Friends, I come to you today to relieve my soul of a burden I’ve been carrying. I’ve been harboring a cranky, irrational, old man opinion, and worse still, I’ve been lying to you about it.

Time and again, while evaluating pitchers, I’ve praised the slider. Dylan Cease’s slider? Incredible. Andrés Muñoz, Chris Sale, whoever. In the kayfabe my position demands, I must praise a slider that gets outs. But my heart isn’t in it. I am awed by the slider’s effectiveness the same way I’m awed by the voraciousness of a swarm of locusts.

Deep down, I detest the slider. It is a crude instrument, with none of the curveball’s grace or the changeup’s playfulness. The curveball is a calligraphy brush, all swooping lines and fine control. The changeup is a Blackwing pencil, rich and precise, its marks here one moment and gone the next.

The slider is a crayon. Read the rest of this entry »

About two weeks ago, Kyle Kishimoto wrote about a shift in the AL West race as the Astros, who had been trailing the Mariners all year, pulled level in the division. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t revisit a topic so soon, especially because Kyle was himself issuing an update to his own previous appraisal of Seattle’s success. But between Kyle’s two posts, the Mariners blew a 10-game division lead to Houston. And in the two weeks since then, well at the risk of steering directly into stereotype, let’s take a look at a graph.

On the morning of August 5, when Kyle’s second piece ran, the Mariners were still actually slight favorites to win the AL West. In the ensuing 15 days, their division title odds dropped by 43.4 percentage points, to just 10.8%. Seattle’s odds of making the playoffs in any fashion are now just 16.4%, which is down 41.6 points. Only three other teams have seen their playoff odds move even 20 points in either direction in that time. One is the Padres. The other two are the Astros and Royals, two of the major beneficiaries of the Mariners’ ongoing slide. Read the rest of this entry »

Every spectator sport has its own tradeoffs between watching on TV and going to a game in person. And while there are some that can only be truly appreciated live, I personally think television does a pretty good job of portraying baseball at its best. This is a game of inches, and inches can be hard to perceive from the cheap seats.

One exception is exceptional center field defense. By the time the camera angle turns around on a fly ball, the outfielders have already covered dozens of feet in their pursuit of the baseball. To appreciate the speed and timing required to play this position well, you really have to see it live.

There aren’t many guys who can really go out and get it. There definitely aren’t 30 who can hit well enough to stick in a major league lineup every day. Most center fielders, therefore, fall into two camps: Good hitters who can kind of hang but should probably be in a corner, and the genuine article. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I wrote about Jake McCarthy’s BABIP, and touched on an assumption about which kinds of hitters are going to put up outlier numbers in that stat. McCarthy hits a lot of grounders, which generally produce a higher BABIP than fly balls (though they’re less productive by other metrics). He’s also left-handed and very fast, which means he ought to be able to beat out grounders for infield singles.

So let’s take a little gander at the infield hit rate leaderboard for qualified hitters. This is the percentage of groundballs a batter produces that turn into infield hits. Simple enough:

So yeah, Bellinger is primarily known for grinding hanging curveballs to make his bread, but in spite of his size, he is a left-handed fast guy. That tracks. Peña is a righty, but he’s very fast. His average home-to-first time is actually in the top 20 among all hitters — lefties and righties alike — this season. And because Peña hits so many grounders, he leads all batters in total infield hits with 24.

And then there’s Rhys Hoskins. Wait, what? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made no secret of my longtime admiration for Rangers reliever Kirby Yates (formerly Braves reliever Kirby Yates and Padres reliever Kirby Yates), but what he’s doing now even surprised me.

Yates entered Tuesday night’s contest against the Boston Red Sox with an ERA of 1.04; that mark is second among big league relievers, behind only Emmanuel Clase (another favorite of mine). It’s also a career best for Yates, which is more surprising than it would be for most pitchers. Yates already has a season with a microscopic ERA on his CV: 2019, when he posted a 1.19 ERA in 60 2/3 innings, with a strikeout rate of 41.6% and a walk rate of 5.3%. Pitchers who produce even one season of that quality are vanishingly rare; pitchers who produce two are almost unheard of. Read the rest of this entry »

What a wild ride it’s been for Jake McCarthy the past three seasons. In 2022, he finished fourth in NL Rookie of the Year voting, seemingly the right fielder of the future for the Arizona Diamondbacks. It wasn’t the kind of performance that would make anyone think that he — and not Corbin Carroll — was Arizona’s franchise player. But it was the kind of performance that could tempt inveterate contrarians into saying, “You know, Carroll gets all the attention, but McCarthy is the one who really makes this team tick.”

