I was standing in the Yankees clubhouse on July 5 after their 5-3 loss to the Red Sox when I received an angry text from my friend Andy, a huge Yankees fan. “How many years is it now that they light it up in the first half and because [sic] absolutely terrible in the second?”

I sent him back a few texts, first correcting his typo — Andy writes for a living, but considering that many of his texts are incoherent, this one wasn’t all that bad — and then answering his question about the trajectories of New York’s recent seasons. His response: “They’re just playing such ugly baseball.”

After the performance I’d just watched, which might best be described as the baseball equivalent of the poop emoji, it was hard to argue with his assessment. It was the first time in at least the last 115 years that the Yankees lost to the Red Sox at home when leading by multiple runs with two outs in the ninth inning. They made several baserunning blunders owing either to mental lapses, a lack of hustle, compromised health or some combination of the three. They botched two throws to second base, one from the catcher on a bunt attempt that probably should’ve been caught and another on a pickoff throw that sailed into center field. They allowed two two-run home runs to the bottom of Boston’s order — one in the ninth to tie the game and the other to lead off the 10th — and then failed to push across a run in the 10th with runners on the corners, nobody out, and their third, fourth, and fifth batters due up.

The loss was New York’s 14th in 18 games, and by the time the homestand ended with a 3-0 loss two nights later, the Yankees were 5-15 over a 20-game span. A week later, when they took two of three against the first-place Orioles, it was their first series victory in a month. Now, after a win Friday and two losses over the weekend, the Yankees enter this afternoon’s series finale against the Rays with a 9-20 record since June 15. Those nine wins are tied with the White Sox for the fewest in that span.

And yet, for as awful as the past five and a half weeks have been, the Yankees remain one of the best teams in baseball. At 59-42, they enter this week first in the AL Wild Card standings and just two games behind the Orioles in the division, and their Playoff Odds have fallen to 97.5%, down from 99.9% on June 14, the last night before all the losing began. Their 12.2% odds to win the World Series are the best in the American League; only the Phillies (16.1%) and Dodgers (15.3%) have a higher probability to win it all.

If you’re having a tough time making sense of this contradictory reality — that the Yankees have played terribly for over a month and remain the most likely American League team to win the pennant — you’re not alone. When I started writing this piece, I was skeptical, too. Living in New York surrounded by Yankees fans, it’s easy to understand why people like Andy are so frustrated; it’s difficult not to get caught up in the emotions of the moment, especially when that moment has spanned nearly six weeks. I also groan with cynicism when I hear manager Aaron Boone say, “It’s all right there in front of us,” because all we can see right now is a team standing amid the ruins of a season that was supposed to be different. However, on closer examination, it’s clear that the foundation of this once-promising team is still in tact, and I think the crumbled pieces from the caved in ceiling can be fixed and supported with beams borrowed, bought, or bartered from the neighbors.

To understand how the Yankees can keep the building from collapsing further, we need to figure out what exactly has gone wrong, and to do that, we should also determine what was working well. From there, we’ll look at how they can start putting their season back together and perhaps make it even better.

For the first two and a half months, this season really was different. On June 14, with a resounding 8-1 win against the Red Sox at Fenway Park, the Yankees became the first team in the majors this year to reach 50 wins, improved to a season-high 28 games over .500, and increased their odds to win the division to 76.6%. They had one of the best pitching staffs in baseball — this without reigning AL Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole, who hadn’t yet returned from the elbow injury that forced him to miss the first 83 days of the season — and their lineup, while still top heavy, was 20% better than league average. Aaron Judge (205 wRC+ at the time) and Juan Soto (188) were the two best hitters in the majors.

Of course, since then, their season has taken a turn for the worse in ways that feel all too familiar. Their potent lineup has become stagnant. Several key contributors have landed on the injured list, most notably Giancarlo Stanton, who was enjoying a resurgent season before suffering a hamstring strain the third week of June, and more recently Jose Trevino, who despite his reputation as a glove-first catcher was one of the handful of Yankees regulars who’d been above league average at the plate this season (103 wRC+). They are no longer hitting for average and they’re not slugging like they were over the first two and a half months. The only thing to improve since they started losing is their walk rate, but walks will only get you so far if you’re not getting the hits to bring those baserunners home. Oh, about running the bases — the Yankees have been the worst baserunning team in the majors all season, but now that they aren’t hitting for average or power, their ineptitude on the basepaths has turned into a much more glaring problem.

