The last two seasons, Jose Berrios has been on the periphery when it comes to considering the best pitchers in baseball. In 2017 and 2018, he put up three-win campaigns and his 6.1 WAR ranked 22nd among pitchers, just behind Blake Snell, Kyle Freeland, and Mike Clevenger, and just ahead of Jon Gray, Charlie Morton, and Kyle Hendricks. It’s a good group to be associated with, and a few of those players have had great seasons, but with Berrios putting up two similar seasons, he’s not viewed in the same way as Snell and he hasn’t been quite good enough to move himself into the top 10 or 15 pitchers in the game. That’s changed this season, as Berrios has been more aggressive, reduced his walk rate, and become more effective against lefties, all of which has resulted in a season that’s put him firmly among the top 10 pitchers in the game.

After an uneven debut season in 2016 at just 22 years of age, Berrios registered solid efforts in 2017 and 2018. Here’s how those seasons compare to what Berrios has been able to do this year:

The big positive change is the reduction in his walk rate. Berrios has achieved that number mostly by pitching more in the zone. He’s sacrificed his strikeout rate slightly, though he’s made up for that loss by doubling his infield fly rate. Berrios’ FIP this season might not seem drastically altered from the previous two seasons, but with the change in run environment, the three-tenths difference means more than a win over the course of a full season. Berrios did suffer a blister issue in his last start against Kansas City, but currently remains on schedule to start later this week with hopes that the issue is a minor one. Read the rest of this entry »

Less than a year ago, Tom Murphy was catching in Triple-A Albuquerque, batting eighth for the Isotopes and wrapping up a fourth consecutive season in which he failed to register 100 big-league plate appearances. Now platooning with Omar Narvaez in Seattle, Murphy’s .366 wOBA is sixth among big-league catchers with as many trips to the plate, and he has past the century mark on that count two weeks before the 4th of July. Since June 1, he’s hit five home runs for the Mariners, matching his career high for a single season in a month that’s not over yet.

To hear Murphy tell it, his sustained success in the major leagues this year — he’s always been a good Triple-A hitter — has been driven by three major adjustments, made meaningful by the opportunity he’s getting to play so often. The first is to the pitches he’s hunting. The second is to the way his upper body helps him get to those pitches in time to make contact. The final adjustment is to the physical foundation that lets him do damage when he makes contact.

During his first four seasons in the big leagues, Murphy swung at 74% of the fastballs he saw up in the zone (64 of 86), which was about the same rate at which he swung at fastballs in the middle and bottom thirds, too. (He swung at 70% of those pitches, or 116 of 165 he saw.) This year, by contrast, he’s swinging at pitches in the top third nearly 81% of the time (34 of 42 pitches), and pitches in the bottom two-thirds just 64% of the time (63 of 99). That’s the first adjustment.

But just swinging at different pitches won’t make much of a difference if you can’t hit those pitches when you try to. Murphy told me that this off-season, he switched from taking pitches off a tee to training off an Iron Mike pitching machine almost exclusively. The resultant change in training velocity — from literally zero to something more closely approximating game speed — exposed what, to Murphy, had become an unhelpful amount of “slack” in his upper body. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the more interesting league. Back in 2015, ZiPS saw two very different leagues — an American League in which most of the teams were competitive, and a bifurcated National League that featured a stronger line between the haves and the have-nots than 1780s France. By mid-September of that year, just one team in the the American League (the Oakland A’s) was positioned to finish with a sub-.500 record; only two were on track to reach the 90-win mark. As for the Senior Circuit, ZiPS thought that six of baseball’s best eight teams resided there, as well as five of the six worst.

In four years, these positions have done a Freaky Friday switcheroo. The AL is now home to six of the eight teams with the best projected rosters and six of the eight with the worst, with only three AL West teams (the A’s, Rangers, and Mariners, in that order) representing the middle class. The average NL trailer is 9 1/2 games back in the division and 3 1/2 back of a wild card berth compared to the AL’s 14 games and 8 1/2 games respectively.

