Author Archive

There’s No ‘A’ in Coliseum

Ed Szczepanski-Imagn Images

In the early 2000s, the Oakland Athletics’ marketing department rolled out a promotional campaign that played on the team’s ubiquitous single-letter nickname. Billboards appeared throughout the Bay Area with images of the A’s squad, each one emblazoned with bold, white font stating “There’s No A in Give Up,” or “There’s No A in Ego”:

Over the course of several years, that basic format was toyed with in various creative ways. When I attended Jason Giambi’s first game back in Oakland donning Yankee pinstripes, I spotted several “There’s No A in Sellout” signs throughout the stands. A few years later, tee-shirts asserting that “There is an A in Streak” were unavoidable in the East Bay. But now, that once-fun ad campaign feels like a punch to the gut, as the Oakland fanbase reckons with the reality of a Coliseum with no A’s in it. Read the rest of this entry »


A Visual Scouting Primer: Pitching, Part Three

Katie Stratman-USA TODAY Sports

We’re back at it again with another batch of baseball lingo. As usual, I encourage you to go check out previous installments of this series to catch up on what you missed or familiarize yourself with the premise of these primers. You can find each of them by clicking on each individual part for its corresponding article:

PITCHING: Part One and Part Two
HITTING: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three

At the end of my last piece, I hinted at moving beyond four-seamers, and digging into the types of pitches that typically make up the rest of a pitcher’s arsenal. But as soon as I sat down to start cataloging the ways that secondary pitch shapes are described, the vastness of the array of breaking balls and offspeed offerings throughout professional baseball quickly became overwhelming. That is largely due to how pitching practices and preferences vary from player to player, and how those individual approaches impact how each respective arsenal is most effectively used.

Asking a major league pitcher how to throw a slider would be like asking a world-renowned chef how to make scrambled eggs. They probably wouldn’t actually answer the question of how to make scrambled eggs, but rather, they’d tell you how they make their scrambled eggs. And those preparation processes would vary drastically. Some would be of the Anthony Bourdain ilk, with an inclination toward old-school simplicity. Beat eggs in a bowl with nothing but salt and pepper. Throw some butter in a hot pan and add the eggs, then move them around with a wooden spoon for a while. Meanwhile, others would take more of a Gordon Ramsay angle, insistent that a cold pot, a 60-second timer, and a dab of f—ing crème fraiche are all necessary for perfect scrambled eggs. The only shared components between these two preparations are the eggs, the heat, and the fact that they are kept in motion while cooking. And yet, both outputs, while different in innumerable ways, are classified simply as “scrambled eggs.”

Similarly, pitchers’ grips and releases of their secondary offerings also vary greatly from pitcher to pitcher. Depending on what a pitcher is naturally adept at, what he prefers, or even the length of his fingers or his overall grip strength can dictate how a he throws a given breaking ball or offspeed pitch. As a result, despite being classified as the same type, the shape of a pitch from one hurler to the next can look so different as to hardly seem comparable. So, before we dig into describing the shapes of specific pitches, and the way those shapes are created by a given pitcher, let’s boil down these classifications to their essential elements – the eggs, heat, and perpetual movement, as it were.

Secondary pitches, while individually unique, can also be broken down into basic elements. Namely, we can boil them down to the type of spin a pitcher applies to the ball, the angle of the spin axis he creates in doing so, and the degree of supination or pronation in his release that accomplishes these distinct spin attributes. Of course, there’s much more to pitch design than these elements, but understanding them is a great place to start.

So, let’s jump in!

Spin Axis

The spin axis is the central point that the ball is spinning around. In other words (apparently, I’m on a food metaphor kick right now), if the ball were a candy apple, and you wanted to use it to illustrate the spin of a certain pitch, the spin axis would be where you would hold the stick. It’s very rare for a ball to have perfect forms of any type of spin, with spin axes at perfect parallels or perpendiculars. Instead, variation comes from the pitcher’s arm slot, release point, supination/pronation (which I’ll discuss in a moment), and many other personalized characteristics. Those variations, among other factors, influence the degree to which a pitch’s shape digresses from pure north/south or east/west movement.

Spin Types

Backspin: Michael Kopech’s Four-Seamer

On a ball with pure backspin, the spin axis would be in the exact center of either side of the ball, horizontal to the ground. As mentioned in Pitching, Part 2: Backspin is created by the pitcher letting the ball roll off his fingertips.

Kopech keeps his fingers behind the ball upon release, and the seams move upward across the front of the ball as it travels toward the plate.

Gyroscopic Spin: Victor Vodnik’s Slider

Gyroscopic spin is the term used to describe clockwise or counterclockwise spin. On a ball with pure gyroscopic spin, the spin axis would be in the exact center of the front and back of the ball, horizontal to the ground.

To create this bullet-like spin, Vodnik moves his fingers along the side of the ball as he releases it.

Topspin: Ryan Cusick’s Curveball

Topspin, also referred to as “forward spin” or sometimes “tumble,” is the inverse of backspin. On a ball with pure topspin, the spin axis would also be in the exact center of either side of the ball, horizontal to the ground, but spinning in the opposite direction.

As the ball travels toward the plate, the seams move downward across the front of it. This requires Cusick to move his fingers around the side of the ball even more than what is required for gyroscopic spin, to the point where his fingers are moving downward across the front of the ball as he releases it.

Supination vs. Pronation

Supination and pronation refer to the direction and degree to which a pitcher rotates his wrist and forearm. Applying supination or pronation to a pitch will most often sacrifice some amount of velocity in favor of some amount of movement. The exact type of movement, and the effect on velocity, depends on how the supinated or pronated release is being utilized – i.e. what type of spin it’s creating on the ball, and on what spin axis.

Supination: Hunter Greene’s Slider

Supination is when a pitcher rotates his forearm such that his knuckles move toward the outside of the ball, and his palm moves toward an upward position. This creates glove-side cut on a pitch.

Pitches that feature supination include cutters, sliders, and curveballs, to name a few.

Pronation: Cristian Javier’s Circle Change

Pronation is the inverse of supination. When a pitcher pronates his arm, his wrist and forearm rotate in the other direction, finishing with his palm facing away from his body or toward the ground. This creates arm-side run on a pitch.

A non-comprehensive list of pronated pitches includes two-seamers, circle changeups, and screwballs.

Again, we’re only talking about the fundamentals here, when it comes to understanding pitch design. The fun part occurs when these elements are mixed and matched to create different types of pitches. Now that we’ve defined and illustrated our terms, we can move on to how these terms combine and commingle to make up a pitcher’s full arsenal, as well as which pitches are most and least open to interpretation. If sliders are scrambled eggs, for example, then knuckleballs are poached eggs; there’s only very slight variation in how pitchers throw them, and the output should be virtually the same from pitcher to pitcher, with mistakes being easy to spot. I look forward to digging into these comparisons and more in installments to come!


A Visual Scouting Primer: Pitching, Part Two

Kiyoshi Mio-USA TODAY Sports

Welcome back to another round of scouting lingo! If you’re new here, be sure to check out the first installment of the pitching visual scouting primer, which includes an introduction to this series, along with parts one, two, and three of the hitting visual scouting primer, to catch up on what I’ve already covered.

In this installment, we’re making our way back to the mound to delve into the rich world of pitch shapes, specifically those of four-seam fastballs. As usual, much of this may be familiar to you, but my hope is that these visual examples can serve as a reference for the various ways we distinguish between different pitch shapes in scouting reports. Read the rest of this entry »


A Visual Scouting Primer: Hitting, Part Three

Peter Aiken-USA TODAY Sports

Welcome back for another installment of FanGraphs’ Visual Scouting Primer! For previous editions, or an introduction explaining the concept of this ongoing series, you can click here, here, and here, but in an effort to tamp down my word count, I’m diving right into it this time. Read the rest of this entry »


A Visual Scouting Primer: Hitting, Part Two

Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports

Earlier this week, in the second installment of this ongoing series, I started picking apart the language used to describe baseball swings. But given how many elements make up a player’s swing, and therefore how much terminology exists to describe the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between them, I could only fit so much into that post before I had to cut myself off.

I’m skipping the preamble this time, so if you’re not quite sure what you’ve stumbled into with this primer, you can catch up with the first and second editions of this series, and meet me back here when you’re ready. I will, however, reiterate that the point of this is not to identify “good” or “bad” elements of baseball mechanics, but rather to define these terms as descriptive tools, as opposed to value-based judgements. And just like in my last post, I’m focusing on big leaguers for this one, thanks to the availability of side views of their swings, which are featured in MLB broadcasts, but missing from most MiLB game feeds.

Now, as promised, I’ll pick up exactly where I left off.

Short Swing vs. Long Swing
In Hitting, Part One, I dug into players’ loads, i.e. where a player’s hands come set before he starts his forward motion toward an incoming pitch. When a swing is described as being either “long” or “short” to the ball, that is referring to how quickly and directly a player can get the barrel of his bat to the ball. There’s some debate as to whether the length we’re describing is a measure of time, or of distance, but in either case, a “short” swing is one where a player’s bat moves directly to the ball, while a “long” swing is one where the bat’s path is less direct.

Typically, being short to the ball is favored, in the same way that a pitcher’s repeatable delivery is often more favorable than a violent one (see Pitching, Part One, for more on that). Of course, there are many exceptions to that rule, but generally, being short to the ball is considered a good thing. This is largely due to the fact that the simplicity of a short swing is often seen as more reliable and sustainable, particularly as a player is still developing in the minor leagues. A short swing allows a player to wait longer before deciding whether to swing at a given offering, which can be valuable by way of pitch selection, and for a minor leaguer who hasn’t yet faced advanced pitching, that bodes well for how he’ll fair as opposing pitchers’ velocities increase and their command becomes more precise.

Short swings come in many flavors. Here are some examples:

Short to the Ball, With Power: Yordan Alvarez

Yordan Alvarez’s simple load and short bat path allow him to attack pitches and get the sweet spot of his bat to the ball quickly. He guides the knob of his bat directly to where the pitch is coming at him, and the barrel of his bat quickly follows the same route.

Short to the Ball, Without Power: Steven Kwan

Kwan is short to the ball, but his swing differs from Alvarez’s cut. Whereas the appeal of Alvarez’s being short to the ball allows him to apply his upper body strength to pitches throughout the strike zone, Kwan’s swing is more about simply getting his bat on the ball, even if he’s not trying to send it out of the park. As such, a side-by-side look at their respective swings shows similarly short bat paths, but by the time they’re making contact, their postures are very different, illustrating the difference between a power swing and a contact swing (more on that later).

Sometimes, adding length to a swing is valuable. For example, Fernando Tatis Jr.’s deep load, and Junior Caminero’s bat wrap (both featured in my previous entry), create a longer distance for their bats to travel, but are also contributors to those players’ bat speed and power production.

Long to the Ball: Davis Schneider

In Schneider’s case, his long swing isn’t due to a particularly deep load or a bat wrap. His bat simply takes a longer route to the strike zone from his load to his point of contact.

A side-by-side comparison with Alvarez’s direct bat path makes this easier to see. Switching back to a front view of their respective swings (the camera movement in Schneider’s side view makes for a nauseating side by side), keep an eye on the heads of their respective bats. You’ll first see the swing all the way through, then with a few freeze frames thrown in to illustrate the moments when their bat paths differ the most, with Schneider’s dipping down behind him, rather than making a straight line to the ball.


Thus far, Schneider has used his long swing to optimize his launch angle, despite his middling average exit velocity. Because he raked during his first taste of the majors last year, albeit in just 35 games (141 plate appearances), it is acceptable for him to maintain his current mechanics (weirdos welcome!), but if he encounters timing issues in the future, he may have to adjust to shorten his swing.

Shortening Up: Alec Bohm

Adjusting swing length can make a huge impact on a player’s ability to consistently get to his power in a game. After a headline-making 2020 season, Bohm’s power dipped significantly the following year. This may have been due to his swing becoming too long.

Here’s a look at his swing in 2020:

And here’s what it looked like in 2021:

And to make it even clearer, here’s a side by side, first all the way through, and then with some handy freeze frames:

These camera angles are slightly different, so I can’t overlay these videos to make my point, but you can see that his 2021 swing starts earlier, and begins with his back elbow dipping, and his bat head looping back toward the catcher, whereas in 2020, his hands and bat moved directly to the ball. As of 2023, his power was back, as was his short swing.

Power vs. Contact Swing
As I hinted above, in the Alvarez-Kwan comparison, players will often develop swings that are geared specifically toward either power or contact. The reasons why players do this are relatively self explanatory, and based on body type, speed, positional profile, or countless other attributes that may make a player more valuable if he focuses on either power or contact, rather than both.

Power Swing: Kyle Schwarber

Schwarber generates power with a stable, balanced lower half, with his weight evenly distributed, if not slightly shifted toward his back foot. He uses his strong hands and arms to generate bat speed without sacrificing that stable base. Schwarber’s swing has always been geared for power, though he has simplified it in significant ways since he came up with the Cubs.

Schwarber’s old swing included a much noisier load, an obvious hitch (or trigger), and a more pronounced leg kick. The leg kick, in particular, caused Schwarber to shift his weight during his swing, whereas his current mechanics finish with his weight distributed in more or less the same way as before he starts his swing, allowing for an even stronger and more stable base. In other words, while it’s always been a power swing, the simplifications he’s made over the years have enhanced the power-driven aspects of it.

Contact Swing: Luis Arraez

Arraez is MLB’s current king of contact. Dating back to his debut in 2019, he’s never finished a season with a contact rate below 90%. He’s short to the ball, and adjusts the barrel of his bat to pitches throughout the strike zone. In contrast to Schwarber, Arraez’s lower half is less stable, with his back foot rarely staying planted, and he lets his arms extend as he makes contact with the ball, essentially allowing the weight of the bat, combined with basic physics, to do more of the heavy lifting, when it comes to power generation (or lack thereof).

He doesn’t hike his back elbow up like Schwarber does, and he’s not clubbing the ball with his upper body, so when he makes contact, he doesn’t focus on activating the muscles in his arms to drive the ball a great distance, opting instead to throw his hands toward the ball, and simply spray line drives to whatever part of the field makes the most sense, based on the pitch’s location. (He led the majors in line drive percentage in 2023.) In slow motion, you can see that the impact of the ball on the bat causes his arms to wobble in a noodly kind of way, which you’ll rarely see from a pure power hitter like Schwarber, whose arms stay bent and flexing as he makes contact.

That’ll do it for this installment, but I’ll be back soon with yet another batch of hitting terminology, and after that we’ll get back to the pitching side of things. Stay tuned!


A Visual Scouting Primer: Hitting, Part One

Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports

A few weeks ago, I introduced an ongoing series aimed at clearing up the confusion that sometimes accompanies the scouting-specific language that pops up in our (and others’) scouting reports. While the first installment was an introduction to pitching terminology, this one will be focused on hitting. And while the previous entry was part of Prospect Week, and accordingly featured almost entirely videos of prospects, this one will focus more on current big leaguers.

There are a number of reasons for the departure from prospects for this installment. For one thing, I believe it’s easier to understand these terms when they’re exemplified by players with whom you, the dear reader, are more familiar. Additionally, most of the terms I’ll dig into that are used to describe swings are more easily illustrated using a side view of a player’s swing and, unlike major league broadcasts, minor league broadcasts tend not to include these angles. But even aside from that practicality, I think it’s important to place these terms in a broader context than just prospect evaluation. While some of these terms are sometimes used to describe a possible hinderance to a prospect’s development, I want to emphasize that they aren’t inherently good or bad. Players can excel at the major league level while still embodying these traits, even the ones that, in a vacuum, seem to carry negative connotations.

Just like in the last installment, many of these terms will be familiar to you as baseball-savvy folks, but I hope that the accompanying visuals will serve as a useful supplement to your consumption of scouting reports, both past and present. And because I can’t help myself, I’ve sprinkled a few prospects in throughout the piece for those of you who may be jonesing for more prospect coverage. Read the rest of this entry »


A Visual Scouting Primer: Pitching, Part One

Robert Edwards-USA TODAY Sports

Scouting is a complex process. Sure, subjectivity and personal preference are biases that will always color the approach scouts take during the evaluation process. But beyond that, the task of describing in words how players differ, and what context is relevant during each player’s individual evaluation, is an entirely different type of challenge than just separating the “good” from the “bad.”

When writing scouting reports, I’m often reminded of a thought experiment that was introduced to me in an undergraduate linguistics class, wherein the professor had us each imagine a bowl of oranges on a kitchen counter. He then asked us how we would approach the task of going into another room and describing one specific orange in that bowl, such that the person we were talking to, having not previously seen the bowl of oranges, could go into the kitchen and successfully select the orange we were describing. The limits of language were clearly illustrated by this exercise. Assuming there weren’t any obviously different oranges (no tangelos or satsumas to make our delineation clear), it required us to avoid terms like “more orange” or “less squishy” because those terms lose meaning without an agreed upon reference point. Read the rest of this entry »


Alek Thomas Has Made Tremendous Strides Backwards (and That’s a Good Thing)

Alek Thomas
Arizona Republic

When I began writing this piece about Alek Thomas‘ defense, it was in response to the excellence he had shown in the postseason as Arizona’s everyday centerfielder. Since then, an elephant walked into the room in the form of his ninth-inning error in Game 5 of the World Series, and while it didn’t cost the Diamondbacks the title or even the game, it undoubtedly left a bitter taste in his mouth that he’ll likely spend much of the offseason trying to rinse out. But his late-game error was a tragically timed blip on an otherwise excellent performance this October — one that speaks to the specific improvements he’s made to his outfield defense, and how those adjustments have altered his forecast as a big leaguer. So let’s take a look at how Thomas’ defense has evolved since his days as a bat-first prospect, rewinding to this catch in Monday night’s Game 3.

That catch was one of several he made throughout the postseason, which provided Thomas with a national audience to wow with his range in the outfield. The way he covered ground out there played well on TV, too, particularly how he went back on deep balls to center field, sprinting with his head down toward the wall and making mid-route adjustments as needed. But while his wall-banging robbery of what would otherwise have been an RBI double for Mitch Garver was an obvious defensive highlight in its own right, it was also a clear indication of the improvements Thomas has made to his center field defense over the past couple seasons. Read the rest of this entry »


Adam Wainwright Explains the Sweeper: A Close Reading

Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports

In Game 3 of the Twins/Astros ALDS, the subject of Sonny Gray’s sweeper came up in the broadcast booth. That set the stage for Adam Wainwright to clear up some confusion that dates back a ways, and put forth an answer to the question that has been spinning around the league for a while: What exactly is a sweeper?

Here’s the clip:

In just over a minute (and with deftly added pauses for the purposes of game calling), Wainwright covered a lot of ground, first pointing out the shape of the sweeper as compared to a traditional slider, then going on to scratch the surface of how the pitch is thrown and how that impacts its shape. At one point during his spiel, he chuckled at the camera, visibly concerned about how little time he had to explain something so complicated. So with the benefit of a much more flexible word count than he was afforded in the booth, let’s break down Wainwright’s breakdown, beat-by-beat, and see if we can illustrate and expand on what he was talking about by taking a look at some of 2023’s sweepingest pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »


What Kyle Harrison Can Teach Us About Ricky Tiedemann

Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

There’s a week at the end of every season when Triple-A welcomes some of baseball’s top prospects for a brief stint at the minor leagues’ highest level before they hang up their cleats for the year (or in many cases, head to the Arizona Fall League). Expanded rosters at the big league level leave a slew of freshly vacated Triple-A roster spots. Meanwhile, the Low-, High-, and Double-A seasons end when there’s still a week left on the Triple-A schedule, creating a sizable pool of lower-level up-and-comers. These prospects, especially the younger ones, are looking to prove themselves capable of standing up to competition beyond what their developmental schedule might otherwise deem appropriate. It’s also a big reason why so many of the following year’s prospect list write-ups include some version of the phrase “He notched a few innings at Triple-A at the end of last season.”

One such prospect this year is Ricky Tiedemann, the young lefty hurler who sits atop the Blue Jays prospect list and currently ranks 18th on our overall Top 100. If that résumé sounds oddly familiar, you may be picking up echos of recent big league debutant Kyle Harrison, who tops the Giants list and is stacked just spot above Tiedemann on our Top 100. The similarities don’t end there, though. Both Harrison and Tiedemann were drafted as teenagers, and both boast a tremendous punchout ability that belies their years, posting strikeout rates above 40% at various points in their young pro careers.

Before I continue, a caveat: Due to a combination of mid-season arm soreness and a short leash when it came to his pitch count, Tiedemann only threw 44 innings in 2023. That’s important to keep in mind, especially considering that Harrison’s lowest innings total in a pro season is more than double that. Tiedemann still has to demonstrate that he’s capable of maintaining his prowess over the type of innings load that Harrison has endured. With that established, let’s dig into how the two young southpaws resemble one another, and more importantly, what sets Tiedemann apart, at least for now. Read the rest of this entry »