For all of the dysfunction that Major League Baseball has offered thus far in the 2020 season, some players are firing on all cylinders, from first-month flashes in the pan (Donovan Solano is hitting .457/.474/.657, Hanser Alberto .429/.459/.686) to familiar faces. Few of the latter are doing so to a greater degree than Aaron Judge. The Yankees right fielder, who has missed a good chunk of the past two seasons due to injuries — and might have missed half of this one if not for the delay caused by the coronavirus pandemic — has hit an major league-high six home runs, all of them in a streak of five straight games from July 29 through August 2. That streak came to an end on Monday, as he had to “settle” for a 2-for-4 performance in the Yankees’ 6-3 win over the Phillies, their eighth in nine games.

The last two of Judge’s home runs came on Sunday night at Yankee Stadium against the Red Sox and were timely, to say the least. His towering three-run shot to left field off of Matt Hall erased a 2-0 deficit in the second inning, while his two-run homer to left center off Matthew Barnes broke a 7-7 tie with two outs in the eighth inning, providing the margin of victory:

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It’s the beginning of August, and one only one pitcher is on pace for a 6 WAR season. In a normal year, that would be disappointing; there are usually something like four or five of them. In this short year, on the other hand, it’s downright amazing, and I don’t know a better way to say it than that: right now, Shane Bieber is downright amazing.

Through two starts, Bieber is putting up numbers like peak Craig Kimbrel, only he’s doing it as a starter. You’ve seen individual games like this before, so the numbers might not sound completely wild to you, but they’re wild. A 54% strikeout rate and 2% walk rate, a 0 ERA, a -0.36 FIP; that’s all obviously excellent in an abstract sense. To truly understand it, however, you have to take a closer look at Bieber’s stuff. He’s absolutely bullied his way through two straight dominant performances, and there’s no better way to do it than to take a trip through his overpowering secondary stuff. Watch hitters flail, and you can get a better sense of how thoroughly masterful Bieber has been this year.

In 2018 and 2019, Bieber’s calling card was his wipeout slider. He threw it 23% of the time in 2018 and 26% of the time in 2019, and hitters simply couldn’t do anything with it. They whiffed on roughly 43% of their swings against the pitch in both years, often looking foolish:

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Take a glance at the early season position player WAR leaders and you’ll find Mike Yastrzemski leading all of MLB, making his grandfather proud. Next you’ll find José Ramirez on his quest to show that last year’s struggles were just a blip. The player with the third-highest WAR in this young campaign is Mariners center fielder Kyle Lewis, who was leading the category yesterday. After a sparkling debut last September, Lewis is proving that his hot start wasn’t a fluke.

With another two yesterday, Lewis has now collected hits in all seven games this season and has strung together five multi-hit performances in a row. All told, he’s hit .448/.500/.655 this year and owns a .320/.355/.610 line in his young career. His historic September included blasting home runs in his first three major league games, becoming just the second player in history to accomplish the feat. He would go on to hit three more through the first 10 games of his career.

But that success came with some glaring red flags. He posted a 38.7% strikeout rate last year, and it is only a touch lower so far this season. His tendency to swing and miss often only confirmed the skepticism some had about his hit tool. His swinging strike rate is a bit lower this year (from 17.7% to 15.2%), and his underlying plate discipline stats look a little better — a lower overall swing rate, particularly on pitches out of the zone — but his high strikeout rate will likely follow him throughout his career. Thriving in the majors with such a high swinging strike rate is difficult but not impossible. Bryce Harper ran a 15.3% swinging strike rate last season while posting a 125 wRC+. The difference for Lewis is that many of those whiffs are coming with two strikes, driving up his strikeout rate. Harper can survive with such a high swinging strike rate because he’s aggressive early in the count but adjusts his approach with two strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

The downtime produced by shelter-in-place orders and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic has inspired many people to take up new hobbies or polish previously dormant skills. The Jaffe-Span household, for example, has created a windowsill garden with herbs and vegetables, and every person on social media can name a friend or five who has tracked their recent forays into breadmaking. Ji-Man Choi apparently used his time to rediscover the advantages of switch-hitting. On Sunday, in the first major league game in which he batted right-handed, the Rays’ 29-year-old first baseman clubbed a home run off Blue Jays lefty Anthony Kay.

