Five Things was off last week while I gallivanted around the country on vacation. Well, I’m back, and I’ve been furiously watching baseball to make up for the time I missed on the road. As such, some of these items are going to be amalgams of a few games because the same themes kept calling out to me. As always, this column was inspired by Zach Lowe of ESPN, whose basketball columns are some of the best in the business. We’ve got plenty to cover, so let’s get started.

1. Unexpected Pitching Duels
Last Thursday, the Rockies and Diamondbacks faced off in Arizona. The pregame forecast: runs galore. Zach Davies brought his 5.68 ERA to bear for the Diamondbacks (with a 5.65 FIP, it’s not like he’d been catastrophically unlucky) while Connor Seabold took the mound for the Rockies (5.94 ERA, 5.79 FIP).

Naturally, both pitchers came out in fine form. Davies started shakily but recovered to post three straight scoreless innings. Meanwhile, Seabold couldn’t miss; well-located fastballs helped him escape his first jam of the game to complete five scoreless innings:

The good times didn’t keep going – both teams scored two runs in the sixth to chase the opposing starter – but just for a moment, Davies and Seabold did their best impressions of aces. I love that kind of game, where you show up expecting a shootout and get a tense duel instead. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s pull back the curtain a little. I’ve been covering baseball full-time for about 10 years now, and in that time I’ve basically written five types of article over and over. Every sportswriter cranks out game stories and interview-based features, and at least two or three times a week, every FanGraphs writer pens a focused topical analysis punctuated by charts and jokes. I’m no different. Category no. 4 involves Political/social/economic commentary, since our sport is governed by the society it exists within, and should be analyzed accordingly.

Which brings up category no. 5: I become fixated on something weird or trivial that nobody else in the world cares about. And rather than throw out a joke tweet and forget about it like a normal person, I spend days and days finding, compiling, and analyzing data in a vain attempt to discover the truth. If a truth as such even exists. Then, indifferent to whether the readers of FanGraphs Dot Com — i.e. all of you fine folks — give a tinker’s damn about the subject, I post the results on this little corner of the internet.

Be warned, this is a category no. 5 post. Read the rest of this entry »

LaMonte Wade Jr. is having a wonderful season. As Michael Baumann wrote a few weeks ago, the step forward he’s taken in his swing decisions have fueled a career high 156 wRC+ and .429 OBP, both significant improvements from his 2021 breakout campaign. And while much of his development is the result of him reducing his swing rate, he’s still doing more damage on contact than his previous self. Last Friday, the man nicknamed “Late Night LaMonte” (due to his .975 career OPS in high leverage situations) inserted himself into the record books early in the evening, sending Dean Kremer’s first pitch of the game deep to right field for the 100th splash hit in Oracle Park history:

Since its opening in 2000, the right field wall has been one of the most distinctive features of Oracle Park. Despite measuring just 309 feet down the line (the second shortest of any big league park), it has been one of the most difficult to clear for a home run, with the wall’s 24-foot height and wind from the neighboring San Francisco Bay helping to suppress long balls. According to Statcast, Oracle Park is among the most difficult parks for left-handed hitters to hit homers despite grading out neutral overall. But on 100 occasions, hitters managed not just to clear the right field wall, but also to leave the stadium entirely. Read the rest of this entry »

A straw man, per the Cambridge Dictionary, is “an argument, claim, or opponent that is invented in order to win or create an argument.” The term can also refer to “someone, often an imaginary person, who is used to hide an illegal or secret activity.” The Strawman, without the space, is a nickname I like to use for Guardians center fielder Myles Straw, a man whose spectacular outfield defense is the stuff of imagination; his elite speed and flying leaps would have you believe he’s a comic book hero invented in order to win ballgames.

Perhaps the whole superhero nickname thing for great ballplayers has been done to death at this point, but then again, so has the whole superhero thing in general. If Marvel can keep pumping out movies, then I can keep pumping out nicknames. Besides, this comparison feels especially apt; Straw plays for the Guardians, after all.

From 2021 to ’22, Straw racked up 22 OAA, tied with Michael A. Taylor for most in the American League. He posted 5.1 WAR in 310 games, 14th among center fielders despite single-digit home run totals and an 81 wRC+. All the defensive metrics agreed that Straw was one of the best in the game; his 22 UZR ranked second among outfielders, and his 21 DRS ranked third. Baseball Prospectus rated him as the most valuable defensive player in baseball by DRP.

Then came 2023. If Straw were a superhero, this would be the point in his narrative arc when his powers come into question. Through 59 games in center field, he has a shocking -2 OAA. That puts him in the 21st percentile league-wide, just a year after he finished in the 98th. His -0.2 WAR ranks last among qualified outfielders, and somehow, his defense has been an even bigger liability than his offense so far. Suffice it to say, that’s a problem for a center fielder with a 71 wRC+.

This isn’t just an OAA issue, either. By UZR, Straw ranks among the bottom five outfielders in the majors, just ahead of Kyle Schwarber, arguably the worst defensive outfielder in the game. Straw’s -0.5 DRP is better than his UZR, and his +1 DRS is better still, but the overall point remains: His defense seems to have taken a big step back. None of the metrics see him as an elite defender this season, and only one has him above league average. The small sample size warning applies, but even so, this is a strange turn of events for a young player who has been the definition of consistency since joining the Guardians at the 2021 trade deadline:

My immediate assumption was that Straw must have gotten slower; perhaps he was playing through an unrevealed injury. But it doesn’t seem like his physical skills have taken a hit. Straw has been healthy and durable throughout his time in Cleveland, and at 28 years old, he still has years of youth ahead of him. His sprint speed and time to first base remain the same, and he’s tied for eighth in the AL with 14 bolts (any run above 30 ft/sec). Thanks to the handy racing tool at Baseball Savant, we can even watch Straw race his past self down the line. Here’s 2022 Straw compared to 2023… or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s hard to keep track when the difference is so inconsequential:

But while Straw is running as fast as ever, his outfielder jump, as measured by Statcast, is noticeably worse. It sat in the 67th percentile in 2021 and the 58th in ’22, and this year it’s fallen from the reds to the blues. To be fair, he has never had terrific jump numbers, and that hasn’t been a problem. Nearly all of his defensive stats were better in 2022 than ’21, despite his jump numbers worsening. Moreover, an outfielder doesn’t necessarily need great jumps if he can run as fast as Straw can. In some cases, it might even help a fielder to get a slightly slower start, as long as he takes advantage of that extra time to plan his route and uses his footspeed to compensate for the delayed reaction. Nevertheless, Straw’s declining outfielder jump in conjunction with his negative OAA is a worrisome combination:

What’s most upsetting of all is that we haven’t seen nearly as many highlight-reel catches from a man typically capable of filling SportsCenter’s Top Ten all on his own. A quick search of MLB Film Room turned up only three of Straw’s catches this year that warranted highlights. One is an Anthony Volpe flyout, which required Straw to cover a tremendous amount of ground from his initial position in shallow right-center to the warning track at the deepest part of Yankee Stadium. Still, Straw had plenty of time to get there — he’s practically jogging in the clip — and his little leap at the end was more for show than anything else:

The other two catches are almost identical to one another. A couple of liners from Jonathan Schoop and Avisaíl García allowed Straw to show off his wheels, and he makes a nice grab each time. Still, you’re not winning any Gold Gloves if this is the pièce de résistance of your highlight reel:

I’ve been reading FanGraphs long enough to know that good defense is about more than web gems, but in this case, Straw’s dearth of incredible catches is one of the major reasons his fielding metrics are so poor. In 2022, he made eight four- or five-star catches (those with a Statcast catch probability of 50% or lower). The year before, he made seven. So far in 2023, he has yet to make a single one. Furthermore, he only has one three-star catch (probability between 51–75%), which is even more surprising, given that he cleaned up on three-star catches last season, making 21 in 26 chances.

