The last thing the Yankees needed amid a slump that’s knocked them into last place in the AL East for the first time since April 26, 2021 was in injury to their best player. Yet that’s what they’re facing, because on Monday they placed Aaron Judge on the 10-day injured list due to a strain in his right hip. While the injury isn’t believed to be a severe one — indeed, the reigning AL MVP and the team waited the weekend to see if he felt good enough to return to the lineup — it comes at a time when New York has already been hit hard by injuries, magnifying the roster’s shaky construction.

Judge injured himself last Wednesday, on his 31st birthday. In the second inning, after collecting his second double of the game off the Twins’ Kenta Maeda and helping the Yankees build up a 5–0 lead, he attempted to steal third base. Catcher Christian Vázquez made a perfect peg to third baseman Willi Castro, who tagged Judge on his helmet as he made an awkward headfirst slide into the bag.

The initial concern about Judge was that he’d jammed his right wrist; cameras and tweets from the Target Field press box showed him flexing and shaking his right hand in the dugout afterwards. That he was serving as the team’s designated hitter that day created some suspense as to whether he’d take his next plate appearance. He did, and reached base two more times. But he departed after four innings and two plate appearances on Thursday against the Rangers due to discomfort in his right hip. “It was just a little grab in the hip area — after that headfirst slide… the whole right side has been a little locked up,” he said after that game. “The culmination of having that [slide] and a couple of swings today, I just really couldn’t get it loose.”

An MRI showed what the team described as a small strain near the top of his right hip. Judge didn’t play in any of the remaining three games of the series, forcing an already beaten-up team to play shorthanded. The Yankees lost all three, scoring just four runs and collecting a total of 16 hits. Read the rest of this entry »

Though it feels like Opening Day was just yesterday, we’re officially a month into the 2023 regular season. On the macro level, that means the disappointing and surprising players are already starting to come out of the woodwork. More specifically (and importantly for writers like me), we’re at the point in the season when hitters are routinely cracking the century mark in plate appearances and pitchers are notching 35 innings.

Yet in some ways, this juncture is almost more maddening than Opening Day; we’re still in small-sample-size territory, but enough baseball has been played that we’re tantalizingly close to being able to take a hard look at some of the narratives being spun. For the time being, though, it still makes more sense to look at changes in approach rather than surface-level stats to predict rest-of-season production.

So I returned to a project I started this offseason — analyzing pitcher arm slots — to examine some hurlers who’ve made discernible tweaks to their release in accordance with early shifts in their performance. The equations I used to calculate these numbers can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago, no one would have believed you if you told them that Brandon Nimmo would get $162 million in free agency. That hustling guy on the Mets? How many millions? I don’t know whether it’s the try-hard-ness or the walk-heavy shape of his production, but his rise to prominence and subsequent nine-figure payday elicited more “wow he got what?” responses and raised eyebrows than any marquee free agent in recent history, save possibly Xander Bogaerts’ deal with the Padres. Well, the joke’s on those eyebrow raisers, because Nimmo is one of the best players in baseball this year, and he’s doing it by being as Nimmo as he’s ever been.

What does that mean? I’m glad you asked. For me, the core Nimmo skillset is getting on base without putting the ball in play. He might do it by walking. He might do it by wearing one on the elbow (or, let’s be realistic, elbow pad). However he handles it, though, his most consistent and bankable skill is juicing up the bases for the Mets’ bashers and boppers to drive him home.

In that sense, this season is just business as usual:

All those free bases add up. Nimmo got a cup of coffee in the majors in 2016, but his first real playing time was in 2017. Since then, he’s seventh in baseball in on-base percentage, just behind plate discipline legend Joey Votto. Read the rest of this entry »

“What poor sucker is going to have to pitch in those games?” That’s what Meg Rowley asked last year on an episode of Effectively Wild after MLB announced a two-game series between the Giants and Padres in Mexico City. Those games happened over the weekend, and they lived up to those lofty expectations. Played at an elevation of 7,349 feet — more than 2,000 feet higher than Coors Field, in case you hadn’t been told several times already — they featured 15 home runs, including 11 in Saturday night’s 16–11 offensive explosion. Although Sunday’s game started with yet another home run, this time courtesy of LaMonte Wade Jr., the wind was blowing in, accounting for the paltry total of five homers. So far in the 2023 season, the average game has featured 2.26 home runs. By my calculations, that’s a whole lot less than 7.5 home runs per game. It was so wild that Nelson Cruz hit a triple yesterday. Let me rephrase that: The very nearly 43-year-old Nelson Cruz hit a stand-up triple yesterday. This was not baseball as usual.

