It’s been a fun couple of weeks seeing all the work that has been done as a result of Statcast’s expanding into bat tracking. The great thing about this game is that there is always more to learn. With the addition of bat speed and swing length, we now have a better idea of telling the story of a player’s swing, but there is still so much more to tap into.

Back when I was using a Blast Motion bat sensor on a daily basis, I was exposed to every component of the swing that you could think of. Bat speed was one of them, but that only scratched the surface. There were pieces explaining my path at different points in the swing, how long it took my barrel to meet the plane of the ball, where in space that happened, and so much more. For a while, the public data available was focused on the outcome. What was the pitch? What was the result? What was the exit velocity and/or launch angle? With this new update, we’re progressing toward the how. How fast did the player swing? How long was their swing? We can now tie that in with the result, but there are additional details needed to understand the full scope of how results happened. That’ll be the focus of this piece.

First, it’s important to highlight the great work that has already been done explaining the new data we have and what the information tells (and doesn’t tell) us about the swing. Ben Clemens explained some applications of the new metrics and what their relationship with performance is on a macro scale. One thing Ben mentioned that resonated with me is thinking about the new (and old) information as inputs for us to use to understand performance rather than the answers themselves. Each piece works together to tell a story, whether that be league wide or player specific. Basically, these are pieces of information that need additional context.

Relatedly, Patrick Dubuque and Stephen Sutton-Brown from Baseball Prospectus, provided a great analysis of how to put bat speed into the context of pitch counts, from the perspective of both the hitter and pitcher. And there is more beyond just these two, including Noah Woodward’s Substack post about bat speed, swing length, and understanding what they mean and how they contribute to the swing.

Woodward touched on a few components of the swing that I’ve talked about in previous work that we still don’t have comprehensive data on from Statcast: contact point and attack angle. Swing variability, swing adjustability, having A and B swings, etc. are all extremely important to being successful at the big league level. If you have a hole in your swing, generally speaking, pitchers will expose you, so having multiple high-quality swings is going to set you up to have consistent success, just ask Triston Casas. Swing-by-swing data on attack angle, vertical and horizontal bat angle, and point of contact will all help the public understanding of swing variability, or when and how the swing changes in general.

Let’s start with attack angle. This is the angle of the bat path at contact, relative to the ground. As your bat travels through the zone, it creates a trajectory. To optimize your chances of hitting the ball in the air, the bat should be on an upward trajectory at contact, meaning you should have a positive attack angle. One component of swing variability is creating a positive attack angle at different heights, widths, and depths. You pretty much just want to be able to manipulate your barrel to move upward no matter where the pitch is. To get a better idea of what attack angle looks like, let’s look at a video from David Adler outlining a swing from Oneil Cruz:

Bat path tracking — Oneil Cruz 120.4 mph single (hardest-hit ball in MLB this year)

84.5 mph bat speed (75+ mph is the "fast swing" threshold) pic.twitter.com/FO9gA6fqva

— David Adler (@_dadler) May 21, 2024

While attack angle is officially measured as the angle of the path at contact, seeing the path leading up to contact can tell us what kind of depth the hitter creates. In this clip, the angle of the path changes as it moves from behind Cruz’s body to in front of it. This illuminates how attack angle is dependent on point of contact. In general, the farther in front of the plate your bat is, the easier it is to create a positive attack angle. However, this thread from Driveline’s Director of Hitting, Tanner Stokey, discusses the importance of creating bat speed deep in the zone. The best hitters create their peak speeds in tight windows. Like all facets of baseball, swinging is about striking a balance of creating high levels of bat speed and positive attack angles. You don’t want to have a one dimensional swing that is focused on high bat speed while ignoring the need to create ideal bat angles both deep in the zone and in front of the plate.