Let’s start by looking at the lack of five-star catches, because that’s the easiest to explain. As the name implies, these plays are few and far between. Only 16 players made more than one last season, and only 10 made more than two. It isn’t a cause for concern that Straw doesn’t have one yet; only a quarter of qualified outfielders do. He had two last season and another two the year before, and all four came after the All-Star break. In 2021, both of them came within two weeks of one another. If Straw doesn’t have any five-star catches by September, then it might be time to reassess, but for now, it’s nothing to worry about. I wouldn’t be all that shocked if he made two in the next week, shooting his OAA up into positive territory.

As for the three- and four-star catches, Straw simply hasn’t had enough chances to make them. The charts below show his three- and four-star catch opportunities in 2022 and ’23 (via Baseball Savant):

His lone three-star catch in 2023 (the orange dot on the upper-right chart) was his running grab against García. The ball had a 70% catch probability, thereby earning him 0.3 of an out above average. The three-star opportunity he missed (circled in green) had a 65% catch probability, so missing it cost him 0.65 of an out. Statcast, however, clearly doesn’t have a perfect grasp of the intricacies of the Green Monster. This might have been a catchable ball in most stadiums, but there’s no way to blame Straw for missing this one:

Just as Straw will presumably make a five-star grab or two at some point down the line, he should also see more three- and four-star opportunities. The ones he catches will hopefully make up for the ones he’s missed so far.

Straw has also bumbled a few cans of corn this year, something he didn’t do at all in 2022. These misplays have had a sizeable impact on his OAA since their catch probabilities were so high, but only one was truly an indictment of his defensive skills. Two were high fly balls with a 99% catch probability that he lost amid a miscommunication with his infielders. They were bad plays to be sure, but not in a way that makes me worry about his defense going forward. Then there was this liner from Kris Bryant. It’s clear that Straw misread the ball, as he has to change his route last minute to get behind it. With a better read, it’s easily the second out of the inning:

It’s not a smart play, but the outcome was hardly disastrous. That was also the first and only ball with a catch probability between 90–95% that Straw has missed in his Guardians career. Slip-ups happen, even to the best defenders, and as the year goes on, those rare mistakes will be weighted less heavily in his overall numbers.

The catch opportunities (or lack thereof) that Straw has had so far might also explain his poor outfielder jump numbers. Outfielder jump measures a player’s initial movement on two-, three-, four-, and five-star catch opportunities. So far in 2023, Straw’s opportunities have skewed to the extremes. In particular, he has had significantly more five-star chances, and of those, 82% have had a catch probability of 5% or below:

That’s a high percentage of balls that are nearly uncatchable. On those plays, it stands to reason that a good outfielder might take the time he needs to get behind the ball and field it on a hop rather than going all out on the off chance he can make a diving grab. I watched all nine of Straw’s 5% catch opportunities this year, and lo and behold, I wouldn’t say he was actively trying to make the catch on any of them. But he also didn’t let a single one go past him, either. Only two of those balls went for more than a single: a double off the wall by Francisco Lindor, and a double to right-center by Triston Casas that could have been a triple if Straw weren’t there to cut it off:

More than almost any other player in baseball, Straw needs to be an elite defender to stick on a major league roster; his offense certainly isn’t keeping him employed. The Guardians, more than any other team in baseball, need Gold Glove defense from their center fielder; their league-worst offense certainly isn’t getting them to the playoffs. Thankfully, Straw’s poor metrics don’t portend a major defensive fall-off; he simply hasn’t the right chances to make his mark. The Strawman still has all the necessary tools in his fielding utility belt, and as the sample size increases, he should be just fine.

If he never played another game, Mike Trout would waltz into the Hall of Fame. With three MVP awards, 10 All-Star appearances, and the number five ranking among center fielders in JAWS — all complied in fewer than 1,500 games spread across 13 seasons — he’s already accomplished more than most enshrinees. Hell, he recently surpassed Ken Griffey Jr.’s 83.8 career bWAR, in over 1,200 fewer games (he did so in fWAR early last year). So far this season, however, Trout is off to one of the worst starts of his career, and it’s fair to wonder if we’re seeing the tail end of his time as one of the game’s elite players.

