We’ll start with some screen shots.

The author of that trickery is Ryan Weathers, a 21-year-old rookie for the San Diego Padres who leads all of baseball in pickoffs this season with nine. Runners have only stolen two bases off of him and he hasn’t been called for a balk yet. His pickoff proficiency has been historic, as he has retired those nine runners in only 89.2 innings, or 127 baserunners allowed. On a per baserunner basis, Weathers is having one of the best pickoff seasons of all time:

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Episode 940

This week on FanGraphs Audio, we sit down with The Cobra before welcoming back a friend for a prospect chat.

• At the top of the show, David Laurila is joined by 19-year major league veteran Dave Parker, as well as his co-author Dave Jordan, to talk about their book, Cobra: A Life of Baseball and Brotherhood. Parker tells a number of tales from the book and shares what it was like to be teammates with players like Dock Ellis, Willie Stargell, Pete Rose, and more. Meanwhile, Jordan explains how he came to help The Cobra write his memoir and how it got its title. The trio also discuss the Dave Parker 39 Foundation and its fight against Parkinson’s disease. [2:54]
• In our second segment, Eric Longenhagen catches up with The Athletic’s Keith Law on music and social media before diving into the 2021 season. The duo agree that minor league performances have been subpar in general, but also that there are a number of prospects rising up their rankings. Eric and Keith reconsider Anthony Volpe and Nick Yorke, and talk about players such as Elly De La Cruz, who offer a frightening range of potential futures. Finally, they discuss some players they hope to see in the Arizona Fall League this year. [28:37]

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“I was at dinner with our scout in Japan and he made a comment that even truck drivers throw 95 over here,” said Oakland’s Assistant General Manager Dan Feinstein. “That caught my attention. I said, ‘If that’s true, maybe we should be trying out some of these truck drivers.'”

Feinstein soon decided to run an experiment. Oakland advertised an open tryout for pitchers and invited players with a college pedigree to send video to the A’s scouting department. From there, the team invited 60 of them to throw in front of scouts. One of them, right-hander Shohei Tomioka, bumped 95 on the gun, which impressed Oakland enough to offer him a contract then and there. “We call it the truck driver tryout,” Feinstein said with a chuckle.

Tomioka’s story was only possible because of a brilliant combination of scouting and technology, with a dash of luck mixed in. His signing is also an indication that the international talent market is laden with players just waiting to be discovered. See, Tomioka wasn’t simply a truck driver with a live arm. He was an experienced pitcher, a graduate of one of Tokyo’s top baseball programs — he was just never seen at the right time by the right people. By the time Oakland discovered him, he was loitering in a small local league. “There’s a lot of independent ball over there,” Feinstein says, “and he had been pitching in one of these kind of obscure leagues. He was free to try out and was throwing 95 so we signed him.”

For anyone lamenting the rise of big tech in baseball or the demise of the scout, Tomioka is living proof that, for good and for ill, an element of the unpredictable remains in the game. His signing demonstrates the value of having a robust international department, while also highlighting how fertile the international market is today, and how teams that invest abroad now stand to reap a competitive advantage in the years to come. To get a better sense of how that might develop, let’s take a deeper dive into how teams scout internationally today. Read the rest of this entry »

I wish I could come to you with news about the mass adoption of backup sliders from pitchers across the league. I also wish I could come to you with a shining example of even one player who has perfected the art of the effective mistake. There is no apparent analytical case that comes to mind; it’s largely just a fascination to me — the best hitters in the world swinging through the worst offering a pitcher could imagine throwing. Here’s an example:

Matt Wisler is the perfect guy to have here — someone who throws nothing but sliders making the biggest kind of slider mistake! And yet there are times when it just works. What I want to try to answer is what makes these mistake sliders click without diving into the rabbit hole of pitch sequencing. Are there particular characteristics of movement and velocity that make for better backup sliders?

First, we have to set guidelines on what a backup slider is. You know it when you see it, but it is more broadly defined as something that “hangs” when thrown to a batter of the same handedness. Sliders behave differently depending on whether they’re thrown inside or out, as shown by Eno Sarris on this site a few years back; those away gain almost half a foot of horizontal movement compared to ones thrown inside! Sliders need height to be considered mistakes, but the distinctions in horizontal movement are too vast for an outside-and-up slider to be as bad a mistake as one up but inside. For our purposes, let’s say that a backup slider is anything in the upper third of the strike zone, middle-to-in, in a same handedness matchup. Read the rest of this entry »

Eli Morgan has “a bugs-bunny changeup.” That’s how the 25-year-old rookie right-hander’s signature offering was described when it was suggested that I interview him for the Learning and Developing a Pitch series. Delivered at an average velocity of 75.1 mph, Morgan’s changeup is the slowest among pitchers who have worked at least 40 innings (not including Seattle’s Paul Sewald, who per StatCast has thrown just one changeup all season).

