The first week of baseball is a wondrous time to be a baseball fan. It’s also a weird time to be a baseball writer. On one hand, baseball is happening, and that’s a relief after the long dark night of the offseason. On the other hand, not that much baseball has happened, and most of the seemingly noteworthy stories are small-sample noise. Give me an early-season take (Tim Beckham is great! Sandy Alcantara is a top-10 pitcher!), and I’ll likely dismiss it as a fluke. One performance this week, however, made me sit up and take notice. Corbin Burnes struck out 12 batters on Sunday, and the way he did it should have Brewers fans, and baseball fans in general, salivating.

At first glance, Burnes’ start against the Cardinals is a textbook case of not reading too much into a single start. He struck out 12 batters and walked only one, which is obviously incredible. On the other hand, he gave up three home runs and only lasted five innings, producing a what’s-going-on split of a 6.53 FIP and 0.00 xFIP. If I were a betting man, though, I’d wager that the strikeouts are more predictive than the home runs. Why? Corbin Burnes’ fastball was absolutely ludicrous, and in a way that you can’t fake.

Most of the things that happen in a baseball game are contextual. Did a pitcher strike a lot of hitters out? Well, consider who was batting. If it’s a bunch of high schoolers or the 2019 Giants outfield, that’s an extenuating circumstance. Did he give up a lot of home runs? A ton of factors go into that. One thing that isn’t contextual is a pitch’s spin rate. The batter doesn’t influence it. Pitch selection doesn’t influence it. It doesn’t take long to stabilize. It’s basically as clean as it gets in baseball statistics — you throw the ball, and you get your results.

When Burnes threw the ball on Sunday, the results were off the charts. Burnes fired 61 four-seam fastballs on Sunday. His velocity was down a tick or so from last year, when he worked out of the bullpen — nothing unusual about that. His spin, on the other hand, was wholly new. Burnes averaged 2912 rpm, and it’s hard to explain how crazy that is. It was nearly 150 rpm higher than last year’s league leader in average spin rate, Luke Bard. The fastball that Burnes spun most slowly, at 2660 rpm, would have been good for the second-highest fastball spin rate in baseball last year.

Burnes has always been a high-spin pitcher (11th in baseball among pitchers who threw at least 100 fastballs in 2018), but this is an entirely different level. Spin rates vary from start to start, but not like this. In fact, Burnes made thirty appearances last year, and the gap between the highest spin rate he recorded and the lowest was 270 rpm. Sunday’s start was 200 rpm faster than last year’s highest rate. Graphically, that looks pretty absurd, like so:

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As a part of the FanGraphs staff predictions for this season, I picked the Boston Red Sox to win the American League East, and the New York Yankees to pick up a wild card slot. All 32 of us picked the Yankees to make what would be a third consecutive trip to the postseason. And our preseason projections pegged the Bronx Bombers for 99 wins, the best record in baseball, and a whopping 66.4% chance of winning the American League East. The Yankees – on paper, at least – were and are good.

But life, they say, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. The Yankees have started slowly, yes, but a 2-4 record is hardly alarming when you’re less than a week’s worth of games into a 162-game season. More worrisome is the fact that the Yankees’ injured list is suddenly beginning to resemble an All-Star team in its own right. First, newly extended center fielder Aaron Hicks went from tweaking his back in Spring Training to receiving two cortisone shots to an indefinite injured list stint with a lower back strain. That’s not good, seeing as Hicks is the second most valuable center fielder in the American League since 2017, behind some guy named Mike Trout. Still, the Yankees are deep, and they could plug Brett Gardner into center field without suffering a major catastrophe.

If this had been the team’s only major injury, the team might have been fine, especially on the back of what was projected to be an elite starting rotation. But also-newly-extended ace right hander Luis Severino joined Hicks on the shelf late in Spring Training after suffering rotator cuff inflammation, and isn’t expected back until May. Shoulder problems, including rotator cuff injuries, are notoriously finicky in pitchers, and while there’s no reason to believe Severino’s injury is more serious that we know, we also don’t know how the hard-throwing right-hander will fare after returning from the injury, particularly after not having had a single Spring Training start. With C.C. Sabathia’s farewell tour on hold after offseason heart surgery, the Yankees’ rotation suddenly started to look a little thin.

But no matter. The Yankees still had a fearsome lineup and perhaps the best bullpen ever, right? But then Dellin Betances’ spring training fastball clocked in the high-80s, and it wasn’t long before a shoulder impingement was diagnosed as the cause of his missing velocity. So Betances joined the list of the Yankees’ walking wounded.