Depending on how you start your swing and enter the zone, it takes time to turn your barrel over into an upward slope. For many hitters, the bat needs to travel a greater distance to create the positive attack angle that leads to optimal contact. This, of course, takes more time. But, as Robert Orr pointed out last week in his piece on the relationship between pulled fly balls and swing length, a long swing isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s really just another data point. With access to attack angle, we could better tell the story of how a hitter like Isaac Paredes creates depth in his swing while often making ideal contact far out in front of the plate, versus a hitter who makes contact out in front without creating the necessary depth in their swing to avoid major holes.

At the same time, it’s still possible to create a positive attack angle deeper in the hitting zone. To get there, you need to make movements that aren’t easy to do while generating bat speed and controlling your body. Some hitters with great mobility use lateral torso bend — they lean toward their back leg right before contact — to get their barrel on an upward slope deep in the hitting zone. Think of Shohei Ohtani or Edouard Julien:

These two have unorthodox skills that allow them to launch pitches high in the air to the opposite field. With point of contact and attack angle, we’d be able to quantify how different they really are from their peers on top of the visual analysis.

Then there are hitters who create flatter (but still positive) attack angles with a path that stays on a similar plane throughout their swing. They get on plane with the ball early and don’t do much to change their path throughout the swing. It’s nearly impossible to do this with a steep swing. Juan Soto is a great example of this, even if he is more powerful than the other hitters with this swing style. Here is a great angle that illustrates what I’m referencing:

Bat path tracking — Juan Soto 112.0 mph line-drive single off Justin Verlander

Staying on top of a hanging curveball at the top of the zone pic.twitter.com/IRhdzHVMy8

— David Adler (@_dadler) May 8, 2024

Soto’s vertical entry angle (angle of the bat relative to the ground at the beginning of the downswing) isn’t far off from his attack angle. You can see how much this swing contrasts with that of Cruz, who is a big dude with a narrow stance. Because of that, his bat path is vertically oriented, and his bat needs to travel a greater distance to get on plane with the ball. With more detailed information of barrel angles at different points in the swing, we would know more about how hitters like Soto and Cruz vary from one another when it comes to getting and staying on plane.

This has been a ton of information all at once, so I’ll leave you with one last tidbit. Depending on the hitter, the angle of the path at contact can be very different from the angle of the barrel at contact (relative to the ground), known as vertical bat angle. While I’ve cited average vertical bat angle from SwingGraphs on several occasions, I’ve always focused on putting the metric into context because it varies based on several factors. Luis Arraez and Aaron Judge can have similar average vertical bat angles, but that doesn’t tell us anything about how different their swings are. We know the metric depends on pitch height, but even that alone isn’t enough to explain why Judge is a launcher and Arraez is a sprayer. As we learned earlier, each data point is an input and isn’t meant to be used alone.

There is no question teams have been using, monitoring, and applying these data to scout and develop players for years now, but despite all the metrics that we have, the information on the public side is still lagging. Ideally, in future years, we will gain access to more swing data so that we can better understand the game we love.

For years now, a simple message has been gaining traction in major league bullpens and pitching labs: Just throw it down the middle. As big league pitches have gotten speedier and bendier, the people who throw them have been increasingly advised to trust their stuff, stop nibbling around the edges, and attack the heart of the zone. Adam Berry wrote about the Rays adopting this approach in 2021. In 2022, Bryan Adams superfan Justin Choi looked into the numbers and noted, “In each season since 2015, when Statcast data became public, hitters have accumulated a negative run value against down-the-middle fastballs.” Last year, Stephanie Apstein documented the phenomenon in Baltimore, while Hannah Keyser and Zach Crizer did the same on a league-wide basis, describing the Rays model thusly:

Step 1: Develop unhittable stuff
Step 2: Let it rip down the middle
Step 3: Win

Just last week, Jeff Fletcher wrote that after trying and failing to get their pitchers to attack the zone more often, the Angels started putting their pitchers in the box to face their own arsenal, courtesy of a Trajekt pitching machine. “I knew my pitches were good,” said José Soriano through an interpreter, “but when I faced myself, I find out they’re really good. So I have more trust in my stuff now.” Pitches right down the middle are called meatballs for a reason, but if you’ve ever watched peak Max Scherzer demolish the heart of the other team’s lineup by simply pumping 97-mph fastballs across the heart of the plate, none of this comes as a galloping shock.

