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You can’t have too much pitching, and despite boasting arguably the majors’ deepest rotation in the spring, the Dodgers are depleted enough to continue hunting for reinforcements even after their big pickups at the trade deadline. Just hours before they took the wraps off marquee acquisition Max Scherzer, they added another well-decorated 37-year-old hurler to their reserve, signing free agent lefty Cole Hamels to an incentive-based one-year deal in hopes that he can help to offset their various injuries, absences, and workload concerns.

Mind you, there are no guarantees with 37-year-old arms, and that’s especially true for Hamels, a four-time All-Star and World Series MVP who is working to put his own recent string of injuries behind him. He’s pitched in just one game since the end of the 2019 season, and the second half of that campaign was a slog. On the strength of an improved changeup, Hamels posted a 2.98 ERA and 3.59 FIP in his first 99.2 innings for the Cubs in 2019, but left his June 28 start with an oblique strain. After missing five weeks, he struggled to regain his velocity and deception, getting hit for a 5.79 ERA and 5.29 FIP in 10 starts upon returning, and he made just one start after September 16 due to shoulder fatigue. Still, he finished with a 3.81 ERA, 4.09 FIP and 2.4 WAR, the last two marks his best since 2016.

After reportedly drawing interest from 13 teams, Hamels signed a one-year, $18 million deal with the Braves in December 2019, but by the time he reported to camp in mid-February, he was already ailing, having irritated his shoulder while doing weighted ball exercises as part of his winter workouts. He was behind schedule before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down spring training. About a week before camps reopened, the Braves reported that Hamels was throwing pain free and expected to be ready to start the shortened season, but by mid-July, he was sidelined by triceps tendinitis, deemed unlikely for Opening Day, and placed on the 45-day Injured List the day before the season began. When he finally made his first appearance, on September 16, he lasted just 3.1 innings and 52 pitches, allowing three runs. Before he could take his next turn, he was placed on the 10-day IL with shoulder fatigue, and that was all she wrote.

A free agent again, Hamels reportedly drew the interest of several teams as of December, but nothing materialized before the season began. As of mid-June, he continued to build up strength throwing off a mound, but it wasn’t until July 16 that he finally threw a showcase. Representatives from 20 teams attended, but with attention focused on the July 30 trade deadline, Hamels didn’t sign anywhere until Wednesday.

His deal with the Dodgers isn’t a bank-breaker, guaranteeing Hamels a $1 million base salary (the prorated share of $3.05 million) plus $200,000 for every start or relief appearance of 3.1 innings or longer (terms updated via this AP report); additionally, he has agreed to accept an optional assignment to the minors, and the Dodgers have agreed to recall him no later than September 2. With the team already nearly $65 million past the $210 million Competitive Balance Tax threshold, and nearly $25 million past the third tier threshold, they’ll pay a surtax on his salary. They won’t get a ton of innings from him, as Hamels is first headed to the team’s spring training facility in Arizona. He’s scheduled to throw a two-inning simulated game on Saturday, and to be built up to a starter’s pitch count. The Dodgers don’t need a fifth starter until August 14 agains the Mets, but Hamels would probably have to dazzle in order to make even an abbreviated start in that game.

It’s too early to know how exactly he’ll fit into the Dodgers’ revamped rotation, which currently includes Scherzer (who dazzled in his debut, a seven-inning, 10-strikeout performance against the Astros, bookended by whiffs of Jose Altuve and Chas McCormick, the latter drawing a curtain call), Walker Buehler, Julio Urías, David Price, and a big ol’ TBD. The team lost Dustin May to Tommy John surgery in May, and in the past week placed Tony Gonsolin to the 10-day IL due to shoulder inflammation and traded top pitching prospect Josiah Gray, who had made two appearances, to the Nationals in the Scherzer deal.

