It all started with what I thought was an innocuous tweet.

The Reds released outfielder Matt Kemp on Saturday, and I sent a tweet with a few sabermetric stats — wRC+, WAR, and xwOBA — from his 2019 season. A few hours later, actor Chad Lowe (the brother of Rob) quote-tweeted my original post remarking that, and I’m paraphrasing here, analytics are ruining baseball. (The actual tweet contains profanity, but here it is if you’d like to see it.) My mentions filled up from there, and my original tweet ended up getting ratio’d by baseball fans who do not care for advanced stats. Lowe’s tweet started a new debate over the prevalence of sabermetric stats in mainstream baseball analysis, and it all played out in my notifications tab.

Since Saturday, Lowe and I have found a point of similarity, that being that there are some unquantifiable factors that go into the construction of a winning baseball team. It was a crazy few hours on Saturday night, to say the least.

Of course, I think we all know which side of the “saber v. Traditionalist” debate I fall upon, so this article isn’t going to be a further discussion about that. What I actually want to get into is the topic that prompted this whole debate: Kemp. 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 — Wade LeBlanc, Michael Lorenzen, and Lou Trivino — on how they learned and developed their cutters.

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Wade LeBlanc, Seattle Mariners

“I learned a cutter in 2009. I taught myself. That was after I got my brains beat in, and got sent back to Triple-A. I figured it was my last shot. If I was going to make anything out of this career, I was going to have to find something that worked.

“My fear about throwing cutters, or sliders, was always arm issues. I’ve never actually had an arm issue, but that was the fear. I didn’t want to throw something that could cause some problems with my arm, so I’d held off. But at that point, I was on my last legs. It was either figure something out, or go home. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday afternoon at Wrigley Field, a week after lasting just five innings (and giving up seven runs) against the Diamondbacks in Arizona, Kyle Hendricks threw perhaps the finest game of his six-year career. Nine innings. No runs. Four hits. Eighty-one pitches, not one of them flying faster than 90 miles per hour and only 18 of them landing, unchallenged, outside of the strike zone. If Noah Syndergaard’s complete-game, 10-K, no-run performance against the Reds on Thursday — during which he hit the home run that won the game 1-0 — was the logical end of 2019’s high-strikeout, high-velocity environment, then Hendricks’ was its precise opposite: the least 2019 game of the year. That these two starts could come on consecutive days is why we love baseball; it’s a beautiful game.

If you are willing to accept a contextual definition of “struggled,” then Hendricks probably struggled most in the first inning (the other candidate is the fourth, about which I’ll say more later). He went 2-1 on the always-dangerous Matt Carpenter to lead off the game, then retired the Cardinal star on the fifth pitch of the sequence with a sinking fastball right down the middle. Nobody knew it at the time, but Hendricks had already thrown more than six percent of the pitches he’d throw in the entire game. It took him just five more pitches to close out the first inning — four to Paul Goldschmidt and one to Paul DeJong — and Hendricks was on his way.

The DeJong plate appearance was perhaps the most critical of the entire game for what it told Hendricks and catcher Willson Contreras about how the Cardinals would approach him on Friday. When Hendricks has struggled this year, it’s been when he’s forced into the strike zone late in counts when hitters know he’s got to be there. Eight-eight miles an hour, in that situation, is often just too easy for big-league hitters to hit. Against DeJong, though, Hendricks saw what would become a trend for the Cardinals throughout the game: A willingness to be aggressive early in the count. Hendricks was perfectly willing to play into it. After starting the first two hitters with at least two balls before first getting into the zone, Hendricks started 21 of the next 27 with a pitch in the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

I thank God every day. It’s still a dream. Being here, it’s a dream. It’s surreal and I’m trying to hold onto it.

– Matt Shoemaker, 2013

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The Blue Jays are playing the A’s. Two out, an 0-2 count in the bottom of the third, a runner on first. Matt Shoemaker is facing Stephen Piscotty.

You can probably guess what’s coming next. It’s Shoemaker’s specialty, his put away pitch, the pitch he has thrown 71% of the time this season when facing a right-handed hitter in a two-strike count: a splitter, diving out of the bottom of the zone. Matt Chapman guesses, and he takes his chances, straying a few steps away from first. Stephen Piscotty guesses, and when the pitch leaves Shoemaker’s hand, he doesn’t swing.

They guess right — it’s a splitter, low, and it hits the dirt in front of Danny Jansen. Ball one. But Jansen recovers it faster than Chapman can recover his steps. He throws to first, where Rowdy Tellez is waiting, ready. They have Chapman caught. And as Tellez chases after him, ball in hand, Shoemaker does what he’s supposed to do. He runs from the mound to cover first, and when the ball comes his way, he, too, is ready. He sprints alongside Chapman, both of them unstable, the unwieldy dance of the rundown clearly in its dying stages. Shoemaker reaches out his glove, turns to avoid a collision, and suddenly —

Something is wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Grayson Greiner hit the first home run of his brief big-league career two weeks ago Friday. He then banged out number-two the following Tuesday. What did the blasts have in common? I asked the Detroit Tigers catcher that very question a day after the second dinger.

“They were similar pitches,” Greiner told me. “They were kind of down in the zone, and middle-in-ish. Both fastballs. One was off Ryan Burr, a right-hander for the White Sox, and yesterday’s was off Chris Sale. The one off the righty was on a 2-2 count, and the one off Sale was 1-1 count. I think the counts being even is a reason they were both home runs. I wasn’t sure what was coming, and that made me stay back a little bit longer, instead of getting out front. I was in a good, strong hitting position.”

