The Baltimore Orioles have been exceeding expectations this season, and an improved offense is one of the reasons why. Second from the bottom in runs scored last year, the Birds went into yesterday’s off day tied with the Chicago White Sox for seventh-most in the American League. While improved pitching and defense has arguably had a bigger impact, plating more runners has greatly benefitted the team’s fortunes.

Ryan Fuller has played a key role in the offensive uptick. A former University of Connecticut infielder who joined the Orioles organization as a minor league hitting coordinator in 2019, Fuller was promoted to big league co-hitting coach, along with Matt Borgschulte, last November.

In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series, Fuller discussed the club’s new school meets old school philosophy — and some of the notable players who embrace it — when Baltimore visited Boston earlier this season.

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David Laurila: What is your approach — the Orioles approach — to hitting?

Ryan Fuller: “Organizationally, what we believe in starts with making great swing decisions, swinging at the right pitches in the zone, and taking pitches that aren’t in the zone. If we do that, hard contact is going to come. And if we make hard contact, OPS, scoring runs — whatever metric you want to look at — is going to heighten. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers have been so good for so long that whatever numbers they put up seem to elicit a blasé response at best. Oh, their 116 wRC+ is good for third in the league? Ho-hum. It’s been that way for a while, and I wouldn’t blame you for not thinking about the Dodgers, or even refusing to. You’d like someone else to seize the throne; after all, baseball is at its best with several contending teams, not select superpowers.

But let me implore you to consider the Dodgers again. The mere fact that they’re great isn’t interesting; it’s how they’re great that is. While the pitching is playing a crucial role, I’m going to focus solely on the hitting, because that’s where this team stands out.

To lay some groundwork: Over at Baseball Savant, there’s a tool called Swing/Take runs, which shows the run value players accrue on pitches in each zone. The distinction goes beyond simple balls and strikes; down-the-middle strikes, for example, correspond to the “Heart” zone, and borderline strikes correspond to the “Shadow” zone.

We can look at these run values by team, too. Quick: what do stellar offenses do against down-the-middle pitches? Crush them, that’s what. To wit, the Yankees have accrued a league-leading 26 runs against such pitches. It makes sense; the Yankees make sense. The Dodgers, however, do not make sense:

It’s not just a quirk from this season: A vast majority of players, and thus teams, are regularly in the red when they swing against seemingly easy pitches. The Yankees are actually an outlier in that regard, and it’s part of why they’ve been successful. But the Dodgers aren’t merely missing out on down-the-middle pitches. Nay, they’re atrocious against them. On the graph, they’re in the same neighborhood as the Nationals, who own the league’s 22nd-best offense by wRC+, and the Athletics, who own the very worst. This is… strange. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays’ injury tally continued to climb over the weekend as the team added two key parts of its lineup — shortstop Wander Franco and center fielder Kevin Kiermaier — to the injured list. Not to be outdone by the hitters, pitcher Jeffrey Springs joined them after his first game back from a family emergency. If the season ended today, the Rays would be the American League’s second Wild Card team, but five other clubs, including the blazing hot Orioles, are within five games.

#Rays Franco looks to be headed for hamate surgery, Kiermaier is sidelined again with left hip problems as injuries continue to mount https://t.co/JxJD3gZO9A

— Marc Topkin (@TBTimes_Rays) July 10, 2022

Franco’s injury is the most concerning, both in terms of its severity and the resulting loss of production. The team’s franchise player broke his hamate bone on Saturday in the first inning against the Reds while fouling off a 100 mph Hunter Greene fastball. While having a fastball explosive enough to indirectly break bones probably adds to the flame-thrower’s mystique, for Franco, it’s a massive setback, one that comes just a couple of weeks after missing a month with a quad injury. With an expected recovery in the six-to-eight week range, it’s unlikely the Rays will have their shortstop back in the lineup much before September, and any significant setback could end his season.

Year-in and year-out, Tampa prides itself on having one of the deepest rosters in baseball, but replacing Franco is a tall order. Indeed, a few weeks ago, ZiPS actually projected him as the AL player who would be the sixth-hardest to replace due to a theoretical season-ending injury. With a .260/.308/.396 line over 58 games (good for a 104 wRC+), his production has been down compared to his rookie season, but would be considered a massive achievement for any other 21-year-old shortstop. He projected as a five-win player coming into the season, and his play so far hasn’t changed that much; all of our projection systems here anticipated at least a 120 wRC+ the rest of the way, and Franco was underperforming the peripheral estimates of both Statcast’s xStats and ZiPS’ zStats. Read the rest of this entry »

On the day he was officially named to the National League All-Star team for the second time, Sandy Alcantara continued to roll, underscoring his case to start the All-Star Game for the NL. The 26-year-old righty’s seven shutout innings against the Mets extended his scoreless streak to 19 innings and his run of starts lasting at least seven innings to 12 in a row, the longest in the majors in seven years.

