Speculating about the playoffs in August always feels strange. The regular season isn’t over. It isn’t nearly over, either – the 45 or so games remaining on each team’s schedule will change how we think about them. The best two records in baseball belong to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros right now, but some team could go 35-10 and wrest that title away from them.
Still, today I’m going to speculate about the playoffs. Whether the Dodgers and Astros hold onto their top spots or not, they’re both playoff locks – our Playoff Odds give them both 100% odds of reaching the postseason. In the past week, they’ve also each gotten rotten injury news that will affect their playoff rosters. So suspend your inherent skepticism of articles in August that talk about October as we consider the playoff impact of losing Walker Buehler and Michael Brantley. Read the rest of this entry »
The delayed start to the 2022 season due to the lockout has had a lot of small consequences for the structure of the season, ranging from expanded rosters to my least favorite thing, the continued use of zombie runners in extra innings. The last (we hope) of these changes is a slight alteration to the playoff schedule, which the league sees as a necessity in order to keep the postseason from straying too far into November. On Monday, MLB announced that the three-game Wild Card Series will be played without any off-days, while an off-day will be trimmed from the Divisional Series (between Games 4 and 5); teams in the ALDS get one additional off-day, without travel, between Games 1 and 2. The Championship Series will lose an off-day between Games 5 and 6). The World Series is business as usual.
While I expected this configuration for the Wild Card round (it was already accounted for in the generalized ZiPS projections for postseason performance), there are some slight tweaks that need to be made to account for the changes to the Division and Championship Series with respect to pitching. When projecting the roster strength of a team for the purposes of postseason probabilities, ZiPS weighs pitchers at the top of the rotation more heavily. That’s because historically they have gotten a larger percentage of starter innings in the playoffs than during the regular season. But losing an extra day of rest could result in teams using the pitchers after their No. 3 starters more heavily, as well as more dilemmas involving bringing back a top starter on three days rest. There are also possible consequences for the bullpens. In other words, teams will need to be slightly deeper than normal this playoff season.
So, how do we account for that? To get a rough estimate — I’m not sure there’s a methodology that will let us do any better than that — of the potential effects of the compressed schedule, I went back into the ZiPS game-by-game postseason simulations and put together a new, quick simulation for starting pitcher usage. I used projections as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »
Jameson Taillon was 20 years old when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in September 2012. Drafted second overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of Woodland (Texas) High School just two years earlier, he’d only recently been promoted to Double-A when he sat down for an interview. The subjects at hand were his repertoire and his early-career development as a professional pitcher.
A decade later, Taillon is now pitching for the New York Yankees. Acquired from Pittsburgh prior to last season — this after missing most of 2019 and all of the shortened 2020 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery — the 30-year-old right-hander is having a solid campaign. In 23 starts comprising 127.2 innings, he is 11–3 with a 3.95 ERA and a 4.02 FIP.
Taillon discussed his decade-long evolution on the mound when the Yankees visited Fenway Park this past weekend.
———
David Laurila: You were in the minors when we first spoke 10 years ago. How would you describe your progression as a pitcher since that time?
Jameson Taillon: “One of the interesting things about pitching is that you’re in constant pursuit of trying to get better. The trends change, the hitters change, the scouting reports change. But I feel like I’ve kept a lot of my strengths the same. My curveball is still a pretty decent pitch for me, I throw a four- and a two-seam, just like I did 10 years ago.
“I’ve added a slider. I’ve probably used the changeup a little bit more in the big leagues than I did at the beginning of my career. But yeah, for a while there I was heavy sinkers and ground balls. Last year I went heavy four-seam. Now I’m kind of finding that sweet mix, that balance.”
In April, the baseball article subject of choice is often a player who has a scorching hot start to the season. We put him under scrutiny, examine his ins and outs, then ultimately shrug and say, well, maybe. Maybe it’s something! Then again, it could also be nothing. Months pass, and said player and their progress is never revisited. Instead, you’ll likely come across their remains in the dustiest corner of a box score, discovering a mere shell of a once-promising breakout candidate.
Let’s amend that. If there’s anyone who deserves a follow-up, it’s Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan, who ranked No. 57 on our 2022 Top 100 prospect list before the season and who captivated fans back in April with an endless stream of hits and a refusal to swing and miss. But a horrid May (.173/.271/.253) removed him from the community’s collective radar, consigning him to a Yermín Mercedes-like fate. Since then, however, Kwan has been outstanding: Following a productive summer, he’s brought up his slash line on the season to a respectable .295/.371/.389, for a 121 wRC+. This sport has seen countless one-month wonders; he isn’t one of them. Read the rest of this entry »
Sunday afternoon, Drew Rasmussen had everything working. For eight innings, his fastball/cutter combination kept Orioles batters off balance, with intermittent sliders only deepening their confusion. The first 24 Orioles to come to the plate walked away empty-handed. It took Rasmussen just 79 pitches to navigate those eight innings. He was on course for both a perfect game and a Maddux, and the Orioles looked unlikely to stop him.
