Remember when the Rockies attempted to assemble a super-mega bullpen? During the 2017-18 offseason, the team committed a combined $106 million to Wade Davis, Jake McGee, and the protagonist of this article, Bryan Shaw. What followed was a disaster. The trio put up just 0.4 WAR while part of the Rockies bullpen, a miserable return on investment.

Each pitcher had his own flaws, but none was worse than Shaw, who dragged down an already disappointing total with -0.5 WAR over a two-year span. If you’re not too familiar with him, Shaw is synonymous with his cutter, which he’s thrown upwards to 80% of the time in his career. It’s a fantastic pitch, featuring some of the league’s best horizontal movement in tandem with ample rise. The problem: In Colorado, the high altitude suppresses magnus force, the source of backspin and thus vertical break. Many of Shaw’s cutters became extremely hittable in this new environment – his Hard Hit rate jumped from 28.6% in 2017 to 39.7% the following year.

That’s where the story ended, for a while. Even at FanGraphs, our last mention of Shaw was in a Sunday Notes column back in 2019. Two years later, Bryan Shaw is now an essential part of Cleveland’s bullpen, his former home, with a 1.42 ERA and 3.56 FIP. Talk about a resurgence! What’s more, it’s not as if he’s added a secret new pitch. He still throws the cutter as often as he did years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

In the war for the NL Central, the Cardinals are leading the charge. Their robust 25-18 record is no stroke of luck – per our BaseRuns standings, they’ve outperformed their theoretical win total by just one. Breaking this down further, the pitching has done most of the heavy lifting. Jack Flaherty has become that ace who’s going to ace, Kwang Hyun Kim has upped his strikeout rate thanks to a refined slider, and John Gant (!) has a 2.08 ERA in 39.2 innings. Gant is also leading major league baseball with 28 walks, but hey, the Cardinals will take it.

The offense isn’t bad – it has managed 4.29 runs per game, which is about the league average. It might have been worse, however, if not for Yadier Molina. The legendary catcher somehow has a 138 wRC+, the second-highest amongst Cardinals hitters with at least 50 plate appearances. His defense is no longer an asset, but he’s more than made up for lost value by swinging a hot bat.

But sure, this isn’t the first time Molina has gone on an offensive tear. Looking at 25-game stretches of wOBA dating back to 2018, we can see the many peaks and valleys that have shaped his production: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to proclaim 2021 the Year of the No-Hitter.

At the beginning of April, Joe Musgrove graced us with an electric performance versus the Rangers. Just five days later, Carlos Rodón announced his resurgence by shutting down Cleveland. John Means then tossed a near-perfect game against the Mariners, and Wade Miley followed in Rodón’s footsteps, handing Cleveland another no-hit night. That brings us to yesterday, when Spencer Turnbull became the latest pitcher to go the distance, striking out nine Mariners while allowing just two baserunners via a pair of walks.

That’s an almost unfathomable five no-hitters – and we’re still in the month of May. Since 1901, the only other season with at least five such games before June was 1917, a year that falls in major league baseball’s Dead Ball era. There were six total no-nos that year, all thrown prior to June, but it doesn’t feel like the string of no-hitters will come to a stop this time around. Though the league’s offensive environment is certainly livelier now compared to a century ago, pitchers of all sizes, deliveries, and repertoires are throwing harder and smarter than before. In addition, a greater emphasis on power has seen hitters whiffing at higher and higher rates, sacrificing contact for big hits. The modern record for the most no-hitters in a single season is seven, which occurred in 1990, 1991, and 2012. We are on track to obliterate it.

On a more granular note, the Seattle Mariners give opposing pitchers one of the better chances at authoring baseball history. Coming into the game against Detroit, they collectively carried a 89 wRC+, the eighth-lowest mark in baseball. At the conclusion of Turnbull’s masterful performance, the team’s batting average dropped below .200, the worst in the majors. Mariners hitters have struck out in 26.3% of their plate appearances, but the main issue is they just aren’t performing well – that goes for regulars (Dylan Moore) and recently demoted prospects (Taylor Trammell) alike. Read the rest of this entry »

At some point in your baseball fandom, you’ll end up thinking about Schrödinger’s Baseball Player. The question posed by it is simple: When does a struggling hitter or pitcher stop existing as a superposition of states – either plain unlucky or genuinely worrisome – and become one or the other?

