I don’t know about you, but I was very excited about the Blue Jays’ outfield coming into this season. In December, the team signed veteran defensive wizard Kevin Kiermaier to take over in center field, pushing incumbent George Springer to right. Just a few weeks later, they sent catcher Gabriel Moreno to the Diamondbacks so that young defensive wizard and all-around rising star Daulton Varsho could play left. If you’re keeping score at home, that makes one George Springer and two defensive wizards. Most teams don’t have two defensive wizards. There just aren’t that many wizards running around, and the ones who play baseball tend to prefer the infield. The Blue Jays had three center fielders, two of whom were well-respected veterans with long track records on successful teams, two of whom were coming off four-win seasons, and two of whom could reasonably claim to be, when healthy, the best defensive outfielder in all of baseball. That’s a pretty exciting Venn diagram.

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Back in March, I used the Rockies’ signing of Brad Hand as an entry point into an interesting trend: the Rockies were stockpiling soft-tossing lefties. A couple weeks later, I went to Scottsdale and talked to Austin Gomber. And now I’m writing about the Rockies’ pitching staff again. And not their erstwhile no. 1 starter (Kyle Freeland) nor their closer (Pierce Johnson) nor the guy who was supposed to be the closer (Daniel Bard) nor the hard-throwing setup guy with the goofy slider (Justin Lawrence). I’m writing about Brent Suter, another finesse lefty. The most soft-tossin’ lefthander in all the land, as a matter of fact.

Why? Because I can, mostly. If you’re tired of reading about the Rockies’ bullpen, write your Congressperson. They can’t stop me either. But also because Suter seems to have cracked it. This 33-year-old, whose fastball is so slow passing motorists would give it the finger for holding up traffic in parts of Texas, has been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Gilbert discussed his new changeup in detail when he was featured here at FanGraphs 12 months ago. Not satisfied with the one he’d been throwing, the Seattle Mariners right-hander had gone to “more of a traditional circle,” a grip he felt would yield better command and consistency. His stated goals included upping the pitch’s usage from 8% (it had been 7.8% in 2021) to 10-15%.

A certain amount of success followed — opposing hitters batted .125 with a .122 wOBA against the pitch — but Gilbert’s goals went largely unmet. The 6-foot-6 hurler never felt completely comfortable with the revamped offering, and by season’s end, his changeup usage was still a meager 8%. Instead of becoming a reliable weapon, it remained little more than an infrequently used, hit-or-miss option in his arsenal.

As pitching nerds are wont to do — and Gilbert certainly qualifies as such — he went back to the drawing board. The righty traded in his circle change for a splitter over the offseason, and the results have been just what he was looking for. He has been comfortably throwing his new weapon 12.7% of the time, and it has yielded a paltry .111 batting-average-against and an equally impressive .111 wOBA.

Gilbert explained the successful transition from his changeup to his splitter when Seattle visited Boston last week. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2022 Blue Jays won 92 games and finished second in the American League in runs scored, and Alejandro Kirk had a lot to do with that. Hitting .285/.372/.415 and playing better defense behind the plate than most expected when he was a prospect, he formed a dynamite catching chimera with Danny Jansen and Gabriel Moreno, who was sent to Arizona this offseason. The resultant pairing of Kirk and Jansen projected to give the Blue Jays the best catching situation in baseball in 2023. But while the rest of the top catchers in the majors have worked out about as expected, Toronto’s have not, combining to hit a respectable but disappointing .232/.311/.384. As the younger and much less experienced of the two, with more time to grow as an offensive player, Kirk’s struggles concern me more.

It’s easy to forget how quickly Kirk rocketed through the minors in recent years. After playing mostly in High-A Dunedin in 2019, the Blue Jays were interested enough in his talent to put him on the taxi squad at the start of September 2020, even getting him into nine games, seven as a catcher. The following season, he only played a couple of weeks at Triple-A Buffalo before becoming a permanent major leaguer. While a promotion that aggressive does happen once in a while, there’s no situation that I can remember in which a team promoted a catcher who wasn’t an extremely polished defender that quickly. He hit .242/.328/.436 — a solid triple-slash for any catcher, but exciting for a player with such little high-level experience. Perhaps as importantly, while Kirk didn’t fool anyone into thinking he was the next Yadier Molina with the glove, he played far better defensively than the DH-pretending-to-be-a-catcher archetype that players like Zack Collins fall into. But Kirk’s .234/.353/.324 line so far is not what people expected in the follow-up season, and while the resulting wRC+ of 96 is far better than trainwreck status, it’s also far from the stardom he displayed last year.

When you see a dropoff like that, especially in a fairly short stretch of games, you frequently see a BABIP blip along with it. But while Kirk has dropped about 40 points of BABIP since last year, his hit profile supports a fairly low BABIP. In fact, ZiPS thinks that he’s “earned” a .249 BABIP based on how he’s hit this year, lower than his actual BABIP of .261. The plate discipline stats also show no red flags; he still makes good contact and isn’t suddenly offering more often at worse pitches.

The icky part of Kirk’s seasonal line involves the loss of power, and unfortunately, the drop in both his exit velocity and loft is real; four miles per hour and seven degrees of launch angle are not small deviations. For the Statcast era, I took every player who put 75 pitches into play in consecutive years, ranked their dips in exit velocity and launch angle (out of 2,389 players), and found those with the biggest dropoffs, using the average of their ranks (we’re trying to get a general idea, so a very simple method is fine). Here are the results:

Kirk ranks highly in terms of dropoff in these stats, so it’s not surprising to see his power evaporate. It’s also not something that bodes well. ZiPS and other projection systems deal with these issues in a more scientifically sound fashion than this, but there are a lot of fading players on this list. The ones that did improve overall in seasons after the two-year window, such as Díaz and Acuña Jr., managed to reverse this process. I went down the top 50 players on this list and found that this held true as well. And Kirk actually showed some dropoff from 2021 to ’22 despite his excellent performance, suggesting that the seeds of a future issue had already been sown.

One culprit here is that he is simply topping hard pitches down in the zone, whereas last year he was getting just enough loft to squeeze a bunch of hits out of them; he hit .452 on low fastballs and lifted the majority of them with a positive launch angle. This season, only three of 13 low fastballs haven’t been driven into the ground, and Kirk has lost about eight degrees of launch angle on average compared to last year. It’s not just luck either: he’s hitting them with less velocity, resulting in an xBA of .231 compared to .336 last year.

The exit velocity issue is important for Kirk because he’s not a fast player and hits a lot of grounders; he’s not going to be legging out many soft infield hits, so he needs to hit the ball hard. Groundball BABIP is very sensitive to exit velocity, as unlike fly balls, there’s no sweet spot where a soft hit becomes an impossible-to-field bloop.

And if you check the Statcast leaderboard in terms of year-to-year change, Kirk is near the top of the list in terms of most increased topped contact rate.

The good news is that the full model of ZiPS is aware of these hit tendencies and still thinks Kirk is going to be alright over the long haul, though his problems right now have increased the downside risk, pushing his projections down from the 3.5–4.0 WAR range they were in before the season:

These types of changes aren’t good, but they’re also not death sentences for careers and can be reversed. Kirk, even while struggling, still retains a lot of the characteristics that made him such a good hitter last year. The key to improving his baseball game right now may be working on his golf game and re-embracing the modern trend of turning low pitches into long drives rather than worm-burners.

Coming into the season, two players were the obvious front runners for their respective league’s Rookie of the Year award: Corbin Carroll and Gunnar Henderson. Not only were they each elite in the minors in 2022, they both came up to help their big league club late in the season and continued their incredible all-around play. Carroll hasn’t skipped a beat in 2023. He has a 140 wRC+ and 13 stolen bases, and has played good defense. But despite posting a 125 wRC+ in 132 plate appearances in 2022 — a performance that suggested he would hit, hit, and just keep on hitting — Henderson has struggled so far. After 161 plate appearances this year, he sits at a 103 wRC+. The holes that were present in his game in the minor leagues before 2022 have popped back up, leading to a 31.1 K% and a bottom-decile whiff rate.

Let’s go over a few notes from Eric Longenhagen’s offseason report on Henderson. I want to focus on three things: a worse than average in-zone whiff rate, a surgically precise approach, and huge all-fields power. For better or worse, these three aspects of his profile are all holding up almost perfectly. Right now, Henderson’s in-zone whiffs are indeed below average. This year, the league-wide in-zone whiff rate on fastballs is 16.9%. Henderson’s mark is 33.3% after being much better last year at 23.4%. Now let’s go to the good parts. His approach still seems to be surgically precise. His 20.4% chase rate is in the 89th percentile, so it’s not like pitchers are suddenly getting him to leave his ideal zones, and his highly impressive 16.1% walk rate has carried his offensive production this season. Lastly, his all-fields power is still present. He has two 400-foot home runs to left field and another that went so deep to right field in Kaufmann Stadium that the camera could hardly track it. I say all of this because it means Henderson is still who we knew him to be. But the main hole in his game is being exposed more in this year’s sample than last year’s. That’s what this piece will explore.

When such a talented hitter experiences a 10 percentage point jump in his whiff rate on fastballs in the zone, my mind immediately goes to two things: swing decisions and mechanical changes. I’ve already mentioned that it seems like Henderson’s approach hasn’t faltered out of the zone, but let’s double check that the trend holds in the zone – particularly at the top of the zone, since that’s the potential hole in his swing that we already have knowledge of. Interestingly enough, his swing rate has significantly decreased in the upper third from last season. In 2022, he swung at 72.4% of the pitches he saw in this zone; this year, it’s only 37.8%. Given that we know Henderson’s approach is so sound, it makes sense that he would try and cut down on swings in this zone. However, despite this logical downtick, Henderson has nearly doubled his Whiff% from 28.9% to 52.6%. This brings me right back to the other part of the investigation: his swing mechanics. Below are two swings from 2022, followed by another two from 2023. Each pitch is a fastball in the upper third:

2022

2023

The two swings from 2022 were both barrels hit over 100 mph. Eric noted in his report that one of Henderson’s key skills is his ability to let the ball travel deep into the zone before driving it to the opposite field. Both swings from 2022 displayed this ability, and the one against Justin Verlander’s nicely located four-seamer was even more impressive. If you have a hole in your swing and can still occasionally barrel the ball when pitchers attack that hole, you’re going to be alright. If you can’t get to that barrel, like what’s happening so far this year, then it becomes more of a concern.

Henderson’s swing against Reynaldo López wasn’t necessarily a bad one. It was hit at an ideal 27-degree launch angle. But it wasn’t hit nearly hard enough (88.7 mph) and resulted in a can of corn fly out. Similarly, against Josiah Gray, Henderson couldn’t get to quality contact and fouled the pitch straight back. I picked these two swings because each pitcher’s four-seamer hasn’t performed well this season (> .500 SLG%). It’s my quick way of showing that Henderson isn’t getting to four-seamers with sub-optimal pitch shapes. These are pitches that you’d expect most good hitters to have a decent shot at barreling up, especially one with Henderson’s skill and power. But he is either missing them altogether or not squaring them up.

Earlier this week, I talked about how Vertical Bat Angle (VBA), the angle of a hitter’s barrel at impact, could be a factor in explaining these types of fluctuations in a hitter’s performance and habits. However, this most likely isn’t the case with the struggling rookie. His VBA last September/October was 34.5 degrees; in the first month of this season, it was 34.6. Instead, I’d like to focus on a different measurement of bat path called Vertical Entry Angle (VEA), also courtesy of SwingGraphs, and its relationship with VBA. SwingGraphs defines VEA as the angle of the bat 83 milliseconds before contact, but for simplicity’s sake, it’s basically the angle of the bat right at the start of the downswing.

In this piece, D.K. Willardson presents data explaining how excessive flattening in bat angle from VEA to VBA can be a bat speed killer. This makes intuitive sense. From a pitching perspective, we know that having an asymmetrical relationship between the direction of your left and right arm can be a velocity killer. Luis Castillo needs a side-swiping glove to match his side arm slot, and Verlander needs a vertical glove tuck to match his high arm slot. Doing otherwise might kill their velocity. From a bat speed perspective, a hitter entering the zone at an extreme vertical angle and adjusting their bat too much to a flat angle can throw off the connection between their torso and hips and effectively decrease their rotational velocity. Now, let’s focus on how that relates to Henderson.

Last year, the degree of flattening between Henderson’s VEA and VBA was 15.4 degrees (49.9 to 34.5). In April, that number increased to 17.2 (51.8 to 34.6). The question is, did that result in any batted ball differences for Henderson? Well, yes it did. His max exit velocity is down 1.7 mph from last year, while his average exit velocity is down 1 mph. These fluctuations seem small, but Henderson was already teetering quite close to flattening out too much. Per SwingGraphs, that gap between VEA and VBA is the 11th highest in all of baseball this year and puts him next to other struggling hitters such as Alec Bohm and Trent Grisham. For Henderson, a slight dip in bat speed is a pretty darn good explanation for why he might struggle to cover the top of the zone. This might strike you as a bit too theoretical, but the results (quality of contact and whiffs) both track well with this explanation.

So how might the Orioles communicate this information to him (or another hitter with a similar issue)? For that, we’ll look at some slo-mo video. The first clip is a slowed down version of the swing against Verlander, while the second is the swing against López:

Unfortunately, I’m not an overlay wizard, so I can’t draw a distinct line at VEA, but the slo-mo video should help you see that the angle of his bat this season is steeper as it begins it descent. Henderson is obviously quite good at adjusting his bat angle according to pitch height, but by starting his entry more vertically, he’s forced to adjust his bat angle even further to get to the plane of the high fastball. All hitters have to adjust their bat angle at the top of the zone, but the more you increase how much you need to adjust it, the more time you spend getting to your ideal angle. The video suggests two potential options. The first is to cue the top of his bat in a different direction than he currently is if he wants to start his entry just a little bit flatter. The second is to slightly adjust his hand setup to start on the plane where he wants to be.

I know, all of this just to say he needs a cue to slightly change his entry into the zone. But with hitters this skilled, small changes are usually the difference between a slump and a hot streak. And it’s not like Henderson is hitting that poorly anyways. It’s more just that he isn’t performing to projections and probably his own expectations, especially when it comes to swing and miss. I expect him to get it going pretty quickly. He is simply too good to not be a force in the already gaudy Orioles lineup.

Lars Nootbaar aspires to drive more balls in the air, and understandably so. The 25-year-old St. Louis Cardinals outfielder has a 120 wRC+ this season — his career mark is one point lower — but he also has a 55.7% groundball rate, which ranks sixth highest among qualified hitters. Not coincidentally, his slash line is an OBP-heavy .267/.390/.382.

Nootbaar does possess the ability to make hard contact. His average exit velocity was in the 90th percentile a year ago, although he has admittedly backslid this season to the less impressive 53rd percentile. And again, he’s killing too many worms. Moreover, not only has his groundball rate risen — last year’s mark was 43.8% — the percentage of balls he’s hit pull side has dropped from 42.4% to 32.3%. While his plus plate discipline has remained as good as ever, Nootbar needs to find a way to up his power production in order to do meaningful damage.

Nootbaar discussed his still-in-progress identity as a hitter, and his efforts to develop more pop, when the Cardinals visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: How would you describe yourself as a hitter? In other words, what is your identity at the plate?

Lars Nootbaar: “I don’t really know. I guess I’m still kind of searching to figure out what kind of hitter I am. In the meantime, I’m just trying to do the best I can to compete up here. So yeah, right now I guess I’m not exactly sure.” Read the rest of this entry »

If Nolan Gorman were filling out a hitting resume this year, he might struggle with the “weaknesses” section. “I care too much,” he might have to settle for, or “my teammates say I have trouble letting go after work.” It would have to be one of those silly platitudes; he’s in the midst of an admirably complete season. It’s not just his .301/.392/.636 slash line, though that’s great. He’s been good against four-seam fastballs, good against sinkers, good against curveballs, good against cutters and changeups; the only pitch he’s struggled with even a little bit is the slider, and he’s still roughly average there. He’s hitting for power and average, taking his walks, and even holding his own against opposing lefties.

That balance is all the more impressive because it’s a 180-degree turn from last year’s campaign. Gorman’s 2022 ended in disappointment. He was called up to the majors in mid-May and briefly found everyday playing time, but by season’s end, the bloom was off the rose. He slumped badly down the stretch, posting a .138/.219/.310 batting line in September, and was demoted to Triple-A before season’s end.

What went wrong? This:

And this:

And this:

Yes, Gorman had trouble with high fastballs. “Trouble” is understating it, really. He was downright atrocious against four-seamers. He ran an 18.3% swinging-strike rate against them (counting foul tips). Edwin Díaz, the best closer on earth, got swinging strikes on 18% of his four-seamers. We’re talking Joey Gallo territory among hitters, or lost-phase Keston Hiura. Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins were the subject of jokes aplenty this winter after they added two established second basemen, Luis Arraez and Jean Segura, to a roster that already featured multiple capable keystone defenders. Yet all jokes aside, Kim Ng’s unconventional method of roster construction has worked out quite well thus far. Arraez leads all primary second basemen with a 151 wRC+, and his defense is tolerable as long as he keeps hitting. Meanwhile, Jazz Chisholm Jr., though currently on the IL, has adjusted well to center field, and Jon Berti and Joey Wendle have been an excellent defensive tandem at shortstop.

However, the second baseman the Marlins signed to play third is struggling terribly. Segura is slashing .200/.268/.236 (the rare .200/.200/.200 batting line, also known as a Paul Janish), and he is one of only five qualified hitters without a home run (an achievement known as a Reggie Willits). His 43 wRC+ ranks last in baseball, as does his .231 wOBA and .504 OPS. The only qualified hitter with a lower WAR is José Abreu, who has had an additional five games in which to be dreadful. Segura’s only saving grace is that he has hit well in 15 high-leverage plate appearances (.385 AVG, 134 wRC+), but even so, his -1.31 WPA is the worst in the National League.

The last qualified batter to finish with a wRC+ below 45 was Clint Barmes, who posted a 38 wRC+ in 2006. Since then, only five other players have even finished below 50; typically, hitters either improve as the year goes on, or they don’t get enough playing time to qualify. As for the handful who lasted a full season with such a feeble bat, the only one to have been an above-average hitter throughout the rest of his career was Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles. His 46 wRC+ in 2017 was a huge step down from his career 117 wRC+ to that point. Read the rest of this entry »

After a doubleheader sweep against the Guardians Sunday, the Mets have stretched their winning streak to five and stand two games above .500 for the first time since May 3. In the double-bill, co-aces Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer combined for 14 innings while allowing just one run. Granted, they mowed down the league’s worst offense by wRC+, but for fans, the pair’s dominance was a sight for sore eyes: Verlander missed all of April with a shoulder issue and Scherzer has had to work around a sticky-stuff suspension, a neck issue, and general ineffectiveness this year. Given these obstacles, it’s reasonable to wonder whether Sunday represented the turning point fans were hoping for or a mere blip in a season of decline for the veteran hurlers. To protect against the latter, the Mets will have to take a hard look at their starting pitching depth.

Coming into the season, we ranked the Mets starting staff as the second-best in the league, right behind the Yankees. While the Bombers have had to weather some injuries of their own, their starters have still managed to post an above-average WAR, FIP, and ERA. Head across the city to Queens, though, and you’ll find the second, third, and sixth-worst staff by WAR, FIP, and ERA, respectively. Clearly, the problems aren’t limited to their top two starters.

Due to ailments of their own, the Mets have gotten just 18.2 frames out of José Quintana and Carlos Carrasco combined. But one reason we liked the Amazins’ staff so much to begin the season was their enviable depth — their sixth, seventh, and eighth starters in David Peterson, Tylor Megill, and Joey Lucchesi easily could have started the season as part of the top-five somewhere else. The three of them have all been healthy, and along with Kodai Senga and the (inconsistent) contributions of Scherzer, that alone should have made for a serviceable starting five through April. Read the rest of this entry »

As contractual blunders go, the seven-year, $70 million extension to which the Yankees signed Aaron Hicks in February 2019 is hardly the worst of general manager Brian Cashman’s 26-season tenure. It’s not even the franchise’s worst contract to an outfielder during the 2010s, not when Jacoby Ellsbury’s deal for more than twice that amount was still on the books when the Yankees extended Hicks. As with Ellsbury, however, Hicks’ ongoing series of injuries left the Yankees hamstrung and prevented the switch-hitting center fielder from playing to the potential he’d once shown. On Saturday, the team finally cut bait, designating the 33-year-old for assignment with more than two full seasons remaining on his deal.

Hicks started just five games in center field this year, along with 15 in left field, but he came into the season unclear about his role, and lately his playing time was on the wane. With the return of center fielder Harrison Bader from an oblique strain that cost him all of April, Hicks had made just two spot starts in middle pasture and one in left since May 10, with Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Jake Bauers filling the latter spot, though not to any great effect. No matter Hicks’ role, he was unable to provide much of an offensive spark, hitting just .188/.263/.261 with one homer and a 49 wRC+ in 76 plate appearances. His 2% barrel rate and 22.4% hard-hit rate both placed in single-digit percentiles among batters with at least 70 PA, and his xwOBA is the majors’ lowest at that cutoff:

Hicks actually had his first three-hit game of the season in last Thursday’s 4–2 win over the Blue Jays, in his penultimate game as a Yankee; that output matched his previous hit total for May, spread over nine games and 23 PA. But even with that big game, Yankees left fielders ranked dead last in the majors with a 63 wRC+ through Sunday, though Hicks only accounted for a little less than one-third of the plate appearances there:

Read the rest of this entry »