Oh my god, sorry I’m so late. Sorry. I can’t believe it! I mean, first of all, I can’t believe they still let me into the stadium this late. Thank goodness the game isn’t over yet. Otherwise that would have been a waste of time and money, right? Haha. You should have seen the traffic, it was– right, right, sorry, it’s the bottom of the ninth. I’ll let you focus. Wait, who’s pitching? That doesn’t look like Jansen. That’s the guy’s name, right? Jansen? Oh, Treinen. Yeah, right, I knew that. Duh! Don’t know where I got Jansen from, but you know me and my weird brain. The stuff I come up with sometimes! Especially after sitting in traffic like that, I mean–

Right, right, sorry! Yes! There’s a guy on first, one of the red guys. But they’re winning, right? The Dodgers, I mean. The blue ones. Obviously. So we don’t have to be worried. LET’S GO DODGERS!

Don’t worry, we’re not going to miss anything. Everyone’s just standing around on the field. Most exciting sport there is, am I right? Haha. You know I’m kidding, though. Love baseball. Love the game. Thanks for buying me a ticket, by the way. Feels like old times again. Not just before COVID, I mean, I haven’t been to one of these in, what, ten years? Was that ten years ago already? When you made me go that one time back when we were roommates, and then we had to leave early because I got dehydrated and was vomiting nachos everywhere, and then you were so mad because one of the guys did something and we missed it, like it was some kind of “historic day,” and we just listened to the radio broadcast in silence sitting in traffic all the way home and you wouldn’t talk to me for a week. That was brutal, man. Like, sorry, but that was kind of mean, and I still feel like you really overreacted. You could see how much suffering I was experiencing, and you knew that I couldn’t have brought a water bottle because I fell on the stairs and broke my Nalgene. It was a really dark time for me, and I went to all that trouble to come with you to the game, you know, taking all that time out of my day to go all the way here and back with you, and you weren’t being a very helpful friend. Not that I’m still mad about it or anything. Oh, wait, is he throwing the ball now? Are they done talking on their microphone thingies? Read the rest of this entry »

On May 17, Chicago White Sox legend Yermín Mercedes hit the sixth home run of his stellar, albeit wilting, nevertheless unlikely, rookie campaign. A mammoth blast over the center field wall of Target Field, the home run sparked — in equal parts, seemingly — awe and controversy.

? THE YERMINATOR JUST HOMERED OFF OF LA TORTUGA! ? pic.twitter.com/pHacUxXtdF

— MLB (@MLB) May 18, 2021

The controversy? Mercedes teed off on a 3-0 count with one out to spare in a 15-4 blowout, off a beloved Position Player Pitching^TM no less. He did so in the home park of a sputtering rival, one expected to compete for their division’s title but, at the time, had instead won half as many games (13) as it had lost (26). Naturally, a lengthy and unpleasant discourse about the game’s unwritten rules ensued. Retribution, however juvenile, was had.

At the time, the sheer amount of baggage on the home run did not register with me. My brain is so moldy and soggy that I reacted somewhat primitively. Good lord, Yermín Mercedes absolutely mashed possibly the slowest pitch I’ve ever seen.

Indeed, Mercedes’ home run is the hardest-hit batted ball (109.3 mph) against a pitch 60 mph or slower (47.1 mph) in the Statcast era. Only Christian Walker (seen here) and Ryan McMahon (seen here) come close, and their batted balls came against pitches thrown more than 53 mph. That’s, like, light speed in comparison. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite trading Blake Snell to the Padres and losing Charlie Morton to free agency, the Rays currently own the best record in all of baseball at 43-25. Tyler Glasnow has played a significant role in their place in the standings, but the 27-year-old righty’s season is on hold after he landed on the 10-day Injured List due to a partial tear of his ulnar collateral ligament and a strain of his flexor tendon. While the team is still waiting to determine whether he’ll need surgery, Glasnow made headlines by casting blame on Major League Baseball’s crackdown on grip-enhancing substances, claiming that altering his grip to compensate for going “cold turkey” contributed to his injury.

Glasnow left Monday night’s start against the White Sox after just four innings and 53 pitches, both season lows. Though he allowed two runs to one of the league’s most potent offenses, he didn’t pitch badly, striking out six while walking just one. He matched his seasonal average of 97.0 mph with his four-seam fastball, generated eight swings and misses (seven via his slider) and equaled his 34% seasonal CSW (called strike and whiff) rate as well.

