Despite reaching the playoffs in dramatically different ways, the Brewers (95–67, NL Central champions) and Braves (88–73, NL East champions) look rather alike. Our power rankings give Atlanta the slight edge, but our projections land slightly on the side of Milwaukee. And while the Brewers may have the advantage in record, the Braves had a better run differential. To make matters even tighter, they split their season series, 3–3. Still, our staff predictions, where 26 of 28 folks chose the Brewers, would suggest that this is the most lopsided of the first-round matchups, but I don’t think that captures how close this series is on paper.

The Brewers won the NL Central with elite starting pitching that helped make up for their poor offense, which scored just enough runs to make those starts stand up. The Braves have a more well-rounded team that is strong on offense, pitching and defense, but is perhaps not elite anywhere.

Milwaukee coasted into the playoffs, with a 52–27 stretch in the heart of the season giving them a 99.9% chance to win the division on September 1. Going 14–15 in that final month may have made fans uneasy heading into October, but Craig Counsell was able to use his team’s large lead to go a bit easier on a pitching staff that will be asked to do the heaviest lifting going forward.

Of more concern for the Brewers is the injury to Devin Williams, who broke his hand while celebrating the division clinch and will miss the postseason. He was their best right-handed option out of the pen, and his loss will put added pressure on Brad Boxberger, Hunter Strickland and Jake Cousins, all of whom move up a rung on the ladder and none of whom are sure bets. Boxberger had a great season but pitched poorly in September, with 10 earned runs and three homers allowed in 8.2 innings. Strickland has been stellar since joining the Brewers in mid-June, but that came with a .198 BABIP. Cousins has the most electric stuff of the trio but is fresh off a biceps injury that kept him out of Milwaukee’s final week of games.

Unlike the Brewers, the Braves have been playing meaningful games all September, sweeping a big series against the Phillies at the end of the month and surviving just enough shaky outings from volatile closer Will Smith to clinch their fourth straight division crown. That latest title did not come easy. Atlanta lost its best player, Ronald Acuña Jr., to a torn ACL on July 10th, and went without one of their best pitchers all season when Mike Soroka suffered a setback in his recovery from an Achilles tear. Add some poor play to the mix, and the Braves had just a 10.4% chance to win the NL East on the day of the trade deadline. But thanks to a number of small moves made at the deadline, like bringing in Eddie Rosario, Adam Duvall, and Jorge Soler, the team took off.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Belt has had his fair share of freak injuries throughout his career; Monday evening brought news of yet another, as an X-ray on his thumb revealed a fracture that occurred Sunday afternoon when he was hit on the hand when squaring around to bunt against Rockies reliever Lucas Gilbreath. Some may question why Belt was bunting in the first place, but he sadly has a history of being on the wrong end of poorly thrown baseballs. Also, bunting has long been a tactic he’s successfully used as a heavily shifted upon hitter.

When it comes to Belt, you don’t often have to search for analogous injuries from around the league to get a sense of a timeline, because a similar injury has probably already happened to Belt himself. In fact, this exact same scenario is a repeat: In 2014, he was hit by a pitch and missed eight weeks with a fracture in his thumb. Recovery time from this latest injury is officially unknown, and a timetable will come out soon, but it’s possible if not likely that the Giants will be without Belt for the rest of the year.

That would be a huge loss for San Francisco. Not only has Belt been the team’s best hitter since the start of last season, but he’s also been one of the best in all of baseball over that span:

Throughout his prime, Belt was always a great hitter (a 136 wRC+ from 2013 to ’16), but his lack of homers and his injury history made him a rather contentious figure among Giants fans. When his production wavered from 2017 to ’19 (107 wRC+), like most of the team’s core, it seemed that the best was behind him. But as you saw in that chart, he has reached unforeseen heights thanks to a new diet of home runs that has his isolated slugging (ISO) at a career-high .323, up alongside the game’s best sluggers.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ll start with some screen shots.

