Last week, I investigated something that I’ve long wondered about: are relievers particularly prone to wildness on their first batter of the game? I didn’t find much of an effect, and I also got tons of valuable feedback about further avenues for investigation. Do base/out states matter? Does handedness matter? Do intentional walks skew the data?

Aside from the last one (a definite yes), I haven’t explored all of these avenues yet. I did, however, answer another question I was curious about, one that ties into the general theme of reliever walk rates. I’ll tell you upfront that I found a confusing result, and that I’d love to hear anything I’ve missed or avenues for further investigation.

Here’s the question I’m answering: when a reliever walks the first batter he faces, what does that tell us about the rest of his appearance? All of us have seen this in practice, and we probably all know the existential dread it engenders. Great, he doesn’t have his command today. How many walks are coming up? Is the lead safe? Will the team even stay in the game long enough for a new pitcher comes in?

To explore this possibility, I examined every game thrown by a reliever since the beginning of the 2015 season. I split each reliever’s appearances into two subsets: every appearance where they unintentionally walked the first batter they faced on one hand, and every other appearance (except intentional walks, I threw those out) on the other. This gave me a sample of 1,085 relievers across more than 80,000 appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Saturday in the Bronx, Max Scherzer showed off the dominant form that has earned him three Cy Young awards and seven All-Star selections. Admittedly, he wasn’t exactly facing Murderer’s Row, but against a Yankees team that had recently righted itself with a 7-1 tear, he struck out 10 out of the first 14 batters he faced, finishing with 14 strikeout in 7.1 innings, that while allowing just two hits, one walk, and one run.

The Nationals wound up losing that game in 11 innings, but nonetheless, the outing was the latest example of the 36-year-old righty in vintage form. The 14 strikeouts was the most by a visitor in the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009, and the most by any opponent in any iteration of Yankee Stadium since Pedro Martinez’s ultra-dominant one-hit performance against the defending champions in 1999:

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On Tuesday night, the Dodgers were only a Gavin Lux home run away from falling to a .500 record. A .500 record isn’t generally cause for panic, but it would definitely have been a disappointment for the reigning world champions, a team that was expected to steamroll most of the rest of baseball this season. Just to match 2020’s regular season record, the Dodgers need to add another 24 consecutive wins to Monday night’s win over the Mariners.

So how worried should the third-place Dodgers be? Not very.

The Dodgers Aren’t Actually Playing Poorly

Okay, this header isn’t true if we engage in an ultra-literal reading, but in losing 15 of the last 21 games, the Dodgers have only been outscored by a total of seven runs in the aggregate. The team’s overall Pythagorean record puts them at a 94.5 win pace, below the preseason projections, but not alarmingly so. The bullpen had a 4.48 ERA over this stretch, and while there is a relationship between bullpen performance and Pythagorean performance, the relationship is fairly loose.

I went back through history to look at the Pythagorean performances of all teams that underperformed their expected record by at least two wins after 36 games. Over the rest of the seasons, those teams fell short of their Pythagorean records by about a tenth of a run on average. In other words, the discrepancy between expected record and actual record in the early season is mostly noise, as opposed to hiding something sinister about a team’s true abilities. Read the rest of this entry »

I was unwinding on Friday after a long week of work when I got an alert from MLB that Wade Miley was throwing a no-hitter against Cleveland. I blinked my eyes a couple of times in disbelief before putting the game on, but as I was watching Miley complete his no-hitter, my alerts went off again: Sean Manaea had a perfect game in progress in Oakland. He ended up losing it when Randy Arozarena walked in the seventh and his no-hitter when Mike Brosseau led off the eighth with a double, but if your head is spinning a bit from all the alerts, you are not alone. We are barely five weeks into the 2021 season, and we’ve already seen four no-hitters (five, if you count Madison Bumgarner’s seven-inning no-no, which MLB officially doesn’t). As fun as it has been to follow the action this season, something historically anomalous is afoot.

Let’s start with the raw numbers. There are only 21 full MLB seasons with four or more no-hitters since 1901, and the only season that saw more than four no-hitters happen before May 15 is 1917, when five took place (all before May 6). That season ended with six no-hitters and a tie for the highest percentage of no-hitters per game played — until now.

The existing record of no-hitters as a percent of total games is at 0.48%, which has happened twice in MLB history, but it’s unlikely many of us were around for those 1908 and 1917 seasons. The vaunted 1968 “Year of the Pitcher” season that resulted in the mound being lowered five inches doesn’t even crack the top-10 list in terms of no-hitters as a percent of total games. Here are the top 20 seasons for no-hitters as a percent of total games, including 2021 data through May 9: Read the rest of this entry »

On February 18, the Reds signed outfielder Tyler Naquin to a minor league contract with a non-roster invitation to major league spring training. It’s not the kind of transaction that generally generates analysis here at FanGraphs. It was just a standard depth move at the time, the kind of signing every team makes multiples of every off-season. Flash forward nearly three months later, and after an impressive spring training, Naquin is among the top 15 in wRC+ in the National League and part of the best offense in the senior circuit. The Reds utilize a daily strategy of trying to outslug their opponent to make up for what has been a miserable pitching staff, and the results so far have them hovering around .500.

Hot stars happen all the time, and while one week should be readily dismissed as a small sample not worthy of any kind of real scrutiny, a month merits looking into. Where did the player come from? Has anything changed? Is this sustainable? In Naquin’s case, the answers are a bit murky.

Naquin’s background is unique. The 2012 draft was weak in terms of college position players, but Naquin was nonetheless the second one selected at 15th overall. And while there was much debate over his ability to stay in center field, as well as his ultimate power ceiling, scouts were universal in their praise for the Texas A&M product’s hit tool after he led the Big 12 conference in batting average during each of his final two years as an Aggie.

His minor league career was filled with good-but-not-great seasons as he moved up the ladder (probably more slowly than Cleveland anticipated), but he got the call in 2016 and showed unexpected power on his way to 2.1 WAR in 116 games. It’s a figure he’s yet to match, as the following years were defined by injuries and inconsistent performance that saw him waver between fourth outfielder and Quad-A status. Out of time, and out of patience, Naquin was suddenly a six-year free agent looking for work this winter. The Reds offered him the best deal in terms of the combination of money and opportunity, and he’s certainly taken advantage of it. Read the rest of this entry »

First, a bit of history:

The major league annals include just two players born in Slovakia. One of them is Elmer Valo, an outfielder for six teams from 1940-1961 who hailed from the village of Rybnik. The other is Jack Quinn (born Johannes Pajkos), a pitcher for eight teams from 1909-1933 who drew his first breaths 333 kilometers away in Štefurov. Both came to the United States at a young age, their families settling in the Pennsylvania.

Adam Macko hopes to follow in their footsteps, albeit via pathways. A native of Bratislava, Slovakia, Macko moved to Stoney Plain, Alberta, Canada when he was 12 years old — a year in Ireland bridging the Atlantic journey — and then to the southern part of the province where he spent three years at the Vauxhall Baseball Academy before being selected by Seattle in the seventh round of the 2019 draft.

Profile-wise, Macko is more finesse than power, albeit not by a wide margin. The 20-year-old called himself “a command lefty” when offering a self scouting report, but that belies a velocity jump that saw him clocked as high as 97 mph in spring training. In his first start of the season, Macko sat 92-96 with his four-seamer while hurling four scoreless innings for the Low-A Modesto Nuts. Mixing and matching effectively, the southpaw set down seven Stockton Ports batters on strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

When we last checked in on our partially crowd-run Out Of The Park Baseball team, the season wasn’t yet underway. We spent the offseason building pitching depth after a nightmarish injury season left us with a bullpen made of duct tape and late-season callups. In an effort to avoid a recurrence of that problem, we came into this season with pitching depth that could best be described as excessive.

Even after trading Eric Lauer (more on that in a second), the team went seven deep on starters: Brandon Woodruff, Kevin Gausman, Collin McHugh, Freddy Peralta, Adrian Houser, Corbin Burnes, and Brent Suter are all at least candidates for a rotation spot. Surely, I (and you) reasoned, that depth will sustain us even if injuries become a problem again.

Good news: through 42 games, injuries haven’t been a problem. Our top five starters have made all 42 starts, though virtual Adrian Houser is headed for the bullpen unless he turns things around quickly; his 10.64 ERA isn’t reflective of his true talent, but his 9.25 FIP isn’t exactly a great sign. He’s become a two-pitch pitcher in this simulation, so a swap with Suter might suit both.
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Pitchers are always looking to chip away at the platoon advantage. Two of the most common weapons in doing so are the changeup and curveball. The former fades away from opposite-side batters and from the barrel as the bat whips through the zone. Most of a curveball’s movement, meanwhile, is vertical; no matter the handedness of the batter and corresponding bat path, the pitch can duck under the bat as the batter makes contact. Sliders, though, generally have a large platoon split, to the detriment of the pitcher, as they move more horizontally relative to vertically and toward the pitcher’s glove side. This leads the ball towards the barrel of an opposite-handed hitter, giving him more of an opportunity to make contact.

