The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Aramis Ramirez hit more homers than all but six players who spent the majority of their careers at third base, and he also ranks among the top half-dozen from the hot corner in RBI, and fourth in slugging percentage among those with at least 7,000 plate appearances. While that’s not enough to make him a serious Hall of Fame candidate once his 18-year career is placed in its proper context, the three-time All-Star deserves his due as the final entry in the One-and-Done portion of my annual series.

Ramirez put up big offensive numbers while spending his entire career in the NL Central, bookended by stints with the Pirates (1998-2003, ’15) that included a chance to finally represent them in postseason play. He was part of three playoff teams during his 8 1/2-season stint with the Cubs (2003-11), for whom he was a two-time All-Star, and made the last of his All-Star berths during three lean years in Milwaukee (’12-14). The man could hit: Ramirez batted .300 or better seven times, with a high of .318 in 2004; swatted 25 or more homers in a season 10 times, topping 30 four times; and drove in 100 or more runs seven times; he set highs in the last two categories in 2006, when he hit 38 homers and drove in 119 runs. Tellingly, in a hitter-friendly era he only grazed the leaderboards in those triple crown categories, with eight top-10 finishes but just one higher than seventh place.

Aramis Ramirez was born on June 25, 1978 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Unlike so many Dominican players who come from poverty, he was comparatively well off, as his father was a doctor and his mother an accountant. Basketball was his first love; he didn’t start playing baseball until age 13, but the fact that he owned three gloves made up for his deficit in skill relative to other kids in his neighborhood. “I was really bad,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Jamal Greene in 2001, “But if they didn’t let me play, they wouldn’t have enough gloves.” Read the rest of this entry »

After playing some pretty terrible baseball in 2019, the Detroit Tigers brought in a couple of veteran free agents to bolster their offense, taking it from very bad to only kind of bad. C.J. Cron only got to play 13 games in a Tigers uniform before he sprained his knee and was lost for the season. Jonathan Schoop worked out much better, producing a 114 wRC+ while playing excellent defense at the keystone, good for 1.4 wins in 44 games. Overall, the team wasn’t much better than their 2019 record, improving from an ugly 114 loss season to a pro-rated 98 loss season in 2020.

Just like last offseason, the Tigers turned to a veteran free agent to aid their beleaguered offense. Yesterday, they signed Robbie Grossman to a two-year deal with a $10 million guarantee and an additional $1 million in incentives, per Cody Stavenhagen and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. Craig Edwards had Grossman towards the bottom of our Top 50 free agents ranking, estimating he’d get a one-year deal worth around $6 million, while the crowd had him pegged for an average of just over a year and a half and $9 million.

The switch-hitting outfielder had a career renaissance in 2020, accumulating 1.3 wins for the Oakland Athletics, easily a career high that becomes even more impressive when you consider that he accumulated that much WAR in just 51 games. Grossman posted a 126 wRC+ in 2020, the second highest mark of his career, and that offensive outburst was fueled by a massive power breakout. During the first seven seasons of his career, he compiled a .119 ISO, a mark you’d expect a light-hitting infielder to produce. Most of his offensive value stemmed from his keen eye at the plate and an above average ability to make solid, if weak, contact. In 2020, Grossman upped his ISO from .107 to .241, launching eight home runs in the abbreviated season. That was more home runs than he had hit during the previous two seasons despite accumulating less than half the number of plate appearances than in ‘19 or ‘18. Among all qualified batters in 2020, Grossman’s 134 point ISO increase over 2019 was the second highest, behind only Wil Myers. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2018, Blake Treinen had one of the best relief pitching seasons of all time. A year later, his strikeouts went down, his walks doubled, and batters were getting the ball in the air and out of the ballpark. Oakland opted to non-tender Treinen after that 2019 season rather than pay him around $8 million. The Dodgers had no problems forking over $10 million in free agency and were rewarded with a solid season, including the final three outs of Game 5 of the World Series. Los Angeles liked what it saw from Treinen, and the 32-year-old righty appeared to have enjoyed his experience, as the parties reached an agreement on Tuesday on a two-year deal with an option for 2023.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the course of this offseason, FanGraphs is compiling a crowdsourced ranking of our readers’ favorite broadcasts. Last month, we announced the results of the crowdsourced vote on TV broadcasts. Now we are once again asking for your help, this time for each team’s radio broadcast.

