I’ve got good news for you, Padres fans. Manny Machado is hitting the ball as hard as nearly anyone in baseball*. Seriously! Take a look at this leaderboard:

Yeah! There’s our guy, fourth in the majors, absolutely pummeling the ball. No Aaron Judge on this list. No Juan Soto or Shohei Ohtani or Gunnar Henderson. Machado’s outdoing them all. Never mind that pesky asterisk up above. He’s totally fixed. Though speaking of, what is that asterisk about?

*: Exit velocity on groundballs only

Oh. Huh. I guess that’s why the list is missing all those great hitters, and instead has dudes barely hanging on or getting demoted to Triple-A. Thunderous power doesn’t mean much if you’re hitting the ball straight into the infield grass. That explains this confusing trend:

If you just looked at his average exit velocity, you’d think Machado was surging this year. Even if you looked at the average of the top half of his contact, it’s better than the last two years. But he’s not hitting the ball any harder when he elevates, and he’s elevating less than ever. The result? Fewer homers and doubles, and a lower ISO. Read the rest of this entry »

For a few years now, I’ve been waiting for Salvador Perez to break down.

There are three reasons for this. First, he’s at the intersection of two kinds of hitter who are at risk of precipitous decline: Big dudes who hit for a lot of power but don’t walk much and free swingers who need to make a lot of contact. Perez is one of seven players who have batted at least 4,500 times since the year 2000, with a career walk rate of 7% or less and a career ISO of .175 or more. The other six are Eduardo Escobar, José Abreu, Javier Báez, Nick Castellanos, Adam Jones, and J.T. Realmuto. That’s five guys who watched it go in a hurry and, well, stay strong, J.T., we’re all rooting for you.

The other point is that Perez plays the hardest position in the sport. Not only that, but he’s one of the biggest guys to ever play that position regularly (a man who weighs 255 pounds and crouches 200 times a day, six days a week has to have thighs the size of bike wheels) and he’s put in an unbelievable amount of time there. Read the rest of this entry »

Season one of One Tree Hill is a perfect season of television, and I will not be entertaining arguments to the contrary. In it we meet Nathan and Lucas Scott, the sons of hometown basketball hero, Dan Scott, who runs a local car dealership. Nathan was raised in the traditional nuclear family structure by Dan and his college sweetheart and wife. Lucas was raised in a single-parent household by his mother, Dan’s high school sweetheart. Despite sourcing their foundational genetic material from the same DNA pool, Nathan and Lucas are depicted at odds with one another in several key ways. Nathan is his father’s golden child and characterized as hyper competitive, entitled, and emotionally stunted; Lucas receives no acknowledgement from Dan and skews more intellectual, reserved, and empathetic. Both are super good at basketball and both crave the approval of their father. Nathan seemingly has it all, but presents as lonely and ill at ease in his environment. Lucas drew the short straw, but is mostly content and supported by several meaningful relationships.

The whole concept is a pretty straightforward exercise in nature vs. nurture, and if you haven’t seen One Tree Hill, don’t worry, I haven’t spoiled anything; this is all part of the show’s initial setup in the pilot episode. What the viewer is intended to puzzle out as the season unfolds is how much of Nathan’s arrogance and aggression is a reaction to his surroundings and how much is an inherent part of his character. And on the other hand, can Lucas, against his father’s wishes, learn to thrive in new surroundings as he steps into the spotlight of varsity basketball? Or is he more naturally suited to exist in the shadows?

I recently read almost six years of scouting reports, statistical breakdowns, and interviews covering two prospects from the 2018 MLB draft in an attempt to to understand the how and why of each player’s career arc. More on that later, but for now, I want to emphasize how much easier it is to analyze a teen soap opera. And it’s not that the scouting reports were unclear, or that the statistical analysis was misleading, or that the players misrepresented themselves in interviews. It’s that taking 18- to 22-year-olds and turning them into big leaguers is a hard thing to do under the best of circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re here to talk about Ryan McMahon, but before we can do that, we need to talk about Joe Kutina. Joe Kutina didn’t steal any bases in 1912. A 6-foot-2, power-hitting first baseman in his second season with the St. Louis Browns, that wasn’t necessarily his job. Kutina earned his spot in 1911, batting .374 with a .589 slugging percentage for the Saginaw Krazy Kats of the Class-C Southern Michigan League. He joined St. Louis at the end of the season, putting up a 96 wRC+ with three home runs in 26 games with the Browns. In 1912, his wRC+ dropped to 59 and he launched just one homer in 69 games. He also got caught stealing seven times.

