A few months ago, I took a look at the Rays pitching staff. Despite having the best offense in the league, the team had fallen back to earth after a red-hot start to the season. Surprisingly, their biggest weakness was relief pitching, an area where the team has long had a reputation for excellence. Even with strong offensive showings and a league-leading wRC+, their revolving door of bulk guys and back-of-the-bullpen options simply wasn’t keeping runs off the board. Headed down the stretch, the Rays boast the fourth-best record in baseball and sit just three games back of the AL-leading Orioles in the East. The bullpen has turned it around in a big way. When I last checked in on them in June, their relievers ranked 29th in FIP. Since then, they’ve been in the top five:

One of the biggest reasons for this improvement has been greater stability in the starting rotation. Despite Shane McClanahan going down with a torn UCL after the early-season losses of Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs, this is the closest thing the Rays have had to a regular rotation all year. After missing two months with an oblique injury, Tyler Glasnow has returned to form, with a sub-three ERA and a 34% strikeout rate. They’ve also made the most of Zach Eflin’s elite command; he currently ranks fourth among AL pitchers in WAR and has almost doubled his previous career high. They moved aggressively at the deadline, trading top slugging prospect Kyle Manzardo for Aaron Civale, who’s improved his K-BB% by nine points since leaving Cleveland. And finally, they’ve converted up/down reliever Zack Littell into an effective starter, because what can’t they do? Since being added to the rotation at the end of July, his 5.8 innings per start ranks in the top quarter of all starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Late on Tuesday night, baseball fans all over the world tuned their dials to the ninth inning of the Giants and Reds’ matchup in San Francisco. Through eight innings and 25 batters, Giants starter Alex Cobb had allowed just a single baserunner on a Casey Schmitt error, while setting down the other 24 in order. In the ninth, Cobb sandwiched a walk between two routine fly outs before leaving a splitter over the heart of the plate to Spencer Steer, who crushed an opposite-field liner past the outstretched glove of right fielder Luis Matos to end the no-hitter and the shutout. While a splitter ended Cobb’s no-hit bid tantalizingly close to completion, it’s also the reason his attempt got that far in the first place. Even independent of Cobb’s brilliant outing, his splitter made history in its own way on Tuesday night.

Before going into the splitter, let’s talk about Cobb’s general approach to pitching. He’ll try to catch you off guard with a knuckle curveball on the first pitch, hoping to steal strike one (nine of the 11 curveballs in his complete game were on first pitches), but after that he almost exclusively throws sinkers and splitters in near-equal proportion. These two pitches operate similarly – both leverage the power of seam-shifted wake to maximize arm-side movement, missing barrels and getting batters to hammer the ball into the ground when they make contact. But a quick look at the plate discipline metrics shows his distinct goals in utilizing each pitch:

Like many pitchers who throw splitters, Cobb uses his as a weapon to get hitters to chase below the zone. He’ll get hitters into uncomfortable counts by filling the zone with sinkers, then throw a split that looks nearly identical before diving beneath their barrels. Splitters are pretty uncommon in the majors – while 2023 has represented a peak in splitter usage, they still only represent about 2% of total pitches. While there are others who throw splitters, including Kevin Gausman, Taijuan Walker, and most notably former NPB players like Shohei Ohtani, Kodai Senga, and Shintaro Fujinami, what separates Cobb from the rest of the pack is the sheer frequency with which he throws them. In the past three seasons, he’s ranked first, first, and second in splitter usage rate among starting pitchers, throwing them 38% of the time this year. This splitter, dubbed “The Thing,” ranks second among splitters to Gausman’s in pitch value since Cobb’s debut in 2011. The Thing isn’t just Cobb’s main secondary pitch, it becomes his only secondary pitch in deep counts. And sometimes, he’ll make it his primary pitch.