So how do the ZiPS in-season projections work? For the Big, Official projections, I use the full ZiPS model rather than the comparatively simple in-season version in an effort to get the best estimates possible. Each player receives a percentile projection, with ZiPS randomly selecting from each player’s distribution to get a range of the expected roster strength for each individual team. Then each team is projected against every other team in their schedule a million times for the rest of the year. All this has the benefit of getting more accurate tails, as opposed to the binomial distribution you get when you’re working with an assumed roster strength; one of the most important things about ZiPS is that on all layers, it’s designed to be skeptical about its own accuracy.

According to projections, the eventual NL Central winner will be under 95.3 wins 90% of time, assuming a strange world in which we can play out the final three months of the season a million times. That barely gets you the home field-advantaged wild card spot in the American League half the time. If the National League doesn’t have an exciting trade deadline, maybe we should start to think that something’s up, given that mid-to-upper 80s in wins makes you a serious wild card contender. Only two teams in the league ought to actually be sure about throwing in the towel right now: the Marlins and the Giants.

Back in April, this race projected to be the second most exciting in baseball after the NL Central, with four teams projected between 87 and 93 wins and the fifth projected to, well, complete the 2019 season without folding (I’ll leave the identities of these teams for you to figure out). Instead, with a 16-5 record in June, the Atlanta Braves have put some real daylight between themselves and their rivals. Dallas Keuchel is not a superstar, but he also represents the biggest addition to an NL East team so far, one which addressed a significant team worry. With the deepest farm system in the division and a likely willingness to add salary for the right player, the “intangible” projections may be even better than what my computer spits out.

The Nationals have shown a pulse in June, enough to get them within a couple games of second place in the division. ZiPS still sees Washington as the team with the strongest overall 2019 roster in the East, with an 11-point edge in winning percentage over the Braves in a theoretical world in which the teams played identical schedules. But that margin is smaller than it was at the start of the season and it’s simply preferable to be the team with the 8 1/2 game advantage than the one that’s slightly better on paper. Start the grandmaster out without a couple of pawns, and a highly-skilled amateur chess player will probably win. If anything, it makes the decision to make trades in July a little trickier; it’s easier psychologically to shop Anthony Rendon or Max Scherzer if you’re not competitive. And with a weak farm system, the Nats don’t have a lot of ammo. Perhaps they’d be well-served to stop giving away interesting relievers.

As of this morning, the Mets were closer to the Marlins than the Braves in the division. The team made significant improvements in the offseason, but those moves also had the feeling of being half-measures, with team ownership still not wanting to spend money at the level you would expect from a team in a massive market (even if they do play second fiddle). The rotation’s 4.64 ERA left pitching coach Dave Eiland as the team’s designated scapegoat for its failings, but the real culprit here is the team defense. At -55 runs (if you believe the numbers from Baseball Info Solutions), a league-average defense would have the Mets at a 3.92 ERA, fourth in the National League. Even UZR’s less depressing estimates would place the Mets with a 4.27 ERA, better than the NL’s current 4.37 average. I’m sure threatening two or three more journalists will fix that right up.

I’m not going to fault the Phillies for Bryce Harper’s rather pedestrian offense. But I will fault them for their apparent disinterest in either Dallas Keuchel or Craig Kimbrel. While only one team could sign each player, none of the usual sources buzzing around the Phillies suggested that they ever had more serious interest than their public demeanor reflected. Losing Andrew McCutchen — even a post-star McCutchen — was a blow the team is ill-positioned to handle and one it can’t wait to address.

Caleb Smith is likely a real find, certainly more of one than I envisioned when the Marlins picked him up from the Yankees in 2017. Garrett Cooper is likely the only interesting player on the team’s offense (he’s 28, but a long way from free agency), which makes one ask the very real question of how Miami managed to get more for Mike King than for Chris Paddack, Josh Naylor, and Luis Castillo combined. Perhaps the Marlins tanking is somehow less depressing than the Marlins trying to contend?

The Central feels a lot like the division that nobody wants to win. Four of the five teams have held first place for multiple consecutive days, and not just at the start of the season when you have a bunch of 2-0 and 1-1 records floating around the league. While nobody has achieved any permanent daylight, I still think the Cubs have the best chance of doing so. Kimbrel may not be at his peak, but his signing and the theoretical return of Brandon Morrow would address what has been the team’s largest hole.

