At first glance, Josh Rojas and Derek Zoolander don’t have a lot in common. Rojas is a third baseman, while Zoolander is a fictional male model. Rojas is from Arizona, while Zoolander is from an unnamed coal mining town in Appalachia. They have different jobs, different lives, and again, one is a fictional character. But one thing unites the two: Their careers took off when they learned how to go left.

In 2022, Rojas settled into a role as an everyday third baseman after years of bouncing between positions. Just one problem: He was one of the worst defenders in the major leagues at the hot corner. That was the consensus of scouts when he was a prospect, and defensive metrics bore it out. He particularly struggled ranging towards second base. Statcast breaks defensive opportunities up based on which direction a player has to move to make the play. When Rojas was moving to his right, forward, or backward, he was one run above average defensively. When he went left, he was seven runs below average. Read the rest of this entry »

This has not been the year for the AL West. With the reigning World Series champion Rangers sitting below .500 amid a string of injuries, the Astros’ core succumbing to age, and the Angels and A’s sitting at rock bottom, one of baseball’s stronger divisions over the past few years has become its weakest. Just one team has a winning record: the Seattle Mariners. At 43-31, the Mariners hold an 8.5-game lead in the West, even as some of the underlying numbers indicate the team isn’t as good as its record suggests. Seattle has overperformed its Pythagorean record by four wins and its BaseRuns record by two, and its run differential is by far the worst among division leaders. But this kind of thing is nothing new for this organization.

The Mariners are currently enjoying their fourth consecutive year of contention, falling short of a Wild Card spot in 2021 and ’23 and snapping their two-decade playoff drought in ’22. In each of these seasons, they’ve pulled out wins in close games like no other club, and manager Scott Servais has pointed to the poise and experience with which his team handles tight matchups. Famously, after a 2021 road trip where the Mariners went 6-2 despite being outscored by their opponents, Servais introduced the term “fun differential” to evaluate the team rather than its relatively poor run differential. Three years later, with a new group of players, the fun differential is still elite.

Naturally, in order to win a lot of one-run games, you need to play in a lot of one-run games. One of the best ways to do that is to play plenty of low-scoring affairs, when neither team scores enough runs to pull away from its opponent. And indeed, the Mariners rank in the bottom third of the majors in both runs scored and allowed. The first factor that puts them in so many tight games is the strength of their starting rotation, which has been among the best in baseball by both volume and efficiency. As a squad, they rank eighth in ERA- and FIP-, and second in innings per start; they’re one of just two teams to convert quality starts over half the time. While none of their starters are individually dominating the leaderboards, the depth they have is nearly unmatched. The Mariners are one of three teams (along with the Phillies and Yankees) with four qualified starters with an ERA- of 95 or lower, and even Seattle’s fifth slot (with starts made by Emerson Hancock, Bryan Woo, and Jhonathan Diaz) has pitched to a 3.25 ERA. In short, they’re the only team in the league that can expect to have good starting pitching every single night.

On the flip side, Seattle’s offense has taken a significant hit from last year. Lineup mainstays like J.P. Crawford, Julio Rodríguez, and Cal Raleigh have regressed this season, though Rodríguez has turned things around over the past month. Many of the hitters Seattle added during the offseason have underperformed as well. Returning fan favorite Mitch Haniger has been below replacement level, and Jorge Polanco and Mitch Garver are each hitting below the Mendoza line.

With an excellent rotation and below-average hitting, the Mariners have the recipe for low-scoring games, but there’s another factor here as well: their home field. T-Mobile Park has been regarded as a pitcher’s paradise since its opening 25 years ago, but it’s been even more unfavorable for hitters in 2024 than in previous years. Statcast’s single-season park factors view it as, by far, this season’s most pitcher-friendly park, with a factor of 87; it has had scores between 92 and 96 for the past half-decade. The end result is that nearly a third of Mariners games have been decided by a single run, one of the highest marks in the league.

