On Monday night, Framber Valdez struck out 11 Angels across seven innings in an easy 11-4 Astros win. All 11 strikeouts came off of Valdez’s curveball — six swinging and five looking. It wasn’t a completely clean performance, however. The left-hander allowed four runs on six hits and two walks but the Astros offense powered their way past a hodgepodge collection of Los Angeles pitchers. Still, he pushed his strikeout rate up to 26.0%, a nearly six-point increase over what he posted last year. While the additional punch outs are a nice development, the biggest difference for Valdez this season has been his excellent command.

Valdez’s raw stuff has never been a question. He relies on a plus curveball and a mid-90s sinker, both of which induce above average whiff rates and result in groundball contact over 60% of the time batters put them in play; his 62.9% groundball rate over the last three years is the third highest in baseball since his debut in 2018. He enjoys two key skills for success on the mound but he’s been undermined by his complete lack of command. Among all pitchers who threw at least 100 innings between 2018 and 2019, Valdez’s 14.1% walk rate was the third highest in the majors.

A high walk rate and a high groundball rate can be a dangerous combination. Groundballs rarely turn into extra-base hits but they find holes in the defense more often than fly balls. With runners on base, groundballs turn into hits a little more often, from a BABIP of .234 with bases empty to a BABIP of .253 with runners on. For Valdez, that’s meant a BABIP higher than league average and a strand rate well below league average, a combination that led to an ERA almost a full run higher than his FIP last year. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part Two of an interview — the primary focus being his year-plus with the Detroit Tigers— with former All-Star outfielder Fred Lynn. Part One can be found here.

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David Laurila: In 1989 — your one full season in Detroit — the team lost over 100 games. What happened?

Fred Lynn: “It was an older team. They’d also traded Luis Salazar and Tommy Brookens, our two third basemen, and got Chris Brown from the Giants. That didn’t work out so well. Chris got hurt, plus Brookie and Luis had been really popular in the clubhouse. Sometimes you lose something in the clubhouse more than you lose on the field, and I think that was the case with those guys. As professionals you have to move on, but sometimes there’s a hole.

“Tram got hurt that year, too. He had a banged up knee and was kind of hobbling around. That hurt us a lot. Darrell [Evans] was gone, too. So there was a little bit of a changing of the guard, and with a pitch here and a pitch there… a lot of little things can happen that will turn around a season.

“And we didn’t play as well as we should have, to be honest. The pitching was… they had a tough year, and when that happens the offense feels like it has to score more runs. That puts a lot of pressure on the position players. The same thing is happening with the Red Sox right now. The offense feels like they have to score a million, and you can’t do that day in and day out. When the load is like that, it’s a tough one to bear.”

Laurila: Earlier we touched on how underrated Evans was. Chet Lemon is another guy who was better than a lot of people probably realize. Read the rest of this entry »

Through Monday night, major league baseball teams have played 415 games, the same number of games they had played on April 28 of last year. Back then, Cody Bellinger, Christian Yelich and Mike Trout were the top three players by WAR. Also in the top 10 were Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Pete Alonso, Anthony Rendon, Javier Báez, and Paul DeJong, who all went on to have good-to-great seasons. Elvis Andrus, on the other hand, put up 1.5 WAR through most of April and was replacement-level the rest of the way. Moving one month forward, a stretch equivalent to half of this season, Pete Alonso was replacement-level in May. Marcus Semien put up an 80 wRC+. All of which serves as a good reminder that in this shortened season, it’s best not to make too much of one month’s worth of performance when looking forward. That said, though, let’s take a look at the current WAR Leaderboard for position players:

