Tom House doesn’t need an introduction within baseball circles, and that’s especially true when it comes to pitching. His credentials are impeccable. A big-league reliever throughout the 1970s, the now-73-year-old went on to have an extensive coaching career, not only in MLB, but also in NPB and at the amateur level. A co-founder of the National Pitching Association, and the author of several books, House has been referred to as “the father of modern pitching mechanics.”

House addressed a variety of pitching topics — and shared a handful of interesting anecdotes — earlier this week.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with pitch counts. Atlanta manager Brian Snitker said during an NLCS media session that he was “blown away” to learn that Max Fried had never thrown more than 109 pitches in a game, adding that a career-high should be closer to 140. He also suggested that once Fried got into his rhythm he might have been able to throw 200 pitches. What are your thoughts on that?

Tom House: “From research, there are three things that keep a pitcher’s arm healthy: workloads, number of pitches, [and] his functional strength and mechanical efficiency. The research goes all the way back to Paul Richards, who was the general manager of the Orioles. Richards was the first guy, when he had ‘the baby birds,’ the four 20-game winners. He intuited that 100 pitches was about when most pitchers start getting into muscle failure — this assuming they have pretty solid mechanics and some functional strength. The 100-pitch idea grew from there, and has kind of become the standard.

“What it boils down to is, if you can pitch… I’m going to give you a resource. If you go to ASMI.org and look for age-specific pitch totals, Glenn Fleisig and a bunch of us did the research. I know for a fact that Nolan Ryan had a 260-pitch outing one time, and came back four days later and threw a two-hitter. He was with the Angels, and I think threw 14 or 15 innings. But with pitch totals, a blanket 100-pitch per game is kind of the standard right now. Everybody works forward and backwards from there. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, Nick Anderson hung a curveball. Will Smith greeted it rudely:

Two batters later, Anderson faced Edwin Ríos with a chance to get out of the inning. As Eric Longenhagen noted on our Twitch stream at the time, Anderson hung another one:

Luckily for the Rays, Ríos didn’t quite time that one up. Anderson followed it up with another curve, which bounced, and he escaped the inning. Things could have gone much worse, however, and Eric and I mused that Anderson might want to take a look at what was causing his pitches to float in like that.

It seems pretty obvious that Anderson’s breaking ball, a biting snapdragon that seems to pack two inches of horizontal break into the last 10 feet of its homeward path, is at its best when it drops most. There’s only one problem with that theory: the data. Take a look at Anderson’s curve in 2019, broken up into quartiles based on vertical break:

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Watching Mookie Betts on a daily basis makes it difficult to understand how his teams ever lose, though they did in Game 2 of the World Series on Wednesday night, in part because the Rays kept him in check. The 28-year-old right fielder is one of the game’s top hitters, but his contributions are hardly confined to the batter’s box, and during this postseason — as it’s been throughout his seven-year major league career — he has amply illustrated just how well-rounded his game is.

In Tuesday’s World Series-opening 8-3 victory, Betts put on a show with his baserunning, that after working a five-pitch leadoff walk against a flagging Tyler Glasnow to start the fifth inning. The Rays had just trimmed the Dodgers’ lead to 2-1, so when Betts stole second and then third base — the latter at the front end of a double steal with Corey Seager, who also walked — and then scored on a fielder’s choice thanks to a great secondary lead and a well-executed slide, it was a big deal.

Betts’ journey around the bases not only produced a run without the benefit of a base hit, it effectively tossed an anvil to Glasnow as he was trying to keep his head above water. “At that point, he was kinda not in the zone as much,” Betts told MLB Network’s Greg Amsinger afterwards. “So I knew he was going to try and slow up and get back in the zone, and I was able to take advantage of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Tom House and Dusty Baker go way back. They were Atlanta Braves teammates from 1971-1975, and before that they roomed together in the minor leagues. Their bond remains as strong as ever. Just last week the Houston Astros manager tapped into the renowned pitching guru’s expertise — albeit for reasons you might not expect. Baker consulted with House because his second baseman was battling a serious case of the yips.

“We kind of have this troubleshooting thing,” divulged House, who is often referred to as the father of modern pitching mechanics. “When Dusty runs across something he’s not quite sure about, or if I have a question about something that I don’t have access to… we’ve maintained a pretty solid communication relationship since way back when.”

What’s shared between the old friends follows the Vegas Rule, but while anything Jose Altuve specific would thus remain in-house, an overview of the phenomenon qualifies as fair game. I asked what causes a player to suddenly not be able to throw a baseball with any degree of accuracy.

“It’s when the conscious mind and the subconscious mind have a disconnect,” explained House, who has a Ph.D. in sports psychology. “Basically, it’s what they call a double-bind — you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Your brain won’t allow your arm to throw properly, because it doesn’t want to suffer the consequences of throwing the ball. It happens with catchers all the time. Steve Sax is famous because he couldn’t throw from second base. With golf, it’s putting the ball into the hole.”

Interestingly, an attack of the yips — or, as House prefers to call them “the creature” — rarely inflicts duffers. Read the rest of this entry »

I probably don’t need to write this article. If you’re reading it, you’ve navigated to FanGraphs, which already implies a certain willingness to “trust the stats” and “look at the evidence,” those kinds of things. It’s playoff time, though, which means that on TV broadcasts across the land, a motley crew of players are being described as Proven Postseason Performers. George Springer, Jose Altuve, Joc Pederson; it seems to simply be common knowledge that they have some secret baseball skill they only activate come playoff time.

One thing that you could do, should you be so inclined, is to simply take people at their word. The world could use a little more magic in it, after all, and there being players who somehow see the ball better when it counts most is a really fun concept.