The Dodgers don’t know yet when Clayton Kershaw, who has not pitched in a game since July 3 due to forearm inflammation, will return from the IL, and they have worked to distance themselves from Trevor Bauer, who hasn’t pitched for them since June 28 in the wake of sexual assault allegations. Kershaw
had worked his way back to the point of throwing a three-inning simulated game on July 27. The Dodgers hoped he could be ready as soon as this weekend, but he’s now experiencing what manager Dave Roberts termed “residual soreness,” putting his next sim start on hold. Bauer remains on administrative leave through August 6 in connection with two separate investigations, a criminal one by the Pasadena Police Department, and an MLB one in connection with its joint domestic violence policy. His leave is expected to be extended given that his next hearing concerning a temporary restraining order was postponed from July 23 to August 16. Last week, the Los Angeles Times‘ Mike DiGiovanna reported that “a majority of players do not want Bauer back under any circumstances.”

The Dodgers do have one other potential starter waiting in the wings in lefty Danny Duffy, who was acquired from the Royals on July 29. He hasn’t pitched since July 16 due to a flexor strain, however, and isn’t expected back before September. Whether as a starter or multi-inning reliever, he’s not expected to carry a huge workload, but with Urías having already set a career high for innings (129.2), and Price coming off a season in which he opted out due to the pandemic, anybody who can offer a slice of quality innings is welcome.

Hence the signing of Hamels, who in addition to getting a chance to pitch close to home (he’s a San Diego native) is hoping to prolong an impressive career during which he’s won 163 games, struck out 2,560 hitters, and helped teams to eight playoff appearances highlighted by his winning NLCS and World Series MVP honors for the 2008 Phillies. With his time away, the major round-numbered milestones and an outside shot at the Hall of Fame (he’s 13.4 points short of the JAWS standard for starting pitchers) may be out of reach unless he musters some late-career staying power:

Even without such accomplishments, another championship would probably suffice for Hamels. With the playoff-bound Dodgers, he’ll get a shot at that — if he can stay healthy.

On July 26, the Seattle Mariners experienced what was perhaps the apex of their season. Down 6-0 against the Astros until the third inning, they embarked on an improbable rally that would culminate in an 11-8 victory. Let’s take some time to admire Dylan Moore and his swing, which produced the grand slam that punctuated the uphill battle:

Chills! It was a great moment, and not just for Mariners fans but for baseball in general. Who doesn’t love a cathartic underdog upset? (Well, maybe not the Astros in this moment.) But it was also a reminder of how the team had gotten to that point. Despite an ugly run differential, the Mariners had managed to squeeze out key wins throughout the season. This latest against the Astros gave them a 55-46 record. Suddenly, a Wild Card berth didn’t seem out of reach.

Two weeks later, the Mariners are still going. I had planned to write this article as early as July 24, when I tweeted about the team’s offense. In the back of my mind, I sort of assumed they’d fizzle out. But here we are, and the Mariners have a respectable 58-51 record – three games behind Oakland, and just a few more behind Boston. No team has been more clutch. Read the rest of this entry »

Bo Bichette is one of the best young hitters in the game. Just 23 years old, the Toronto Blue Jays shortstop has a .299/.345/.509 slash line to go with a 128 wRC+ and 35 home runs — 19 of them coming this season — in 795 big-league plate appearances through Tuesday’s action. Drafted 66th overall in 2016 out of a St. Petersburg high school, the 2021 American League All-Star is the son of former major-league slugger Dante Bichette.

Bichette talked hitting prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite Talks Hitting ice-breaker questions: Do you view hitting as more of an art, or more of a science?

Bo Bichette: “That’s an interesting question. I’d say it’s a combination of both, but I would lean more toward it being an art. I think hitting is more mental than anything, and science kind of equates to mechanics and all that. So I would say art.”

Laurila: Hitting analytics have obviously become a bigger part of the game…

Bichette: “Yes, but for me, no. I think the analytics are more how we’re evaluated as players. Everybody has their own things that click in their head. I haven’t really looked at the analytics all that much. The one thing is that pitchers pitch up in the zone more often, so you definitely practice hitting that pitch a little bit. But I don’t pay attention to my launch angle, exit velocity, and stuff like that.”

