Things didn’t exactly go his way on Saturday, but Ryan Feierabend’s start for the Blue Jays against the White Sox — a four-inning stint that resulted in defeat — was noteworthy, not just the kind of thing you don’t see every day, but the kind of thing you don’t see every decade. Not only had Feierabend, who began throwing the knuckleball during a four-year stint in the Korea Baseball Organization, not started in the majors since September 23, 2008 (when he faced the Angels’ Vladimir Guerrero, ahem), or appeared in a major league game since July 27, 2014, but it had been nearly 19 years since a left-handed knuckleballer pitched in the majors, and more than 20 since the last one made a start.

As I noted in February, when the 33-year-old Feierabend, who found little success in parts of four major league seasons before going to Korea, signed with Toronto, the practice of throwing the knuckleball has fallen upon hard times during the pitch-tracking era:

Last year, Boston’s Steven Wright was the only pitcher (as opposed to the occasionally dabbling position player) to throw a knuckleball, but between complications stemming from left knee surgery and a 15-game suspension for violating the league’s domestic violence policy, he threw just 53.2 innings. As he’s currently serving an 80-game suspension for a PED violation — making him the first major leaguer to attain that dubious dual distinction — the pitch needs a new champion. Enter Feierabend, who by virtue of even one appearance resurrected a long-dormant line. Read the rest of this entry »

When we look back on this era of baseball in future times, exhorting children to get off our lawns, nobody shed tears of pity for the San Francisco Giants. After all, the Giants of this generation made the World Series four times and won three of them, a difficult, probability-crushing feat in a world where six division winners and four wild card teams make the playoffs. It was a team that featured most of the grandest years of one of the best players anyone will ever see — no, Dusty Baker, not Pedro Feliz — before that mantle was handed off.

After such a highlight-filled epic, the problem is what comes next? In literature, you have the ability to just end the story. King Arthur’s body sails to Avalon; Beowulf lives another 50 years; Frodo sails away. Or maybe the author doesn’t finish the books, and a TV adaptation shoves three years’ worth of material into 13 episodes. But baseball always has another sequel, another tale with new protagonists and antagonists and unfortunate Joe West cameos, and these San Francisco Giants have bungled the end of their current tale.

The Outfield Conundrum

We’ve talked a lot about Cleveland’s failures this offseason to address their outfield situation, but San Francisco’s problems are long-standing and arguably even less excusable. While one can rightly complain about the amount of chutzpah (and possibly arrogance) needed for a contending team to just let a major weakness slide going into the season because their competition is extremely weak, the Giants were under no such illusion. The NL West provided five playoff teams combined in 2017 and 2018 and the Dodgers were the NL champs in both seasons, so the “Hey, we play the Tigers and Royals a lot” excuse doesn’t hold. Not to mention that the Dodgers, while losing their partial season from Manny Machado, reasonably expected to get a full season from a returning Corey Seager, which is as good as a major free agent signing. 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 —Ryan Pressly, Trent Thornton, and Justin Verlander — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Ryan Pressly, Houston Astros

“I started throwing a curveball when I was around 14-15 years old. Steve Busby was my pitching coach growing up — the guy played in the big leagues for a long time and threw a couple of no-hitters — and he taught me his curveball. He told me I could only throw it with him during our pitching lessons. Once I got to eighth grade, or freshman year, is when I started throwing it in games.

“How my curveball works is kind of just a natural thing. My spin rate… I mean, I know why my spin rate increased. You hear all of this stuff about the Astros, but it’s not nearly the case. My spin rate increased because my velocity started increasing. I tore my lat in 2015, and when I came back my velocity kept going up. As the velocity goes up on your curveball, the spin rate is going to go up as well. I’ve also been throwing it more and more, and getting consistent with it. That’s a big reason it has gotten better. Read the rest of this entry »

Freeze baseball at the end of last year, and Josh Bell fit into an ignominious archetype. A former top prospect, he’d fallen into the power-light first base role previously occupied by the likes of James Loney and Sean Casey. The good power vibes from a homer-happy 2017 (26 dingers, .211 ISO) had faded after his slap-hitting 2018 (12 home runs and a .150 ISO). FanGraphs’ Depth Charts projections penciled him in for a .172 ISO and a wRC+ around 113 — roughly average offensive production for a first baseman.

If that projection was surprising, it was only because Bell looks the part of a slugger. At 6-foot-4 and 235 pounds, he’s an imposing presence at the plate. His minor league numbers had never showed great thump — his best showing was a credible .173 ISO with 14 homers in 2016. After that 2016 season, Eric Longenhagen graded him as having 50 game power — dead average, with the chance to improve to a 55 eventually. Bell’s frame always carried the promise of greater power numbers, but neither scouts nor projection systems thought it was a likely outcome.

That’s all well and good, but uh, have you seen Josh Bell’s 2019? He’s recorded a ludicrous .364 ISO, fifth-best in the majors. He already has 14 home runs and 14 doubles (and, perplexingly, two triples), besting last year’s home run output in only 188 plate appearances. This prodigious power, along with a .366 BABIP, has propelled him to a 185 wRC+, third-best in baseball. The power that was promised by Bell’s physical gifts has finally come in, and it’s come in all at once.

When someone puts up a line like Bell’s (an ISO that looks like a BABIP, a season-long wRC+ higher than any previous month of his career), my natural inclination as an analyst is to look for flukes. Maybe he’s hitting an unsustainable number of line drives, or 75% of his fly balls are turning into home runs. Perhaps he’s faced abysmal pitching in hitters’ parks. Surely any of those explanations is more likely than a sudden, real power spike that dwarfs his previous career. Read the rest of this entry »

It remains one of the game’s unsolved mysteries. A batter hits a pop-up near the mound and the person closest to it — a professional athlete wearing a glove — isn’t expected to catch the ball. Moreover, he’s not supposed to catch the ball. That job belongs to any one of several teammates, all of whom has traversed a greater distance. As often as not they’re climbing a slope to get under the descending baseball.

Chaos can ensue as the infielders and the catcher converge. The multiple “I’ve got its,” are drowned out by crowd noise and suddenly what should be a routine out becomes an adventure. We’ve all seen it. A bumper-car-like collision occurs and the catch is made clumsily… or not at all.

Just last week, Red Sox right-hander Rick Porcello was charged with an error when he failed to catch a pop up in front of the mound. Not because of ineptitude, but rather because he was veritably mugged by his catcher as the ball was about to arrive comfortably in his glove.

Why aren’t pitchers expected to handle simple pop-ups? They’re perfectly capable, so it makes sense that they should be catching them. Right?

“I don’t know why, and yes, they should be,’ said Seattle’s Perry Hill, whom many consider the game’s best infield instructor. “They’re on on the field of play when the ball is in play, so they should be able to make a play. It’s practiced in spring training. That little short pop-up that nobody can get to. The third baseman is playing way back. The first baseman is way back. The pitcher is the closest guy to the ball. He’ll catch that ball.”

Scott Servais sees it somewhat differently than his first base coach. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rockies’ addition of top prospect Brendan Rodgers — No. 1 in Colorado’s system, No. 28 overall — to their big-league roster completes part of a journey that seemed preordained when Rodgers was still just a high school underclassman. As is the case with lots of prominent Floridian high schoolers, Rodgers was evaluated early thanks to the endless parade of both varsity and travel baseball in Florida. Scouts were interested in Rodgers very early, as Kiley noted in his initial 2015 draft rankings.

Rodgers was a standout last summer with scouts saying he’d go in the top 50 picks as a high school junior, then he took a huge step forward this summer when his bat speed and raw power jumped at least a notch, if not two.

Those rankings, which Rodgers topped at the time, were produced after the high school summer showcase season, during which Rodgers looked fine at shortstop and continued to perform against the best pitching in the country. There were tepid evaluations of his defense and some concerns, from model-driven clubs, regarding his advanced age. But Rodgers’ offensive consistency and mix of physical talents (he had among the best raw power in the class at the time) overrode those notions.

When draft day arrived, Rodgers ranked No. 2 on the FanGraphs draft board. The Rockies drafted him No. 3 overall. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember what you were doing last Saturday night, at about 7:45 pm Eastern? Perhaps it was a memorable occasion, a fancy dinner with your significant other. Maybe it was a round of drinks with your buddies to launch a raucous evening on the town, or just a lazy, relaxing weekend day that leaked into dusk. The Marlins surely remember where they were at that moment, because that was the last time they scored a run.

Indeed, it’s been a bleak week-plus for the Miami nine. They’ve lost seven games in a row, and so their theoretical highlight reel for the May 7-16 period would consist of a rainout and two off days. They scored a grand total of eight runs in that span, never more than two in a game in a stretch that includes back-to-back walk-off losses to the Cubs and back-to-back shutouts by the Rays. Did I mention that it’s been a full week since the last Marlins position player drove in a run, or 11 days since one of their players homered? Or that it’s the team’s only homer this month, hit by a 29-year-old rookie named Jon Berti? I kid you not.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 2019 Marlins are awful. On the heels of a 63-98 season, their first in a teardown carried out under the Bruce Sherman/Derek Jeter regime, we knew that they would be bad; our preseason forecast called for a 63-99 record. We did not envision them slipping below the Throneberry Line, the .250 winning percentage of the 1962 Mets, but at 10-31 (.244), that’s where the Marvelous Marlins are.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, I noted that hitters are chasing fewer pitches and seeking out fastballs in the zone. It’s one thing batters can do to fight back against the rising pitching talent and increased strikeouts. It seemed to me that every time I looked into a hitter potentially breaking out this season, I saw the same pattern: fewer swings on pitches outside the zone and a rising wRC+.

• It was true for George Springer, who took over the AL WAR lead.
• Hunter Dozier seemed to benefit greatly from better discipline.
• Jason Heyward’s mini-resurgence seemed due to better plate recognition.
• Paul DeJong took a step forward by mashing balls in the strike zone and avoiding those outside of it.

There comes a point when writing about the same thing over and over again becomes presumptuous if we can’t quite be sure that the benefits will last. To that end, I first went through plate discipline numbers from this season to determine if chasing fewer pitches seemed to help batters like I think it should. First, I looked at all hitters with at least 300 plate appearances in 2018 who were also qualified for the batting title as of May 13 of this year. While we can presume that taking pitches outside the strike zone is a skill, and one that stabilizes pretty quickly based on previous research, here’s how the numbers from last season and this one match up as of Tuesday’s data. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Walden is a 30-year-old rookie with a 5-0 record, a 1.46 ERA, and a spiked-grip slider that helped rescue him from minor-league purgatory. The story behind the pitch is one of avoidance-turned-desperation, with a healthy dose of studiousness thrown in for good measure. Walden has thrown his slider 41.6% of the time this year in 24.2 innings out of the Boston bullpen.

The righty’s journey to the big leagues was a meandering one. Drafted by the Blue Jays in 2007, Walden subsequently saw time in the A’s, Reds, and Twins organizations. He also spent a summer toiling in the independent Atlantic League. The Red Sox signed him off the scrap heap prior to the 2017 season, but even then his prospect status was tenuous at best. Twenty-six pitchers saw action for the AL East club that year, yet Walden remained in Triple-A.

Walden finally made his MLB debut last April, but his time at the top was short-lived. Sent down in May, he stayed on the Pawtucket roster throughout the remainder of the campaign. This year has been a different story. Walden has been one of Boston’s best relievers — his aforementioned numbers are augmented by a 10.95 K/9 and a 2.46 FIP — and again, his slider is a big reason why. I talked to Walden about his signature offering prior to a recent game.

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David Laurila: Your go-to pitch is a slider. What is the story behind it?

Marcus Walden: “I didn’t start pitching until my senior year of high school. My freshman year [at Fresno City College] — the one year I went to school — I was throwing a four-seam fastball and a slider. Now I’ve gone back to that same style of a slider, although with a little bit different grip that I learned from Chandler Shepherd, in 2017. And watching Craig Kimbrel was a big help. I watched him closely, especially in spring training of ’17 and ’18 when he was throwing his live BPs. I talked to him a little. It was, ‘All right. What kind of shape are we trying to make with this pitch?’ He throws a knuckle slider, and that’s what I throw now.”

Laurila: Why did you start spiking your slider? Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the chart that got me interested in what Marcus Semien is up to:

It’s the last two columns that should grab your attention. Semien is walking nearly two-thirds more often this year than he’s ever walked before, and striking out less, too. Those are good things for hitters to do, and they’ve resulted in a 24-point increase in Semien’s wOBA (.335) compared to what had been his career mark (.311). If that figure holds, it will be the best of Semien’s career by 20 points.

Semien has experienced stretches of similar success before. For a brief period at the beginning of the 2017 season, before being put out of commission by a wrist injury, Semien was walking nearly 17% of the time — but also striking out in something like 27% of his plate appearances. He brought that number down beginning in early 2018, to something like its current levels, but saw his walk rate drop back down below 5% as he did so. Not until the early part of this 2019 season have we seen a Semien who is both walking a lot and not striking out that much:

Read the rest of this entry »