Archive for Daily Graphings

Between Shohei Ohtani, Félix Bautista, and now Tony Gonsolin, the fragility of ulnar collateral ligaments has been an all-too-frequent topic of conversation within the past week. Gonsolin, in case you haven’t heard, is headed for Tommy John surgery on Friday, while we’re still waiting to hear whether the UCL injuries of Ohtani and Bautista are significant enough to merit going under the knife. Between that trio and the Rays’ Shane McClanahan going down earlier this month — and the fact that neither Gonsolin nor McClanahan are the first members of their teams’ rotations this year to need such surgery — it certainly feels as though we’re dealing with a lot of Tommy Johns lately, so it’s worth cutting through the numbers.

First, however, let’s spare a few paragraphs for Gonsolin and the Dodgers. The 29-year-old righty was coming off an All-Star season in which he posted a 2.14 ERA and 3.28 FIP in 130.1 innings, and owned similarly impressive career marks (2.51 ERA, 3.45 FIP) despite his intermittent availability due to injuries, which included a six-week absence near the end of last season due to a forearm strain, and just two appearances totaling 3.1 innings afterwards, one of them a four-out start in the 2022 Division Series. After spraining his left ankle during fielding drills in early March, he was playing catch-up and never seemed to find a comfort zone. He began the regular season on the injured list, finally debuting on April 26, and while his run prevention numbers looked good in the early going, his peripherals told another story, and his average fastball velocity was down. On June 11, manager Dave Roberts alluded to some health issues with Gonsolin, noting that his between-starts recovery “hasn’t been great,” and wondering if he was having trouble getting loose or pacing himself. In his next start two days later, Gonsolin threw six shutout innings but averaged just 91.1 mph with his four-seamer, two full ticks below last year.

To that point, Gonsolin had a 1.93 ERA but a 4.25 FIP, and soon he began to get roughed up on a routine basis. Over his next seven starts, he allowed four or more runs six times, producing a 7.25 ERA. Following a 3.1-inning, five-homer, 10-run stinker on August 18, Gonsolin’s second bad start out of three, Roberts told reporters that Gonsolin had been pitching through an unspecified “arm issue” for four to six weeks and would likely head to the injured list. On Sunday, the Dodgers acknowledged that surgery was an option, and on Monday it was revealed he’d undergo Tommy John on September 1. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Correa seems like he should be a good baserunner. He’s a young shortstop with great instincts in the field. He’s tall and lean, with a long pair of legs. In his rookie season, he stole 32 bases in 37 attempts across Double-A, Triple-A, and the majors. Yet despite what you’d think, Correa is decidedly not a good baserunner. In fact, he’s been the least valuable runner in the game this season. Over the past two years, he has been worth -13.6 baserunning runs (BsR); only Christian Vázquez (-14.0 BsR) has been worse. Surrounded by catchers, first basemen, and aging veterans, Correa is a fish out of water at the bottom of the BsR leaderboards.

The Twins shortstop recently opened up about his baserunning to Do-Hyoung Park of MLB.com, calling himself “slow as f–k.” It’s no surprise Correa is down on himself amid a career-worst season. Moreover, in a textual medium, it’s hard to gauge just how tongue-in-cheek his comment was. Still, whether he was dramatizing, joking, or a bit of both, it’s worth clarifying that Correa isn’t quite that slow. His sprint speed, as measured by Statcast, ranks in the 34th percentile – slow, sure, but it’s not like he’s walking around the bases. There are 177 players with a slower sprint speed this season (min. 10 opportunities) and 115 with a slower home-to-first time. If Correa is “slow as f–k,” I don’t even want to know what expletives he’d use to describe Miguel Cabrera and Yasmani Grandal. Correa may not have much speed to work with, but even so, his problem is that he isn’t making the most of the speed he’s got.

Correa isn’t the only player guilty of squandering speed, either. Indeed, there are much faster players who have hurt their teams on the basepaths this season, guys who can’t rely on the “slow as f–k” defense. Inspired by Correa’s comments, I looked at the sprint speed for the 50 worst players by BsR this season and took note of some interesting names. I also conducted my search the other way around, checking out the BsR for each of the 50 fastest runners by sprint speed. These are the guys who stood out. Read the rest of this entry »

The idea of the Mets trading Pete Alonso would have seemed positively preposterous six months ago. Coming off a 101-win season, the Mets committed to a half-billion dollars in new contracts over the winter, entering the season with the most expensive team in history. But rather than battle the Braves for NL East supremacy, they’ve instead been fighting to stay ahead of the Nationals for fourth place, a mêlée they’re currently losing. The Mets have already traded off some of their veterans, including both Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer, so the idea of parting with Alonso doesn’t seem quite as farfetched as it once did.

There have been some sports radio rumblings about Alonso-related clubhouse issues, but I tend to not take those things too seriously. And even if I did, it’s not a surprising development in the context of a wreck of a season; unless you’re the late 1970s Yankees, winning tends to make people get along better. What I do take seriously are the reports from Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic. No deal was close, but the Mets reportedly talked to at least the Brewers and Cubs around the trade deadline, getting to the point where the players to be sent to New York were discussed.

The facts on the ground, divorced from any specific rumors, also make such a trade plausible this winter. Players a year from free agency are frequently discussed in trades, and while there’s no reason to think the Mets are going to tear the team down to a small, long-term core, a 75-win season — and that’s only if the Mets play decent baseball in September — makes some kind of short-term retool quite possible. In that case, trading the unsigned Alonso for players who can contribute past 2024 is an idea with considerable merit. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Brown had yet to pitch above High-A when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in April 2021. Two years removed from being drafted in the fifth round out of Wayne State University, expectations surrounding the Detroit-area native were high coming into that season, as he was ranked as the no. 2 prospect (50 FV) in the Houston Astros system. He’s since lived up to those expectations. Brown not only made his big league debut last September, he went on to log three scoreless appearances in the postseason, including one in which he blanked the Seattle Mariners in the 12th and 13th innings of an epic 1-0 Astros win that took 18 frames to complete. This season he’s been a mainstay in the Houston rotation. Over 25 starts, the hard-throwing right-hander is 10-9 with a 4.47 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, and 152 strikeouts in 133 innings.

Brown discussed a recent change to his delivery, and the current quality of his curveball, on Monday, one day before celebrating his 25th birthday.

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David Laurila: We talked pitching two years ago. Outside of being in the big leagues, what has changed since that time?

Hunter Brown: “My stuff and my pitch shapes are similar, but I actually made a bit of a change in my last outing. There’s a difference in my windup, and in the stretch, where my hands are coming set. And my shoulders are already lined up out of the windup. It’s just a little rocker step kind of deal. That’s something we’ve been talking about for a while. We’re trying to clean up some inconsistencies that came with my previous [delivery]. It worked against the Tigers [on August 26], and hopefully it will continue to work.” Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think you understand. You probably think you understand, but you don’t understand. Oh, you know that Spencer Strider is a bolt of lightning, a strikeout pitcher so overpowering that he might as well have been created in a lab. You know that he’s having a good season, surely; he’s locked in a tight race for NL Cy Young with Zac Gallen and Blake Snell. You know that he’s the logical continuation of the high-strikeout ace lineage, Bob Feller or Sandy Koufax or Roger Clemens for a new age. But I doubt you grasp how much of an outlier Strider’s 2023 season is, because I didn’t either until I took a closer look.

We have pitch-by-pitch data for every major league game on our leaderboards starting in 2002. That means we can calculate swinging strike rate, the percentage of pitches that result in a swing and a miss, for all of those years. I’ll tell you right off the bat that the single-season leader in this category is Jacob deGrom in 2020. In fact, four of the top five seasons on the list are from 2020; they’re outliers that were likely aided by the inherent randomness of a shortened schedule, in other words. For a rate statistic, that makes sense; the fewer innings you can throw to qualify, the easier it is to put up a wild number. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs are in playoff contention at the end of August, and Kyle Hendricks is getting hitters out with a tasting menu of exquisitely located mid-80s funk. (Grabs nearest passerby) “The date! I need you to tell me the date!…God Almighty, my time machine works!”

For most of the late 2010s, Hendricks was not quite an ace but was a bankable no. 2 or no. 3 starter. Even in his relative youth, he never threw hard; the fastest pitch of Hendricks’ entire career was 93.1 mph, and he hasn’t even hit 91 since 2016. People who apparently never watched Greg Maddux loved to stamp a “next Greg Maddux” label on any bookish right-hander with great command, and of those, Hendricks probably came the closest to living up to the comparison. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey there. Are you a major league general manager or president of baseball operations? Do you work in a front office role for a playoff-contending team? Do you wish you had another starter, a good closer, or maybe an outfielder? Well, I’ve got great news for you, my friend. Operators are waiting now for your call: the Los Angeles Angels just yelled “Everything must go!” and threw their roster on the waiver wire like a miffed fantasy owner.