Some of these offensive woes can be attributed to injuries and players going cold at the same time, while some portion of it is probably due to players pressing as the losing persisted. Of course, some of it is just, to borrow one of Boone’s favorite clichés, “the ebbs and flows of the season.” We should expect some rebound here. This isn’t the case of Judge alone propping up an otherwise meek lineup as he did in 2022; remember, the Yankees held their own while their captain looked lost through April. That said, this offense still lacks depth.

Meanwhile, the Yankees pitching staff, which had been the bedrock of their success, has crumbled over the past four weeks. After posting the best ERA in baseball (2.90) over their 72 games through June 14, the Yankees have the second-worst ERA (5.37) during their 29-game slide, and they are the only team whose pitching staff has been below replacement level over that span.

Boone has cited a spike in home runs allowed as one of the main sources of trouble for Yankees pitchers — that the few mistakes his pitchers are making are ending up in the seats, whereas earlier in the year, they were staying in the ballpark, providing the pitchers a chance to escape the inning unscathed. And, for the most part, he is correct. Their opponents’ home run rate has increased 87.5%, from 2.4% through June 14 to 4.5% since then. But Yankees pitchers are also allowing a higher rate of non-HR hits than they did before. Their opponents recorded non-HR hits on 16.2% of their plate appearances through June 14; that rate is 19.0% since then. Meanwhile, using the same cutoff, the percentage of hits the Yankees allowed that were home runs has gone from 13.1% to 19.3%. So, yes, home runs are a big issue here, probably even the main issue, but the Yankees are also giving up more hits in general than they did before.

As the losing has continued, Boone and the players have resorted to the same keeping-the-faith approach that hasn’t worked for them before.

“Regardless of when we’re on winning streaks or when it’s like this, I think we have a really good clubhouse, staying even-keel and showing up every day,” said shortstop Anthony Volpe after that sloppy Friday night game against the Red Sox. “We trust each other, we trust ourselves. We know we’ve got everything in front of us. We play to win, we expect to win — we’re the Yankees.”

“We’re still believing,” Soto said after the Yankees’ loss to the Red Sox on July 7. “We’re still grinding every day. We still come in with the same energy. I think that’s really positive on our side.”

“Nobody likes losing,” Judge said after the Yankees lost their July 11 rubber match with the Rays. “Nobody is happy about it. We’ve just got to keep showing up, doing our thing.”

That implies that “showing up, doing our thing” is working, and well, at least right now, it isn’t. To the fans who have been through this with the Yankees before, many of these comments sound like a lack of urgency. Simply being the Yankees won’t save them from more losing, nor will the power of positive thinking.

However, Boone is right in a sense when he says, “It’s all right there in front of us.” Unlike in 2022, when the Yankees had an even better start to the season, this year they went cold before the All-Star break, so there are more games ahead of them to turn things around. More importantly, the trade deadline is still a week away, meaning GM Brian Cashman has had time to assess the flaws of the roster and determine which moves he needs to make to improve it, and he still has more time to work the phones and make something happen. Two years ago, the Yankees were 70-34 and 12 games up in the AL East entering the day of the deadline. Their fall to earth began a few hours after the deadline passed, when they suffered the first of five straight losses that kicked off a 3-14 stretch. They couldn’t swing a trade to pull them out of their rut; they had to make due with the players they had and hope they would snap out of it. By the end of the month, their division lead was cut in half, and it was down to 3.5 games after a loss on September 9. They rebounded from there and won the division, but they were gassed and overmatched by the time they faced and were swept by the Astros in the ALCS.

This time, the Yankees can look externally to address their weaknesses, and considering their willingness to splurge for one season of Soto, we should expect the front office to double down on its intent to win it all this year with a major acquisition or two. We know the Yankees need to add a productive hitter in the infield, especially at third base. All-Star Ryan McMahon, who has another three years and $44 million left on his contract after this year, would make a lot of sense, though it’s unclear if the Rockies would be willing to trade him because of that club control.

Otherwise, the trade market for third basemen has yet to solidify because there are so many teams caught in the mediocre middle. There has been some chatter about Rays All-Star and Ben Clemens’ favorite player Isaac Paredes, but considering he’s only in his first year of arbitration eligibility and therefore is affordable and controllable through the 2027 season, it seems unlikely that Tampa Bay would trade him without getting a haul of prospects in return — especially not to a divisional foe like the Yankees.

