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 »

Pitching is complicated. There are so many layers to it, including mechanics, sequencing, proprioception, supination/pronation… the list goes on and on. Depending on a player’s personality and knack for including analytical information in their learning and development process, digesting this information can be a battle. Over the years, we’ve seen Sonny Gray progress through this experience with multiple teams; now in Minnesota, it seems like he is hitting his peak. As David Laurila wrote, Sonny Gray is evolving as a pitcher.

That interview that David conducted with Gray is a must read. Having the player’s perspective on how they’ve thought through their own changes and development experience helps gives direction to an analyst, and it’s clear in that interview that Gray’s goal is to have a pitch that moves in almost any direction. As somebody who doesn’t have overwhelming fastball velocity (16th percentile), it’s crucial that he stays unpredictable and deceptive. That hasn’t been a problem for him in the past, but this year he has leveled up his diversification. Below is a plot of his pitch movement chart in 2023 (top) versus 2022 (bottom):

Last season, there were essentially two tiers of separation: fastballs in one area, breaking balls in another. For the most part, there isn’t much negative blending happening within either pitch group. The two-seamer has distinct horizontal separation from the four-seamer, and the curveball has vertical separation from the sweeper. The horizontal distribution of the sweeper is on the tail ends of the curveball; Gray manipulated the pitch to have more or less sweep than the curveball to ensure that separation. This year, he has taken his 2022 arsenal, improved upon it, and added two more effective pitches in the cutter and changeup.

In this interview with Rob Friedman, Gray goes into deep detail about the shape of each of his pitches and why he thought it would be valuable to include two new ones, particularly the cutter, in his repertoire, and about the value of his cutter serving as an in-between for the two fastballs and two breaking balls. From the hitter’s point of view, doing that complicates attacking or locking in on one zone or speed. If you’re a left-handed hitter sitting on a four-seam fastball on the inner third, a cutter could move in and jam your barrel or, if it has a little more vertical depth, slide right under. The same idea can be applied for expecting breaking balls; the cutter can stay up and freeze you instead of having the level of drop or sweep of a curveball or sweeper. In addition, the cutter velocity is just a few ticks faster than the two breaking balls and a few ticks slower than the two fastballs.

Gray has has done almost everything possible to assure he maintains deception. His release points are consistent. He has multiple layers of movement both vertically and horizontally. He can vary velocity and movement within a given pitch. If you were to build a pitcher who doesn’t have great velocity but can spin the heck out of the ball, this is a darn good blueprint.

It’s important to see exactly how Gray uses these pitches within the context of an at-bat. You can have all this movement and velocity diversity, but you still need to command each pitch and sequence correctly. I’ll start with an at-bat against a right-handed hitter.

Pitch 1 (0-0 count, four-seamer)

Pitch 2 (0-1 count, cutter)

Pitch 3 (0-2 count, curveball)

Pitch 4 (0-2 count, sweeper)

Pitch 5 (1-2 count, sweeper)

Gray has gotten his cutter usage up to 17.6% on the year; you should expect to see it only one or two times in an at-bat. But this at-bat against Yan Gomes is a perfect example of how the pitch allows him to progress with a four-seamer through to a sweeper. Gomes didn’t pull the trigger on the upper third four-seamer but did on a cutter that had enough separation to miss his barrel. Gray followed up with a curveball out of the same tunnel, and Gomes chopped it on the ground for a foul ball.

At this point, Gomes had failed to differentiate his swing enough to get his barrel to any of these pitches, and Gray still had the sweeper in his back pocket. The first he threw was backed up out of the zone, but the second was placed in the same tunnel as the other three pitches, and Gomes swung too early on it. Again, the cutter isn’t the main weapon here; it’s another layer to keep Gomes guessing.

Now, here is an example of how Gray used the pitch against a lefty:

Pitch 1 (0-0 count, curveball)

Pitch 2 (1-0 count, cutter)

Pitch 3 (1-1 count, curveball)

Pitch 4 (1-2 count, two-seamer)

This is one of my favorite sequences from any pitcher all year. After starting with a curveball out of the zone against Brandon Belt, Gray followed up with a cutter that stayed up. Belt was clearly prepared for a breaking ball of some sort based on his timing and swing path, but the cutter got above his barrel. Because Gray was able to keep the pitch in the zone, Belt’s eye level was changed, leading to him chasing the next curveball below the zone. With a 1–2 count and two bad swings from Belt, Gray could’ve gone in multiple directions but ultimately opted for a front-door running two-seamer at the knees. Why? Because Belt had showed Gray that his swing was geared for middle-of-the-zone loft; horizontal entry low was unhittable for that swing path if Gray could execute it, and that he did.