Laurila: Is your stroke conducive to hitting the elevated fastball? Read the rest of this entry »

When you pull up the position player leaderboards since May 22, you’ll see a pair of likely MVP candidates sitting on top of the list. Shohei Ohtani leads all batters with 3.1 WAR during this period and that’s ignoring the additional 1.3 WAR the two-way star has accumulated on the mound over his last nine starts. Fernando Tatis Jr. sits behind Ohtani with Cedric Mullins rounding out the top trio (perhaps this article should have been about what Mullins has done this year). But nestled behind those three is Willy Adames with 3.1 WAR in 64 games. Why is May 22 the arbitrary time frame placed on this query? That was the day Adames made his debut for the Brewers after being traded to Milwaukee from the Rays.

On May 22, the Brewers were 22-23 and sitting behind the Cubs and Cardinals in the NL Central. Since then, they’ve had the best record in the National League at 42-21 and have built a sizable cushion in the standings ahead of their division rivals. That turnaround is due in no small part to Adames’ fantastic performance over these last two-plus months. He’s hit .295/.379/.553 for the Brewers, good for a 148 wRC+, and has played excellent defense at shortstop. With Christian Yelich still struggling to reproduce his MVP-quality production from 2018 and ‘19, Adames has taken the reins as the leading run producer in the Brewers lineup.

When you compare what Adames has accomplished in Milwaukee with what he did in Tampa Bay, it certainly appears as though the change of scenery has made the difference:

Adames has shown flashes of production like this in the past, but he’s been held back by an aggressive approach that’s led to some untenable strikeout rates. He’s taken his ability to hit for power to new levels with the Brewers, and his strikeout and walk rates have both greatly improved. We’re talking about just 268 plate appearances, but there are enough positive signs in his underlying numbers that we could be witnessing a huge breakout from Adames.

Part of that might be attributable to a literal change in his scenery. Last year, Adames tested out wearing non-prescription glasses while playing at home at Tropicana Field. He was having a really difficult time seeing the ball while playing under the lights of the domed field. “I was good on the road; I just couldn’t hit at the Trop,” Adames told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times in an interview from early July.

“After they changed the lights in ’19, it was tough for me to see the ball there. Everybody thought it was mental, but it wasn’t. I was just guessing all the time there because I couldn’t pick up the ball when I was hitting.”

His issues hitting at Tropicana Field are born out in his home/road splits while playing for the Rays.

What he was able to accomplish on the road while with Tampa looks remarkably similar to what he’s done in Milwaukee. But if he was able to see the ball better on the road, and now while he’s a member of the Brewers, that should show up in some of his underlying plate discipline metrics.

I’ve broken Adames’ career down into three buckets: his home/away splits with the Rays and these last few months with the Brewers. Four of the five metrics above stay astonishingly consistent no matter where Adames is playing. But the one that has some significant differences may be the most important. While batting at Tropicana Field, Adames’ chase rate was a touch above league average; on the road as a Ray and as a Brewer, his chase rate falls well below league average.

That tracks with the way Adames described the effect of the lighting at Tropicana Field in this interview with MLB.com:

“Whenever I was out of the Trop, I feel like I was able to recognize the spin of the ball. You could see if it was a breaking ball, changeup or whatever. At The Trop, I couldn’t pick it up.”

In other interviews, he essentially said his approach while playing in Tampa Bay was just guessing at pitches and hoping to guess correctly. Everything about his approach stayed consistent, except for his ability to recognize pitches and lay off the ones that were traveling out of the strike zone.

These issues also affected the quality of contact he made at home as a Ray. Because he was guessing at which pitches were being thrown to him, when he did make contact with a pitch, he was more prone to mishit it, resulting in poor contact quality.

All of his significant batted ball peripherals were considerably weaker while hitting at Tropicana Field. He wasn’t hitting them as hard and struggled to tap into the power he’s displayed throughout his career.

