Among all 30 big league franchises, the Guardians have one of the richest recent histories of developing pitchers. Dating back to the days of CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee, Cleveland always seems to be churning out young pitching from a stockpile of talent acquired through the draft, international free agency, and the trade market. Coming into the 2023 season, the team’s rotation already featured four former Guardians draft picks — Shane Bieber, Aaron Civale, Zach Plesac, and Triston McKenzie — and the onslaught doesn’t show signs of stopping.
In April, the Guardians promoted a pair of top-100 prospects to their starting rotation in Logan Allen (No. 63 on The Board at the beginning of 2023) and Tanner Bibee (No. 74). In June, Gavin Williams (No. 76) made his big league debut. With Bieber, McKenzie, and Cal Quantrill missing time to injury and Civale traded to Tampa Bay at the deadline, a full 47 starts have gone to this trio of 24-year-old rookies – plus another 17 to less-highly touted prospects Peyton Battenfield, Hunter Gaddis, and Xzavion Curry:
Freddie Freeman is a fantastic baseball player. Since the beginning of 2020, he is tied with Juan Soto for fourth in wRC+, sitting at 157. He is also as durable as any other position player in the league, ranking third in games played in that same span. But wRC+ and durability aren’t why I’m here to discuss Freeman today. Instead, I’m interested in his baserunning.
Baserunning is certainly not the most important aspect of Freeman’s game, but he is darn good at it. Before I get into how and why, though, I want to talk about his lack of speed. At 26.6 ft/s on average, Freeman is a 35th-percentile runner; in the landscape of the league and other good baserunners, he is a bit of a tortoise. But that doesn’t stop him on the bases.
When it comes to baserunning, your chances are much better of being above average on the basepaths if you can boogie. If you peruse the BsR or Statcast Runner Runs leaderboards, you’ll see mostly 90th-percentile runners and above, with the bottom line being in the mid-70s. Rarely does a name like Freeman’s pop up, but he ranks 17th of 139 in BsR and 37th of 295 in Runner Runs. For him, these results come about because of other aspects of the game that you don’t need speed for: instincts, reads, and preparation. The further down you are in the speed department, the more important these skills become. This wasn’t always a positive part of Freeman’s game, but in the last few years, he has been consistently above-average. Read the rest of this entry »
Look at the top of the leaguewide standings and you’ll find both types of elite teams: First, the Braves, an all-conquering, all-chewing-up-and-spitting-out combine harvester that sits atop the standings. After them: an Orioles club that’s outplaying its Pythagorean record by eight games.
That’s not to take anything away from the Orioles, who are dogwalking the hardest division in baseball thanks to a dizzying collection of talented young hitters and the best bullpen in the sport. Besides, they don’t ask how — they ask how many. But this is yet another reboot of a classic from the generation prior; in 2012, the O’s romped to the playoffs with a 93–69 record and the run differential of an 82–80 team. Now they’re doing the same thing, with Félix Bautista as Jim Johnson, Gunnar Henderson as Manny Machado, and Kyle Bradish as… Wei-Yin Chen, I guess?
It’s not just the Orioles: the Marlins (minus-37 run differential) are beating the Cubs (plus-62) to the last Wild Card spot. The Brewers are 10 games over .500 with the run differential of a .500 team. Every year, it seems like a low-payroll team with a good bullpen smashes its expected record to smithereens and barges into the playoffs. Is there an actual pattern here, or is this just trivia? Read the rest of this entry »
Kerry Carpenter has quietly emerged as a productive big league hitter. Largely flying under the radar on a middling-at-best Detroit Tigers club, the 25-year-old outfielder is slashing .286/.347/.521 with 16 home runs and a 139 wRC+ in 285 plate appearances. Since debuting in the majors last August, he has 22 round-trippers and a 135 wRC+ over 398 plate appearances.
