Archive for Daily Graphings

Through the course of a season, it can be difficult to appreciate catcher defense. The expectation is that catchers will put their body on the line for their team day in and day out. But while they have their opportunities to save runs and steal strikes, no single block, frame, or throw has a significant effect on the season; at best, you’re saving a single run. If you miss a block or don’t get your hand under a low fastball in the shadow zone, you just move on and get the next one. But in a close playoff game, each of those pitches suddenly becomes more important, and along with that, the role of the catcher. These are the times when you get to see a catcher who really controls the game, just like Jonah Heim has.

Heim was one of the best catchers in baseball this year, delivering 4.1 WAR over 131 games. From a defensive perspective, he was the best in baseball regardless of position according to Defensive Runs Above Average, third-best according to Deserved Runs Prevented, and eighth-best according to Statcast’s Fielding Run Value. Visually, the argument is just as compelling. He is smooth in every aspect of the game and easily deserving of the statistical reputation he’s established for himself. He’s showing extreme poise in guiding a staff that’s missing some of its best pitchers, allowing them to take the risks they need to combat a talented Orioles’ lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

Alas, even throwbacks get injured. For all of the excitement about the extent to which Sandy Alcantara bucked recent trends by piling up innings and pitching complete games en route to the 2022 NL Cy Young award, his combination of volume and velocity — both at the outer edge of what pitchers of recent vintage have shown they could sustain — placed him at risk for an arm injury. His season ended about a month before those of his Marlins teammates, who made it as far as the NL Wild Card Series, and on Friday the 28-year-old righty announced that he had undergone Tommy John surgery, which will sideline him for the 2024 season.

Alcantara missed just one start over the first five months of the season due to a bout of “very mild” biceps tendinitis in late April, but after throwing eight innings in his September 3 start against the Nationals, he landed on the injured list with what was initially diagnosed as a flexor strain. On September 13, Marlins manager Skip Schumaker told reporters that an MRI revealed that Alcantara had actually sprained his ulnar collateral ligament. Even so, he soon resumed a throwing program. After multiple pain-free bullpen sessions, he was allowed to make a rehab start for Triple-A Jacksonville on September 21. He threw four scoreless innings, but afterwards told the team that he felt renewed tightness in his forearm. The Marlins announced that he was being shut down for the remainder of the season.

While the Marlins hadn’t offered any indication that Alcantara’s sprain was significant enough to merit surgery, it’s not terribly surprising; after all, a sprain is a tear, and with a UCL sprain, it needn’t be a full thickness tear to require surgery. It’s unclear whether the injury worsened with that rehab outing, but the more likely explanation is that as with the Orioles and Félix Bautista, the Marlins qualifying for the postseason made it worth seeing whether Alcantara could pitch through a partial tear. The answer, sadly, was no. Read the rest of this entry »

Caleb Ferguson is far from the biggest name on a Los Angeles Dodgers team that won 100 games during the regular season. Much for that reason, people who don’t closely follow the perennial NL West powerhouse probably don’t know how effective he’s been. To little fanfare, the 27-year-old southpaw made 68 appearances and went 7-4 with three saves while posting a 3.43 ERA and a 3.34 FIP over 60-and-a-third innings. Moreover, his numbers were even better if you discount the seven times he served as an opener. As a reliever, Ferguson won seven of nine decisions with a 3.02 ERA and a 3.07 FIP. His K-rate out of the pen was a tasty 27.5%.

Home cooking has been to his liking. Pitching at Chavez Ravine — Dodger Stadium if you will — the Columbus, Ohio native logged a sparkling 1.10 ERA while holding opposing hitters to a paltry .190/.258/.267 slash line.

Those things said, Ferguson is a square peg in a round hole when it comes to one of the organization’s well-known strengths. Analytics aren’t his thing.

“I guess it has the characteristics of a high-spin fastball,” Ferguson replied when I asked about the movement profile of his mid-90s four-seamer, a pitch he relied on 66.5% of the time this year. “But I don’t really look at the metrics, to be honest. I just come in and try to make good pitches. More than anything, I try to throw the ball in the safest spot to each guy. When I look at scouting reports, it’s basically just the safe zones and the danger zones.”

Ferguson likewise claimed not to know the metrics on his 33.5 percent-usage slider (Baseball Savant classifies the pitch as a cutter). Nor is he interested in knowing. Read the rest of this entry »

In their Wild Card Series, the Diamondbacks were the comeback kids, the sixth seed that had limped their way into the postseason with a .451 second-half winning percentage and erased deficits of multiple runs on back-to-back days to beat the Brewers in Milwaukee. But on Saturday in Los Angeles, there was no mistaking it: this team can be a serious threat. Arizona came out punching in the first inning, with hard-hit ball after hard-hit ball off Dodgers starter Clayton Kershaw, chasing the left-hander after just a third of an inning – the shortest start of his Hall of Fame career. Before the Dodgers knew it, the Diamondbacks led 9-0, a hole too deep for Los Angeles to climb out of:

The second pitch of the game, a 73 mph curveball, was smoked by Ketel Marte at 115.7 mph and ate up James Outman in center field, leaving Marte on second with a double. It was good for the second-hardest batted ball of the over 21,000 hit off Kershaw in the Statcast portion of his career. In all of Statcast history, just two hitters – Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton – have tagged a pitch thrown at 73 mph or slower with an exit velocity that high. It was a harbinger of things to come, the first of eight hard-hit balls in the opening inning, which amounts to one of the most impressive first-inning onslaughts in recent memory – no team has unleashed more hard-hit balls in the first inning of any game in over five years. Arizona plated six runs in the first and three in the second, and the focus – even Dave Roberts’ focus, as he shared in a third-inning interview – shifted to what a blowout here means for the rest of the series. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Sunday in Arizona, Kyle Tucker came to the plate in Game 162 with 29 home runs, one shy of his career high of 30 recorded in both 2021 and ’22. He also had a career-high 30 stolen bases to his name, giving him a chance to become just the second player in Astros history to record a 30–30 season, after Jeff Bagwell, who did so in 1997 and ’99. (To be precise, he’d be the third Astro with a 30–30 season — Carlos Beltrán was dealt to Houston partway through his lone 30–30 campaign in 2004 — but just the second to reach those marks in a full season in an Astros uniform.) Tucker would join four others — Ronald Acuña Jr., Francisco Lindor, Julio Rodriguez, and Bobby Witt Jr. — in the 30-30 club this season, which would have been the biggest cohort of 30–30ers in a single year in big league history. In a game where there was a division title at stake, he had a shot to add some metaphorical hardware to his personal trophy case as well.

In the fifth inning, Tucker, well, touched ‘em all:

He struck a line drive into right field, where Arizona’s Jake McCarthy misjudged it with a few steps inward, allowing it to sail over his head. Tucker got on his horse, coasted into third, and appeared to pick up on some lackadaisical defensive effort on Arizona’s part, at which point he took off for home. He was there before the back end of the Diamondbacks’ relay could realize it was happening and do anything about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Two years ago, the Giants won 107 games, and Gabe Kapler was voted NL Manager of the Year. Last year, the Mets won 101 games, and Buck Showalter was voted NL Manager of the Year. But both teams were bounced out of the postseason in their first playoff series nonetheless, and with both teams struggling to return to such heights thereafter, the two managers lost their jobs this past weekend after their teams asked in effect, “What have you won for me lately?” The Giants fired Kapler on Friday with the team holding a 78–81 record; the Mets (then 74–86) announced before Sunday’s finale that they were moving on from Showalter.

Kapler and Showalter were the first two managers to lose their jobs in 2023, but not the last, as the Angels decided to move on from Phil Nevin, who was in the last year of his contract, on Monday after a 73–89 finish. The Padres and Yankees haven’t officially confirmed the status of their incumbents, but Bob Melvin and Aaron Boone remain under contract through next season, with the Yankees holding an option on Boone for 2025 as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start today, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its National League counterpart break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs start on Tuesday, and we are going to cover every single game, from the Wild Card round to the World Series. But those games are played by humans, and those humans have to find a way to avoid murdering each other over the course of a very long season. Inventing goofy celebrations is a good way to inject some fun into the proceedings. This article and its American League counterpart, which will run tomorrow, will break down how each playoff team celebrates when a player reaches base or the team notches a victory. (I’m going to skip the home run celebrations because they’ve already been covered very thoroughly, and because they’re sure to get plenty of camera time as October unfolds.) The point of this article is to help you enjoy the smaller celebrations that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One important note: This is necessarily an incomplete list. I spent a lot of time looking, but I wasn’t able to track down the origin of every single celebration. When you search for information about a team’s celebration, you have to wade through an ocean of articles about the night they clinched a playoff berth. The declining functionality of Twitter (now known as X) also made it harder to find relevant information by searching for old tweets (now known as florps). When I couldn’t find the truth about a celebration’s backstory, I either gave it my best guess or invented the most entertaining backstory I could think of. If you happen to know the real story behind a particular celebration, or if you’d like to share your own absurd conjectures, please post them in the comments. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in August, my colleague Ben Clemens crafted an article titled Wait, Zack Littell is a Starter Now?! It was an apt headline. Not only had the 27-year-old right-hander been DFA’d by the Red Sox a few months earlier — Boston having been his third organization in as many years, and his sixth overall — he’d logged a 4.08 ERA over 145 big-league appearances, all but four out of the bullpen, with just three saves. As Clemens pointed out, Littell “wasn’t even a dominant reliever.”

Of course, this was the Tampa Bay Rays who’d moved him into their rotation. Much for that reason, Clemens qualified his skepticism by saying, “What else can we do but wait and see the results?”

The results have remained largely positive. Littell has a not-so-great 6.75 ERA in 14 appearances out of the bullpen this year, but in the same number of outings as a starter his ERA is 3.41. Moreover, he’s consistently gone five-plus innings. As Rays beat writer Marc Topkin told me for an article that ran here at FanGraphs on Friday. the under-the-radar righty “has basically saved the starting rotation.”

How did the opportunity come about? Read the rest of this entry »

“Let’s Talk About Underrated 2023 Orioles” was the subtitle of my Sunday Notes column on September 10, with the opening section having featured a combination of Baltimore broadcasters and scribes opining on that very topic. Today, we’ll head south and talk about underrated Tampa Bay Rays — arguably an even more subjective exercise. Few teams in any sport have enjoyed as much success while getting contributions from as many players who largely fly under the radar from a national perspective.

The six people quoted below — four Tampa Bay broadcasters and a pair of the team’s beat writers — offered their perspectives on Wednesday when the Rays played the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

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Brian Anderson, Rays broadcaster:

“The guy who had the big game tonight: Josh Lowe. Coming into the season, it was Vidal Bruján, Jonathan Aranda, Luke Raley, and Josh Lowe — those four guys for two spots — and it was a battle right to the end of spring training. Raley and Lowe got them. Not only did [Lowe] fight for a roster spot and get it, he turned it into .290 with 20 home runs, and he’s 32-for-35 in stolen bases. He’s third on the team in runs driven in. He plays a good outfield. I mean, he’s gone through the roof for a guy who, until the end of camp, didn’t know if he was going to make the team or not. To be able to do what he did… I don’t think anyone saw him putting together the kind of year he’s put together.” Read the rest of this entry »