On Sunday in Oakland, with the A’s trailing the Phillies 3-1 and lefty José Alvarado on the mound, A’s manager Mark Kotsay sent the right-handed Esteury Ruiz to the plate to pinch hit for lefty Seth Brown, hoping to use a platoon advantage to mobilize some sort of comeback. After falling behind 1-2, Ruiz turned on an Alvarado cutter and sent a 94.1-mph grounder past the third baseman and into left field, giving his team some hope:

Ruiz would come around on a Carlos Pérez single, but the rally would ultimately fall short as the A’s extended a losing streak that has since run to eight games. But Ruiz had done all he was given the chance to do. Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s what happened. I was watching the MLB game highlights of Tuesday’s Marlins-Blue Jays matchup. I like MLB’s game highlights; in order to keep all the quick cuts from feeling disjointed, they kind of just plop some music on top everything unceremoniously, and sometimes the music can really color your perception of the game. This Mets-Padres game from April is a great example. It was a nailbiter, but it lost some of its nerve-wracking heft thanks to a soundtrack that’s a cross between John Coltrane, Kool & The Gang, and Super Mario 3.

Two on, two out, bottom of the ninth, and it sounds like the monologue is about to start on Saturday Night Live. Anyway, I was watching Tuesday’s Marlins-Jays highlights (the soundtrack for which sounds like The Living End on their union-mandated lunch break), and I noticed this single from Luis Arraez.

Normally, a single from Arraez is about the least remarkable thing in baseball. He is the game’s preeminent singles hitter (and depending on your worldview, perhaps the game’s preeminent hitter, period). What caught my eye was how quickly Daulton Varsho managed to cut this ball off, considering that Arraez slashed it just a foot inside the left field line. Varsho gets fantastic jumps, but I figured he also had to be playing extremely shallow. It occurred to me that maybe every outfielder is playing right on top of Arraez this year, seeing as dumping liners right in front of the outfielders for singles is his superpower. Read the rest of this entry »

As one would expect, records and milestones often reflect the eras in which they’re achieved. Pitching records tend to be set in low-offense eras, while offensive milestones rack up more quickly at times when runs are plentiful. As the game ebbs and flows, certain benchmarks that are achievable in one era become far more difficult, or even impossible, in another. One of these achievements, which has long fascinated fans, is hitting .400. Even as batting average became a less relevant number in the post-Deadball era (and even less so as front offices gravitated toward other metrics 75 years later), baseball observers have still rooted for someone to hit .400. I’m one of them; not everything that’s fun has to be an amazing analytical tool, and vice-versa. Hits are, for lack of a better word, cool, and the ability to rack up value primarily via batting average has become far rarer than it used to be. And if hits are cool, Luis Arraez is in super-rad territory, as the Marlins second baseman is currently sitting at .398 as we approach the season’s halfway mark.

Whether you think the most recent .400 hitter was Ted Williams, who put up a .406 average in 1941, or Josh Gibson, who put up an impressive .466 for the Homestead Grays in 69 games a couple of years later, there are very few baseball fans remaining who have a living memory of a .400 hitter. After the Splendid Splinter hit .388 in 1957, it was another 20 years until anyone came that close (Rod Carew in 1977). There were always scattered attempts, such as George Brett‘s effort to sneak up to .400 when he hit a stunning .421 in the second half of the 1980 season (he ran out of calendar, finishing at .390). The offensive outburst of the 1990s wasn’t just in home runs, but in batting average as well, and there was another mini-run of .400 attempts. From 1993 through 2000, there were a surprising number of first-half hitters above .380: Tony Gwynn (twice), Larry Walker, Nomar Garciaparra, John Olerud, Darin Erstad, Todd Helton, Frank Thomas, and Paul O’Neill. Nobody’s been at .380 in the first half more recently, and since 2010, only Justin Turner’s gone into the All-Star break with a batting average north of .370. Read the rest of this entry »

Charlie Blackmon is heading down the home stretch of what has been a productive career with the Colorado Rockies. A little more than a week away from his 37th birthday and in his 13th season with the club that drafted him out of Georgia Tech in 2008, the left-handed-hitting outfielder has stroked 1,646 hits, 572 of which have gone for extra bases. Boasting a .296 career batting average — Coors Field has certainly benefitted him — he topped the Senior Circuit in that department in 2017, when he hit .331. Only Todd Helton has played more games in a Rockies uniform.