Over the last month, Ben Clemens has written about Mike Yastrzemski, Mookie Betts, and Ian Happ; Jay Jaffe has added his own piece on Betts. Fernando Tatis Jr. has been featured in posts from Jaffe and Dan Szymborski, and ranked very highly in our Trade Value Series. Jake Mailhot has written up Kyle Lewis and Trent Grisham. While Anthony Rendon, Nelson Cruz, and Bryce Harper have all been great and perhaps deserve articles of their own, their greatness isn’t too far removed from our general expectations for them. That just leaves Brandon Lowe, whose start definitely merits attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Most fans are familiar with Fred Lynn’s career. A superstar in six-plus seasons with the Red Sox — good for a 142 wRC+ and 30.7 WAR — Lynn subsequently fell short of those lofty standards after being dealt to the Angels following the 1980 season. Even so, he continued to be a solid player despite myriad injuries. Three of Lynn’s nine All-Star nods came with the Halos, and by the time he hung up his spikes at age 38, he’d accumulated 1,960 hits and 306 home runs. A four-time Gold Glove winner as a center fielder — and an AL MVP to boot — Lynn finished with 49.2 WAR.

The later of Lynn’s seasons aren’t nearly as well-chronicled as his earlier ones. Especially overlooked is his time in Detroit. Acquired by the Tigers at the 1988 trade deadline, Lynn joined a team in a pennant race, then returned the following year for what was to be his penultimate big-league season. What was Lynn’s Motown experience like? That’s the focus of this two-part interview, which was conducted over the phone earlier this month.

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David Laurila: You went from the Orioles to the Tigers in a trade-deadline deal. What are your memories of that?

Fred Lynn: “It wasn’t unexpected. We’d gone through that 0-21 start to the 1988 season, and during the All-Star break the A’s wanted to get me. The deal just wasn’t good enough for [the Orioles] to make the move. My wife and I both liked Baltimore. The fans were great, and while we weren’t playing well, it was a good bunch of guys, so I enjoyed playing there. And it was baseball-only. The Colts had exited, so baseball was the only game in town.

“So the Oakland thing hadn’t panned out during the break, and now the trade deadline comes around. We’re playing the Angels, I’m at my hotel room, and my agent calls and says the Tigers are interested in making a deal. This is probably around 4:00 o’clock, and I’m going to the park at 5:00. I have no-trade clause, and it doesn’t work out. I call my wife and tell her, ‘The deal is off, don’t worry about it.’

“I hang up the phone, and my agent calls back. The Tigers have sweetened the pot. I said, ‘Okay, deal.’ Then I had to call the ballpark. I called my manager and said, ‘Hey, Frank [Robinson], am I in the lineup tonight?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, you’re hitting third.’ ‘I said, ‘Well, you might want to change that lineup, because I’ve just been traded to Detroit.’” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re looking for a sure sign that a manager is thinking in old-timey baseball cliches instead of playing to win, listen for the words “save situation.” There are tons of reasons not to use your best reliever in a big spot — load management, handedness matchups, heck, maybe he ate some bad sushi last night. “We wanted to hold him for a save situation”? Nope! Bad management alert… or at least, it was until the rules of baseball changed.

Love or hate the automatic runner in extra innings, it’s changed the tactical calculus of baseball significantly. Teams haven’t bunted as much as I predicted, which is fascinating in itself, but today, I’m more interested in which pitchers are doing the extra innings pitching. Before 2020, “saving” a pitcher for a lead was self-defeating, but that isn’t an automatic truth, simply a contextual one. Let’s delve into why that was the case, and why it might not be this year.

To explain how this scenario worked in the past, I’m going to use a hypothetical situation. It’s the bottom of the ninth inning in a tie game, and the visiting team has two options for pitching: Nick Anderson or Aaron Loup. They’ll bring one of the two in for the ninth, the other for the 10th if necessary, and then completely average pitchers for every inning after that.

More specifically, they’ll be bringing in pitchers with the career rate statistics that exactly match Anderson’s and Loup’s. This is an abstraction, so we’re ignoring opposing batters and handedness matchups, which a real-life manager would care about: for this article, we’re only worrying about whether bringing in your closer makes sense with everything else held equal. Here are those result rates:

Anderson is clearly better. In fact, over a million simulated innings (every batter receives a random result from each pitcher’s result grid until there are three outs), he allowed 2.80 runs per nine innings, while Loup allowed 3.74 runs. Anderson was better in terms of the percentage of innings holding opponents scoreless, too: 80.3% of his innings were scoreless, as compared to 76% for Loup. Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. And yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets, and have presented it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.

