One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.

ZiPS doesn’t discard actual stats; the models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. You can read more on how zStats relate to actual stats here. For those curious about the r-squared values between zStats and real stats for the offensive components, it’s 0.59 for zBABIP, 0.86 for strikeouts, 0.83 for walks, and 0.78 for homers. Those relationships are what make these stats useful for predicting the future. If you can explain 78% of the variance in home run rate between hitters with no information about how many homers they actually hit, you’ve answered a lot of the riddle. All of these numbers correlate better than the actual numbers with future numbers, though a model that uses both zStats and actual ones, as the full model of ZiPS does, is superior to either by themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Red Sox hitters will be facing an enigmatic fastball when they host the Royals at Fenway Park tonight. When Eric Longenhagen put together our Kansas City Royals Top Prospect list last month, he wrote that Alec Marsh’s fastball “doesn’t hop even though it has the approach angle and spin axis of a fastball that typically does; it has below-average vertical break and might be surprisingly hittable against big league bats.” Calling the pitch “weird,” our lead prospect analyst further described it as a “flat-angled, high-spin sinker,” adding that the 25-year-old right-hander, whom he assigned a 45 FV and a no. 3 ranking in the system, is no longer touching triple digits as he did in his initial seasons of pro ball.

Intrigued, I showed the 2019 second-round pick out of Arizona State University what my colleague had written, and asked him a simple question: How accurate is this?

Here is Marsh’s response to that, as well as a smattering of other questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday night in Philadelphia didn’t start off as a celebration of Michael Lorenzen. Making his first home start after joining the team at the trade deadline, he struggled to get comfortable on the mound. The first batter of the game, CJ Abrams, smashed a pitch to the warning track in the deepest part of the field. The next three batters worked full counts, with one walking. Keibert Ruiz worked another walk to lead off the second inning. Lorenzen threw 53 pitches in the first three frames. Through four, he had three strikeouts and three walks.

Luckily, he didn’t need to be the focus, because a celebration in Philly was happening one way or another. Weston Wilson smashed a home run in his first major league at-bat. Nick Castellanos popped a two-run shot in the first and followed up with a solo shot in the third. The Phillies were romping over the Nationals on a glorious summer evening. And that’s leaving the best part for last: Ryan Howard was in the booth to celebrate opening a new chicken and waffles stand in the stadium.

I won’t lie to you; those waffles looked good. John Kruk was nearly rapturous as he contemplated them. At one point, he openly begged Alex Call to finish an at-bat quickly so the booth could go to commercial and he could eat. Howard seemed happy, too, and the Phillies continued to pile up runs while he recapped the genesis of his foodie vision. After four innings, the Phillies led 6-0, and the celebration was in full swing.

Obviously, though, you aren’t here to read about Howard’s chicken and waffles, or to learn, as I did, that Kruk avoids spicy food. You’re here because a funny thing happened in the back half of this game. Lorenzen, staked to an enormous lead, started attacking the strike zone. He dared the Nationals to swing – four-seamers middle-middle and belt-high sinkers, calling out to be swung at. When he fell behind in the count, he fired one down the pipe and said “hit it.”

This being the Nationals, they mostly didn’t hit it. Calling their offense punchless might be going too far, but they’re towards the bottom of the league in every offensive category, and that doesn’t account for the fact that they traded their best hitter at the deadline. Abrams is coming on, and Lane Thomas has been good all year, but we’re not quite talking about Murderers’ Row here.

Suddenly it was the seventh inning, and the Nationals were still hitless. Lorenzen pulled his secondary pitches back out; he buried Jake Alu under a pile of changeups for his fourth strikeout and then mixed four-seamers high with changeups low to coax a groundout (smashed, great play by Rodolfo Castro) out of Ildemaro Vargas. Seven innings, 100 pitches, no hits – was this happening?

That last out of the seventh inning awoke the Philadelphia crowd from its post-homer lethargy. They’d been enjoying a casual demolishing of the little brothers of the NL East. Now, they might be witnessing history. A roar broke out, and the crowd rose to its feet to collectively cheer Lorenzen as he strode off the field. Six outs, six measly outs – surely he could do it.

