Trying to project how teams will behave in the coming months involves considering a lot of variables. There are the standings themselves, and yes, many teams are daily visitors to the FanGraphs Playoff Odds pages. There are payroll limitations as defined by the ownership group, though front offices frequently try to make the case for spending more money if they can make the argument that it will lead to more revenue in the form of an extended postseason run. Finally, there is the state of the roster in terms of now versus the future. Who’s good on this team? Who’s good on this team and will be here next year? What about in three years? When thinking about all those things and how teams will comport themselves this summer, no franchise fascinates me more than the Giants.

The Giants have been one of the most pleasant surprises in baseball. Their ZIPS projection entering the season was 75–87, with the potential to get to .500 if everything went well. Their rotation was seen as a strong suit, and their bullpen and offense were viewed as major question marks. Two months into the season, the rotation has been as expected, the bullpen has been more than good enough, and their lineup has put more runs on the board than anticipated with a low-contact group that depends on walks and power. Like with his former team in Oakland, Farhan Zaidi knows how to make a sum greater than the parts when constructing a roster, mixing and matching his lineups well beyond simple platoons to maximize what he has. He’s also also benefitting from seasons from Buster Posey and Brandon Crawford that are in the 90th-plus percentile of expectations.

As we hit late May, the Giants are one of the best teams in baseball, with a run differential that says this might not be a fluke. If you just look at the record and team performance so far, this is a clear go-for-it moment for the club. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they are in the same division as the Dodgers and the Padres, who are unanimously seen as two of the best teams in baseball. San Francisco has stuck with the pair for two months, but asking for four more months of equal performance might be pushing the envelope a bit, and last weekend’s sweep at the hands of Los Angeles confused matters even more.

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Remember when the Rockies attempted to assemble a super-mega bullpen? During the 2017-18 offseason, the team committed a combined $106 million to Wade Davis, Jake McGee, and the protagonist of this article, Bryan Shaw. What followed was a disaster. The trio put up just 0.4 WAR while part of the Rockies bullpen, a miserable return on investment.

Each pitcher had his own flaws, but none was worse than Shaw, who dragged down an already disappointing total with -0.5 WAR over a two-year span. If you’re not too familiar with him, Shaw is synonymous with his cutter, which he’s thrown upwards to 80% of the time in his career. It’s a fantastic pitch, featuring some of the league’s best horizontal movement in tandem with ample rise. The problem: In Colorado, the high altitude suppresses magnus force, the source of backspin and thus vertical break. Many of Shaw’s cutters became extremely hittable in this new environment – his Hard Hit rate jumped from 28.6% in 2017 to 39.7% the following year.

That’s where the story ended, for a while. Even at FanGraphs, our last mention of Shaw was in a Sunday Notes column back in 2019. Two years later, Bryan Shaw is now an essential part of Cleveland’s bullpen, his former home, with a 1.42 ERA and 3.56 FIP. Talk about a resurgence! What’s more, it’s not as if he’s added a secret new pitch. He still throws the cutter as often as he did years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

David Hamilton didn’t raise his stock in his junior year at the University of Texas. He never got the opportunity. On the heels of a sophomore season that saw him put up a .404 OBP and pilfer 31 bases, the speedy shortstop suffered a torn Achilles tendon in a scooter accident. The date was January 11, 2019, the motorized scooter was a Lime, and the upshot was Hamilton lasting until the 253nd pick of that summer’s draft.

The 5-foot-11, 175 pound San Marcos, Texas native could end up being be an eighth-round steal. Finally getting his feet wet in organized ball, Hamilton is off to a pedestrian start with the bat — a .250/.324/.359 slash line in 71 plate appearances — but the tools are real. Especially the wheels. Hitting near the top of the order for Milwaukee’s High-A affiliate, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, Hamilton has legged out a pair of triples and is 10-for-11 in stolen base attempts.

The 23-year-old middle infielder aspires to swipe 50 bags this year, and there’s a pretty good chance he’ll do just that. Augmenting his plus speed — Hamilton shared that he’s run a 6.4 sixty and a 4.4 forty — is an experimental rule designed to reward jackrabbits. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite losing Corey Seager to a broken right hand, getting less-than-vintage work from Mookie Betts, and continuing to await the return of Cody Bellinger from a hairline fracture of his left fibula, the Dodgers have won seven straight games and 11 of 12 to move within half a game of first place in the NL West. Leading the way on the offensive side — indeed, leading the entire majors from an offensive standpoint over the past two weeks — has been Max Muncy. After a down 2020 season and a dismal slump that more or less coincided with the team’s 5-15 tailspin, the 30-year-old infielder has seen some adjustments to his approach at the plate pay off.

This past weekend, Muncy helped the Dodgers to a three-game sweep of the division-leading Giants by homering twice and getting on base a total of six times in Saturday and Sunday’s wins. After taking Friday night off save for a late-inning defensive cameo to replace Albert Pujols, he opened the scoring on Saturday by putting one into McCovey Cove at the expense of Scott Kazmir, who was making his first major league appearance since September 23, 2016.

As best we can tell, Muncy did not suggest that Kazmir go get the ball out of the ocean, as he did for Madison Bumgarner on his previous splash hit in 2019. Sunday’s homer was window dressing in a rout; he hit one off reliever Sam Selman, who replaced Anthony DeSclafani after the Giants’ starter was rocked for 10 runs in 2.2 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll spare you the description of how I came up with the idea for this article. There was a lot of Alex Rodriguez’s announcing involved, and this is a family website, so my opinions on that will remain undiscussed. The point is, though, that it made me wonder about something I used to take for granted but have increasingly questioned: how do pitchers change their game plan with a runner on third base?

Depending on who you talk to, it might matter a lot or a little. Maybe pitchers won’t be willing to bounce one. Maybe they’ll pitch to a strikeout (assuming fewer than two outs), trying to keep the run from scoring. Maybe pitchers will completely ignore the runner on third and pitch normally. I’m legitimately uncertain. Not I think it’s 50% likely to be one and 50% likely to be the other — I have absolutely no idea how to weigh the relevant probabilities.

First things first; what about those bounced pitches? This is a classic announcer trope, but it’s a trope for a reason; throwing a pitch in the dirt really is more dangerous with a runner on third. Through the magic of run expectancy tables, we can see how much a one-base advancement costs the fielding team, based on whether there’s a runner on first, second, or third (I ignored other base/out states for brevity’s sake):

With no one out, everything is more or less the same; that runner on third was pretty likely to score anyway, in fact. As the outs pile up, allowing the runner from third to score hurts more and more — quite logical. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an understatement: Jesse Winker had a pretty solid weekend. On Friday, he collected four hits, including three home runs, and a walk. On Saturday, he only went 1-for-4, but added another homer. And on Sunday, he homered again, bringing his weekend total to five and his season total to 13. His wRC+, which entered the weekend at a cool 166, jumped 26 points to 192; by this metric, he’s now the third-best hitter in baseball. His .463 wOBA, meanwhile, ranks first.

To say that Winker has broken out this season would be inaccurate. He has always been a very good hitter, particularly against right-handed pitching. Plus, his numbers have seen a significant uptick over a fairly large sample. In short, it’s not just 2021: Over his last 162 games, dating back to May 22, 2019, he is hitting .306/.401/.563 with 31 homers. In that span, he has been the seventh-best hitter in the majors by wRC+, at 154.

He really put everything together during his 2020 season, with his once-extreme platoon splits (we’ll get to those in a moment) dissipating in the shortened campaign. His 146 wRC+ was a “seasonal” career-high, and his .289 ISO was eye-popping for a hitter who had posted sub-.200 marks for his career to that point. Winker, who had rarely been considered a power hitter — he graded as having 30 game power in his last prospect scouting report back in 2018 — posted the same 2020 ISO as Teoscar Hernández.

Winker’s 2020 season did turn heads, as did his hot start to 2021. But we’re admittedly still dealing with small-ish samples for this new slugging version of him. His ISO, which was only .181 going into 2020, is .320 so far this season. And we’re starting to see the projection systems more fully buy in. Here are the largest rest-of-season ZiPS ISO increases, compared to the pre-season projections:

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In past iterations of this column, a combination of pressing narratives and fatigue with certain pitchers and their respective teams, or a straight up lack of interesting matchups have forced us to get creative. Not so this week, where the first three days of the week each feature games with giant WATCH ME signs stapled to their probable pitchers. Beginning with the Padres-Brewers series, the final week of May has gifted us some undeniably fun fixtures.