The radio broadcasts will follow the same general format as our earlier TV broadcast surveys. When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of radio teams will be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. Of note, this doesn’t mean sabermetric or statistical analysis, though some broadcast teams certainly excel in that area. Rather, it covers all the ways in which a broadcast team attempts to inform listeners about the players on the field and the game situation they find themselves in.

Is a color commentator particularly adept at breaking down a hitter’s adjustments? That’s excellent analysis. Does a broadcaster mention a player’s DRS, then use that number without context to explain why someone is a good or bad defender? That’s bad analysis, despite its use of advanced metrics. This category’s score should represent how much you feel you learn about baseball while you listen to the game.

The “Charisma” score covers the amount of enjoyment you derive from listening to the announcers. Does the booth’s camaraderie make you feel like you’re listening to a game with friends? Does an announcer’s wistful recounting of his playing days leave you in stitches? Do you find yourself just downright having fun listening to their stories? All of that is contained in this category. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

A.J. Burnett’s stuff was never in doubt. The owner of a mid-90s fastball and a devastating knuckle curve that he threw from multiple arm slots, he could make batters look foolish and miss bats aplenty, but his command and control were another matter. When Burnett no-hit the Padres as a member of the Marlins on May 12, 2001, he walked nine batters — the most by a pitcher ever in a nine-inning no-no — and hit another.

Burnett spent parts of 17 seasons (1999–2015) in the majors with the Marlins, Blue Jays, Yankees, Pirates, and Phillies. He struck out at least 190 hitters in a season half a dozen times, led his league in strikeouts per nine twice, played a key role in helping New York win a World Series and in ending an epic postseason drought in Pittsburgh, and went through an impressive late-career reinvention there that culminated with his only All-Star berth in the final year of his career. Yet he also ranked among the league’s top 10 in walk rate nine times, leading once and placing second twice. Three times he led his league in wild pitches and once in hit batsmen. From his tattoos and nipple rings to his penchant for self-immolation on the mound, he earned an unenviable reputation by the middle of his career.

“When his head’s not right, then his body won’t follow. But his head goes first. Then his body gets all out of whack,” Yankees pitching coach Dave Eiland bluntly told ESPN’s Johnette Howard in 2010, as Burnett suddenly devolved into yet another pitcher who couldn’t handle the Bronx. It took a change of scenery and mastery of a two-seam fastball to get his career back on track. Once he did, he became a favorite of teammates and fans — an outcome that at one point appeared so remote.

Allan James Burnett was born on January 3, 1977 in North Little Rock, Arkansas. He played mostly third base at Central Arkansas Christian High School, and when he pitched a bit during his junior year, “more of his pitches ended up at the backstop than in the strike zone,” wrote ESPN Magazine’s Eric Adelson in 2001. Filling in for a teammate in a key game as a senior, he broke through, and the Mets chose him in the eighth round of the 1995 draft; he signed for a $60,000 bonus. By FanGraphs’ version of WAR — which at 42.5 is well beyond the value estimate of Baseball-Reference’s version (28.8) — he’s the most valuable eight-round pick ever, though Paul Goldschmidt will soon surpass him.

Burnett struggled with his control and his temper from the outset of his professional carer, walking 77 batters (but striking out 94) in 91.2 innings in his first two seasons. He began harnessing his stuff after coming under the tutelage of Pittsfield Mets pitching coach Bob Stanley (the former Red Sox reliever) in 1997. Via Adelson, Stanley once sent Burnett back to the mound with bloody knuckles after Burnett had repeatedly punched a dugout ceiling in anger; he struck out the side.

In February 1998, Burnett was traded to the Marlins — who were in the process of tearing apart their World Series-winning roster — as part of the Al Leiter deal. Despite missing the first seven weeks of the season due to a broken right hand suffered while playing catch (he was protecting himself from an errant throw), he made an indelible impression with his performance at A-level Kane County, posting a 1.97 ERA with 14.1 strikeouts per nine in 119 innings. The performance rocketed him to No. 21 on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list; the publication lauded his stuff (mid-90s fastball that touched 97, two other average or better pitches) and his makeup (“not afraid to make a mistake, loves to challenge hitters and won’t back down… willingness to make adjustments and correct mistakes on his own”).