Cleveland’s eighth-round pick in the 2017 draft, Morgan has made 14 starts and has a 5.48 ERA and a 5.01 FIP to go with 68 strikeouts in 67.1 innings. He’s thrown his changeup — a pitch he described in detail this past Sunday — 22.4% of the time.

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Eli Morgan: “I started out mainly fastball/breaking ball, and then my senior year of high school I began developing my changeup. I’d thrown a splitter — that was my changeup for my first couple years of high school — but I figured that probably wasn’t great for my arm going forward. At the time, there was talk of Masahiro Tanaka having issues with his elbow because of the splitter, and that kind of turned me off of that pitch. I decided to go to a regular circle change.

“When I got to [Gonzaga University] they told me that if I wanted to pitch, let alone be a starter, I needed to have a good changeup. That was a big thing up there, so I started throwing it a lot more and got comfortable with it.

“Because I throw a four-seam fastball, I throw a four-seam changeup. That’s something one of my pitching coaches mentioned: ‘Make sure it comes out with the same seams as your fastball.’ That’s what I went with, and I had pretty good command of it right from the start. Over time, I began getting more movement on it, getting more fade. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest reasons the Mariners have stuck around the fringes of the AL wild card race despite a -60 run differential has been the collective performance of their bullpen. Kendall Graveman had established himself as a bonafide relief ace before being traded to the Astros in late-July, and Drew Steckenrider has revived his career after falling apart in Miami two years ago. But equally unexpected, and perhaps the biggest reason Seattle felt comfortable dealing Graveman at all, has been the fantastic season put together by its other breakout relief ace: Paul Sewald.

Drafted as a reliever by the Mets in the 10th round of the 2012 draft, Sewald came with two years of college experience under his belt at the University of San Diego and quickly moved through the farm system. He reached the majors in 2017 and made 125 appearances out of the bullpen through 2020, but outside of a 23.5% strikeout rate that was just a hair above league average, he was mostly forgettable as a Met; across 147.1 innings in New York, he posted a 5.50 ERA. He was non-tendered this past offseason and signed a minor-league contract with the Mariners in January.

Even though Sewald wasn’t able to make the major league roster out of spring training, he has thrived in Seattle. He was called up on May 13, the same day Jarred Kelenic and Logan Gilbert made their debuts, and while his return to the majors was much less heralded than those two top prospects, he’s arguably been more important to the Mariners this season than either. He’s upped his strikeout rate to 40.3% in 2021, the fifth highest rate among all qualified relievers, and all those strikeouts have helped him drop his FIP to just 1.95. In just 45.1 innings, he’s more than doubled his total career WAR.

Michael Ajeto of Lookout Landing was one of the first to write about Sewald’s breakout, but the reasons for his improvement are tough to spot on the surface. He’s simplified his pitch mix a bit, cutting out his rarely thrown changeup and increasing the usage of his slider to make him a two-pitch pitcher:

Both the fastball and slider are returning better-than-ever results, with the latter generating a 38.6% whiff rate and a .270 wOBA against. But as good as his breaking ball has been, the four-seam fastball has been even better. Its whiff rate is up to 35.3%, the 12th-highest mark among all four-seam fastballs thrown at least 100 times this year, and it boasts the 12th-highest CSW% (35.7) in that group.

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Here’s a story that you hear all too often these days. A reliever has a breakout season, perhaps aided by leaning more into throwing his best pitch to the exclusion of everything else. He parlays that into an offseason deal, or maybe a newly-prominent role on his current team. Then the next season starts, and the bloom is off the rose. Whatever ineffable magic powered last season is simply gone.

Here’s another story you hear all too often these days. A reliever has a bad stretch, looks like he might be cooked. The Rays, though, have seen something in him. They trade for him, whisper a few sweet nothings (or, fine, mechanical adjustments) into his ear, and bam! He’s part of their bullpen army.

