In 2021, I once again had an opportunity to interview numerous people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the Talks Hitting series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, and an assortment of Q&As and feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

———

“I knew that I had a high BABIP, but I had no idea it was the highest in history. Once he told me, it wasn’t like I was coming back to the dugout thinking, ‘Man, I think I’m having some bad luck.’ It was actually on paper, as a stat.” — Mitch Keller, Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher, January 2021

“Always trying to hit the ball way out in front is a recipe for a lot of strikeouts. Yeah, you’re going to hit some home runs, but you’re so susceptible to being pitched to that you limit the times in a game that you can truly do damage. You’re limited to the type of pitchers you can hit and the type of pitches you can hit.” — Dave Magadan, Colorado Rockies hitting coach, January 2021

“The guy that probably had the most power was actually Dean Palmer. He could hit a baseball a long ways. But Cecil… what he did was just incredible. And a lot of my home runs were with the bases empty, because I usually hit behind him, and he’d cleared them all. I hit with the bases empty a lot.” — Mickey Tettleton, 1980s-1990s slugger, January 2021

“An individual with a much lower spin rate, but a spin direction closer to 12:00 — high spin efficiency/active spin — can achieve significantly higher vertical break values than an individual who generates a much higher spin rate, but a spin direction further from 12:00.” — Eric Jagers, Cincinnati Reds assistant pitching coach, January 2021 Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Wiemer began tapping into his tools this year. Explosive but raw coming into his first full professional season, the 2020 fourth-round pick out of the University of Cincinnati slashed .293/.403/.556 and went deep 27 times in 472 plate appearances between Low-A Carolina and High-A Wisconsin. Moreover, he belied his 6-foot-5, 230-pound frame by swiping 30 bases in 36 attempts. It came as little surprise when the Milwaukee Brewers named the 22-year-old outfielder their 2021 Minor League Player of the Year.

Wiemer — No. 2 on our just released Brewers Top Prospects list — discussed his breakout in the penultimate week of the Arizona Fall League season, where he was playing for the Salt River Rafters.

———

David Laurila: You exceeded most expectations in your first professional season. What changes have you made as a hitter?

Joey Wiemer: “A lot of it has been cutting down on my head movement and getting lower in my stance. My thought process was mostly the same. Swing-wise, my hands… I’m really athletic when I hit, so I’m trying to think mechanically, as opposed to just competing. That’s in my cage work. In the game, it’s about trusting what I do in the cage.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on your stance?

Wiemer: “I’m lower and more widened out, with more of a toe-tap as opposed to the big leg kick I used to have. I started working on that in independent ball, during the 2020 season. I went out and played some indie ball so I could get some live ABs, get some reads, to really feel that change. And honestly, my swing is quicker now than it was at the start of this year. I have more hand movement, preload. I feel like everything is more direct now.”

Laurila: Whose suggestion was it get wider? Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres announced Bob Melvin’s 2022 coaching staff earlier this week, and the group is at once progressive and diverse. Notable among the new hires is 27-year-old hitting coach Michael Brdar, who comes to San Diego via the San Francisco Giants organization. Asked about him in Zoom session, Melvin — himself a newcomer to the club — told reporters that Brdar “Talks a language that I don’t talk; he talks the language that younger hitters are talking now.”

Clarifying that he does “talk it a little bit,” the 60-year-old, three-time Manager of the Year went on to say that “You need to be able reach these guys and speak their language.”

Following up on the question posed by MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell, I asked Melvin how much the hiring process has changed since he first joined the managerial ranks in 2003.

“I came here from Oakland, where we did everything pretty much in-house,” said Melvin, whose 11-year tenure with the A’s followed managerial stints in Seattle and Arizona. “We would look in-house to begin with; that was just kind of how the organization flowed. This was a little bit of a different process, knowing we were probably going to bring some guys in from the outside. We wanted it to be diverse in age, we wanted it to be diverse in thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, sinkers. Wait three years, and the “smart” view of them will change. In the early 2010s, they were the coolest. A few years later, they were a laughingstock, a sure way to make your franchise seem old-fashioned. Between 2015 and 2019, the league abandoned sinkers (and two-seam fastballs, which I’m including in today’s analysis) en masse. In the former, pitchers threw 148,000 sinkers. By the latter, that number fell to 116,000. That trend is still ongoing; 2021 saw only 109,000 sinkers.

