Doug Latta’s name is well known in the baseball world, and for good reason. The long-time hitting instructor has worked with a plethora of players over the years, including a number of major league notables, at his Ball Yard facility in Northridge, California. Latta has been featured here at FanGraphs previously — most recently by Sung Min Kim in 2019 — and we’ll hear from him again in the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series.

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David Laurila: I’ve asked a lot of hitters if they view hitting as more of an art or more of a science. A lot of people reading this might assume you’d say science, but is that actually the case?

Doug Latta: “No, and it’s not just both. It’s more than that. It’s a combination of science and art and everything in between. People look at a swing as a mechanical thing, and they’ll look at all of the [physical] elements, like movements, but there is an incredible psychological-and-mental side that plays into hitting in a game. You’ve got to transcend the mechanical side, because hitting is quite a feat at the major-league level.”

Laurila: Does the swing itself get overemphasized by some hitting instructors?

Latta: “I think a lot of instructors look at the swing itself, and part of that is, ‘This was a swing that did X in a game versus the swing you took the other day.’ I’ve always seen it as how we move. The things that may or may not affect us happen long before we initiate the swing. We talk about movement patterns and how that plays a role in what swing is going to come out. If your body isn’t working in an optimal way, the swing that’s going to come out is going to be affected.”

Laurila: You shy away from addressing guys you work with, but I assume Hunter Pence is fair game given that he’s spoken openly about what he learned from you?

Latta: “He would definitely be an outlier example of a body that moves in a different way than most other people. It’s almost an awkward movement pattern. Hunter came to us and make some changes during the 2018 offseason, and his 2019 year was incredible. He was able to integrate the changes, which were so different than everything else his body had been doing for 28 years.

“It’s also not only what his body was patterned to do, but how he would think about hitting — the concepts of hitting and how he would regard his moves. So, when the changes were made, it wasn’t just movements. It was thoughts. I love hearing Hunter talking about hitting now, because late in his career he was able to tap into the movements.”

Laurila: With the caveat that not every hitter is the same, what do all hitters need to do to be successful? What are the core components?

Latta: “I think the biggest core component is they have to move athletically. I’m constantly talking about balance, because balance is the integral element to athletic movement. And in hitting, a lot of moves we make really aren’t based on balance. When we start moving better, from the standpoint of clean moves to a position to hit, this changes a lot of things for the positive. For instance, timing and vision are improved. These are intangible elements that people often don’t consider. They’re looking at a hitter and saying, ‘Let’s change a swing,’ whereas when we move better, we see the ball better. If seeing the ball better isn’t a good thing for a hitter, I’m not sure what it is.

“When people start understanding that small compensation moves will affect how you see the ball — and how you move to do that — it makes sense that you essentially need to make hitters more efficient. Pitching has been getting really far ahead from the standpoint of development over the last 10 years, and not just in the major leagues; it runs all the way down to the minor leagues into the amateur side. The quality of pitching is going up, so hitters need to be more efficient. When the body moves efficiently, hitters are so much more effective, and that goes well beyond ‘executing a swing.’
Read the rest of this entry »

As you might have noticed if you were surfing FanGraphs while relaxing over the weekend — or recovering from shoveling snow in the Northeast — the ZiPS projections have now been populated in the projections section of the site.

There will be multiple updates to those projections this spring because, well, a whole bunch of the offseason remains, far more than is typical when ZiPS makes its appearance in the database. While I’m more cautiously optimistic than most of my colleagues are about the future of the 2022 season, in the present, baseball’s landscape is less about fans huddled around an abstract hot stove and more about the heat death of the universe. With no MLBPA members being signed, traded, or even acknowledged on official MLB channels, baseball has nearly entered a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.

While this is bad for the game and anyone who likes it, it at least makes depth charts less volatile and provides a good opportunity to run some mid-lockout standings. These are quite obviously nowhere near the final preseason projections, but they’re a snapshot of where baseball stands right now. Which teams are in good shape, and which ones still have work to do? Let’s forget about the eternal void that beckons and get to some projections! Read the rest of this entry »

As one of the few remaining free-agent pitchers, there will be a time (hopefully) soon enough when Carlos Rodón is a hot commodity. A pitcher coming off a 4.9 WAR season usually doesn’t have serious contract questions attached to them, but that’s the case for Rodón, who amassed that WAR total in only 132.2 innings and was given significant rest between starts, as his velocity dipped significantly over the course of the year. The end result is that he didn’t receive a qualifying offer from the White Sox and remained unsigned as the lockout began.

Rodón’s injury history combined with the in-season fatigue is alarming on its own, but a pitcher who can put together a 5-win season in under 200 innings deserves a fair assessment. How likely is it that those fatigue issues occur again, and if they do, what team is best suited to handle a mixed starter/reliever workload?

We’ll start with assessing the fatigue issues. As noted, Rodón threw 132.2 innings in 2021 — rather remarkable, considering he had only thrown 42.1 innings in ’19 and ’20 combined. Innings jumps that large are understandably scary, but every pitcher experienced that after the 2020 season; Rodon’s was the 24th largest year-to-year increase from that season to last year. That is something, but there was a significant lack of workload for Rodón in 2019 as well. Where does he rank in terms of innings jumps from 2019 and ’20 combined to 2021?

Many of the pitchers here have suffered significant injuries before and once again ran into injury troubles this past season. Regardless, the jump for Rodón was not unprecedented; what’s maybe more concerning is the velocity drop in-season.

Rodón’s velo saw a more characteristic switch after his last start of seven-plus innings on July 18. Before then, there was a clearer build-up from innings 1–3 to innings 4–6; after, the relationship breaks. That start on the 18th was seemingly max effort the whole time, with the highest early-inning velocity he’d shown all year. There’s nothing that we can reasonably assume about the nature of his shoulder fatigue, whether it’s this one start that caused trouble or having hit a wall in general, but his season decline began there. He had built up to 89.2 innings before that July 18 start; everything after has the caveat of him either throwing through noticeable injury, receiving extended periods of rest, or spending time on the IL.

If we take those 89.2 innings as a benchmark of the healthy Rodón, we can look at other year-to-year workload increases to get a sense of what may be reasonable.

For those that do throw somewhere in the range of 90 innings, jumps in the range of 30–40 innings are within reason, although many of those who fall into that 80–90 range are midseason call-ups. In the 130-inning range, best-case jumps top out at 20 or so innings. Barring injury and without much else information to bake in, we would expect Rodón in 2022 to fall somewhere between 110 and 150 innings.
Read the rest of this entry »

As you might have noticed if you were surfing FanGraphs while relaxing over the weekend — or recovering from shoveling snow in the Northeast — the ZiPS projections have now been populated in the projections section of the site.

There will be multiple updates to those projections this spring because, well, a whole bunch of the offseason remains, far more than is typical when ZiPS makes its appearance in the database. While I’m more cautiously optimistic than most of my colleagues are about the future of the 2022 season, in the present, baseball’s landscape is less about fans huddled around an abstract hot stove and more about the heat death of the universe. With no MLBPA members being signed, traded, or even acknowledged on official MLB channels, baseball has nearly entered a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.

While this is bad for the game and anyone who likes it, it at least makes depth charts less volatile and provides a good opportunity to run some mid-lockout standings. These are quite obviously nowhere near the final preseason projections, but they’re a snapshot of where baseball stands right now. Which teams are in good shape, and which ones still have work to do?
Let’s forget about the eternal void that beckons and get to some projections! Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Bishop has barely gotten started. Drafted 10th overall by the San Francisco Giants in 2019 out of Arizona State University, the 23-year-old outfielder has logged just 202 professional plate appearances due to a COVID-canceled 2020 minor-league campaign and a shoulder injury that shelved him for much of last season. He’s done his best to make up for lost time. Shaking off some of the rust in the Arizona Fall League, the left-handed hitting Palo Alto, California native put up a .754 OPS in 51 plate appearances with the Scottsdale Scorpions.

Bishop — No. 8 on our newly-released Giants Top Prospects list — talked about his evolution as a hitter, and the challenges of coming back from two lost seasons, toward the tail end of his AFL stint.

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David Laurila: You were drafted out of ASU in 2019. How much have you changed since that time?

Hunter Bishop: “A lot. There were some things I did in college that were really good, but the college program is so different. How they pitch you is different. For one, you’re going from metal to wood. So, I would say that I’ve changed a lot as a hitter, and more than anything it’s the mental part of the game. It’s understanding what pitchers are trying to do to you, more than the actual mechanics of hitting.”

Laurila: That said, have your mechanics changed at all? If I compared video of you in college to now, would I see the same guy?

Bishop: “I’d say that mechanically it’s the same. The only thing I’ve changed is that in college, my hands were like this — the bat was pointing straight up; it was off my shoulder. Now I start it on my shoulder. But I get to the same exact position.”

Laurila: Why, and when, did you make that change? Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Wells is well-regarded, albeit with a lot to prove on the defensive side of the ball. There’s little doubt that he can mash. No. 15 on our recently-released New York Yankees Top Prospects list, Wells went deep 16 times in 469 plate appearances last year between Low-A Tampa and High-A Hudson Valley. His left-handed stroke produced a solid .264/.390/.476 slash line, while his wRC+ was an every-bit-as-sturdy 135.

Wells is built to bash — he packs 220 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame — and his size is also befits a backstop. That’s what he wants to be. Asked about his positional future during his stint in the Arizona Fall League, Wells shared that he’s caught since he was six years old, and plans to continue doing so. Since being drafted 28th-overall in 2020 out of the University of Arizona, all 70 of his defensive games have been spent behind behind the dish. Moreover, “there haven’t been any conversations about playing anywhere else.”

Wells was preparing to play in the Fall Stars Game when I caught up to him, and the first thing I wanted to address were the nuances of his craft. I began by asking what role analytics play for a young, minor-league catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins starting rotation is a clear area of weakness for the team as they head into the 2022 season. The departures of José Berríos, J.A. Happ, and Michael Pineda, plus Kenta Maeda’s elbow injury, drained the group of some serious talent. Before the lockout, Minnesota’s only move to address this concern was to add Dylan Bundy on a one-year deal. For all sorts of reasons, it seems clear the team just isn’t likely to bring in another quality starter from outside the organization. Instead, I suspect the Twins are hoping some of their young starters will take a significant step forward in 2022.

Bailey Ober, Joe Ryan, and Randy Dobnak have fewer than 50 career starts between them but each is likely to hold down a significant role this year. Earlier this week, I examined Ober’s deep arsenal and the path he could take toward a breakout sophomore season. Despite being injured for most of 2021, the five-year extension Dobnak signed before the season should give him a long leash to prove he can be a successful major league starter. Luke Hooper already investigated the intriguing addition of Jharel Cotton to the pitching staff (though his role is far from defined at this point). As for Ryan, he has a fascinating profile that has the potential to be the best of the bunch.

Ryan was a seventh round pick in the 2018 draft out of Cal State Stanislaus. He was assigned to Low-A that same year and started racking up tons of strikeouts. After blowing through three levels of the minors in 2019, he started appearing on Rays prospect lists, debuting at 13th on the 2020 list as a 45 FV. In all, he compiled a 36.7% career strikeout rate as a member of Tampa Bay’s farm system. Questions about his fastball, which sat around 90-94 mph, and a lack of quality secondary stuff held him back from rising any higher on our prospect lists despite the elite results he was putting up at each level.

Eventually, Ryan was traded to the Twins in the Nelson Cruz deal and made his major league debut on September 1. The strikeouts continued to come in the big leagues, as he sent down 30% of the batters he faced on strikes. He wound up with a 3.43 FIP and a phenomenal 6.00 strikeout-to-walk ratio across his five starts during the final month of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

A fact: Among the 157 pitchers with a minimum of 400 innings pitched since 2016, Dodgers southpaw Julio Urías has the lowest home run per fly ball rate (HR/FB) at 8.4%. The distance between him and second-place Brad Keller (10.1%) is the same as the distance between Keller and 20th-place Rich Hill (11.8%). It’s no wonder that Urías has been terrific so far in his career – he’s controlled the contact he allows like no other.

Also a fact: The reason why xFIP still holds up as a decent ERA estimator is because most pitchers, regardless of their talent level, tend to drift towards a league-average HR/FB rate. Yet here’s Urías, resisting the inevitable pull of regression before our very eyes. Does he have a secret? Or is he merely running from the grim reaper, time ticking with each step? I’m still not sure! But if you’ll allow, here are a few educated guesses that hopefully make sense.

First things first, I need to address a common possibility. As Jeff Zimmerman demonstrated years ago, pitchers with higher fly ball rates also have lower HR/FB rates. That’s because they also get their fair share of popups, so the denominator ends up outpacing the numerator. But even though Urías isn’t a groundball pitcher, he isn’t a notable fly ball pitcher, either. He’s 37th among the aforementioned 157 in terms of fly ball rate – above-average, sure, but not extreme enough to explain his deflated career HR/FB mark. Our answers, if any, lie elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

If you wanted to design a puzzle to attract my interest, you couldn’t do much better than pitchers who throw both sinkers and four-seamers. I love thinking about pitching. I love thinking about fastball spin, and I’ve been having a blast looking at approach angle recently. Want to kick it into overdrive, though? Add in platoon splits, and we’re really cooking with gas.

One of those weird, of-course-this-exists-but-we-don’t-talk-about-it splits is groundball pitchers against flyball hitters and vice versa. I first learned about this split in The Book, and while it’s always made sense, Alex Chamberlain put it into a pretty picture recently that brought it back to mind for me:

fly ball hitters perform better against ground ball pitchers, and ground ball hitters perform better against fly ball pitchers

(y-axis: pitcher influence on launch angle
x-axis: hitter LA, absent pitcher influence
colors: hitter wOBAcon bins) pic.twitter.com/K43Kj868T5

— Alex "Oxlade" Chamberlain (@DolphHauldhagen) January 21, 2022

There are some terms you might not know on there, like pitcher influence on launch angle. For that, you should read Alex’s work on launch angle here. Honestly, you should probably just read all of Alex’s stuff anyway – but particularly for this, his work is invaluable.

The key takeaway here? Against groundball hitters, sinkers are an excellent choice of pitch. The hitter tends to hit the ball into the ground and sinkers generally influence launch angles downward. The result is frequently a grounder, which is great for the defense. Similarly, if you’re facing a fly ball hitter, you want them to hit it even higher into the air, which means a four-seamer with solid rise is the ticket. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Vilade knows what he does best with a bat in his hands. He also knows what he needs to do better. The son of a longtime coach — James Vilade has tutored hitters at both the college and minor-league levels — the 22-year-old outfield prospect possesses a smooth right-handed stroke, albeit one that has propelled fewer balls over fences than his size would suggest. Since being selected 48th overall out of a Stillwater, Oklahoma high school in 2017, the 6-foot-2, 225 pound Vilade has gone yard just 29 times in 1,783 professional plate appearances.

But he can square up a baseball. Playing at Triple-A Albuquerque this past season — his first action above High-A — Vilade slashed a solid .284/.339/.410, earning himself a late-September cup of coffee in Colorado. Prior to the 2020 COVID shutdown, Vilade put up a .303/.367/.466 slash line for the California League’s Lancaster JetHawks.

Vilade — No. 3 in our newly-released Rockies Top Prospects list — discussed his hitting approach, and the adjustment that should lead to more dingers, late in the Arizona Fall League season.

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David Laurila: To start, who are you as hitter? What do you do well?

Ryan Vilade: “If I had to give a scouting report on myself, I would say that I drive the ball the other way really well. That’s my strength. One thing that I continue to work on is pulling ball in the air. I can do that well with off-speed; it’s the fastball that I go [opposite field] with. That doesn’t really bother me, because I feel like pulling the fastball is something that you just react to. But yeah, staying the other way and reacting off-speed. That’s kind of who I am.”

Laurila: Why is your swing conducive to driving the ball the other way? Read the rest of this entry »