Cobb threw 83 splitters on Tuesday. Since the pitch tracking era began in 2008, no one else had ever thrown 80 splitters in a single game. Or 70, for that matter. Heck, besides a lone Brad Penny start in 2010 with 66 splitters, no one else had even thrown 60. Cobb’s shattering of the single-game splitter record wasn’t just a result of his pitch count (his 131 pitches thrown is the highest since Mike Fiers‘ no-hitter in 2019); he ranks behind only Penny in single-game splitter percentage, as they comprised 63.4% of his total offerings. Even throwing 50% splitters in a game is a rare occurrence, though it’s unsurprising to see Cobb dominating that leaderboard as well. In fact, all nine of his majority-splitter games have come in the past two seasons:

Cobb’s splitter-first approach in this game offered many advantages over his typical plan of attack, which involves using sinkers to set up the splitter. The first – and most obvious – can be seen from a quick glance at his splits (no pun intended). His splitter is a darned effective pitch, leading his arsenal in chases, swinging strikes, ground balls, wOBA against, and overall run value. If you have a pitch that can do almost everything well, why not throw more of them?

Second, this change in pitch usage was likely a result of advance scouting on the Giants’ part. While the Reds’ offense is middle of the pack versus sinkers, they rank 13th in the NL in wOBA against offspeed pitches. One hitter who particularly struggles against offspeed stuff is TJ Friedl, hitting just .167 with a 34% whiff rate. Cobb capitalized on this weakness by throwing him 11 splitters compared to just four sinkers, three of which came on his first pitches of the game. Friedl’s 0-fer brought his line against splitters to a measly 1-for-19. Reds hitters swung and missed 18 times in their effort to muster up one hit, a season high for Cobb. Unsurprisingly, all 18 whiffs came against The Thing.

Finally, scaling back the sinker in favor of the split has made the sinker even more effective, especially in taking free strikes when hitters were expecting a splitter to dive beneath the strike zone. While Cobb’s surface-level results have been shockingly consistent in the past three years, posting ERAs in the mid-threes, he’s experienced extreme levels of variance under the hood. After posting an impressive 2.80 FIP and 3.15 xERA in his debut season with the Giants, his FIP has climbed by a full run and his xERA has jumped to a scary 4.64. While he’s earning fewer whiffs than before, the most noticeable difference from last year is a near doubling of his home run rate. While it’s easy to point to an outlier HR/FB rate and claim bad luck, his barrel rate has spiked at a rate proportional to the increase in dingers.

The sinker has regressed the most, allowing nine homers so far (compared to just four last year) and a .365 xwOBA, the highest of any of his pitches. On average, he’s thrown his sinkers higher than any other season in his career, preventing it from working its magic as a groundball pitch. And while a difference of a couple inches may not seem significant, just a few mistake pitches can have an outsized effect on barrel and home run rates. Indeed, his sinker’s Location+ has fallen from 105 to 102 over the past two seasons, as higher sinkers tend to be hit harder and on a line. In this start, he missed spots with both pitches along his arm’s path through the zone, but his ability to draw chases on low splitters kept him out of dangerous hitters’ counts:

If hitters are doing more damage to the sinker than they used to, then it’s in Cobb’s interest to get as few swings as possible against it. This is where the splitter comes in. Batters thinking of the splitter as the primary pitch may give up on offerings that they expect to move out of the zone, instead watching them flutter over the plate, even when located suboptimally. In the seventh inning, both Steer and Elly De La Cruz took first-pitch sinkers in the nitro zone, setting the table for a barrage of splitters chased outside the zone that led to a strikeout and groundout. Of Cobb’s 36 sinkers thrown, 17 were taken for strikes, giving him the upper hand in countless plate appearances. While the average hitter swings at about two-thirds of the pitches they see in the zone, Reds hitters saw 23 in-zone sinkers and swung at just six of them. Even when they did swing, none of the balls put in play against it had an xBA higher than .200. In total, Cobb racked up 28 called strikes on the night, tied for the second most of any pitching performance all year.

Leading with the splitter allowed Cobb to maximize the strengths of his wipeout pitch, while simultaneously shielding the weaknesses of his sinker. The synergy of his arsenal, along with added velocity, has brought Cobb to a new career apex at an age when many pitchers are in decline. And he’s doing this despite recovering from two major injuries and temporarily losing feel for his signature pitch. Yet, his 3.20 FIP over the past three seasons is the best stretch of his career, and he’s recently added his first All-Star appearance to the mix. Losing a no-hitter just two strikes away from glory can be heartbreaking, but he’s only come back stronger from adversity before. That’s just The Thing about Alex Cobb.