Promoted to Double-A Portland, Burnett struggled, with high walk and homer rates pushing his ERA to 5.52, but he responded well to a detour to the bullpen, and the Marlins called him up to debut on August 17, 1999. He threw 5.2 innings and allowed one run in beating the Dodgers, the first of seven starts over which he posted a 3.84 ERA but walked 5.4 per nine.

Expected to make the Marlins out of spring training in 2000, Burnett ruptured a ligament in his right thumb and was sidelined until July 20. He pitched quite well initially but faded in September, finishing with a 4.79 ERA in 82.2 innings. He continued to develop over the next two seasons, throwing that ugly 129-pitch no-hitter against the Padres in just his second start off the disabled list following a right foot fracture (suffered after he stepped in a gutter while bowling, naturally).

Burnett enjoyed a significant breakout in 2002, when he posted a 3.30 ERA and struck out 203 in 204.1 innings while leading the NL in shutouts (five), hit and homer rates (6.7 and 0.5 per nine, respectively) and wild pitches (14). His usage was heavy even in the context of the time; his 12 outings with at least 120 pitches over the 2001–02 seasons tied for fourth in the majors, and at 24 and 25 years old, he was the youngest pitcher among the top eight in that category. Thus it wasn’t much of a shock when the elbow trouble he developed in early 2003 led to Tommy John surgery. He missed the Marlins’ championship run, but given how awash the team was with young pitching — Josh Beckett, Dontrelle Willis (his rotation replacement), Brad Penny, Carl Pavano — the team barely missed him.

Even so, Burnett made a strong return in June 2004, highlighted by a 14-strikeout effort against the Rockies on August 29. Despite posting solid numbers in 2005 (3.44 ERA, 116 ERA+, 198 strikeouts in 209 innings), he lost his final six decisions amid a race for a playoff spot and was sent home during the final week of the season after a clubhouse outburst regarding the negative attitude surrounding the team. “We play scared. We manage scared. We coach scared and I’m sick of it,” he told reporters. “It’s depressing around here. It’s like they expect us to mess up, and when we do they chew us out. There’s no positive nothing around here for anybody.”

Though Burnett apologized, and manager Jack McKeon was replaced, the skids were greased for his exit via free agency, not that the Marlins were going to pay market rate for his services. As one of the top starting pitchers in a weak field, he signed a five-year, $55 million deal with the Blue Jays, reuniting with pitching coach Brad Arnsberg, with whom he’d worked well in Florida. He pitched reasonably well in Toronto and benefited from the guidance of teammate Roy Halladay, who helped him evolve from a thrower to a pitcher. Asked about his approach by the future Hall of Famer, a flummoxed Burnett couldn’t come up with more than, “Umm… I just try to throw heaters by guys. And if I get ahead, I throw my curveball as hard as I can.”

“Roy just started laughing. Like for a while. And I’m just shaking my head, like, What? What! Dude, what’s so funny?” a sheepish Burnett recalled in 2018.

Elbow inflammation (2006) and a shoulder strain (’07) limited Burnett to 46 starts and 301.1 innings in his first two seasons as a Blue Jay, the latter amid some high pitch counts. Though his 4.07 ERA (104 ERA+) in 2008 was the highest mark of his Toronto tenure, he went 18–10 while leading the AL with 231 strikeouts (and 9.4 per nine) in a career-high 221.1 innings, then exercised an opt-out clause and hit free agency again.

The Yankees, smarting from missing the playoffs for the first time since the 1994–95 strike, signed the going-on-32-year-old Burnett to a five-year, $82.5 million deal on December 12, kicking off a spending spree that would also include even more lucrative deals for CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira. They won 103 games and the AL East in 2009 while Burnett pitched to a 4.04 ERA, struck out 195, and livened up a staid clubhouse with at least 10 celebratory pies-in-the-face of teammates who collected walk-off hits. In the postseason, he made three strong starts and two lousy ones, most notably sparkling in a seven-inning, nine-strikeout, one-run effort against the Phillies — and opposite Pedro Martinez — in Game 2 of the World Series, but getting roughed up for six runs in two-plus innings when starting Game 5 on three days of rest. Still, he did a lot more for his World Series ring than he’d done in 2003.

