The Twins have won the AL Central in each of the past two seasons, but their chances for running their streak to three in a row have taken some major hits. Not only have they stumbled out of the gate with a 12-20 record, but now they’ve lost Byron Buxton, potentially for several weeks, due to a Grade 2 hip strain. Adding insult to injury, at this writing the team owns the dubious distinction of the largest drop in their Playoff Odds since Opening Day.

The 27-year-old Buxton was injured during Thursday’s 4-3 loss to the Rangers. He pulled up hurt while running out a groundball in the ninth inning, but he may have injured himself before that. In the top of the seventh inning, he crashed into the outfield wall and then tumbled to the ground in an unsuccessful attempt to rob Jonah Heim of a home run:

In the bottom of the seventh, he didn’t run hard to first base on a groundout (I made a GIF because the video’s not embeddable, but here you can hear Twins play-by-play announcer Dick Bremer noting, “Buxton does not run hard out of the box”):

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When it comes to early-season dominance or struggles, BABIP tends to be a featured player in many of the odder-looking lines. At the top of the league, you have the already amazing Mike Trout sporting a .519 BABIP, fueling a video game-like 236 wRC+ and a 1.224 OPS. On the flip side, quality players are still looking way up at the Mendoza line, such as Yasmani Grandal (.121 BA, .125 BABIP) or Kyle Tucker (.179 BA, .173 BABIP). Even though the evidence suggests that there’s more variability in BABIP ability among hitters than pitchers, a month of a season is a pitifully small amount of time to establish a new baseline expectation for BABIP. So, who is “earning” their BABIP and who isn’t so far?

Similar to the “x” Statcast stats, the ZiPS calculates “z” stats — I’ll let you guess what the z stands for — as part of its year-end projection model. These aren’t yet used in the simpler in-season model, though that’s in the works. Similar to Statcast, ZiPS estimates BABIP from the component parts: launch angle, exit velocity, speed data (for grounders), and so on. ZiPS also considers the direction a ball is hit, as a player’s pull tendency is a repeatable skill. This last data matters quite a bit. For example, grounders hit up the middle end up as singles about half the time, but grounders hit 15 degrees to the left or right of the second base bag are hits about a tenth of the time.

How does it work? The numbers are still volatile, but if all you have is zBABIP and actual BABIP, zBABIP is historically the better predictor. For all players with 50 PA in both 2020 and ’21, 2020 zBABIP is closer to 2021 BABIP than 2020 BABIP for 65% of players. Historically, the best predictor of actual BABIP, again using only these two stats, is a linear combination of 0.9 zBABIP and 0.1 actual BABIP.

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This is Part Two of the April edition of my monthly column, in which I recap what’s been going on in the Korean Baseball Organization on both a league- and team-wide scale. In case you missed it, Part One provided a brief introduction to this column, discussed league-wide trends, then covered the Samsung Lions, LG Twins, KT Wiz, and SSG Landers. Today’s post will cover the remaining six teams. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them as comments or reach out to me via Twitter. Without further ado, let’s talk some KBO!

Team Notes

Doosan Bears

The offseason was not kind to the Doosan Bears. Pitchers Chris Flexen and Raúl Alcántara both had phenomenal years, but were whisked away by foreign leagues. They also lost multiple regulars to free agency, including first baseman Jae-il Oh 오재일 and second baseman Joo-hwan Choi 최주환, both formidable hitters.

That doesn’t mean the Bears are no longer a playoff-caliber team – there’s still an abundance of talent on the roster, but there’s no guarantee this time around. At least replacement signee Walker Lockett has averaged six innings per start with a 3.54 FIP, but Aríel Miranda 미란다 seems like a disaster waiting to happen. His 36 strikeouts in 28.1 innings don’t look as impressive when you consider that (a) they’re spread across six starts, and (b) he also has 22 walks, six of them issued in a single outing. There’s upside, but unless Miranda finds the zone, the Bears will have a headache to deal with. Read the rest of this entry »

All the pitchers in the league seem to have gotten together and decided that someone has to throw a no-hitter each week. One of our best matchups this week involves a guy who already threw one, two guys meeting in LA who are certainly pitching well enough to nab one of their own, and an AL Central altercation between pitchers – and teams – trending in opposite directions.

Tuesday, May 11, 7:10 PM ET: John Means vs. Marcus Stroman

John Means got his 15 minutes of fame last week after methodically tearing the Mariners apart. Means’ destruction of the M’s lineup earned him a no-hitter and the baseball world’s spotlight, but the Baltimore bro has been reliably great all season. He’s allowed just five hits and three earned runs over his last 22.1 innings, striking out 27 hitters along the way. If we zoom out and look at his entire body of work across seven starts, we find that Means has become one of the best pitchers in the game thanks to one little trick.