Via the Tampa Bay Times‘ Mark Topkin, Glasnow felt tightness in his elbow but believed he had avoided a worst-case scenario:

Initial word from the team was inflammation, but Glasnow said that he felt “a little tug” and “tightness” in his elbow, first on a 98.2-mph fastball, then during three subsequent pitches to finish the inning.

“I think I got it relatively early,” Glasnow said. “I just was like, I don’t want to go back out and like chance it. I felt it, like, the last four (pitches). The (velocity) and everything was still there. But it just felt not right.”

Glasnow underwent an MRI and consulted with a doctor in Chicago, resulting in the diagnosis. Via MLB.com’s Adam Berry, the Rays said that a timeline for his return will be determined after further evaluation; he’s scheduled to see another doctor on Friday. While the tear itself may not be severe enough to mandate Tommy John surgery, which would knock him out until at least the middle of next season, a sprain significant enough that he receives an injection of platelet-rich plasma would likely mean at least a six-week wait until he’s cleared to throw again, and then several weeks to build up his pitch count. When a frustrated Glasnow spoke to the media via Zoom on Tuesday, he sounded resigned to missing most of the remainder of the season. Via The Athletic, he said, “I’m sitting here, my lifelong dream, I want to go out and win a Cy Young. I want to be an All-Star and now it’s shit on. Now it’s over. And now I have to try and rehab to come back in the playoffs.”

Indeed, Glasnow was pitching his way into All-Star and Cy Young consideration for a team whose Playoff Odds currently sit at 74.6%. He entered Wednesday ranked second in the AL in WAR (2.5), xERA (2.67), strikeout rate (36.2%), and strikeout-walk differential (28.2%) as well as third in FIP (2.76) and fifth in ERA (2.66).

This is the second time in three years the 6-foot-7 fireballer has been sidelined by an arm injury after a stellar start to his season. In 2019, Glasnow missed about four months due to a forearm strain, going down in mid-May after posting a 1.86 ERA, 2.30 FIP, and 33% strikeout rate through his first eight starts. He threw just 12.1 regular season innings in four short starts after returning in September because he didn’t have enough time to stretch out to a full workload, though he made two starts in the Rays’ five-game loss to the Astros in the Division Series.

Regarding UCL sprains and PRP injections, former Yankees pitcher Masahiro Tanaka, to cite a high-profile example, missed about 2 1/2 months in 2014 via that combination, and likewise for the Reds’ Michael Lorenzen in ’16. The Marlins’ Wei-Yin Chen returned in just seven weeks in 2016, and the Mets’ Seth Lugo in about 10 weeks in ’17, but he only had to be built up as a reliever. Shohei Ohtani missed nearly three months of pitching after an injection in 2018; he returned to DHing after about four weeks, but made just one September mound appearance before needing Tommy John surgery. Several other pitchers who received such injections wound up getting the surgery before they could return.

Two and a half months from now would mean a September return for Glasnow, but all of this presupposes that his flexor tendon strain — an injury that itself can lead to season-ending surgery, as in the case of Miles Mikolas last year — is minor enough to heal along the same timeline. Really, until we know more about the severity of his injuries and he receives another evaluation, this is just guessing. For now it will suffice to say that his season is deep in the weeds.

For as big a blow as the league’s best team losing its best pitcher might be, Glasnow’s comments on Tuesday made headlines for another reason. On the day that MLB formally announced its plans to issue 10-game suspensions for pitchers caught using foreign substances — whether to enhance their grips or improve the spin rates on their pitches — the pitcher expressed his belief that not using a grip enhancer was a factor in his injury. “I one hundred percent believe that contributed to me getting hurt, no doubt,” said Glasnow. “I have used sticky stuff before. It’s ridiculous that it seems like this whole public perception of select few people — your favorite pitcher probably 50 years ago was using something, too. If you felt these balls, how inconsistent they were, you have to use something. My substance of choice is sunscreen and rosin, nothing egregious, something where I can get a grip on the ball and it doesn’t feel dusty.”

Via the Washington Post, here’s a video containing most of Glasnow’s comments, followed by my own transcription of its highlights:

The pitcher explained the sequence of events that he feels contributed to his injury:

“Two starts ago against the Nationals [June 8], I went cold turkey — nothing. Before that start, I remember when all this stuff came out I was talking to people and talking to doctors and they were like, the thing that maybe MLB doesn’t realize is that… maybe that will add to injuries. And in my mind I was like. ‘That sounds dumb. That sounds like an excuse a player would use to make sure he can use sticky stuff.’

“But I threw to the Nationals with nothing — I don’t use Spider Tack, I don’t need more spin, I have huge hands and I spin the ball fine. I want more grip.

“I did well against the Nationals, probably my best start all year. I woke up the next day and I was sore in places I didn’t even know I had muscles in. I felt completely different. I switched my fastball grip and my curveball grip… I had to put my fastball deeper into my hand and grip it way harder. Instead of holding my curveball at the tip of my fingers, I had to dig it deeper into my hand. So I’m choking the shit out of all my pitches.

…. “Waking up after that start, I was like, ‘This sucks. Something is weird here.’ That same feeling is persisting all week long. I go into my start [Monday] and that same feeling, it pops or whatever the hell happened to my elbow. I feel it. Something happens.”

Ugh. To Glasnow, the issue is less a matter of the league enforcing the rule than the midseason timing:

“I’m not trying to blame anyone, I’m not trying to say it’s all MLB’s fault. They got thrown into this situation and are doing the best they possibly can to navigate around this. They’re trying to make this fair for people, I understand that.

“Whether you want us to not use sticky stuff or not is fine. Do it in the offseason. Give us a chance to adjust to it. But I just threw 80-something innings, then you’ve just told me I can’t use anything in the middle of the year. I have to change everything I’ve been doing the entire season… I truly believe that’s why I got hurt.

“Me throwing 100 and being 6-7 is why I got hurt, but that contributed.

Ouch. For what it’s worth (perhaps not much), Glasnow’s average four-seam fastball spin rate on Tuesday (2,419) was just five RPM below his seasonal average, while the aforementioned June 8 start was 67 below his seasonal average (about half of a season’s standard deviation for most pitchers, according to Eno Sarris) and tied for his second-lowest per-game average. In other words, if he wasn’t using anything to spin the ball against the Nationals, he had other outings earlier this year where his spin rate was similarly low. We’re not talking fluctuations of a few hundred RPM from start to start.

Anyway, the sticky stuff problem is much larger than just Glasnow, and if there’s a silver lining to his absence it’s that maybe MLB will have a better… handle… on the situation by the time he’s able to return. As to how the Rays will deal his absence, obviously he won’t be easy to replace — particularly given that his 88 innings is the league’s second-highest total — though it’s not as though Glasnow had singlehandedly pitched them to the majors’ best record. Granted, their use of openers muddies the accounting a bit, but their starters have pitched to a 3.43 ERA (second in the AL) and 3.69 FIP (fourth).

Lefties Rich Hill, Ryan Yarbrough, Shane McClanahan, and Josh Fleming have been doing the bulk of the work in that capacity, with righties Michael Wacha and Collin McHugh sometimes serving as openers in front of Fleming and Yarbrough. Righty Luis Patiño, a 21-year-old rookie who ranked 12th on our Top 100 Prospects list this spring, and who was the centerpiece in the return for Snell, is currently starting at Triple-A Durham and is the likely candidate to rejoin the mix. From late April to mid-May, Patiño made three starts and two relief appearances totaling 15 innings, acquitting himself well (3.60 ERA, 3.55 FIP) before a right middle finger laceration sent him to the IL; he was optioned upon returning.

Righty Brent Honeywell Jr., a former Top 100 prospect who is back in action after undergoing four arm surgeries in a 3 1/2-year span, might be another option to fill Glasnow’s spot at some point, most likely in an opener capacity given that he’s thrown just 15.2 innings in 11 appearances between Tampa Bay and Durham. Righty Chris Archer, whose trade to the Pirates on July 31, 2018 brought Glasnow to the Rays in the first place, is back in the fold after missing all of 2020 due to surgery to alleviate thoracic outlet syndrome; he made just two appearances before suffering a bout of forearm tightness and is eying a mid-July return. Righties Drew Strotman and Shane Baz, who entered the season respectively ranked 17th and seventh on the Rays’ top prospects list, could be options at some point as well. Both are currently at Durham, though the latter — who was the player to be named later in the Archer trade — was just promoted there on Monday after dominating at Double-A Montgomery, with 49 strikeouts and just two walks in 32.2 innings. The July 30 trade deadline will offer an opportunity for fortification from outside the organization as well.

