Who’s the best catcher in the NL Central? Before the season, this was a good way to start an argument between Cardinals and Cubs fans. Was it Willson Contreras, the cannon-armed, cannon-batted Chicago backstop who has worked hard to improve his framing of late? Was it Yadier Molina, the stalwart St. Louis lifer with legendary defense who continued to hit long past when most thought he’d fade?

Neither! The best catcher in the NL Central this year is Omar Narváez, and it hasn’t been particularly close. By WAR, his 3.0 mark is nearly double Contreras, and that undersells it; he’s played in nine fewer games and has 64 fewer plate appearances. His 137 wRC+ is the second-best among catchers, trailing only Buster Posey’s incandescent season. He’s sixth in baseball in framing runs and third in total defensive value for catchers. A year after his worst offensive season, he’s turned it all around, and the Brewers are reaping the rewards.

Narváez came to Milwaukee with a reputation as a defensive butcher who could hit. He popped 22 homers in 2019 in only 482 plate appearances, his lone season in Seattle. Not only that, but he also struck out only 19.1% of the time — with a walk rate of nearly 10%. More walks than average, fewer strikeouts than average, plus power … he sounded like a match made in heaven.
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Politics aside, the biggest upside to Major League Baseball’s decision to move this year’s All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver is that for the first time in 23 years, the Home Run Derby will be held at Coors Field, where baseballs fly further than any other major league venue due to the mile-high altitude. If you have any sustained interest in the event, this is the bucket list location for a Derby, and if that’s not enough to juice this competition, MLB has made clear the balls themselves won’t be stored in the humidor prior to the festivities, theoretically resulting in drives of even greater distance. Short story longer: MORE DINGERS!

If there’s a downside to the pending fireworks show, it’s that the new baseball MLB introduced this year isn’t carrying quite as far as years past. The average distance of a hard-hit fly ball — that is, one hit with an exit velocity of 95 mph or greater — is 366 feet, which is up five feet from the shortened 2020 season but down nine feet relative to ’19, the year those distances peaked.

That decreased distance is despite this year’s hard-hit fly balls having the highest average exit velocity of the Statcast era at 101.2 mph; they averaged 101 mph in 2019, the year that home runs peaked with an average of 1.39 per team per game. That was deemed Too Many Homers, and after dropping by 8% from 2019 to ’20, per-game home run rates have fallen another 7.85% this year, to 1.18 per team per game. The good news is that at Coors Field, that downturn won’t matter; via Statcast, this year’s hard-hit fly balls are averaging 393 feet — 7.3% further — and that’s with the humidor. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great batting lines of the first half was Yasmani Grandal’s .189/.388/.436 slash. Unfortunately, as has been the case for many a hitter on the White Sox, his return to action in ‘21 is in doubt after he underwent surgery to repair a knee ligament. I won’t wax poetic on Grandal; Devan Fink did a great job covering his early-season batting line. But it’s becoming more common to see a hitter with an average that starts with a “1” these days. The common reference to a batting average under .200 is the “Mendoza Line,” which our Ashley MacLennon made a strong case for ditching as a reference earlier this season. I, on the other hand, am going to make the case for why it’s become irrelevant.

Batting average, the prevailing measure of a hitter’s success for most of baseball’s existence, has faded into the background, yet the rate at which a hitter successfully reaches base via a hit is still usually the first statistic reported. Grandal’s batting average is not good, but the selection of .200 as a cutoff point is arbitrary; after all, a batting average of .214 is also not good. What most baseball fans understand now is that because all base hits are not equal in value, batting average is limited in what it says about a hitter. But there is a stigma attached to a poor batting average, which is probably why the Mendoza Line has stuck.

Let’s rewind to last year’s shortened campaign. There was a lot of speculation going into a 60-game season as to whether or not a player would be able to hit .400. That didn’t happen, though Charlie Blackmon was hitting .500 after a couple weeks. We did end up with a handful of qualified hitters with an average below .200 — seven such, to be exact:

This is by far the highest number of qualified hitters with a batting average below .200 for a single season. It is totally a product of the short season, though. None of the hitters on the list above are contact hitters, but their true bat-to-ball skills are probably better than what they showed in ‘20. When the sample is small, there is a greater chance that you get some outliers in your results.

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Let’s check in on the farm system rankings before the draft. I’m going to begin by pointing readers to a few useful resources. First and most importantly, here is a primer to remind you of the features of the rankings and here is Craig Edwards’ research on prospect valuation that helped inform our rankings methodology. Readers should consider the dollar amounts as an approximation of what the player might receive were they exposed to the open market, which in addition to acting as a filter that aids in our analysis of trades featuring prospect where money also changes hands, is also an illustration of the gap between what minor leaguers earn and what they’re “worth” to their organizations.

Next I’ll note that the “2021 Updated” section of The Board is now live. As players are added to (via the draft or trade) or subtracted from (via trade or graduation) an organization, the Farm Rankings associated with those teams will also update automatically. You may want to follow the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account, which I typically use to tweet Board updates when players are added, subtracted, or move within the Future Value tiers. If you avoid Twitter because it crosses the wires of your brain and tears at our social fabric, you can simply access the feed on the Prospects Homepage. Just scroll down a little bit; it’s on the right. Read the rest of this entry »

In late June and in just his fourth major league start, Marlins right-hander Zach Thompson accomplished something that has only been done nine times in the last decade. Facing the Nationals, he went six innings, allowed just two runs (one earned), and struck out 11. In the process, he became the 10th pitcher in the last 10 seasons to strike out 11 or more batters in his first four career appearances — certainly a qualifier-heavy fact, but it still yields quite an impressive list of names:

As the table shows, it’s rare to break into the major leagues with the level of dominance that Thompson displayed, but his path here has been even more fascinating.

In perhaps the most innocuous of moves, the Marlins signed Thompson last November as a minor league free agent to serve as additional bullpen depth. Even still, he was one of the team’s top targets on the minor league free-agent market, Marlins director of pro scouting Hadi Raad told Christina De Nicola of MLB.com, in what he said was based on a blend of scouting and analytics. As Marlins manager Don Mattingly told De Nicola after Thompson’s start against the Nationals, “It’s like, ‘How does this guy get away from teams?’ I liked his stuff, but you never know where that goes, too, after spring training. Sometimes those guys go to Triple-A and you never see them again. Zach, I think, started a little slow, and then kind of got it going. He’s been impressive, so hopefully this just keeps going.” Read the rest of this entry »

You’re not as good at your job as Jacob deGrom is at his. That’s no knock on you — I don’t even know who you are, much less have access to your performance reviews or job history. But deGrom is one of the very best, in all of history, at the thing he does. I’m sure you’re a great accountant or whatever, but you just don’t stack up.

There’s good news, though. As it turns out, deGrom is actually relatable at times. Last Thursday, deGrom came into the office and had an absolutely miserable hour of work. He got smacked around the park and gave up three runs before recording three outs. And if one of the best of all time at a job can have an off day, then anyone can.

What does a deGrom off day look like? Like anyone’s, kind of. It starts with being a little sloppy, making a silly mistake that you know, even as you make it, isn’t right. For example, don’t leave a fastball, the second pitch of the game, here:

That’s not where pitches are supposed to go. It was a 100 mph fastball, but middle-middle is still not a good look, and Ehire Adrianza laced it past Dominic Smith and into the corner for a leadoff triple. Two pitches in, nothing was going right for the best pitcher in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

On hiatus since the onset of the COVID pandemic, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last week with three pitchers telling the stories behind their sliders. Today, in the second of this year’s installments, we hear from Jake Brentz, Brooks Kriske, and Hirokazu Sawamura on their changeups and splitters.

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Jake Brentz, Kansas City Royals

“I never had a changeup in the minor leagues. I was fastball slider/breaking ball, but I always mixed around my breaking ball. I didn’t really find a breaking ball that worked for me until probably a year and a half, two years ago — not until I got to Triple-A.

“Paul Gibson is our pitching coordinator here with the Royals, and last year at the alternate site he told me, ‘Hey, I would like you to develop a changeup; I think it would be a very valuable pitch for you.’ So I really focused on developing one, throwing it as many times as I could during an outing. We were just playing each other — nothing really mattered — so it was just developing and whatnot. I’d throw it back to back to back, and messed around with grips. I found one that really worked for me, and then worked on it more over the offseason. In spring training I wasn’t throwing it a lot at first, but Mike [Matheny] came to me said, ‘I think your changeup can be a devastating pitch, so we’re going to throw that a lot.’ Over time, I’ve continuing to throw it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees are in a precarious position; at 41-39, they’re 8.5 games back of first in the AL East and 5.5 games out of the second Wild Card spot. Sometime soon, they’ll have to decide whether they plan on adding major league talent for a playoff push this year or retooling for the future. Today, they made a trade that doesn’t really do either, but is still a ton of fun. As first reported by Lindsey Adler of The Athletic, the Yankees acquired Tim Locastro from the Diamondbacks in exchange for minor league pitcher Keegan Curtis.

Locastro is a deeply strange player. He’s one of the few true oddities left in a game that’s increasingly moving towards multi-position mashers and fluid-role strikeout pitchers. His two standout skills are getting hit by pitches and stealing bases successfully, which is about as weird of a combination as it sounds. But they work together quite well — or at least, they did until this year, when everything has gone south in a hurry.

Getting hit by pitches doesn’t feel like a skill. If you needed any confirmation, just look at the way we describe it — it’s something done to you, rather than some great feat. You draw a walk, or hit a double — but you get hit by a pitch. Year in and year out, though, Locastro gets hit at a ludicrous rate. In the minors, 6.2% of his plate appearances resulted in a HBP. In the majors, he’s been hit in 7.5% of his plate appearances — the highest rate in league history.

That’s mostly hilarious — how can this guy be so good at something that seems so out of his control? — but it’s also real value. Across the majors, batters get hit in roughly 1.1% of plate appearances. That’s an additional 6.4% of the time that Locastro gets on base for free! His career 6.3% walk rate plays more like a 12.7% walk rate, which is downright elite.

The Yankees could use a center fielder who can get on base. With Aaron Hicks on the 60-day Injured List, they’ve given the majority of their starts to Brett Gardner, and his .318 OBP would be the lowest mark of his career. The daily rigors of playing center also aren’t optimal for a 37-year-old — he’s held up well defensively so far, but he can’t play every day, and using Aaron Judge to soak up some of the defensive innings isn’t a great solution either. Read the rest of this entry »

With 11 strikeouts in six innings in his start against the Dodgers last week, Yu Darvish reached 1,500 major-league strikeouts in fewer innings than anyone else in history. Playing in NPB from 2005 to 2012, he racked up 1,250 strikeouts.

No. 1678

Last year he was close to becoming Rookie of the Year, even though one might well consider him a veteran: a pro since he was 18 back in 2005, a decade of experience carried with him. But on this continent, he is not the ubiquitous superstar he is at home. The things he is capable of — the command, when he’s on, of almost every pitch imaginable; the apparent ease with which he can induce whiffs and strikeouts — are still brand new.

He began this season with a 14-strikeout game — an out away from completing the game on his own. Now, deep in the summer heat of August, he has racked up four such games. And here he is, at work on another one. In the eighth, with one out (strikeout 14), he has yet to allow a hit.

But it only takes one swing, and the tenuous lead he has been protecting all this time is cut in half: one hit on the board now, one run. So he comes back with another strikeout. The first one this inning was a strikeout looking, but this one is a strikeout swinging — his 109th pitch, impossibly placed, moving as though manipulated by invisible hands. “15,” the scorebug flashes — strikeout number 15. And if it’s thrilling, or if it’s tiring, or if he is reaching the end of his rope, there is no sign of it: just an exhale, a circling of the mound, a return — one more batter, just one more. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, Trevor Bauer had a rough start. In six innings, he struck out 10 Padres, but that’s where the highlights ended. He walked four and gave up three home runs, pushing his season total to 17 homers allowed. They were all solo shots, which limited the damage, but still: three home runs isn’t a good day’s work. After the game, Bauer was understandably defensive:

"I have the worst home run luck in the league. Every time I make a little mistake it leaves the yard." — Trevor Bauer on his 3 solo shots allowed tonight. #Dodgers

— Michael J. Duarte (@michaeljduarte) June 24, 2021

Now, “little mistakes” are hard to measure. Consider this titanic Manny Machado blast, for example:

Mistake? Maybe. But how do you define a mistake pitch? That was an 82.6 mph slider, roughly two ticks faster than Bauer’s average for the pitch. Per Statcast, it had 16 inches of total break (against spin-less movement), roughly 1.5 inches less than his average slider breaks. He left it over the plate, but not excessively so; five inches above the bottom of the zone. He doesn’t locate sliders there often, but the previous three had resulted in two swinging strikes and a pop out.

So was this a sublime effort by Machado or a bad pitch by Bauer? I’d lean towards the former — though Bauer would have a better argument on his pitch to Victor Caratini later in the game. But that’s hardly a scientific way of looking at it, and I wanted to do at least slightly better. Otherwise, how will we evaluate Bauer’s claim that he’s the unluckiest man on the planet, at least when it comes to home runs? Read the rest of this entry »