Monday, May 24, 7:40 PM ET: Blake Snell vs. Brandon Woodruff

In his first year in San Diego, Blake Snell seems to be learning his new city using a method that many non-pitchers find helpful: a lot of walks. Snell has already issued 25 walks in 40.1 innings (13.7 BB%) and allowed hitters to reach base at a clip comfortably above the league average. The former Ray has a .330 on-base percentage against him, while the rest of the league is at .313. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve still got a week to go in May, a month that has included four no-hitters, including two last week on back-to-back days — the Tigers’ Spencer Turnbull against the Mariners on Tuesday, and then the Yankees’ Corey Kluber against the Rangers on Wednesday, plus two that were just two days apart earlier this month. That brings this year’s total to six no-hitters of the nine-inning variety, plus a seven-inning one by Madison Bumgarner that The Man doesn’t want you to count. Particularly because the major league batting average of .237 is in a virtual tie for the all-time low mark set in 1968, these remarkable achievements are threatening to lose some luster.

That’s a shame, because the experience of actually watching a no-hitter from start to finish, rather than just flipping over to rubberneck for the final three or six outs, is still one of the most gripping in all of sports. The dawning of the possibility at some point in the middle innings — individually, we all have our thresholds for when our antennae go up — and then the batter-by-batter, pitch-by-pitch suspense, knowing that this gem could disintegrate either though one bad pitch or one bad break, makes a no-hitter a thrill to watch. Every single one of them is meaningful to its participants; for the pitcher and probably the catcher as well, it’s the pinnacle of performance. It takes a heart of coal not to be moved by the likes of Turnbull or Carlos Rodón having that one day of untouchability after years of ups and downs.

That said, some no-hitters are more impressive than others, with strikeouts galore and maybe just a walk or two separating them from perfection. Particularly given the current conditions, under which three teams have been no-hit twice — Cleveland, Texas, and Seattle — it’s obvious that there are varying degrees of difficulty when it comes to opponents as well. No-hitting the Mariners, who entered Sunday with a team batting average of .198, isn’t the same as doing it to the Rangers (.236), and neither of those are the equal of, say, Sean Manaea no-hitting the 2018 Red Sox, who hit .271. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries continue to wreak havoc on nearly every team in baseball. With the shortened season still close in the rear-view mirror and the realignment and delayed start to the minor leagues, teams have had to scramble to fill their major league rosters. Some teams have been able to weather these issues with extraordinary depth while others have been forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find replacements for their injured regulars.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (50%/50% FIP- and RA9-) — 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.

The top tier got a lot bigger this week. The Red Sox continued to play well last week but the White Sox stumbled a bit. They were swept in New York over the weekend and won just two of their six games. The real reason this tier has grown so large is because the other three teams are playing out of their minds right now. The Rays, Padres, and Dodgers have won 10, nine, and six games straight, respectively. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot went wrong for Pittsburgh last season. Josh Bell tanked his trade value with a career-worst season. Gregory Polanco showed rather conclusively that he can’t hit. The team finished last in the NL Central for a second year in a row and has spent the last few winters demonstrating a disinterest in climbing out of the cellar anytime soon. There are enough problems with the Pirates that a sudden decline by young outfielder Bryan Reynolds was more or less reduced to a footnote.

Reynolds, a former second-round pick who was acquired from San Francisco in the Andrew McCutchen trade and finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2019, hit an abysmal .189/.257/.357 (72 wRC+) in 55 games last year. That line allowed him to blend in with pretty much everyone else in the lineup not named Ke’Bryan Hayes, but it was still an unwelcome development. While Hayes is clearly the player Pittsburgh wants to build its next good team around, having a second foundational player in the lineup is always going to make things a little easier down the line. Reynolds seemed like that player after his rookie season. Fortunately for the Pirates, he now looks like that player again.

Through 44 games, Reynolds is hitting .298/.389/.472 with four home runs, good for a 139 wRC+ and a team-high 1.4 WAR. He’s been on a particular tear in the month of May, hitting .324/.400/.549 with 10 doubles in just 19 games. Last Thursday, he took Drew Smyly deep with a game-tying homer to center in a game the Pirates would go on to win in extras.

Reynolds’ start to 2021 looks awfully similar to the performance he gave in 2019, when he hit .314/.377/.503 with 16 homers, a 130 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR, and he’s having success for a lot of the same reasons. He hits lots of line drives, picks up extra bases by putting balls in the gaps, and provides modest over-the-fence power. The consistency of his numbers in 2019 and ’21, though, brings up one question: What the heck happened last year?

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