After MLB announced they were deadening the ball for 2021, we’ve spent a lot of time chasing the effects of those changes. Devan Fink has looked at what happened to the hits that used to be home runs and compared the total number of home runs per batted ball event in April. But while home run totals are comparatively lower over the short-term, it’s worth noting that there are still a historically high number of home runs in baseball. In fact, as of Wednesday morning, 3.48% of at-bats resulted in a home run, which is the fourth-highest rate in the majors since 1921:

It turns out that as a proportion of baseball’s offense, the home run is as prominent as it’s ever been. While 2019 is still the outlier for home runs as a proportion of total hits, with a whopping 16.2% of all hits being home runs, 2021 has the third highest proportion of teams offense coming in the form of a long ball. The explosion of home runs across the league in the last five seasons makes the steroid era pale in comparison:

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All-Star Game voting kicked off a few weeks ago (if you haven’t filled out a ballot, you can do so here), with the first round of totals announced earlier this week. There are a few players running away with their position, but most are up for grabs. Among those looking for more votes: Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Rangers shortstop, who’s unhappy with the results so far.

https://twitter.com/Isiahkf11/status/1404490572069588993

Kiner-Falefa has a case for taking the trip to Colorado, as he currently ranks fourth in both FanGraphs WAR (2.0) and bWAR (2.8) among shortstops in the AL, yet he did not crack the top 10 in the first vote update. Still, All-Star roster spot or no, this has been a wildly successful season for him, particularly in light of the defensive move he had to make.

Originally drafted as a shortstop, Kiner-Falefa played multiple infield positions as he worked his way through the minor leagues and also tried his hand at catching before going from third base to shortstop this season. As noted by Andrew Simon of MLB.com and our Jake Mailhot during the offseason, he’s now become the first player in the modern era to play at least 50 games at catcher, third base, and shortstop throughout his career.

It’s not only his versatility that is noteworthy. The reigning 2020 AL Gold Glove winner at third base, Kiner-Falefa’s skills haven’t diminished with his shift to shortstop; his defensive component of WAR (based on UZR) is the highest at that position in the AL. The table below shows a breakdown of FanGraphs’ measures of the primary components of WAR individually (hitting, fielding, and base running):

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In 2020, the San Diego Padres finally had their breakout season, going 37-23 in the pandemic-shortened sprint, good enough for the third-best record in baseball. A lot of players were responsible for getting them to where they ended up, but one of the best bits of news for the team was that Eric Hosmer was one of them. After signing a long-term contract prior to the 2018 season, Hosmer hit .259/.316/.412 in his first two seasons with the Friars, for a wRC+ of 93 and -0.5 combined WAR that placed him near the bottom of the ranks of baseball’s first baseman. But in 2020, with the highest average launch angle and lowest grounder percentage of his career, he hit .287/.333/.517, giving some hope that would turn things around.

If the first three months of 2021 are any indication, those hopes have mostly evaporated, ninth inning, game-tying home runs aside. Hosmer’s still hitting the ball very hard, but he’s largely back to his old, pre-2020 habits, hitting an inordinate number of pitches straight into the dirt, knocking out more ants than opposing pitchers. Since 2015, Statcast has kept track of what they call the “Sweet Spot” or pitches hit with a launch angle between eight and 32 degrees. Only twice has Hosmer been over 30%: in 2020 and his equally excellent 2017 season. For 2021, that mark has dropped to his lowest number yet, 22.3%. As a result, even with a better average exit velocity than last year, he’s missing 150 points of slugging percentage:

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Spencer Strider is a pitching nerd. He’s also a promising prospect putting up stellar numbers in his first professional season. Drafted in the fourth round last year out of Clemson University, the 22-year-old right-hander has a sparkling 1.50 ERA in six starts split between Low-A Augusta and High-A Rome. Moreover, he’s overpowering hitters to the tune of 14 hits allowed and 44 strikeouts in 24 innings.

Strider — No. 22 on our Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list — nerded out about his repertoire, and the evolution of his approach, prior to last night’s game.

———

David Laurila: Tell me about yourself as a pitcher. How do you get guys out?

Spencer Strider: “I believe in attacking the zone and putting the game in the hitters’ hands. Whether you’re throwing 50 [mph] and can’t throw a strike, or you’re throwing 101 and spotting up like Jacob deGrom, the hitters have to deal with whatever you give them. The statistics show that’s going to work in your favor the vast majority of the time.

“I’ve also come to learn a lot about my fastball. At the end of college we were able to get more more data and metrics on it, and I understood the concept of vertical break, how spin is helpful, and everything else that’s part of the vernacular now. I’ve focused on pitching to the top half of the zone, where it’s most difficult to hit a good rising fastball. Most of my attention over the last few months has been working on a breaking ball that complements that fastball use, something with more vertical depth at a high velocity.”

Laurila: For years, pitchers tended to tell me that they pitch to contact. Now it’s more common for them to say they’re trying to miss bats. Where do you stand?

Strider: “I’m definitely trying to miss bats. That’s the best outcome. I want to give myself the best chance of being successful, and if a guy swings-and-misses, I can’t be hurt by that. If I can pitch in a way that guarantees me more swings-and-misses, that helps remove the possibility of bad outcomes. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like this season, umpires are under more scrutiny than ever before. Part of that might be because we’ve grown tired of the inconsistency that comes with human umpires, while another part could be access to more information, such as data on individual umpires’ accuracies.

On the sabermetric side, research on umpire performance has yielded mixed results. In April, our Ben Clemens examined whether the strike zone had changed and found no difference compared to previous seasons (though he noted that might not be very satisfying to frustrated fans). Recently, over at Baseball Prospectus, Rob Arthur concluded that the issue wasn’t the rate of wrong calls, but rather their magnitude. In other words, umpires are messing up in high-leverage situations. But is this because of umpires succumbing to pressure? Or just variance? The “why” component still eludes us.

In the midst of all the umpire-related hoopla, though, it seems like we’ve overlooked the importance of pitch framing. Until robot umpires come along, the art of presenting would-be balls as strikes (and making sure strikes don’t turn into balls) will remain relevant. This season’s umpires have been inconsistent, sure, but it’s undeniable that a certain amount of agency belongs to skillful catchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Lance Lynn has been among the best pitchers in the majors since the moment he signed with the Rangers back in 2019. Before that season, Lynn accumulated 16.9 WAR in 1,134.1 innings, good for a rate of 2.7 WAR per 180 IP, the epitome of a very good mid-rotation starter. He was remarkably consistent across those seasons, first for the Cardinals from 2011-17 and then for the Twins and Yankees in ’18. The winter after his partial season in New York, Lynn signed with the Rangers for a modest (by quality veteran standards) $30 million over three years. This was a perfectly reasonable contract given his output prior to 2019; if anything, it was a little light. Lynn had proven time and again that he could effectively eat innings for playoff-caliber clubs. From 2012-18, he threw 176.0, 201.2, 203.2, 175.1, 186.1, and 156.2 innings; again, a paragon of consistency.

Starting in 2019, Lynn found another gear. In his first season in Arlington, he posted 6.7 WAR on the back of a minuscule 66 FIP-. He has not looked back since: from 2019 through this season, Lynn is fifth overall in WAR, with 9.9 wins to his name, narrowly edging out Zack Wheeler. The only pitchers with better results have been Jacob deGrom, Gerrit Cole, Shane Bieber, and Max Scherzer. Much of that production can be attributed to continuing to soak up innings; Lynn is fourth in innings pitched in that time frame. But he has also been excellent on a rate basis. From 2019-21, he has posted the sixth lowest ERA- among starting pitchers and the ninth lowest FIP-. His production is the confluence of continuing to be a workhorse and upping the ante in terms of his per start effectiveness.

Lynn’s salary and the Rangers place in their rebuilding cycle made Lynn an obvious trade candidate this past winter. Lynn’s contract and the White Sox wanting to (let me be nice) maintain “payroll flexibility” while also making a playoff push made the player and club a perfect match. These factors led Chicago to send Dane Dunning and Avery Weems to the Rangers for the last year of Lynn (and his rib-smashing aesthetic). As one can imagine, given his place on the WAR leaderboard through the 2021 season, Lynn has continued to excel on the Southside. He is striking out 28.1% of the batters he faces while posting a walk rate of just 7.0% through 12 starts and a park adjusted ERA 64% better than league average. He has been everything the White Sox could ask for and more. His continued success might make you believe that Lynn is humming along, picking up right where he left off after dominant 2019 and ’20 showings. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I took a look at the worst bunts of the season. They were all horrible! Balls were hit directly at fielders, lead runners were thrown out, and altogether the worst five bunts produced eight outs and no base advancements. Not great! But that’s only one side of the coin, and today I’d like to look at the bunts that have helped the batting team most so far this year.

You’ll notice that there aren’t any textbook sacrifice bunts on either list. That’s no knock on skilled bunters, but rather a function of the way I’m defining best and worst. Bunts, by their very nature, are hedges. They reduce volatility by definition — exchanging an out for some base advances is neither the worst nor best outcome of a given plate appearance, so a successful sacrifice bunt will inherently have a modest change in win probability relative to a play where something goes very right or very wrong.

Even so, today isn’t solely a showcase of bad defense. There’s some bad defense, but there’s also plenty of bunting for a hit. When you change the math by giving yourself a chance to reach base, bunts become far more valuable. It’s hard to greatly increase your team’s chances of winning while also making an out, so separating the sacrifice from the bunt is a prerequisite for having one of the most valuable bunts of the year.

For the most part, the plays on this list are all baseball being played at a high level. There are some defensive howlers, sure, but there’s plenty of skill here on both sides of the ball. Let’s take a look at the bunts that have helped out the most this year (through June 9), starting with an honorable mention.
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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.