It’s true – compared to previous seasons, hitters are struggling against pitchers. The league batting average is the lowest it’s been in decades even if you exclude pitchers, the strikeout rate the highest. It’s easy to point fingers at the people tasked with making contact, but really, there’s no simple defense against a triple-digit heater followed by a wipeout slider.

But sometimes, the hitters fight back. They’re world-class athletes after all, and are capable of actions we can only dream of. Hitting a baseball 400 feet for a home run is one such example, but let’s go a step further. What about home runs hit off of seemingly impossible pitches? Today, I wanted to look at the four highest home runs hitters have belted out this season, then determine which one is the most impressive. This unfortunately means I had to leave out Jazz Chisholm’s homer off Jacob deGrom, as the pitch wasn’t high enough, but don’t worry, you can read about it here.

With that introduction out of the way, let’s meet the candidates alongside their home runs. The first batter up is Willians Astudillo:

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot to dissect when it comes to understanding the increase in strikeouts in baseball. Pitchers at the plate are striking out at a higher clip than ever, but even when filtering out their plate appearances, we’re still seeing yearly increases in strikeout rate. A continued increase in velocity and an improved ability to spot fastballs up in the zone was always going to boost strikeouts, but we are also coming to shifts in pitching approach that are directly attacking long-standing hitter’s comforts, making even hitter’s counts unpredictable.

Since I’ll be going through league-wide pitching trends, it’s useful to take a quick glance at pitch usage for the year.

Fastball usage is holding steady from last year at just over 50%. In addition, the increase in slider usage continues, taking a chunk out of curveball usage. Still, the takeaway is that we’re approaching true 50/50 fastball/non-fastball usage splits over all counts, and it’s probably here to stay. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s just under 150 miles by road from Vancouver to Seattle — not necessarily an easy round-trip distance, but one that’s covered easily enough over the course of a day, given planning around border waits and traffic. It’s certainly a more reasonable distance to cover than the thousands of miles over mountain and prairie to the only other major league ballpark within Canada’s borders. For most people in western Canada, the most frequent major league ballpark they’ll make a trip to is Seattle’s T-Mobile Park.

I’ve gone to T-Mobile Park via a few different means of transportation. When I was a toddler, my family would sometimes take day trips down in the car when the Blue Jays or Yankees were in town. We weren’t able to go for many years after that, but when we did manage to take trips down in 2016 and ’17, it was a matter of a great deal of planning: making sure the car wouldn’t break down on the way (or renting one, when we didn’t have a car), accounting for the cost of tickets and food and parking. Not to mention, too, the amount of time that would need to be committed. Added up, these trips were luxuries, a single day a year set aside for a baseball pilgrimage.

By far the most frequent way I’ve gotten to T-Mobile Park, though, is the bus. There was the Greyhound, or the Bolt Bus, or one of the other interchangeable bargain travel services that operated cross-border routes. They were frequently late, often unhelpful, and almost always uncomfortable, but they fulfilled their purpose: For someone who didn’t have a car, or couldn’t access a rental, they were a cheap way of getting from Point A to Point B.

The first time I took the bus to a baseball game in Seattle was by chance, a happy accident. My partner and I had taken a weekend trip on the Greyhound down to Olympia to see the final date of a concert tour. But our return trip was delayed: the bus coming up from LA had run into some kind of horrible traffic, and we sat for almost three hours in the stuffy, sometimes unstaffed, exceedingly cramped bus station in Olympia. As a result, we missed our evening transfer in Seattle. By the time we got there, it would be another three hours of waiting for the next bus up to Vancouver at 10 PM. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves are short one outfielder for at least six weeks, with Marcell Ozuna placed on the IL after injuring two fingers on his left hand while sliding into third against the Red Sox on Tuesday night. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether Ozuna would miss significant time, with manager Brian Snitker telling the press that the two-time All-Star was going back to Atlanta for tests, but with Wednesday came the news that his stay on the shelf would be a long one.

Ozuna has gotten off to a poor start in 2021, hitting .213/.288/.356 in just over 200 plate appearances, for a 79 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR — a major disappointment for a player coming off an OPS of 1.067 last season. It wouldn’t be the first time he had a bit of a letdown year after what seemed to be a breakout campaign, as was the case with his two seasons in St. Louis, but at least he hit for enough batting average then to be a league-average player in a corner outfield position.

Atlanta hasn’t received much production from Ozuna, but there were several reasons to think that his overall lines would recover. His power numbers are down from past seasons, but he’s partially compensated for that with some of the best plate discipline of his career. ZiPS thought his BABIP of .244 should have actually been more like .298 from his contact data, and Statcast saw similar underperformance, with an xBA of .268 and an xSLG of .471, both numbers more in line with his typical showing. A repeat of 2020’s 179 wRC+ was always unreasonable, but even with this early slump, his Depth Chart-projected wRC+ was still at the 123 it was back in March.

Ozuna suffered a similar injury in 2019, breaking the middle and ring fingers on his right hand while sliding during a pickoff attempt. It probably won’t assuage the worries of Braves fans that he went from an .847 OPS before that injury to a .729 OPS after returning, but I wouldn’t worry much about this limited precedent. I haven’t found much underperformance in hitters returning from broken fingers, and month-to-month play is quite volatile without any injury-based explanations involved. Short of significantly worse news, I wouldn’t be especially concerned about Ozuna after he returns, probably at or near the All-Star break. At least he can take it as consolation that he broke his fingers doing actual baseball things, unlike Zach Plesac, who suffered a broken thumb taking off his shirt.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, the Phillies placed Bryce Harper on the 10-day injured list with a bruised left wrist after insisting for days that their star rightfielder was healthy. Last Sunday, when asked if Harper was out of the lineup due to any medical issues, manager Joe Girardi flatly told reporters, including Matt Gelb of The Athletic, “No. [It’s] just a day off. Just a day off.” When Harper missed a second consecutive game, Girardi again denied that anything was wrong, saying, “I went to bed last night, woke up this morning and said, ‘You know what? I’m going to give him another day.’ And that’s the reason.”

But once Harper was officially on the IL, Girardi finally admitted that he had been dishonest with the media, citing that he’d face a competitive disadvantage if he noted publicly that Harper’s wrist was causing him discomfort. “There is a distinct advantage to the other manager if I tell you a guy’s wrist is hurt,” he said. “And the idea here is to win games…. I understand you want to know. But there are distinct advantages that I can give another club if they know everything that’s going on over here. So I’m sorry that I had to do that. But we’re trying to win games, and he’s just not ready to go. I thought he’d be ready on Monday or Tuesday. He’s not.”

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cubs’ 2021 schedule came out, I circled May 17-20. That otherwise unremarkable four-game series with the Nationals would mark the return of 2016 World Series heroes Jon Lester and Kyle Schwarber to Wrigley Field. I knew they would receive an epic welcome from fans and I felt like I needed to be part of it.

The Cubs are pretty far removed from the juggernaut that won 103 games on the way to the team’s first championship in 108 years. While a relatively weak division means it’s certainly possible they could go on a run that would keep Jed Hoyer’s front office from being sellers at the deadline, it is far from guaranteed. Our playoff odds give the Cubs a 35.1% chance of making the postseason. It has left me looking for those moments of joy that fall short of the ultimate goal of hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy at the end of the season but are still meaningful.

It occurred to me that I am far from the only fan looking for moments to celebrate beyond the expectation of playing in October. So I started looking for all of the silver linings to 2021’s cloudiest seasons. I identified all of the teams with less than a 20% chance to make the playoffs per our odds, then dug into the prospect lists, record books and clubhouse storylines to see what I might circle on the calendar for the sport’s less fortunate faithful. So here they are, a few moments of joy for the fanbases that may still be holding out hope that their team will channel its inner 2019 Nationals, but suspect they won’t. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s what struck me as notable. Today, I’ll take a look at the American League, with a National League post to follow next week. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres’ nine-game winning streak came to an end on Monday night at the hands of the Brewers, who beat them 5-3 in Milwaukee, but the loss did have at least one bright spot, in that Tommy Pham homered for just the second time this season. The 33-year-old outfielder has struggled mightily since being acquired from the Rays in December 2019, particularly after being the victim of a stabbing last October, but lately he’s showed signs of heating up, a welcome development for the surging NL West leaders, who have since returned to their winning ways with back-to-back wins and at 32-18 lead the NL West by a game and a half.

Pham crushed a two-run homer in the ninth inning of Monday’s game off reliever Angel Perdomo, at a time when the Padres trailed 5-0:

The blast had an estimated distance of 430 feet, making it his longest since his 440-foot homer at Coors Field last July 31. In his previous 75 games with the Padres, he’d hit just one other drive of more than 390 feet, a 410-foot homer against the Dodgers in Los Angeles last August 13, three days before fracturing a hamate bone in his right hand while fouling off a pitch.

That hamate fracture, which required surgery and sidelined Pham for just over a month, was a far less severe injury than the stabbing. On October 11, three days after the Padres were ousted from the playoffs by the Dodgers, Pham was involved in an altercation in a parking lot outside a San Diego strip club, during which he was slashed across his lower back. He needed 200 stitches to close the deep gash, and was fortunate to escape even worse damage. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Wheeler signed a big contract before the 2020 season, and if we’re being honest, the Phillies paid for potential. That’s not to say Wheeler wasn’t an effective starter with the Mets, but his career numbers — a 3.77 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, a 22.8% strikeout rate, and an 8.5% walk rate — didn’t scream ace.

His stuff, on the other hand, spoke loudly. An upper-90s fastball and lower-90s slider invite comparisons with Jacob deGrom, and his curveball prevents batters from sitting on a single breaking ball. If you could design a pitcher in a lab — well, fine, you might come up with deGrom or Gerrit Cole. But if you ended up with Wheeler, you’d certainly be happy with your work.

When a pitcher’s results — and again, they were good results — fall short of what you’d expect from their stuff, any stretch of better outcomes feels like a tantalizing glimpse at what a breakthrough might look like. At this point, however, it’s not a glimpse: Wheeler has fully broken out into the ace the Phillies hoped for when they signed him.

Consider this: since leaving the Mets, Wheeler has the 10th-best ERA in baseball. It’s not some fluky sequencing effect, either. He has the eighth-best FIP in the game over that time frame, the 17th-best xFIP, and the 17th-best SIERA, another advanced ERA estimator. He’s done all of that while throwing the third-most innings in the game, behind only Shane Bieber and Aaron Civale. That combination of skill and volume puts him sixth among all starters in WAR over that time frame, in a virtual tie with Cole. Read the rest of this entry »

Trying to project how teams will behave in the coming months involves considering a lot of variables. There are the standings themselves, and yes, many teams are daily visitors to the FanGraphs Playoff Odds pages. There are payroll limitations as defined by the ownership group, though front offices frequently try to make the case for spending more money if they can make the argument that it will lead to more revenue in the form of an extended postseason run. Finally, there is the state of the roster in terms of now versus the future. Who’s good on this team? Who’s good on this team and will be here next year? What about in three years? When thinking about all those things and how teams will comport themselves this summer, no franchise fascinates me more than the Giants.

The Giants have been one of the most pleasant surprises in baseball. Their ZIPS projection entering the season was 75–87, with the potential to get to .500 if everything went well. Their rotation was seen as a strong suit, and their bullpen and offense were viewed as major question marks. Two months into the season, the rotation has been as expected, the bullpen has been more than good enough, and their lineup has put more runs on the board than anticipated with a low-contact group that depends on walks and power. Like with his former team in Oakland, Farhan Zaidi knows how to make a sum greater than the parts when constructing a roster, mixing and matching his lineups well beyond simple platoons to maximize what he has. He’s also also benefitting from seasons from Buster Posey and Brandon Crawford that are in the 90th-plus percentile of expectations.

As we hit late May, the Giants are one of the best teams in baseball, with a run differential that says this might not be a fluke. If you just look at the record and team performance so far, this is a clear go-for-it moment for the club. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they are in the same division as the Dodgers and the Padres, who are unanimously seen as two of the best teams in baseball. San Francisco has stuck with the pair for two months, but asking for four more months of equal performance might be pushing the envelope a bit, and last weekend’s sweep at the hands of Los Angeles confused matters even more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember when the Rockies attempted to assemble a super-mega bullpen? During the 2017-18 offseason, the team committed a combined $106 million to Wade Davis, Jake McGee, and the protagonist of this article, Bryan Shaw. What followed was a disaster. The trio put up just 0.4 WAR while part of the Rockies bullpen, a miserable return on investment.

Each pitcher had his own flaws, but none was worse than Shaw, who dragged down an already disappointing total with -0.5 WAR over a two-year span. If you’re not too familiar with him, Shaw is synonymous with his cutter, which he’s thrown upwards to 80% of the time in his career. It’s a fantastic pitch, featuring some of the league’s best horizontal movement in tandem with ample rise. The problem: In Colorado, the high altitude suppresses magnus force, the source of backspin and thus vertical break. Many of Shaw’s cutters became extremely hittable in this new environment – his Hard Hit rate jumped from 28.6% in 2017 to 39.7% the following year.

That’s where the story ended, for a while. Even at FanGraphs, our last mention of Shaw was in a Sunday Notes column back in 2019. Two years later, Bryan Shaw is now an essential part of Cleveland’s bullpen, his former home, with a 1.42 ERA and 3.56 FIP. Talk about a resurgence! What’s more, it’s not as if he’s added a secret new pitch. He still throws the cutter as often as he did years ago. Read the rest of this entry »