We’re now about 10 days into the season, which means it’s time for a round of “Who’s looking good out of the gate?” Today, I want to focus on three post-hype starters who piqued my interest in the last week: Carlos Rodón, Jeff Hoffman, and Justin Dunn. Obviously, these three have teased before, and given their track records, there’s good reason to be skeptical of them going forward. All three have good arms though, and I’m a sucker for a spring breakout. With that in mind, I’ve donned my yellow zigzagged shirt, taken a running start, and am ready to blast this metaphorical football.

I trust that a small sample warning isn’t really necessary here. We all know that we’re working with extremely limited data at this point in the year, and that the following content comes with an extra-large SSS warning label. I trust you to recognize the intent of this article, which is simply to highlight interesting starts from a few talented but oft-frustrating arms. I’m not declaring that they’re suddenly budding All-Stars; I’m not even arguing they belong on your fantasy team. If someone reads this and comments “Uh, it was one start,” I will, well, I won’t do anything, but someone else will down-vote you in the comments, and that will be embarrassing. Don’t do that.

With that out of the way:

Carlos Rodón

Rodón’s run of bad luck in recent years is well-documented. He missed a couple of months in 2018 with a shoulder injury, then had to go under the knife for Tommy John early the following year. He returned to the mound last season, but only for a handful of innings, and he was unceremoniously non-tendered this past winter. Chicago invited him to camp anyway, and while he had a strong spring and won a job in the rotation, he didn’t have a ton of buzz heading into the season. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday afternoon, a familiar groan rippled across the baseball world.

The Mets entered the bottom of the ninth down by one against the Marlins, and had put on a showcase of Fun Baseball to tie the game: a Jeff McNeil bat flip on a bomb into the right field stands, Luis Guillorme hustling out an infield single, and Brandon Nimmo slapping a double down the left field line against an extreme shift. Francisco Lindor was intentionally walked, which brought up Michael Conforto to face Marlins pitcher Anthony Bass. A few pitches later, on a 1-2 count, Conforto leaned his padded elbow into the strike zone and was grazed by a ring-him-up slider that home plate umpire Ron Kulpa was midway through calling before reversing course mid ring-up, instead awarding Conforto first base for a game-winning hit-by-pitch.

Here’s a look at where that pitch was:

And here’s a look at the contact being made:

Ouch?

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Carmen’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Carmen is an engineer living in the Bay Area. Born and raised in Connecticut, his inherited Yankees fandom (yes, he can hear all of your grumbles) and curiosity about math and science combined to foster a fascination with how players contribute to run scoring and prevention, as did growing up reading the venerable pages of sabermetric havens such as FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Beyond the Boxscore. The accessibility of pitch-by-pitch Statcast data has allowed him to dig deeper into player and team tendencies and examine how each approaches the opposition, which he has written about at his own website, Sabermetric Musings. He hopes to use his skills and interests to contribute to the baseball discourse at large, as well as the website that played such a big part in making him the baseball observer he is today.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a supremely talented hitter. In this season’s early going, he has already hit a ball 114.1 mph, swatted a home run, and has a couple of RBI to his name. Prior to his call-up in 2019, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel rated him as the best prospect in baseball with a 70 Future Value. If you go to The Board, only five other players since 2017 have received such a grade: Wander Franco (now an 80), MacKenzie Gore, Gavin Lux, Yoán Moncada, and Shohei Ohtani. His specific combination of future tool grades, consisting of a 70 hit tool, 70 game power, and 80 raw power, is unrivaled in the dataset, a unique blend of elite bat-to-ball skills and game-changing power. At 19, he posted a 203 wRC+ in Double-A and a 175 wRC+ in Triple-A. The latter is especially impressive given that the average age of a Triple-A player is 28.

With those things in mind, you might say that what we have seen from the young phenom thus far is a bit disappointing. In 757 plate appearances through his age-21 season, Guerrero has posted a 107 wRC+. That places him 112th amongst all hitters since 2019 (for players with at least 500 plate appearances), sandwiched between the aging Robinson Canó and Omar Narváez. But I would note that context is key. Guerrero is one of only 10 players to receive 500 plate appearances through age 21. On that list, he ranks seventh in wRC+ behind Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Cody Bellinger, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Carlos Correa. One could argue that four of those guys are on a Hall of Fame trajectory while the fifth (Correa) has been one of the top talents in the sport when he is not struggling with injury.