They managed to break through. Jorge Mateo led off the ninth inning by lacing a double down the third base line. He advanced on a groundout, then scored on a wild pitch. Rasmussen didn’t even manage a complete game; after Brett Phillips reached on a dropped third strike, Kevin Cash went to the bullpen for the last two outs of the game. It wasn’t the crowning achievement for Rasmussen that it might have been, but this season has been a success nonetheless, and a near-perfecto presents a great excuse to examine what’s gone right.
I last checked in on Rasmussen after his first start this season, when he adopted a new sweeping slider and threw it a ton. In 2021, he’d been a fastball-first pitcher with a slider that changed shape as he worked on it throughout the year. In 2022, he came out featuring the slider, with a new cutter to boot. Would 2022 be the year of the sweeper for Rasmussen?
As it turns out, not so much. His first few starts represented a local high in slider usage, and he’s been leaning on the pitch less and less since. He’s filled in that gap by going back to his high-octane fastball and by trusting that new cutter: Read the rest of this entry »
Kyle Harrison is one of the top pitching prospects in baseball. Drafted 85th overall in 2020 out of Concord, California’s De La Salle High School, the just-turned-21-year-old left-hander is No. 30 on our updated Top 100. Ranked ninth among hurlers, Harrison has dominated at two levels. Currently with the Richmond Flying Squirrels, the Double-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants, he’s fanned 143 batters and allowed just 57 hits in 86-and-a-third innings this season. In a word, the young southpaw has been overpowering.
Harrison discussed his repertoire when Richmond played in Portland over the weekend.
———
David Laurila: To start, give me a self-scouting report.
Kyle Harrison: “My fastball averages around 94 [mph]. I spin it decently — not too high — but it’s from a low approach angle, so I think it looks like the ball has a little bit of rise. Then I’ll go to my slider. I’ll kind of grip that off the four-seam and really just try to rip it at the bottom of the zone. It’s a little more sweepy-ish than a regular slider. I’m trying to make it harder. I’m able to get it to 85 sometimes — that’s kind of where I want it to be — but those are the max-effort ones. It’s usually more 80-83.
“The changeup I’m playing around with now is a new grip. I’m kind of splitting the two seams there. It’s more of a one-seam, so I can get a little bit more tumble. I’ve been throwing it harder than I’d like. I’m trying to take a little velo off to get some better speed differential.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Baltimore Orioles were nine games under. 500 when I talked to Jordan Lyles in late May, and they were only a smattering of games better when the veteran right-hander was featured here in Sunday Notes on June 26. Not much changed over a month’s time. Moreover, most signs pointed to the rebuilding Birds’ going on to have a sixth straight losing season.
A revisiting of what I wrote seven weeks ago is in order. Not only has Baltimore morphed into one of baseball’s hottest teams, the crux of that column was Lyles’s bad-club background. Now in his 12th big-league season, the journeyman hurler came into the current campaign having never played a full year with a team that finished above .500.
That might be about to change. With 24 wins in their last 33 games, the Orioles went into last night with a record of 59-53, in third place in the American League East and in possession of the final wildcard slot. Earlier this week, I asked Lyles about the team’s unexpected ascent in the standings.
“When we talked, there was a different atmosphere around our ball club, our clubhouse,” said Lyles. “Things definitely turned around and got moving in a better direction for us. It’s been a joyful ride. It’s been fun to see these young guys start to grow, and to grow quickly.”
Amid that growth, the Orioles front office saw fit to take one step backward in hopes of taking two steps forward. In moves that weren’t well-received by much of the fan base, Baltimore traded Trey Mancini and Jorge Lopez. On back-to-back days, an impact bat and a closer departed town in exchange for a further influx of promising, yet mostly-unproven, talent. Read the rest of this entry »
As anyone who does a lot of work with projections could likely tell you, one of the most annoying things about modeling future performance is that results themselves are a small sample size. Individual seasons, even full ones over 162 games, still feature results that are not very predictive, such as a hitter or a pitcher with a BABIP low or high enough to be practically unsustainable. For example, if Luis Arraez finishes the season hitting .333, we don’t actually know that a median projection of .333 was the correct projection going into the season. There’s no divine baseball exchequer to swoop in and let you know whether he’s “actually” a .333 hitter who did what he was supposed to, a .320 hitter who got lucky, or a .380 hitter who suffered extreme misfortune.
