Less than a year after being drafted first overall, Paul Skenes made his first major league start for the Pirates. On Saturday, nearly 35,000 fans packed the stands at PNC Park in Pittsburgh for the occasion, hoping to get the first glimpse of a new era for the long-struggling home team. It was impossible not to draw comparisons to Stephen Strasburg’s debut in 2010, a masterpiece in which he struck out 14 batters, coincidentally against the Pirates. Perhaps no pitching prospect in history has come with the same hype that Strasburg did as he ascended through the minors, but the buzz surrounding Skenes comes close. Let’s see how he began his big league career.

Even those who haven’t read the full scouting report on Skenes know that he throws incredibly hard, and he needed just one pitch to associate himself with triple-digit Trackman readings. While he’s averaged 99 mph during his (mostly abbreviated) minor league starts over the past month, Skenes opened up the game with 101 mph heat and sat at 100 throughout the start. He threw mostly fastballs to leadoff hitter Mike Tauchman, save for a slider that missed outside. After reaching full count, Skenes collected his first strikeout in style.

Prior to Saturday, no starting pitcher in 2024 had thrown a pitch at 101 or higher. Skenes did so six times before his debut was over. While velocity might be the best known part of his game, Skenes has developed a deep arsenal of pitches, the newest of which he put to work against the next batter, Seiya Suzuki.

This splitter-sinker hybrid, or “splinker,” is a pitch with few comparisons; only Jhoan Duran and José Soriano throw any offering remotely similar. It feels impossible to throw in the mid-90s while simultaneously killing enough spin to give the pitch a negative induced vertical break, but Skenes rips these off with ease. He tends to use this pitch as more of a sinker than an offspeed offering (after all, it averages 95 mph), deploying it mostly against right-handed hitters while saving his lesser-used, upper-80s changeup for lefties. Suzuki could only watch the splinker go by. He couldn’t do much more with the next two pitches he saw, either. Let’s play them back to back.

First, Skenes claimed strike two with the harder version of his slider. After seeing something that broke a foot toward him, Suzuki flinched a bit at a that pitch, which ended up solidly in the zone. Well ahead in the count now, Skenes went in for the kill. This sweeping slider was his most-used pitch against righties in his start, featuring 15 inches of gloveside break. Moreover, because Skenes releases the ball so far on the third base side of the mound, it approaches the plate at a more extreme angle and makes it even more difficult to hit. All Suzuki could do was flail at it for strike three.

Skenes finished his first three innings of work without allowing any runs, though he issued two walks and hit a batter. At times, he struggled to find his release, finishing late with the fastball and ending up with a clump of misses below the zone to the gloveside. He also threw a sizable number down the heart of the plate, and Cubs hitters squared up a trio of them. With his slider, he would sometimes release early and cause the pitch to back up over the plate, but the few that he landed on the outside corner, mainly of the sweeper variation, were among his best pitches of the day.

While Skenes certainly has room to grow with his fastball and slider command, he threw his splinker with remarkable accuracy and consistency throughout his start. With the exception of the pitch that hit Nico Hoerner, Skenes’ splinkers lived at the bottom of the zone or right below it; that’s especially impressive considering he’s been throwing that pitch for only a couple months. Spotting it on the edges of the zone makes it so challenging for hitters to decide whether to swing, let alone make contact if they do. The pitch led Skenes’ arsenal with a 55% chase rate, 53% CSW, and seven swinging strikes, including these two to Ian Happ to start the fourth inning.

After dispatching Happ with a fastball, Hoerner stepped up for his second plate appearance. He quickly exacted his revenge for the second-inning plunk, pulling a first-pitch slider left over the middle for a home run that barely cleared the left field fence. Many gyro sliders feature late downward break, but unlike those thrown by the likes of Jeff Hoffman and Dylan Cease, Skenes’ has a few inches of rise compared to a ball thrown without spin. Without the downward bite, batters have an easier time barreling it up when he doesn’t locate it well. That’s what happened with the slider to Hoerner, who easily kept his swing on its plane and hooked the pitch out of the yard because it didn’t dive low and away from him. In his report, Eric Longenhagen explained that Skenes’ low arm slot is a likely cause of this pitch shape, as Skenes tends to get around the side of the ball instead of imparting motion on the vertical axis.