More specifically, the Angels placed Lucas Giolito, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López, Dominic Leone, Hunter Renfroe, and Randal Grichuk on waivers. For the next 47 hours, any team in baseball can place a claim on any or all of their services. It’s an unprecedented maneuver that could inject talent into playoff races across the league, and in an unpredictable fashion. If you’re on the fringes, you’ll get the first bite at the apple, but there are so many players here that even some teams currently in playoff position might end up with someone. If you’re looking for more specifics on the waiver process, Jon Becker wrote a nice explainer here.

Let’s talk about the way this works for the Angels first. Coming into yesterday, we projected them for a competitive balance tax payroll of $234,398,925. The first CBT threshold for this year is $233 million. That means they need to save around $1.5 million to duck under that threshold. The players put on waivers are owed around $6.44 million over the remainder of the year, and a similar amount even when CBT tax calculations are applied. The total tax savings will be slightly less than that, because the Rockies are paying a portion of Grichuk’s salary, but assuming most of these players find takers, the Angels will end up below that threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve probably seen that the Angels put what we in the business call “Darn Near a Whole Roster Of Players” on waivers. Per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, Lucas Giolito, Matt Moore, Reynaldo López, Hunter Renfroe and Randal Grichuk are all free for the salary relief taking; USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reports that Dominic Leone is on waivers as well. Meanwhile, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reports that Harrison Bader, Carlos Carrasco, Mike Clevinger and José Cisnero have also been placed on waivers by their respective clubs. What does this mean for those players? What about the teams waiving or claiming them? What about you, the reader? Let’s dive in to some of the common questions I’ve seen since the news broke.

Q: What does “being placed on waivers” even mean anyway?

In the context of post-trade deadline transactions, being placed on waivers is similar to the waiver action that occurs when a player is designated for assignment. However, since the trade deadline has passed, the option to trade a player who has been placed on waivers is gone. The only option for a claiming team is to claim the player straight-up, paying all of his remaining salary for the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

While Bryce Harper made the quickest return from Tommy John surgery of any position player on record, it came with a cost. Not surprisingly, he didn’t hit the ball as hard as usual in the early months of his return, or do as much damage because he wasn’t elevating it with consistency. At one point, he went 166 plate appearances without a home run, the longest drought of his career, but even then, he remained a reasonably productive hitter. Lately he’s been heating up, crushing the ball while helping the Phillies climb to the top of the NL Wild Card race.

In the fourth inning of Monday night’s game against the Angels in Philadelphia, Harper demolished a Lucas Giolito fastball that was playing in the middle of the road:

The homer — a 111.9-mph scorcher with a projected distance of 429 feet — was Harper’s fourth in a seven-game rampage, during which he’s hit .500/.613/1.037. It was his eighth homer of the month, his highest total since he hit nine in September/October 2021 (and 10 in August of the same season) en route to his second MVP award. He maxed out at seven homers in May of last season, the month he was diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the most frustrating arguments involving baseball statistics revolve around the use of expected stats. Perhaps the most frequently cited of these metrics are Statcast’s xStats, which use Statcast data for hitters to estimate the batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and wOBA you’d “expect” a hitter to achieve. Investigating how predictive xStats are compared to their corresponding actual stats has been a common research exercise over the last few years. While it depends on the exact dataset used, xStats by themselves generally aren’t much better than the actual stats at predicting the next year’s actual stats. But that doesn’t mean we should simply discard expected stats when trying to evaluate players.

While I’m not going spend too much time talking about how predictive xStats are versus the actual ones, I do want to briefly touch on some of the existing work on the subject. Jonathan Judge at Baseball Prospectus examined many of the expected metrics back in 2018. He also spoke with MLBAM’s Tom Tango about the nature of expected stats and their usage:

Earlier this week, we reached out to BAM with our findings, asking if they had any comment.

MLBAM Senior Database Architect of Stats Tom Tango promptly responded, asking that we ensure we had the most recent version of the data, due to some recent changes being made. We refreshed our data sets, found some small changes, and retested. The results were the same.

Tango then stressed that the expected metrics were only ever intended to be descriptive, that they were not designed to be predictive, and that if they had been intended to be predictive, they could have been designed differently or other metrics could be used.

Read the rest of this entry »