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 »

Jack Flaherty has a 2.83 ERA through seven starts, which comes out to a 73 ERA-. His park adjusted FIP- of 75 is right in line with that figure; his FIP is 3.03. It would be easy to stop there and say Flaherty has been great; his excellent ERA matches up with his FIP, so he must be doing something right. Dig a little deeper, however, and there are some reasons to be skeptical. His overall line has been buoyed by a 7.5% HR/FB. His strikeout rate is down almost four percentage points compared to his last three seasons combined (25.8% versus 29.7%). Worse, his swinging strike rate is down to a below league-average 11.6%, indicating he has been somewhat fortunate to punch out a little over a quarter of the batters he has faced. On contact, things are not much better. His groundball rate is five percentage points lower than it was over those same three seasons and after allowing a below average rate of hard-hit balls from 2018-20, he is now right at league average.

This is all to say that Flaherty hasn’t quite been his excellent, arguably ace-level self (no, I will not be debating the definition of an ace). Poking around, I found an interesting trend. Flaherty has always leaned on his four-seamer and slider, but in 2021, that reliance has accelerated. He is throwing his fastball and slider as a higher percentage of his total pitches than in any other season up until this point. He is increasingly becoming a two-pitch pitcher:

There are two ways you can look at this. First, you could say that he is using his best offerings more often than ever, which can be construed as a positive development. Or you can say that this is making him more predictable, allowing batters to sit on those two pitches, making him less effective. Given that his peripherals are a bit worse this year, one might say that the latter explanation rings true. But his results are as good as ever, so maybe the former point is viable. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I investigated something that I’ve long wondered about: are relievers particularly prone to wildness on their first batter of the game? I didn’t find much of an effect, and I also got tons of valuable feedback about further avenues for investigation. Do base/out states matter? Does handedness matter? Do intentional walks skew the data?

Aside from the last one (a definite yes), I haven’t explored all of these avenues yet. I did, however, answer another question I was curious about, one that ties into the general theme of reliever walk rates. I’ll tell you upfront that I found a confusing result, and that I’d love to hear anything I’ve missed or avenues for further investigation.

Here’s the question I’m answering: when a reliever walks the first batter he faces, what does that tell us about the rest of his appearance? All of us have seen this in practice, and we probably all know the existential dread it engenders. Great, he doesn’t have his command today. How many walks are coming up? Is the lead safe? Will the team even stay in the game long enough for a new pitcher comes in?

To explore this possibility, I examined every game thrown by a reliever since the beginning of the 2015 season. I split each reliever’s appearances into two subsets: every appearance where they unintentionally walked the first batter they faced on one hand, and every other appearance (except intentional walks, I threw those out) on the other. This gave me a sample of 1,085 relievers across more than 80,000 appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Saturday in the Bronx, Max Scherzer showed off the dominant form that has earned him three Cy Young awards and seven All-Star selections. Admittedly, he wasn’t exactly facing Murderer’s Row, but against a Yankees team that had recently righted itself with a 7-1 tear, he struck out 10 out of the first 14 batters he faced, finishing with 14 strikeout in 7.1 innings, that while allowing just two hits, one walk, and one run.

The Nationals wound up losing that game in 11 innings, but nonetheless, the outing was the latest example of the 36-year-old righty in vintage form. The 14 strikeouts was the most by a visitor in the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009, and the most by any opponent in any iteration of Yankee Stadium since Pedro Martinez’s ultra-dominant one-hit performance against the defending champions in 1999:

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On Tuesday night, the Dodgers were only a Gavin Lux home run away from falling to a .500 record. A .500 record isn’t generally cause for panic, but it would definitely have been a disappointment for the reigning world champions, a team that was expected to steamroll most of the rest of baseball this season. Just to match 2020’s regular season record, the Dodgers need to add another 24 consecutive wins to Monday night’s win over the Mariners.

So how worried should the third-place Dodgers be? Not very.

The Dodgers Aren’t Actually Playing Poorly

Okay, this header isn’t true if we engage in an ultra-literal reading, but in losing 15 of the last 21 games, the Dodgers have only been outscored by a total of seven runs in the aggregate. The team’s overall Pythagorean record puts them at a 94.5 win pace, below the preseason projections, but not alarmingly so. The bullpen had a 4.48 ERA over this stretch, and while there is a relationship between bullpen performance and Pythagorean performance, the relationship is fairly loose.

I went back through history to look at the Pythagorean performances of all teams that underperformed their expected record by at least two wins after 36 games. Over the rest of the seasons, those teams fell short of their Pythagorean records by about a tenth of a run on average. In other words, the discrepancy between expected record and actual record in the early season is mostly noise, as opposed to hiding something sinister about a team’s true abilities. Read the rest of this entry »

I was unwinding on Friday after a long week of work when I got an alert from MLB that Wade Miley was throwing a no-hitter against Cleveland. I blinked my eyes a couple of times in disbelief before putting the game on, but as I was watching Miley complete his no-hitter, my alerts went off again: Sean Manaea had a perfect game in progress in Oakland. He ended up losing it when Randy Arozarena walked in the seventh and his no-hitter when Mike Brosseau led off the eighth with a double, but if your head is spinning a bit from all the alerts, you are not alone. We are barely five weeks into the 2021 season, and we’ve already seen four no-hitters (five, if you count Madison Bumgarner’s seven-inning no-no, which MLB officially doesn’t). As fun as it has been to follow the action this season, something historically anomalous is afoot.

Let’s start with the raw numbers. There are only 21 full MLB seasons with four or more no-hitters since 1901, and the only season that saw more than four no-hitters happen before May 15 is 1917, when five took place (all before May 6). That season ended with six no-hitters and a tie for the highest percentage of no-hitters per game played — until now.

The existing record of no-hitters as a percent of total games is at 0.48%, which has happened twice in MLB history, but it’s unlikely many of us were around for those 1908 and 1917 seasons. The vaunted 1968 “Year of the Pitcher” season that resulted in the mound being lowered five inches doesn’t even crack the top-10 list in terms of no-hitters as a percent of total games. Here are the top 20 seasons for no-hitters as a percent of total games, including 2021 data through May 9: Read the rest of this entry »

On February 18, the Reds signed outfielder Tyler Naquin to a minor league contract with a non-roster invitation to major league spring training. It’s not the kind of transaction that generally generates analysis here at FanGraphs. It was just a standard depth move at the time, the kind of signing every team makes multiples of every off-season. Flash forward nearly three months later, and after an impressive spring training, Naquin is among the top 15 in wRC+ in the National League and part of the best offense in the senior circuit. The Reds utilize a daily strategy of trying to outslug their opponent to make up for what has been a miserable pitching staff, and the results so far have them hovering around .500.

Hot stars happen all the time, and while one week should be readily dismissed as a small sample not worthy of any kind of real scrutiny, a month merits looking into. Where did the player come from? Has anything changed? Is this sustainable? In Naquin’s case, the answers are a bit murky.

Naquin’s background is unique. The 2012 draft was weak in terms of college position players, but Naquin was nonetheless the second one selected at 15th overall. And while there was much debate over his ability to stay in center field, as well as his ultimate power ceiling, scouts were universal in their praise for the Texas A&M product’s hit tool after he led the Big 12 conference in batting average during each of his final two years as an Aggie.

His minor league career was filled with good-but-not-great seasons as he moved up the ladder (probably more slowly than Cleveland anticipated), but he got the call in 2016 and showed unexpected power on his way to 2.1 WAR in 116 games. It’s a figure he’s yet to match, as the following years were defined by injuries and inconsistent performance that saw him waver between fourth outfielder and Quad-A status. Out of time, and out of patience, Naquin was suddenly a six-year free agent looking for work this winter. The Reds offered him the best deal in terms of the combination of money and opportunity, and he’s certainly taken advantage of it. Read the rest of this entry »