Recently, I wrote a piece about the benefits of hitters simplifying the mechanical process in their load or gather. For many hitters, moving too much in the lead-up to their barrel entering the hitting zone can create inconsistent timing and suboptimal reciprocal movements. Taking noise out of the swing can better prepare a hitter to have a consistent bat path; if you always know where your barrel is in space, you’re better equipped to hit the sweet spot more frequently. The thing is, not all hitters are the same. What works for one may not work for another, and that is the beauty of baseball.

I’m afraid I may have left some readers with the impression that simplification is the only path to improvement, when in reality, some hitters need to add more movement to their process to put their body in a position to be athletic. More movement does not always equal more complication if that movement is in the right direction. If a hitter stagnates their mechanics too much, they could be taking away from their potential. The kinetic chain needs flowing energy to function at full capacity. To some people, cueing simplicity and less movement can be harmful. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox signed Orix Buffaloes star Masataka Yoshida over the winter, suffice it to say I was intrigued. In his walk year, in the second-best league in the world, he hit .336/.449/.559 with 21 home runs and 82 walks against just 42 strikeouts. In the 20 months leading up to his competitive debut in MLB, he had made two NPB All-Star teams and won a batting title, a Japan Series, an Olympic gold medal, and a WBC title. In the latter event, he went 9-for-22 with two home runs and struck out just once.

I don’t pretend to know much about what goes on in NPB, but everything I’d heard about Yoshida was exciting: Here was this ultra-high contact hitter who idolized Bryce Harper and posted basically peak Juan Soto numbers against the toughest pitching you’ll find outside MLB. Moreover, no baseball player’s name is more fun to say in an Australian accent, if you care about that sort of thing.

Whenever a star player comes over from Japan, there’s a natural excitement. North American baseball is so saturated with information that it’s a refreshing change when a fully formed top-level pro appears from another league — all the more so because every newcomer presents the opportunity to learn. American baseball pedagogy is as open-minded now as it’s ever been, but it still imposes an orthodoxy. Athletes are molded to fit an ideal; if not intentionally, then they mold themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Swanson has quietly emerged as a top-shelf reliever. Since the beginning of last season, the 29-year-old right-hander has made 75 appearances — 57 last year with Seattle and 18 this year with Toronto, who acquired him along with Adam Macko in exchange for Teoscar Hernández — and boasts a 1.64 ERA and a 2.18 FIP. Moreover, he’s allowed just 46 hits and fanned 93 batters in 71.1 innings. Thanks in part to one of baseball’s best splitters, his K-rate over that span is a robust 34.7%; with the Blue Jays this season, it’s an even higher 35.4%.

His path to Canada’s largest city was circuitous. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, Swanson proceeded to “bounce around a little bit growing up,” eventually landing in suburban Cincinnati where he graduated from Mariemont High School. From there it was on to Mount Carmel, Illinois, where he attended Wabash Valley Community College — “one of my only options for baseball” — and then to Council Bluffs, where he spent his sophomore year at Iowa Western Community College. It was at the last of those stops where he began to blossom as a pitcher. The Texas Rangers selected the raw but promising youngster in the eighth round of the 2014 draft.

More moves were afoot. Texas subsequently swapped Swanson to the Yankees in August 2016 as part of the Carlos Beltrán deal, and in November 2018, he was shipped from New York to Seattle in a trade involving James Paxton. The latter move went a long way toward shaping his future. A handful of months into his 2019 rookie season — his MLB debut came that April — Swanson was switched from a starter to a full-time reliever. Even more impactful was a suggestion he received from Seattle’s then-bullpen coach Jim Brower.

“He told me to think about throwing the splitter and pairing that up with my fastball,” Swanson said. “My changeup hadn’t been very good. A lot of guys were shutting it down right out of the hand, and I was also having a tough time throwing it in the zone. So I started messing around with grips after the 2019 season. The splitter changed the course of my career.”

It took time for Swanson to develop what is now his signature pitch. The COVID-19 pandemic shutting down spring training in 2020 just as he was getting a feel for it was one hurdle to overcome. His anatomy was another.

