Jed Lowrie has played for three organizations already, despite having accrued little more than two full seasons worth of Major League plate appearances. That might be because the oft-injured 29-year-old has never had so much as 400 plate appearances in a given season since his major league debut in 2008. Through it all, he’s been trying to shake off those injuries and prove himself as a young veteran in the league. Maybe we’re just getting to know the real Jed Lowrie now.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are few reversal of fortune so dramatic as the 0-2 home run. When pitchers corner a batsman into an 0-2 count, said batsman has hit .154/.160/.216 through the 2013 season. The following sample of at bats combine for an immaculate 1.000/1.000/4.000 slash.

Let’s take a look at them.
Read the rest of this entry »

I offered my explanation for Clay Buchholz’s success this season yesterday, citing improved fastball command and a recently harnessed but always nasty changeup. Jack Morris, now on the radio call for the Toronto Blue Jays, has other ideas:

I found out because the guys on the video camera showed it to me right after the game,” he said. “I didn’t see it during the game. They showed it to me and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ and I said, ‘Well, he’s throwing a spitter. Cause that’s what it is.

The scandal, if one can even call it such, involves video of rosin on Buchholz’s left forearm. The accusations are tenuous at best, and as Morris himself put it, “I can’t prove anything. I can’t prove anything.” Although Morris wasn’t the only one to accuse Buchholz of throwing a spitter — former pitcher Dirk Hayhurst, also with the Blue Jays radio team, joined in — it’s hard to imagine these accusations going anywhere.

However, Morris and Hayhurst give us an opportunity to revisit the spitball, in my opinion one of the most unique pieces of baseball history, from its time as a legal pitch in baseball’s early years to Gaylord Perry’s Hall of Fame spitball and everywhere in between.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most in his profession, Jim Summers goes largely unnoticed. That doesn’t mean he and his brethren aren’t invaluable to the teams that employ them. When it comes to day-to-day preparation, they are the rock stars of baseball’s video age.

Summers is the video coordinator for the Houston Astros. If a player or coach needs a frame-by-frame breakdown of a pitching delivery or a swing, he’s the go-to guy. Need to know how much a slider is breaking or which pitch an opposing slugger is hammering? He has the answer.

Summers is — in his own words — “a traveling video library.”

——

Summers on the responsibilities of a video coordinator: “What I do is track every pitch thrown by us and against us. I track the pitch type, pitch speed, pitch location, where the ball was hit and how hard it was hit. Everything is categorized, marked and data-based. We track between 45,000 and 60,000 pitches each year. I then help the advance scouts by loading the games from the rest of the league. Basically, I’m a traveling video library.

“We get our video from TVTI. The data comes from Inside Edge, which sends us their comma-separated vector files, or CSV files. Those are integrated into a program called BATS, which is made by Sydex Sports and owned by Mike Phillips. I think 28 of the 30 teams use it.

“Here, with the Houston Astros, we have our own group of people doing statistics. I believe we will eventually do all of our own statistical inputs and outputs. We have one of the best decision science departments around. Sig Mejdal and the guys can really break things down, and because it’s a science it’s not subject to human prejudice.”

On how the data is used:
Read the rest of this entry »

Over at NBC, Joe Posnanski raises this provocative question: Would Major League Baseball be better off if it eliminated the postseason, and just crowned its champion based on regular-season record, the way that England’s Premier League does?
Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, Mike Petriello put out the following quiz on Twitter.

Here’s a list of every hitter in baseball w/ 40 PA, sorted by BB%. Dare you to guess who is #1 without clicking. fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?p…

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) May 2, 2013

Assuming you read the headline to this post, I’ve already spoiled the answer, but I’m not sure that knowing that Juan Uribe is the current leader in BB% makes it any less shocking. Juan Uribe! This Juan Uribe.

Uribe is 34-years-old. Uribe has been in the big leagues since 2001, and he’s been hacking his way through almost every at-bat since. Juan Uribe is Yuniesky Betancourt’s hero*. What is happening here?

*I don’t know if that’s true, but it would make sense if it were true.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Lucas Harrell takes the mound this weekend against the Tigers, batters can expect to see a lot of two-seam fastballs. The Houston Astros right-hander has thrown his signature pitch 61.8 percent of the time this season. In his most recent start — a shut-down effort against the Yankees — 75 of his 105 pitches were two-seamers averaging 92.4 mph.

