Kenley Jansen was a 19-year-old catching prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he played for the 2007 Great Lakes Loons. Sixteen years and 417 saves later, he looks back at his time in Midland, Michigan fondly. The All-Star closer didn’t hit much — his conversion to the mound in 2009 came for a reason — but the overall experience shaped who he is today.
“I loved everything about that city, man,” said Jansen, a native of Curaçao who also called Midland home in 2008. “It was cold, but probably also my favorite city from my time in the minor leagues. We played at Dow Diamond and that place was packed every night. The fans were great. I lived with Rob Wright and Lori Wright — Danny Wright, too — and I don’t even consider them my host family anymore; they’re part of my family now. I didn’t play very well, but a lot of good things came out of that whole experience. Great Lakes helped transition me from being a kid to being a man.”
The 2007 season was also notable because of his manager and a pair of teammates. Longtime Detroit Tigers backstop Lance Parrish was at the helm of the Midwest League affiliate, the club’s primary catcher was Carlos Santana, and a teenage left-hander was the most-prominent member of the pitching staff. Read the rest of this entry »
Justin Turner has faced a lot of fastballs over the years. Now in his 15th season, and his first with the Boston Red Sox, the 38-year-old infielder has logged 5,597 plate appearances, a good number of them against pitchers with elite heaters. Moreover, he’s had his fair share of success. One of the game’s most-respected hitters, he has a 128 wRC+ to go with a .289/.365/.467 slash line for his career.
Four years after interviewing him for one of the early installments of my Talks Hitting series, I caught up to Turner to focus on one specific aspect of his craft: the art of hitting a fastball.
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David Laurila: How different is it to prepare for high-velocity fastballs when not all high-velocity fastballs are the same? Does that make sense?
Justin Turner: “It does. There are guys in the game that throw hard and put up big [velocity] numbers, but for whatever reason it doesn’t feel that hard when you’re in the box. There are also guys that don’t throw as hard. but in the box it feels like they’re throwing harder than what the number says. When you get a guy who throws hard and it feels hard, that’s a pretty good combination for their side of it.”
Laurila: Who are some of the pitchers who stand out in those respects?
Turner: “I don’t have a specific example in mind, but there are just some pitchers where you get in the box and… I mean, guys will talk about it. It’s like, ‘Man, that actually feels a little light, it doesn’t feel like 100 [mph].’ I don’t want to call anyone out, trash their fastballs or anything like that.”
Laurila: What about guys where it does feel hard?
Turner: “Spencer Strider is a guy that throws hard and it feels hard. Jacob deGrom throws hard and it feels hard. There are guys where the fastball comes out of their hand and it looks like an aspirin. The ball looks smaller because they’re throwing so hard.” Read the rest of this entry »
One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. 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 like ZiPS or simply our 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 home runs 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 which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s 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 its 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 only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 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.
And why is this important and not just number-spinning? Knowing that changes in walk rates, home run rates, and strikeout rates stabilized far quicker than other stats was an important step forward in player valuation. That’s something that’s useful whether you work for a front office, are a hardcore fan, want to make some fantasy league moves, or even just a regular fan who is rooting for your faves. If we improve our knowledge of the basic molecular structure of a walk or a strikeout, then we can find players who are improving or struggling even more quickly, and provide better answers on why a walk rate or a strikeout rate has changed. This is useful data for me in particular because I obviously do a lot of work with projections, but I’m hoping this type of information is interesting to readers beyond that.
After a frantic trade deadline with an excess of buyers, a few committed sellers fielding offers, and a handful of in-betweeners on the cusp of contention, the month of August is doing its best to separate the real contenders from the rest. Ten days in, five teams — the Angels, Yankees, Guardians, Reds and Diamondbacks — have seen their playoff chances slashed by more than half, and a sixth (the Red Sox) has gone from 24.6% to 13.8%. Meanwhile, the Rangers responded to a late-July skid with an eight-game winning streak, the Cubs doubled their playoff odds with series wins over the Reds and Braves, the Phillies played their way into the top Wild Card spot in the National League, and the Mariners swept the Angels and Padres to leapfrog New York, Boston, and Los Angeles in the AL Wild Card race. It’s been quite the shuffle for a ten-day stretch.
The Toronto Blue Jays have devoted huge resources to their rotation, spending a first-round pick on Alek Manoah, doling out huge free agent contracts to Chris Bassitt and Kevin Gausman, and trading the farm for José Berríos. (And then giving Berríos a huge contract extension as well.)
But Toronto’s best starting pitcher over the past month — and in a three-way tie for the best pitcher in all of baseball, by WAR — has been Yusei Kikuchi, the guy who couldn’t stay in the rotation a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you remember the springtime? We were so young and carefree, so full of hope. We hadn’t even breathed in our first lungfuls of Canadian wildfire smoke. Pitchers were full of hope, too. They’d spent the whole offseason in a lab, or playing winter ball, or maybe just in a nice condo, trying to figure how to get better.
Amazingly, a lot of them settled on the exact same recipe for success: start throwing a cutter. You couldn’t open up a soon-to-be-shuttered sports section without reading an article about some pitcher whose plan for world domination hinged on whipping up a delicious new cut fastball. Now that we’re in the dog days of summer, it’s time to check and see how those cutters are coming along. Are they browning nicely and just starting to set? Or have they filled the house with smoke, bubbling over the sides of the pan and burning down to a carbonized blob that needs to be scraped off the bottom of the oven with steel wool?
I pulled data on every pitcher who has thrown at least 400 pitches in both 2022 and ’23, focusing on the ones who are throwing a cutter at least 10% of the time this year after throwing it either infrequently or not at all last season. These cutoffs did mean that we missed some interesting players like Brayan Bello and Danny Coulombe, but we’re left with a list of 25 pitchers.
So did their new toys turn them into peak Pedro? The short answer is no. Taken as a whole, they’ve performed roughly as well as they did last season. As you’d expect from any sample, roughly half our pitchers got better, and half got worse. Of the pitchers who improved from last year to this year, I don’t think I can definitively say that any of them reached new heights specifically because of the cutter. Read the rest of this entry »
How in the world can you explain a team like the Rays? There are a lot of strange and seemingly magical things going on there, but let’s focus on just their starters. They churn out top-of-the-line dudes like no one’s business. Shane McClanahan is nasty. Tyler Glasnow looks unhittable at times. Jeffrey Springs went from zero to hero and stayed there. Zach Eflin is suddenly dominant. They can’t seem to take a step without tripping over a great starter.
They’re also always hungry for more. Whether it’s bad luck, adverse selection, or something about their performance training methods, the Rays stack up pitching injuries like few teams in baseball history. Of that group I named up above, only Eflin hasn’t missed significant time in 2023, and both McClanahan and Springs are out for the rest of the year. The Rays not only have all these starters, but they also traded for Aaron Civale at the deadline, and they’re still short on arms.
They did what anyone would do: point at a random reliever in the bullpen and tell him he’s now an excellent starter. Wait, that’s not what anyone else would do? Only the Rays do that? You’re right, at least a little bit; surely you recall the Drew Rasmussen experiment from 2021. That one was a big hit until Rasmussen tore his UCL this year. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. 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 like ZiPS or simply our 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 home runs 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 which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s 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 its 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 only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 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 models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. You can read more on how zStats relate to actual stats here. For those curious about the r-squared values between zStats and real stats for the offensive components, it’s 0.59 for zBABIP, 0.86 for strikeouts, 0.83 for walks, and 0.78 for homers. Those relationships are what make these stats useful for predicting the future. If you can explain 78% of the variance in home run rate between hitters with no information about how many homers they actually hit, you’ve answered a lot of the riddle. All of these numbers correlate better than the actual numbers with future numbers, though a model that uses both zStats and actual ones, as the full model of ZiPS does, is superior to either by themselves. Read the rest of this entry »
Red Sox hitters will be facing an enigmatic fastball when they host the Royals at Fenway Park tonight. When Eric Longenhagen put together our Kansas City Royals Top Prospect list last month, he wrote that Alec Marsh’s fastball “doesn’t hop even though it has the approach angle and spin axis of a fastball that typically does; it has below-average vertical break and might be surprisingly hittable against big league bats.” Calling the pitch “weird,” our lead prospect analyst further described it as a “flat-angled, high-spin sinker,” adding that the 25-year-old right-hander, whom he assigned a 45 FV and a no. 3 ranking in the system, is no longer touching triple digits as he did in his initial seasons of pro ball.
Intrigued, I showed the 2019 second-round pick out of Arizona State University what my colleague had written, and asked him a simple question: How accurate is this?
Wednesday night in Philadelphia didn’t start off as a celebration of Michael Lorenzen. Making his first home start after joining the team at the trade deadline, he struggled to get comfortable on the mound. The first batter of the game, CJ Abrams, smashed a pitch to the warning track in the deepest part of the field. The next three batters worked full counts, with one walking. Keibert Ruiz worked another walk to lead off the second inning. Lorenzen threw 53 pitches in the first three frames. Through four, he had three strikeouts and three walks.
Luckily, he didn’t need to be the focus, because a celebration in Philly was happening one way or another. Weston Wilson smashed a home run in his first major league at-bat. Nick Castellanos popped a two-run shot in the first and followed up with a solo shot in the third. The Phillies were romping over the Nationals on a glorious summer evening. And that’s leaving the best part for last: Ryan Howard was in the booth to celebrate opening a new chicken and waffles stand in the stadium.
I won’t lie to you; those waffles looked good. John Kruk was nearly rapturous as he contemplated them. At one point, he openly begged Alex Call to finish an at-bat quickly so the booth could go to commercial and he could eat. Howard seemed happy, too, and the Phillies continued to pile up runs while he recapped the genesis of his foodie vision. After four innings, the Phillies led 6-0, and the celebration was in full swing.
Obviously, though, you aren’t here to read about Howard’s chicken and waffles, or to learn, as I did, that Kruk avoids spicy food. You’re here because a funny thing happened in the back half of this game. Lorenzen, staked to an enormous lead, started attacking the strike zone. He dared the Nationals to swing – four-seamers middle-middle and belt-high sinkers, calling out to be swung at. When he fell behind in the count, he fired one down the pipe and said “hit it.”
This being the Nationals, they mostly didn’t hit it. Calling their offense punchless might be going too far, but they’re towards the bottom of the league in every offensive category, and that doesn’t account for the fact that they traded their best hitter at the deadline. Abrams is coming on, and Lane Thomas has been good all year, but we’re not quite talking about Murderers’ Row here.
Suddenly it was the seventh inning, and the Nationals were still hitless. Lorenzen pulled his secondary pitches back out; he buried Jake Alu under a pile of changeups for his fourth strikeout and then mixed four-seamers high with changeups low to coax a groundout (smashed, great play by Rodolfo Castro) out of Ildemaro Vargas. Seven innings, 100 pitches, no hits – was this happening?
That last out of the seventh inning awoke the Philadelphia crowd from its post-homer lethargy. They’d been enjoying a casual demolishing of the little brothers of the NL East. Now, they might be witnessing history. A roar broke out, and the crowd rose to its feet to collectively cheer Lorenzen as he strode off the field. Six outs, six measly outs – surely he could do it.
Lorenzen came out sharp in the eighth – by which I mean, he threw some good pitches when the count made that possible and otherwise made the Nationals beat him by putting the ball in play. It was a brilliant plan all night; the Phillies recorded 15 outs in the air, few of them threatening to be anything more than cans of corn. Most importantly for Lorenzen, that eighth inning took only 11 pitches, which gave him enough runway to come back out for the ninth.
I’ve spent a lot of this writeup talking about Lorenzen’s ability to adapt his pitching to the situation, and that was on display in his last inning of work. The strike zone widens when no-hitters near the finish line. Hitters’ pulses rise – you don’t want to be on that highlight reel, you know? Lorenzen aimed for the corners to get ahead, then snapped off ridiculous breaking balls whenever he had the chance, hoping for a miserable flail from a desperate opponent.
That plan dealt with Thomas and Joey Meneses, the latter a victim of a called strike three that was both clearly outside and clearly a pitch you have to swing at in the ninth inning of a no-hitter. That left only Dominic Smith, but he wasn’t going down easily. After falling behind 1-2, he took and fouled his way back to a 3-2 count. Lorenzen looked gassed. “One more pitch,” Kruk breathed on the broadcast, almost a mantra. And Lorenzen left it up to the gods of contact one more time. He threw a slider right down main street at 85 and dared Smith to do his worst:
After the momentous end to the seventh inning, Citizen’s Bank Park had turned raucous. That energy carried right through to the end of the game. The place positively shook when Meneses struck out, and erupted even more when Johan Rojas squeezed Smith’s fly ball for the final out. Sorry Weston, and sorry Ryan; it was Lorenzen’s night now, and the crowd bathed him in applause as he exulted in his achievement.
If you didn’t know he hadn’t allowed any hits, Lorenzen’s line wouldn’t turn any heads. Five strikeouts, four walks; it’s not exactly the stuff of aces. But Lorenzen has never been an ace, and he wouldn’t tell you otherwise. He’s never been a high octane strikeout pitcher, and now that he’s transitioned from the bullpen to the rotation, he’s leaning more than ever on his savvy. Tonight was the crowning achievement of that style.
As the stadium roared and Lorenzen’s mom beamed from the crowd, the team mobbed him. What a glorious feeling it must be to combine the pinnacle of individual achievement with your first real taste at team success. Lorenzen has played for a winning team exactly twice in his major league career – the 2020 Reds went 31-29 and the 2021 edition finished 83-79.
This year’s Phillies are a cut above that – the defending National League champions, near-locks to make the playoffs and another run at the title. And he’s one of them now, indelibly linked with this team, this city. You won’t be able to tell the story of the 2023 Phillies without mentioning this night, which means you won’t be able to tell it without mentioning Lorenzen. How wonderful that must feel after nearly a decade in the wilderness, hoping to start, then getting your wish only to toil in obscurity.
Baseball is about a lot of things. It’s about the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd, the beauty of close plays and the shocking speed and strength of grown men wearing ridiculous pajamas. Increasingly, it’s about numbers too – teams are getting smarter and smarter about separating what seems important from what is important. But regardless of the numbers, tonight was important. Baseball isn’t just about who wins the trophy at the end of the year. It’s about nights like these, and players like these. What a glorious night for Lorenzen, and what a wonderful celebration of baseball.
