The Blue Jays are roughly where they planned on being heading into the season: 40-36 and on the periphery of the Wild Card chase. They’re doing it roughly the way they expected — with big seasons from their young boppers (Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is an MVP front runner, Bo Bichette has been excellent) and timely contributions from their opportunistic offseason spending spree (Marcus Semien has been excellent, Robbie Ray looks solid).

Despite those bright spots, however, the team has plenty of room for improvement. The outfield, which looked like a potential strength coming into the season, has been hamstrung by a quad injury to George Springer; he’s made only 39 plate appearances so far this year. Teoscar Hernández has played the field in his place, and while he’s hitting well, he’s a better fit at DH. He’s also right-handed, a trait the team’s four primary outfielders share. The bullpen has been disappointing as well; Jordan Romano and Tim Mayza have impressed, but that’s about it.

To address this concern and simultaneously shore up the bullpen, the Blue Jays made a trade with the Marlins. Adam Cimber, Corey Dickerson, and an undisclosed amount of cash are headed to Toronto (well, to Buffalo at least) in exchange for Joe Panik and Andrew McInvale, as Craig Mish and Jon Heyman first reported. Read the rest of this entry »

Xander Bogaerts was right in the middle of the action as the Red Sox swept the Yankees this past weekend, going 6-for-11 with three doubles while either scoring or driving in eight of Boston’s 18 runs. The 28-year-old shortstop is in the midst of his best offensive season, though as his performance in Friday night’s win served to remind viewers, his defense hasn’t been so hot.

Indeed, Bogaerts had an adventurous game in the series opener at Fenway Park. After mashing a two-run first-inning double off Domingo Germán and coming around to score himself to run the lead to 3-0, he made an error that loomed large in the top of the second, helping the Yankees tie the game. With one out and runners on first and second, Gio Urshela hit a hot 98.6 mph grounder to Bogaerts’ right, a ball that could have extricated starter Martin Pérez from a jam with an inning-ending double play. Bogaerts ranged over to stop the ball but couldn’t pick it up cleanly, and once he did pick it up, he threw behind the runner to third. All hands were safe, leaving the bases loaded; one out later, all three runs eventually scored, unearned.

Bogaerts failed to convert two other balls into outs, a 112.7 mph hot smash off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton in the third inning, and a 75.1 mph dribbler by Urshela in the ninth; both went as infield singles. By the time the latter occurred, the Red Sox had retaken the lead, 5-3, but afterwards Bogaerts expressed relief that his initial miscue hadn’t cost the team the game, saying, “I messed it up big time. That was a rough feeling for me right there […] I’m the happiest guy that we won today, to be honest with you. Because, man, it could have gotten ugly. These guys picked me up big time tonight.” Read the rest of this entry »

By now, I’m sure you’re aware of Yasmani Grandal’s odd season. We’re approaching the All-Star Game, yet the veteran catcher still has an unbelievably low batting average (.177) to go along with a stellar wRC+ (131). The juxtaposition encapsulates everything useful or wrong about modern baseball, depending on whom you ask.

Regardless, it works because while Grandal does strike out a fair amount, he also walks just as often – at a league-leading rate, in fact. But enough about Grandal. This is all a set up, because really, I want to talk about Christian Yelich. Why is he relevant? Yelich is one of two hitters (min. 150 PA) this season to have both a strikeout and walk rate above 20% – you can guess who the other is. Grandal’s season is, indeed, weird. But under the radar, Yelich is showcasing the same skills necessary for one, albeit without the hideous BABIP.

Focusing on the more positive rate first, it appears that Yelich’s monstrous walk rate is thanks to an ability to lay off unattractive pitches; his chase rate this season ranks in the 98th percentile per Baseball Savant. But here’s what piqued my curiosity. The other day, I stumbled across an article in Reviewing the Brew that suggested Yelich is seeing fewer pitches in the zone since last season. While true in the aggregate, looking at 2020-21 as one chunk prevents us from unearthing a notable truth. Let’s get to the bottom of it. Below is a rolling average graph showing Yelich’s zone rate over time, beginning a couple of years ago:

Consider the roller coaster ride. Before his transformation into a destroyer of baseballs, Yelich saw an above-average rate of strikes. That rate remained stable into his 2018 MVP campaign, perhaps because pitchers were caught off-guard by his late-season tear. The following year, though, they got the memo. In response to Yelich’s newfound might, the graph illustrates how pitchers began to shy away from the zone.

