It’s a great time to be a fan of the Baltimore Orioles. This is now the third season since their emergence from the dark basement of the AL East, and they no longer retain their tatterdemalion appearance. The O’s, at 20-11, have been winning by the very straightforward method of beating their opponents into submission, not by collecting more than their fair share of extra-inning and one-run victories. While the pitching staff has been a big part of the team’s success, what has made the Orioles so dangerous is a lineup that leads the American League in runs scored and wRC+. Even better for an O’s fan, they’re terrorizing opposing pitchers with a lineup that’s largely made of players that came up with the franchise and are several years away from hitting free agency. And there’s more on the way, giving the team a rather novel first world problem: having too many hitters and not enough lineup spots.

That the O’s have some of the best young offensive talent in the majors should not be lost on anyone who is into baseball. Adley Rutschman was the runner-up for AL Rookie of the Year in 2022, Gunnar Henderson took the award last year, and Jackson Holliday was the heavy favorite before his poor debut. Holliday could very easily come back and win it in the end, but if he doesn’t, one of the current favorites is yet another young Baltimore left-handed hitter, Colton Cowser. Through Thursday’s games, Cowser stands with the top WAR among AL rookies, with a .277/.351/.578, 164 wRC+ line. I haven’t even mentioned Jordan Westburg, who has an .890 OPS while splitting time between second and third base.

Even with Holliday falling flat in his first 10 games in the majors – something I expect him to rectify in the not-too-distant future – the O’s are leading the league in WAR from players younger than the traditional peak age of 27.

In franchise history, including its first year as the Milwaukee Brewers in 1901 and through decades as the St. Louis Browns, the 2023 team ranked seventh in WAR (12.2) from position players younger than 27, and this year’s team is already within shouting distance of halfway to that mark. So naturally, my question is how this team is likely to end up by the end of the season, and whether it would stack up to the best young offensive teams ever. For this, I’ll use our Depth Charts playing time to give plausible estimates of how the O’s will use their lineup for the rest of the season.

Even with Depth Charts projecting a much more conservative promotion schedule for Holliday than expected at the start of the season, the O’s have a mean projection of 21.7 WAR from this group of players. That would be the best in team history, edging out the 1973 club with Bobby Grich, Don Baylor, Earl Williams, and Al Bumbry as the headliners. And yes, it’s significant on a historical level as well.

Their 21.7 WAR would be enough to put the Orioles in the top 25, and there’s an argument that this undersells the group. The vast majority of the teams with the most 26-and-under contributions come from the pre-World War II era, when players were called up at younger ages and there was no ticking service time clock. Looking at just the divisional era – which now covers more than half a century – the Orioles rank impressively among recent stables of young talent.

There are some mighty impressive teams on that list, most notably the Big Red Machine and the early 1970s Athletics before free agency.

And even this perhaps underrates Baltimore’s offensive talent. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Holliday destroy in the minors and get a quick call back up, and if he does, he would slide right into the everyday lineup. Otherwise, though, the Orioles are now up to the practical limitation of roster and starting lineup spots. Cowser is an example of this: It would have been hard to get him regular playing time if not for Austin Hays’ dreadful start to the season. (Hayes is now on the IL). Heston Kjerstad was called up to replace Hays on April 23, after hitting .349/.431/.744 at Triple-A Norfolk, yet the former first rounder has gotten only eight plate appearances total in three games — the O’s have played 10 games with him on the roster.

Kjerstad is far from the only Orioles farmhand who likely would have gotten more playing time on a team with a thinner roster. At Triple-A, Coby Mayo is hitting .333/.397/.683 with 11 homers while mostly playing third base, a position at which the Orioles are already overflowing. Connor Norby has split time at second base and the outfield with an .829 OPS at Norfolk, but there’s no obvious place for him to get playing time unless the team decides to cut Ramón Urías. Using up-to-date minor league translations for Kjerstad, Mayo, and Norby, we can get an idea, via some up-to-date ZiPS projections, at what this trio could do if they O’s had playing time to give them.

All three players project as league average or better if they started in the majors right now.

While this represents a pretty enviable problem for the Orioles to have, it also can be an opportunity. The organization is deep in hitters, but its farm system does not have anywhere near the same depth when it comes to pitching. We don’t yet have a 2024 farm system ranking up for the Orioles, but in the updated 2023 list, the top 15 prospects featured just two pitchers, Cade Povich and Seth Johnson. Corbin Burnes was a great acquisition, but it doesn’t have to end there; as teams fall out of contention, the possibility exists for Baltimore to add a pitcher who can not only pitch down the stretch or in a possible playoff series or three, but in 2025 and beyond. The surplus of offensive talent should give the Orioles the ability to offer more for the right pitcher than practically any other team in baseball can, and if they do swing a trade, they’d still have so many other hitters in the pipeline that such a move likely wouldn’t make a dent in the team’s long-term outlook in a meaningful way.

