Adam Wainwright wasn’t supposed to be pitching this season. After a 13-year run that had become increasingly injury-plagued since 2015, he was contemplating retiring at the end of 2018. His five-year contract extension, which had been paying him almost $20 million annually, was expiring at the end of the year and he had spent the majority of the season on the injured list with elbow inflammation. At 37 years old with a very successful and storied career under his belt, no one would have questioned him if he had hung up his spikes.

Wainwright returned to the mound for four starts in September and rediscovered his feel for pitching, even if his results didn’t exactly match. He allowed 12 runs in just over 22 innings in the final month of the season despite posting a 3.21 FIP during that stretch. Instead of a last-minute retirement tour, those four games became the building blocks for his resurgence this year.

It turns out the Cardinals weren’t ready to part with Wainwright either. They re-signed him to a one-year, incentive-laden contract with a $2 million base salary. With Carlos Martinez injured and then sent to the bullpen, Michael Wacha ineffective and also relegated to relief, and Alex Reyes not yet ready for prime time, the Cardinals have had to rely on Wainwright a little more than they were supposed to. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a strange couple of weeks for Francisco Cervelli. The 33-year-old Pirates catcher, who hasn’t played since May 25 due to a concussion, was quoted as saying earlier this month that he was giving up catching due to the toll of multiple concussions, but on Saturday, he refuted that report. Either way, his career appears to be at a crossroads, and his situation serves to remind us just how vulnerable catchers are to such injuries.

Cervelli — whose surname means “brains” in Italian, hence the nickname “Frankie Brains” — began the season in a slump and was hitting just .193/.279/.248 when, in a game against the Dodgers, Joc Pederson’s broken bat struck him in the mask:

He was placed on the seven-day injured list, and after undergoing several rounds of tests, wasn’t cleared to resume baseball activities until late June. It was the sixth documented concussion of the catcher’s 11-year major league career; he suffered one with the Yankees in 2011, two with the Pirates in 2017, and two last year. While he served primarily as a backup during parts of seven seasons (2008-14) with New York — a period that included a near-full season exile to Triple-A and a 50-game Biogenesis-related PED suspension — he’s been the Pirates’ primary backstop since arriving in a November 2014 trade for reliever Justin Wilson, one that rates as quite the heist given that Wilson’s 1.5 WAR in his lone season in the Bronx (though Yankees general manager Brian Cashman did flip him to the Tigers for Chad Green and Luis Cessa, a move that’s still paying dividends). Read the rest of this entry »

Ronald Acuña had Steve Cishek right where he wanted him. He had worked the count to 3-0, and with a man on first base, Cishek was in a tough situation. The Cubs led by only two, and that put Cishek in quite the bind. Walk Acuña, and the tying run would be aboard with no one out. Give him a pitch to hit, and the game could be tied in a single swing. Acuña waited, Cishek dealt, and the result:

Cishek, no doubt, made the exact pitch he was hoping for. Still, it was a tremendously aggressive swing from Acuña, at a pitch that he couldn’t do much with. No real harm done — Acuña walked on the very next pitch. Cishek, as it turns out, was wild that day — he’d walked Freddie Freeman before Acuña, and he walked Nick Markakis after him to load the bases. All three scored, and the Braves won. Still, what was Acuña doing swinging there? Cishek had thrown seven straight balls to start the inning. The Braves weren’t punished for Acuña’s aggression, but the swing seemed a bit out of place. Read the rest of this entry »

Bucky Jacobsen represents one of the rarest flavors of big leaguer: the rookie who succeeded and yet never got a second chance. An old 28 when he debuted in 2004, Jacobsen hit .275/.335/.500 in 42 games. His beefy build, bald head, and big bat made him a hero in Seattle; to this day you’ll occasionally see “Jacobsen” jerseys around the ballpark.

But those 42 games constituted the entirety of his career. A knee injury ended his season prematurely and recovery from surgery sidelined him for most of 2005. The Mariners released him that summer and he was out of the game completely two years later.

Such a quick rise and fall was naturally disorienting. In a recent Corey Brock profile at The Athletic, Jacobsen described the nagging feeling that he’d unjustly lost something: “To have success in the big leagues and then not be allowed to continue that? That felt unfair.”

We all know what it’s like to fall just short of our dreams; the Triple-A veteran who plateaus at the highest level is an easy guy to empathize with. But there’s something just as sad about the guys who get their chance, succeed, and fade away, like the dream itself never mattered.

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When you’re on the fringes of a big league roster, you develop a few peculiar rooting interests. You certainly want to play — you need to play, need to show why you deserve your spot on the team. But, if you’re a reliever of a certain stripe, some outings are more dangerous than others. You can call it the Goldilocks Theory of a big league audition.

If you’re the last man in the bullpen, you don’t really want to see the starter struggle. If the starter struggles, then the team needs someone to soak up innings. That person will be you, and in 2019, the inning sponge tends to get wrung out in Triple-A. Read the rest of this entry »

Adding injury to the ongoing insult that is their 2019 season, the Mets have placed Zack Wheeler on the 10-day injured list due to what the team described as shoulder fatigue and what the pitcher himself defined as impingement. The 29-year-old righty’s condition has been described by sources as “not a serious concern,” and the timing still leaves open the possibility that the pending free agent could return before the July 31 trade deadline and demonstrate his fitness for potential suitors. Nonetheless, the news puts a significant dent in whatever plans the Mets may have to retool amid a season gone awry.

Back in January, after signing free agents Jed Lowrie, Wilson Ramos, and Jeurys Familia, as well as trading for Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz, rookie general manager Brodie Van Wagenen boldly told reporters, “I look forward to showing people that we’re a team to be reckoned with. Let’s not be shy on wanting to be the best and I fully expect us to be competitive, to be a winning team. Our goal is to win a championship and it starts with the division. So come get us.” Last Friday, with the Mets 40-50 as they began the second half — fourth in the NL East, 13.5 games out of first place, and second-to-last in the Wild Card race at seven games out — Van Wagenen conceded, “They came and got us.”

Ouch. As the trade deadline approaches — and this year, there’s only one deadline, with no August waiver period during which teams can buy time for injured players to heal — it’s time for Van Wagenen to break up this non-dynasty. In a market light in frontline starting pitching, Wheeler figured to be an attractive rental option due to his combination of performance (more on which momentarily) and price (he’s making just $5.975 million). He’s drawn attention from the Braves, Brewers, Red Sox, Yankees, and probably other teams as well. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2018, Nick Pivetta struck out 27.1% of the 694 batters he faced. That’s not as impressive a figure as it would have been 10 years ago, but it was still the 14th-best such figure in the game last year, and caused me to write a piece last November called “You May Wish to Consider Nick Pivetta” in which I implored you, the FanGraphs reader, to consider Nick Pivetta. It’s been eight months since that piece was published, and Pivetta has faced 295 more batters. It’s time to re-consider Nick Pivetta, and see whether his performance has rewarded your close scrutiny.

The reason I’m writing about this now is not because the answer to that question is yes — it is, in fact, emphatically no, in the sense that Pivetta’s performance this season has mostly been bad and has occasionally been awful — but because Pivetta strikes me as representative of a type. In particular, Pivetta strikes me as representative of a player who shows us just enough to dream on, just enough to see signs of a breakout, that we read into those signs and give them more credit than they perhaps deserve. Nick Pivetta strikes me as representative of our optimism as observers.

So let’s talk about Pivetta — what made us dream, and what’s happened to that dream as this 2019 season has worn on. (All stats are through July 13.) Pivetta’s stand-out pitch is his curveball, a massive breaker that spins (2872 rpm, fifth in the majors this year), dips (7.2 inches of horizontal movement, 14th), and dives (-9.7 inches of vertical movement, ninth) with the very best of its kind. That’s the pitch that Pivetta learned to use differently against righties and lefties in 2018, much to his credit, taking an offering that had been predictably in the bottom left corner of the zone regardless of count or opponent and putting it in on right-handers’ hands (even when behind in the count), and down and in to lefties. Here’s what that looked like:

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 — Jose Leclerc, Evan Marshall, and Tony Watson — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Jose Leclerc, Texas Rangers

“I was around 10 years old when I started throwing it — 10 or 12 — and I thought it was a regular changeup. When I was playing Little League, nobody told me that it wasn’t really a changeup. I just kept throwing it, kept throwing it, and when I signed my contract with the Rangers, the pitching coach told me, ‘That’s not a changeup.’ I said, ‘That’s how I hold my changeup.’ He said, ‘No, that’s a slider.’ But I kept throwing it, kept throwing it, and it was good.

“It’s a changeup grip, but I throw it like a football and it moves kind of like a slider. I don’t know why. I’ve tried to show it to my compañeros — to my teammates — and they can’t do it. Sam Dyson; he asked me to show it to him. A few others did, as well. Some of them could kind of throw it, but they couldn’t command it like I do.

“I throw it the same now as when I was a kid. Everything is the same. It is better, though. I throw harder now, so there’s more movement. But what it is … I call it a cut-change. It’s just something natural that I have. I don’t how I do it. For real.” Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most significant stories of the past few years of baseball has been the changing composition of the baseball. I mean story in the grand narrative sense, but I also mean it in the sense of literal stories. The slice-open-a-baseball-and-catalog-its-contents article has gotten very popular over the last few years, as have studies of drag and bounciness. Physics is having a moment in baseball analysis.

One of the frustrating parts of breaking down the new ball’s effect on offense is that there was no clean way to isolate which hitters were helped most. Many batters adapted their swings to the new ball as the ball kept changing. The ball undoubtedly led to more home runs, as an independent panel reported in 2018. Which batters, though, were the biggest beneficiaries of the new ball? The launch angle revolution might increase batters’ home run rates, but surely a lot of its popularity comes down to the fact that home runs started flying out of the park at elevated rates as the ball changed. Separating cause from effect as swings and baseballs change over years’ worth of games is difficult. Our own Jeff Sullivan took a shot at it in 2016, but didn’t find much evidence for one group over another.

Luckily, this season provides a convenient, natural experiment. To much fanfare, Triple-A switched over to using the major league ball this year. Home runs predictably skyrocketed, driven by the new ball. This creates an opportunity for all kinds of research, such as this attempt by Baseball America to test out whether the ball changes fastball velocity. I thought I’d take the occasion of this new ball to investigate something I’ve always wanted to know about the home run surge: what types of hitters does the new ball help most? Read the rest of this entry »

As you might have already heard, RosterResource will be transitioning its baseball content to FanGraphs over the next few months. Effective today, the 30 depth charts can be found here.

Our first version is close to an exact replica of RosterResource, with a few important improvements. The load time is much faster, and player names link to the corresponding FanGraphs player page. In addition, the minor league power rankings, plate appearances, and innings will be updated daily as opposed to weekly.

In case you’re unfamiliar with RosterResource, here’s the lowdown. I created the site just over 10 years ago. It was initially called MLBDepthCharts but was renamed RosterResource a few years later. The idea was that the site would be an easy-to-read, visual interpretation of a team’s 25-man roster and organizational depth throughout the entire year. It has evolved over time, but at a pace that was never fast enough for me. With the move to FanGraphs, you should expect to see a cross-pollination of data and features from both FanGraphs and RosterResource in the hopes of bringing you a more useful product. Read the rest of this entry »

In January 2017, a publicist from SCP Auctions contacted me with an invitation to interview Jim Bouton, the pitcher-turned-author whose candid, irreverent, and poignant “tell-some” account of his 1969 season, Ball Four, became not just a best seller but a game-changer in the coverage of athletes, and a cultural touchstone that resonated far beyond the diamond. I jumped at the chance; not only had I first read a dog-eared copy of Ball Four at age nine, I had returned to the book countless times over the years, connecting to its outsider point-of-view and drawing the inspiration to write myself while crossing paths with Bouton a few times from 2000-08. Our conversations had always been a delight.

SCP was auctioning the Ball Four original manuscript and ancillary materials, “every note Bouton scribbled, every tape he recorded, the full manuscript and all the heated correspondence from Major League Baseball, which ordered him to deny it,” wrote the New York Times’ Typer Kepner. Also included was the edited manuscript “detailing the publisher’s attempt to gut the book of every tough, revealing, or sexual passage,” a letter from the publisher’s lawyer “identifying 42 instances of potential libel, and Bouton’s final edits that addressed only 4 of them,” correspondence related to Bouton’s always-contentious contract negotiations from his playing days, and “exquisitely maintained scrapbooks” kept by Bouton’s mother, detailing every stage of his career, including his 1978 comeback. The Ball Four lot, whose auction was scheduled to end on January 21, was expected to fetch “somewhere in the $300,000-to-$500,000 range” and already had attracted multiple bidders, according to the managing director of SCP Auctions.

The stars did not quite align. Initial hopes of conducting our interview face-to-face at MLB Network headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey, in connection with separately scheduled appearances on MLB Now, were dashed when the 77-year-old Bouton decided to pass on a trip from his home in the Berkshires to the studio. Instead, we did the interview by phone on Friday, January 13, eight days before the auction closed. What I did not know until calling was that Bouton was ailing. As his second wife, Dr. Paula Kurman, explained before our interview, he had not fully recovered from a 2012 stroke and had difficulty speaking (as well as reading and writing). Hence, she would assist with the interview.

Read the rest of this entry »