Cutters are interesting in this regard. Given the movement of the pitch, you would expect it to have significant platoon splits like a slider. The ball moves toward a pitcher’s glove side, albeit generally not as far as a slider; an opposite-handed hitter would have a better chance putting the barrel on it. But this is not the case, according to research from Max Marchi done back in 2010, as he found that cutters were in the middle of the pack with respect to pitch-type platoon splits. It still had more favorable splits when the batter had the platoon advantage, but that is the case for all pitches in general.

So why does the cutter not have much of an effect on the platoon advantage despite its break? As MLB.com explains it, the magnitude of the horizontal break is subtle enough to catch a hitter expecting a four-seamer off guard. Thus, when he swings, the movement of the pitch forces the batter to fight it off his hands and either induces weak contact or breaks the bat altogether. My thesis was that players are turning to the cutter because of these neutral platoon splits, as heavily using a pitch that works well to hitters from both sides makes you harder to predict. Read the rest of this entry »

I love wonky early-season slash lines, the kinds of combinations that make you scratch your head and consider what exactly had to happen to get to this point. It’s pretty easy to put Yasmani Grandal’s start in that category: Through 22 games and 91 plate appearances, Grandal is hitting .113/.378/.242, slugging two homers and posting a… 102 wRC+?!?

Yes, you read that correctly. Through games on Sunday, Grandal has just seven hits and has the worst batting average among players with at least 80 trips to the plate. And yet he’s also managed to be an above-average hitter by wRC+. There’s truly some wild stuff going on here.

Of course, none of this is sustainable. Grandal has faced some pretty horrible BABIP luck, and as Dan Szymborski noted in his article yesterday, he is the fourth-largest underachiever in actual BABIP (.119) versus ZiPS-developed zBABIP (.261). Plug that figure into his balls-in-play total and you’d find that Grandal should have more than 13 hits this season, giving him a more-respectable-though-still-not-great .210 batting average.

But what is most interesting about Grandal’s start isn’t that he’s faced such poor BABIP luck; it’s that he has still managed to be a productive hitter in spite of it. Grandal has walked a whopping 27 times to start the season, a near-30% walk rate and a figure that leads baseball by a rather healthy margin. As of this writing, Max Muncy is the only other player who has amassed more than 50 plate appearances with a walk rate above 20%, and he’s still more than six points behind Grandal. Since 1901, Grandal’s 27 walks in his 22 games are tied for the 16th-most walks in any player’s first 22 to begin a season, but he’s one of just five players to do that while also batting under .150. Read the rest of this entry »

First base is an offense-first position. Sure, it’s great to have a first baseman who is handy with the glove and can scoop errant throws, but by and large, it’s a position for sluggers. Even though the position supplied both of last season’s MVPs — Freddie Freeman and José Abreu — it’s production doesn’t hold up as strongly as it has compared to previous years. From 2018 through the 2021 season thus far, first basemen have averaged a 108 wRC+ compared to an average wRC+ of 115 over the 2000-17 seasons.

There are plenty of teams suffering from lackluster production at first base but I want to highlight two of them: the Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays. The Brewers have managed a measly 68 wRC+ and -0.5 WAR, with contributions mostly from the duo of Keston Hiura (who is now in Triple-A) and Daniel Vogelbach. The Rays have been a bit better with a wRC+ of 82 and -0.1 WAR. These aren’t the worst teams in the majors at first base but they do share something in common; they once had Jesús Aguilar under team control and let him go.

In his tenure with the Marlins after being selected off waivers on December 2, 2019, Aguilar has solidified himself as the team’s primary first baseman, slashing .254/.356/.469 with 14 homers across his two seasons (the stats in this piece are through May 9); that’s good for 126 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR. This season has been particularly good to Aguilar so far. He’s slashing .269/.363/.490 and is in the top 10 in the majors among first basemen in wRC+ (9th) and WAR (9th). Not bad for a waiver pickup! I make mention of his previous clubs’ oversight not to shame them; it’s not the first time a valuable player has been overlooked. But his path to the player he is today is a unique one. Read the rest of this entry »