Salvador Perez has been aggressive from the start. He’s long been an aggressive hitter, and a talented bat-to-ball hitter, and pitchers have responded as you’d expect. This is Perez’s seventh year in the big leagues. In every successive year, he’s seen a lower rate of pitches in the zone. He’s also steadily seen fewer fastballs, this year owning the lowest fastball rate in the game. Perez doesn’t see strikes because he swings at balls, and for the same reason, he seldom draws a walk. In each of Perez’s last three seasons, he’s finished with an OBP under .300. For that matter, he’s finished with an OBP under .290.

Perez is no stranger to having a hot start, so, bear that in mind. But something so far this year is unusual. Again, he’s not seeing many strikes, and he’s not seeing many fastballs. Accordingly, he hasn’t drawn walks, because he’s still chasing as often as ever. Yet Perez is hitting for power, sitting on a 127 wRC+. There’s a long way to go before we know what Perez truly is, but he looks to be building on a process started last year. Salvador Perez is fully focused on finding left field.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s begin with something pleasing. We’re all in a good mood. Here’s Michael Conforto hitting an unnecessary home run on Tuesday:

That home run didn’t matter in part because, earlier in the game, Michael Conforto hit a home run. And it didn’t matter in part because, earlier in the game, Conforto hit a two-run single. It was a good night to be Michael Conforto. It’s been a good year to be Michael Conforto.

As things stand, Conforto ranks 11th among position players in WAR. The weird news is he’s behind Zack Cozart. The better news is he’s tied with Buster Posey. Just by hitting, Conforto’s fifth in wRC+, between Ryan Zimmerman and Bryce Harper. There was concern coming into the season that Conforto might not end up with enough playing time. Circumstances have allowed him to play plenty, and now he’s made himself impossible to sit.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays and the Angels have played more than anyone, all the way up at 47 games. There’s no major reason why they presently lead the league — it’s just noise, and everyone ends up in the same place. The Cardinals and the Twins will have to catch up eventually. They’re trailing behind, having each played just 41 games. The median right now is 44. We’re through more than a quarter of the regular season.

Small samples don’t feel so small anymore. They are small, at least relative to full-season data, but now we can more safely look for trends, for disappointments and surprises. It’s true on the player level, and it’s also true on the team level. For example, check out the surprisingly good Colorado Rockies! Or, check out the surprisingly disappointing San Francisco Giants. The records are all starting to mean something.

But, just how much do they mean? I have prepared for you a quick post. Before long, every team in baseball will reach the 50-game mark. I’ve chosen 50 because it’s nice and round and, well, that’s it. If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll notice I’ve run a post like this before. Consider this an update, with new data. How much do those early records mean? How much more or less do they mean than the projections?

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve read enough articles over the years that you’re pretty well aware of the major trends within the game. Relative to history, strikeout totals keep climbing higher and higher. Fastball velocities keep climbing higher and higher, and the number of defensive shifts is on its own upswing. And, of course, there’s the recent home-run spike, which has seen the total dinger number skyrocket. This is the modern-day brand of baseball that we accept: there are more whiffs than ever, because there’s more heat than ever, but the reduced balls in play are at least partially offset by the balls that are leaving the yard. All of this is well and irrefutably established.

What if I told you that, right now, baseball is on pace for another all-time high? One that has nothing to do with homers or strikeouts or anything else. Would you be curious? It’s only natural that the answer would be yes — we all want to know what’s going on within the game. So, I’ll go ahead and let you in on the secret. But, let me forewarn you. It’s awfully stupid.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sorry to have to tell you that you’re never going to hit in the major leagues. As far as how well you’d do if you got the opportunity — it’s fun to think about the lowest possible limits, but random fans never get the chance. It’s an experiment that will never be run, but the closest we can get to an understanding is by examining American League pitchers. Every last one of them is a professional athlete worth millions of dollars, but they’re not supposed to have to hit. The fact that they do hit sometimes is more or less an accident of scheduling. They practice hitting just about never, and that’s reflected in their results. In this table, there are two lines. One shows how American League pitchers have hit so far in 2017. The other shows how all the regular players have hit so far against Craig Kimbrel.

I kept it a mystery because it’s a popular writer technique. Look, they’re almost indistinguishably bad! Point made! But just for the hell of it, I’ll tell you now, the AL pitcher line is the first one. The Kimbrel line is the second one. The second one is the worse one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

If we can just be up front about things — I don’t think the Twins are very good. Chances are, you don’t think the Twins are very good, either. They didn’t come in as a consensus contender, and even now, the rest of the way, our projections have the Twins as the second-worst team in the American League. If they’re good, actually good, well, I know at least I will need a lot more convincing. That’s enough of that. Let’s get to the positive stuff.

I don’t know how much longer it’ll last, but right now one can find the Twins at the top of the AL Central. It’s not a division many expected to be good, but it *is* a division that includes the defending AL champs, so seeing the Twins where they are is a surprise. As long as the Twins are successful, they’re worth our attention, and for now I’d like to bring your attention to something about the team’s hitters. Recently, I noted that the Twins have experienced something of a defensive turnaround. There are also signs of progress on the offensive front. Stick with me, because you know I have plots.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an argument to be made that we’re exposed to too much Statcast data. It’s kind of a silly argument, and it’s easy enough to avoid, but there might indeed be overuse, or at least over-citation. It’s a function, I think, of enthusiasm; think about the data we have access to now. Not very long ago, such an amount of information would’ve been unimaginable. Now we have everything. It’s no wonder some people want to refer to it all the time. It’s an information miracle. Sometimes the enthusiasm can go a little overboard.

What I personally don’t have much use for is the normal stuff. I don’t care about regular pitches, or regular home runs. A home run, by its very existence, has to be hit pretty hard, at a vertical angle. I don’t need to hear that some guy hit a homer 105 miles per hour. I’m intrigued when the home runs are particularly fast. I’m even more intrigued when the home runs are particularly slow. That brings us to Wednesday.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a FanGraphs reader, you’re presumably familiar with the TTO acronym. Just in case you’re not, TTO stands for Three True Outcomes, and said three true outcomes are walks, strikeouts, and homers. They’re the outcomes least likely to lie to you; they’re the outcomes that tell you the most about the individuals involved. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that there are more strikeouts now than ever before. You also know that home-run rates have taken off. So this plot should fit with what you’d figure. Viewing over an entire century of baseball, you see league-wide TTO% taking flight.

This season, a third of all plate appearances have ended with either a walk, a strikeout, or a homer. As recently as 1992, it was more like a quarter of all plate appearances. It was a fifth of all plate appearances in 1946. The image there speaks for itself, so I suppose I don’t need to address it any longer. The trends are up, is the point. There’s no sign of this pattern changing course.

Recently, the Effectively Wild podcast received a listener email, asking how high is too high. That is, how high could TTO% go before the game just feels all weird and broken? I didn’t have a good answer. I’m unconvinced the average fan cares about this as much as analysts do. We’re the ones who need stuff to write about, while the average fan just wants to know if a given team is winning or losing. Here’s one thing I can say: The future might look like the Rays. Nobody else TTOs quite like the Rays do.

Read the rest of this entry »

Theory: Players have gotten better than ever at hitting pitches down in the zone. I don’t think this counts as a controversial theory anymore, and it goes hand in hand with what’s been casually termed the fly-ball revolution. Anecdotally, it seems like there are more and more hitters trying to hit the ball in the air. Generally speaking, this is achieved by swinging with more of an uppercut, and, generally speaking, players with uppercuts are more productive down in the zone, instead of up.

Theory: This is one of the reasons why there’s been an emphasis on higher-spin fastballs. Those are the tougher-to-hit fastballs, fastballs you mostly want to be elevated. This past offseason, I put forth the idea that the cure to the home-run spike could involve more fastballs up. If pitchers just focused somewhere else, then hitters wouldn’t so often be able to elevate the pitches at their knees. To summarize, simply: It seems like there would be a pitcher response to the hitter response. It seems like there should be more high fastballs.

But, are there more high fastballs? Turns out this is really easy to check. And the answer is, well, basically, no.

Read the rest of this entry »