Guerrero is in rare company given the amount of big-league time he has logged at such a young age; that is an accomplishment in and of itself. But we are still left wanting more. How can he unlock his generational tools and become the hitter we hope he can be? I would argue the most glaring potential adjustment is to his swing plane. In 2019 and ’20, Guerrero posted groundball rates of 50.4% and 54.6%, respectively. The following represents his rolling average groundball rate in 25 groundball samples:

A whopping 68.5% of these samples yielded groundball rates above the major league average. Over the past two seasons, major league hitters have produced a .218 wOBA and .244 BABIP on groundballs compared to a .500 wOBA and .344 BABIP on batted balls in the air. Among the group of players with 500 plate appearances the past two seasons, Guerrero ranks 15th out of 226 players in the cohort. The frustrating part of this phenomenon is that he hits the ball exceptionally hard, to the point where if he put the ball in the air at closer to league average rates he would be a candidate to place amongst the league leaders in home runs and overall production.

To get a better idea of how Guerrero compares to sluggers with his prodigious power, I pulled the batted ball data from Baseball Savant (via Bill Petti’s baseballR package) for a select few right-handed hitters who posted comparable maximum exit velocities to Guerrero in ’19 and 2020. This list includes the following:

Max exit velocity is our best indication of a player’s raw power. We do not have to worry about a sufficient sample of plate appearances to see how that power plays in the game; all we care about is how hard the player can put the ball in play if he makes optimal contact. You, the reader, might gripe that it is difficult to use max exit velocity to gauge a player’s power. How do we know this is truly the hardest he can hit the ball? To that I say, yes, smart reader we definitely do not know if a player’s maximum exit velocity is actually the hardest he will hit the ball. But, I will say, we can reasonably confident that we are in range fairly quickly, based on research from Alex Chamberlain.

The main comparison I am interested in is the differences in approximate attack angle between these players. The concept was outlined in great detail by Jason Ochart at Driveline in this 2018 post, but the TLDR is it is the vertical angle (which is associated with the launch angle of a batted ball) of the bat as it goes to impact the baseball. Hitters can measure it with bat sensors or by parsing video.

Unfortunately, we do not have this information for major league hitters in games because they do not walk up to the plate with sensors on their bats. Instead of throwing our collective hands up, however, we can approximate attack angle with the data we do have access to. And fortunately, that has already been done. Back in 2017, David Marshall wrote an amazing piece on the Community Research blog here at FanGraphs reverse engineering attack angle from Statcast data. He concluded his post with an elegant linear equation approximating attack angle based on the launch angle of the top 20% of a player’s hardest hit batted balls. Anthony Shattell has also posted about data of this nature in the past, and I would highly-recommend scrolling through his feed for some batted ball related visuals; he uses the top 10% of hardest hit balls for his attack angle approximations. For this analysis, I arbitrarily took the top 5%. One might quibble with such a choice, but I think it gets the same point across.

Here are the estimated attack angles for the hitters in the table above based on my filtering criteria:

Stanton has the flattest swing in this group with an estimated attack angle of 8.74 degrees. Guerrero is even lower at 8.71 degrees. Stanton and Judge stick out in that they hit a ton of home runs but have noticeably flatter swings then the rest of the group. They make up for those flat swings by hitting the ball harder than anybody else in baseball. In the Statcast era (since 2015), Stanton has hit 28 balls over 118 mph, the most in the majors. Judge sits second with 10 (he was not a full-time regular until 2017). Third, despite his lack of experience in the big leagues, is Guerrero. If you just look at 2019 and ’20, Vlad is tied for the most with Stanton. Guerrero and his power are in rare company. What’s more, Stanton and Judge have career strikeout rates of 28.1% and 31.4%. Guerrero’s sits at just 17.0%. Even though he doesn’t have quite the same amount of juice on contact as the Yankees outfielders, he makes up for it by putting the ball in play much more often, albeit on the ground. Stanton and Judge have career groundball rates of 42.2% and 38.5%, respectively, with the former about league average and the latter about a standard deviation below it.

