The White Sox took a giant blow Sunday when young centerfielder Luis Robert injured his right hip flexor running to first while trying to beat out a grounder to third against Cleveland. As it turns out, the injury wasn’t minor, as he was diagnosed with a Grade III strain — a complete rupture of the muscle involved — and will not be able to resume baseball activities for 12–16 weeks.

Chicago hasn’t officially ruled out Robert for the season, but there’s enough uncertainty that senior VP/general manager Rick Hahn did not give a particularly optimistic assessment of when his return could be.

“But it’s safe to say in terms of projecting his possible return, it’s too soon to know. Quite frankly, we are not going to be able to provide you with an educated projection of that for another 12 weeks or so as we see how he progresses.”

The most serious consequence of Robert’s injury is naturally a painful recovery process for last year’s AL Rookie of the Year runner-up. But the White Sox have more than 130 games to play, meaning there will also be consequences for the team and some pivotal decisions to make.

Losing Robert is particularly unwelcome for the Sox, as he represents the second serious loss at a position at which they’re not terribly deep. In an unfortunately timely look I did last month at baseball’s most irreplaceable players, the ZiPS projections pegged him as the seventh-most crucial player in the majors in terms of effect on the playoff race.

From a straight-up projection standpoint, Robert falls short of most of the names on this list. Just on the Sox, ZiPS thinks Lucas Giolito is a significantly more valuable player overall, at least when he’s not pitching in the morning. But if something should happen to Giolito, Chicago has spare arms to patch up the hole. If the team loses Robert, let’s just say ZiPS does not have a case of Leurymania or Engelalia. The race with the Twins is likely going to be a tight one, and the Royals have shown surprising spunk. The White Sox could ill afford an injury to their center fielder.

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Through the first four starts of his season, Dustin May looked as though he’d put it all together. The hard-throwing, high-kicking ginger mop top was getting the strikeouts to match his elite stuff, and putting together a performance that fit right in with the rest of the Dodgers’ top-notch rotation. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a long while before May gets to build upon his strong showing. After leaving Saturday’s start against the Brewers in obvious pain, he’ll undergo Tommy John surgery on May 11 and miss the remainder of the season, an injury that comes at a time when the Dodgers’ vaunted depth has already taken significant hits on both sides of the ball.

In the second inning of Saturday’s game, May threw a 2-2 pitch to Billy McKinney that was a couple of feet outside. The 23-year-old righty winced, signaled for the trainer, and then departed, with manager Dave Roberts describing him reporting “a shooting sensation” in his right elbow. An MRI revealed the UCL damage, and he’ll go under the knife of Dr. Neal ElAttrache next week.

As Jake Mailhot documented less than two weeks ago, by mixing his curve and 98-99 mph four-seam fastball into what was predominantly a sinker/cutter mix, May was missing far more bats this year than before with his light-up-the-radar-gun stuff. Updating the stats, where he had struck out 20.8% of batters in his 80.2 innings in 2019-20, he’d nearly doubled that to 37.6% in 23 innings this year — the NL’s fourth-highest rate among pitchers with at least 20 innings behind Jacob deGrom, Corbin Burnes, and Freddy Peralta. Meanwhile, May’s 31.2% strikeout-to-walk differential ranked third behind only Burnes and deGrom. Of the Dodgers’ other starters, only Clayton Kershaw has outdone both his 2.74 ERA and 3.24 FIP, while only Trevor Bauer has the better ERA, and Julio Urías and Walker Buehler the better FIPs. All told, he was hangin’ with the big boys and fitting right in. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite playing for the Yankees and having the largest contract ever handed out to a pitcher, I think Gerrit Cole’s start to the 2021 season is going under the radar. Now, I have no empirical evidence that this is the case, but go with me here. I think two things are at play. First, Jacob deGrom is striking out every batter he faces (do not fact check me on that) and plays in the same city. Second, the Yankees’ struggles have been the talk of baseball in the early going, with much of the focus centered on the lineup and rightfully so. The team’s performance thus far has been extremely underwhelming, though they are 9-4 since their 5-10 start.

None of the blame for the Yankees tepid beginning can be put on Cole, however. He is off to a fantastic start. Through his first six starts, he has struck out 44.3% of the batters he has faced and walked only 2.1%. That strikeout rate is third in the majors behind deGrom and Corbin Burnes; the walk rate sits fourth in the league behind Burnes, Zach Eflin, and Walker Buehler. Put those two figures together and Cole has a K-BB% of 42.1%, only a few percentage points behind Burnes and deGrom and a shade under 10 percentage points above Joe Musgrove. The difference between Cole and Musgrove is about the same as the difference between Musgrove and Clayton Kershaw who is 19th on the leaderboard. Cole’s 2.4 WAR is tops in the league, though he has made one more start than both deGrom and Burnes, though I will note that he has only thrown two and two thirds more innings than deGrom so on a rate basis he has actually been more effective in accumulating WAR. Most of the difference has to do with a .315 BABIP allowed compared to deGrom’s .241 and a strand rate that is 8.3 percentage points lower.

So, Cole has been great. But this is not a breakout. Cole has been one of the best handful of pitchers in the sport since he first donned an Astros uniform in 2018. In the three preceding seasons, he posted a 36.6% strikeout rate and 6.8% walk rate over 485.2 innings, good for 6.05 WAR per 200 innings pitched. What is notable is that early on, he is pitching as well as ever. Better even. Since 2018, Cole only has one six start stretch where he struck out at least 44.3% of opposing hitters (44.6% from the end of July to end of August in 2018) and he has never posted a six start stretch walking so few batters (on a rate basis). At this point baseball fans are accustomed to Cole’s dominance over the opposition, but the degree to which he is doing so is unprecedented. Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the season, most teams hold weekly meetings with their baseball leadership group, usually involving those at a director level or higher. These are often done via conference call or Zoom, as sometimes there is an executive with the team on a road trip and various scouting officials can be spread across the country (or even internationally) checking out players. Sometimes it’s a brief check-in just to see what everyone is up to, but around once a month, it’s time to dig deep on the road ahead and talk about some specific tasks to address needs and issues. While one month in the books is still a small sample size, it’s enough to get a vibe of where your team is at, and where it at least might be going, so I put together some bullet points for each team’s call this week. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, you may have noticed that Kenta Maeda prominently featured in a Matthew Roberson article on this site, though probably not in the way he would have liked. He was the guy throwing the pitches that led to the “nearly 900 feet of home run” that Franmil Reyes hit. Maeda has been on the business end of a lot of home run highlights so far this year. He’s already given up seven of them after only surrendering nine last year in three times the number of innings pitched.

This is the same guy who finished second in AL Cy Young voting last season and allowed a stingy .219 wOBA (97th percentile). This year things are quite different, as Maeda carries a 6.56 ERA, a 6.16 FIP and a 4.19 xFIP through his first five starts. That 97th percentile wOBA from last season? Well it’s in the fourth percentile this season at .439. You might look at his elite walk rate of 4.5%, his swollen HR/FB rate of 26.9% and his soaring .372 BABIP and think that this is just a bit of bad luck. He’s not going to end the season having more than a quarter of his fly balls go for homers. But there’s more than just bad luck going on here. Maeda is getting hit extremely hard. He’s already allowed as many hard hits (95 mph or higher) in 2021 as he did all of last season and his xERA (the newest ERA estimator found here at FanGraphs, courtesy of Statcast) is 5.17.

So what’s going on? If you came into this article knowing anything about Maeda, it might be the fact that he has a great slider. According to our pitch values, it’s hard to find one better. Maeda’s was the sixth best slider in baseball from 2016-20. Here are his pitch values on his four main offerings throughout his career, with usage thrown in as well.

Over the years, he has become more reliant on his plus slider and this year is no different, as he’s throwing it at a career-high rate. But the pitch has betrayed him completely. All of his pitches have struggled, mind you, but because the slider has been his most consistent pitch throughout his career, I think it’s worth focusing on. Read the rest of this entry »

In a division that projected to include the league’s two strongest teams, improbably enough it’s the Giants (17–11) and not the Dodgers (17–12) or Padres (16–13) who sit atop the NL West as the calendar flips to May. It’s a welcome development for a team that’s finished below .500 in each of the past four seasons, and while our Playoff Odds still show them with just a 16.9% chance of holding onto a postseason spot, surprise contenders are certainly welcome. Generally speaking, it’s been the Giants’ run prevention that’s gotten them to first place, as the team has yielded an NL-low 3.21 runs per game but scored a middling 4.11 runs per game. What’s encouraging is that on the offensive side, the hitter who’s led the charge has been Buster Posey.

Perhaps you’ve heard of him? You might be forgiven if not. I kid, but it’s been awhile since the 34-year-old, six-time All-Star backstop was front and center. As a former MVP and three-time World Series winner, Posey was perhaps the highest-profile player to opt out last year amid the coronavirus pandemic, with his family’s new pair of prematurely-born adopted twins weighing heavily into his decision. Currently hitting .359/.423/.688 with six homers and a 199 wRC+ in 71 plate appearances, he has been by far the most productive of the opt-out returnees over the season’s first month (I set up a couple of custom pages to track their performances in case anyone is interested). That’s a particularly welcome rebound for a player who, in the two previous seasons before his absence, played just 219 games due to a variety of injuries including a torn right hip labrum that required season-ending surgery in 2018 and a concussion (his second in three years) and a hamstring strain in ’19.

Those injuries, particularly the hip one, sapped Posey’s power to a great degree, as his lower half wasn’t much help in his swing. He went homerless in his final 45 games before the surgery in 2018, the second-longest single-season drought of his career, and that dry spell continued for another 19 games once he returned in ’19. He homered just 12 times in 893 plate appearances across those two seasons, slugging .375. Some of that was owed to playing at Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park), where the park home run factor for right-handed batters for both of those seasons was 90, the majors’ second-lowest, but Posey wasn’t hitting the ball very hard very often. This year is a different story.

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One month down, five more to go! The final week in April saw the top teams in the American League and National League fall back towards the pack. The standings are pretty compact around the middle, which is as much an indicator of parity as it is a reflection of a wild month of baseball. Scoring is down. Pitching is dominant. Here’s the third week of the FanGraphs Power Rankings.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their starting rotation (SP FIP-), and their bullpen (RP FIP-) — 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. Since we’re so early in the season, teams can move up and down the rankings pretty dramatically if they have a particularly good or bad week. Read the rest of this entry »

This week kicks off with two exciting players who should leave a huge impact on the sport over the next decade, and concludes with two who left their fingerprints all over the last one.

Monday, May 3, 9:38 PM ET: Tyler Glasnow vs. Shohei Ohtani

Outside of a deGrom-Ohtani matchup (which, All-Star Game, if you’re listening…) you’d be hard pressed to come up with a more exciting combination of starting pitchers. Tyler Glasnow, a pitcher who’s been abandoned by consistency at times in the past, is turning his question marks into periods. The looming issue with Glasnow was always when, not if, his strikeout numbers would reach kick-ass status. Like many of his fellow right-handed power pitchers, getting out of Pittsburgh was a great start. In his first full season with Tampa – albeit in just 12 starts – Glasnow made it over the 30% K-rate hump for the first time. His second full season with the Rays ended with a 38.2 K% and a trip to the World Series. This season, he’s still climbing, and hitters are getting completely neutralized.

Notching 10 or more strikeouts in three of his last four starts, including a career-high 14 on April 12 against the Rangers, Glasnow’s strikeout percentage is a robust 39.2%. With Blake Snell and Charlie Morton out of the picture, Glasnow is still bulldozing everything in his path, and he’s on an immaculate pace.

The most elementary reasons for that? Rather than going all in on fastballs and curveballs – pitches he threw a combined 95.4% of the time last season – Glasnow has scaled back the curve and introduced a slider-cutter hybrid. He’s spoken about the increased confidence that came from working with Tampa Bay’s coaching staff and their support, stating that they instructed him to “out stuff” guys rather than trying to dot the corner. When he only had two pitches though, his stuff was too predictable. Enter the “slutter,” a pitch that Glasnow admits has made things easier on him, which I’m sure he and his Boy Meets World good looks really needed. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about the Padres and how their usage of the infield shift stands out. To recap: They shift almost exclusively against left-handed hitters to great success, neglecting right-handed ones in the process. This decision is backed up by public research, which casts doubt on the efficacy of shifts against righties.

As a few of the comments noted, though, the Padres aren’t the most interesting subject when it comes to shifts. If anything, they’re conformists! The Dodgers and Rays, in contrast, are the rebels who defy convention by shifting more against righties than against lefties. We still don’t have a clear answer as to why. Leading up to this article, I did take a crack at the problem, and in the process, unearthed something about the Dodgers.

Before that, some context: Much of our discourse regarding the shift is focused on the dynamic between the hitter and team shifting against him. Kole Calhoun has a tendency to pull the ball, so the Dodgers have prepared this alignment. If Calhoun could go the other way, he’d earn himself a free knock, and so on.

But what about a version of the dynamic that includes the pitcher? By the same logic applied to hitters, if a pitcher could alter his approach to induce pulled grounders that are tailor-made for infield shifts, he’d probably be successful. We know pitchers can control the types of batted balls they allow to some extent: Last season, our Alex Chamberlain wrote about the relationship between pitch location and launch angle. As it turns out, a lower pitch will yield a lower launch angle compared to one located higher up, irrespective of pitch type.

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Seemingly in the blink of an eye, a month of baseball is behind us. With nearly 30,000 plate appearances taken and more than 18,000 batted balls put into play, a month of data is plenty to begin examining league-wide trends and to make some predictions for the rest of 2021.

One big question going into this season — and a topic already examined here by both Ben Clemens and Justin Choi — was what the impact of the new baseball would be on the overall offensive environment. As both Ben and Justin found and detailed, the new baseball is bouncier, yielding higher exit velocities than in years past, and also possesses more drag, as it is not traveling as far. I want to focus on that second point. If the ball isn’t traveling as far, we should be seeing fewer home runs hit in 2021 — and we are. But can we pinpoint just how many home runs will be hit this season? That takes a bit more guesswork, but before getting into that, let’s first see how April 2021 stacks up to prior seasons, as well as identify where exactly we lost those home runs.

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