Consider the case of Luis Castillo. Like most, I initially ignored his first few bad starts. But now, about a quarter of the way into the season, the righty’s 7.71 ERA is the worst amongst all qualified starters. Though his peripherals are much better, including a relatively respectable 4.79 FIP, you have to imagine that something is off. Maybe we should open the box and find out what.

There are a couple of things to consider regarding Castillo, but let’s focus on his changeup. Improved command of it led to a breakout season in 2019, which he followed up with an excellent 2020. A pitch with incredible movement and a penchant for missing bats, it’s the foundation of his entire repertoire. In fact, even this season, hitters have only mustered a .254 xwOBA against it, which is obviously great. So what’s the hold up? Well:

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“Houser (3-3) picked up the win on Saturday, allowing two runs on five hits over six innings in a 6-2 victory over the Marlins,“ RotoWire News reported. “He struck out ten without walking a batter.”

That’s a straightforward blurb. Nothing really stands out, so I understand if you forgot about it. Adrian Houser himself isn’t a very notable pitcher – his repertoire, which consists primarily of a sinker and an assorted mix of other pitches, doesn’t scream Pitching Ninja material. Against the Marlins a week ago, however, Houser entered uncharted territory in the realm of pitching. Not all outliers are worth mentioning, but this one is:

The graph is messy, but you can still see what happened. Ten strikeouts tied a career-high for Houser, which he reached on August 10, 2019. This time around, though, the journey there was markedly different. For the first time in his career, Houser threw his sinker over 70% of the time. He’d been high-strikeout in some games, high-sinker in others, but the two attributes had never converged so clearly until now. It’s not as if those sinkers were setting up a different pitch, either. Of the 10 strikeouts Houser collected, eight came from the sinker, while the remaining two came from the changeup and the curveball. For the most part, one pitch bookended each plate appearance.

This is remarkable if you know at least a smidgen of pitching. For one, the sinker isn’t a strikeout pitch! Its intended purpose is to induce grounders from hitters, not collect whiffs. Second, unless you’re a reliever, who throws a sinker or any one pitch that often? You’d imagine that hitters would catch on at some point. Yet Houser emerged relatively unscathed. The home run, double, and single that led to two earned runs weren’t even recorded off his sinker. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part Two of the April edition of my monthly column, in which I recap what’s been going on in the Korean Baseball Organization on both a league- and team-wide scale. In case you missed it, Part One provided a brief introduction to this column, discussed league-wide trends, then covered the Samsung Lions, LG Twins, KT Wiz, and SSG Landers. Today’s post will cover the remaining six teams. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them as comments or reach out to me via Twitter. Without further ado, let’s talk some KBO!

Team Notes

Doosan Bears

The offseason was not kind to the Doosan Bears. Pitchers Chris Flexen and Raúl Alcántara both had phenomenal years, but were whisked away by foreign leagues. They also lost multiple regulars to free agency, including first baseman Jae-il Oh 오재일 and second baseman Joo-hwan Choi 최주환, both formidable hitters.

That doesn’t mean the Bears are no longer a playoff-caliber team – there’s still an abundance of talent on the roster, but there’s no guarantee this time around. At least replacement signee Walker Lockett has averaged six innings per start with a 3.54 FIP, but Aríel Miranda 미란다 seems like a disaster waiting to happen. His 36 strikeouts in 28.1 innings don’t look as impressive when you consider that (a) they’re spread across six starts, and (b) he also has 22 walks, six of them issued in a single outing. There’s upside, but unless Miranda finds the zone, the Bears will have a headache to deal with. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the arrival of the KBO was a breath of fresh air for our despondent, quarantined, and baseball-deprived selves. Between May and July, the entire baseball community became invested in a league that is in many ways different from MLB. There’s greater emphasis on contact hitting and baserunning, which recalled another, perhaps nostalgic, era of major league baseball for some. Sure, the defense and pitching could be clunky at times, but we embraced them as fun idiosyncrasies. And though baseball and a semblance of normalcy has returned stateside, there are still plenty of fans who want to monitor the KBO.