Guerrero is still a step behind Stanton and Judge with regards to power, so any large increase in extra base hits (where he has been slightly above league average in terms of the percentage of his total plate appearances) will have to come from either hitting the ball harder or putting more balls in the air. In my own research, I found that maximum exit velocity peaks around age 26 and average exit velocity on balls in the air peaks around 30. So maybe there is some power Guerrero can still squeeze out of his bat. Given that he is already inside the top 1% in raw power, however, I am dubious of how much room for growth there is in that department. What about swing plane? There is precedence for young hitters changing their distribution of batted balls.

More often than not, these young talented hitters saw performance boosts when putting the ball in the air more. That is not to say Guerrero will definitely see a bump in production if he focuses on hitting the ball in the air. It could mess with his swing for all I know. But I do believe that there is room for him to add some loft in his swing, even at the expense of more whiffs. His strikeout rate is close to six percentage points below the league average. There is a trade-off to be had there that can make him the fearsome hitter we all believe he can be.

Guerrero is still very young and has a lot of room to grow as a hitter. The projection systems seem to agree. The FanGraphs Depth Charts projections see him putting up a .360 wOBA in 2021, 23rd in baseball. THE BAT X, which to my knowledge most explicitly leverages existing Statcast data, is even more optimistic. It sees a .376 wOBA in Vlad’s future, placing him 11th in the league and sandwiching him in between Yordan Alvarez and Judge.

When you consider his pedigree coming into the majors, his high-end bat control (as evidenced by his strikeout rate), and his nearly unmatched power, I still think these projection systems are a little light on what to expect from Vlad Jr. going forward. His combination of skills should put him in the conversation to be among the best hitters in baseball, the type who is in the MVP conversation throughout his 20s. Let’s hope he can make the necessary adjustments and grow into that kind of player starting this season.

You can see, if you want, the teenager who signed with the Minnesota Twins in 2016: a second-round pick from Salem High School in Georgia, leaving an offer from the University of Kentucky to make a go of it in the minors. You can see, in fact, his pre-draft workout for the Twins. It’s right here on YouTube, with a modest thousand views: not the best quality, not the best angle, but he’s there, swinging away, his face turned away from the camera. The video was uploaded by John Baddoo, his dad, whose channel features just one other video — again, starring his son Akil, this time going up to bat in Puerto Rico. From behind the dugout in the sparsely-populated stands — so far that, at first, it’s unclear who is being filmed — the phone camera slowly focuses on Akil as he takes his warm-up swings. Its shaky zoom follows him to the plate. When he puts the ball in play, the video ends abruptly. We don’t know what happened to that ball, whether it was a hit or an out, but it doesn’t matter: We saw his patience, his swing. When this video was uploaded in 2015, he was only 17 years old.

Now, Akil Baddoo is 22. He is, as of last week, a major leaguer. And his debut week has been unlike any other. He made his first appearance on Sunday. His parents were there at Comerica Park, watching, just as they had been when their son was in high school. And on the very first pitch Baddoo saw in the majors, he homered.

That, in itself, is some incredible magic — of all the players who’ve debuted in the major leagues, a number that is currently approaching 20,000, only 31 have done what Baddoo did — seen one pitch and sent it out of the ballpark. But it didn’t stop there. The next day, Baddoo hit another home run: a grand slam, in fact. Read the rest of this entry »

What unfolded in the bottom of the sixth at Coors Field on Friday night was melodrama of the highest tier. There was the astonishingly rapid unraveling of Trevor Bauer‘s no-hitter: a walk, a homer, a walk, a homer — within 10 minutes, what had been a dominant performance was utterly spoiled. Then came David Price’s first on-field appearance with the Dodgers, his first pitching appearance since 2019 — and within 10 more minutes, the Rockies had hit another two long balls. What had been an unassailable 10-0 lead became, out of nowhere, an entirely assailable 10-6 lead.