Whether Baltimore gets to the World Series after a drought of more than 40 years is still uncertain. But this is the Orioles team that looks the most like the ones of the early Earl Weaver years: It’s a club that’s built mostly from within and overflowing with young stars. That worked out pretty well the first time around.

Release angles comprise the vertical and horizontal angles at which a pitcher releases a pitch. They are the natural counterpart to approach angles, except they capture the initial angle of a pitch’s trajectory rather than its final angle upon crossing home plate. Release angles can tell us a lot — namely, where a pitch is headed (or, at least, intended to go). However, we already have plenty of data to describe a pitch’s flight path. We have its short-form movement (i.e., total inches of break), as well as its acceleration and velocity vectors in all three dimensions, not to mention its final location coordinates. We can pretty much map the entire trajectory without release angles. Like the last unrevealed letter in Wheel of Fortune, you theoretically need it to solve the puzzle, but you can probably infer the word or phrase just fine without it. What are release angles, then, if not just a different way to describe a pitch’s movement in space? What information do release angles add? (Michael Rosen adeptly provided an answer to that question here.)

When a pitcher throws a pitch, the pitch reaches home plate in a fraction of a second. The opposing hitter, then, has a fraction of a fraction of a second to discern a great many things about the pitch: its velocity, its shape, its probable final location, all to then ascertain whether or not he should swing. Given the impossibly small window of time in which to make a swing decision, much of a hitter’s behavior is influenced by the untold thousands of pitches he’s seen before, like a mental library of pitch shapes. One of the very first visual cues a hitter receives, aside from the pitcher’s release point, is the angle at which a pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand. This particular visual cue ought to enable a hitter to determine out-of-hand a prohibitively bad pitch — one that, on most occasions, will not find the zone. He can potentially make a snap decision with a fairly high degree of confidence that the pitch will miss the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

In the course of researching the haphazard nature of JP Sears’ fastball command for my blog Pitch Plots, I realized I was missing the answer to a fundamental question: Why does the ball go where it goes?

Specifically, I had no idea which variables determine the physical location where a pitch crosses home plate. My first guesses revealed nothing: a combination of velocity, extension, spin, and release height had no relationship to a pitch’s eventual location. If it wasn’t any of these factors, what could Sears change to throw his fastball to better locations?

I was missing the key variable: the release trajectory. Trajectory, as defined here, is not just release height and width but also the vertical and horizontal release angles of the pitch, which are not widely available to the public on a pitch-by-pitch basis.

The release trajectory, it turns out, explains nearly everything about the ultimate location of a pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the numerous reasons why Mike Trout’s latest injury — a torn meniscus in his left knee, requiring surgery that will sideline him for at least four weeks and perhaps longer — is such a bummer is that the three-time MVP and future Hall of Famer was off to a pretty strong start. While his .220/.325/.541 slash line is nothing to write home about within the context of his career — indeed, his 141 wRC+ would be his second-lowest mark, after last year — he had hit 10 homers before the end of April for just the second time (2018 was the other). That total was enough to share the major league lead with Gunnar Henderson, and it put him on pace to challenge his career high of 45 homers, set in 2019. Even within an offensive profile that’s undergoing some evolution as he ages, that’s impressive.

That goes doubly given that through the end of April, league-wide home run rates were down more than 15% relative to last season. Where in 2023 teams averaged 1.21 home runs per game, through the end of April they had averaged just 1.02 homers per game. Note that we’re still early enough in the season that a single day’s slate of games can bump that last decimal in one direction or another; with 20 homers in 30 team-games on May 1, the season-to-date average fell from 1.018 homers per game to 1.007. All of which is to say that while the situation deserves a closer look — particularly with league-wide scoring having decreased from last year — this should be considered a preliminary investigation.