Harrell has been specializing in shut-down efforts. In five of his six starts he has allowed two or fewer runs. The 27-year-old doesn’t get much national attention, but outside of a brutal outing against the A’s in early April, he has pitched like an ace. It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Last year — his first full season in the big leagues — he had a 3.76 ERA in 193 innings.

Harrell lives and dies with his sinker, but he has solid command of four other pitches. He is also throwing a four-seam fastball 9.3 percent of the time, a cutter (13.9%), changeup (8.5%) and curveball (6.5%).

Harrell talked about his repertoire — including his heavy sinker — last weekend at Fenway Park. Also weighing in on his game were catcher Jason Castro, manager Bo Porter, pitching coach Doug Brocail, and Red Sox pitching coach Juan Nieves.

——

Harrell on his two-seamer: “I throw a lot of sinkers. That’s my main pitch and my other stuff I basically just work in. It’s been my go-to pitch ever since high school. I’ve always had movement on it and I can also throw hard. The combination of those two together usually produces ground balls. I’m a ground ball guy and don’t strike a lot of people out.

“I get a little arm-side tail sometimes, but on good days I get more downward action. That’s what’s going to get me the ground balls. When I get side to side, I leave it up and it gets hit a little more.

“If you’re throwing your sinker at 88-90, or you’re throwing 90-93, that’s a big difference. The harder it is, the harder it is to hit. It rides a little bit more on the hands, which gives you a little more advantage. Even so, the more I’m out there, the sharper I am and the more action I have on the ball.”

On his two-seam grip: “I rotate the ball slightly in my hand and can really feel it come off my middle finger. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper had two of the best seasons for age-19/age-20 players in baseball history. We might not ever see anything like Trout’s 2012 season from a 20-year-old again. Those two ruined our expectations for what underaged position players are supposed to do in the big leagues. Everyone else pales in comparison to what we just saw.

That shouldn’t cause us to overlook the fact that there’s another 20-year-old putting his mark on Major League Baseball right now. In Baltimore, Manny Machado is showing the early signs of being a superstar.

Read the rest of this entry »

Although Clay Buchholz had enjoyed his share of success heading into 2013, from a no-hitter to a 17-win season, one assumes the Red Sox were hoping for more. Buchholz was Baseball America’s fourth-best prospect entering 2008 and appeared to be a top-of-the-rotation power arm capable of ace-level dominance. Instead, Buchholz has had one very good season — a 2010 with a 2.33 ERA and a still-solid 3.61 FIP. He has otherwise pitched like a back-end rotation-filler, with a 4.26 ERA and a 4.38 FIP over 500.1 innings.

Wednesday night, Buchholz’s fifth start of his age-28 season, is the latest signal of the step forward the Red Sox have been waiting for. Buchholz held the Blue Jays to just two hits and three walks over seven shutout innings as he struck out eight to lower his ERA to 1.01. And fret not, the peripherals are fantastic as well: he owns a 2.28 FIP and 3.00 xFIP.

The strikeout total he put up Wednesday night has been there all season, and it’s the main difference between the new Buchholz and the old Buchholz. Despite his blazing fastball and breaking pitches lauded as grade 70 pitches in Baseball America reports, Buchholz was posted remarkably consistent and mediocre strikeout rates from 2009-2012, always between 6.1 and 6.7 K/9. He now has 47 strikeouts in 44.2 innings in 2013.

Additionally, Buchholz kept a Blue Jays lineup loaded with power hitters without a home run, and he has allowed just one this season. His HR/FB was a horrible 13 percent last year and he had four seasons above 10 percent in his last five.

So what’s new? Via last night’s Blue Jays broadcast, Red Sox catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia said Buchholz’s biggest difference is improved fastball command. And indeed, the numbers (via BrooksBaseball.net) bear this out: Buchholz has thrown his four-seam fastball for a called strike 27.5 percent of the time this year after just 22.8 percent in 2012. Conversely, the pitch has seen a similar drop in in-play rate. Considering Buchholz has allowed a .537 slugging on contact on the pitch for his career — the worst by over 100 points for any pitch he still throws — the fewer four-seam fastballs put in play the better.