Like a local magician bringing their act on the road, Means risked letting the secret out of the bag when he performed the trick over and over again in Seattle. The Orioles’ breakout star threw first pitch strikes to 26 of the 27 hitters he faced, elevating his first-pitch strike percentage to a maniacal 73.5%. Not only is this 12 percentage points above Means’ career-high, it’s also the highest of any American League starter. As a predominantly fastball-changeup artist, one would think that Means adheres to the traditional method of fastballs in the zone, changeups just underneath it. While he still utilizes his changeup in that fashion – to the tune of a 33.3% chase rate – it’s actually the pitch he throws most frequently in the zone, per Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »

So far, the Red Sox have been one of this season’s biggest surprises. Since Opening Day, the Sox have already increased their playoff odds by 23.6 percentage points up to 61.5%, the second-largest percentage point increase in baseball (Athletics, +25.7).

To reach the pinnacle of the AL East this quickly, Boston has been successful on both sides of the ball, but it’s the team’s offense that has found itself alone at the top of most major league leaderboards. Through games on Saturday, the Red Sox are slashing .269/.334/.445, with the batting average and slugging percentage each ranking tops among the 30 teams. Their .338 wOBA is seven points above the next-best team, the Dodgers, and their park-adjusted 115 wRC+ is three points above Los Angeles as well.

The entire lineup is hitting, but it’s their core five of J.D. Martinez (195 wRC+), Xander Bogaerts (176 wRC+), Rafael Devers (150 wRC+), Alex Verdugo (135 wRC+), and Christian Vázquez (100 wRC+) that have more or less led the way. And though this could easily be an article about any of those five players’ starts, I want to highlight Devers, whose .281/.371/.544 slash line through games on Saturday actually represents one of the biggest under-performances in baseball relative to his batted ball quality. Read the rest of this entry »

When Mario Feliciano made his major league debut last weekend, it was unlikely for a number of reasons. That’s not to say that Feliciano is a nobody: The hard-hitting catcher was the MVP of the Carolina League in 2019 and has been highly ranked by multiple outlets for some time now. But prior to the 2021 season, he had barely played above A-ball, having spent most of 2019 as a member of the Carolina Mudcats, then a high-A affiliate of the Brewers, before earning a late-season promotion to the Double-A Biloxi Shuckers, where he played in only three games. But when Omar Narváez was placed on the injured list on May 1, Feliciano was called up from the Brewers’ alternate site to replace the ailing backup catcher on the roster, though his call-up seemed unlikely to lead to playing time, barring unforeseen circumstances.

You know where this is going. Those unforeseen circumstances arrived in the form of an extra-inning game against the Dodgers, when Milwaukee called upon Feliciano, the only remaining player on the bench, to pinch hit in the pitchers slot in bottom of the 11th inning. Down by two with runners on first and second, Feliciano fouled off a couple of good pitches and laid off some close ones out of the zone, drawing the count full before walking to load the bases and eventually scoring the winning run on a walk-off single by Travis Shaw three batters later.

But that unlikely appearance meant that Feliciano’s MLB debut preceded his first game in Triple A by three days. And while a mid-week matchup between the Nashville Sounds and the Toledo Mud Hens may seem much less exciting than an 11th-inning at-bat against the reigning World Series champions, Feliciano’s Triple A opener was arguably steeped in more anticipation and intrigue. On the mound that night for the Mud Hens was Matt Manning, a Top 100 prospect who has earned future-of-the-franchise fanfare of his own. Indeed, this game represented the return of one of the aspects of the minors most sorely missed during the nearly 600 days since the end of the 2019 MiLB season: a glimpse into baseball’s future.

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Though he’s made just 12 appearances for them, Wade Miley’s time with the Reds has already been a rollercoaster. Last season, the first of a two-year, $15-million contract, he hit the injured list three different times and pitched so poorly when he was active that he lost his rotation spot. He earned it back this year, largely thanks to injuries to Sonny Gray and Michael Lorenzen, then began the season with 11 shutout innings over two starts. Eight runs in 16 innings over his next three starts followed, as his ability to miss bats waned and bad pitches landed in outfield seats. All of this adds up to an average pitcher playing on an average team in a division that average teams could win. Then, all of a sudden, came the extraordinary.