Playing in a lot of one-run games is one thing, but winning them is another. The Cubs and Athletics, the only teams with more one-run contests, each have losing records in such games. But the Mariners combine quantity with quality, having the most one-run wins while placing second to the Rays in one-run winning percentage. In contests decided by multiple runs, the Mariners are 26-24 — their .520 win percentage in such games is shockingly close to their .527 Pythagorean record — but one-run wins have vaulted them to a dozen games above .500. Some of these wins have come in dramatic fashion, as their five walk-offs are tied for the league lead. The Mariners have been far from an offensive powerhouse, but all year the bats have come alive when it matters most.

These splits are staggering. In low leverage, the Mariners are one of worst-hitting teams in the league. But when the stakes are highest, they collectively produce like a top-15 hitter in baseball. However, the eye-popping 144 wRC+ figure in high-leverage spots comes with a .377 BABIP – more than 40 points higher than any other team in that split. Come year’s end, that number will certainly be lower than it is now, but looking underneath the hood, Seattle batsmen have still been hitting better in high leverage than low leverage. Their walk rate is three points higher and strikeout rate three points lower in such situations, and their hard-hit rate is also modestly higher.

While Mariners hitters might not be able to forever continue their dominance in dramatic moments, the production they are getting from their bullpen, the other component of their success in one-run games, is far more sustainable. Despite some confusing trades, strong relief pitching has been a strength of recent Seattle squads. The organization has a knack for finding, acquiring, and developing under-the-radar relievers.

Andrés Muñoz is enjoying his first full season as Mariners closer, but he hasn’t been deployed solely in ninth-inning save situations. In fact, only half of his appearances have begun at the start of the ninth inning. He’s been called upon for a couple of extra-inning appearances, but his most notable work has come when he’s inherited a dirty eighth inning and converted a four- or five-out save. Muñoz has recorded more than three outs in seven games, second to Mason Miller among full-time closers, and in those games, he hasn’t surrendered a single run. Servais has consistently picked the right time to get his relief ace onto the mound, as Muñoz has the highest average entrance leverage index in the league.

Veteran reliever Ryne Stanek and 31-year old breakout Tayler Saucedo, who each rank above some closers on the leverage index leaderboard, have mostly handled set-up duties ahead of Muñoz. The two of them complement each other well, as both Stanek, a righty, and Saucedo, a lefty, have significant platoon splits, and Servais shrewdly deploys them based on matchups.

Among Seattle’s lower-leverage options, former starters Austin Voth and Trent Thornton have hit their stride coming out of the bullpen; the pair lead the staff in relief innings while effectively keeping runs off the board.

It would be easy to chalk all of this up to luck, even within the context of the other recent Mariners teams. Their offense has less thump than it has in previous years, and their bullpen is more reliant on high-leverage studs than an entire stable of them. Yet, they still have the ingredients that have made them so successful in tight games, even if the recipe is a bit different. Besides, maybe a slight variation is a good thing. After all, in recent years the best the Mariners could do was secure one AL Wild Card berth. Now, for the first time in their fun differential era, they are in position to ride their recipe for success all the way to a division crown.

After a year of caressing hopes for a triumphant return of José Abreu’s salad days, the Astros released the veteran first baseman on Friday, ending his disappointing tenure in Houston. It would be an understatement to say the 37-year-old Abreu struggled this season; across 35 games, he batted .124/.167/.195 with two home runs, for an wRC+ of 2 and a WAR that I won’t repeat due to the possibility of children reading. The Astros still owe Abreu a hair under $31 million of the three-year deal he signed soon after the 2022 season, though they’ll be on the hook for slightly less than that if another team signs him for the pro-rated league minimum.

If David Ortiz’s magnificent final season represents the optimal scenario for a beloved veteran slugger to reach retirement, then Abreu’s time with the Astros exemplifies the other far end of the spectrum. During his nine years with the White Sox, from 2014-22, Abreu was one of the most consistent sluggers in baseball, batting .292/.354/.506 with 243 home runs, a 133 wRC+, and 28.3 WAR. He had five 30-homer seasons, and that doesn’t include the shortened 2020 campaign, when he smacked 19 longballs, a full-season pace of 51, en route to winning the AL MVP award. With Chicago, he also earned AL Rookie of the Year honors (2014), made three All-Star teams (’14, ’18, ’19), and won three Silver Sluggers (’14, ’18, ’20). When he became a free agent after his age-35 season and the White Sox didn’t show much interest in bringing him back, Abreu quickly signed with the Astros, who had won the World Series a few weeks earlier.