Lorenzen came out sharp in the eighth – by which I mean, he threw some good pitches when the count made that possible and otherwise made the Nationals beat him by putting the ball in play. It was a brilliant plan all night; the Phillies recorded 15 outs in the air, few of them threatening to be anything more than cans of corn. Most importantly for Lorenzen, that eighth inning took only 11 pitches, which gave him enough runway to come back out for the ninth.

I’ve spent a lot of this writeup talking about Lorenzen’s ability to adapt his pitching to the situation, and that was on display in his last inning of work. The strike zone widens when no-hitters near the finish line. Hitters’ pulses rise – you don’t want to be on that highlight reel, you know? Lorenzen aimed for the corners to get ahead, then snapped off ridiculous breaking balls whenever he had the chance, hoping for a miserable flail from a desperate opponent.

That plan dealt with Thomas and Joey Meneses, the latter a victim of a called strike three that was both clearly outside and clearly a pitch you have to swing at in the ninth inning of a no-hitter. That left only Dominic Smith, but he wasn’t going down easily. After falling behind 1-2, he took and fouled his way back to a 3-2 count. Lorenzen looked gassed. “One more pitch,” Kruk breathed on the broadcast, almost a mantra. And Lorenzen left it up to the gods of contact one more time. He threw a slider right down main street at 85 and dared Smith to do his worst:

After the momentous end to the seventh inning, Citizen’s Bank Park had turned raucous. That energy carried right through to the end of the game. The place positively shook when Meneses struck out, and erupted even more when Johan Rojas squeezed Smith’s fly ball for the final out. Sorry Weston, and sorry Ryan; it was Lorenzen’s night now, and the crowd bathed him in applause as he exulted in his achievement.

If you didn’t know he hadn’t allowed any hits, Lorenzen’s line wouldn’t turn any heads. Five strikeouts, four walks; it’s not exactly the stuff of aces. But Lorenzen has never been an ace, and he wouldn’t tell you otherwise. He’s never been a high octane strikeout pitcher, and now that he’s transitioned from the bullpen to the rotation, he’s leaning more than ever on his savvy. Tonight was the crowning achievement of that style.

As the stadium roared and Lorenzen’s mom beamed from the crowd, the team mobbed him. What a glorious feeling it must be to combine the pinnacle of individual achievement with your first real taste at team success. Lorenzen has played for a winning team exactly twice in his major league career – the 2020 Reds went 31-29 and the 2021 edition finished 83-79.

This year’s Phillies are a cut above that – the defending National League champions, near-locks to make the playoffs and another run at the title. And he’s one of them now, indelibly linked with this team, this city. You won’t be able to tell the story of the 2023 Phillies without mentioning this night, which means you won’t be able to tell it without mentioning Lorenzen. How wonderful that must feel after nearly a decade in the wilderness, hoping to start, then getting your wish only to toil in obscurity.

Baseball is about a lot of things. It’s about the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd, the beauty of close plays and the shocking speed and strength of grown men wearing ridiculous pajamas. Increasingly, it’s about numbers too – teams are getting smarter and smarter about separating what seems important from what is important. But regardless of the numbers, tonight was important. Baseball isn’t just about who wins the trophy at the end of the year. It’s about nights like these, and players like these. What a glorious night for Lorenzen, and what a wonderful celebration of baseball.

No team has come out of the August 1 trade deadline hotter than the Texas Rangers. Not only did they make substantial additions to their roster — most notably by adding Max Scherzer and Jordan Montgomery to their rotation — but they’ve reeled off a season-high eight-game winning streak to start this month, enabling them to expand their AL West lead over the Astros to three games. Alas, they suffered a substantial blow along the way, as rookie third baseman Josh Jung fractured his left thumb in Sunday’s game. He’ll undergo surgery to stabilize the injury, which could sideline him for the next six weeks, but fortunately the Rangers have the depth to withstand his absence.