As Price pitched, a grey blur darted across the backstop. “Did you see the cat?” my brother texted me — and I hadn’t seen it. A moment of inattention was enough to miss it. But it didn’t matter, because, in a matter of minutes, the cat bolted onto the field. The baseball game had been one thing; quickly, without warning, it had become another. And now, it had stopped. The field was transformed into a venue for people to watch the cat.

The cat was an ominous figure, a fluffy gray shadow, its teeth bared in fear as it loped over the infield dirt. It stopped, eventually, in the outfield, where it assumed a defensive resting position. For a moment it sat there, panting, while the thousands of people surround it roared, willing it onward to whatever escapade might lie ahead. The cat was very frightened, as one might well expect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spring games are a blast, a return to baseball after a starved winter of boring transaction rumors. They’re the first chance to see major league players in their natural environment, and the pinnacle of baseball talent facing off against each other (and, inevitably, against some overmatched minor leaguers getting their first taste of the big time). One thing they are most assuredly not, however, are tactical masterpieces. The highest-leverage decision a manager makes is whether to bat their veterans at the top of the lineup so that they can duck out early. In the majors, though, tactical decision-making started when the regular season began. Almost immediately, a neat situation came up, and I’m excited enough to talk tactics that I’m going to give it far more coverage than it deserves.

In the second game of the season, the White Sox were in a pickle. After busting out to a 7–1 lead over the Angels, they’d frittered most of it away. A three-run shot from Albert Pujols here, an Adam Eaton three-base error there, and it was 7–6. A laugher had turned into a struggle for survival.

In the bottom of the eighth, the Angels were again threatening. After Mike Trout led the inning off with a walk, manager Tony LaRussa went to Evan Marshall. Marshall started strong, inducing a pop up from Anthony Rendon and a groundout from Justin Upton. But wait! LaRussa intentionally walked Pujols, putting the go-ahead run on base. What the!?
Read the rest of this entry »

The first-pitch temperature for Opening Day in Detroit was a frosty 32 degrees, and what’s more, snow was falling. Amid those decidedly baseball-unfriendly conditions, the Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera launched the first home run of the 2021 season, and off reigning AL Cy Young winner Shane Bieber, to boot. It was a sight to behold, yet it wasn’t easy to see. Launched off Cabrera’s bat at 101.8 mph, the ball caromed off the railing atop the outfield wall and back towards the field of play. Given the limited visibility, Cabrera didn’t believe he had homered, and slid into second before realizing the ball had gone out.

The two-run shot not only helped power Detroit to a 3-2 win over Cleveland, it was the opening salvo in what has the potential to be a milestone-laden season for the slugger, who tuns 38 on April 18. That was Cabrera’s 488th career homer, and his 350th as a Tiger; it was also his 2,867th hit. For as modest as his preseason projections are — I’ll get to the full lines, but 21 homers and 139 hits are the numbers to start with — he projects not only to become the seventh player to attain those twin milestones but the first to reach both in the same season:

Mind you, Cabrera doesn’t have much margin for error with the hit count if he’s going to do it this year while puttering along at the .261/.332/.418 clip from our Depth Charts projections, which take the average of his separate Steamer and ZiPS projections. Opening Day is a time for optimism, however, and in this case that optimism resides in the fact that until Thursday, he hadn’t hit an Opening Day homer since 2009. The reality, on the other hand, is that even when he’s homered early in the other seasons of what we might call his wilderness years — such as in the third game of 2018 and the second game of last season — his production was meager.

Indeed, over the past four seasons, Cabrera’s age-34 to age-37 campaigns, he hit just .267/.342/.406 for a 99 wRC+. Injuries played a part in that decline, particularly a pair of herniated discs that caused lingering pain throughout the 2017 season, and a ruptured left biceps tendon that ended his ’18 season — in which he’d gotten off to a strong start — after just 38 games. He did play 57 out of the Tigers’ 60 games last year, and his 102 wRC+ (.250/.329/.417) outdid both his 2017 and ’19 showings, as did his 0.3 WAR, but for a two-time MVP and 11-time All-Star making $31 million annually (before proration), that’s nothing to write home about.

