All the pitchers in the league seem to have gotten together and decided that someone has to throw a no-hitter each week. One of our best matchups this week involves a guy who already threw one, two guys meeting in LA who are certainly pitching well enough to nab one of their own, and an AL Central altercation between pitchers – and teams – trending in opposite directions.

Tuesday, May 11, 7:10 PM ET: John Means vs. Marcus Stroman

John Means got his 15 minutes of fame last week after methodically tearing the Mariners apart. Means’ destruction of the M’s lineup earned him a no-hitter and the baseball world’s spotlight, but the Baltimore bro has been reliably great all season. He’s allowed just five hits and three earned runs over his last 22.1 innings, striking out 27 hitters along the way. If we zoom out and look at his entire body of work across seven starts, we find that Means has become one of the best pitchers in the game thanks to one little trick.

Like a local magician bringing their act on the road, Means risked letting the secret out of the bag when he performed the trick over and over again in Seattle. The Orioles’ breakout star threw first pitch strikes to 26 of the 27 hitters he faced, elevating his first-pitch strike percentage to a maniacal 73.5%. Not only is this 12 percentage points above Means’ career-high, it’s also the highest of any American League starter. As a predominantly fastball-changeup artist, one would think that Means adheres to the traditional method of fastballs in the zone, changeups just underneath it. While he still utilizes his changeup in that fashion – to the tune of a 33.3% chase rate – it’s actually the pitch he throws most frequently in the zone, per Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »

So far, the Red Sox have been one of this season’s biggest surprises. Since Opening Day, the Sox have already increased their playoff odds by 23.6 percentage points up to 61.5%, the second-largest percentage point increase in baseball (Athletics, +25.7).

To reach the pinnacle of the AL East this quickly, Boston has been successful on both sides of the ball, but it’s the team’s offense that has found itself alone at the top of most major league leaderboards. Through games on Saturday, the Red Sox are slashing .269/.334/.445, with the batting average and slugging percentage each ranking tops among the 30 teams. Their .338 wOBA is seven points above the next-best team, the Dodgers, and their park-adjusted 115 wRC+ is three points above Los Angeles as well.

The entire lineup is hitting, but it’s their core five of J.D. Martinez (195 wRC+), Xander Bogaerts (176 wRC+), Rafael Devers (150 wRC+), Alex Verdugo (135 wRC+), and Christian Vázquez (100 wRC+) that have more or less led the way. And though this could easily be an article about any of those five players’ starts, I want to highlight Devers, whose .281/.371/.544 slash line through games on Saturday actually represents one of the biggest under-performances in baseball relative to his batted ball quality. Read the rest of this entry »

When Mario Feliciano made his major league debut last weekend, it was unlikely for a number of reasons. That’s not to say that Feliciano is a nobody: The hard-hitting catcher was the MVP of the Carolina League in 2019 and has been highly ranked by multiple outlets for some time now. But prior to the 2021 season, he had barely played above A-ball, having spent most of 2019 as a member of the Carolina Mudcats, then a high-A affiliate of the Brewers, before earning a late-season promotion to the Double-A Biloxi Shuckers, where he played in only three games. But when Omar Narváez was placed on the injured list on May 1, Feliciano was called up from the Brewers’ alternate site to replace the ailing backup catcher on the roster, though his call-up seemed unlikely to lead to playing time, barring unforeseen circumstances.

You know where this is going. Those unforeseen circumstances arrived in the form of an extra-inning game against the Dodgers, when Milwaukee called upon Feliciano, the only remaining player on the bench, to pinch hit in the pitchers slot in bottom of the 11th inning. Down by two with runners on first and second, Feliciano fouled off a couple of good pitches and laid off some close ones out of the zone, drawing the count full before walking to load the bases and eventually scoring the winning run on a walk-off single by Travis Shaw three batters later.

But that unlikely appearance meant that Feliciano’s MLB debut preceded his first game in Triple A by three days. And while a mid-week matchup between the Nashville Sounds and the Toledo Mud Hens may seem much less exciting than an 11th-inning at-bat against the reigning World Series champions, Feliciano’s Triple A opener was arguably steeped in more anticipation and intrigue. On the mound that night for the Mud Hens was Matt Manning, a Top 100 prospect who has earned future-of-the-franchise fanfare of his own. Indeed, this game represented the return of one of the aspects of the minors most sorely missed during the nearly 600 days since the end of the 2019 MiLB season: a glimpse into baseball’s future.