Things are different this year, as you may have noticed. With six days to go before the August 31 deadline, just a month’s worth of performance to analyze — if, that is, a team has avoided a COVID-19 outbreak that has blown a hole in its schedule — and 23 teams within two games of spot in the expanded playoff field through Monday, putting together this year’s set of Replacement-Level Killers is a challenge like no other. The sample sizes are tiny, especially when players are sharing a position; month-long slumps are hardly unique. Even without being a complete devotee to exactitude, normally I’m able to curate a tidy list at each position by focusing on the subset of contenders (teams with .500 records or at least a 10% chance of reaching the playoffs) who have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at that spot through roughly two-thirds of the season. Scale that down to 30 games, and the threshold becomes 0.3 WAR or less, in which case a single good day by a player at the position in question might boost him from Killer to mid-pack producer.

Thus, I’m doing things a bit differently this time around. While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (apologies in advance to fans of the Royals, Angels, Tigers, Red Sox, Rangers, Mariners, and Pirates), I’ll incorporate our Depth Charts rest-of-season WARs into the equation, considering any team that comes out with a total of 0.4 WAR or less to be in the replacement-level realm (that’s 1.1 WAR over the course of 162 games, decidedly subpar), though I may give a few teams in each batch a lightning round-type treatment, as I see their problems as less pressing given other contexts (returns from injury, contradictory defensive metrics, bigger holes elsewhere on the roster etc.) and I’ve pledged to keep these from becoming 3,000-word tomes. Read the rest of this entry »

Back before the Chicago Cubs decided to go full-on Ebenezer Scrooge, they aggressively pursued top players in free agency to improve their roster. One of those players was Yu Darvish, an ace for the Rangers and Dodgers after seven years of dominating the Japan Pacific League, a feat he accomplished while still a teenager. Darvish was the best pitcher available after the 2017 season and the Cubs signed him to a six-year, $126 million contract, a sum commensurate with his abilities. And unlike his first deal in the majors, Darvish didn’t have to contend with a posting fee; when the right-hander came to the States, the Nippon Ham Fighters got nearly as much ($51.7 million) as he did ($56 million).

The initial returns were not promising. The Cubs won 95 games in 2018 before being bounced in the Wild Card game by the Colorado Rockies, while triceps and elbow issues limited Darvish to just eight games. Those were mostly ineffective games to boot, as his walk rate jumped to career highs, his ERA and FIP ballooned to near five, and he failed to complete the fifth inning in five of his starts. MRIs revealed no structural damage to his arm, but the team was careful; the triceps is important in the arm deceleration phase of a pitcher’s delivery:

Activity of the triceps muscles, as well as activity of the anconeus and wrist flexor muscles, helped the joint’s ligaments apply a compression force during this phase in order to stabilize the elbow and prevent elbow distraction.

Darvish was already a veteran of one Tommy John surgery and the Cubs were rightly conservative about rushing their ace to full-time duty. The first victory of 2019 was just staying healthy, which he achieved; Darvish only missed a single start down the stretch due to forearm pain. But the control wasn’t there in the early-going and a third of the way through the season, his ERA was at 5.40 with an extremely worrying 38 walks in 11 starts. Indeed, even late as Independence Day, Darvish’s ERA was north of five. Read the rest of this entry »

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of last night’s game between the Braves and Phillies, the visiting Phillies were holding on to a two-run lead. Dansby Swanson stood on first base with Adeiny Hechavarría on second. Freddie Freeman was facing off against new Phillies acquisition Brandon Workman. In terms of compelling endings, this is pretty close to what you hope for. One of the better hitters in the game had a chance to hit a walk-off home run to end the game, while making an out would mean victory for the other side. Freeman did get a hit, pushing a double into the gap, but the game ended when Swanson was thrown out at home trying to score the tying run. The play, already compelling given the game state, was made more interesting by two factors:

1. Andrew Knapp might have blocked the plate in violation of the rules designed to prevent collisions at home.
2. Swanson decided to try to score the tying run on the play, but made the final out instead.