Miley no-hit Cleveland at Progressive Field on Friday, walking one batter and watching another reach on an error and striking out eight. It was the Reds’ first no-hitter since Homer Bailey’s second on July 2, 2013, and the 17th in franchise history. Expand the scope to all of baseball, and Miley joined a group whose size is increasing with perplexing speed. When he took the mound Friday, the dust had barely settled from a no-hitter thrown by John Means on Wednesday, who threw his on the heels of a seven-inning no-hitter by Madison Bumgarner, who threw his in the wake of nine-inning no-hitters by Carlos Rodón and Joe Musgrove. That’s five no-nos in a span of 29 days, with no end in sight.

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Brandon Woodruff has quietly been one of the better pitchers in the National League since the start of the 2019 season. In 42 starts comprising 237 innings, the Milwaukee Brewers right-hander has 285 strikeouts to go with a 3.11 ERA and a 2.93 FIP. The last of those numbers is equal to Shane Bieber’s mark over the same period.

A big reason for Woodruff’s success is a repertoire adjustment he made midway through the 2018 season. As he explained in an article that ran here at FanGraphs last April, he began throwing both two- and four-seam fastballs. Neither is anything to write home about movement-wise, but paired together and sequenced well they’re a formidable combo. As Woodruff told me at the time, “It’s hard for the hitter to distinguish which one is going to be coming.”

Pitchers often “pitch backwards,” throwing breaking pitches in fastball counts, and vice versa. Thinking back to what Woodruff had told me, an idea crossed my mind: is it possible to pitch backwards with two different fastballs?

I asked the 28-year-old Tupelo, Mississippi native that question in a Zoom call. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday afternoon, Liam Hendriks entered a tough situation. There were two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but his margin for error was nonexistent. The bases were loaded, and the White Sox were locked in a tie game. One hiccup in command, four slightly misplaced pitches, and the game would be over.

Do pitchers have less command when they enter? Is it worth worrying about whether a pitcher might not have it that day? I have no earthly idea, so I decided to investigate. First things first, though: I wasn’t actually sure what I was investigating. Time for some experimental design.

What about the walk rate, but only on the first batter faced by a new reliever? That’s certainly a number I could look up. That checks in at 8.1% from 2015 to present (I used the Statcast era even though there’s no Statcast data involved in this query, just for consistency’s sake). Over the same time frame, the overall reliever walk rate is 9.3%. Case closed, let’s go get brunch.

Only, that’s a bad comparison. We’re not comparing apples to apples. If we’re actually going to look into whether pitchers are particularly likely to come in and not have it, we need to compare like to like. Take the immortal Sugar Ray Marimon, who made 16 appearances for the Braves in 2015. He was a one-hit wonder, though “wonder” might be strong: he compiled a 7.36 ERA in 25.2 innings before decamping to Korea. Read the rest of this entry »

The news was as abrupt as a mid-afternoon tweet, and yet long overdue: On Thursday, the Angels designated Albert Pujols for assignment. The 41-year-old Pujols is a no-doubt Hall of Famer, one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs. But he’s now a month into his fifth season of sub-replacement level production, an impediment to improving a team that needs all the help it can get to overcome a league-worst defense as it scrambles to return to the playoffs for the first time since 2014.

Mired in a 7-for-43 slump on a 13–17 team, Pujols is hitting just .198/.250/.372 with five homers and a 75 wRC+ in 92 plate appearances and making $30 million in the final season of the 10-year, $240 million deal that he signed following a remarkable 11-year run with the Cardinals. With his body unable to withstand a litany of leg and foot injuries — hamstrings, knees, plantar fasciitis — his megadeal provided little bang for the buck. Where he made nine All-Star teams and won three MVP awards as well as the NL Rookie of the Year award in St. Louis while helping the Cardinals to three pennants and two championships, he never approached such levels in Anaheim. As an Angel, he made just one All-Star team, finished no higher than 17th in the MVP voting, and was swept out of his lone playoff appearance.

This isn’t a move that the Angels have taken lightly, and it owes plenty to the pressures on new general manager Perry Minasian, who was hired last November, as well as the development of Jared Walsh and the continued health and presence of Shohei Ohtani. Walsh, a first baseman who has taken over most of the duties in right field since Dexter Fowler suffered a season-ending ACL tear on April 9, has hit for a 166 wRC+ in 222 PA since the start of last season. Ohtani, who this year has been available to serve as the designated hitter on days before and after his starts (which the Angels were reluctant to let him do previously), has hit for a 169 wRC+ with a major league-high 10 homers in 118 PA.

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