Of course, why should the pitching staff have all of the fun? On the same day, two lynchpins of the Yankees’ fearsome lineup – outfield adonis Giancarlo Stanton and sophomore third-sacker Miguel Andujar – both suffered significant, and potentially long-term, injuries. Stanton suffered a left biceps strain whilst swinging and missing in just the team’s third game of the season, and Andujar suffered a small tear of his labrum diving into third base in the same game. By the end of the team’s second series of the year against the Tigers, Troy Tulowitzki had joined the injured list as well with a calf strain.

How bad are the Yankees’ injuries? Right now, including Tulowitzki, New York has 11 players on its injured list; no other team has more than eight. Here’s the complete list, with 2019 Depth Charts projected WAR:

• Miguel Andujar (1.9)
• Dellin Betances (1.1)
• Jacoby Ellsbury (0)
• Didi Gregorius (1.6)
• Ben Heller (0)
• Aaron Hicks (3.2)
• Jordan Montgomery (0.2)
• C.C. Sabathia (1.4)
• Luis Severino (4.1)
• Giancarlo Stanton (4.2)
• Troy Tulowitzki (0.9)

That’s 18.6 projected fWAR on the injured list at one time, which is more than the 2019 projected WAR for the entire Orioles team. That might also be understating the value of these players; they posted a combined 26 WAR in 2018. Some of these injured list placements were expected; after all, both Gregorius and Montgomery are still recovering from Tommy John surgery and aren’t expected back until midseason, and outfielder Ellsbury fell into a temporal vortex and likely will never be heard from again. Still, that’s a contending team’s starting third baseman (Andujar), starting shortstop (Gregorius), the replacement for the injured starting shortstop (Tulowitzki), starting left fielder/designated hitter (Stanton), and starting center fielder (Hicks), along with its No. 1 (Severino) and No. 4 (Sabathia) starters, and primary setup reliever (Betances), all injured at once.

That’s a lot of WAR for any team to lose, even the Yankees, even temporarily; the team is missing the equivalent of one and a half Mike Trouts. So in some ways, it’s a minor miracle that even after losing that much talent, the team is still projected to win 95 games. In fact, owing to the Red Sox’s nightmarish West Coast trip, the Yankees’ odds of winning the division have remained relatively steady since Opening Day, though they have dipped slightly.

The good news is that the Yankees’ pitching staff is well equipped to weather the storm. Johnny Loaisiga and Domingo German have both impressed as replacements for Sabathia and Severino. Even without Betances, a bullpen featuring Adam Ottavino, Zack Britton, and Aroldis Chapman is still fearsome, even if Chad Green has been hittable in the early going. James Paxton and Masahiro Tanaka have been great. Sabathia is expected back before the end of April, with Betances back around the same time. Severino’s return is somewhat murkier, but projected around May or June. In short, the Yankees should still spend the bulk of their season with their pitching at least largely intact.

The larger problem is one you wouldn’t have anticipated going into the season: the offense. And unlike the pitching staff, help isn’t arriving any time soon. Stanton hopes to be back in early May barring a setback, but Andujar is without a timetable and still may require season-ending surgery. All of a sudden, an infield without a place for D.J. LeMahieu to play regularly just a week ago is deploying Tyler Wade as its starting second baseman. Didi Gregorius won’t be back until the second half.

With so many big bats missing, the result is about what you’d expect. The Yankees gave up just six runs in their most recent three-game set against the Detroit Tigers, but scored only five and dropped two out of three. Tuesday, a lineup featuring D.J. LeMahieu batting fifth managed just one run against Jordan Zimmermann; Wednesday, the team struck out 18 times against a Tigers pitching staff that ranked just 24th in pitcher WAR, 25th in FIP, and 26th in strikeout rate in 2018.

The second wild card gives the Yankees a considerable margin for error, as does their depth. It might all prove to be fine. That said, with Tampa Bay, a deep and talented team in its own right, off to a 5-1 start, and the Red Sox healthy, the Yankees might not have the luxury of treading water until their injured players return if their goal is to win the division. Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez can’t carry the offensive load by themselves, and Greg Bird is himself injury-prone. Clint Frazier is talented, but untested and coming off a concussion that ruined his 2018. Unless the team is willing to use heavy doses of Mike Tauchmann and Tyler Wade moving forward, the Yankees may have no choice but to start looking for offensive help from outside the organization.