The 25-year-old Jung injured himself while knocking down a 109-mph line drive off the bat of the Marlins’ Jorge Soler in the sixth inning of Sunday’s game. The ball hit the base of the thumb of his glove hand and squirted out, but he had the presence of mind to recover it and step on third base for a force out, then throw to second to complete a double play.

One batter later, Jung left the game, to the surprise of manager Bruce Bochy. “I went out to the mound, I had no idea he got hurt on that play,” said Bochy. “The calmness that he showed picking up the ball, stepping on third … he didn’t grimace, he didn’t do anything to make us think that he was hurt.” Read the rest of this entry »

One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.

ZiPS doesn’t discard actual stats; the models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. You can read more on how zStats relate to actual stats here. For those curious about the r-squared values between zStats and real stats for the offensive components, it’s 0.59 for zBABIP, 0.86 for strikeouts, 0.83 for walks, and 0.78 for homers. Those relationships are what make these stats useful for predicting the future. If you can explain 78% of the variance in home run rate between hitters with no information about how many homers they actually hit, you’ve answered a lot of the riddle. All of these numbers correlate better than the actual numbers with future numbers, though a model that uses both zStats and actual ones, as the full model of ZiPS does, is superior to either by themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

“Dr. Neal ElAttrache” is up there on the list of three-word phrases you don’t want to see near a pitcher’s name. Not quite as bad as “Federal grand jury,” “Devoured by wolverines,” or “Drafted by Colorado,” but up there. Tampa Bay Rays ace Shane McClanahan visited the estimable orthopedic surgeon on Monday to get a tight left forearm checked out, and the results were not to his liking. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported Tuesday afternoon that McClanahan is “highly unlikely” to return this season, in the words of Rays manager Kevin Cash.

Over Tampa Bay’s most recent run of success, the Rays have set great store by their pitching, and more recently by their rotation, which ranks third in the majors in WAR. But that success has come amidst a sweeps-week Grey’s Anatomy special in the medical department. McClanahan will be the biggest loss yet, as he leads Rays starters in innings and was one of the team’s All-Star representatives last month. The question, as always, is whether Tampa Bay can hang on, and what “hanging on” looks like for a club that’s already headed backwards. Read the rest of this entry »

“There’s something about his swing that looks odd and unnatural, but DeLauter otherwise looks like a middle-of-the-order bat from a tools perspective.”

Eric Longenhagen shared that scouting perspective when describing Chase DeLauter back in January. Ranking him No. 9 on our Cleveland Guardians Top Prospects list as a 45 FV prospect, our lead prospect analyst also opined that the 2022 first rounder was “a fascinating draft case,” in part because he played just 66 games over three seasons at James Madison University. Moreover, the broken foot that prematurely ended his final collegiate season delayed DeLauter’s professional debut until this past June. Initially assigned to the Arizona Complex League, the 21-year-old outfielder has slashed .356/.373/.548 with one home run in 75 plate appearances since being promoted to the High-A Lake County Captains.

DeLauter discussed his swing, and the approach that goes with it, prior to a recent game. Read the rest of this entry »

Things didn’t look so hot for Triston Casas in the first few months of the season. From the beginning of the year through the end of May, he had a 95 wRC+ and a .195/.326/.376 slash line. He wasn’t doing enough damage in the heart of the zone and had a suboptimal launch angle distribution. That’s a fancy way of saying he wasn’t consistently making pitchers’ mistakes hurt because his batted balls were all over the place. His promising future as a masher had a bit of a cloud over it, but after an explosive July, there is good reason to be more confident in him.