After cruising through the first two months of 2010, Burnett began spiraling downwards during an 0–5, 11.35 ERA June, his inability to self-correct on the mound apparent to teammates, opponents, media, and fans; the boos rained down. Even after turning things around, he cut both of his hands hitting a clubhouse door in anger after a July start, prompting Eiland’s unflattering assessment. While he held opponents scoreless in six of his 33 starts, he allowed six or more runs 10 times and finished 10–15 with a 5.26 ERA. He was similarly bad in 2011 and clashed with manager Joe Girardi when he was pulled early from games. Even so, the Yankees gave him playoff turns in both years, and he notably beat the Tigers in a must-win Game 4 of the 2011 Division Series.

That turned out to be Burnett’s final start as a Yankee. On February 19, 2012 he was traded to the Pirates for two minor league non-prospects, with the Yankees sending along $20 million to cover his remaining salary. Before he could make his first official appearance for Pittsburgh, he fractured his right orbital during a spring training bunting drill and needed surgery, delaying his debut until April 21. Nonetheless, he quickly took to his new surroundings and was embraced as a clubhouse leader and mentor as well as a fierce competitor. A clip of him telling the Dodgers’ Hanley Ramirez to “Sit the fuck down” after a strikeout still circulates on the internet:

This day in #PGHistory: A.J. Burnett strikes out Hanley Ramirez, before telling him to “Sit The F*** Down” at PNC Park. (2012) pic.twitter.com/F1VoHqScO8

— Pittsburgh Clothing Co. (@PGHClothingCo) August 16, 2017

“He wanted to impact an organization,” manager Clint Hurdle told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2016. “He was going to be our ace. I don’t know if he had been ‘the guy’ before, but he was going to be our guy.”

With his average fastball velocity having dipped from 95.0 mph in 2008 to 93.4 in ’11, Burnett became more reliant upon his two-seam fastball, which helped him keep the ball in the park. His ground-ball rate jumped from 49.2% to 56.9%, his home-run rate dropped from 1.47 per nine to 0.8, and he turned in a 3.51 ERA while helping the Pirates to 79 wins. He was similarly strong in 2013: Despite missing four weeks due to a calf strain, he struck out 209 hitters in 191 innings for an NL-high 9.8 K/9. More importantly, he helped the Pirates clinch their first postseason berth since 1992. Alas, his lone postseason start was a disaster; after two scoreless innings in the Division Series opener against the Cardinals, he allowed seven straight batters to reach base in the third, all of whom scored before he could retire a hitter. He didn’t get another turn, bypassed in favor of Game 2 starter Gerrit Cole as the series went five games.

Having completed his five-year deal — during which he made at least 30 starts annually, something he had done just twice prior — the going-on-37-year-old Burnett was mulling retirement. The Pirates didn’t issue him a $14.1 million qualifying offer, and by the time he decided to return in January, the team somehow wasn’t interested despite making no significant additions to its roster. Burnett instead signed a one-year, $16 million deal with the Phillies, but things went poorly for both him and the 89-loss team. While he made an NL-high 34 starts and pitched 213.1 innings, his highest total since 2008, he was lit for a 4.59 ERA and took a league-leading 18 losses. Pitching the entire season with a hernia that required offseason surgery couldn’t have helped.

Not wanting to end on such a sour note, Burnett returned to the Pirates via a one-year, $8.5 million deal ($4.25 million less than the Phillies offered). He was stellar in the season’s first half, posting a 2.11 ERA while allowing two or fewer runs in 15 of 18 starts. For the first time in his career, he made an All-Star team, though manager Bruce Bochy somehow couldn’t shoehorn him into the game. After struggling in his first three starts of the second half, he missed six weeks due to elbow inflammation. He returned and helped the Pirates secure their third straight Wild Card berth, collecting his 2,500th strikeout (the Cubs’ Jorge Soler) on September 27, and his 2,507th (the Reds’ Todd Frazier) on October 3, tying Christy Mathewson for 31st on the all-time list; he surpassed Mathewson an inning later by striking out Tucker Barnhart.

That turned out to be Burnett’s final outing, as he didn’t appear in the Wild Card Game, where the team was eliminated at the hands of the Cubs. Though he believed he could still pitch — and the numbers clearly say so, with 3,000 strikeouts an outside possibility — his desire to spend time with his wife and children won out. In his retirement, his Pirates teammates lauded him for his effect on his teammates. Said pitcher Jeff Locke, “There’s just nothing that any one of us in this clubhouse are going through, or are going to go through, that he really hasn’t been through.”

A weird thing happened in 2020. Well, lots of weird things happened in 2020 — my statement is maddeningly vague — but one in particular surprised me. The Nationals came into the season as strong contenders in the NL East despite losing Anthony Rendon in free agency, not least because of playoff superstar Juan Soto.

Of course, calling Soto a playoff superstar sells him short. His genius isn’t limited to the postseason. He’s simply one of the top five players in baseball, full stop; his combination of unparalleled batting eye, tremendous bat control, and startling power are exciting enough, and that’s before considering the fact that he didn’t turn 22 until this October. Quite simply, he’s a huge part of the future of the game. Heck, ZiPS comped him to literally Ted Williams earlier this offseason.

Right, we were talking about a weird thing and the Nats. Just before the season started, Soto tested positive for COVID (he believes it was a false positive). He didn’t play his first game until August 5, and the Nats never got into gear; per our playoff odds, they were under 10% to make even the expanded field by the time the calendar flipped to September:

Because of that, it’s easy to forget about Washington’s 2020. Before the season, they were defending champions, and then BAM, it was over. Weird! But this is an article about Soto, and Soto didn’t fade like the rest of the DC nine. He hit, and hit, and hit some more, to the tune of a Bonds-looking .351/.490/.695 slash line. It’s hard to think about that line, because what in the world does a .490 on-base percentage look like? .695 is a middle infielder’s OPS, not a slugging percentage. It beggars belief. Read the rest of this entry »

In previous seasons, I have taken a look at Opening Day payrolls and team win totals in August to see how closely the two figures correlate. Given that the 2020 regular season was just a few weeks old in mid-August, I didn’t write that piece then, and since the season was only 60 games long overall, I wouldn’t have been able to make the same type of comparison as in past seasons. Sixty games means more randomness and not as much of an opportunity for the good and bad teams to create separation between each other. It should come as no surprise, then, that the relationship between payroll and wins was not strong last year. The difference between the Dodgers and the Pirates last year was just 24 wins, but if you pro-rated their win percentages over 162 games, it would be a 65-win gap.

It isn’t really the top and the bottom that bunched teams together, though, relative to each other. Sixteen teams finished with a win total from 26 to 34, an eight-game spread. In a normal year, those winning percentages would be the difference between a 70-win team and a 92-win team. Typically, we can be confident that the 92-win team is significantly better than the 70-win team, since the amount of luck required to close a gap of that size is enormous. In a 60-game season, though, that confidence erodes a bit. For example, the Mets and Cubs finished with the same 31–29 BaseRuns record, but Chicago won the NL Central with a 34–26 mark, while New York missed the playoffs at 26–34. The Diamondbacks and Marlins had the same 24–36 BaseRuns record, but Miami finished two games above .500 and made the playoffs, while Arizona was 10 games below .500 at 25–35.

Comparisons between teams were made even more difficult by the unbalanced schedule. Teams played 40 games in their own division and another 20 games against the same directional division in the opposite league. The wins in the West, Central, and East all even out, but the pre-pandemic average payroll for the 10 West teams was around $157 million, followed by $147 million in the East and $122 million in the Central.

With all of that out of the way, here’s how the wins and payroll numbers shake out for 2020.

When it came to winning baseball games last year, payroll was not a significant factor. It’s worth noting that if we used BaseRuns standings, the correlation coefficient (r) moves up to .3, which is in line with what it was for actual wins and payroll for most of the last decade. Here’s a year-by-year look at wins and payrolls over the years.

On its face, last year’s correlation is the lowest since before baseball’s strike. As with much of 2020, the lack of a full season tends to distort the numbers and our ability to get value from them. Would the Marlins and Astros have maintained their roughly .500 trajectories, or would they have moved more toward their projected status? Looking at BaseRuns shows a significantly higher correlation between expected wins and projected payroll, and it’s likely that a full season would have resulted in a much stronger relationship, but the shortened season limits certainty.

