Archive for Daily Graphings

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 »

Travis Hafner is hitting like it’s 2005. The 35-year-old has raced to a .318/.438/.667 line, replete with six home runs, three doubles and a triple in April. He has helped breathe life into a lineup missing its usual stars. With Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson, and Alex Rodriguez all shelved, the Yankees have still managed 4.6 runs per game, good for ninth in the league.

The Yankees’ lineup has been 14 runs above average this year by wRAA. Hafner is at plus-9 himself, powering the Yankees lineup like he powered those mid-2000s Cleveland teams.

Read the rest of this entry »

“I’m not a tremendously gifted athlete,” Mark Trumbo said. “I have to work at it, and be smart out there.” That might be surprising given how country strong the six-foot-four, 225-pound outfielder looks, but if you consider his game at as a whole, it’s obvious that there are aspects that could use refinement. Statistics have helped shape some of his baseball values as he’s worked to improve himself, even if he doesn’t incorporate them daily.

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday night and Tuesday morning, the A’s and Angels played a game for the ages, a 19-inning affair that saw the hosts rally in the ninth and the 15th before walking off in the game’s seventh hour. The game featured 18 runs and nearly 600 pitches, and in the end, the A’s improved to 15-12, while the Angels fell to something much worse than that. Generally, such games are immediately thought of as turning points, and generally, such games don’t go on to work that way. But this was a game that few will forget, regardless, simply because the duration grew to be so extreme.

FanGraphs isn’t in the business of issuing game recaps, particularly several hours after the fact. But still, some attention to the game should be paid, and I’m electing to focus on a particular intentional ball. With two out in the top of the 11th inning, Grant Balfour intentionally walked Albert Pujols. We consider the 3-and-0 pitch.

Read the rest of this entry »

While it goes without saying that the present site is required reading for all of baseball’s most progressive front offices, it’s also the case that no post at the site today will be read more hungrily or with such hunger as this one — which post is a very urgent scouting report on Skip Schumaker, who both (a) is a middle infielder for the Dodgers and (b) threw a scoreless inning for that same team on Monday night (box).

Fastball
Schumaker’s fastball — in relief, at least — bears striking resemblance to an average major-league one, sitting at about 88-90 mph and with similar rise and arm-side run.

Irrefutable proof of same is contained within this animated GIF:

Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Hamilton is the most aggressive hack in baseball. This isn’t news, of course, but to put his hacktastic ways in context, here is where Hamilton’s swing rates rank among batters with 500+ PAs in the last year.

O-Swing%: 42.7% (150th of 151)
Z-Swing: 82.0% (151st of 151)
Swing%: 57.9% (150th of 151)
Zone%: 38.8% (151st of 151)
Contact%: 64.9% (151st of 151)

The only guy who has swung the bat more often than Hamilton is Delmon Young, but 46.1% of the pitches Young has been thrown have been in the strike zone. Hamilton is pitched around more than any other hitter in the game, and yet he swings more often than anyone, with the exception of one replacement level scrub.

Josh Hamilton has always been an aggressive hitter. Josh Hamilton has a career major league batting line of .301/.360/.542. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

Well, it is broke(n), but most importantly, this isn’t the approach that made Josh Hamilton an elite Major League player. This approach is new, and if he doesn’t make some changes in a hurry, he’s on his way to becoming the new Ryan Howard.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stetson Allie sat, staring at the ground as Rockies farmhand Drew Beuerlein verbally tore into him. Moments before, the 240-pound Allie delivered a glancing blow on a home plate collision, unable to jar the ball loose from the 24-year-old catcher. As teammates took the field, Allie continued to sit as if he’d been shaken up during impact. The pitcher-turned-first-baseman eventually rose to his feet and gingerly took two steps towards the third base dugout before he quickened his pace.

Read the rest of this entry »