What’s the most important characteristic of a slider? Let me show you a table:

There are two things that might need explaining in here. The attack zones are Baseball Savant’s way of cutting the strike zone up into granular pieces, and I think they’re neat. They look like so:

Run values are from the batter’s perspective, so that -785 runs in the shadow zone means that batters have been 785 runs below average — what they’ve done on all pitches across the whole year — when they faced sliders in the shadow zone. In other words, sliders on the corners of the plate have been excellent — not really a shock.

What’s the most important characteristic of a slider, then? Well, allow me to show you a different table:

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It’s always a strange thing to see an all-time great donning an unfamiliar uniform at the tail end of his career. Even if the sights of Willie Mays in Mets pinstripes or Hank Aaron wearing a Brewers pullover — to say nothing of Babe Ruth as a Brave — predate your time as a viewer, they probably produce a double-take. Examples such as Ken Griffey Jr. in White Sox garb, Mike Piazza in A’s green and gold (or Padres blue and sand), or Randy Johnson in Giants black and orange might be more recent, but those sights are no less alien. Which brings us to Albert Pujols of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The 41-year-old Pujols, a future Hall of Famer who is one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs, was designated for assignment by the Angels last week. Not surprisingly, given that he was hitting just .198/.250/.372 while still due the bulk of this year’s $30 million salary, he cleared waivers, thus sticking the Angels for the lion’s share of that amount. After clearing waivers, he reportedly drew interest from three or four teams, but while it was easy to spitball a few possible destinations — the Cardinals given his status as franchise icon, the Reds because they’d just lost Joey Votto to a broken thumb, the White Sox because they’re managed by Tony La Russa, the Marlins because they could use an attendance bump — nobody saw the Dodgers as contenders for his services. Yet on Saturday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times‘ Jorge Castillo reported that the defending champions had signed Pujols to a major league deal for the remainder of the season. They’ll pay him the minimum salary while the Angels pick up the rest of the tab.

In a vacuum, the move was something of a head scratcher, but the Dodgers are amid an incessant wave of injuries that on the offensive side had already claimed center fielder Cody Bellinger, superutilityman Zach McKinstry, and infielder Edwin Ríos, and kept growing over the weekend. On Friday, left fielder AJ Pollock reaggravated a left hamstring injury that had limited him to three plate appearances in a week, and on Saturday, just hours after the Pujols news broke, so too did the fifth metacarpal in Corey Seager’s right hand, via a pitch from the Marlins’ Ross Detwiler. Given all the moving parts among the Dodgers’ multiposition players, the injury opens up a lane for Pujols to get some playing time, but whether he can improve upon his meager production to date is another story. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now a quarter of the way through the season and the biggest storyline has been the remarkable parity throughout baseball. A few pre-season favorites have continued to disappoint and some early season surprises have proven they’re for real, but with the standings so bunched up, anything could still happen. No team is on pace to win more than 100 games right now, and there are a gaggle of teams sitting just below or just above .500. With more teams sitting on the bubble between holding fast and selling, it should make for a dramatic summer.

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.

These two teams barely budged in the rankings this week. The White Sox crushed the Twins in a three-game series and then split a four-game set with the Royals that ended with a wild, walk-off win on Sunday. They now possess the best record in baseball backed by the best run differential in baseball. The concerns about how their offense and defense will perform without Luis Robert are still present — Billy Hamilton has been nearly as good in the field though definitely not with the bat. They’ll need to lean on their fantastic pitching staff even more to carry them through the season. Read the rest of this entry »

The best word to describe how teams are approaching the 2021 draft might be “uneasy.” Teams lean hard on things like the Cape Cod League and summer high school showcases, which the industry lost in 2020 due to the pandemic. Track records of performance are hard to come by because of it (as well as other factors), and teams are desperate for anything resembling a sure thing.

Entering the season, Vanderbilt right-hander Kumar Rocker looked like one of these few sure things. A highly regarded prep arm out of Georgia in 2018, he might have slipped into the first round that year had he not made it abundantly clear that without an elite bonus offer, he had every intention of honoring his college commitment. He’s succeeded since arriving in Nashville, stepping right into the weekend rotation and throwing a no-hitter in Super Regional Play as a freshman. With athletic bloodlines and the much-desired combination of above-average stuff and command, Rocker entered the season as a strong candidate to be selected by the Pirates with the No. 1 pick come July.

