Which players have helped their Hall of Fame cases the most this year? The question comes up in almost every chat of mine, and sometimes in radio spots as well. You’d think I’d be used to this by now, but I rarely have more than an answer or two at the ready unless one of those players has recently been in the headlines for reaching a milestone. But with the end of the 2021 season in sight, and with the COVID-delayed Class of 2020 Hall of Fame Induction Day ceremony just a week away, it’s worth digging deeper for answers.

For this exercise, I’m focused mainly on mid- or late-career players rather than early-career ones. Yes, the five-win seasons of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Juan Soto, and Fernando Tatis Jr. are solid steps towards attaining the ceilings we envision — and likewise for Shohei Ohtani given his singularly remarkable two-way season — but all of those players are at least half a decade away from the point when we can start to get real about their chances. JAWS and seven-year peak WAR gains are the major drivers of my selections in this piece and a companion one for pitchers, but positional standards, traditional milestones, and ordinal rankings are considerations as well. With one exception, all of the players below have surpassed 35.0 JAWS; roughly speaking, that’s the equivalent of seven five-win seasons, a point at which I start to take mid-career position players seriously. All WAR figures here refer to the Baseball Reference version, unless otherwise indicated.

One other thing to note: since my reference point for “old” WAR and JAWS figures dates back to January 2021, some portion of these players’ gains may be due to updates to bWAR itself, particularly via changes to 2019 and ’20 park factors and tweaks to 2017-20 Defensive Runs Saved that were announced in March, but also due to a second update to 2020 park factors that just went live on Tuesday. Read the rest of this entry »

Martín Pérez has a plus changeup, and he relies on it often. The 30-year-old native of Guanare, Venezuela has thrown his “cambio” 24.6% of the time since coming to the Red Sox prior to the 2020 season. A four-seam circle delivered at an average velocity of 84.9 mph, it’s the pitch the southpaw was once told would be his ticket to the big leagues.

Perez discussed the art of the changeup prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

———

Perez on his changeup: “I started throwing my changeup when I was 14 years old. Before that age, I just threw fastballs. I’d met couple of guys in Venezuela who played — Ramon Garcia, a righty with Houston, and Ernesto Mejia, who signed with Atlanta — and they told me not to throw breaking pitches, to just throw fastballs. As soon as I started my process to sign as a professional baseball player, I started to throw changeups, breaking balls, and fastballs.

“It’s important to have a changeup that will have the same arm speed as the fastball. You throw your fastball, and you throw your changeup, and they’re going to look the same. That’s why it’s so hard to hit. It’s hard for hitters to recognize that pitch, because they both have the same rotation. So, that was my focus.

“After I signed [with the Rangers] in 2007, the guy who was my boss at that time was [Director of Player Development] Scott Servais. In 2008, I played in [short-season] Spokane and it was a good year. I threw my breaking ball, my changeup, and my fastball. I had a big breaking ball. It was 12–6 and really good; I could throw it in any count. But then, in 2009, I went to Hickory, Low-A, and they told me, ‘Martín, you don’t have to throw more breaking balls. We want you to focus on your changeup, because that’s the pitch that’s going to take you to the big leagues.’ Read the rest of this entry »

As Kris Bryant helps the Giants fend off the Dodgers in the NL West division race, his replacement in Chicago seems like a lock to break his old team’s rookie home run record despite being older than Bryant is right now. Patrick Wisdom, who turned 30 on August 27, has swatted 25 home runs so far this season, coming out of nowhere to produce one of baseball’s most fascinating stat lines.

Prior to this season, Wisdom had just 27 games of big league experience, including two with the Cubs in 2020, who re-signed him to a minor league deal in January. Though he posted “ridiculous” numbers at the team’s alternate training site last season, he seemed more likely to provide bench depth for the big league club than be a regular, only to end up playing 83 games split between first base, third base and left field, take 279 plate appearances, and post a .256/.320/.579 slash line.

There remain questions of sustainability. Wisdom isn’t a true-talent 136 wRC+ player, but he’s certainly more of a viable big league bat than initially thought. ZiPS projected him for an 82 wRC+ before the season, which was much more bullish than Steamer’s 70 wRC+ prediction, but both are still a far cry from the actual numbers so far. As a result, both systems have seen significant improvement in the underlying talent given the sizable sample of good performance: His rest-of-season ZiPS projection has him up to a 104 wRC+, and Steamer has him at 93. Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Burnes is laying waste to the National League, putting up numbers that can best be described as comical. A 34.6% strikeout rate? That’s closer territory. A 4.8% walk rate? That’s lower than Kyle Hendricks’ career mark. His 2.27 ERA might undersell how good he’s been; both his xERA (a Statcast ERA estimator) and FIP are in the ones (1.96 and 1.58, respectively).

You know about the cutter he leads with, which he described to David Laurila earlier this year. You know about the slider and sinker, the two pitches that complement his cutter. That trio took the league by storm last year, and he’s doubled down on cutters this year; he now throws the pitch roughly half the time.

Like an annoying hipster, though, I’ve moved on to the next cool Burnes thing that no one is talking about yet. The cutter? It’s fine, I guess (it’s the best cutter in baseball, but I’m doing a bit here, so bear with me). I’m here to talk to you about the curveball, a pitch that he threw less than 10% of the time before making it a staple this season.

If Burnes has one standout skill, it’s his ability to impart spin. Even when he was bad, he threw the highest-spinning four-seamer in the game, and his slider has always jumped out of his hand. It’s hardly a surprise that his curveball is cut from the same cloth. Spin data is fraught this year, what with the foreign substance crackdown and all, but since June 21, he’s thrown his curveball with a whopping 2,840 rpm, the 16th-best mark in the game (21st-best if you consider spin-to-velocity ratio instead).

What does that mean in English? It means that he has the raw stuff to generate eye-popping movement. He also throws the pitch in the low 80s, which means batters don’t have a ton of time to react. Put those two things together, and you can make MVP candidate Buster Posey look like a toddler learning how to walk:

The pitch is an absolute delight, and it’s also phenomenally effective. Batters have come up empty on half of their swings against it, the third-highest mark in the league (and 45% since June 21, so don’t go sticky-stuff-asterisking up this great pitch). As an added bonus, he’s seventh in baseball when it comes to batters not swinging at pitches in the zone. He throws it for a strike 49.3% of the time, which ranks seventh in the majors, and batters take it, doing his work for him. Can’t hit it when they swing at it, often take it when they should swing at it: what’s an opposing hitter to do but complain?
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest reasons the Mariners have stuck around the fringes of the AL wild card race despite a -60 run differential has been the collective performance of their bullpen. Kendall Graveman had established himself as a bonafide relief ace before being traded to the Astros in late-July, and Drew Steckenrider has revived his career after falling apart in Miami two years ago. But equally unexpected, and perhaps the biggest reason Seattle felt comfortable dealing Graveman at all, has been the fantastic season put together by its other breakout relief ace: Paul Sewald.

Drafted as a reliever by the Mets in the 10th round of the 2012 draft, Sewald came with two years of college experience under his belt at the University of San Diego and quickly moved through the farm system. He reached the majors in 2017 and made 125 appearances out of the bullpen through 2020, but outside of a 23.5% strikeout rate that was just a hair above league average, he was mostly forgettable as a Met; across 147.1 innings in New York, he posted a 5.50 ERA. He was non-tendered this past offseason and signed a minor-league contract with the Mariners in January.

Even though Sewald wasn’t able to make the major league roster out of spring training, he has thrived in Seattle. He was called up on May 13, the same day Jarred Kelenic and Logan Gilbert made their debuts, and while his return to the majors was much less heralded than those two top prospects, he’s arguably been more important to the Mariners this season than either. He’s upped his strikeout rate to 40.3% in 2021, the fifth highest rate among all qualified relievers, and all those strikeouts have helped him drop his FIP to just 1.95. In just 45.1 innings, he’s more than doubled his total career WAR.

Michael Ajeto of Lookout Landing was one of the first to write about Sewald’s breakout, but the reasons for his improvement are tough to spot on the surface. He’s simplified his pitch mix a bit, cutting out his rarely thrown changeup and increasing the usage of his slider to make him a two-pitch pitcher:

Both the fastball and slider are returning better-than-ever results, with the latter generating a 38.6% whiff rate and a .270 wOBA against. But as good as his breaking ball has been, the four-seam fastball has been even better. Its whiff rate is up to 35.3%, the 12th-highest mark among all four-seam fastballs thrown at least 100 times this year, and it boasts the 12th-highest CSW% (35.7) in that group.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees’ 13-game winning streak came to an end in Oakland on Saturday, as a lineup that had been cranking out nearly seven runs per game for over a week had its bats silenced, and as starting pitcher Nestor Cortes bore the brunt of a questionable call or two, as well as some bad luck. It wasn’t his day, but that doesn’t diminish the job he’s done at the back of a banged-up rotation. Like many far better paid and more heralded players, the 26-year-old lefty has helped save New York’s season from oblivion, and in doing so, “Nasty Nestor” has carved himself a place in the majors while earning cult status.

Currently in his third stint with the Yankees, Cortes cuts an unassuming figure on the mound at 5-foot-11 and 210 pounds, armed a fastball that averages just over 90 mph. Those numbers belie the athleticism and inventiveness of the Cuban-born southpaw, who has taken a page from the playbook of countryman Orlando Hernandez by coming at hitters from a variety of angles, speeds, and arm slots, with the occasional hesitation thrown in for good measure.

Nestor Cortes, Messing with Timing. ? pic.twitter.com/7a0vRyFoB1

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 11, 2021

Thanks to his creativity, Cortes has posted a 2.77 ERA, 3.59 FIP, and 25.6% strikeout rate, generating a whole lot of soft contact in his 61.2 innings. In doing so, he’s helped to compensate for injuries to Corey Kluber, Domingo Germán, and Michael King, as well as the prolonged absence of Luis Severino, and to lift the Yankees from their .500-ish nadir into a spot atop the AL wild card race.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been paying close attention to my writing recently, you’ll notice a hidden theme running through my last month or so of work: frequent and bad jokes. But there’s a second theme, too: batters do really well when they swing at pitches over the heart of the plate. Splitting the plate up into the center and the corners does a lot to explain where hitters do best; when you swing at something there, it’s hardly a surprise that the results, on average, are excellent.

Will Smith is a great hitter. He gets my vote as the best catcher in the game, and while I wouldn’t fault you for picking Buster Posey, Smith leads all catchers in WAR and is doing it at a young age. He’s a perfectly acceptable defensive catcher, but he’s valuable because of his hitting, with a .267/.377/.510 line that’s good for a 140 wRC+. Those numbers are great for any hitter, but particularly for one playing the hardest defensive position.

With that in mind, you’d assume Smith is great against pitches in the middle of the plate. That’s how hitters succeed! Well, you’d be wrong. Take a look at his Swing/Take runs, a neat Statcast tool that shows the run value a player has accrued on pitches in each zone:

That’s not how this is supposed to work. What the heck is going on?
Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last month after being on hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features Peyton Battenfield, Demarcus Evans, and Josh Fleming on their cutters.

———

Peyton Battenfield, Cleveland prospect

“Slider, cutter… that pitch is kind of loosely defined. I call it a cutter. The horizontal movement isn’t super high, and I throw it anywhere from 87–90 [mph]. I’d tried throwing a slider in college, but I could never really get it to move. When I got drafted by the Astros, I had the same grip and still couldn’t get it to move. For whatever reason, I didn’t understand the right type of spin that I was supposed to be getting out of it, but then I got showed a cutter grip. This was in October 2020, in instructs, and that’s when it started moving.

“I actually tried learning one back in 2019, when I was with the Astros, but like with any pitch, when you’re first starting to learn it takes time and patience. You’re learning a new grip, so you’ve got to figure out the right release point, what feels right coming out of the hand in order to get the movement profile you’re looking for.

“I came into spring training this year able to throw it for a strike more consistently. I was also getting more consistent movement, the way I wanted it to move, and the velo was higher on it as well. As much as anything, I simplified the pitch. Trusting the grip and throwing it like my fastball was probably the biggest thing. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, White Sox manager Tony LaRussa called first baseman José Abreu “one of the great players in major league history.” That’s certainly a strong statement — probably too strong, but that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with a manager praising his players.

Abreu’s season has been defined by streaks, but he’s getting hot down the stretch for Chicago, and when he’s hot, he’s an aircraft carrier in terms of the ability to put the team on his back if needed.

As he heats up, he’s now on track to lead the American League in RBIs for the third consecutive season, and while that statistic is exceptionally lineup dependent, it still speaks to his value in the middle of the order, as well as his exceptional durability and consistency. His career wRC+ is 133, and his lowest mark in a season is 114, back in 2018. He’s had off years, but only in the context of his own career; he’s never approached anything that could be called bad. Most of his ability comes from his massive strength, as he ranks in the 90th-plus percentile among major leaguers in most any advanced power measurement stat. And while he’s a bit of a free swinger, he barrels balls up at an elite rate, and they tend to have more oomph on them than when your average player squares a ball up.

Is he one of the greatest players in history? He is not, but he’s certainly high on my Cuban-What-Could-Have-Been list. While most baseball fans have only been aware of Abreu since his 2014 rookie season, for many inside the game, last year’s MVP campaign was a long time coming.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in March, all we had to look at for the 2021 season was projection; we’re now on the cusp of September, with just over 80% of the games already played. To the consternation of a percentage of fans, projections on sites like this one look unreasonably grumpy to teams like the Giants, who have played above their projections in 2021. It’s undeniable that they have been off for teams, which is something you should expect. But are these computers actually wrong when predicting middling play from these high-achieving surprises going forward?

The Giants, in particular, have already outperformed their original preseason projections by somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 wins. With a month to go in the season, it wouldn’t be a total surprise if San Francisco ended up with 25 more wins than the predictions. Yet our assembled projections only list the Giants with an expected roster strength of .512 over the rest of the season. Using ZiPS alone is sunnier but also well off the team’s seasonal pace through the end of August.

Yes, ZiPS projects the Giants as the slight favorite to win the NL West now, but that doesn’t take a lot of mathematical courage given that they’re already in first place with most of the season done. With the help of a little math, you can see that the computer projects San Francisco to go just 16–16 the rest of the season; to be more precise, ZiPS thinks the Giants have a roster strength that indicates a .521 winning percentage with their average opponent for the rest of the season having a .520 roster strength, resulting in a mean projection around the .500 mark. That’s up quite a bit from the preseason, when ZiPS thought the Giants were a .467 team with a .502 schedule, ending up with a 75–87 preseason estimate. But it almost feels a bit disrespectful to the team leading the league in wins for most of the season.

So why are projections so grumpy? In a nutshell, it’s because they’re assembled based on empirical looks at what baseball’s history tells us, not (hopefully) the aesthetic valuations of the developer. And in the baseball history we have, seasonal projections do not become this all-powerful crystal ball when it comes to projecting how the rest of the season goes.

Read the rest of this entry »