Blackmon, who is currently on the injured list with a fractured hand, sat down to talk hitting when Colorado visited Boston earlier this month.

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David Laurila: Prior to the 2017 season, I talked to you and one of your then-teammates for a piece titled “Charlie Blackmon and Chris Denorfia on Launch Angles.” What are your thoughts on that subject six years later?

Charlie Blackmon: ”Yeah, so launch angle is something people were really excited about a little while ago. I think that’s a way to reverse engineer a really good hit or a home run, right? It’s taking a dataset and saying, ‘Guys have a higher slugging percentage when they hit the ball in the air,’ and then basically find out that 31 degrees is their optimal angle. I mean, it’s like taking something you already knew was good and saying, ‘Well, now I’m going to try to hit it 31 degrees.’

“Adding lift to your swing is going to put the ball in the air, but I didn’t really like how people were going about it. Now I’m seeing that change. I think where the game is from a pitching perspective, even compared to five years ago, is very different. If you look across the league, I would bet that the amount of strikes thrown in the upper third of the zone has more than doubled. I would say that 70% of the pitchers in the league consistently throw high fastballs, whereas it wasn’t long ago that everybody was trying to throw down and away. There has been a big shift in pitching philosophy and fastball-location philosophy in the past few years.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Romano is one of the best closers in baseball, but you wouldn’t know it from perusing your average sports page. He’s a quiet star, in the mildly pejorative sense often implied by “quiet” — not well-enough known, not well-enough talked about, somehow lacking in whatever je ne sais quoi that makes you a star.

Here’s the thing, though: that’s silly. At FanGraphs, we try to avoid that very way of thinking, and yet we’ve written almost nothing about Romano in the past few years. An interview here, a hockey anecdote there, the occasional fantasy piece — it’s not what you’d expect from a guy at the top of the bullpen hierarchy for a playoff team. I’m not kidding myself; this article is Canadian fan service. Let’s talk about what makes Romano so dang good, and ignore why audiences in America seem to ignore him.

If you’re looking at it from a pitch perspective, this one is pretty easy. Romano is good because he throws a hellacious fastball and backs it with an above-average slider. His fastball is a work of art. All the things you’ve heard about what makes a four-seamer good? He has them. He avoids the dreaded line of normality that plagues some heaters that underperform their radar gun numbers; his is mostly up-and-down. Per Baseball Savant, his fastball drops 1.7 inches less than the average four-seamer thrown with similar velocity and also gets 2.4 inches less arm-side fade. In other words, when he throws it to a righty, it ends up less inside than they expect, and also meaningfully higher. Read the rest of this entry »

If we’ve written it once, we’ve written it a hundred times: Pirates third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes is a solid player, but if he could just figure out how to hit the ball in the air, he’d be a star. Well, here we are in June 2023, and it appears that Hayes has finally started elevating the ball some.

For the second season in a row, Hayes has knocked at least five percentage points off his groundball rate, increased his hard-hit rate and average exit velocity, and more than doubled his launch angle. And for the second season in a row, his overall performance at the plate has stayed almost exactly the same. Let me say this very clearly: We were wrong. We are so sorry. We will work to do better in the future. Let’s take a look at what exactly Hayes has been doing to make liars out of us. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Justin Choi wrote a fascinating article about sinkers. You should read it, because Justin’s stuff is great, but I’m going to summarize it here because I want to riff on it a little bit. In essence, Justin pointed out what we all kind of knew but didn’t talk about much: sinkers are much better against same-handed batters. Teams have caught on, and they’re changing usage accordingly.

Here’s a great chart from that article: the percentage of all right-handed sinkers that are thrown to right-handed batters:

That’s pretty straightforward: pitchers are increasingly using sinkers only when they have the platoon advantage. Here’s another way of looking at it: the percentage of sinkers among all pitches thrown by righties to lefties, league-wide:

In plain English, pitchers have stopped throwing sinkers when they’re faced with opposite-handed batters. Meanwhile, they’re throwing right/right sinkers as frequently as ever:

Those two charts hardly look like the same pitch, and in fact they aren’t really. Righty pitchers are actually playing two slightly different games: they’re pitching to same-handed batters and separately pitching to opposite-handed hitters. The object of both games is to get the batter out, so it’s not like the games are that different, but it’s inconceivable that the same pitches would be best against both sides. Read the rest of this entry »

Jorge Soler has always had big power potential. His power was his carrying tool as a prospect, and he homered in his first big league plate appearance. Unfortunately, he’s had trouble making the most of his strength throughout his career. For years, Soler was an “if he can put it all together” kind of player. His raw power was enticing, but injuries and inconsistency kept getting in the way. From 2014 to ’18, he hit just 38 home runs in 307 games, a pace of 20 per 162.

