As the man who inspired Brad Pitt’s most memorable role once said, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.” Assuming Billy Beane wasn’t explaining an October Metamucil purchase to a grocery store cashier who simply asked how his day was going, what Beane likely meant was that the statistics used to construct his major league rosters don’t accrue large enough samples during postseason series to eventually even out in his favor. Over the course of 162 games, a team’s production settles into a reasonable representation of the squad’s true talent. But zoom in on any random seven-game stretch and the team on the field might look like a bunch of dudes in baseball player cosplay.

What applies to team outcomes applies just as well to player outcomes. A player with a perfectly respectable stat line in the regular season might morph into a pumpkin as the calendar shifts to fall, or on the flip side, an unlikely hero may emerge from the ashes of a cruel summer and put the whole team on his back.

With the law of averages in mind, I’d always assumed that the more consistent hitters would be better positioned to perform well in the playoffs. My thinking went like this: The natural variation in these hitters’ performances would never wander too far from their season-long average, making them the safer, more predictable options. Whereas streaky hitters — the ones with high highs, low lows, and steep transitions between the two — would be too reliant on “getting hot at the right time” to be the type of hitter a front office should depend on in the postseason.

Reader, I was incorrect. Read the rest of this entry »

Eleven seasons after making his big league debut, David Peralta might best be described as a professional hitter. As clichéd (and definitionally daft) as that label is, it’s pretty much what the 37-year-old San Diego Padres outfielder is at this stage of his career. A reliable left-handed bat now with his fourth team — the bulk of his time has come with the Arizona Diamondbacks — Peralta is slashing .268/.327/.439 with six home runs and a 118 wRC+ in the current campaign. His career numbers are actually somewhat similar. Over 1,200 games and 4,492 plate appearances, the Valencia, Venezuela native has a .279/.334/.449 slash line to go with 123 home runs and a 109 wRC+.

Peralta talked hitting when the Padres visited Fenway Park earlier this season.

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David Laurila: How different a hitter are you now compared to when you reached the big leagues?

David Peralta: “I’m different now, because every year, every day, you learn something to get better, how to approach the game, how to approach pitching. That’s especially true now. When I first got called up, in 2014, you didn’t see that many guys throwing 99-100 mph. Now that’s normal. So, it’s a different approach that you have to have.”

Laurila: Have there been any notable changes over the years?

Peralta: “I’ve always been more simple and short, but I tried one time in my career to change my mechanics. It worked for a little bit and then stopped working.”

Laurila: This was when?

Peralta: “In 2022, in the offseason, I started doing something different with Michael Brantley. I started hitting the way he does. Again, it worked for a little bit, but then for some reason I came off of that and couldn’t find myself again. I ended up going back to my mechanics. You have to know what type of player you are, what type of hitter you are. I know that I’m not a home run hitter. I’m a line drive hitter, so I have to work on things that way.”

Laurila: Brantley hasn’t been a home run hitter either. What was he doing that you were trying to emulate? Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Judge has ascended to another plane of existence. On Wednesday, he hit his 300th career home run in his 955th career game, making him by far the fastest player to reach that milestone. He’s currently on pace for 57 homers and 11.3 WAR, and in the two weeks since I compared him to a seven-foot-tall god-child, he’s somehow gotten even better, raising his wRC+ from 212 to 219. All of this is to say that the occasion didn’t need any help in the drama department, but the White Sox couldn’t help themselves.

In the top of the eighth inning, down four runs with one out and Alex Verdugo on second, brand-new manager Grady Sizemore chose to intentionally walk Juan Soto in order to get to Judge. Let me say that again: The White Sox intentionally walked someone so that they could pitch to the guy with the best batting line since 2004 Barry Bonds – whom they were going to have to face anyway unless Verdugo somehow got doubled off second base – with two runners on base rather than one. And it worked, in the sense that Judge quickly freed the White Sox from having to play in a competitive baseball game. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Miller has improved on his 2023 rookie season with the Seattle Mariners. Especially notable are his ERA (3.46 versus last year’s 4.32), FIP (3.70 versus 3.98), and OPS against opposite-handed hitters (.685 OPS versus .917). At the same time, many of his numbers have been strikingly similar. When I spoke to the 25-year-old right-hander at the end of July — he’s since made two starts — his win-loss record and average fastball velocity were identical to last year’s marks, as were his FB% and HR/FB%. His strikeout rate differed by just a few percentage points.

I cited those similarities to the righty, then proceeded to ask him what differentiates this season’s version of Bryce Miller from last year’s.

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Bryce Miller: “I think that type of stuff is very similar, but the lefty-righty splits are quite a bit different. Last year, lefties batted over .300 against me. This year, it’s around .215. I think the addition of the splitter has been big, and I’ve also been locating better. If you look at the heat maps from last year, a lot of the fastballs were in the middle of the plate. This year, I’ve gotten them [elevated] a little better for the most part. So getting the heaters up and the splitters down has helped me out a lot with the lefties. That’s really been the main thing.”

David Laurila: Why is the splitter so much better than the changeup you were throwing? Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday evening, Camilo Doval stepped to the mound without his usual light show. He showed the range of his game right away – after striking out the first two batters he faced, he walked Greg Jones, who promptly stole both second and third. Then Nolan Jones ripped a scorching line drive to center for a triple, Elehuris Montero stroked a line drive single, and two runs had scored just like that. To make matters worse, this wasn’t even against the Rockies – it was against the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes.

It’s hard to wrap your head around Doval’s sudden fall from ace closer to minor leaguer. He debuted in the magical 2021 season, picked up closing duties at the tail end of that year, and looked like one of the best relievers in the sport almost immediately. In 2022 and ’23, he pitched to a 2.73 ERA and 2.87 FIP. He was wild at times, overpowering at others, and impossible to square up in every iteration. When you have a 100 mph cutter and a tight 90 mph slider to throw off of it, you don’t need much else. He was fifth in baseball in saves, ninth in reliever WAR, 10th in innings pitched among relievers; in other words, he was a one-man back-of-the-bullpen for the Giants.

One thing always bothered me about Doval, even when he was dominating the opposition for the last two years: His cutter doesn’t cut correctly. That sounds nonsensical, or at best like a weak nitpick. But here, take a look at his cutter as compared to Emmanuel Clase’s best-in-class offering, using our pitch-type splits:

The “cut” in a cutter refers to glove-side movement. A good cutter looks like a fastball out of the hand before the spin takes over; then it veers sharply away from the four-seam path that hitters have spent their whole lives tracking. It’s not just a matter of how differently shaped the cutter is from the rest of a given pitcher’s arsenal – just ask Mariano Rivera. Instead, it’s more about defying the brain patterns batters have built up over decades of playing baseball. That’s just not where a fastball should go, and so hitters either swing fruitlessly over it or, in the case of opposite-handed batters, end up breaking their bats when the pitch bores in on their hands.
Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I wrote about Jake McCarthy’s BABIP, and touched on an assumption about which kinds of hitters are going to put up outlier numbers in that stat. McCarthy hits a lot of grounders, which generally produce a higher BABIP than fly balls (though they’re less productive by other metrics). He’s also left-handed and very fast, which means he ought to be able to beat out grounders for infield singles.

So let’s take a little gander at the infield hit rate leaderboard for qualified hitters. This is the percentage of groundballs a batter produces that turn into infield hits. Simple enough:

So yeah, Bellinger is primarily known for grinding hanging curveballs to make his bread, but in spite of his size, he is a left-handed fast guy. That tracks. Peña is a righty, but he’s very fast. His average home-to-first time is actually in the top 20 among all hitters — lefties and righties alike — this season. And because Peña hits so many grounders, he leads all batters in total infield hits with 24.

And then there’s Rhys Hoskins. Wait, what? Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the trade deadline, this is a quiet time of the year for transactions, but baseball’s injured list is always hopping, and Tuesday was sadly no exception. First came the announcement that Dodgers pitching prospect River Ryan, our 21st-ranked prospect on the Top 100, would require Tommy John surgery, ending his 2024 season, and at best keeping him out for the vast majority of 2025. Not to be left out of the UCL injury party, Jazz Chisholm Jr. injured his left elbow on a slide into home plate on Monday night. The exact severity of Chisholm’s injury is still unknown, but with the season rapidly reaching its conclusion, any significant time on the shelf could imperil his ability to help the Yankees in their playoff push this year.

Chisholm was easily the biggest addition the Yankees made at the deadline, a flexible offensive player who the team hoped would bring some emergency relief to an extremely top-heavy offense that has received an OPS in the mid-.600s from four positions (first base, second base, third base, and left field). And Chisholm was more than fulfilling that expectation, with seven home runs in 14 games on the back of a .316/.361/.702 slashline. As noted above, the full extent of his injury isn’t yet known, but in a tight divisional race with the Baltimore Orioles (and with a playoff bye at stake), every run is precious. The Yankees have had a curious amount of misfortune when it comes to the health of their deadline acquisitions in recent years; between Frankie Montas, Scott Effross, Lou Trivino, Andrew Benintendi, and Harrison Bader, you might get the idea that they mostly acquire medical bills in their trades. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite notching two wins over their last six games, the White Sox are flirting with history, and not the good kind. As of this morning, Chicago stands 63 games below .500, 42.5 games back in the AL Central, and on pace to finish 39-123. Out of compassion, I will refrain from reciting the record of the 1962 Mets, but the players from that team who are still with us are likely taking this time to get the champagne good and chilled. Hard as it may be to believe, the goal of this article is not to dunk on the White Sox. Instead, as we enter the home stretch of the season, I’d like to consider how they’ve affected the playoff picture.

The White Sox have played 25 of the other 29 teams in the league, and they have distributed to those fortunate franchises a net total of 63 victories in the same way that an elderly man on a park bench distributes bread to the legion of ravenous pigeons jockeying for position at his feet: indiscriminately. For a few weeks now, I’ve been wondering whether the landscape would look different if those 25 teams never had the good fortune of playing the White Sox. Whom have the White Sox helped or hurt the most? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made no secret of my longtime admiration for Rangers reliever Kirby Yates (formerly Braves reliever Kirby Yates and Padres reliever Kirby Yates), but what he’s doing now even surprised me.

Yates entered Tuesday night’s contest against the Boston Red Sox with an ERA of 1.04; that mark is second among big league relievers, behind only Emmanuel Clase (another favorite of mine). It’s also a career best for Yates, which is more surprising than it would be for most pitchers. Yates already has a season with a microscopic ERA on his CV: 2019, when he posted a 1.19 ERA in 60 2/3 innings, with a strikeout rate of 41.6% and a walk rate of 5.3%. Pitchers who produce even one season of that quality are vanishingly rare; pitchers who produce two are almost unheard of. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I cracked the PitchingBot black box open a tiny bit and asked it to show me the worst pitches of the year. It was for fun, mostly; I think there are some interesting data in there, but the main thing I learned was that the worst pitches are non-competitive balls. That’s always a tough concept to grasp, because the ones that stick with us are the hanging sliders and no-ride fastballs right down the pipe, the kind of pitch that we see and go, “Oh I could hit a home run on that.” Like this one:

That’s the worst pitch in baseball this year by one specific metric: the likelihood that PitchingBot assigns it of turning into a home run. I’ll show you some more of them in a moment, but first I thought I’d lay out how I did this so you can get a sense of how the model is reaching its conclusions.

Cameron Grove, the creator of PitchingBot, wrote about this idea back before he started working for the Guardians, and he was kind enough to nudge me in the right direction when it came to looking at pitches not just for the “worst,” but the ones that are the most crushable.
Read the rest of this entry »