Corbin Carroll is having a marvelous season. After a 2022 cup of coffee in which he put up a 130 wRC+, he has improved in nearly every statistical category and leads all rookies in WAR by a wide margin. But while he has a 145 wRC+ (highest among NL rookies) and 41 extra-base hits, he isn’t just a one-dimensional slugger; the completeness of his profile is astonishing for a 22-year-old rookie. He’s amassed 7 RAA since his debut and is the only outfielder with three five-star catches this season, though his arm strength still has room for improvement. Most impressively, Carroll is possibly the most electric baserunner in the league and is producing value with his legs at a historic rate.

Carroll puts a lot of balls in play; his 19.8% strikeout rate and 8.4% swinging-strike rate are both better than league average. But perhaps the only remaining weakness in his game is in his batted ball distribution. He hits the ball on the ground nearly half the time, and while he’s good at turning his fly balls into homers, a considerable fraction of his air balls are popped up. In other words, many of Carroll’s batted balls are either hit straight up or straight down, with a big gap in the middle. His sweet spot rate ranks in the 16th percentile, and his line drive percentile is barely in the double digits. While Luis Arraez can practically walk to first thanks to his barrage of liners into the outfield, Carroll has to sprint for every base he can get.

Luckily for Carroll, his ability to fly out of the box is nearly unmatched. His average home-to-first time of 4.07 seconds is tied for second in baseball. And he can turn on the jets when he needs to; his 62 bolts rank second to only Bobby Witt Jr., who carries the disadvantage of having to start from the right-handed batter’s box. But Carroll doesn’t just use his speed to get on base (he has just six infield hits this year); he uses it to stretch his base hits as far as they can go. With his ability to rocket around the basepaths, any ball he puts in play can easily become a double or triple.

Imagine you’re an MLB outfielder. A batter hits the ball hard on the ground, past a diving shortstop. You run to cut the ball off before it gets past you and fire a strike to second base. How much time do you think you need to make that play? If your answer is anything longer than 7.5 seconds, then congratulations: Carroll has just stretched his single into a double off you. He had the three fastest home-to-second times in the majors in 2022 despite hitting just nine doubles, leveraging his 99th-percentile sprint speed to teleport around the bases. Read the rest of this entry »

Content warning: This story contains details of domestic abuse.

Professional sports are enthralling for the action they produce on the playing field. Highlights of home runs, slam dunks, and touchdowns can create lifelong relationships between fans and the sports they enjoy. Yet it’s necessary to remember that sports are situated within the world around them, and often mirror wider trends within it.

It’s easy to think of baseball players as little figures on a screen who appear at 7:00 every night, run around for a few hours while being televised live, and blink out of existence until the next evening when network cameras are back on. It seems that the closer we get to perfectly measuring a player’s value on the diamond, the more we detach the dots on the television from real people who, like us, have lives even after the camera operators go home for the night. People with hobbies, homes, and families, people who matter to other real people besides the fans on the other side of the screen with emotions, bragging rights, or even money staked to what the little humanoid figures do. Every baseball player possesses the same traits that make those watching at home human, and with that unfortunately comes the capacity to cause indescribable harm to others. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember early in the year, when the Rays were winning seemingly every single game? Well, they still are. They’re not on the 130-win pace they were at the beginning of May, but the fact they’re still well ahead of anyone else in a loaded division is impressive in itself. So how are they winning so much? First off, they put runs on the scoreboard like no other.

If the season ended today, their 127 wRC+ would be the highest in MLB history, ahead of the Big Red Machine, murderer’s row Yankees, or recent Astros squads. We’ve written about players like Randy Arozarena, Wander Franco, and Yandy Díaz, who have all put up superstar performances. And despite losing both Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs to injury, Tampa’s rotation grades out impressively thanks to free-agent signee Zach Eflin having a career year, top prospect Taj Bradley putting up good numbers, and Shane McClanahan continuing to do Shane McClanahan things.