If there was good news to be found in Cabrera’s 2020 numbers beyond his ability to DH nearly every day, it’s that he hit the ball hard. Leaving the small sample of 2018 aside, his 9.7% barrel rate matched his high for the past four season, while his 49.7% hard-hit rate was a high for that span, with the latter just a hair below his 50% in 2016, his last excellent season. Even given the fact that he’s hitting too many groundballs (1.33 GB/FB ratio, a bit better than his 1.41 from 2017-19), his .375 xwOBA placed in the 86th percentile. The problem is that given his first-percentile sprint speed — “slower than a Molina dragging a Molina with another Molina on his back” is the phrase that I have used for such measures — he managed just a .323 wOBA. His 52-point underperformance placed him in the second percentile from among the 252 players who faced at least 500 pitches last year, and this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon; his 33-point underperformance over the past four seasons (.354 xwOBA, .321 wOBA) placed him in the first percentile. Sticking to last year’s numbers, his expected batting average of .285 was 35 points higher than his actual one, and his expected slugging percentage of .514 was 97 points higher than his actual mark. If not for some combination of bad luck and bad wheels, he’d be even closer to the aforementioned milestones; based on his 35-point batting average underperformance over the past four seasons, he’d have another 46 hits even before accounting for injuries.

If Cabrera’s Depth Charts projection is underwhelming, his ZiPS projection is even more so. Dan Szymborski provided me with a percentile breakdown:

There’s quite a gap between that 50th percentile ZiPS projection and the one from Steamer (where he’s forecast for a .266/.343/.440 line) due to their different ways of weighing past performance. The eagle-eyed reader will also note that there’s a gap between the WAR associated with that 50th percentile and the ZiPS line on his player page (-0.4), owing to the fact that FanGraphs applies a heavier positional adjustment factor to DHs (-17.5 runs per year) than Baseball-Reference (-15 runs), and that the park factors may differ as well. Still, we’re talking about a player whose median projection is in the ballpark of replacement level, and expected to get worse over the next two seasons, though the same caveats apply to Cabrera’s three-year ZiPS projections, which on his player page forecast seasons of -0.9 WAR (2022) and -1.4 WAR (2023). You can mentally add maybe half a win to each of those figures but that’s just putting a bit of Chapstick on a pig, which won’t make it any prettier.

Most teams will curb the playing time of somebody whose production has fallen off to that degree — that is the concept of replacement level, after all — but as we’ve seen in relation to the Angels and Albert Pujols, the big contract of a future Hall of Famer can get in the way of things. As Dan noted last year, because of his contract, we’ve seen Pujols at his worst for longer than any other great hitter; he’s “produced” -0.6 fWAR over the course of 3,153 PA from his age-35 season onward, which takes a bit of the shine off his astounding totals of 662 home runs, 3,153 hits, and 80.9 JAWS, which ranks second among first baseman even with that arid stretch, behind only Lou Gehrig.

Sticking with fWAR for the moment, among Hall of Famers only Willie Keeler (1,291 PA, -0.8 WAR) and Jim Bottomley (1,146 PA, -1.2 WAR) have surpassed 1,000 PA from 35 onward while festering below replacement level. Based on that three-year ZiPS projection, Cabrera is a very real threat to join their company, as he’s managed only 0.6 WAR in 941 PA from his age-35 season onward. By Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, Cabrera has produced 0.4 WAR from age-35 onward, but even with that minimal production, his career WAR (69.3), peak WAR (44.8) and JAWS (57.0) are all solidly above the standards at first base (66.9/42.7/54.8), and with the pending milestones and already-acquired hardware, he figures to be a lock for Cooperstown.