While the Brewers aren’t a depressing franchise, their use of Keston Hiura and Travis Shaw is a real head-scratcher. At the start of the season, I felt the team’s best use of Hiura would be to start him in the minors and have him bash his way into the majors, allowing them not to worry about having to make a difficult decision. The first part of that plan seemed to work out, but even with Shaw struggling and Hiura slugging .531, the Brewers haven’t been able to make the hard choice to turn Shaw into a reserve and make the team better right now. Yes, Hiura’s strikeout-to-walk ratio in the majors didn’t exactly scream Joey Votto, but he’s actually hitting the ball once in a while. ZiPS estimates that starting Shaw instead of Hiura over the rest of the season costs the Brewers about a tenth of a playoff appearance. That’s not negligible.

Who would’ve thought the bullpen would be the best part of the Cardinals? Yes, Paul Goldschmidt should be hitting better and Matt Carpenter should be hitting better and most of the rotation should be pitching better, but there’s no such thing as a Should NL Central winner. The Cards are a hard team to upgrade, simply because there aren’t many obvious places to give out pink slips. ZiPS is down to believing the Cards are a .510 team.

The Reds are a better team than their record, but the math remains daunting. How damaging was the team’s 1-8 start? They’ve gone 35-32 since, have a 43-33 Pythagorean record overall, and their 7.0% projected playoff chance is still behind their preseason projection of 11.5%. But at least they’re actually putting their best possible lineup on the field, with Jesse Winker, Nick Senzel, and Yasiel Puig as a fairly stable outfield. It would have been nice if they had just committed to this group from the start rather than trying to get Matt Kemp at-bats and seeing more in Scott Schebler than a fourth outfielder. Derek Dietrich’s offense has been encouraging, but it’s perhaps his defense that’s been the bigger surprise. He could always hit, but his defensive numbers at second are much more adequate than they were in his Marlins days. Small sample size, of course.

As for Pittsburgh, I don’t think they have the arms to peek back over the .500 mark for any extended period of time this year. With a healthy Jameson Taillon, and Chris Archer looking more like the Cy Young threat he once was, the division’s middle-heavy enough that the Pirates could be a contender. I don’t think they are, though.

It’s only really a 100.0% chance to win the NL West because of rounding, but it’s hard to envision a scenario in which the Dodgers blow a 13-game lead. Maybe, if there was another top team in the division that was simply underperforming, you could squint your way to seeing some type of apocalyptic scenario in which a second place team goes 55-25 in the second-half while Cody Bellinger and Hyun-Jin Ryu are captured by brigands in a forest. You can’t even “But ’69 Mets!” here — that team maxed out at a ten-game deficit. Okay, the Bucky Dent Yankees, but who in the division has a Goose Gossage or a Reggie Jackson?

Suffice it to say, Goose Gossage might actually upgrade the Colorado Rockies bullpen. I don’t mean 1978 Gossage — I mean Gossage now. In truth, Colorado’s bullpen hasn’t really been that mad, but they tend to fail in the most spectacular ways possible, as seen in their three straight walk-off losses against the Dodgers. In typical Colorado fashion, the team ranks 22nd in position player WAR and 22nd in wRC+ and I’m not sure anyone in the front office realizes this.

The Padres are obviously not as good a team as the Dodgers, but they’re the most fascinating team to watch, simply because of the young talent that will inevitably reach the majors in the next few years. I remain at a loss as to why they’ve been so conservative with Luis Urias, who is likely to be part of the best possible lineup right now (and I say this as someone who is a fan of Ian Kinsler as a player). It’s hard to blame any fiduciary shenanigans given that the team pointedly decided to not play those sorts of games with Paddack or Fernando Tatis Jr. The team is obviously pleased to be wild card-relevant, though I don’t think they’ll do anything to jeopardize the real show, which should start as soon as next year.

The Diamondbacks continues to accidentally contend, but I still think they’re more likely to trade off the reasons for that contention rather than make any additions. I still don’t believe Zack Greinke finishes his contract in Arizona, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Robbie Ray go. I think either Greinke or Ray are potentially more impactful pickups than Madison Bumgarner would be and there’s an actual Bumgarner market. It’s hard to see the Diamondbacks as a good enough team to be able to turn down solid offers should they materialize.