In past years, I’ve discussed the relationship between wins and franchise valuations as well as looking at payroll and wins over multiple seasons. There doesn’t seem to be as much fruitful ground to cover beyond what I’ve previously written given the way the 2020 season turned out, though I will note that going back to 2014 puts the relationship between payroll and wins at .52 with the Forbes valuation and wins over that period at .56. Even with the 60-game season, the overall trend remains the same: Money, in terms of payroll or organizational worth, has a strong relationship with how much a team wins.

While I performed this exercise mostly out of habit, it is good to see the intuition of 2020 randomness supported here. Given a shortened season, we would expect to see a weaker relationship between payroll and wins, and that’s exactly what we got. The more games, the more likely we are to see talent win out, and talent is often acquired in exchange for significant sums of money. There isn’t much reason to think the dynamic that has existed in previous seasons has undergone significant change, and 2020 will simply provide an asterisk-laden blip in history. We will see how 2021 turns out for payroll and wins, but I would expect that most teams will continue to be rewarded for higher payrolls while exceptions like the Rays and A’s succeed despite their competitive disadvantage when it comes to player salaries.

If the Brewers had their druthers, Orlando Arcia wouldn’t have played much this year. After the 2019 season, they acquired Luis Urías from the Padres with the intention of making him their starting shortstop. Arcia, a former top prospect whose bat had stagnated, would be relegated to a backup and defensive replacement — or at least, that was the plan.

Things don’t always work out so cleanly, and 2020 had a way of ruining everything. Urías contracted COVID-19 in July and didn’t debut until August 10. The third base situation didn’t quite work out; Brock Holt and Eric Sogard struggled, and Jedd Gyorko played mainly first base — the addition of the universal DH meant that their brief Ryan Braun experiment at first never amounted to much.

In the end, Arcia racked up 189 plate appearances, nearly a full-time slate. That doesn’t sound great for Milwaukee — Arcia put up a 54 wRC+ in 2018 and a 61 in 2019, plumbing the depths of offensive futility. Those are bad numbers even for a glove-first shortstop, but hey, with a DH, you can just bat him at the bottom of the lineup and limit the leverage of those plate appearances, right? Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

LaTroy Hawkins was just about as well-traveled as they come. The 6-foot-5, 220-pound righty spent 21 years in the majors, pitching for 11 different teams (not counting a return engagement in Colorado) in 44 different ballparks. Generally a setup man (though he did spend time closing), he never made an All-Star team, but he did pitch in the postseason five times with four different franchises, including a World Series with the Rockies. He stuck around long enough to become the 16th pitcher to appear in 1,000 games, and today ranks 10th all-time:

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the “Best of 2020” articles that ran here at FanGraphs over the holidays featured an under-the-radar right-hander with a unique backstory and a knee-buckling bender. Titled Rangers Prospect Cole Uvila is a Driveline-Developed Spin Monster, the story chronicled, among things, a curveball that had spun upwards of 3,300 RPM in Arizona Fall League action. Honed with the help of technology, the pitch profiled as his ticket to Texas.

He’s no longer throwing it. Instead, Uvila is endeavoring to channel former Cleveland Indians closer Cody Allen.

“In my head, I was going to throw it until my career was over,” Uvila said of his old curveball. “Then the pandemic happened. There was a lot of time to look in the mirror, and you just don’t see big-league relievers throwing 76-mph curveballs. It’s not really a thing.”

Uvila started talking with people in the Rangers organization, as well as to the instructors he’s worked with at Driveline over the years. Their messages were essentially the same: With breaking balls — much like fastballs — velocity is king.

“Driveline R&D has this metric called Stuff Plus, which essentially takes every breaking ball over the last five years and gives it a number,” Uvila told me earlier this week. “It’s kind of like wRC+, where 100 is average. I think the highest one was a dude with the Cubs, named [Dillon] Maples, and his graded out at something like 240. So there’s this range of pitches, and looking at the list, I saw this theme of curveballs at 84-85 [mph]. I said, ‘Man, I need to throw this pitch harder.’” Read the rest of this entry »