But that doesn’t mean the Yankees shouldn’t look to the AL East to improve at third base. The Blue Jays have old friend Isiah Kiner-Falefa at the hot corner. He’s signed through next season at a relatively affordable $7.5 million, and while Yankees fans might balk at trading for someone who was best suited for a utility role during his two seasons in the Bronx, they should remember that depth is crucial down the stretch and into the postseason. Beyond that, though, they should look at IKF’s stats for this season, because if he were in the Yankees lineup today, he’d be their third-most productive hitter by wRC+ (117), behind only Judge (208) and Soto (185). Kiner-Falefa also plays excellent defense and runs the bases well. The one concern here is that Kiner-Falefa is currently on the injured list with a sprained left knee. He has started doing baseball activities and is expected back late this month or in early August.

At this point, it seems unlikely the Yankees would trade Gleyber Torres, because for as much as he’s disappointed this season, there aren’t many available second basemen who’d represent an offensive improvement, especially not ones who’d be worth the cost. If they’re going to add a bat in their infield, it will almost certainly come at third.

New York could also seek to improve its offense with an upgrade in the outfield. The New York Post’s Jon Heyman has reported that the Yankees have discussed Jazz Chisholm Jr. with the Marlins. A lefty batter with power and speed, Chisholm would slide into center field, with Judge moving to left. That would likely move Verdugo to the bench upon Stanton’s return from injury (which MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch reported recently is “really close”). Verdugo started the season strong but has been awful (17 wRC+) since June 15. The Yankees’ outfield defense would get worse with Chisholm, a converted middle infielder now in his second season as an everyday center fielder, but he would be an upgrade at the plate and especially on the bases. New York could also mix and match its lineup and work Chisholm in at second base to give Torres a spell against tough righties. Chisholm has two years of arbitration left after this season, and trading for him would also fill the hole at second base that the Yankees are expected to have next season; Torres is a pending free agent, and given his lackluster performance this year, it seems unlikely that the Yankees will re-sign him. Another outfielder the Yankees could (read: should) target is Jesse Winker of the Nationals, who has a 132 wRC+ this season and, as a rental, would likely come cheap.

As is the case with every contender, the Yankees need to add at least one or two relievers. Their bullpen is especially light on high-leverage lefties, so Tanner Scott of the Marlins is the obvious best fit, but the Yankees should also see what it would take to get Andrew Chafin from the Tigers. Or, if the Yankees do decide to trade with the Blue Jays for IKF, maybe they could get Toronto to throw in righty Chad Green and make it a bigger reunion.

The Yankees will be in better shape if any of these players are on their roster come July 31, but those additions on their own are not going to solve all the problems that we’ve seen over the last month. The good news is the Yankees as currently constructed are still a good team, maybe even a great one. As we can see by their place in the standings and Playoff Odds even after such a disastrous stretch, one month of “ugly baseball” doesn’t erase all that came before it.

A more-consistent arm slot related to a move back to the third base side of the rubber has contributed to Cole Ragans’s success this season. The raw stuff was obviously already there. As Ben Clemens wrote back in March, the Kansas City Royals left-hander “looks like an absolute terror on the mound.” My colleague went on to say that if he “were designing a pitcher in a laboratory, he’d look a lot like Ragans.”

When I talked to the 2024 American League All-Star on the eve of the break, he told me that going into full attack mode following last year’s oft-reported velocity jump played a huge role in his emergence as a front-line starter. As he put it, “I kind of had to teach myself that I could get away with a little more of a miss compared to when I was throwing 90-91 [mph]. I have a good arsenal in my opinion, so I can just go after hitters.”

And then there’s the work he does in the laboratory.

“I use TrackMan in my bullpens, especially with the slider and the cutter, to kind of see where I’m at,” said Ragans, whose heater is now mid-to-high 90s. “The biggest thing for me is my release points, making sure that my pitches are in a tight cluster. I want everything coming out of the same tunnel. I don’t want to be throwing a fastball from this release height, and my slider from a lower release height.” Read the rest of this entry »

All-Star Week is the traditional midpoint of the baseball season — though not the mathematical one – and with the MLB Draft adding a bunch of new prospects to the minors, it’s a good time to look back at the ZiPS prospect list from this past winter. Some prospects have excelled in the majors and some, well, not so much, but that’s why we call them prospects and not certainties. Interpreting minor league statistics properly has always been a challenge, but it’s more so these days with an unusual divergence in offensive levels between the majors and high minors, especially the Triple-A leagues. An .850 OPS that may have been impressive in the International League a few years ago isn’t that mouth-watering these days, while an ERA around four is unusually promising. ZiPS, naturally, has to translate minor league performance as part of predicting how players will fare in the majors, and now that we have public Statcast data for the minors, there’s even more to dig into in 2024.

For each player in last winter’s ZiPS Top 100, I’m listing quick lines for their translated minor league performance (lower-case m), any major league performance, and lastly, a combination of the two to get one 2024 line (noted with a c).

As I’ve said before, Jackson Holliday might actually be underrated at this point. I got a lot of complaints about the “bearish” .255/.341/.381 projection for him coming into the season, but ZiPS (and I) shared the belief that people were coming too quickly on him. He’s still extremely likely to be a fantastic player, but considering he’s a 20-year-old who blasted through four levels of the minors, it’s not the weirdest thing ever that he’d see a consolidation season. That .336/.332 OBP/SLG isn’t really that far behind his projection, especially considering ZiPS expected the major league offensive environment to be better than it has been this season.

Coby Mayo has had the better season but still wouldn’t come close to passing Holliday if I rerolled the full top prospects right now. James Wood actually has surpassed Holliday, though that will only last until he exceeds the rookie maximum and sheds his prospect status; he was legitimately excellent in the minors this year. The sheen has come off both Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter a little bit, while Jackson Chourio and Masyn Winn have performed about as advertised. As movers go, Adael Amador and Pete Crow-Armstrong look like the two who will take the biggest hit of this group before next year’s rankings (if PCA hasn’t graduated). There hasn’t been as much ink about Emmanuel Rodriguez as I would have expected this year, even before he injured his thumb last month. The Texas League, unlike the Triple-A leagues, is a pretty low offensive environment, with a league OPS of just .705, so his actual 1.100 OPS is pretty impressive.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga have both performed as well as ZiPS expected. While that’s hardly going out on a limb for Yamamoto, whom everyone liked, ZiPS was in on Imanaga very early. Paul Skenes, of course, has been fabulous, even more so than his top-notch translations from April and May. I’d only describe two of the pitchers on this list as unmitigated disappointments so far in 2024, at least from a projections standpoint: Both Ricky Tiedemann and Dylan Lesko will take pretty big hits in the next rankings. Andrew Painter will slide quite a bit as well, but it would be pretty churlish to call a pitcher a disappointment for being injured.

Among this tranche of prospects, Brooks Lee is having arguably the most impressive 2024, and he’s continued to hit since his call-up a couple of weeks ago. Between Lee and the Twins’ taking Kaelen Culpepper with their first-round pick on Sunday, Edouard Julien might get lost in the shuffle quickly in Minnesota; if I were a GM of a team in need of a second baseman, I’d give the Twins call to see if he can rule again on my club. Anyway, I actually expected ZiPS to come around quicker on Dylan Crews, but he’s not really torching minor league pitching as I thought he would. Davis Schneider has long been a ZiPS favorite, but he’s cooled off since a hot run right after he earned more playing time through the process of elimination in Toronto’s struggling lineup.

Jett Williams inevitably will drop considerably after a wrist injury ruined his 2024 season, and Kevin Alcantára was one of the big ZiPS droppers in terms of future WAR. While Samuel Basallo is not matching his breakout 2023 season, he’s still a 19-year-old catcher, so he won’t sag in the rankings too far.

Looking at this group’s long-term projections, it’s almost shocking how little movement there’s been in the long-term projections. Of these 21 pitchers, only three have had their five-year projected WAR move by more than two WAR. The first is Drew Thorpe, who was solid for Birmingham, and his poor K/BB ratios in the majors so far probably aren’t representative of his abilities. The other is a much less heralded prospect, Thomas Harrington of the Pirates, a rather Doug Fister-y prospect (is that a legal adjective), who relies on control and changeups. The high minors can be cruel for this type of pitcher, but he’s survived at least one of the jumps, to Double-A, which improves his long-term outlook. On the flip side, Mick Abel’s command has continued to deteriorate, with both a seven-walk and a six-walk outing in the last month. It would be a shock if he didn’t fall completely off the ZiPS Top 100 for 2025.

It hasn’t shown yet in the majors, but Kyle Manzardo’s minor league performance this year before his call-up wiped out the real “meh” feeling that ZiPS had about his 2023. Post-suspension Noelvi Marte has been pretty lousy, though we have enough data from players after drug suspensions to dismiss any histrionics that he’s struggled because of the lack of performance enhancement. Last year was largely the season that ZiPS came around on Colson Montgomery after being later than practically everyone/everything else, and the result has been a little how I feel after eating a hot dog from a gas station. Joey Ortiz is the big winner in this group, contending for the NL Rookie of the Year award, and Kyle Teel ought to see a bump in next year’s prospect rankings as well. Like Basallo, Ethan Salas’ bat has backslid a bit, but it’s not worth obsessing over how a teenage catching prospect is hitting. Andy Pages hasn’t matched his minor league start this year, but he’s been at least respectable.

Heston Kjerstad just missed the overall ZiPS gainers list, yet given Baltimore’s crowded offense, he’s still had trouble getting a full serving of plate appearances in the majors. If the O’s land Tarik Skubal or Garrett Crochet, Kjerstad has to be one of the names likely to be included, especially for the Tigers considering they are much more motivated to add major league-ready talent than the hopeless Sox. ZiPS was as big fan of Michael Busch, one of those low-ceiling, high-floor hitters without any real positional value, and he’s performed about as well for the Cubs as could have reasonably been expected.

ZiPS was hoping for more power from Matt Shaw, and he’ll probably drop from the top 100 unless his trajectory changes again. But he won’t drop as far as Luisangel Acuña, who has only a 73 wRC+ in Triple-A, though the Mets don’t actually seem disappointed with his performance. Even as offense is up across Triple-A, Angel Martínez was having a dynamite season before he was called up; you shouldn’t dismiss a 147 wRC+ at Triple-A without a pretty compelling reason. He’s also continued to hit in the majors, and I now feel kinda guilty that I didn’t give ZiPS some new RAM to reward it for being so high on him coming into the season.

Have you ever had a friend enthusiastically recommend that you watch a TV show and then say, “It takes a few episodes to get going, and the timeline gets weird at the end, and one or two of the main characters can be kind of annoying, but other than that it’s SO GOOD.” And initially you might be put off, thinking that a truly good show wouldn’t require that many qualifiers. Sometimes you’re right about that, but sometimes it turns out the show is Parks and Recreation and even though the first season is about as appealing as living in a pit, the rest of the show is an absolute treat.

Sometimes small components of a larger body of work do a poor job of representing the work as a whole. The oddities that occur in small samples are likely not a new concept to FanGraphs readers, nor will it shock anyone when I note that what constitutes a small sample depends on what exactly we want to measure. Recently, the fine folks at MLB Advanced Media gifted us with a handful of new metrics that make use of Statcast’s bat tracking technology. Every time we dig into a new metric, we must consider the appropriate serving size to satiate our hunger for knowledge, lest we find ourselves hangrily generating takes that we later regret.

For this article, we’ll attempt to determine appropriate sample thresholds for measuring a hitter’s average bat speed; so that players without bats don’t feel left out, we’ll do the same for sword rate from the pitcher’s perspective. For many metrics, the sample size is measured in pitches or plate appearences, but since both bat speed and sword rate are tied specifically to bat movement, their samples will be composed of swings. To determine reasonable sample sizes, I used the split-half correlation method. The idea is to randomly select two samples of size X from a player’s collection of swings, calculate the player’s average bat speed or sword rate for both samples, lather/rinse/repeat for a bunch of players, then take the full set of two-sample pairs for all players and see how well they correlate. We complete the experiment by repeating the process for progressively larger sample sizes. And just to be super thorough, we’ll re-run the experiment several times and average the correlation values. Read the rest of this entry »

The Toronto Blue Jays’ Matt Hague is earning a reputation as one of the best young hitting coaches in the game. Promoted to the big league staff this year after a pair of seasons spent working at Double-A, followed by a year in Triple-A, the 38-year-old former first baseman is one of the team’s two assistant hitting coaches. (Hunter Mense, who was featured in our Talks Hitting series in July 2022, is the other, while Guillermo Martinez is the lead hitting coach and Don Mattingly serves as the team’s offensive coordinator.)

Hague’s playing career included several strong seasons in the minors, but only a smattering of opportunities in the majors. The Bellevue, Washington native logged just 91 big league plate appearances, 74 with the Pittsburgh Pirates and 17 with the Blue Jays. And while what he experienced over 11 professional campaigns influences the approach he brings to his current role, what he’s learned since is every bit as important. Like most coaches who excel at their jobs, Hague is not only an effective communicator, he embraces modern training methods.

Hague sat down to talk hitting when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park in late June.

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David Laurila: You last played professionally in 2018. What do you know now that you didn’t know then?

Matt Hague: “Oh, man. That’s a really good question. I think the how. As a coach you’re kind of forced to unfold things that you thought as a player, but didn’t necessarily go really deep into, or didn’t have the chance to go as deep into. The importance of certain things shift on what you want to emphasize. That’s because you’re looking out for a whole group, even though it’s an individual plan, or an individual mover — a certain trait that an individual person needs to develop and continue to get better at.

“There are a lot of different pathways on how to bring out certain stuff, and the more you evolve as a coach, your perspective shifts. You try to find understandings on the mentality side, the game-planning side, the technical part of it. So yeah, I think it’s that you’re just forced to find out more. You’re forced to have a broader perspective than you had as a player.” Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with a riddle: Team A and Team B have both played 98 games this season. Due to the vagaries of extra innings and unplayed bottoms of ninths, Team A’s pitchers have thrown four more innings than Team B’s pitchers. However, Team B’s pitchers have faced 259 more batters than Team A. How is this possible?

OK, yeah, so this was actually a pretty easy riddle. The answer is that Team B’s pitchers stink, while Team A’s pitchers are very good. Team A gets a higher percentage of batters out, which means that it faces fewer batters per inning. Let’s put some names and numbers to our hypothetical, shall we? Allow me to introduce you to the Mariners and the White Sox.

The Mariners have better pitchers and a better defense behind them. Consequently, the White Sox have allowed a whopping 130 more runs. But take a look at the last row of that table. The White Sox have thrown the most pitches in baseball, while the Mariners have thrown the second fewest. Having good pitching and good defense has allowed them to throw 1,477 fewer pitches than the South Siders. The average team throws 146 pitches per game, so we’re talking about 10 entire games’ worth of pitches. Ten games! That is a huge number, and these teams still have 64 games left to go. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine an auction that takes place between three bidders. The item in question? An envelope filled with money. All three bidders employ teams of analysts that attempt to ascertain how much money is in the envelope, based on a variety of evidence that isn’t important for this analogy. Each bidder thus arrives at an estimate of the fair value of the envelope. Then they place a single sealed bid. The highest bidder out of the three gets the envelope.

What bidding strategy would you employ? Here’s a bad one: Just bid what your team of analysts calculates as the expected value of what’s in the envelope. The reason this is bad is known as the winner’s curse. If each bidder comes up with an estimate of fair value and bids that number, the winner will be the one with the highest estimate of fair value. In other words, you’ll only win if your estimation of the envelope’s value is higher than everyone else’s, and since you’re always paying exactly what you’re hoping to gain, you’ll tend to lose in the long run.

Allowing for a lot of approximation, this situation describes free agency in major league baseball. Every free agent has an unknowable amount of expected future production. Teams employ armies of analysts who attempt to estimate that production. Then, armed with that knowledge, they make contract offers to that free agent, in competition with other teams.

As I said, there’s a ton of approximation and simplification going on here. Players aren’t envelopes filled with money. Team context matters. Players don’t have to accept the highest bid. Tax regimes aren’t equal, and non-monetary incentives matter, too. Contracts are complex, and there’s no requirement that they be the same number of years, have the same number of options, no trade clauses, or anything of the sort. There’s no agreed-upon universal value system; different players present different value to different teams.

But that doesn’t mean the abstracted case has no use. As we approach the trade deadline, I think there’s one clear one: dispelling the myth that teams refuse to give up much to trade for a player who just signed a big free agent deal — after all, if they valued them enough for a blockbuster, they would have just offered a bigger contract, right? That’s a great soundbite, so you hear it all the time, but it doesn’t jive with established economic theory. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the fun things about baseball (that’s also one of the fun things about life in general) is that at any moment you can look for and find something that you alone are seeing, that you alone are paying enough attention to notice, that you alone care about. Last Wednesday, the Twins finally lost to the White Sox. The Twins had won their first eight matchups with the South Siders, and they would beat the Sox again later that day. In fact, if not for the opportunity to pummel the White Sox at frequent intervals, Minnesota’s first half would look much different and much darker. But just this once, in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader, the Twins lost to the White Sox.

The bird showed up sometime during the first inning. It wasn’t there when Carlos Correa slapped the 11th pitch of the game through the right side for a single, but in the bottom of the inning, when Andrew Vaughn grounded into a 5-4-3 double play and the camera whipped around the horn to follow the ball, there it was — perched on a steel cable right above the on-deck circle as if it had been there forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

He may not be playing in Arlington tonight, but Christian Walker just wrapped up an All-Star level first half. The Diamondbacks first baseman came into the All-Star break ranked third in the National League with 22 home runs, fifth with 66 RBI, and among the top 15 qualified batters in wOBA (.357), xwOBA (.365), and wRC+ (131). His 10 OAA are third-most among NL fielders, while his 7 DRS, 4.1 UZR, and 8 FRV are all the top marks at his position. Thanks to his spectacular defensive performance, the two-time Gold Glove winner is the only qualified NL first baseman who has provided positive defensive value at first despite the hefty positional adjustment. On top of that, he has played in all 97 of Arizona’s games so far, putting him on pace for more than 700 plate appearances this season.

Add his offense, defense, and durability together and you get 2.9 WAR, which places Walker in the top 15 among NL position players and top 30 in the majors. Considering that 46 position players were invited to the Midsummer Classic this year, it’s hard to deny that Walker is having an All-Star worthy season. At the same time, it’s also hard to get too fired to up about his “snub.” Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman have put up superior offensive numbers and WAR totals, rightfully earning the two guaranteed spots for first basemen on the NL roster. In addition, three NL players with more WAR and arguably even stronger All-Star cases than Walker were also left off the squad: Francisco Lindor, Brandon Nimmo, and Willy Adames. Finally, this isn’t even the most disappointing time Walker has missed out on a trip back to Globe Life Field within the past 10 months. Still, it’s a shame that Walker’s excellent first half will go unrewarded. At 33 years old, the late bloomer is putting together the best season of his career at the plate and in the field. Surely, that deserves to be celebrated. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Thursday, a Q&A titled “Chris Bassitt Embraces the Art of Pitching” ran here at FanGraphs. In it, the 35-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander discussed his diverse repertoire — “eight or nine pitches,” he told me — and how he uses them to attack hitters. Both stylistically and variety-wise, Bassitt is a close approximation of a pitcher who will represent the Kansas City Royals in tonight’s All-Star Game. That would be Seth Lugo.

The Royals were at Fenway Park last weekend, and with Boston being my home base, I took the opportunity to talk to the 34-year-old right-hander. I expected a conversation similar to the one I’d had with Bassitt, and I was by no means mistaken. Lugo, who boasts a 2.48 ERA and a 3.31 FIP this season, very much embraces the art of pitching.

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David Laurila: How have you developed as a pitcher over the years?

Seth Lugo: “I would say that I’ve learned from failure. Coming up through the minors is different than pitching in the big leagues. Once you get to the big leagues you start to notice a pattern with how your mistakes are happening, whether it’s a pitch, sequences, or game situations. I think that learning from my mistakes has been the biggest thing for me.”

Laurila: You used to be known primarily for your curveball, and now you have a varied repertoire. How has your adding of pitches evolved?

Lugo: “Well, as a reliever I would usually just stick with my best two pitches and show one or two more, whether it be [against] a righty or a lefty, a changeup or a slider. When I was in San Diego last year, the pitching coach, Ruben Niebla, was talking about sweeper sliders. I’d never heard the term sweeper before. I didn’t really know what it meant. We started messing with some grips. He told me, ‘You can spin it good. You can spin some other stuff, so it doesn’t have to be just one pitch you’re spinning so well.’ That’s kind of how that came along.

“Growing up, I was always messing around with balls, whether it was a Whiffle Ball or a baseball. I was throwing pitches, just having fun. I’ve always had the ability to pick up a new pitch pretty quickly, so I realized that I can throw more than just three or four pitches in a game. Right now it’s up to 10 or 11. I’m keeping the hitters off balance and recognizing their swing paths, trying to make an adjustment before they do.”

Laurila: What is your full repertoire right now?

Lugo: “Two-seam, four-seam, cutter, change, split-change, sweeper, slow sweeper, one that I call the carry sweeper, slurve, curveball, and slider — a regular slider.”

Laurila: You’re basically Chris Bassitt…

Lugo: “I think I’ve got one or two more than him. I was also throwing a gyro sweeper earlier in the season — I haven’t thrown it in about four starts now — so then I had 12 pitches.”