Gray’s -5 run value on his cutter is eighth in the league, right behind pitchers with established elite cutters like Kenley Jansen, David Robertson, Marcus Stroman, and Camilo Doval. To add such an effective pitch — a .231 batting average against, a .233 wOBA, and it doesn’t have bad splits, with a .153 wOBA and -2.4 run value versus lefties — into your arsenal this quickly is a career-changing development. All that, and I haven’t mentioned Gray’s changeup usage and effectiveness thus far (-1 run value). Having a sixth pitch with a .125 batting average against is a premium not many other pitchers in baseball have, even if you just occasionally flash it (and Gray has thrown it just 6.4% of the time).

Gray is on pace for the highest fWAR of his career and is a mere 0.4 wins behind the AL leader, Kevin Gausman. There may be some regression coming considering he has only given up one home run all season, but that is a skill he’s displayed his entire career anyways. If he can keep this up and stay healthy, he is in a for a career year.

The Guardians made a catching change heading into the weekend, designating veteran Mike Zunino for assignment and calling up prospect Bo Naylor from Triple-A Columbus to take his place. Zunino, signed this past offseason, hit .177/.271/.306 in 42 games in Cleveland, “good” enough for a 63 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR. Naylor, in his second go of Triple-A, is having a season similar to last one, hitting .254/.393/.498 with 13 homers in 60 games, giving him a wRC+ of 122.

Signed to a one-year, $6 million contract this past offseason, Zunino was never intended to be a long-term option for the Guardians. He’s always been a maddingly inconsistent hitter from year to year, oscillating between .850-OPS and .550-OPS seasons, and he missed nearly half of 2022 due to thoracic outlet syndrome. But the hope was that he’d be good enough to hold down the fort long enough for Naylor to get more time behind the plate in the minors.

Zunino’s offense didn’t initially seem all that crucial to his continued employment. Over the last decade, Cleveland has been more than happy to employ catchers who struggle with the bat, so long as said catcher was at least more than competent defensively. The last time Cleveland’s backstops combined for a wRC+ of even 90 was 2014, during the early stages of the Yan Gomes residency. This was a noted shift from the previous decade, when the organization took the opposite approach, with defensively challenged catchers like Victor Martinez and Carlos Santana making their money with their bats. Despite the absymal offense, if Zunino’s defense this season had been at the levels of his time with the Mariners, Naylor would still be hanging out in the state capital. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien is up to his usual tricks. He’s eighth among all position players in WAR, comfortably the best on a first-place Rangers squad. For the third straight year and the fourth out of five, he’s on track to rack up four-plus WAR as one of the two best players on his team. For someone who didn’t post an above-average batting line until his seventh major league season, it’s an impressive accomplishment.

Perhaps more impressive to me: he’s doing it right under our noses, and no one seems to notice. Semien is good at everything but not in a way that adds up to a tremendous offensive line. His best skill might be durability. He’s clearly a very good player, but his particular set of skills are highlighted by the framework we grade him under. I’m interested in Semien as a player, and I’m also interested in why he’s the poster boy for both what WAR gets right and where it has limits.

Let’s start with how Semien does it. It’s fairly straightforward: he’s above average at every phase of the game. It begins with his plate discipline. To put it simply, he doesn’t make bad decisions about when to swing. In each of the past five years, he’s accomplished an impressive double: chasing fewer pitches than league average and simultaneously swinging at more in-zone pitches than league average. To state the obvious, that’s a great way to both rack up a pile of walks and avoid strikeouts. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Jacques had an anything-but-ordinary big-league debut with the Boston Red Sox on Monday at Fenway Park. The 28-year-old southpaw not only entered a game against the Colorado Rockies with two outs and the bases loaded in the 10th inning; he did so in a downpour. Moreover, the first of the five pitches he threw came on a 1-0 count. Unbeknownst to Jacques until he returned to the dugout, he’d committed a pitch clock violation before the 20-second countdown had started. More on that in a moment.

Drafted 984th overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2016 out of Manhattan College, Jacques had been claimed off of waivers by the Red Sox last December. Almost exclusively a reliever since coming to pro ball, he’d made 146 appearances down on the farm, including 23 with Triple-A Worcester this season. If there were any nerves associated with his taste of high-leverage MLB action, he wasn’t letting on.

“Honestly, I didn’t have that much of an adrenaline spike,” the Shrewsbury, New Jersey native told me on Wednesday. “That’s not the time to be panicking. With the bases loaded, in the rain, you’ve just got to come in and pound the zone. Plus, having been in Yankee Stadium the previous three days — I got hot once — definitely helped my nerves. I was pretty locked in.”

That wasn’t necessarily the case in terms of a pitch clock rule that many fans aren’t even aware of. What happened was initially a mystery to the left-hander. Read the rest of this entry »