All the same, it was extremely fun baseball. Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus put it best, tweeting, “The game is being played on the surface of the moon.” The ball moved differently out of the pitcher’s hand, off the bat, and coming off the turf. In this article, I’ll be relying on Statcast data, so I should note up front that the stadium was working with a temporary TrackMan setup, rather than the permanent Hawkeye systems installed in all 30 MLB parks. It’s reasonable to expect that the numbers are not quite as reliable as they normally would be, but they’re still plenty convincing. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Rangers shocked the baseball world by signing Jacob deGrom to a five-year, $185 million contract in December, it was with the hope that the 34-year-old righty could steer clear of the type of injuries that limited him to a total of 26 starts in the 2021 and ’22 seasons. But since the opening of camps in February, it’s been a bumpy ride, and that’s carried over into the regular season. On Friday night, for the second time in three starts, deGrom took an early exit due to an arm issue; this time, he’s headed to the injured list, with a diagnosis of elbow inflammation. To call upon an oft-used metaphor: this fancy, expensive, high-performance sports car is once again in the shop.

Facing a Yankees lineup weakened by injuries — no Aaron Judge, no Giancarlo Stanton, no Josh Donaldson — on Friday night, deGrom cruised through the first three innings, retiring all nine hitters on a total of 28 pitches, striking out two and never reaching a three-ball count. He began to labor in the fourth, however. After a six-pitch groundout by DJ LeMahieu, he issued a five-pitch walk to Anthony Rizzo, then went to a full count against Gleyber Torres before getting him to fly out, and finally allowed a two-strike single to Willie Calhoun. Notably, deGrom’s last two pitches to Calhoun — a 96.6 mph fastball taken for a ball and then the 89.4 mph slider that he hit, both of which were several inches outside — were down about three miles per hour relative to their previous offerings of that type.

That sudden drop cued pitching coach Mike Maddux and the team trainer to visit the mound; Maddux soon tag-teamed with manager Bruce Bochy, who did little more than pat a dejected-looking deGrom on the shoulder and send him on his way.

After the Rangers finished off their 5–2 win, the team announced that deGrom had departed due to forearm tightness; the pitcher himself described it as “just some discomfort.” According to general manager Chris Young, an MRI taken the next day showed inflammation, but notably, he made no mention of structural damage, suggesting that whatever the team saw with regards to deGrom’s ulnar collateral ligament, flexor, and whatever else was, if not in mint condition, not a concern at this time. The Rangers elected to put him on the 15-day injured list, though Young downplayed the situation, saying, “[H]e came in today and felt OK, which was a positive, but given how important he is to us and our season, we’re going to play this very cautiously and see how he responds over the next several days to treatment. And then after seven to 10 days, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next steps are.” Read the rest of this entry »

If Matt Strahm wasn’t on your radar before this season, I can’t blame you. The left-hander put up increasingly worse results during his four years with the Padres, culminating in a 2021 season lost to injury. He bounced back the following year as a solid middle reliever for the Red Sox, but even so, he was hardly a free agent to watch this winter. He only made headlines because the two-year, $15 million deal he signed with the Phillies was more lucrative than anyone expected for him; an unnamed executive claimed that the contract “destroyed the market” for left-handed relievers.

A few years back, though, Strahm was a top-100 prospect and the most promising name in the Royals’ system. He earned his first feature here at FanGraphs in August 2016 in a piece that called him “a new relief weapon.” He was marvelous that season, posting a 1.23 ERA and 2.06 FIP across 22 innings for the reigning world champs. A year later, he earned another look from the FanGraphs staff, this time as the headlining return in the Trevor Cahill trade between the Royals and Padres. The summer after that, Strahm was once again the star of a FanGraphs story, this one about his work as an opener. Travis Sawchik looked at Strahm’s success and wondered if “Hader Lite” was an appropriate nickname. That’s high praise, indeed.

All this to say, Strahm isn’t just some guy, no matter how much his new nickname (Pastrami, i.e. “Pa-strahm-i”) makes him sound like the manager of an old-time Brooklyn deli or a kid from The Little Rascals. At the same time, he hasn’t been particularly relevant for several years, and as he entered his age-31 season, you might have thought the former top prospect was done making headlines.

Six games into his Phillies career, Strahm demands attention. He ranks 10th among National League pitchers (min. 20 IP) with a 2.31 ERA and among the top 10 in all the major ERA estimators: FIP, xFIP, xERA, and SIERA. The only other NL pitchers who can say the same are Spencer Strider, Zac Gallen, and Max Fried — arguably the early-season frontrunners for the National League Cy Young. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates, you might have heard, are in first place at the end of April. Not only that, they’ve played like a first-place team and then some, outscoring opponents by 48 runs in 29 games. Heading into Sunday, their pitching staff had the second-best ERA and FIP in the National League. Their offense had posted the second-best wRC+ in the NL as well; based on the first month of the season, the only thing fluky about them has been the names on the backs of their jerseys. Maybe they’ll cool off, maybe they won’t, but full credit to them for an exceptional first month of the season.

