Back in April, I wrote about how the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) had de-juiced their baseballs, and how the offensive environment in the league appeared to be reflecting that change. If you remember from the piece, in March, the KBO conducted a test on a batch of new baseballs to test their coefficient of restitution (COR). It was supposedly reduced from a range of .4123-.4374 to .4034-.4234, while the ball size was increased by 1 millimeter and 1 gram. However, the test brought out some interesting results, as they found several defective balls with a COR more in line with the 2018 baseballs mixed in with the new, less-lively ball.

It doesn’t mean that this season has looked like 2018, though. In fact, the changes became clear in a month’s worth of games, but now that it’s mid-August, I thought I’d give you an update with a bigger sample size. I also thought it would be interesting to see how the de-juiced balls interact with Korea’s warm summer weather. The 2019 KBO regular season is about two-thirds of the way through, and league-wide temperatures have risen enough to see if hotter temperatures have caused an uptick in power that might counteract the effects of the new ball.

Here is how the overall league offensive numbers look this year, compared to those of last year:

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Over the last decade, we’ve seen a change in the demographics of baseball, with playing time shifting away from older, declining veterans toward younger players still in their prime. There’s a good reason for that, as each new generation of player entering the majors has been getting better and better relative to their older peers. Baseball’s owners have capitalized on this development — those younger, better players are also much cheaper. And teams have not reinvested those gains elsewhere on their rosters, as major league payrolls have stagnated the last few seasons while amateur talent expenditures have become hard-capped. Given the emphasis on younger players, it might be reasonable to believe that when it comes to fielding a winning team, payroll matters less than ever. But that hasn’t been the case this season.

This piece marks the fifth season during which I’ve taken a look at the standings in August and compared them to Opening Day payrolls (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018) and for the most part, the relationship between Opening Day payrolls and wins has been relatively low. I’ve used the Pearson correlation coefficient “r” to track the strength of the relationship between the two and from the end of the strike through 2011, the average correlation per year was .45. In the last seven seasons heading into this season, though, the correlation coefficient between the two was higher than .31 only once, when it was a high .62 back in 2016.

In past years, I’ve noted that while individual season correlations have remained low, looking at either sustained spending or using Forbes franchise valuations to gauge a team’s overall financial might tends to show that the relationship between spending, wealth, and winning remains strong. That logic remains for this season, and indeed, the relationship between wins and payroll trails only that of 2016 season this decade:

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It’s no secret that Nick Anderson is one of my favorite pitchers. When he ran a near-50% strikeout rate for the first month or two of the year, only months removed from being traded by the Twins to avoid a roster crunch, I was hooked by the story. More than the story, I was hooked by his curveball, a mid-80s, 12-6 snapping thing that ate batters alive:

Of course, I wasn’t the only person to notice, not by a long shot: the 37% strikeout rate he ran with the Marlins was a top-10 rate in baseball, and that’s not exactly easy to fake. The curve clearly played, getting whiffs on 53.7% of swings, third-highest in baseball for a curveball, and it wasn’t just numbers on a spreadsheet either — you can’t watch that pitch to Carson Kelly above and not say “ooh that’s nasty.”

When the Rays traded for Anderson at the deadline, I was elated. Anderson wasn’t exactly a household name, but he is in my household, and it was quite a thrill seeing a playoff-contending team, one who employs a noted reliever discoverer, concur with me that Anderson was a monster. The Rays don’t quite have the same reputation as the Astros for improving pitchers, but they do have a reputation for getting the most out of relievers, and an unlocked Nick Anderson sounded amazing to me. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a rough time to be a catcher. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen catcher offensive production drop to extreme lows. Last year, major league backstops compiled 49.9 WAR, the lowest total since 2004, and their collective wRC+ was just 84, the lowest mark since 2002. In this day and age, it’s not uncommon to see teams select their starting backstops based on their defensive prowess and ability to handle a pitching staff rather than their ability to contribute offensively. That’s the only explanation for why Jeff Mathis continues to receive plate appearances despite a running a wRC+ that’s in the single digits.

For most teams, the backup catcher is an afterthought on the roster, selected for his ability to competently go about his duties without hurting the team too much. Most backup catchers see the field once or twice a week, three times if they’re lucky, so their effect on the overall production of the lineup is rather minimal. But there are a few squads this year who have been blessed with an abundance of catching riches.

Five teams have received more than three wins from their catching corps in 2019:

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As we’re reminded every time they face the Yankees and give up homers by the half-dozen, the Orioles are a very bad baseball team. At 39-82, they’re 41 1/2 games out of first place, and on pace for 52 wins, which means they could lose more than two-thirds of their games for the second season in a row. They’re just nine homers away from breaking the single-season record for dingers allowed (258). And yet they’re not even the majors’ worst team. Neither are the Marlins, who through the first 41 games of the season slipped below the Throneberry Line by losing 31 games.

That so much attention has been paid to those bad ballclubs might be chalked up to yet another instance of East Coast Bias, because tucked away in the more wholesome Midwest are the Detroit Tigers, who are doing things (and not doing things) to rekindle memories of their 2003 squad, which gave Throneberry’s 1962 Mets a run for their money by losing 119 games. At 36-81, these Tigers are on pace to go 50-112, but a slight slippage could send them past last year’s 115-loss Orioles. In the words of James Brown, “People, it’s bad.”

This — what’s the opposite of web gem? — might be the 2019 squad’s signature play (h/t @suss2hyphens):

The Tigers were a competitive concern as recently as 2016, when they went 86-75 but slid out of a Wild Card spot in late September. That was the last gasp of the core that won four straight AL Central titles from 2011-14, and one that probably should have begun scattering to the four winds earlier. As it was, general manager Al Avila — who replaced Dave Dombrowski in late 2015 — traded Alex Avila (his own son!), J.D. Martinez, Justin Upton, Justin Verlander, and Justin Wilson in a six-week span in mid-2017, as the team was en route to 98 losses.

The Tigers are rebuilding, but their rebuild has been hampered by a farm system weakened by years of bad drafts and repeated mining to keep their competitive window open. One has to dial back to 2011 to find a year in which the Tigers’ top draft pick (James McCann, who was a second-rounder) ever suited up for the team in the regular season, and 2012 (Jake Thompson) for one who even played in the majors. Baseball America’s annual organizational rankings placed their system between 26th and 30th annually from 2014-17. That’s a lousy platform from which to launch a rebuild, and it’s shown. Last year’s Tigers lost 98 games under new manager Ron Gardenhire, and this year’s crop is worse. Much, much worse.

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MLB Senior Data Architect Tom Tango posed an interesting question on Twitter today:

The best questions are usually simple, and this one is perfect. What does average matter? What does slugging percentage mean in the context of two different batting averages? If your OBP and slugging are the same, does it even matter how you get to them?

The first-level answer is “give me the average.” If I’m going to get the same OBP and slug, I’ll do it with extra hits, because hits advance more runners. As you can see, that was the most common answer on the poll.

Go a level up, and you might end up where I was at first. With a lower batting average but the same slugging percentage, Player B is hitting for a ton of power. An easy way to think about the trade-off is that Player B is getting the same number of bases per at-bat (slugging percentage) and reaching base as often (on-base percentage), which means there’s an exchange where Player B adds a base to a hit (stretching a single into a double or a double into a triple) and converts a single to a walk. Read the rest of this entry »

Ronald Acuña Jr., with 34 home runs, 28 stolen bases, and six weeks left in the season, has a chance to become the fifth player to join Major League Baseball’s 40-40 Club. If Acuña’s membership application is approved by feats of baseballing, he’ll join an exclusive fraternity of Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Alfonso Soriano. Okay, mostly elite.

As someone who apparently became a “veteran” baseball analyst at some point, I’m not always sure if the game has changed or if I have. When I was a kid, there’d be talk of 20-20 clubs, 30 HR/100 RBI guys, and scores of home run milestones. But you don’t hear about these baseball clubs as often as you used to. Has fandom changed this much or have I become jaded about these kinds of statistically interesting accomplishments? Or is that some of the older markers for performance, such as the 400 Homer Club, have become less exclusive institutions to join than a sandwich shop that give you a 10th sub free after buying nine?

The 40-40 Club, on the other hand, still excites me. Part of it could be that Jose Canseco’s charge on his way to becoming the founding member of this fraternity in 1988 was still very early in my Serious Baseball Fandom phase. I’ve loved watching baseball from the age of three, but it wasn’t until a few years later I really became a serious fan of the game, aided by my grandfather getting me a subscription to Sports Illustrated in 1986, a bit before my eighth birthday. While I watched the 1983-1985 World Series games, the 1986 World Series was the first one where I really followed every pitch, watching to the end even on school nights. I can still remember Tim Teufel‘s error as much as Bill Buckner‘s more famous one, and am able to exactly replicate Marty Barrett‘s closed stance and Sid Fernandez’s three-quarters delivery.

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Fernando Tatis Jr. has been one of the most exciting players in baseball this year. I get giddy when he does things like this:

Or like this:

Despite that, I haven’t written about Tatis. It’s not that he wasn’t interesting enough. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, he should take it as a compliment that I’ve been writing about everyone in the league but him. I simply couldn’t find an angle that I felt captured what’s so awesome about Tatis. I still don’t have that angle, but I don’t care anymore. Fernando Tatis Jr. is the best, and it pains me that he’s day-to-day with a back injury right now. Let’s talk about him, because no day should go by without a Tatis highlight. Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly three months into this season, José Ramírez was one of the worst hitters in the game. On June 24, Ramírez had played in 77 games, come to the plate 328 times, and put up a 66 wRC+ which ranked 153rd out of 160 qualified batters. Only good baserunning and decent defense kept Ramírez above replacement level. Since June 25, Ramírez has come to bat 172 times and put up a 143 wRC+ and 1.8 WAR, with both figures ranking among the top 25 players in the game. Before the season, Ramírez was projected for a 138 wRC+ and 6.3 WAR, so he went from one of the worst hitters in baseball for half a season to nearly the exact player he was projected for the last quarter of a season. While slumps and streaks invariably have a lot of contributing factors, it certainly seems like Ramírez spent the first part of the season not trying to crush the game and simply flipped a switch in late June.

The dates used above aren’t exactly arbitrary. On June 25, I wrote a post entitled José Ramirez Isn’t That Far Off. In that piece, I discussed a few different theories behind Ramírez’s struggles, including too many fly balls at poor angles and failures in attempting to adjust to the shift. Ultimately, I went down a plate approach rabbit hole and concluded Ramírez was swinging and making contact on too many pitches when behind in the count instead of just looking and swinging at pitches he could drive. I concluded with this:

Ramírez simply isn’t commanding the strike zone like he used to, and it is showing up in increased swings on breaking and offspeed pitches out of the zone. Ramírez needs to be able to hunt for those fastballs in the plate, and to do so, he has to be able to avoid the breaking stuff. He hasn’t done a poor job of that relative to other players, but part of what made Ramírez a very good hitter was getting in favorable counts and taking advantage. The league might have caught up to him a little bit, but the problem appears to be more on Ramírez’s end and swinging at pitches he didn’t used to. That also means the issue could be fixable. Bad luck has certainly played some role in Ramírez’s big drop, as it might not be as bad as it appears, and if Ramírez can control the plate like he has in seasons past, he just might turn things around.

Ramírez has certainly made me look good over the past couple months, but we can take a closer look at the analysis from June and see if the reasoning still fits. First, let’s look at Ramírez’s swings by count type compared to last year, the early part of this season, and his recent hot streak. Read the rest of this entry »

In modern baseball, it’s hard to win if you can’t develop talent, particularly as the sport’s best teams get even better at turning raw ingredients into functional ballplayers. The best example these days is Houston’s pattern of acquiring pitchers with high-spin fastballs or curveballs and polishing them into All-Stars. As has been detailed at length here and elsewhere, Houston’s success with that breed has powered the club to the top of baseball’s hierarchy. They’ve worked wonders with Gerrit Cole, Charlie Morton, and Ryan Pressly. They may run it back again with Aaron Sanchez and Joe Biagini.

But the Astros aren’t the only team with a competitive advantage on the mound. Before Morton and Cole exploded, Cleveland was widely considered the gold standard at developing pitching talent. They earned that reputation: former and current rotation stalwarts like Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, Trevor Bauer, Danny Salazar, Mike Clevinger, and Shane Bieber all became significant contributors in just the last several years. Of those, only Bauer and Carrasco had major prospect hype, and even those two took their lumps in other organizations before straightening things out in Ohio. Indeed, Cleveland’s ability to turn wayward arms into productive contributors sparked their mini-dynasty in the AL Central, and may again prove decisive in this year’s playoff push.

Cleveland’s player development staff has worked its magic on a variety of pitchers; Salazar and Kluber, to name two, are very different hurlers. One commonality, though, is that they end up with a lot of right-handed pitchers who are really good at tunneling on the glove-side corner. Kluber is perhaps the best at this: The late action on his slider and two-seam fastball make the pitches perfect for starting near the corner and forcing hitters to guess which direction it’s going to move.

Increasingly, it appears that this is a replicable strategy. The latest guy to carry the mail? Aaron Civale, a 24-year-old righty who barely snuck onto Cleveland’s top prospect list earlier this spring and has flourished in three big league starts this summer. Through 18 innings, he’s allowed just two runs and has whiffed a batter per frame while walking only four. Read the rest of this entry »