Matching zeroes with Taijuan Walker at Citi Field, Alcantara held the Mets to six hits and one walk while striking out four; the Marlins won 2-0 in 10 innings. The surprise wasn’t that he stifled the Mets so much as it was that he made a comparatively early exit by his high standards. Alcantara’s pitch count of 93 was 10 short of his major league-leading average through his first 17 turns, and was his shortest outing since his 83-pitch start against the Giants on Opening Day. In his last two starts, he’d thrown a career-high 117 pitches in a June 29 complete game against the Cardinals, then 107 in his July 5 follow-up, eight innings of two-hit shutout work against the Angels.

After Sunday’s game, manager Don Mattingly praised Alcantara’s labor-intensive effort, suggesting that he didn’t have his best stuff, particularly when it came to throwing his slider for strikes:

“It was probably one of his best performances from the standpoint where he wasn’t clicking with all his stuff… Today, he had to fight. He didn’t have all his stuff today. Him and [catcher Jacob Stallings] did a nice job of using his stuff and getting through it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Who has been your most influential teammate? I asked that question to 10 major leaguers — two each from five different teams — and all of the answers came after a moment of thoughtful consideration. Most couldn’t name just one, and there was another common theme that emerged, as well. A combination of appreciation and admiration was genuinely expressed with each and every response.

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Harrison Bader, St. Louis Cardinals

“Paul Goldschmidt. I like to watch just enough video to familiarize myself with the pitcher in terms of his tempo in the stretch, in the windup, his arm slots on different pitches, and maybe his tells on the base paths. Anything past that, I don’t like to watch. Paul has been the most influential, because I trust his assessment of the pitcher and his approach far more than anything I would create on my own. That’s because he keeps it really simple; he keeps it very straightforward. That approach helps him be very successful for his team. Because of that, I’ve learned to understand pitchers — when to open up a little more, when to stay focused on maybe driving the ball back up the middle. Little things like that allow you to be successful over nine innings.”

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Tucker Barnhart, Detroit Tigers

“Four come to mind, and it starts with Skip Schumaker. Skip and I played together in 2014 and 2015, and he was the guy I defaulted to if I had any questions. This was back when I was trying to figure out what the big leagues were like. So, Skip was one of my guys. We still talk. Read the rest of this entry »

John Schreiber has been a find for the Red Sox. Claimed off waivers by Boston from the Detroit Tigers prior to last season, the 28-year-old sidewinder has come out of the bullpen 30 times this year and allowed just 12 hits and two earned runs over 29 innings. Schreiber has 35 strikeouts to go with three saves and a pair of wins in as many decisions.

He’s not the same pitcher who failed to distinguish himself in Detroit.

“I’d mainly been a four-seam/slider guy,” explained Schreiber, who logged a 6.28 ERA over parts of two seasons with the Tigers. “In college and for most of my pro-ball career, that’s all I threw. Two years ago I started working on a better changeup, and last year I started throwing my sinker. Paul Abbott is our Triple-A pitching coach, and he helped me work on a two-seam sinker. I’ve gotten really comfortable throwing that.”

Schreiber still features his old mix prominently — this year he’s thrown 35.3% four-seamers and 35.8% sliders — but his 22.5% sinker usage has added a whole new twist. The 2016, 15th-round draft pick out of the University of Northwestern Ohio is now far less predictable, and just as importantly, he’s better able to match up with hitters who do damage on high heaters. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani is doing remarkable things again. The reigning AL MVP has been on an exceptional run as a pitcher lately, not only making a bit of history but also bolstering his cases to start the All-Star Game and to win additional hardware. While his hitting was the more amazing of his two endeavors in 2021, his improvements on the mound have pushed him into new territory.

On Wednesday night, Ohtani threw seven innings of two-hit ball against the Marlins, striking out 10 and allowing just one unearned run. That run came in the first inning, as the fans in Miami (they do have those, right?) were still settling into their seats. Jon Berti reached on a throwing error by shortstop Luis Rengifo, took third on a Joey Wendle double, and scored on a Garrett Cooper sacrifice fly. The run ended Ohtani’s streak of scoreless innings at 21.2, the longest of his career, but from there he cruised. He didn’t allow a hit after giving up a one-out single in the second to Miguel Rojas and retired 15 straight batters from that point until he walked Jesús Sánchez with one out in the seventh. For good measure, Ohtani also drove in the go-ahead runs via a two-run single off Trevor Rogers and later walked, stole a base, and scored another run. Nobody has had a game like that in at least the last century.