One way or another, the Rays will patch their rotation together and soldier on towards the playoffs, because that’s what the Rays always seem to do, and hopefully Glasnow will be well enough to participate in the ride. In the meantime, as umpires pat down every pitcher, we’ll see if other hurlers lend credence to his theory that the loss of grip-enhancing substances plays a role in pitcher injuries, a dimension that hasn’t received much consideration until now.

Swing decisions are generally evaluated with limited nuance. We consider whether the pitch was in the strike zone (as defined by your data provider of choice) and whether the batter swung. Over the course of hundreds or thousands of pitches, this provides an easy-to-comprehend method of effectively evaluating a player’s approach. With a sufficient sample, these binary classifications give us insight into how players approach their plate appearances relative to their peers, which hitters are better at discerning the strike zone and which are more aggressive.

I have a bone to pick, though: there is often no differentiation between pitches that just miss the defined strike zone versus those that miss by multiple feet, or pitches that just nick the strike zone as opposed to pitches right down the middle. A lot of swing decision analysis is done in the binary, but as many analysts have shown, looking at the gradations in the strike zone can be revealing. Granted, this distinction lacks meaning over many pitches; selective hitters with elite batting eyes will separate from their less fastidious peers with respect to chase rate over time. But in smaller samples, the lack of distinction between pitches and their proximity to the strike zone makes judging a player’s swing decisions difficult.

One method we can use is to group pitches by their probability of being called a strike. Similar to how pitches are evaluated for the purpose of studying catcher framing, I created a general additive model for gauging the probability that a given pitch would be called a strike. My model was trivial (relative to the research I linked above) in that I just considered pitch location and pitch movement; for the purpose of this exercise, I thought that would be enough to get the idea across. The model was trained on 80% of pitches called a ball or strike from the 2020 season, with the remaining 20% used as the test set. For the test set, the model was about 92.5% accurate, in that it correctly predicted whether a pitch was called strike 92.5% of the time.

I applied the model to all pitches from the 2019 and ’20 regular seasons, which yielded the probability of a called strike on every pitch. Pitches with higher probabilities of being a called strike if taken are toward the heart of the zone. Pitches at the edges of the zone have anywhere from a 40–60% chance of being called a strike. And pitches with expected probabilities closer to zero are nowhere near the strike zone.

I binned every pitch in increments of 10% of called strike probability. The following represents the swing rates in each of those bins:

As one would imagine, the league as a whole swings at pitches that have higher called strike probabilities; the closer the pitch is to the heart of the zone, the higher that probability. Break those probabilities down even further, and you can see that the chance of a swing increases steadily with called strike probability.

Swing rates increase rapidly as the called strike probability approaches 0 and 100%. For the more competitive pitches, the changes in swing rate are much smaller. Intuitively, you would expect this relationship to be linear throughout the probability interval; for every 1% increase in called strike probability, the swing rate would also increase by some corresponding percent described by the slope of a line regardless of where you are along this interval. This is not the case.

My hunch is that once a pitch reaches a certain threshold of competitiveness (in terms of challenging the hitter to swing), the swing decision is not as tethered to the chance of the pitch being called a strike. Instead, the choice depends on the pitch type and what the hitter is guessing or picks up out of the pitcher’s hand. Addressing the rapid increase in swing rate on the lower end of the spectrum, I would imagine that many of these pitches are thrown in advantageous counts from the perspective of the pitcher — two-strike counts. While the lack of stigma surrounding strikeouts has been talked about ad nauseam in baseball circles, hitters still do not want to strike out. So if these less competitive pitches are often being thrown with two strikes, the swing rate increases are going to be more sensitive to any marginal change in called strike probability. Break it down by count, and you can see that that’s the case:

For the sharp increase on the higher end of the range, my theory is the same as the other end of the spectrum: Pitches approaching a 100% called strike probability are so enticing to swing at that batters will disregard the count to attack them. Murkier pitches will not really be swung at in 2–0, 3–0 or 3–1 counts, but if the pitch is close to an automatic strike, it must be toward the heart of the plate; a batter who has the green light will want to swing.