Still, I wondered whether I could find data to back up this shift in mindset. Are pitchers really attacking the zone more often? And are better pitching staffs (or staffs with better stuff) really attacking the middle of the plate more often? After all, the Angels rank 22nd in Stuff+ and 14th in PitchingBot Stuff, not to mention near the bottom in ERA, FIP, and xFIP. If they feel this good about their stuff, I’d imagine that every team does. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the dawn of time, there’s always been at least one elite major league closer who’s thrown the cutter almost exclusively. By “dawn of time” I mean the mid-1990s, of course, but I think we can all agree that civilization only truly began when humankind discovered frosted tips and cargo shorts. First there was Mariano Rivera, then Kenley Jansen, and now that everything from the ’90s is back in style, there’s Emmanuel Clase.

Clase has been a crucial part of Cleveland’s surprising run to first place in the AL Central; he’s recorded the win or the save in 18 of the Guardians’ 33 victories, and he’s fifth among relievers in WPA. Cleveland’s record in one-run games is 8-6, which isn’t particularly freakish, but the Guardians are 8-2 in one-run games when Clase pitches, and 0-4 when he doesn’t.

Here’s another fun one: Clase is on pace for the first 50-save season in MLB since Edwin Díaz in 2018, and 3.4 WAR, which would be the most by a Guardians reliever since 1988. WAR wasn’t even a stat back then! Read the rest of this entry »

I’m writing this article for selfish reasons. Every Monday, I chat with FanGraphs readers (come hang out with us! But not next Monday, because it’s a holiday). Four or five times per chat, someone asks a variation of the same question: “Should my team trade this reliever who has been better than expected to a contender for a huge haul?” Four or five times per chat, I say that they should, but that no one would trade with them. So now, I’m trying to put some numbers to it.

The first argument against doing this is fairly simple: Reliever performance doesn’t work that way. To measure this analytically, I took a bunch of recent seasons (2019, 2021, 2022, and 2023) and split them into two. I looked at the correlation between first-half numbers and second-half numbers for every reliever we listed as qualified in the first half of those seasons. I was looking for a simple question: How much can we infer about second-half numbers based on first-half numbers?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is “not very much.” There’s an obvious problem. Relievers simply don’t pitch very many innings. Last year, Jake Bird led all relievers in innings pitched at the All-Star break, with 53.1. Most relievers had meaningfully fewer innings. They didn’t pitch a ton of innings in the second half, either, because that’s just not how relief pitching works. Only 20 relievers threw 70 or more innings last year.
Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — On Tuesday afternoon, Gerrit Cole donned the pinstripes and took the mound at Yankee Stadium, not for his long-awaited season debut, but for a key milestone in his rehab: his first live batting practice session since a bout of nerve inflammation in his right elbow sidelined him in mid-March. The reigning AL Cy Young winner is still at least a few weeks away from returning, but in his absence — and in the face of considerable uncertainty given last year’s performances — his fellow starters have stepped up to help the Yankees into the AL East lead and the American League’s best record.

In front of an empty ballpark but an audience of teammates, coaches, and media, Cole — who eschewed his batting practice jersey in favor of the real thing “because I miss it” — faced teammates Jahmai Jones (a righty) and Oswaldo Cabrera (a switch-hitter batting lefty) from behind an L-screen. He threw 22 pitches, working through his full five-pitch arsenal, and by his own admission, the adrenaline from the setting led him to push his velocity to 96 mph, a point where pitching coach Matt Blake told him to back off. “Matt yelled at me, so I had to throw it like 90 a few times to even it back out,” he quipped afterwards.

