Hindsight is always 20/20, a truism that is acutely felt after a particularly heartbreaking loss. It’s one ringing true in the heads of Mariners fans who witnessed a Game 1 victory in the AL Division Series slip through their fingers yesterday. Ben Clemens had the game recap, but I wanted to hone in on the final, decisive at-bat in the bottom of the ninth. More specifically, I want to try to answer the question in the headline: what were the Mariners thinking when they brought in Robbie Ray to face Yordan Alvarez?
On the surface, the move looks defensible. Paul Sewald had gotten the first two outs of the inning but had allowed two baserunners to reach to bring Alvarez to the plate. Why not bring in the lefty to gain the platoon advantage? Seattle even thought this very situation through in the lead up to this series. After the game, Mariners manager Scott Servais explained how that plan came to be:
“It was something going into the series where we were at, looking at our rotation, where we were going to head, and talking with Robbie about using him out of the bullpen as a bullet, so to speak, for that type of scenario. Bringing in a lefty against Alvarez, although Alvarez is one of the better hitters in the league … I looked at it in the seventh inning and said, ‘Hey, this could happen.’ So that was the plan going in.”
The Mariners aren’t strangers to game planning around Alvarez, having faced him dozens of times in the regular season during his career. Not that it’s done them much good: he has a career .305/.385/.597 (166 wRC+) slash line against Seattle in 179 plate appearances. You really can’t game plan around Alvarez, either; he’s one of the best hitters in the league and was one of the two best hitters in baseball this year. And it’s not like gaining the platoon advantage is much of an advantage anyway, given his impossibly small career platoon split: a .404 wOBA versus right-handers and a .406 wOBA against left-handers. His career strikeout rate against southpaws is even a few points lower. Read the rest of this entry »
Did you watch the Guardians and the Rays in their Wild Card Series? It was extremely fun, especially if you hate runs. Everyone got out so much! Both teams had a better WHIP than Justin Verlander. The Guardians batted .171. The Rays batted .115. Together they batted .143. That’s Robbie Ray’s career batting average. Robbie Ray is famously not a hitter.
While Cleveland and Tampa Bay pushed the boundaries of modern science searching for new and innovative ways to not get on base, I noticed that one player seemed to take his failures a bit harder than the rest. See if you can spot it as well. Turn your sound all the way up, especially if you’re at the office. If you’re at an elementary school or a place of worship, see if there’s a public address system you can plug into:
The Wild Card Series opener between the Rays and Guardians was quick-moving from the beginning. Rays ace Shane McClanahan worked around a few weakly hit singles in the early innings. Cleveland starter Shane Bieber’s only baserunner in the first four frames — Ji-Man Choi, who walked — was quickly erased by a Manuel Margot double play. The first five full innings were completed in just an hour and nine minutes despite playoff-length commercial breaks, largely due to the lack of offense and Bieber’s ridiculously quick pace on the mound. The matchup of two premier starters — the AL’s fifth- and seventh-best qualified pitchers by ERA — seemed to be everything fans were hoping for.
Bieber’s start was masterful, matching his MO from the regular season: steal strikes with four-seam fastballs, then get hitters to chase his cutter and slider off the plate. The Rays’ righty-heavy lineup couldn’t figure it out for the entire game, coming up empty on 17 of their 27 swings against those two pitches. Unsurprisingly, every single one of those swinging strikes was located down and to his glove side. Bieber’s impeccable placement of pitches on the outer half was especially noteworthy against the chase-happy Christian Bethancourt and Randy Arozarena, who went a combined 0–6 with five strikeouts, four of which came on breaking balls off the plate. Bieber’s 7.2 innings of one-run ball made for the longest playoff start by a Cleveland pitcher in 15 years and will likely be among the longest starts of any pitcher this postseason. That’s a continuation of the impressive volume he put up in the regular season; he was one of just three AL pitchers to cross the 200-inning threshold. Read the rest of this entry »
In a race for the National League batting title that ended up coming down to the final day, Jeff McNeil emerged victorious, hitting .465 (20-for-43) in his last 11 games of the season (he was a late defensive replacement Wednesday, but didn’t hit) to finish at .326, one point higher than Freddie Freeman for the highest in the majors. McNeil’s final two weeks put a bow on a career year. He finished with 5.9 WAR, 16th among major league hitters and the most by any Mets primary second baseman save Edgardo Alfonzo, who set the mark with 5.9 WAR in 1999 and then bested it with 6.4 in 2000 (of course, McNeil also spent a good chunk of time in the outfield). He started the All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium, some 100 miles from his southern California home, and now his Mets are headed to his first career postseason. It’s a good year to be Jeff McNeil.
McNeil has generated his value with a set of skills very different from those of your typical modern All-Star or 5.9-WAR player. In a home run era, he’s been as far from a power hitter as an All-Star gets. He finished 2022 with nine home runs, including two in his final three games, making him just the third player in the last decade to amass as many as 5.5 WAR without clearing the fence 10 times. He hit 23 home runs in 2019, the homer-happiest season in major league history, but even with that outlier included, he’s still gone deep in just 2.3% of his big league plate appearances.
In truth, your 2022 batting champion is among the softest-hitting big leaguers in the game, ranking in the 12th percentile in average exit velocity, the eighth percentile in hard-hit percentage, and the seventh percentile in barrel percentage. Just 13 of his 477 batted balls this season registered as barrels: Read the rest of this entry »
The Atlanta Braves don’t bunt much. To be fair, most teams aren’t bunting all that often these days, especially since the introduction of the universal designated hitter. The Braves, however, still stand out from the pack. In an age of reduced bunting, Atlanta is leading the charge.
Of the thousands of balls the Braves have put into play this year, only four have been bunts. Of their 1,327 hits this season, only one has come on a bunt. One. You’d be hard-pressed to find any other counting stat category on the FanGraphs leaderboards with the number one written next to a team’s name.
The bunt-tracking era at FanGraphs began in 2002. (Side note: I’m going to take credit for coining the phrase “bunt-tracking era.”) Records for sacrifice bunts were kept long before 2002, but the data for bunts and bunt hits only goes back 21 years. In that time, the lowest number of bunts for a team in a full season is 12, courtesy of the 2018 Toronto Blue Jays. With a mere four bunts this season, the Braves are nestled amongst most teams from the shortened 2020 season at the bottom of the team bunt leaderboards:
If Oakland Coliseum is indeed “baseball’s last dive bar,” as has often been asserted, then it must have one hell of a booking manager. Let’s not forget, after all, that this dive bar has a stage. And yes, that stage may be a bit far from the audience, and sure, it is housed in a hulking cement behemoth that shares a BART station with the airport, and fine, it might be subject to the occasional rodent or plumbing issue. But it still draws the same big names as other, glitzier venues. The Coliseum’s dinginess might generate headlines, but lately I’ve been struck more by the unique backdrop it offers attendees for seeing the major’s biggest names.
When I used this metaphor to describe my experience at an August 9 Shohei Ohtani start at the Coliseum, a friend likened it to seeing Metallica play an unannounced show a few years ago at The Metro, a venue just a stone’s throw up Clark Street from Wrigley Field, with a capacity of 1,100. You may remember this early-August Ohtani outing: one of those Tungsten Arm games – unremarkable but for the home run he launched into the right field bleachers and the win he secured, allowing him to reach the Babe Ruth milestone of recording 10 wins and 10 home runs in a season, though Ohtani’s home run total for the season had long eclipsed Ruth’s. The vastness of the stands only emphasized how few people I was sharing my baseball viewing experience with.
The next day, I followed up that major league masterclass with a Low-A day game in the uncovered San Jose grandstand, watching a teenager struggle to throw strikes under the blazing sun. If Ohtani at the Coliseum is Metallica at the Metro, then this game, where I went to watch prospects from the San Francisco Giants organziation, was sitting in on a garage band rehearsal. Low-A is an altogether different brand of baseball, where tweaks are made every day – sometimes even mid-game – in the hopes of tapping into young players’ potential. Read the rest of this entry »
This is Leo’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Leo is a Philadelphia sports fan, but he lives in Toronto, meaning he is subjected to the agony of watching Joe Carter’s 1993 World Series-winning walk-off home run replayed on a loop every single time he attends a Phillies game. Nevertheless, his love of the game has persevered. He has written for sites across the web, including Baseball Prospectus, Inside the Phillies, PitcherList, and The Good Phight. He is also a comedy writer and occasionally tries his hand at mixing baseball and humor. Sometimes it goes well; sometimes his work is called “bad satire” and “a waste of time.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Framber Valdez is having a historic season.
Earlier this year, Justin Choi wrote about Valdez and his historic groundball-to-fly ball ratio through the first six weeks of the season. Valdez has always been good at inducing groundballs and limiting fly balls, but his 10.00 GB/FB ratio over his first seven starts was on another level.
Unsurprisingly, Valdez himself was on another level, too. Through May 18, he posted a 2.93 ERA and 3.33 FIP in 40 innings pitched. His journey from middle-relief prospect to top-of-the-rotation starter was complete. Groundballs were always his super power, and fly balls had long been his kryptonite, so it made perfect sense he was thriving after increasing his GB/FB ratio. Since mid-May, however, his GB/FB ratio has slowly been coming back to Earth. It now sits at 4.20, which is still excellent to be sure, but not exactly sky-scraping. Yet Valdez is still having a historic season – just in a different way. Read the rest of this entry »
This is Kyle’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Kyle is a lifelong baseball fan who has always been enamored with the numbers and analytics behind the game. He has written for PitcherList on the pitcher GIFs team and for his own personal blog, covering topics from player analysis to the draft, mostly focused on the Angels. Kyle is a senior at the University of California, living in the Bay Area and studying education and math. As an aspiring teacher, he wants to think and write about the game of baseball from the perspective of an educator.
From 2017-20, Jakob Junis was a below-average starter for the Royals, posting a 4.78 ERA and 4.77 FIP. After a poor 2021 that saw him pitch out of the bullpen, he was non-tendered by Kansas City and signed with the Giants. Fresh off a 107-win season that was bolstered by career resurgences from hurlers like Johnny Cueto, Anthony DeSclafani, and Alex Wood, San Francisco clearly saw a path to improvement for Junis. Mostly serving as a member of the starting rotation, Junis has done just that – his FIP has improved by about a full run (3.83). While he hasn’t thrown harder, landed more strikes, or added movement to his pitches (his sweeping slider has actually lost about an inch of break), he’s made one important change, and it’s one that is emblematic of pitching philosophy in the modern age.
This is Chris’ first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Chris is a data journalist based in Boston. He started his career working in baseball, first as a media relations intern with the 2014 Cubs and then with the Red Sox media relations department from 2015 to ’19. In addition to thinking about baseball, he reports on data topics ranging from education to climate to COVID-19 for U.S. News and World Report. Chris has long used FanGraphs to describe what data journalism is to confused friends and family.
The baseball fan’s proposition is a delicate balance. We’re asked to tune in for 162 games that are of relatively little individual importance to the team’s World Series chances, an act of faith anchored somewhat in the premise that “anything can happen” in the postseason. If your team is able to survive the regular season grind, the game assures you, they have a shot to bring home the ultimate reward.
But with less than three weeks to play, the 2022 regular season is looking a little flat from a competitive standpoint. The playoff field, with its new three Wild Card structure, is looking relatively set, and this year’s regular season is shaping up to have been, well, mild when it comes to non-home run chase drama. Read the rest of this entry »
When Randy Arozarena burst onto the national stage, he did so as the best hitter in baseball. For one postseason, he channeled peak Joe DiMaggio, hitting a ludicrous .377/.442/.831 in the 2020 playoffs. He was no slouch in the playoffs last year either, posting a .333/.474/.600 line, albeit in just four games. If you follow baseball in October, you probably think of Arozarena as a bruising power hitter. During the regular season, though, he’s something else entirely.
That’s not to say he’s a bad hitter. In fact, he’s put together an excellent 2022 line by cutting down on strikeouts. He’s been solid at the plate for three straight years now. He boasts a 133 wRC+ since the start of the 2020 season, a top 25 mark among all hitters over that timeframe, sandwiched between some guys you probably think are comfortably better than him: Corey Seager and Will Smith.
That’s great, and fine, but that’s not what I want to talk about. Arozarena is good in a conventional way in the batter’s box. He’s wild, and perhaps kind of bad, on the basepaths. It’s an absolute blast. Observe.
In the first game of yesterday’s doubleheader against the Blue Jays, Arozarena was busy early. In the first inning, he grounded into a force out, but beat out the double play relay throw to keep the inning alive and score a run. Arozarena is obviously fast; when you watch him you can’t help thinking of a defensive back in the open field. He’s compact and explosive; when he hustles down the line, you can almost hear the footsteps coming.
In the third inning, Arozarena delivered another RBI groundout, ho hum. That’s when things got interesting. With two outs and Manuel Margot at the plate, Arozarena got the itch to run. He gets that itch a lot; he’s attempted 39 steals this year and succeeded on 29 of them. I wouldn’t call his base-stealing instincts great, but I would call them voracious. In fact, he’d already scratched that itch in this very game, stealing second in the first inning without a throw.
But if one steal is good, two is better. Arozarena doesn’t so much steal on the pitcher as on the general disbelief that he can be stopped. A man on first and two outs? It’s a classic base-stealing opportunity, a situation where you only need to be successful 70% of the time to break even. Say no more – it was go time for Arozarena. Even a hidden ball trick attempt couldn’t stop him:
On 1-0, Arozarena took off and stole second easily:
Or did he? Home plate umpire Ramon De Jesus didn’t think so:
Margot inadvertently made contact with Danny Jansen on his backswing, as you can clearly see from a reverse angle:
Easy call, if you’re a veritable encyclopedia of baseball rules like De Jesus. If a batter inadvertently makes contact with a catcher on his backswing, the stolen base attempt simply doesn’t count; the runner has to go back to first, but the result of the pitch counts. You don’t see that one every day, but it seems like a pretty fair rule.
Not that there was any suspense about whether Arozarena was running, but now it was doubly obvious. Mitch White threw over to first before his next pitch, and Arozarena giggled a bit at Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who actually threw the ball back to White this time:
After bluffing a steal on 1-1 (he stopped after a bad jump), Arozarena was yet again on the move, and yet again easily safe:
But, uh, you’re not gonna believe it:
Yep, another clear case of inadvertent interference on Margot’s backswing. I don’t know if I’ve seen two of those calls all year, let alone two in the same at-bat. What could Arozarena do but sulk back to first?
Honestly, I’d GIF the entire at-bat if I could. The Jays and Rays should keep cameras on Arozarena and Guerrero at first base; every time the broadcast panned there, they were bantering back and forth, presumably about how ridiculous the situation was. Arozarena is a ton of fun to watch, particularly on the basepaths, and he was in fine form yesterday. But that wasn’t even the best part of this particular time on base.
When Margot put a ball in play, it stopped being a stolen base opportunity, and instead became an opportunity to get a head of steam and make something happen on the basepaths. Arozarena loves to do nothing else more – and that’s much to his detriment. He’s made 12 outs on the basepaths this year, the third-highest mark in the majors (Jose Altuve has 15, Yandy Díaz 14). Despite his blinding speed, he’s among the worst in the game by UBR, our measure of how many runs a player has added or lost based on their non-stealing baserunning. That’s basically tied with Alejandro Kirk, who isn’t exactly known for being fleet footed. The Rays are on course for a historical tally of outs made on the basepaths, thanks in no small part to Arozarena and Díaz.
And those outs add up. Making an out on the bases every once in a while is unavoidable, but Arozarena racks them up in bunches. He’s a gambler with unshakeable faith in his speed, but major league outfielders are pretty dang good. Still, you don’t steal home in a playoff game if you’re not pushing the envelope. Rays fans surely fret about the extra outs, but there’s no denying the adrenaline rush he produces every time he tries.
Margot gave him another chance to shine, shooting a hard-hit ball off of Matt Chapman and into left field. Since Arozarena was running on the pitch, there was no doubt he’d reach third base. But he went one further:
Wait, uh, what? I’ve seen a lot of baseball in my day, but I can’t think of any runners scoring from first on a single since Enos Slaughter’s famous mad dash (and that was ruled a double). This wasn’t even a particularly deep hit; Teoscar Hernández was in shallow left field when he fielded the ball.
My favorite part of this play is that Arozarena wasn’t even running hard the whole time:
That’s not to say he was loafing; he played it by the book until he reached third. There’s no reason to sharply round second on a grounder there, so he was pulling in safely. When the ball kicked into the outfield, he took third base, again without needing to kick it into high gear.
That’s a by-the-numbers play by a fast baserunner. Then, Arozarena channeled vroom vroom guy. Look at where he was when Hernández fielded the ball:
I don’t even know what to think about this. This isn’t just that Arozarena knows he’s fast. He could be peak Cool Papa Bell and not cover that much ground before a throw made it home. He wasn’t even running at full speed there; he was throttling down to stop at third.
That deceleration didn’t last long. When Hernández didn’t immediately throw to a relay man but instead started jogging in, Arozarena mashed the turbo button. He went from a slow jog to a sprint, catching Hernández off guard.
It still shouldn’t have mattered. Hernández was in shallow left field, with the ball in his hands, when Arozarena touched third base. This isn’t about testing a fielder’s arm; I don’t think there’s any outfielder in the major leagues who couldn’t make that throw if they knew they were going home with the ball, particularly now that Khris Davis plays for the Wild Health Genomes of the Atlantic League.
This was outright picking on the frailties of the human brain. Major league players are great athletes, masters of their craft, but thousands upon thousands of hours spent playing baseball builds pattern recognition, pattern recognition that Arozarena weaponized on this play (which I’ll just note wasn’t scored an error). When Hernández fielded that ball, he knew the play was over. One look at the runners – Arozarena decelerating into third, Margot cooling his heels at first – told him all he needed to know. This play was over; no need to come up throwing and risk an error.
You can see it in the way he fields the ball. No one in the stadium was expecting that play to require a full-effort throw, Hernández included:
I love it. I love everything about it. I wish every baserunner behaved more like this. I don’t mean getting thrown out on the basepaths, though to be honest I’m in for the occasional light-hearted TOOTBLAN. I’m talking about the combination of speed, belief, and guile that led to Arozarena creating a run out of thin air. That wasn’t a run-scoring opportunity. Usain Bolt wouldn’t have scored there. Plenty of runners wouldn’t have scored from second there.
In fact, I love this play so much that I’m going to break down Arozarena’s mad dash into three parts. First, the attempted steal and realization that the ball is in play:
That’s pretty standard. I think he had the base stolen pretty easily, and when he saw a grounder to third base, he correctly throttled down at second. When the ball kicked away from Chapman, the next read was automatic, something that every fast player in the majors does instinctively:
Again, easy. After an initial acceleration, he realized there wouldn’t be a competitive play at third base and did what every runner does in his situation: ease off. With the advantage of starting in motion, any baserunner in the majors would likely reach third there. But what happened next was pure genius, and it’s more fun in an isolation view of Arozarena. Even as he was decelerating into third, he made up his mind that he was going to pick on Hernández:
He had eyes on Hernández fielding the ball. When he turned his head away, he had made up his mind: he was going to hope Hernández made a bad throw from a tough position, coasting towards second and throwing halfway across his body. I’m honestly not even sure it was much of a gamble; Arozarena had time to peek back and see the throw, and was still close enough to third that he could have made it back safely if the throw was on line.
That’s something you don’t see every day, because if you saw it every day it wouldn’t work. You can’t subvert expectations for fun and profit if you’re always doing it; those expectations would change. This was a sublime moment, but it was just a moment: Arozarena also makes plenty of overly-aggressive attempts at extra bases that end in disaster.
On this day, though, he was perfect, and his speed and derring-do accounted for two RBIs and a run in a 4-2 Tampa Bay victory. But all that running takes a toll. After two successful stolen bases that got called back, two pickoff throws, a bluffed steal, a foul ball on a steal attempt, and that trip around the bases, Arozarena was gassed:
Who could blame him? That’s a lot of running, and a lot of thinking on his feet while doing it.
Baserunning doesn’t always work out this well for Randy Arozarena. It almost never works out this well, in fact. Even counting this play, he’s been an atrocious baserunner this year. But I don’t really care because that was a blast. I audibly gasped when I saw this play developing in real time. He couldn’t score from there, could he? How could he even think about trying to score from there? Then, of course, he went and did it. More audible gasps in baseball. More audacious baserunning decisions. More Randy Arozarena, please.