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Though he’s made just 12 appearances for them, Wade Miley’s time with the Reds has already been a rollercoaster. Last season, the first of a two-year, $15-million contract, he hit the injured list three different times and pitched so poorly when he was active that he lost his rotation spot. He earned it back this year, largely thanks to injuries to Sonny Gray and Michael Lorenzen, then began the season with 11 shutout innings over two starts. Eight runs in 16 innings over his next three starts followed, as his ability to miss bats waned and bad pitches landed in outfield seats. All of this adds up to an average pitcher playing on an average team in a division that average teams could win. Then, all of a sudden, came the extraordinary.

Miley no-hit Cleveland at Progressive Field on Friday, walking one batter and watching another reach on an error and striking out eight. It was the Reds’ first no-hitter since Homer Bailey’s second on July 2, 2013, and the 17th in franchise history. Expand the scope to all of baseball, and Miley joined a group whose size is increasing with perplexing speed. When he took the mound Friday, the dust had barely settled from a no-hitter thrown by John Means on Wednesday, who threw his on the heels of a seven-inning no-hitter by Madison Bumgarner, who threw his in the wake of nine-inning no-hitters by Carlos Rodón and Joe Musgrove. That’s five no-nos in a span of 29 days, with no end in sight.

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Brandon Woodruff has quietly been one of the better pitchers in the National League since the start of the 2019 season. In 42 starts comprising 237 innings, the Milwaukee Brewers right-hander has 285 strikeouts to go with a 3.11 ERA and a 2.93 FIP. The last of those numbers is equal to Shane Bieber’s mark over the same period.

A big reason for Woodruff’s success is a repertoire adjustment he made midway through the 2018 season. As he explained in an article that ran here at FanGraphs last April, he began throwing both two- and four-seam fastballs. Neither is anything to write home about movement-wise, but paired together and sequenced well they’re a formidable combo. As Woodruff told me at the time, “It’s hard for the hitter to distinguish which one is going to be coming.”

Pitchers often “pitch backwards,” throwing breaking pitches in fastball counts, and vice versa. Thinking back to what Woodruff had told me, an idea crossed my mind: is it possible to pitch backwards with two different fastballs?

I asked the 28-year-old Tupelo, Mississippi native that question in a Zoom call. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday afternoon, Liam Hendriks entered a tough situation. There were two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but his margin for error was nonexistent. The bases were loaded, and the White Sox were locked in a tie game. One hiccup in command, four slightly misplaced pitches, and the game would be over.

Do pitchers have less command when they enter? Is it worth worrying about whether a pitcher might not have it that day? I have no earthly idea, so I decided to investigate. First things first, though: I wasn’t actually sure what I was investigating. Time for some experimental design.

What about the walk rate, but only on the first batter faced by a new reliever? That’s certainly a number I could look up. That checks in at 8.1% from 2015 to present (I used the Statcast era even though there’s no Statcast data involved in this query, just for consistency’s sake). Over the same time frame, the overall reliever walk rate is 9.3%. Case closed, let’s go get brunch.

Only, that’s a bad comparison. We’re not comparing apples to apples. If we’re actually going to look into whether pitchers are particularly likely to come in and not have it, we need to compare like to like. Take the immortal Sugar Ray Marimon, who made 16 appearances for the Braves in 2015. He was a one-hit wonder, though “wonder” might be strong: he compiled a 7.36 ERA in 25.2 innings before decamping to Korea. Read the rest of this entry »

The news was as abrupt as a mid-afternoon tweet, and yet long overdue: On Thursday, the Angels designated Albert Pujols for assignment. The 41-year-old Pujols is a no-doubt Hall of Famer, one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs. But he’s now a month into his fifth season of sub-replacement level production, an impediment to improving a team that needs all the help it can get to overcome a league-worst defense as it scrambles to return to the playoffs for the first time since 2014.

Mired in a 7-for-43 slump on a 13–17 team, Pujols is hitting just .198/.250/.372 with five homers and a 75 wRC+ in 92 plate appearances and making $30 million in the final season of the 10-year, $240 million deal that he signed following a remarkable 11-year run with the Cardinals. With his body unable to withstand a litany of leg and foot injuries — hamstrings, knees, plantar fasciitis — his megadeal provided little bang for the buck. Where he made nine All-Star teams and won three MVP awards as well as the NL Rookie of the Year award in St. Louis while helping the Cardinals to three pennants and two championships, he never approached such levels in Anaheim. As an Angel, he made just one All-Star team, finished no higher than 17th in the MVP voting, and was swept out of his lone playoff appearance.