“To me, he looked very much in control, with easy velocity,” said manager Aaron Boone of Cole’s session. The ace is eligible to come off the 60-day injured list later this month, but his rehab isn’t far enough for that to be realistic. As for a return in June, Boone indicated that it was a possibility, “but I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.” Assuming Cole’s recovery from the session goes as planned, he’ll probably throw a couple more BP sessions before heading out on a rehab assignment, which given the math of building up a pitch count points to a late June return. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Kelly is proving to be yet another diamond in the rough for the Tampa Bay Rays. Acquired from the Cleveland Guardians via the Colorado Rockies in the December 2022 Rule 5 draft, the 26-year-old right-hander has since logged a 3.14 ERA and a 3.24 FIP in 73 appearances out of the Rays bullpen. Attacking the strike zone from a low arm slot, Kelly has fanned 74 batters while allowing 70 hits and just 16 walks over 86 innings.

His prospect profile was modest at best. A 19th-round pick in the 2019 draft out of James Madison University, Kelly was unranked prior to changing organizations, and going into last year he was conservatively assigned a 40 FV and a no. 27 ranking on our Rays list. Which isn’t to say that Eric Longenhagen didn’t recognize Kelly’s potential. Pointing to the side-slinger’s east-west arsenal and ability to keep the ball out of the air, Longenhagen wrote that Kelly had a chance to stick on Tampa Bay’s roster and be “a great option out of the bullpen when you need a ground ball to get out of a jam.”

Inducing worm-killers is indeed one of Kelly’s greatest strengths. Per Statcast, his 48.2% ground ball rate ranked in the 78th percentile last season, and this year he’s currently in the 91st percentile at 55.6%. And it’s not as though he doesn’t miss a reasonable amount of bats. His strikeout rate might not be anything to write home about, but at 23.0% it dwells in middle of the pack of major league hurlers.

According to Tampa Bay pitching coach Kyle Snyder, the righty reliever’s success is based on multiple factors. Read the rest of this entry »

Writers frequently use threshold moments as a way to delineate a shift in the narrative from some prior homeostasis to an entirely new one. As author Jeannine Ouellette describes them, “These thresholds — the pause at the top of each breath, the space between the before and the after — can hold the entirety of our lives in a single second. Can hold everything we have been and everything we might become.”

Threshold moments exist in real life too. Sometimes we don’t notice them until years later, through the lens of hindsight. Other times, it’s as if an arrow-shaped neon sign is casting the scene with a vintage glow, reminding us that we’ll look back on this moment for years to come.

When Shohei Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles Angels in December of 2017, he experienced a threshold moment. Maybe not the day he officially signed, and maybe not for a singular instant, but as he met with teams and envisioned the different iterations of his future, everything he was in Japan and everything he might become in the U.S. likely began to clarify in his mind’s eye. Ohtani’s decision to sign with the Dodgers six years later represents another threshold moment, but again, one that didn’t happen on signing day. More likely, Ohtani underwent two transformational shifts: one where he stopped viewing himself as a Los Angeles Angel, and one where he started viewing himself as a Los Angeles Dodger. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my menagerie of cats, a black cat named Cassiopeia, has a mortal enemy. Not the vacuum cleaner or an empty food bowl like my other cats, but a bright red cardinal that has been hanging around my backyard for quite a while. Cassie’s bête noire survives because she’s an indoor cat, but if for some reason Cassie ever gained access to the cardinal, that bird would be toast. The St. Louis Cardinals are in a not-dissimilar position. A stable, secure franchise for two decades, their careful planning and prudent measures have kept them away from the cat. But as things have gone wrong for the Cardinals over the last year, they’ve found themselves on a precarious perch, short of options other than unpleasant ones.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I talk positively about the long-term stability of the Cardinals. Before last year’s dreadful 71-91 campaign, the franchise had not been under .500 since 2007, and to find a season with more losses, you have to go all the way back to 1990, when this grumpy aging Gen X’er was a grumpy 12-year-old. Last year’s 4.54 ERA doesn’t sound particularly unusual for a lousy team, but it was for the Cards. The pitching staff’s 114 ERA- was the worst for the franchise in a full season (1994 was an even worse disaster, but a truncated one) since 1913.

All in all, this is an organization that even in rough years could never be described as a dumpster fire. And then last year happened. If we go through the Cardinals’ history of ZiPS projections, we can see a team that was a titan of above-average competence.

This year, the Cardinals were projected to have a bit of a bounceback from 2023, but 83-79 should have served as a bit of a red flag, as only once had ZiPS projected a Cards team to finish with a worse record. The NL Central is one of the weakest divisions and the Cards are not a team in the middle of a rebuild, but one trying to win now. This was an organization that tried to go back to its usual playbook and retool carefully and conservatively. Sonny Gray was the highlight of the winter, signed to a three-year, $75 million contract, but the other signings were one-year stopgaps, either to patch holes in the rotation with no. 4 starters (Lance Lynn, Kyle Gibson) or fill out the back of the depth chart (Brandon Crawford, Matt Carpenter, Keynan Middleton).

Staying the course may work as a long-term strategy when you’re dependably winning 87-93 games a year and your farm system is steadily reinforcing the parent club’s depth with unheralded prospects that end up being real contributors, like Lars Nootbaar, Tommy Edman, Brendan Donovan, and Harrison Bader, among others. This strategy basically involved pretending 2023 didn’t happen, and it ignored a key aspect that also needed addressing: the team’s offense. While the lineup didn’t collapse as drastically as the pitching staff, the team finished 10th in the National League in runs scored, with three of its key contributors in their 30s (Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, and Willson Contreras). Yet the most significant move the Cardinals made with their position players this offseason was a subtraction, when they traded left fielder Tyler O’Neill to the Red Sox. The Cardinals certainly couldn’t have counted on the oft-injured O’Neill to stay healthy enough to be one of the most productive power hitters in the league, as he is right now with the Red Sox (.255/.366/.540, 11 HR, 146 wRC+, 1.1 WAR in 38 games entering Tuesday), but just to shed $6 million in salary, the trade cost St. Louis depth and upside that it no longer had to spare.

It was certainly within the realm of probability that the pitching triage would be effective and Arenado and Goldschmidt would play more like they had in 2022 than last year, but so far, that hasn’t been the case. And now the Cards face a serious problem: The expectations of their talent are simply a lot lower than they were a year ago, or even two months ago. To try to demonstrate this in a straightforward manner, I started with everyone projected to make one plate appearance or throw one inning in the majors the rest of the season. To me, that’s a realistic definition of the short-term talent a team intends to use. Then, I grouped each of these players by team. From there, using these groupings, I looked at each of the 30 teams’ projected WAR for 2025, as of Tuesday morning, and compared it to the 2025 outlooks from before the 2023 season and before the 2024 season. This list doesn’t make any accounting for free agents; I’m simply trying to get a feel for the trajectory of the talent each team has access to at this moment.

The absolute numbers don’t really matter here, so don’t read too much into them. Few teams, if any, will use the same number of players this season, so these projections are based on a varying amount of players for teams, depending on how each club deploys its roster. What does matter is the change in these numbers.

And, as you can see, the Cardinals have the third-largest dropoff in baseball, from before the 2023 season and before Opening Day this year to now. What’s going on here? The simple answer is that many of the players the Cardinals are relying on the most (Arenado, Goldschmidt, the injured Contreras, Gray, Lynn, and Gibson, among others) are in the decline stage of their careers.

Meanwhile, quick reinforcements from within are unlikely. Of the 11 pitchers who have thrown at least 20 innings at Double-A or Triple-A, only Connor Thomas has a translated ERA in ZiPS under four. Perhaps more concerning, Thomas is the only one of the 11 whose projected 2025 ERA is better now than it was before this season began.

