A ballplayer who grabs a bat and steps up to the plate aims to hit. The point of the sport is to go around the bases, and the most efficient way to do that is to put wood on the ball and hope for the best. But it’s far from the only way to go around the bases.

Sometimes you hit the ball, and sometimes the ball hits you. I’ve long been fascinated by players who use their own bodies as a means of advancement, dating back to when I, as a child, read a George Vecsey feature on the single-season hit-by-pitch leader in an old anthology of baseball writing. “Ron Hunt, Loner,” painted a broadly ambivalent portrait of a second baseman with modest physical gifts. But Hunt made two All-Star teams and retired with the same career OBP as Shohei Ohtani, despite playing in the most pitcher-friendly era of the past 100 years.

Those who are able to systematize the hit-by pitch can transform their careers. Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah what the heck, let’s watch the super regional no-hitter again.

This is Kumar Rocker at his peak: A 19-strikeout no-hitter in the NCAA Tournament. (Also: Hey, look, it’s Joey Loperfido!) Watching that video, you’d get the notion that he ran up to the mound that night in Nashville and got the Duke lineup to swing at every single 59-foot slider he threw. You wouldn’t be too far off. Peak Rocker was one of my favorite college players ever, because he had everything you’d want from an athlete. He was big, he was physical, he was skilled. To watch him was to watch an excitable teenager (which he was) operate the body of a major league ace (which he had).

Pitchers like him come along only so often, guys who not only mow down college hitters but do it in a fashion that makes you wonder how even professionals will ever cope. Stephen Strasburg, Gerrit Cole, Carlos Rodón, Paul Skenes, and Rocker. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Crow-Armstrong just had a really good night. He made multiple highlight-reel catches in center field, including robbing Max Muncy of a home run with two outs in the ninth inning.

That was a great play even by PCA’s lofty standards, but his speed and defense are a known quantity. I just had to stop myself from using the word “gamebreaking,” like he’s a cornerback and punt returner from the 1990s or something. Crow-Armstrong’s glove is going to get him on SportsCenter, but it’s on the other side of the ball where he’ll determine how much he can help the Cubs while he’s there, as well as how long he stays in the lineup and how much money he makes over his career. The really exciting part of PCA’s Tuesday night only shows up in the box score: He went 2-for-4 with two RBI. Read the rest of this entry »

Late Wednesday night, I was poking around the internet looking for inspiration. A badly timed bout of writer’s block had kept me working on my Spencer Schwellenbach article well into the evening, so I wanted to get a head start on Friday’s piece and pick a topic before I went to bed. That’s when I saw this, from Weird Twitter agenda-setter and Batting Around podcast host Lauren:

i think all the 2024 white sox team records should stand but somehow player records should get expunged. like, the MLB stat nerd community has a duty to figure out how stuff was handled when individuals were held responsible for plagues that effected cities in babylon

— lauren (@Very__Regular) September 5, 2024

Over the past few days, you’ve probably seen something about how the AL Central has four teams with winning records, but the White Sox have been so bad they’ve dragged the division as a whole dozens of games under .500. This fun fact relies on the Detroit Tigers keeping their heads above the break-even point — a delicate tightrope act if ever one existed — but it speaks to an exciting possibility: That the White Sox might be so bad they’re breaking the curve for everyone. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the oldest story in baseball. The Braves took an athletic, hard-throwing, but undersized college pitcher named Spencer sometime after the first round of the draft. Even though said pitcher had done most of his collegiate work out of the bullpen, Atlanta stuck him in the rotation. And after only 20-odd starts in the minors, Spencer is in Atlanta’s major league rotation and a candidate to throw high-leverage innings — possibly even to start — in the playoffs.

OK, maybe it’s not the oldest story in baseball, but it’s happened twice now in the span of three seasons. And that’s where the paths of Spencer Strider and Spencer Schwellenbach diverge. Strider is what you’d get if a traditional power closer could throw 180 innings a year. (Well, if he could throw 180 innings in one year. We remember what happened a couple months ago.) It’s a hard fastball, and then a wicked slider. Pick one, because there’s no way for a hitter to cover both.