By keeping the fastballs on the corners, something he did proficiently Wednesday night, he’ll turn what used to be balls in play into called strikes or foul balls. He has thrown the fastball for a strike but not in play 51.8 percent of the time this year, six points higher than last season. And, with 160 four-seam fastballs thrown already this season, this difference is already statistically significant (in a 90 percent confidence interval, to be specific).

His HR/FB won’t stay grounded at 3.7 percent, but keeping fastballs out of play will keep it from escalating too quickly. It’s especially key because he needs to be able to throw the fastball to get into favorable counts — it’s his best-controlled pitch at about 68 percent strikes the last two seasons, slightly better than the two-seamer and much better than his off-speed options.

And thanks to those fastball strikes, Buchholz has been in plenty of two-strike counts. The next question, then, is which pitch will be the out pitch. His curveball has been shockingly bad at drawing whiffs — under 10 percent since 2007, close to the major league fastball average — and that hasn’t changed this year. But his changeup, at least in 2013, has been an elite swing-and-miss pitch. Of the 74 Buchholz has tossed, hitters have waved at 20, a massive 27 percent.

As mentioned above, Buchholz’s changeup has been heralded in the past; a 70 grade is frontline material. But he was struggling mightily with the pitch last season, so much so that he scrapped it for a splitter Josh Beckett taught him after he threw the pitch for a ball nearly 50 percent of the time in April last season.

That arsenal change didn’t take as the calendar flipped to 2013. Buchholz had little trouble drawing swings and misses when he used the changeup in 2012 — 18.9 percent is still an excellent mark for a changeup — and his control issues have disappeared. Buchholz threw 13 changeups Wednesday night with nine (69 percent) going for strikes, and his 63 percent overall strike rate works fine for a pitch designed to fool hitters. The pitch has been devastating to left-handers and right-handers alike, with whiff rates over 20 percent to both sides. It’s been so good, he’s put the splitter back in the toolbox, leaving it as a side project for bullpen sessions.

Things will come back to earth. Buchholz’s changeup probably won’t finish with a higher whiff rate than Aroldis Chapman’s slider (currently at 24.4 percent). Teams will tag his fastball for a few home runs. But Buchholz has already thrown enough fastballs to suggest his control and command of the pitch have improved this year, and his changeup has been a highly regarded pitch dating back to his time in Double-A. If he can maintain even a fraction of the improvements he’s shown over his first five starts with these two pitches, the Red Sox can expect Buchholz to finally step into his frontline potential.

When I’m watching baseball, I’m almost always also on Twitter. Twitter has made watching a game by yourself in your home a social experience, and so now, it’s almost like watching a bunch of games with a bunch of other people. It’s great. Twitter is really an amazing creation, considering that the idea is basically mass text messaging.

Among the people I follow on Twitter is Keith Law. Keith is a prolific tweeter, and he interacts with his massive audience pretty much every night. An ongoing point of this conversation between Law and his followers is a derision of the intentional walk. Seemingly every night, someone will send Law an example of a manager putting a batter on, followed by the guy behind the IBB’d hitter launching a bases clearing extra base hit, scoring everyone including the guy who just got walked. Or the pitcher, now without the safety net of having a base open, will end up walking the next guy unintentionally, occasionally forcing in a run without ever forcing the opponent to swing the bat.

Just based on the data that shows up in my Twitter feed on a nightly basis, it feels like the average hitter bats .950 and slugs 2.500 after the guy in front of him gets walked intentionally. And, you frequently hear announcers talk about the disrespect the IBB is showing to the on-deck hitter, and how that might motivate them to prove the opposing manager wrong. All of this talk led me to realize that I actually had no idea what really happened after an intentional walk was issued, but I wanted to find out if the narrative held up to the light of data.

So, as is my usual approach now, I asked Jeff Zimmerman to run a complicated query for me, and now I’m going to take credit for his hard work. Jeff was kind enough to extract the play-by-play data following an IBB, and then removed all of the situations where the next batter was a pitcher, since I don’t think too many people have problems with an intentional walk that forces a pitcher to swing the bat. What we really want to know is how often an intentional walk to get to a worse hitter, or to gain the platoon advantage, ends up working out.

The answer? More often than you might think.

Read the rest of this entry »