He’s certainly held up his end on a performance level. Through 13 starts for the Commodores, he’s struck out 118 over 81 innings and allowed just 47 hits and 25 walks. But on a stuff level, it’s been a different story, as the average firmness of Rocker’s fastball has ranged by as much as six miles per hour on average from one start to the next. He is still expected to be a top-five pick at minimum, and that 1–1 slot is in play for him as well, but for teams looking for consistency, the varying fastball is a bit troubling. For teams looking for answer as to his ability to handle a pro workload, it’s even more so.

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If you are a regular FanGraphs reader, chances are that you’re aware of the rise in strikeouts across the majors. At this point, bemoaning the rise in strikeouts is an essential component of the baseball media apparatus. Every season is accompanied by pieces on the subject. I found this type of article going as far back as 2013, and they have been especially prevalent in recent seasons. It seems to be a rite of passage to put out a piece on the increasing strikeout rate, so as a newly minted member of the baseball writing community, here is my entry in the genre.

For context, the league-wide strikeout rate has increased every season since 2005, when it sat at 16.4%. In 2021, that figure has risen to 24.1%. That is a 47% increase in 16 seasons. Not only has the strikeout percentage monotonically increased, but the rate at which it is increasing is growing. From 2005-09, the rate increased by 9.7%; from 2010-14, 10.3%. In the most recent five seasons, the strikeout rate increased by 11.6%.

The question is always who and what is driving this phenomenon, and the answer is almost always “well, there are a few factors at play.” One angle that I thought has been under-researched is hitter behavior with two strikes. You may have heard your favorite local newspaper columnist bemoan the idea that hitters do not have a two-strike approach anymore, that all they try to do is hit home runs, which has led to all the strikeouts. Of course, this type of thinking is reductive, mostly because it does not even consider the role of the pitcher. Nevertheless, many have discussed two-strike results, though more anecdotally than quantitatively. So let’s investigate this aspect of the strikeout rate problem first. The following is the strikeout rate and wOBA in plate appearances that reach two-strike counts in the Statcast era:

Like the overall strikeout rate, the strikeout rate in these plate appearances is monotonically increasing but much more slowly. Year-over-year, the increase never exceeds 2% besides this season and 2020 (about 3%). I will note we are only about a month and a half into the season and given the weather, league offense is at its nadir, so I would expect this to regress some. wOBA with two strikes has jumped in the Statcast era and this season so far has stuck out like a sore thumb. The weather caveat applies here also, as does the caveat that we are dealing with only a fraction of the plate appearances in 2021 versus all other seasons besides 2020 (for obvious reasons). This information seemingly debunks the awful two strike approach theory, at least within the defined time frame. Hitters are barely striking out more when they get to two strikes and their overall performance has not changed much season-over-season, 2021 notwithstanding. If we dig further into two strike behavior, the idea that hitters have drastically changed when they are confronted with two strikes does not track:

I will note that the chase rate calculation is based on my own filtering of the Statcast data from Baseball Savant. The swinging strike rate has increased every season and the rate at which balls are put in play with two strikes has decreased every year, which gives some credence to the complaint about hitter behavior. I would argue the changes are so small, however, that drastic claims about today’s players are not warranted. We are talking about 1.3 percentage points in terms of swinging strike rate, and 2.2 percentage points in balls in play rate from 2015-21. I do not think anyone without access to this kind of statistical information can really tell the difference between those figures when watching the game. The swing rate with two strikes has been very stable in this era. In terms of chase rate, batters have become more discerning, which can only be construed as a positive development, assuming we believe it’s better to have fewer strikeouts.

Interestingly, the rate of called strikes as a percentage of total two-strike pitches has seen a noticeable jump in 2021. Devan Fink wrote about how pitchers have become more aggressive throwing the ball in the zone this season with the advent of the new ball. I would imagine this is the impetus for the growth in the percentage of strikeouts via the called strike.

Overall, the differences in two-strike performances between seasons do not seem substantial enough to explain the acceleration of the strikeout rate growth. Maybe it is not batter performance in two strike counts, but instead a notably higher percentage of total pitches being thrown with two strikes?

There is basically no difference between 2021 and the preceding five seasons combined. The count-based run values are more of a mixed bag with no discernible trend.

Two strike performance changes does not seem notable in recent vintage. In fact, the swinging strike rates in all counts have effectively increased at the same rate across all counts.

The last thing I investigated was looking at pitch types and seeing if any groups of pitches are more responsible for the rate of whiffs than the others. Here there are more interesting trends.

Neither breaking pitches nor offspeed pitches have seen much of an influx in swinging strikes. Hitters have struggled more with fastballs, on the other hand, in all situations. (Another hat tip to Devan Fink, who wrote about the unusually large increase in fastball velocity in the month of April this season.) Pitchers’ fastballs are becoming tougher to time-up and now that they are becoming more aggressive throwing the ball in the zone, they are inducing more swinging strikes with those pitches.

The league’s two-strike approach does not seem to be having an outsized effect on the rise in strikeouts, at least in this most recent era of baseball. There are small upticks in a few relevant metrics, but more of the increase has to do with swings and misses in all counts, especially on fastballs. This count-based analysis yielded similar results to an excellent piece from Chet Gutwein here at FanGraphs. He found that not only has the league’s swinging strike rate on fastballs increased more relative to other pitch types, but fastballs high in the zone were mostly to blame due to the continuing growth of velocity and, as a consequence, spin rate.

As the league tries to address the issue of fewer balls in play now and in the future, finding a way to combat the rise in pitcher velocity should be one of the first items on the docket. The fact that pitches are moving more than ever does not appear to be as large a factor, given the changes in whiff rates on breaking and offspeed pitches. Moving the mound back, which will be implemented in the Atlantic League this season, and giving hitters more time to react seems like a good start. After parsing through the two strike data, it seems like rectifying the lack of formidable two strike approaches across the majors is not the silver bullet many believe. Digging further into the data by pitch type in all counts, the main issue is rising whiff rates on fastballs, which Chet Gutwein opined on in his own piece I referenced above. So maybe combating velocity is the elusive silver bullet? Without a relatively controlled experiment we cannot say for certain. But we can say that hitters being criticized for forgoing any semblance of a two strike approach and placing the blame on them for the rise in strikeouts is most likely a futile exercise.

As the 2021 season nears its Memorial Day checkpoint, feast your eyes upon some stars who are off to the best starts of their career, a couple of wily veterans still learning (and if they know what’s good for them, eventually unlearning) some new tricks, and two-up-and down hurlers on a quest for consistency.

Tuesday, May 18, 6:40 PM ET: Trevor Rogers vs. Zack Wheeler

Two of the National League’s best pitchers through the season’s first month are on a collision course at Citizens Bank Park. One is an NL East mainstay who generated considerable prospect hype; the other is making a name for himself after a relatively anonymous minor league career. While Rogers was a first-round pick and a top-six prospect in the Marlins’ system heading into the season, he certainly was not on many fans’ radars outside of South Florida; our own Eric Longenhagen viewed him as a “stable 2-WAR starter prospect.”

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David Bednar has been a find for the Pirates. Picked up from the Padres over the offseason as part of the seven-player Joe Musgrove deal, Bednar has emerged as one of the most-reliable arms in the Pittsburgh pen. In 17 outings comprising 15-and-a-third innings, the 26-year-old right-hander has 19 strikeouts to go with a 2.35 ERA and a 2.91 FIP.

Expectations weren’t nearly that high. San Diego’s 35th-round pick in the 2016 draft, the former Lafayette College Leopard came into the current campaign with a gnarly 6.75 ERA in 17-and-a-third big-league innings. Moreover, while his velocity has always been intriguing — ditto his splitter — Bednar’s name had never been spotted near the top of a prospect list. By and large, the 6-foot-1, 245-pound hurler came to his new club unheralded, unpolished, and in need of a fresh start.

I asked Ben Cherington if the decision to acquire the Pittsburgh-born-and-bred Bednar was driven more by the team’s analytics department, or by its scouting department.