Schwellenbach also boasts mid-to-upper 90s fastball velocity, but unlike his teammate and fellow Spencer, he has one of the most varied repertoires in all of baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The English language is full to overflowing with sailing idioms: Obvious ones, like “even-keeled,” and others, like “three square meals,” that hide in plain sight. And there’s a good reason. Our language originates from a nation of sailors. England’s global empire was built on, and maintained by, the strength of its navy and commercial shipping industry — naturally the jargon of that foundational trade came to dominate the language.

Hundreds of years and a Revolutionary War later (up yours, Charles Lord Cornwallis!), we Americans have built a language on baseball. Three strikes and you’re out. Home run. At least three different pitch types — fastball, curveball, screwball — have distinct non-sporting connotations these days.

I barely remember a time before I knew the ins and outs of baseball, and I suspect that most of you, reading this specialized website for baseball enthusiasts, have similar experiences. But even Americans who are indifferent to or mostly ignorant of the national pastime tend to know the basics just by osmosis. Read the rest of this entry »

At the trade deadline, all fans are equal. No matter their age, location, partisan commitments, gender, religion, emotional disposition, or level of statistical curiosity, they have one thought: “Man, our bullpen stinks. Our GM really needs to do something about it.”

By and large, the GMs agree. That’s why a quick survey reveals that roughly a bajillion pitchers got traded this deadline season. OK, it’s not that many. Between July 1 and July 30 this year, I counted 44 major league pitchers who were traded to a playoff contender. For transparency’s sake, I judged “major league pitcher” subjectively. Some of these trades amount to one team sending the other a Low-A no-hoper or a bag of cash in order to jump the waiver line for a guy they like. And then the team in question waives the guy they traded for three weeks later.

In short, I love you, Tyler Jay, and we’ll always have that killer Big Ten regular season in 2015, but you don’t count as a major league pitcher for the purposes of this experiment. Read the rest of this entry »

I was contemplating Astros right-hander Hunter Brown the other day — I imagine this is a topic many of you contemplate regularly as well — and when I looked at his Baseball Savant page, I found myself a little nonplussed:

Brown is one of those pitchers who throws three fastballs; his exciting midseason turnaround owes much to the addition of a sinker. But wow, he’s thrown a lot of fastballs to left-handed hitters, hasn’t he? Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get one thing straight off the top: If all the Guardians got out of Jhonkensy Noel was the nickname, he’d be worth the roster spot.

The heyday of baseball was the early- to mid-20th century, a period which overlapped with what I assume was a New Deal policy where the government issued everyone a catchy nickname on their 10th birthday. It was not a perfect time; we’re better off having left the likes of “Chief” and “Fat Freddie” in the past, and let’s not act like it was the hallmark of a clever generation that every left-handed pitcher was called “Lefty” and every player with blonde hair was called “Whitey.”

In 2024, I’d give a kidney for a Joltin’ Joe or a Splendid Splinter. It’s a minor miracle that, in a few years, I won’t be checking off Markus Betts or Gerald Posey on a Hall of Fame ballot. Read the rest of this entry »

Usually, with a baseball trade, you want to avoid rushing to judgment. Like, did the Rays get fleeced when they traded David Price to Detroit in 2014, considering that the third piece they got in that deal, Willy Adames, was a starter for three years in Tampa Bay, then got traded again, and is still under team control in Milwaukee? Always in motion, said the great philosopher, is the future.

Usually.

Sometimes you need about three weeks to find out if a trade worked out for your team. So say the Orioles, who on Thursday demoted their big deadline acquisition, left-hander Trevor Rogers, to the minor leagues. The 2021 NL Rookie of the Year runner-up made four starts for Baltimore, totaling 19 innings in which he allowed 16 runs, as well as an opponent batting line of .338/.404/.514. For a presumptive playoff starter, it’s not ideal. Read the rest of this entry »