When the Silver Slugger finalists were announced last week, I took a minute to compare the stats between the candidates at each position. Judging by the comprehensive hitting metrics, like OPS, wOBA, and wRC+, it seemed, at first, like there were numerous close races — many too close to call. But when I turned my attention to Offensive Runs Above Average, several of the close races suddenly disappeared, with one player becoming the clear frontrunner. That can be the result of playing time considerations, but in these cases, it was largely because of baserunning. For example, José Ramirez, Rafael Devers, and Alex Bregman are neck-and-neck-and-neck when it comes to most measures of hitting, but by total offensive value, Ramírez has a commanding lead. There’s a similar thing going on between Xander Bogaerts, Bo Bichette, and Carlos Correa; they have nearly identical hitting stats, but Bogaerts is a markedly superior baserunner.

Once I looked at the baserunning stats, these once-close races hardly seemed close at all. Understandably, this got me thinking about what role baserunning plays in determining the Silver Sluggers. Is it one of the criteria voters are supposed to consider? That sounds like a simple enough question, and one that should have a simple enough answer. And yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a fan of balls in play and general athleticism, I’ve got bad news for you: the 2022 playoffs have featured the highest strikeout rate in playoff history, a whopping 26.6% excluding intentional walks heading into last night’s game. More than a quarter of plate appearances have ended without the fielders moving, the runners tearing around the bases, or indeed anyone having reached at all. For what it’s worth, the unintentional walk rate is only 7%; the strikeouts are what’s out of hand, not the non-contact plays.

Why is this the case? I can think of many reasons. Maybe the teams that made the playoffs are jam-packed with the best strikeout pitchers they can find. Perhaps the parade of relievers Jay Jaffe noted last week are just too effective. Maybe that extra velocity from starters is to blame. Hitters shouldn’t escape scrutiny, either; maybe they’re swinging for the fences more with the bright lights of October on them and accepting more strikeouts as a result. It could be matchup-based, or pitchers could be using their best pitches more often. It could be better scouting of hitters’ weaknesses, or just an accident of a few pitchers getting hot, or any number of things. Read the rest of this entry »

Some kids dream about playing in the World Series and getting the big hit. Fewer kids, one imagines, dream about playing in the World Series and taking the big hit, but that small group might include Aledmys Díaz.

In Game 1 of the World Series, Díaz came to the plate with two on in the bottom of the 10th inning. After a wild pitch moved both runners into scoring position, David Robertson hung a curveball high and inside, and Díaz did his best to thrust his shoulder into the path of the ball, barely missing. The next pitch wasn’t a hanger, but that didn’t stop Díaz from sticking his Kevlar-covered elbow into the ball and trotting off toward first base. Read the rest of this entry »

There were a few times during the ALCS when I glanced up at a game and mistook Chas McCormick for Jose Altuve. Why? Both he and McCormick don’t set their feet in the box like a typical hitter would. Instead, they have distinct foot placement which aligns their front shoulder with the right fielder instead of the typical alignment with the center fielder. In McCormick’s case, it’s more pronounced than that of Altuve. And that’s not just in the setup; it includes the extent to which the Astros outfielder strides closed as well.

Every hitter, player, human, etc. has a different body. Depending on one’s body and its strengths and limitations, different adjustments need to be made to get the most out of that body when it comes to swinging a baseball bat. You may think it’s weird or ugly, but that doesn’t matter. McCormick’s closed setup and stride unlock a part of his game that he otherwise would not have. During the ALCS, I progressively came to realize he is a dangerous hitter when he drives the ball to the opposite field. If you pitch to his strengths that play into his inside-out bat path, then he can get lift on the ball and pepper the short porch in Minute Maid Park. Read the rest of this entry »

Say this for the Cardinals: They do a very good job of keeping the band together. On Wednesday, the news broke that Adam Wainwright will return to the team for his 19th and final major league season. On Saturday, St. Louis revealed that Nolan Arenado has declined to exercise the opt-out clause in his contract, meaning that he will remain in the fold through 2027, making $144 million (much of it deferred) for the five-year period.

In his second season with the Cardinals, the 31-year-old Arenado set career highs in WAR (7.3) and wRC+ (151) — numbers that ranked second and fourth in the NL, respectively — and hit .292/.358/.533 with 30 homers. He made his seventh All-Star team and is a finalist to win a 10th Gold Glove; if he does win the award, he’ll tie Mike Schmidt for the second-highest total behind only Brooks Robinson (16). As he also led the NL in bWAR (7.9), and therefore edged teammate Paul Goldschmidt in both versions (Goldy had 7.1 fWAR and 7.8 bWAR), he stands a reasonable chance of winning the NL MVP award. But whether or not he does, the Cardinals couldn’t have asked for anything more from their third baseman.

When Arenado signed his eight-year, $260 million extension with the Rockies in February 2019, his contract included no-trade protection as well as the ability to opt out after the 2021 season. His relationship with the organization began to sour quite quickly after that deal came together, however, and he was traded to St. Louis in February 2021 along with $51 million in guaranteed and conditional payments. As part of the trade, he agreed to defer about $50 million, payable over the 2022–41 timespan; accepted a guaranteed salary of $15 million for 2027; and received an additional opt-out after the 2022 season. By opting out either after last year or this one, he could have saved Colorado about $20.57 million from that $51 million figure, but because he’s staying, his old team is on the hook for that money, which includes $5 million annual payments from 2024 to ’26. He’s the gift that keeps on giving to the Rockies’ beleaguered front office. Via Cot’s Contracts, he’ll receive $35 million for 2023 and ’24, and subsequent salaries of $32 million, $27 million, and $15 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Craig Lefferts has a place in San Diego Padres history, and a good story that goes along with it. The 65-year-old veteran of 12 big-league seasons shared it with me prior to a recent Arizona Fall League game.

“My rookie year was 1983, with the Chicago Cubs,” said Lefferts, who is now a pitching coordinator in the Oakland Athletics organization. “We had two left-handers in the bullpen, myself and Willie Hernandez, and the two of us would play catch every day, trying to work on a changeup. We had a right-hander in our pen by the name of Bill Campbell who threw a screwball. He taught, or at least attempted to teach, us how to throw a screwball. Mine was terrible and Willie’s wasn’t very good either. [Pitching coach] Billy Connors told me, ‘I don’t want you to ever use that in a game. I want you to pitch with the stuff that got you here. You’re a rookie, so don’t go out there and try and throw a new pitch.’ So I didn’t, but I kept working on it. After the season, I went to winter ball and perfected it.

“The next year, Willie got traded to the Tigers and I got traded to the Padres,” continued Lefferts. “Both of us threw a screwball as our best pitch. He won the Cy Young Award and I had arguably the best year of my career. I had 10 saves, but was mostly setting up Rich Gossage. Then Willie and I met in the World Series.” Read the rest of this entry »

In this year’s regular season, games took a pretty pronounced step away from three true outcomes hitting. Home runs dropped from 3.3% of plate appearances in 2021 to 2.9%, walks from 8.7% to 8.2%, and strikeouts — this one in part thanks to replacing nearly 5,000 pitcher plate appearances with designated hitters — fell from 23.2% to 22.4%. All told, the percentage of plate appearances winding up in one of these results dropped 1.7 percentage points, from 35.1% to 33.4% — the most profound drop since 1988.

There are a lot of theories as to why this could be happening, from the universal designated hitter to more changes in the balls to humidors, but the fact is, after this figure dropped nearly one percentage point from the pandemic-shortened 2020 season to ’21, this year marks the second of a league-wide trend away from the trio. Which makes it all the more fun that when the Phillies and Astros take the field in Houston tonight for Game 1 of the World Series, it will be National League home run and strikeout champion Kyle Schwarber digging in to lead off the Fall Classic.

In his first season in Philadelphia this year, Schwarber was as much of a three true outcomes hitter as there was. No other player this season finished in the 90th percentile or above in home run rate and walk rate and in the bottom 10th in strikeout rate. That isn’t to say there aren’t other players in that mold; indeed, there are many. Giancarlo Stanton and Eugenio Suárez hit 31 home runs apiece and both finished in the bottom 10% in strikeout rate but landed in the second decile in walk rate. Max Muncy, who led off a World Series in 2018, leans pretty heavily in that direction. Matt Chapman, Daniel Vogelbach, and Joey Gallo all fit the bill to some degree, the latter most prototypically in previous seasons. But in 2022, nobody took it to the extreme that Schwarber did; he hit more home runs than anyone other than Aaron Judge, led the majors with 200 strikeouts, and finished sixth with 86 walks. While about a third of PA league-wide ended in one of the true outcomes, just about half — 49.6% — of Schwarber’s did. Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Altuve takes off, running as fast as he can down the line. The throw is coming in faster, sailing toward the bag. You can tell it’s going to be a close call, and indeed it is. The umpire extends his arms, signaling safe, and the crowd erupts into either emphatic cheers or cacophonous boos, depending on whether this hypothetical call takes place in Houston or Philadelphia. The whole play lasts only a few short seconds, but it’s one of the most thrilling moments of the entire game.

What I am describing is an infield hit — one of the most overlooked plays in baseball. It’s not surprising that home runs, extra-base hits and the like get a little more attention, especially since infield hits are just as often the result of poor defense or a lucky bounce as they are the result of true offensive skill. Yet as individual plays, infield singles are exactly what make baseball so exciting. There are few batted ball events as highly suspenseful as those in which an infield hit is possible. Those four to five seconds between the contact and the call can get your heart racing nearly as fast as the runner himself. Infield hits represent a true battle between batter, fielder, and even the field itself. On top of that, the ever-present possibility of an infield single is exactly what makes every routine ground ball worth watching.

This year, we have the privilege of watching two of the very best infield hitters in the game face off in the World Series. Altuve and Jean Segura are the active leaders in infield hits, the former with 247 and the latter right behind him with 244. They both passed Elvis Andrus on the active leaderboard this season, who himself reached the top of the leaderboard when Hunter Pence retired in 2020. FanGraphs began tracking infield hits in 2002, and in that time Segura and Altuve each rank among the top ten. Both just 32 years old, they have plenty of time to climb the ranks, too. Within a few years, they should find themselves second and third behind only infield hit god Ichiro Suzuki. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to a moment to appreciate how they both got here. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello there! Here’s a graph.

Were you not geared up for such a quick graph? Did I blow it right by you? That was kind of the point. The graph shows the run value of fastballs, bucketed in 1-mph increments. Over the past four seasons, for every 100 fastballs thrown, one tick of velocity has been worth roughly an eighth of a run. The lesson? Throw your fastballs fast.

I’ll stick to fastballs in this article, but I should mention that harder soft stuff is also associated with better outcomes, though the correlation is weaker and the effect is less dramatic. My number crunching indicates that over 100 breaking and offspeed pitches, an extra mile per hour is worth roughly 1/16 of a run. Read the rest of this entry »

Every October, I eagerly await the latest installment of Jay Jaffe’s series about the state of starting pitching in the playoffs (his look at relievers is also a highlight). Last year, that waiting was almost rubbernecking; I wanted to see how absurdly short the postseason starts had gotten, and I wasn’t disappointed – thanks, opener Corey Knebel. This year, I was excited to see a rebound because I’m a sucker for playoff pitching duels. Again, I wasn’t disappointed; as Jay noted, start length has exploded this year, to the highest mark since 2019 and second-highest since ’16.

That tracks perfectly with my experience of this year’s slate of games. Sure, there were some games like the deciding Padres/Phillies clash where neither starter escaped the first inning, but for the first time in ages, aces pitching into the seventh has felt more like the rule than the exception this year. Yu Darvish totaled 25 innings across four starts. Zack Wheeler has amassed 25.1 innings in four starts, and he’s coming back for more. Framber Valdez and Joe Musgrove have each averaged more than six innings per start. Six is the new seven; in modern baseball, these qualify as workhorse performances.

You should read Jay’s article if you haven’t already. It’s one of my favorite recurring features — it’s that and my postseason managerial report cards, except with Jay’s series, I get the great pleasure of reading instead of having to pore over every game log countless times myself. When you’re done reading Jay, though, I have a treat: I got my hands on a database of postseason game logs, which means I can do some fun permutations and take a closer look at this season’s postseason starters. Read the rest of this entry »