David Bednar has been a find for the Pirates. Picked up from the Padres over the offseason as part of the seven-player Joe Musgrove deal, Bednar has emerged as one of the most-reliable arms in the Pittsburgh pen. In 17 outings comprising 15-and-a-third innings, the 26-year-old right-hander has 19 strikeouts to go with a 2.35 ERA and a 2.91 FIP.

Expectations weren’t nearly that high. San Diego’s 35th-round pick in the 2016 draft, the former Lafayette College Leopard came into the current campaign with a gnarly 6.75 ERA in 17-and-a-third big-league innings. Moreover, while his velocity has always been intriguing — ditto his splitter — Bednar’s name had never been spotted near the top of a prospect list. By and large, the 6-foot-1, 245-pound hurler came to his new club unheralded, unpolished, and in need of a fresh start.

I asked Ben Cherington if the decision to acquire the Pittsburgh-born-and-bred Bednar was driven more by the team’s analytics department, or by its scouting department.

“It was both,” said the Pirates GM. “From the scouting end, I believe Andrew Lorraine was one of the pro scouts who had seen him. Joe Douglas from our professional acquisitions group is someone who dug into him from a data perspective. Plus, he’s from here, so we had some personal background as well.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s April 27. The Blue Jays may not be dominant — their roster has been decimated by injuries — but they are getting by, at least so far. They have just taken a rare series from the Rays in St. Petersburg; after a lengthy road trip, they now return to their home away from home in Dunedin, with Max Scherzer awaiting them on the mound.

On a bullpen day, the Nationals quickly take a 3-0 lead: two home runs from Trea Turner, another from Yadiel Hernandez. Scherzer erases singles in the first and second on double plays. But in the third, things start to happen: back-to-back singles from Alejandro Kirk and Cavan Biggio. A Bo Bichette walk loads the bases for Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 

Guerrero hit into the double play that ended the first inning — just the second time he’s grounded into a double play this season, a ball he scorched into the dirt at 109 mph. He’s 1-for-11 over the past few games. He fouls off Scherzer’s first pitch, a slider in the zone; he watches two that miss. The fourth slider stays up. A grand slam, and the Jays lead. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres already had to endure life without Fernando Tatis Jr. for one stretch this season due to his left shoulder subluxation, and now they’re without him again. On Tuesday, the 22-year-old shortstop tested positive for COVID-19 and landed on the Injured List. He quickly gained company when right fielder Wil Myers also tested positive, while three other Padres — first baseman Eric Hosmer, outfielder Jorge Mateo, and superutilityman Jurickson Profar — were sidelined via MLB’s contact tracing protocols. The absences have left San Diego significantly shorthanded and highlighted the potential competitive disadvantage that a team can face while dealing with an outbreak.

The Padres aren’t the only team in the midst of a COVID-19 cluster, either. On Tuesday, about an hour before Tatis’ positive test became public, news of an outbreak among the Yankees’ coaching staff broke as well. While Padres manager Jayce Tingler declined to say whether any of his sidelined players have been vaccinated, their status will become apparent depending upon how quickly they’re allowed to return (more on which below). Meanwhile, the Yankees’ group — now up to eight, including third base coach Phil Nevin, first base coach Reggie Willits, pitching coach Matt Blake, and shortstop Gleyber Torres, plus four unnamed members of the team’s traveling staff — are known to have been fully vaccinated. In fact, the Yankees were among the majors’ first teams to reach the 85% vaccination threshold that allowed them to relax certain health and safety protocols. But less than a week after MLB announced that more than 83% of all Tier 1 individuals (players, managers, coaches, athletic trainers and support personnel) had been partially or fully vaccinated, and that it had gone a week without a single positive test from its major league camps (and just one positive from a staffer at an alternate site), the Padres and Yankees offered rude reminders of COVID-19’s lingering presence.

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The 2021 Detroit Tigers are terrible.

I don’t say this out of cruelty or to beat a dead horse, but to continue on with this piece, it’s important to understand that the team is very, very bad. It took them five weeks to notch their 10th win of the year. Future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera is hitting a mere .160/.259/.253. The incredible hot starts of Akil Baddoo and Wilson Ramos have cooled, and with the sole exception of Matthew Boyd, the team’s pitching staff seems to be struggling mightily against all comers.

For fans, it’s feels like a familiar story told year after year, only it seems to be getting worse over time. And it’s becoming a story that’s getting a lot harder to listen to without a mounting sense of frustration, because in terms of a rebuild, the Tigers appear to have been abandoned by their contractor with only a rough hewn foundation to show for it.

To truly get a sense of where the Tigers find themselves now, we must first understand just how bad this team is in a historical context. To do so, we have to compare the first months of 2021 to the Tigers’ two worst seasons historically: 2003 and 2019. In 2003, the Tigers came close to making history as the worst team in the modern era. They lost 119 games versus just 43 wins, coming within one loss of tying the 1962 Mets for most single season losses. For the franchise, it marked a turning point and a trend towards improvement. By 2006 they made it to the World Series, had a Rookie of the Year winner in pitcher Justin Verlander, and won 95 games. Read the rest of this entry »

Cole Irvin has epitomized the term “crafty lefty” in his first season with the Oakland Athletics. In seven starts covering 41 innings, the 27-year-old former Philadelphia Phillies pitcher has a 3.29 ERA and a 3.54 FIP, and he’s fanned 37 while walking just six. A StatCast darling he’s not. Irvin’s four-seamer averages a pedestrian 91.2 mph, and his fastball and curveball spin rates rank among the lowest in the majors. No matter. Much to the consternation of opposing hitters, the erstwhile Oregon Duck is gobbling up outs with a combination of command, moxie, and guile.

Irvin — acquired by the A’s from the Phillies for cash considerations over the offseason — discussed his cerebral approach to the art of pitching prior to last night’s game.

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David Laurila: You’re enjoying a level of success that in many ways belies your pitching metrics. How are you doing it?

Cole Irvin: “When I first learned pitching, I was reading about Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux. There was a book that came out from the Atlanta Braves pitching coach [Leo Mazzone] when the Atlanta Braves rotation was as good as it gets back in the ‘90s. And then, when I really started pitching, I was watching Cole Hamels, Cliff Lee, and Roy Halladay. I’ve just always been taught to be a pitcher.

“The first thing I was taught when I got to high school was to have a good changeup. In California, the baseball crop is very good. I don’t think I hit 90 [mph] until my senior year, so the ability to pitch was obviously something I needed to have. In my league, we had Austin Hedges, Gerrit Cole, Trayce Thompson … a bunch of guys everyone knew would be big-leaguers. The ability to pitch was something I had to pick up pretty quickly.

“I was never told to throw harder. It was about repeating my delivery and thinking through the game, as opposed to really getting it up there. Now, in the past I have been able to throw hard. I’ve hit 98 in the big leagues. It was versus Cleveland, and I remember it distinctly. Maybe that’s the reason my old team — the [Phillies] coaching staff — wanted me to be fastball/slider: I had 98 in my pocket and could throw a slider off of it. But I lost the ability to pitch because of that. Read the rest of this entry »

Pierce Johnson wasn’t the highest-profile addition the Padres made before the 2020 season. Johnson, a right-handed pitcher who began his career in the Cubs minor league system as a starter, transitioned to relieving and then transitioned to Hanshin in the NPB, where he delivered a standout 2019 season. Along with fellow offseason acquisitions Drew Pomeranz and Emilio Pagán, he was part of a reworked bullpen for a newly-aggressive contender.

Johnson’s 2020 went fairly well, aside from the whole global-pandemic-changing-the-entire-world part. He started throwing harder during his sojourn to Japan, and held that new velocity upon his return. His blend of roughly 50/50 fastballs and curves played quite well; he put up a 33.8% strikeout rate en route to 20 innings of 2.70 ERA, 3.14 FIP relief.

In truth, Johnson’s fastball was just a palate cleanser for his devastating curve. He used it early in counts and when he got behind, but threw nearly 75% curveballs in key spots — 1-0, 0-1, and 1-1 counts, as well as when he reached two strikes. It’s easy to see why when you look at the curveball’s merits. Among pitchers who threw at least 150 curves last year, it was one of the best in the game:

That’s excellent company, to state the obvious. It’s not as though the pitch is a wipeout breaker that only excels when he bounces it, either. In obvious strike-throwing counts (2-0, 2-1, 3-0, and 3-1) since returning from Japan, Johnson has hit the strike zone with his curveball 58.6% of the time. That’s higher than his fastball zone rate in the same counts (42.1%) and higher than the overall league zone rate for all pitches in those counts (56.9%).
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When Robbie Ray walked Freddie Freeman in the first inning of his start on Tuesday evening, it was the first time he had walked a batter since April 18, ending a 20.2-inning stretch without allowing a free pass. That’s quite an accomplishment for someone who has always been known for his elite strikeout abilities and a serious lack of control. Ray’s career walk rate sits at 10.9%, a touch above league average, but over the last four years, it’s ballooned to 12.3% and reached a career worst 17.9% last year. But across six starts this season, his walk rate has fallen to 7.2%, easily a career best.

As you’d expect with such a drastic change in his control, Ray has started pounding the zone this year.

In 2020, he was tied with Shane Bieber for the lowest Zone% among all pitchers with at least 50 innings pitches at 42.6%. This season, he’s among the league leaders in Zone%, at 56.7%. During the pitch tracking era, that’s the largest increase in Zone% from one season to the next by a wide margin.

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“Houser (3-3) picked up the win on Saturday, allowing two runs on five hits over six innings in a 6-2 victory over the Marlins,“ RotoWire News reported. “He struck out ten without walking a batter.”

That’s a straightforward blurb. Nothing really stands out, so I understand if you forgot about it. Adrian Houser himself isn’t a very notable pitcher – his repertoire, which consists primarily of a sinker and an assorted mix of other pitches, doesn’t scream Pitching Ninja material. Against the Marlins a week ago, however, Houser entered uncharted territory in the realm of pitching. Not all outliers are worth mentioning, but this one is:

The graph is messy, but you can still see what happened. Ten strikeouts tied a career-high for Houser, which he reached on August 10, 2019. This time around, though, the journey there was markedly different. For the first time in his career, Houser threw his sinker over 70% of the time. He’d been high-strikeout in some games, high-sinker in others, but the two attributes had never converged so clearly until now. It’s not as if those sinkers were setting up a different pitch, either. Of the 10 strikeouts Houser collected, eight came from the sinker, while the remaining two came from the changeup and the curveball. For the most part, one pitch bookended each plate appearance.

This is remarkable if you know at least a smidgen of pitching. For one, the sinker isn’t a strikeout pitch! Its intended purpose is to induce grounders from hitters, not collect whiffs. Second, unless you’re a reliever, who throws a sinker or any one pitch that often? You’d imagine that hitters would catch on at some point. Yet Houser emerged relatively unscathed. The home run, double, and single that led to two earned runs weren’t even recorded off his sinker. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, the Seattle Mariners promoted Logan Gilbert and Jarred Kelenic to their active roster; both are expected to start in tonight’s game against Cleveland. The joint moves are the latest and most decisive steps to date in Seattle’s rebuild, and mark the next phase in the Mariners’ quest to construct a contender around a nucleus of homegrown talent.

This is undoubtedly a big day for the Mariners and their fans. As you probably know, the team owns the longest playoff drought in major American sports, a streak now in its 20th year. In those two decades of fits and starts, aborted tear-downs and calamitous collapses, Seattle has teased fans with young and talented rosters before. But while there’s never any guarantee that bluechip farmhands will live up to their billing, this era has a different feel to it. The current regime’s player development staff already has a few wins under their belt, and Seattle’s farm system is deeper than in previous rebuilding cycles, particularly when it comes to premium position players: In Kelenic and Julio Rodríguez, the Mariners have a pair of prospects with legitimate star potential.

There’s not much I can tell you about Kelenic that Eric Longenhagen hasn’t covered already. We have him as the game’s fourth-best prospect right now, a player who projects as a plus bat and one who may have muscled his way into plus power as well. Mariners fans will find much to salivate over in Eric’s full remarks, but as a brief teaser: “Kelenic rakes. His feel for contact, strength, and mature approach combine to make him a lethal offensive threat… I expect him to come up in 2021 and be an immediate impact player.” We’ll talk more about all of the learning and developing and maturing he did in his six games down in Tacoma later. For now, suffice to say that his spring and Triple-A appearances did nothing to damage his stock. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a very messy cubby hole in my desk crammed with various pieces of baseball-related paper. It’s filled with things like the roster sheets from the international workouts where I saw Rafael Devers and Marcos Diplán, an Arizona Fall League lineup that included George Springer, Joc Pederson and Nick Castellanos, and various other ephemera. Why I hold on to this stuff is beyond me, but I was looking for something the other day and found an ancient wonder — the starting lineups for the April 29, 2004 Midwest League game between the Yankees’ Battle Creek team and the A’s Kane County club. The game was more than 17 years ago now, but I remember the day very well, as it featured left-hander Steven Bondurant taking a no-hitter into the ninth.

The discovery, and the recent rash of major league no-nos, led to an afternoon spent down an internet rabbit hole as I furiously tried to find a box score from the game (hat tip to Cory Schwartz at MLB for his assistance) and, ultimately, to me tracking down Bondurant himself. As it turns out, he also recalls that day quite well. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” he told me on the phone on Wednesday.

There’s a solid chance you’ve never heard of Bondurant. He never reached the major leagues, and pitched his last professional game in 2007. A 15th-round pick in the 2003 draft out of South Carolina, Bondurant wasn’t the type of pitcher who made a lot of prospect lists, as he was a fifth-year senior sign who rarely cracked the 90s with his fastball. He readily admits that in today’s power-driven game, he might not have even gotten the opportunity to play professional baseball. “I was 85-88 mph in college, if that. The A’s at the time were focused on production,” said Bondurant. “They didn’t go off being 6-foot-4, 230 and throwing 95. I was the Friday night guy at an SEC school, threw strikes and got outs, and I think that went a long way at the time.” Read the rest of this entry »