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Triston McKenzie has a big arm. He’s also charismatic with a big heart, which helps make him a natural fit for the team that drafted him 42nd overall in 2015. As much as any organization in baseball, the pitching-rich Cleveland Indians value character and makeup.

McKenzie has all the makings of a role model, but at 19 years old, he is hesitant to set it as a goal. He would nonetheless embrace that sort of reputation.

“I wouldn’t try to put myself in that position, but if that’s what happens, that’s what happens,” said McKenzie, who has a 2.84 ERA this year with high-A Lynchburg. “I always try to set a good example for my younger (16 year old) brother, and I guess it would stem from there.”

McKenzie pays attention to players he can look up to, and model his game after. He feels that athletes who set good examples are not only “good for the culture of baseball,” they also “open eyes for a lot of people outside the game.”

His father isn’t a pitching professional — McKenzie’s parents are both physical therapist assistants — but he does have insights on the craft. Pitchability is considered one of the youngster’s strengths, and paternal advice is part of the reason. Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, I remember thinking that Billy Beane must be feeling pretty good about having Sonny Gray, perhaps one of baseball’s best trade chips. Stephen Strasburg had just signed a contract extension, leaving few, if any, pending free agents around the league and little else available on the trade market at the deadline. With a cost-controlled pitcher, the A’s could sell to any team without being limited to major markets. If Drew Pomeranz was capable of fetching a top prospect in Anderson Espinoza, Sonny Gray was going to merit a haul.

It didn’t quite work out that way. A combination of ineffectiveness and arm injuries, perhaps one causing the other, left Gray with a poor season. A year later, Gray is pitching well, and he might still be that valuable trade chip I considered him to be a year ago.

I have some recollection of Sonny Gray being a top-of-the-rotation starter, an ace-type player. Then I look at some of his stats, and I can’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed. There’s his 21% strikeout rate from 2013 to 2015, which ranks an okay 31st out of 89 pitchers with at least 400 innings. His 7.7% walk rate was 60th among those 89 pitchers — not that good at all, in other words. Then you look a little further and find the one thing that Gray did very well — namely, keep the ball on the ground. His ground-ball rate of 54% was seventh in the majors during that timeframe. It’s hard for opposing batters to collect extra-base hits when they can’t get off the ground. It’s impossible to hit it out of the park. Unsurprisingly, Gray’s 0.66 HR/9 was 12th best in baseball during that period. Opponent ISO was under .100, second only to Clayton Kershaw.

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Yency Almonte is scheduled to take the mound for the Hartford Yard Goats this weekend. It will be the 22-year-old right-hander’s first appearance since May 3, when shoulder discomfort cut short his fifth start of the season.

Prior to being shelved, Almonte excelled. The No. 13 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system has a 1.37 ERA, and Eastern League opponents have hit .189 against his power mix. He was almost untouchable when I saw him live. On April 20, Almonte allowed just four baserunners, and fanned 10, over seven scoreless innings against Harrisburg.

When I caught up to him a few weeks later, the first thing I asked about was the velocity escalation I’d witnessed. Almonte had sat 91-92 in the early innings. By game’s end, he was consistently 95-96.

“I like to spot up and not overdo it early,” explained Almonte. “I know that once the game goes on, and I start getting warm — I start getting hot — I start getting it up there. This year, I’ve been anywhere from 91 to 99.”

Reigning in a tendency to overthrow has been a focus. According to Yard Goats pitching coach Dave Burba, the youngster has been guilty of trying to light up radar guns.

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Yasmani Grandal and I will be forever connected.

Despite his paltry traditional offensive numbers a year ago — including a .229 batting average, 49 runs scored, and 72 runs batted in — I placed Grandal seventh on my NL MVP ballot. I was the only writer to cast a vote for Grandal. I wrote about why I did this back in January when I was still new on the job here at FanGraphs. In summary, I gave a lot of value to Grandal’s framing, batting eye, and power from each side of the plate.

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While pace of play has been an issue discussed by the league for some time now, I’ve personally been slow to regard it as an actual problem for the sport. It’s been, for me, a matter that only casual fans would take note of — and that if they weren’t complaining about this issue, they would surely find another one about which to complain.