It seemed like the ideal destination for his three-year autumnal epilogue. Houston wasn’t counting on him to be the centerpiece of the lineup; rather, his role would be to shore up first base and/or designated hitter for a few years and support stars like Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez, Jose Altuve, and Alex Bregman. With the Astros coming off a 106-win season and a World Series championship, with many of their core players returning, it certainly appeared that his new team would provide Abreu a better chance to win a ring than he would’ve had with the clearly fading White Sox. To get an idea of what the reasonable expectations were for Abreu when he signed with Houston, let’s look at his three-year ZiPS projections heading into the 2023 season:

While ZiPS was skeptical that Abreu would be an everyday starter for all three years in Houston, it broadly thought he would be an adequate average-ish option for a year or two. Abreu got off to a wretched start last year, hitting .214/.262/.253 with no home runs through May 14 while starting 39 of the team’s first 40 games. As I wrote last April, there wasn’t even a hint that his struggles were a fluke; his plate discipline had deteriorated and his power evaporated like a puddle after a July thunderstorm in Texas.

There are some highly concerning issues in Abreu’s early-season profile this year that weren’t present in other early starts. When he struggles, he still generally hits the ball extremely hard. This year, his exit velocity has averaged 86.6 mph with an overall hard-hit rate of 36.7% — extremely low numbers for him. He was lousy last April, hitting .217/.308/.348, but he was still crushing pitches he connected with, resulting in a 94.6 mph average EV and a hard-hit rate of 59.6%. He also struggled in April 2021, hitting .213/.296/.394, but with a 92.1 mph EV and a 53.7% hard-hit rate — not quite as good as 2022, but worlds better than where those numbers currently stand. He got off to good starts in 2018 and ’19, so they’re not particularly helpful, and he crushed the ball in August of 2020 (I did not include any 2020 seasons in the April numbers, as the year was just too weird).

Abreu played somewhat better over the rest of the 2023 campaign, hitting .246/.309/.435 with 18 homers across 102 games and capping things off with four homers in the postseason. Rather than taking Abreu’s early-season woes as a warning that the end was near, the Astros proceeded to do very little to pick up another bat over the offseason; their biggest move to add some boom to the lineup came when they acquired Trey Cabbage from the Los Angeles Angels. Given Houston’s ALCS elimination at the hands of its cross-state rivals, the Texas Rangers, and its 90-72 record being its weakest since 2016, it’s hard to guess why the Astros took such a lackadaisical approach to a possible issue. Whether it has to do with the front office overhaul after James Click left is a topic for another day.

This season started off even worse for Abreu. He hit .111/.161/.123 with no homers, for an OPS (.284) that was even lower than the career OPS of Hall of Fame pitcher/extremely awkward hitter Randy Johnson (.305). His exit velocity numbers looked a lot like they did the previous April, and he failed to hit a single barrel. Things were so rough that Abreu agreed to be optioned to the minors to figure things out, leading to the rather odd sight of a former MVP debuting in the minors at age 37; he went straight to the majors 10 years ago after the White Sox signed him as an international free agent out of Cuba, and he never even played in the minors on an injury rehab assignment. Abreu did get back to Houston after a stint in Rookie-ball and a couple games with Triple-A Sugar Land, and he even hit two homers this month. But the writing was on the wall, and with the Mariners finally putting some space between them and the rest of the AL West, the Astros clearly could not afford to wait endlessly for another revival that may never come.

Over the short term, Jon Singleton is likely to continue to get the majority of the playing time at first base with Abreu out of the picture, but saying Singleton improves the team is damning with faint praise; while it was cool to see him come back to the majors after a decade away, he’s not really a productive major league bat. Singleton turns 33 later this year and is a .183/.294/.322 career hitter in the majors, with projections that rank from terrible (.214/.327/.388 in Steamer, .215/.324/.376 in ZiPS) to even more terrible (THE BAT at .193/.289/.343). Rookie Joey Loperfido would seem to be the obvious in-house solution to replace Abreu, but he’s primarily been an outfielder to this point and the organization hasn’t given him many starts at first base in Triple-A, which seems inconsistent with the idea that the Astros will offer him the next crack at the job. A big improvement here likely would require a larger trade, and I’m frankly not sure the decision-makers in Houston right now are equipped to move swiftly and deftly.