So far, so sensical. What’s interesting, however, is that the downward trend continued into 2020, despite Yelich battling through an extended slump that resulted in the worst season of his career by wRC+. At the very least, he seemed to take advantage of the increasing abundance of balls. As Tony Wolfe pointed out last year, Yelich effectively turned into Joey Gallo by cutting down his swing rate from 45.2% in 2019 to 34.6% in ’20. Unfortunately, his whiff rate – even against in-zone pitches – trended in the wrong direction, pushing up both walks and strikeouts.

Now it’s 2021. As I alluded to earlier, Yelich is still a patient hitter, and his 38.2% swing rate also suggests that he’s retained most of his 2020 self. The difference? His zone rate (48.0%) has skyrocketed this season, to the point where it’s similar to that of previous years (50.8% in 2018).

More strikes, but with the same passive approach – that seems like a recipe for disaster. But as of this writing, Yelich possesses the highest walk rate of his career. He’s managed to shave off a bit of his strikeout rate, too. That’s been possible because of how pitchers have allocated their extra strikes. Here’s a plot of Yelich’s yearly zone rate since 2017 by count type (ahead, even, or behind), from which we can gain some insight:

When Yelich is ahead in the count this season, his zone rate hasn’t seen a significant increase. Maybe pitchers are reluctant to challenge him – their escape is via a surefire strike, which Yelich has crushed multiple times in his career. It’s better to nibble around the edges, I suppose. Elsewhere, though, pitchers have caught on. The strikeout totals aren’t that hideous because Yelich’s contact rates have rebounded somewhat, but they’re still a few ticks below their pre-pandemic norms.

It’s a problem. More than ever, Yelich is having a difficult time defending himself against a barrage of strikes in unfavorable situations. Sean Doolittle, seemingly aware of this, threw a fastball down the middle against Yelich for… strike three.

Look at that smirk. He knows what he did!

But besides that example, how has Yelich responded overall? Compared to 2020, his swing rates are up across all counts. That’s good when he’s behind, and not as good when he’s ahead, though it could be that he’s targeting obvious strikes. Either way, Yelich is earning his walks. Looking at the numbers, however, I began to wonder – should Yelich become even more aggressive when behind? His swing rate in those instances is up, sure. But at 39.8%, it’s still lower than the 48.2% he posted in 2018, the year when he last saw a similar rate of strikes.

Let’s try and evaluate Yelich’s swing decisions using basic game theory. Consider a showdown between him and a pitcher with the count 0-and-1. What should each player strive to accomplish? For the pitcher, the best-case scenario is reaching 0-and-2. Since the start of the Statcast era, batters have recorded a .357 wOBA on 0-and-1; with an additional strike, that number drops precipitously to .166. Missing the zone en route to 1-and-1 isn’t as bad one might think, as batters pick up just 17 points of wOBA. It’s no wonder they’re considered behind.

On the other end, Yelich’s utmost goal is to avoid reaching 0-and-2. But to swing or to take, that is the question. Swinging seems like the most logical option, but there’s a good chance Yelich will end up whiffing or fouling off the pitch. Taking a strike isn’t the end of the world, but there are also obvious balls a hitter should never go after. And what about the borderline pitches that could go either way? Hitting is hard!

Amidst a hairy situation, here’s what I did. Based on Yelich’s contact, whiff, and foul rates this season, I calculated the average value of an in-zone swing in terms of wOBA, as well as an out-of-zone swing. The value of taking a strike or ball was based on the count-based wOBAs I described earlier. With these numbers, I was able to construct a two-by-two payoff matrix, with each cell containing the wOBA loss/gain of the pitcher (left of the comma) and the batter (right of the comma) that’s dependent on the actions taken:

For example, swinging at a strike would net Yelich 38 points of wOBA and lose pitchers the same amount. The latter are offering Yelich a strike 39% of the time in 0-and-1 counts. But is this optimal? For our sake, let’s say optimization means pitchers throw strikes at a rate that makes Yelich indifferent to swinging or taking. In other words, equalizing the payoffs robs him of a preference. Do the math, and it turns out the equilibrium point for pitchers is 35.5% strikes – quite close to their actual rate.