A couple of developments have changed my thinking, though. First, Grant Brisbee took the time to actually investigate two games held 30 years apart and came away with the conclusion that a pitch clock actually may make a substantial difference in the length of games. Second, players have continued taking longer than ever between pitches this season, despite the increasing talk about the league’s problem with pace of play.

Let’s start with a graph that illustrates the problem on a league-wide basis. Data is as of Thursday morning, but the Pace numbers won’t have changed much in a day, so that’s fine.

You can see the one time in the past decade that saw any marked shift downward was in 2015, when the league put a new rule in place mandating that batters had to keep one foot in the box (except after foul balls) during a plate appearance. From my viewing experiences, the rule doesn’t appear to have been enforced with the same vigilance over the last two seasons, and the data suggest the same thing. The effect has been a rise in the average pace of more than a second and a half since 2015, and 0.7 seconds more than the previous high in 2014.

This is a problem on a couple of levels. First, it shows that the players aren’t taking the Commissioner’s Office very seriously, unless there was a new memo or rule put in place that I have missed. Second, it shows that the players cannot be trusted to follow the honor system — and, as such, more heavy-handed methods of enforcement might be necessary.

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In the second half of last season, the Reds played just about .500 baseball, and they were driven in large part by a new version of Joey Votto — a version of Joey Votto that refused to strike out. However, while Votto drew himself a little bit of attention, it never became a major story, mostly because of the Reds’ miserable first half knocking them off of everyone’s radar. By the time August rolls around, there are teams that are already out of the hunt, and those teams don’t get very much coverage.

It’s still the first half of this season, and the Reds have played just about .500 baseball. They’ve been driven in large part by a sustained version of Joey Votto — a version that still refuses to strike out. Don’t get me wrong, Votto was never particularly whiff-prone. It’s not like this is Chris Davis learning to put everything in play. But Votto’s a guy who’s entered his mid-30s. Contact is thought of as a young-player skill. In this way, Votto’s turned back the clock, and also bucked the league-wide strikeout trend that so many others have fallen into.

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Previously
Changeups: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveballs: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Cutters and Splitters: MLB Starters.
Four-Seamers: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Sinkers: MLB Starters.
Sliders: AL Starters.
Two-Seamers: MLB Starters.

This series seemingly began eons ago, but here we are: the final installment of our pitch-specific evaluation of 2016 ERA title-qualifying MLB starters. The best may have been saved for last, as today we examine NL starters’ sliders.

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Let me set two arbitrary thresholds for you. One is going to be 25% strikeouts. Nice, clean, familiar dividing line. The other is going to be 20 innings pitched, as a starter. That’s not very many innings, but it’s probably enough to show whether you’re a strikeout starter or not.

Between 2008 and 2016, the Dodgers had 17 pitcher-seasons meet those criteria. That’s a lot! The Indians are in second, with 11. Then the Nationals had 10, and the Tigers had nine, and so on. The Orioles had one. The Rockies had one. The Twins had zero. They’re the only team with zero, and this just further demonstrates a point we’ve all understood seemingly forever: The Twins haven’t collected strikeout starters. It’s been a while since Francisco Liriano, and it’s been even longer since Johan Santana.

This is one of the reasons why there’s been so much hype around Jose Berrios. Berrios, last year, had a chance to make an impression. I suppose he did make an impression, but it wasn’t the one anyone wanted. The winter afforded the opportunity to hit the reset button. Berrios has gotten a chance of late to make a *new* impression, a better impression. This time, he’s succeeding. This time, Berrios is pitching like he ought to pitch. Don’t look now, but the Twins have a quality starter.

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Strategy in the game of baseball has always evolved. As it pertains to pitcher usage, that evolution has been particularly swift over the last few decades. The four-man rotations of the 1950s and ’60s morphed into five-man groups in the ’70s and early ’80s. The 200-inning season has become increasingly rare in more recent seasons. Bullpens have become more specialized and diverse. In part due to the frequency of injury among pitchers in today’s game, teams and individual players have become more curious about prevention and efficiency.

My best guess, and I am hardly alone in this thinking this, is that the future of pitching-staff organization will eventually look much different. The structure will perhaps begin with tandem starters as part of four- or three-man rotations, or the rotations will be extended to six-man rotations. Perhaps there will be a battle of ideas and practices.

While 25-man rosters limit creativity, the new 10-day DL has allowed teams to experiment, and the Dodgers — as was forecast before the season by many — have best taken advantage of the truncated disabled list. The Dodgers entered the season with the greatest number of quality rotation options in the game, and that depth came with plenty of talented but risky options like Rich Hill, Scott Kazmir, and Brandon McCarthy. The Dodgers were the first natural test case and Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci procured an interesting quote from a Dodgers official while reporting on the club’s pitching strategy in 2017:

“There’s no team that has the kind of depth we do,” said one club source. “This team is built to win 95 games on the strength of depth carrying us over six months. We should get to 95 wins. But the year comes down to this: Clayton, Richie and Julio being healthy and ready to go to start playoff games. That’s it. So if it means they throw 170 innings instead of 200, that’s fine. They’ll actually be better for it.”

The disabled list has always been loosely governed. It’s always been used as a roster-manipulation tool in addition to a place to earnestly store injured players. And the 10-day DL certainly hasn’t ended that. As Eno Sarris noted last week, days spent on DL this year are up about 50% compared to the 2011-15 five-year average.

Wrote Sarris:

The positive spin on this situation is that maybe, once the dust settles, we’ll see some reduction in days lost. Players can take a 10-day breather in a situation where they would have previously attempted to return too early. Maybe a little bit of preventative rest will reduce the amount of catastrophic injury. Trips up, days down might be the slogan.

But that’s a maybe. In the meantime, we’re left a very real explosion of unavailable players. And a few teams that are perhaps superior at manipulating that rule change and new situation, whether due to resources or superior preparation.

And perhaps thanks to resources, and superior preparation, the Dodgers are leading the way in a practice that is surely to be copy catted — if it works. And it is working: the Dodgers lead baseball in fewest runs allowed per nine innings by starting pitchers (3.59 runs). They’re one of three teams with starting rotations allowing fewer than four runs per nine innings. Sure, having Clayton Kershaw helps. But the Dodgers ranked fifth last season in the majors in runs per game from starters (3.94), they allowed 3.67 in 2015, second in MLB, and 2014 (3.81), when the Dodgers ranked 10th and the game was still in a modern dead-ball era.

To date this season, the Dodgers have never pitched more effectively in the Andrew Friedman Era, and Kershaw is just getting his slider back.

And while a number of factors could be at work, this is also the first year of the 10-day DL, and the Dodgers are leading MLB in something else: the number of starts made by starters on more than four days of rest. Consider the leaders in “Long Days Rest”, tracked by Baseball Reference:

In 2014, the Dodgers ranked 11th in starts made on four days rest or more (85). The league average was 83. In 2015, Dodgers starters made 83 such starts. The league average that season was 84. Last season, the Dodgers jumped to second (103), and the league average jumped to 87. This season, they’re on pace to shatter that mark, with 130 such starts, while the league average will grow to near 90. In 1990, the league average was 55. In 1970, it was 45.

And the Dodgers aren’t just giving their starters more rest between starts; they’re also limiting them to 87 pitchers per start, tied for the third fewest in the majors.

The Dodgers represent an interesting experiment this year: never in the history of game will a staff have been as well rested throughout a season — or, presumably, entering the postseason.

While the Rich Hills and Kenta Maedas and Alex Woods are receiving more rest and trips to the DL, Kershaw is also receiving more time between starts. He’s already made six starts on more than four days rest, according to Baseball Reference. The most such starts he’s made in a season was 17 in 2011.

The Dodgers are creating a de facto six-man rotation. If this experiment works, if the team plans for it and has the depth for it, perhaps it will become a new model going forward.

In theory, a four- or three-man tandem rotation makes a lot of sense. Starting pitchers are less effective each time they work through a stating lineup, and a team can more often create platoon advantages by flipping to an opposite-handed tandem starter. (And in the NL, for as long as DH doesn’t exist, pitchers will less often bat.) But in speaking with executives, coaches, and players on the subject, the problems with the idea include how it would stretch a staff, the limited roster spots available, and when the plan blows up on a given day. If a pitcher fails to log his innings, it really stresses a roster.

So while the piggyback rotation is ideal in theory — and could perhaps become a reality with a combination of expended rosters and a 10-day DL — perhaps it’s the six-man rotation, or some sort of 10-day DL-enabled variety, that will eventually win the day.

If a fresh Dodgers rotation rolls through October, it will be a model to be copied.