For a team with a losing record, the Padres were aggressive in advance of the August 1 trade deadline, swinging three trades in order to patch holes on the major league roster without fretting about the impact of further increasing their payroll. Yet their first week since upgrading their roster hasn’t gone well. Not only did they lose Joe Musgrove to the injured list on Friday, but they also followed that by losing three of four to the Dodgers this weekend at Petco Park, missing a golden opportunity to get to .500 for the first time in nearly two months and gain ground on the NL West leaders.

The 30-year-old Musgrove was scratched from his start last Wednesday in Colorado due to what was initially termed “minor” shoulder soreness. The thinking at the time was that he would just miss one turn and be able to start against the Mariners in a two-game series starting on Tuesday. But when Musgrove flew home to San Diego to be examined, an MRI revealed that he had inflammation in his right shoulder capsule. Surgery is not yet a consideration, but he’ll be shut down from throwing for at least three weeks, meaning that at best he’ll return sometime in September. The Padres won’t have much clarity until he is examined after his rest period, and then he’ll need at least a couple of weeks to rebuild his pitch count.

The injury caught Musgrove by surprise. “I honestly thought we were going in for a pretty routine checkup… but they went in and found some injury to the capsule,” he told reporters. “Every part of me wants to go out there and throw. But everything’s telling us that we needed to step back and give it some rest.”

The injury caught the Padres by surprise as well. Said general manager A.J. Preller, “At the time of the deadline, we honestly were not looking at Joe as missing a few weeks or extended time or anything like that.” Preller did reinforce the pitching staff by acquiring starter Rich Hill from the Pirates in one deadline-day trade and reliever Scott Barlow from the Royals in another, but they don’t add up to a healthy Musgrove. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone likes an inspiring story. They don’t call it a Hollywood ending for nothing; people love it when the hero wins before the credits roll. Over in near near-ish the center of American film-making, it looked like the Angels were setting up for another iteration of that classic arc. They were down and out, deciding whether they could stomach trading the best player in the game before losing him forever. The previous best player in the game was out with injury, and the ship was taking on water. Then, a classic mid-story twist: they ripped off an 8-1 run in the latter half of July and decided to go for it one last time.

Yeah, about that. Since trading for Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo López to lean fully into this year, they’ve gone 2-9, slipping back below .500. After their playoff odds reached 22.7% on July 27, the Halos have crashed down to 1.3% in short order. That’s a seasonal low for their chances of making the postseason. Things are decidedly non-magical in the land of Disney these days.

What’s gone wrong for the Angels? Well, one thing’s for sure: it’s not Shohei Ohtani. He’s started at DH for all 11 games of the stretch and has hit a ludicrous .405/.542/.649, even better than his seasonal line. He left his lone start in that span early with hand cramps, but pitched four scoreless innings before departing. To the extent that one player can power a team, Ohtani is doing his best. 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.

And why is this important and not just number-spinning? Knowing that changes in walk rates, home run rates, and strikeout rates stabilized far quicker than other stats was an important step forward in player valuation. That’s something that’s useful whether you work for a front office, are a hardcore fan, want to make some fantasy league moves, or even just a regular fan who is rooting for your faves. If we improve our knowledge of the basic molecular structure of a walk or a strikeout, then we can find players who are improving or struggling even more quickly, and provide better answers on why a walk rate or a strikeout rate has changed. This is useful data for me in particular because I obviously do a lot of work with projections, but I’m hoping this type of information is interesting to readers beyond that.

As with any model, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and there are always some people that question the value of data such as these. So for this run, I’m pitting zStats against the last two months and all new data that obviously could not have been used in the model without a time machine to see how the zStats did compared to reality. I’m not going to do a whole post for this every time, but this is something that, based on the feedback from the last post in June, people really wanted to see the results for.

Starting with zBABIP, let’s look at how the numbers have shaken out for the leaders and trailers from back in June. I didn’t include players with fewer than 100 plate appearances over the last two months. Read the rest of this entry »

In an attempt to arrest a slide that began in early July, the Diamondbacks were busy in the run-up to the August 1 trade deadline, but so far, their moves haven’t been enough to turn things around. In fact, they have yet to win a game in August, having finished a seven-game road trip by losing six in a row to the Giants and Twins. On Sunday, their highest-profile deadline addition, former Mariners closer Paul Sewald, failed to retire a batter in his first save opportunity since the trade. Instead, he served up a game-tying homer to Max Kepler on his first pitch and then, after a walk, a two-run walk-off homer to Matt Wallner. Ouch.