This spring, Randal Grichuk is following Mike Trout. The outfielder whom the Angels drafted with the 24th pick in 2009, one slot before they chose a player who’s already in the conversation for the greatest of all time, is the latest to agree to a long-term extension. It’s significantly less than Trout’s 12-year, $430 million pact, of course, but Grichuk nonetheless guaranteed himself a substantial payday by agreeing to a five-year, $52 million deal with the Blue Jays, covering the 2019-23 seasons. That’s not too shabby for a player who was viewed as a fourth or fifth outfielder when he was acquired from the Cardinals in January 2018.

As the Blue Jays have steered themselves into rebuilding mode by shedding the likes of Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson, J.A. Happ, Russell Martin, Troy Tulowitzki, and others over the past 18 months, either via trade or free agency, the now-27-year-old Grichuk has emerged as more than just a backup. Last year, he started 84 games in right field, another 25 in center — largely when Kevin Pillar, who coincidentally was traded to the Giants on Tuesday, the same day that Grichuk’s deal was announced, missed time with a shoulder sprain — and one in left field. Despite hitting just .106/.208/.227 in 77 plate appearances before missing all of May due to a right knee sprain, he set a career high with 25 homers while posting his highest on-base percentage (.301), slugging percentage (.502), and wRC+ (115) since his 2015 rookie season. Read the rest of this entry »

After a strong 2017 campaign for Tampa and Baltimore led some observers to declare, perhaps prematurely, that the former No. 1 pick had finally figured out how to sustainably deliver on his sky-high potential, Tim Beckham’s 2018 performance was sufficiently awful (a 79 wRC+ over 402 plate appearances) that the Baltimore front office declined to tender him a contract and left him to sign a $1.75 million deal with the Mariners in early January. Well, for a guy who was probably only intended to hold the middle of the field warm until J.P. Crawford gets the call up to Seattle at some point later this summer, Beckham has had a remarkably good first week in the Queen City:

Usually, I wouldn’t note a first week like this except in passing — Preston Tucker was hitting .435 through his first seven games of 2018, after all — except for two things. First, Beckham was hurt — with a core muscle injury that required surgery — throughout much of 2018, which suggests that perhaps his poor performance over the full season was less a reflection of a regression from 2017’s breakout and more what you’d expect from a player toughing it out through a debilitating injury. Second, Beckham has actually had a pretty good five weeks, dating back to September 1st of 2018. Since that date, his wRC+ of 186 is eighth-best in the game.

Beckham has always had good power to all fields, but until 2017, that power was too often undercut by a tendency to end at-bats early by swinging at the first pitch he saw offered close to the zone. In 2017, he solved the mental hurdle that had pushed him to try to do too much and instead started taking a few pitches early in at-bats until he found the one he wanted. “These days,” he told me back then, “I want to see the ball in the zone where I can drive it, and if it’s not” — here, a pause — “I want to trust that it’s going to be a ball.” The core injury hindered his ability to execute on that mindset in 2018, yes, but since September of last year, he’s been able to put it into practice again. The results have been impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s something that won’t surprise you. The number one starter in all of baseball last year, when it came to getting batters to chase pitches outside the strike zone, was Patrick Corbin. Of course it was Patrick Corbin! Dude threw 95% sliders last year, and that’s only a little bit of an exaggeration (it was a little over 41%, if you’re intent on checking my math). The second guy on the list, a minuscule 0.1% of out-of-zone swing rate behind Corbin, was Jacob deGrom. I mean … yeah. DeGrom had a 1.7 ERA last year and struck out 32% of the batters he faced. People swung at a lot of pitches outside the strike zone.

At number three, though, the list takes an unexpected turn. The third-highest chase rate in baseball last year belonged to Miles Mikolas, and it’s hard to think of a pitcher who resembles Corbin and deGrom less than Mikolas does. While the aforementioned duo both had top-10 strikeout rates among qualified starters, Mikolas was in the bottom ten. Corbin and deGrom were exemplars of the new three-true-outcome direction baseball has taken (mostly one true outcome, in their case), while Mikolas had essentially the lowest three true outcome rate in all of baseball. What does it mean to generate a ton of swings outside the strike zone but few strikeouts?