For context, league-wide swing rates have oscillated between 45–47% over the past decade. Swing rates on pitches with a called strike probability between 40–60% generally fell in this range in 2019 and ’20. It’s the extreme ends of the spectrum where hitter behavior changes most rapidly. We also saw that the count has a significant effect on the swing rates for any given pitch, especially those that were most and least competitive. So, we know the general league-wide trends and we understand why this is a more nuanced method in evaluating swing decisions. What about at the player level? I found a couple of interesting quirks. When you look at the players who are most aggressive on the pitches that are the most advantageous to swing at (those with a called strike probability of at least 90%), you get a mix of players who we think of as having good plate discipline and those who are more free swingers:

Freddie Freeman, Luke Voit, Brandon Lowe, and Corey Seager are all examples of players we generally understand as having good plate discipline. They lay off pitches that have very little chance of resulting in a called strike and attack pitches that can result in positive outcomes on contact. This list also includes Jeff McNeil, Jay Bruce, and Jorge Alfaro, all of whom swing at pitchers at rates higher than league average no matter the location. This type of strategy can work for a player like McNeill, who has displayed throughout his career he is among the league’s best at making contact. For players like Bruce and Alfaro, this is a recipe for either falling out of the league (in the case of Bruce) or finding more time on the bench as time goes on (in the case of Alfaro). On the other end of the spectrum, the analysis is more cut and dry:

Here we have a list of players who we consider either disciplined or passive. These players do a good job of avoiding swinging at bad pitches, but it seems to be more of a product of just not swinging at all. It could also mean that these players are zeroing in on “their pitches to hit,” and can lead to very good seasons (see: Yasmani Grandal, Mitch Garver, and until this season David Fletcher, Brett Gardner, and Eric Sogard) but passing up good pitches can be problematic without either elite power or contact ability (see: Greg Garcia, Harrison Bader before 2021, and Josh VanMeter). This extreme passivity is a fine line to walk; as you can see after great combined 2019-20 seasons, Fletcher, Gardner, and Sogard have fallen off this season after posting very good lines previously. Fletcher especially is one of the best at putting the bat-head on the baseball, but his passivity may be catching up to him as the league has collected more data on his swing patterns.

Finally, here were the most aggressive and passive swingers on pitches with very little chance of becoming a strike:

Unsurprisingly, batters who avoid swinging at the worst pitches tend to post good results. The other end is a bit of a mixed bag. Tim Anderson has gotten away with what we would consider poor swing decisions because of his demonstrated ability to post high-end BABIPs the past few years, a combination of hitting the ball at angles that result in singles and his foot speed. Javier Báez has posted excellent lines (2020 notwithstanding) by slugging his way to success. Without outlier skills, this sort of approach leads to lackluster performance. Before 2020, José Iglesias was not a good hitter in the majors. Kevin Pillar and Hanser Alberto have mostly posted middling results, and I talked about Alfaro’s issues above.

There is not a one-size-fits-all method of approaching plate appearances. A player’s ability to make contact and his power are the driving forces behind how often he should swing and which pitches he should choose to offer at. This conclusion is nothing revelatory but distinguishing swing decisions based on its chance of being a strike if taken gives additional insight into certain players’ plate discipline profiles. Freddie Freeman or Juan Soto, how swing clearly can track the ball very well and we know they have great discipline. But their plate discipline is different than a player like Yasmani Grandal, who has also displayed discipline throughout his career, though that discipline manifests itself in a much more passive approach. When parsing swing decisions by the quality of a pitch on a granular level, players can get by either through aggression or selectivity. This also shows that free-swingers are free-swingers, no matter the pitch. Baseball players and their skills contain multitudes. When we deal with samples in terms of pitches faced, it helps to further parse the information at hand to get a better understanding of how players struggle or perform well.

Ryan Pepiot is No. 6 on our Los Angeles Dodgers Top Prospects list largely because of his changeup. Baseball America has described the 23-year-old’s best pitch as “devastating [and] plus-plus,’ while our own Eric Longenhagen has likened it to Devin Williams’s Airbender. Per BA, Pepiot has the second-best changeup in the minors, with only Jackson Kowar’s grading out as better.