Before getting to the collision rule and whether Knapp was where he shouldn’t have been, let’s first consider Swanson’s decision to attempt to score from first base. While Freeman hit the ball pretty far, it was cut off by Roman Quinn. One of the fastest runners in the game, Quinn got to the ball in the gap before left fielder Andrew McCutchen. While McCutchen’s arm strength isn’t terrible, it isn’t much more than average, while Quinn has thrown an easy 87 mph pitch from the mound, and made this throw earlier this month:

Read the rest of this entry »

David Fletcher is 5 feet and 9 inches tall. By the standards of professional baseball, that’s quite short. He makes up for it a bit by standing upright in the batter’s box, but no one is going to confuse him for Aaron Judge anytime soon. That makes it all the more confusing that on Friday night, he did this:

First of all, wow! Are you kidding me? That ball was nearly five feet off the ground. Halfway to home plate, it was unclear whether Fletcher was taking a swing at a major league pitch or a piñata:

If you’ve been paying attention throughout his career, Fletcher making contact with that pitch will be less surprising. He’s a singular player, a contact machine who will defend the strike zone at all costs when the count reaches two strikes. So far this year, he’s swung at 51 pitches outside the strike zone and only missed nine of them. That 87.3% out-of-zone contact rate is higher than the league contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 season couldn’t have gone much better for Stephen Strasburg, but his follow-up performance is already over. After making just two long-delayed and abbreviated starts, the 32-year-old righty has been transferred to the 60-day Injured List and is slated to undergo surgery to alleviate carpal tunnel neuritis in his right hand. He becomes the latest top-flight pitcher to land on the IL this season, and leaves the already-struggling Nationals just that much more shorthanded as they defend their title.

After averaging just 24 starts per season from 2015-18 due to a variety of ailments, Strasburg didn’t miss a single start in 2019. He struck out a career-high 251 batters in a National League-high 209 innings, received enough run support to notch an NL-high 18 wins as well, and finished with a 3.32 ERA, 3.25 FIP, and 5.7 WAR, the last of which ranked third in the NL behind Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer. He followed that stellar season with a dominant postseason performance, pitching to a 1.98 ERA with 47 strikeouts and just four walks in 36.1 innings, and won World Series MVP honors while helping the Nationals win their first championship in franchise history. After opting out of the final four years and $100 million of his contract, he signed a new seven-year, $245 million deal. It was a very good year.

Strasburg appeared to be on track to make his season debut on July 25, in the Nationals’ second game, but he was scratched from the start just hours before first pitch due to what was described as a nerve issue. He was replaced by Erick Fedde, and received an injection of cortisone. At the time, he admitted that he had been pitching through numbness in his hand for weeks. From NBC Sports’ Todd Dybas:

“Started out, probably, like the end of the first week of camp. I was waking up in the middle of the night and my hand was asleep. Kept falling asleep and I was getting these feelings, and it wasn’t really bothering me throwing. It seemed like once I tried starting to ramp up and stuff, the symptoms started to increase. It really’s something the last two [intrasquad] games was feeling it pretty regularly. Just something you try to throw through. After I got out of the last start problems, issues, just kept persisting. Saw that there was nerve impingement in my wrist. Got a cortisone shot to hopefully create more space in there to get it to calm down and get back to normal.

…”It got to the point where I didn’t have the same feeling in my hand holding the ball. It was affecting my ability to command the baseball the way I’m accustomed to. It’s something that I feel like if I take some time now to get that feeling back to normal, I can be out there much sooner than if I try to just gut it out at this point.”

Read the rest of this entry »