There is an old adage in baseball that changing a hitter’s eye level pitch-to-pitch will lead to better outcomes for the pitcher. This makes sense on its face: compared to varying pitch heights and forcing a hitter to alter his bat path, throwing two consecutive pitches at the same height should make it easier for a batter to square up the ball. In a New York Times piece by Tyler Kepner, Mike Mussina discussed the importance of varying locations pitch-to-pitch to mess with the hitter’s eye, offering the example of throwing fastballs down and then countering with a pitch up in the zone. Kepner noted that the hitter’s eye would then be trained on a pitch higher in strike zone, affording the pitcher the opportunity to throw a curveball down to induce a groundball, or net a swing-and-miss. David Price has expressed a similar sentiment: “That’s always a big emphasis [for] me, just making sure I’m hitting spots with that fastball – two-seam, four-seam, both sides of the plate, moving it in, up, down.”

In research on the effect of eye level change on college hitters’ performance against fastballs, Higuchi et al. found that quick eye movement as a pitch traverses towards home plate has negative consequences for the hitter. This research was included in Driveline Baseball’s examination of hitters’ gazes when standing at the plate. On these pages in 2015, Jonah Pemstein looked into whether a pitch thrown at a different height than the one that followed it affected how umpires called the pitch at hand. Permstein surmised that this was indeed the case, with umpires less likely to call a pitch a strike at any height if the previous pitch was thrown at a different vertical location.

As I said up top, this all makes intuitive sense. But does it hold up to further scrutiny? The research I cited by Higuchi et al. only included six collegiate hitters and only considered fastballs. While their work was extremely thorough, its scope didn’t consider the hitter population many of us are most interested in (major league hitters) and only included fastballs at a time when pitches are leaning on breaking balls and offspeed pitches more than ever. Pemstein’s research looked at umpires, not hitters; his conclusions give us some confidence that behavior changes when pitchers vary their pitch location, but doesn’t provide insight into the strategy’s ability to flummox batters. I decided to delve into the data myself and see if there was any merit to this fundamental aspect of pitching strategy.

Using Statcast data from the past three seasons, I constructed various pitch sequence parameters to gauge the efficacy of changing the hitter’s eye level. The first parameter involved pitches that were in the strike zone, as defined by the MLB Gameday zone. Pitches in zones 1, 2, and 3 were coded as “up,” zones 7, 8, and 9 as “down,” and 4, 5, and 6 as “middle.” All other zones were considered off the plate. I focused on pitches in the strike zone because we know hitters are more likely to swing at those pitches and generally have success when they do. The in-zone swinging strike rate over this sample was 12.1%, while 28.1% of these pitches were put into play. Batters had a .349 wOBA on pitches inside this strike zone versus a .304 wOBA outside of it. Any degradation in performance on pitches inside the zone would be a real value-add for pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, the Mets announced that they would not offer a contract to Vanderbilt ace Kumar Rocker. New York had selected the right-hander with the 10th overall pick in the draft just a few weeks earlier, but backed out of a deal upon seeing his medicals. Rocker’s camp was understandably upset. Scott Boras released a statement on his client’s behalf, declaring that Rocker is healthy, ready to pitch, and set to embark on his professional career. It’s a gut-wrenching situation, particularly since no other team is allowed to sign Rocker. He plans to enter the 2022 draft, but for now, he’s in purgatory.

However disappointed Rocker and Mets fans justifiably are, there’s a larger, structural issue at play here, one that overshadows Rocker’s medicals, or even the Mets’ approach to handling them. Steve Cohen violated Rule No. 1 (never Tweet, Steve) but New York isn’t dangling Rocker’s big league dreams for sport: They picked Rocker in good faith and must have really disliked what they saw in his file, particularly since they didn’t have the foresight to take an overslot guy late in the draft as backup. After signing all of their other selections, the Mets wound up leaving more than $1 million in bonus pool money on the table. Nobody wins here.