If you flip heads on a coin eight times out of 10 and have no reason to believe you have a special coin-flipping ability, you’ll eventually see the split approach 50/50 given a sufficiently large number of coin flips. Convergence in probability is a fairly large academic area that we thankfully do not need to go into here, but for most things in baseball, you never actually get enough coin flips to see this happen. The boundaries of a season are quite strict.
What does this have to do with projections? This volatile data becomes the source of future predictions, and one of the things done in projections is to find things that are not only as predictive as the ordinary stats but also more predictive based on fewer plate appearances or batters faced. Imagine, for example, if body mass index were a wonderful predictor of isolated power. It would be a highly useful one, as changes to it over the course of a season are bound to be rather small. The underlying reasons for performance tend to be more stable than the results, which is why ERA is more volatile than strikeout rate, and why strikeout rate is more volatile than the plate discipline stats that result in strikeout rate.
MLB’s own method comes with an x before the stat, whereas what ZiPS uses internally has a z. (I’ll let you guess what it stands for!) I’ve written more about this stuff in various other places (like here and here), so let’s get right to the data as we start the final third of the season. We’re also looking at how zStats leaders and trailers fared in the two months since I last posted the numbers. Sure, we’re using a small sample size of players and comparing a small sample size to another small sample size, but curiosity gets precedence over everything! Read the rest of this entry »
Justin Verlander wasn’t quite at his best on Wednesday night, yielding three runs in six innings against the Rangers in Houston — his first time surrendering more than two runs since June 24. Even so, the 39-year-old righty continued an impressive comeback following nearly two full seasons lost to injuries — first a forearm strain and then Tommy John surgery. In fact, he leads the American League in both wins (15) and ERA (1.85), and while those don’t carry the same currency at FanGraphs as they do elsewhere, it’s not hard to imagine him adding a third Cy Young award to his trophy room if he keeps this up.
Verlander won the award for the first time in 2011, when he went 24-5 with a 2.40 ERA and 250 strikeouts in 251 innings; by leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, he also claimed the pitching triple crown and added the AL MVP award as well. Over the next seven seasons, he finished as the runner-up for the AL Cy Young three times (2012, ’16, and ’18) but also endured some ups and downs, including a 4.54-ERA season (2014), an injury-shortened one (2015), and a late-season trade to the Astros that helped him claim a World Series ring (2017), albeit on a team that was later sanctioned for its illegal electronic sign-stealing efforts.
After narrowly losing out to Blake Snell for the award in 2018, Verlander finally won another Cy Young in 2019, going 21-6 with a 2.58 ERA and an even 300 strikeouts; in the same game he reached that plateau, he also became the 18th pitcher to surpass the 3,000-strikeout milestone. It’s taken more than two years to follow that up, however. After a spring in which he suffered both lat and groin strains, Verlander underwent surgery to repair the latter shortly after Major League Baseball was forced to postpone Opening Day due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When he finally did take the mound roughly four months later for the Astros’ season opener, he suffered a forearm strain, and after experiencing pain during a simulated game while rehabbing, he was diagnosed with a torn UCL and underwent Tommy John surgery in late September, which cost him all of 2021. Read the rest of this entry »
On Wednesday, the Detroit Tigers fired general manager Al Avila. Mired in last place in the American League Central in what was supposed to be a resurgent season, the firing fit the mood around Detroit. This was meant to be the Tigers’ triumphant return to postseason contention, a culmination of seven years of stockpiling and honing. Instead, it’s been another lost season, adding to the gulf that separates today’s Tigers from the perennial World Series contenders of a decade ago.
Four months later, all of that optimism has disappeared. Báez is having one of his worst years as a professional. Rodriguez got hurt early in the year and then hit the restricted list while dealing with a personal matter. He last pitched in the majors on May 18; when he took the mound for Single-A Lakeland this past Saturday, it was his first game action since June 9. Meadows, the third piece of the team’s major league talent trifecta, has missed extended time with a laundry list of injuries, and playing hurt when available has resulted in sub-replacement-level production.
That alone would hurt the offense, but it gets worse. Torkelson, who came into the season as our fifth-ranked prospect overall, made the Opening Day roster. To put it mildly, things haven’t gone according to plan since. His .197/.282/.295 line led to a demotion to Triple-A, where he’s also scuffled. Greene broke his foot in spring training and hasn’t lit the world on fire since joining the big league club in June. Read the rest of this entry »