Skenes recovered nicely from the blemish on his line, fanning two more Cubs to put his total at seven through four innings. He had thrown 74 pitches, one shy of his season high in Triple-A. Had his day ended here, I think most would have been satisfied with what they saw – a dominant yet imperfect performance that gave a rosy glimpse into the future. But his start wasn’t over yet.

Much of what I’ve written about here explains why things happened. Skenes overwhelmed hitters with his fastball because he threw it so hard. He had success with his splinker because he located it so well. He gave up a homer with his slider because he hung it up in the zone. But I have no rational explanation for what happened next. Skenes, on a short leash, was pulled quickly after ground balls from Tauchman and Suzuki found just the right holes to end up as hits. Kyle Nicolas entered the game in relief, quickly striking out the next two batters before hitting the third. With two outs and the bases loaded, he proceeded to throw 12 consecutive balls, allowing a trio of runs to score, two of which were charged to Skenes. But even as Nicolas was removed from the game, the inning was far from over. Josh Fleming and Colin Holderman combined to walk in three more runs before the inning’s merciful conclusion, which took nearly three hours thanks to a rain delay.

Skenes, in a rather unfortunate feat, tripled his ERA while sitting on the bench. But he certainly gave a lot to be excited about while on the mound. Despite having just 34 minor league innings under his belt, he is certainly a different pitcher than he was this time last year at LSU. Most notably, he has expanded and diversified his arsenal considerably, and while some wondered whether he would have a viable third pitch in the majors, he showed off a six-pitch arsenal in his first career game.

We still talk about Strasburg’s debut 14 years after it happened, not only because of the incredible results but because of what he meant for the future of the Nationals franchise. Soon after, Strasburg was joined by other homegrown talents like Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon, and much later, Juan Soto. Washington won a World Series after a decade of contention, and Strasburg was the series MVP. What Skenes brings to Pittsburgh is no different, with his call-up carrying the optimism that he would be one of a new wave of young talents who’d come to reverse the fortunes of a team and city. Skenes didn’t have the legendary debut performance that Strasburg did, but he certainly pitched well enough to keep that hope alive.

For years, Statcast cameras (and before that, radar systems) have captured reams of data about every single play in every single major league game. We know not just the speed of a pitch, but its release point in three dimensions, where it crosses the plate, and the spin imparted on the ball. When a hitter makes contact, we know how fast the ball is moving when it comes off the bat, as well as the angle and the exact place it lands in (or out of) play. But there’s one thing we haven’t seen publicly – until now. Baseball Savant has released bat tracking data to the public, and it’s an exciting time to be analyzing hitters as a result.

The Statcast team was kind enough to provide us with an early look at things. So while you’re playing around with the new leaderboards and reading this excellent article by Mike Petriello that breaks down how this new data works, I wanted to give you a few early observations of my own, to spark some discussion and hopefully make you as excited about this new treasure trove as I am.

First things first: You’re going to love squared-up rate. You can think of this as a mathematical way of describing Luis Arraez. For a given swing speed and a given pitch speed, there’s a maximum possible exit velocity. That’s essentially what you’d get if you hit the ball on the sweet spot exactly on plane. If you’ve ever swung a metal bat, you know what this feels like. Statcast considers a ball squared up if its actual exit velocity is at least 80% of its maximum theoretical exit velocity. In other words, it measures whether you caught the ball flush. Read the rest of this entry »

Your local beat reporter has the power to shape the way you see your favorite team. Day in and day out, it’s their voice delivering the good news and the bad, telling you what’s happening on the field and in the locker room. If you’re lucky enough to love a team with a good beat writer, it can absolutely deepen your relationship with the sport. A reporter might become required reading because they write beautifully, make you laugh, really know the game, ask good questions, or build great relationships with the players. If you don’t have a good beat writer, it’s easier to drift away from the team, and even the sport. They matter quite a bit, is what I’m saying. Despite that fact, beat reporters are rarely the focus. For all they mean to us, we don’t even see their faces all that often. Most of the time, all we see of a beat reporter is a disembodied hand holding a recording device (or, as in the picture below, the very tip of their nose).

It’s a complicated job. It requires knowledge of the game, constant creativity, tight deadlines, long hours, travel, and the ability to forge good relationships with players despite the fact that you sometimes have to stick a recorder in their face and ask, “So what was going through your mind when you made the error that cost your team the game?” In order to learn more about what the job actually entails, I reached out to Andrew Golden, who took over as the Washington Post’s lead beat writer covering the Nationals this season and has been on the beat for a few years.

