If you’ve been able to keep pace with our trade deadline articles, you’ve probably noticed a lot of articles about the Braves. They’ve brought in an entirely new outfield just today: Jorge Soler from the Royals and Eddie Rosario and Adam Duvall from Cleveland and Miami, respectively. That’s after acquiring Joc Pederson a few weeks ago when they lost Ronald Acuña Jr. to injury. It’s a flurry of moves for a team in a precarious playoff position: below .500 and with playoff odds under 10%. At the same time, Atlanta is only four games back of the Mets in the NL East.

With both the stretch run and a potential postseason stay in mind, the Braves decided to keep churning, acquiring reliever Richard Rodríguez from the Pirates for a pair of prospects: right-handers Bryse Wilson and Ricky DeVito. Rodríguez is no playoffs-or-bust rental, though; he has the most team control left of any of the players Atlanta added at the deadline, as he won’t reach free agency until after the 2023 season.

Rodríguez, 31, will go from being the Pirates’ closer to a high-leverage role with the Braves, perhaps even getting some save opportunities if manager Brian Snitker wants to platoon the righty with primary closer Will Smith, a lefty. Rodríguez’s 2.82 ERA and 2.58 FIP are excellent, but there are some red flags in his profile. His strikeout rate has dropped precipitously, going from 36.6% in 2020 to 22.8 this year — from the 96th percentile to the 40th. He’s also sporting an unsustainably low HR/FB rate of 3.3%.
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With the help of an endearing smile and wipeout slider, Sergio Romo has become a favorite of many a fanbase throughout his long and successful career. Currently with the Oakland A’s, Romo is in his 14th season. At age 38, you would expect any pitcher to be a shell of their former self, yet Romo continues to get hitters out in mostly the same way he always has: sliders, sliders and more sliders. He even has a new wrinkle that might be making his slider even better.

Of course, this season hasn’t gone exactly to plan. Romo got off to quite a rough start; through April he had a 9.35 ERA and 5.70 FIP. He wasn’t getting strikeouts at his usual level (13.3% K-rate) and his dominant slider was uncharacteristically hittable (.370 wOBA). Given his age and the way his 2020 ended (he had a 5.59 FIP in September), you had to wonder whether Romo’s time in the big leagues was drawing to a close. Come May however, he had righted the ship in a big way and since then he’s been the A’s most dominant reliever, posting a 1.88 ERA and 1.83 FIP. Most importantly for fans of his slider, the pitch is back to doing this:

That location off the plate is where Romo likes to live with his slider but he wasn’t able to execute there when he was struggling in April. Take a look at his slider heat maps to righties:

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When you sit back and daydream about the perfect changeup, which one comes to mind? Do you think of Luis Castillo’s circle changeup, or maybe Gerrit Cole’s power change? Perhaps modern pitchers aren’t doing it for you and Trevor Hoffman has your favorite changeup. Regardless of what changeup takes shape in your imagination, there is always room for a new one to catch your fancy.

That’s Patrick Sandoval and his changeup is one of the nastiest pitches in baseball. I know that is quite the claim, but take a look at the best swinging strike rates for starting pitchers, broken down by individual pitch.

Being sandwiched between two of the most supremely talented players in the game is no easy feat, not to mention the number of Cy Young awards and All-Stars appearances that comprise the rest of the list. In fact, Sandoval sticks out like a sore thumb as he’s nearly unheard of compared to these other pitchers. Sandoval has the best whiff inducing changeup in baseball this season and it’s not particularly close. The next best among starting pitchers is Brandon Woodruff’s changeup with a 23.0% SwStr%, or Raisel Iglesias’ changeup at 27.7%, if you are interested in relievers as well. Read the rest of this entry »

As the Padres were transitioning from upstart to powerhouse over the offseason, they signed Jurickson Profar to a three year deal. It was a relatively quiet move for a team that did some big things over the winter, but a three year deal for a fourth outfielder, or super-utility man, is bold. It was a signing that signified the importance of depth for a team competing in the same division as the godfather of depth, the Dodgers. Profar, a former number one overall prospect, spent the early days of his career suffering through shoulder injuries and poor performance before finally breaking out in 2018 as an average hitter who can play everywhere competently. His 2020 was spent doing just that for the Padres as he covered five different positions, played nearly everyday and put up a career high 111 wRC+. That’s how you get yourself a three year deal without being the prototypical everyday starter.