The Dodgers’ third-round pick in the 2018 draft out of Butler University, Pepiot has made six starts with the Double-A Tulsa Drillers this year and has a 1.64 ERA to go with 33 strikeouts — and just 10 hits allowed — in 22 innings of work. He discussed his signature offering, and touched on the rest of his repertoire, prior to last night’s game.

———

David Laurila: How would you describe your changeup?

Ryan Pepiot: “I’m trying to make it as close to a screwball as possible. A lot of guys cut the spin when they throw their changeups, but the way mine works, I actually spin the ball more than I do my fastball. It’s kind of like how Devin Williams does it, where he spins it close to 3,000 [rpm]. I’m not that high — I’m in the 2,500-2,600 range — but I get arm-side fade and depth. I throw a four-seam circle change, and that allows the spin to look closer to a fastball from a hitter’s perspective. That helps get swings-and-misses, and also takes on pitches that sometimes I wouldn’t get takes on if it was a two-seam changeup and you could see the spin.”

Laurila: It sounds like you don’t back away from the Devin Williams comps you’ve gotten at times.

Pepiot: “No. I see his and I’m like, ‘That’s just gross.’ Like, how do you make something move like that? When I’m out there, I’m trying to do something similar.”

Laurila: What is the story behind your changeup? You don’t just walk onto the mound and start throwing a pitch like that. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the bigger on-field stories of the 2021 season has been which pitchers are using foreign substances, and how much help they’re getting from it. Whether it’s Giovanny Gallegos and hat-gate, Gerrit Cole’s word salad about Spider Tack, or Trevor Bauer’s wildly fluctuating spin rate, what pitchers do to the ball has been a hot topic. Yesterday, the league opened a new chapter in the saga when they released a memo that details a drastically increased enforcement policy, one that promises more suspensions than seemed imaginable only a year ago.

The new rule is draconian and more or less without exception. If a pitcher is caught with foreign substances on the ball or on their person, they’ll be immediately ejected from the game. They’ll also be automatically suspended. The memo, which FanGraphs obtained a copy of, doesn’t specify a suspension length. It does tie the suspensions to the existing rules and past precedent, however, which suggests a 10-game suspension with pay for any violations, a figure the league made explicit in its press release.

“Any foreign substance” is a massive change from the way baseball is currently played. The rule is intended, at least in theory, to crack down on synthetic grip enhancers, such as Spider Tack, that create huge increases in grip strength and spin rate. Pitchers have used lower-potency grip enhancers for years; mixing sunscreen and rosin or dabbing pine tar on the fingertips are both time-tested practices. Read the rest of this entry »

Vladimir Guerrero spent 16 years in the majors, hitting .318 with 449 home runs and nabbing scores of overambitious baserunners with his cannon of an arm. Just a couple years ago, he gave his induction speech in Cooperstown after breezing into the Hall of Fame on his second appearance on the ballot. For a son getting into the same profession, matching those accolades is a tall order, one of Jon Rauchian proportions. But after a so-so start to his major league career, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is having a breakout season and now threatens to do something Dad never did: win a Triple Crown.

That the younger Guerrero is quite adept at hitting a baseball shouldn’t shock anyone, though his first two stints in the majors were admittedly more middling than magical. But hype is difficult, and I suspect that if he played under a nom de guerre rather than a nom de Guerrero, people would likely have been far more patient before starting to worry about him. As I wrote about Guerrero in my preseason breakout picks:

Perhaps not the gutsiest call, but it feels to me like people have soured way too much on Vladito. A 112 wRC+ won’t win any Silver Sluggers, but we have to remember he was just 21 last season. Let’s imagine that Guerrero Jr. wasn’t part of the imperial-Vlad bloodline and was just a guy in Triple-A in 2020 (in an alternate universe where the minor league season existed). If we translate Guerrero’s actual major league performance into a Triple-A Buffalo line, ZiPS estimates that he would’ve been hitting .288/.370/.526 as a 21-year-old in the International League. Would anyone be disappointed with this line? There would be cries of Free Vlad! echoing through the streets by June. I think players like Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr. have spoiled us for normal awesome prospects.

While he was one of my favorite breakout picks, I certainly can’t claim to have seen a breakout on this particular level. If we look back at the preseason projections, neither could ZiPS:

Now, he hasn’t yet completed 2021 with a wRC+ of 206, but if he did, that’s in 99th percentile territory. I’ve been working on calibrating this model since the start of the season, and projected right now, his 90th percentile wRC+ gets a bump to 163, but 206 still would have been seen as a one-in-50 shot to happen.

As of Tuesday morning, Guerrero leads the American League in batting average, home runs, and RBI, baseball’s Triple Crown components. His sterling performance has been enough for a wRC+ bump of an impressive 27 points since March in ZiPS’ estimate of his current level of ability. At this point, it’s hard to argue his ceiling has been raised; the main question is how high. In the updated projections, which combine year-to-date with the rest-of-season projections, ZiPS has Guerrero leading the league in home runs and RBI and finishing second in batting average behind Michael Brantley. Steamer has Guerrero leading in all three categories.

Even if the stats were reset to zero, Vladito’s projections have improved to the point that he’d have a fighting chance to lead in the three stats, and be in the top 10 in each.

What this doesn’t tell us is the probability that Vlad does, in fact, win the Triple Crown. For that, I used the ZiPS season simulation and projected the rest of 2021 a million times for the American League, then added to the stats already in the books, counting — by computer, not by hand, of course– how many times each player led the league in the Triple Crown categories.

Injuries have been a red flag for Brantley, but he’s been healthy enough to qualify for the batting title in three consecutive seasons after missing more than 200 games in 2016 and ’17 combined. Assuming perfect health, ZiPS would give him about a 43% chance of taking the batting title, but with him already having missed time with a hamstring injury, he has a smaller margin of error in getting the required plate appearances. ZiPS sees Vlad at the back of the top 10 in rest-of-season batting average, but he’s got a 23-point cushion over the non-Brantley candidates. Also providing an assist is that two of the bigger threats, Mike Trout and Luis Arraez, are almost certainly going to fall short of 3.1 plate appearances per game (or lose too much BA if they fall just short in PA).

ZiPS still sees Matt Olson and Giancarlo Stanton as better home run hitters, but the four-homer edge to date is enough to leave Vlad the favorite over either. The computer projects him with a 44% shot to beat his dad’s career-high of 44; it surprises me too, but Vlad Sr. never led the league (or finished second) in any Triple Crown stat. The projections give him a 28% chance to pass the 50-homer threshold.

José Abreu isn’t repeating his 2020 season, but he’s still a player who should hit for power, even in a relative down season. As importantly, Abreu hits third or fourth in a White Sox lineup that’s been surprisingly potent for a team that’s lost Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert. Nobody has more plate appearances with runners on base this season than Abreu. But the Jays are no slouches, and as with the other categories, Guerrero has the lead right now.

If you wanted to be lazy, you’d multiply Vlad’s probability of leading each category together and get 2.6%, decent odds of getting into the record books. That, of course, is something you cannot actually do since these aren’t independent variables. The hundred games of baseball that leave Guerrero with the home run title also leave him with the RBI title most of the time. Batting average isn’t as highly correlated with the others, but if Guerrero hits .340, well, many of those hits will be homers and/or drive in runners. All told, ZiPS gives him a 19.1% chance of winning the Triple Crown. Not a bad shot at something that’s been done once in the last half-century.

Leading all of baseball in the Triple Crown categories — the Triple Crown Magnifique, as I like to call it — is a trickier challenge. That one hasn’t been done since Mickey Mantle in 1956, and Vlad has tough competition in this one. Fighting against Fernando Tatis Jr. and Ronald Acuña Jr. in a battle for junior supremacy drops his chances from 19.1% to well under 1% (0.2%).

Whether he wins the Triple Crown or not, it appears the Vladimir Guerrero Jr. era is in full swing. I don’t have kids, but I’m at least of the belief that most parents hope to see their children exceed their accomplishments. Vladito has a long way to go, but 2021 looks like the start of a run that may end with him achieving just that.