Tangential to that subject, I often get asked in my FanGraphs chats a variant of the question of whether there are examples of players who have hung on too long and played their way out of a Hall berth. It’s a difficult question to answer, though we’ve certainly seen future Hall of Famers deliver sub-replacement level work as they’ve slogged past milestones. Craig Biggio‘s -2.1 WAR in 2007 as he surpassed 3,000 hits, comes to mind, and likewise Lou Brock‘s -2.0 WAR over his final three seasons as he surpassed both Ty Cobb’s career record for stolen bases (then believed to be 892, currently 897 at B-Ref) and the 3,000-hit mark. Wade Boggs had -0.3 WAR in 1999 as he went over the 3,000 line, and given time I’m sure I could come up with a few more.

Keeping with an age-35 season as the dividing line, here are the non-Hall of Famers with at least 500 PA from that point onward who have produced the lowest bWARs:

I don’t think we could say definitively that any of those players were derailed en route to enshrinement, though in his 1994 book The Politics of Glory, Bill James predicted that Parker, an MVP and two-time batting champion, would be elected by the BBWAA in 2003, and likewise for Murphy, a two-time MVP, in 2008. Then again, from that vantage he also had Pete Rose, Joe Carter, Jack McDowell, and Ruben Sierra — among others — eventually getting the nod.

Among the players above who escaped James’ cloudy crystal ball, Bando and Bell might have helped to flesh out the dearth of Hall of Fame third basemen had they stuck around longer. Williams felt like he had a shot as a pivotal player in the Yankees’ turn-of-the-millennium dynasty, at least until advanced fielding metrics — and perhaps his disinterest in anything besides starting in center field — squashed his hopes like a bug. Miñoso’s actual birthdate is unclear; B-Ref uses 1925, the youngest of the four apparent options according to various sources, which would have placed his debut at age 23 and meant that his age-35 season was still a productive one (2.0 WAR in 1961).

Mauer and Votto are of particular interest to statheads, as we fret over whether the general BBWAA electorate will appreciate their charms, statistical and otherwise, as much as we do. Mauer is seventh in JAWS among catchers and above all three standards (his seven peak seasons all took place while catching, it’s worth noting), while Votto, whose contract situation makes him an analogue to Cabrera and Pujols, albeit without the milestones, is 15th among first basemen, above the peak standard (46.9 vs. 42.7) and 0.9 shy in JAWS (53.9 vs. 54.8).

Of course, there’s nothing set in stone about 45.0 WAR, age-35 seasons, and 500 PA as cutoffs; my qualifications above notably omit both Tony Oliva (43.1 WAR through his age-34 season, -0.1 thereafter) and Dave Parker (40.5 WAR through his age-35 season, -0.4 thereafter), two other Era Committee candidate of note. This seems like a topic worthy of further exploration.

As for Cabrera, who’s making $31 million annually this year and each of the next two, the Tigers can only hope he’s about to find his way out of the doldrums. If they’re to turn the corner on their rebuilding effort, they may face the type of hard choice that the Angels have been unwilling to make when it comes to Pujols. In the meantime, until Spencer Torkelson arrives and the likes of Casey Mize, Tarik Skubal and Matt Manning carve their places (knock on wood), we can hope that Cabrera hits well enough to avoid such awkwardness.

Well, after a winter spent fretting over the pandemic and the free agent market’s glacial pace (and what both might mean for baseball), the 2021 season is upon us. We made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule and predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Despite the 11th-hour format switcheroo, the FanGraphs staff ended up doing pretty well when it came to last year’s playoff field, though with eight teams in each league advancing to the postseason, the odds were in our favor. Still, with the exception of the Marlins (we thought the Nationals would do a better job defending their World Series title) and the Blue Jays (whither the Angels we picked instead?), we had October pretty well pegged. The 2020 individual awards? A big goose egg! Such is the prognostication business.

Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in; here are the results.