With his 10 strikeouts, Ohtani reached double digits for the third game in a row, something he’d never done before in his stateside career, and something only one other pitcher (Corbin Burnes) has done this season; six pitchers did it last year, with two (Shane Bieber and Robbie Ray) putting together four-game streaks. Over his past four starts, Ohtani hasn’t allowed a single earned run and has struck out 40 batters, something only seven other pitchers have done (one of them twice) since 1913, the year that earned runs became an official stat:

That’s some pretty cool company, even if the list heavily skews towards the recent past thanks to ever-increasing strikeout rates — so much so that Ohtani required fewer innings to complete the feat than all but one pitcher (Sale). It’s also worth pointing out that none of the aforementioned hurlers were regularly taking their cuts as hitters on the days they weren’t pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Patrick Sandoval broke out in a big way, posting career-bests in ERA, FIP, strikeout rate, called and swinging strike rate, and WAR. The foundation of his newfound success was a phenomenal changeup that was among the most effective pitches in all of baseball. This season, he’s lowered his ERA and FIP by more than half a run apiece, and has been the Angels second-most valuable starter behind Shohei Ohtani. Still, his strikeout rate has fallen by a couple of points even though his change has been as effective as it was last year. Looking past that one standout pitch, it’s clear Sandoval is being held back by another aspect of his arsenal: his fastballs.

Sandoval throws two different types of heaters and neither is all that effective. Last year, he allowed a cumulative .356 wOBA off his two fastballs; that mark is up to .408 this season. It’s a stark contrast to his three secondary offerings, which are all whiff machines. Here’s a look at his per pitch type results from this year:

Among all four-seam fastballs thrown at least 100 times this year, Sandoval’s whiff rate of 7.5% is the second lowest in baseball. His sinker’s whiff rate is a little better at 10.9%, but still below average for that pitch type. On the other hand, his changeup and two separate breaking balls each have whiff rates no lower than 38.5%. For Sandoval, it’s feast or famine depending on which pitch in his arsenal he’s throwing. Read the rest of this entry »

As we reach the mathematical halfway point of the season and approach the trade deadline, this is an opportune moment to run an update of the ZiPS projected standings. The standings are based on projections from the most robust version of ZiPS rather than the simpler one, which is more practical to run daily during the regular season, implementing things like the Statcast-aided zStats and up-to-date minor league translations.

The process that ZiPS uses is the typical one, but I’ll run it down quickly for those who may be new to how these projections work. ZiPS starts with a modified version of our depth chart and applies a generalized probabilistic model of available playing time for the players listed. So instead of a team’s roster strength being a simple sum of everyone’s projected WAR pro-rated to a fixed expected number of plate appearances, we end up with a whole distribution of possible roster strength. As an example: While Jacob deGrom still has a median of 55 innings in the roster sims I run for each team, sometimes he’ll be at 65 or 70 innings, sometimes he’ll be at 30 or 45 innings, and occasionally, it’ll be much worse than that. ZiPS will then “fill in” playing time based on the next players available on the depth chart and their probabilistic measure of availability. Just to stay with the Mets: When the outfield is healthy, the depth chart is mostly Mark Canha, Brandon Nimmo, and Starling Marte. But on the particularly bad rolls, the team’s estimated roster strength will have a lot more Ender Inciarte, Nick Plummer, Mark Vientos, and even players like Daniel Palka and Terrance Gore.

After ZiPS gets a distribution of each team’s roster strength, it “draws” one each year and sims out the rest of the season, team versus team, a million times and sees what happens. Is this a perfect methodology? Absolutely not! But I think we get closer to our goal of trying to evaluate team uncertainty and team depth, something which is harder to do using a less time-consuming scheme.

We checked the American League yesterday, so now it’s the Senior Circuit’s term. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants won a franchise-record 107 games last year, then reloaded after being knocked out of the Division Series by the Dodgers. But since posting a 14-7 record through the end of April, things haven’t gone their way. Though they snapped a six-game losing streak with a late-inning comeback against the Diamondbacks on Wednesday night, they’ve dropped 12 of their last 16 games, largely against sub-.500 teams. As the season’s midway point approaches, they’re barely above .500 at 41-39, and what’s more, they just lost their hottest hitter, Evan Longoria, to an oblique strain.

It’s not clear at this writing how Longoria was injured, but losing him is a blow nonetheless. The 36-year-old third baseman is hitting .242/.331/.462 with eight home runs; his 123 wRC+ is fourth among Giants regulars. In the two weeks prior to his injury, as the team has struggled, he hit for a team-high 166 wRC+ (.316/.413/.553) with three of those eight homers.

Longoria already missed the first 30 games of the season due to surgery to repair a torn ligament in his right index finger, making this the fifth straight season in which he has landed on the injured list. Last year, he was limited to 81 games due to a dislocated sternoclavicular joint in his left shoulder as well as a right hand contusion. In 2020, he missed the first seven games of the season due to an oblique strain; reportedly, he tweaked the muscle on his right side while swinging on July 14 of that year and was back in the lineup on July 30. In terming his current strain mild, manager Gabe Kapler offered similar optimism that this won’t be a long-term absence, though Longoria is out through at least the All-Star break. Read the rest of this entry »