His success has been equal parts unexpected and untraditional in execution. Selected in the 19th round of the 2019 draft out of Virginia Tech, the left-handed-hitting Carpenter was an unranked prospect going into last season, only to bash his way to Detroit with 30 dingers in just 400 trips to the plate between Double-A Erie and Triple-A Toledo. He believes the lion’s share of the credit for his out-of-the-blue offensive explosion should go to a hitting instructor who employs unconventional methods.
Carpenter discussed his path to big league success when the Tigers visited Fenway Park last weekend.
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David Laurila: How did you go from a low-round pick to a guy putting up solid numbers against big league pitching?
Kerry Carpenter: “The short story is that I didn’t play very well at Virginia Tech. I got drafted in the 19th round and that’s about where I should have been drafted. It’s not as though I slid; I just didn’t have great numbers there in my junior year. I was in a bad mental spot, to be honest. I had a big slump that I couldn’t get out of for so long. I always thought I was better than a 19th-round pick, but again, I just didn’t play very well. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re in a tiny lull in the baseball season, and honestly, I’m happy about it. July is jam packed with draft and trade talk, September and October are for the stretch run and the postseason, but the middle of August is when everyone catches their breath. There’s no divisional race poised on a razor’s edge, no nightly drama that everyone in baseball tunes in for; it’s just a good few weeks to get your energy back and relax.
For me, that means getting a head start on some things I won’t have time to do in September, and there’s one article in particular that I always want to write but never get around to. I’m not a BBWAA member, and I’ll probably never vote for MVP awards, but I spend a lot of time thinking about them every year nonetheless. When I’m looking at who would get my vote, I take Win Probability Added into account. Every time I mention it, however, there’s an issue to tackle. Plenty of readers and analysts think of WPA as “just a storytelling statistic” and don’t like using it as a measure of player value. So today, I’m going to explain why I think it has merit.
First, a quick refresher: Win Probability Added is a straightforward statistic. After every plate appearance, WPA looks at the change in a team’s chances of winning the game. We use our win expectancy measure, which takes historical data to see how often teams win from a given position, to assign each team a chance of winning after every discrete event. Then the pitcher and hitter involved in that plate appearance get credited (or debited, depending) for the change in their team’s chances of winning the game. Since every game starts with each team 50% likely to win and ends with one team winning, the credit for each win (and blame for each loss) gets apportioned out as the game unfolds. The winning team will always produce an aggregate of 0.5 WPA, and the losing team will always produce -0.5, spread out among all of their players. Read the rest of this entry »
Two months ago, if you asked me to name the most disappointing member of the phenom class, I’d have said Bobby Witt Jr. With barely a month of professional games past high school under his belt, he was invited to spring training in 2021 and hit three homers and put up an .851 OPS, creating chatter around baseball that he might start the season with the parent club. That was a bit premature, though he did spend the next six months terrorizing minor league pitchers into thinking long and hard about their choice of occupation. But in 2022 and early on in ’23, brevity was no longer the soul of Witt, as his whirlwind professional progress slowed to become one of those inevitably anemic breezes on an unpleasantly muggy July day.
Things appeared to reach their nadir in late June, when his OPS almost dipped under .700 once again. Since then, however, Witt has been on a tear, hitting .350/.385/.662, not only bringing his OPS safely over the .700 line but also getting it over .800. Since the morning of June 30, he’s been one of the absolute best players in baseball, providing a rare highlight for the 2023 Royals:
I’ve included BABIP here for a very good reason: when players are having hot streaks, BABIP is usually a big reason why. After all, players playing at their peak are more likely to be playing above their abilities than below. Witt is no exception here, with his numbers fueled in part by a .370 BABIP over that period. But I include that figure not to defuse my thesis, but to reinforce it. While a BABIP that high is hard to sustain over the long haul, ZiPS’ zBABIP thinks that .370 mark only barely outperforms what he’s actually done in the last month and a half. Read the rest of this entry »
Look, Juan Soto is going to be fine. In fact, he’s probably fine already. At some point during every season, we start worrying that Juan Soto isn’t performing like Juan Soto anymore, and then he starts performing like Juan Soto again. You know why? Because he was Juan Soto the whole time, and as we all know, Juan Soto was built by robo-umpires from the future and sent back in time to teach us the exact parameters of the strike zone. The robo-umps also gave him the ability to hit dingers and do a little dance in the batter’s box to help him blend in with us humans. Point is, Juan Soto will be fine.
I pitched this article on Monday afternoon, when Juan Soto was definitely not fine. He was in a bit of a slump, batting .121 with a -14 wRC+ over his last eight games. We’re talking about a very small sample here, but once there’s a minus sign in front of your wRC+, it’s not just bad for a time-traveling strike zone robot. It’s bad for a regular human, too. Still, that’s not what made me want to write about Juan Soto. This is what made me want to write about him:
Jeff Montgomery faced some formidable Cleveland teams while pitching for the Kansas City Royals from 1988 to ’99. Thanks largely to a robust offense, Cleveland averaged 94.2 wins annually from ’95 to ’99, making the playoffs all five years and twice playing in the World Series. No team in either league scored more runs over that span.
Montgomery, whose 304 saves are the most in Royals franchise history, now serves as one of the team’s broadcast analysts. He sat down to discuss the erstwhile Cleveland powerhouse prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.
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David Laurila:Mark Gubicza told me earlier this summer that the 1984 Detroit Tigers were the best team he played against. Which was the best team you faced?
Jeff Montgomery: “I look back at teams by how they stacked up against me personally, which is maybe a little different perspective. But those mid-to-late ‘90s Cleveland teams were really deep. They had so many different weapons. It seemed like every time you played against them, if you had a lead, there was a pretty good chance they were going to find a way to cut into it or even overtake that lead. I think their fanbase played a part in that. They created an environment that was almost hostile when you went to Cleveland to play them.
“One game in particular stands out. Our manager told me that I had the night off, so I was sitting out in bullpen that day. We had a left-handed reliever named Billy Brewer, and he goes in and gets what I think was his first major league save. After the game, he came up to me in the clubhouse and said, ‘Man, you can have that job. That’s not a lot of fun.’ [Closing] is different. Personally, it made me better in regard to focus, concentration, and eventually execution, because I knew how great it felt to be shaking teammates’ hands after a game was over. I also knew how bad it felt not to get that last out and feel like you’ve let your teammates down, that you’ve let the fanbase down.
“But again, going back to those days in Cleveland, they had the Alomar brothers, Carlos Baerga, Kenny Lofton, Travis Fryman, Omar Vizquel, Jim Thome, Paul Sorrento, Manny Ramirez… I mean, you could go on with the players they had during that stretch. That was right around the time the divisions were reorganized and there was now a Central Division. They became the team in the Central that was going to be a force, year in and year out. I’m not sure how many years they made it to postseason, but I know they were always contenders. For me personally, going into a game against Cleveland, especially on the road, was a real challenge.”
Laurila: Which player on those teams did you most respect when he came to the plate?
Montgomery: “Well, Albert Belle was such professional hitter. He could hit for power, he could hit for average, and he was also one of those players that loved to be in that big situation. I feel like he kind of got… I don’t want to say a bad rap, but from a personality standpoint… I mean, he was a really bright individual. I got to know him a little bit over the years, us having spring training close to where [Cleveland did], and playing some All-Star games with him. Again, a very bright guy. But he was a beast. He was a guy that was going to do everything he possibly could to try to beat you and help his team win a baseball game. So, he stands out quite a bit for the impact he had, how good he made their lineup.
“Another one, obviously, was Manny Ramirez. The way he was able to handle a bat from the right side… I mean, he was one of the best right-handed batters in baseball for a long time.”
Laurila: Can you share any Albert Belle stories?