After spending the majority of the first half leading the NL West, the Diamondbacks have slipped to sixth in the NL Wild Card race, 1.5 games behind the Cubs and Reds, who are tied for the third spot. Their trend is actually worse than that. Since winning on July 1 to lift their record to 50-34 and restore their NL West lead to three games, the Snakes have gone 7-22 (.241). That’s worse than the A’s (9-19, .321) or any other team in the majors. It’s not as though they’ve been particularly jobbed in the process; their Pythagenpat record is the majors’ worst in that span as well:

To be fair, the Diamondbacks weren’t expected to be a powerhouse this year; after going 74-88 last year, they projected for 78.4 wins via our preseason Playoff Odds. In a slow-starting NL West, they took over a share of first place for the first time on April 8, when they were 5-4, and finished the month 16-13, which was good enough to tie for first. Despite going 17-10 in May, they didn’t get a share of first place again until June 1, but they spent that entire month atop the division — most of it with sole possession of first place — while going 16-11.

It was around that time that Corbin Carroll’s season started taking an unfortunate turn. On June 29 — the same day he was named as a starter for the National League in the upcoming All-Star Game — the 22-year-old outfielder left a 6-1 loss to the Rays after four innings, having experienced soreness in his right shoulder during a third-inning plate appearance. It was the same shoulder on which he’d undergone surgery to repair a torn labrum in 2021, which cost him nearly the entire season. In the wake of his removal from the game, he underwent strength testing, which showed that his shoulder was strong and stable, but the Diamondbacks gave him a breather, limiting him to a single pitch-hitting appearance over the next three days. After returning to the lineup, he played just three more games before leaving the team’s July 6 tilt against the Mets in the seventh inning, once again in pain. “I took a swing, and I felt a shift in my shoulder, shocking, tingling sensation go down my arm and then my hand go numb,” he told reporters. “I was just holding it thinking it came out of the socket, pretty much thought that the season was over.”

Despite his initial concerns, Carroll had not experienced a dislocation, and his MRI came back clean. He was back in the lineup the next day, and while he’s certainly had his moments since then — and hasn’t missed a game — his production and quality of contact are down considerably since the first incident:

Note that with two hits and two walks on Sunday, Carroll raised his post-July 1 wRC+ nine points; he was at 96 previously. Along the way, his swinging strike rate has spiked from 8.4% to 12.4%, and his chase rate from 28.8% to 32.6%, though his strikeout rate has barely budged, from 19.8% to 20.1%.

Maybe Carroll’s downturn in production is related to his shoulder woes, maybe it’s just the league adjusting to a player who looked like an MVP candidate early in the season, or maybe it’s just regression, more on which below. One way or another, it’s been poorly timed, in part because he’s not the only Diamondback who has tailed off in recent weeks:

Just four Diamondbacks have a 100 wRC+ or better since the start of July, one of them a catcher (Moreno) who has been limited to 11 of the team’s first 29 games in that span and is now sidelined by left shoulder inflammation. Moreno, Thomas, and McCarthy are the only three players with a higher wRC+ since the start of July than before, and they’re still below average offensively overall. Deadline additions Tommy Pham (from the Mets) and Jace Peterson (from the A’s) have yet to make an impact, going a combined 4-for-30, all singles.

Meanwhile, note that not only has Carroll fallen off steeply but so have Gurriel and Perdomo, both of whom joined him on the NL All-Star squad but might as well be on the side of a milk carton these days. Setting the narrative of Carroll’s shoulder injury to the side for a moment, this is striking:

All three players hit well above their Statcast expected stats through the end of June, particularly Perdomo, a slappy switch-hitter who doesn’t hit the ball hard at all; his season barrel rate is 1.2%, his hard-hit rate 19.9%. Then it’s as though the Regression Monster showed up and took a bite — each of these three players has seen about a 75-point swing in their wOBA-xwOBA differential.

Overall, the Diamondbacks hit .263/.330/.437 through the end of June, ranking fifth in the majors in scoring (5.11 runs per game) and seventh in wRC+ (106). Since then, they’ve hit just .227/.302/.373 while ranking 29th in scoring (3.44 runs per game) and 26th in wRC+ (83). Their performance against every major pitch type except changeups has fallen off by at least 50 points of SLG and 25 points of wOBA:

Yikes. They were punishing four-seam fastballs earlier in the season, but that’s stopped, and they’ve particularly gotten eaten alive by sliders and sweepers lately. What’s especially strange is the general downward trend of their more recent numbers despite the weather getting even warmer, which tends to increase offense. Of course, it’s as hot as the surface of Mercury in Arizona, so maybe the Diamondbacks have just wilted in the heat.

That does seem to be true with the team’s pitching, particularly the bullpen:

Good gravy. In writing about the Sewald trade — which sent Rojas and prospects Dominic Canzone and Ryan Bliss to Seattle — I noted that manager Torey Lovullo had been working with a matchup-based closer-by-committee system involving righties Miguel Castro, Kevin Ginkel and Scott McGough and lefty Andrew Chafin. However, I did not drill down to see just how bad things had gotten for them in the recent past. Using the July 1 cutoff again, with full awareness of the small samples in play, Ginkel has pitched well (0.75 ERA, 2.35 FIP in 12 innings), but the other three had been torched, with Castro (6.00 ERA and 6.60 FIP in 12 IP) the “best” of them, though he had stopped getting ninth-inning save chances, and Chafin (9.95 ERA and 5.63 FIP in 6.1 IP) and McGough (8.76 ERA and 6.91 FIP in 12.1 IP) utterly terrible. Chafin had two blown ninth-inning saves that led to losses in that span; he’s now a Brewer.

As for the rotation, it’s been pretty unstable, with Zac Gallen and rookie Ryne Nelson the only real constants, and both of them experiencing fall-offs since the start of July. Gallen pitched to a 3.02 ERA and 2.73 FIP in 104.1 innings through June, making his first All-Star team, but has yielded a 4.17 ERA and 4.12 FIP in 45.1 innings since, with his home run rate increasing from 0.6 per nine to 1.6. Nelson went from a 4.97 ERA and 4.44 FIP to a 5.59 ERA and 6.19 FIP, not that it should have been too surprising given his double-digit barrel rate even in the “good” times. Merrill Kelly, the team’s second-best starter, missed four weeks (most of July) due to a blood clot in his right calf but has been solid when available. Tommy Henry showed some improvement before being sidelined last week due to elbow inflammation. Brandon Pfaadt has been getting better results since being recalled on July 22 than prior, though his overall ERA of 7.11 in 44.1 innings is pretty damning. Also sporting an unsightly ERA (7.38) is Zach Davies, who has been dreadful on both sides of the divide while missing time with oblique and back injuries. Slade Cecconi, the team’s 2020 first-round pick, just made his major league debut on August 2 in place of Henry and acquitted himself reasonably well in a losing cause against the Giants, though his catcher (Herrera) had a rough time on the rookie’s first strikeout.

Given their current injury situation, the Diamondbacks now find themselves trying to stay afloat with just two starters who have demonstrated the ability to be league average or better, plus three rookies who have combined for a 5.63 ERA and 5.31 FIP. It’s not like the cavalry is on the horizon, either. The team’s playoff odds, which stood at 76.4% through the end of June (24.9% division, 51.5% Wild Card), are down to 21% at this writing, including just a 0.7% chance of overcoming their 8.5-game deficit to win the division. Considering that they lost 110 games just two seasons ago, they’ve certainly made progress to get to this point, but it seems quite apparent given their performance over the past five-plus weeks that they’re not quite ready for prime time.

Shohei Ohtani and Ronald Acuña Jr. have been the MVP frontrunners for quite some time. They lead the majors in WAR, and to make things nice and easy, there’s no need to specify which kind; they’re the top dogs here at FanGraphs, as well as Baseball Reference and Baseball Prospectus. MLB.com has conducted three MVP polls throughout the season, asking over 40 writers and analysts to fill out a ballot. Ohtani and Acuña won all three, and in the latest iteration, released on July 13, they were unanimous choices. The NL Rookie of the Year is just as cut and dry, with Corbin Carroll the hands-down favorite. Meanwhile, Gunnar Henderson is pulling ahead in the AL, and Josh Jung’s fractured thumb likely takes him out of the race.

Thankfully, at least one of the major awards will provide a compelling race down the stretch. There is no clear-cut frontrunner for Cy Young in the AL or the NL, and if the season ended today, five or six pitchers could earn first-place votes in either league. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Jobe has added a cutter to the power arsenal that helps make him one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Every bit as importantly, he’s returned to full health following a back ailment that landed him on the shelf from early April to mid June. The recently-turned 21-year-old right-hander had incurred an L5 (i.e. bottom left vertebra) stress fracture, an injury he attributed to “rotating fast and throwing hard at a young age when I wasn’t really strong enough to support that.”

The pitch now augmenting his fastball/slider/changeup combination was portended in a conversation I had with him last August. As his second full professional season was concluding, Jobe told me that he wanted to develop something new, “probably a cutter,” and he went on to do just that.

