When we talk about teams not taking advantage of the best seasons of their stars, there’s no better example than Mike Trout and the Angels. You could make a 90-win team by simply building a .500 team around Trout, and yet the Angels have been able to do this only once with their center fielder. But they’re hardly the only team to fritter away the prime of top talent. Enter the Colorado Rockies.

The Rockies can hardly be called a grand failure on the field, having won 87 and 91 games in 2017 and ’18, making the playoffs in consecutive years for the first time in franchise history. But you could also argue that it’s a team that you can say underperformed those win totals, especially last year. The 2018 Rockies won 91 games, but that was with two legitimate Cy Young and MVP contenders; after successfully doing the hard part and finding legitimate stars, they’ve repeatedly failed to put a halfway competent team around those stars.

To illustrate this, here is team WAR from 2017, 2018, and 2019 (through July 29) outside of a team’s top two position players and top two hitters. As noted above, the Rockies have done as good job finding high-end talent as any team in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Parker, who signed with the Phillies as a free agent today for terms not yet disclosed, struck out 33.9% of the batters he faced as an Angel in 2017 and walked just 6.3%. That performance earned him two consecutive one-year, $1.8 million deals: one with the Angels, for 2018, and one with the Twins for this year. Parker wasn’t all that effective in Minnesota, though, posting a 5.35 FIP over 36.1 innings pitched, and he lost Rocco Baldelli’s confidence in July, earning just six appearances after getting 12 in June. Now he’s a Phillie, after the Twins designated him for assignment on July 24 and he cleared waivers three days later.

The problem in 2019 appears on the surface to be velocity, especially on the fastball. That pitch was averaging 93.9 mph just two years ago, then dropped down to 92.8 last year and 92 so far this year. Parker can succeed without a fastball at 94 — he posted a 2.90 FIP over 46 innings with the Cubs in 2013 while it sat at 92.8 — but he threw his curveball nearly a third of the time back then, and that pitch has never been particularly effective. In late 2018, he added a cut fastball that he now throws about 7% of the time, almost entirely at the expense of his four-seamer, but the overall package just hasn’t come together. His strikeout rate and swinging strike rate are both down even as contact against him is up:

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A glimpse at Robbie Ray might look like an ace at work. Four times this season, Ray has struck out at least 10 batters while walking one hitter or fewer. Only Gerrit Cole, Chris Sale, and Max Scherzer have more matching games. Since the beginning of the 2016 season, Ray has struck out 31% of batters faced; among the 183 starters with at least 200 innings, only Scherzer and Sale have higher strikeout rates. The strikeouts are great, but Ray’s walk rates and inability to pitch deep into games has long held him back. While he has continued to work to get better, the changes have continued to lead Ray back to being the generally above-average pitcher he’s always been.

Ray’s first full season with the Diamondbacks in 2015 was a solid one, with a 22% strikeout rate, a 9% walk rate, and an ERA and FIP both in the mid-threes, about 10% better than average. Ray tried to get better by changing his delivery slightly, as he told David Laurila in 2016, and become a “strikeout madman”, as August Fagerstrom detailed. His strikeouts went way up, but so did his homers, though his 3.76 FIP was again about 10% better than average. Some bad luck on balls in play meant an ugly 4.90 ERA and the questions began about Ray’s ability to pitch deep into games and limit hard contact.

In 2017, Ray ditched his changeup as well as his sinker and used his curve much more, as Eno Sarris wrote at the beginning of the season. Ray increased his strikeout rate even more, though his walk rate climbed a bit as well and he still gave up his fair share of homers on the way to a 3.72 FIP that was 15% better than league average. It was Ray’s best season and whatever bad luck he had from 2016 turned itself around in 2017, to the tune of a 2.89 ERA and a handful of down-ballot Cy Young votes. Last year was a disappointing one, as Ray missed two months with an oblique injury and posted his first below-average FIP in Arizona. His walk rate surged, though after a rough start to open the second half, he closed the season well with a 3.78 FIP that was about 10% better than average and a 2.83 ERA thanks to a very low BABIP. Read the rest of this entry »

I was a Nationals season-plan holder for two years, and amid all the wins and losses, one thing in the game remained a constant delight: walk-up songs. Music is an integral part of a baseball game; it’s played between at-bats, after a run is scored, and also between innings. However, the best tunes are always chosen by the players themselves. A walk-up song is a crucial decision, one that could follow a player throughout the season. It should be a jam that both hypes them up and won’t be annoying when played three or more times a day.

