Early in the season, Luis Castillo was the pitcher drawing eyeballs in the Cincinnati Reds rotation. After showing flashes of elite potential in his first two seasons in the big leagues, the right-hander had reached new heights with his ridiculous change-up, and the numbers he posted over the first six weeks of the season had him getting serious attention as a Cy Young favorite. After years of abysmal pitching staffs, the Reds finally looked like they had an ace on their hands.

A couple of months later, however, Castillo’s been surpassed in WAR by a teammate who once garnered ace buzz at a similar age. In 21 starts, Sonny Gray has been worth 2.7 WAR, thanks to a solid 3.51 FIP to go with a 3.47 xFIP. Castillo has had trouble with walks as the season has progressed, but overall, his numbers remain fairly strong, and optimism surrounding him is deservedly high. Quietly, though, Gray has been every bit as good.

While Castillo entered the 2019 season with the expectation that his best years were ahead of him, Gray faced the question of what he had left to offer. He picked up 7.4 WAR from 2014-15 with the Oakland A’s, finishing third in Cy Young voting in the second of those seasons. His ERA ballooned to 5.69 in 2016, but he returned to approach another 3 WAR season between Oakland and New York the following year. That paved the way for a truly head-scratching 2018 season in which his home-road splits reached absurd levels, and he failed to stick in the rotation, allowing a 5.26 ERA in 23 starts. Viewing him as a lost cause, the Yankees were determined to trade him last offseason, and found a match with Cincinnati in January. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies have bolstered the back-end of a flagging rotation, which by some measures ranks among the National League’s worst. What’s more, they’ve done so through an upgrade obtained from within the division, namely the Mets’ Jason Vargas. The 36-year-old southpaw doesn’t light up radar guns or dominate hitters, but he does give a youngish rotation a left-handed presence with playoff experience — and at a negligible cost to boot. His being dealt by the Mets was highly anticipated, not only given Sunday’s acquisition of Marcus Stroman, but also because he angered the Mets’ brass with his involvement in a clubhouse altercation with a beat reporter in June.

Philadelphia gets:

LHP Jason Vargas
Cash considerations

New York gets:

C Austin Bossart

Vargas, who is now in his 14th major league season, has rebounded from a dreadful, injury-wracked 2018, during which he was torched for a 5.77 ERA and 5.02 FIP in just 92 innings, and an ugly beginning to this year when he yielded 10 runs in his first 6.1 innings and failed to last five innings in three of his first four starts. Overall, he’s pitched to a 4.01 ERA and 4.71 FIP, and since returning from a mid-May left hamstring strain that cost him 19 days, he’s turned in a 3.34 ERA and 4.01 FIP.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Marlins and Twins pulled off a pre-deadline swap.

First, the trade:

Miami gets:

1B Lewin Diaz

Minnesota gets:

RHP Sergio Romo
RHP Chris Vallimont
Player to be Named Later

This deal’s immediate big league relevance centers around 36-year-old Romo, who has had an incredible career for a reliever, especially one who throws as hard as he does. Romo’s fastball has never averaged more than even 90 mph, topping out at 89.9 mph during his rookie year, while average relief fastballs now hum in at 93.6 mph. His 9.8 WAR ranks 15th among relievers since he debuted in 2008, and splitter wizard Koji Uehara is the only other soft-tosser ahead of him.

Most of our readers have probably seen enough of Romo over the last decade to know that he’s been exceptional because of his ability to locate, and change the speed and shape of, his trademark slider. Hitters know that slider is coming — he’s thrown it roughly 53% of the time during his career, second most to Carlos Marmol among all pitchers with 400 or more innings since Romo debuted — and yet Romo’s surgical placement of the pitch just off the plate, equal parts enticing and unhittable, has had big league hitters flailing away at it across more than a decade now. Read the rest of this entry »

If you just glanced at his player page for a second, you might think Lucas Giolito was falling apart. After a triumphant first half, during which he paired a 30% strikeout rate with a 9.5% walk rate on his way to a 3.15 ERA and 3.23 FIP, he made the All-Star team. And this was no automatic invite extended to the best available White Sox player; he was simply one of the best pitchers in baseball, running comparable park-adjusted numbers to Stephen Strasburg, Walker Buehler, and Zack Greinke.

