It’s the oldest story in baseball. The Braves took an athletic, hard-throwing, but undersized college pitcher named Spencer sometime after the first round of the draft. Even though said pitcher had done most of his collegiate work out of the bullpen, Atlanta stuck him in the rotation. And after only 20-odd starts in the minors, Spencer is in Atlanta’s major league rotation and a candidate to throw high-leverage innings — possibly even to start — in the playoffs.

OK, maybe it’s not the oldest story in baseball, but it’s happened twice now in the span of three seasons. And that’s where the paths of Spencer Strider and Spencer Schwellenbach diverge. Strider is what you’d get if a traditional power closer could throw 180 innings a year. (Well, if he could throw 180 innings in one year. We remember what happened a couple months ago.) It’s a hard fastball, and then a wicked slider. Pick one, because there’s no way for a hitter to cover both.

Schwellenbach also boasts mid-to-upper 90s fastball velocity, but unlike his teammate and fellow Spencer, he has one of the most varied repertoires in all of baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The NFL season kicks off tonight, with another game tomorrow, 13 more on Sunday, and a Monday Night Football matchup set to cap off the Week One slate. Millions will be tuning in, although not everyone will be able to watch their favorite team (or keep close tabs on their fantasy football squad). Among those missing out will be the vast majority of big leaguers. At the same time that pigskin luminaries like Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes are performing on the gridiron, major leaguers will be plying their trade on the baseball diamond. When you’re a professional athlete, forgoing other pastimes — watching other sports is but one of many — comes with the territory.

What is it like to miss out on things you’d be enjoying were it not for your responsibilities as a ballplayer? I asked several big league players for their perspectives on that very subject. Here is what they had to say.

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George Springer, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder: “I wouldn’t ever say ‘Why do I have to play today?’ but I love football. I’m a big football fan. When the NFL gets going, and college football gets going, it’s exciting for me. A lot of it is just a break from the constant everyday grind of baseball, having a chance to go to an NFL game, to a hockey game, to a concert. Anything like that. Read the rest of this entry »

By this time a year ago, the Yankees were simply playing out the string, battling to avoid their first losing season since 1992. Their September was briefly enlivened by the arrival of Jasson Domínguez, a switch-hitting 20-year-old center fielder who homered off Justin Verlander in his first plate appearance, but “The Martian” — so named for his otherworldly collection of tools — tore his right ulnar collateral ligament after playing just eight games. His Tommy John surgery and projected lack of availability early this season led the Yankees to trade for Alex Verdugo, whom they’ve stuck with as their everyday left fielder despite his increasingly conspicuous lack of production. As they run neck-and-neck with the Orioles in the AL East race, they’ve bypassed a golden opportunity to upgrade their lineup.

On Tuesday night in Arlington, the Yankees blew a 4-0 eighth-inning lead, losing 7-4 when closer Clay Holmes blew his major league-leading 11th save by retiring just one of the five batters he faced, capped by a walk-off grand slam by Wyatt Langford. The loss, the Yankees’ fifth in seven games, knocked them out of first place for the first time since August 20; at 80-59, they’re now half a game behind the Orioles (81-59). While the Holmes saga is a story for another day, it shares with the Verdugo/Domínguez situation the Yankees’ stubborn refusal to change what isn’t working in the midst of a playoff race, one where a first-round bye is at stake. In both cases — and in others throughout his seven-year tenure — manager Aaron Boone has publicly avoided acknowledging players’ struggles, sounding notes of Pollyanna-ish optimism that may have earned him loyalty within the Yankees’ clubhouse (and apparently the rest of the organization), but too often appear divorced from reality.

In the case of the offense, the Yankees lead the AL in scoring (5.09 runs per game) and wRC+ (118), but that’s largely a reflection of the incredible, historic contributions of the majors’ top two hitters by wRC+, namely Aaron Judge (.324/.457/.706, 217 wRC+) and Juan Soto (.291/.419/.582, 181 wRC+). Only three other regulars have a wRC+ of 100 or better: Austin Wells, who’s doing about 60% of the catching work; Giancarlo Stanton, who missed over five weeks in June and July due to a left hamstring strain; and Jazz Chisholm Jr., who has played all of 25 games for the Yankees since being acquired on July 27. Besides Judge and Soto, their other three players with at least 561 plate appearances each have a wRC+ below 100, namely second baseman Gleyber Torres (96), shortstop Anthony Volpe (95 wRC+), and Verdugo (84 wRC+). Volpe’s defense is strong enough that he ranks third on the team with 3.6 WAR, Torres has hit for a 115 wRC+ in the second half, and Chisholm has shored up their once-dismal third base production, but first base has been an additional drag on the offense, with Anthony Rizzo, Ben Rice, DJ LeMahieu et al combining for just a 74 wRC+ and -1.3 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

