Marcell Ozuna has had a solid start to his 2019 season. Through 89 plate appearances, Ozuna has hit .256/.348/.615 (150 wRC+) with eight home runs, producing 0.6 WAR. Ozuna’s WAR total puts him in the 67th percentile among qualified hitters to begin the year; that’s not elite, though it’s certainly not bad, either.

But what if I told you that there is a pitcher who has produced as much position player value as Marcell Ozuna, as Nelson Cruz, as Jean Segura, Whit Merrifield, Byron Buxton, Jay Bruce, Mike Moustakas, and a host of other solid hitters? Would you believe me? Could you guess who it is?

One of the (few) fun things about small sample baseball season is the ridiculous numbers that come from it. Jay Jaffe already covered some of these blips from both the pitcher and hitter perspective, but there’s one overlapping case that, at least to me, was worth discussing in its own separate piece, the answer to the above questions, perhaps obvious given this piece’s title: Zack Greinke.

This whole idea came about when I was glancing over the Statcast leaderboards at Baseball Savant a few days ago. At the time, the default setting on the hitter numbers was just 10 batted ball events, allowing for some smaller samples to sneak their way into prominent positions on the board. But there’s no position more prominent than No. 1, and seeing Greinke leading all major league hitters in barrels per plate appearance made me chuckle. It also made me take a second look at his season stats this year.

In 13 plate appearances, Greinke has slashed .500/.545/1.300 (361 wRC+). He has hit two home runs, two doubles, and a single, all while drawing a walk without registering a single strikeout. That’s better than Barry Bonds‘ slash line after 13 plate appearances (.400/.538/.900) in 2004, when he went on to post a ridiculous 1.422 full-season OPS. Let’s marvel at that for a second while we watch Greinke’s two home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

All major league pitchers throw pretty hard, and on average, fastballs are hitting close to 93 miles per hour these days. Pitchers throwing 95 seems common-place, and we regularly see pitches in the upper-90s. Pitchers throwing the ball really hard seems routine, but that should make us appreciate pitchers throwing the hardest even more. As pitch velocities get higher and higher, there are still upper limits, and the players who tend to reach those upper limits seem to find themselves alone. Right now, Jordan Hicks is alone.

The graph below represents all the fastballs thrown, except those by J.R. Murphy, this season.

It might be difficult to see the bars at 102 mph and above, so here’s a chart showing those pitches.

And to further clarify matters, here’s the average fastball velocity for pitchers with at least 10 fastballs this season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Chavis lived a dream on Saturday. The No. 3 prospect in the Red Sox system not only made his MLB debut, he banged out a pinch-hit double in his first-ever at bat. He did so against Tampa Bay’s Jose Alvarado, with one on and one out in the top of the ninth inning, and the score knotted at five apiece. Boston went on to score, then held on for a 6-5 win.

There’s a pretty good chance that Chavis was the happiest person in Tropicana Dome that night. He was certainly one of the most excited. At age 23, the native of Marietta, Georgia had done in real life what he once fantasized about doing while batting rocks with a stick in his family’s back yard.

Chavis described the thrill-of-lifetime experience prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

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Michael Chavis: “I wasn’t in the lineup — I was on the bench — but I knew the situation. They’d said there was a chance I would get to hit that day. Of course, I didn’t know when, who for, or who would be pitching. Come the eighth inning, looking at the lineup and how the game was playing out, I was thinking there was a chance.

“I’m taking some swings in the cage, and they come in and say, ‘Hey, you’re going to pinch hit in the ninth.’ I’m like, OK. Beautiful. ‘Who’s pitching?’ They say, ‘It’s Alvarado.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, wow.’ He’s a talented guy. Very good fastball.

“I’d faced him in spring training. I’d just come back from being sick, and it was kind of a similar situation in that I didn’t know if I was going to hit. I went up there and K’d on something like four pitches. I hadn’t seen a pitch in seven days, which made a 100-mph fastball that runs like his even more difficult to see. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Rob Arthur and Tim Dix of FiveThirtyEight helped to reveal to the masses that the core of the major league baseball had changed, reducing the air drag and resulting in the ball traveling farther in the air. Ever since then, the ball has been a recurring topic of conversation, including here at FanGraphs. The subject got a re-boot earlier this month when Arthur, writing for Baseball Prospectus, concluded that there’s less drag on the batted balls hit in the 2019 season, which has led to more speculation that the league has “juiced” the ball.

