In 2014, George Springer received an April callup to the majors and for half a season, he was Houston’s second-best player, with Jose Altuve leading the way. In 2015, Springer was on his way to a very good season when he fractured his wrist. Despite playing in just 102 games, he put up nearly four wins, about half a win shy of Altuve’s total. In 2016, Springer put up a very good five-win campaign, but he was bested not just by Altuve, but by rising shortstop Carlos Correa. The trio finished in the same order the following season, but last season, Alex Bregman jumped to the front of the pack, followed by a five-win season from Altuve, and a disappointing three-win year from Springer. Entering this season, Springer looked like the fourth-best position player on the Astros, but thus far, he’s been the fourth-best position player in baseball and tops in the American League.

Springer hasn’t exactly languished in the shadows of his star teammates, but his best seasons haven’t been nearly as good as their’s have been, and at 29 years old, he’s the same age as Altuve, four years older than Bregman, and five years Correa’s senior. Despite his relatively lesser status on the Astros, Springer’s 19 wins since the start of the 2015 season rank 21st in baseball, just ahead of Anthony Rizzo, J.D. Martinez, Andrelton Simmons, Charlie Blackmon, Giancarlo Stanton, and Correa. His 117 homers ranks 20th, just ahead of Kris Bryant and Freddie Freeman. Since the start of the 2016 season, his 15 wins are 15th among position players and his 101 homers is 12th in the sport. Looking at Springer’s numbers over multiple years helps to shape a greater appreciation for him, but it also glosses over a disappointing 2018 season.

Last season, Springer looked a lot like the player he’d been earlier in his career, with a walk rate around 10% and a strikeout rate twice that. His batted ball profile in terms of groundballs, fly balls and balls pulled looked the same. He had roughly the same number of doubles as in previous years. The problems for Springer came because the ball just wan’t flying out of the park. His 22 home runs constituted a big drop after hitting 63 the previous two seasons, and his .169 ISO was close to average. He just wasn’t hitting the ball as hard, with an average exit velocity on fly balls that was down to 92.6 mph from 94.4 mph in 2017, per Baseball Savant. In 2017, his average fly ball went 338 feet; it was down to 329 feet last season. Read the rest of this entry »

To escape February cold and rain, many college programs head to Phoenix for their early-season games. While the weather is often quite perfect there during the day, the winter nights are still quite cold, especially once you’ve become accustomed to the heat. This creates a hilarious visual contrast among fans, as the locals are layered — a hoodie and beanie at least — while out-of-towners from Michigan, Illinois, or the Pacific Northwest are sleeveless. But there are evenings that we’d all agree are frigid — unbearable for the locals, and a source of disappointment and disgust, especially among the shivering unprepared, for those who hoped coming to Arizona in February would let them avoid the chill for a while.

San Diego’s early-season, midweek game at Arizona State was like this. I was up the third base line watching hitters, my teeth chattering, nose running. People walked past me with Styrofoam cups full of steaming hot chocolate, a ballpark rarity, and I wondered if I might eventually need one to get through what had, to that point, been a terribly played game.

My standards for cocoa are high. I’ve gone from being a double-packet Swiss Miss kid to an adult who prefers a single packet, with a teaspoon of baking cocoa and a dash of cinnamon and cayenne if I’m feeling frisky. Surely, at stadium prices, hastily mixed and diluted to meet the speed and volume of demand, it would fall short of what I wanted.

My nose kept running. I felt like I miss-timed two Adam Kerner throws down to second because my fingers had slowed down. I just wanted something warm. I turned to the napkin/condiment kiosk (my de facto box of Kleenex for the evening) and saw yet another person carrying a fresh cup of relief. As I looked to their face to ask how much it cost, I recognized Keston Hiura, who told me he had gotten the last cup of hot chocolate they had. He departed, walked down into the bleachers and sat, alone, attentive and focused on a random, local, college game on a miserable night in the middle of the week.

For all players, baseball is a job. For a lot of them, it clearly and justifiably feels that way. But then for others, it’s a vocation. They love it and go out of their way to watch and be around it when they’re off the clock. It’s not possible to know whether or not every prospect we like and talk about on this site has this trait, which I believe to beneficial. But it seems like Hiura does.

He’s also exceptionally talented. Dominant immediately as a freshman at UC Irvine, Hiura hit .331 that year and .375/.466/.581 throughout his college career. He faced early-career questions about quality of competition (Irvine does play the bigger SoCal schools, but they don’t often face weekend pitching) and, later and more severely, about an elbow injury moved him off of second base and mostly to the outfield or DH for his summer with Team USA and his junior spring. Here is our draft blurb on Hiura, who we ranked as the No. 2 college hitter in that class:

Hiura has had elbow issues for much of his college career and has seen Dr. Neal El Attrache in Los Angeles. He’s not throwing right now, taking grounders at second base during batting practice but lobbing balls away to teammates after fielding them. He has the feet and actions for second base but there’s uncertainty about his future defensive home because of the arm. He rakes though, with one of the draft’s quickest bats and above average raw power. If his arm gets healthy he could hit and hit for power while playing an up the middle position.

The gap between the offensive bar at second base (an 88 wRC+ is the 2019 average at the position) and at DH (111 wRC+) is vast. Drafting Hiura was somewhat risky, because it was not widely known (at least, I never found out) exactly what was wrong with his elbow or if he’d need surgery, or ever be able to play a passable second base (where he might be a star) or if he’d need to be a DH/LF type (where it’d be harder to clear that offensive bar).

After the Brewers drafted him, Hiura predictably crushed lower-level pitching while playing DH until the final few games of the year, when he finally saw time at second again. He had no balls hit to him that required him to throw during that span. During instructional league in the fall, scouts finally saw what it looked like and were encouraged. We moved Hiura from a 45 FV on draft day, to a 55 FV based on confidence that he could indeed play second. He ranked No. 1 in Milwaukee’s system and 24th overall.

In 2018, Hiura reached Double-A and was, in my opinion, the second best offensive prospect in the Arizona Fall League behind Vlad Guerrero, Jr. His hands are so explosive and violent, but precise and deft, that he’s likely to hit for contact, hit for power, and play a premium defensive position better than who Milwaukee currently has shoe-horned there. Here’s what we wrote about Hiura on this offseason’s Top 100 prospect list, where we had him as the No. 13 prospect in baseball, a 60 FV player.

Hiura reached Double-A in his first full pro season, and then was clearly one of the top five or six talents in the Arizona Fall League, where he won League MVP. Most importantly, his arm strength is once again viable at second base. An elbow injury relegated Hiura to DH-only duty as a junior at UC Irvine, and he may have gone even earlier in the 2017 draft if not for concerns about the injury and how it might limit his defense. That’s no longer a concern, as Hiura has an average arm and plays an unspectacular second base. This is an incredible hitter. He has lightning-quick hands that square up premium velocity and possesses a rare blend of power and bat control. Hiura’s footwork in the box is a little noisier than it has to be, and if any of his swing’s elements are ill-timed, it can throw off the rest of his cut. This, combined with an aggressive style of hitting, could cause him to be streaky. But ultimately he’s an exceptional hitting talent and he’s going to play a premium defensive position. We think he’s an All-Star second baseman.

And now he’s a big leaguer. Hiura has been hitting .333/.408/.698 at Triple-A San Antonio. The new baseball and the PCL hitting environment has probably helped, but this is a middle of the order talent who’s ready to hit for all-fields power right now. I’m not totally buying the 2019 uptick in his walk rate. Hiura hunts early-count fastballs and I expect him to have a proactive approach, bordering on aggressive (he did beat me to that cocoa, after all), which is more palatable at second base even if it means his OBPs are closer to average, especially if it helps him hit for power by attacking pitches he can drive. He’s an entertaining, homegrown hitter who’s poised to hit in the middle of Milwaukee’s order for most of the next half decade.

A rough stretch for Jose Altuve has hit a new bump. The Astros’ second baseman, who has been scuffling considerably for the past three weeks, left Friday night’s game during the first inning shortly after legging out an infield hit. While manager A.J. Hinch called the injury a “slight strain of his hamstring,” the team has opted to play it safe by placing the 29-year-old former MVP on the injured list for just the second time in his career, thus forestalling the end of his current slump.

Via MLB.com’s Brian McTaggart, “Altuve said he felt his muscle tighten when he was running to first base and then became worried when the hamstring continued to bother him while he was getting his secondary lead off first base.” Rather than sit Altuve for a few days, the Astros opted to replace him on the active roster. Said Hinch:

“When you have these three-, five-, seven-day injuries, they always last longer than you think. We’ve gone through this with [Altuve] before. We’ve gone through this with Alex [Bregman]. We went through this with George [Springer]. These quads and hammies and calves, as soon as you think it’s four or five days, you probably should err on the side of caution and put them on the injured list and play with a full team.”

With a 27-15 record and a 6.5-game lead in the AL West through Monday, the Astros can afford to be cautious, particularly if the break provides Altuve a chance to reset his season. A six-time All-Star and a career .314/.364/.454 hitter, he’s batting a meager .169/.289/.299 over his past 90 plate appearances, dating back to April 17. Propped up by nine homers — compared to 13 all last season — his overall batting line (.243/.329/.472 in 164 plate appearances) is still respectable; his 119 wRC+ is tied for sixth among all second basemen, just seven points below his career mark and 16 points below last year. The likes of Brian Dozier (.197/.301/.331, 72 wRC+) or Robinson Cano (.261/.315/.399, 97 wRC+) would gladly swap stats, though in the context of Altuve’s career, the shape of his current production is somewhat unsettling. Read the rest of this entry »

When describing the swing changes that have rekindled his career at the age of 36, Hunter Pence made sure to mention what will remain the same, even despite all the differences.

“It looks different and feels different,” Pence told Jon Taylor of Sports Illustrated in April. “The bat path is totally different, and the muscles I’m firing with are different. But because it’s me and my genetics, you’re going to see similar movements.”

Indeed, Pence’s 2019 swing — responsible for a .316/.389/.658 slash line (168 wRC+) through 90 plate appearances as of May 13 — doesn’t look drastically different when compared to his 2018 swing. And yet, Pence is currently in the midst of his most successful 26-game stretch since 2014, back when he was contributing to the Giants’ third World Series title in five years.

Much like the hitter himself does, the “similar movements” certainly stand out in the 2018 version of Pence’s swing versus its 2019 upgrade. Pence has always had one of baseball’s more unusual swing paths, and his personal style and feel — due to what Pence referred to as his “genetics” — are still clearly present.

Here’s a Pence single from 2018: Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Martin made his major league debut on Sunday, striking out nine and walking one over 5.1 innings, taking over, at least temporarily, the rotation spot of the struggling Collin McHugh. McHugh, a steady hand for the Astros since 2014, has seen his walk rate and home run rate increase, culminating in a three inning, eight earned run outing against the Royals on May 7.

Martin’s debut made him the fourth draftee from the 2017 class to reach the majors, after Kyle Wright, Nick Margevicius, and Griffin Canning. Long considered a talented prospect, Martin was heavily recruited out of Cypress Ranch High School and chose to turn down pro overtures to attend Texas A&M. The Houston-area native (he grew up in Hempstead and moved to Cypress for high school, both northwest of the city) had some ups and downs in his college career, often flashing tantalizing stuff but struggling to consistently harness it. He pitched nearly exclusively out of the bullpen for the Aggies during his first two years, amassing a total of just 44 innings pitched and striking out 54 while walking 33.

Scouts considered Martin’s 2016 summer campaign in the prestigious Cape Cod League to be a potential breakout. Pitching out of the bullpen for the Falmouth Commodores, Martin struck out 22 and walked just three in 15.2 innings, flashing a dynamic mid-90s fastball and an above average breaking ball to go along with his easy, athletic delivery. There was significant first round buzz heading into his junior season, and an expectation that he would cement himself atop of the Aggies’ strong pitching rotation and lead them through SEC play.

Martin ended up making 24 appearances and 13 starts as a junior for A&M, finishing third on the team in innings pitched behind Brigham Hill and Stephen Kolek. The inconsistent command he showed during his first two years in College Station was less significant but was still present, as he walked 38 batters in 87.2 innings. The intrigue scouts saw in Martin kept him in the conversation for those going toward the top of the draft despite the inconsistent performance. The Astros saw an opportunity to get the athletic right-hander in the second round of the 2017 draft, giving him a $1 million signing bonus with the 56th overall pick. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last decade, pitchers have striven to be more and more like Stephen Strasburg. While Strasburg has always had one of the better changeups in the game, the 30-year-old righty has long used a four-seam fastball up in the zone paired with a big curve to dominate hitters. It’s a combo the Astros have famously used to successfully transform multiple pitchers, but almost nobody has been better than Strasburg with both the four-seamer and the curve over the last decade. The graph below shows all pitchers with at least 500 innings pitched who have thrown a four-seamer and curve, and the total run value the two pitches have produced.

Sure, Clayton Kershaw is on another planet, but Strasburg is the only other pitcher at least 50 runs above average on both pitches. Since 2016, he’s been the best at combining the fastball and the curve to get great results. Read the rest of this entry »

Take one look at the numbers, and Yu Darvish is having a pretty rough 2019. A 5.40 ERA is bad enough, but he’s actually outperforming his FIP, which sits at a grisly 6.49. While it’s only eight starts, a small enough sample that I’d normally counsel patience, Cubs fans surely don’t feel that way — 16 games into his Cubs career after an injury-shortened 2018, Darvish has compiled a 5.16 ERA (5.64 FIP) and been worth -0.1 fWAR. A closer look at Darvish, however, makes the picture far more muddled. Despite his undeniably rough start, silver linings abound in his underlying statistics.

The story with Darvish has to start with walks. No one would ever call him a control pitcher (he’s had a walk rate higher than league average in five of his seven seasons), but he’s veered from effectively wild to caricature this year. His 19.3% walk rate is not only first in baseball, it’s first in baseball by a comical margin — among pitchers with 30 IP, he’s as far ahead of second-place Brad Keller as Keller is ahead of 54th-place James Paxton. It’s early in the season to start considering Darvish’s place in history, but full-season walk rates like these haven’t been seen since young Randy Johnson.

Let’s leave aside the walks for a moment, though. Take those out of the picture, and you might struggle to differentiate Darvish’s 2019 from the rest of his spectacular career. Here are Darvish’s groundball/fly ball ratio and hard-hit rate for every year of his career.

Darvish has not only amassed an average-ish hard-hit rate, he’s getting grounders like he never has in his career. Those are hardly the numbers of a pitcher with a 5-handle ERA. What gives? Read the rest of this entry »

The 2018 Atlanta Braves finished their season 90-72, in first place in an NL East that saw just one other team — the Nationals, at 82-80 — finish above .500. That Braves team featured three hitters under the age of 25 with wOBAs above .320, a strong farm system, and middling pitching that could surely be remedied with an arm-heavy offseason haul. After a winter during which the Braves didn’t add those arms, we gave them a 38% pre-season chance to make the playoffs — not an exceptional mark in a competitive division in which we gave three other teams better than that chance, but substantially improved from 2018’s pre-season 3.2% shot. After 2018, expectations were raised for this season’s summer in Atlanta.

One-quarter of the way through that 2019 season, sitting at 21-20 and three games behind the Phillies, it’s not yet clear what kind of season the Braves now intend to have.

The offense, at least, has been there — for the most part. Off-season acquisitions Josh Donaldson and  Brian McCann, along with holdovers Nick Markakis, Freddie Freeman, and Ronald Acuña Jr., are all hitting well (the lowest wOBA among the group is Markakis’s .362). Ozzie Albies and Dansby Swanson are hitting passably, which for Swanson is a major victory and for Albies is about par for the course (his .334 wOBA on the season to date is almost exactly in line with his .331 career mark). Johan Camargo and Ender Inciarte have fallen off a cliff.

The resultant 104 team wRC+ is ninth league-wide and an improvement on last year’s 97 figure (15th). But Atlanta’s top-third ordinal position betrays the fact that the Braves’ overall offensive performance is as close to the 19th-ranked A’s (94) than to the fourth-ranked Mariners (114), and is certainly not the kind of overwhelming force that can cover for poor pitching. And the Braves’ pitching, while not abysmal, is also not good. More damningly for a front office that didn’t add any major arms this offseason, it’s not better than last year’s crew.

As Ben Clemens noted last week, starters league-wide are improving relative to relievers. In Atlanta, where the Braves’ starting depth chart ran at least seven men long to start the season before being shortened by injury, and where Sean Newcomb has recently come into a relief role after a disastrous turn as a starter, the pattern holds. Last year, Braves starters posted a 3.99 ERA and Atlanta relievers a 3.99. This year, both outfits are worse — by a fair margin — but the relief crew’s regression has been particularly noticeable: their 4.87 FIP is the seventh-worst in the game, and a third of a run worse than the starters’ 4.41 mark to date (18th).

If you’re willing to be charitable to a front office (and, presumably, ownership group) that made “financial flexibility” the guiding star of their offseason, you might say that the Braves’ decision not to sign Craig Kimbrel (or any other major relief arms) this winter was a savvy move in a world where all that good young pitching the team spent a half-decade stockpiling was on the cusp of reaching Cobb County. Some of it has worked out. Mike Soroka and Max Fried have been excellent, and Newcomb and (to a much lesser extent) Touki Toussaint have been effective relievers once put into that role. There were certainly enough good pitchers on the Braves’ roster this offseason to squint and see a quality staff emerging from it.

But that hasn’t really happened. Despite Luke Jackson’s emergence as a strong option in the ninth, and Toussaint and Newcomb’s mostly effective efforts to shore up the innings leading into it, the rest of the bullpen’s performance has ranged from acceptable (Jacob Webb’s 3.54 FIP) to ghastly (Shane Carle’s 9.85). And it’s not just outliers bringing the overall numbers down: Chad Sobotka, who has a 6.52 FIP, is among the team’s leaders in relief innings pitched. Josh Tomlin, who has a 4.56 FIP and hasn’t been effective since 2017, leads the team in that category.

The rotation, meanwhile, despite the best efforts of Soroka and Fried, has seen Kevin Gausman, Julio Teheran, and especially Mike Foltynewicz struggle with bouts of inconsistency or injury and consequent ineffectiveness. Foltynewicz’s case is particularly worrying (a 6.88 FIP over three starts, in which he’s allowed 15 runs), both because it stands in contrast to strong performances earlier in his career and because it comes along with a nearly 2 mph drop in fastball velocity, and equivalent (though mostly smaller) velocity drops on pitches across the board. That drop has sapped his ability to strike hitters out, even as it does not appear to have materially affected his walk rate:

It’s not a pretty chart, and exposes the degree to which Foltynewicz’s recent success was built on top of his top-10 fastball velocity. Without that velocity, which began to slump in early August last season and has plummeted in the early going this year after an elbow injury limited him to just a few bullpen sessions and a substantially limited spring training, Foltynewicz simply can’t generate the separation between his fastball and his off-speed pitches that he needs to be successful. So far in 2019, his stuff just isn’t powerful enough to fool anybody. Gausman, too, was brought along slowly during spring training due to a shoulder injury, and Gausman, too, has been slowed by injury this season, leading to similar (if somewhat less dramatic) poor results.

So if a wait-and-see-what we have approach to pitching might have been justifiable coming into spring training — and even that is debatable — it’s no longer nearly as justifiable today. Injuries have killed the depth that underlaid the Braves’ inaction. What the Braves have now, in reality rather than in expectation, is a solid if not overwhelmingly consistent offense, inconsistent starting and relief pitching around a few bright spots, and only a three-game deficit in the division despite starting the first 41 games of the season just barely over .500. They also have that prized payroll flexibility so carefully hoarded in the offseason. If this isn’t the time to go out and buy pitching, it’s not really clear to me when is. Craig Kimbrel is still available. So is Dallas Keuchel, though he may admittedly carry a higher price than would be sensible for the Braves to pay.

For now, the Braves seem content to tinker around the edges of their roster and try to see if anything shakes loose. Last Friday, staring down the barrel of a four-game losing streak after a 10-inning walk-off loss in Arizona dropped Atlanta to 18-20 on the season, Snitker changed things up, moving Acuña Jr. from the cleanup spot to leadoff, Donaldson from second into the vacated fourth slot, and the struggling Swanson from purgatory somewhere near the bottom of the lineup into the two-hole. Acuña Jr. hit a 462-foot home run, and the Braves haven’t lost since.

That’s a nice story, but the offense isn’t really the problem in Atlanta. Their pitching — particularly in relief — is what’s holding them back, and it’s teetering on the edge just as the Braves enter a stretch in which they’re going to play the Cardinals, Brewers, and Nationals 11 times in 15 games. If the Braves’ pen didn’t play all that well in going 9-5 against the Marlins (who the Braves have played six times so far), the Rockies (five), and the Reds (three), I’m not sure it’ll play out so well against the better teams to come. In short, the first quarter of Atlanta’s season has given no indication that the pitching will work out on its own, even as there are a number of good arms to build around in-house already. Few other teams, at this point in the season, have so little of the story of their 2019 campaign down in ink. The Braves’ front office still has a chance to determine the way their season will go. They should take it.

The Dodgers have an injury-prone lefty who’s been dominating hitters lately, and it’s not Clayton Kershaw. Nor is it Rich Hill — it’s Hyun-Jin Ryu. The 32-year-old South Korea-born southpaw has yet to allow more than two runs in any of his eight starts (one of which, admittedly, was curtailed by a groin strain), and lately, he’s been utterly stifling. On May 1, he threw eight innings of four-hit one-run ball against the Giants. On May 7, he threw a four-hit shutout of the Braves. On Sunday in Los Angeles, he no-hit the Nationals for 7.1 innings before Gerardo Parra — who on Saturday night hit a game-winning grand slam — clubbed a ground-rule double that proved to be the Nationals’ only hit of the day.

Here’s some good company:

Though Ryu wasn’t as efficient as in his previous turn, where his 93-pitch outing gave him the season’s second Maddux, after Kyle Hendricks‘ 81-pitch job on May 3, he had allowed only one baserunner to the point of Parra’s hit, via a fourth-inning walk issued to former teammate Brian Dozier. He had served up just two hard-hit balls, a 99.1 lineout off the bat of Kurt Suzuki in the second inning, and a 95.5 mph fly ball from Anthony Rendon in the fourth, and had been the beneficiary of every no-hit bid’s seemingly obligatory defensive gem. In the sixth inning, Stephen Strasburg appeared to have singled to right field… only to be thrown out at first base by right fielder Cody Bellinger (it’s just after the one-minute mark here):

Alas, the lefty-hitting Parra, who earlier this month drew his release by the Giants and entered the day hitting an anemic .194/.276/.290, sliced a 98.0 mph drive to the warning track in left centerfield, where it bounced over the wall for the Nationals’ first and only hit of the day. That was Ryu’s 105th pitch of the afternoon; he completed the frame having thrown 116 pitches, the highest total of his MLB career.

Completing the no-hitter had seemed like an unlikely proposition; Ryu had finished the seventh inning at 98 pitches. Given the 24 pitches he burned in the fourth (including eight on Adam Eaton’s leadoff groundout), he appeared hellbent on testing the length of manager Dave Roberts‘ leash. Since taking the reins of the Dodgers for the 2016 season, Roberts has been at the forefront of a growing trend of pulling pitchers with no-hitters in progress (forget the openers, we’re talking those of at least five innings). His total of three in that span is tied with the Marlins’ Don Mattingly for the MLB high. Roberts famously gave the hook to Ross Stripling after 7.1 no-hit innings on April 8, 2016, then removed Hill after seven perfect innings on September 10 of that season, and told Walker Buehler to hit the showers on May 4 of last season; three relievers helped the rookie finish the job.

What’s more, Ryu had never thrown more than 114 pitches in a stateside start, and had been above 105 only twice in the past three seasons: 108 pitches against the Padres on August 12, 2017, and 107 pitches in the aforementioned May 1 start. “I’m not sure there’s a pitcher/manager combo alive less likely to push him through 9 just to try for a no hitter,” tweeted MLB.com’s Mike Petriello. Roberts suggested that he would have been more flexible…

…which was easy to say in hindsight, but anyway, enough about the manager. The pitcher struck out nine to go with his one walk and one hit, generating 14 swings and misses, including seven via his changeup and four via his cutter. In doing so, he lowered his ERA to 1.72, second in the NL; he’s tied for third in FIP (2.71), and ranks fifth in WAR (1.5). Most impressive within his stat line is his 54-to-3 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 52.1 innings. That’s a 28.6% strikeout rate (eighth in the NL) and a league-low 1.6% walk rate; his 27.0% K-BB% is third.

Combine that stingy walk rate with a .230 BABIP (second in the league, thanks in large part to the Dodgers’ stellar defense thus far) and you’ve got a pitcher who rarely has anybody on base. I haven’t played fantasy baseball in nearly a decade, so I seldom look at stats like WHIP or strand rate for even casual purposes, but dig: his 0.726 WHIP is second in the majors behind only Chris Paddack (0.689), while his 94.6% strand rate is in a virtual tie with Justin Verlander for the highest mark of the post-strike era. Blake Snell (88.0% last year) and Kershaw (87.8% in 2017) own the highest marks among full-season ERA qualifiers, while Pedro Martinez (86.0% in 2000) and Zack Greinke (86.5% in 2015) are tops among those who reached 200 innings.

Putting this in more analytical terms, albeit with the usual sample size caveats, here’s a scatter plot of pitcher performance (wOBA allowed) with the bases empty versus when men are on base:

Ryu is the red dot, Paddack the yellow one (the Padres righty is one of the reasons I had to lower the threshold of batters faced with men on base).

This is actually the second season in a row that Ryu has ranked among the majors’ stingiest pitchers. Last year, in 15 starts, he posted a 1.97 ERA and 3.00 FIP, with a 27.5 % strikeout rate and 4.6% walk rate. He missed 3.5 months due to a left groin strain so severe its description included the cringe-inducing phrase “tore muscle off the bone,” but he did not require surgery. That was just the latest in a string of injuries that has dogged the burly lefty since coming over from Korea, most notably a torn labrum that cost him all of 2015 and the first half of ’16, then elbow woes that culminated in debridement surgery after he made just one start in the latter season. Only in his 2013 rookie season did he make 30 starts or qualify for the ERA title, yet he owns a career 3.11 ERA and 3.36 FIP. Among the 112 pitchers with at least 600 innings in that span, his 82 ERA- ranks 17th, his 85 FIP- 18th, but because of his less-than-perfect attendance, he’s a modest 47th in WAR (11.9).

Ryu doesn’t have exceptional velocity; per Statcast, his four-seamer’s 90.4 mph average velo ranks in the 11th percentile as does his fastball spin. He’s in the middle of the pack as far as exit velocity (87.7 mph) and hard hit rate (38.8%) are concerned too. His 11.7% swinging strike rate is in the 66th percentile, though his 34.5% chase rate is in the 81st percentile. As The Athletic’s Eno Sarris pointed out last week, he’s the rare pitcher who has above-average command of five different pitches according to Stats LLC’s new Command+ metric, along with Marco Gonzales, Merrill Kelly, Mike Leake (who has six such pitches), Max Scherzer, and Noah Syndergaard; for Ryu, that would be his four-seamer, sinker, cutter, changeup, and curve. Obviously, that group includes a couple of impressive names, but it’s nonetheless a mixed bag, and only tells us so much.

The exceptional results Ryu has been getting owe a considerable debt to his changeup and cutter. The former, which he throws 22.0% of the time, averages just 79.1 mph according to Pitch Info, giving him more than 10 mph of separation from the, uh, heater. It falls out of the zone more often than not, batters can’t resist chasing it, and when they make contact, they tend to hit it on the ground. His results are more or less on par with the two young changeup artists I covered last week, Luis Castillo and Chris Paddack; he allows fewer baserunners with the pitch thanks to the low walk rate, but gets hit a little harder:

I’ve included Ryu’s 2018 numbers there to illustrate that the pitch is working even better for him than it did last year, when it worked pretty well. The big differences from then to now are last year’s lower groundball rate and tendency to work further off the plate against righties (and in to lefties):

Petriello has a good look at how the vertical gap between Ryu’s four-seamer and his changeup has widened this year, though that’s mostly due to his working higher with the heater. As for the cutter, it’s a pitch Ryu didn’t introduce into his arsenal until 2017. It’s about three clicks slower than the fastball, averaging 87.3 mph, and it now accounts for 21.2% of his pitches thrown; over that three-year timespan, he’s mothballed his slider and cut way back on the usage of his curve. The pitch didn’t work especially well for him last year:

Look at that jump in swinging strike rate! I don’t see a great deal of year-to-year variation in his spin rate (2029 to 2063 rpm in that span) or movement to account for the jump, but location-wise, he’s not only throwing it in the zone less often (while getting significantly more chases), he’s keeping it out of the middle third:

Obviously, the caveat all over this is that of small sample size; we are talking about a body of work that covers a modest 134.2 innings over the past two seasons. Still, it’s been an impressive run, and if Ryu — who returned to the Dodgers upon completion of his six-year, $36 million deal by accepting a $17.9 million qualifying offer — can stay upright while fleshing out this body of work, he should be in line for some kind of multiyear payday this coming winter, though one with some complexity of structure likely — incentives, a vesting option or a club option. J.A. Happ’s two-year, $34 million deal with a $17 million vesting option for year three comes to mind.

While Ryu’s fragility makes him one more pitcher in a rotation full of less-than-durable ones, his early-season performance has provided a best-case scenario while helping the Dodgers weather the late arrivals of Kershaw and Hill, whose combined total of eight starts matches his own. His rise to the occasion is just one more reason why the Dodgers (27-16) are vying for the league’s best record and remain the favorites for a third straight NL pennant.

Catching is a thankless job, but it’s widely considered to be one of the most important roles on the field. In 2018, there were 721,191 pitches thrown in the major leagues, and there was a catcher on the receiving end of all of them. Of those pitches, umpires got the ball or strike call wrong nearly 5% of the time. Every umpire has quantifiable tendencies, some of which adjust from pitcher to pitcher and some of which remain consistent. Nearly all umpiring careers follow a trajectory similar to that of players, in that they start in the minor leagues and work to be promoted, calling balls and strikes in front of TrackMan arrays, often for years.

As such, the sample of data teams can use to detect those tendencies grows quickly. The more pitches called, the more data teams collect, meaning that by the time umpires reach the upper levels of the minor leagues, their tendencies are a known commodity. And while umpires can and certainly do improve their craft, old habits are tough to kick. In March, building on previous research, FanGraphs released an update to our catcher WAR that includes the value of pitch framing. Which catchers generate more called strikes for their pitchers can be quantified, but the question remains: How can catchers improve their receiving abilities?

To start, it’s probably better to think of it not as pitch “framing,” but as pitch “absorption.” Consider the following. A baseball is about five ounces. That might not seem like much, but try to envision yourself catching an object that is moving in different directions and hitting different locations with the speed of a major league pitch and not only being able to keep still, but guide the ball in a motion that we call “framing” in order to make the pitch seem closer than it is. Of those 721,191 major league pitches thrown in 2018, 604,007 were “competitive” — more than 124 pitches per game, per team, that had a chance to be called a strike. Read the rest of this entry »