The author of that trickery is Ryan Weathers, a 21-year-old rookie for the San Diego Padres who leads all of baseball in pickoffs this season with nine. Runners have only stolen two bases off of him and he hasn’t been called for a balk yet. His pickoff proficiency has been historic, as he has retired those nine runners in only 89.2 innings, or 127 baserunners allowed. On a per baserunner basis, Weathers is having one of the best pickoff seasons of all time:

Read the rest of this entry »

For much of the 2021 season, the story of the Milwaukee Brewers has been the dominant pitching they’ve gotten from their three aces, Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta. Those three all have ERAs under 3.00 and have combined for 14.6 WAR. Since July 1, the Brewers have been on an absolute tear, going 41-23; the once competitive NL Central has turned into a blowout. The roll they’ve been on hasn’t come entirely from who you might expect, though. Look at their starting pitching since July 1:

Please attempt to ignore the nonsense that Burnes has been up to and check out how good Eric Lauer has been. Yes, Adrian Houser has been great, too, but I want to focus on Lauer. His 3.10 ERA is nearly a run and a half better than his previous best and even with him outperforming his peripherals (3.94 FIP, 4.22 xFIP, 4.05 xERA), those marks remain career bests as well. So how has he done it? Read the rest of this entry »

In the years after being drafted by the Los Angeles Angels 10th overall in 2017, Jo Adell was one of the most exciting prospects in baseball. He spent the next few season flying up prospect lists around the industry; at FanGraphs, Adell ranked 66th overall in 2018, 11th in 2019, and fourth going into 2020. Last year, he made his much-hyped debut but it went about as poorly as 38 games and 132 plate appearances can go. He struck out a shocking 41.7% of the time, with an abysmal 29 wRC+. When combined with his surprisingly poor defense, he ended up being the least valuable player in baseball last season.

Adell spent his offseason retooling his swing and sharpening his defense. The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya had this to say about Adell’s changes:

“One day in the cage, he started to cut things down. He held his hands higher, reducing their movement before the pitch. He focused on putting his body in a position to consistently be on time and athletic, rotating through his hips to generate power instead of attempting to force it. He ditched his leg kick, opting for a toe tap that gave him more of a window to stay on time and on plane with a flatter overall approach.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s already September, and maybe you’re still processing that fact. I’ll do you one better by pointing out that the Dodgers and Giants are about to play each other for the final time in the regular season. This is the earliest in the year that these rivals’ last series has occurred since way back in 1968, when Willie Mays and Don Drysdale were fixtures of the rivalry.

With Los Angeles and San Francisco tied atop the division and both teams on pace for 100 wins for the first time since 1962, I thought it prudent to break down what we might expect in this big weekend series.

The Series So Far

The Dodgers and Giants have split their 16 games so far (with San Francisco winning five of the last seven), featuring stellar pitching, unlikely heroes, home run robberies and blown saves. A four-game series in mid-July was full of drama, including Tyler Rogers giving up a walk-off homer to Will Smith, his second three-run outing against the Dodgers this season.

The very next night — actually the next two nights — it was Kenley Jansen who was handed a ninth-inning lead but walked off to a booing home crowd both times after giving up seven combined runs.

That’s just how this series has gone; no lead is safe from a disaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Bell has long been stuck in a quagmire. He possesses the rare quality of hitting the ball extremely hard (92nd percentile HardHit%) while not striking out much (66th percentile K%); only Juan Soto, Manny Machado, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. have a better hard hit rate and better strikeout rate. We’ve seen stretches where this elite combination led to tremendous results, like his two-month tear in 2019 when he put up a 178 wRC+, but for the most part, Bell has settled in as a hitter who falls far short of those lofty heights. And since that breakout 2019, his production has fallen below even his stats before that season, with a 94 wRC+ over his last 634 plate appearances.

One characteristic of Bell’s career is that he is a swing tinkerer. It’s hard to analyze a player when every week you might be looking at a different stance or a new load. If you remember Ben Clemens’ article on Bell from 2019, you may be familiar with some of the tinkering that he has done. That year, he mostly settled into a quieter setup and consistent pre-swing routine, which may have led to his career-low ground-ball rate of 44% and career-high 37 home runs. Fast-forward to this last off-season, when Tony Wolfe wrote up his trade to the Nationals and pointed out that, in 2020, he was back to tinkering with his swing constantly. That is the Josh Bell quagmire: Is he struggling because he’s constantly changing something, or is he constantly changing something because he’s struggling?

I’ve decided to wade into this muck because I never tire of seeing Bell hit home runs, and I simply want there to be more of them. Take the following one, for example:

Notice how he is off-balance. That swing was all arms, and it didn’t matter.

Sure, you’ve seen prodigious power before. You’ve retweeted a Joey Gallo “pop-up” that left the yard or ogled at Franmil Reyes hitting an opposite-field line drive that just never stops going, but those guys strike out over 30% of the time. Bell does weird stuff like that while running a strikeout rate under 20%. Read the rest of this entry »

Whit Merrifield has long been one of the best base stealers in the game, but he has seemingly reached a new level of thievery this season, with 33 steals on only 35 attempts. That 94% success rate is the highest of his career and leads the majors among players with at least 20 attempts (Bo Bichette is an impressive 17 for 17). Our base running metric pegs him as the most valuable runner in the game, and he’s on pace to set a new career high in steals (he swiped 45 in 2018) with a chance to become the first player to reach 50 steals since 2017 — and all at the age of 32.

What’s particularly interesting is that, despite a 90th percentile Sprint Speed of 28.7 feet per second, which is about a half a foot per second off of his peak, Merrifield is far from elite when it comes to his short distance split times, which is a good way to gauge a player’s acceleration. His 90-foot split has gone from a peak of 3.89 seconds in 2018 to 3.97 this season, or from the 79th percentile to the 68th. Other elite thieves like Trea Turner, Byron Buxton and Tim Locastro have splits in the 99th percentile. Even Starling Marte, a fellow high success-rate stealer in his early 30s, is in the 81st percentile.

Base stealing is much more than a runner going top speed, though; it’s a mental and physical duel between the base runner and the pitcher. (That’s not to make light of the catcher’s role, but they are often left holding a baton, and the blame, for a race long lost.) What makes Merrifield the best base stealer in the game at a time when he’s far from the fastest player in the game is that he’s a master of this duel.

Exhibit A:

Read the rest of this entry »

In late June, Chicago White Sox rookie and 2019 third overall pick Andrew Vaughn had a 13-game stretch where he struck out 31% of the time with a 15.1% swinging strike rate. This slump brought his season-long wRC+ down to 91 and his K-rate up to 27.2%. It was a disappointing start to the career of a prospect who was seen as having a great hit tool and had always had below-average strikeout rates in the minors. That stretch culminated in a three-game series against the Mariners that saw Vaughn strike out four times in eight plate appearances and wave through 20% of the pitches he saw:

The White Sox had a day off the next day and by the time their next series against the Twins started on June 29, Vaughn had snapped out of his funk. In fact, he didn’t whiff a single time in the series against Minnesota. When watching his swing in that series, you could notice an adjustment beginning to take shape. Focus on his hands, compared to the swings you saw above:

Vaughn’s ability to make contact has continued and since June 29, his swinging strike rate is an elite of 6.3% — that’s Juan Soto territory. Now that we are into August, Vaughn’s new hand load has solidified further, making it easier to see the difference compared to his early season swings. Here’s a better look at the adjustment:

Read the rest of this entry »

For much of the San Francisco Giants’ wildly improbable 2021 season, the story of their pitching success (they have the third-best ERA and fourth-best FIP in baseball) has centered on a group of revitalized veterans, namely Kevin Gausman, Anthony DeSclafani, Johnny Cueto and Alex Wood, who have pitched better than ever, or at least better than they have in years. The shine on that group has begun to fade in recent weeks, however: the staff ace, Gausman, had a rough July and DeSclafani has struggled recently and now finds himself on the Injured List. Enter Logan Webb, a pitcher much their junior, who couldn’t have picked a better time to get his first taste of big league success.

A fourth round pick back in 2014, Webb moved methodically through a Giants farm system that was struggling to develop starting pitching. Even with the blockades of a 2016 Tommy John Surgery and a 2019 PED suspension, Webb still made his debut in 2019 at 22 years old, making him the youngest Giants starter to debut since Madison Bumgarner did so at age 20 in 2009.

Now 24, Webb is sustaining a high-level of performance in the midst of a pennant race that has the Giants gripping tightly to first place in a stout NL West. He currently boasts an ERA (3.33) more than two runs better than his career mark prior to the season (5.36). He also has the best ERA and FIP in the rotation since July 1 and has given up two runs or fewer in his last eight starts — half of which came against the vaunted Dodgers (three times) and Astros:

Read the rest of this entry »