Making sense of how Miles Mikolas operates is difficult. He’s kind of a unicorn — you probably think you can name pitchers like him, but none of them fit. Is he Kyle Hendricks, the pinpoint control artist with a preposterous changeup? Mikolas doesn’t even throw a changeup. He also sits around 94.5mph with his fastball, top 20 among qualified starters in 2018. Hendricks has the slowest fastball in that group. Is he a rich man’s Mike Leake, perplexingly effective despite never striking anyone out? That’s not it either — Leake never generates swings and misses, and never is barely an exaggeration here. He’s had a bottom-10 swinging strike rate every year he’s been a qualifying pitcher. Mikolas, meanwhile, is around league average. Leake also, somehow, throws significantly fewer strikes than Mikolas — Mikolas put the ball in the strike zone a league-leading 48% of the time last year. Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty-three months ago, I wrote about how Jon Duplantier was no longer perfect. The previous day — May 2, 2017 — he’d allowed a pair of earned runs while pitching for the Low-A Kane County Cougars. Going into that game, Arizona’s third-round pick in the 2016 draft had a 0.00 ERA in 21.1 professional innings.

He’s still perfect in MLB. Duplantier debuted with the Diamondbacks two nights ago and tossed three scoreless frames against the San Diego Padres. He did so out of the bullpen, which likely isn’t his eventual home. When assessing this past season’s Arizona Fall League performers, our own Eric Longenhagen wrote that “Duplantier was arguably the best non-Whitley pitching prospect who was a lock to start.”

The former Rice Owl isn’t ranked as high as Forrest Whitley on our 2019 Top 100 Prospects list — the Astros phenom comes in at No. 4 — but Duplantier did make the cut at No. 87. He’s Arizona’s top pitching prospect for the second year running.

On an idyllic Monday evening in SoCal, he was on top of the world. Duplantier entered with his team up 9-3 — the final was 10-3 — and his post-game quotes encapsulated his emotions perfectly. As chronicled by D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro, the 24-year-old righty described the experience as, “Sheer joy. I felt like a child and they were like, ‘Hey, go play. Run free, go play.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Amid winters that were rather underwhelming relative to the excitement of their respective 2018 seasons, the Braves and Dodgers brought back a pair of familiar, if grizzled, faces, namely 35-year-old Brian McCann and 36-year-old Russell Martin. Now several years removed from their last All-Star appearances, neither figures to do the bulk of the catching duty for their respective teams in 2019. Our new pitch framing metrics underscore what they bring to the table at this stage of their careers, as well as just how valuable they’ve been over the years — valuable to the point of amplifying their cases for Cooperstown.

McCann, a Georgia native who was drafted by the Braves in 2002 and spent 2005-13 with the team, making seven All-Star appearances while playing a part on four postseason-bound squads, signed a one-year, $2 million deal to return to Atlanta in late November, the five-year, $85 million deal he signed with the Yankees in December 2013 having expired (McCann spent 2017-18 in Houston, following a 2016 trade). The plan is for him to share time with Tyler Flowers, who started 70 games behind the plate for the NL East-winning Braves last year; Kurt Suzuki, who started 83 games, signed a two-year, $10 million deal with the Nationals.

McCann is coming off the weakest year of his career, having hit just .212/.301/.339 (79 wRC+) in 216 PA over 63 games with the Astros. He spent over 10 weeks on the disabled list with a torn meniscus in his right knee, which required surgery in early July. That knee, which also sent him to the disabled list in August 2017, may have been a factor in his atypically rough season behind the plate as well. Via Fox Sports South’s Cory McCartney, the knee “became so unbearable that it left the left-hander unable to push off his plant leg at the plate and it became difficult to squat as moving around on it led to a fluid buildup. ‘Every time I would land, my knee would collapse,’ McCann said. ‘I should have gotten the surgery done after the (2017) World Series — but thought I could get through it, I just couldn’t.’”

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On Monday night, the Orioles — who last year lost 115 games, the third-highest total of the post-1960 expansion era — won their third game out of four in this young season, beating the Blue Jays, 6-5. The win itself was less notable than the pitching performance of David Hess, a 25-year-old righty in his second major league season. Hess no-hit the Blue Jays for 6.1 innings while the Orioles built up a 6-0 lead, but before he could pitch further, rookie manager Brandon Hyde gave him the hook.

It would be an exaggeration to say a large group of people lost their mind at this decision, in part because the game between a pair of rebuilding teams was being played in Toronto in front of just 10,460 paying fans, but there were those who took umbrage. “David Hess Got Pulled From His No-Hitter Because The Orioles Are Clowns” read one Apple News-driven tweet promoting a Deadspin piece by Tom Ley that apparently has since been retitled, “This Is The Face Of A Man Getting Pulled In The Seventh Inning Of A No-Hitter.” USA Today’s Ted Berg called it “one clear instance where the numbers suck the fun out of baseball.” Somewhere a sports talk radio yakker probably turned purple and declared this The Downfall of America, though WFAN’s Mike Francesa almost certainly slept through the start.