We can also find an equilibrium point for the hitter, Yelich. This time, it’s a matter of making sure pitchers are indifferent to throwing a strike or a ball, and the math suggests Yelich needs to swing 58.6% of the time in pursuit of that goal. Sounds too high? It probably is: I sorted all 0-and-1 pitches into simple strikes or balls, but as mentioned earlier, the reality is that a fair number of balls are flat-out uncompetitive pitches. Disregard them, and Yelich’s ideal swing rate is deflated. Even if we conservatively estimate it as 50%, however, it’s still a far cry from Yelich’s actual swing rate of 39.3% in 0-and-1 counts. Small sample caveats apply – he’s seen 84 of them so far this season – but there’s potential evidence that Yelich is missing out by letting strikes pass by.

Here’s an easier way to think about this. After factoring in zone rate, Yelich is expected to lose 50 points of wOBA by swinging. Taking a pitch loses 66 points, also bad, but which one is the lesser of two evils? You certainly wouldn’t want to swing every time, but faced with these payoffs, swinging a majority of the time makes sense. The math bears out our intuition.

For fun, I repeated the process using Yelich’s ridiculous 2019 output. Ready? To neutralize Yelich, pitchers needed to throw strikes roughly 20% of the time! Nobody would have followed that advice, of course, but it goes to show how terrifying Yelich was. He crushed pitches in the zone. He crushed pitches outside the zone, too, even when behind in the count.

It’s the version of the slugger we lament the disappearance of. But all things considered, it’s been a rough two-or-so years for Yelich. His 2019 campaign came to a premature halt after a knee injury, which then segued into a truncated, strange 2020 season. Mere days into the current season, back issues sent Yelich to the Injured List, where he remained for a month. Expecting him to attack the ball with his former authority is a bit unreasonable. And arguably, Yelich’s reluctance to swing is a precaution against re-aggravating his back.

But as far as adjustments go, raising his aggression to match that of pitchers, who are adhering to both a new and old book on himself, is a simple one. As Yelich recuperates, the various components of his game are likely to come together. It’ll be interesting to observe how he and opposing pitchers adjust against each other over the course of an entire season, engaging in a dance of zero sums. How high will Yelich’s zone rate climb? At what point does he swing enough for pitchers to change course and offer more balls instead? This piece’s title suggests the book on him is fixed. In reality, it’s constantly being updated.

On hiatus since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, FanGraphs’ Learning and Developing a Pitch series returns with three pitchers — Michael King, Lucas Luetge, and Jordan Romano — telling the stories behind their sliders.

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Michael King, New York Yankees

“I’ve been developing a slider since my freshman year of college. I was always bigger curveball, and then I had like seven different grips in college. I could never get consistent with anything — not consistent movement, not consistent location — and it just never felt comfortable. So I always used to say that I was a sinker/slider guy that didn’t have a slider.

“Once I got drafted in 2016, I said, ‘I don’t care what it does, I’m sticking with this grip so I can at least locate it.’ In 2018 is when I finally felt like I was consistent with the shape and the location. Then we got a new pitching director, Sam Briend, and he said, ‘Your slider is terrible. It’s located well, but it doesn’t have a good movement profile. Let’s fix it.’

“In 2019, I got hurt, and then it was the whole process of trying to change the movement profile. I wanted it to be more horizontal, more sweepy, like [Corey] Kluber’s, rather than the slider I had, which just had a little bit of depth. This year I’m finally figuring it out. Having Kluber on my team, I could talk to him about his grip, what his mentality is, what he’s trying to do at release.

