After finishing up some research noting the wide gap between the quality of relief innings depending on the importance of the situation this season, it felt necessary to take a similar look at team performance. If teams were deploying less-good relievers in low leverage situations and good ones in high leverage situations, it could distort our sense of the quality of a bullpen when looking at overall numbers.

We’ll start with a pretty generic view of bullpens this year, with FIP by team:

The Cardinals have the lowest FIP of any bullpen this season, as the group as a whole has pitched very well. The Rays coming in second and first in the American League is somewhat of a surprise given their use of an opener in half their games; they are losing about 60 good relief innings and replacing them with around 180 good-but-not-as-good starting pitching-type innings. The teams fall down in a nice cascade the rest of the way, with the Baltimore Orioles providing a a very heavy base at the bottom of baseball.

But not all innings are created equal, and some of the innings pitched by bullpens are more important than others. If we separate meaningful innings (medium leverage and high leverage) from less important innings (low leverage), we can get a sense of how good a team’s bullpen is when it matters. This also could provide a better sense of which teams might be better prepared for the playoffs, given the consolidation of relief innings in October:

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If you’re reading this article, you’re probably not dead, and if you’re not dead, you’ve heard all the fuss about soaring home run rates. I’m not here to judge your perspective on it — I think reasonable people can disagree on how they like their baseball, though I will say that I love a good strikeout and feel pretty neutral about home runs. But I think one thing everyone wonders about is who this all helps.

It’s not the pitchers, clearly. It doesn’t seem to be the big boppers — despite the stupendous home run totals, no one is threatening to hit 73 home runs any time soon. Heck, no one has approached 61 since Giancarlo Stanton’s chase in 2017, and that was a singular event rather than a wave of history-chasing sluggers. Is it the little guys? Freddy Galvis has 20 dingers on the year — that has to count for something.

There’s a lot of chicken-and-egg going on here and no real answers to the answer of who benefits the most from the livelier ball. That’s why I looked to the minor leagues to see which players were most affected by the new ball. That study was basically inconclusive, aside from showing that players with absolutely no power are barely affected.

I thought I’d take a different look at it today. It’s hard to say who has benefited the most from the new ball, but what if we could answer a different question: who would be most affected if the league surreptitiously replaced today’s baseballs with old ones overnight? Read the rest of this entry »

Because he is still only 20 years old, Juan Soto cannot legally drink in the United States. And yet, despite his recent pubescence, he’s one of baseball’s best hitters. Last week, he became just the third player in major league history to hit 50 home runs before turning 21. He’s drawn comparisons to Miguel Cabrera. He’s even already received some Hall of Fame discussion, assuming he can stay healthy over the course of what ought to be a long career.

In a piece for MLB.com from early August, Mike Petriello noted something interesting about Soto: his consistency.

There are no cold streaks, so there’s no fevered “what’s wrong with Juan Soto?” think pieces, like we’ve done with José Ramírez. There are no wild, Bryce Harper-esque up-and-downs that demand attention. There’s just steady, regular production, the kind of thing that makes Mike Trout so outstanding, and for all of that, sometimes we consider Trout to be boring.

This paragraph from Petriello’s story piqued my interest. Is there any way to examine a player’s consistency? With Soto, I attempted to do so.

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Chris Sale is apparently done for the year. Nathan Eovaldi is back in the rotation after his stint in the bullpen went badly. Mookie Betts is answering questions about his desire to test free agency. The Red Sox’s playoff odds look like the base of a Bryce Canyon formation, but right now, Rafael Devers isn’t just in the midst of a breakout season at age 22, he’s one of the hottest hitters in baseball.

Over an eight-game span against the Angels, Indians, and Orioles from August 9-18, Devers went 20-for-37 with 12 extra-base hits and 14 RBI, batting .541/.575/1.081 for a 324 wRC+. On August 13 against the Indians, he went 6-for-6, the first Red Sock to collect six hits in a game since Nomar Garciaparra on June, 21, 2003; four of those hits were doubles. He began the next night with a pair of hits off Shane Bieber, including a homer, to run his streak to eight straight. On Sunday, he had four hits, running his season total of four-hit games to four, one fewer than major league leader Charlie Blackmon. Unsurprisingly, Devers was named the AL Player of the Week on Monday.

Such is the nature of hot streaks that as soon as I started writing this, Devers went 0-for-4, and to be fair, one can find recent stretches — all of them relatively small sample sizes — where Gio Urshela or Aristides Aquino or Alex Bregman had better numbers, but the larger point is that the kid is in the midst of a great season during which he’s shown significant improvements on both sides of the ball. Devers entered Monday ranked second in the AL in slugging percentage (.596), third in batting average (.332), tied for fifth in wRC+ (147), 10th in on-base percentage (.380), and tied for 11th in homers (27th). His 5.5 WAR was tied with Bregman, trailing only teammate Xander Bogaerts (5.6) and you-know-who, Mike Trout (8.3). Read the rest of this entry »

Who have been the best players in the South Atlantic League so far this season? I recently posed that question to some of the circuit’s broadcasters, with an important qualifier: I requested that they base their selections on what they’ve seen with their own eyes, and not on players’ reputations. I also asked for snapshot observations on each player named, which the respondents graciously took the time to provide.

As with the Midwest League survey we ran last month, the respondents will have seen some players more than others (or not at all) as the SAL plays an unbalanced schedule with two seven-team divisions. Three broadcasters participated, two from the league’s Southern division, and one from the Northern division. Their respective lists were put together within the past couple of weeks.

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Will DeBoer, Delmarva Shorebirds (Orioles)

Pitchers

1. Grayson Rodriguez (Orioles): Perhaps a little biased since he’s one of ours, but I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone else rates him this high. He’s like no 19-year-old I’ve ever seen. Blazing fastball, remarkable command of his changeup at such a young age. When he’s on, you can’t stop him. He’s a Freight Train.

2. Hans Crouse (Rangers): Dominated over the limited innings the Rangers kept him on. Wicked fastball, the sort that makes you pay attention because if anyone ever fouled it off, it turned into a crowd missile. Seemed to streamline his windup, which wasn’t as eccentric as his reputation suggested; for a guy who loves the whimsical side of baseball, that was the only disappointment.

3. Hever Bueno (Rangers): More than anybody in our league, when he came into the game you knew your goose was cooked. Straight gas, phenomenal strikeout stuff. The Rangers always seem to have somebody like this in the Hickory bullpen, but this year’s model outshines the rest.

4. Drew Rom (Orioles): A sneaky pick because Grayson Rodriguez soaks up all the limelight in the Orioles system, but Rom has at times been even better. Great splitter that most guys in this league can’t catch up to. Another 19-year-old that’s advanced beyond his years; the O’s could end up with the R&R Boys in their big league rotation in a few years. Read the rest of this entry »

With so many variables, isolating specific trends in baseball can be tricky. Relievers have been pitching more and more innings. Strikeouts keep going up. The ball has been juiced, de-juiced, and re-juiced, making home run totals hard to fathom and difficult to place in context, both for this year and for years past. One noticeable aspect of this season’s play, influenced by some or all of the factors just listed, is that relievers are actually performing worse than starters. Our starter/reliever splits go back to 1974, and that has never happened before. Here is how starter and relievers have performed since 2002:

A healthy gap between the two roles has existed for some time, but seems to have taken an abrupt turn this year. Ben Clemens looked at the talent level between starters and relievers earlier this season in a pair of posts that discussed how starters are preparing more like relievers, as well as the potential dilution of talent among relievers. The evidence seemed to point toward the latter theory, though exactly how that dilution has affected performance comes in a rather interesting package. Providing some evidence for the dilution effect is the number of innings handled by relievers in recent seasons. While the idea of starters pitching better than relievers is a new one statistically, the trend of increasing reliever innings likely made this year’s change possible. Below, see the share of reliever innings and reliever WAR since 2002:

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On Monday, Rays’ infielder Michael Brosseau took the mound. On Sunday, it was Brewers infielder Hernán Pérez, and before him, Diamondbacks catcher Alex Avila on Saturday, and Reds infielder Jose Peraza on Friday. On Thursday, which now seems so long ago — seriously, do you remember what you had for dinner that night? — it was Yankees first baseman Mike Ford. If you think that home run and strikeout rates have gotten out of hand, consider the tally of position players pitching.

While teams are producing homers at a per-game rate 12% higher than the previous record (set in 2017), and while per-game strikeout rates are on the rise for the 14th straight season (up about 3% relative to last year), the single-season record for position player outings (65, set just last year, and no, that count doesn’t include Shohei Ohtani) fell earlier this month. Already, position players have taken the hill a total of 78 times this season; prorated to a full schedule, that’s 101 outings, a 55% increase on last year. And if things were to continue at the blistering pace we’ve seen since the All-Star break — 33 appearances in 39 days — the number would soar higher than the drive the Indians’ Carlos Santana hit off Ford:

Whew. Traditionally, a position player pitching appearance has been a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency desperation move (generally in extra innings) or a lighthearted farce that draws attention away from an otherwise unpleasant blowout. Through some combination of higher-scoring games, higher per-game totals of relievers, concerns about reliever workloads, and the reduced stigma of this particular maneuver, the rate of such appearances has accelerated. Like the barrage of homers and strikeouts, whether or not the higher frequency takes the fun out of it is rather subjective. To these eyes, the novelty is in the absurdity, like imagining a dog penning this article, and the bordering-on-routine nature of this year’s appearances has dimmed some of the luster. Even so, it’s an interesting enough subject to dwell upon for a few minutes.

For starters, here’s the progression for the past decade:

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We treat the statistics around torn UCL’s and Tommy John surgery with abstract sadness. It’s awful that so many elbows blow out, but for the most part, it’s just a number. Sure, when a star is injured, we notice — Jordan Hicks, say, or Shohei Ohtani. Those are marquee names, and the disappointment over not getting to see them pitch is merited. But that doesn’t mean that other players who need surgery aren’t just as sad of a story.

Consider Dinelson Lamet. When he made it to the majors in 2017, he was a rare bright spot for the Padres. Three years after signing with them as an international free agent, he’d torn through the minors, striking out 27% of the batters he faced at a mix of levels he was too old (rookie ball at 22) and too young (Triple-A at 24) for. Without much reason to keep him in the minors, the Padres called him up.

Lamet wasn’t a star. He didn’t feature on Twitter highlights, wasn’t gunning for any records. His wasn’t a story to set the major leagues ablaze, the heralded Padre savior arriving to lead the team to the playoffs. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t effective, though; it doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a great story.

Even as he tore through the minors, Lamet looked like a reliever before he got to the majors, with only two pitches he had confidence in. After throwing just two starts in Triple-A before 2017, he was an average pitcher over 114 innings with the big league club. The two-pitch arsenal played — his slider was good enough to offset the lack of a third pitch. A ZiPS darling from day one, he was living his major league fantasy — the Padres slotted him in as their number two starter for 2018.

And just like that, he was gone. He felt pain in his elbow while making his final start of the spring, and a few MRIs later, he went under the knife. If you weren’t a Padres fan or a fantasy baseball owner, though, you might never have known. Lamet was a long shot to make it from the start, and even though he’d defied the odds for a season, the abyss is never far away for a major league pitcher.

Lamet has always lived on the margins as a starter. Two-pitch pitchers have a tough time starting, and Lamet was no exception in his 2017 debut. The problem is two-fold — opposite-handed batters are tough to beat without a pitch that breaks away from them, and facing the same batter multiple times without a new look to show is dangerous. Lamet had particular trouble the third time through the order, but he suffered nearly as much against lefties:

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Five years ago, as the Chicago Cubs were playing out the final stretch of their last losing season before their rebuilt roster took flight, they called up two of their top prospects — Javier Báez and Jorge Soler — to get their first look at big league pitching. While Báez struggled, finishing with just a 58 wRC+ and -0.8 WAR, Soler flourished. He burst on the scene with three homers and seven hits in his first three games, and finished his 24-game test run with a .292/.330/.573 line, a 148 wRC+, and 0.7 WAR. Both players figured to be key to Chicago turning the corner, but in the years that followed, the two trended in very different directions.

Báez turned into a defensive wizard and overcame his plate discipline issues with a lethal power stroke, eventually earning a second-place MVP finish in 2018. Soler, however, has failed to live up to the promise he showed in his first season. Thanks to a series of injuries, he was limited to 187 games in the majors between 2015 and 2016, after which the Cubs traded him to the Kansas City Royals. He spent most of 2017 at Triple-A, and posted just a 32 wRC+ in the 35 games he spent in the big leagues. Last year, he began to break out again, but had his season derailed by a broken foot in June. He entered this season having never played more than 109 games in a year, compiling just 1.7 WAR since that debut.

The past few years have been frustrating enough to snuff out the flame of excitement that surrounded Soler’s arrival in the majors, but this season, he’s finally establishing himself as the slugger he was expected to be. After Sunday’s games, he is slashing .259/.351/.549, with a 131 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR. His 35 homers are tied with Ronald Acuña Jr. for fifth-most in baseball, and have him on pace to demolish Mike Moustakas’s franchise record of 38 dingers in a season. They are also nearly triple his previous career-high of 12 homers, set with the Cubs in 2016. 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 pitchers — Trevor Cahill, Marco Gonzales, and David Phelps— on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Trevor Cahill, Los Angeles Angels

“I didn’t throw my [current] curveball until my second year in the big leagues. I used to throw the double-knuckle — I didn’t spin it; I would literally flick it — and that worked in the minor leagues. It was actually my strikeout pitch. But once I got up here, I couldn’t really throw it with the big-league ball. Not consistently.

“The seams in the minor leagues were bigger, and that made a difference. Plus, big league hitters are more patient. I used to throw that pitch in the dirt a lot, and get swings, but I had trouble throwing it for strikes. Big league hitters, if you can’t throw it for a strike, they see that spin and just spit on it.

“One day I was playing catch with Brett Anderson, working on his slider grip, which he spikes. I did that, and it was really good on flat ground, so that offseason I started working on it. Then my finger started coming up higher, so I was throwing a normal spiked curveball. In 2010, in spring training, I started using it against hitters. I’ve thrown it ever since. Read the rest of this entry »