Despite the downward trend in usage, sinkers are cool again. When the league switched to Hawkeye tracking technology in 2020, the public could suddenly see the impact of seam-shifted wake, an effect that creates movement that previously wasn’t being measured. Pure transverse spin — like a backspinning four-seam fastball — is one way to create movement. Seam-shifted wake is another, and sinkers have it in spades, though they also generate plenty of movement from spin.

What does that word salad mean? Basically, sinkers drop and fade more than you would expect given the spin that pitchers impart on them. It’s not like sinkers started moving more in 2020 when cameras caught this effect, but quantifying something makes it easier to look for and teach.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the last installment of this series, we looked at improbable home runs. I love a good wild-swinging home run, and Eddie Rosario and friends certainly delivered. It’s one of a small sliver of baseball moments that somehow makes the pitcher look good at the same time he gives up a home run. Likewise, the batter looks foolish and yet triumphant. There’s something for everyone.

Today, there isn’t something for everyone. This article is just GIFs of hitters looking bad. To hit a home run on a bad pitch, it has to be at least somewhat hittable; otherwise, you couldn’t hit it. If a pitch is in the opposite batter’s box, or bounces three feet in front of the plate, well, there’s no home run happening. To swing and miss, well: you just need a pitch.

There are no hidden heroes here. If anything, there are hidden goats. The pitchers who threw these pitches shouldn’t have expected to get a swing for their troubles. Almost exclusively, they missed their target. They just had the good fortune to mis-throw it to just the right guy. Let’s get started.
Read the rest of this entry »

This year I have the honor of casting a Hall of Fame ballot for the second time. Jay Jaffe does as well — we both joined the BBWAA in 2010 while colleagues at Baseball Prospectus — and as Jay stated in Friday’s episode of FanGraphs Audio, the exercise is every bit as challenging as it was 12 months ago. Defining worthiness is inherently subjective, and that would be the case even without PEDs and the character clause complicating matters. As it turned out, the latter of those two conundrum-inducers prompted me to drop one of last year’s selections. More on that in a moment.

As many of you have seen from Ryan Thibodaux’s invaluable Ballot Tracker, a number of voters remain stingy with their checkmarks. And they have that right. If you feel that only a small handful of the eligibles are worthy, you should vote accordingly. (Submitting a blank ballot is another thing entirely; the idea that no player in a given year meets acceptable standards is questionable at best.)

I am, unapologetically, “a Big-Hall” guy. For me, one of the biggest dilemmas has been deciding which of a dozen-plus deserving candidates will be excluded. Last year, Todd Helton and Jeff Kent stood out as players I agonized over and ultimately didn’t cast ballots for. The was especially true for Helton; I determined almost immediately afterward that he would get a checkmark this year. He did, while Kent — purely because there wasn’t room for him on my ballot — did not.

All 10 of the players I voted for a year ago returned to the ballot — and a pair of high-profile candidates were added — which accentuated the dilemma. By adding Helton, and one or two of the newcomers, I was going to have to drop multiple players whose numbers and impact on the game had not changed one iota. Read the rest of this entry »

Deep into the dog days of the offseason, it’s time to get extreme. You can crack open a Mountain Dew and do some skateboard tricks if you’d like. I won’t be joining you, though; I’m a little old for the skateboard tricks, and while I had some delicious watermelon-flavored Dew earlier this year, I’m drinking a peppermint tea while I write this. Instead, for my contribution to being extreme, I’m going to show you some home runs that were hit extremely far away from the center of the strike zone.

What’s that? This is an extremely cheesy introduction? You’re right again! The truth is, I wasn’t really sure how to introduce an article that will mainly be funny GIFs of home runs. Instead of spending a long time coming up with the best possible introduction, though, I’m just doing it off the cuff. Home runs: you love them. Home run GIFs: I love making them. Let’s have a party! Here are the five most extreme (for a very specific definition of extreme) home runs of 2021.
Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Davidson struggled to find himself in 2021. Two years after being drafted 29th overall by the Oakland A’s out of Clemson University, the 23-year-old shortstop slashed a paltry .212/.307/.313 with 155 strikeouts in 515 plate appearances with the Double-A Midland RockHounds. Continuity proved elusive. In almost chameleon-like fashion, Davidson went back to the drawing board time and again over the course of the season.

His quest to discover a productive stroke continued in the Arizona Fall League, where he put up numbers far more pleasing to the eye. Playing for the Mesa Solar Sox, Davidson logged a .274/.400/.411 slash line in 90 plate appearances. Promising as that was, punch-outs remained a problem. The switch-hitting infielder went down on strikes 33 times.

In a refreshingly candid interview during the penultimate week of the Arizona Fall League season, Davidson — No. 24 on our newly-released Oakland A’s Top Prospects list — discussed his 2021 struggles.

———

David Laurila: To start, how do you identify as a hitter?

Logan Davidson: “I’d say I’m gap-to-gap, a line-drive guy who is going to run into some power. I’m working on the strikeouts. Obviously, I’m a pretty big swing-and-miss guy right now. I’m trying to get a solid approach, seeing balls up and hitting pitches that I’m supposed to hit, and taking pitches you’re supposed to take. That’s pretty much it: a gap-to-gap guy who is working on cutting down the strikeouts.”

Laurila: Why have there been so many strikeouts? Read the rest of this entry »

We’re digging deep into the archives today. I’ve been meaning to write about a weird mathematical phenomenon in baseball for more than a year, and now seems like a great time to break it out. It all starts, naturally enough, with an Effectively Wild episode from 2019. That episode was about the Grand Junction Rockies’ name non-change – but it was also about the annual congressional baseball game.

Unless you follow Louisiana politics, you may not have heard of Cedric Richmond, but he figures prominently in our tale today. After a 10-year career in the House of Representatives (Orleans Parish, Louisiana), Richmond left to head the Office of Public Liaison. It’s a good thing for the balance of the annual congressional baseball game, because as Nathaniel Rakich so ably put it, Richmond was that contest’s equivalent of Mike Trout crossed with Max Scherzer, only if Scherzer got to pitch in every game.

At the time of the episode, Richmond had played eight congressional baseball games and amassed 2.5 WAR, which works out to a 50-WAR pace in a 162-game season, a number that doesn’t make any sense in the context of major league baseball. Richmond pitched at Morehouse, and while his pitching skills weren’t enough to float a minor league career, they’re comically better than your average congressperson’s. We’re talking about Jacob deGrom level dominance on the mound – at the time of the podcast, Richmond had put up a 2.20 ERA and struck out more than a quarter of the batters he faced, and completed all but one of the games he started. In a high-scoring environment (well, for people not facing Richmond), that worked out to 1.8 WAR on the pitching side.

We’re not here to talk about Richmond’s pitching, though. That’s great, and good, and his hitting is much funnier. He was hitting .652/.758/1.087, which is, uh… yeah, it’s off the charts. It’s hard to comprehend how good that is, in fact, because we don’t have any .650 hitters or .750 OBP types to create a mental framework. Read the rest of this entry »

There might not have been a bigger surprise performer in 2021 than Cedric Mullins. With just over 400 plate appearances spread across parts of three years prior, he had put up a cumulative 72 wRC+ and accumulated -0.4 WAR; this season, he pushed his wRC+ up to 136 and posted 5.3 WAR, the 14th highest mark among all position players. He also became just the 11th player to reach 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases in a single season over the last decade.

The catalyst for his breakout season was quite simple: Mullins quit switch-hitting and began batting exclusively from the left side. That discussion had begun all the way back in 2018, his debut season, when then-Orioles manager Buck Showalter suggested it to him. After struggling to establish himself in the majors for three seasons, he finally decided to rely on his natural swing during the offseason. “It was getting difficult to try and create two different swings,” he told MASN’s Steve Melewski in March. “I know my left-side is my natural side, so trying to develop my right-handed swing at the highest level was challenging.”

Switch-hitting has always been a scarce skill, but the number of players who can swing both ways has dwindled in recent years. In 2021, just 17 qualified batters (13.1%) were switch-hitters, right in line with the league-wide average over the last decade. Compare that to the decade between 1986 and ’95 (excluding the strike-shortened 1994 season), when more than one in five qualified batters (21.1%) hit from both sides, with a peak of 24.8% in ’89. With modern baseball strategy so heavily emphasizing the platoon advantage, it’s surprising to see so few switch-hitters these days. Giving up that advantage in every at-bat is a radical decision, and there’s barely any precedent for it.

The number of players who have dropped switch-hitting after making their major league debuts is tiny. J.T. Snow did it in 1999, halfway through his career. So did Orlando Merced in 1996. Shane Victorino flip-flopped between switch-hitting and batting right-handed after injuries forced him to give up left-handed batting at various points during his career. More recently, Tucker Barnhart gave up switch-hitting in 2019. But those previous examples were all players who had already established themselves in the majors. Mullins could have seriously damaged his chances of having a productive major league career if his decision went wrong.
Read the rest of this entry »