You might be a bit surprised to learn just how rare 3-0 counts are. As of Tuesday morning, there had been 155,045 plate appearances in the 2024 season, and just 5,852 of them, or 3.8%, had gone 3-0. That means that each team should expect to see a 3-0 count just 1.4 times per game. That’s a whole lot fewer than I expected. Because of that scarcity, if somebody comes to you with statistics about a batter’s splits in 3-0 counts, you can probably discount them as a small sample size aberration. That’s all the more true when you consider that, ignoring intentional walks, 3-0 counts turn into walks roughly 60% of the time (which in turns means that they account for roughly 29% of all walks). Once the batter gets ahead 3-0, there are very few actual at-bats taking place. So you don’t have to take this seriously if you don’t want to, but once he reaches a 3-0 count, Aaron Judge is putting together the greatest season in recorded history. I know that’s not exactly a shocking lede – Aaron Judge is good at something; film at eleven – but it’s fun, so hear me out.

In this case, recorded history starts in 1988. That’s the earliest year that Stathead lets you pull count-based splits. Those splits are slightly muddied by the fact that as far as Stathead is concerned, 3-0 counts include intentional walks. (That’s understandable, since until very recently, intentional walks still required pitchers to throw four actual balls. Still, it definitely skews the numbers; it doesn’t make a ton of sense to include PAs where the batter never saw a competitive pitch in count splits.) This season, Judge has been walked intentionally 18 times, but four of those passes only happened once the pitcher had fallen behind 3-0, so we’ll leave them and strip out the other 14.

That leaves Judge with 43 PAs that went to a 3-0 count, second in baseball behind Juan Soto, who has 54 (which also gives the Yankees far more 3-0 counts than any other team in baseball). In those PAs, Judge has walked 35 times, for a walk rate of 81.4%. That’s how terrifying Aaron Judge is: Even though he ranks second in this split by PAs, pitchers are so disinclined to throw him a strike that he’s tied for 75th in ABs. Read the rest of this entry »

When Michael King’s season got off to a slow start, it was pretty easy to find the things that were going wrong. The walks, the homers, the short outings: I wouldn’t blame an analyst for doubting him. Oh, wait, that was me doubting King? Well that’s awkward, because he’s been exceptional ever since. But for someone with King’s profile – a kitchen-sink arsenal without a clear standout pitch and a history of working in relief – disaster never feels far off. So today I thought I’d highlight all the stuff that hasn’t gone wrong, because seeing King pitch is a good reminder that sometimes life is all about minimizing your weaknesses.

The first thing that could have gone wrong was decreased fastball velocity. King averaged 95.1 mph on his four-seamer in starts last year, but he was down around 93 mph through a month of play this season. He’s sitting 94 mph since the start of June, though, and his results on that pitch have improved markedly. He’s doing the same thing with his sinker: adding velocity and getting better results. To be fair, the results have been much better on his sinker than his four-seamer, but in both cases, they’ve improved quite a bit since the beginning of the year, and the improvement is the key here.

Pitching off of those two fastballs is particularly important for King, because he struggled mightily with falling behind in the count earlier this year. That led to a predictable dance. King would attack the zone with fastballs to get back into the count, and he’d sometimes fly too close to the sun. Given that his four-seamer is still crushable and he doesn’t consistently locate his sinker for strikes, he was getting himself into a lot of trouble and spending too much effort digging out of holes. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals survived Willson Contreras‘ first extended absence due to injury, going 24-16 while their catcher/designated hitter was sidelined for six weeks due to a fractured left forearm. Despite his loss, the ineffectiveness of cornerstones Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, and a host of other issues, they were still in contention for a playoff spot when the July 30 trade deadline approached — not in great shape, but with a roster worth augmenting for the stretch run. But by the time Contreras suffered a fractured middle finger on his right hand as a result of an errant Pablo López pitch on August 24, it was clear that this wouldn’t be the Cardinals’ year. They had already shaken up their roster with a couple of notable demotions, and by the end of the month, they let deadline acquisition Tommy Pham depart via waivers.

