Jared Walsh is a studious hitter. He’s also a productive hitter in the middle of the Los Angeles Angels lineup. In just over 1,000 big league plate appearances, the 28-year-old first baseman has 50 home runs to go along with a .269/.325/.499 slash line and a 122 wRC+. This past Saturday, Walsh went deep for the 11th time on the season while hitting for the ninth cycle in franchise history.

A two-way player at the University of Georgia who has also taken the mound in pro ball — including five times for the Angels in 2019 — Walsh lasted until the 39th round of the 2015 draft. To say he’s gone on to exceed most expectations with the bat would be an understatement.

Walsh discussed his watch-and-learn approach to hitting when the Angels visited Fenway Park last month.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your M.O. as a hitter. What are you looking to do when you’re in the box?

Jared Walsh: “In my perfect world, I’m a line drive into left-center and a line drive into right-center kind of hitter.”

Laurila: Is that an approach you’ve always had, or have you evolved over time? Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I was listening to one of my favorite non-baseball podcasts when baseball unexpectedly cropped up. Well, the theory of skin in the game cropped up. The idea, espoused by many people but notably by Nassim Taleb, is that actors perform better when they get rewarded for a good outcome and punished for a bad outcome. Want a better doctor? Fine them if they misdiagnose a patient, but give them a bonus for prescribing the correct treatment. Better money manager? Force them to invest all their own money alongside their client. You get the idea.

Anyway, one example of skin not being in the game is a sports team playing out the string. For most teams at most times, sports is a very skin-in-the-game-intensive field. If you hit well, you get paid more. If you don’t, you might get sent to the minors. If your team wins, they make the playoffs. If the team doesn’t win, no postseason. The incentives are straightforward.

At the end of a long season, however, it might not feel that way. If you’re 50-100 in late September, the rewards of a good game aren’t that high, and the cost of a bad game is quite low. If you’re 15 games out in the race, being 16 games out won’t suddenly bring out the detractors. You can think of these teams as having no skin in the game; the result of one game won’t change anything for them. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Greene started the 2022 season off with a bang. An audible one, if you were sitting near home plate: Greene topped out at 102.6 mph in his second start of the year, averaged nearly 101 mph on his fastball, and generally looked like an entirely new type of pitcher, a starter with closer velocity.

A funny thing has happened since, though. That fastball didn’t play out quite how you’d expect. After those initial two starts, Greene lost a bit of zip on the pitch, and hitters stopped missing it. He drew 21 swings and misses in his first two major league outings; it took him another six starts to match that total. After walking just two hitters in those first two starts, he walked eight in his next two. It was time for an adjustment.

Consider that adjustment made. In his last seven starts, Greene looks like a top-flight major league starter again. He’s striking out a third of the batters he faces, walking less than 10%, and pitching to a 3.20 ERA (and 3.47 FIP) beginning with his May 10 start against Milwaukee. He’s going deeper into starts. And after the Brewers tormented him for five home runs on May 5, he’s allowed only five in these last seven starts over nearly 40 innings of work. How has the starter with the fastest fastball in the game done it? Exactly how you’d expect – by de-emphasizing his fastball and leaning on his best pitch, an upper-80s slider. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how good we are at what we do, mistakes are inevitable. They happen. That doesn’t make them any less embarrassing, of course, but such a reminder helps us to get over our mishaps. And though I’m no major leaguer, I assume hitters and pitchers alike need the occasional self-therapy session. Baseball is a taxing and capricious endeavor – one week you’re striking out batter after batter, the next you’re getting shelled. It takes quite a bit of mental fortitude.

Saturday, Kevin Gausman didn’t have the best start. It wasn’t a disaster by any means – he went six innings and gave up a single run – but with three walks and just four strikeouts, it paled in comparison to his typical dominance. Not only that, two of those walks were issued to Javier Báez. If you’re reading this, you know how unlikely that is. No qualified pitcher in baseball induces a higher rate of swings against pitches outside the zone than Gausman. No qualified hitter in baseball swings at pitches outside the zone more often than Báez. Based on the numbers, it seems like a foregone conclusion: Báez would struggle, while Gausman would triumph. Read the rest of this entry »

Win streaks and losing streaks across baseball have resulted in some major movement in the power rankings this week.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

I considered putting the Yankees in their own tier at the top of these rankings this week; that’s how well they’ve been playing recently. They absolutely crushed the Cubs during a three-game weekend series, launching 11 home runs and outscoring Chicago, 28–5. Matt Carpenter has collected eight hits since joining the Yanks in late May, and six of them have been home runs, including two on Sunday. Oh, and their pitching staff has been one of the best in the majors, too. They’re firing on all cylinders at just the right time; their schedule gets tough over the next two weeks, with a pair of series against the Rays, a series in Toronto, and a four-game set against the Astros.

After handling the White Sox earlier in the week, the Dodgers traveled to San Francisco over the weekend and scored just four runs in a three-game sweep at the hands of their division rival. To make matters worse, Walker Buehler left his start on Friday after just four innings with elbow discomfort. The next day, the Dodgers announced that he’ll be shut down for two months with a flexor strain. Clayton Kershaw returned from his own Injured List stint over the weekend, and Andrew Heaney is on the mend and should be activated sometime this week. Still, with the Padres and Giants breathing down their necks in the NL West, the Dodgers’ margin for error just got a lot thinner without Buehler in the rotation for a while.

The Mets wrapped up a long West Coast road trip with a series win against the Angels over the weekend. That gave them a 5–5 record during the trip, a perfectly acceptable outcome based on the tough opponents and travel they faced. Since Max Scherzer went down with his oblique injury in mid-May, New York has gone 15–8 and maintained a strong grip on the NL East. The Braves’ recent hot streak may cause some concern, but the Mets have proven they’re a good enough team even without their two best pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Faced with a middling rotation on a middling roster, the Angels took a risk this winter when they made Noah Syndergaard their big free-agent pitcher signing over any of the marquee names available. Syndergaard was once one of those dazzling names, but injuries haven taken away three of his most recent seasons (most of 2017, all of 2020, and all but two innings in 2021) and, eventually, the final gear of a fastball and sinker that both tangled with triple digits on the radar gun. It’s difficult for a one-year deal to end too badly, but at $21 million for 2022, the Angels clearly thought of this as more than a pillow contract or a lottery ticket. So has it worked? Sort of.

To get one thing out of the way: Syndergaard is not the pitcher he once was. As Jay Jaffe wrote earlier this month, he’s lost about four miles per hour on his fastball, forcing him to reconfigure his pitch mix. He’s not exactly Jered Weaver or Zack Greinke, let alone Frank Schwindel throwing 35-mph rainbows to the Yankees, but throwing 93 or 94 mph is quite different than throwing 99 or 100. That said, he’s still gotten decent results, at least in bottom-line numbers, and his ERA stands at 3.69, with his FIP barely behind at 3.81. His strikeout rate has plummeted to just 15.4%, or 5.83 K/9, numbers that barely match up to his 26.4% and 9.74 through 2019. But the lack of strikeouts is partially mitigated by the fact that his control remains excellent, and he’s still effective at preventing hitters from making good contact.

Pitchers have been successful with meager strikeout rates, even in today’s game. However, it leaves little margin for error, and when pitchers like Kirk Rueter or Chien-Ming Wang finally hit a bump, they didn’t just get a flat; the wheels fell completely off. Even with more reason to hope for his health than before the season and after some perfectly respectable performances, ZiPS is actually less confident about Syndergaard’s future than before:

While we can be a little more confident now about playing time, we should also be less bullish about the chances of Syndergaard recapturing his pre-injury form. Even with more innings now projected than at the start of 2022, ZiPS has knocked his rest-of-career mean projection from 19.1 WAR to 13.7. Every game of a decidedly mortal Syndergaard takes us a little farther from the thunder god. Read the rest of this entry »

For as much slack as Tyler Anderson and Tony Gonsolin have been picking up in the Dodgers rotation lately, the news that Walker Buehler will miss a large chunk of the remainder of the season is a gut punch. The 27-year-old righty departed Friday night’s start against the Giants with elbow discomfort — his second early exit in a row — and after undergoing an MRI on Saturday was diagnosed with a flexor tendon strain. He will be shut down completely for six to eight weeks before restarting a throwing program, all but guaranteeing that he won’t see major league activity again until September.

Buehler struck out the side in the third inning on Friday night, but via MLB.com’s Juan Toribio, he “noticed something was bothering him after throwing a breaking ball” during the frame. While he made it through that inning and the fourth, his discomfort increased. Said manager Dave Roberts afterwards, “Certain discomforts you can manage through, where this one tonight, clearly he felt that any more could potentially be damaging.”

Coming off the best season of his career, Buehler had not pitched well lately, though he said on Friday that he didn’t believe the injury was linked to his previous woes. His overall 4.02 ERA (100 ERA-) is the highest of his career excluding his cup-of-coffee 2017 stint, and a full run per nine above his career mark, while his 3.83 FIP (96 FIP-) is only his second time above 3.16; he was at 4.36 in 2020, a season during which he made just eight starts due to recurrent blisters on his right index and middle fingers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ezequiel Tovar came into the season ranked as the No. 4 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system. Despite being just 20 years old, he might finish it in the big leagues. In 229 plate appearances with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats, Tovar is slashing .317/.393/.579 with a 165 wRC+. Moreover, he has a dozen home runs and has swiped 16 bases in 17 attempts.

His calling card is his glove. Described by our own Eric Longenhagen as “a no-doubt shortstop with balletic defensive footwork and a well-calibrated internal clock.” Tovar had received similar rave reviews from MLB scouts in the Arizona Fall League. And that was before he blossomed with the bat.

I asked Yard Goats manager Chris Denorfia about the offensive strides that have elevated Tovar’s profile.

“Coming into this year, I was told that there was some chase on down-and-away sliders,” said Denorfia, who played 10 big-league seasons. “But I haven’t seen what everybody was talking about. Somewhere between the Fall League and this spring, he’s made this developmental jump. Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase. Whether you call it slowing the game down, or just having enough reps, he’s made that adjustment. It was probably the one thing that was holding him back, which is kind of weird to say, because he was only 19 last year.”

The discipline is reflected in the numbers. Despite being one the youngest players in his league, Tovar possesses a 9.6 walk-rate and a 22.3% K-rate. When you add his improved pop to the equation, it’s easy to see why speculation of a call-up — premature that it may be — has begun to grow legs. Read the rest of this entry »

As anyone who does a lot of work with projections could likely tell you, one of the most annoying things about modeling future performance is that results themselves are a small sample size. Individual seasons, even full ones over 162 games, still feature results that are not very predictive, such as a hitter or a pitcher with a BABIP low or high enough to be practically unsustainable. For example, if Luis Arraez finishes the season hitting .350, we don’t actually know that a median projection of .350 was the correct projection going into the season. There’s no divine baseball exchequer to swoop in and let you know if he was “actually” a .350 hitter who did what he was supposed to, a .320 hitter who got lucky, or a .380 hitter who suffered misfortune. If you flip heads on a coin eight times out of 10 and have no reason to believe you have a special coin-flipping ability, you’ll eventually see the split approach 50/50 given a sufficiently large number of coin flips. Convergence in probability is a fairly large academic area that we thankfully do not need to go into here. But for most things in baseball, you never actually get enough coin flips to see this happen. The boundaries of a season are quite strict.

What does this have to do with projections? This volatile data becomes the source of future predictions, and one of the things done in projections is to find things that are not only as predictive as the ordinary stats, but also more predictive based on fewer plate appearances or batters faced. Imagine, for example, if body mass index was a wonderful predictor of isolated power. It would be a highly useful one, as changes to it over the course of a season are bound to be rather small. The underlying reasons for performance tend to be more stable than the results, which is why ERA is more volatile than strikeout rate, and why strikeout rate is more volatile than the plate discipline stats that result in strikeout rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Given their success over the past half-dozen years and the strength of their preseason projections, it’s no surprise to find the Dodgers owning the National League’s top record (37-20, .649) while continuing to hold the league’s highest Playoff Odds (98.4%) and highest odds of winning the World Series (15.5%). What’s unusual is that they’ve done it with Clayton Kershaw missing about half the season thus far and with both Walker Buehler and Julio Urías struggling to regain their front-of-the-rotation form. Instead it’s been Tyler Anderson and Tony Gonsolin — two pitchers we initially projected to throw fewer than 100 innings as starters — leading the way in a rotation that has the majors’ lowest ERA (2.65).

On Thursday, Anderson’s scoreless streak came to an end at 28 innings against the White Sox, thanks in part to a ball that parkour’d its way into becoming a triple, but so far this year, he’s ridden an improved changeup to unexpected success. The night before that, it was Gonsolin holding Chicago to one run over six innings while helping to halt a three-game losing streak, the Dodgers’ second within a nine-day span. In the process, the 28-year-old righty took over the official NL ERA lead, at least for the moment, via a 1.58 mark. He’s pitched 57 innings while the Dodgers have played 57 games, but he’ll slip below the qualifying threshold again before he next gets the ball.

Regardless, Gonsolin is showing signs of a breakout, and at the very least enjoying his longest sustained run of major league success. Though he’s pitched for the Dodgers for four seasons — and largely pitched very well, with a 2.48 ERA and 3.50 FIP in 199.1 innings — it’s been in fits and starts. The ninth-round 2016 pick out of St. Mary’s College of California debuted in the majors three years later but that year was yo-yoed between Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, totaling just six starts, five relief appearances, and 40 innings. In 2020, Gonsolin totaled eight starts, one relief appearance, 46.2 innings, and three times being optioned to the Dodgers’ alternate training site. Last year, he spent two separate stretches on the injured list due to recurring right shoulder inflammation, not debuting until June 9 and then spending all of August and part of September sidelined. He made a career-high 13 starts plus two relief appearances but finished with just 55.2 innings. Read the rest of this entry »