Baseball is like one big reference book. The veterans that fill the landscape have knowledge born of their experience, you just have to ask. Luke Weaver in St. Louis has been asking, and that inquisitiveness has benefited his game in ways that aren’t obvious. Command, deception, new pitches — the veterans around him have given him many presents.
| 1:34 |
: i named my son Calvin so, even though I don’t mind the music, I think I’m rooting against this guy
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| 1:36 |
: nah, whatever, it’s fun
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| 12:00 |
: mookie has been playing like crap. is he still worth a $25 keeper for next year? I can only keep 4
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| 12:01 |
: Yeah man, I think he’s still a .300/25/20 type and that batting average is super rare. I know he’s not doing it now but he still has all the pieces he needs to be that guy.
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| 12:01 |
: Think Lyons is taking over the closer gig in St. Louis?
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| 12:02 |
: With Cecil and Duke in the fold, they can afford a lefty closer. Yes.
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This post is about Gio Gonzalez. It says so right in the title. But to get there, we first have to talk to Dennis Eckersley, because he said something the other day that’s pertinent to what the lefty in Washington is doing right now.
Eckersley, in Oakland because the team named a gate after him, was relaxing before a game. We were talking about changes in the sport, and I asked him why his strikeout rate peaked in 1992, at a point when he was 38 years old and had been a reliever for five years. Was it a new pitch? Grip? Approach?
Nope.
“Everyone started chasing, just like now,” the legendary reliever said that day. “You punch out 200 guys now, it’s not a big deal. Everyone is striking out a guy an inning. You tell me why. First of all, they’re throwing harder. I get that. But no one puts down their hack. These 2-2 swings… they’re, like, crazy.”
Maybe you’ve noticed that Masahiro Tanaka is a little different these days. His recent good stretch has coincided with a trend we noticed a while back: he’s not really throwing the fastball any more. He’s not alone on the Yankees — it looks like it’s a team-wide phenomenon. But is it working for every Yankee?
| 1:26 |
: Weird intro, but i’m looking forward to seeing them in New York at https://octfest.co in two weeks. See you there?
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| 12:00 |
: How many hits do you think you could get in 600 plate appearances Eno?
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| 12:00 |
: Man you saw my swing path and stats. I think zero, but the role of luck is huge. I’d just swing as hard as I could as soon as the pitcher released the ball and maybe get one.
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| 12:01 |
: headed across the pond soon – beer/brewery recs in London, Edinburgh & Amsterdam? Enjoying the book also.
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| 12:01 |
: I don’t know as much about those spots as I should. Cloudburst is doing fun stuff though.
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| 12:01 |
: Eno I just missed out on Pliny and had to get Blind Pig. How big is the gap?
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Admit it, you’ve wondered. Not you, the former Division I baseball player or the major leaguer who’s maybe reading this. I mean you, the former pony-league baseball kid who maybe got a cup of coffee with the varsity in a nondescript high school league: you’ve wondered if, given a full season’s chance — say, 600 plate appearances — you could get a single major league hit.
Maybe you haven’t. I certainly have. And so has MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes.
Something I mull alot: If I took a season's worth of plate appearances in the MLB would I get a single hit? I think answer is no.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 24, 2017
It’s easy to argue that he wouldn’t. Just making contact requires sufficient bat speed to catch up to the incoming pitch speed, and the difference between a layperson’s bat speed and a professional one is stark. I’ve linked this image recently, but this time it’s for the stats on the left. Take a look at how much faster Hunter Pence can swing a bat than I can.
Pence nearly doubles my bat speed and gets to the ball three times quicker. Maybe we mere fans just couldn’t connect with the hard stuff. And that’s on the fastball. What happens when a pitcher starts throwing the bendy stuff?
Hayes wondered the same. “I was recently at a batting cage and spent about half an hour, got the speed up to 70 mph, and after enough of them I was more or less getting around, though mostly fouling pitches off, with occasional solid contact,” he wrote in an email. “BUT: no breaking balls and no pitches out of the zone. I just think any major leaguer would be able to just terrify me with a first pitch fastball and then get me to chase garbage out of the zone and that would happen for literally an entire season.”
But isn’t this a question of numbers in the end? Over 600 plate appearances, more than 2000 pitches… couldn’t you swing as hard as possible middle-in and eventually get one measly hit?
Things are going well for Arizona starter Zack Godley. He’s among the top 25 of all pitchers this year no matter how you measure value, his team comfortably occupies the first Wild Card spot, and he’s outperforming expectations. Some of those expectations might have been muted because, at first glance, he looks like a run-of-the-mill sinker/breaking-ball pitcher without a sufficiently good changeup to battle lefties. But then you look at the results on his change and you’re tempted to tinker, to suggest he should throw it more. Dig a little deeper, though, and things aren’t as clear.
Sometimes it takes a while to really hear an idea. Justin Turner told me something two and a half years ago that only recently clicked. All it took for this idiot to finally understand was an illustration of a bat path, a couple of graphs, and like 10 others players articulating a similar thought. Maybe you got it the first time. The rest of you, though, might benefit (as I did) from hearing it again: go get the ball. It’s that simple, but it’s also not that simple.
One of the best closers in the game is struggling. In fact, one of the best closers in the game isn’t even being used as a closer at the moment. Last week, Yankees manager Joe Girardi effectively demoted Aroldis Chapman from his end-of-game duties, stating that he would use the hard-throwing left-hander “at any point.” This followed a series of shaky outings during which Chapman conceded seven runs in 4.1 innings.
Though he possesses a strikeout rate that would still make most of the league jealous, it’s also the worst of his career. And while he’s also experienced some misfortune on balls in play, there’s a sense that the misfortune is “earned.” And it is, in a way. It’s a little bit about how he’s throwing the ball, but also a lot about where.
When Danny Duffy first arrived in the big leagues, he was electric. As a guy, he’s naturally laid back — perhaps a product of having grown up in southern California — but he used to throw really hard. Unfortunately, the velocity didn’t necessarily translate to success. Duffy lacked real command of his repertoire. As the left-hander put it to me recently, he “had no idea where the ball was going.” He threw mostly just four-seam fastballs and a curve.
Duffy has evolved pretty considerably since his rookie season in 2011. It’s not that he’s just a command guy now — he still throws hard — but a lot has changed over the last few years. With more than a month left in the season, Duffy has already recorded the highest WAR figure (2.9) of his career.
What happened? What allowed him to refine his command, to establish a more ideal pitch mix? Duffy recently helped answer those questions, relating all the “aha” moments that led to a completely different, and much more successful, arsenal — an arsenal I address pitch by pitch in what follows.
The Fastball
This year is the closest Duffy has ever come to throwing more sinkers than four-seamers. There’s always a ground-ball benefit — “I started getting more ground balls, more weak contact,” said Duffy, who is currently enjoying the highest ground-ball rate of his career — but this change was more about command than outcomes on balls in play.
When Duffy first came up, the refrain was that he’d go as far as his command would take him. “I thought I had to be so fine when I was younger, because I struggled with the strike zone so much,” Duffy remembered. “Then I figured out that it was all about repetition. You can’t expedite it; experience will give it to you.”