Montgomery: “Again, he was a beast. I remember one time, I’m going to guess around 1989 or 1990, I forget the exact year, we had a benches-clearing brawl in Cleveland. Albert Belle put a hurt on one of our pitchers. Well, in spring training the next year, our pitching coach indicated that it was a good time to take care of business with Belle. I threw a pitch that was probably going to hit him in the neck if he didn’t swing. He swung and hit a line drive home run out of our spring training facility in Haines City, Florida. It almost tore out three rows of bleachers. It was an embarrassing moment for me, because here’s a guy that turns on my best fastball, one that’s supposed to knock him down, and he hits it for a home run.”
Laurila: Knocking Belle down and having him charge the mound wouldn’t be an enviable scenario for a pitcher.
Montgomery: “Neal Heaton did that once. We’d had a benches-clearing brawl the day before, and Neal was trying to retaliate. I don’t think he actually hit him, I think he threw three balls behind him. After the third one, Belle took off after Neal. I remember Mike Macfarlane grabbed him, and he pretty much just drug Mac out to the pitcher’s mound. It was one of those crazy, crazy brawls. There was some blood shed in that one.”
Laurila: It sound like McFarlane saved Heaton from some serious damage.
Montgomery: “Well, Neal still got a pretty good beating out there. And I actually did hit him once. It wasn’t Albert Belle’s fault, but I had to hit him. I hit him right in the cheeks. They had a guy named Mark Whiten. Do you remember him?”
Laurila: I do. Hard hittin’ Mark Whiten.
Montgomery: “Yes. Well, Whiten hits a ball to the first baseman, and I’m covering the bag. Whiten veers off to fair territory to give me the bag, I’m a half step ahead of him, and he pushes me, flips me into right field. My rule of thumb was that if you were trying to hurt or embarrass me or one of my teammates, I was going to take care of business. The next batter was Albert Belle. I think everybody in the ballpark knew what was going to happen. I drilled him. But I did it the right way; I hit him right in the wallet. He dropped that bat and stared out at me, I thought he was coming after me, but luckily he didn’t. Thankfully he just jogged to first base.”
You can picture it in your mind. A runner on first, a single into the gap — it’s first and third with one out, and it’s time to fret. Having a runner on third base with less than two outs is secretly one of the most stressful moments in an average baseball game. Success feels like it should be automatic, but of course it isn’t. Failing to get that runner home always feels like a moral failing, some elemental lack on the part of the batting team. It’s so easy! No hits necessary. Just put your mind to it and do it.
Depending on who you watch baseball with, you might hear this cast as old school versus new school, but I don’t think that’s fair. It’s been a part of baseball since time immemorial. You don’t have to remember baseball from the 1970s to get annoyed by a strikeout or pop up that leads to your team trudging dejectedly back to the dugout. And even if you’re young enough that you got your first cell phone before your 10th birthday, the sweet relief of a clean single with two outs to rescue that poor, potentially stranded soul on third base feels great.
For such a central part of the baseball viewing experience, I’m woefully underinformed about the statistics of that particular pivot point. Do teams score that runner a lot of the time? Rarely? How much has it changed over time? Which team is the worst at it in baseball this year? The best? I couldn’t tell you the answer to any of those questions, so I set out to find them. Read the rest of this entry »
If I have one criticism of Shohei Ohtani, it’s that he has singlehandedly ruined baseball’s great parlor discussions. Admittedly, this is the only valid criticism of Ohtani that I can think of. But questions like “Which player would you want to start a franchise with?” or “Who’s the most talented ballplayer you’ve ever seen?” are so much less fun now than they were a decade ago. First person to answer just says, “Ohtani,” and there’s a brief but grave silence until someone pipes up and asks if anyone is watching the new season of Billions.
Setting Ohtani aside, Fernando Tatis Jr. would be on my short list of most talented or dynamic baseball players I’ve had the good fortune to witness. In the past, I’d compared his physicality to that of a 3–4 outside linebacker, but watching him scramble around the diamond is like watching an alien who’s holding something in reserve so he doesn’t get outed by the humans. If that is his goal, Tatis is not doing a great job of blending in.