Like Barret Loux and Brady Aiken before him, Rocker deserves better than to get the rug yanked out from under him like this. I’m sure he has many gripes with how this all played out, but his biggest shouldn’t be with the Mets, but rather with the draft itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Particularly when measured against their competitors in the NL West, the Padres did not have a very good trade deadline — or even a good July. While they added depth to their infield, outfield, and bullpen with a trio of trades, none of those were impact moves. Everything they did was overshadowed by their failure to reach the finish line on a deal for Max Scherzer that was reported as “close” by multiple reporters on Thursday night. Ultimately, though, the three-time Cy Young winner went to the division rival Dodgers in a move that turn(er)ed out to be bigger than anyone expected. Beyond that, the Padres could only watch as the Giants landed slugger Kris Bryant. And to add injuries to insult, the deadline dust had barely settled when San Diego had to place both Fernando Tatis Jr. and Chris Paddack on the Injured List on Saturday.

In his post-deadline ZiPS roundup from Monday, Dan Szymborski illustrated the summer swap meet’s impact on the Playoff Odds for each individual team. His estimates showed the Giants as the NL West’s biggest winner at the deadline, with the Dodgers winners (albeit with diminishing returns given where they started), and the Padres clear losers:

All of which is to say that the Padres hurt their chances with missed opportunities, and that was before they suffered the one-two punch of the Paddack and Tatis injuries. Chronologically, the Paddack injury came first, but as Tatis is the Padres’ marquee player, we’ll begin there. The 22-year-old shortstop once again suffered a left shoulder subluxation (partial dislocation) while sliding into third base against the Rockies on Friday night. After he singled in his first-inning plate appearance, he had headed to second on Manny Machado’s hot smash to third baseman Ryan McMahon, then lit out for third when the ball ball squirted away from McMahon while trying to transfer it to his glove. Tatis slid feet first, but in attempting to evade shortstop Brendan Rodgers‘ tag, he twisted, caught his left shoulder, and immediately grabbed his arm after being tagged out. Read the rest of this entry »

At 4 PM EST last Friday, the trade deadline closing bell rang, and when it did, those of us on the outside looking in were glued to Twitter to learn about the trades that had been completed right before the countdown clock hit zero. It usually takes a little while to learn about all the transactions that get completed in those final minutes. Plenty of players found new homes, but the surprise of the afternoon was that when the dust settled, Trevor Story was still a member of the Colorado Rockies.

The Rockies are 21 games out of first place in their division. Per our Playoff Odds (and good sense), their chances of reaching the postseason this year are a big fat zero, and have been for some time. They also play in the toughest division in baseball, with the Dodgers and Padres looking like teams that will sit at the top of the National League West standings for years to come. The Rockies need to make drastic changes in order to take on those two powerhouses (and the Giants aren’t exactly slouches), and those changes should have begun on Friday. Instead, they sat on their hands, losing a golden opportunity to kick-start a return to competitiveness for a franchise that has reached the playoffs just five times in 28 seasons and has still never won a division title.

Colorado did make one trade during deadline week, sending reliever Mychal Givens and his expiring contract to the Reds for a pair of fringe pitching prospects. But that’s not starting a re-build or, if that term strikes you as too strong, re-tooling the roster so much as it is taking care of some necessary chores. And while Givens departed, there were other players rumored to be on the move who ended up staying put. Holding on to Jon Gray is a curious decision. The team hasn’t earned the benefit of anybody’s doubt, but let’s give it to them in the case of Gray, who has publicly stated his desire to stay in Colorado. Player comfort leads to better player performance, and if they can sign him to an extension, this makes sense. The jury can still be out on that one. But Daniel Bard still being the teams’ closer on August 1 is significantly more difficult to explain. Again, there is surely some loyalty here, and the Rockies deserve some credit for getting Bard back on the mound and finding a decent late-inning option in the process, but as a free agent following the 2022 season (a season in which Colorado will almost certainly not contend), the club just squandered Bard’s peak trade value, and yet another chance to boost a farm system that is among the worst in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last month after being on hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment focuses on breaking balls and features a big-league reliever, Zack Britton, and a pair of prospects, Tim Cate and Alex Scherff.