I know that getting caught stealing seven times sounds like a lot, but things were a little different back then. In the 1912 season, 73 players got caught stealing at least seven times. Ty Cobb led the league with 34 unsuccessful steal attempts, and three other players also got nabbed at least 30 times. The difference is that Cobb and those three others combined for 203 successful steals. Kutina, once again, stole zero bases. That made him the first player in AL/NL history to get caught stealing at least four times without successfully stealing a single base in a season — or at least to be recorded doing so in that era of spottier record keeping. According to Stathead, over the last 112 years, just 216 players have replicated Kutina’s dubious accomplishment. Although that averages out to a bit below two per season, the distribution isn’t exactly even.

We’re only third of the way into this decade, but unless the pace picks up dramatically, we’ll end with the lowest total since the days when Joe Kutina was lumbering around the bases with reckless abandon. As it turns out, one of the changes wrought by the data revolution was an unwillingness to let players who were incapable of stealing a base keep trying and failing over and over again. This is why people don’t like analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries are an ever-present factor in baseball. They lurk everywhere, just at the periphery of the game. They pop up seemingly at random, when things couldn’t get any worse and also when they’re going incredibly well. They strike without rhyme or reason. But if you’re an Astros fan, none of that is going to make you feel better at the moment, because Houston’s sudden injury flare-up couldn’t be coming at a worse time.

The most recent deluge of bad news on the Gulf Coast isn’t about the team’s inconsistent play, though that’s surely worrisome. They’ve gone 5-5 over their last 10 games, and they didn’t have a lot of runway to play with in the first place. They’re seven games out of first place in the AL West. Even worse, recent injury news has them reeling at the time they can least afford it.

José Urquidy started the year on the IL, part of a planned wave of reinforcements the Astros hoped would give them a rotation buffer in case of unexpected news. But that plan hit a snag when Urquidy left a May 24 rehab start with pain in his forearm. Today, the Astros confirmed a report from earlier in the week that Urquidy will undergo Tommy John surgery. He’s out for the season, and most of the next one too. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Sale is a serious Cy Young contender. This was once a fairly common combination of words to put together, but after five years of injuries and/or ineffectiveness, it seems like a very weird thing to say today. That’s where we are, though, with Sale striking out 82 batters against 10 walks over his 11 starts and 67 2/3 innings. He leads all NL starters in FIP (2.48), walks per nine innings (1.33), and strikeout-to-walk ratio (8.20); he ranks fourth in strikeouts per nine (10.91), sixth in pitcher WAR (1.9), and 12th in ERA (3.06), though both his excellent FIP and xERA (2.73, third in NL) suggest his actual mark could improve as the season goes on. And for subscribers to the old school, he’s posted an 8-1 record for the Braves, a top contender who lost their ace for the season. Indeed, Atlanta’s offseason gamble to trade for Sale is paying off well so far, and his resurgence have been paramount in preventing the Braves from falling even farther behind the Phillies in the NL East standings.

But what hasn’t been revived yet is any talk about Sale’s chances of making a run at Cooperstown immortality in another decade or so. That’s not surprising, given he lost a good chunk of his mid-career years and stands at only 128 wins and 1,848 1/3 innings — volume that wouldn’t get it done for even the most dominant of starters on a per-inning basis. We’ve long accepted that 300-game winners were going to be increasingly unlikely, but what if 200 becomes the new standard? If Sale truly has reemerged from five years in the injury wasteland, suddenly his Hall of Fame case looks at least plausible.

The 300-win standard never actually was a standard for Hall of Fame voting until relatively recently. Barely a quarter of Hall of Fame pitchers are 300-game winners and a quarter of them (six of 24) exclusively played in the 19th century, when baseball was as much a carnival show as professional sport. From 1917 to 1965, nearly a half-century that included baseball’s peak in the context of American culture, there were never more than three future 300-win pitchers active at any point. In most of those years, baseball had only one or two active pitchers who would eventually hit that threshold, typically a combination of Lefty Grove, Early Wynn, and Warren Spahn. It’s not as if this was an era in baseball history that lacked for Hall of Fame pitchers; slightly more than half of AL/NL Hall of Famers had the majority of their careers within that span of years.

To get a clearer picture, I took all starting pitchers (at least 50% of games as starters) and tracked how many per year got at least 10% support on the BBWAA’s Hall of Fame ballot. It’s not completely an apples-to-apples comparison because the rules have changed at times, but it’s not apples-to-grenades either, as the BBWAA rules have been more stable than the various Veterans Committee schemes.