Then, in 2023, McCarthy was total buttcrack. He barely kept his head above replacement level as he lost playing time to Alek Thomas, Pavin Smith, Tommy Pham, and a partridge in a pear tree. Then, because when it rains it pours — even in the desert — McCarthy suffered an oblique injury that kept him from playing any part in the Diamondbacks’ run to the World Series.

But in 2024, he’s reclaimed his rightful place in the lineup, and he’s hitting .303/.375/.451. With almost two months left in the regular season, he’s set new career highs in games played and WAR. All is well once again. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday morning the White Sox sat at 28-89, recently having broken a 21-game losing streak. Which looks bad, but consider that Chicago is on pace to lose three more games than the 1962 Mets did. Or that over a comparable period — their last 117 games — the Vanderbilt Commodores football team is 40-77. (Vanderbilt’s past 117 games includes a winless season.) So the White Sox cashiered manager Pedro Grifol.

Yeah, that’ll fix the problem.

Immediately, thoughts turned to which unfortunate would be handed this hospital pass of a team. Especially because the traditional next man up for an in-season firing is the bench coach, and Charlie Montoyo (who has recent MLB managerial experience with the Blue Jays) was among the casualties.

As it turns out, the next skipper on this voyage of the damned, apparently, is Grady Sizemore. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a little insight into my writing process. When I turn on my computer in the morning, my mind completely devoid of ideas apart from the knowledge that Meg is going to message me in a couple hours asking if I plan on working today, the first thing I do is look at our leaderboards. Maybe just seeing a name will jog something loose, or maybe I’ll learn about someone doing something exceptionally good or bad.

It’s fun to write about the extremities of baseball, and fun to read about them. It’s why we fight over who gets to write about Aaron Judge, or Paul Skenes, or the White Sox. We aim to please.

But I also have a soft spot in my heart for the unremarkable. My very first week on this job, I wrote an ode to Cal Quantrill, declaring him “the averagest pitcher north of the Rio Grande.” Well I’ve been noodling on averageness. Who’s the anti-Judge or anti-Skenes? The anti-Jose Altuve? Who is the least remarkable player in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

This probably isn’t a problem for most people, but I’m plagued constantly by the memory of frustrating baseball arguments from days past. I probably get into these arguments more than most people, partially because of my (and I hope it doesn’t sound immodest to say this) vast knowledge of the sport, but mostly because I’ve lived most of my life in New Jersey, which his home to the most stubborn, tendentious people you’d ever have the misfortune of meeting.

One such argument took place probably close to 15 years ago, when I ruined what was supposed to be a relaxing Friday evening down the shore by getting into a shouting match over the issue of Alex Rodriguez vs. Derek Jeter. I preferred A-Rod, who would go on to finish his career with a slugging percentage more than 100 points higher than that of his Yankees teammate. I was arguing against someone whose case rested on Jeter being “more clutch.”

If you’re old enough to remember what “analytics bloggers” like me thought about that argument in the 2010s, you can understand my quickness to anger and probably imagine the colors my face turned. When the dust settled, Jeter — who, it turns out, was actually an exceptional hitter all along — did finish with a better career postseason wRC+ than A-Rod. But it was close: 121 to Jeter, 116 for Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »

The Arizona Diamondbacks came through this weekend having won eight of their past 10 games, and after a bumpy start to the season, the Snakes are suddenly one of the most dangerous teams in the National League bracket. They hold a playoff spot even though their franchise player, Corbin Carroll, has hit like Eric Bruntlett this season, and despite having gotten nothing from the 2-3-4 slots in a rotation that was supposed to be a strength. Literally nothing in the case of Eduardo Rodriguez, who makes his season debut today.

So I was a little surprised when I went on Ketel Marte’s page and saw that we hadn’t written a standalone article about him on the main FanGraphs site this season. That’s our bad. Let me make up for it. Read the rest of this entry »