Gerrit Cole simply dominated the Rays across his two starts in the ALDS. Across almost 16 innings, he allowed just one run and nine baserunners while striking out nearly half of the batters he faced. That lone run he allowed was a solo home run off the bat of Eric Sogard. Of all the players on the Rays’ playoff roster, no one would have guessed it would be Sogard to hit a dinger off one of the best pitchers in all of baseball. But was it really that unlikely?

For his part, Sogard put together a career year this season. He posted career highs in ISO, wRC+, and WAR while launching 13 home runs, two more than his career total across eight previous seasons. Long viewed as a light-hitting utility infielder, Sogard showed he was capable of hitting for power in a way that he had never been able to before. And yet, he only averaged an 84.7 mph exit velocity this year, and his hard hit rate sat in the third percentile in the majors. But by adding an extra 2.5 degrees to his average launch angle — and with some help from the dragless ball — 13 of those hard-ish hit fly balls snuck over the fence.

Cole did struggle a bit with the long ball this season, allowing 29 home runs and a career-high 16.9% home run per fly ball rate. That’s 10 more home runs than he allowed last year and just two fewer than the career high he allowed in his final season in Pittsburgh in 2017. But Cole’s home run troubles and Sogard’s newfound power only tell part of the story in broad generalizations. So let’s dig into the specific event to see if we can find anything more interesting. For starts, here’s the video of Sogard’s home run in case you missed it last night.

Sogard gets around on a 95-mph fastball on the inside corner and hits it solidly enough to reach four rows back in right field. The pitch itself was rather peculiar. Cole’s average fastball velocity this season was 97.1 mph. In the game last night, he averaged 97.3 mph. This fastball was the second slowest fastball he threw all night. When Cole’s fastball velocity has dipped that low, opposing batters have had a much easier time handling his heater. Here’s a table showing how batters have fared against his fastball at different velocities: Read the rest of this entry »

The 16-straight postseason losses is a story hard to ignore. So is the fact that 13 of those defeats — Monday night’s ALDS ousting being the latest in that inglorious stretch — have come at the hands of the Bronx Bombers. October has indeed been a cruel month for the Minnesota Twins.

Remember Prince singing, “Two thousand zero zero, party over”? Since the dawning of the 21st century, Kirby Puckett’s old club has been a playoff piñata.

That’s not going to be the primary focus here. Words will be spilled on the just-completed series — mostly from the mouths of the participants — but let’s not forget that the future is what matters most (not just for the Twins, but for all of us.) As Henry Ford once said, “History is more or less bunk… the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”

Back in 2004, with the Red Sox on the brink of elimination in the ALCS, Kevin Millar defiantly told the Yankees: “Don’t let us win today.” With the Twins facing their own lose-one-and-you’re-done scenario, I mentioned Millar’s proclamation to Trevor May in Sunday’s workout day press conference.

”Don’t give us an inch, because we’ll take a mile,” May responded. “That’s been something — when doors have been opened for us all year, we’ve exploded through them. That’s what we’re looking to do.”

That’s not what happened, of course. Monday’s 5-1 loss put Minnesota’s 2019 season in the history books, and what comes next is some meaningful tinkering. Without it, an implosion looms as a possibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Night, Félix Hernández made his final start as a Seattle Mariner, and baseball is a little different for me now. Dimmer, further away. It has been on the road to different for a while, I suppose; it is not an original idea to note how one’s hobby becoming one’s job alters our relationship to our devotions, nor is it novel for a baseball fan or writer to have a guy. You know, your guy? The one who, among all the others, rendered the sport in its most vivid colors, made your appetite for it insatiable, transformed you into a lifer. Your guy. You love your guy! My guy is gone now; I wonder if I’ll ever have another.

To expect that his last outing would mirror his halcyon days would have been to miss the point. Félix is altered, worn. He threw 106 pitches; at times he labored. When the time came, he wept, and the tears marked a father’s face, a man’s; and he had been so young when we came to know him. He added three strikeouts to his career total, which now stands at 2,524, but there were three runs, too. He pitched into the sixth; he never saw October. He may yet pitch again, decamping to some other city after having stayed all of these years, but it won’t be the same. He isn’t their guy. How could he be? He’s ours.

…

It’s such a funny thing, fandom. It houses within it theft; we make symbols of human beings, transfigure persons so as to serve the function of a satisfyingly smooth stone we transfer from pants pocket to pants pocket. We carry them around with our memories and sadness, spirit them into our bits of kindness paid and received. The special ones, the ones who stick with us, who become our guys, are both magical and not so dissimilar from the restaurant where we paused and realized we were in love, or the couch where we sat and learned that our grandma was sick, the familiar street corner in our hometown where we first thought, I need to go away for a while, and go see things. They become guideposts, markers in our memories for both what they are on the field, and who we were.

To imbue these strangers with so much is a bit silly, and I wonder if it isn’t also a bit rude. I have to imagine that franchise cornerstones know that fans will come to adore and scorn them, but Félix never asked to mean this to me; to be burdened with these expectations. He doesn’t know my name, but I call him by his first, casual. Familiar. He never meant to be a lesson; in patience; in greatness; in decline; in things left undone. In still being young; in being finished. To make of these guys what we do, to make them our guys, is to see them at once as they are and as we are. True to themselves but also infected with our own picayune trials.

When Félix debuted, I was distant; from Detroit, where he recorded his first four strikeouts, from home, where the faithful watched and waited for his promise to be fulfilled, from baseball, difficult as it was to make time for amidst school and laundry and finding my way. I grew up a baseball fan, and still observed its rituals, but the sport was now rendered in unfamiliar hues. Not the cool blues and greens I knew, but in a vibrant Phillies red, and later, as I navigated the post-college world of full-time work and financial crisis, a stately pinstripe, a garish Queens orange. Seattle baseball was a long ways off, removed from the normal evening hours it had once occupied, and relegated to a twilight time.

I don’t remember when I first read one more article at Lookout Landing than my lunch break comfortably fit; I don’t know that the first time was that remarkable. It was probably some dumb thing that Jeff wrote, to fill all the dumb, meaningless days when the Mariners still, somehow, had to play baseball. But soon, it was a place I toggled to without thinking, the destination of idle wanderings between meetings and during conference calls. I couldn’t watch Félix at home — home was so far, and not where I lived anymore — but I would watch him in the Bronx, trudge to 161st Street armed with my fellow expats and homemade K cards and a sense that this was time well spent even when it was dumb; even though it was meaningless. Because Félix made it mean something.

The day the Mariners announced Félix’s extension, I remember turning to my coworkers, many of whom were Yankees fans smugly convinced that our King was soon to establish a new court out East, and saying with all the defiance I could muster: Félix is ours, and you can’t have him. Later that evening, I spoke with the professor who would become my graduate school advisor. Félix had declared his home, and I was about to declare what I thought was mine. Félix was to me a connection to both to where I’d been and where I might go, a reminder of what I liked and who I wanted to be at a time when I was struggling to know myself, caught in a job that so often took me into the twilight hours where Félix would wait. To appreciate him for staying was to christen this place, my place, worthy of staying in, and more importantly, of getting back to. But it was more than that. It meant more than that.

Perhaps then it is less a theft and more a drawing of loans one can never fully repay. I cheered for Félix, sure, was one of his court, but I didn’t inspire him to a career. I loved to watch him play, celebrated his day, christened him My Guy, but the people he loves he came to know through other means. And yet Félix is why I am here; the stirring his pitches caused, a warmth that radiated into the tips of my fingers and into the space behind my eyes when that cambio flew shifted things around. The desire to know more, to understand the how of this man, even as he, with tears and yelps and a commitment to stay traced over too many innings, articulated his why, made up a pledge to write things down so as to pick them apart. I sought rigor to explain why he meant so much and how good he was; I embraced whimsy to do justice to all he made me feel. I wrote and wrote until all I wanted to do was write more, and then finally, I got to. And the road to being here is why I’ve collected the people I have, friends I love, and can’t imagine my life without, all new lines of credit, charged against this man. My guy.

…

My guy is gone, bound for other places, returned to a life peopled with his people, rather than one serving as a marker for mine, folks who I don’t know and in whose story I play no part, even as so many of those in whose lives I am firmly planted are there because of the years, and turns, and miseries he spent in this place that for so long, I couldn’t get back to. This guy, whose permission to mean all this I was never able to ask for but who has given me so much, by deciding to stay. He is gone, but the memory of him — perfect, resplendent, royal, wrecked, but importantly ours — will persist. Baseball is a little different now; my life unrecognizable. I am here now. The debt remains, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever be able to pay it back.

Yesterday, Ned Yost announced that he would retire at the end of the season. While the news came as a surprise, the man himself has always kept a healthy perspective on the game. Based on Alec Lewis’s profile, he’ll leave the game feeling fulfilled and ready for the next chapter of his life. His departure, along with a juicy rumor that Royals special advisor and former Cardinals manager Mike Matheny will replace him, made for an eventful Monday morning in Kansas City.

As a skipper, Yost was never a visionary strategist. He’s not analytically inclined by nature, and he struggled in game states that require managers to play the percentages. Too often, his choices looked reflexive and dated: He liked having his fast shortstop lead off, OBP be damned. His good players bunted far too often. He didn’t always know when to deploy his closer. Managing the bullpen proved particularly challenging.

In one 2014 game, Yost summoned young Danny Duffy into a tied, extra-inning contest on the road, and then turned to Louis Coleman after the lefty loaded the bases. All that time, he had all-world closer Greg Holland ready to go, but he never got to pitch; Baltimore walked it off against Coleman. Later that year, Yost brought in a lefty specialist specifically to face (then) feeble-hitting Jackie Bradley Jr. with one on late in a one-run game; the Red Sox predictably inserted lefty-basher Jonny Gomes, who socked a two-run homer to give Boston a one-run win. After that episode, the manager memorably took responsibility, saying he’d “outsmarted himself.” Perhaps more than anyone over the last decade, Yost earned an almost anti-analytic reputation, becoming the face of what sabermetric seamheads spent so much time ranting about on Twitter.

But as Yost’s time in the dugout stretched on, the criticisms of his tactical acumen felt like an increasingly small slice of the story. For subscribers of the iceberg theory of managing, it’s clear that he compensated with other strengths. Yost always absorbed the blame whenever things went haywire, a point that both his bosses and charges acknowledged and appreciated. He also had a steady hand with young players. In Milwaukee and Kansas City, he helped turn perennially losing teams into playoff-caliber squads, happily shepherding young talents through the inevitable growing pains. Notably, a number of highly touted prospects who began their big league careers slowly — Eric Hosmer, Alex Gordon, Mike Moustakas, Jorge Soler, and Adalberto Mondesi among them — eventually blossomed. Might they have done so sooner under another manager? Perhaps, perhaps not. Regardless, most of the best prospects under Yost’s watch figured things out eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

A man in black stands in the bullpen. He looks different than the last time we saw him here, almost six months ago now. The strange uniform hangs off him so loosely; his hair is clipped shorter; his beard is longer. It is the early evening, and the sky is loosely clouded, the light and shadow falling in that way that is so familiar now, the way it only does in this specific place, this close to the ocean in the west.

The energy, though, is not familiar for this building: the loud blue everywhere, the excitement of thousands who are experiencing something they can only have once a year, or once every few years, or even once in a lifetime. They are not here for the man in black; he might as well be one of the shadows.

In the corner, though, above the bullpen, the faithful form their block of yellow. They hold up their signs, and the kids wear their little foam crowns. And if it wasn’t for the fact that the words they hold up mirror the ones sewn to the back of his uniform, you might not know that the person they were so excited to see is the same subdued presence now taking the man.

It is the 209th time that Félix Hernández has started a game in this ballpark. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday, the Red Sox and Royals resumed a game from August 7 that had been previously suspended due to rain. The original contest took its pause knotted up 4-4; it resumed in a 2-1 count in the top of the 10th. It was a strange viewing experience. With the game still tied in the home half of the inning, Andrew Benintendi came up to bat. The chyron showed his season stats entering this day, August 22, but marked his batting line from a day when he was two full weeks younger:

It was a testament to a few things — the surprising rigidity of baseball’s schedule, the allure of a chance, however small (entering the day, our playoff odds had the Red Sox with a 1.7% shot at playing October baseball), the grip of a discounted hot dog on the hearts of children. But the whole ordeal also made me think about how we think about time — how we sometimes consider it banked, or free, or very precious, or, when we’re mad, or tired, or perhaps inconvenienced, something we’d just like to hurry along. The Red Sox played the Royals for about 12 minutes, and in that span, they showed us time in four different states. These are those four. Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Hosmer is a hard man to shift against. Though he fits the two main criteria for an overshift (namely: he’s left-handed and plays baseball), that’s where his list as an ideal candidate ends. If ever anyone was going to poke a groundball the opposite way, it would be Hosmer — his groundball rate is perennially among the league’s highest, and he hits a fair number of them to the opposite field. Teams generally agree — he’s faced a shift in fewer than half of his bases-empty plate appearances this year, and only 40.7% overall. Both place him in the bottom third of left-handed batters when it comes to the defensive alignment.

You don’t have to dig into his groundball numbers for long to work out why. The reasoning behind a shift is simple; hitters pull groundballs. League-wide, a whopping 55.5% of groundballs have been pulled, against only 12.1% hit the opposite way. The split is the same regardless of handedness, but first base is conveniently located on the lefty pull side of the field, which makes shifting a left-handed batter a high-percentage move.

For some reason, though, Hosmer doesn’t fit that mold. In 2019, he’s pulled only 46.4% of his groundballs, almost exactly equivalent to his career average of 46.3%. He’s at 16.3% opposite-field groundballs for his career over a whopping 2,263 grounders. His pull rate is in the bottom 20% of batters this year, and was in the bottom 3% last year, the bottom 10% two years ago, the bottom 15% for his career — you get the idea.

This isn’t to say there’s no merit to shifting against Hosmer — you’d need a more detailed mapping of infielder speeds and groundball exit velocity to work the math out perfectly. But look at his groundball (and blooper) distribution from 2016 to 2019 and tell me you want to shift against this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
Read the rest of this entry »

Gio Gonzalez is expressive on the mound, there’s no doubt about that. He tends to wear the result of the most recent plate appearance on his face. So if I told you that he threw a 3-2 pitch to Javier Báez, and followed it by looking like this:

What would you think happened? A double off the wall? A home run? Perhaps a smashed line drive that miraculously found a glove?

What if I told you that the pitch was a fastball that ended up here?

Okay, now you have a good guess. You’d make that face too if you walked Javy Báez on an uncompetitive pitch. There’s not much good to say about a pitch that missed the outer edge of the plate, per Statcast, by 13.2 inches.

Ha, I’m joking. It’s Javy Báez. That was a strikeout:

You might think, after that intro, that this is an article that will take issue with Javy Báez’s plate discipline. It is most emphatically not that. This is a paean to Báez’s singular, tremendous talent. Who else in baseball can swing at that pitch and also be a star? Who else can swing at that pitch and even be a major leaguer?

The book on Báez has always been that he has all the power in the world and none of the plate discipline. In the minors, he had unheard-of pop for an elite, up-the-middle defender — the kind of tools prospect evaluators drool over. There was just that one little thing: as his Triple-A manager, Marty Pevey, said when he was called up: “It’ll be a learning curve for Javy. He’ll want to hit every ball 600 feet. He’s such a great competitor.” Read the rest of this entry »

Before Cleveland Indians right-hander Mike Clevinger exited his second start of the season with an injury, he was throwing some of the most dominant stuff in baseball. He left his April 9 start against the Toronto Blue Jays with five innings of one-hit baseball under his belt, and over his first two starts combined, he had allowed no runs, surrendered just four walks, and struck out 22 batters in 12 innings. A strained muscle in his upper back, however, meant that the Indians would have to wait more than two months for him to return to the mound. In his first two starts back in June, he got roughed up to the tune of 12 runs allowed on eight hits, six walks, and nine strikeouts in 6.1 combined innings. Then the calendar turned to July, and Clevinger turned back into the version of himself he teased in April.

Since July 1, Clevinger has made nine starts. He has thrown 54 innings, struck out 74 batters, walked just 14, and allowed four home runs. His ERA of 2.17 in that timespan ranks 10th in the majors, but his 2.33 FIP is second, and his 2.55 xFIP is first. That kind of performance is no mere return to being healthy for the 28-year-old veteran; It’s the best he’s ever looked.

Clevinger finished his first three seasons in the big leagues with FIPs of 4.86, 3.85 and 3.52, respectively. In 72 innings this season, he’s lowered that all that way down to 2.47. That figure is weighted down by the lowest walk and home run rates of Clevinger’s career, but mostly, it’s down because his strikeout rate has skyrocketed. After entering 2019 with a career K/9 rate of around 9.5, he’s elevated that figure to over 13 to this point in the season.

That explosion in strikeouts coincides with a major step forward for Clevinger’s stuff in just the past year or so. Over the past three years, he has seen his average fastball velocity increase each season — not an easy task, considering that he didn’t break into the majors until he was 25 years old. Most pitchers lose a tick or two in velocity between their mid and late 20s, but Clevinger has gone the other direction. According to Statcast’s pitch data, from the beginning of the 2017 season until June 9, 2018, Clevinger registered an average fastball velocity of at least 94 mph in just two games, both of which were relief appearances. In starts, he tended to average 92-93 mph. Then, on June 14, his average fastball velocity spiked to 94.9 mph in a seven-inning, one-run, 10-strikeout performance against the White Sox. His average velocity was above 94 mph in three of his next five starts, and reached at least 93.9 mph in each of his final nine starts of the season. In those nine starts, his ERA was 2.03, and he struck out 63 batters in 53.1 innings. Read the rest of this entry »