The story is the same for the hitters. Entering Tuesday, 21 players in the high minors have at least 60 plate appearances, and even in that really small sample size, only two of them (José Fermín and Jimmy Crooks) have a translated OPS north of .750. More than half the players (12) have OPS translations below .600.

Two-thirds of the hitters have seen their projections for 2025 get worse. Even more troubling is how few of these projected numbers are actually useful to a major league club. Only two hitters project with a .700 OPS in the majors in 2025, and only then just barely.

Further complicating matters is that the diminished projections haven’t been limited to veterans like Goldschmidt. Rather, they’re also the case for pretty much all of the core hitters on the roster who were expected to be “the next generation” of Cardinals. The departed O’Neill may have resuscitated his career with his 2024 so far, but after two injury-affected seasons, he had dropped in status from a player who was eighth in the NL MVP balloting in 2021 to one the Cardinals were happy to see go to save a little cash. Jordan Walker was demoted to Triple-A Memphis before the end of April, and while he’s hit somewhat better since then, a wRC+ of 111 down there is not impressive for a player whose contributions will almost entirely come on offense. Nolan Gorman’s hits this year have been softer than an erotic thriller edited for network television, resulting in 10 points shaved off his projected 2025 wRC+ (115 to 105). Dylan Carlson bears less responsibility for 2024 given the shoulder injury that cost him a month, but after bursting into the majors with a solid rookie season in 2021, he now looks like a fourth outfielder — if that.

Here’s what makes things even trickier for the Cardinals: Despite their 21-26 record and third-place standing, they’ve won six of their last eight games entering Wednesday — their game Tuesday night against the Orioles was suspended due to rain in the sixth inning with the score tied, 1-1 — and have an 19.1% probability to make the postseason, per our Depth Charts playoff odds. That certainly isn’t a great chance, but considering the lack of options to turn things around in time for short-term future seasons, it might be more appealing for the organization to stay the course with the hope of making an unlikely, but hardly impossible, playoff push than it would be to make a drastic decision now that might be more beneficial in the long run.

It’s worth mentioning that, as of Tuesday morning, ZiPS projected St. Louis to have a 15.3% playoff probability because ZiPS is normally more optimistic about the Cardinals than is Depth Charts. ZiPS generally factors in organizational depth more than DC does, and the Cardinals typically have excellent depth. This year, that is not the case. Additionally, even with the expectation that Goldschmidt and Arenado are likely to better the rest of the way than their early season performance, as well as the assumption that Contreras will come back strong from his brutal arm fracture, ZiPS projects the Cardinals to have the 11th-best offense in the National League for the remainder of the season. And the rotation projects no better, at 12th of the 15 NL teams. Amusingly, the bullpen may be the team’s strongest asset, a reversal of fortune from previous years.

In other words, the Cards could very well win 85 games and sneak into a wild card spot. But that’s the hope of a mediocre team, not a top contender. It’s a risky one, too; the prospect of having some chance of making the playoffs may keep the team willing to tread water, again trying to filibuster the decision of whether to push in all their chips or to fold their hand. If the Cardinals decide to punt, some of their players would still have value to other teams in a trade. Closer Ryan Helsley, lefty setup man JoJo Romero, Nootbaar, and Goldschmidt, assuming he starts to hit again, all could fetch significant prospects for the farm system. The 33-year-old Arenado would also net a nice return so long as the Cardinals would agree to pay a chunk of his remaining salary. (After this season, he’ll make $52 million over the final three years of his contract.) Or, if St. Louis wants to double down and try to win in 2025 without selling before the deadline, there are some enticing players who will be free agents after the season, such as Corbin Burnes, Max Fried, Pete Alonso, and – dare I say – Juan Soto. But the organization’s track record suggests that neither of these approaches is likely; the Cardinals don’t tear everything down, and they don’t play at the top of the free agent market.