It wasn’t a cheapie, either. Choi hit a 429-foot shot that came off the bat at 109.9 mph — the second hardest-hit homer of his five-season career:

Ji-Man Choi hadn’t ever had a hit as a righty

Ji-Man Choi now has a home run as a righty pic.twitter.com/zo6YSsoWZX

— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) July 26, 2020

The South Korea native, who began his stateside professional career in the Mariners’ organization in 2010, and who does throw right-handed despite regularly batting left-handed, isn’t a complete newcomer to switch-hitting. In 2015, after breaking his right fibula during spring training, he spent time learning to switch-hit under the tutelage of Mariners Triple-A hitting coach Howard Johnson, who spent 14 seasons switch-hitting in the majors, primarily with the Mets and Tigers. Upon returning to action in August, first with the team’s Arizona League affiliate and then with the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers, Choi went 6-for-14 with a double and a walk while batting righty against left-handed pitchers, and 0-for-2 with two walks while batting righty against righties.

“I did it, and it worked well, so I kept doing it” Choi told MLB.com’s Alden Gonzalez (through an interpreter) the following spring. Gonzalez noted at the time that Choi’s leg kick was more pronounced from the right side of the plate. “But I don’t worry about the form,” Choi said, “I just concentrate on hitting the ball. See the ball, hit the ball.”

That conversation took place in the context of Choi having joined the Angels via the Rule 5 draft. Less than three weeks later, however, the team asked him to abandon switch-hitting, with manager Mike Scioscia saying that the Angels felt Choi’s left-handed swing was better, and that they planned to use him more in that capacity. Read the rest of this entry »

Five years ago, gimmick defenses were bush league. I don’t just mean that in the pejorative baseball sense, though of course I mean that too. Rather, I mean that when Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh were running the Sonoma Stompers, they toyed with adding gimmick defenses to their indy ball team, and the team rebelled. The players tolerated it — not without reservation — but the reason the wild defensive alignments merited mention in the book is because they were wild.

That was 2015, however, and sensibilities have changed since then. Strange defensive alignments are hardly unusual now. Joey Votto faced a four-man outfield in 2017, and it’s gotten weirder from there. Joey Gallo faces four-man outfields with some frequency. Five-ish man infields have sometimes been a thing in do-or-die late game situations, but the Dodgers rolled one out against Eric Hosmer in the middle innings last year.

I know what you’re thinking. Ben’s going to talk about the “seven-man outfield” the Royals used against Miguel Cabrera. I’m not exactly sure that’s a novel defensive alignment, though. Backing up when somebody slow is batting isn’t the same as forfeiting a right fielder or inventing a new position. It was funny, no doubt, the ultimate mark of disrespect for someone’s speed, but teams have been doing something similar to Albert Pujols for years.

Even though the shock of novel positioning has mostly worn off, I did do a double take on Monday night. With the Pirates attempting to lock down a 5-1 win against the Brewers (about that…), Justin Smoak came to bat. The Pirates checked their laminated positioning cards, shuffled around, and presto! Four in the outfield:

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Here’s something you hear a lot that also has the benefit of being true: baseball is a sport of haves and have nots. There are super teams scattered around the league, the Dodgers and Yankees and Astros of the world. There are plenty of teams that aren’t trying to compete this year; the Tigers and Royals spring to mind, but it’s not like there aren’t others.

In a technical sense, however, the league achieved a rare degree of parity over the weekend — and as we all know, being technically correct is the best kind of correct. After each team played three games, the entire league stood at either 1-2 or 2-1, with fifteen teams apiece in each camp. In that odd, specific sense, this is one of the best years ever for parity in baseball.

Come again? Per no less an authority than MLB.com, this is the first time in the last 66 years that no team started 3-0 in their first three games. In that contrived sense, then, this is the most parity since 1954. Given that it was far easier to have no team start 3-0 then (there were only 16 teams), you would even be justified in saying that this was the most balanced start of all time.

That sounds, without putting too much thought into it, very impressive. 1954! Man hadn’t landed on the moon. The LOOGY hadn’t been invented, or the personal computer. It was a very different time.

As fun as it would be to leave it at “Wow, that was crazy,” I thought I’d spoil the fun with a little math. First things first — what if we think every team is evenly matched? Let’s leave home field advantage out for now — we’re just approximating anyway, and that makes the math cleaner. The math for a single series is easy; if each game is a coin flip, all we need to do is find the odds of getting either three heads or three tails in a row. Read the rest of this entry »

The first few days of baseball have brought us our first taste of this year’s new extra innings rules. Sure, the rules were around in the minor leagues before now. Sure, teams theoretically care about their prospects winning. But for the most part, this is new — high stakes games with untested rules to try out. There have now been five extra inning games. Let’s walk through the decisions in each of them to see whether teams are playing the odds or acting rashly.

Angels at A’s

The game between the Angels and A’s was the first extra innings contest of the year. In the top of the 10th, the Angels played it by the book. With first-ever ghost runner Shohei Ohtani on second, Jared Walsh swung away. Whoops:

What can we say tactically, other than that you shouldn’t do that as a runner? Not much. Matt Olson made an excellent read, Matt Chapman made an excellent scoop, and it’s probably a bad break for the Angels that their first automatic runner was the player who had the most on his plate in summer camp, between rehabbing from Tommy John and the usual rigors of two-way work. Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, on a Friday in the middle of July, Yoenis Céspedes hits a home run.

***

It’s only been a few days since I’ve once again had the opportunity to spend my days sitting around watching MLB.TV. I’m already sick of the MLB Flashbacks that get shown during commercial breaks. The idea behind them is solid: There are so many feats in major league baseball’s memory bank, so many of the magical sports moments that people cite when they talk about why they love the game. Why not use otherwise unoccupied airtime to remind fans just how great the game can be?

But in my experience, at least, they end up having the opposite effect. Devoid of context, unhinged from past and future, the homers and robberies — and they are almost always homers and robberies — start to blur, then to lose meaning altogether. Like a favorite word repeated too often and too excitedly by a little kid, I start to get tired of hearing the same hype music leading in, the same fever pitch of the broadcast, the same reaction of the crowd. It’s what watching baseball feels like if you don’t like baseball. Swing. Bat hits ball. Ball leaves yard. Cheer! Repeat.

That sense of numbness one gets watching home run after home run, back-to-back, packed into the space of a minute or two — it isn’t what drew me to baseball, what continues to draw me to baseball sometimes in spite of myself. The rhythm is too much like time, or at least too much like the way we so often measure it as working adults. Seconds and minutes and hours clipping forward relentlessly, reminding you that in every idle moment you are wasting your life, wasting moments you could have spent being productive. Your time is limited. There is a distance between you and nothing, and that distance is even now getting shorter. Read the rest of this entry »

You were supposed to read this yesterday. Yesterday, when the playoffs consisted of just 10 teams and Mookie Betts hadn’t yet registered his first hit in Dodger blue. But as with a great deal else about this season, the 2020 playoffs will be something different than we initially expected. Mere hours before the first pitch of last night’s Yankees-Nationals tilt was scheduled to be thrown, ESPN’s Marly Rivera reported that MLB and the MLBPA had approved a deal to expand the postseason. This new structure will only be in effect for the 2020 season, barring further negotiations between the league and the players. The field will now feature 16 teams; every division winner and runner up will make the playoffs, along with the two teams in each league that have the best records beyond those six. They’ll meet in a three-game Wild Card Series that will be seeded thusly:

Seeds 1-3 will go to the division winners based on record.

Seeds 4-6 will go to the runners-up based on record.

Seeds 7 and 8 will be based on record.

Thus, there is a possibility the third-best division winner actually plays a worse team than the two best division winners.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 23, 2020

All of the games in the Wild Card Series will be played in the home ballpark of the more highly seeded team. In the event of regular season ties, mathematical tiebreakers will be used — MLB isn’t exactly keen to play games deeper into the Fall.

David Appelman and Sean Dolinar have already updated our playoff odds to account for the new format (they are wizards). You can poke around here, but the unsurprising takeaway is this: a lot of teams are a lot more likely to play October baseball than they were when yesterday began. Read the rest of this entry »

At last, nearly four months after originally planned, the Opening Day of the 2020 season is upon us. It begins this evening at 7 pm ET in Washington, DC, with an impressive pitching matchup that reprises last year’s World Series opener, albeit with one of the principals having changed teams. At Nationals Park — where, in acknowledgement of his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic that caused the delay, Dr. Anthony Fauci will throw out the ceremonial first pitch — three-time Cy Young winner Max Scherzer will take the ball for the defending champion Nationals while Gerrit Cole will inaugurate his record-setting $324 million contract with his first regular season start as a Yankee. The night’s other contest, beginning at 10 pm ET, calls upon one of the sport’s top rivalries, pitting the Dodgers — albeit with Dustin May as a last-minute substitute for Clayton Kershaw, who was placed on the injured list due to back stiffness on Thursday afternoon — against the Giants and Johnny Cueto.

This will be Scherzer’s fifth Opening Day start, and third in a row, all with Washington; a fractured knuckle in his right ring finger forced him to yield to Stephen Strasburg in 2017. Cole has just one previous Opening Day start, in 2017 for the Pirates. Both pitchers lost at least a couple such starts to Justin Verlander, Scherzer’s teammate in Detroit from 2010-14 and Cole’s teammate since late ’17; Scherzer didn’t even get the nod when he was fresh off his 2013 AL Cy Young award. Verlander, who will take the ball in the Astros’ opener against the Mariners on Friday, will move into the active lead in Opening Day starts with his 12th. Kershaw would have taken sole possession of third with nine:

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