Although he’s barely three years out of college, Golden’s credentials are imposing. In high school, he played baseball and wrote about sports for the school paper and for a blog he ran with some friends. He double-majored in journalism and African American studies at Northwestern, where he covered sports for the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, earning internships at the Kansas City Star, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post. The Post internship came immediately after graduation, and he was hired full-time when it ended. Golden had spent three months covering the Washington Commanders and another three covering various sports when an editor asked him if he’d like to cover the Nationals, working with the lead beat writer at the time, Jesse Dougherty.

“I always loved baseball,” he told me. “It’s my first love, and so l hoped at some point I could cover it. I just didn’t think it would happen the way that it did.” He joined the club during the last week of Spring Training in 2022. “To go from helping out with Navy basketball coverage to then suddenly you’re in the clubhouse and you see Juan Soto and Josh Bell, it was very much a culture shock… I don’t think I talked to Juan Soto for the first month, I was so starstruck.” When I spoke to Golden last week, he took me through the nuts and bolts of the job, and humored me when I asked questions like whether it was possible for a beat reporter to be an introvert.

For Golden, 24, a normal day on the beat starts at 9 a.m., earlier if it’s a Sunday. The first thing he does is go over the previous day’s game. “I typically like to look back at the night before and see the big trends,” he said. “Obviously, when you’re writing on deadline, there are certain things that you might miss because you need to type or something happened in the late innings that maybe you missed. So I typically like to go back and look at the night prior and do some studying… I go back and look at Baseball Savant. Does anything stand out? Did this pitcher utilize one pitch more than he normally does? Those sorts of things. What trends did I miss?” He’ll also catch up on the previous day’s news at each level of Washington’s farm system and read whatever might have been written about the Nationals or their players from other news outlets. For the first of several times throughout the day, he’ll consult with his editors about what he’s working on now and what he might work on next.

Most importantly, he’ll research and write. In addition to writing game stories, beat reporters write everything from statistical deep dives to profiles of coaches and players to breaking news about the business side of the game. At 5:12 on Friday morning, the Post published an article Golden wrote about how Trevor Williams has succeeded by using his four-seamer less often. On the day we spoke, he mentioned that he was researching Luis García Jr.’s recent success at the plate. If all that sounds like a lot, well, it is. Later in the interview, I had to circle back and make sure that I understood the logistics of, specifically, at what point of the day Golden has time to do normal person things like go to the store. The answer: whenever he finishes all of the work above. “I get normal things done,” he laughed. “There is that free time, that flexibility during the morning, definitely. I promise I have groceries in my fridge.” For that reason, he dreads 4:00 p.m. games, which don’t leave time to do anything either before or afterward. “I love 1 o’clock games or 7. You know you’re going to have the front or the back end free, but 4 o’clock is right smack in the middle.”

It’s not always feasible, but for a typical 7 p.m. game, Golden prefers to get to the ballpark at 1:45. The clubhouse opens to reporters at 3, and until then he writes down questions he’d like to ask and keeps an eye on the field. “I like to be there early. Sometimes you’ll see a guy on the field doing something and it might pique your interest.” At 3, he goes down from the press box to the clubhouse. “It’s open for 45, 50 minutes, so that’s your time to talk to players, talk to front office people if they’re there, talk to whoever’s around.” Reporters are only allowed in certain parts of the clubhouse. Places like the kitchen, training room, and bathroom are off limits. Some parts Golden has never seen even once. “There’s two sections,” he said, “an office area and a coaches’ locker room area where we’re not really allowed. And there’s a back section we’re not allowed either, and I truly can’t tell you what’s back there.” Manager Davey Martinez talks to reporters at 4, and after that reporters go on the field to watch batting practice.

Lane Thomas taking swings in the final round of BP: https://t.co/asTCGf2Jih pic.twitter.com/s4WXkXN5F5

— Andrew Golden (@andrewcgolden) May 7, 2024

“You can still get players then if you want,” he explained. “If you can grab them coming off the field, that sort of thing. That’s typically when I like to talk to Darnell Coles, the hitting coach. The hitting coach is really busy, but I always know that he has to come off the field and walk past me, so I can get him when he’s coming off the field.” Golden laughed as he said the last part, but he explained that learning each player’s routines and figuring out how to be in the right place at the right time is actually a crucial part of the job. “I think that’s one of the things about the beat that people don’t realize. There’s definitely a rhythm to how things go. You know the relievers will always be around because they’re not doing a ton of prep work before the game… But starting pitchers are rarely around because they’re obviously going through their whole routine to get ready. And the hitters are kind of hit or miss. It depends on when they go to the cage and what their routine is. That’s one thing I didn’t know early on, like, ‘Oh, I want to talk to Josiah Gray.’ And Josiah was figuring out his routine and going through his stuff, and I was like, ‘Man, why is he never here?’ You have to kind of give these guys these moments and try to figure out what their routines are, and you build around that.”

