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 — Jalen Beeks, Dallas Braden, and John Means— on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Jalen Beeks, Tampa Bay Rays

“I had a changeup in high school, but it wasn’t very good. When I got to college, I changed the grip; I moved my pinky finger down. It’s pretty much a circle change. I grip it hard and think about it almost like a fastball. I don’t pronate. No one taught it to me. I just threw it one day and it worked. You have to tinker. You have to figure out what works for you.

“It’s gotten better over the last year. I think that’s mainly from my mechanics having changed a little bit. I use my legs more, and have shortened my arm action. I’m not so tall on the mound now. I’m activating my legs more, by getting into more of a squat position. And like I said, I think fastball. I throw it as hard as I can. My average fastball is around 92 [mph] and my changeup is around 88. Read the rest of this entry »

When baseball fans quibble with sabermetrics, one of the arguments I hear is, “If we can already predict everything that will happen, then why isn’t baseball just played on a computer?” It’s a funny stance to me for two reasons. First, statistics can’t predict everything; they can only tell you the odds of an event occurring. And, second, the randomness of baseball — and, really, sports in general — is something that even the most devout statisticians can marvel at.

Mike Fiers threw the second no-hitter of his career last week. Rachael McDaniel did a brilliant job of explaining how unlikely it was for Fiers, the individual, to have the fortunate of joining the group of 35 pitchers to throw two no-hitters in the big leagues. I just want to borrow a few lines from McDaniel’s prose, but you should really read the whole thing. It’s great:

That’s the wonderful thing about pitching achievements, the no-hitter and the perfect game. With their length and intensity, with the level of collaboration and the sprinkling of luck that is necessary to sustain that nine-inning walk along the knife’s edge, there is so much room for serendipity. In the annals of the no-hitter, you can just as easily find the greatest of all time proving why they’re the greatest as you can a roster of unlikely heroes — rookies, journeymen, washed-up veterans — who, for those few hours, reach out and find perfection.

I want to take a second crack of explaining how unlikely Fiers’ second no-hitter was, but with a different angle: math. Read the rest of this entry »

Rowdy Tellez’s weapon of choice is 34 inches long, weighs 32 ounces, and is made out of maple. Trey Mancini’s is 33-and-a-half inches long, weighs 31 ounces, and is made out of birch. Both do damage. The Blue Jays first baseman is known for his light-tower power, while the Orioles outfielder is coming off of consecutive 24-home-runs seasons.

How they went about choosing, and then settling on, their bat models differs.

“When I first got into pro ball, I signed a bat contract with Victus,” explained Tellez, who was drafted by Toronto out of an Elk Grove, California in 2013. “I told them what I wanted, and they sent me bats. I didn’t really like it at first, so I tweaked it a little more. I got to what they called an AC24, which is kind of a combination of models. It’s kind of like a 271 knob and handle, maybe a little bit thicker heading towards the barrel, and then almost like an I13 barrel, but circumference-wise a little bit thinner, and a tick longer. I’ve kind of stuck with that. It’s a comfort thing.”

Mancini was drafted by Baltimore out of Notre Dame in 2013. Three years later, a C243 model Louisville Slugger became his bat of choice. Read the rest of this entry »

The best prospects in baseball generally become very good major league players. When I looked at prospect valuations last year, on average, position players ranked first or second in baseball became three-win players in the big leagues with more than half playing at an All-Star level or above. Those averages and All-Star rates were far and away the best results for ranked prospects, with players just five spots down worth roughly half of what the players who were ranked among the top-two prospects in baseball were worth. There are certainly busts (with Delmon Young at the forefront), but most players do well. When I looked at players like Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. yesterday, one player showed up as bust-like in some of the charts, but I don’t think those charts were completely fair to Byron Buxton.

Here’s the chart showing top prospects in their 600 plate appearances after their first 10 games or so and how they performed over the rest of their careers. Byron Buxton should be pretty easy to spot.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you read about baseball on the internet these days, it’s tough to miss pieces on the changing relative skill levels of relievers and starting pitchers. As Sam Miller pointed out on Effectively Wild, relievers have a higher ERA this year than starters. Not only that, but the strikeout rate advantage relievers have traditionally had over starters is plummeting. Look at almost any statistic, and the historical edge relievers have had over those in the rotation has diminished.

At the same time, relievers are setting volume records left and right. For five straight years, relievers have set a new record for largest share of pitches thrown. In 2012, Rockies relievers struck out more batters than Rockies starters for the first time in baseball history, and you could convince yourself that it was a Coors field oddity. In the next six years, however, four more teams did it. From a bulk perspective, relievers are pitching more and more innings, carrying ever more of baseball’s pitching workload.

Clearly, these two effects are correlated. You’ve undoubtedly heard of the times-through-the-order penalty, the concept that starters fare worse each time through the batting order. In tandem with the innings spike by relievers, the number of pitches starters throw their third time through the order is plummeting. It’s not rocket science — the third time through the order is the time when starters are weakest, and those weak points are disappearing. Of course starters’ stats look better!