If the home run rate from this March and April holds up — and hereafter, I’m going to lump all games before May 1 into what we consider April, just as we do in our splits — it would represent the largest year-to-year drop since 1987–88, when the per-game rate fell from 1.06 homers per game to 0.76. If you’ve been following along with home run history, you know that the 1987 season was an outlier that marked the first time home run rates rose above 1.0 per game. While rates immediately fell back below that threshold and remained there through the next half-decade, that season served as a preview of what was to come from 1994–2009, when home run rates were above that threshold every year, likely due to a confluence of factors that ranged from expansion and newer ballparks to the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs and changes to the baseball itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Wilyer Abreu has been one of the top rookies in baseball this season. Along with playing above-average defense in right field, the 24-year-old Boston Red Sox outfielder has logged a 155 wRC+ while slashing .316/.396/.519 over 91 plate appearances. His 1.1 WAR ranks second among rookie position players, behind Baltimore’s Colton Cowser. Granted, less than a month’s worth of games is hardly enough time to know if he’ll keep this up, but Abreu’s strong start is encouraging nonetheless.

He similarly impressed last year in a 28-game cameo. Debuting in late August, Abreu went 24-for-76 (.316) with two home runs, the exact same numbers he had this April. There’s juice in his bat. Eric Longenhagen wrote last summer that Abreu “has above-average raw power,” and the youngster’s production has backed up that prose. By the time of his call-up, Abreu had gone yard 22 times, with a 135 wRC+, at Triple-A Worcester.

His path to the big leagues included more than your typical climb up the minor league ladder. The Red Sox acquired Abreu from the Houston Astros, along with Enmanuel Valdez, in the trade for Christian Vázquez on August 1, 2022 — but that’s also only part of the story. The Maracaibo, Venezuela native had intended to sign with Boston in 2016, but the Red Sox were locked out of the international amateur market in 2016-17 as punishment for violating international-signing regulations. Abreu subsequently signed with the Astros in 2017; he waited an extra year to sign because he was told he’d get a better offer if he did.

He’s evolved as a hitter since inking his first professional contract. Read the rest of this entry »

I won’t sugarcoat it for you, friends. It’s a tough time to be a major league starting pitcher. Their ligaments are under threat like never before. Their workloads aren’t far behind. For a variety of reasons, the old style of starting pitcher is quickly headed toward extinction and we’re transitioning to a new way of doing things.

That all seems like the obvious truth. But I decided to go to the data and make sure. As Malice of the Clipse (and yes, fine, Edgar Allan Poe) memorably said, “Believe half what you see, none of what you heard.” I’m not sure exactly where that leaves you, since I’m going to be telling you what I saw, but that’s an epistemological question for another day. Let me just give you the data.

So far this year, there have been 452 games, and thus 904 starts. Starters have completed 4,735 1/3 innings, or 5.24 innings per start, and they’ve thrown an average of 86.2 pitches to get there. They’ve averaged 94.1 mph with their four-seamers, yet despite all that velocity, they’ve thrown fastballs of any type just 54.9% of the time. This isn’t Opening Day starters, or anything of that nature; it’s just whoever has picked up the ball for the first pitch on each side.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re going to spend big on a free agent closer, you should probably shop at the top of the market. That’s what the Astros did this past offseason, shelling out $95 million over five years to bring Josh Hader home. Last season, Hader was unhittable, with a 1.28 ERA in 61 appearances and 33 saves in 38 opportunities.

This year, not so much. His ERA is 6.39, and was over 9.00 on Tax Day. He’s only had two saves, which is partially his teammates’ fault, but Hader has also blown a save and taken a loss. The Astros, meanwhile, have struggled to find spots to use him. He’s had only one save opportunity since the first week of April, including a weeklong stretch in which he didn’t pitch at all. Tuesday night, Hader had his first two-inning regular-season relief appearance since 2019. Not the start either Hader or the Astros envisioned, I think we can all agree. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, in his 26th game of the 2024 season, Alex Bregman hit his first home run. It didn’t come a moment too soon. Over his first 25 games, Bregman had run a wRC+ of 65. Until this year, he’d never had a stretch of 25 games in a single season in which he’d hit so poorly. Even in his worst season, an injury shortened 2021 campaign, he still finished with a 114 wRC+ and 2.1 WAR. So far this season, Bregman has been worth just 0.2 WAR. A cursory look at Bregman’s numbers over those first 25 games tells a very simple story: zero home runs, .268 SLG, .052 ISO. That’s not just a power outage. That’s a catastrophic grid failure. Only once before has Bregman posted an ISO this low over a 25-game stretch: In 2017, in the 54th through 78th games of his entire career, his ISO was .044. Because he’s been an impact player for so long, it’s easy to forget that Bregman is just 30 years old. It’s not as if Father Time has suddenly caught up with him, and he’ll surely bounce back at some point. But what’s going on right now?

