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.

Every major league player has great individual performances on his résumé, and that’s especially true when you include their time in the minors and amateur ball. From youth leagues on up, they’ve had games where they’ve stood out among their peers with epic displays at the plate and/or the mound. When you’re good enough to have advanced to the highest level of your profession, such showings come with the territory.

With this in mind, my colleague Michael Baumann and I recently asked a dozen players a straightforward question: “What has been the best game of your life?”

———

Sal Frelick, Milwaukee Brewers outfielder: “I think I was part of one of the greatest college comebacks in NCAA history. We were down to Auburn 9-1 in the ninth inning, with two outs, and ended up coming back to win. I led off the ninth inning with a single, came around to score, then came back up as the tying run and hit a homer. We went into extras and won the game. This was in 2021 [with Boston College], my draft year. It was an absurd rally.

“I hit for the cycle one time in the Futures League. This was with my summer ball team, the North Shore Navigators. It was after my senior year of high school, before my freshman year at Boston College, and the game was in Worcester. I went strikeout, walk, double, triple, homer, single. A strikeout and a walk, then the cycle. That was crazy.”

——

Riley Greene, Detroit Tigers outfielder: “I hit for the cycle at Hagerty High School [Oviedo, Florida]. I’m almost positive that it was the first cycle in school history. I could be wrong, but yeah, it was that game. I started off with a leadoff homer — I was hitting leadoff — and then I went single, double, triple. We were playing Edgewater High School and it was a pretty big game. We had a beef with that team, so it was pretty cool to do it against them in front of all my boys, who I’m still best friends with to this day.

“What probably stands out the most from here is my first homer, the walk-off homer [against the Royals in 2022] to win the game. That’s pretty special.”

——

Kyle Finnegan, Washington Nationals pitcher: “I threw an immaculate inning in 2021, in the big leagues. I’d have to say that was my best inning. I struck out Austin Riley, Dansby Swanson, and William Contreras.

“The best game I’ve ever pitched in my life was in college [at Texas State University in 2012]. I was a starting pitcher. We were playing Notre Dame, who was really good at the time. And, here’s a fun fact about that weekend: In the three-game series we didn’t allow an opponent to reach third base. We were in the middle of one of the longest consecutive scoreless streak in modern NCAA history; we threw something like 50 scoreless innings. I pitched the Saturday game in that series and went seven innings with 12 strikeouts. I struck out the first seven guys that game.”

——

Josh Lowe, Tampa Bay Rays infielder: “I had a three-homer game my senior year in high school. That would probably be the best game I can remember. It was early in the year and it was freezing cold. The temp was in the upper 20s and it was super windy. I grew up outside of Atlanta and while it doesn’t get that cold often, it does get cold.

“One game in Triple-A, I think I had five or six plate appearances and hit all five or six balls over 105 [mph]. I’d say that was a pretty good game. It was against Jacksonville. I don’t remember anything specific about it outside of having five or six at-bats and hitting the ball hard five or six times.”

——

Christian Yelich, Milwaukee Brewers outfielder: “You’re a FanGraphs guy, so what’s better, a three-home run game — probably that one? — or 6-for-6 and hitting for the cycle? I don’t know if I’ll be able to beat [the latter]. Three home runs is pretty cool, but going 6-for-6 and hitting for the cycle is pretty cool, too.

“[Amateur ball], I can’t really remember. I’ve spent 12 years in the big leagues, so high school was a long time ago. I’m sure there were some decent ones back in the day, but everything that happens here is obviously more special for me.”

——

Matt Vierling, Detroit Tigers infielder/outfielder: “The game the other day was pretty good [4-for-6 with two home runs, including a walk-off three-run homer, against the Toronto Blue Jays]. There have been a couple of them, but the best game of my life was probably in high school. We were in the state semifinals when I was a sophomore and I threw six innings [and allowed] no runs, and also hit two home runs. It was the most fans we’d had at a game — about 2,000, which was a ton for us in Missouri — and it got us to the state championship game.

“Another good one was when I was with the Phillies. I went 5-for-5 against the Blue Jays. This was in 2022, the year we went to the World Series, and we needed a couple of wins to keep things going. Along with the 5-for-5 — everything seemed to find a hole — I ended up hitting a walk-off single. It was a great game.”

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Jonny DeLuca, Tampa Bay Rays outfielder: “My senior year of high school, in the first game of the year, I went 6-for-6 with a grand slam, another home run, a triple, and three singles. It was a home game, and while I know we won, I don’t remember what the score was. I don’t think I’ve had a game that comes close to that one.

“In pro ball, last year was pretty cool when I made those two catches against Texas. I made a diving catch and then kind of robbed a home run. It’s up for debate if it would have been a homer or not, but yeah, that game last year.”

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Jordan Weems, Washington Nationals pitcher: “I had a game with five punchies when I was with Double-A Portland. That one really stood out, because I had really good stuff that night. In the big leagues it would have to be the one in Seattle where I had the bases loaded, got out of it, then came back for another inning to shut them down and we got the win.

“As a kid… I mean in 9- or 10-year-old All-Stars there was a game where I went something like 5-for-6 with two home runs. That was in a championship game to go the regionals. That was a pretty cool experience. Not trying to brag, but there were a lot of cool games in Little League, high school, and all that. I remember a playoff game, right before the state championship, I went 3-for-4 with two home runs. This was in high school.

“Another time — I could go forever on these — we lost the first game [of a high school playoff series] to Matthew Crownover, a big lefty who went to Clemson but then had Tommy John and never really came back from it. He was throwing really hard and kind of shoved it up our butts, so we had to win the second game. We were down by a run going into the bottom of the seventh inning, and I led off with a double. Cody Walker, who went to Mississippi State as a catcher, had this great at-bat. He hit a ground ball up the middle and I scored to tie the game. I remember going crazy at home plate after sliding in safely. We ended winning to force a Game 3, then went on to win the state championship.”

——

Grant Anderson, Texas Rangers pitcher:

“There were a couple of games in high school, but I’ve got to go with my [MLB] debut, which was in Detroit last year. I got called up and struck out seven out of nine guys. That’s pretty high up there in the best game I’ve ever played. Like, I didn’t really have any expectations. At the end of the day I just wanted to throw up some zeros, so the strikeouts were kind of like a cherry on top. To be honest, it was kind of an out-of-body experience to strike out that many guys. It was almost a blur. It was a pretty crazy experience.”

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Whit Merrifield, Philadelphia Phillies infielder: “The first thing that comes to mind is the College World Series [with the University of South Carolina, against UCLA, in 2010] — the walk-off World Series with the walk-off hit. I’ve had better individual games; I’ve had a couple five-hit games, multi-homer games, a six-RBI game, but I honestly can’t really remember the games [specifically]. I remember the World Series game like it was yesterday.

“[In the ninth inning] our leadoff guy walks. Evan Marzilli gets the bunt down — good bunt — the pitcher fields it and throws to first. Watching from my angle, I thought he had thrown it away, because he kind of short-hopped it. The guy made great play at first base to catch it.

“Trevor Bauer is warming up in the bullpen. I’m thinking that he’s going to come in to face me. I step up. The manager goes to the mound. I’m thinking he’s going to bring [Bauer] in, but he doesn’t. He walks back to the dugout and I’m thinking they’re going to walk me. Jackie Bradley, who’d had a great World Series, was behind me, and Christian Walker was behind him. Christian was a freshman, so I’m thinking they’re going to walk me and Jackie, and pitch to Christian with the bases loaded.

“I really don’t have any intention to hit. Catcher is standing up, then finally squats down. As soon as he squats down I get a rush of nerves and emotion. Balls one and two aren’t really close pitches. I’m thinking unintentional intentional walk; they’re going to try to get me to chase something. Guy takes awhile, shakes off some pitches. I end up calling time. Like I said, in my head I’m thinking they’re going to try to walk me. But I thought to myself, ‘You’ve got a chance to win the World Series here. If the ball is close, I’m swinging. I’m going to try to win the game.’ He threw a good pitch, a fastball down and away — not really a good 2-0 pitch for a hitter to go after — but I made a good swing and hit the ball to right. We won. I can’t believe it was 14 years ago.”

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Spencer Torkelson, Detroit Tigers first baseman: “Minor leagues, Double-A Erie, and it wasn’t one game; it was a doubleheader. In two seven-inning games, I went 7-for-7 with three home runs, a double, and [six] RBIs. I remember it felt like I was literally seeing a beachball for a whole day. It was amazing.

“I had a couple of two-homer games [as an amateur], but nothing crazy. I think my greatest [quality] growing up was just how consistent I was. It wasn’t like really high, really low, really high, really low; it was just being consistently good. I’m sure there were some really good days in travel ball, but I can’t really remember. There is no book on that.”

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Zack Littell, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher: “Off the top of my head, I don’t really know. Especially in pro ball, they all kind of run together. I don’t know that I have that kind of memory. I guess there was one in high school. I had a game in our conference championship where I had two home runs, a double, and a single. I went 4-for-4 and also threw seven innings. We won 3-1, or something like that. In terms of sheer everything, it would probably have to be that one.

“I’d had one home run all year, and then in our three-game conference tournament I had three, including two in the championship. And again, I pitched seven innings. I was Shohei Ohtani that day. That’s the way I like to think of it.”

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Thanks to Michael for procuring the quotes from Grant Anderson and Whit Merrifield.

Baseball is big business and no team is infinitely patient with players who are struggling. While teams won’t generally describe it in such blunt terms, at the beginning of the season, every player has some unknown, invisible amount of leeway when it comes to poor performance. Established role players and fringe starters who just squeezed their way onto the big league roster in March may find themselves in the Pacific Coast or International League come late April or early May as they feel the heat of a poor start. As summer approaches, the names facing demotion become bigger, especially when those players are younger guys who still have minor league options remaining. On Sunday night, two of those bigger names ran out of rope, at least for now: Spencer Torkelson and Edouard Julien are headed to Triple-A to play for smaller crowds in smaller towns.

Before we examine what this pair of demotions means, I thought I’d put some numbers to the broader phenomena. I looked at the preseason ZiPS projections for players optioned during the season over the last 10 years. In nine of the 10 seasons, June was the month in which the players with the most combined projected WAR were sent to the minors. That holds true on a rate basis as well, with 0.75 projected WAR per June demoted player the highest monthly average. Naturally, demoted players tend to be worse performers than those who keep their jobs. To use last year as an example, of the 1,091 demotions, only 19 involved players projected for at least 2 WAR. Just one such player, Brayan Bello, was optioned in April, but starting on May 10 with Jose Miranda, bigger demotions started populating the list, with Miranda, David Villar, Oswald Peraza, Brandon Pfaadt, Alek Manoah, Josh Rojas, and Luis Urías all hitting the minors from mid-May through the end of June. Only four two-win players were demoted in July, with Manoah’s second demotion on August 11 the final one. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Kyle Schwarber became the first player in MLB history to drive in more than 100 runs (104, to be exact) in a season with a batting average below .200. He was also the first player to hit 40 home runs (he hit 47), score 100 runs (he had 108), or draw at least 120 walks (he drew 126) despite getting a hit in fewer than one-fifth of his at-bats. The fact that he finished tied for third in the NL in plate appearances (720) certainly helped him compile those counting stats – no other hitter has ever topped 650 PA with an average so low – but there was no denying that Schwarber was a valuable offensive player despite his league-worst .197 batting average. He became the second qualified, sub-.200 hitter in history to post an OPS above .800 and came just shy of beating 2021 Joey Gallo for the highest-ever wRC+ in a qualified, sub-.200 season; Gallo finished that year at 121, while Schwarber was at 119 in 2023.

When I hear those fun facts, my inclination is to celebrate Schwarber and his unusual accomplishments. Sure, he’d be a better ballplayer if he could bat .300 and still club 40-plus homers and draw 120-plus walks, but that’s not really saying anything. Just as chocolate cake would be better if it were chocolate cake with ice cream, Schwarber would be better with Luis Arraez’s batting average. That’s not analysis; it’s a Facebook graphic asking you to build your dream hitter with $15. The fact of the matter is that Schwarber is excellent at what he does, batting average be damned.

Unfortunately, not everyone is so inclined to focus on the positives. When Schwarber himself spoke about his season last September, he couldn’t help but lament his low batting average: “Heck, do I like seeing a .193 [batting average]? No. Do I wish I was hitting higher? Absolutely.”

Schwarber elaborated this spring, telling Scott Lauber of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “If you’d have told me I was going to hit .190-whatever and hit 47 bombs and drive in 100, score 100, and punch out 200 times, I would’ve said you’re crazy. But it happened, right? I lived it.”

In Lauber’s words, the slugger spent the winter “figuring out how to never, ever live it again.” To be clear, Schwarber understood that he was still productive at the plate last season, but he wanted to be more than a three-true-outcomes player. As he put it: “I just know that there’s more [of a] hitter in there.”

I hate to destroy the illusion of my journalistic objectivity, but I must admit the Phillies fan in me was scared by Schwarber’s comments. Except for Bryce Harper, who because of injuries played just 225 of the team’s 324 regular season games across 2022 and ’23, Schwarber was probably Philadelphia’s most dangerous bat over his first two seasons in the City of Brotherly Love. He didn’t need to change. Call me a metathesiophobic, but when it comes to a 31-year-old, nine-year veteran, I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Yet, 60 games into the year, it certainly seems like Schwarber’s offseason efforts are paying off. His TTO% is lower (50%, down from his league-leading 53.8% in 2023) and his batting average is significantly higher than last year’s .197. In fact, his .239 batting average is only a tick below league average. Among qualified players from 2023 and 2024, only seven have seen a higher year-over-year increase. What’s more, Schwarber’s overall numbers haven’t taken a hit like I worried they would. He is enjoying another strong season at the plate with a .341 wOBA, .356 xwOBA, and 122 wRC+, all of which place him among the top 25 qualified batters in the National League.

All that being said, I haven’t seen enough to allay my preseason fears. The best way for a hitter to reduce his TTO% and increase his batting average is to cut back on strikeouts and make more contact, but that’s not what Schwarber has done. He has struck out in 29.5% of his plate appearances, right in line with his 29.9% rate last season, and his 34.1% whiff rate is a career high. Instead, the 2022 NL home run leader is sacrificing long balls for base hits. If you’re familiar with the basic rules of baseball, you’ll see why that’s a problem: The farther you make it around the bases, the better.

Schwarber is on pace for 30 home runs this year. He hit 47 last year and 46 the year before. He crushed 32 home runs during an injury-shortened 2021 campaign. Thirty homers is nothing to scoff at, but Schwarber is sending the ball out of the park at the lowest rate of his career. The same is true for doubles and, thus, extra-base hits overall. He is currently averaging an extra-base hit once every 17.3 plate appearances; his career pace entering the season was once every 10.2 PA. To be fair, power is down across the league this season; the league-average isolated power (.147) has never been lower since Schwarber debuted in 2015. Even so, his career-low .170 ISO this season is only 20% higher than league average. That’s a big step back for a slugger whose career ISO (.259) is 56% better than that of the average hitter. Similarly, his .408 slugging percentage, which would be the lowest full-season mark of his career, is only 5.4% above average. For his career, his .486 slugging is 17.7% better than the average hitter in that span.

Without the context of Schwarber’s preseason comments, the simplest explanation for his dropping power numbers might be age-related decline. However, the poster boy of the Phillies’ “ball go boom” lineup has not lost a lick of strength. His 54.9% hard-hit rate, a new career high, places him among the top 10 qualified batters in the sport. And although we can’t compare his bat speed to previous seasons, the fact that it sits in the 99th percentile makes me pretty confident he has not entered his decline phase quite yet.

Another explanation for Schwarber’s low home run rate could be his typical streakiness. He has a reputation for heating up later in the season, specifically during June, August, and September. He had a 95 wRC+ through the end of May in 2023 and a 102 wRC+ through the end of May the year before. However, his extra-base hit rate was still significantly higher during the first two months of 2022 and ’23 than it is right now. He averaged an extra-base hit once every 12.5 PA in March/April/May during his first two seasons with the Phillies; as a reminder, that number is one extra-base hit every 17.3 PA so far this year.

Instead of representing a step back or a slump, this looks like a deliberate adjustment on Schwarber’s part. Although his hard-hit rate is higher than ever, his barrel rate is a career low. His launch angle sweet spot rate is the lowest it’s been since 2020, the worst season of his career. On a related note, his groundball rate (39.6%) is significantly higher than it was during his first two seasons with the Phillies (33.8%), while his fly ball rate is significantly lower (down from 50.3% to 42.4%). Among qualified hitters from the past two seasons, he has seen the eighth-largest decrease in fly ball rate. According to a recent piece by Phillies beat writer Alex Coffey, Schwarber’s teammates and coaches have started joking that “he’s a slappy leadoff hitter now.”

For what it’s worth, Schwarber has been a better groundball hitter this season than in years past, and I can’t say I’m surprised. He’s a talented hitter, and I didn’t doubt he could change his approach if he wanted to. He said he was going to improve his directional hitting this year, and he has done exactly that, pulling fewer groundballs in favor of sending them up the middle, and he is making more hard contact on those groundballs. It’s further evidence that he’s hitting more grounders with intention, but hey, at least it’s working. Except… his BABIP on groundballs is absolutely, undeniably, without a doubt unsustainable. The league average BABIP on groundballs this season is .242. Schwarber’s career mark entering the year was .204. So far in 2024, he is running a .368 BABIP on the ground. That’s not to say Schwarber has merely been getting lucky; his .246 xBA is actually slightly higher than his actual batting average. However, he can’t keep this up. No one can maintain a BABIP on groundballs this high, especially not such a slow runner. Schwarber is due for some regression, and it when comes, he won’t be able to continue replicating his past production with his new approach.

Another thing Schwarber wanted to improve this season was his consistency. He didn’t want to prop up mediocre performances in April, May, and July with strong showings in June, August, and September. Unfortunately, baseball is inherently volatile, and he might be about to learn that BABIP is even more fickle than home run-to-fly ball ratio.

I tend to think consistency and well-roundedness are overrated. Schwarbombs, on the other hand, are a thing of beauty. Including the postseason, no batter crushed more no-doubters last season than Schwarber. Indeed, thanks to his power stroke, he has been the author of some of the most exciting moments in recent postseason memory. A common criticism of the three true outcomes is that they make baseball less interesting, aesthetically speaking. However, that criticism is more relevant for the sport as a whole, rather than specific batters. On an individual level, TTO hitters are part of the diverse landscape of players that make the sport so wonderful. As Michael Baumann put it, “One of the beautiful things about baseball, or any sport, is the emergence of varied and seemingly contradictory paths to success.”

If Schwarber continues to produce like a top 30 hitter in the National League, I doubt the Phillies will complain about his new path to success. That said, as he strives to become a jack of all trades, he runs the risk of devolving into a master of none. For the sake of his slash line – and the sake of Schwarbombs – he might be better off going back to his old ways.