From that great height, Giolito’s second half has had a rocky beginning. In three post-break starts, he’s compiled a 5.6 ERA, with a FIP over five. A lot of that ugliness is driven by a pasting at the hands of the Twins, when he allowed four home runs and seven runs over five innings, but it’s not as though there weren’t other warning signs. In his last pre-break start, he went only four innings against the Cubs, walking five batters on his way to giving up six earned runs. All told, it was a beyond-forgettable July for Giolito.

Situations like this are among the most difficult for writers to assess. Pitchers are fickle, and there’s no better example of that than Giolito. In parts of three seasons from 2016 to 2018, he was below replacement level, whether you’re into runs allowed or FIP; over 240 innings, he ran a 5.48 ERA and 5.68 FIP. He only struck out 16.2% of batters he faced while walking 11%. He still had some prospect shine, but projection systems weren’t buying it: ZiPS projected him for a 5.03 ERA in a lower-scoring environment than what we’ve realized in 2019, while Steamer foresaw an even higher 5.32 ERA.

Of course, Giolito proceeded to make those projections look ridiculous. Through 16 starts, roughly the first half of his season, he pitched nothing at all like the projections. That 30% strikeout rate was nearly double what the two projection systems expected, and his walk rate was significantly lower — you get the idea. Essentially, Giolito looked like an ace. If there was cause for concern, it was unsustainable home run suppression — he’d allowed a 9.7% HR/FB rate in the first half, and for a fly ball pitcher, that adds up. The point, though, is that Giolito went from replacement-level disappointment to deserving All-Star. Read the rest of this entry »

After is appeared the Mets put some more eggs in their 2020 basket by trading for Marcus Stroman, there now seems to be a pretty distinct possibility that the club is merely moving eggs around as it attempts to deal Noah Syndergaard. With the relative dearth of impact arms on the market and the decreasing likelihood of a Madison Bumgarner deal, Syndergaard could be the biggest name and best pitcher to change teams this week, even including the recently acquired Stroman. The trade package necessary to land Syndergaard should be significantly richer than the one the Mets gave up for Stroman, given Syndergaard’s relative track record, age, and the extra season of team control through 2021. As was the case with Stroman, there are some discrepancies in how good Syndergaard is as a pitcher given his 4.33 ERA.

Nobody disputes that Sydergaard was an ace for the Mets back in 2016 when he put up a six-win season with a 2.29 FIP and 2.60 ERA. He missed most of 2017 with a torn right lat muscle. In 2018, despite missing more than a month with a finger injury and a little bit of time with hand, foot, and mouth disease, Syndergaard was still one of the best pitchers in the game, posting a four-win season, a 2.80 FIP and 3.03 ERA. This season, Syndergaard’s FIP is very good, but his ERA is not. There’s a fairy simple explanation for that disparity, and for the gap between Syndergaard’s FIP and ERA throughout his career. Simply put, the Mets infield defense is very bad and has been very bad throughout the right-hander’s career:

A .315 career BABIP, and and the lower FIP than ERA, could be an indicator that Syndergaard gives up hard contact. The Statcast numbers tend to disagree:

Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three former pitchers — Jason Frasor, Brandon Gomes, and Pete Walker — on how they learned and developed their versions of the split-finger fastball.

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Jason Frasor, Toronto Blue Jays all-time leader in appearances

“I always called it a changeup, but I did split my fingers. If you saw it, you’d be like, ‘Oh, he throws a splitter,’ but the problem was, my hands are really small. I could never spread them really far. I came off three elbow surgeries, including two Tommy Johns, OK? So I just didn’t know how to spin the ball anymore. All I had was a fastball.

“One day, Bruce Walton — remember Bruce Walton? — was like, ‘Try this.’ He said to spread my fingers and throw it like a fastball. I practiced it for a little bit, then took it out to a game. And it was great. That was my rookie year, and for the rest of my career it was my secondary pitch.

“How deep I held the ball in my hand depended on the day. And the climate. If I was in Seattle, where it was cool — it was dry and cool — I usually had a great one. If I was in Texas, I was worried. The pitch would kind of just squirt out of my hand. Weather effected my changeup. Therefore, I’d maybe have a little pine tar in my hat. Read the rest of this entry »

Like Nomar Garciaparra before him, Troy Tulowitzki had the primary attributes of a Hall of Fame shortstop. He dazzled us with his combination of a powerful bat, good range, sure hands, the occasional spectacular leap, and a strong and accurate arm while making a case for himself as the position’s best. And like Garciaparra, Tulowtzki has been forced away from the game in his mid-30s after a seemingly endless string of injuries, leaving us to wonder what might have been. The 34-year-old shortstop announced his retirement in a statement released by the Yankees last Thursday.