“I’ve got really small hands,” he admitted. ”Initially, I was having a lot of pain [below the crook of the pointer and middle fingers] because I couldn’t get around the baseball very well. It definitely wasn’t a good pitch from the get-go.”

North Dakota backroads provided a panacea. Swanson had moved back to Fargo in 2015 — his family had previously relocated when he was six years old — and spent many hours of his offseason driving around in his pickup truck with a baseball tucked between his fingers, stretching them out. The increased flexibility improved the comfortability of his new splitter grip, the genesis of which was a video clip of a now-Blue Jays teammate.

“One of the guys I watched when I was trying to figure it out was Kevin Gausman, who was with the Giants at the time,” Swanson said. “I watched a video where he explained his grip, I started holding it similar to the way he does, and from there it kind of just clicked.

“Initially, I’d tried to use a traditional splitter grip, but my hands just couldn’t do it. I ended up bringing [the pinky and ring fingers] up on the side. They’re together with [the middle finger]. Then I’m just kind of running the two seams and getting around it a little bit. Gausman’s is similar to that. but he’s got bigger hands than I do, so he’s actually able to curl [his index finger] a little bit. I don’t do that. He’s also got the one seam that comes down the middle, and I’ve got the two seams that comes down the middle.”

Asked how Swanson’s and his pitches compare, Gausman, who arguably possesses the game’s best splitter, pointed both to movement and mechanics.

“It’s a different shape of a split,” Swanson said. “I would say he probably has more horizontal, while I have more vert. He’s also got a little funk in his delivery and hides the ball really well. I think hitters see his later than they do mine. So while the grips are very similar, the way we throw is pretty different. Arm angle, approach angle… but what matters is that we both have success with the pitch.”

That’s an understatement. Opponents are batting .203 with a .234 slug against Gausman’s split this season, and they’ve fared even worse against Swanson’s. The well-traveled reliever has delivered 124 splitters this season — 48.6% of his total pitches thrown — and allowed a .105 batting average and a .158 slugging percentage. Not bad for a kid from Fargo, which is how Swanson identifies himself, despite plans to change his home address yet one more time.

“I’m Fargo through and through,” he said. “Even though I haven’t spent my entire life there, it will always be home for me. I’m actually moving north, though, to Roseau, Minnesota, where my wife is from. Roseau is 12 miles from the Canadian border, around 3,000 people live there, and I love that area of the country. I love the outdoors, so it’s the perfect place for me.”

Given the success he’s having on mound, Toronto is a perfect place for him as well. Fargo’s own has been a stalwart out of the Blue Jays’ bullpen.

The book on Yandy Díaz has already been written. An excellent eye at the plate paired with great bat-to-ball skills has allowed him to post fantastic strikeout and walk rates throughout his career; he was one of six qualified batters who walked more than they struck out last year. When he puts the ball in play, he hits it harder than nearly anyone else in baseball, though his extremely high groundball rate has been a problem. In 2022, all those skills coalesced into a career-high 146 wRC+ and 3.8 WAR.

The book on Díaz has yet to be written. His elite plate discipline is still present, but he’s already matched his home run total from last year in just 32 games; he’s on pace to launch more than 40 this year, which would blow away his previous career high of 14 in 2019. On April 18, he hit the longest home run of his career, a 440-foot blast. His outstanding hard-hit rate has increased up to 56.4%, and his barrel rate has increased by nine points, fueling a .281 ISO and a 192 wRC+, all career-bests. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Arenado could have won the National League Most Valuable Player award last year, though he lost out to teammate Paul Goldschmidt, who gave chase to the Triple Crown and finished with the more eye-catching traditional stats (but slightly lower fWAR and bWAR). But while Goldschmidt has been similarly productive this year amid the Cardinals’ dreadful start — indeed, his three homers on Sunday helped end the team’s eight-game losing streak — the same can’t be said for Arenado, who’s off to an uncharacteristically bad start.

Between compiling their worst record through 35 games in half a century and making the puzzling decision to move marquee free agent Willson Contreras off of catcher, the Cardinals are such a mess that I mentioned Arenado only in passing on Monday. He’s nowhere near the team’s biggest problem, yet at the same time, the 32-year-old third baseman is hitting just .232/.282/.326 for a 69 wRC+ thus far. His 82-point drop from last year’s 151 wRC+ is the majors’ second-largest among players with at least 400 plate appearances last year and 100 this year:

Arenado, whose 207-point drop in slugging is also the majors’ largest at these cutoffs, isn’t the only MVP-caliber player struggling. Judge, the reigning AL MVP, hasn’t come close to replicating last year’s astronomical numbers, though he’s still an above-average hitter. Machado, who finished between Goldschmidt and Arenado in the NL MVP voting (and edged both in WAR), is scuffling nearly as badly as his fellow third baseman. Several recent All-Stars besides those players (Benintendi, Giménez, Marte, Rodríguez, and Springer) are represented above as well. That’s baseball, Suzyn. Read the rest of this entry »

If you look at teams with long-term stability, you’ll tend to find teams who have managed to get a lot of their best talent inked to contract extensions. When it comes to team construction, that certainty makes resolving other questions about the team a simpler matter and reduces the risk of a nasty surprise when your rival decides to spend the GDP of a small country on one of your best players in baseball. Making sure your core is locked up has been trickier since the mid-1970s, as it shockingly turned out that when you allow players to choose their employer, they may choose to find new employment! Teams as widely varying as John Hart’s 1990s Cleveland teams to today’s Braves employed these strategies as foundation of their continued success.

This year has already seen a number of key players signing long-term contracts that guarantee them healthy amounts of guaranteed cash: Corbin Carroll, Andrés Giménez, Keibert Ruiz, Miles Mikolas, Jake Cronenworth, Logan Webb, Ian Happ, Pablo López, Bryan Reynolds, and Hunter Greene have all signed deals within the last two months. Signing players now is usually better than waiting to later, so here are my eight players who teams should most urgently attempt to sign to long-term deals. For each player, I’ve included the current ZiPS-projected contract.

First off, let me address two players who you might expect to see here but who are not: Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto. Ohtani looks like such a mega-blockbuster free agent that I’m not sure the Angels can realistically keep him from hitting the open market, and in any case, the projection would just be “all the currency that exists or ever will exist.” As for Soto, as much as it suprises me that I’m saying this, there’s enough of a question around where his ability level is right now that I think a meeting of the minds may be very difficult. The fact is that he’s a .234/.398/.437 hitter over the last calendar year, and with extremely limited defensive value, I’d actually be a little squeamish about offering him the 14-year, $440 million extension he turned down from the Nats. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, as you might have heard, the Guardians cracked the code. I say “you might have heard,” but let’s be honest: you heard. You couldn’t walk five feet without someone telling you that contact was in, that this team of genius mavericks had turned baseball on its ear by finding players who don’t fit the modern-day ideal. What dummies, those other teams! All you have to do is not strike out, and then baseball is easy. Why didn’t anyone else try this plan before?

Good news! The Guardians have continued their no-strikeout ways this year; they’re fourth in baseball in strikeout rate (lower is better), striking out only 20.3% of the time. But bad news! They stink. Their offense is hitting an aggregate .224/.301/.330, good for a 75 wRC+, the worst mark in baseball. The Athletics are in the middle of recreating the plot of Major League, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. The Nationals traded everyone who wasn’t nailed down, then traded the nails they had left over, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. They’re comfortably worse than everyone offensively; the Tigers are in 29th place, and they’re six points of wRC+ better. Only the Tigers and Marlins, who combine awful offense with awful baserunning, have scored fewer runs.

What gives? To some extent, this is about overhype. The Guardians had the lowest strikeout rate in baseball last year, but it’s not like they lit the world on fire offensively. They produced a 99 wRC+, which is below average (that’s how it works), and scored 698 runs, 15th in baseball. That’s despite playing a lot of games against the Royals, White Sox, and Tigers, who were all bad pitching teams. They did that with Andrés Giménez putting up a 140 wRC+ and Oscar Gonzalez coming out of nowhere to hit .296/.327/.461 over nearly 400 plate appearances. To put it mildly, those two haven’t backed up their performances this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan India started his career with a bang. In 2021, the Cincinnati second baseman put up a 120 wRC+ and 3.0 WAR over 150 games, good enough to snag National League Rookie of the Year honors. Last year, a hamstring injury limited him to just 103 games, and he struggled to a 95 wRC+ at the plate. He looked like a natural bounce back candidate coming into the 2023 season, and here he is bouncing back. After a big day on Sunday, India’s .306/.397/.460 slash line consists of three career-best figures. His underlying metrics are also better than ever in a host of categories.

Let’s start with plate discipline. India is chasing less than ever, whiffing less than ever, walking more, and striking out way less. Those developments are all — and please excuse the inside baseball jargon here — very good. His chase rate has either improved or held steady against every pitch type except for sinkers, which have been something of an Achilles’ heel this year. He’s hitting them harder, but 71% of the sinkers he’s put in play have been groundballs, up from 54% in previous years.

India is reaching base more and hitting the ball much harder. After the previous paragraph, you might assume that his increased exit velocity has come from hitting more pitches in the zone, but the difference is smaller than you might think: 87% of his balls in play came on pitches in the zone, as opposed to 84% in 2021. Further, a close look at his batting line reveals something interesting: Although he’s hitting the ball harder and his BABIP is at a career high, his production on balls in play is still a ways off from where it was in 2021.

Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing; walking more and striking out less has so far made this a worthwhile tradeoff. But it’s worth exploring why India’s newfound exit velocity hasn’t translated into as much power as we might expect. He’s currently running a .153 ISO, closer to the mark he put up last year than the .190 he posted in 2021. His barrel rate is likewise between his 2021 and ’22 figures, and his HR/FB is at a career low. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals snapped their eight-game losing streak on Sunday thanks to Paul Goldschmidt’s three-homer day, but not before finding new ways to embarrass themselves this weekend. Saturday’s loss dropped them to 10–24, their worst record through 34 games since 1907. On top of that, that same day the team declared that Willson Contreras, the marquee free-agent catcher signed in December to replace the retired Yadier Molina, would no longer be the primary backstop but would instead spend his time as a designated hitter and corner outfielder, drastically reducing his value. A day later, St. Louis backtracked, announcing that Contreras will DH but have a path to returning to catching duties.

What in the world?

This is jaw-dropping, panicky stuff coming from what was supposed to be a well-run organization. The Cardinals entered the season having reached the playoffs in four straight years and won at least 90 games in each of the last three full seasons; twice in those four years they took home division titles, including last year, when they went 93–69. But more than 20% into this season, they own the National League’s worst record at 11–24, three games worse than the Rockies (14–21), the NL’s next-worst team, and only three games ahead of the godforsaken A’s (8–27) for the majors’ worst record. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season represents a golden opportunity for the Brewers. Their long-time tormenters, the Cardinals, can’t get out of their own way. The Cubs aren’t quite ready for prime time yet. The Pirates are an awesome story, but they’re light on impact players; this feels more like a feel-good warmup for the future than their year to shine. But the Brewers have problems of their own: their vaunted starting pitching has let them down to start the year.

You might assume I’m talking about the shaky back of the rotation; after all, the Brewers have been built around Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, and Freddy Peralta for years now. But Wade Miley is holding up his end of the bargain, and even Colin Rea and Eric Lauer have turned in mid-4s ERAs — hardly a disaster. Instead, the problems have come at the very top: Woodruff is out indefinitely with a shoulder injury, and Burnes simply doesn’t look like himself this year.

Over the past three seasons, Burnes had established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball. He has outrageous strikeout stuff; his 33.4% strikeout rate over those three years was 0.1 percentage points off of the best mark in baseball for a qualified starter. He mastered his command in the past two seasons, turning in back-to-back years of excellent walk rates. He even added durability, topping 200 innings in 2022, the first time in his career he’d even exceeded 170.

What’s gone wrong this year? A little bit of everything, to be honest. He’s walking more batters. His strikeouts have gone missing in action. His velocity is down across the board, as are his swinging-strike and chase rates. He’s giving up more contact than ever before, and “ever before” encompasses the 2019 season, when he ran up an 8.82 ERA and 6.09 FIP and got sent to the bullpen. In sum, he’s pitched to a 3.86 ERA and 4.34 FIP this year, quite the letdown after his last three years produced a 2.62 ERA and 2.40 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »