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 »

Though the short and ugly starts of Bailey Falter and Mike Clevinger in Game 4 of the NLCS put a small dent in the numbers, thus far in the postseason we’ve seen a welcome rebound when it comes to starters preventing runs and pitching deeper into games relative to recent years. After two postseasons in which relievers threw more than half of all innings, starters have reclaimed their rightful spot atop the marquee. Even so, when it comes to October, the relievers we’ve seen have been stingier and more dominant than at any time in recent years. Thankfully, we’re seeing fewer of them — meaning fewer pitching changes and less dead time — but that’s of cold comfort to both the Mariners and Yankees.

As you can probably guess, that’s because Houston’s relief corps has been so overwhelming thus far. The Astros are 7-0 in this postseason, and while their starting pitching has been a major part of the story, their relievers have held opponents to just three runs in 33 innings (a 0.82 ERA) and a .127/.207/.227 line, with a 34.7% strikeout rate. As old friend Mike Petriello wrote recently, the staff — not just the bullpen — doesn’t have a weak link, even without having a late-inning lefty. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how many photo ops he posed for with the retiring Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina, no matter how many cameos he made in the broadcast booth, Adam Wainwright never actually said that 2022 would be his last season in professional baseball. And sure enough, as first reported by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wainwright will return to the Cardinals in 2023.

Surely, if Wainwright were to pitch anywhere this year, it would be here. The Cardinals, perhaps by dint of producing so many memorable players in this century, do seem to be uniquely sentimental about their old guys. And Wainwright has been pitching there so long he probably still refers to Missouri as “French Louisiana.” Still, this is no mere victory lap. Wainwright is not the all-spinning, all-conquering ace he was 10–12 years ago, but he can still pitch. This past year, in a season during which he turned 41, he finished second on the Cardinals in innings and strikeouts and 13th and 32nd in the entire league in innings and ERA-, respectively. That’s quite impressive for someone who’s older than Blade Runner.

There are two main questions regarding Wainwright’s outlook this year: What can one last season do for him; and what can he do for the Cardinals? Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Lawlar’s fifth stop in what was essentially his first professional season ended prematurely on Friday. Playing for the Arizona Fall League’s Salt River Rafters, the 20-year-old shortstop suffered a fractured left scapula after being plunked by a pitch. The injury — the second to put him out of action since he was taken with the sixth overall pick of the 2021 draft — will leave him on the shelf for a reported six to eight weeks. Fourteen months ago, he tore a labrum in the same shoulder after just a pair of games with the Arizona Diamondbacks’ rookie-league entry.

The progress he’s made in the interim is a testament to his talent. Advancing from the Arizona Complex League to Double-A Amarillo, with two stops in-between, Lawlar slashed .303/.401/.509 with a 138 wRC+ and 16 home runs in 459 plate appearances this season. A self-described “pure hitter who likes to just be athletic in the box,” the Dallas-area native is currently No. 42 in our Top 100 Prospects rankings.

Veronica Gajownik knows him well. An outfield and hitting coach in the Diamondbacks system, the former Team USA infielder worked with Lawlar in Amarillo this year, and more recently in the AFL.

“He wants to get better,” said Gajownik, who is on Salt River’s coaching staff. “He has a very open mind, and the determination to do what it takes to get to the big leagues. The effort level is great to see from someone his age.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Part 2 of my new series, How Did Jose Altuve Hit in the Last 36 Innings? For those of you who missed Part 1, the answer last time was, well, badly enough to write a whole article about it!

Here in Part 2, I’m happy to report that Altuve’s performance over the most recent 36 innings has been upgraded to “still bad, but with reasons for optimism.”

Before we dig in, I should probably mention that Altuve is excellent. His playoff struggles are notable because he’s normally so fantastic at the plate. He posted a 164 wRC+ this year, fourth among qualified batters. He’s a great hitter. Now let’s talk about why he’s not hitting so great right now. Read the rest of this entry »