Laurila: Gyro sweeper sounds counterintuitive…

Lugo: “Yeah. It’s like a one-seam gyro spin that catches. It’s a bigger horizontal break than a regular gyro slider. It’s not depth-y, but shoots to the left pretty good. A sweeper is going to have side spin. Gyros have bullet spin. A gyro sweeper is bullet spin, but with one seam… one seam that catches. A seam-shift gyro.”

Laurila: But you’re not actually throwing it now…

Lugo: “I’ll probably bring it back out. I was working through a couple of other things. Between that one and my slider they were starting to blend a little bit. But yeah, I’ll bring it back out one day.”

Laurila: How did you initially learn it?

Lugo: “I had someone reach out to me. He said that a lot of guys around the league are swinging and missing at gyro spin, and if you can find a way to get more sweeper action with gyro spin, that one’s pretty hard to hit. I think [Alec] Marsh throws a variation of that. Tinkering with a couple of grips, I found one that worked pretty good. But I kind of got away from it a little bit. I picked it up after a month, just this season, so I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it and find the consistency.”

Laurila: Who suggested the pitch?

Lugo: “A guy I know. I’ll leave it at that.”

Laurila: How many pitches did you have when you moved into a starting role last season?

Lugo: “In the offseason, I developed a different slider. I threw it for two months last year before I figured out the sweeper and the other pitches. It was like a slow slider, which I haven’t thrown since. So, it was two sliders, changeup, four-seam, sinker, curveball.”

Laurila: You’ve basically doubled the number of pitches you’re throwing…

Lugo: “In about a year, yeah. I was on the IL and that’s when I came up with a couple of pitches — in June, last year.”

Laurila: I assume you’ve used a lot of tech when developing pitches?

Lugo: “It’s actually more feel for me. Feel and just the horizontal and vertical movements. We’ve got the TrackMan. I don’t look at spin rates, really. I check on my curveball every once awhile, just to make sure it’s spinning like it should, but mostly it’s just horizontal and vertical movements that I look at.”

Laurila: Are you still throwing the same curveball?

Lugo: “Same curveball I’ve always had. I’ve just learned how to use other pitches off of it to make it perform better. My first couple years, with two strikes you were probably getting a curveball. That makes it easier to hit. Guys could eliminate pitches really easily. Now, having four or five pitches in their head when they get to two strikes makes the curveball perform even better.”

Laurila: Where do you think you’d be if you were still a reliever? Would you be as good as you are now?

Lugo: “Well, I wouldn’t have all of these pitches. I would say it would be similar to my career average. I would kind of be where I was.”

Laurila: With your ability to utilize a variety of pitches, starting seems like a natural fit.

Lugo: “Yeah. That and reading swings, and trying to get guys off certain pitches to save them for later in the game. Finding holes where I can go to them over and over. As a reliever, you’re only facing three or four guys, so they can be ambushing first pitch, or they could be taking to get a strike. It’s kind of a smaller game plan, tactic, to pitch as a reliever.

“As a starter, if a guy has a big hole you’re going to expose that hole. But if the guy is a pretty good hitter — he’s hard to get out — you’re going to show all of your pitches, and you’ve got to know where each of them fits. As I’m going over these hitters, we’re talking about where we’re going to throw each one. Some of them might not even be competitive, but I want them to look at it and think about it. I try to find a spot to throw every pitch, even if it’s a pitch they hit well. There is going to be somewhere they don’t hit it — it might be in the dirt — but we’re going to throw it.”

Laurila: You mentioned saving pitches. What is the value in not throwing something you know a hitter has a hard time handling?

Lugo: “So, let’s say it’s the four-hole hitter. This pitch is going get him out most every time — he’s got some weak contact on it — but he’s not going to swing and miss at it. There is no one on base and we’ve got a three-run lead. I’m not going to go straight to my best pitch to get him out; I’m going to save that for when there are two guys on and no outs. In a different situation, you pitch different. That also keeps it harder for guys to pick up my sequences.”

Laurila: Something I’ve asked a lot of pitchers is whether they view pitching as more of an art or as more of a science. I think I know what your answer would be…

Lugo: “It’s an art. I mean, science will help you. Like with anything, you can use science to make your techniques better. You can use it as a learning tool, but you can’t just plug it in. There are too many variables out there for it to work every time. Ultimately — at least to me — it’s not a science. It’s an art.”