Bregman has always had a somewhat odd offensive profile. As Houston hitting coach Troy Snitker told reporters, “He doesn’t hit for power because he hits the ball harder than most guys; he hits for power because he hits it in the air more than most guys.” In his entire career, Bregman has posted an above-average hard-hit rate just once, and he’s never broken 40%. However, he has impeccable plate discipline and bat-to-ball skills, and he’s constantly pulling the ball in the air. Although he’s recorded an above-average barrel rate just once, he’s never once had a below-average sweet spot rate. If you’re pulling the ball in the air, especially at Minute Maid Park, you don’t need to hit the ball hard enough to qualify for a barrel; you just need to hit it hard enough to get to the Crawford Boxes. Since 2015, Bregman has hit 18 home runs at or below 95 mph, second in all of baseball to Didi Gregorius with 19.

Snitker saw Bregman’s approach as an opportunity. “So with guys like that,” he said, “if you can have any small improvements to how hard the ball is coming off (the bat), he benefits the most, because he’s already getting the most balls out there.” This offseason, Snitker proposed weighted bat training in order to increase Bregman’s bat speed, with the goal of adding just a single mile per hour in exit velocity: “Just his batted-ball profile with 1 mile an hour is worth a lot in production,” said Snitker. Bregman explained that the focus was “trying to move (the bat) as fast as I could.” After four months of training, Bregman said, his bat speed numbers increased significantly without having any adverse impact on his mechanics. Coming into spring training, Bregman said he felt like his swing was “in the best spot that it’s been in years.”

Needless to say, the results have not been there. Bregman’s hard-hit rate is down, as are his average exit velocity and his 50th percentile exit velo. However, his 90th percentile EV is doing just fine and he’s nearly matched his max from last season. It’s not that he can’t hit the ball as hard as he used to; it’s just that he’s not doing it as often.

But it’s not just his contact quality; it’s his entire batted ball profile. Bregman’s groundball rate has exploded while his pull rate has cratered. His pull rate hadn’t been below 42% since his rookie season, but this year it’s at 33.7%. Only once before has he had a groundball rate as high as 40%; this year he’s at 42.7%. Look at his spray charts from 2023 and 2024. There’s so much less in the outfield, especially to the pull side.

Bregman’s line drive rate has cratered. When he hits the ball on the ground, he’s rolling over the it and sending it to shortstop rather than ripping it down the line. His fly ball rate is nearly the same, but when he puts it in the air, he’s often dropping his back shoulder, resulting in a weakly hit ball to right field.

If we combine the contact quality and batted ball profile, the picture becomes more clear. In 2023, Bregman’s hard-hit balls had an average launch angle of 13.6 degrees, and his balls that weren’t hard-hit were at 20. This year, those numbers are 10 and 26.8. As it’s currently constituted, Bregman’s swing just doesn’t seem as optimized as it once was for hard contact in the air. In the launch angle charts below, I’ve highlighted the exit velocities above 80 mph. In 2023, his average EV was that high on just about anything except popups and balls hit straight into the ground. This year, not only is he hitting the ball at optimal launch angles less often, when he does, he’s hitting it softer.

So that’s the bad news. Now let’s look at some reasons for optimism. First of all, it’s still April (or at least it was while I was writing this). Bregman usually starts slow, though not this poorly; his career 110 wRC+ in March/April is his worst of any month. And maybe he just needs some time to get used to his new swing. Second, a big reason for Bregman’s problems is that his line drive rate cratered, and line drive rates are notoriously fickle. Third, Bregman has been seeing tougher pitches this season. Because he succeeds by lifting the ball to the pull side, it’s no surprise that pitchers have always tried to attack him away and down. However, they’ve done a much better job of hitting that outside corner this season. He’s seen more pitches on the edges of the zone and fewer pitches right down the middle than in any previous season. The heat maps below show the location of the pitches he saw in 2023 and 2024.

After looking at these, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that Bregman has made worse swing decisions and had a harder time pulling and lifting the ball. Assuming pitchers don’t remain that precise all season, this could be something that evens out over time.

When a player stops pulling the ball, it also makes sense to check whether they just can’t get around on the fastball anymore, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem. Although he’s had poor results against four-seamers, a pitch he usually crushes, Bregman is both chasing and whiffing against them less often than he did last year. It’s breaking and offspeed stuff that’s giving him fits, and players don’t usually forget how to hit soft stuff after eight excellent big league seasons. That lends credence to the idea that Bregman has merely been struggling with timing issues. That his homer last night came against a changeup should make it all the more encouraging.

Let’s assume that Bregman’s weighted bat work did give him some more power. Maybe we should be encouraged by the fact that his exit velocity hasn’t fallen all that drastically, considering the fact that he hasn’t really been swinging at the right pitches or making the kind of contact he wants. Maybe when he does figure those things out, that extra power will announce itself.

It’s also worth noting that Bregman’s batting stance looks different this season. His stance was slightly closed in 2023, but this year he’s squared up to the pitcher and a little more upright. Additionally, his leg kick is often less pronounced now than it was last season. In the stills below, I captured Bregman at the moment when his knee was at its highest; it’s subtle, but you can see that it’s a bit higher on the left, in 2023. Despite these changes, by the time he gets his foot down, it looks to me like he’s in pretty much the same hitting position that he was last year.

I don’t want to come anywhere near blaming Bregman’s struggles on his new stance or the changes he made to his swing. There are a million things that could be affecting his performance, and it would be facile to seize on the few that I can see or read about in the Houston Chronicle. That said, these are a lot of changes to make to a swing in a single offseason, especially when that swing has been so effective. Maybe Bregman just needs some time to get used to facing big league pitching with this swing, or maybe he needs to consider returning to what was working for him before. After a two-hit perforamnce in Mexico City on Sunday, Bregman noted that he something seemed to click when he tried getting into his load earlier. Either way, things are bound to pick up sooner or later, if for no other reason than that they couldn’t get much worse.

Roughly a month’s worth of the 2024 season is now in the books. The American League East looks great. The Brewers and Guardians are standing up for the Central divisions. The White Sox can only beat the Rays, and the Astros somehow can’t beat anyone. Enough time has passed that I feel confident saying all of those things. On the other hand, it still feels too early to be certain about which players are over- or under-performing. But that doesn’t mean our opinions can’t change a bit. There’s enough data to make some educated guesses, so let’s put on our speculation caps. Yesterday, I looked at four players — two hitters and two pitchers — who have gone up in my estimation. Today, I’m examining the other side of the ledger.

Spencer Torkelson, 1B, Detroit Tigers
Torkelson is going to end up giving FanGraphs analysts whiplash. We loved him as a prospect, then he started slow and we adjusted our expectations down. Then he got hot at the tail end of last year and made a raftload of loud contact; both Dan Szymborski and I were high on him again coming into 2024. Now he’s off to one of the worst starts in baseball, and I’m back out.

Two things have changed my view. First, Torkelson’s approach at the plate has regressed. I’ve generally liked his swing decisions; he looks for something to drive and doesn’t chase breaking balls. But his swing rate in the heart of the strike zone is down meaningfully this year, and he’s not drawing walks at a rate that makes that sacrifice work out for him. If you’re going to be passive over the heart of the plate, you better absolutely crush the ball when you do swing, or at least possess a Soto-level batting eye so that pitchers are either tempting fate or walking you. Right now, Torkelson isn’t doing either of those things. Read the rest of this entry »

When Matt Waldron made his major league debut for the Padres last June 24, it was a noteworthy event. While a few position players had thrown the occasional knuckleball ast a goof after taking the mound for mop-up duty, no true pitcher had thrown one in a regular season game in two years. The last one who had done so, the Orioles’ Mickey Jannis, made just one major league appearance. Mixing his knuckler in with four other offerings, Waldron bounced between the minors and majors for a couple months before sticking around in September. Now he’s a regular part of the Padres’ rotation, and he’s having success… some of the time.

Through six starts totaling 31 innings this season, Waldron owns a 4.35 ERA (111 ERA-) and 4.06 FIP (103 FIP-), which won’t put him in contention for the Cy Young award but is respectable enough to keep him occupying a back-of-the-rotation spot. For what it’s worth, within the Padres’ rotation he’s handily outpitched both Michael King (5.00 ERA, 6.30 FIP), whom the Padres acquired from the Yankees as one of the key pieces in the Juan Soto trade, and Joe Musgrove (6.94 ERA, 6.59 FIP), who last year signed a $100 million extension.

Waldron is striking out a modest 19.7% of hitters but walking just 7.3%; his 12.4% strikeout-walk differential is second best among Padres starters behind only Dylan Cease’s 18.7%, and Waldron’s 1.16 homers per nine sits in the middle of the pack among their starting five (which also includes Yu Darvish) — and a vast improvement on his 1.67 allowed per nine at Triple-A El Paso in 2022–23. He’s done a very good job of limiting hard contact, with his 87 mph average exit velocity placing in the 78th percentile and his 33.3% hard-hit rate in the 75th percentile. Read the rest of this entry »