At a time when they’re already without ace Jacob deGrom and two of their top hitters, and still trying to dig out of a team-wide early-season slump that led to the dismissal of their hitting coaches, the Mets lost two more regulars to the Injured List on Sunday. Facing the Rays in St. Petersburg, both Michael Conforto and Jeff McNeil left after suffering hamstring injuries in the first inning, the kind of calamity that seems as though it could befall only the Mets. The team received no respite, because in Monday’s game, starting pitcher Taijuan Walker departed after three innings due to tightness in his left side, and then Kevin Pillar was hit in the face by a fastball, suffering a bloodied and broken nose and perhaps more. An Injured List that’s already at an even dozen threatens to continue to grow.

McNeil, who had previously departed last Tuesday’s game against the Orioles due to what was termed “body cramps” after trying to stretch a single into a double, legged out an infield single to lead off Sunday’s game, and was erased on an inning-ending double play. As he was the designated hitter, his spot didn’t come up again until the third inning, at which time he was pinch-hit for by Patrick Mazeika. He departed with what the team initially described as “left hamstring tightness.”

That double play ball came off the bat of Conforto, who was visibly limping and grabbing his right hamstring by the time he crossed first base. You can see that in the video, as well as McNeil getting no further than halfway to second by the time Brandon Lowe’s throw reached Ji-Man Choi:

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The Red Sox caught us all by surprise by jumping out to an incredible start en route to an early-season lead atop the AL East. As Tony Wolfe wrote, the strong performance was largely thanks to consistent run-scoring and a dominant bullpen. Fast-forward to mid-May, and Boston is still there, first in the division and continuing to climb up various weekly Power Rankings (including our own). As impressive as the Red Sox have been at the plate, though, the rotation seems to have been overshadowed. I get it; there’s not a lot of name brand recognition. Their two best starters from 2019, Chris Sale and Eduardo Rodriguez, pitched a grand total of 0 innings in 2020. But after taking three of four from the Angels over the weekend, the Red Sox lead the American League in FIP (3.29) among starting pitchers.

Leading the charge is Nathan Eovaldi. His most recent start extended his streak without giving up a homer to 50 innings; he is the only qualified starting pitcher who has yet to do so. That helps make up for a modest 4.50 ERA and strikeout-per-nine rate of 8.46; his FIP is 2.15. Since he’s been in Boston, Eovaldi has struggled with home runs, allowing an average of 1.86 per nine over the past two seasons. That makes sense, as he’s always allowed a lot of balls to be put in play with a penchant for giving up the occasional dinger. But so far this season, the expected value in terms of xwOBA on those balls suggests that Eovaldi is eliciting softer contact, which is supported by his peripherals.

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Cleveland develops pitchers as well as any team in baseball, and that’s good news for Tanner Burns. The second of the club’s two first round picks last summer, Burns has an Auburn University pedigree and a high ceiling. He also has some question marks, as evidenced by Eric Longenhagen — who acknowledged that he’s “a little lighter on Burns than the industry consensus” — having ranked the 22-year-old right-hander conservatively at No. 20 on the team’s 2021 Top Prospects list. Baseball America is somewhat more bullish on Burns, slotting him at No. 15 on their own list.

The Decatur, Alabama native has pitched solidly in his first two appearances of the season. In a pair of starts for the High-A Lake County Captains, Burns has allowed four hits and two runs, with one walk and 13 strikeouts, his fastball sitting 94-95 and topping out at 96. He discussed his approach to pitching, and the influences of Tim Hudson and Casey Mize, following his initial outing.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with an icebreaker I’ve used several times in the past: Do you consider pitching to be more of an art, or more of a science?

Tanner Burns: “I feel it’s more of an art. I try to keep it plain and simple, like straight vanilla. With my release points, I think ‘off my right ear’ to go inside on a righty, ‘off my nose’ for down the middle,’ and ‘off my left ear’ for away to a righty.’ So I kind of take it as an art, delivering my pitches, letting it come off my hand.” Read the rest of this entry »

At some point in your baseball fandom, you’ll end up thinking about Schrödinger’s Baseball Player. The question posed by it is simple: When does a struggling hitter or pitcher stop existing as a superposition of states – either plain unlucky or genuinely worrisome – and become one or the other?

Consider the case of Luis Castillo. Like most, I initially ignored his first few bad starts. But now, about a quarter of the way into the season, the righty’s 7.71 ERA is the worst amongst all qualified starters. Though his peripherals are much better, including a relatively respectable 4.79 FIP, you have to imagine that something is off. Maybe we should open the box and find out what.

There are a couple of things to consider regarding Castillo, but let’s focus on his changeup. Improved command of it led to a breakout season in 2019, which he followed up with an excellent 2020. A pitch with incredible movement and a penchant for missing bats, it’s the foundation of his entire repertoire. In fact, even this season, hitters have only mustered a .254 xwOBA against it, which is obviously great. So what’s the hold up? Well:

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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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