American League

The American League once again appears to be stratified into the haves and the yet-to-arrives, though our writers see two of the three divisions as competitive at the top. Twenty of our voters submitted ballots with Houston and New York as division winners; their Central votes were split between the Minnesota (12 votes) and Chicago (eight). Meanwhile, four teams received no playoff votes (the Mariners, Rangers, Tigers, and Orioles), while two more (Royals and Red Sox) received just one. I expected Kansas City to be a more popular sleeper pick. I’m don’t think they’re ready to compete in earnest with the AL’s other Wild Card contenders, but they certainly seem to think they are, and it’s always good to have a little zag in a ballot full of zig. Better luck next year, Royals. Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another weekend of college baseball and week of spring training. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Kevin’s Notes

Sam Bachman, RHP, Miami (Ohio): 3 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 9 K

Bachman has cross-checkers around the country Googling where the hell Oxford, Ohio is (it’s in the southwest part of the state; fly into Cincinnati and it’s about an hour drive north from there). He’s been getting into triple digits most weekends and touched 101 on Saturday against a sub-par Northern Illinois squad; his outing featured nine up, nine down, and nine strikeouts on 41 pitches. Bachman is being treated with kid gloves as a starter due to some early-season shoulder soreness, but most teams see him as a pure reliever due to an awkward, unathletic delivery. At 6-foot-1 and somewhere in the neighborhood of 235 pounds, he’s built like a linebacker, and he seems to throw like one as well. The scary thing about him is that his 96-100 mph fastball might not even be his best pitch. Of the 41 offerings on Saturday, he threw 24 sliders, and it’s a 70-grade pitch that features massive velocity and equally impressive break; in the end, it generated eight of his nine whiffs. Despite the concerns about his delivery and ultimate role, this is some of the best pure stuff in the draft and Bachman is starting to generate some mid-first-round buzz.

Jacob Campbell, C, Illinois: 4-for-7, 2B, HR, BB, K

I was talking to a front office person the other day when he suddenly stated, “Catching around the league is so awful.” It’s baseball’s most difficult position, and takes a physical toll that greatly limits backstops’ ability to perform at the plate. There are 30 everyday catching jobs, but there aren’t 30 everyday catchers. That forces teams to move catchers up on their draft boards, and Campbell could end up a beneficiary of that strategy. A 36th-round pick by the Cubs in 2018 out of a Wisconsin high school, he hit just .197 in his first two years at Illinois, but scouts remained optimistic because of his athleticism and power, though there was concern about the latter following offseason hamate surgery. He’s come out strong so far this spring, going 12-for-27 with three bombs, and he’s suddenly being talking about in the third round, give or take 30 picks. Campbell moves well behind the plate and has a plus arm, and while there’s some swing-and-miss in his game, he has a solid approach to go with sneaky pop. Catching around the league is awful and players like Campbell are in a good position to take advantage of that come July. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Eric Longenhagen previewed baseball’s lesser bullpens. Now, Dan Szymborski takes a look at the relief corps projected to be the league’s best.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, there have been gradual changes to how bullpens are built and deployed. Clubs are more willing than ever to admit that their closer is simply the best pitcher on their roster rather than one blessed with magical abilities, able to secure the final outs of a game where lesser men would fail. Closers are still a fairly big deal, mind you, but the trend of late has been to talk more about bullpens in terms of the entire unit, rather than just the closer and his backing band. As such, that’s how we rank them. There’s not a lot of turnover this year, with 11 of the top 15 teams from last season returning.

It will be interesting to see what effects the shortened 2020 season has on bullpen usage in 2021. By the time we get to October, it will have been two years since any pitcher threw 200 innings, and teams are likely going to protect their starters more than usual this season. Nobody really knows what the long-term effects will be of throwing pitchers into a 162-game marathon after a weird, shortened sprint season, one that featured two spring trainings set three months apart. Tommy John surgery may have a high success rate these days, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to flirt with it.

We sometimes pooh-pooh the value of bullpens because of their volatility, but the fact is, the share of innings thrown by relievers has steadily increased over the last half-century, with their proportion of innings going from just over a quarter in the mid-70s to nearly half last year.

Forty-four percent of innings in 2020 were thrown by relievers and there’s no reason to expect a sudden reversal in 2021. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that 20 years from now, there’s no actual distinction between starters and relievers, with those classifications largely considered a relic. That’s still speculative, but for now, even if a reliever can’t match the value of a Jacob deGrom, bullpens have a very real effect on who makes the playoffs and who pops bubbly in late October. Read the rest of this entry »