So why am I singling out David Bednar?

Heading into the season, Bednar was one of the few Pirates who it was safe to assume would be good. Carlos Santana and Andrew McCutchen are big names, but they’re getting up there in years. Bryan Reynolds would be good, most likely, but perhaps not in Pirates colors. But Bednar is a rock. He was an All-Star last year, for God’s sake. Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Haselman precipitated a memorable brawl on June 6, 1993. Plunked by a Mike Mussina pitch, the Seattle Mariners catcher charged the mound and proceeded to tackle the Baltimore Orioles right-hander. The melee that followed was a doozy. Tussles involving numerous players took place all around the infield, and when all was said and done, seven players were ejected, and at least four were injured — including one who had played in 1,790 consecutive games.

“It was just a weird situation,” recalled Haselman, three decades later. “Chris Bosio was pitching for us — he’d come back from a broken collarbone — and he threw balls behind Mark McLemore and Harold Reynolds. The first one wasn’t on purpose. The one he threw behind Reynolds [in the bottom of the sixth inning] was on purpose. Reynolds had bunted for a hit against him with two strikes, and he’d also always hit Bosio well [14-for-28 lifetime]. Back then, that’s what you did: you hit a guy. The pitch went behind him.

“We come up in the seventh and Mussina punches out Jay Buhner and Mackey Sasser,” continued Haselman, who is now a coach for the Los Angeles Angels. “I’m up next, and I had an idea of what might happen. I never had any thought of charging the mound — I’d never done it in my life — but for some reason, I did. It was ‘Boom!” Then there was a brawl.”

Haselman had homered off of Mussina earlier in the game, but the erstwhile backstop doesn’t believe that had any bearing on the HBP. Rather, it was because Bosio had thrown behind a pair of Birds. Mussina’s pitch didn’t miss, and that fact that it was a shoulder shot contributed heavily to Haselman’s impromptu mound visit. “I didn’t like it being so high, near my head,” he explained. “That’s why I went out there.” Read the rest of this entry »

The new rules introduced to MLB this season have been the subject of much discussion. From the larger bases and pickoff rules leading to a rise in stolen bases, to the shift restrictions resuscitating the pulled groundball, to the potential impact of the pitch timer on the fan and player experience, the 2023 rule changes have been the most significant in recent memory.

Whether or not new ideas end up in the final rulebook, the league is constantly innovating to determine whether further changes would improve the game. In 2019, MLB reached an agreement with the Atlantic League, considered to be the highest non-affiliated league in the country, to “test experimental playing rules and equipment during the Atlantic League’s Championship Season.” Recent rule changes like the larger bases and limited infield shifting were piloted in the Atlantic League before coming to MLB, but not every rule tested there has been or will be implemented in the majors. In 2021, the Atlantic League moved the pitching mound back by a foot, breaking a century-long custom. The goal was to give hitters a better chance against premium velocity while also allowing breaking balls to shine more, but testing found that the change hadn’t accomplished its intended effects. Last week, MLB announced its new experimental rules for the 2023 Atlantic League season, which begins today:

Here are the experimental rules MLB is using in the Atlantic League which starts on Friday, April 28: pic.twitter.com/93NSEFR59B

— Britt Ghiroli (@Britt_Ghiroli) April 18, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

While I’m sure those of you who are reading this should be aware of what I’m about to say, I’m going to say it anyway: hitting baseballs is difficult. In fact, it is the very reason I’m writing this piece. As I’ve watched the beginning of the season, I’ve noticed some hitters make tweaks here and there. Hitting is a game of adjustments; if one thing doesn’t work or doesn’t feel comfortable, you try the next, and so on and so forth until something clicks. When you’re struggling at the plate, there are some rules of thumb to consider if you’re considering a change. The first thing that comes to mind is obvious: simplify.

There are a few ways to interpret that, but what I have in mind focuses on a hitter’s load. Depending on factors such as bat speed, barrel acceleration, and pitch identification, a hitter will fall somewhere between Javier Báez and Giancarlo Stanton on the movement spectrum. By that, I mean that you can move almost every part of your body, or you can just pick your bat up off your shoulder and swing. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but for some hitters, too much movement (or movement in an inefficient direction) can negatively impact bat path or the ability to make flush contact on a consistent basis. An adjustment which simplifies your load can make it easier for a hitter to get the bat on plane with the baseball. Read the rest of this entry »