What’s next for Abreu? While the natural inclination would be a return to the White Sox, I think that would be a dreadful idea. Mal Tiempo doesn’t bring bad weather to opposing pitchers anymore, and I can’t help but feel that everything good he’ll be remembered for in Chicago is in the past. The Sox need to use their losing season more productively than a farewell tour for Abreu, and a bench bat with the Pale Hose won’t get Abreu one last run in the playoffs. Perhaps the Dodgers will sign him in July and he’ll slug .700 in 100 at-bats in a part-time role, because they’re the Dodgers.

A fun player for a long time and a great leader for the team and his city, Abreu’s almost certainly going to fall short of the Hall of Fame, perhaps even dropping off the ballot after his first year of eligibility. It would be shocking if he added much to his career 263 homers or 26.3 WAR (which is actually two wins less than it was when he left the White Sox), and we’ve yet to see the Hall of Fame voters credit foreign play to get a borderline player over the top. Ichiro Suzuki will easily make the Hall of Fame when he debuts on the ballot in the upcoming election, but that would be the case even if he had never played in Japan. I wrote a little about the possibility of including Abreu’s time in Cuba to evaluate his Hall of Fame case back in 2021, but that was more of a theoretical exercise than a serious expectation he’ll get votes.

No, Abreu is not going out on his best, but the cruelty of time in baseball isn’t that different from life. At some point, all of us will lose our ability to do the things we’re great at, the things we love, and eventually, anything at all. It’s just that as a ballplayer, his transition comes at a relatively younger age under very public scrutiny. I’ve always been a fan of the Orson Welles quote on the subject, and it’s one I’ve said that I’d like to have on my eventual epitaph: “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” If this is the melancholy final chapter of the story of Abreu’s baseball career, it was still a volume that was wonderful to read.

The Dodgers took two out of three from the Royals this weekend in Los Angeles, but they suffered a pair of losses that can’t help but prove costly, as injuries felled two of the game’s best players. On Saturday, Yoshinobu Yamamoto left his start after just two innings due to what was initially described as triceps tightness but was later diagnosed as a rotator cuff strain. On Sunday, Mookie Betts suffered a fracture after being hit on the left hand by a 98-mph fastball. Neither injury is season-ending, but both players figure to be out for several weeks.

Yamamoto’s problems are traceable to his June 7 start against the Yankees. He was brilliant in that outing, shutting out the Bronx Bombers on two hits and two walks while striking out seven in a game that remained scoreless until the 11th inning, when Teoscar Hernández’s two-run double proved decisive. Perhaps owing to the adrenaline that comes with pitching in a playoff-like atmosphere, the 25-year-old righty’s four-seam fastball averaged 97.0 mph that night, 1.5 mph above his average in his first season since coming over from Japan after signing a 12-year, $325 million deal last December. He threw his 17 fastest four-seamers and eight fastest sliders while throwing a season-high 106 pitches; it was his fourth straight outing of at least 100 pitches after topping out at 99 in his first nine turns.

Because Yamamoto experienced soreness in his triceps in the wake of that start, the Dodgers pushed back his next outing from Thursday to Saturday; instead, he threw a bullpen on Thursday but did not experience any additional soreness. On Saturday, he did experience some discomfort while warming up, but “it was not that serious at that point,” as he later said through a translator according to the Los Angeles Times‘ Mike DiGiovanna. He told pitching coach Mark Prior after his warmup, “I don’t feel 100%. I don’t feel frisky, but I feel fine.” Read the rest of this entry »

Rick Kranitz has seen a lot of good changeups over the years. A minor league pitcher in the Milwaukee Brewers system for five seasons beginning in 1979, he joined the coaching ranks in 1984 and has been tutoring hurlers ever since. As noted when I talked pitching with him for FanGraphs three years ago, “Kranny” has served as the pitching coach for multiple big league teams, including the one he joined in 2019, the Atlanta Braves.