The Cardinals aren’t the only team whose playoff hopes withered some time between the trade deadline and Labor Day, just the one that made the most noise on the transaction wire. Based on the changes in our Playoff Odds, here are the teams that suffered the steepest declines from the close of play on July 29 (i.e., the day before the deadline) through Monday:

Read the rest of this entry »

As we enter the final month of the season, there are a handful of clubs on the edge of the playoff picture whose play of late has made a few of the postseason races fairly exciting as the 2024 campaign winds down.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coinflip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps. Read the rest of this entry »

In the pre-PitchCom era, major league teams had more rigorous protocols for protecting their signs than your bank has for securing your account. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some teams’ custom PitchCom audio clips are read in a modified pig latin created by a pitching strategy staffer. That the hitter doesn’t know what pitch is coming is considered a huge advantage for the pitcher. And it’s not only pitchers who think so — just ask the 2017 Astros.

Sign-stealing aside, hitters stand in the box pondering which pitch might come hurtling their way mere seconds later. What that pondering looks like depends on the hitter. There’s Nick Castellanos and his “glorified batting practice” approach, in which he looks for the ball and hits it as hard as he can. But there’s also Carlos Correa, who starts his day studying pitcher tendencies in the video room.

For their part, pitchers set the difficulty level on the hitter’s guessing game. That terms like “fastball count” and “pitching backwards” exist tell us that pitchers follow (and, at times, purposefully upend) conventional tactics to sequence their pitches, and believe that certain pitch types are optimal in certain counts. Strategies become standard practices because they’re effective, but an over-reliance on one or two strategies can lead to predictability. Become too predictable and a pitcher effectively sets their opponents’ guessing game on “easy” mode. But does making it easy for the hitter to sit on a certain pitch automatically make the overall task of hitting easier? Does keeping a hitter guessing always ensure effective pitching? Read the rest of this entry »

Lucas Erceg’s story is fairly well known. A position player for his first seven professional seasons, the 2014 second-round draft pick converted to the mound in 2021 and went on to make his big-league debut last May after being traded from the Milwaukee Brewers to the Oakland Athletics. The transition has been a resounding success. Now with the Royals — Kansas City acquired the 29-year-old right-hander at last month’s trade deadline — Erceg has eight saves to go with a 3.40 ERA, a 2.87 FIP, and a 27.3% strikeout rate over 50-and-a-third innings on the season.

Pitching and hitting are different animals, and that includes the data and technology used to help hone one’s craft at the professional level. With that in mind, I asked Erceg if the degree to which he is analytically-inclined has changed along with his job description.

“I’ve always been kind of minimal with that” Erceg told me prior to a game at Detroit’s Comerica Park. “I think the more I start to look at numbers, and hyper-focus on what they are telling me, the more I’ll overcorrect instead of just making those day-to-day progressions.”

Erceg feels that he was guilty of overcorrecting during his hitting days down on the farm. Looking back, he realizes that he was prone to listening to too many voices, and as a result ended up “kind of bouncing around from idea to idea, never finding consistency.” The potential — especially in the power department — was there, but he ultimately stalled out developmentally as a slugger. In his final season as a position player, Erceg slashed .219/.305/.398 in Triple-A.

Moving to the mound coincided with a mental shift for the Menlo College product. Read the rest of this entry »

One thing I love about writing for FanGraphs is getting the chance to cover players who otherwise would receive little (if any) attention from sources outside of their own team’s market. On this little part of the internet, pieces about the Joe Blows of the league aren’t just allowed, they’re encouraged. Yet, almost 10 years ago, the great Jeff Sullivan hemmed and hawed before writing about one such player:

For a while, I’ve personally been interested in Tyler Clippard. I’ve considered on several occasions writing about him, and about him specifically, but on every one of those occasions, I’ve talked myself out of it, because it just never seemed relevant enough. Generally, people haven’t woken up and thought, today I’d like to read in depth about Tyler Clippard.

I get what Jeff meant. I felt the same way before I wrote this article, hence this introduction. Still, it’s a funny train of thought coming from a writer who was so well known for making his readers care about topics they didn’t realize they would have cared about until they started reading. There was no need for Jeff to justify the subject matter of his article, least of all at FanGraphs. It’s also funny because Clippard was coming off an All-Star season in which he pitched to a 2.18 ERA and 1.5 WAR in 75 games. He had been one of the best relievers in baseball for the past five years. Clearly, the landscape of baseball blogging has changed over the past decade; a player with Clippard’s resume wouldn’t even qualify as a niche topic anymore. Indeed, Clippard might as well be a Shohei Ohtani-level mega-star compared to the reliever I’m writing about today. Read the rest of this entry »