This isn’t a move that the Angels have taken lightly, and it owes plenty to the pressures on new general manager Perry Minasian, who was hired last November, as well as the development of Jared Walsh and the continued health and presence of Shohei Ohtani. Walsh, a first baseman who has taken over most of the duties in right field since Dexter Fowler suffered a season-ending ACL tear on April 9, has hit for a 166 wRC+ in 222 PA since the start of last season. Ohtani, who this year has been available to serve as the designated hitter on days before and after his starts (which the Angels were reluctant to let him do previously), has hit for a 169 wRC+ with a major league-high 10 homers in 118 PA.

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In her 2012 novel Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn wrote that the Midwest is full of people who are nice enough, but easy to manipulate. “Easy to mold, easy to wipe down,” Flynn wrote of these people, who she described as having plastic souls. But she could not have foreseen two current Midwest residents who are breaking the mold of modern baseball.

The major-league walk rate has comfortably sat around 8% for the last 100 years, and with 21st-century front offices emphasizing on-base percentage, the game’s elite offensive players regularly walk more than 10% of the time while boasting on-base percentages in the .400 club.

This season, the American League Central plays home to two players that don’t seem to care about any of that. The Twins’ Willians Astudillo and the Royals’ Hanser Alberto have each strode to the plate at least 55 times in 2021. They have combined for zero walks.

The pair of Midwest transplants are the only players in the league who have batted at least 50 times without drawing a walk. They are also the only players in the league who have batted at least 40 times without drawing a walk, and the only players who have batted at least 30 times without a walk. The player with the third-highest amount of plate appearances this year without a base on balls is Angels journeyman Scott Schebler, who’s all the way down at 27. Red Sox backup catcher Kevin Plawecki had made 35 straight walkless plate appearances to begin his season before inexplicably drawing two on Thursday against the Tigers’ bullpen.

Astudillo and Alberto have never been paragons of patience during their careers. Both players have career walk rates under 2.5%, with Astudillo at 1.9% and Alberto at a slightly more selective 2.4%. Since Astudillo was summoned to the big leagues in 2018, he and Alberto have the lowest walk rates of any players with at least 300 plate appearances. Yet, they can each claim on-base percentages above .310 during that span, which certainly isn’t great, but is much better than almost all of their classmates in the remedial walk room. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the arrival of the KBO was a breath of fresh air for our despondent, quarantined, and baseball-deprived selves. Between May and July, the entire baseball community became invested in a league that is in many ways different from MLB. There’s greater emphasis on contact hitting and baserunning, which recalled another, perhaps nostalgic, era of major league baseball for some. Sure, the defense and pitching could be clunky at times, but we embraced them as fun idiosyncrasies. And though baseball and a semblance of normalcy has returned stateside, there are still plenty of fans who want to monitor the KBO.

That’s why I’ve decided to start a monthly column that acts as a periodic check-in on the KBO. This isn’t, say, a power ranking, but rather an overview of which developments I find interesting. Today’s Part One will discuss league-wide trends and include updates on the Samsung Lions, KT Wiz, LG Twins, and SSG Landers. Part Two, which I hope to get published on Monday, will deal with the six remaining teams. Also, don’t forget to check out our expanded KBO stats offering as the season progresses! So without further ado, let’s begin! Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, I examined the new baseball’s impact on April home run totals. In sum, home runs were down in April 2021 compared to April 2019, with the home run per batted ball rate dropping by roughly 0.45 percentage points, a figure that would result in about an 8% decrease in home runs from ’19 to ’21, under the assumption that hitters receive roughly equal plate appearances in each season. (Due to seven-inning doubleheaders and the new extra inning rules, though, that won’t happen, but it’s still good to compare apples-to-apples to estimate the impact.)

After sharing the article on Twitter, I received an interesting question that I felt merited further discussion: How many of those now-non-homers turn into hits versus outs? That is a fascinating question because it potentially gets to the heart of why MLB dejuiced the baseballs in the first place. Baseball didn’t want to eliminate offense, per se; they just wanted to alter how it is generated, with more balls put into play rather than what they perceived as a recent over-reliance on the long ball. In short, if all of those newly-created non-homers are now other types of hits, then dejuicing the baseball might’ve actually had the impact MLB wanted. If they are now outs, then it’s just going to make life that much harder for batters.

Given the majors’ historically-low batting average this season — once again, I’ll point you to Brendan Gawlowski’s excellent piece on the matter — you can likely guess what happened: Outs are up. Read the rest of this entry »