What Ley noted (but Berg did not) — and here I don’t mean to pick upon either, because both are fine writers — is that Hess had thrown 42 pitches in relief on March 28. meaning that he was working on three days of rest, which helped to explain why Hyde pulled him after 82 pitches instead of pushing him further. Indeed, the manager cited a concern for the pitcher’s health and the long season as primary in his thinking. To Berg’s point, the fact that Hess was about to face the middle of the Blue Jays’ batting order (Justin Smoak, Randal Grichuk, and Rowdy Tellez, admittedly not exactly Murderers’ Row) probably entered into the manager’s decision as well, given that the Cubs’ former bench coach was chosen for this job in part because it was time to bring the Orioles into the 21st century, analytics-wise. For what it’s worth, batters hit .299/.371/.612 for a .408 wOBA in 97 PA against Hess last year under such circumstances. That wOBA was the ninth-highest out of 131 qualifying pitchers. Not Great, in layman’s terms. Read the rest of this entry »

It isn’t hard to justify a player’s reasoning for signing a long-term extension. It isn’t hard to justify Ronald Acuña Jr. wanting to secure his future. In 2014, the Braves phenom received a signing bonus of $100,000 and then spent the next three and a half years making almost nothing. Last season, he made a bit more than half a million dollars. He was set to do the same this season and next before finally cashing in to the tune of somewhere between four and eight million dollars, unless he manages to win an MVP award, in which case it would bump him up closer to $10 million. Earning just over $1 million for his six years after signing as a professional baseball player isn’t nothing, but it’s also not $100 million, and per Jeff Passan, Ronald Acuña Jr. appears set to sign a contract for a guaranteed $100 million over potentially the next 10 years of his professional baseball life. It’s a lot of money, but it also might be the biggest bargain of a contract since Mike Trout’s six-year, $149.5-million contract signed in 2014 or Albert Pujols‘ eight-year, $100-million contract signed in 2004.

Acuña isn’t on the level of Trout or Pujols, and odds are he never will be, but he is already a very good player. Our Depth Chart projections have Acuña as a four-win player today at 21 years old, sitting right next to J.D. Martinez, Javier Baez, Joey Votto, and Matt Carpenter. Dan Szymborski ran the ZiPS projections for Acuña’s next eight seasons; he averaged about four and a half wins per season, putting him right in line with expectations for Freddie Freeman and Anthony Rendon this year. Acuña is already one of the game’s better players, and his age should keep him at that level for the next decade before he declines, so he gave away potentially four free agent seasons and arguably his entire prime for a fraction of what he might have earned otherwise.

There are two paths to walk down when it comes to putting this contract in perspective. The first is to compare the deal to the one just signed by Eloy Jimenez. The White Sox prospect was guaranteed $43 million over the next six seasons despite never playing a day in the majors. If things break well for him and the White Sox, he will make $77 million over the next eight years and give up one free agent season. Acuña, who has already played a season in the majors and performed really well, will make just $90 million over the next eight seasons if things break right and will have given up two free agent seasons. Then it gets worse for Acuña, because $10 million of that $100 million guarantee is a buyout of a $17 million option for a ninth season followed by another option for $17 million. Those option prices are incredibly small when free agents or free-agents-to-be like Manny Machado and Nolan Arenado are making twice that today, not to mention what salaries might be like eight years from now. According to Passan, the most Acuña could make over the next 10 seasons is $124 million. Read the rest of this entry »

There probably won’t be many bright spots for the Orioles this year. Coming off of an awful 47-115 campaign in 2018, there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement to say the least, but even still, Baltimore is projected to be the worst team in baseball yet again. They did, however, open their season by taking two of three games against the Yankees, who project to be the best team in the majors. So perhaps we already have found bright spot No. 1.

Nonetheless, the Orioles employed the opener on Saturday, pitching Nathan Karns for two innings before turning to Jimmy Yacabonis as their first arm out of the bullpen. Karns was solid, limiting the Yankees to just one hit (though he did walk three) and no runs. Yacabonis, too, pitched well; he only allowed one run in his three innings of work. In the third, Yacabonis recorded both of his strikeouts on the day. The victims were Aaron Judge and Luke Voit. Read the rest of this entry »