Once batting practice is over, reporters return to the press box to eat dinner before the game. For a night game, Golden’s 700- to 800-word game story is due when the final out is recorded, which means that he’s taking notes and writing throughout the game, then rewriting when new developments come up. “That was an adjustment too,” said Golden. “When do you start writing? Because obviously things can change. If somebody hits a go-ahead home run in the eighth inning, it can completely flip your story… Sometimes it just takes time to kind of develop that muscle and learn how to do that. I think that was a struggle at first, but then it starts to get a little bit easier, it starts to come to you a little more naturally.” Many beat writers also tweet the play-by-play throughout the game. Here’s a sample of Golden’s Twitter feed during last Wednesday night’s 12-inning affair between the Nationals and Orioles. Luckily for him, colleague Spencer Nusbaum was in charge of the game story that night.

As soon as their stories have been filed, reporters head back down to the clubhouse to hear from players and coaches again. “While we’re down there, our editors are editing the story,” said Golden. “And then we’ll come back up, and then we’ll add quotes in, and that’ll be the final story. So it’s probably an hour between when I file the first one and the second one.” At that point, the reporters finally get to go home or to their hotel, unless it’s getaway day. Golden generally prefers to go straight from the ballpark to the airport so that the next day, he can wake up in the city where he’ll be covering the game. I stammered a bit after Golden finished walking me through a normal day on the beat. It was a lot to take in. “So, so that’s — I mean, that’s a long day,” I said. “Yeah,” he said, laughing. “It is a grind. I’m sure people kind of know that, but I don’t think they know the extent. I mean, I have friends who are like, ‘Well, the game starts at 7. Don’t you get there at like 5:30?’”

It’s a grueling job: a month away from home during spring training, then a six-month-long season of days like the one described above, half of them on the road, with few days off. Knowing that, I asked Golden whether my impression of the beat writer demographic was correct. I’d noticed that beat writers tend to be either very young reporters or veterans who have been doing it forever because they’ve found a way to balance the lifestyle. “Yeah, that’s absolutely correct, at least from what I’ve seen,” he said. “I remember somebody telling me when I started, ‘Yeah, this is a job that you have when you’re single and have no kids’… You do it when you’re young, because it’s easier to manage a 162-game season when you don’t have all those other responsibilities, families, all that stuff.”

Golden recently got engaged, and the quirks of his job have been a part of the relationship from the very beginning. His first date with his now-fiancée was supposed to take place on the first Sunday of October 2022, but the Nationals and the Phillies needed to play four games in three days, all of them rain-soaked because a hurricane was bearing down on the east coast. Golden was texting her throughout the weekend, trying to explain the scheduling and scoring arcana that would determine whether he could make it or whether they’d need to reschedule. “It’s hard to explain how ridiculous it is. I’m trying to explain to her… we just have to get to the fifth inning and then we’re good. She’s like, ‘Why do you only need to get through half a game?’ There are so many things about baseball that we think are so normal that actually are not normal to normal people.” To make the grind more manageable, he now sends his parents and his fiancée an email every month with his entire travel itinerary, down to the flight numbers and hotels.

Golden mentioned another challenge to working the beat for an extended period of time: finding new ways to tell the same story. “I think when you first get started on the beat, everything feels new,” he said. “Coming up with ideas can be challenging when you’ve written stuff before. Trying to think, ‘How can I make this new?’ or ‘How can I make this different from before?’” As with any job, some days are harder than others. “There are some days where you just don’t have it. There’s just some days where you’re tired, you just got off a plane this morning and you drove to the stadium. And it’s day eight of a road trip and you’re like, ‘Man, I just don’t have it today.’ Those days definitely happen.”

All of this makes Golden more impressed by the veterans who have been doing it for years and years. “There are people who do balance both and who do this for a very long time. Mad props to them for that,” he said. “I can imagine trying to balance all those things, but it definitely is either younger people or people who have been doing this like 40 years and really know the business, know everybody in the business, and know the organization. The people who have institutional knowledge, it’s really interesting. One of our beat reporters is Mark Zuckerman [of MASN]. He’s been covering the team since 2005. He has an institutional knowledge that I just don’t have.”