Finally, in 2019, everything clicked. The 6-foot-4 slugger played all 162 games, walloping an AL-leading 48 home runs. He finished fifth in the league in slugging, third in isolated power, and 13th in wRC+. His wRC+ went up every month, and no player in baseball hit for more power over the final two months of the season. He lost the Silver Slugger at DH to an ageless Nelson Cruz, but all the same, Soler was finally living up to the hype. There was even talk of the Royals signing him to a long-term deal.

But that extension never came, and Soler’s performance over the rest of his Royals tenure dashed any dreams he might have had of a lucrative long-term contract. In 2020, his old problems came back to haunt him. He didn’t make the most of his power, hitting only eight home runs in 43 games, and injuries kept him off the field for several weeks in September. The following season started out even worse; in 95 games with Kansas City, he hit 13 home runs and posted a feeble 77 wRC+. At the trade deadline, the former home run king was sent to Atlanta for pennies on the dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember early in the year, when the Rays were winning seemingly every single game? Well, they still are. They’re not on the 130-win pace they were at the beginning of May, but the fact they’re still well ahead of anyone else in a loaded division is impressive in itself. So how are they winning so much? First off, they put runs on the scoreboard like no other.

If the season ended today, their 127 wRC+ would be the highest in MLB history, ahead of the Big Red Machine, murderer’s row Yankees, or recent Astros squads. We’ve written about players like Randy Arozarena, Wander Franco, and Yandy Díaz, who have all put up superstar performances. And despite losing both Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs to injury, Tampa’s rotation grades out impressively thanks to free-agent signee Zach Eflin having a career year, top prospect Taj Bradley putting up good numbers, and Shane McClanahan continuing to do Shane McClanahan things.

Finally, there’s the bullpen. For the past decade, much of the Rays’ reputation as a premier organization for player development has come from their ability to turn almost anyone into an above-average reliever, building competitive playoff pitching staffs with minimal contributions from the starting rotation. With two key rotation pieces shelved for the season, the relievers must be neutralizing opponents at an elite rate. Let’s see how their season is going.

As surprising as it is, the Rays’ 4.54 bullpen FIP ranks sixth worst in baseball, narrowly avoiding sub-replacement level status. How has the team with the greatest track record of reliever development experienced such futility this season, and how have they won so much despite leading the league in bullpen innings? Read the rest of this entry »

Giancarlo Stanton is a prolific slugger experiencing a frustrating season. A hamstring strain kept him out of the Yankees’ lineup from mid-April to early June, and he’s scuffled mightily since returning to action. Over 47 plate appearances this month, the 6-foot-4, 245-pound outfielder/DH is 5-for-41 with a pair of home runs and 15 strikeouts. On the year, he’s slashing .204/.267/.441 with a 91 wRC+ — well below his standards.

No stranger to the injured list, having landed on it multiple times since New York acquired him from the Miami Marlins via trade in December 2017, Stanton has mostly been excellent when healthy. Now 33 years old and in his 14th big league season, he has 384 career home runs, including 59 in 2017, to go with a .535 slugging percentage and a 139 wRC+.

Stanton talked about his evolution as a hitter, which includes no longer taking swings in the dark, when the Yankees visited Fenway Park over the weekend.

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David Laurila: [Toronto Blue Jays hitting coach] Hunter Mense told me that when you were Low-A teammates, he walked into an indoor cage and found you hitting with the lights off. Why were you doing that?

Giancarlo Stanton: “Dim lights, yeah. It was about trying to pick up the ball. My difficulty back then was picking up balls and chasing. It’s always a work in progress. I still get in trouble up here. You never completely eliminate your original mishaps; you can just get better and improve on them. But yeah, what I was doing was kind of finding obstacles.”

Laurila: Do you do anything like that now?

Stanton: “No. I don’t do anything that extreme anymore, but I did do a lot of extreme stuff to get here. I put it in my mind that someone is always working harder, and there were things I needed to get better at. With so much failure in this game, there are always ways to improve.” Read the rest of this entry »