Turns out the Padres were right to spend a little money on depth. Like seemingly every team, they’ve had a lot of injuries. Profar has played five different positions this season and is fifth on the Padres in plate appearances. That’s really the only part of the signing that has gone to plan, however, as the performance in those plate appearances has really cratered. In a lot of ways, he’s back to his pre-2018 breakout. He’s hitting the ball more softly and his fly balls aren’t leaving the yard.

Even at his best, Profar wasn’t one to roast the ball. His career best exit velocity in 2018 was only good for the 25th percentile. This season, he’s down to the second percentile. Profar became an average hitter by hitting a decent number of line drives and pulled fly balls while also having a well above average strikeout rate. We’ll touch on the plate discipline a bit later but it’s been the fly balls that are the big issue for him. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Gomber came to the Rockies by way of the Nolan Arenado trade back in January, but of the five players acquired by Colorado, he faced the most immediate pressure as the lone newcomer expected to contribute to the big league club right away. That may feel like a bit of misfortune for a 27-year-old pitcher simply trying to find a foothold on a big league roster after bouncing between Triple A and the bigs between 2018 and ‘20 while with the Cardinals. Being traded for a franchise cornerstone wasn’t his only bit of rotten luck; he now has to make half of his starts in Coors Field, a place that is far and away the worst pitcher’s park in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Crawford’s career has always centered around his elite defense; he’s won three Gold Gloves and has been one of the best defenders in baseball over the last decade. But behind the accolades for his glove was a quietly improving offensive player. He upped his wRC+ each season in his first five and earned down-ballot MVP votes in 2016 on the back of 5.2 WAR and career-best defensive metrics. Heading into his age-30 season in ’17, our positional power rankings pegged him as one of the best shortstops in baseball and projected him for 3.5 WAR.

Instead, Crawford started a sharp decline, putting up just 4.4 WAR over the next three years. By the time 2020 rolled around, his career was a half-sunk dinghy; coming off of a near–replacement-level season, he was expected to lose playing time. And his downturn couldn’t have come at a worse time, with free agency coming after the 2021 season and the Giants under new boss Farhan Zaidi beginning to transition away from the aging veterans who made up a big chunk of San Francisco’s roster. But facing the end, Crawford posted a 111 wRC+ and a career-high .209 ISO last season, then built on that improvement this year with a 141 wRC+ and 2.1 WAR — the latter the best figure than he’s put up since ’17.

The following chart shows a closer look at his late-career resurgence.

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Last week at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur looked at the rise of advanced defensive positioning since 2015. It turns out that every position has started playing deeper, but — perhaps unsurprisingly — first basemen have moved the least of all. As Arthur writes, “First basemen have barely budged, which makes sense since they are more anchored to the bag.” But this lack of movement feels like a concession that doesn’t necessarily need to be made. The base is fixed, and the defender has to reach it, but a quicker first baseman would be able to stray farther from the anchor. If the lack of an anchor is allowing these other positions to play in more optimal locations, then some of the range that has always been a prerequisite for playing those positions is potentially going to waste. Let’s get some of those more rangy players over to first base, which doesn’t allow for the defender to be so perfectly placed.

The Right-Handed Shift

One of the reasons I’m interested in the positioning of first basemen is how it relates to the current conundrum involving the right-handed shift, about which folks like Tom Tango, Russell Carlton and Ben Lindbergh have written countless words. The short recap is that the publicly available data suggests that the right-handed shift doesn’t really work. And yet, some of the most data-driven teams are the ones that employ the shift the most.

There are a few things that make the right-handed shift different than the more prevalent left-handed one, but what I’m focused on is first base and the existence of that “anchor” that was mentioned earlier. First basemen can only stray off the bag as far as allows them to return safely in time for the throw. Turns out, that isn’t nearly far enough to cover the tendencies of the hitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, you may have noticed that Kenta Maeda prominently featured in a Matthew Roberson article on this site, though probably not in the way he would have liked. He was the guy throwing the pitches that led to the “nearly 900 feet of home run” that Franmil Reyes hit. Maeda has been on the business end of a lot of home run highlights so far this year. He’s already given up seven of them after only surrendering nine last year in three times the number of innings pitched.

This is the same guy who finished second in AL Cy Young voting last season and allowed a stingy .219 wOBA (97th percentile). This year things are quite different, as Maeda carries a 6.56 ERA, a 6.16 FIP and a 4.19 xFIP through his first five starts. That 97th percentile wOBA from last season? Well it’s in the fourth percentile this season at .439. You might look at his elite walk rate of 4.5%, his swollen HR/FB rate of 26.9% and his soaring .372 BABIP and think that this is just a bit of bad luck. He’s not going to end the season having more than a quarter of his fly balls go for homers. But there’s more than just bad luck going on here. Maeda is getting hit extremely hard. He’s already allowed as many hard hits (95 mph or higher) in 2021 as he did all of last season and his xERA (the newest ERA estimator found here at FanGraphs, courtesy of Statcast) is 5.17.

So what’s going on? If you came into this article knowing anything about Maeda, it might be the fact that he has a great slider. According to our pitch values, it’s hard to find one better. Maeda’s was the sixth best slider in baseball from 2016-20. Here are his pitch values on his four main offerings throughout his career, with usage thrown in as well.

Over the years, he has become more reliant on his plus slider and this year is no different, as he’s throwing it at a career-high rate. But the pitch has betrayed him completely. All of his pitches have struggled, mind you, but because the slider has been his most consistent pitch throughout his career, I think it’s worth focusing on. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two things that jump out to me about Freddy Peralta’s start to the 2021 season. The first is that the man once known as Fastball Freddy is throwing said fastball at a career-low rate. The second is that he’s added some new moves into his windup that may be increasing his deception. Amidst all that change are some underlying command issues that suggest he still has things to work on.

Let’s start with his windup, which I’ve become absolutely fixated on. It’s not at all the windup I remembered him having, and I’m mesmerized by it.

Like an alarm clock going from a restful existence into a blaring beep that jiggles itself off the nightstand, Peralta has added some chaos to his delivery. What once was a fairly normal over-the-head windup and cross-body release has gotten more complicated. The leg kicks up higher, his feet are more caffeinated, and he starts in a more hunched position as if to make his over-the-head motion easier to attain. His new windup is nearly a half a second faster from start to release. And did I mention his feet? His feet!

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This is Luke’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Luke has been a graphic designer in the golf industry for the last five years, though he’s never truly enjoyed that particular “swing at a ball” sport. Rather, it’s baseball that provides the proper amount of weirdness for him. Umpires ringing up hitters. Gold Glovers awkwardly squirming under wind-blown popups. Sluggers whiffing on 88 mph fastballs. That stuff is Luke’s wheelhouse, and he explores those interests on his site, The Pop Up Dance. He lives in Portland and is on a never ending quest to find the mythical Jeff Sullivan. You can purchase the new FanGraphs t-shirts he designed here.

For its entire 15-year history, MLB The Show has been exclusive to Sony consoles, from the PlayStation 2 up to the current era PlayStation 5. The reason for that is simple: Sony owns San Diego Studio, the creators of the game. But this year, a whole new group of gamers will be able to join in the digital action, as MLB The Show 21 will be released on Microsoft’s Xbox consoles for the first time; it’ll also be a part of the company’s subscription service with millions of active subscribers. This move allows for casual or new baseball fans to enjoy the acclaimed video game series without the barrier of it being full-priced. Increasing the accessibility of MLB The Show is a great way to get new fans interested in not just the video game, but the sport of baseball itself. There is a lot to parse here, so a little background should help us fully understand the baseball ramifications.

At the time, San Diego Studio was fairly small compared to some of the other sports video game studios, such as EA Sports (the makers of Madden and FIFA) and 2K Sports (NBA 2K). 2K Sports even had a licensed baseball game of their own that was released yearly on multiple consoles, including PlayStation.

San Diego Studio began releasing their MLB The Show series in 2006 to immediate praise. Focused on a revolutionary “Road To The Show” mode in which one could create a player and play their way up through the minors, MLB The Show quickly became the game that baseball fans wanted to have. Year after year it racked up high review scores for its polished and innovative releases — the funny commercials were just a bonus. San Diego Studio was making their rival obsolete.
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