Back in March, I wrote about how Adames quietly enjoyed a power breakout last year despite some major red flags in his approach. All the gains he made in terms of contact quality last year have taken another step forward this year. His barrel rate, hard hit rate, and average exit velocity are all at career highs — and that’s even including his miserable two months to start the season. All of his batted ball peripherals are even better as a Brewer. Even more encouraging, his batted ball profile isn’t as pull heavy as it was last year. He’s spreading the ball around the field again while still hitting for tons of power. He’s still hitting the ball to left field more often than he was in 2018 and ‘19, but his pull rate has come down more than 10 points from where it was last year.

Based on his struggles in Tampa Bay to start this year, it appears as though the pressure to keep his job on the Rays, particularly with Wander Franco looming, may have affected his performance on the field. That pressure, coupled with the visual issues he’s been dealing with over the last few years, really cratered his production. Now that Adames is in Milwaukee, he’s better recognizing pitches and has adjusted his approach accordingly while continuing to build on the improved contact quality he worked on last year. We’ve seen the best version of Adames over the last two months. The Brewers have to be thrilled they’ve found their long-term solution at shortstop.

The trade deadline has come and gone, and teams are approaching the two-thirds mark of the season. With the elimination of August waiver season, clubs have little room to adjust from here. Other than the smallest of moves involving minor leaguers or unaffiliated players, rosters are what they are, and evaluators have already moved on to preparing for the offseason free agent class. In some ways, it’s a frustrating time for playoff contenders, as one can feel a bit helpless; all you can do from here on out is watch what happens. For teams clearly out of the playoff race, August and September have a different dynamic, with clubs using their last 60 games to learn about their young players. There is no greater jump in baseball than from Triple-A to the big leagues. The players are exponentially better, and there are prospects who thrive (or shrink) in ballparks with third decks, bright lights, and an army of TV cameras. In terms of the 2021 season, the teams listed below are playing out the string. But they’re also using this time to figure out which of the players on their roster can be part of their next team to play late-season games that matter.

Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks had a relatively quiet deadline, but this also wasn’t a team expected to be this bad or loaded with good players on expiring deals. It will be interesting to see if Cooper Hummel, acquired from Milwaukee in the Eduardo Escobar deal, gets some major league at-bats this year. He’s had an outstanding Triple-A campaign, with more walks than strikeouts and a decent amount of power, but he also turns 27 in November, so it’s time to get going. It’s interesting to note that Arizona tried him at third base (it was just his second game at the position as a pro) during his first week in Reno, as most scouts put him firmly in the 1B/LF category. It looks like the D-backs will initially give at-bats to another older minor league slugger in the form of Drew Ellis, with the hope that one of the pair can represent an improvement over Christian Walker, which wouldn’t be asking much. The club also needs more assurances from Pavin Smith and Daulton Varsho, who so far have both looked more like nice bench pieces than everyday players on a contending team. A remarkable 36 players have taken the mound for the Diamondbacks, but the majority of their better pitching prospects are at the lower levels, so all they can really do from here is keep rolling out a variety of Quad-A-type bullpen arms to see if any of them have potential beyond that. Read the rest of this entry »

Every season, the trade deadline brings with it a fresh dose of jarring imagery. A clean shaven Joey Gallo and an orange-and-black clad Kris Bryant are just a few of the sights that will take some getting used to this year. But 2021 offers an additional element of strangeness, as the Tokyo Olympics and the trade deadline have conspired to leave some players in a unique state of suspended baseball animation. Last month, Joe Ryan and Shane Baz headed to Tokyo as Durham Bulls teammates. But a few days and one Nelson Cruz trade later, it became clear that only Baz would be returning to the Rays’ Triple-A affiliate after the Games. And unlike most of the players dealt in the most explosive trade deadline in recent memory, our first post-trade look at Ryan wasn’t in the uniform of his new minor league home team with the Twins, but rather adorned in red, white and blue as he took the hill for Team USA’s first game of the Olympic tournament against Israel.

Among the arms in Team USA’s rotation, Ryan isn’t really considered a Game One starter, but given that their first matchup in pool play was against the tournament’s decided underdog, it seemed like an obvious opportunity for the US to maximize Ryan’s effectiveness while also saving their more seasoned starters for the stiffer offensive competition to come. Ryan has a tendency to favor his low-90s fastball, an approach that has led him to a tremendous 34.9% K-rate at Triple-A so far this year, against a walk rate of just 4.7%. And while his fastball-heavy approach is less likely to keep the offense of teams like the Dominican Republic or Japan at bay – and by Eric Longenhagen’s estimation, may ultimately lead to a career as a major-league reliever – it was enough for Ryan to emerge victorious in his start against Israel (you can read more about Eric’s take on Ryan in Dan Szymborski’s analysis of the Cruz trade, linked above). Ryan gave up five hits and notched five strikeouts with no free passes over his six innings, as Team USA won 8-1. The only run he allowed was a solo home run off the bat of Danny Valencia, which added an extra dash of surreality for Twins fans: a clash of prospect past and future. Read the rest of this entry »

With the trade deadline officially behind us and the home stretch of the 2021 season underway, it might just be the time to take a peek at baseball’s major award races. Now that every team is comfortably past the 100-game mark, there isn’t much time left for the candidates for full-season achievements to pad their résumés, but many of these awards are still somewhat up for grabs.

Shohei Ohtani is a pretty good bet to win AL MVP. But for the other five major award races — the ones that FanGraphs writers are asked to predict prior to the season — there still seems to be plenty of competition the rest of the way. Oddsmakers don’t currently have a favorite for either the NL Cy Young or AL Rookie of the Year awards, and give only slight edges to Lance Lynn for the AL Cy Young and Trevor Rogers for the NL Rookie of the Year awards, suggesting there are plenty of opportunities for other players to get hot and capture some end-of-season hardware.

Still, even in some of these cases, we have a pretty good idea of the collection of players who might seriously contend. In the AL Cy Young race, for example, oddsmakers think it should be one of Lynn, Gerrit Cole, or Carlos Rodón. For the NL Rookie of the Year, they see a two-man race between Rogers and Jonathan India. The NL Cy Young paints a more complicated picture given Jacob deGrom’s injury. Read the rest of this entry »

There is an old adage in baseball that changing a hitter’s eye level pitch-to-pitch will lead to better outcomes for the pitcher. This makes sense on its face: compared to varying pitch heights and forcing a hitter to alter his bat path, throwing two consecutive pitches at the same height should make it easier for a batter to square up the ball. In a New York Times piece by Tyler Kepner, Mike Mussina discussed the importance of varying locations pitch-to-pitch to mess with the hitter’s eye, offering the example of throwing fastballs down and then countering with a pitch up in the zone. Kepner noted that the hitter’s eye would then be trained on a pitch higher in strike zone, affording the pitcher the opportunity to throw a curveball down to induce a groundball, or net a swing-and-miss. David Price has expressed a similar sentiment: “That’s always a big emphasis [for] me, just making sure I’m hitting spots with that fastball – two-seam, four-seam, both sides of the plate, moving it in, up, down.”

In research on the effect of eye level change on college hitters’ performance against fastballs, Higuchi et al. found that quick eye movement as a pitch traverses towards home plate has negative consequences for the hitter. This research was included in Driveline Baseball’s examination of hitters’ gazes when standing at the plate. On these pages in 2015, Jonah Pemstein looked into whether a pitch thrown at a different height than the one that followed it affected how umpires called the pitch at hand. Permstein surmised that this was indeed the case, with umpires less likely to call a pitch a strike at any height if the previous pitch was thrown at a different vertical location.

As I said up top, this all makes intuitive sense. But does it hold up to further scrutiny? The research I cited by Higuchi et al. only included six collegiate hitters and only considered fastballs. While their work was extremely thorough, its scope didn’t consider the hitter population many of us are most interested in (major league hitters) and only included fastballs at a time when pitches are leaning on breaking balls and offspeed pitches more than ever. Pemstein’s research looked at umpires, not hitters; his conclusions give us some confidence that behavior changes when pitchers vary their pitch location, but doesn’t provide insight into the strategy’s ability to flummox batters. I decided to delve into the data myself and see if there was any merit to this fundamental aspect of pitching strategy.

Using Statcast data from the past three seasons, I constructed various pitch sequence parameters to gauge the efficacy of changing the hitter’s eye level. The first parameter involved pitches that were in the strike zone, as defined by the MLB Gameday zone. Pitches in zones 1, 2, and 3 were coded as “up,” zones 7, 8, and 9 as “down,” and 4, 5, and 6 as “middle.” All other zones were considered off the plate. I focused on pitches in the strike zone because we know hitters are more likely to swing at those pitches and generally have success when they do. The in-zone swinging strike rate over this sample was 12.1%, while 28.1% of these pitches were put into play. Batters had a .349 wOBA on pitches inside this strike zone versus a .304 wOBA outside of it. Any degradation in performance on pitches inside the zone would be a real value-add for pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, the Mets announced that they would not offer a contract to Vanderbilt ace Kumar Rocker. New York had selected the right-hander with the 10th overall pick in the draft just a few weeks earlier, but backed out of a deal upon seeing his medicals. Rocker’s camp was understandably upset. Scott Boras released a statement on his client’s behalf, declaring that Rocker is healthy, ready to pitch, and set to embark on his professional career. It’s a gut-wrenching situation, particularly since no other team is allowed to sign Rocker. He plans to enter the 2022 draft, but for now, he’s in purgatory.

However disappointed Rocker and Mets fans justifiably are, there’s a larger, structural issue at play here, one that overshadows Rocker’s medicals, or even the Mets’ approach to handling them. Steve Cohen violated Rule No. 1 (never Tweet, Steve) but New York isn’t dangling Rocker’s big league dreams for sport: They picked Rocker in good faith and must have really disliked what they saw in his file, particularly since they didn’t have the foresight to take an overslot guy late in the draft as backup. After signing all of their other selections, the Mets wound up leaving more than $1 million in bonus pool money on the table. Nobody wins here.

Like Barret Loux and Brady Aiken before him, Rocker deserves better than to get the rug yanked out from under him like this. I’m sure he has many gripes with how this all played out, but his biggest shouldn’t be with the Mets, but rather with the draft itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Particularly when measured against their competitors in the NL West, the Padres did not have a very good trade deadline — or even a good July. While they added depth to their infield, outfield, and bullpen with a trio of trades, none of those were impact moves. Everything they did was overshadowed by their failure to reach the finish line on a deal for Max Scherzer that was reported as “close” by multiple reporters on Thursday night. Ultimately, though, the three-time Cy Young winner went to the division rival Dodgers in a move that turn(er)ed out to be bigger than anyone expected. Beyond that, the Padres could only watch as the Giants landed slugger Kris Bryant. And to add injuries to insult, the deadline dust had barely settled when San Diego had to place both Fernando Tatis Jr. and Chris Paddack on the Injured List on Saturday.

In his post-deadline ZiPS roundup from Monday, Dan Szymborski illustrated the summer swap meet’s impact on the Playoff Odds for each individual team. His estimates showed the Giants as the NL West’s biggest winner at the deadline, with the Dodgers winners (albeit with diminishing returns given where they started), and the Padres clear losers:

All of which is to say that the Padres hurt their chances with missed opportunities, and that was before they suffered the one-two punch of the Paddack and Tatis injuries. Chronologically, the Paddack injury came first, but as Tatis is the Padres’ marquee player, we’ll begin there. The 22-year-old shortstop once again suffered a left shoulder subluxation (partial dislocation) while sliding into third base against the Rockies on Friday night. After he singled in his first-inning plate appearance, he had headed to second on Manny Machado’s hot smash to third baseman Ryan McMahon, then lit out for third when the ball ball squirted away from McMahon while trying to transfer it to his glove. Tatis slid feet first, but in attempting to evade shortstop Brendan Rodgers‘ tag, he twisted, caught his left shoulder, and immediately grabbed his arm after being tagged out. Read the rest of this entry »