Go to any ballgame and you will hear a dozen different walk-up songs, spanning musical genres from reggaeton to pop to metal. I remembered a wide variety of music from my days at Nats Park, and it got me wondering whether that variety was reflected throughout the rest of baseball. I decided to do an analysis of player walk-up songs, building off a similar “study” conducted by Meg Rowley in 2016, back when she was at Baseball Prospectus. MLB maintains a database of players’ chosen walk-up music. Using that, I was able to break players’ selections down by genre. Does the league as a whole demonstrate the same musical range the Nats do?

It does! The top genre is rap/hip-hop, while house music rounds out the bottom with 11 songs. Those listed under “other” include salsa, classical, and soundtrack music.

Now, let’s talk country. Only 8% of walk-up songs are country tunes. “Burning Man” by Dierks Bentley is the most popular, but that’s not the interesting thing about this list. When I think of hype-up music, there are several country artists who have appropriate jams. You could go with Carrie Underwood or Dolly Parton or Rascal Flatts. (Don’t laugh — I know you sing along to “Life is a Highway” any time you hear it.) I want to know why five players needed a hype song and ended up with Johnny Cash. Read the rest of this entry »

Early in the season, Luis Castillo was the pitcher drawing eyeballs in the Cincinnati Reds rotation. After showing flashes of elite potential in his first two seasons in the big leagues, the right-hander had reached new heights with his ridiculous change-up, and the numbers he posted over the first six weeks of the season had him getting serious attention as a Cy Young favorite. After years of abysmal pitching staffs, the Reds finally looked like they had an ace on their hands.

A couple of months later, however, Castillo’s been surpassed in WAR by a teammate who once garnered ace buzz at a similar age. In 21 starts, Sonny Gray has been worth 2.7 WAR, thanks to a solid 3.51 FIP to go with a 3.47 xFIP. Castillo has had trouble with walks as the season has progressed, but overall, his numbers remain fairly strong, and optimism surrounding him is deservedly high. Quietly, though, Gray has been every bit as good.

While Castillo entered the 2019 season with the expectation that his best years were ahead of him, Gray faced the question of what he had left to offer. He picked up 7.4 WAR from 2014-15 with the Oakland A’s, finishing third in Cy Young voting in the second of those seasons. His ERA ballooned to 5.69 in 2016, but he returned to approach another 3 WAR season between Oakland and New York the following year. That paved the way for a truly head-scratching 2018 season in which his home-road splits reached absurd levels, and he failed to stick in the rotation, allowing a 5.26 ERA in 23 starts. Viewing him as a lost cause, the Yankees were determined to trade him last offseason, and found a match with Cincinnati in January. Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies have bolstered the back-end of a flagging rotation, which by some measures ranks among the National League’s worst. What’s more, they’ve done so through an upgrade obtained from within the division, namely the Mets’ Jason Vargas. The 36-year-old southpaw doesn’t light up radar guns or dominate hitters, but he does give a youngish rotation a left-handed presence with playoff experience — and at a negligible cost to boot. His being dealt by the Mets was highly anticipated, not only given Sunday’s acquisition of Marcus Stroman, but also because he angered the Mets’ brass with his involvement in a clubhouse altercation with a beat reporter in June.

Philadelphia gets:

LHP Jason Vargas
Cash considerations

New York gets:

C Austin Bossart

Vargas, who is now in his 14th major league season, has rebounded from a dreadful, injury-wracked 2018, during which he was torched for a 5.77 ERA and 5.02 FIP in just 92 innings, and an ugly beginning to this year when he yielded 10 runs in his first 6.1 innings and failed to last five innings in three of his first four starts. Overall, he’s pitched to a 4.01 ERA and 4.71 FIP, and since returning from a mid-May left hamstring strain that cost him 19 days, he’s turned in a 3.34 ERA and 4.01 FIP.

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On Saturday, the Marlins and Twins pulled off a pre-deadline swap.

First, the trade:

Miami gets:

1B Lewin Diaz

Minnesota gets:

RHP Sergio Romo
RHP Chris Vallimont
Player to be Named Later

This deal’s immediate big league relevance centers around 36-year-old Romo, who has had an incredible career for a reliever, especially one who throws as hard as he does. Romo’s fastball has never averaged more than even 90 mph, topping out at 89.9 mph during his rookie year, while average relief fastballs now hum in at 93.6 mph. His 9.8 WAR ranks 15th among relievers since he debuted in 2008, and splitter wizard Koji Uehara is the only other soft-tosser ahead of him.

Most of our readers have probably seen enough of Romo over the last decade to know that he’s been exceptional because of his ability to locate, and change the speed and shape of, his trademark slider. Hitters know that slider is coming — he’s thrown it roughly 53% of the time during his career, second most to Carlos Marmol among all pitchers with 400 or more innings since Romo debuted — and yet Romo’s surgical placement of the pitch just off the plate, equal parts enticing and unhittable, has had big league hitters flailing away at it across more than a decade now. Read the rest of this entry »

If you just glanced at his player page for a second, you might think Lucas Giolito was falling apart. After a triumphant first half, during which he paired a 30% strikeout rate with a 9.5% walk rate on his way to a 3.15 ERA and 3.23 FIP, he made the All-Star team. And this was no automatic invite extended to the best available White Sox player; he was simply one of the best pitchers in baseball, running comparable park-adjusted numbers to Stephen Strasburg, Walker Buehler, and Zack Greinke.

From that great height, Giolito’s second half has had a rocky beginning. In three post-break starts, he’s compiled a 5.6 ERA, with a FIP over five. A lot of that ugliness is driven by a pasting at the hands of the Twins, when he allowed four home runs and seven runs over five innings, but it’s not as though there weren’t other warning signs. In his last pre-break start, he went only four innings against the Cubs, walking five batters on his way to giving up six earned runs. All told, it was a beyond-forgettable July for Giolito.

Situations like this are among the most difficult for writers to assess. Pitchers are fickle, and there’s no better example of that than Giolito. In parts of three seasons from 2016 to 2018, he was below replacement level, whether you’re into runs allowed or FIP; over 240 innings, he ran a 5.48 ERA and 5.68 FIP. He only struck out 16.2% of batters he faced while walking 11%. He still had some prospect shine, but projection systems weren’t buying it: ZiPS projected him for a 5.03 ERA in a lower-scoring environment than what we’ve realized in 2019, while Steamer foresaw an even higher 5.32 ERA.

Of course, Giolito proceeded to make those projections look ridiculous. Through 16 starts, roughly the first half of his season, he pitched nothing at all like the projections. That 30% strikeout rate was nearly double what the two projection systems expected, and his walk rate was significantly lower — you get the idea. Essentially, Giolito looked like an ace. If there was cause for concern, it was unsustainable home run suppression — he’d allowed a 9.7% HR/FB rate in the first half, and for a fly ball pitcher, that adds up. The point, though, is that Giolito went from replacement-level disappointment to deserving All-Star. Read the rest of this entry »

After is appeared the Mets put some more eggs in their 2020 basket by trading for Marcus Stroman, there now seems to be a pretty distinct possibility that the club is merely moving eggs around as it attempts to deal Noah Syndergaard. With the relative dearth of impact arms on the market and the decreasing likelihood of a Madison Bumgarner deal, Syndergaard could be the biggest name and best pitcher to change teams this week, even including the recently acquired Stroman. The trade package necessary to land Syndergaard should be significantly richer than the one the Mets gave up for Stroman, given Syndergaard’s relative track record, age, and the extra season of team control through 2021. As was the case with Stroman, there are some discrepancies in how good Syndergaard is as a pitcher given his 4.33 ERA.

Nobody disputes that Sydergaard was an ace for the Mets back in 2016 when he put up a six-win season with a 2.29 FIP and 2.60 ERA. He missed most of 2017 with a torn right lat muscle. In 2018, despite missing more than a month with a finger injury and a little bit of time with hand, foot, and mouth disease, Syndergaard was still one of the best pitchers in the game, posting a four-win season, a 2.80 FIP and 3.03 ERA. This season, Syndergaard’s FIP is very good, but his ERA is not. There’s a fairy simple explanation for that disparity, and for the gap between Syndergaard’s FIP and ERA throughout his career. Simply put, the Mets infield defense is very bad and has been very bad throughout the right-hander’s career:

A .315 career BABIP, and and the lower FIP than ERA, could be an indicator that Syndergaard gives up hard contact. The Statcast numbers tend to disagree:

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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 former pitchers — Jason Frasor, Brandon Gomes, and Pete Walker — on how they learned and developed their versions of the split-finger fastball.

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Jason Frasor, Toronto Blue Jays all-time leader in appearances

“I always called it a changeup, but I did split my fingers. If you saw it, you’d be like, ‘Oh, he throws a splitter,’ but the problem was, my hands are really small. I could never spread them really far. I came off three elbow surgeries, including two Tommy Johns, OK? So I just didn’t know how to spin the ball anymore. All I had was a fastball.

“One day, Bruce Walton — remember Bruce Walton? — was like, ‘Try this.’ He said to spread my fingers and throw it like a fastball. I practiced it for a little bit, then took it out to a game. And it was great. That was my rookie year, and for the rest of my career it was my secondary pitch.

“How deep I held the ball in my hand depended on the day. And the climate. If I was in Seattle, where it was cool — it was dry and cool — I usually had a great one. If I was in Texas, I was worried. The pitch would kind of just squirt out of my hand. Weather effected my changeup. Therefore, I’d maybe have a little pine tar in my hat. Read the rest of this entry »