Intending no disrespect to the Minnesota Twins, a lovely team with plenty of commendable players, but the AL Central is a bit of a joke this year. I guess that’s not too surprising — the Central champion has either had or shared the lowest win total among the American League division winners every year since 2017. But as of this writing, the Twins are just one game over .500, a record that would put them in a battle for fourth place (at best) in four of the five other divisions in baseball; nevertheless Minnesota is securely in first place.

Maybe 30 Rock was right, everything is easier in the Midwest. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Mains did some digging into home field advantage and found a very curious effect: home teams did worse in extra inning games than in regular-season games. More specifically, he found that home teams won roughly 54% of games overall but only roughly 52% of extra inning games. There are no two ways about it: that’s strange.

Mains looked into many potential explanations for this discrepancy: team quality, pitcher quality, games that were tied going into the ninth, and various ways of looking at how teams have adapted to the zombie runner era. Today, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with a slightly different way of thinking about why home teams are less successful in extras than they are overall.

My immediate thought when I heard this problem was something Ben Lindbergh mentioned on Effectively Wild: home field advantage accrues slowly, and extra innings have fewer innings than regulation. The minimum scoring increment in baseball is one run, naturally. Home field advantage is clearly less than a run per inning; it’s less than a run per game. I like to think of home field advantage as fractionally more plays going the home team’s way. A called strike here, a ball that lands in the gap instead of being caught there, and eventually one of those plays might put an extra run on the board. Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Votto is nearing the end of a career that should land him in the Hall of Fame. Three months shy of his 40th birthday, the Toronto native has played 16 seasons, all with the Cincinnati Reds, and has a career .297/.412/.513 slash line to go with a 146 wRC+. A six-time All-Star and former NL MVP, he has led the senior circuit in OBP seven times, and in walks six times. Moreover — this amid criticism from the segment of the Cincinnati fanbase who feels he is too passive at the plate — his left-handed stroke has produced 2,093 hits, including 453 doubles and 342 home runs.

Currently on a rehab assignment with Triple-A Louisville, Votto is recovering from rotator cuff and biceps surgery and has yet to play in a big league game this year. He sat down to talk hitting when the Reds visited Fenway Park last week.

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David Laurila: Is hitting easy, or is it hard?

Joey Votto: “Well, it’s the only thing I’ve done, so I don’t have much to compare it to. I failed my math exam. High school math may be more difficult than major league hitting.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers, as you might have heard, are in first place. And that doesn’t even tell the whole story; the Rangers are currently on a 106-win pace, and believe it or not, they’re underperforming their Pythagorean record by four games. And they’ve done a lot of it without the best pitcher in the world.

Jacob deGrom, foremost among the numerous high-profile free agent arms Texas has invested in over recent years, has spent the past month on the IL with elbow inflammation. A slow recovery led the Rangers to move the two-time Cy Young winner to the 60-day IL on Monday. That precludes deGrom from returning to action before the end of June — which may or may not have been in the cards anyway.

But the Rangers have coped just fine without deGrom throughout May thanks in no small part to Dane Dunning, who started the year as a reliever but has matched deGrom’s results. Read the rest of this entry »

As far as ballplayers go, Chris Sale and Cal Quantrill don’t have a whole lot in common. Sale is an established star, with the resume and salary to prove it; Quantrill only recently completed his first full season as a starting pitcher. At his peak, Sale was the preeminent strikeout artist in baseball and arguably the best of all time; Quantrill has the lowest K-rate among qualified pitchers this season. Both have gone under the knife for Tommy John surgery, but while Quantrill has been the picture of health ever since, Sale has yet to return to his former glory.

This past Friday, these two dissimilar pitchers found themselves in the same boat when they landed on the injured list with shoulder inflammation, just days before their respective clubs were due to face off in a three-game set. Shoulder inflammation is a vague descriptor, and the prognosis for it can vary widely. Sometimes a pitcher will only miss a couple of starts to let the pain subside, but in a worst-case scenario, shoulder problems can lead to season-ending surgery. There is no reason to believe, as of yet, that either Sale or Quantrill will need to go the surgical route, but it also seems unlikely that either will return as soon as the minimum 15 days are up. Sale will undergo further testing and might not have a proper diagnosis until this weekend. Quantrill, meanwhile, has stopped throwing altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates are having a relatively successful 2023, as the team has defied expectations and is currently in second place in the NL Central, just a half-game behind the first-place Brewers. The record on the field isn’t the only thing coming up Pirate this year: the team successfully signed Bryan Reynolds to an eight-year, $106.75 million contract extension, ending the eternal and well-founded speculation about which team the Bucs would trade him to and when. With Ke’Bryan Hayes already signed to a $70 million extension — then the largest dollar figure for a contract in franchise history — Pittsburgh has discussed locking up two other foundational talents, Mitch Keller and Oneil Cruz.

Despite the Pirates signing a nine-figure deal with Reynolds, it would be a mistake to assume that it foreshadows a new era in team spending that gets them into the next tier up in the spending ranks. The last time they finished even 20th in baseball in payroll was 20 years ago, in 2003, and they’re usually in the bottom five. There they will stay, but if they spend a good proportion of that self-limited budget on their best young talent, they get their best shots at the NL Central and don’t explicitly look like a stop for young players between Triple-A and the majors. To manage this, Pittsburgh has to sign its young players sooner rather than later, and absorb additional risk.

Of these two players, Keller’s extension is probably the more urgent matter to attend to. The least expensive time to sign him would have been a few years ago, when he was struggling to adjust to the majors and the Pirates could, as noted above, defray some of the cost by taking on that additional risk that he’d never develop. Keller is eligible to hit free agency after the 2025 season, so there’s a real ticking clock here; the longer the Pirates take to come to an agreement, the less financial reason their ace has to take one and the less talent would come to Pittsburgh in the event of a trade. Now that Keller’s breakout appears to be a reality and not a fluke or merely speculation about the future, he has a lot more financial leverage than he did a year ago.

While Keller worked out most of his remaining command issues last season, he still suffered a bit from having strikeout stuff but not being great at actually collecting those Ks. The full version of ZiPS still sees his improved swinging-strike rate not supporting the impressive 50% bump in his overall strikeout rate, but it does agree that his performance in 2023 in this department represents real and significant improvement. As such, Keller has one of the biggest bumps among pitchers from his preseason long-term projection. Even the simpler in-season projection version of ZiPS still has him finishing in the top five in the NL in WAR, behind just Zac Gallen, Zack Wheeler, Spencer Strider, and Logan Webb.

Perhaps the most striking example of Keller’s continued breakout is just how improved his cohort of most similar past pitchers is. Here are the top 50 pitchers in ZiPS similarity (with the specific year at which their baseline is similar) for Keller both before 2023 and now:

You will note that I didn’t label which column was which, because I’m just that confident that you’ll know in about a half-second of glancing which list is the better one!

In sum, ZiPS suggests a fair six-year deal right now would be six years, $116 million:

This reflects the fact that he has two more years of arbitration; a projected offer as a free agent would be six years, $153 million, or seven years, $171 million.

Despite being a shortstop — for now at least — rather than a pitcher, Cruz is the riskier of the pair. He’s less established in the majors than Keller and is currently on the IL with a fractured ankle, making a projection that much trickier. But when agreeing to a mutually beneficial contract, you basically have to pay either in currency or risk, and if the Pirates don’t want to give up a ton of the former, they’ll have to be willing to pay by taking on a bunch of the latter. Even if the current injury makes the atmosphere a little too much like gambling for either side of the negotiations, a healthy Cruz — which is expected to be a thing sometime around August — should be enough to kickstart talks.

Cruz was one of my breakout picks this year, and while the ankle means that’s one that I’m unlikely to get right, he still has a great deal of upside with his game-changing power. And his contact issues, while concerning, are at least a problem that you can pinpoint; it only take a few percentage points of a bump in contact rate for ZiPS to start projecting him with Javier Báez’s prime. Cruz had already shown an uptick in his nine games this year, walking seven times as his contact rate hit 70%. Nine games is a pitifully small sample size, even for less volatile numbers, but it’s certainly better than those numbers going in the opposite direction!

Cruz has more upside than Hayes does, but the latter is healthy and closer to his potential than the former is to his higher potential, and the contract projection comes out similarly to the extension that Hayes signed: a seven-year, $67 million extension that delays Cruz’s free agency by two years.

Will contracts like these single-handedly make the Pirates a perennial contender? No, but signing young players to long-term deals at least gives them the path to long-term relevance in the NL Central and gives a fanbase that’s been beaten up for 30 years some hope that it’ll get to see PNC Park be the long-term home for the team’s core rather than a set of turnstiles.

The Padres continue to sputter along, below .500 (27-32) and outside the playoff picture. While Juan Soto has heated up, Manny Machado has extended the slump that he was in before landing on the injured list with a fractured metacarpal, and Xander Bogaerts has underperformed while playing through a lingering wrist issue for the past month. As for Fernando Tatis Jr., he’s returned from a lost season that included a wrist fracture and an 80-game suspension for using a banned substance, and while he’s been one of the Padres’ most productive hitters, his performance has been uneven, well short of his superstar-level showings from 2019-21.

The circumstances surrounding Tatis’ left wrist fracture have yet to be clarified fully, in part because he could not communicate with the Padres during the lockout, but he’s believed to have suffered the injury during one of the multiple (!) motorcycle accidents he was involved in while in the Dominican Republic during the 2021-22 offseason. He apparently did not start feeling the effects of the injury until he began taking swings in mid-February in preparation for spring training, but only after the lockout ended did the team discover the injury. He underwent surgery to repair his scaphoid bone on March 16, and his recovery took longer than expected. Four games into his rehab stint, Major League Baseball announced that he had incurred an 80-game suspension for testing positive for Clostebol, an anabolic steroid prohibited under the league’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program, a shock and disappointment given both his growing stature within the game and the tantalizing possibility of him joining a revamped Padres lineup.

Tatis’ suspension ran through the Padres’ final 48 regular season games, their 12-game postseason run (during which they reached the National League Championship Series after upsetting both the 101-win Mets and 111-win Dodgers), and their first 20 games of this season. When he took the field on April 20, in the Padres’ 21st game, he was 18 1/2 months removed from his last regular season major league game. That’s a substantial slice of time in a 24-year-old player’s life. Read the rest of this entry »

As a hitting mechanics nerd, there are a few players on my shortlist of guys who I would love to get in the cage with and talk about their process, development, and mindset in the batter’s box. J.D. Martinez is one of them. He’s established a reputation for himself as a cerebral hitter. It was a key reason for his breakout season in 2014, his rebound in 2021 after a rough shortened season in 2020, and now his resurgence in 2023. Despite an IL stint earlier this month for a back issue, Martinez has destroyed baseballs recently and pushed his wRC+ up to a 146 on the season. In May alone, he posted a 172 wRC+ and .392 ISO.

His power stroke is back after working on recovering it with Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc throughout spring training and the opening month of the season. The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya spoke to Martinez and Van Scoyoc in early April about Martinez losing efficiency in one of the most important aspects of his swing: his hand row. Martinez pointed to a line of physical compensations in his swing as a result of an ankle injury from the 2018 World Series that he reaggravated down the stretch in 2021. When you’re as in tune with your mechanics and where your barrel is in space as Martinez is, these little aggravations can significantly impact the way you understand how your body is moving. Before jumping into some video showing how Martinez has changed since last year with Boston, let’s take a look at some batted ball and performance data that detail how much better he has been this season:

Read the rest of this entry »

Taj Bradley has had an up-and-down rookie season with the Rays, but only in terms of promotions and demotions. The 22-year-old right-hander has twice been optioned to Triple-A, and three times he’s been summoned back to the big leagues. He might be in Tampa Bay to stay. Over six starts comprising 30 innings, Bradley has logged a 3.62 ERA and a 2.82 FIP, with wins in three of five decisions. Moreover, he’s fanned 42 batters while issuing just five free passes.

The level of composure he’s displayed belies his age and inexperience. While many players performing on the big stage for the first time have a fast heartbeat, his has been borderline bradycardia. In a word, Bradley is chill.

“I’m not the kind of person to get too caught up in anything,” the 2018 fifth-round pick out of Stone Mountain, Georgia’s Redan High School told me on Friday. “If I were to meet a celebrity, or pitch in a big game, I wouldn’t be making too much of a moment of it. I always downplay things. I mean, you do get your nerves, but I don’t build it up. Someone might say, ‘Oh, you made your debut,’ or ‘Oh, you got a win against the Red Sox,’ but I just go about my day.”

Bradley’s debut, which came at home in a spot start against Boston on April 12, did elicit emotions. Being unflappable may be in his DNA, but it’s not as though he’s an unfeeling cyborg. Nearly two months later, the game remains a blur. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small sample sizes. 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 in something like ZiPS or simply 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 homers 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 what StatCast provides gives us the ability to get what is 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 the 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, over the same time period, only became hits 10.6% of the time and toward the second base side, 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 actual models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. For data on how zStats relate to actual stats, I’ve talked more about this here and here.

But you’re here to see the numbers themselves, not the exposition, so let’s star wipe to the main storyline. Read the rest of this entry »