Unlike our 2021 interview, which covered a variety of pitching topics, this one focuses exclusively on one offering. I sat down with Kranitz to talk changeups when the Braves visited Boston earlier this month.

———

David Laurila: I want to ask you about a pitcher you were with 40-plus years ago, a guy who had a great changeup.

Rick Kranitz: “You must be talking about Greg Maddux.” Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Tuiasosopo has fond memories of his 2013 season with the Detroit Tigers. An October swing of the bat is responsible for one of the few unpleasant memories. Now the third base coach for the Atlanta Braves, Tuiasosopo was watching from the bench when David Ortiz blasted an eighth-inning, game-tying grand slam, a play that saw Torii Hunter tumble into Fenway Park’s home bullpen in a futile attempt to snare the drive. It was the signature moment of an epic ALCS Game 2 that the Red Sox went on to win, and a catalyst to their eventual capturing of the series.

What was it like to be on the wrong side of such a memorable event, and how does he look back at it now that a decade’s worth of water has passed under the bridge? I asked Tuiasosopo those questions when the Braves visited Boston earlier this month.

“That was an intense moment, “ recalled Tuiasosopo, who while not on Detroit’s ALCS active roster was in uniform for the games. “The whole stadium was going nuts. It was really loud. Of course, my first concern was Torii, because he flew over that wall. When he got up, it was ‘Thankfully he’s okay.’ I mean, there were a lot of different emotions.

“It obviously wasn’t fun,” continued Tuiasosopo. “At the same time, as a baseball fan it was, ‘Big Papi against one of our best relievers — Joaquín Benoit was big for us that season — and there was also everything that happened for the city of Boston [the Marathon bombing] that year. The moment was special, even though it sucked on our end.” Read the rest of this entry »

Among the panoply of stats created by Statcast and similar tracking tools in recent years are a whole class of stats sometimes called the “expected stats.” These types of numbers elicit decidedly mixed feelings among fans – especially when they suggest their favorite team’s best player is overachieving – but they serve an important purpose of linking between Statcast data and the events that happen on the field. Events in baseball, whether a single or a homer or strikeout or whatever, happen for reasons, and this type of data allows us to peer a little better into baseball on an elemental level.

While a lucky home run or a seeing-eye single still count on the scoreboard and in the box score, the expected stats assist us in projecting what comes next. Naturally, as the developer of the ZiPS projection tool for the last 20 (!) years, I have a great deal of interest in improving these prognostications. Statcast has its own methodology for estimating expected stats, which you’ll see all over the place with a little x preceding the stats (xBA, xSLG, xwOBA, etc). While these data don’t have the status of magic, they do help us predict the future slightly less inaccurately, even if they weren’t explicitly designed to optimize predictive value. What ZiPS uses is designed to be as predictive as I can make it. I’ve talked a lot about this for both hitters and for pitchers. The expected stats that ZiPS uses are called zStats; I’ll let you guess what the “z” stands for!

It’s important to remember that these aren’t predictions in themselves. ZiPS certainly doesn’t just look at a pitcher’s zSO from the last year and go, “Cool, brah, we’ll just go with that.” But the data contextualize how events come to pass, and are more stable for individual players than the actual stats. That allows the model to shade the projections in one direction or the other. And sometimes it’s extremely important, such as in the case of homers allowed for pitchers. Of the fielding-neutral stats, homers are easily the most volatile, and home run estimators for pitchers are much more predictive of future homers than are actual homers allowed. Also, the longer a pitcher “underachieves” or “overachieves” in a specific stat, the more ZiPS believes the actual performance rather than the expected one.

One example of the last point is Tyler Anderson. He has a history of greatly underperforming what ZiPS expects, to the extent that ZiPS barely believes the zStats at this point (more on Anderson below). Expected stats give us useful information; they don’t conjure up magic.

What’s also interesting to me is that zHR is quite surprised by this year’s decline in homers. There have been 2,076 home runs hit in 2024 as I type this, yet before making the league-wide adjustment for environment, zHR thinks there “should have been” 2,375 home runs hit, a difference of 299. That’s a massive divergence; zHR has never been off by more than 150 home runs league-wide across a whole season, and it is aware that these home runs were mostly hit in April/May and the summer has yet to come. That does make me wonder about the sudden drop in offense this year. It’s not a methodology change either, as I re-ran 2023 with the current model (with any training data from 2023 removed) and there were 5,822 zHR last year compared to the actual total of 5,868 homers.

Let’s start the pitchers off with the summary data. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s Friday, and over the past couple weeks, I have crunched so, so many bat tracking numbers. I wrote about them last week and then again on Wednesday, and the effort required to write those two articles has worn me down into a smaller, duller baseball writer than I was back in May. Today, I’d like to look at the lighter side of bat tracking. In particular, I’m interested in the lower limits of squared-up rate. Before we get into it, though, I need to make a detour and speak directly to the industrious baseball savants over at Baseball Savant who made all of this pitch-, ball-, player-, and bat-tracking possible.

Dear Baseball Savant baseball savants,

I love you. You are doing God’s work. You are making known the unknown, shining the light of truth into the dark corners of the world, and I would gladly bake brownies for you any day of the week. However, after a month of bat tracking data, it’s time that we acknowledge a solemn truth: You probably need to shuffle around a few names. Here’s the big one: Squared-Up Rate should actually be called Barrel Rate.

I imagine you would have called it that had you not already given the name away. After all, it’s right in the definition: A squared-up swing “can only happen on the sweet spot of the bat.” That’s the barrel of the bat, though Sweet Spot Rate is taken too. You currently classify a Sweet Spot as any ball hit at an optimal launch angle, whereas a Barrel is a hard-hit ball hit at an optimal combination of velocity and launch angle. But neither of those terms implies a particular trajectory. Sweet Spot Rate should be shifted to Lift Rate and Barrel Rate should be shifted to Launch Rate. That makes them more accurate and allows Squared-Up Rate to shift over to Barrel Rate where it belongs. Everybody wins.

I understand that this would be confusing at first, but that’s ok, baseball savants. We’ll get used to it. We got used to xwOBACON. You just changed Best Speed to EV50 and nobody so much as batted an eye. Besides, it’s not as if you did anything wrong. It was totally reasonable for you to call those balls Barrels a few years ago. How could you have even imagined you’d get to this point, measuring bat speed with cameras that capture 500 frames per second? But now you know better.

Hugs and kisses,

Davy

PS: Please start tracking the sprint speed of turtles (and any other animals) that wander onto the field.

PPS: I was serious about the brownies.

Ok, end of detour. For each batted ball, the respective speeds of the pitch and the bat make for a maximum possible exit velocity. Statcast calculates the squared-up percentage by dividing the actual exit velocity by that maximum possible exit velocity. Ben Clemens published a rough version of the formula on Tuesday:

Squared-Up Percentage = EV / ((Bat Speed x 1.23) + (0.2116 x Pitch Speed))

Because it’s just a percentage, there’s no minimum bat speed or exit velocity required to square up a ball. You can square up a ball even if your bat is barely moving. In theory, you could square up a ball if your bat were moving backward. You can square up a bunt. Here’s Masyn Winn doing just that against the Brewers. Not only did he produce the slowest squared-up ball in recorded history, he also singled and loaded the bases for the Cardinals on the play.

The 94.6-mph pitch contacted Winn’s bat, which was moving at 4.8 mph, resulting in a 20.9-mph batted ball that was 81% squared up. More importantly, after Winn squared up the ball so beautifully, multiple people fell down. First, pitcher Freddy Peralta started to make a diving play, then thought better of it and awkwardly spiked his knee into the turf. He next attempted to snare the ball on a short hop, but with its strange combination of spin and velocity, the seemingly sentient sphere took a perpendicular bounce away from him. Next, Peralta unleashed an off-target throw to first, which understandably frightened first base umpire Alan Porter enough that he toppled backward, only to pop up and make the correct call like a champion.

I watched every squared-up ball that was hit below 70 mph. The best part of that exercise by far was admiring the swings. They are a truly gorgeous collection of excuse-me swings, and as it turns out, they can all be sorted out according to a spectrum. On the left is The Swing That Never Really Got Started. In the middle is The Swing That Got Interrupted Before It Was Finished. And on the right is The Swing That Wasn’t Supposed To Happen in the First Place. Those poles are roughly correlated to spray angle, and in the supercut below, I’ve tried to put them in order as they go from one end of the spectrum to the other.

To be sure, I saw plenty more silly squared-up balls. I’ve seen more players fall down or fire the ball wildly into the stands. I’ve seen a ball bounce off Jonathan India’s bat, then the gloves of two different fielders. I’ve seen Nick Madrigal get credit for squaring the ball up on a 63.6-mph groundout that looked for all the world like every other Nick Madrigal batted ball.

All the same, after watching all these squared-up squibbers and squared-up swinging bunts, I hope you can begin to see the beauty of the statistic that should be called barrels. There’s something moving about the idea that there’s no limit to pure contact. It’s possible to square up the ball perfectly while touching it as lightly as a feather. It’s possible to square up the ball perfectly even if that’s the last thing on earth you want to happen. No matter how mangled your swing, perfection is always attainable.

Sure, squaring up a baseball means Oneil Cruz stress testing a center-cut fastball’s 108 stitches in the most brutal fashion imaginable, and it means Steven Kwan reaching out and slapping a changeup into shallow left field. Why shouldn’t it also mean Patrick Wisdom trying and failing to lay off a high inside pitch from a position player in a 17-0 game, chipping the ball toward the first baseman at 41.7 mph, throwing his head back in frustration, and then trudging off toward first base like a 5-year-old who just got told that if he didn’t march upstairs and take a bath this very instant, then there would be no dessert tonight, mister?

Bunts aside, that is the weakest squared-up ball ever recorded and I love it. Wisdom squared it up at 92% and so, so wished he hadn’t, which just makes it all the more perfect. In this age of seemingly infinite velocity and Edgertronic pitch design, shouldn’t we celebrate anyone who manages to square up the baseball, even if they did so accidentally?

At any given point in the season, it’s not too hard to figure out which hitters are performing the best and which the worst — various leaderboards do a good job of that. But particularly when it’s early in the season and the samples are on the smaller side, it’s easy to miss when a slow-starting player has gotten it going, as his overall numbers may not be as eye-catching.

That isn’t exactly a new epiphany, but it’s one I was reminded of when writing about Oneil Cruz on Wednesday, and, to a lesser extent, when tracking Aaron Judge in the weeks before I finally wrote about his hot streak (which, remarkably, has continued). What may look like a stat line of fairly typical production can conceal some interesting developments or adjustments. Or maybe it’s just some positive regression.

With that in mind, I decided to take a look at players, such as Cruz, who started the season slowly but have come around more recently. I’ve used May 1 as the dividing line for creating my list, because the flipping of the calendar page is an obvious reference point, and in this case it’s still pretty close to the midpoint of the season to date; when I wrote about Cruz, for example, the Pirates had played 31 games before May 1 and 35 since. Read the rest of this entry »

Luke Raley is a big, strong man. The Seattle outfielder stands 6-foot-4, weighs 235 pounds, and spent much of his childhood in Ohio felling trees with a chainsaw. He’s got a huge arm, and he’s boasted a maximum exit velocity at or above the 90th percentile in three of the last four seasons. Former teammates have called him “a big ball of muscle” and said, “He kind of plays like a monster.” Just last night he launched a moonshot home run that reached an altitude of 104 feet. And yet somehow, if you Google the phrase luke raley feats of strength, this is all that comes up:

First of all, yes, Raley is married. He found out that he got traded to Seattle during his honeymoon, while playing pool volleyball. Second, there’s a pretty good reason that Raley’s strength doesn’t headline his search results: He’s more than just a beef boy. Raley has finesse. In fact, he’s currently tied with Jacob Young for the major league lead with five bunts for a base hit. While Young has a 35.7% success rate on his bunts, Raley is the only player so far this decade to bunt for at least five hits in a season while maintaining a 1.000 batting average on those bunt attempts. Want to guess who’s in second place? That would be 2023 Luke Raley, who went 5-for-6 in his bunt attempts. The big, strong man has a big, strong bunt game. Read the rest of this entry »