Finally, there’s the bullpen. For the past decade, much of the Rays’ reputation as a premier organization for player development has come from their ability to turn almost anyone into an above-average reliever, building competitive playoff pitching staffs with minimal contributions from the starting rotation. With two key rotation pieces shelved for the season, the relievers must be neutralizing opponents at an elite rate. Let’s see how their season is going.

As surprising as it is, the Rays’ 4.54 bullpen FIP ranks sixth worst in baseball, narrowly avoiding sub-replacement level status. How has the team with the greatest track record of reliever development experienced such futility this season, and how have they won so much despite leading the league in bullpen innings? Read the rest of this entry »

LaMonte Wade Jr. is having a wonderful season. As Michael Baumann wrote a few weeks ago, the step forward he’s taken in his swing decisions have fueled a career high 156 wRC+ and .429 OBP, both significant improvements from his 2021 breakout campaign. And while much of his development is the result of him reducing his swing rate, he’s still doing more damage on contact than his previous self. Last Friday, the man nicknamed “Late Night LaMonte” (due to his .975 career OPS in high leverage situations) inserted himself into the record books early in the evening, sending Dean Kremer’s first pitch of the game deep to right field for the 100th splash hit in Oracle Park history:

Since its opening in 2000, the right field wall has been one of the most distinctive features of Oracle Park. Despite measuring just 309 feet down the line (the second shortest of any big league park), it has been one of the most difficult to clear for a home run, with the wall’s 24-foot height and wind from the neighboring San Francisco Bay helping to suppress long balls. According to Statcast, Oracle Park is among the most difficult parks for left-handed hitters to hit homers despite grading out neutral overall. But on 100 occasions, hitters managed not just to clear the right field wall, but also to leave the stadium entirely. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a growing stereotype that even the most unheralded reliever coming off the shuttle from Triple-A can pump triple digits and throw wipeout secondary stuff out of nowhere. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this phenomenon in the pitch data era, from the Rays developing Jason Adam into a high-leverage ace to Yennier Cano improving his ERA from 11.50 to 0.35. Baltimore and Tampa Bay are known for turning people off the street into elite relievers, but nearly every team is light years ahead of where the industry was just a few years ago. Of course, not every pitcher can have a 200 ERA+, but I wanted to see just how many replacement-caliber relievers really are the real deal. Let’s take a look at a nondescript game from earlier this week and find out.

On Tuesday, the Angels and Red Sox faced off. The two teams had played a rather close game through the end of seven innings. Boston starter Brayan Bello surrendered just two solo shots in the longest start of his young career, while his opponent, Griffin Canning, one-upped him with seven shutout frames. As the bullpens came in, the Sox still had a fighting chance to win… at least until Mike Trout clubbed a two-run homer off Joely Rodríguez, who would then allow two more runners to reach base. While just a one-run swing would make it a save situation, the leverage index sat at a measly 0.07. At this point, both teams went to the back of their bullpens, with the Sox summoning Justin Garza and the Angels letting Jacob Webb complete the game. Read the rest of this entry »

The new rules introduced to MLB this season have been the subject of much discussion. From the larger bases and pickoff rules leading to a rise in stolen bases, to the shift restrictions resuscitating the pulled groundball, to the potential impact of the pitch timer on the fan and player experience, the 2023 rule changes have been the most significant in recent memory.

Whether or not new ideas end up in the final rulebook, the league is constantly innovating to determine whether further changes would improve the game. In 2019, MLB reached an agreement with the Atlantic League, considered to be the highest non-affiliated league in the country, to “test experimental playing rules and equipment during the Atlantic League’s Championship Season.” Recent rule changes like the larger bases and limited infield shifting were piloted in the Atlantic League before coming to MLB, but not every rule tested there has been or will be implemented in the majors. In 2021, the Atlantic League moved the pitching mound back by a foot, breaking a century-long custom. The goal was to give hitters a better chance against premium velocity while also allowing breaking balls to shine more, but testing found that the change hadn’t accomplished its intended effects. Last week, MLB announced its new experimental rules for the 2023 Atlantic League season, which begins today:

Here are the experimental rules MLB is using in the Atlantic League which starts on Friday, April 28: pic.twitter.com/93NSEFR59B

— Britt Ghiroli (@Britt_Ghiroli) April 18, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not often that a 33-year old player still owed $34 million over two years is designated for assignment, but after a three-inning, seven run performance against the Cardinals on Wednesday that ballooned his ERA to 10.26, the Diamondbacks decided to cut bait on Madison Bumgarner. Things certainly didn’t go the way the D-Backs anticipated after inking him to a five-year, $85 million deal, as he closed out his Arizona tenure with a 5.23 ERA, 5.18 FIP, and 1 WAR in 363 innings.