He’s freezing https://t.co/ay0BgrIPUB pic.twitter.com/mXA6lMTx7B

— Spencer Nusbaum (@spencernusbaum_) March 26, 2024

That brought us to another important part of the job: Beat writers need to develop relationships with the people they’re covering. I asked Golden whether he has an easier time talking to players now than he did when he first started. “Definitely, yeah,” he said. “When you first join the beat there is a bit of — it’s not discomfort, but — I guess discomfort is the right word. They don’t really know you, you don’t really know them, and now you’re developing trust with them.” The most important thing is putting in the time, especially on road trips. “When you travel, and they realize that you’re traveling with them a lot and they see you on the road a lot, you’re going through the ride with them. I think they start to respect you more and they start to open up more, because they also understand you are going to be around.” Traveling and befriending writers in other cities has also made that easier. For example, when the Nationals signed Eddie Rosario, Golden asked Justin Toscano, who covered Rosario for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for advice on how to connect with him. He also traded notes about Jeimer Candelario and Nick Senzel with Charlie Goldsmith of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which was easy because Goldsmith also happened to be Golden’s college roommate.

Golden mentioned several other ways to build trust with players. When they see you keep your word about not printing off-the-record comments, they start to trust that you’re not there to make them look bad. Similarly, they appreciate when a writer strikes the right balance when someone’s struggling. Some of the Nationals follow Golden on social media, where it is sometimes his job to talk about what’s going wrong with the team. “It can be a little bit awkward having to go to guys and be like, ‘Hey man, what happened there? Why’d you make that mistake?’ Or, ‘What was going through your mind?’ It can be awkward, uncomfortable. Nobody wants to ask about failures.” Managing to tell the truth respectfully makes a difference. “As long as you’re fair, and you’re not attacking them personally, I think people can respect that… I think a lot of times, people think the players will get upset if you say something negative. But I also think if you pretend like everything is positive and going well, I think they get upset with that too. Where the guy is 2-for-40 in his last 10 games, and you’re like, ‘What do you think you’re doing well at the plate right now?’ And they don’t want to hear that… You don’t want to personally attack somebody or say something negative about them as a person. But I also do think there’s a balance. You want to be honest with where they’re at. And if they get upset with your honesty, you have to live with that.”

Toward the end of the conversation, I asked Golden what people might not understand about his job. He mentioned the hours and the various unseen aspects, but he also talked about the perspective that comes from doing it day in and day out, and the way that all of his research allows him to ask the right questions. “Having to know the ins and outs of the team, and thinking critically about every roster move. What does this mean? Even just now, Robert Garcia just returned from a rehab assignment, and then Matt Barnes got DFA’d. And what does it mean? What does it mean for Tanner Rainey? I think my first year, I was not thinking like that. Now, your brain naturally goes like that. It’s an odd thought, like, ‘Man, my brain moves like this now?’ But there’s a lot of thought that goes into this.”

Blade Tidwell has a five-pitch arsenal and a future on a big-league mound. Two years removed from being drafted 52nd-overall out of the University of Tennessee, the 22-year-old right-hander ranks among the top prospects in the New York Mets organization. “An old school power pitcher” in the words of our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, Tidwell has made six appearances for the Double-A Binghamton Rumble Ponies this year and has a 2.59 ERA, a 1.85 FIP, and 38 strikeouts in 31-and-a-third innings.

He’s developed a good understanding of his pitch metrics, a process that began when he was playing with Team USA following his 2021 freshman season at UT. Tidwell “started studying analytics” on his own, and would often discuss the subject with fellow Mets prospect Drew Gilbert, his roommate that summer. He subsequently “didn’t dabble too much into it” during his sophomore year — the Columbia, Tennessee native played just two collegiate seasons due to the pandemic — but that changed after he signed a professional contract. There was a lot more to learn… and to improve upon.

His four-seamer, which sits 94-96 mph and tops out at 98, has grown meaningfully since his amateur days. The 6-foot-4 righty got “around 14-15 inches” of ride in college, and now he gets “around 19 inches on a good day.”