Tulowitzki’s Yankees career lasted just five games, a blink of an eye compared to the 1,048 he played for the Rockies, or even the 238 he played for the Blue Jays. He wound up a Yankee after being released by Toronto in November 2018, that following a full season spent on the sidelines recuperating from surgery to remove bone spurs in both heels. The Blue Jays cut him while he still had $38 million in guaranteed salary remaining on the 10-year, $157.75 million deal he signed back in November 2010. Given that he would cost his next employer no more than the minimum salary, interest in him was heavy following a December showcase, with as many as many as 16 teams reportedly interested. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers announced Thursday that Joey Gallo will miss 4-6 weeks after undergoing surgery to remove a fractured hamate bone in his right wrist. That’s bad news for Rangers fans, who’ll see somewhat fewer moonshots and scalded line drives than they would have otherwise, middling news for the Rangers themselves, who were never really in the playoff race they’re now decidedly out of, and worst news of all for Gallo, who’d been in the middle of his best season yet.

Gallo has been part of our national baseball consciousness for many years now as a walking indicator of the game’s direction, possessed as he was of exceptional raw power, an abysmal contact rate, and horrific-even-for-the-late-2010’s strikeout numbers. In 2017, he hit 41 home runs and posted a 14% walk rate but got on base only a third of the time in part due to shifts that limited him to a .250 BABIP. 2018 was more of the same; his 110 wRC+ that year was good, but 75 big league players posted better.

This year had been different. Through June 1, when a strained oblique muscle cost him three weeks, Gallo was among the major league leaders in a number of offensive categories, including a few he’s never come close to ranking in before:

Read the rest of this entry »

While it might not be a surprise that the Blue Jays’ Marcus Stroman is the first big-name player to be traded in advance of the coming July 31 deadline, the team on the other end of the transaction has raised some eyebrows. At 50-55, the Mets are running fourth in the National League East (11 1/2 games out of first place), and seventh in the NL Wild Card race (six games out). Acquiring the 28-year-old righty, who has one more year of club control remaining, in exchange for a pair of pitching prospects appears to be both a prelude to another deal involving a Mets starting pitcher and a signal that the team intends to contend next season rather than plunge itself into a more substantial rebuild. The alternative — that first-year general manager Brodie Van Wagenen is doubling down on a disappointing team whose playoff odds are just 11.2% (10.5% for the Wild Card) — well, that would be quite the four-dimensional chess move.

New York gets:

RHP Marcus Stroman
Cash considerations

Toronto gets:

LHP Anthony Kay
RHP Simeon Woods-Richardson

Stroman has pitched far better than his 6-11 won-loss record indicates. Entering Sunday, his 2.96 ERA ranks fifth in the AL, his 3.52 FIP sixth, his 2.9 WAR 10th. In a season where home runs are more common than ever before (1.38 per team per game), he owns the league’s third-lowest rate per nine innings (0.72), in part because he’s excelled at keeping the ball on the ground; his 56.3% groundball rate is the Junior Circuit’s highest. Read the rest of this entry »

Teams have been smiling at each another and making their fair share of prolonged eye contact, but the trade deadline tension had yielded little in the way of actual consummation until Saturday’s A’s and Royals trade that sent veteran lefty reliever Jake Diekman to Oakland for two prospects. Here’s the deal:

Oakland gets:

LHP Jake Diekman

Kansas City gets:

RHP Ismael Aquino
CF Dairon Blanco

Diekman, who has struck out 33.5% of opposing hitters and has a 3.37 FIP across 41.2 innings this year, immediately becomes the best lefty in Oakland’s bullpen, surpassing cutter/curveball/command lefty Ryan Buchter (who was also acquired from Kansas City via trade last year), and strike-throwing Taiwanese depth piece, Wei-Chung Wang. That’s less a knock on either of those two, and more to do with Diekman, who has been good with uncommon consistency for a reliever throughout his seven-year big league career. Read the rest of this entry »