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 »

Over the last month, a lot of players have elected to forego participation in future free agent classes by signing contract extensions. Ten players within two years of free agency have signed contracts worth more than $50 million, totaling over one billion dollars in future guarantees. The list includes the best player in baseball, two of the very best pitchers in the game, and multiple other MVP candidates. It’s hard to get a sense how much of signing these contracts is due to players trying to avoid free agency, and much is due to teams simply having boatloads of cash and happily paying their star players to stick around. Earlier today, we published Opening Day payroll numbers showing another decline, with these extensions having little effect on current salaries. To help make some sense of all these extensions, there is a survey below that might help answer some of our questions.

The survey is relatively simple one, asking two basic questions about each of the 10 players who signed extensions, as well as one other rumored to have been in talks. The first question gets at how good the player is now by asking what type of contract he would have received had he been on the open market this past offseason. While I could ask how the player did with his extension, the answer can be kind of mushy. Instead, I’ll ask you to project in the future, and based on what you know about the player now, estimate what the player would receive in free agency when he would have become eligible. For all but the the last three extensions, that period is after the current season.

The relevant player pages with projections are linked below, with the survey to follow.

• • Nolan Arenado
  • Paul Goldschmidt
  • Aaron Hicks
  • Miles Mikolas
  • Chris Sale
  • Justin Verlander
  • Anthony Rendon
  • Mike Trout
  • Jacob deGrom
  • Kyle Hendricks
  • Xander Bogaerts

Thanks for your help.

It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for Yusei Kikuchi. Not only did he see his first action as a major leaguer, a well-documented dream of his since his high school days, but his father passed away after a long battle against cancer. He is staying in the United States in accordance with his father’s wish that he concentrate on baseball. It is quite hard to imagine what the young pitcher must be feeling, and we wish for the best for him and his family in this difficult time.

Kikuchi has made two starts for the Mariners. While some data exists from his days in the NPB, MLB presents a new challenge. We can’t reach any grand conclusions about him as a major leaguer yet, but we can make observations and possibly, some extrapolations. At this moment, here are the basic numbers: 10.2 innings pitched, five hits, three earned runs, two home runs, eight strikeouts, and one walk. Kikuchi currently has a 2.53 ERA and a 4.25 FIP. It’s too early to make any calls, but Seattle has got to be pleased with the return so far.

Our analysis of this limited sample becomes trickier because we only have Statcast data for one of his starts. His Tokyo start – you know, the one where Ichiro announced his retirement mid-game – is not registered there because the Tokyo Dome isn’t equipped with Trackman or PITCHf/x cameras. So, we have his 91-pitch start against the Red Sox on March 29, which is quite a small sample to work with. Kikuchi’s tendencies could change as he pitches in the majors and adjusts to either his strengths or hitters’ weaknesses (or both). With those the caveats understood, his early efforts still merit examination.

Let’s start with the obvious here: the fastball. Since he was an acclaimed prospect at the Hanamaki Higashi High, Kikuchi has been known in Japan for his fastball velocity. In 2017, he set what was then an NPB record for the fastest pitch recorded by a left-handed pitcher with a 158 kmph (roughly 98 mph), though it should be noted that his average fastball velocity was 148.6 kmph (around 92.3 mph). In 2018, his velocity slipped a bit. According to Delta, an NPB sabermetrics site, it went down to 147.3 kmph (around 91.5 mph) last year. He suffered shoulder tightness that was later diagnosed as decreased functionality of shoulder last year, so that seems to have played a part in the decline in velocity. Of all his pitches, the fastball is the only one that Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel did not describe as above average in their write up of Kikuchi for in this year’s top 100.

Against the Red Sox, Kikuchi averaged at 93.1 mph. Statcast had him as high as 95.4 mph. It is not Ohtani-esque big velocity, but it is a range that should work in the majors, especially if he can maintain it through starts consistently locate it like this:

By average velocity, he’s comparable to the likes of David Price and Sean Newcomb. Maybe he’ll gain a tick or two as the season goes on or maybe he’ll get worn down. I don’t know. But as far as the velocity goes, Kikuchi can say he belongs in the majors. One thing of note is that his fastball only induced a whiff once out of the 43 times he threw the pitch. Statcast measured the pitch’s average spin rate at 2,173 rpm. According to Travis Sawchik, an average fastball around 93-94 mph measures out to 2,240 to 2,300 rpm. At least for that one start, his fastball was not seen to be a swing-and-miss weapon, as his velocity would indicate. Obviously, Kikuchi has arm strength, but not all 93 mph fastballs are created equally. Luckily for him, he has another tool in his toolbox that drew many more swings-and-misses: his slider.

Kikuchi’s slider features a nasty 10-5 tilt. He used it as a swing-and-miss pitch in Japan, and he’s used it as one in his early going in the majors as well. Against Boston, he generated seven whiffs from 22 sliders used, which is pretty good! Here’s one to Xander Bogaerts that I feel is representative of how he likes to use the pitch.

And here’s one to Sam Travis that had a particularly vicious bite.

Looking at Kikuchi’s slider heatmap from that game, we see a lot of low and inside pitches to the right-handed heavy Sox lineup. Being aware of his pitch tendencies from the NPB, I’d assume he meant to locate them that way as well. It’s hard to draw a conclusion at this moment, but Kikuchi’s slider has been rated above-average, as noted by Eric and Kiley. Future value grades don’t always come to fruition, but I would say that Kikuchi’s slider could forecast well in the majors.

As for the bad, Kikuchi did not necessarily avoid the meat of the zone. Here is his pitch heatmap:

The good here is that Kikuchi located well to the inside edge versus right-handed hitters, and away versus left-handed hitters. However, there’s that big dark and red circle towards the middle-up part of the strike zone that indicates that he was also prone to leaving pitches “up there.” FanGraphs rated his command as a 45-grade, which is just below major league average. As of this moment, Kikuchi has thrown 64% of his pitches for strikes and allowed only one walk in 10.2 innings pitched. Those are good control numbers. Command is a different thing. The Red Sox hitters were much less than forgiving on Kikuchi’s mistake pitches.

Here’s J.D. Martinez going yard on a fastball right down the middle. The catcher had his glove up and in, but the ball missed the spot and Martinez drove it over the center field fence.

Here’s another home run allowed, this time against Xander Bogaerts. The explanation is simple – the catcher appears to have wanted it down and away but the fastball went right down the middle, which is likely to be punished by many major league hitters.

Pitching is extremely hard. You must stand a mark and locate each pitch into a glove size smaller than a pie tin from 60 feet 6 inches away. But it’s also the nature of the business – if you miss even so slightly, major league-caliber hitters can hit it a long way. It is worth noting that every pitcher makes mistakes. It’s the matter of minimizing the amount of them. There will be days when Kikuchi will makes fewer mistakes, and there will probably be days he makes more.

What’s curious for now is that Kikuchi has noticeably bumped up his curveball usage. Here’s the chart of his March 29 start versus his 2018 pitch data with the Seibu Lions, thanks to the NPB sabermetric website Delta.

It’s an interesting bump. He never threw his curve more than 11.1% in a season with the Seibu Lions. He was known for his fastball/slider mix in Japan. The curveball, according to multiple scouting reports, was a third pitch that he would use to give different looks. And it’s not just his start against the Red Sox either. Over at Lookout Landing, Jake Mailhot recorded Kikuchi’s pitch data by hand during the Athletics game in the Tokyo Dome. The chart below indicates that Kikuchi has shown very similar pitch mix for his first two starts as a big leaguer.

One theory on why Kikuchi increased his curveball usage lies in data. Last June, Jim Allen of Kyodo News wrote on how Kikuchi relies on data to make adjustments to things like his release point and extension. I’m not sure how much attention he puts on his pitch metrics, but his curveball does grade out well on Statcast. Take a look at his pitch data from Baseball Savant:

Not only does an effective curveball give hitters another thing to worry about, but the velocity difference can also make his heater stand out more. Here’s a curveball that he threw to the reigning AL MVP Mookie Betts. Betts reacted like he was not expecting this pitch. He held up a for a microsecond and got his bat head out, but made weak contact that ended up being a groundout.

He didn’t generate any whiff with the pitch, but it induced two bits of weak contact for an overall .124 xBA. He also used it to get ahead in counts. Out of 18 curves thrown, nine of them were called strikes. Here’s one of them to Betts.

Kikuchi has had two decent starts and the pitch has worked well, so I don’t anticipate him making drastic changes anytime soon. It will be something to monitor, though. History has shown that many successful pitchers – Tanaka, for instance – have demonstrated the ability to modify their approach to survive in the majors. As time goes on, major league teams will have a book on how to approach Kikuchi. Once they know better what to expect, I don’t know how successful they’ll hit against him, but surviving in the majors involves series of adjustments. If Kikuchi runs into a harder time getting hitters out, I would expect him to take a different approach.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that Kikuchi seemed to struggle when facing the order the third time around. In a very small sample, Kikuchi faced five batters a third time through the order between the A’s and Red Sox games, and allowed two hits, including that aforementioned JD Martinez home run. Again, it is hard to draw conclusions out of five-batter sample, but the concern is not unfounded. The lack of a big fastball could become a problem late in games in instances where he struggles to give hitters different looks. As Bill Petti has written for FanGraphs about how pitchers with a big fastball — who can maintain that velocity late in games — are more likely to pitch deeper.

There will be so much more Kikuchi to watch. Personally, I’ve waited for awhile for him to arrive to the majors, as I’ve written about the lefty a couple of times in the past. Two starts in, Kikuchi gave his team a real chance to win on both occasions. For a starting pitcher, there’s not a lot more you can ask for.

Earlier this offseason, I wrote that even if everything broke right for the free agents who remained on the market, we’d see a roughly one percent increase in Opening Day payrolls compared to last year. At the time, I cautioned that things were not likely to break right for the remaining free agents, and that a similar exercise the year prior ended with a one percent drop on Opening Day. Even worse for the players, that one percent drop last season turned into a 2.5% drop by season’s end. Opening Day payrolls are down again in 2019 by roughly the same amount as last year. If last season’s scenario were to repeat itself, the players will be looking at a half-billion dollar swing in revenues to owners in 2019 alone even if we assume that the split between players and owners was 50/50 two seasons ago.

As we begin the 2019 season, here’s a look at every team’s Opening Day payroll, per Cot’s Contracts, which includes a team’s 25-man roster plus whatever other obligations they’ve accrued to players who are on the injured list or no longer with the club.

The Red Sox, coming off their World Series win and the highest major league payroll in 2018, look poised to repeat at least one of those designations this season with a decent shot at both. The Yankees appear just above $200 million this season after a major decline last season, though the team first crossed the $200 million barrier back in 2005, so it is hardly heady territory for them. The Cubs have seen their payroll rise as they try to augment their World Series-winning core with free agents, though they sat this winter out. The Nationals kept up spending after Bryce Harper’s departure, and Los Angeles looks to be trying to stay under the competitive balance tax for the second straight season after averaging a figure more than $50 million higher the previous three seasons. At the lower end of the spectrum, we see the usual suspects of smaller-market teams and traditionally weak-spenders. Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ve no doubt heard, we’re living in a golden age for position players pitching. Don’t believe me? Read the copious articles written about it in the past few years. At this point, you know the broad strokes of the genre. You know that position players are pitching a lot more often these days. You know that it’s funny because they’re not that good at pitching, but also funny because they’re not as bad as you’d think.

It’s gotten so common, so normal, that less than a week into the 2019 season, we’ve already had a game where position players pitched on both sides. That game had a little bit of everything: John Ryan Murphy was terrible, allowing seven runs in two innings. Russell Martin was perplexingly effective, setting the side down in order in his one inning of work to close out the Dodgers 18-5 win over the Diamondbacks. He was the first full-time position player to close out the ninth inning of a game since 1963.

There was one thing missing from that game, though — neither “pitcher” recorded a strikeout, and strikeouts have been, in my opinion, criminally under-reported in all the coverage of position-player pitchers. Those embarrassing-but-not-that-embarrassing pitching lines? They were compiled against real, honest-to-god major league hitters (and also occasionally pitchers pretending to be major league batters). We all know that position players pitch well enough to occasionally get strikeouts, and that’s a pretty great fact. Take a minute, though, to consider this: the pseudo-pitcher’s small triumph is also the batter’s great failure. He just struck out, the most miserable feeling in baseball, and he did it against a guy who’s out there goofing around.

In 2018, position-player pitchers struck out 22 batters. On the one hand, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but on the other hand — that’s a lot! Still, though, not all of these strikeouts were created equal. There’s a lot of distance between Gerrit Cole striking out against a utility infielder and Eugenio Suarez going down on strikes against a backup catcher. I wanted to chronicle this, because in a year there might be too many strikeouts for it to be interesting or too few to devote an article to. I sat down and watched all 22 strikeouts and separated them into tiers of embarrassment. These guys might be multi-millionaires. They might be unfathomably strong and coordinated baseball machines, but sometimes they mess up the easiest tasks. They’re just like us. Who couldn’t relate to that?
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 — Corbin Burnes, Ty Buttrey, and Steve Cishek — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

Corbin Burnes, Milwaukee Brewers

“Coming out of high school I was mainly fastball-curveball-changeup. When I got to college, my coach approached me and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about throwing a slider?’ I was all for it. My fastball had a little bit of cutting action, so if we could kind of extend that cut, it would make for a good deception pitch off my fastball.

“I’ve tinkered with grips a little over the years. What I’ve come to is basically … it’s like my four-seam fastball, but with a little pressure adjustment. Originally it was going to be more of an extended cutter — we were going to try to keep it hard — but the more I threw it, the more it turned into a slider. That was more natural for me. Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers came within one win of a trip to the World Series last year thanks in part to the performance of a dominant bullpen that helped to offset a shaky, injury-wracked rotation. Thus far this spring, however, that bullpen has borne the brunt of the Brewers’ injuries. With Jeremy Jeffress having already started the season on the injury list due to shoulder weakness, the team just suffered an even bigger loss, as Corey Knebel revealed on Friday that he will undergo Tommy John surgery.

The 27-year-old Knebel originally suffered a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament in 2014, while pitching for the Rangers’ Triple-A Round Rock affiliate. He was just over a year into his professional career at that point, having been chosen as a supplemental first-round pick by the Tigers out of the University of Texas in 2013, then dealt to the Rangers in a July 2014 trade involving Joakim Soria. The injury wasn’t severe enough to require TJS, so he rehabbed it and kept pitching, establishing himself in the majors after being traded to the Brewers in the Yovani Gallardo deal in 2015, then taking over closer duties from the struggling Neftali Feliz in 2017. That year, he earned All-Star honors while saving 39 games, making an NL-high 76 appearances, and pitching to a 1.78 ERA, 2.53 FIP, and 2.7 WAR; the last mark ranked fourth in the majors among relievers with at least 50 innings.

The 2018 season was a different story for Knebel. He made just three appearances before missing a month due to a left hamstring strain, and pitched so erratically that he was sent back to Triple-A Colorado Springs with a 5.08 ERA and 4.29 FIP in late August. Fortunately for the Brewers, he was thoroughly dominant upon returning, holding batters to a .096/.175/.135 line while striking out 33 of the 57 he faced in 16.1 scoreless innings through the end of the regular season, then striking out 14 out of 33 hitters over 10 postseason innings while allowing just one run. Overall, his 3.58 ERA was more than double his 2017 mark, though his 3.03 FIP wasn’t so far removed; in both seasons, he posted top-five strikeout rates (40.8% in 2017, 39.5% last year) and top 10 K-BB% (27.8% and 29.6%, respectively), with a jump in home run rate (from 0.71 per nine to 1.14) the big difference. Still, between that and a lesser workload (from 76 innings to 55.1), his WAR dropped from 2.7 to 1.0. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s no denying that Ryan McMahon has been a monster in the month of March. In 59 Cactus League at bats, the Colorado Rockies infielder banged out 25 hits while slashing a behemothic .424/.470/.763. His 1.233 OPS led the leaderboards in Arizona and Florida alike.

No, he isn’t about to approach those numbers in games that count — this isn’t Ty Cobb we’re talking about — but the 24-year-old is being counted on to provide value to the Rockies lineup. Three games into the regular season, he’s done just that. McMahon has four hits, including a pair of doubles, plus two walks, in a dozen plate appearances. Lilliputian sample size? Sure, but it’s nonetheless a nice start for the 2013 second-round pick.

His 2018 rookie season was a disappointment. In 202 big-league PAS, he fanned 64 times, and logged a .683 OPS. That came on the heels of spring training numbers which, while not as heady as this year’s, suggested he was ready to rake at the highest level. Instead, he scuffled.

McMahon is self-aware enough not to have forgotten last year. Asked a few weeks ago about his scorching spring, he reminded reporters that it had only been a few dozen at bats — spring training at bats, no less — and that “Baseball is a very humbling game. You never have it all the way figured out.” Read the rest of this entry »