The stinginess trend toward pitchers is clear. Without a lot of 300-win pitchers to vote on, voters didn’t simply shrug and decide that no pitchers were good enough; they were quite happy to vote for lots of pitchers who failed to get 300 wins, or even 250. From 1936 to 1975, the 10-election rolling average of pitchers with fewer than 200 wins to reach that 10% threshold was 2.5. A pitcher with fewer than 200 wins hasn’t received 10% of the vote since Don Newcombe in 1980. This is despite early voters having the deepest pools of players to vote for; even as Hall of Fame voting started in 1936 and players hung on ballots for 15 years instead of the current 10-year window, voters found room for these pitchers with less impressive win totals.

The 90s cluster of pitching greats are either in the Hall of Fame or off the ballot, so unless voting patterns become more like they were before the 1970s, we may have a real lack of pitchers inducted into the Hall of Fame in the coming years. That process has already started, with only 17 different pitchers ever getting 10% of the vote in 21st-century balloting. There are three active pitchers with 200 wins: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Clayton Kershaw. There’s also Zack Greinke, who at age 40 has probably thrown his last big league inning, even though he has not yet officially retired and remains unsigned. It seems very likely that all four will get into the Hall of Fame. But then what? Pitcher usage has changed considerably since that quartet debuted. Right now, there are only 11 other active pitchers with 100 (!) career wins, and none between 150 and 200.

Aside from the previously mentioned quartet, only Sale and Gerrit Cole have ever really come up in future Hall of Fame conversations, though Yu Darvish has an interesting-but-tricky case if voters give consideration to his seven years pitching in Japan. For the first time in ZiPS history, ZiPS doesn’t project a single pitcher who hasn’t already eclipsed 200 wins to have at least a 50% shot of reaching the milestone. Considering this, Sale has an fascinating path to the Hall of Fame. For the most part, the writers still aren’t voting for pitchers without lofty win totals, but it has become clear that the fixation on pitcher wins has decreased in Cy Young voting. This could provide an interesting preview of where Hall of Fame voting is going to be over the next 5-10 years, because year-end voters don’t have the same 10-year requirement for BBWAA membership that Hall of Fame voting does. As a result, you tend to get a younger demographic participating in year-end awards voting, and at least some of those writers will be gaining their Hall of Fame vote between now and when Sale hits the ballot. Additionally, some of the most veteran writers aren’t as active in the year-end voting, as some of them are in a state of semi or full retirement but have maintained their Hall vote. In a contrast the younger writers, some of these senior BBWAA members will lose their vote over the next 5-10 years. Call it the Baseball Writing Circle of Life.

Considering this, let’s crank up ZiPS (Hey, you had to know I was going to do this at some point!) and look at Sale’s up-to-date projections. As discussed at the top of this post, Sale has been excellent in 2024 and, just as importantly, he’s been healthy.

Even with ZiPS projecting Sale to be only healthy-ish rather than to have a late-career renaissance like Verlander, that’s another 50 wins and 10 WAR, and with the rest of 2024 added in, 58 wins and 12 WAR. That would bring his total career projection to 186 wins and 62 WAR. Excluding the quartet of Verlander, Scherzer, Kershaw, and Greinke, that’d place Sale second among active pitchers in both wins and WAR, behind only Cole. As far 200 wins go, ZiPS projects Sale to have a 45% chance to reach that milestone, and if 200 becomes the new 300, then he’s got a 45% shot at making it to Cooperstown. Obviously, it’s not that simple, but Sale might not need to get to 200 wins to get elected. When voters look at Sale’s Hall of Fame case, they’ll consider his utter dominance during his best seasons — an eight-season peak from 2012-19 — and, should his health hold up at least to the level that ZiPS projects, he’ll likely go down as one of the very best pitchers during the two-decade era from 2010-2030. That would probably be enough to get him over the hump even if he falls short of 200. This chart tells the story.

It’s not as if Sale’s career is missing those non-statistical highlights. While his postseason performances have been short of cromulence, he does have a World Series ring, six All-Star selections so far, and is already 27th all-time in Cy Young career shares.

Will Sale actually end up in the Hall of Fame? We’ll have to wait until he finishes writing the last handful of chapters, which is sometimes a difficult task. But I think the final story may be better than many people think.

The fastball is dead. Or is it?

Every season has its share of articles detailing the league-wide decline in fastball usage, and 2024 is no exception. This time around, the spotlight has been on the Red Sox, who have seemingly crafted an elite rotation based on a delightfully succinct philosophy: Spin go brrrr. Indeed, they trail the league in four-seam fastball usage by a wide margin. But they’re also ninth in sinker usage and first in cutter usage as of this writing. This is incredibly interesting to me, especially after you consider the graph below:

In early counts (0-0, 0-1, and 1-0), when batters are more eager to swing and hunt for fastballs, we’ve reached a new minimum for four-seam fastballs. That checks out. But look at the combined rate of sinkers and cutters: It’s back up to levels last seen in 2018. So really, the Red Sox aren’t being hipsters. If anything, they represent what the league is thinking as a whole. The uptick is there, even if you exclude Boston. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday morning, Major League Baseball announced the suspension of five players for violating Rule 21, the prohibition on betting on baseball. Minor leaguers Jay Groome of the Padres, José Rodríguez of the Phillies, Michael Kelly of the Athletics, and Andrew Saalfrank of the Diamondbacks were all suspended for one season.

But the headline figure in the announcement is Padres utilityman Tucupita Marcano, who has been declared permanently ineligible after betting some $150,000 on baseball games — a mix of MLB and international contests — through legal sportsbooks. Marcano placed 25 bets on games involving the Pirates last summer while he was on Pittsburgh’s injured list and receiving treatment at PNC Park. While all five players placed bets on their parent clubs, the key distinction is that Marcano did so while assigned to the major league team. For that, he became the first player to receive a lifetime sanction for this offense since Pete Rose 35 years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

When we last checked in on Aaron Judge on April 24, the big slugger was scuffling, hitting just .180/.315/.348 through the Yankees’ first 24 games. He had homered just three times, and was approximating league-average production thanks mainly to his 15.7% walk rate. A smattering of fans had booed him on his own bobblehead day at Yankee Stadium, when he struck out in all four plate appearances, and the haters on social media were sure that he was washed. Since then, he’s turned his season around in emphatic fashion, destroying opponents’ pitching, taking his place atop a few key leaderboards, and helping New York assemble the AL’s best record at 42-19.

Judge homered three times in a three-game series against the Giants at Oracle Park this past weekend while helping the Yankees to a sweep. It was the Linden, California native’s first time playing at the park of his favorite childhood team, and the ballpark he would have called home had Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner’s last-ditch effort to re-sign him in December 2022 not succeeded. He went yard twice off Jordan Hicks in Friday night’s 6-2 win, first with a three-run shot and later a solo one, then connected off Logan Webb for a two-run blast in a 7-3 win on Saturday; the 464-foot projected distance on that one made it his third-longest of the season. He merely went 2-for-3 with two singles, two walks, and two steals in Sunday’s 7-5 win, with Juan Soto filling the power vacuum by homering twice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Bummer is one of the best pitchers in baseball at one of the most important skills in the game. He’s reached two-strike counts against an impressive 67.8% of opposing batters. That’s among the best marks in the majors – seventh among pitchers who have faced 50 or more batters this year. It makes perfect sense; his sinker is so nasty that hitters take it for strikes or foul it off all the time, so he’s ahead in the count if he’s in the zone.

Knowing that, you might be surprised that Bummer’s strikeout rate is roughly league average. He’s one of the best pitchers in the game at getting to two strikes, but he’s actually in the bottom quarter of baseball when it comes to converting two-strike counts into strikeouts. He only does it roughly 35% of the time. The things that get him ahead simply don’t work as well with two strikes. No one’s taking a two-strike sinker low in the zone because they don’t think they’ll be able to do much with it; there are two strikes! Foul balls don’t work to Bummer’s benefit either.

Naturally, Bummer adjusts. He goes sweeper-heavy in two strike counts. But it doesn’t work well enough to turn his huge early advantage into enormous strikeout totals. His sweeper misses bats at a league-average rate, largely because batters don’t often chase it. None of that means he’s a bad pitcher – I think he’s great, and was surprised the Braves were able to acquire him for relatively little – but imagine how much better he could be if he struck batters out at a reasonable clip after getting to two strikes.

That got me thinking about The Strategy, caps intentional. That’s not any strategy; it’s the one that Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discussed all the time on Effectively Wild after the Yankees changed pitchers in the middle of a plate appearance. When reporters asked why manager Joe Girardi had made the switch, he simply said “strategy.” Thus, the name was born, and Ben eventually documented how the tactic was starting to catch on at the collegiate level.

It still hasn’t caught on at the major league level – sorry, Ben and Sam. But I think it should, and Bummer is half of the reason why. Every time I watch Bummer pitch, I’m struck by how easily he gets ahead. If he’s around the plate, there’s almost nothing hitters can do. They make a ton of contact against him, but it’s all topped grounders. That’s just how Bummer works. Hitters are okay going to two strikes if it means avoiding one of those rally-killing double play balls. And he’s been intermittently wild throughout his career, so trying to wait him out has merit.

Pierce Johnson, meanwhile, really only has one move. It’s a great one, though; he throws his curveball 80% of the time and still gets a ton of outs with it. He’s running a glorious 32.1% strikeout rate so far this year. But he’s doing it very differently. Bummer gets to two-strike counts better than almost everyone else in baseball. Johnson is above average, but not hugely so. After reaching two strikes, however, he’s automatic. He’s 15th in baseball when it comes to converting two-strike counts into strikeouts. The reason is obvious – he only throws curveballs, so he must have a pretty good curveball – but that doesn’t make it less true.

For the most part, this just isn’t important. It doesn’t matter how you trace a path to outs; it just matters how many you get overall. Bummer is much worse than Johnson after 0-2 counts, but he suffers much less when falling behind 2-0. His game tends towards grounders, regardless of counts; Johnson’s is about making hitters swing through three curveballs before they take four out of the zone. That 2-0 count hurts more when you’re trying to avoid contact than when you’re betting on it. But at the end of the day, Johnson has allowed a lower wOBA than Bummer so far, and the way they get there doesn’t matter.

What if it could, though? There’s no rule that prevents Brian Snitker from waiting for Bummer to get ahead 0-2 or 1-2 in an important spot and then replacing him with Johnson. A pitcher who got to two-strike counts with Bummer’s frequency and converted them with Pierce’s would have a 39.2% strikeout rate. And that might understate things, honestly.

Imagine getting down in the count against Bummer’s heavy lefty sinker, then hearing time called. You wait two minutes for a pitching change, standing awkwardly on the field or maybe reading some iPad scouting reports, and then bam, you’re facing an over-the-top curveball from a righty. Also, if you miss once, the plate appearance ends. It’s a tough spot to imagine, let alone live through.

That additional strikeout rate is hardly a game-breaking edge. But it’s a non-zero advantage, and baseball teams famously like to take those. And it’s not just limited to Bummer/Johnson pairings, either. Every high-leverage reliever on the Braves puts away hitters more efficiently than Bummer. None of them reach two strikes as frequently. This is a tailor-made spot for the strategy, resilient to who the specific batter is (someone hits curveballs well would be a bad spot for Johnson) and which relievers are unavailable on a given day. It’s not resilient to the requirement that pitchers face three batters during their outings, but Bummer has faced four or more batters in 14 of his 20 appearances this year, so it’s at least technically available to Atlanta in the majority of his games. Johnson, too, is subject to a three-batter minimum. You might not use him if he had a particularly bad matchup due up next. But he has neutral platoon splits for his career, and the Braves have other options as well. The minimum is more of an inconvenience than a dealbreaker.

There’s no indication that the Braves are trying the strategy. There’s no indication that anyone’s trying it, really. Caleb Ferguson looks like a candidate for the Bummer role, though to be fair the Yankees don’t have an obvious hammer to bring in after him. Luke Weaver might make the most sense – the problem is that he’s also better at getting to two strikes than Ferguson. Likewise, Anthony Bender is probably the best overall fit – Tanner Scott and Calvin Faucher are nice strikeout anchors – but I can’t quite see the Marlins trying something so strange.

No, we’re probably doomed to see no uses of the strategy in the majors, even as it continues to happen in high stakes college baseball. As an eagle-eyed listener pointed out to the Effectively Wild crew in Episode 2169, TCU manager Kirk Saarloos brought in a new pitcher in the highest-leverage position imaginable this season: late innings, tie game, full count, bases loaded. That’s the kind of initiative I’d love to see in the majors, and only partially because I’ve heard Ben and Sam (and Meg and Jeff) talk about it so much over the years.

Maybe, like me, you find this whole pre-two-strike vs. post-two-strike split fascinating. Maybe you’re wondering who’s the best at each. Here’s a leaderboard, but really, the answer is just Mason Miller. Unsurprisingly, he’s nearly the best in the business at turning two-strike counts into strikeouts, at a ridiculous 68.9% clip. Only Fernando Cruz (70.4%) has done better. But wait, there’s more: Miller is also the best at reaching two strike counts, at 74.8%. That’s ludicrous. The hybridized Bummer/Johnson strategy can’t even recreate Miller’s brilliance.

In the end, that’s probably a good thing. “The Strategy” is interesting because of its rarity, and because it seems like a free upgrade. But the magnitude of that upgrade is tiny – the best way to manufacture a strikeout is to have Mason Miller pitching, not to strategically swap your guys in and out. This plan probably isn’t coming to a stadium near you – but the Braves should do it once or twice all the same, because there’s rarely a situation that calls out for it this clearly.