As a Diamondback, Bumgarner seemed like a shell of his former self, the former Giants ace who was the hero of three separate playoff runs. His numbers went from good to terrible almost overnight, but the writing was on the wall long before he signed with Arizona. After a successful 2016 campaign that ended in his second top-five Cy Young finish, he missed about half of ’17 and ’18 with injuries, one of which was sustained in a dirt bike crash. While his surface-level results in those two seasons held steady with his career norms, his FIP climbed by nearly a full run as he lost much of the strikeout potency that made him so dominant in years past. His fastball, which once sat around 93 mph, lost two ticks and much of its whiff capabilities. The slider/cutter hybrid that he threw with near-equal frequency to the heater also started getting hit harder; batters had an xSLG nearing .500 versus both offerings in his final season as a Giant.

Despite these warning flags, the Diamondbacks still handed him a big contract before the 2020 season, where his performance began to tank. His strikeout rates continued to fall, and the good luck he experienced later in his Giants tenure faded away. It doesn’t help that Bumgarner has been characterized as unwilling to make adjustments even with diminished stuff, instead sticking with his old, clearly ineffective gameplan. In his late-30s, Charlie Morton nearly tripled his curveball usage compared to his early Pittsburgh days and had the best years of his career. Justin Verlander stopped throwing changeups with the Astros and returned to Cy Young form after some middling seasons; his teammate Gerrit Cole started elevating his fastball more, setting strikeout records in the process. Bumgarner, though, stuck with his fastball/cutter diet, despite the fact that in 2022, his four-seamer was the second-worst pitch in baseball, according to Statcast. As hitters adapted to crush his weakened stuff, Bumgarner couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt back, leading to an unceremonious end to his time on the Diamondbacks. Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland Athletics entered the season with low expectations. After completing their two-year fire sale by trading Sean Murphy to Atlanta for a package that was generally agreed to be quite light and adding minimal talent in free agency, the Opening Day ZiPS projections forecasted them to win just 69 games; their playoff odds were just 2.9%. Still, that total would have tied them with Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Kansas City, while Colorado and Washington saved them from the honor of being projected for the league’s worst record. Two weeks later, the A’s sit at a miserable 3-13, below any of the other bottom feeders. While the team’s collective 94 wRC+ isn’t good by any means, it’s not the reason their run differential is 29 runs worse than anyone else’s. Instead, their pitching staff has been one of the worst in recent memory.

With 125 runs surrendered in 16 games, Oakland has pitched far worse than any other team in the league. The 29th-place White Sox are closer in runs allowed to the 12th-place Astros than they are to the last place A’s. The A’s 188 ERA- and 156 FIP- paint a similar picture. In fact, with a 7.60 ERA thus far, this Oakland squad has the third-worst staff ERA through 16 games of any team in the integration era, only outdone by the 1951 St. Louis Browns and the 1955 Kansas City A’s; those teams each went on to allow at least 5.7 runs per game across the entire season. A simple glance at each team’s 2023 strikeout and walk rates shows a clear gulf between Oakland and the field:

Many of these struggles have occurred in a handful of huge blowups, as the A’s have surrendered double digit runs in six games. On the second day of the season, fans excitedly watched the major league debut of Shintaro Fujinami, who showed flashes of both elite stuff and extreme wildness in NPB. After sitting down his first six batters and notching four strikeouts, Fujinami allowed eight baserunners, three via walk, while recording just one out before being lifted from the game. His second start also featured a blowup inning after cruising the first time through the order; he exited after 4.1 innings, with four walks and a hit batsman. On Saturday, in the A’s 15th game of the season, Fujinami recorded the team’s first quality start with six innings of one-run ball, but he still took the loss after coming out for a seventh inning and adding two more runs to his line. Read the rest of this entry »