Janzen Blade Tidwell — his father picked his middle name, his mother his first name — also gets good movement on his sweeper. Moreover, he can massage the movement by upping or lowing velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

Willson Contreras’ tenure with the Cardinals has not lacked for drama, controversy, or interruptions in his work behind the plate. Unfortunately, the latest chapter in that saga began on Tuesday, when a J.D. Martinez swing fractured the 31-year-old catcher’s left forearm. After undergoing surgery on Wednesday, he’s likely to be out until around the All-Star break, leaving the struggling Cardinals to right their season without their most productive hitter.

The injury took place during the top of the second inning of Tuesday’s Mets-Cardinals game. With one out and nobody on base, Martinez swung at a 2-1 slider from Miles Mikolas and connected squarely with Contreras’ forearm “like a lumberjack taking a hack at a sequoia tree,” as Cardinals broadcaster Brad Thompson said. Conteras went down immediately and then began flailing around in obvious pain before being tended to by the Cardinals’ staff. Adding insult to injury, Martinez was awarded first base due to catcher’s interference. Here’s the video, which is not for the faint of heart:

X-rays taken at the ballpark confirmed the fracture, and while the Cardinals have not revealed whether it was Contreras’ radius or ulna that broke, Under the Knife’s Will Carroll reported that he did have a plate inserted because the bone was slightly out of alignment. It is worth noting that in the immediate aftermath of the injury, Contreras said he was told he’d be out six to eight weeks, but that estimate has since been revised upward to 10 weeks, which would put his return right after the All-Star break. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the crowd of high-end starting pitchers to sign with new teams over the offseason, perhaps none had wider error bars surrounding his projection than Shota Imanaga. An NPB star for the past half-decade, Imanaga had a track record of success but also many questions about how his skills would translate to MLB. This certainly is reflected in his contract with the Cubs, which came with just two guaranteed years worth $23 million, a far cry from our $88 million estimate. But for the past month and change, the 30-year old rookie has been up there with the league’s best.

Through his first seven starts, Imanaga has allowed just five earned runs, fewest among qualified pitchers. He’s been downright dominant through much of this stretch, proving his stuff is up to major league standards while controlling the strike zone better than almost anyone else. But he’s done so differently than other top pitching talents. Let’s take a look at his pitch arsenal.

From a quick glance at the stat sheet, the first thing that catches my eye is the sheer frequency with which Imanaga uses his fastball. In an era where nearly two-thirds of starters throw non-fastballs a majority of the time, Imanaga’s 58.4% usage (91st percentile) stands out. As pointed out by MLB.com’s David Adler, Imanaga’s heater has been the best individual pitch in baseball by run value, beating out Corbin Burnes’ notorious cutter Tyler Glasnow’s frightening fastball. But while the other heaters at the top of this list sit in the mid- to upper-90s, Imanaga’s four-seamer averages just 92 mph.

The list of starters who sit at 92 or below is rather short, and mostly consists of names that we certainly don’t think of as strikeout artists. In his piece, Adler noted that Imanaga’s fastball has elite induced vertical break (IVB). But carry alone doesn’t always make a fastball effective; Triston McKenzie’s four-seamer, which currently leads the league in fastball IVB, has the highest xwOBA allowed of any such pitch (min. 50 plate appearances). Rather, what makes Imanaga’s offering so special is its plus movement in combination with its ultra-low release point.

Pitchers like McKenzie and Ross Stripling throw from high, over-the-top arm slots, making their backspin (and thus vertical movement) predictable for hitters. In contrast, Imanaga’s delivery from a low three-quarters slot creates a movement profile much different than what you’d expect from his arm angle. Earlier this week, Michael Rosen broke down the biomechanics of Imanaga’s ability to spin the ball so well from an outlier release point, showing how his hip and lower-body flexibility enable him to “get behind” the ball and create backspin. Throughout the league, no starter gets a higher IVB than Imanaga does from such a low release point – those throwing from lower slots are primarily sidearmers whose deliveries generate run at the expense of carry, while the only two hurlers with more IVB (min. 250 four-seamers), McKenzie and Tyler Anderson, have release points about a foot higher.

Because of its low release point and high carry, Imanaga’s four-seamer has the third-shallowest vertical approach angle in baseball, creating the deception that causes batters to swing under it with surprising frequency. Its 12.5% swinging strike rate and 22.1% putaway rate easily exceed the league averages of 10.3% and 17.9%, respectively, as he’s able to throw it for a whiff in any count.