Here’s the fun part: Matt Wisler personifies both of these stories. He was so bad the Giants designated him for assignment after a horrid start, then agreed to a trade with the Rays. Since heading East, he’s been incredible, one of the best relievers in the game. Seriously, look at these splits:

I had to know what changed. I’ll warn you: there’s a lot of failure in this article, a lot of finding not much, before we get to the good stuff — and I promise there’s good stuff. If you’re not into seeing how a pitcher can get to wildly different results with a substantially similar process, this article might bore you. But if you’re curious like I was, read on, and delve deeply with me into the minutiae of a pitcher who didn’t change very much and yet went from unplayable to great. Read the rest of this entry »

This series of articles looks at players whose careers are cut short due to misfortune, but few of them are cases as sudden or as dramatic as that of former Astros pitcher J.R. Richard, who died one week ago at age 70. The Houston fireballer had emerged as one of the game’s hardest throwing starters and a potential ace when he suffered a stroke 41 years ago and collapsed during the team’s pregame warmups. He never pitched in the majors again.

Richard’s debut was about as brilliant as one can get: a complete-game shutout of the Giants in September 1971 in which he struck out 15 batters. This was toward the end of Willie Mays‘ illustrious career, but how many pitchers can claim to have pulled off a hat trick of whiffs against an inner-circle Hall of Famer in their debut? Those 15 strikeouts tied pitcher Karl Spooner’s debut record; incidentally, Spooner is another player with a short career that was ended by a shoulder injury a year later, but that’s a tale for another time.

As a pitcher, Richard looks more at home in 2021 than in 1970. At 6’8″ with a fastball hitting the century mark and a slider in the low 90s, there was a lot of intimidation and little in the way of pitching to contact here. The only problem was that he was raw mechanically, just two years out of high school, and coaching staffs weren’t as experienced as today at helping pitchers harness such an explosive repertoire; over his 12 remaining innings that season, including a first inning he didn’t finish, Richard walked 13 batters.

The wildness never quite went away, and Richard spent the new few years riding the Triple-A shuttle. But the Astros traded Claude Osteen in 1974 for two recent Cardinals draft picks, and Don Wilson and his son died in January 1975 from carbon monoxide poisoning, and these were the days you couldn’t just go shopping in free agency. So up to the majors came Richard for good.

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Don Mattingly knows hitting. The Miami Marlins manager slashed .307/.358/.471 over his 14 seasons with the New York Yankees, winning a batting title along the way. Since his playing days, he’s served as a hitting coach for both his former team and for the Los Angeles Dodgers. “Donnie Baseball” also managed the Dodgers, a five-season stint that preceded his arrival in Miami six years ago.

Mattingly shared his thoughts on hitting, both mechanical and philosophical, over the phone prior to a recent game. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your playing career. How would you describe who you were as a hitter?

Don Mattingly: “I kind of changed over the years. I came up as a guy who was probably known more for just putting the ball in play. I hit for [a high] average in the minor leagues. I used the whole field and had more of a hit-it-where-it’s-pitched type approach. From there, I kind of grew in strength, which allowed me to drive in runs. I became more of a doubles guy.”

Laurila: Was the change mostly a matter of getting stronger, or were there adjustments, as well?

Mattingly: “I definitely made adjustments. The biggest was probably getting physically stronger — that was the start of it — [because] I didn’t really hit for true home run power. I didn’t have home run power through the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

For much of the San Francisco Giants’ wildly improbable 2021 season, the story of their pitching success (they have the third-best ERA and fourth-best FIP in baseball) has centered on a group of revitalized veterans, namely Kevin Gausman, Anthony DeSclafani, Johnny Cueto and Alex Wood, who have pitched better than ever, or at least better than they have in years. The shine on that group has begun to fade in recent weeks, however: the staff ace, Gausman, had a rough July and DeSclafani has struggled recently and now finds himself on the Injured List. Enter Logan Webb, a pitcher much their junior, who couldn’t have picked a better time to get his first taste of big league success.

A fourth round pick back in 2014, Webb moved methodically through a Giants farm system that was struggling to develop starting pitching. Even with the blockades of a 2016 Tommy John Surgery and a 2019 PED suspension, Webb still made his debut in 2019 at 22 years old, making him the youngest Giants starter to debut since Madison Bumgarner did so at age 20 in 2009.

Now 24, Webb is sustaining a high-level of performance in the midst of a pennant race that has the Giants gripping tightly to first place in a stout NL West. He currently boasts an ERA (3.33) more than two runs better than his career mark prior to the season (5.36). He also has the best ERA and FIP in the rotation since July 1 and has given up two runs or fewer in his last eight starts — half of which came against the vaunted Dodgers (three times) and Astros:

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