Greiner and Burr know each other, having played summer ball together when they were collegians. Baseball friendships being what they are, Greiner received a text after the April 19 game saying, ‘Congrats on the first homer. I wish it wasn’t off of me.’ He didn’t hear from Sale after taking him deep. “He probably doesn’t know who I am,” was Greiner’s guess as to why that didn’t happen.

The fact that Sale is Sale, and Fenway is Fenway, made Greiner’s second-ever home run even more meaningful than his first. Read the rest of this entry »

To be frank, there aren’t a whole lot of reasons to watch the Marlins this season. As of this writing, they’re just 9-21 and already eight games out of first place. Unfortunately, the FanGraphs’ playoff projections had the Marlins’ odds at a measly 0.0% prior to the season. As you might have expected based on their record, these odds have not changed after a month of play.

The Marlins, as a team, have produced just 1.2 WAR this season. Of that, left-handed starter Caleb Smith has accounted for 1.0. Yes, you read that correctly. A single player on the Marlins’ 25-man roster has produced 83% of the team’s entire WAR. I don’t know if that is good or if that is bad. Well, I know that Smith is good, and the Marlins are bad. So, I guess that answers that.

Smith has had a stellar beginning to his season. In six starts, spanning 36 innings pitched, Smith has posted a 2.00 ERA, 2.81 FIP, and a 26.9 K-BB%. His aforementioned 1.0 WAR ranks 13th among qualified starters, and his 33.6 K% is tied with Blake Snell for fourth. The only pitchers with a higher strikeout rate than Smith this season are Gerrit Cole (37.6%), James Paxton (36.2%), and Jacob deGrom (34.8%). I’ll let those names stand for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Senzel burst onto the national scouting scene with an MVP campaign in the Cape Cod League in 2015, hitting .364 with 21 extra base hits in 40 games. He steadily rose up boards throughout the spring when it became clear his raw tools were better than many had thought at first blush, with above average raw power, speed, fielding, and throwing tools, and a 1.051 OPS, 40/21 BB/K, and 34 extra base hits in 57 games. Senzel’s baseball skills (specifically a 60-or-better hit tool with at least above average plate discipline) along with being young for his class (he didn’t turn 21 until after the draft) came together to make him a complete package as the top hitting prospect in the 2016 draft for most clubs.

The Reds took him second overall and we ranked him as the top prospect in the Reds’ system and 30th best prospect in baseball that winter after a loud pro debut, mostly in Low-A:

Senzel has above-average bat speed and bat control. His swing can get long at times and, despite simple hitting feet, his front foot sometimes gets down late which causes the rest of his swing to be tardy, as well. He was getting that foot down earlier during instructional league. He has above-average raw power, which should grow to plus as Senzel reaches physical maturity (he was only 20 on draft day and is well built), though it doesn’t play to that level in games because Senzel doesn’t incorporate his lower half into his swing especially well. If Senzel reaches a point when it would be useful to alter some aspects of his swing to generate more game power I think he’s athletic enough to make the adjustments.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve written a lot about James Paxton here at FanGraphs, and deservingly so. The obvious reasoning is that Paxton is a very good pitcher. The intrigue builds once you consider that he throws hard, is a lefty, has thrown a no-hitter, and flaunts a lot of tools that just have the look of being very electric. In 2019, he also plays for the Yankees, which, whether you like it or not, means that he will be in the general media spotlight more.

In the past, Jeff Sullivan wrote several articles on Paxton’s explosive fastball and how he gets swinging strikes with it in the top of the zone. In terms of fastball usage, not a lot has changed. Paxton still throws pretty hard, and he uses his heat pretty frequently and gets whiffs with it. However, there’s always a room for improvement, even for pitcher who’s as good as Paxton is.

Paxton has struck batters out a lot this season. That is not a news. He’s always been a strikeout pitcher in his big league career. But after striking out 32.3% of the hitters he faced last year, his 2019 numbers are up to 36.2%. There was a concern over how Paxton, a fly ball pitcher, would adjust to the home run-friendly confines of Yankee Stadium, but we haven’t seen any problem yet; he’s posted a 0.78 HR/9 IP and 9.1% HR/FB rate so far. And he’s been one of the most valuable pitchers in all of the majors. As of May 2, his 1.5 WAR ranks third among all starters behind Max Scherzer and Matthew Boyd. All in all, he’s having a pretty good season. So what has led to the improvement?

Looking at his pitch usage, we don’t see a huge overhaul, but there is a notable change. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — “It’s probably more rare than a perfect game, I’d guess,” said Mets manager Mickey Callaway on Thursday afternoon. “To hit a homer and win 1-0 with a shutout, that’s got to be one of the rarest things in baseball.”

Callaway was speaking of Noah Syndergaard’s two-way tour de force against the Reds at Citi Field, and he was correct. Dating back to the 19th century, major league pitchers have thrown 23 perfect games, the most recent on August 15, 2012, by the Mariners’ Felix Hernandez against the Rays. By the most generous count, just nine other pitchers have accomplished what Syndergaard did, the last of them the Dodgers’ Bob Welch on June 17, 1983, also against the Reds.

You don’t see that every day.

“Awesome,” said the 26-year-old Syndergaard when informed that he’d accomplished something that hadn’t been done in 36 years.

Read the rest of this entry »