“A big thing for me was, because I wanted to get that sweep and horizontal, I would get really rotational with my body to try to pull it sideways. [Kluber] said that’s the opposite of what you want to do. He said to just let the grip do the work. Read the rest of this entry »

Jimmy Nelson has had a rough few years, facing the most harrowing tribulation of a professional pitcher: persistent injuries. In 2015 and 2016, Nelson tossed 177.1 and 179.1 innings, respectively, with a cumulative ERA of 4.37 and 2.5 WAR. That WAR total over 356.2 innings put him on about a 1.56 WAR per 180 innings pace, about what we might expect from a back-end starter. Given how many innings he was able to shoulder, he was a valuable contributor. The following season, Nelson broke out. He added almost a tick to his fastball and increased the usage of his two breaking balls with great results. He posted a 3.49 ERA in 2017. His strikeout rate increased from 18.5% in his prior two seasons to 27.3% and he trimmed his walk rate by about 33% while maintaining an above average groundball rate of 50.3%. These improvements added up to an astounding 4.8 WAR in 175.1 innings, a massive leap that placed him eighth in baseball among starters.

But the end of the 2017 season marked the start of a string of injuries that kept Nelson off the mound for much of the past three seasons. The first came in September of his superlative 2017. Running the bases following a single against the Cubs, Nelson took a hard turn around first and was forced to dive back to the bag after inducing a throw from the defense. Upon extending his arm to the base, he tore the labrum and rotator cuff in his right arm, comprising his shoulder capsule and incurring nerve damage; the injury kept Nelson out for all of 2018. He returned to the Brewers on June 5, 2019, made four appearances (three of them starts) and suffered an elbow injury that forced him off the mound until September of that same year when he then made six more appearances. In just 22 innings of work, he had a less-than-stellar 6.95 ERA and walked over 16% of the batters he faced. Milwaukee did not tender him a contract that offseason.

The Dodgers signed Nelson that winter, with the intent of rehabilitating someone who was among the most effective pitchers in the majors. But Nelson suffered a back injury in spring training prior to the COVID-19 shutdown, forcing him to have surgery on his back. That injury, according to Nelson himself, was the result of “mechanical compensations that developed over time going back from the shoulder.” He missed all of 2020 but the Dodgers brought him back on a minor-league contract, hoping he could rediscover some of his prior form and fortify a bullpen that lost its second, fifth, and ninth most-used arms, including Jake McGee, who was the team’s most valuable reliever by WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 3, 2020, J.D. Davis hit a hard grounder between second and first, fielded cleanly by Freddie Freeman for a simple force out of the runner heading to second. This routine play might have been forgotten if not for the fact that Mike Soroka, the Braves’ consensus ace after a sterling rookie campaign in 2019, took an awkward step while trying to cover first base and limped out of the game. Nearly a year later, Soroka has not returned to a pitcher’s mound, and now, it’ll likely be at least another year until he can do so again, as a torn Achilles tendon — a repeat of the injury that knocked him out last season — will shelve him for the rest of ’21 and probably into ’22.

Last August, Soroka was immediately sent off for an MRI, which revealed that he had torn his right Achilles tendon. You know an injury is serious when a team’s rivals are offering their condolences nearly instantly.

“It kind of makes you sick, honestly,” Mets outfielder Michael Conforto said. “I can tell you a lot of us felt that way, just the way he went down and what we were hearing it was. … We heard it was the Achilles. He’s a bright young star, and we know he’ll come back and be the same guy.”

This wasn’t Soroka’s first major injury setback. After debuting in early 2018, shoulder inflammation shut him down quickly, costing him the rest of that season. He showed few signs of that malady in 2019, throwing 174 2/3 innings with a 2.68 ERA and 4.03 FIP for an even 4 WAR — good enough of a year to rank him highly among other young pitchers in Braves history.

I was an NL Rookie of the Year award voter in 2019, and though I gave my first-place vote to Pete Alonso, I wasn’t too far from giving it to the young Braves hurler instead. As you might expect, ZiPS was also a huge fan of Soroka going into the COVID year.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve now reached the true halfway point of the season and the best teams in both leagues have continued to pull away from the pack. It’s looking like the Wild Card teams in both leagues will need to win around 95 games to ensure their playoff spot. That’s a lot of ground to make up for the squads that are well off that pace and the group of teams on the bubble has started to shrink as teams start to drop out of contention.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (50%/50% FIP- and RA9-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking.

The top tier grew after the Padres, Rays, and Astros had really strong weeks. The six teams that make up this tier each have a run differential of at least +77 and hold a commanding grip on a playoff spot.

After holding the best record in baseball for the last few weeks, the Giants finally moved into the top spot in these rankings. They swept the Angels in a two-game series early last week and won their series against their Bay Area rivals over the weekend. They’ve won 10 of their last 12 games and have scored 6.9 runs per game during this hot stretch. With a Rays-esque roster that’s incredibly flexible and a fantastic rotation led by Kevin Gausman and Anthony DeSclafani, they’ve proven their success this year is no fluke. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, Trevor Bauer had a rough start. In six innings, he struck out 10 Padres, but that’s where the highlights ended. He walked four and gave up three home runs, pushing his season total to 17 homers allowed. They were all solo shots, which limited the damage, but still: three home runs isn’t a good day’s work. After the game, Bauer was understandably defensive:

"I have the worst home run luck in the league. Every time I make a little mistake it leaves the yard." — Trevor Bauer on his 3 solo shots allowed tonight. #Dodgers

— Michael J. Duarte (@michaeljduarte) June 24, 2021

Now, “little mistakes” are hard to measure. Consider this titanic Manny Machado blast, for example:

Mistake? Maybe. But how do you define a mistake pitch? That was an 82.6 mph slider, roughly two ticks faster than Bauer’s average for the pitch. Per Statcast, it had 16 inches of total break (against spin-less movement), roughly 1.5 inches less than his average slider breaks. He left it over the plate, but not excessively so; five inches above the bottom of the zone. He doesn’t locate sliders there often, but the previous three had resulted in two swinging strikes and a pop out.

So was this a sublime effort by Machado or a bad pitch by Bauer? I’d lean towards the former — though Bauer would have a better argument on his pitch to Victor Caratini later in the game. But that’s hardly a scientific way of looking at it, and I wanted to do at least slightly better. Otherwise, how will we evaluate Bauer’s claim that he’s the unluckiest man on the planet, at least when it comes to home runs? Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani’s amazing season aside, not too much has gone the Angels’ way thus far. Mike Trout is injured, Anthony Rendon has struggled, Albert Pujols has been productive — but only after being cut by the Angels and picked up by the Dodgers — and the team’s defense has been dreadful enough to undo a rotation that appeared to be solid coming into the year. Justin Upton contributed to their miseries by playing quite badly on both sides of the ball in the early going, but after a torrid month, he’s landed on the Injured List with a lower back strain.

The 33-year-old Upton exited Tuesday night’s game against the Giants after two plate appearances due to lower back tightness. He didn’t play on Wednesday, and when he wasn’t included in the lineup on Friday, manager Joe Maddon said that he anticipated Upton returning this past weekend. When he arrived at the ballpark and underwent testing, however, trainers determined that he would need more time to heal, and so the Angels placed him on the IL, backdating his stint so that he will be eligible to return on July 3.

Upton is hitting .247/.336/.480 with 14 homers overall; his 125 wRC+ is his best mark since 2017, and fourth among Angels regulars behind Trout (193), Ohtani (174), and Jared Walsh (143). That’s quite a turnaround given his descent into replacement territory in the previous two seasons and the first part of this one:

Read the rest of this entry »

After hitting 62 home runs over his first two seasons in the big leagues — his age-21 and age-22 seasons, no less — Gleyber Torres was hailed as baseball’s next superstar. Even in lineups featuring Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, and Gary Sánchez, no Yankees player hit more homers over the 2018 and ’19 seasons than Torres. And while subpar defense limited his overall ceiling, his 5.6 WAR over that stretch still represented an impressive output for a player that young.

In 2020, however, the power that defined Torres’ offensive production all but disappeared. Torres, who posted a .235 ISO in 1,088 plate appearances over his first two seasons, slashed just .243/.356/.368 last season, good for a .125 ISO. He homered just three times in 160 plate appearances, but improved plate discipline — his walk rate jumped 5.5 points compared to his career averages, while his strikeout rate fell 5.6 — drove what remained above-average offensive output. Torres still posted a 106 wRC+, but he couldn’t outhit his defense like he had the two years prior and posted just 0.2 WAR.

Read the rest of this entry »