Casas’ turnaround has multiple layers to it. Along with a slight mechanical tweak, he has taken on a more aggressive approach while focusing on contact towards the middle of the field. With a solid combination of power and natural lift, he is able to play with the big parts of Fenway Park. He isn’t utilizing the approach we’ve seen many lefty Red Sox hitters adopt over the years of peppering line drives and fly balls off the Green Monster. In fact, he’s 134th out of 143 qualified hitters in Oppo%. Instead, he sticks to where his bat path plays – the middle of the field. Well, that was his approach in July, anyway. Below is a table showing Casas’ horizontal and vertical batted ball profile by month this season:

He had a good June, but in terms of his batted ball profile, it didn’t look like his breakout July. In July, he stayed off the ground at an extreme rate while hitting half of his batted balls up the middle. There are only three qualified hitters in baseball with a groundball rate below 30% for the entire year: Jack Suwinski (26.1%), Nolan Gorman (27.8%), and Mookie Betts (28.0%). This isn’t in the table, but Casas’ July HR/FB ratio was 29.2%, which would put him behind only Shohei Ohtani if he were to sustain it over the full season. To see Casas hit at rates similar to elite guys like Betts and Ohtani is both good and bad. He doesn’t have the raw power or hit tool to live in outlier territory on a consistent basis, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate his success. Rather, it shows us what Casas needs to do to be a consistent power hitter. If his swing tweak and new approach enable him to more consistently hit the ball in the air, we should have greater confidence in his ability to sustain success, even as his stats become less extreme.

Before looking at the mechanical tweak, I want to focus on where and when the Red Sox first baseman has been more aggressive. The data below details his swing rates on pitches in the upper and lower third of the zone:

When the calendar flipped to June, Casas got significantly more aggressive at the top and bottom of the zone. As July rolled around, he doubled down on that aggression while adding more early count swings. There is an old school mantra that the best pitch you’ll see in an at-bat is the first one. Pitchers want to get ahead and take advantage of the hitter trying to find their timing. Still, if a pitcher lays in a cookie, the hitter should attack it. It’s always a sound approach to hunt the heart of the zone, and if you’re a struggling rookie, it makes even more sense to simplify things. When Casas implemented that strategy in July, it paid off.

He had success in the first two months of the season on 0-0 pitches in the zone, with a .424 and .681 xwOBA, respectively. In June, he ran a .026 xwOBA on these pitches across 18 total swings, though the results on those swings seem like a small sample blip; 11 of them were foul balls and three were whiffs. Something was off there, but the trend didn’t continue into July. Casas flipped the script and bumped up his swing rate by over 20 percentage points while running a .476 xwOBA. If a pitcher attacked him in the zone to start the at-bat, he put on an A swing. Now that he seems to have a better feel for his swing, he’ll have to strike the right balance of patience and aggression depending on how pitchers approach him.

Let’s look at the adjustment that helped things click mechanically. Here are a few swings from May and June before Casas made the change:

And here are a few during his stellar month:

Every hitter has a different feel for how to turn their barrel over and enter the zone. Some are more handsy, like Marcus Semien, while others aren’t handsy at all, like Casas. My use of two different angles from before his tweak is intentional. One shows his hands relative to his body on a straight angle, and the other shows how far he tucked them behind his ear. There was a good bit of movement that was triggered by his hands. But after his tweak, his barrel was almost perpendicular to the ground, with his hands working according to the movement of his entire upper body load rather than on their own. This brings me to the idea of connection. Before explaining what that means, take a look at this video posted by Alex Speier from a few days ago:

Triston Casas does not step in the bucket. He steps with a bucket. pic.twitter.com/z7TFNtM3EA

— Alex Speier (@alexspeier) August 4, 2023

This is a drill that hones the feeling of early connection between your upper body and barrel. By holding the bucket between his arms and chest throughout his swing, Casas establishes where his barrel is in space relative to his arms and torso. The result is his hands being along for the ride, rather than being the driver of the swing. In other words, his barrel placement is the result of how his upper body moves in space. While the swing in this video isn’t what it looks like in game, it helps give Casas the feel he needs to have an efficiently sequenced load and plane of rotation. You’ll notice that his hands are hardly moving during this practice swing. That ties directly to what we saw him change in July. His hands aren’t tipping until his shoulders do, and he’s not letting them guide his swing path. The result is improved barrel control stemming from better feel for where his barrel is in space. The data backs that up too. July was the first month Casas had a SweetSpot% above 37% on the season, and he blew that mark away, with 49% of his batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.