Trout, who’s two months shy of his 32nd birthday, had a big night in Anaheim on Wednesday against the Cubs. In the top of the fourth, he robbed Ian Happ of a home run, then followed up by homering off Jameson Taillon in the bottom of the frame, his 14th dinger of the season. He added to his highlight reel via back-to-back pitches in the seventh inning, making impressive running catches on flies off the bats of Miguel Amaya and Matt Mervis.

Mike Trout is still pretty damn good at baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Between Cody Bellinger’s perplexing season, Dansby Swanson’s continued excellence, and Christopher Morel’s power surge, there are a lot of fascinating things happening with the Cubs. But I want to focus on their cleanup hitter and right fielder, Seiya Suzuki. In his introduction to the majors, he posted a 116 wRC+ in 446 plate appearances, but various hand, ankle, and finger injuries throughout the year kept him from getting in a prolonged rhythm; a 158 wRC+ in the first month and a 139 wRC+ in the final month sandwiched a 98 wRC+ from May through August. We got a few glimpses of what peak Suzuki could look like; health was the key to that becoming a consistent display.

Unfortunately for him, he suffered an oblique injury during spring training that forced him to withdraw from the World Baseball Classic and slowed down the start of his season. Early-season oblique injuries are incredibly frustrating; as you’re ramping up activities, the last thing you want is to hurt a part of your body that compromises your rotational power. He returned to action on April 14, but he wasn’t the best version of himself. His groundball rate that month was 49.1%, most likely due to an overly flat swing path. His 30-degree Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) — the angle of the barrel at impact — was flatter than any of his best months in 2022 by at least a full degree without a corresponding increase in pitch height, making it very tough for somebody of his size and mechanics to cover breaking balls and offspeed pitches consistently without significant body angle adjustments to compensate for his high hands preset and flat path. The blueprint for success from the previous season didn’t look like this. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Brennan is a hot hitter on a Cleveland Guardians team that has struggled to produce at the plate. Over his last eight games, the 25-year-old rookie outfielder is 14-for-29 with four doubles and a home run. Rebounding from a slow start, he is now slashing .261/.298/.380 with an 88 wRC+ on the season.

How good of a hitter Brennan will be at the big league level remains to be seen. An eighth-round pick in 2019 out of Kansas State University, he debuted last September and slashed .357/.400/.500 in 45 plate appearances, this after posting a .314/.371/.479 line between Double-A Akron and Triple-A Columbus. Currently no. 7 on our Guardians top prospects list, he was described by our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen as a hitter who generates “doubles power with a compact swing and all-fields approach to contact.”

Brennan sat down to talk hitting when the Guardians visited Fenway Park at the end of April. Read the rest of this entry »

The prospect ranks are as high as an elephant’s eye at Castellini Farms. The Reds may have entered this rebuilding cycle with all the grace of an angry cat trying to get a cereal box off its head (as opposed to the awkward toe-dipping of the last go-around), but through trades and their own scouting, they’ve accumulated an impressive amount of talent in the minors. By our in-progress farm system rankings, only the Baltimore Orioles place higher for the 2023 season. Mean ol’ Grandpa ZiPS agrees; the Reds had seven prospects on the preseason ZiPS Top 100, a total that trailed only the Guardians and the O’s. Baltimore and Cincinnati combined seem to have about 80% of the shortstop prospects in baseball.

Whether you go by human or machine, no Red ranked more highly this winter than Elly De La Cruz, who was no. 6 (60 FV) on the prospect team’s Top 100 and no. 15 on the ZiPS list. After an impressive 2021 full-season debut, De La Cruz cranked things up a notch in 2022, hitting 28 homers and slugging .586 combined across High- and Double-A despite only being 20 years old. Questions still remain about his long-term defensive position, but his bat has proved to be even more potent for Triple-A Louisville, as he hit 12 home runs in a mere 38 games and is already two-thirds of the way to last year’s walk total. He’s responsible for the International League’s ERA going up by nearly half a run a game from 2022! OK, I made that last bit up, but you had to actually think about it for a full second before you smelled burning khaki. Read the rest of this entry »

Across a career in baseball that spanned over 40 years, Roger Craig was at various points a hotshot rookie who helped the Dodgers win their only championship in Brooklyn, the first and best pitcher on an historically awful Mets team, the answer to a trivia question linking the Dodgers and Mets, a well-traveled pitching coach who shaped a championship-winning Tigers staff, and a culture-changing, pennant-winning manager of the Giants. He was particularly beloved within the Giants family for his positive demeanor and the way he shook the franchise out of the doldrums, though it was via his role as a teacher and evangelist of the split-fingered fastball — the pitch of the 1980s, as Sports Illustrated and others often called it — that he left his greatest mark on the game.

Craig didn’t invent the splitter, which owed its lineage to the forkball, a pitch that was popular in the 1940s and ’50s, but he proved exceptionally adept at teaching it to anyone eager to learn, regardless of team. For the pitch, a pitcher splits his index and middle fingers parallel to the seams, as in a forkball grip, but holds the ball further away from the palm, and throws with the arm action of a fastball. The resulting pitch “drops down in front of the batter so fast he don’t know where it’s goin’,” Craig told Playboy in 1988. “To put it in layman’s terms, it’s a fastball that’s also got the extra spin of a curveball.”

Given its sudden drop, the pitch was often mistaken for a spitball, so much so that it was sometimes referred to as “a dry spitter.” It baffled hitters and helped turn journeymen into stars, and stars into superstars. After pioneering reliever Bruce Sutter rode the pitch to the NL Cy Young Award in 1979, pitchers such as Mike Scott, Mark Davis, Orel Hershiser, and Bob Welch either learned the pitch directly from Craig, or from someone Craig taught, and themselves took home Cy Youngs in the 1980s. Jack Morris, Ron Darling, and Dave Stewart won championships with the pitch, as did Hershiser. Years later, the likes of Roger Clemens, David Cone, Curt Schilling, and John Smoltz would find similar success with the pitch, though it eventually fell out of vogue due to a belief that it caused arm problems, an allegation that Craig hotly refuted.

Not that Craig was a hothead. Indeed, he was even-keeled, revered within the game for his positivity. Such traits were reflected in the tributes paid to him after he died on Sunday at the age of 93, after what his family said was a short illness. “We have lost a legendary member of our Giants family.” Giants CEO Larry Baer said in a statement. “Roger was beloved by players, coaches, front-office staff and fans. He was a father figure to many and his optimism and wisdom resulted in some of the most memorable seasons in our history.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, in his update on pitch mix, my colleague Davy Andrews told a tale as old as time (or at least 2008, when the pitch-tracking era began): fastball usage is on the decline, largely to the benefit of sliders (and sweepers). But this year, there’s a new wrinkle: cutter usage is on the rise, too.

Per Statcast, pitchers are turning to cutters more than they have in any season since 2008. That usage is still at just 7.6%, but the year-over-year jump of 0.7% is the second highest on record. Plus, as Davy and the folks over at Prospects Live put it, a lot of the cutter’s value lies purely in its mere existence; it doesn’t have to be used a ton to be a worthwhile offering. That’s because, out of a pitcher’s hand, the cutter bears resemblance to both a fastball and a slider. When pitchers are struggling to tunnel their heater and slide-piece, the problem might be that there’s simply too large a movement and/or velocity gap between the two offerings — one that a cutter can bridge. As long as the hitter has to think not only about the dissimilar fastball and slider, but also a cutter, it can make a big difference, even if the cutter doesn’t show up all that often.

Along those lines, horizontal movement gaps between fastballs and sliders have only grown in the age of the sweeper. The new “riding slider” also tends to have larger platoon splits than other similar breakers, which is where the cutter can come in handy yet again due to its relative platoon neutrality. Read the rest of this entry »