third by getting Mike Moustakas swinging at a slider, but walked Brandon Drury, and two batters later served up a double to Farmer, though Drury held at third. He escaped the jam, and worked around a two-out walk of Stephenson in the fourth while striking out Tommy Pham, Votto, and Aquino all swinging at sliders. He ended the fifth by whiffing Jake Fraley on a slider, and sandwiched strikeouts of Tyler Naquin (fastball) and Votto (slider) around a two-out walk of Pham in the sixth. Whew!
That was the first time Votto struck out three times in the same game against one pitcher since August 25, 2020, when Brandon Woodruff did a number on him. To find the last time a lefty did it to him, one has to go all the way back to September 10, 2010, when the Pirates’ Paul Maholm did so, joining the Giants’ Jonathan Sanchez (April 25, 2008), the Brewers’ CC Sabathia (four times on September 10, 2008), and Kershaw (August 30, 2009). Welcome to the club, Andrew Heaney.
According to Statcast, on Sunday Heaney got 14 whiffs from among his 39 sliders; throw in those four called strikes and that’s a 46% CSW for the pitch, and again a 37% CSW overall. For the two outings, the slider has produced a 36.5% swinging strike rate, and a 51.1% whiffs per swing rate. When batters have connected on the pitch, they’re 2-for-20, with both hits doubles.
Which raises a cautionary point: While Heaney is missing bats galore with his new toy, he’s also giving up a lot of hard contact. Batters have averaged a 93.3 mph exit velocity on the 20 balls they’ve put in play across his two starts, with a 55% hard-hit rate; all four hits he’s surrendered have been doubles, and loud ones at that, two by the Twins’ Carlos Correa (100.3 mph and 105.5 mph), one by Max Kepler (106.5 mph), and one by Farmer (97.3 mph). Hitters have only barreled one ball against him — a 108.2 mph third-inning lineout by Naquin that Cody Bellinger had to run down in center field — but of the eight balls the Reds put into play, five had xBAs of at least .370. Additionally, while sweepers tend to cause a lot of popups, Heaney has yet to generate a single one. But even with those hard-hit balls, the mix has still been favorable enough for Heaney that his xERA based on his Statcast numbers is 1.99.
On another positive note, the new-look Heaney has so far held lefties to a 1-for-13 showing, that after they cuffed him at a .280/.340/.451 (.339 wOBA) clip over the previous three seasons, compared to .243/.305/.463 (.324 wOBA) by righties. Small sample, obviously, and with regards to the new pitch, demonstrative of the extremes illustrated above: he’s finished five lefties off with the slider (including Votto three times), but of the two put into play, Naquin not only scorched that liner to Bellinger but also hit a similarly hot grounder (108.3 mph), albeit right at second baseman Gavin Lux.
For as impressive as his new offering is, it’s worth noting that Heaney is basically just working with two pitches; he’s thrown the four-seamer 48.7% of the time this year, the sweeper 48.1%, and his changeup just 3.2% (five times). Odds are that those limitations, and the hard contact, will catch up to Heaney, but for the moment his performance stands as an impressive testament to the quick makeover he and the Dodgers have undertaken.
Jay Jaffe