Imanaga gets more fastball whiffs than most, but his swinging strike rate with the pitch is a far cry from Jared Jones’ league-leading 20.1%. To be the most valuable pitch in baseball, Imanaga’s fastball has to work even when he’s not blowing it past hitters. And at first glance, you might think that a low-90s heater that lives in the zone would get sent a long way when batters connect with it. Indeed, homers were the one knock on Imanaga’s game in NPB, as his 2.9% homer rate (1.04 HR/9) last year was highest in the league in a deadened offensive environment. But he’s allowed just three homers across his seven MLB starts, and the Statcast data indicate this low total is more a product of skill than luck.

I’m not saying that a 0.65 HR/9 represents Imanaga’s true talent (ZiPS forecasts a 0.94 mark for the rest of the year), and it’s certainly likely that the results will regress toward his xwOBA as the season goes on, but he’s clearly been keeping pitches away from barrels at an above-average clip, a skill that many evaluators were skeptical of as he made the leap to MLB. Part of this is due to his fastball’s shape – a flat VAA can lead to uncomfortable swings and produce weak outs. While this type of fastball does contribute to a high fly ball rate, opponents haven’t been able to put a charge into their aerial hits thus far. Imanaga’s average exit velocity and hard-hit rates allowed sit around the league average, but his exit velocity allowed on batted balls in the air is a much more favorable 70th percentile. He also has the ninth-lowest line drive rate among qualified starters, almost never allowing squared-up contact.

Imanaga also locates his fastball in places unlikely to produce barrels. Sure, he throws more heaters in the zone than almost anyone else, but he’s not just sending them down Broadway and hoping for the best; instead, he’s consistently hitting his spots at the top edge of the zone. He ranks 10th in fastballs thrown in the upper third of the zone, an area where the flatness of the pitch can play up and create the illusion that it’s rising. Unsurprisingly, his Kirby Index, a stat that measures release angle consistency, ranks in the 90th percentile.

Imanaga’s fastball alone has made him one of the most effective pitchers in the league, and I haven’t even talked about his plus splitter yet. Like the fastball, this is a pitch he throws with remarkable accuracy. Splitters are hard to command – many pitchers’ splitter heatmaps look like giant blobs, and nearly 14% of splitters are wasted, the second highest of any pitch type. But Imanaga repeatedly hits the area at the bottom of and just below the strike zone, an optimal spot for success. His splitter has a 108 Location+ and 57 PitchingBot command grade, both among the league’s highest.

From a pure shape perspective, Imanaga’s splitter doesn’t particularly stand out. It doesn’t have absurd lateral movement like Kevin Gausman’s or fall off the table like Jordan Hicks’; Imanaga’s actually drops a few inches less than average. But when paired with his high fastball, that splitter becomes downright nasty. Thrown from the same release point and angle as his heater, Imanaga’s splitter gets hitters to swing at what they think is a meaty fastball before they have time to realize that the pitch is 9 mph slower and 19 inches lower. He throws it only about half as often as his heater, saving the split for two-strike counts where hitters are in swing mode. And swing they do, coming up empty nearly half the time they offer at it. The end result is that Imanaga’s splitter is one of the best whiff pitches in the league.

The splitter has also been integral in maintaining Imanaga’s minuscule walk rate, as hitters swing and miss at them before they can work themselves into deep counts. Opponents have swung at 47.2% of the out-of-zone splitters he’s thrown, a huge reason his overall chase rate nearly tops the charts. His low walk rate and refusal to waste pitches has worked wonders in terms of efficiency, averaging the sixth-fewest pitches per inning among qualified starters. Imanaga’s quick work of opposing lineups has allowed him to pitch deep into games (averaging six innings per start) while acclimating to more frequent outings as part of a five-man rotation.

Just a month into his MLB career, Imanaga has exceeded all expectations and emerged as an ace. His brilliant pitch execution hasn’t just proven what he can be at his best, they’ve also calmed concerns about what his downside risk can look like. When he signed, it was easy for skeptics to compare him to other hurlers without big velocity and forecast doubt. But Imanaga has shown that nobody else pitches the way he does.

When the Braves signed Reynaldo López to a three-year, $30 million contract last winter, I was confused. Like most people in baseball, I thought López and Lucas Giolito had an E.T.-and-Elliott thing going on, where they couldn’t be separated. They’d come up together as minor leaguers with the Nationals, before being traded together to the White Sox, then traded again to the Angels, then waivered over to Cleveland, all without breaking the telepathic link.

