I like to amuse myself by imagining a scenario in which Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane has to replace a departing Juan Soto. Now, if Moneyball came out in the 2020s, Soto would’ve been traded years ago and Jonah Hill’s Peter Brand would be heroically figuring out how to procure a block of taxpayer-funded stadium-adjacent condos for Steve, the cheapskate owner. But it’s my imagination, so it doesn’t have to be that bleak.

This is a kind of reverse-Six Million Dollar Man scenario: “We have to rebuild him; we don’t have the money.” Soto doesn’t provide any special value in the field or on the bases; even the cheapest team in the league can find an unremarkable defensive corner outfielder who steals 10 bases a year. The tricky thing about finding a poor man’s Soto is replacing his ability to get on base.

Guys who run a .400 OBP, or a walk rate in the high teens, are rare but not unique. Especially if you exclude those high-OBP guys who also bat near .300 and have 30-plus home run power, the tools that price the imaginary A’s out of Soto’s market. (Or Bryce Harper’s or Aaron Judge’s or Kyle Tucker’s.) Read the rest of this entry »

Statcast released bat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not quite right to say that Fernando Cruz was a late-blooming prospect. That would imply that he was a prospect, and he wasn’t, at least not really. He was picked in the sixth round of the 2007 draft as a hitter, but never made it out of A-ball in four years. He tried pitching after that, and it worked, but not enough for the Royals to keep him. He kicked around the minors, indy ball, and the winter league circuit for more than a decade. He played in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. He was living a full baseball life, and almost exclusively outside of affiliated ball. Over the 2021-2022 winter, though, Cruz put on a show, racking up a 2.03 ERA with 81 strikeouts in 61 innings of work across three leagues and the Caribbean Series.

You can have big league potential without pitching in affiliated ball, and the Reds saw it. They signed Cruz to a minor league deal before the 2022 season and sent him straight to Triple-A, where he was one of the best relievers in the minors right away. He earned a promotion to the big leagues that September, and he hasn’t looked back since. Now, at 34, he’s off to one of the best starts of any reliever in baseball when it comes to missing bats. It’s a remarkable story, and he’s a player worth celebrating. How in the world did he sneak past everyone for so long, and how is he thriving now? I hope I’ll be able to tell you. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Finnegan might be the most underrated closer in baseball. Flying below all but D.C. radar, the 32-year-old right-hander logged 28 saves for the Washington Nationals a year ago, and this season he has 13 saves — no one in the majors has more — to go with a 1.56 ERA. Relying primarily on a 97.3-mph fastball and an 89.8-mph splitter, he’s holding opposing hitters to a .138 average and a .259 slugging percentage in the current campaign. Finnegan’s peripherals (4.41 xERA, 4.06 FIP, 3.45 xFIP, .154 BABIP) suggest that he likely won’t remain this dominant all season, but so far, he has been on of the league’s top relievers.

His ascent to the big leagues took time. Selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft by the Oakland Athletics out of Texas State University, Finnegan was just shy of his 29th birthday when he debuted in July 2020, seven months after he’d signed with the Nationals as a minor league free agent.

How did he go from a low-profile prospect to a high-level MLB closer?

“It’s kind of been like a slow burn for me, picking up different things and building off past experiences,” Finnegan told me prior to a recent game. “I’ve always had potential. I’ve thrown hard since I was a sophomore in college — I could run it up to 97-98 [mph] — so I really just needed the offspeed to come along. I’ve also been fortunate to be healthy throughout my career. Outside of that, I wish I could give you a rhyme or reason. I think I’ve just gotten a little better every year.” Read the rest of this entry »

Clarke Schmidt has a thing for spin. This season, there are only 14 breaking pitches in the entire league that average 3,000 rpm or more; Schmidt throws two of them. To find another South Carolina alum with such mastery of spin, you’d have to go all the way back to Andrew Card, who was George W. Bush’s chief of staff during the lead-up to the Iraq War. Schmidt’s breaking balls would fit perfectly in a turn-of-the-century alt-rock milieu, alongside the Spin Doctors, or Lifehouse’s “Spin,” or the Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl.

Baseball Savant recently started publishing bat tracking data, and the public sabermetric community is currently working out what this new avalanche of data actually means. So it was in the early days of spin rate: How much is too much, and how little is not enough, and how does it vary pitch by pitch? It took a minute to actually sort this stuff out, and as ever, the characteristics of a pitch don’t matter very much if it’s poorly located.

For example: Last year, Schmidt spent his first full season in the Yankees’ big league rotation. And he was fine. His ERA was 4.64, his FIP 4.42. Even though he achieved that vanishingly difficult feat of starting 32 games and throwing 159 innings, he was only a 1.8 WAR pitcher on the season. Opponents hit .265 against him, and his two outrageous breaking pitches landed him smack dab in the 50th percentile for breaking ball run value. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite a strong late-winter effort to beef up their roster by adding big-name free agents Jorge Soler, Matt Chapman, and Blake Snell in February and March, the Giants have stumbled out of the gate. They haven’t even been at .500 since March 31, when they were 2-2, and now they’re 19-24 and in the midst of an unrelenting wave of injuries that has thinned their roster. The most serious is that of Jung Hoo Lee, who dislocated his left shoulder trying to make a run-saving catch in Sunday’s win over the Reds and could be out for several weeks, or even months.

The play occurred in the top of the first inning at Oracle Park, after the Reds loaded the bases against starter Kyle Harrison on a hit-by-pitch, two steals, a throwing error, and a walk. With two outs, Jeimer Candelario hit a high 104-mph drive to deep center field. At the warning track, Lee leaped for the ball, but it bounced off the padding on top of the wall instead of hitting his glove. On his way down, he smacked his left forearm into the padding; his elbow and then his back both hit the chain link fence (!) below the padding, jamming his left shoulder. He went down hard as all three runners scored, and after several minutes on the ground, left the game accompanied by head athletic trainer Dave Groeschner, who held Lee’s arm in place.

Though manager Bob Melvin initially indicated that the 25-year-old center fielder had separated his shoulder, the Giants later clarified that he had dislocated it, indicating a more serious injury. Lee underwent an MRI on Monday, but a more detailed prognosis won’t be known until at least Tuesday after he and the Giants consult with Dr. Ken Akizuki, the team’s orthopedic surgeon. The Giants are hopeful that Lee won’t need surgery, unlike Red Sox shortstop Trevor Story, who on April 5 dislocated his left shoulder while diving for a ball and additionally suffered a fracture of the glenoid rim, an injury that required season-ending surgery. There’s been no report of a fracture yet for Lee, but soft-tissue damage could be another matter.

[Update: Indeed, on Tuesday evening, the Giants confirmed that Lee has suffered structural damage in his shoulder. He will get a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache in Los Angeles on Thursday, indicating that surgery is a possibility.] Read the rest of this entry »

The bat tracking era is here, and nothing will ever be the same again. Wait, no, that’s not right. Baseball is going to continue pretty much exactly as it was. Pitchers will throw the ball, hitters will swing at it, and then people will run around the field either trying to catch it or touch bases. But baseball analysis is going to start looking different, because we analysts have new shiny toys and a plethora of new ideas to test out. That’s very exciting, and also possibly a little overwhelming. So today, I thought I’d take you on a tour of what the high-level summary numbers do and don’t say about hitting, as well as stump for more granular analysis. I’m sure I’m not alone on either of those points, but still, it’s good to say it out loud. So let’s talk about average swing speed, average swing length, squared-up rate and blast rate, shall we?

Swing harder, do better, right? Well, maybe. That makes sense broadly, and it particularly makes sense when you look at some of the names dotting the top of the swing speed leaderboard. Juan Soto, Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, William Contreras, Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, Gunnar Henderson — there are plenty of hitters at the top of the swing speed leaderboard who are unquestionably excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no way to say this without sounding snarky, so I’m not going to try: The Oakland A’s, who were supposed to be abysmal, have shocked the baseball world by being merely mediocre. They’re in third place in the AL West, with a full series’ worth of buffer between them and their pursuers. The Angels are suffering the mother of all post-breakup hangovers, and it appears that the Astros have finally been caught by Mephistopheles. Reports say a sinister-looking goateed man has been seen pounding on the door to Minute Maid Park, saying, “I gave you your two World Series, now I’m here for your soul!”

Nothing gold can stay.

The key — or at least one key — to Oakland’s surprising ascent to averageness has been a superb bullpen. Closer Mason Miller has grabbed most of the headlines; some people are saying he’s the best reliever in baseball now. I don’t know if that assertion will hold up over a full season, but the hyperbole will continue until the FIP doesn’t start with a minus sign.

Miller’s emergence has sucked up all the air in the room — insofar as there was ever a ton of air in the room for discussing Oakland’s bullpen — to the detriment of his teammates. So I wanted to highlight Lucas Erceg, who’s been very good this season, and is also kind of weird.

The first thing to know about Erceg is that he was, until very recently, a third baseman. As a sophomore at Cal, Erceg hit .303/.357/.502 with 11 home runs in 57 games, but was ruled academically ineligible the following season, which kicked off a circuitous path to the majors. First: A year at NAIA Menlo College, alma mater of former MLB… standout is probably too strong a word, even if he won a World Series and made an All-Star team… Gino Cimoli. Erceg went in the second round to Milwaukee, becoming Menlo’s highest draft pick ever in the process, and slowly worked his way through the minors with a series of unremarkable batting lines.

In 2021, the Brewers gave Erceg, who’d pitched occasionally at Cal, a shot as a reliever, and by that summer he was good enough to get an honorable mention on Milwaukee’s prospect list. (Even if it was only one sentence in a section labeled “Arm Strength.”)

In 2023, the A’s — who have had some success with converting college infielders into relief pitchers, or who at least brought Sean Doolittle through — purchased Erceg from Milwaukee. This furthers my long-held belief that everyone who plays for the Brewers will one day play for the A’s, and vice-versa. We’d save a lot of hassle by merging the two franchises and having them play on a barnstorming circuit called the John Jaha Highway.

But I digress.

Erceg’s surface stats look pretty pedestrian right now, but about half of his 3.38 ERA comes from one three-run blown save against the Rangers on May 6. At the end of April, he was on a run of nine consecutive scoreless appearances, the last eight of which were also hitless. It’s not as impressive as a hidden perfect game, but Erceg did throw a hidden no-hitter (with 13 strikeouts and three walks on 120 pitches) from April 11 to April 30. I regret not getting to this topic two weeks ago, because I would’ve hammered the “more like Lucas Goose-egg” joke until you all started sending me rotten vegetables in the mail.

Puns and unusual development plan withstanding, there are two things I want to highlight about Erceg: His unusual repertoire and the significant step forward he’s made in missing bats from last year to this year.

As you might expect from a conversion project, there are elements of Erceg’s game that might be considered crude. He’s a hard-throwing one-inning reliever, to start, and even after taking a substantial step forward in this department, his walk rate this year is 11.9%. That’s in the “survivable, but not ideal” bucket for a pitcher, even a reliever.

Nevertheless, Erceg has a legitimate four-pitch repertoire. And this isn’t some fastball-slider guy who has a show-me curveball and a changeup he occasionally throws to opposite-handed batters. He throws four pitches between 18.9% and 30.5% of the time, and while he has specialist offerings to both righties and lefties, he throws his four-seamer and slider against everyone, giving him a three-pitch repertoire against any opponent.

There are 15 pitchers this year who qualify for Baseball Savant’s leaderboards, throw at least four pitches 15% of the time, and have no more than a 20-percentage point spread between their most-used pitch and their least-used pitch. (Erceg’s spread is 11.6 percentage points, the third-lowest of his cohort.) Of those 15 pitchers, 10 have thrown most or all of this season out of the rotation. That makes sense, because the more times a pitcher goes through the lineup, the more pitches he needs.

Here are the five relievers, with the number of pitches they throw, the spread between their highest and lowest pitch usage rate, and the average velocity of their hardest fastball. (Hardest, because all five of these pitchers throw at least two types of fastballs.)

These guys aren’t soft-tossers — Brent Suter came up in the net I originally cast before I narrowed the parameters some — but Erceg is on a different planet, velocity-wise. His changeup is averaging 91.4 mph, which is just 0.3 mph slower than Farmer’s sinker. That changeup is getting knocked around — five of the seven extra-base hits Erceg has allowed this season have come off the changeup, including his only home run — but it’s also missing bats at a rate of 37.5%.

In fact, I’m going to combine arbitrary-endpoint theater and small-sample-size theater to give you a fun fact: Through the weekend, only three pitchers in baseball were running whiff rates of at least 28% on four different pitches they’d thrown at least 49 times: Zack Wheeler, Pablo López, and Erceg.

Now to the really fun part. Erceg has experienced a massive uptick in chase rate, from 23.2% to 31.0%, while at the same time lowering his in-zone swing rate from 62.9% to 56.1% and his in-zone contact rate from 79.3% to 67.2%.

In other words, hitters are swinging less at pitches in the zone, and when they swing they’re not making as much contact. And simultaneously they’re chasing pitches a third more than they did last year. It’s not immediately clear to me why this is happening; Erceg’s in-zone rate is down a couple percentage points, and while his overall opponent swing rate is up, it’s by about two swings at this point in the season. That’s nothing.

As with any reliever performance before the All-Star break, it bears monitoring before we start to count on it going forward. But for now, Erceg is getting whiffs on four different pitches, and is one of the best relievers in baseball both at missing bats and avoiding hard contact. Not bad for a converted infielder, and at best the second-most important reliever on the Oakland A’s.

The Angels haven’t had a whole lot to cheer about this season aside from Mike Trout’s power outburst before he suffered his knee injury. They’re 15-26, last in the AL West, and given both their lackluster offense and dreadful run prevention, they appear on track for their ninth consecutive sub-.500 season. Amid that, one positive development worth noting is the progress of Jo Adell, who looks as though he’s finally carved out a spot in the majors.

The 25-year-old Adell recently homered three times in a four-game span, and none of them were cheapies. Last Wednesday against the Pirates, he hit a Martín Pérez cutter 407 feet to center field, a third-inning solo homer that kicked off the scoring in a 5-4 win. On Friday against the Royals, he crushed an Alec Marsh sinker, sending it 436 feet into the Angel Stadium rockpile; alas, that was the Halos’ only run in a 2-1 loss. On Saturday he destroyed a Cole Ragans slider for a 419-foot three-run homer that led to a 9-3 win.

Adell is now hitting .255/.314/.532 (134 wRC+) with seven homers and seven steals in 105 plate appearances. While those slash stats aren’t as eye-catching as the .316/.365/.614 (171 wRC+) that he posted in April, his recent outburst has followed an 0-for-16 skid that could have sent him into a deeper slide or worse, the bench or Triple-A. What’s more, Adell now has enough plate appearances and batted ball events for several of his key stats to have stabilized, which should hopefully make this check-in more illuminating. Read the rest of this entry »

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.