Given the changing roles of starters and relievers, it’s probably not right to look at unmodified splits to figure out whether starters are actually getting better relative to relievers. Even if the talent level of every pitcher remained exactly the same, cutting out a chunk of third-time-through plate appearances from starters’ cumulative totals will change their statistics. To actually see whether relievers are getting better relative to starters, we’ll need to do something a little fancier. Read the rest of this entry »

Things haven’t been going the Mariners’ way lately. With Tuesday’s loss to the Yankees, they fell to 19-19, thereby setting a record for the fastest plunge to .500 for a team that started the season 13-2. In the third inning of Thursday night’s contest, second baseman Dee Gordon departed the game after being hit on the right wrist by a J.A. Happ fastball, and after manager Scott Servais pinch-hit for fill-in Dylan Moore in the top of the eighth, he resorted to calling upon first baseman Edwin Encarnacion to shift to second base, a position he’d never played before during his 20-year professional career. When the Yankees’ DJ Lemahieu led off the bottom of the eighth with a 100-mph grounder towards second, the 36-year-old Encarnacion gamely dove for the ball, not only coming up empty but rolling the wrist of his left (glove) hand.

Encarnacion was able to continue, but Gordon is still being evaluated. So much for one wag’s theory that the move would improve the Mariners’ defense, which has been downright dreadful, as I noted in passing during my look at the Nationals’ porous defense and disappointing start. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Is it premature to call Michael Brantley the best free agent signing of the 2018-19 offseason? Probably, but that depends on how one defines “best.” Also important are the words “so far,” which are admittedly not in the initial question, but are still significant nonetheless. If we are trying to determine a total return on investment, we’d need to evaluate the impact of many factors, including those not specifically seen on the field.

By this process, one could argue that Bryce Harper has been the “best” free agent so far, generating increased interest in baseball in Philadelphia (attendance numbers are an indication of this) and setting the professional sports record for most jersey sales in the first 24 hours of a launch. Those are certainly positive numbers for the Phillies’ brass, but that’s not what I’m looking at here.

Narrowing our focus down to on-field production alone, no 2018-19 free agent signee has been better so far than the Astros’ new outfielder. Though 37 games, Brantley has produced 1.7 WAR, putting himself in first by a 0.4-win gap over the next closest player, Charlie Morton. He’s half a win ahead of the next position player, with Eduardo Escobar and DJ LeMahieu each having been worth 1.2 wins. Read the rest of this entry »

79 years ago Friday, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, triggering a new phase of World War II and leading to France’s surrender six weeks later. Contrary to popular belief, the French army was not weak, and fought well. In the end, their failure was one of planning and imagination. While the Maginot Line actually held until everything else collapsed — again, contrary to what many people today think — the French leadership widely assumed they could easily take the offensive in Belgium, keeping the fighting on their left out of France, and that the Ardennes were unsuitable for any kind of invasion. Neither of those things turned out to be true and what with most of the reserve the French had in Northern Belgium or the Netherlands, they were unable to counterattack; the German crossing of the Meuse in the first week doomed them.

The Cleveland Indians, while obviously finding themselves in a considerably sunnier position than being in a life-or-death struggle with an invader trying to wipe them off the map, have struggled in 2019 and are currently looking up at the Minnesota Twins by a four-game margin; their scuffling is largely the result of same failures of planning and imagination the French exhibited. The team had a viable plan for winning this season, but it involved believing in a number of very specific things being true. Now that some of those things have turned out not to be true, the team finds itself backed into a corner, with many weaknesses that can’t be easily painted over. The fight for the AL Central is very real.

Cleveland’s argument for winning the Central relied on the team’s strengths, the things that no other team in the division could match. There was a very good case to be made for the projected five-man rotation to be the best in baseball; ZiPS pegged them to go 71-41 with a 3.47 ERA in 911 innings, combining for 20.5 WAR. The other four teams in the division combined only possessed a single starting pitcher who projected at a level high enough to even make Cleveland’s rotation — Jose Berrios of the Twins. Read the rest of this entry »

Even after losing Bryce Harper to free agency, the Nationals were projected to win the NL East, but for the second year in a row, things are going awry. At 14-22, they’re actually five games worse than they were last year at this point; they currently own the worst record in the NL this side of the Marlins, who at least have the excuse of being bad by design (not that they haven’t been designed badly). With Wednesday’s sweep-culminating loss to Milwaukee, Washington has lost four games in a row, and 14 out of 19; they’ve dropped six straight series. They’re underperforming in virtually every phase of their game, and while injuries have been a part of the story, they’re hardly alone in that regard. Everybody hurts.

When the season began, the Nationals were projected for a .555 winning percentage, a 53.2% chance of winning the division, and a 25.9% chance at claiming a Wild Card spot, resulting in a 79.1% chance at a playoff spot overall. Through Wednesday, they’re down to 28.6% for the division, 16.8% for the Wild Card, and 45.4% for any playoff spot.

Those are still better odds than recent history suggests. While a sub-.500 start through 36 games isn’t fatal to a team’s playoff hopes, in the era of two Wild Card teams per league (since 2012), no team has dug itself out of a hole this deep at this particular point. Of the 70 playoff teams in that span, only seven were even below .500 at this point before recovering to claim a spot: the 2013 Dodgers (15-21); 2014 Pirates (16-20) and Royals (17-19); 2015 Rangers (15-21), Blue Jays (17-19), and Pirates (17-19); and 2018 Dodgers (16-20). It’s been 10 years since a playoff-bound team started 14-22, namely the 2009 Rockies.

Relative to our preseason projections as of March 21, the Nationals are the majors’ top underachievers by a wide margin: Read the rest of this entry »