“I added it in the offseason, and on paper it’s a really good pitch,” the third-overall pick in the 2021 draft explained prior to his last start, which came on Friday with the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. “I dive into all the TrackMan stuff — the vertical movement, horizontal movement, the spin efficiency, the tilt — and use the data in pitch-design. The cutter has performed pretty well.”

Asking the analytically-minded hurler about the metrics on his cutter elicited a response that was preceded by a pregnant pause. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a rough week for the Yankees, full of bad luck and questionable decisions that highlighted a season that had already begun to spin out of control. With the team above .500 but stuck in the basement of a very competitive AL East, general manager Brian Cashman did very little to fortify the roster before the August 1 trade deadline despite its significant holes, including two left by position players who had landed on the 60-day injured list in the past two weeks. Then, in the span of 24 hours, the Yankees lost Domingo Germán and Anthony Rizzo, both for alarming and unsettling reasons.

Prior to Wednesday night’s game, the Yankees announced that Germán would be placed on the restricted list, a move that ended his season. On Thursday, the team placed Rizzo on the 10-day injured list due to post-concussion symptoms traceable to his May 28 collision with the Padres’ Fernando Tatis Jr., a situation that helps to account for the first baseman’s prolonged slump, the impact of which was magnified during Aaron Judge’s eight-week absence for a torn ligament in his right big toe.

Both matters have come to light in the wake of Cashman’s puzzling approach to the trade deadline. With catcher Jose Trevino out for the remainder of the season due to a torn ligament in his right wrist, third baseman Josh Donaldson possibly out for the remainder due to a Grade 2-plus right calf strain, and with the team’s production in left field and within the rotation both ongoing problems, the Yankees emerged having acquired only relievers Keynan Middleton (from the White Sox) and Spencer Howard (from the Rangers), with the latter assigned to Triple-A. While Aaron Boone’s management of the bullpen has sometimes been questionable, the unit owns the majors’ lowest ERA by nearly half a run (3.07) and the fifth-lowest FIP (3.91). Every contender could use more relief help, but for the Yankees an extra middle-innings arm could hardly have been the top priority. Read the rest of this entry »

Slade Cecconi must have been nervous. Staring down the first batter of his big league career, the 24-year-old couldn’t quite get on top of a 2-2 curveball. The looping pitch floated harmlessly past LaMonte Wade Jr., well above the strike zone for ball three. Wade called time out, and Cecconi used the respite to take a few calming breaths before returning to the rubber.

For the sixth pitch in a row, catcher Jose Herrera set up on the outside corner. For the sixth pitch in a row, Cecconi overthrew it, yanking a four-seamer toward the left-hand batter’s box. Wade had no time to react as it screamed in toward his hands at 94.8 mph. Only after the ball had made contact did he recoil, leaning away so far and so fast that he had to start jogging backward toward first base just to keep from falling over. Then things started to get stuck. Read the rest of this entry »

The Reds are on the verge of their first playoff appearance since 2020 and their first real playoff appearance since 2013, when they lost the loudest baseball game in the history of Pittsburgh. (I go back and forth on whether 2020 counts as a real postseason, depending on what’s expedient for my argument. In this case, I think you have to score at least one run for it to count as a playoff appearance.) And in pursuit of that end, the Reds’ ownership and front office have elected… not to send reinforcements. They traded for Sam Moll at the deadline, but that’s it. The Reds are more relevant than they’ve been in a decade, and this poor team is getting Siege of Jadotville’d. Water is running low, and help is not coming.

So it’s all up to you, Andrew Abbott. Read the rest of this entry »

Watching the ebbs and flows of Christian Yelich’s career has been very interesting. From 2018 to 2019, he was one of the best players in baseball, winning the NL MVP in 2018 and placing second in the voting the following year. He was sending balls to the moon like he never had before (some of that might have owed to the livelier ball, but Yelich also hit the ball very hard those years, and continues to). Then from 2020 to 2022, he was just an average dude. He had a 108 wRC+ over that span, swatting just 35 home runs and accruing 4.4 total WAR.

Typically, I’d say that a player like Yelich already has a blueprint for success. Faced with a few down seasons, his focus should be on regaining the traits that had served him so well previously. However, a lot of what we know about the Brewers outfielder needs to be thrown out the window. This is a different player from the one we saw during Yelich’s MVP run, and he’s also a different player from the one we’ve watched the last two and a half years. Instead of figuring out how he could get back to his old self, Yelich seems to have decided to blend all of his previous years together to create a new version. And with a 129 wRC+ and 3.6 WAR so far this season, Yelich has shown he can still be a star player — it just looks different. Read the rest of this entry »