“It was both,” said the Pirates GM. “From the scouting end, I believe Andrew Lorraine was one of the pro scouts who had seen him. Joe Douglas from our professional acquisitions group is someone who dug into him from a data perspective. Plus, he’s from here, so we had some personal background as well.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s April 27. The Blue Jays may not be dominant — their roster has been decimated by injuries — but they are getting by, at least so far. They have just taken a rare series from the Rays in St. Petersburg; after a lengthy road trip, they now return to their home away from home in Dunedin, with Max Scherzer awaiting them on the mound.

On a bullpen day, the Nationals quickly take a 3-0 lead: two home runs from Trea Turner, another from Yadiel Hernandez. Scherzer erases singles in the first and second on double plays. But in the third, things start to happen: back-to-back singles from Alejandro Kirk and Cavan Biggio. A Bo Bichette walk loads the bases for Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 

Guerrero hit into the double play that ended the first inning — just the second time he’s grounded into a double play this season, a ball he scorched into the dirt at 109 mph. He’s 1-for-11 over the past few games. He fouls off Scherzer’s first pitch, a slider in the zone; he watches two that miss. The fourth slider stays up. A grand slam, and the Jays lead. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres already had to endure life without Fernando Tatis Jr. for one stretch this season due to his left shoulder subluxation, and now they’re without him again. On Tuesday, the 22-year-old shortstop tested positive for COVID-19 and landed on the Injured List. He quickly gained company when right fielder Wil Myers also tested positive, while three other Padres — first baseman Eric Hosmer, outfielder Jorge Mateo, and superutilityman Jurickson Profar — were sidelined via MLB’s contact tracing protocols. The absences have left San Diego significantly shorthanded and highlighted the potential competitive disadvantage that a team can face while dealing with an outbreak.

The Padres aren’t the only team in the midst of a COVID-19 cluster, either. On Tuesday, about an hour before Tatis’ positive test became public, news of an outbreak among the Yankees’ coaching staff broke as well. While Padres manager Jayce Tingler declined to say whether any of his sidelined players have been vaccinated, their status will become apparent depending upon how quickly they’re allowed to return (more on which below). Meanwhile, the Yankees’ group — now up to eight, including third base coach Phil Nevin, first base coach Reggie Willits, pitching coach Matt Blake, and shortstop Gleyber Torres, plus four unnamed members of the team’s traveling staff — are known to have been fully vaccinated. In fact, the Yankees were among the majors’ first teams to reach the 85% vaccination threshold that allowed them to relax certain health and safety protocols. But less than a week after MLB announced that more than 83% of all Tier 1 individuals (players, managers, coaches, athletic trainers and support personnel) had been partially or fully vaccinated, and that it had gone a week without a single positive test from its major league camps (and just one positive from a staffer at an alternate site), the Padres and Yankees offered rude reminders of COVID-19’s lingering presence.

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The 2021 Detroit Tigers are terrible.

I don’t say this out of cruelty or to beat a dead horse, but to continue on with this piece, it’s important to understand that the team is very, very bad. It took them five weeks to notch their 10th win of the year. Future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera is hitting a mere .160/.259/.253. The incredible hot starts of Akil Baddoo and Wilson Ramos have cooled, and with the sole exception of Matthew Boyd, the team’s pitching staff seems to be struggling mightily against all comers.

For fans, it’s feels like a familiar story told year after year, only it seems to be getting worse over time. And it’s becoming a story that’s getting a lot harder to listen to without a mounting sense of frustration, because in terms of a rebuild, the Tigers appear to have been abandoned by their contractor with only a rough hewn foundation to show for it.

To truly get a sense of where the Tigers find themselves now, we must first understand just how bad this team is in a historical context. To do so, we have to compare the first months of 2021 to the Tigers’ two worst seasons historically: 2003 and 2019. In 2003, the Tigers came close to making history as the worst team in the modern era. They lost 119 games versus just 43 wins, coming within one loss of tying the 1962 Mets for most single season losses. For the franchise, it marked a turning point and a trend towards improvement. By 2006 they made it to the World Series, had a Rookie of the Year winner in pitcher Justin Verlander, and won 95 games. Read the rest of this entry »