Lyon Richardson remains raw with a ton of potential. Ranked sixth on our Cincinnati Reds Top Prospects list, the 21-year-old right-hander has a 5.13 ERA in seven starts for High-A Dayton, but he also has a pair of a high-octane heaters, a plus changeup, and a hard curveball that gets side-to-side movement. What he lacks more than anything is experience on the mound. Primarily a position player as a Florida prep, Richardson didn’t become a starter until his senior year at Jensen Beach High School. It was then that he began turning heads. Enamored with his athleticism and explosive velocity, the Reds selected him with the 47th-overall pick of the 2018 draft.

Richardson discussed his arsenal, and the learning curve that goes along with it, late last week.

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David Laurila: Describe yourself as a pitcher.

Lyon Richardson: “I haven’t been pitching for very long. I just try to learn as much as I can, and be as aggressive as I can. At this point, I don’t really have the ability to give in, if that makes any sense. So really, I just try to be as aggressive as possible and push the hitter.”

Laurila: Would you say you’re more of a “stuff guy” right now?

Richardson: “For the most part, in the history of me pitching, I’m a thrower. Historically, I’m a position player, so all I really knew was to throw hard. I’m trying to be more of a stuff guy, but it’s in production. It’s definitely a production.”

Laurila: By and large, you’re trying to be a stuff guy and learning to “pitch” at the same time?

Richardson: “Correct. So, my velocity is definitely up — especially over the past year — and being able to control the pitches with that velocity is definitely a big thing. In 2019, I think my average fastball was 89 to 92 [mph] — something like that. Out of high school, I was anywhere from 95 to 98. This year, it’s back up to right around high school range. I was up to 98 in spring training, and I’ve been up to 97 a bunch so far this season.” Read the rest of this entry »

For over two decades, Baseball Reference has served as the most direct conduit to the game’s statistical history, going beyond Major League Baseball’s gatekeeping to provide access to a fuller swath of leagues and teams dating back to the inception of the National Association in 1871. On Tuesday, the site officially launched its expanded coverage of the Negro Leagues and historical Black major league players, a monumental effort incorporating data previously available only via the Seamheads Negro League Database and accompanying it with commissioned articles by experts on Negro Leagues baseball to help place that data in perspective.

“With this change, we now present these Black major leagues as the equals of the American and National Leagues,” said Sports Reference President Sean Forman via Zoom press conference on Monday. “We have had Negro Leagues baseball stats on Baseball Reference for at least 10 years now, but we treated them as less than the statistics of the white major leagues. We will now treat them as the major leagues that they are.”

“Our decision to fix this omission is just a tiny part of the story,” continued Forman. “The main story here is the work of hundreds of researchers, activists, players, and families who did the research, made their arguments, and would not let the memories of these players and leagues fade away.”

For Monday’s event, Forman was joined by both Sean Gibson and Larry Lester as representatives of “the groups most central to this story, the players and their families and the researchers who told their stories.” Gibson is the great-grandson of Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson and the executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation, which provides athletic, academic, and mentoring programs for children in the Pittsburgh area. Lester is an award-winning researcher who co-founded the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum; who has worked extensively with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in its research into Black baseball; who helped compile the Seamheads database; and who for over 25 years has chaired SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee. Read the rest of this entry »

I like the Marlins pitching staff. There’s a certain charm to a rotation that mostly consists of farm-grown talent, and it’s a powerhouse, too. Sandy Alcantara and Trevor Rogers have become two of the league’s more reliable starters by virtue of their electric stuff, with room for further growth. The bullpen is home to a diverse group of relievers whose idiosyncrasies are so irresistible that we’ve written about a member of Miami’s relief corps not once, but twice – and it’s not even the offseason! Collectively, the Marlins ‘pen has accrued 2.7 WAR, good for fourth-best in the majors.

Rarely is there one reason for success like this. In all likelihood, the Marlins have excelled at pitching because they just happen to roster good pitchers. With teams increasingly tailoring plans to the needs of individual pitchers, team-wide dogmas and philosophies are harder to find. So what follows isn’t an explanation. Rather, it’s a series of observations I find noteworthy. Up first, here’s a graph showing each team’s average vertical break on its four-seam fastball (abbreviated as “fastball” from here on):

Though the gap between first and last is only a couple of inches of movement, we can still glean certain teams’ preferences. For example, teams like the Dodgers, White Sox, and Yankees have a predilection for fastballs that generate ample ride. You know the drill – throw them up in the zone and chances are hitters will swing and miss. It’s a tried and true approach. Read the rest of this entry »