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Zack Britton, New York Yankees

“Originally, I learned [my slider] in the minors, kind of at the same time I was learning the sinker. They taught me a slider grip, more of a four-seam grip, kind of hooking the horseshoe. It was pretty good. It always had a high swing-and-miss compared to my sinker, which had more contact. I threw it a lot as a starter, but then when I went to the bullpen I didn’t throw it as much. I just relied on the sinker.

“I started developing it more in 2018. When I came over here [to the Yankees], David Robertson was talking to me about how he threw his curveball. We were playing catch and I was interested in seeing how he gripped it. He kind of presets, so that he doesn’t really have to think about anything. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ So I started doing it on my slider.

“It actually turned my slider into more of… I guess, a slurve? They don’t really characterize it as anything. It’s 79 or 80 [mph], so it’s kind of slider velocity, but with a curveball break. It’s funky with how it sweeps. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday’s trade deadline was one for the ages. If you haven’t checked out all of our analysis here at FanGraphs, I highly recommend you do so. Most of this year’s swaps were of the prospects-for-free-agents-to-be variety, meaning it will take years to assess who got the most out of a trade. Hindsight is 20-20. Even when the Dodgers famously dealt Pedro Martinez for Delino DeShields, it was somewhat defensible at the time, though of course we all know how that ended up. And so in the wake of the deadline passing, I thought I would check in on how a seemingly irrelevant deal from the 2019 deadline is working out: the Angels acquisition of Max Stassi. The Angels are on life support at the moment, having dropped two of three to the Athletics over the weekend to fall below .500. Our latest projections give them a 1.1% chance to make the playoffs. But without the offensive output from Stassi over the past two months, those odds would be even lower.

Since his return from the Injured List on June 1, Stassi has been on a tear, emerging as a quality bat from an unlikely position. His 170 wRC+ is the seventh-best mark among hitters with at least 100 plate appearances over that stretch. He leads all catchers in wRC+ during that span, along with a handful of other categories, including slugging percentage.

As a catcher, he’s not getting the plethora of plate appearances that hitters at other positions get. He’s only eclipsed 200 plate appearances once, in 2018, when he played in 88 games for the Astros and hit .226/.316/.394 for an even 100 wRC+. He ended the year with 2.8 WAR mostly due to his superior skills behind the plate. In 2019, Astros sent him to the the Angels in exchange for two long-shot prospects in the aforementioned deadline deal. He’s a back-up catcher, or at least, he has been up until now. He thrived in a small sample as recently as last year when he slashed .278/.352/.533 with seven homers in just 105 plate appearances. He’s following it up with an even better campaign in 2021. So how has Stassi gone from a glove-first backstop to one of the league’s best hitting catchers? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s sad to say farewell to what I think was the best trade deadline in the years I’ve been covering baseball, but at least there’s still an autopsy to do! With the league moving to a single trade deadline after eliminating the August waiver-trade shenanigans, this was the last, best opportunity for teams to make changes as we head into the season’s closing chapters.

So who won, who lost, and who finished in the murky middle? To aid us in answering those questions, I ran two sets of ZiPS projections. First, I ran the projections as of Monday morning with each team’s post-deadline roster. Then I ran ZiPS again with today’s standings and current injuries, but having undone all the additions over the two weeks before the trade deadline (including differences in WAR between players). I then compared the pre- and post-deadline projections. Some differences surprised me. Others … did not. Read the rest of this entry »

While the rest of the baseball industry was focused on the flurry of rumors and trades leading up to Friday afternoon’s deadline, Joey Votto was mashing like never before. From Saturday, July 24 through Friday, July 30th, the Reds’ first baseman not only homered in seven consecutive games, he doubled up on back-to-back contests on July 27-28 against the Cubs. With a chance at tying the major league record for consecutive games with a home run on Saturday against the Mets at Citi Field, Votto managed just a groundout and a pair of routine fly balls against starter Rich Hill. He had another shot in the eighth inning against Seth Lugo, and whacked a center-cut changeup 109.4 mph off the bat, a drive with an expected batting average of .970, and an expected slugging percentage of 3.649…

…but it came just inches from going over the wall in right-center. Votto had to settle for a loud single. D’oh! Because the Mets tied the game in the ninth inning, he actually got one more shot in the 10th, but struck out against Edwin Díaz. Thus Votto fell short of becoming the fourth player to homer in eight straight games, and the first since Ken Griffey Jr. in 1993:

Read the rest of this entry »

This past week was one of the most action-packed trade deadlines in recent history. A perfect storm of motivated sellers with strong cores and contenders looking to avoid a one-game play-in led to a pile of big names changing teams, with marquee prospects coming back. With the caveat that instant reaction pieces like this one are educated guesses at best — we don’t know how any of the players traded will turn out, or what other offers teams made — let’s assign some winners, losers, and overall head-scratchers.

Winners

Los Angeles Dodgers
The Dodgers got the best pitcher and the best hitter traded at the deadline, and they did it in one trade. The NL West will be the hardest-fought division in baseball, regardless of who wins; all three contenders are in the top eight in baseball by actual record, Pythagorean record, and BaseRuns record. This is a Glengarry Glen Ross situation; first place is hugely important, and the prize for second place is a single-elimination game against your fellow divisional loser, with one of the best teams in baseball heading home with only one playoff game in the books.

By adding Max Scherzer and Trea Turner, the Dodgers accomplished two things. First, they managed to upgrade a roster that already had very few holes. The more talent you start with, the harder it is to find an upgrade, and many of the available players would have been marginal upgrades at best in Los Angeles. With Scherzer in the fold, no other starter who moved could have cracked their playoff rotation, and Turner lets them put All-Stars at every position on the field when the team is fully healthy.

Just as important, however, was the blocking value of the move. When it looked like Scherzer was on the way to San Diego, I wrote a transaction analysis of that deal that focused on how much of a boon adding Scherzer for a one-game playoff would be — it would be worth, per my rough math, a three percentage point better chance of winning that game as compared to starting Yu Darvish. If the Giants had acquired Scherzer, the upgrade from Kevin Gausman would have been even steeper. If the Dodgers end up in the Wild Card game despite their best efforts, they won’t have to face one of the best pitchers of our generation there — and both rivals will have to turn to lesser starters rather than Scherzer as the regular season wears on. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past two weeks, the FanGraphs staff has written over 50 pieces dedicated to analyzing the 2021 trade deadline, from Jay Jaffe’s Replacement-Level Killers series, which previewed teams’ positions of need, to Eric Longenhagen’s breakdown of the teams with impending 40-man roster crunch, to our analysis of every deadline move, to Ben Clemens and Dan Szymborski’s recaps of the deadline’s winners and losers. It’s a lot to sort through, so to assist you in finding anything you may have missed during the flurry, I’ve rounded up all of our deadline pieces in one place. You’ll find the broader preview and summary pieces (of which we’ll have a few more today, so stay tuned) listed first, followed by a team-by-team listing of the transaction analyses that involved your favorite squad, either as buyers or sellers. In instances where we dissected a transaction across multiple pieces — hello, Max Scherzer/Trea Turner trade! — you’ll see them grouped together.

As always, all of the pieces linked below are free to read, but they took time and resources to produce. If you enjoyed our coverage of the trade deadline and are in a position to do so, we hope you’ll sign up for a FanGraphs Ad-free Membership. It’s the best way to support our work and experience the site. Now, on to the roundup! Read the rest of this entry »