Denuded of his longtime colleague, López cut a curious figure. The White Sox had tried to make him a starter in the late 2010s and it went badly. The only time López has ever led the league in anything was when he led the league in earned runs allowed in 2019. Since the dawn of the 2020s, he’s been a reliever, and a good one, but it was unlikely he’d return to the rotation, let alone for a team with standards as high as Atlanta’s.

But starting pitching is harder to come by than ever these days, and a major theme of the 2023-24 free agent class was, “OK, but let’s make absolutely sure this guy can’t start.” Jordan Hicks, Jakob Junis, Nick Martinez, Michael Lorenzen, and López, of course. Read the rest of this entry »

Keaton Winn is a rare big league pitcher, and not just because he’s the only one who grew up in Ollie, Iowa, with a population of 201 in the 2020 census. The 26-year-old San Francisco Giants right-hander’s primary pitch is a splitter, and by a significant margin. Through seven starts this season, Winn’s usage breakdown is 42.2% splitters, 23.3% four-seamers, 20.4% sinkers, and 14.1% sliders. No starter in baseball has thrown a higher percentage of splits this season.

With one notable exception, his atypical approach has yielded good results. Winn failed to get out of the first inning when he faced the Phillies in his most recent start, on May 4, but even with that turbulent outing — five runs in 2/3 frames — he has a respectable 4.41 ERA and a 3.97 FIP. In each of the three starts that preceded the debacle, he went six innings and allowed just one run. His next start is scheduled for this afternoon against the Rockies in Colorado, at 3:10 p.m. ET.

Winn’s mix was even more splitter heavy a year ago. He made his MLB debut last June and proceeded to throw his signature offering an eye-opening 55.1% of the time in 42 1/3 innings. It’s understandable that he would prioritize the pitch — last month, our prospect writers Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice called Winn’s splitter “devastating… one of the nastier ones in pro ball” — even if such an approach is unprecedented among starters. San Francisco’s fifth-round pick in the 2017 draft out of Iowa Western Community College is anything but ordinary in the way he attacks hitters.

Winn discussed his splitter when the Giants played the Red Sox at Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your full repertoire. What was it at the time you signed your first professional contract, and what is it now?

Keaton Winn: “When I signed it was four-seam, curveball, slider, and I maybe threw like five sinkers. No changeup. Now it is four-seamer, sinker, splitter, slider.”

Laurila: You obviously throw a ton of splitters. Given how much you rely on it, would it be fair to say that you’re probably not in the big leagues right now had you never developed a splitter?

Winn: “Yeah. That’s definitely crossed my mind before. I mean, I think I ultimately could have competed to get a role, but having the splitter made it so much easier.”

Laurila: What’s the story behind it? Read the rest of this entry »

We’re far enough into the 2024 regular season that a lot of the extreme flukes and outliers have tumbled back to Earth. Mookie Betts leads the league in position player WAR; Shohei Ohtani leads in wRC+; Patrick Corbin doesn’t quite lead the league in earned runs allowed, but he’s close, and everyone ahead of him on the leaderboard has made more starts.

Nevertheless, we do have a few surprises hanging around at or near the top of various leaderboards. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a few before they disappear. These (mostly) aren’t surprising rookies; rather, they’re players you’ve probably heard of, but might have forgotten about in the past few years while they sorted some stuff out. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I wrote about at the mysterious disappearing zone rate of Mookie Betts. Today, we’ll be looking at a player who has seen his zone rate go in the other direction: Adley Rutschman. This season, opponents are throwing 51.7% of their pitches in the zone against Rutschman, up from 47.3% in 2023 (and 45.9% in 2022). That jump of 4.4 percentage points is the fourth largest among all qualified players. The trend is much stronger when Rutschman is batting right-handed, but as you can see from the world’s tiniest table, it’s also there when he’s batting lefty.

In yesterday’s article, I broke down the reasons that throwing fewer pitches in the zone to Betts (or at least the approach that led to fewer pitches in the zone) made some sense. I don’t have any such argument today. If anything, I think pitchers should be throwing Rutschman way fewer strikes. The reason is simple: He’s chasing way more than he did last year. In 2023, Rutschman swung at 23.4% of pitches outside the zone, which put him in the 81st percentile. This season, he’s at 32.5%, which puts him in the 22nd percentile. That is an enormous change, the third highest among all qualified players, and it hasn’t been limited to one side of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »