Early this March, I talked to Sean Doolittle after a game. He was excited. “I was throwing 93-94 today, and normally it takes me a little to get going,” he told me. “Normally I won’t hit ‘3 until the last week of March.” The excitement was infectious, as it often is with him. He’s an upbeat guy.

As I headed back to the press box, I tweeted something about what he said. Another writer pulled me aside and told me their source hadn’t seen anything over 92. That was a bit of cold water.

That back and forth? That up and down? That’s probably what it’s like to come back from labrum problems. Hope, false hope maybe, sadness, wash, and do it all again. You just hope that you’re building back to where you were. The good news is that, through two appearances, it looks like the old Sean Doolittle is back.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

We have launch angle for all batted balls last year! We’re still in the infancy of Statcast, and there have been some wiggles in the wobble so far, but with the new update to Baseball Savant, it looks like we can search all batted balls for launch angle. I’m giddy.

This should give us the chance to all sorts of great things later, but for now I’ll do something relatively simple that’s relevant to the newest big slugger in the game, Matt Duffy. We all knew he’d bust out like this, and now we know why.

Turn back to Alan Nathan’s excellent post on the long ball yesterday at The Hardball Times. It’s full of nerdy goodness, but there’s also a fun little factoid that runs through most of his analysis: the ideal launch angle for a home run is between 25 and 30 degrees. Given a certain exit velocity, that range is where distance on a batted ball peaks:

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s anecdotal of course, of little value maybe, but when you’re talking to Carlos Rodon these days, you get a different feeling than you might have last year. He’s more… comfortable. He’s not a rookie anymore. “Knowing you belong” is really important, as he put it to me.

But the reason he knows he belongs now is that he had a great second half last year. He agreed that went a long way to calming the nerves. But anyone can have a great half without a major adjustment, only to see things change once again at the whim of the baseball gods.

The good news is that Rodon made two huge adjustments last year that coincided with the start of his run. That suggests it wasn’t luck. That suggests that Rodon has found something that can help him walk fewer batters. And that’s about all that stands between Rodon and a breakout season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while since we’ve had a new pitch. Zack Greinke wasn’t sure if that new hard change he learned from Felix Hernandez was a completely new pitch, so we may have to wait and see on that one. Before that, you’ll just have to wade into arguments about the cutter, the palmball, and the splitter. Someone invented them, but there is no consensus about who it was, exactly.

So let’s invent a pitch. It’ll be all ours if it catches on. We’ll get to name it. Or we won’t, as will become abundantly clear by the end of this endeavor.

Read the rest of this entry »

Used to be, you put a fly catcher in center and didn’t worry too much about offense, even if he batted leadoff because he was fast. Willie McGee and Otis Nixon come to mind, though their on-base percentages were decent enough, maybe. They didn’t have power, though. Those years, the position’s isolated power was around 10% worse than league average.

These days, it seems the position has evolved. There are center fielders now who don’t count fielding as their best strength, and their collective power is now closer to average than it used to be. Even Kevin Kiermaier — in some ways a throwback, defense-first burner — has decent power. Maybe down table, around two thirds down the list, you’ll find some guys that would have fit on any 80s squad in center.

But Leonys Martin, Billy Hamilton, and Odubel Herrera are today’s maybes instead of yesterday’s sure things, it seems. Today we wonder if Odubel’s defense is as good as his tools, or if Martin will ever hit lefties, or if Hamilton will ever hit righties. In any case, they provide diversity where some other positions have lacked it. There’s a long way from Yoenis Cespedes to Billy Hamilton.

Let’s separate the burners from the bombers among today’s center fielders!

Looks like two or three stars, a couple clearly above-average guys after that, and then a big bucket of decent. They won’t all get there the same way, but today’s center fielders can swing the stick a bit.

#1 Angels

This ranking is not built on depth. Should (perish the thought) Mike Trout go down with a season-ending injury, the Angels’ center-field situation would drop down to the bottom of the heap. That may sound like a knock on Craig Gentry — a decent defense-first center fielder when his legs are right — but more it’s just another way to fawn about Trout.

There are so many ways to fawn, though. As August Fagerstrom pointed out in his player cap, he’s already accrued more wins than any player in the history of baseball through their age-23 season. Only Ted Williams, Joe Jackson, Stan Musial, and Ty Cobb were any better with the bat alone, and Trout adds legs and glove to the package. Or you can go the route of Tony Blengino, who found that Trout was better than Micky Mantle through the same age. Or Jeff Sullivan it up, and chronicle the way that Trout has adjusted to every single wrinkle that the league has thrown at him, like handling the high pitch, and now including now taking inside pitches yard to the opposite field.

Or you can just be succinct, as Fagerstrom was when he summed up his player cap on Trout: the best in the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Ask a current major league batter about his two strike approach. Watch the words stop coming out of their mouth.

About twenty minutes into a long conversation with Josh Donaldson about his approach to swinging the bat, we got to what he can do to deal with the low and away pitch in counts where he has to protect. I didn’t realize it, but I’d asked for his two-strike approach. “I don’t really want to get too in depth into that,” he said, shutting off the inquiry.

Brandon Moss, the most loquacious of interviews, just laughed when I asked him about how his approach changed. Quickly, I learned not to talk about it.

But it was still out there. And when Paul Konerko told me (during another long conversation about hitting) that he felt like a strikeout was a weakness, my ears perked up. He’d tell me about his two-strike approach. He wasn’t in the league any more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with the video. And then the words. Because you might not spot everything in the video the first time through. It sorta looks like an everyday foul ball, maybe with some sort of inside joke at the end. Trust me, though, this moment is fairly epic.

Paul Konerko‘s reaction provides our first clue that something was a bit different about this swing. He’s animated, talking to the third base coach about something. Zack Greinke’s doing a bit of stomping around after he watches it go.

“There are guys that take so quickly that it almost forces you to throw strikes,” Greinke told me at Spring Training earlier this month. “Paul Konerko, he would change his stances all the time, but there was this one time where he had this new stance where it looked like he wasn’t even getting ready and then all of a sudden you go and he’d swing.”

I laughed out loud. He was quick-pitching you! “Yeah,” Greinke agreed. “Before release, I think, oh, he’s taking, and you’d get overconfident. He only did that for a month or so.”

Go back and look at the video. It’s not quite a bat on the shoulder, but there is something about Konerko’s setup that seems lackadaisical. Given the 1-0 count, it looks like he’s waiting for Greinke to get himself in a deeper hole. “A guy like that, you think most pitchers would be coming with the fastball, but he’s liable to give you another slider out of the zone,” agreed Konerko when contacted by phone about the at-bat. “And then sometimes, he’d even take something off when he was supposed to come at you.”

So maybe Konerko was just taking, and that’s why it took him so long to get ready? Not quite. It did take him a long time to get ready back then. On purpose. “I used to be too tense too early before the pitch came,” Konerko remembered, “so sometimes I would wait to see how long I could wait. I was so ready to hit that it didn’t help me.” So, in the footage here, Konerko actually is attempting to chill out as long as possible, but not so much to mislead Greinke as to prepare himself optimally.

Read the rest of this entry »