Usually, we don’t get a look into drill work like we did here. Connection drills are very common but can look confusing to the casual viewer. Luckily for us, a logical story can be told here. There is a direct line between Casas’ batted ball data and swing tweak, and the connection drill swings. I often talk about players finding their blueprint for success. A lot of the time, a particular drill can help a hitter get back in line with that blueprint. Casas now appears to have a better idea of idea of what that looks like for him, and specific cues for how he can stay there.

All this said, it doesn’t necessarily mean Casas has figured out hitting. Like most hitters, he has holes that can be exposed. As he finds success, pitchers will adjust their mix or location. Since August began, Casas has faced a career-high rate of breaking balls. He hadn’t seen more than 34% breakers in any month, but after 73 pitches this month, that rate is up to 50.7%. It’s working too – his whiff rate on that pitch group is 41.7% and he has yet to barrel a breaking ball. It’s a cat and mouse game that he will have to continuously adjust to while trying to find stability.

How Casas progresses versus his opponents’ changing approach will be crucial to our understanding of where his floor and ceiling will ultimately settle. At the very least, though, we’ve seen what the best version of Casas might look like, even if it hasn’t lasted a full season. A 122 wRC+ in your first full season ain’t too shabby.

Monday night, my wife posed a baseball question I couldn’t immediately answer. As the Angels and Giants went to the eighth inning with the Halos up by a run, she had a simple question: How often does a team that’s losing after seven innings come back and win? I guess I could have gone to our wonderful WPA Inquirer, a fun little tool for hypotheticals. That tells me that the Giants had around a 25% chance to win heading into the eighth. But I took her question as a broader one, concerned not just with that specific game, but with all games. How likely is a comeback?

I didn’t know the answer offhand, and I couldn’t find it on Google either (secret professional writer tip: use Google). So I did what anyone in my situation would do: I said “I don’t know, but now I’m going to write an article about this.” Two days later, here we are.

I’m hardly the first person to do research on comebacks. Russell Carleton has been looking into comebacks for a while. Rob Mains has too. Chet Gutwein investigated comeback wins and blown saves here at FanGraphs in 2021. Everyone loves to write about comebacks. Baseball Reference even keeps a list of the biggest comeback wins. They’re memorable games, and fertile ground for investigation. Read the rest of this entry »

After trading away veteran pieces and restocking the farm system at the deadline, the Mets have pivoted and are now focusing on the future. That being the case, it both was and wasn’t a curious time for the team to option Brett Baty, seemingly their third baseman of the future, to Triple-A Syracuse on Monday. Now is the time to let the kids play and figure things out at the big-league level, but Baty has been struggling so mightily that he might need a change of scenery. He’s running a 77 wRC+ on the season, and since the start of July, he’s at a measly 39. He hasn’t recorded a hit since July 23, a stretch of 25 plate appearances. That’s the second-longest active streak in baseball, behind the also recently demoted Corey Julks with 42. Combine that with poor defense, and Baty certainly sounds like someone who could use a little time away from the spotlight to figure things out.

The Mets have said the same. “We think this is what’s best for Brett, which is what’s best for the Mets, for the time being,” Buck Showalter told reporters. “Just because something’s delayed doesn’t mean it’s denied.” He added, “I’d be surprised if he doesn’t take a little time – two or three days – and then all of a sudden kind of get back to who he is and who he’s capable of being.”

What complicates the issue is Baty’s service time. It’s a tricky situation because, to borrow a phrase, the timing is nothing short of predominant. Between this year and last, Baty has accrued 162 days of major league service time, just short of the 172 that constitute a full year. When the Mets started the season with him at Triple-A Syracuse, it seemed like they might be deliberately gaming the system. He was 23rd overall in our prospect rankings and, along with Mark Vientos, had torn up the Grapefruit League. The Mets did call Baty up in mid-April, early enough that he’d have a chance to accrue a full year of service time, but once he arrived in Flushing, they still seemed to be on the fence about him, even though he had raked in Syracuse and continued raking for his first month in the big leagues. He was kept in a loose platoon with Eduardo Escobar, starting against righties and sitting about half the time against lefties — not necessarily how you handle your third baseman of the future. Read the rest of this entry »