As things stand, time is not on the organization’s side. When I project the results for the NL Central in 2025 and 2026, using each team’s in-system talent and therefore not accounting for potential future moves, the Cardinals continue to slide relative to the other teams in the division. In fact, St. Louis is the only one of the five teams that has a worse projection for 2026 projection than it does for 2024. The system-only projection for 2025 pegs the Cardinals to win only 79 games, followed by 77 wins for 2026. In these projections, the young pitching in the high minors would replace the team’s current starters, except for Gray, but Hence is the only one who projects to have a high ceiling. Meanwhile, on offense, ZiPS projects the team to continue to get almost nothing from the farm. That’s a problem for many reasons, but one of the most immediate ones is that Goldschmidt, who turns 37 in September, will be a free agent after the season. Even if he isn’t as bad as he’s looked so far this year, it’s unlikely that he’ll be as good as he once was in the future; recognizing this, it would make sense for the Cardinals to move on from him. Except, because of their uninspiring hitting prospects, the Cardinals don’t have a good option to replace even a diminished version of Goldschmidt. Walker and Gorman are natural third basemen, so one of them could take over for Arenado if the Cardinals trade him, but that would open up a hole somewhere else on their roster that would need to be filled by players who aren’t good enough to replace the lost production.

The Cards have long been one of the most competent organizations in the league. But at the moment, steadiness looks like indecision and conservatism looks meek. My cat Cassie will never get the chance to catch her cardinal, but there’s a very real possibility that the predators in the NL Central have successfully captured theirs.

We’re about a month and a half into the minor league season, a reasonable time for a Top 100 update, albeit one with a relatively light touch. The purpose of this update is to pluck the low-hanging fruit, to polish and reshape the list rather than tear down the one from February. Much of the country is chilly or rainy in April and early May, and it can take time for players (hitters especially) to get going. Young players are also changing all the time, which often includes adjustments to their first taste of failure.

You can see the updated list in its entirety here. Below, I’ve highlighted some individual players. I touch on how everyone who is a 60 FV prospect or better has performed so far this year, as well as which players have moved up the list in a meaningful way. There are many cases in which the order of the list changed but the player’s overall grade and evaluation did not. If a pitcher is hurt and slid to the back of their FV tier (as with River Ryan, Ricky Tiedemann, Kyle Hurt and Chase Hampton), or if guys are stacked differently due to syllogistic reasoning (such as former back-of-the-list starter Christian Scott racing past similar talents who are in, say, Double-A), then I don’t address that individual move. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Chris Sale pitch like an ace — or it had been, until recently. For the first time in more than half a decade, the 35-year-old lefty is dominating hitters on a routine basis. On Monday night in Atlanta, Sale turned in his third consecutive scoreless start, shutting out the Padres for seven innings while striking out nine, and helping the Braves halt a four-game losing streak.

Sale allowed just five hits, didn’t walk a single batter, and went to a three-ball count just twice (he retired both hitters). Only in the fourth, when Donovan Solano and Ha-Seong Kim hit back-to-back two-out singles, did the Padres put two men on base against Sale. Solano took third on Kim’s single, and then Kim stole second, but Sale escaped the jam by getting José Azocar to fly out. San Diego mustered just five hard-hit balls, which together amounted to two singles — a 95.9-mph one in the first inning by Jurickson Profar, and a 108.2-mph scorcher in the second inning by Manny Machado — plus two groundouts and a fly out. The last of those, a towering 104.9-mph drive to left center by Kyle Higashioka, would have been a home run in 28 out of the 30 major league parks according to Statcast, but at Truist Park it was a routine warning track out to left fielder Adam Duvall.

Meanwhile, Sale generated 18 whiffs, seven apiece with his four-seamer and his slider, and four with his changeup. He had a 35% called strike and walk rate, and got the Padres to chase on 37% of his pitches outside the zone, consistent with his season rate, which is also his Statcast-era high. All but one of his strikeouts came on pitches out of the zone, most of them on the outer edge; six of them were swinging (three sliders, two fastballs, one changeup) and two were foul tips, while the other was a swinging strike at the top border:

Read the rest of this entry »