That’s why I’ve decided to start a monthly column that acts as a periodic check-in on the KBO. This isn’t, say, a power ranking, but rather an overview of which developments I find interesting. Today’s Part One will discuss league-wide trends and include updates on the Samsung Lions, KT Wiz, LG Twins, and SSG Landers. Part Two, which I hope to get published on Monday, will deal with the six remaining teams. Also, don’t forget to check out our expanded KBO stats offering as the season progresses! So without further ado, let’s begin! Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about the Padres and how their usage of the infield shift stands out. To recap: They shift almost exclusively against left-handed hitters to great success, neglecting right-handed ones in the process. This decision is backed up by public research, which casts doubt on the efficacy of shifts against righties.

As a few of the comments noted, though, the Padres aren’t the most interesting subject when it comes to shifts. If anything, they’re conformists! The Dodgers and Rays, in contrast, are the rebels who defy convention by shifting more against righties than against lefties. We still don’t have a clear answer as to why. Leading up to this article, I did take a crack at the problem, and in the process, unearthed something about the Dodgers.

Before that, some context: Much of our discourse regarding the shift is focused on the dynamic between the hitter and team shifting against him. Kole Calhoun has a tendency to pull the ball, so the Dodgers have prepared this alignment. If Calhoun could go the other way, he’d earn himself a free knock, and so on.

But what about a version of the dynamic that includes the pitcher? By the same logic applied to hitters, if a pitcher could alter his approach to induce pulled grounders that are tailor-made for infield shifts, he’d probably be successful. We know pitchers can control the types of batted balls they allow to some extent: Last season, our Alex Chamberlain wrote about the relationship between pitch location and launch angle. As it turns out, a lower pitch will yield a lower launch angle compared to one located higher up, irrespective of pitch type.

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The recent flurry of matchups between the Dodgers and Padres have been enthralling. That’s what transpires when two teams of similar caliber go head-to-head – both clubs feature impressive lineups, employ the league’s best starters, and have quality bullpens and bench options to maintain the tension in later innings. They also both possess good front offices. The Dodgers have long been at the sabermetric forefront, while the Padres have strengthened their analytics department over the last few years. They share multiple characteristics, and not surprisingly, both teams excel.

However, the intrastate rivals do disagree on one major aspect of the modern game: infield shifts. Since last year, the Dodgers have applied the shift in 58.0% of opportunities, a league-leading rate over that span. In contrast, the Padres have done so just 21.5% of time. Only the Cardinals and Braves, two teams that are notably shift-averse, recorded lower rates.

What’s interesting, though, is that this isn’t because the Padres dislike the shift. Let’s dig a bit deeper. The Dodgers are what you would call equal-opportunity shifters – that is, they don’t discriminate between left- and right-handed hitters. Of their 6,729 shifts during the aforementioned time span, 3,210 (47.7%) of them were against the former. (Here I should clarify that I’m only factoring in Baseball Savant’s shifts, not strategic alignments, to simplify the analysis.)

Ok, now for San Diego. Their total of 2,608 shifts is much lower, but, and I kid you not, 2,524 (96.8%) of them were against left-handed hitters! And no, the Padres didn’t stumble into this. The gap between them and second place, the Rockies, is about 18 percentage points. There’s clear intent here, which looks even more impressive on a graph:

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There are two hitters I would like to introduce. The first, Player A, has been described in terms of the classic trio of statistics: average, on-base percentage, and slugging. The second, Player B, has been described in terms of modern metrics like Exit Velocity and Barrel rate. Take a look at their numbers and try to see who’s better:

Player A: .081/.205/.162

Player B: 95.4 mph Exit Velocity, 63.6% Hard-Hit rate, 27.3% Barrel rate

Not much of a competition, right? Without additional context, you probably chose Player B in a heartbeat. Player A’s appalling triple-slash makes him a DFA candidate. Player B, on the other hand, looks like a hitting genius! Those numbers and rates would place him well above the 95th percentile of all major leaguers. The twist, of course, is that these two hitters are in fact the same person: Matt Carpenter, veteran infielder for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Traditional and modern metrics do disagree at times, but the disparity between them is seldom this wide. Through 18 games, Carpenter’s efforts to clobber the ball have not translated into actual results, much to the chagrin of Cardinals fans. There’s having a stretch of bad luck, then there’s hitting below .100. Is there something else we’re missing? Read the rest of this entry »