Every year, there’s a team that’s rebuilding that doesn’t quite realize it. Right now, that’s the San Francisco Giants. Other teams have come back from deeper pits than 33-43, but most of those other teams were more talented. The Giants have already played 13 different players in the outfield and just claimed Joey Rickard on waivers. By comparison, the Yankees have had most of their desired starting lineup on the IL but have only used nine.

It’s been a weird season thus far for Justin Verlander. On the one hand, the 36-year-old righty has enjoyed dominant stretches and generally pitched well enough to put himself in the conversation for another All-Star appearance (perhaps even a start) and that elusive second Cy Young Award, all while advancing his case for eventual election to the Hall of Fame. On the other hand, he’s struggling to keep the ball in the park like never before — but then, that describes most pitchers in a year of record-setting home run rates. The combination has created some very unusual, extreme statistics

On Sunday, Verlander threw seven strong innings against the Yankees in the Bronx, allowing just four hits, two walks, and three runs while striking out nine. The runs all came via a three-run homer by DJ LeMahieu, but the blast was of trivial importance, hit at a time when the Astros owned a commanding 9-0 lead. The trivia was shared by both teams. It was the 26th straight game in which the Yankees homered, a franchise record and one short of the major league record, held by the 2002 Rangers. It was also the first time since April 15, 2017 — back when he was still a Tiger — that Verlander had surrendered a three-run homer.

I’ll get back to the home runs momentarily. The Astros’ 9-4 win gave Verlander his 10th victory of the season and the 214th of his career; he’s second among active pitchers behind only CC Sabathia, who claimed his 250th win last week. His 142 strikeouts trail only teammate Gerrit Cole for the league lead, while his 2.67 ERA is good for fourth. However, because he’s served up 21 homers in 114.2 innings — a career-high 1.65 per nine — his FIP is a less-impressive 3.77, and his ERA-FIP differential of -1.10 ranks third in the AL. Depending upon one’s choice of pitching value metrics, he either looks like a Cy hopeful (second in bWAR at 3.8) or just a solid All-Star candidate (tied for ninth in fWAR at 2.5). Read the rest of this entry »

For quite some time, it seemed as if the Nationals’ season was going awry.

I could point to a number of games to describe the beginning of their 2019 campaign, but none epitomize it nearly as well as their May 23 matinee versus the Mets. Stephen Strasburg was brilliant for seven innings (three runs, two earned), and after manager Dave Martinez “threw a furious tantrum” in the eighth, the Nationals went on to score three runs to take a 4-3 lead. But in the bottom half, a two-out, three-run home run from Carlos Gomez gave the Mets a 6-4 lead that they wouldn’t relinquish.

This game included all aspects of the beginning of the Nationals’ season. There was a great outing from the starting pitcher. The offense managed to come through at the right time. And, of course, the bullpen blew a late lead. On top of that, the manager let the rumors of his firing get to his emotions, and the team fell to 19-31, a season-high 12 games under .500.

The baseball season is long. Even in spite of the disarray, we put the Nationals’ odds at making the playoffs at 22.2%. That was their season-low. Check out what has happened in the time since. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Clippard got top billing in this column nine months ago. A Toronto Blue Jay at the time, he boasted a 3.17 ERA, and had allowed just 6.5 hits per nine innings over 696 career appearances. Thanks in part to a lack of save opportunities, he was one of the most-underrated relievers in the game.

Twisting a familiar phrase, the more things remain the same, the more they change. Clippard is now a Cleveland Indian, and while he’s still gobbling up outs — his 3.05 ERA and 5.2 H/9 are proof in the pudding — he’s getting them in a new way. At age 34, having lost an inch or two off his fastball, the under-the-radar righty has pulled an old pitch out of his back pocket.

“Toward the end of last season, I started to incorporate a two-seamer,” said Clippard, who’d scrapped the pitch after transitioning to the bullpen in 2009. The new role wasn’t the primary driver, though. As he explained, “I mostly got rid of it because it wasn’t necessarily sinking. I thought, ‘If it’s not sinking, why should I throw it?’”

A decade later, a reason for throwing it emerged.

“Traditionally, I’ve been a fly-ball pitcher and have given up home runs,” said Clippard, who has surrendered 99 of them at baseball’s highest level. “In the overall scheme of things, I have’t been too concerned about that. There was a year, 2011, when I gave up 11 home runs — which is a lot for a reliever — but I had a 1.83 [ERA]. I can give up home runs and still be fine. At the same time, if I can keep the ball in the ballpark a little bit more, that’s obviously going to benefit me.”

Hence the reintroduction of a two-seamer… this despite the fact that it isn’t diving any more now than it did a decade ago. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cardinals played the Marlins on Wednesday night, two of the hardest throwers in baseball made appearances. Jordan Hicks was flawless, getting two strikeouts and four grounders in two perfect innings. Tayron Guerrero pitched a 1-2-3 inning, but with a tad more excitement than Hicks produced. He allowed a fly ball to medium-deep center field, and fly balls are always adventures given the current state of home runs. As I listened to the game, however, the announcers were quick to mention that Guerrero wasn’t in great peril with that fly ball, because it’s hard to hit home runs off of someone who throws so hard.

My statistical curiosity was piqued by that comment. It’s something I’ve heard from time to time, and it seems logical — I’ve watched a fair amount of Hicks appearances in the past two years, and batters seem tremendously uncomfortable when facing him. On the other hand, there are plenty of things I’ve heard about baseball that seem logical but aren’t true. I grew up knowing when the right time to bunt was and how some batters were just better at hitting in the clutch, and those have since been proven false. What’s to say that “throwing harder suppresses home runs” isn’t just another in a list of untruths?

To a certain extent, every time you use xFIP to describe a pitcher’s skill level, you’re ignoring this pearl of broadcaster wisdom. After all, if you’re regressing everyone’s home runs back to a league-wide average, that implies that no one has special skills to suppress home runs when the ball is hit in the air. No one would say that xFIP is a perfect and foolproof predictor, but it does do fairly well when it comes to ERA estimators — it beats FIP and ERA, for example.

As a general believer that skill is over-ascribed in baseball (not every 2.5 ERA or 150 wRC+ is hiding a great process — sometimes it’s just a hot stretch), I’m naturally inclined to go with xFIP’s explanation of how fly balls become home runs. That’s not to say that throwing hard doesn’t have advantages, obviously — baseball’s ever-creeping velocity increase is proof of that. It helps with swinging strike rate, of course, and therefore directly helps increase strikeouts, the most valuable thing a pitcher can do. When the ball is struck, however, the hitter has, necessarily, not swung and missed. In fact, you’ve probably heard people say that when a hard thrower allows contact, it’s usually harder than normal because the ball was coming in so fast. Wouldn’t this increase home runs per fly ball? Sounds like something worth looking at. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Mets made an out-of-the-box move yesterday, hiring 82-year-old Phil Regan as their interim pitching coach. The former big-league hurler, and longtime coach, takes over for Dave Eiland, who along with understudy Chuck Hernandez, was relieved of his duties in the throes of what has been an underachieving season.

As you should be aware, Regan’s nickname is “The Vulture.” It was given to him by Sandy Koufax, in a year that Regan went 14-1 out of the Dodgers bullpen with 21 saves and a 1.62 ERA. Prior to that 1966 season, he’d pitched primarily as a starter for the Detroit Tigers, the team he grew up rooting for in rural Michigan. Overall, Regan appeared in 551 games, for four teams, from 1960-1972.

The excerpted interview that follows was conducted approximately five or six years ago and was intended for inclusion in a book project — conversations with Detroit Tigers players of yesteryear — that has remained on the back burner. Given the timeliness of Regan’s hiring, I am choosing to share highlights from the interview here.

David Laurila: You were born in 1937, and grew up in southwest Michigan rooting for the Tigers.

Phil Regan: “Yes, I grew up in a town called Wayland. My earliest recollection of the Tigers was listening to Harry Heilmann call games on the radio. I recall players like George Kell, Johnny Lipon, Hoot Evers, Johnny Groth, and Vic Wertz. But my favorite of all was Hal Newhouser. He always seemed to be the one who pitched on Sundays, often against Bob Feller. He was my hero.

“During the week, I’d rush home from school, turn on the radio, and listen to Harry Heilmann and then, later on, Van Patrick. In those days we didn’t have a lot of television, but we always had the games on the radio. Of course, being from Michigan, I grew up wanting to play for the Tigers.”

Laurila: You ended up signing with them after graduating from high school.

Regan: “I did. As a kid, I never really got to play many games of baseball, because I lived out on a little farm, near a little town. Mostly I threw against a barn, with my brother, and stuff like that. But I had a good arm, and after graduating I was invited to Tiger Stadium to work out. They offered me a contract, but I decided that I wanted to go to Western Michigan [University]. After a year at Western, I decided to sign with the Tigers. From there I went into their minor league system.”

Laurila: How much did you sign for? Read the rest of this entry »

We are truly living in the age of blazing fastballs. Pitchers are throwing harder than ever, and measurements like spin rates are getting recognized as a crucial tool for effectiveness. At the same time, the fastball is also getting rarer than ever, but the pitch is still quite valuable and that will never change. Having the most valuable fastball in the league is something that will catch a lot of fans’, scouts’, and front office members’ attention.

It’s easy to think that the most effective fastball in 2019 would be that of a classic fireballer. One could guess names like Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole, or Max Scherzer. While those three are all having good seasons, our metrics have so far crowned someone else as having the best fastball of 2019 so far. The current fastball champ is none other than Jake Odorizzi. Depending on how much you’ve been following the Twins, you may be surprised to hear that Odorizzi has a 2.24 ERA and a 3.00 FIP in 14 starts this year. He’s boasting a career-best 28.3% strikeout rate while limiting home runs (0.71 HR/9IP) despite being an extreme fly-ball pitcher (29.4% ground-ball rate). Prior to this year, Odorizzi’s been known as a decent, middle-to-back-end pitcher, but not quite a top-of-the-rotation caliber starter like he’s been this season.

Arsenal-wise, Odorizzi’s fastball has been his best pitch in his career. It has accumulated 59.6 in wFB while the only other pitch that netted a positive value is his slider at 2.9. His other pitches — a cutter (-10.3), curveball (-8.2), and changeup (-18.9), have not. He’s done that without significantly backing off fastball usage, having used it 55.4% of the time in his career. This year, that figure is that 60.7%, which is the highest after his debut 2012 season (71.1%) in which he made only seven starts. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyson Ross has had an uneven career since being selected in the second round of the 2008 draft by the Oakland Athletics. Along with his original organization, he’s pitched for the San Diego Padres, Texas Rangers, St. Louis Cardinals, and now the Detroit Tigers. Injuries have been an issue. Currently on the 60-day Injured List with ulnar nerve neuritis, the 32-year-old right-hander previously underwent Thoracic Outlet Syndrome surgery in 2016.

When healthy, he’s been a quality big-league pitcher. Ross was an All-Star with the Padres in 2014, and the following year he led the National League in games started. His ERA over that two-season stretch was 3.03, while his K/9 was a robust 9.4. A mid-90s fastball played in a big role in that success, but it’s never been his best pitch. Ross has — when at full strength — one of the game’s best sliders.

Ross talked about his signature pitch, as well the cutter his college coach didn’t know he threw, and what he’s learned since purchasing a Rapsodo, when the Tigers visited Fenway Park in late April.

———

David Laurila: You’re known for your slider. What is the history behind it?

Tyson Ross: “It’s always been my go-to pitch. I went to college at Cal-Berkeley and threw a ton of sliders when I was there. But I originally learned the pitch when I was 11 years old. I was in All Stars, playing third base, and we ended up needing an emergency pitcher. I could get on the mound and throw strikes with a fastball, but I needed a second pitch. My buddy’s dad said, ‘Hey, grip it like this and throw it like a fastball.’ The second or third one broke. He didn’t actually call it a slider — he just called it a breaking ball — but it felt good in my hand, and I’ve been throwing it the same way ever since.”

Laurila: Is there anything unique about it?

Ross: “Nothing special. It just works the way it does, for whatever reason.” Read the rest of this entry »