Sadly, I think they’re just a concept. To wit: take a look at the best hitters from the combined 2017-2018 postseason (among batters who have played in at least one postseason game since, for reasons that will become clear), minimum 25 plate appearances:

There are a lot of Astros and Dodgers here, which makes sense given the composition of those particular playoffs. Extend the list a bit more, and you’d get Christian Yelich, Max Muncy, and Francisco Lindor, three very good hitters. The list of good hitters in the playoffs looks suspiciously like a list of good hitters plus Orlando Arcia. Read the rest of this entry »

October hasn’t been the kindest month to Cody Bellinger. Though he’s established himself as one of the game’s top sluggers while helping the Dodgers reach the World Series in three of his four major league seasons, and collected some big postseason hits here and there, his overall postseason numbers have generally fallen far short of what he’s done during the regular season. Even after a disappointing, abbreviated 2020 campaign, he’s had his ups and downs this fall, though he finished the NLCS on just about the highest possible note, clubbing a no-doubt solo home run that capped the Dodgers’ Game 7 comeback and sent them to a pennant:

My goodness. Bellinger walked towards first base so slowly and indirectly while admiring the blast that it seemed like he might make a stop to feed the parking meter or grab a hot dog — no extra mustard needed. Statcast measured the exit velocity on that one at 107.4 mph but estimated its distance at “only” 400 feet, the byproduct of its steep 33-degree launch angle.

Bellinger is now hitting .250/.365/.545 in 52 plate appearances during this postseason, good for a 141 wRC+ and a reasonable approximation for his regular season career line (.273/.364/.547, 137 wRC+). It’s a far cry better than the totality of his 2017-20 postseason numbers (.196/.269/.380, 73 wRC+), that’s for sure. Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Angeles Dodgers completed their three-game NLCS comeback on Sunday night, beating the Atlanta Braves to reach their third World Series in four years. Joining the Dodgers in Texas will be the Tampa Bay Rays, who avoided an embarrassing four-game reverse sweep at the hands of the Houston Astros by the skin of their teeth the day before. In what will hopefully prove to be 2020’s final mischievous prank, the most unorthodox season in baseball history has ended up with the most orthodox result: despite a 16-team playoff format that held little advantage for the top seeds, the World Series matchup features the clubs with the best records in their respective leagues. For both, a championship would end significant droughts, as the Dodgers have not won a Fall Classic since 1988, and the Rays have yet to grab a title since at least the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

Fittingly in a matchup of the two best teams, ZiPS sees the win probabilities as very close, with the Dodgers squeezing out a slight 53%-47% edge in the projections. But while these squads may be similar in their quality, they approach baseball’s financial world quite differently; the Dodgers are big spenders while the Rays regularly have a payrolls that rank near the bottom of the league. With the outcome squarely in the realm of coin flip, small things will likely decide the series winner. To that end, I’ve outlined seven questions, the answers to which will determine how fate conducts its deliberations. Read the rest of this entry »

On a Rays team that’s long on talent but short on household names, Randy Arozarena has carved out an identity with a postseason for the ages. The 25-year-old left fielder, who has just 99 regular season plate appearances in his brief career, became the first rookie position player to win a League Championship Series MVP award via his four-homer, nine-hit performance against the Astros. He now has seven homers in this postseason, one short of a record, not to mention a prominent place on the leaderboards of a few other categories.

Arozarena’s final homer of the ALCS was a two-run first-inning shot off Lance McCullers Jr. in Game 7, giving the Rays a lead that they would not relinquish. That followed his game-tying solo homer off Framber Valdez in the fourth inning of Game 1, his two-run shot off Zack Greinke in the fourth inning of Game 4, and his solo dinger off Enoli Paredes in the fifth inning of Game 5. Here’s the supercut:

For the series, Arozarena collected five other hits as well, and batted .321/.367/.786 while driving in six runs. In winning LCS MVP honors, he joined the Orioles’ Mike Boddicker (1983 ALCS), the Marlins’ Livan Hernandez (1997 NCS), and the Cardinals’ Michael Wacha (2013 NLCS) — all pitchers — as the only rookies to win the award; Hernandez also won the World Series MVP award, lest Arozarena need to set another goal. They don’t give Division Series MVP awards, but his .421/.476/.895 showing with three home runs against the Yankees, and for that matter his .500/.556/1.000 performance in the Wild Card Series against the Blue Jays, might have garnered him additional hardware. The dude is en fuego, hitting a combined .382/.433/.855 through 60 postseason plate appearances, with 11 of his 21 hits going for extra bases (three doubles, one triple, seven homers). He’s tied for fourth in homers in a single postseason:

Read the rest of this entry »

The likelihood of Patrick Murphy reaching the big leagues was far from certain when I wrote about the then-22-year-old right-hander in February 2018. He’d pitched well the previous season, but that was in Low-A, and his injury history included thoracic outlet syndrome and multiple elbow procedures. Question marks abounded, and Murphy merited a mere honorable mention our Blue Jays Top Prospects list.

His future remained murky when I wrote about him nine months later on the heels a promotion to Toronto’s 40-man roster. Murphy was again coming off a good year — this time in High-A — but there was nonetheless still a lot to prove. He entered 2019 ranked No. 26 on our Blue Jays list, his FV an uninspiring 35+.

Then came a speed bump that necessitated a mechanical change. Midway through the 2019 season, Murphy was told that his delivery was illegal. More on that in a moment.

Fast forward to last month: Seven years after the Blue Jays selected him in the third round of the 2013 draft out of a Chandler, Arizona high school, Murphy made his major league debut. It came against the Philadelphia Phillies, and one of the first batters he faced was a close friend. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West, AL East, and Central. Below is my assessment of the , covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »