Sean Manaea began his start Wednesday night by allowing a home run on his first pitch of the game, and things only briefly got better. After Shin-Soo Choo’s lead-off blast, Manaea retired nine of the next 11 hitters he faced only to have trouble return again in the fourth. He gave up a single to Todd Frazier and a walk to Robinson Chirinos, followed by run-scoring hits from Nick Solak and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, before finally getting his first out of the inning in the form of a sacrifice fly by Rob Refsnyder. With four runs already in on six hits and a walk through 3.2 innings, Oakland manager Bob Melvin moved to his bullpen early, asking right-hander Burch Smith to get his team back on track.

“If you’re Burch Smith, you would love to be able to hand the ball off to somebody in the eighth inning,” A’s analyst Dallas Braden said on the broadcast as Smith tossed his warm-up pitches. In the moment, it sounded optimistic, maybe even a tad foolhardy. Saying something like that is a nice way to remind Oakland fans watching at home that a bad start does not mean hope is lost, and that their team is very much still in the game. But expecting any reliever to go get 11 outs when the starter could only achieve 10 is a pretty tough ask, especially when it’s a 30-year-old journeyman who owns a career ERA north of 6.00.

In reality, Braden almost got it exactly right. Smith pitched two outs into the seventh inning, retiring all 10 hitters he faced on just 33 pitches before Melvin replaced him with T.J. McFarland. McFarland gave up one hit and got two more outs, then Joakim Soria came into the game and retired the final five Rangers hitters of the night. In that time, the A’s hammered a total of four homers and came back to win the game, 6-4. The bullpen was asked to do the heavy lifting, and it did a near-perfect job at it.

That kind of performance has become the norm for the A’s over the first couple weeks of the 2020 season. Here are the most valuable ‘pens in baseball through Wednesday: Read the rest of this entry »

An exciting pitching matchup on Monday between the defending National League Cy Young winner and the NL Rookie of the Year runner-up turned grim in the third inning when 23-year-old Braves right-hander Mike Soroka suffered what appeared to be a leg injury while coming off the mound on a groundball.

Braves starter Mike Soroka leaves today's game after falling to the ground while attempting to cover 1st base. He was helped off of the field. pic.twitter.com/gJC0Dt3Xcz

— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) August 4, 2020

The injury was rather apparent in zoomed-in, slowed-down videos shared on Twitter shortly after — I won’t link them here, you can find them yourself if you really want to — and within hours, the Braves confirmed the worst. Soroka tore his achilles tendon, which will cause him to miss the rest of this season and, depending on his recovery, possibly the beginning of 2021 as well.

Losing Soroka, 23, to a serious injury like this is awful. He was second in NL Rookie of the Year voting a year ago after throwing 174.2 innings and posting a 2.68 ERA, 3.45 FIP, and 4.0 WAR. That ERA was good for fourth among qualified starters, while his FIP was 14th. He didn’t get many strikeouts — he had the 14th-lowest K/9 rate in baseball last year — but instead pitched to contact, and was quite successful at it. He had the sixth-highest groundball rate among qualified starters, and according to Statcast, was in the 84th percentile in barrel rate allowed, the 65th percentile in exit velocity allowed, and the 60th percentile in expected slugging percentage. Underlying data didn’t necessarily believe he was the Cy Young contender his ERA portrayed him as, but he was still rated as a solidly above-average pitcher across the board — no small feat for someone who pitched most of the year at age 21 while attempting to buck some of the game’s most popular pitching trends.

This year, however, there was evidence he might be falling more in line with what modern pitching instructors are preaching. Soroka was a sinker baller last year, throwing the pitch 44.6% of the time, while his four-seam fastball rate was just 18.7%. In a small sample of starts this season, however, those two had converged. According to Statcast, in his first 13.2 innings, Soroka had thrown exactly 59 sinkers and 59 four-seamers. Read the rest of this entry »

Since he was drafted in the second round in 2015, Tigers left-hander Tyler Alexander barely needs two hands to count the number of times he’s struck out nine batters in a game. There was the first time, on April 23, 2016, when he was in High-A. There were two other nine-strikeout performances in 2017, and two more in the minors in 2019, along with one occasion in the majors in just his third big league appearance. That’s six instances of at least nine strikeouts in 126 career appearances as a pro, each one coming in a game he started.

On Sunday, Alexander struck out nine batters in a row. Not over the course of six or seven innings — just one right after another. Entering as a reliever in the third inning of the first game of Detroit’s doubleheader against the Reds, Alexander set the record for consecutive strikeouts in a relief appearance, and tied the American League record for consecutive strikeouts by any pitcher. And a two-strike fastball that drilled Mike Moustakas on his left arm is all that stopped Alexander from tying Tom Seaver for MLB’s all-time record. Actually, because he struck out Eugenio Suárez immediately after plunking Moustakas, that stray heater is all that stopped Alexander from having the longest strikeout streak in baseball history.

By any definition, it will go down as one of the most dominant relief appearances of the season. Of the 55 pitches Alexander threw on Sunday, 16 were called strikes, while 22 induced swings. Of those 22 swings, 11 were whiffs, and none resulted in a ball put in play. For 3.2 innings, Alexander was untouchable. That’s unquestionably a great day for him, and to a lesser extent, it’s also a good day for every other pitcher in baseball, because Alexander’s performance shows this is probably something any pitcher in baseball could achieve.

This isn’t to take anything away from Alexander. Every pitcher on earth would love to simply strike out every hitter he faces without ever allowing the ball to be put in play — that doesn’t mean anyone ever actually accomplishes it. It’s one thing to try to strike out nine guys in a row, and another to actually do it. In order to close that gap, one would think a pitcher would need to be working with some truly elite, lights-out stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

The nerves were easy to see in the eyes of Nate Pearson during the third batter of Wednesday’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Washington Nationals. It was the 23-year-old right-hander’s major league debut, and he had just allowed the first baserunner of his career on a four-pitch walk to Adam Eaton. With the camera aimed at first base, viewers saw Eaton get a big lead, then take another step, then another. Pearson never looked his way. His eyes were straight ahead, beads of sweat already forming under his cap, as he concentrated like the only thing he could think about was making sure his next offering was a strike. It didn’t work. He bounced a slider in the dirt, then turned to see Eaton standing on second base without a throw.

By the time he finished his first career outing, those nerves appeared to be gone. Pearson showed there was no need for nervousness. He ended up throwing five shutout innings, allowing just two hits and two walks while striking out five. The Nationals ultimately won the game anyway, 4-0, thanks to stellar pitching by their own starter — some guy named Max Scherzer — but even in a shortened season in which every game is crucial to a Toronto team on the fringes of a playoff hunt, it’s difficult to think of a reason for a Blue Jays fan to feel anything other than pure excitement over Wednesday’s game.

Pearson’s journey to a big-league mound was a bumpy one. He had a screw put in his throwing elbow in high school, and he was used mainly as a reliever at Central Florida Junior College, albeit an extremely good one. Toronto drafted him 28th overall in 2017 with the intention of stretching him out to be a starter, and he started at Advanced-A in 2018. A couple of injuries, however — an intercostal strain and a fractured arm caused by a line drive back to the mound — limited him to just 1.2 innings for the whole season.

When he finally returned in 2019, the Blue Jays challenged him, asking him to pitch across three levels of the minors. And despite only throwing 21.2 pro innings in the 22 months since he’d been drafted, he responded well, totaling 101.2 frames and allowing just 26 runs on 63 hits with 27 walks and 109 strikeouts. As he began throwing in Blue Jays camp this spring, it was obvious he had the stuff to make the Opening Day rotation, but there were quickly rumblings of the team keeping him in the minors to start the season for just long enough to delay his free agency by a year. Wednesday, as it happens, was the first day the Blue Jays could add Pearson to the roster without him getting a full year of service time in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

Corey Kluber’s debut with Texas lasted just one inning. A strikeout, walk, caught stealing, and popup made for a snappy opening frame against Colorado on Sunday, and after 18 pitches, the 34-year-old right-hander’s velocity was right where it has been for years. It seemed like the start of a solid return to the mound for Kluber and an exciting first glimpse for Rangers fans at the team’s biggest offseason addition, but the good vibes faded quickly. Kluber never took the mound for the second inning, with the team quickly citing “tightness in his right shoulder” and saying there would be an update Monday.

The update came, and it wasn’t reassuring — Kluber has a Grade 2 tear of his teres major muscle, an injury that will require him to be shut down for at least four weeks. There is a chance he could miss the entire season, and if he does return at some point, he will need to pitch out of the bullpen, as there won’t be enough time to stretch him back out to handle a starter’s workload.

This is the second consecutive season the two-time Cy Young winner has missed substantial time following several years of him being one of the most durable starters in the game. Kluber threw at least 200 innings every year from 2014-18, racking up the second-highest innings total over that five-year span. That run got busted on a fluke play last spring when Marlins third baseman Brian Anderson hit a line drive that got Kluber in his right arm, causing a non-displaced fracture that ended his season after just seven starts. Read the rest of this entry »

Once Major League Baseball made the necessary decision to dramatically shorten its 2020 season amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the chances that there would be a few more statistical oddities than usual significantly increased. The potential exists for the numbers themselves to be goofy, like a player hitting .400, but the players who top leaderboards this season might also surprise. For a 60-game stretch in 2018, the batting title belonged to Scooter Gennett; for another, the home run leader was Matt Carpenter. And with this morning’s disturbing news of an outbreak in the Marlins’ clubhouse, this season could wind up being even shorter than we believed just a few days ago, cut off at a point so early that its statistics would be rendered utterly meaningless. But even if we don’t end up 60 games worth of baseball, one data point will likely hold up to historical scrutiny: Giancarlo Stanton had the hardest hit ball of 2020.

483 feet! 121 mph! @Giancarlo818 with a ?. pic.twitter.com/REfWTeejGV

— MLB (@MLB) July 26, 2020

You don’t need to know any of the numbers to appreciate that home run. It’s a cool home run. It has all the aesthetics of a good Stanton dinger — a mistake pitch up in the zone, a direct, powerful swing from a truly massive human being, and then that same human being slowly strutting up the first base line while he watches an obviously crushed ball land in a place most guys can’t reach in batting practice. It’s hard to improve upon that experience, but the numbers actually do add something here. The distance of the homer was 483 feet, and the exit velocity was 121.3 mph. In 2019, just seven home runs surpassed that distance, and no batted balls of any kind matched that exit velocity. If I had to guess, none will in 2020, either.

Read the rest of this entry »

After everything that led to the start of its truncated 60-game season, Major League Baseball tried its hardest to fill Opening Day with all the excitement it could. The defending World Series champion Nationals faced this offseason’s most sought-after free agent pitcher, making his debut for the league’s most storied franchise. After that, the Dodgers took the field, joined for the first time by the newest face of their franchise, to host their longtime rivals. Leading immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci — the face of the United States’ fight against the COVID-19 pandemic that led to the suspension of sports seasons all over the world — threw out the first pitch of the season, a not-so-subtle signal to the American public that things are fine, or fine enough.

But the moment had already been soured. Hours before the first game of their season, Nationals wunderkind Juan Soto was announced to have tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing him to miss the season-opener and enter self-isolation. In addition to being scary news for Soto — who is asymptomatic — it also served as one more reminder of the dangers MLB faces as it attempts to play a season in the middle of a pandemic, and the complicated moral quandaries fans of the sport will struggle with as long as that season goes on.

Wednesday — Works out at Nationals Park

Thursday — Receives positive test result for Tuesday test

That is four full days between giving a saliva sample that tested negative and receiving a positive result.

— Jesse Dougherty (@dougherty_jesse) July 23, 2020

Not that we needed the reminder in the first place. For four months, we’ve been absorbing as much information as possible about the virus, its potentially deadly effects, and its insidious spread through asymptomatic carriers; about the difficult ethical debates it created; about the lost jobs and the likely permanent damage dealt to already vulnerable industries and communities; about the potentially devastating hurdles and pitfalls that lurk within the return plans of various leagues; and, of course, since this is pro sports, about whether all of this might be rendered moot by the greed of ownership. After all of that, there was hope MLB’s return would be the escape we’ve all anxiously waited for. Instead, it has become its own source of anxiety — a profoundly risky gamble with thousands of lives in the balance, in which we root less for teams and players and more for the simple wish that nothing terrible happens. Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re watching a baseball game, there are few things as nerve-wracking as seeing your favorite team’s pitcher consistently fall behind hitters. You know intuitively that the better the count is for the hitter, the better chance there is he’ll see a pitch he can slug. Broadcasters often love to talk about first-pitch strikes and their importance in both “setting the tone” of an at-bat and keeping pitch counts low. These are all valid notions — in 2019, the league-wide wOBA when the pitcher was behind in the count was .432. When the pitcher was ahead or the count was even, that mark was .269. That’s about the same difference as there was between Mike Trout and Orlando Arcia, the worst qualified hitter of last season.

Nearly everyone who threw at least 1,500 pitches in 2019 performed worse when behind in the count, with the exception of Tigers starter Jordan Zimmermann, who was just bad regardless of the situation. But just because someone falls behind in the count doesn’t mean he’s a lost cause. Even when at a disadvantage, some pitchers hold their own just fine. Here were the 10 best pitchers when throwing from behind last season.

By and large, that’s a list of good pitchers. However, there is an outlier here in Gio González. Not because he isn’t a good pitcher, mind you. The veteran lefty, who signed with the White Sox over the winter, held a 3.50 ERA (79 ERA-) and 4.04 FIP (90 FIP-) over 87.1 innings with Milwaukee last season. He doesn’t stand out because of a lack of skill level. He stands out because of how often he’s behind compared to the other pitchers on this list. Read the rest of this entry »

In the third inning of ESPN’s broadcast of a tilt between the KT Wiz and the Kia Tigers on Wednesday, Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez welcomed on former 10-year major leaguer Mel Rojas. The timing worked out well — the fourth batter of the inning was his son, Mel Rojas Jr. 로하스, who stepped to the plate with runners at second and third and one out in a 1-1 game.

“He’s smart,” Mel Sr. said. “He knows he’s not getting a good pitch to hit. He’s patient.” The son proved the father right, fouling off two strikes while taking three balls. With the count full, Perez asked the elder Mel what he would throw his son in this situation, with first base open and two outs. “Split,” he responded. “… I would not throw it for a strike.”

Indeed, he got the splitter from Tigers pitcher Min-woo Lee 이민우, but the pitch hung, crossing the plate at the knees. The younger Rojas flicked his bat effortlessly through the zone, slapping a base hit to center that plated two runs. On the broadcast, his father hardly budged. Two innings later — with his father now off-screen but presumably still watching — Rojas came through with a runner in scoring position again, hitting another two-out RBI single to help push the Wiz to a 7-4 victory.

No one in the KBO is more dependable than Rojas with men on base right now, because there is simply no one hitting better in general. He’s within striking distance of the standard triple crown (third in batting average, first in RBI, first in homers), as well as the triple slash crown (fourth in OBP, first in slugging). In fact, across the board, there is no one having kind of season at the plate that Rojas is.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a little while since we checked in on the Korean Baseball Organization. During Major League Baseball’s struggle to resume play in 2020 — both with fair compensation for players and proper health and safety precautions taken — entire seasons are well underway overseas, not only in South Korea but also in Japan and Taiwan. The KBO was the second to get started after the CPBL and thanks to an effective government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has had its teams play well over 50 games already, or about three-eights of their regular season. Back when the season was just two weeks old, my colleague Jay Jaffe wrote about a league the NC Dinos were already starting to dominate. Six weeks later, very little has changed.

After storming out of the gates with an 11-1 start, the Dinos have yet to relinquish first place, with the team still yet to hit any kind of a real rough patch. Their .685 winning percentage would set them on pace for about a 111-win season in MLB. Even if you strip away their 11-1 start — a run that even a team like, say, the early-season 2019 Mariners can approximate — their record since is still a sparkling 26-16, which equates to about 100 wins in a typical MLB season.

When the Dinos were covered here in May, they were said to be wearing teams out with power and patience. A few weeks later, the patience has diminished, but the intimidating power remains very much alive. The team leads the KBO in slugging (.487) by a good margin, and has hit the most homers in the league with 79. They’ve dropped to fifth in walks drawn, but their power has been enough to keep them the top-scoring team in the league at 6.52 runs per game.

As Jay mentioned, this kind of success for the Dinos has come as a surprise to KBO fans. They haven’t advanced to the Korean Series since 2016, and last year, they finished fifth with a record of 73-69-2; Dan Szymborski’s projections gave them just an 11.6% chance to win the league this year, forecasting them to finish fourth. They’ve surpassed those expectations, though, by having out-of-nowhere breakouts from a number of now-key players.

The Dinos’ lineup is positively relentless. Eight qualified hitters have a wRC+ of at least 110, and four of those rank in the top 10 hitters in the entire league. Jin-sung Kang 강진성 is the best of the bunch, hitting .365/.403/.623 for a 163 wRC+ that ranks third in the KBO. Hui-dong Kwon 권희동 (.312/.425/.558, 158 wRC+), Sung-bum Na 나성범 (.310/.378/.614, 154 wRC+), and Aaron Altherr 알테어 (.307/.380/.615, 154 wRC+), meanwhile, rank seventh, ninth and 10th in the KBO in wRC+, respectively. Each of these guys contributes to the team’s explosive pop — Na ranks second in the league with 15 homers, and Altherr is tied for third with 14.

That group of hitters is a great example of how the Dinos have blossomed. Of those four hitters, only Na had previously established a believable track record of success in the KBO. He entered the season coming off six consecutive seasons with a wRC+ of at least 120, and at 30 years old, he’s still in the prime of his career. It was always likely he’d mash this season — it was less clear whether he’d have much company. Kang, 26, had been a part-time player before this season, posting a wRC+ of 84 last season and 37 the year before. Kwon, 29, had already played six seasons in the KBO, and was above average at the plate in just two of them. Finally, there was Altherr, who as a foreign-born player had some expectations he would perform well, but was still new to the league.

All of those players have broken out in huge ways for the Dinos, and they aren’t alone. On the pitching side, I wrote about the brilliance of Chang-mo Koo 구창모 in the first month of the season and, well, it’s hard to say he’s gotten worse.

Both Statiz and KBO Fancy Stats give Koo the highest WAR of any player in the league this season, despite being a 23-year-old who first managed a FIP under 5.00 just last year. Alongside him in the rotation is Drew Rucinski 루친스키, another first-year KBO player from the U.S. whose 2.30 ERA ranks third in the league, and Mike Wright 라이트, who has outperformed an underwhelming FIP all season long, clocking in with a 3.63 ERA.

The rotation is brilliant at the top, but somewhat suspect at the bottom. If the Dinos have a weakness, it is that the back of their rotation has yet to really crystallize, with Jae-hak Lee 이재학, Sung-young Choi 최성영 and Young-kyu Kim 김영규 all carrying ERAs over 5.00. The story is similar in the bullpen, where Jong-hyun Won 원종현 (2.92 ERA in 24.2 innings) and Jae-whan Bae 배재환 (3.80 ERA in 23.2 innings) have been anchors, but everyone else has gotten hit very hard. It’s an unbalanced pitching staff, but because the offense is so deep — I haven’t even talked about former MVP catcher Euiji Yang 양의지 or longtime KBO stud Sok Min Park 박석민, both of whom are also in the league’s top 20 in wRC+ — that it just hasn’t mattered.

The Dinos aren’t without competition going forward, but no other team has posed a credible threat to their place at the top thus far. The second-place Heroes are sort of a portrait of dull competency — they rank fourth in scoring, on-base percentage, and slugging, and third in team ERA. Their pitching has been led more by finesse than power, as they rank first in BB/9 and eighth in K/9. The Bears, meanwhile, are more of a lesson in extremes. Their offense leads the KBO in OBP and SLG while running second in scoring, but their pitching staff is responsible for the second-highest ERA in the league. Both have had a few cracks at the Dinos this season, but so far, they’ve gone a combined 5-10. Their head-to-head matchups have only widened the gap between them.

All of this places the Dinos in a very good position to take the regular season, and if you need a reminder, that is a very big deal. The KBO playoff format rewards the regular season champion by giving it a bye directly to the Korean Series, with the next four teams having a progressively longer route to face them. The fourth and fifth seeds face each other in a best-of-five wild card round, the winner of that series faces the third seed in the quarterfinals, and so on.

Unlike the top spot, the remaining seeds ought to be highly contested all season. Part of that is due to the fact that the bottom of the league is so clearly defined — the SK Wyverns have gone through a poor enough stretch to nearly catch the Hanwha Eagles, who devoted a chunk of their season to perhaps the worst three-week run in baseball history. With a fifth of the league roughly 10 games behind everyone else, the clubs in front of them have gotten a boost.

Most of those teams have a significant enough strength that it’s easy to imagine them piecing together a hot streak that defines their season. The Kia Tigers, currently in sixth place in the standings, own the league’s best ERA. The seventh-place KT Wiz have scored the third-most runs per game. The road will be quite crowded for some time. But even with much of the season remaining, it seems clear that one team is in the fast lane.