While it is fun to see more dingers and harder hit batted balls, there’s something to be said about how the league may or may not have deliberately manipulated the ball to make it happen. It’s fun to see players like Aaron Judge have a 50-homer season in his rookie campaign or to watch Giancarlo Stanton flirt with a 60-homer mark on the way to earning an MVP award, but fans may question how “authentic” those feats are compared to the pre-juiced ball days, though it’s worth noting that the liveliness of the ball has changed throughout baseball’s history.

Here in Korea, there’s been an opposite trend. Prior to the start of the 2019 season, it was reported that the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) would decrease the coefficient of restitution (COR) value in their baseball. To put it in layman’s terms, the higher the COR number is, the further the ball travels from the impact of the bat. Last year, the KBO allowed baseball COR values between .4134 and .4374. To put that in contrast, Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) in Japan allows it to be between .4034 and .4234; MLB allows between .3860 and .4005. The KBO decided to lower it to the NPB’s Mizuno baseball level of between .4034 and .4234. There’s a reason for such a change. If you’ve followed the KBO for awhile, you know that the league has been quite hitter-friendly for the past few years. Here’s how hitters fared in the three seasons prior to 2019:

To give you an idea how hitter-friendly an environment it was, MLB hitters slashed .248/.318/.409 overall in 2018. The recent baseball change is not the first time the KBO has attempted to curb its high-offense environment. In 2017, they increased the length of the strike zone, which I wrote about during my residency last year. It had an effect, but not really a lasting one. The umpires struggled to maintain consistency with the zone and the hitters adjusted well enough to keep up the league’s high-offense reputation. Read the rest of this entry »

It would not have been a surprise if Christian Yelich had leveled off after coming out of Baseball Nowhere (a.k.a. Miami), joining the Brewers, and winning the NL MVP award. He may yet do that, because nobody makes baseball look so easy for very long. Thus far this season, however, the 27-year-old slugger appears to be improving in several areas, and despite Monday night’s 0-for-4 against the Cardinals — just the third time in 24 games that he had failed to get on base this year — he’s been as hot as any hitter in baseball, batting .337/.439/.820 with a 210 wRC+.

Yelich began his 2019 season with an Opening Day home run off the Cardinals’ Miles Mikolas, and proceeded to go yard again in each of the next three games, thus joining Willie Mays (1971), Mark McGwire (1998), Nelson Cruz (2011), Chris Davis (2013), and Trevor Story (2016) as the only players to homer in each of his team’s first four games. After a relatively quiet 12-game stretch in which he homered just once, he broke out with a three-homer game against the Cardinals on April 15, the first hat trick of his career. Thus began an eight-homers-in-six-games binge that, if not for a bit of highway robbery by the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger on Sunday, would have been nine homers in seven games.

Even with his two-game drought, Yelich’s 13 homers in his team’s first 24 games put him in select company. 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 — Robbie Erlin, Tommy Hottovy, and Marcus Stroman — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Robbie Erlin, San Diego Padres

“I started throwing my curve when I was nine. Everybody frowns upon that — throwing one that young — but I never had any problems. Basically, my dad put me on one knee and taught me. It was almost like casting a fishing reel. What that does is… when you throw a curveball, you want your elbow to come up a little bit. If your elbow is coming down to throw the curveball, you get exposed. That’s when it’s dangerous [health-wise].

“My dad pitched in high school — he was a righty — and he told me that’s how he was taught. So yeah, he put me on his knee and said, ‘Just flip it to me. Just work on spin. We’re not throwing it hard.’ Eventually I got the feel of it. I started throwing it in games — flipping it out in games — but only once in awhile. Not too much as a kid. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s still April, so it may be premature to talk about the year’s most extreme events. If a home run was hit on a high pitch, there will likely be a higher pitch that gets hit for a home run later on. Think an umpire called a perfect pitch a ball? We’ve got plenty more time for an even better pitch to be missed. However, I think we may have already seen the best pitch frame of the year.

I don’t mean the pitch furthest outside the strike zone that gets called a strike — there’s still plenty of time for that to change. I’m talking about full dedication to the craft of pitch framing. Francisco Cervelli sold a pitch against the Cubs not just with his glove and his positioning, but with his whole being. You’ll probably see worse pitches sold for strikes this year. Heck, you might see Cervelli get more egregious calls than this. You won’t see better framing, though — I can pretty much guarantee it. Read the rest of this entry »

As players decline, we tend to focus on what they have lost since their primes. Whether it is velocity, speed, or power, what is newly absent is typically most notable. This is particularly true for once-great, Hall of Fame-type players like Clayton Kershaw. The Dodgers’ ace is one of the greatest pitchers of all time, but the last few seasons have seen his fastball velocity dip considerably, which has negatively affected his numbers. I noted late last season that Kershaw was no longer a fastball pitcher, and instead used his slider as his dominant pitch. This spring, some focus switched to his changeup, and how Kershaw might need something new to combat what he has lost. So far this season, Kershaw has been effective by going to his strengths and using hitter tendencies to his advantage.

Through two starts, Clayton Kershaw has pitched 13 innings, struck out 13 batters, walked four, and given up two homers and four runs total. If we assume that Kershaw will give up homers at a slightly lesser rate but keep the same strikeout and walk numbers, he’d be one of the best 10 or 20 starting pitchers the rest of the season. While we obviously can’t say he will do that, we can look at what he’s done so far and see what has made him successful this season compared to years past. While we won’t focus on Kershaw’s fastball, we can’t escape it entirely. Here’s the graph I used last year showing how Kershaw’s slider usage overtook his fastball.

That trend has held up so far this season, with Kershaw throwing one more slider than fastball in his first two games. That fastball has averaged just over 90 mph, several ticks slower than his prime. It’s a fine fastball, but the velocity is below-average. To get batters out, Kershaw has been forced to go away from his fastball and to his offspeed offerings. This is particularly true when Kershaw is ahead. The graph below shows Kershaw’s fastball usage when ahead in the count since 2011. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Yordan Alvarez, 1B, Houston Astros
Level: Triple-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 7   FV: 50
Line: 2-for-4, HR, 2B

Notes
It’s important that we look at Triple-A statistical performances (especially in the PCL) in a different light given what is transpiring with the baseball itself, but we can still appreciate Alvarez’s blistering start with that in mind. After a little over two weeks, he’s slugging .870; nine of his 17 hits have been home runs, and he has one more walk than strikeout thus far. He’s played eight games in left field, five at DH, two at first base, and one in right field. Most all of Houston’s big league hitters are mashing right now (Tyler White is hitting lefties, at least), so there’s not an obvious short-term path to big league playing time here. If anyone goes down though, perhaps Alvarez will get the call instead of a struggling Kyle Tucker. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, Braves franchise building block Ozzie Albies agreed to an eyebrow-raising extension that was widely considered to be among the most team-friendly in recent baseball history.

There was already speculation that the deteriorating state of free agency appeared to be incentivizing extensions, but Albies’ deal was shocking even given those concerns. Veteran baseball scribe Jeff Passan went so far as to say that the deal was being considered in major league circles as “among the worst ever for a player.” That leads to a number of uncomfortable questions about how these deals are to be handled in the future – by players, by the league, and by the Major League Baseball Players’ Association.

Let’s start with Albies’ representation, an agency called SportsMeter. According to MLB Trade Rumors’ Agency Database, Albies is among the agency’s more marquee clients, with the firm also representing Craig Kimbrel, Nicholas Castellanos, and Francisco Lindor, among others. (According to some reports, SportsMeter also represents Cleveland ace Corey Kluber.)

SportsMeter hasn’t had a great offseason. Not only did they negotiate the much-maligned Albies deal, but they have been unable to broker a contract for their biggest pitcher client, Kimbrel, despite entering the offseason with dreams of a nine-figure contract. That’s led to some speculation from former Brave Eric O’Flaherty that the Albies deal was part of an effort to land a deal for Kimbrel with the savings. Other players certainly haven’t been shy in expressing their feelings about it. Castellanos, who is headed for free agency, may have had similar feelings when he switched his representation to Scott Boras last week. Other baseball writers like Passan and Evan Altman have suggested that SportsMeter may have negotiated the deal now so as to obtain a commission before Albies decided to sign with a bigger agency. Read the rest of this entry »